Month: June 2022

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves …” [Luke 10:1-3]. As I have related in some of these weekly meditations, for the past six years I’ve had the privilege of leading a Bible Study centered in the Carolina Arbors, a “55+” community in southern Durham. While…

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem [Luke 9:51]. To show you just how far the world has come since the mid-1950s, when I was a young lad growing up with my three brothers in rural southern Gaston County (NC), our family had a special board game, a game that would now be called “quaint,” or possibly even “weird.” It was manufactured and sold by Parker Brothers, the dominant name in board games at the time. The name of the game was—wait for it, wait for it — “Going to Jerusalem.” I’ll bet you thought I was speaking…

The LORD created me at the outset of His way, the very first of His works of old. In remote eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of earth…. And I was by Him, an intimate, I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times. Hebrews 8:22-23, 30 (The Hebrew Bible, tr. by Robert Alter) Selecting appropriate scripture passages for this upcoming Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost—particularly passages from the Old Testament—has long been challenging for the church. For the majority of Christians within the Western Tradition, the first Sunday after Pentecost is designated Trinity Sunday, a day in which we…

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” [John 14:8, NIV]. Generally, on Pentecost Sunday, one is drawn to the traditional first lesson offered by the Lectionary committee: Acts 2:1-21. After all, a significant portion of the contemporary church marks the Day of Pentecost as the moment of the church’s birth, with its rushing, powerful wind, its tongues of fire, not to mention the wonderfully strange phenomenon of the disciples’ sermons and presentations being uttered in their own native Galilean tongue yet heard and understood by “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” [Acts 2:5] in their own native languages. As important as the…