Here we are, and can you believe it? Friday is December first, which means we are already almost out of hurricane season! It has been an active year for us. One reality of life here in beautiful Lake Wales, Florida is that we know they are coming. They probably won’t come every year, but they can come any year. They may bring a lot of rain like Donna and Ian, and while they are defined by their wind speeds, some like Charlie are way more intense than others.

And so we watch. We can look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s cone of probability, which is better now that they’ve added a yellow blob to show how wide the high wind area is. And we see the spaghetti of various tracking projections. Many of you like the European model, not because it’s exotic or you’re interested in the World Cup, but because it tends to be right.

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How did Luke learn what was said on the cross? The Apostle Paul was imprisoned at Caesarea Maritima, which was the provincial capital of Judea or Palestine under the Roman Empire. He was there for at least two years. Luke, his companion and a physician, stayed in the area. That gave him the opportunity to learn a great deal from the other Apostles, those who followed Jesus and saw him raised from the dead, including the women and others who stayed with Jesus all the way to the foot of the cross.

Luke was thus able to record what these criminals said and some of the most important words we have from Jesus.

Jesus said, “Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

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The Temple at Jerusalem was a magnificent structure. The original temple that Solomon had built around 950 BC had been destroyed by the Babylonians when they conquered Israel and deported them to Babylon. But when Cyrus of Persia defeated Babylon, he returned the people of Israel to the Promised Land and helped them rebuild the Temple around 550 years before Jesus was born.

It was the sort of place that people wanted to maintain and improve over those centuries, and 30 years before Jesus was born Herod the Great embarked on a massive building project to restore and refresh the Temple that had been in place by that time almost 500 years. He enhanced it by building massive plazas, colonnades, porticos and gardens all around it.

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