The Joshua Victor Theory

            Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. Today our two readings are both about languages, and unity or disunity. In the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, all the earth once spoke one language and had the same words. But because of what happened there, God confused their languages, dividing them, so they couldn’t understand each other. The story of Pentecost, in Acts, is about how people of many different languages united across language barriers to hear a singular, important message. Let’s look at each story in turn, and see how Pentecost starts to reverse the age-old division of languages at Babel, and create a new unity around Jesus Christ. In the words of the crowds on Pentecost: “ we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God .”             At the Tower of Babel humans unified in the...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Today’s message is from Deuteronomy 10. You might be forgiven for wondering what Deuteronomy has to do with our lives today. It is Moses’s sermons to the Israelites, around 1406 BC. That’s over 3,400 years ago, if you’re keeping track. Moses was teaching the Israelites a final time before they entered the promised land, after 40 years of wandering in the desert, because of their unfaithfulness. A new generation of Israelites, were trying to learn from the mistakes of their parent’s generation, and recommit themselves to faithfulness to God. So how does that tie in with us? First a few more facts about Deuteronomy’s importance. In all the Old Testament, it talks the most about passing on the faith to the next generation. A duty for every generation. Also, it strongly promotes the truth that God had specially chosen Israel, of all other nations—as God’s elect people. They weren’t el...

The readings I selected for this midweek service are: Isaiah 46:3-13, Luke 1:67-79, and Psalm 77 spoken responsively. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. How does forgetfulness affect your life? There could be many different answers. Whether it’s our forgetfulness, or someone else’s—forgetfulness can be large or small—major or minor. While forgetting some trivial piece of information might be totally harmless; forgetting an important appointment, a special anniversary, or remembering to finish an important job or task, all might have major consequences. But what could be even worse than forgetting all these? In many passages through the Old Testament, this refrain echoes: that God’s people have forgotten the Lord their God. They have forgotten His mighty works and wonders. This kind of forgetfulness has much higher stakes. To forget God and His works is to forget our Lord and Savior. Quite often, the reason for this f...