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Rev. Scott E. Hoezee (Hoe-zay) is an ordained pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in North America and has served two congregations. He was the pastor of Second Christian Reformed Church in Fremont, Michigan, from 1990-1993. From 1993-2005 he was the Minister of Preaching and Administration at Calvin CRC in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the spring of 2005 Scott accepted the Seminary’s offer to become the first Director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching. He has also been a member of the Pastor-Theologian Program sponsored by the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was pastor-in-residence in the fall of 2000. From 2001-2011 Scott served on the editorial board of Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought and was co-editor of that journal from 2005-2011. He blogs regularly for The Reformed Journal and along with Darrell Delaney is the co-host of the Groundwork radio and podcast program.
Rev. Hoezee is married to Rosemary Apol and they have two children. He enjoys birdwatching, snorkeling, and exploring the beauties and wonders of God’s great creation.
Rev. Hoezee is the author of several books including The Riddle of Grace (1996), Flourishing in the Land (1996), Remember Creation (1998), Speaking as One: A Look at the Ecumenical Creeds (1997), Speaking of Comfort: A Look at the Heidelberg Catechism (1998), and Proclaim the Wonder: Preaching Science on Sunday (2003), Grace Through Every Generation (2007), Actuality: Real Life Stories for Sermons That Matter (2014), and Why We Listen To Sermons (2018).
Scott Hoezee has been writing sermon commentaries for the CEP website since its inception in July 2005.
Psalm 99
Commentary
Last Epiphany C
All these millennia later it is easy to read the Psalms, especially one like Psalm 99, and forget how at once scandalous and vaguely ridiculous they might appear to be. Or at least how they could appear to an outsider to Israel who was looking in. After all, in poems like this one, the psalmist…
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Commentary
Epiphany 7C
Easter in the Western Church can come as early as the third Sunday in March and as late as the last Sunday in April. Falling as it does on April 17 this year, Easter’s late date means an extra-long season after Epiphany and that in turns means getting to some RCL texts we don’t see…
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
Commentary
Epiphany 7C
Across the spectrum of poems in the Hebrew Psalter are prayers that fit most every occasion and season in life. Laments, petitions, confessions, praise, thanksgiving; songs that fit happy days and songs that fit rotten days; lyric expressions of trust and bitter cries of abandonment and anger. It’s all in there. That’s an important thing…
Jeremiah 17:5-10
Commentary
Epiphany 6C
In the most straightforward sense, this snippet from Jeremiah 17 is all about trust. Bad Trust. Good Trust. If you trust in mere human beings in all of life, you are on a slippery slope to ruin. In fact such people can be considered cursed. Nothing good will come their way. But trust in God…
Psalm 1
Commentary
Epiphany 6C
Few of us do what many monastic and other traditions have done in history with the Psalms: namely, read them straight through and in order. Instead we bob and weave our way through the Psalms, picking and choosing to read this Psalm or another for no particular rhyme or reason. And so it’s easy to…
Psalm 138
Commentary
Epiphany 5C
The Lectionary likes Psalm 138 and slates it sometimes in Ordinary Time and sometimes in Epiphany. I have several sermon commentaries on the CEP site on Psalm 138 but for this week I will riff on the last time I wrote about this in the Sundays after Epiphany. I have noted often in my sermon…
Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
Commentary
Epiphany 5C
It was the year King Uzziah died. Or, it was the year President Kennedy died. Or it was the year 9/11 rattled the world to its core. Or it was the year the COVID pandemic began. It was the year when things fell apart, when foundations were shaken, when the markets crumbled, when all that…
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Commentary
Epiphany 4C
My wife mentions this semi-often as an item of some consternation. The issue is vocation, “calling,” and it crops up in conversation between the two of us whenever someone asks me once again to tell my “call story” to be a minister or in case some other preacher—in the course of a sermon perhaps—tells her…
Psalm 71:1-6
Commentary
Epiphany 4C
There is a part of the well-known story (and the popular Sunday School story) of “Jacob’s Ladder” that most people don’t know about or just ignore. The outlines of the story are familiar and are also accurate enough to the biblical text in Genesis: Jacob is on the lam, fleeing the fury of his brother…
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Commentary
Epiphany 3C
Quick! What is your favorite verse from the Book of Nehemiah? Ask that of most churchgoing Christians and the answer is likely to be, “Ummm . . . Not sure.” Although some people may be familiar with the overall storyline of Nehemiah, mostly the specifics are not widely known. So if you said to someone,…
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