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...

** a little side note for those who pay attention to these things...I've moved back to the 3 year lectionary of readings. ** Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. John the Baptist is our familiar Advent messenger, hailing the coming of Jesus. John preached a fiery message in the wilderness, calling people to repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Crowds of people turned out to hear him, but he rebuked them as a “ brood of vipers…fleeing the wrath to come .” If John the Baptist were a visiting preacher at ELC, how would we respond to his sharp call to repentance? Pride or defensiveness? Close our ears or turn away? Alternatively, we could respond like some did to John, with the question, “ Teacher, what shall we do ?” A very good question. How do we respond to the call of repentance? What is repentance, and how do we bear fruits in keeping with repentance? Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance here. It  ...

This month we have focused on themes of the Lutheran Reformation, leading up to today, the 499 th year anniversary of the Reformation of the Christian Church. We’ve touched on themes of repentance and forgiveness, Law and Gospel, the hiddenness of God, and being justified by faith. Luther and his colleagues, usually called the Reformers, made important contributions to all of these Biblical teachings, bringing clarity and returning the church to the fountain from which these teachings flow—the Bible—God’s Word. Having this rich spiritual heritage, with next years’ milestone of 500 years, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the truth is a powerful weapon against error and the enslavement of sin, as Jesus teaches in today’s reading. But on the other hand, it’s dangerously easy to fall into that same sense of special privilege that Jesus’ confronts in the reading. The Jews had a rich spiritual heritage, and they claimed their ancestry back to Abraham, and they took pride t...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Serving as a religious leader comes with its own particular bag of temptations, as Jesus makes clear in today’s gospel reading. Temptations to pride and ego, towards seeking and often receiving honor and the praise of others, temptations to the abuse of power, and temptations to prop up an artificially perfect image of oneself—and therefore fall subject to the charge of hypocrisy. They are spiritually deadly temptations, as the teacher of God’s Word may be tempted to use the appearance of religion or holiness, to disguise their own sin. In a parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus confronts the scribes for not practicing as they preach. Jesus ends His warning to the scribes, by saying “ They will receive the greater condemnation.” Why the greater condemnation? Why are these temptations particular to religious leaders, myself of course, included? First of all, the greater condemnation owes ...