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Sunday’s bulletin

EASTER DAY

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Liturgy of the Palms

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Sunday’s bulletin  March 28 2021 Bulletin Palm Sunday

 

Fifth Sunday of Lent

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Sunday’s bulletin  March 21 2021 bulletin Lent 5B 

  4th Sunday in Lent 

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Third Sunday of Lent

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The Exodus scripture for Sunday is the first listing of the Ten Commandments.

Did you know?

Some scholars date the Ten Commandments between the 16th and 13th centuries BCE because Exodus and Deuteronomy connect the Ten Commandments with Moses and the Sinai Covenant between Yahweh and Israel.

Because they may be part of a summary of prophetic teachings, the Ten Commandments may have been written after the OT prophecies of Amos and Hosea (after 750 BCE) or even later.

The Ten Commandments contain little that was new to the ancient world and reflect a morality common to the ancient Middle East.  They are a description of the conditions accepted by the community of Israel in its relationship to Yahweh.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Ten Commandments”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Nov. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ten-Commandments. Accessed 6 March 2021.

   Second Sunday in Lent 

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Here are 2-minute videos from Encyclopedia Britannica about Abraham and ancient Mesopotamia, where he was from.  Scroll on down the link to see more images.

          First Sunday in Lent

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Transfiguration Sunday

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February 14 2021 bulletin

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

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Today’s reading from Isaiah is dated around the time of King Cyrus  the Great of Persia.  If you remember, King Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine in 538 BCE.  According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Cyrus’s kingdom went from the Aegean Sea (between Greece and Turkey) eastward to the Indus River in Tibet. His successors conquered all of Asia Minor and Egypt.  From my atlas, here’s an overview of the area with the red marking the west (Aegean Sea) and east (Indus River) boundaries.  It helps to know that we now associate Persia with Iran.

Here’s some art work from the period.

This is Hercules doing his first of twelve “Labours.”

 

Here is a basilica located in Paestum Italy.                                                                             It precedes the Parthenon by 100 years.

Here’re are some Persian smiles.

Persian smiles   Look at the smiles on these faces.  It was thought that art depicting humans should show some kind of “sign of life,”  thus the smiles on these statues.  Later in classical Greece, sculptors figured out how to depict the human body with more human expression (signs of life), so the smiling faces disappeared.