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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.
Ephesians 5:8-14
Commentary
Lent 4A
Few Lectionary texts begin more mysteriously than this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. “You were once darkness,” Paul reminds Ephesus’s Christians, “but now you are light in the Lord” (8). The apostle seems to assert that God’s adopted sons and daughters don’t just naturally live in spiritual darkness. We naturally are spiritual darkness. God doesn’t just summon…
Romans 5:1-11
Commentary
Lent 3A
While the kind of peace about which Paul writes in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson may seem hard to define, it may be even harder to achieve. Perhaps, however, that’s at least partly because we sometimes start to work for peace in the wrong places. We sometimes first think of the lack of peace in places…
Romans 4:1-5,13-17
Commentary
Lent 2A
When I was a teenager, we liked to sing a song that also had motions. With arms and legs flailing, we’d sing something like: “Father Abraham/ Had many sons;/ Many sons had Father Abraham;/ And I am one of them,/ And so are you,/ So let’s all praise the Lord.” Now once you got past…
Romans 5:12-19
Commentary
Lent 1A
It’s always humbling for my wife and me to have a problem with our computer or cell phones. After all, we, on whom our sons depended for so many years, must now largely depend on them to help us. I’ll never be as technologically savvy as our thirty-something sons. Fleming Rutledge, who lent me some…
2 Peter 1:16-21
Commentary
Last Epiphany A
To paraphrase an old cliché, for the RCL’s preachers and teachers, “It’s a good thing Transfiguration Sunday comes but once a year.” After all, it can be challenging enough to proclaim the gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration. The challenge may become even greater for those who choose to proclaim the Epistolary Lesson the RCL appoints…
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Commentary
Our text marks what may feel like a rather abrupt change in tone. After all, in the Epistolary Lesson the RCL appoints for this week, Paul portrays the Corinthian Christians quite differently than he did at the beginning of his first letter to them. In chapter 1:4-9 the apostle refers to them as graced by…
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Commentary
Epiphany 4A
In a fine sermon commentary on this text (from which I drew numerous ideas for this commentary), Scott Hoezee suggests that there’s a danger in spending as much time in church and around Christians as some preachers and teachers do. It’s that this whole Christianity business all starts to make too much sense to us….
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Commentary
Epiphany 3A
The Reformed expression of the Christian faith’s many strengths have not always included Christian unity. Reformed Christians’ actions have sometimes tweaked an old saying to sound something like, “Where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name … there you have three or four Reformed denominations.” Presbyterians sometimes talk about “split p’s”. So this Sunday’s…
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Commentary
Epiphany 2A
This Sunday’s RCL’s Epistolary Lesson may seem like a strange way for Paul to begin his first letter to the Corinthians. Of course, it would not be a particularly strange way to begin most communications. 1 Corinthians 1 begins, after all, with (for its day) a fairly typical greeting. What’s more, many of us are…
Acts 10:34-43
Commentary
Epiphany 1A
On this Sunday on which the RCL invites us to contemplate Jesus’ baptism, it omits the account of Cornelius’ baptism from its Epistolary Lesson. That may at least imply that the RCL is less interested in the Romans or even Jesus’s baptism than with the baptized Jesus (and his Church’s) mission. A mission that has…
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