Pastor's Ponderings: Tuesday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 15:36-41 (April 21, 2026)

April 21, 2026:  Tuesday Bible Study on Acts 15:36-41

Good morning! Christ has Risen! He has Risen Indeed! Yes, it is still Easter though it’s easy to let go of the fact that Church Year Calendar places the celebration of Easter as a six week-long event in our lives. I know that Christmas seems to be bigger in terms of its impact on our culture and society, but Christ Birth is celebrated in the Church for 12 days. Yes, I know, we are always celebrating both of these world-changing holy events throughout the year! I want you to know that we still have not received word for the date for our sister-in-law's celebration of life, though we are going to be ready to leave on short notice. Please continue to pray for our nephew Aaron, and our niece Shannon, and their families. My brother died one and one half years ago, and now they have to celebrate their Mom's life in so short a time after their Dad's death. I think it would be good if we all chose to celebrate lives while we are still alive. Doesn't everyone deserve to be celebrated for their faith and sense of Christian Responsibility?

Today in our passage, Paul finds it too difficult to forgive Mark for Mark's earlier departure on Paul's first mission trip with Barnabas. However, when Paul decided it was time to leave , he and Barnabas had an argument about bringing John Mark with again, so Barnabas, and his sense of grace and forgiveness, took Mark with him to Cypress to continue the work there, and Paul chose Silas to join him as he journeyed back to all of the communities where church starts had happened to see how everyone was doing.  This was the beginning of Paul's second missionary journey, and as we proceed through the next chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we will be covering his work in Asia minor and Greece, and even into some parts of Europe in the coming chapters. But we need to get back to the issue that happened in this passage. There are many times when we see in Paul that old pharisaical behavior, with its inherent judgement for others, return in his life. Mark was a young man with little experience on that first missionary journey. Perhaps he was unprepared to take the risks that he had to meet head on with Paul. Maybe Mark was just homesick, or perhaps he felt that with Paul and Barnabas, both strong and knowledgeable in their own ways, that there was little for Mark to do? However, later as Paul continues to reject Mark for the next journey, Barnabas still sees in him a valuable partner for the work on Cypress. Later, Paul will come to understand judgement and grace in a more compassionate way, finally stating that no one has the right to judge another person, and in fact, they don't even have the right to judge themselves. There is only one judge in all of God's creation, and that is Christ. He will judge with love and compassion, and even more, He might tend to be less harsh on us than we would be on ourselves for our failures of life and faith. I think that we could have a really great Sunday class on this topic that would bring many questions and comments. In fact, my new adult ed Sunday class at 9AM will cover exactly this issue in our lives and work for the LORD. It starts on May 10 at 9AM - Faith and Civic Life seeking the well-being for All. How does all this fit into our lives as Christ's children? Do we play a “Paul” and judge others based on our previous experience with them or based on secondhand knowledge of a person or group of people. Yesterday we heard that JFK junior had said at some point that every black child should be removed from their birth homes and turned over to other families (I assume that he meant white families) to be raised properly. Here is a judgement of others certainly based on little direct knowledge, and without admitting that there are many other factors that should be corrected that have a dire impact on black families. And just like white children sometimes need to be removed from birth homes, so do children of other races and cultures, but no single racial community, or Anglo community is any better than the others who are faced with such overwhelming hard impacts on their families. Sounds to me like this all fits into our study, doesn't it? In our lives as a family, we met many wonderful people, and their children, when we lived in multi-cultural communities. It is time for Christians to call racists what they are, not to waltz around their uninformed, biased, hateful thinking. This is an evil that every Christian should be standing against. As we continue in our study of Paul's second, extensive, missionary journey, we will have the opportunity to see the maturing of Paul's faith, and the changes in how he chooses to approach people who reject the message he brings.

Thanks for being with me today. I hope to see you on Sunday for worship at 10AM

With love in Christ, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Monday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 15:22-35 (April 20, 2026)

April 20, 2026:  Monday Bible Study on Acts 15:22-35

For my dear friends in Christ. I am writing this Bible Study on Sunday evening, because we have a complication in our schedules due to the death of our sister-in-law in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Saturday evening. Her passing was not totally unexpected. We do not yet know the date of her Celebration of Life, but both Melody and I are planning on being with our nephew and niece and their families. We have begun making plans to make that happen. Josiah starts at Pima Med Institute in a week, James and Jared are finishing up this school year, with James graduating in late May, and Jesse is working early hours into the afternoon at his job. All of them need to have transportation, so plans are already in place to make certain that can happen. Thankfully, they are very responsible at home and will do just fine in our absence. Mom and Dad just have to be sure that the house is stocked with food for the time we will be away! At some point I will be missing a Sunday worship service, and a scheduled worship may need to be changed around a bit, but I will have music recorded, and a message for that Sunday that we will be away. Please don't stay away because I will not be there.

