Ever got into one of those situations where a pack of kids just experienced something and are all attempting to explain it to you at the same time? If you know the bunch, you typically learn to listen to each one of them with a different ear. You've got the funny kid, the kid bad things always happen to, the kid that exaggerates everything…and the kid that is pretty true to the actual event.

Any time something happens to multiple people, there are different views and different experiences. We all come from different places and that changes the way we encounter things. We enter in with presuppositions, assumptions about what is actually going on, and a different take on what we feel like we need to communicate.

And the books we call the "gospels" aren't that different. We have four different people, with different experiences and assumptions, all trying to communicate the truth of who Jesus is. And they are all different. And they are also all completely true.

"Gospel" means good news. Each of these writers are telling the story of what good news is to a specific group of people in a particular place and time. As the church developed and rapidly spread, they began sifting through and identifying written works as authoritative and worthy of being called scripture, thereby putting them into the same tradition as the ancient Hebrew writings we now call the Old Testament.

So this Sunday will be a little different. We are going to take a quick lap through all four gospels, and look at them each as to why they are written and why they still matter.