The Joshua Victor Theory

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Do you know why the Christian Church observes the seasons of Advent and Lent? They come before the two biggest festivals of the Church Year—Christmas and Good Friday/Easter. Advent and Lent are kept by the church as a time of preparation for those high and holy days—preparing our hearts by repentance and renewal in our faith. They also serve to escalate or build up our anticipation that breaks out into full joy at the arrival of Christmas and Easter. The most joyous singing, celebration, and festivity surround Jesus’ birth and resurrection from the dead. So John the Baptist figures prominently into Advent each year as a prophet of preparation, readying the Lord’s way into our hearts. John doesn’t just arrive out of the blue, 2,000 years ago—Isaiah and Malachi in the Old Testament, prophets some 7 and 4 centuries before him, had predicted his coming, as quoted in the readings. But...

The following Lenten series I will be preaching on is adapted from Dr. Reed Lessing's series on Jonah the prophet. Dr. Lessing is professor of Old Testament at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO.  If this has happened once, it has happened a billion times. A husband and wife are in a car, and the wife tells her husband to turn right at the next junction, and by mistake, he turns left. When he realizes what he has done, he says to his wife “I’m sorry love, I went the wrong way.” But if that is all he does, it isn’t enough. His saying sorry isn’t getting them any closer to where they want to be; it isn’t even stopping them from getting further away. To get where they want to be, he needs to stop the car, turn it around and go back on to the correct road that his wife told him to take in the first place. That is repentance; it is an about-face! The people of Nineveh are a powerful, arrogant, violent, wicked people. Jonah is a little guy from a weak nation at the edge of their soo...