Paul is angry with what has gone on in the Galatian churches, which is that some have said that converted Christians must be subject to Jewish law. Arguing against that, Paul insists that Christians are “called to freedom.” We as US citizens know something about freedom, but are the two freedoms – the one we experience as Americans and the one Paul says we as Christians are called to – alike?

Elijah has been faithful to God, but in this story he finds himself fleeing for his own life, fleeing so determinedly that he feels all is lost, and he is ready to die. God, however, calls him yet again, and this time in a way Elijah never suspects.

Today is Trinity Sunday, and the scripture reading is, perhaps oddly, from Proverbs. What it has to say to us is fundamental about the nature of God, and it teaches us something about how we are to live.

Through the season of Easter we have been looking at passages from Acts where the Holy Spirit is acting. Today is Pentecost, and we’re reading the story of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the disciples, as Jesus had promised in his last appearances to them. The result was essentially the formation of the church.

Through the season of Easter we are looking at passages from Acts where the Holy Spirit is acting. In today’s story, Paul and Silas encounter a slave girl who is inhabited by a spirit of divination and is being used by her owners to make money. When Paul rids her of that spirit, the owners have Paul and Silas arrested, beaten, and imprisoned. It is a difficult story, but through its course, several people become believers.

Through the season of Easter we are looking at passages from Acts where the Holy Spirit is acting. Today’s story is about Lydia, “a dealer in purple cloth,” who, having heard this stranger, Paul, speak, and after being baptized, offered Paul and his companions room and board at her house. It was an act of radical hospitality. What does it mean to offer radical hospitality?

Through the season of Easter we are looking at passages from Acts where the Holy Spirit is acting. Today’s story involves one of the biggest surprises of the New Testament. Peter is questioned by the disciples in Jerusalem about reports of his having dined with gentiles. His response to them not only completely changes the playing field, erasing some things they had held as rules for believers, but causes them to praise God for this new thing.

Through the season of Easter we are looking at passages from Acts where the Holy Spirit is acting. Today’s story is about Peter, the former fisherman, whose behavior as one of Jesus’s closest disciples ranged from declaring Jesus as the Christ to denying him three times. Now Peter raises Tabitha from the dead. But not only is this a story of Peter as disciple, but of Tabitha and others around her as disciples, illuminating what it means for us to be disciples.

The scripture for today is the familiar story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul/Paul who had been very much opposed to Christians, became perhaps the most influential of the early Christians and remains so today. But a key to Saul’s conversion might well have been Ananias, whom we often overlook.

This is West End’s Youth Sunday when youth design and are in charge of both worship services. The text for the day has Peter and other apostles disobeying the orders of the high priest and council and saying they must obey God rather than any human. Lauren Pickens and Richard Ferrara preach on this text.