Faith in Progress

May 21, 2017 Acts 17:22-31 Paul, the main character in our reading from Acts today, is often not my favorite.  I have trouble getting past his judgy moralizing and his ridiculous run-on sentences.  And yet, as someone engaged in this profession, I have to admit that Paul was a bold preacher.  He knew how to argue, and he turned heads.  When he entered a new city, he’d make his way to the synagogue, set up camp, and immediately begin to hold forth on the scriptures with anyone who happened to be there.  Now, sometimes - and to be honest, I am glad that I have never had this happen to me -  sometimes his preaching was so fiery, so uncompromising, so bold, that he offended people to the point of mob rampage.  And in such instances, it was helpful for him to be ready to escape quickly.  That is where we find him in our reading today.  Paul had to rush quickly away from Thessalonica, where he’d been preaching until the crowd started to look a little too menacing.  And so he came to

May 14, 2017 Acts 7:55-60 Pretty great Easter reading from Acts this morning, right?  Nothing like a stoning to start off the morning! What happened?  Just last week, everything was going swimmingly for the early church.  It was experiencing explosive growth, people were praying and eating together, sharing everything in common.  And now this!  The bow breaks, the cradle falls, and the persecution of the early church begins in God-awful earnestness. What happened to “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”  What happened to the joyful celebration?  What happened to Jesus defeating death, the light vanquishing the darkness, and all that? The shock of finding this reading from Acts in our lectionary this 5th Sunday of Easter reminded me of something that happened a couple months ago at our 8:30 service.   At that service, we have lots of young kids, so we gather everyone together around the altar for the entire Eucharistic prayer and stay up there to pass out musical instruments a

Easter 4, Year A (2017) Acts 2:42-47 Apparently I am not as hip as I think I am, because last week I heard for the first time about an internet video phenomena that I completely missed while it was going on last year - the MannequinChallenge.  A group of people pose stock-still as if frozen in time while someone with a video camera pans around to see them from different angles.  These Mannequin Challenge videos have been made by school groups, sports teams, politicians and actors. On Easter and the two following Sundays, our Gospel readings presented us with a Mannequin Challenge, of sorts.  They were 3 different stories that all happened to different people on that first Easter day, giving us different angles on the same Easter tableau.  For three weeks, it was as if that first Easter day froze in time and we had extended chance to investigate it in detail. Our first angle was the view from the story we heard here on Easter morning.  When we saw Mary Magdalene at the t