The lectionary presses forward into the 4^th Sunday of Easter, and we continue with readings from Acts, John and Revelation to go along with the Psalm.

• Acts 9:36-43
• Revelation 7:9-17
• John 10:22-30
• Psalm 23

Acts takes the place of the OT lesson during the Easter season and the story of Dorcas is a familiar one to me.  I preached on it last year or the year before on Mother’s Day.  The Scripture itself is a powerful story, but you’d really be doing yourself a favor if you looked deeper at Dorcas and the type of person she was.  For me, this goes along with another text (used on Mother’s Day) where Paul is saying some very nice things about Timothy’s mother and grandmother.  While the ladies in the latter Scripture nurtured faith in what we sense was a more devotion type way, we see Dorcas show an example of her faith by the work that she does.  Good stuff.

I won’t even begin to pontificate on the 23^rd Psalm.  I feel like I used it in a sermon recently, but I’m getting the feeling it will happen again this coming Sunday.  The parallel between the comfort that the Psalm provides and the comfort a mom provides is hard to ignore.  Put your offering money on this being the Scripture of choice Sunday.

As you all know, this is a no study, first blush look at the readings for the week.  That being said, I do not want to wade into the Revelation Scripture blindly.  I have lots of questions, but very little in the way of answers.  This is simply one that I’ll have to spend extra time with this week and deal with at a later time.  Sometimes it’s obvious that a text will require much study and other times we’re lulled into a false sense of not studying a text that in our mind is cut and dry.  It is for those reasons I typically end all of these Monday blogs asking both you and me to spend more time studying the Word.

This is going to be a poor analogy, but hopefully you get the point.  Whenever you watch a documentary or a special on some long-ago murder and the climax is an interviewer asking them for “the truth” and whether or not they are in fact the killer…what is it that we want to hear?  What is it that we will believe?  Seems to me we want to hear a confession, and anything less is simply not believable.  While there was certainly some political motivation behind some asking Jesus to declare himself the Messiah, I wonder if it really mattered if he answered them straight on as they complain in this reading from John.  Jesus is explaining that he has told them with his words and deeds, but they don’t believe.  Part of that is that the deeds he’s doing don’t have anything to do with overthrowing the Roman government.  It seems the only answer they will truly believe would be in the negative.  I get the feeling they are all standing around wanting to yell out, “I told you he wasn’t it!”  An interesting part of this is Jesus telling them that they do not belong to his flock.  To me, it confirms that those surrounding him are not interested in hearing the truth.   It is our call to hear the truth, believe it and follow Christ Jesus.

As I mentioned earlier, join me this week in studying these texts and finding out what the Scripture is truly revealing to us.