Revolution Church

It’s a crazy time with a lot of emotions after the election. A lot of wide-ranging and diverse emotions from everyone. Ranging from despair and quitting, to invigorated and inspired, to celebrating victory. Here at Revolution, we try to respect the entire spectrum of emotions, ideas, and people. Revolution will always fight for equality, on every level we can. If you are in despair, it’s not over—this is what Revolution trained for. If you are celebrating, please do so, while seeing the humanity and others and understanding why they might not be feeling the same way and help them, with love, understand where you are coming from. No more biting and devouring. Let’s all give of ourselves to each other in hopes that it will bring about a truth that is higher than politics and parties. Are we so devoted to politicians that it blinds us to the humanity of each other? Do we want a revolution but not want to have to endure a revolution? We have to all work together and see each other’s humanity—regardless of politic

The election is here, tomorrow as a matter of fact, so we wanted to get Sunday’s talk out a little ahead of schedule to give people time to listen before everything gets…well, how it’s going to get. This talk isn’t about politics, sort of. It is, and it isn’t. It’s about radical acceptance, about knowing what we can and cannot change and learning to live life on life’s terms. It’s about the smallest things in life meaning the most and helping the most, especially in the darkest times. Are the Beatitudes a small thing that helps us the most? Is it Paul’s letter to the Galatians? Is it each other, and friendship and love? Is it all of the above? It’s uncertain times like this that really emphasize the importance of community. Because when we divide, we stay divided. A lot of us are nervous and on edge, so let’s be kind to others and ourselves. We’ll get through this, one way or another, and we can only do it by helping each other. No matter how this turns out we love you all, and we’ll see you on the other side

Jay is super under the weather, but he throws on a hoody to keep the chills away so he can deliver us a really interesting and thought-provoking talk on what it means to be a Christian. The talk came about after Jay received criticism and questioning on his beliefs and when he wasn’t able to be cleanly labeled and divided it gave him the idea for this talk. So in a sense this talk is your basic Revolution ‘grace and love’ talk, but it is needed. It’s a topic that always should be revisited because it is that important. Can the Bible become an idol if we’re not careful? What about grace is so scary to us? Why do we feel it needs to be earned and can be lost? Why do we treat a relationship with Jesus as sand falling through our hands? Making it almost impossible to maintain fully. In the end it comes down to this: Grace is a free gift and there is nothing we can do about it…except to just accept it. This talk was given on October 27, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.www.facebook.com/revolutionchurchmnwww.revolutio

One of the perks of doing a pre-recorded talk is that sometimes you’re midway through a talk and you realize things just aren’t clicking how you’d like, and when that happens in a live talk you just have to try to power through and hope it all works out in the end—but when it’s pre-recorded you can just put a pin in that talk and revisit it later. That’s what happened this week. Jay’s original talk turned out to need a bit more tweaking and work, so he put it back on the shelf and recorded a new talk. In this new talk Jay dives into the topic of scapegoating, what it is and why we do it. He also discusses the idea of The Lack. What is The Lack? What does it mean to embrace The Lack? Is embracing The Lack at the core of Paul’s message to the Galatians? There is a lot going on in the world. A lot of suffering. It’s at times like this society tends to do the most scapegoating, because in a strange way it gives us comfort in uncomfortable times, but at what price? Here at Revolution, we discuss disagreeing well,

Big doings for Jay recently! He fills us in on his trip to NYC to meet with the folks who are producing and performing the Broadway musical about his mom, including Sir Elton John! Crazy! Today talk though is a bit of an audible. It’s a really great talk! It wasn’t, however, the original talk he had planned—that talk got derailed when his plane ride home from NYC lost power and had to make an emergency landing! Scary stuff, but everyone is okay and safe and sound! But with that talk being too much to tackle on no sleep and a nightmare of a plane ride, Jay switched his focus to Paul Tillich and really knocks the talk out of the park. Tillich is an absolute favorite here at Revolution. Jay discusses two of Tillich’s sermons and wow, do they get you thinking! Do non-Christians do a better job of showing love than Christians do? If we’re void of love, are we void of God? Is genuine love the presence of God? What is calculated justice? Are we living a life of passionate grace, and passionate love? Or are we just c

