What the world needs now
Katie took a monthlong preaching sabbatical in September of 2021. She kicked off this series in August, then we invited several guest preachers, all of whom are familiar to and with Galileo Church, to speak a word of God’s Good News into this moment. Each sermon is a response to the same question: What does God’s world need right now?
What the world needs now is religious faith that supports our communal flourishing. Western, white individualism – including evangelical Christianity’s insistence on a “personal relationship with Jesus” as the pinnacle of spiritual experience – has contributed to the fragmentation of the human family. We have lost our sense that God’s dearest wish is for us to care for one another, to refrain from hurting one another, to regard each other with respect and dignity. Religious belief and practice that tears us from each other, sending us into our respective corners for private righteousness, is not the religious belief and practice that Jesus embodied and taught.
What the world needs now is daily bread. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not just an utterance of a memorized prayer, but a petition where all of The Divine One’s creations can and will be nurtured, allowing them to flourish. Food is essential to any culture, simply because we gotta eat! But even with this understanding, “Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but as many as 811 million people still go hungry.” 30-40% of food produced in the United States, alone, will be wasted. Jesus’s prayer to the disciples might push us a little bit further to think less about how stale our communion bread might be, more about who is starving at our open table, and what our food might be telling us to do.
What the world needs now is to be turned upside down. The beatitudes are a lovely description of a world, but seemingly not the world we are actually living in. What are we to make of a descriptive account (“blessed are…”) that does not seem to correspond to our reality? Reading this text, we are rehearsing a subversive script, trafficking in rumors, whispering conspiratorially about a coming time when the present world will be turned upside down, and a new world will emerge. The only way to prepare is to dare to live now as if that new world were already present.
What the world needs now is to chill the freak out and realize that God's got this. Weird, ever warming weather. The threat of elections being stolen. The fear of not being accepted for who you are, just as you are in all of your complexities and multiple facets of your identity. In God's way of doing things, there is enough time. In God's way of doing things, there are enough workers. In God's way of doing things, you were already created perfectly wonderful in all of those weird and lovely ways that make you YOU. When. it looks as though nothing is possible, God provides more than enough.
What the world needs now is to think critically about our social media citizenship. The most sophisticated technology of our time has one purpose: to make us want to stay on a website. The social media “platforms” are, according to Hank Green, less like services we use and more like places where we live. They have their own governing bodies, their own currencies, and they call us not “customers” but “users.” And we “use” that technology to do a lot of really good things: to create art; to foster relationships; to critique the very platform that hosts our criticism. But what does it mean that so few people—the CEOs of a handful of corporations—have so much power over us? What if this is not a new thing—consolidated power in a central “location” where almost everyone “lives”—but an ancient thing happening in a new, well, “platform”? How can the wisdom of our ancestors in faith help us navigate our citizenship in these strange new lands?