The Joshua Victor Theory

April 12, 2020 Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Amen! Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia! Greetings to my Emmanuel Lu- theran Ohana! I wanted to begin with a personal greeting to you all. It was just about a year ago that I came home for a brief visit to my family after Chaplain School, and preached for you on Palm Sunday. The past year has flown by with my deployment in Afghanistan, and now I am nearly home. As I am writing this, now on Easter Sunday evening, I am at Fort Bliss, TX, having completed my quarantine and getting ready to do the last couple of days of out processing tasks. I should be back on Maui before the end of the week! I look forward to seeing you all soon, though I still will have to complete another state ordered quarantine on return to Maui, but that at least will be in my home. This Easter Sunday is unlike any in our recent memory, as for the first time that most (all?) of us can reme...

Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia! When we see the resurrection of our Lord Jesus, what do we see? Someone could be a smart aleck, and say “None of us ‘ saw’ the resurrection of Jesus.” But neither did you see the birth or death of George Washington, or Caesar crossing Rubicon River to provoke revolution in the Roman Empire. But of course none of us can “see” anything that happened outside our natural lifetime, except to believe the reports of reliable historians and eyewitnesses. And so today you hear the reliable report of the historian and Gospel writer Luke, who along with hundreds of eyewitnesses, records for us the unmistakable miracle of Jesus rising from death, and walking out of His now empty tomb, in a living, physical body. So what do you “see” or “perceive” about this historical event, that changed world history for the past 2,000 years? Some of what we can see, the first eyewitnesses were unable to perceive on that first Sunday morning. They did not p...

The readings I selected and preached on for this midweek service are: Psalm 9, spoken responsively; Psalm 25; Luke 12:4-7; and Isaiah 49:15-16.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. In the past couple weeks we’ve seen how God’s people have a sinful tendency to forget both God and His Word, and how God remembers His people and forgets our sins. We’ve seen how great the cost is to forget God, or to live with the illusion that God forgets or ignores our sins when we think we’re getting away with it, but how God is patient to call us back to Him, and that when we repent, He does truly forget our sins. No doubt most of us have unintentionally forgotten countless things. Our human memory is not so good. But on some occasions when we wish we could forget—we find it nearly impossible to forget something on purpose. Perhaps bad memories we wouldn’t wish to keep—physical, mental, and emotional scars in our life. And then there are the good memorie...

The readings I selected for this Midweek service are Hosea 2:6-23; Ephesians 5:25-27; and Psalm 78:32-42 spoken responsively. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Last week we talked about the theme of forgetting and remembering, and the tendency of God’s people to constantly forget both Him and His commands, and how God restores our memory, and how He never forgets. Today, we consider what the cost is, both of what is forgotten, and also what is remembered. We look to the prophet Hosea, who lived through a “Silver Age” of sorts in ancient Israel, during a time of great prosperity, which was quickly sliding into idolatry, wickedness, and decline. God’s people had become full and satisfied, and began to forget who was the source of all their blessings. They became complacent and forgot God, and in the words of Hosea 2, they chased after other lovers, not knowing that their blessings came from God. Hosea saw firsthand the cost of what the people f...

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...