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Rev. Douglas Bratt is a Minister of the Word in the Christian Reformed Church in North America. After serving Christian Reformed churches in Iowa, Michigan and Maryland, he retired in July, 2024. He enjoys spending time with his grandchildren, reading good literature, and watching televised sports in his free time.
Doug began writing sermon commentaries for the CEP website in 2006 and started writing weekly in 2012.
Colossians 1:15-28
Commentary
Proper 11C
“Sedition” and “seditious” are concepts to which at least some Americans have paid a lot of attention over the past eighteen months. Some are asking themselves and each other whether a mob’s January 6, 2021’s storming of the United States Capital building was an act of sedition. At least some Americans who wonder that also…
Colossians 1:1-14
Commentary
Proper 10C
Elements of this week’s Epistolary Lesson are faintly reminiscent of Huck Finn’s experience with prayer. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck recounts how his foster mother, Miss Watson, tried to teach him to pray. “Miss Watson … took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray…
Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16
Commentary
Proper 9C
“It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up” has spilled from the lips of at least some of us. Sometimes, of course, we try to cloak our braggadocio in the mantle of false humility. But few of us easily resist the temptation to brag about ourselves or people who are dear to us. Thugs…
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Commentary
Proper 8C
It comes up repeatedly in our conversations with our Jewish friends and acquaintances. “How can you live without God’s law to guide your life?” The observant Jews we know and love can’t imagine living without the structure Torah gives them. “Doesn’t it lead to some kind of anarchy?” is one form of the questions they…
Galatians 3:23-29
Commentary
Proper 7C
Occasionally the Revised Common Lectionary’s choice of where to begin and end a Lesson isn’t just puzzling. It’s also downright bewildering. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson is a case in point. After all, the chasm between verses’ 23-25 and 26-29 may seem to be a kind of grand canyon that has no bridge that crosses it….
Romans 5:1-5
Commentary
Trinity Sunday C
A quick glance at the church year’s calendar may make gospel proclaimers’ pulses race. Trinity Sunday has, after all, come again. It may make proclaimers’ palms sweat not just because, as the New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa to whose commentary I owe a great deal for this commentary, notes, “reference to the Trinity is itself…
Romans 8:14-17
Commentary
Pentecost C
My last surviving parent’s death last year reminded me that inheritance can be complicated. My mom and dad, while never materially wealthy by North American standards, did what they could to ensure that their children as well as worthy causes would inherit something from them. But, of course, so many others also wanted a “piece”…
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
Commentary
Easter 7C
Relatively few avid readers that I know enjoy surprise endings, especially to books they’ve come to savor. After all, life seems to end all too often in tragedy. Perhaps partly as a result, most readers prefer our literature to end at least hopefully, if not happily. Sometimes, however, books end not surprisingly or hopefully, but…
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
Commentary
Easter 6C
Revelation 21 is the last stop on the RCL’s “tour” of the book Revelation. That tour is so short that I sometimes wonder if those who constructed it were impatient to get to its happy ending. It’s almost as if they so tired of Revelation’s horrors that they decided to hurdle most of them so…
Revelation 21:1-6
Commentary
Easter 5C
While we sometimes say, “The devil is in the details,” we might say part of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s “gospel is in the details.” After all, some of Revelation 21’s greatest news lies in its verb tenses. In it, the Spirit inspires John to see “a new heaven and a new earth” (1). This is,…
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