Reflections

The key things we have been told during our Easter season are that the results of the Resurrection, for those who believed, were peace and power. Peace from fear, and power to preach – to preach that Jesus had won the battle against death, the battle against fear.  That message reaches its climax today, on the Feast of Pentecost. The message is embodied, made flesh, in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit brings that power to preach, to be understood by everyone (Acts 2:1-11). That message of the  “mighty acts of God” is…

Continue Reading Pentecost Sunday

We are inclined to think of the Ascension as the event that finally took Jesus away from this earth, our world, to somewhere else, a place we call heaven. But the gospel writers, at the end of their telling of the story of Jesus’s life, were not really focused on his departing. If anything, quite the opposite. Their focus was on Jesus staying, with them, and with us.  This is perhaps clearest at the very end of Matthew’s gospel, which we hear today (Matthew 28:16-20). Matthew doesn’t include anything about an ascension…

Continue Reading The Ascension of the Lord

Today, our reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:5-8, 14-17) moves us further on from the simplicity of those very earliest days after the Resurrection, when the apostles and a small group of disciples were still all based in and around Jerusalem.  Now the church is starting to be dispersed over a wider area. We haven’t yet got Paul traveling all over the Middle East (he’s still persecuting Christians at this time), but Philip is traveling by himself in Samaria. And we start to see the regularization of initiation into…

Continue Reading Sixth Sunday of Easter