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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.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Commentary
Epiphany 3B
It’s Round 2 between Yahweh and Jonah. The call to preach gets re-issued and if in Round 1 Jonah walked the opposite direction from Nineveh, this time he heads straight for it. But even well before you get to the petulant, angry Jonah of chapter 4, you just know his heart’s not in this thing….
John 1:43-51
Commentary
Epiphany 2B
Sample Sermon Note: I happened to make a new sermon on this text recently and preached it at a church in my area on January 4 and so for this week I am taking a break from the usual notes on the text to show how on this occasion I assembled those same notes into…
1 Samuel 3:1-20
Commentary
Epiphany 2B
Comments and Observations Over the last quarter-century, audio, visual, and computer technology has advanced more rapidly than our ability to prevent these gizmos from taking over the minds of our youth (and of some of us not-so-young too!!). Not so long ago, parents who wanted to monitor what their kids saw or listened to had…
Mark 1:4-11
Commentary
Epiphany 1B
Comments and Observations: Fans of Peter Jackson’s films in The Lord of the Rings trilogy will recall the opening sequence in the final film, The Return of the King (all this years before Jackson’s—in my humble opinion—disastrous return to Tolkien in his Hobbit trilogy!). As the movie opens, we are taken back hundreds of years…
Genesis 1:1-5
Commentary
Epiphany 1B
Comments and Observations “The first day.” That is how this Year B Lectionary text concludes. There was a morning and there was an evening and together they constituted “the first day.” Of course, even in the text of Genesis it’s difficult to know just what that means. Within the sequence of just these first 5…
John 1:(1-9), 10-18
Commentary
Christmas 2B
Comments, Observations, and Questions The Lectionary may get the last laugh here, and savvy preachers can curl up the corners of their mouths to join the mirth. Because here it is the first Sunday of a new year and really the first Sunday in the 2014-2015 holiday season after Christmas is officially finished. For weeks…
Jeremiah 37:7-14
Commentary
Christmas 2B
You can’t accuse the Old Testament prophets of not being specific enough when it came to describing the blessings of God’s salvation! Sometimes believers today content themselves with generic or generalized descriptions of felicity in “heaven,” sometimes not advancing in their views of the New Creation much beyond the wispy, cloudy, ethereal realm that New…
Luke 2:22-40
Commentary
Christmas 1B
Comments, Observations, and Questions It’s amazing how much detail Luke gives us. If Luke were a movie, it would have been directed by Cecil B. DeMille with a cast of thousands and long, lingering scenes on most every situation imaginable. The Gospel of Mark by comparison is like a PowerPoint presentation where the presenter goes…
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Commentary
Christmas 1B
Comments, Observations, and Questions The First Sunday after Christmas is something of an odd moment in the church’s year. Many in the church regard it as somewhat anticlimactic following whatever big services, concerts, and other celebrations and programs that probably accompanied the run-up to Christmas Day and then whatever special services got held on Christmas…
Luke 1:26-38
Commentary
Advent 4B
Comments and Observations: Biblical scholars call passages like Luke 1 “type scenes.” A modern kind of “type scene” might be something like this: one evening while channel-surfing, you run across a movie already in progress. It’s obviously a Western with two cowboys standing about thirty yards apart in the middle of a dusty street. Each…
About Scott Hoezee