The world is always suffering, always has been and always will be—so the world needs us to show love and grace to each other constantly, as much as we can. What’s today’s talk about? Jesus and Paul, of course. Two of Revolutions biggest staples! Throw in a touch of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Hume, and Tammy Faye and you can’t go wrong! The only hiccup with getting inspiration from all of these heavy hitters is that the lessons they teach are often easier said than done, and today’s talk is no different. It’s important, but we acknowledge that it is progress over perfection. These lessons are hard. Easy to teach, harder to practice. But we should always try. Doing good today is better than being perfect tomorrow. We need to love each other. Sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes we have to love from afar. Find a new, different way to love someone while still keeping our distance. Luckily loving someone doesn’t equal liking them. Is there a way to hate evil, but not hate the people that do evil? Are they one in

Why do we do things we don’t want to do? Why can’t we always do what we want to? These are topics that Paul brings up in his letter to the Romans. It is also a concept that Revolution favorite Paul Tillich dives into when he discusses the concept of sin. At Revolution we believe in grace and acceptance over all things, that’s why we put a lot of trust in our two Pauls! The Apostle, and Tillich. Together they make a great team in their exploration of grace, questioning the laws of religion, and what it means to truly feel accepted. At times probably almost everyone has felt that God hates them, or maybe God has left them. Where does this feeling come from? Is it possible that this feeling is also one of the closest ways to be connected to Jesus? Do the rules and laws of religion amplify these feelings? These feelings of a being sinful and useless and unloved, not accepted by God or the church or ourselves? Where does this roadblock come in? How can we get the breakthrough that’s needed to understand grace? Wha

Today Jay dives into some of the philosophy he’s been reading and shares a lot of the lessons and insights he’s picked up in his studies. In this talk Jay talks about community, but hand in hand with that Jay also discusses the idea of alienation. How the feeling of being alienated is an essential bond that unites all of us. It’s our common ground. Jay also ties that together with some thoughts he has on inclusion. On what true inclusion looks like. How true inclusion involves having different views and backgrounds, this can’t be avoided if we’re seeking to actively practice inclusivity. Jay asks us to look within ourselves and our groups and ask if we have any unseen asterisks next to the grace we show people. Do we see the shared alienated humanity in everyone? Or do we make exceptions on who gets love, grace, and inclusion. How does alienation affect us? How does oppression affect us? How does it affect others? And maybe most importantly, are we becoming all the things we hate by alienating others and form

In today’s talk Jay discussed the Good Samaritan. Like almost all of Jay’s talk, it’s about that…but really about so much more. It’s about the Samaritan, and the man beaten, it’s about Jesus and it’s about Paul and it’s about Gaza. It’s about Martin Luther King, and John Hume and Tammy Faye. It’s about forgiveness and grace! It is about Jay’s compulsion to forgive, or at least trying his hardest to. Today Jay also expands on a principle instilled in him by his mom, and that is we all have a shared common humanity that keeps use connected to each other. We can’t forget that or overlook it. Often, we struggle with the idea of forgiveness, but Jay poses the question that if we reframe forgiveness as mercy rather than sacrifice does it change things? If we see forgiveness as just more than all the adjustments we have to make and overcome, does that reframing help us? Is this how we can find ways to be kinder to everyone and build better bridges? What happens when we think like the Good Samaritan thought? If we se

This will be a bit of a shock to our viewers and listeners but today Jay will be talking about the Apostle Paul. I know, we can’t believe it either. Paul is a bit of a troublesome character these days…or is he? That is what Jay is exploring in today’s talk. He’ll be re-examining Paul and his writings. Are we reading Paul’s letters correctly today? In their correct context? Did Paul know he was writing the Bible at the time? Is everything attributed to Paul actually Paul’s writing? These are some of the topics we’ll be exploring today. Because Paul gets a lot of hate…and also Paul is the person a lot of Christians quote when using the Bible to justify their bias…but Paul also is quoted at almost every wedding when talking about love—how can someone with a message of love and grace that echoed Jesus’s same teachings sit on both sides of the spectrum? Maybe we’ve been wrong? Maybe the context of Paul’s letters is the key to everything! The Bible is so complex with so much nuance, let’s not be afraid to take thes

