Rev Chris Roth

1 Kings 19:1-15; Psalm 22:19-28; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39 Many of us who have been brought up in the modern west have a hard time believing in the idea of demons and spirits. … We tend to boil all evil down to psychological or sociological factors. … When there is a mass school shooting, we tend to say that the shooter has a mental illness. Or we might say that this is an expression of a toxic gun culture, or an expression of toxic masculinity. The shooter is a puppet, and the strings are pulled by psychological factors shaped by their past experiences and neuro-chemical makeup, or the strings are pulled by societal forces. … We won’t always hear a lot of talk about “evil”. … I’m not denying the power of psychological factors and sociological factors, but maybe that doesn’t give us the complete picture. When we read the Bible, what we will sometimes do when we read about a person with a bad spirit is say that the ancient world didn’t have a good grasp of mental illness or neur...

  Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15 Isaac Newton once wrote in a letter,  “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. [1] What he meant was that he was building on the thinking and discoveries of those who have gone before him. This is ultimately what education should be. We should be learning from those who went before us, so we can benefit from their struggle, so that we can then build on that knowledge. Imagine someone who has an old pair of binoculars, and they set out to become a world class astronomer, but they want to start from scratch. They don’t want to be influenced by anyone else who came before them. They refuse to read any astronomy books, or take any classes on astronomy. They just go into their back yard at night and start looking at the sky. … Even if that person is a genius, they will only be able to get so far. … If that person is willing to learn from those who came before them, however, then they will...

  Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, 25-27 Jesus said that after he ascended to the Father, he would send the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The Spirit is not an impersonal force; He is a person. The New Testament usually refers to the Holy Spirit with the male pronoun, as Jesus does in our Gospel reading, where he says, “You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (Jn 14:17b). … Though, there are very old Syriac liturgies that used female pronouns to refer to the Holy Spirit, associating the Holy Spirit with the feminine Wisdom as we see in Proverbs 8. … Gender, when speaking about God is really a metaphor anyway, but I think it’s just helpful to know why sometimes pronoun use seems a bit more wiggly when talking about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is given many names. The Paraclete, which means the “one alongside”. The Comforter, Guide, Counselor, Advocate, and Helper. He is cal...