Rev. Chelsey Harmon lives in Vancouver, BC and is a bivocational pastor at The Bridge Community Church (CRC) in Langley, BC. Chelsey is also on staff at Churches Learning Change, a non-profit that aims to help congregations and leaders pursue personal and congregational transformation. She earned her M.Div. at Calvin Theological Seminary (2009), a ThM in Spiritual Theology at Regent College (2023) and is currently a part-time PhD student at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity where she studies historical examples of Trinitarian mysticism and theology.
Chelsey has been writing sermon commentaries for the CEP website since 2019.
Luke 12:32-40
Commentary
Proper 14C
“Do not be afraid… You also must be ready…” These opening and closing statements from Christ tie this week to last week’s passage. The lectionary skips over another meaningful message about our possessions and our fears and hones in on our stewardship, or being rich towards God through our obedience. Last week, the rich farmer…
Luke 12:13-21
Commentary
Proper 13C
Jesus is speaking to a rather large crowd that is eager to hear from him—according to 12.1, they are even trampling one another to get close. Somehow, a voice from that crowd rises above the rest and the question asked and sparks Jesus’s warning about greed. What Jesus says about greed relates to what he…
Luke 11:1-13
Commentary
Proper 12C
This rich collection of Jesus’s teaching on prayer is made all the more significant given the passage that we looked at last Sunday. At Martha and Mary’s house, Jesus encouraged the women to sit at his feet and choose the better portion, being with God. Now, Jesus describes a practice of being with God in…
Luke 10.38-42
Commentary
Proper 11C
As soon as I read this week’s text, I remembered the last person who was described as sitting at the feet of Jesus: the Gerasene man after the demons were exorcised (Luke 8.26-37). If there is a place to be that is good, it is at God’s feet. At his feet, we are people who…
Luke 10:25-37
Commentary
Proper 10C
The story of the Good Samaritan is so ubiquitous that most of the world, Christian or not, knows it: we’ve used the title to describe people who put themselves in harm’s way or help out strangers in need. So how do we preach a text that is so familiar and is already being used in…
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Commentary
Proper 9C
These words are utterly familiar and yet so few of us (myself included) actually take up the fullness of the call that Jesus gives to the seventy in this passage. Do we even take it up in part? Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem and he commissions pairs of his followers to go out…
Luke 9:51-62
Commentary
Proper 8C
These two discipleship scenarios are an interesting pair. On the one hand, the first scene depicts matters post-decision to follow Jesus. In the other, we have a series of stumbling blocks to saying yes. Going a little deeper than connecting them as discipleship stories, these two scenarios say something about how we are disciples of…
Luke 8.26-39
Commentary
Proper 7C
There is no doubt that this is a difficult passage to preach. Very few of us will feel like we have real world, modern experience with demon possession—and some of us might not even believe it’s a real thing in this age. For those of us who look to match trouble and grace in the…
John 16:12-15
Commentary
Trinity Sunday C
Even on the best of days, if ever anything counted as information that we “cannot bear,” the nature of the Trinity is one of them. The nature of the three persons and their union will forever be out of our reach, but at least we know that we will have some inklings about it because…
John 14:8-17 (25-27)
Commentary
Pentecost
Though many of us return to Acts 2 for Pentecost, writing these gospel commentaries for the last number of years has made me appreciate the work of the Holy Spirit that much more. I mean, don’t get me wrong, flaming tongues are pretty cool to imagine—and a friend of mine once made a pretty rocking…
About Chelsey Harmon