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dear friends in christ, jesus grace you in peace from God our father and from our Lord and Savior , jesus christ our men. Ultimately, this is a sermon about the meaning of Pentecost. We're going

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to get there via the scenic route. The commemoration of Mary, the mother of our Lord takes place on August 15, on the calendar of many Christian churches when austin seminary, Aziz not in session and

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many of us are at the beach for a variety of reasons, not the least of which included a desire to put a lot of distance between reformed protestant christians and catholic christians. The attention to marry by

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Protestants might best be described as centuries of silence. Now christmas was something of an exception since without a mother mary we cannot have the baby jesus, but even in some protestant circles celebrating christmas was suspect being

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associated just a bit too much with Catholicism. It is the mass of christ after all, Saint luke has no such hangups about mary. In Chapter one of Luke's Gospel, Mary receives the astounding words of

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Gabriel with a question followed by consent, and then when visiting her kids woman Elizabeth luke, places in mary's mouth, praises of God that we call the magnificat Marcus borg once called these words the most Marxist

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text in the new testament, mary praises God because God has brought down the powerful from their Thrones and has given food to the hungry, She preaches God's revolution. And as we continue to be careful readers

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of luke, we noticed that the story of jesus and the early christian movement is never exclusively a tale of manly men doing masculine deeds. There are women everywhere in the story, marrying Elizabeth are key figures

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in the early chapters of the Gospel. Then, as jesus preaches and teaches, he attracts followers, both women and men luke notices that some women from galilee accompany jesus. As he travels down to Jerusalem

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after his crucifixion, the risen jesus appears to women before he appears to the male apostles. But that's just in volume one, when we turn to luke X and volume to luke carefully. In the first

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chapter of X forecasts how the story of jesus of Nazareth becomes the message about a messiah that travels from Jerusalem to judea and samaria. And even ultimately tomorrow , luke explicitly states that the earliest christian community is

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comprised of jesus mother and brothers along with the women and male followers of jesus. Now I went to sunday school a lot when I was a kid and I grew up in the independent christian churches and we

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love the Book of Acts and I remember knowing that the gospel got from Jerusalem to Rome, I just don't remember hearing that much about all of those women and perhaps most likely that is the fault of me

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and my self interested male peers, services like ancestry dot com and 23 me catered or curiosity to learn more about where we came from. And they do this by linking us to excuse me to a lot

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of archival and even now genetic information about our past and according to the television commercials, we should expect a few surprises during our journeys of Discovery. And that was true in my case. A couple of

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years ago I had my genetic material tested by 23 and me and it told me deep things about my past. The deep story of my jeans reveals that my mother's mother's mother's ancestors came from an area in

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spain or perhaps northern africa Homeland of the H one maternal appetite. Now, no family story I ever heard goes back that far, but because I now know where my great to the 10th power grandmother came

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from, The way I think about my people is changed. God's love shown in jesus luke consistently writes , is always for women and men for jews and gentiles, for those who live in frigia or Rome

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, even for those who are employees of the roman government. This wide open love is no modernist innovation concocted by progressive christians and then painted over the original biblical story. Boundary crossing love is the true old

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time religion. And if that's the case, surely then the purity of the church doesn't mean male nous or ethnic sameness. We're getting to Pentecost were just a train line away. The transcontinental railroad Built in

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the 19th century was the work of two crews, the Central Pacific Railroad crew, starting from California and they had the harder job to blast through mountains. And then the crew of the Union Pacific who started

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on the flat lands of the midwestern Prairie. They met up on May the 10th 1869 in the Utah territory. Leaders from both railroads met to position engines carefully in place and then drive the final golden spike

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symbolizing the tying together of a continent. And they took a photograph. They probably took a couple. But in that commemorative photo there was not a single chinese face visible, despite the fact that chinese workers

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did a lot of the dangerous work of blasting through the mountains on behalf of the central pacific this year . At a reenactment of that event, descendants of those chinese railroad workers restaged the photograph. They put

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themselves in the picture. Mhm. The Orthodox christian tradition uses icons holy images as imaginative ways to communicate God's presence across time and space. In icons for the feast of Pentecost. Some images show The 12

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Apostles that roll call that I read to you, plus Matthias with their tongues of fire dancing on their heads now. And some other ancient icons mary the mother of jesus is also there at Pentecost. Now

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I'm not an iconography, but I think that sure icon is the one with her in and the church that luke depicts has men in it, along,