Rev Chris Roth

Ezekiel 34.11–16 Psalm 87 2 Timothy 4.1–8 John 21.15–19 The church has been tempted by fragmentation since the very beginning. We are constantly and continuously tempted to walk away from each other. In university I took a class on Christian history. My professor, Dr. Robinson, held up a book that listed all the known Christian denominations, which at that time numbered at somewhere over 20,000. Many of these denominations consisted of only one church. He then told us his two favorite churches/denominations. One was “the Church of God on Turtle Hill”, the other (in the same town) was “The True Church of God on Turtle Hill”. It’s amazing how a whole history can be assumed in the one word “true”. You can imagine there was some sort of a disagreement that happened. It could have been over something theological- like how faith and works determine your salvation. But, it might also have been the result of an argument about the colour of the carpet. Whatever it was, it caused a division in ...

PROVERBS 8:1-4, 22-31;  PSALM 8;  ROMANS 5:1-5;  JOHN 16:12-15 Having a Tradition means that we don’t have to use a lot of energy trying to answer questions that have already been dealt with. … That doesn’t mean we don’t think for ourselves, or that our ancestors can’t get things wrong sometimes. We rely on tradition all the time, and not just in a religious context. Much of education is about learning a tradition. If you go to university and take physics, you will learn a tradition- you will learn the work of those who have come before you. You can look at how they have wrestled with problems and what answers they came up with. You learn a method for approaching a problem. You learn a way of framing a problem. When you learn a tradition, you look at what those who came before us have found out. We can look at the map they left us, and (through their explorations) we can see where the various paths lead us. We can see which paths are dead ends, and which ones lead us o...

  GENESIS 11:1-9; ACTS 2:1-21 Our reading from the Old Testament today is the familiar story of the Tower of Babel. There are a couple of Old Testament scholars who have shed new light on this story for me in the last few years. One is Michael Heiser and the other if Fr. Stephen De Young. [1] De Young sees this story as referring to the Broze Age Collapse that happened in the 12th century BC (just over 3000 years ago). He sees this story not so much as informing people about the Bronze Age Collapse (as it would have been something they were very aware of), rather, the story would be giving the spiritual meaning that lays behind the collapse. According to De Young, The Tower of Babel story is referring to the first Babylonian Empire, which is not to be confused with the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which was 1000 years later, and who destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and took the people into exile. This empire tied together an incredibly wide geography. Bronze was made from tin and copp...