Stopping to Think

  Text       28        “And it shall come to pass afterward,        that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;                    your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,        your old men shall dream dreams,        and your young men shall see visions.              29       Even on the male and female servants        in those days I will pour out my Spirit.  30 “And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. 31 The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 32 And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls. Introduction and Author The book of Joel opens by telling us that the word of the LORD came to Joel, the son of Pethuel (1:1). His name means, “Yahweh is God,” and little el

                                                                    Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash A Response to “A Gospel on the Move” by Eric D. Barreto Introduction In his paper, “A Gospel on the Move: Practice, Proclamation, and Place in Luke-Acts,” Eric D. Barreto argues that from the narrative coming to us as the twin books of Luke and Acts we can draw imaginative tools useful for understanding and evaluating the world around us today. He extends this specifically into the area of border and imigration policy, encouraging his reader to embrace a disruptive and Jesus like stance toward including outsiders in our conception of family and those who belong. Appreciation Barreto asks an important question in his third paragraph on page 175, “how do we move from narration to injunction, from storytelling to ethics, and from narrative to action?” This is an important hermeneutical question. If James urges us to be doers and not mere hearers of the word (see James 1:22), then the qu