Pastor's Ponderings: Tuesday Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles 17:32-34 (June 9, 2026)

June 9, 2026:  Tuesday Bible Study on Acts 17:32-34

Good morning my dear friends in Christ. I had a question yesterday that kind of hit me out of the blue. Here it is. Can a person practice witchcraft and be a Christian too? I hadn't thought about that for many years. At one time we had an encounter with a member who may have been involved with witchcraft. The person ultimately left the congregation, and I am unclear if their faith in Christ was shattered by the attractiveness of being able to think that, like God, they had the power to create and destroy by their own will and authority. So, up pops this question again many years later. Here is my best answer for this time in my life, faith, and ministry for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I said it on Sunday, Christ loves every one of His children, but he does not love the sin that is a part of every one's life. He has died for that sin, and all sin, so that we might pattern our lives in the model of grace and forgiveness. I cannot become the judge of how Christ will approach a person. What I do know is that His Holy Spirit will never stop intervening in a person's life to establish the gift of faith in the Savior, and if the Church is only for the sin free, then none of us had better be there this week for worship.  We must always remember that Christ has told us in His own Words, that He has sheep, a flock, that we do not know. It is another way in which our Savior calls to us, and to everyone else, through faith. Our work in the world is to proclaim Christ crucified, and Resurrected from the dead, defeating the last enemy of all people, death! It is up to Christ in each of our lives, to decide if His forgiveness and love have brought to us a change of heart. What if everything the person who believes in the power of witchcraft does is for the good of others, and their heart is filled with compassion, love, and forgiveness for others? I think that you and I can clearly, and quickly, see why the faithful must let Christ be the sole judge of all of us, and that His loving Church is the place where everyone belongs, regularly confronted by His sacrifice and love for all of His Father's creation, most especially for we who are created in the image of God. 

Today we have a brief passage in chapter 17 about how things moved forward in Athens for Paul's missionary work. These few verses may help us all see more clearly what the Love of Christ can accomplish in the lives of His children. As Luke writes about Paul's time in Athens, Luke also only names two people by name who become part of the community of believers which Paul is attempting to establish. Dionysius was, in all likelihood, a member of the community of "deep" thinkers and philosophers in Athens, and he became a believer, and the woman who Luke mentions, Damaris, would be a person who was in the time-period place of having to seek out a living for herself just because nearly every woman was in the same place in Athens.  What we see here with Luke's mention of these two people, both a man and a woman, was that there was, and still is, a universal appeal of the sharing of the story of God's sacrificial gift of love for His creation in the person and divinity of His Son, Jesus Christ.  I hope that you can see that in Paul's time there was a place for people of every status in the Christian church. We need to remember that Christ's response to the disciples’ appeal that there was a healer doing his work in Jesus’ name, but that he was not one of the followers of Jesus. Christ's response to the disciples is simple, "If he is not our enemy, then he is our friend". How often have we been caught in the unholy trap of thinking that the Church is not the right place for that kind of person?

It took years for women to be accepted into the clergy of the Lutheran Church. And in some of our more conservative Lutheran churches like the LCMS, the Wisconsin Synod, and in most free Lutheran churches, women are not allowed to serve as clergy, and in some of them women cannot be on congregation councils or even teach confirmation or Sunday School beyond elementary age children.  And we all know the years that it has taken for some of the Lutheran Churches to be open to GLBTQ+ members, and even longer for them to be ordained in the ELCA and other full fellowship denominations with whom we are in full communion agreements. All of this because we felt that somehow Jesus needed our protection, and the Gospel would be threatened if we didn't sit on the judgement seat which only rightfully is Christ's. Paul came from the kind of thinking that made it possible for him to literally kill people who went against the ten commandments and their expansion in Jewish writings addressing every life situation which might break a Law of God, but in Christ Paul and the Church has grown to understand that the Love of Christ is meant for everyone.  No one should be set aside because we see them as different. Wow, two verses and a question of Christ's love for people who are different! Grace is the most powerful force for inclusivity and love in our lives.

I hope you have found some things to ponder through all of this.

With love in Christ, Pastor Kim