Rev. John M. Edgerton

Transcript

Transcript

By the time Nicodemus came to visit him, Jesus was the talk of the whole country. Nicodemus had heard Jesus was performing inexplicable wonders. But what’s more, Nicodemus had heard Jesus was traveling amidst the most downtrodden and disreputable people: notorious sinners and suspicious foreigners, poor uneducated laborers, and women, and the sick. Jesus was teaching them they were in the very presence of God, and Jesus was confronting the religious authorities and teaching them they had strayed far from the presence of God.

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

The passage that we’ve just heard from book of Revelation is a vision about the fate of the human soul after we die. As is true with any vision, this vision is meant to communicate something that is true but categorically different from what we know, and so it must rely on metaphor and symbol.

Transcript

It was early in the morning and Pontius Pilate was tense. It was the Passover festival in Jerusalem and so 100,000 people from all over Israel had descended on the city, to remember the story of when the God of Israel smashed the power of an empire and set them free. The Roman Empire looked on this celebration of the smashing of an empire with great suspicion. That’s why Pontius Pilate was there, he was the Roman governor of Israel, and he was in Jerusalem with an army to personally oversee security.

The story of the Magi begins long before Bethlehem. The story of the Magi begins in the far reaches of the stars, and from 800 years before the birth of Jesus. It all began with the great king Nabonassar, ruler of the Babylonian empire.