This week we make our way through King Saul and David, and spend most our time time talking about Solomon.  Solomon, often referred to as the wisest man in the world, is also the King responsible for the fall of Israel.  But Why?  This week we look at the very things that drew Solomon's affections away from God and toward the glories and riches offered by empire.  

In our Journey to Advent, this week we cover what it was the the Jews so faithful to the purity and holiness law kept missing that caused them to continually miss the life of their covenant calling.  

In this week's story we jump ahead to the story where Moses encounters God.  This text not only moves our story forward, but it begs the question from all of us, is our idea of God shaped by our position in life? Answer: Probably.  The texts challenge us to move beyond that which is comfortable to learn God in a way we may not have known him before. 

In this week's bridge talk we are going to take about thirty minutes to cover 600 years of Biblical narratives, bridging where we left off with Abraham and connecting the next part of our story with Moses.  In addition we are going to highlight many of the repeated patterns within these stories and the significance of those patterns.  

Today's story brings us to the end of Abraham and the idea of Covenant.  We explore what scripture means by covenant and how it is, those of us who are in covenant with God are called to approach the promises of God. 

This week we jump from the tower of Babel and we are introduced to our new man or character, Abram.  Abram, is a man who understood God, like most of us, according to the myths of his home society.  In our story today, we learn how God begins to change Abram's understanding of who God is, to make him into the man ready to live into the covenant. 

In this week's bridge talk we bridging the story between Babel and Abram, but we are doing this by looking all the way back at repeated motifs being told at larger levels of graduating magnitude.  We first see the same theme in the opening scene of scripture before there are humans, then we see it again in the first family, and so on.  Abram, begins God's new humanity called to live differently.

This Sunday, we continue our new series leading us toward Advent. Together, we’ll look at Scripture’s first picture of empire—Babel—and see how even the mightiest power collapses when it’s built on pride and set against God’s way. Then we’ll turn inward, asking where the seeds of that same impulse might be taking root in our own hearts.

This episode is meant to cover some ground between each of our stories.  Two things are happening throughout this series: (1) we are covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and (2) I'm assuming an interpretive lens in my storytelling.  In this second bridge talk, I cover both the distance between last week's sermon and next, Babel, and talk about civilization, patterns, and genealogies in the text.

This week we continue a new series that will carry us through to Advent. This week we begin to look at the seeds of empire and how they arose from the first sin, and continued until their natural production and foundation of violence gave way to the flood that destroyed it all. Destruction is never the end; it is sort of a built-in self-purification, and so as throughout all of scripture, sin and chaos never have the final word.