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Acts 10:34-43
Epiphany 1A
It beats me why the Lectionary—on a Sunday celebrating the baptism of Jesus—cuts this reading off at verse 43 just BEFORE there is a wonderful scene of baptism in Acts 10. In fact, I was so sure it was a typo on the one Lectionary site I consult each week that I looked up the…
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost C
What’s the best way to celebrate a birthday? How should one celebrate the birthday of important people or institutions? In fact, how should we celebrate what some have called the “birthday of the Church” that is Pentecost? When we celebrate our sons’ birthdays, we sometimes recall stories of their birth. Of how one was born…
Acts 16:16-34
Easter 7C
TANSTAAFL is an acronym for the old adage, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” reportedly coined by Robert Heinlein. Quite simply, it means even if something appears to be free, there’s always some kind of catch. So your friendly neighborhood lobbyist (or pastor) may buy you lunch or dinner. However, she’s probably…
Acts 16:9-15
Easter 6C
Occasionally the Lectionary’s choice of where to begin and end a text boggles preachers’ and teachers’ minds. This Sunday’s text is a good case in point. It’s not just that it begins in the middle of a paragraph in most English translations. It’s also that this text begins in the middle of what we often…
Acts 11:1-18
Easter 5C
It’s hard for many of us to imagine Christians getting upset with each other over whom they eat lunch with. So we sometimes assume Peter’s Jewish Christian colleagues were angry with him because he shared the gospel with gentiles. You and I may assume this upset them because they thought of the gospel as belonging…
Acts 9:36-43
Easter 4C
The text the Lectionary appoints for the fourth Sunday in Easter is a happy, hopeful one of healing in the face of chronic illness and life in the face of death. Yet it sticks out like a sore thumb in its Scriptural context. Its story of healing and raising to life just doesn’t seem to…
Acts 9:1-6,(7-20)
Easter 3C
The Lord is willing to do almost whatever it takes to get people’s attention. So we save both God and ourselves a lot of time and energy if we just pay attention to the Lord right away. C.S. Lewis was among the most famous Christian authors of the twentieth century. He, however, initially paid virtually…
Acts 5:27-32
Easter 2C
Most 21st century North Americans enjoy nearly unprecedented religious freedom. So it’s rather easy to forget the high price some Christians have paid and still pay for their faith. However, it’s also easy to forget that confrontations between the Christian faith and the political establishment flared up even during the history of the early church….
Acts 10:34-43
Easter Day C
I sometimes wonder if Peter almost choked on the words: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism…” (34) In fact, with one biblical scholar, I sometimes wonder how he justified this profession to himself, much less Jerusalem’s church, as he does later. His family and synagogue had, after all,…
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