Who is “welcome” to join us in following Jesus? Who is not? Where do we draw the line? Should we even draw one? How do we know? During the week prior to the Sunday when this lesson was originally taught, American citizens were mesmerized by two very different and highly publicized funerals: John McCain’s in…
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This week we observed how the stepped-up persecution of Christians in Jerusalem served as a catalyst for the spread of the good news throughout Judea and into Samaria thus fulfilling part of Jesus’ prophecy in Acts 1:8. We focused in on the first non-Judean “missionary journey” post-Resurrection: Philip’s ministry in Samaria. We concluded that this was…
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This week we retraced our steps in Acts 5:17-24 to more closely examine the second arrest story of the nascent church. We learned that Luke often uses a literary technique—the phrase “they/he rose up”—to emphasize a shift in the story line. We studied the motivation behind the second arrest and learned that it was more…
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This week we spent the first half of class discussing the so-called “400 Years of Silence” between the Old and New Testaments (a.k.a. “intertestamental time”). We briefly discussed the difference between the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the origins of the Sadducees. Upon turning our attention to the passage, we…
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