Posts

Showing posts with the label St. Barnabas

Sermon - Trinity IX, 2026 - Luke 16:1-13

-
Image
The Parable of the Unjust Steward , Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1540 Christian Wisdom Seeks Eternal Dwellings Wisdom is forward thinking and focused on the goal Christian wisdom employs every treasure, heavenly and worldly, for the sake of reaching the goal If there is a hardest parable, it might be this one; throws people off every time. The parable presents a rich man with a steward who was found wasting the rich man’s possessions. The job of a steward is to be faithful with someone else’s possessions, and this guy wasn’t cutting it. So obviously, he got fired. What’s crazy is the rich man lets the steward hand in the books, and he doesn’t hunt them down and take them from him immediately. The steward does exactly what you don’t want the steward to do, which is why normally the books get taken from the steward: the steward cooks the books. He meets some of the rich man’s debtors, probably tenant farmers, and in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors he adjusts how much they owe, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sermon - St. Barnabas, Apostle

-
Image
St. Barnabas Healing the Sick,  Paolo Veronese, circa 1556 Generosity and Encouragement Barnabas was generous and encouraging What it means for us to be generous What it means for us to encourage A blessed feast of St. Barnabas to you dear friends in Christ! Many of the saints in the bible don’t always behave rather saintly, and we see many of their character flaws. Barnabas, however, isn’t that way. Throughout the book of Acts he is known for his generosity and encouragement. For that reason Barnabas is a wonderful example to us of what it means to be generous and how to encourage one another. Barnabas was a Levite from the Island of Cyprus, a small but very fertile and rich island. He was originally named Joseph, but the apostles called him Barnabas, meaning son of encouragement. He’s introduced to us in the Bible when he sold one of his fields and gave the money to the apostles to be distributed among the needy christians and support the work of the ministry. Later, after St. Pa...
Post a Comment
Read more