The Joshua Victor Theory

“ Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters !” (Isaiah 55:1a). Come to Jesus Christ, the Living Water! Amen! Today is Pentecost, one of the three great Jewish festivals of the Old Testament, and the day full of grace when Jesus poured out His Holy Spirit on the disciples. But I want to talk to you about one of the other of the three great Jewish festivals—the one mentioned in our Gospel reading, John 7! Because at the Feast of Tabernacles (which means tents or booths) Jesus prophesied about sending His Holy Spirit on the disciples.  So, in John 7:37, it says, “ on the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out… ”  So, if you look earlier in the chapter, you find out that this last day of the feast is referring to the Feast of Tabernacles. It was a joyful, annual holiday, rich with reminders of how they lived in tents in the wilderness as God lead them to the Promised Land. There was lots of beautiful imagery—God dwelling among His people in Hi...

            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 is the Festival of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples of Jesus, so that they were able to speak and be understood in a multitude of known languages, by a large crowd of gathered worshippers from scattered Mediterranean nations. The apostle Peter then got up to publicly explain to the crowd what was going on with this language miracle. Pentecost means “fiftieth”, and it had been 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead, and also 50 days after the Jewish Passover meal. Look at our Old Testament reading today. The Tower of Babel story is paired with the readings about that remarkable Pentecost. These two events, are separated by a few thousand years of human history, and take place in very different settings, one on a monumental construction worksite in ancient Mesopotamia, and the other at a house near the Temple in Jerusalem—but nevertheless they are in...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Last week we talked about bearing witness, or “taking the stand” for Jesus, as we are called by God to testify about who Jesus is and what He has done for us. Today is Pentecost, the celebration of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Christian Church. It was the day when the apostles of Jesus first gave public witness of what they had seen of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, that one of the primary jobs of the Holy Spirit is also to testify or bear witness about Him. In the Gospel reading Jesus gives His disciples a preview of the coming and work of the Holy Spirit. The key work of the Spirit is to point people to Jesus. He doesn’t take the disciples in a different direction than where Jesus has led them, but continues on the same mission for which Jesus had prepared them. If we step back a moment from this reading, we see that all three persons of the Trinity—Father, So...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Today we celebrate the festival of Pentecost, which began as an Old Testament festival of harvest. While we might think of autumn as the time for harvest, the festival of Pentecost marked the ending of the late spring barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest, as these grains were the first crops to bear fruit, and people were to give their first and best as offerings to the Lord. Today we don’t pattern our lives so much by the cycles of planting and harvesting, of summer and winter. Especially here in Hawaii, where produce can be grown year-round; especially in our modern age of international food markets and grocery stores, where you can get tomatoes or apples or just about anything else, almost any time of year. We notice some local fruits or vegetables are best “in season,” but unless you watch carefully, you probably don’t notice much about those seasonal cycles. And with food coming in from al...