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Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)
Easter 3C
As I said last week in my comments on Acts 5, during the season of Easter the Lectionary switches from its customary focus on the Old Testament in the first reading, in order to follow the effects of Easter on the early church in the book of Acts. It is an ingenious way to show…
Acts 5:27-32
Easter 2C
To my great surprise and delight, the RCL moves to the book of Acts on this Second Sunday of Eastertide and stays there until Pentecost. Clearly the intent is to follow the trajectory of Easter. What happened to the church and the world after Jesus rose from the dead? Did that single historical act have…
Acts 8:14-17
Epiphany 1C
While it’s at least tangentially related to this Sunday’s gospel lesson, Acts 8:14-17 may seem like a rather odd text for the second Sunday of the new year. It isn’t, after all, just a mysterious text that even the most learned scholars struggle to fully understand. While the Lectionary longs to unite Christians around the…
Acts 2:2-21
Pentecost B
Throughout nearly all of recorded human history, people’s inability to communicate with each other has divided us. So for people to somehow come (and stay) together, something dramatic must happen. In fact, since human efforts to fully unify people have proved largely futile or temporary, we might add that something dramatic must happen to us….
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Easter 7B
Where besides Acts 1 does Matthias’ name appear in the Scriptures? The answer is, of course, “Nowhere.” After all, as quickly as Matthias appears in Acts 1, he disappears again. Yet while that might render him as little more than a biblical footnote, it’s one of Acts 1’s details that may be an avenue to…
Acts 10:44-48
Easter 6B
May Christians ever give up hope for the salvation of any living person? Can we, in other words, simply abandon anyone to Satan’s captivity? What about those who have already received God’s grace with their faith? May God’s adopted sons and daughters ever deliberately or even unconsciously abandon these fellow Christians? Certainly some early Christians…
Acts 8:26-40
Easter 5B
If the Holy Spirit is a bit like a stone dropped into the middle of a pond, then Acts 8:26-40’s story is like one of the concentric rings that ripples out from it and across God’s world. But it’s only one of the first of a series of rings that continues to spread to this…
Acts 4:5-12
Easter 4B
What in the world got into Acts 4’s Peter? Or to put it more theologically, who in the world got into the apostle? I sometimes wonder if even his companion John didn’t blink his eyes or try to clear his ears to make sure it was Peter who was speaking. Of course, Peter’s talking was…
Acts 3:12-19
Easter 3B
When our family visited China a number of years ago, my wife had a hard time keeping up with our sons who all stand over 6 feet 4 inches tall. So we’d often walk a few steps behind them. As we did so, we lost count of how many people passed them, turned around and…
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