Last weekend was the first sermon I’ve preached in a long while, on Acts 6:1-7. It’s a story from the early days of the church where a complaint had come up that some of the widows (of a particular people group) were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. We can learn some lessons …
Category Archives: christian
What Jesus said about money
When we think about what Jesus said about money, there are a lot of words in the New Testament that overlap with the idea of money. Here’s a quick graph from a Logos search on “money”. You can see a bunch of Greek words in the pie chart, some from the gospels, some from elsewhere …
get behind me!
I hesitate to even use the word “get” in a title, after years of being told that it’s not a good word to use in English. Today, we would use “get behind me” to talk about a show of support, but it works a little bit differently in first century language: it’s more like “depart …
walking on water
If you’ve ever heard the expression “walks on water”, it has something to do with being able to accomplish amazing feats that no-one else could do (though not with the miraculous, just with a high level of talent). This miracle appears in three out of four gospels, and seems to be about demonstrating Jesus’ power …
feeding the 5000
The figure of speech here is “loaves and fishes” – by some miracle stretching out a small resource to accomplish a lot. And it dates back to a couple of events in the midst of Jesus’ ministry: the main one is called “the feeding of the 5000”. This is such a famous miracle that it …
lost sheep
The idea of the lost sheep is deeply embedded into western culture. In the Shaun the Sheep movie, the premise was that the shepherd had gone missing, and the sheep had to find him, so a reversal of the “lost sheep”, but not an ignorant one. Jesus actually tells this parable about the lost sheep, …
the return of the prodigal
The idea of a prodigal son (from the Latin word prodigus meaning “lavish”), who would take half his father’s property, squander it all, and then come back and ask for mercy, is a famous one in western culture. And it’s one of those ideas that comes from the teaching of Jesus. This story appears only …
origin story
There’s one aspect of the Batman story that is revisited time and time again. The origin story: how a young Bruce Wayne, scared of the intensity of the entertainment they were watching (The Mask of Zorrro”), left the performance early with his parents, ended up in Crime Alley, and saw his parents killed in front …
back to the future and me: understanding the timings of the Christian gospels
My kids are getting older, but they’re still not quite old enough to watch the Back to the Future trilogy. We were talking about Rube Goldberg machines, and the kids love to watch YouTube videos of the different machines that people have made. I remember the start of Back to the Future, how Doc Brown …
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upcoming sermon: Isaiah 52-53
I’m preaching at my church in mid-March (March 19th, 10am) on Isaiah 52-53, if you’d like to come along.