It is obvious that becoming a witness for Christ, and His missionary, has its complications. Paul and Barnabas have come back to Jerusalem bringing the good news of all the people in Asia Minor who had heard their words of Good News, and had either converted to Christianity, or became Christian from no other religious experience in their lives. But while there, some questions arose by those who would cause problems, both conservative Jews and idol worshipers who believed that more resistance had to be put in the way to disrupt this new faith community. We know that more included things like strict Kosher food rules, circumcision for the men, and following the massive rules of all the additional laws that every good holy Jew must follow to be right with God needed to be strictly followed by these new Christians. So, Paul's and Barnabas' detractors made it difficult for the new converts to be considered members in full of the Christian movement. Off to Jerusalem go Paul and Barnabas to share the truly good news of their successes in proclaiming the Christ, His sacrifice, death, and Resurrection for the blessing of all people with the God's Grace and Love. However, in Jerusalem, when the time came to make some decisions about how the mother Church should proceed, it was to the word of James which the new Church turned, and in his thoughtfulness, James made choices which would satisfy both the moderate new Christians there, and the more conservative Jews who thought that the new converts must do much more.  They made their decision quickly, not waiting on days and weeks of debates, but sent along Judas and Silas to speak the message of the Jerusalem Christians acceptance of these new converts with only a few changes that the new Church felt must be followed. Rather than a letter which might have left the converts feeling like the response was brisk and cold, the message was delivered by these two new Christian leaders with gentleness, kindness, and truth in their warmth in loving the LORD. By doing this the Jerusalem Church made it clear that Paul and Barnabas did indeed have the backing of the Apostles in Jerusalem, and after Silas and Judas left, Paul and Barnabas stayed on in Antioch to continue their missionary work. Sometimes we can tell our newest members that they are most welcome in our community, but it comes down to how they are received by everyone, including the leaders in the congregation. We know that we are a welcoming and affirming congregation for all people, and in order for every person to feel that reality, it is necessary for us to be the living presence of Christ in every person's life in the congregation, both long time members, and the newest members, and all together, the loving grace of Christ shines brightly through each one of us so that the work of the Gospel will be done!

God bless you in all that you are doing to be the people of Christ,

With love in Christ, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament bible study of Psalm 52 (April 16, 2026)

April 16, 2026:  Thursday Bible Study on Psalm 52

Blessings and Peace in the Name, and by the Power, of our Risen Savior. I hope that we can all pray for peace to be established between Lebanon and Israel, and between the Ukraine and Russia, and between our country and Iran. I know that it seems like a lot to ask of God, but with God all things are possible, and since we pray and live with the Holy Spirit in, with, and around us, we must know that we are guided by Christ's Grace, Love, and Wisdom, not only in our praying, but also in our daily living.  So, my invitation to prayer is for each one of us at American to pray for guidance about how we should move forward as a congregation on the site where we have been for 76 years, remembering that we are not ever deserted by our Savior, but instead promised that His Resurrected presence with us is steadfast.

Our Psalm for today is interesting. In the opening verses we have what appears to be a section which could certainly be indicated in Saul, Israel's first king. As he became less and less stable emotionally and mentally out of fear for his place as the king, Saul acted with strength filled with evil and choices meant to steer away from the direction which God had put in place, by calling a simple shepherd boy, friends of Saul's son, a conveyer of calm when he played his harp for his flocks, or to bring comfort to the king who he would replace.  In our lives all people are presented with choices, the consequences of which often appear unseen as choices are made to follow the LORD'S direction, or to set out on an independent direction with little regard for what it means to fall away from the LORD to do something which will be more violent and dangerous, both to its perpetrator and its victim(s).  Saul's terror at losing his kingship resulted in insanity and instability, and eventually, his son would become the second king of Israel, not David (YET!). From the descriptions we have of David, and the Psalms (songs) attributed to him, we discover a man of faith, who since his childhood has attempted, and often found, success in his God guided actions, all of which brought David, and his followers, great blessings, that is, until David decided to act without God's blessing, taking another man's wife for his own, and then arranging for her husband to be killed at the front of a battle in which Israel was involved.  The ultimate consequence of David's loss of his usual faithfulness meant that both he and Bathsheba would lose the son they had conceived in their deceit. It would take great humility and confession on David's part to get restored in his relationship with the LORD. In our Psalm for today we see a pattern of what happens when a leader, probably Saul, loses his ability to remain faithful to God. We must remember that Saul was a much-loved king until his choices brought about his downfall. And even people of faith can make choices that bring about the destruction of everything with which they have been blessed. Of course, we must ask if this is retribution by God as the Old Testament indicates, or if it is the natural outcome of choices which fail to regard and utilize the gift of faith which has been gifted to us by God's Spirit. Sometimes people use a false sense of faith to convince others that they are loved by Christ, and THAT WOULD BE TRUE because Christ loves every one of His children, both those who know and love Him, and those who have no clue what it means to live in faith.  What every one of us needs to remember is that there is only one judge, and it is the Savior! We must all approach our Savior in humility and confession. No one is without sin. There is only one, and that is Christ himself. Our Psalm for today is a revelation of the power of faith to transform the life of the faithful, providing for all of us who accept Christ as our Savior, to see the outcome of God's Love in our lives, and then in those special moments to laugh with confidence in the power of our LORD to help us see that abundant life, as the doing of our Savior, and to know of His constant presence with His children.

Thank you for sharing with me today. Please pray for me today too. I am continuing to battle a stomach bug which I picked up from one of the boys. (They are really men) So I worked from home yesterday and will again today. God bless you all!

With Love in Christ, Pastor Kim