Acts 16:9-15

A not extraordinary verse here. A vision, a journey, a gathering, the opening of a heart by God, a conversion. A pretty common tale by now. That the gathering is all women is not explained, nor does anyone appear surprised. The main character, Lydia is a business owner. She is a "worshipper of God", which means she is Jewish. She probably chose this path since Macedonia has other religions that are more popular. This is very cosmopolitan. And Paul just walks in and wins her over. What would really be great is if we heard what Paul had to say. That's not the point of the story though, it's not Paul, it's the Lord opening her heart that makes things happen.

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

An unusual range of verses in this Lection, they don't usually cross over chapters like that. And to me, the end of chapter 21 sounds very similar to the beginning of chapter 22. There are churches that really focus on this book, but I don't have the desire to untangle all the language. But, if you're interested, go back to chapter 19 to get a better sense of the wrapping up of the complete Christian narrative. 19:6 is where God comes back to rule. For some, this is a solution to that problem of evil we've encountered now and again.

Some say, evil exists because Satan is in charge of the world we live in. To have love in the world, God couldn't know everything. The word "omnipotent" doesn't actually appear in the Bible, but there are a dozen or so verses that mention God knowing everything, and a few that contradict that. That's the untangling I said I didn't want to do. The Lection also wants to skip over the Satan stuff in chapter 20, leaving it up to your local preacher. Then by these verses, it's all fixed. This is all a vision and there's no clarity on when it will happen or what is symbolic and what is predicted to really happen. That's why we have all the denominations, to argue about that.

John 14:23-29

I had to read verse 24 a few times. There is a semicolon in there, something that would not have appeared in the original. John 12:49 is more clear on this point, "For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken." This chapter also introduces the term "Advocate" and here follows up with "Holy Spirit". When the term is first introduced in John 14:15, it is defined as the "Spirit of truth". I could use "spirit of truth" in a sentence and everyone would understand that I meant a sense of having the agreement of many witnesses and having evidence and being universally accepted as a foundational aspect of the real world. I wouldn't need to evoke any supernatural powers. But you don't hear that much when preachers speak of the Trinity.

Confusing passages like this, where there is some other type of being appearing or expected to appear, were worked out in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. In the end, even those who held adamant opinions on the matter, like Tertullian, say it is a mystery. They tried to maintain the idea of the one God, but fit statements like this into their theology and came up with concepts like the "triune" God. Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted is a good source for this history if you are interested.

I am almost finished with this sermon helper. I will update and maintain it in the years to come, but this is the next to last entry to complete the 3 year cycle. I have found a ton of entries like this, that say keeping "my word" is the answer to everything, but don't tell you what that word is. Simply stating that you should "speak the truth" is not sufficient in any time from any leader. You have to have a systematic way of determining what is actually true. Whenever I point this out to a believer, they tell me it is simple, and I just need to read the Bible and pray. When I tell them that I could go down the street and find someone who would disagree with them on many points about what Jesus actually said we should do and believe, they say the same thing; that the other people are reading the wrong parts of the Bible or the wrong scripture altogether and praying wrong. That is no way to discover the truth.

John 5:1-9

This healing at the pool is one of the 7 public miracles that Jesus performs in the gospel of John. It is an interesting parallel to the 7 seals in Revelations and possibly why it is given as a choice of text this week. At the end of the next to last chapter in John, it is explained that Jesus did these things so that you may come to believe. As I noted in the other passages this week and many times elsewhere, this is the logic of the Bible. It is not a book of thought experiments or explanations of how to work from first principles up to a worldview. It is stories to get you to believe something that can only be taken on faith. It uses miracles, which are events that are unexpected, supernatural, beyond our understanding, so far outside the norm as to be impossible under normal human circumstances. In other words, the evidence for Jesus is itself something that has to be taken on faith.