Claimed, gathered and sent

This is the sermon I preached on Pentecost, 6/9/19 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church . The text was Acts 2:1-21. In high school, I had a dear Jewish friend. Desiring her salvation, I happily told her that we Christians also celebrate the Jewish feast of Pentecost. She had never heard of it! It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that what we call Pentecost, which is from the Greek, is the Jewish feast called Shavuot. Had I referred to it in that way, by its Hebrew name, then I suspect she would have had a better understanding. Shavuot began as an agricultural feast, originally celebrated seven weeks after the beginning of the grain harvest (Deut.16:9). Later on, it celebrated the giving of the Law, being celebrated fifty days after Passover. Still, my friend and I would have had very different understandings of what we call Pentecost. For us, it’s about the outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit and how that power launched God’s work through the church. In Acts we see the beginn...

This is what I preached on Sunday, 7/29 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church . The text was Ephesians 3:14-21   Imagine a sermon in the form of a prayer, that consisted of only two long sentences (which is the case with the Greek). If we think of the letter to the Ephesians as a sermon, since it is a message, and there in the midst of this letter to the infant church, Paul prays. He prays for the congregations. He knows that he is unable to give them what they need in the face of struggles that lie ahead. Paul knows too, that being the church is not a self-help project. The church has to learn to rely on God, not themselves. So what exactly does Paul pray for? In the opening, Paul emphasizes the unity of humankind under God…” from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name” (vv. 14-15). Every means every—no one is excluded. This sums up what has been the chief argument of the first half of Ephesians, that in Christ Jews and Gentiles have been brought together to ...