The Joshua Victor Theory

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. The Apostle Paul was engaging in what we might call “street evangelism” in our reading from Acts 17. Paul was in Athens, Greece, the famous ancient city known in part for its great philosophers Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Paul found opportunities to speak to Jews, people at the local markets, God-fearing Gentiles, and here he goes to the Areopagus or “Mars Hill”, and found the debaters and local armchair philosophers. Everywhere he talked about faith in the True God.  Paul had to choose a different starting point with this crowd because they didn’t share the common background of the Old Testament, as the Jews and God-fearers did. Paul was provoked in his spirit--he was passionately upset--by all the idols he saw there. Worshipping false gods lowers our human dignity, because it’s a sham, and God’s first commandment is that we shall have no other gods before Him. It should stir up our e...

            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...

·          Palm Sunday entry: meets both praise and rejection. Jesus weeps over the grim consequences of their rejection. Passing up a golden opportunity. As if shooting both the messenger and the doctor who holds the cure. ·          God’s heart—Jesus’ bitter anguish—you don’t know what you’re refusing! He sees a great evil coming upon them, that is now irreversible—the destruction of Jerusalem and this temple. And bitterest of all, was they were bringing this upon themselves by rejecting the things that make for peace. Jesus laments: “ Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace ! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43  For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44  and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone...

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. A blessed All Saints’ Day to you, dear saints and children of God! Yes, you also are saints! Not because any of us “have what it takes” to be considered “saints,” but because Christ Jesus has washed and cleansed us by His blood, and we’re “holy ones” or saints in His eyes. Today we remember the saints that have gone before us in Jesus’ name, and we look at the passage from Revelation to see a heavenly vision, and answer the question, “Who are the Saints?” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The first answer our reading gives to the question of “who are the saints?” is that the saints are believers from every nation, tribe, people and language. The beauty of a diverse and colorful heaven is portrayed, with believers from every nation represented. Considering this was written almost 2,000 years ago, it’s a pretty remarkable statement against racial pre...