Palm Sunday Mark 11:1-11 One of my core memories is of a parishioner who said, "I don't think I would have been as brave as the three in the fiery furnace. I think I would have just bowed to the king. I would have bowed and known in my heart that I still loved God. I admire them, but I can tell the truth that I wouldn't have done it." (Daniel 3) To me, this man's honesty was just as brave. In front of his fellow Christians, in front of his pastor, he owned up to his own facts: he did not believe he would have had the courage to resist the pressures of the king. He would have rather continued to live, being faithful in secret, than risk dying painfully and prematurely for open obedience to God. I can respect that kind of truth-telling. None of us want to be weighed in the balance and found wanting. For some of us, that's our greatest fear. The truth is, however, that I suspect most of us are not as brave as we think we are. The right side of history seems cle
John 3:14-21 Let’s talk for a moment about chapter and verse. None of the books of the Bible were written with chapters and verses, neither the epistles (letters), the histories, the prophets, or the gospels. Each work was a scroll or set of papyri that flowed. Not only were there not chapters and verses, but neither biblical Hebrew nor biblical Greek have capital letters or punctuation. Better still, biblical Hebrew doesn’t have vowels. No capital letters, no punctuation, and sometimes no vowels. This means that when the Holy Spirit guided the first person who wrote down the stories that were circulating orally, they knew what they meant. And the people around them did as well, but after 2-3 generations translators, readers, and copiers are making their best educated guess. Line breaks were used after the scriptures were codified to make reading easier, but a line break was still a guide and an interpretation. Chapter separations that we would recognize came into being in the very e