Jay received a text that a dear friend of his, Bobby, had passed away. This news came as a shock and devastation to Jay, so today is a bit of a memorial for Bobby. This talk is hard to summarize, because it’s not just about Bobby, but it’s about grace, and how grace is for us and for others, that there is no asterisk. It’s about telling people you love them, while you can. It’s about letting people know the impact they have on your life while you’re able to tell them. It’s about realizing that grace isn’t too good to be true. It’s about the nuance of life. It's about being there for people when they need you. It’s about the dangers of pushing people away. The dangers of retreating into yourself. It’s about the power of community and love and the impact we can have on each other’s lives. It’s about love, it’s about friendship, it’s about grief, it’s about loss. It’s about togetherness. It’s about Bobby. This talk was given on August 25, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.www.facebook.com/revolutionchurchmnwww.

Lately a lot of our talks seem somber but recently we’ve been living in some tough times, and here at Revolution we try to live life on life’s terms, but as of lately those terms are pretty somber. There is a famous quote about some of the things we’ll remember most in this life will be the silence of our friends when we needed them. We don’t want to stay silent, and we don’t want to make our friends or any loved one feel alone, like they don’t have anyone in their corner—that is for our brothers and sisters both local and abroad. All over the world. Today Jay discusses how all conflict stems from differences, the problem is that difference is the essence of humanity, so there will always be differences. Jay dives into the gospel of Matthew, as well as some letters from Paul to try and see what grace without peace looks like, and what we can do to both show each other grace, and to be peacemakers. This talk was given on August 18, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.www.facebook.com/revolutionchurchmnwww.revolution

The world is upside-down and on fire. Everyone is killing each other, being nasty to each other, violence is begetting violence, bombs are falling everywhere…and our tax dollars are footing the bill. It’s making us go mad—and enough is enough. We’re stumped, we’re at a loss, so today we’re going to be leaning on King. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a great map on how to approach conflict resolution, and on that map is his speech Beyond Vietnam. We’re going to take a look at this speech, and we’ll be treating it similarly to how we do other scripture and letters in the Bible. Why? Why not! We don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t treat it that way. King refers to speaking up and speaking out, and to peacekeeping as a vocation of agony—and here at Revolution we couldn’t agree more. It’s tiresome, constant, and unceasing. But it’s part of the work and it comes with the territory. Can you have grace without social justice? And can you have social justice without grace? Because this is part of it, right? They go ha

Love is a common thread through all of the talks that come from Revolution. Love and Grace. And this week we continue that thread when Jay looks at 1 John to unpack what the Bible says about love and about loving God, and about how God loves. We seem to live in a time of almost exclusively biting and devouring each other, or as Jay puts it, Dancing on Their Graves. But when we do that, instead of how the Bible calls us to gently and humbly restore one another, then where is the love? Do we leave room for others to make mistakes? Do we demand perfection over progress? The struggle is that some of us have hurt that runs so deeply in us that we can’t help but pay it forward, even if we don’t want to. Even if we try not to. But we always have to keep trying. Again, progress over perfection. Because what if how we love others is how we truly love God? What if how we know God, and God’s place in our lives, is by how we love others. That is how we experience God. So, let’s let love rule. Because if any of us are sai

Seems like every week life finds new ways to surprise us, and there has been a string of things lately. An attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Joe Biden stepping out of the presidential race, and now everyone being upset over the opening ceremony of the Olympics due to some misunderstandings and projections. It’s always something. Always something that has people clutching their pearls, horrified and disgusted. And often it leads us to scapegoating and othering. All of these things swirl together in todays talk. Jay uses passages from Matthew and Luke to discuss an idea we talk about pretty often here at Revolution—arguing and disagreeing well. Having tough conversations. But in todays talk Jay takes a different approach and wonders if even though we believe in disagreeing well, maybe some disagreements aren’t worth having. Some tough conversations aren’t worth the effort. When do we know when to just drop it and walk away, knowing our efforts will not accomplish anything, that we’re spinning our wheels. When is

