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OK so let me tell you about Acts 19, because it has the only Bible passage I ever preached on, which is also one of the cartooniest stories of the Bible. Over the almost 30 years (!) since I preached on it, I’ve come to realize a few things that put it in a different…
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I always thought the people of Athens got a raw deal in Acts, but maybe not. Acts 19 has my very favorite story – it’s very Hanna Barbera-funny, and it was the first Scripture I preached on (and technically the only one I’ve preached on, I guess). But I’m going to save 19 for another…
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There are a couple of funny moments and a few great stories in Acts 14-16, but I guess the question for the night is “Who do you listen to, and what are they keeping you from seeing?” So the second half of Acts is basically just Paul running around the Mediterranean getting beat up for…
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Whose voice would you recognize in the dark? Acts 12-13 isn’t particularly memorable, plot wise, but all the humor and weirdness of Acts shows up plenty. (If you’re scoring at home, this Acts-reading thing is going to go on for a while; we’re not at the halfway point yet.) We’ve got prisons and preaching and…
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Back when I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a basketball coach, one thing that sunk in was the importance of playing “away from the ball.” When you have the ball in your hands, everyone is focused on you. But in order for a team to be successful, you need the…
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You could say that Acts 6-8 is the part of the story when things begin to go off the rails. But only if you are open to the possibility that “off the rails” is exactly where God wants them to be. Regardless, there are at least five fascinating characters and a couple funny things in…
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There are a couple of funny moments in Acts 3-5, but more than that, there are just some great examples of interesting storytelling. If you’re like most people, you probably got turned off to the Bible a long time ago. You read a translation that made everything sound stuffy and foreign and inaccessible, and you…
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“My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.” I don’t know about that. Joy in tribulation isn’t a major theme of James, appearing only in the beginning and end of the letter. Nor is it unique to James – Paul says very similar things in his letters.…
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“Hamilton” is in some ways a victim of its own success. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember that in, say, 2015, very few people knew much of anything about the historical Alexander Hamilton. So when characters in Miranda’s musical muse about the fickle nature of fate and the unpredictability of…