The talk last week was pre-recorded so this is the first live talk since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Jay spends some time addressing and discussing that. This talk, however, being live at the time, is when Jay found out about President Biden dropping out of the Presidential Race—strange times, we’re living in. Strange times. But beyond all the political stuff, today’s talk is very special. It’s been 17 years since we lost Tammy Faye. We miss her every day! Today Jay discusses some of Tammy’s favorite Bible verses and some stories about who she was and her legacy. More than that though, Jay also discusses grief and grieving. Personally speaking (This is Josh writing this), when my dad passed in 2020 Jay’s words about grief and the pitfalls of not grieving properly were such a huge, huge, Godsend and helped me navigate those dark times. His words about navigating grief are very helpful, and as good as this talk is, that in itself makes this talk worth the listen. Tammy Faye was a wonderful pers

Life is strange, and not in a good way. Things make less and less sense as we try and navigate these current times. We all feel it, we all dread what’s coming around the corner…but we’re all in it together. Since the beginning of the year we’ve been diving into the teachings of a few people from history. Unifiers and philosophers. We discussed what Tillich said about grace and inclusion. We discussed what Martin Luther King said about non-violence, grace, and inclusion. We discussed what John Hume said about grace and inclusion. Now let’s dive in and see what Jesus has to say. What he says and what he does. How his actions speak just as loud as his words. For this, Jay looks at Matthew chapter 9—Jesus picking his disciples. Who did Jesus pick? From what walks of life? Were they good and righteous people? Beloved by all? Where did they stand in society, and how did people view them? Did any of this matter to Jesus? Did Jesus follow the pressure to hate who everyone else hated? It’s important to look at passage

We know that at Revolution we might have a tendency to beat a dead horse, talking about the same topics again and again, but these topics are important and warrant repeating. The dead horse we’ll be beating today is about arguing well. It’s an important to discuss, especially in these months leading up to the election. Discussing these hard topics sometimes is seen as creating tension, but the tension is already there so all that’s happening is that tension is just being exposed. Not talking about the elephant in the room doesn’t make it go away. There is a difference between causing tension and exposing tension. Conversation can be a much stronger tool for fighting tension than any weapon. Because we can love people we disagree with and talk with people we disagree with—we need to stop this black & white, binary thinking. Whenever we create an echo chamber aren’t we just like all of the people we’re critiquing and their echo chambers? We become what we’re against. So let’s also be careful to not boast ab

Here we are with Part 2 of Martin Luther King’s sermon: Love Your Enemies. It goes without saying that just about all of us are fearful, or angry, or confused these days, especially after the recent presidential debates. So, we get it. We get it because we feel the same—we understand why, but we also want love to win out. And who better to guide us than MLK. With this part of the talk Jay dives into the ‘Theoretical Why’ when it comes to loving our enemies. We emphasize love in a time where loving feels impossible because hate multiplies hate, and multiplying hate makes for some very dark nights of the soul. And also, we have to ask ourselves, have Christians just been making bigger divisions? Is there so much anger that we forget just how to have conversations? Does this anger turn our enemies into ‘the least of these?’ and if it does, shouldn’t that spark our love even more? Because after all, doesn’t hate just divide our own personalities and hurt us just as much as it hurts the people we hate? This talk w

We have a really great talk for you today. This is part one on a two-part talk on Martin Luther King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies.” Besides this being a great commentary and discussion on Dr. King’s talk, Jay also speaks pretty candidly, and opens up about his personal struggles with anger and bitterness and times that his grace has failed, no matter how much he tried. We’re all in this together, folks. It’s no easier for us than it is for you, and we fail just as much as anyone else. But it’s not about the failing, it’s about the love. It’s about not quitting when our love and grace fails, but about trying again next time. And the time after. It’s something that becomes part of our daily lives—it’s a continual process. When people hate us, we need to love them. Is it harder to love our friends and family than it is our enemies? Jay argues that it might be. Does love get confused with hypocrisy? Mixing the two up because a lot of us have these impenetrable walls of hate that makes the act of loving ‘the othe