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1 John 3:1-7
Easter 3B
It keeps coming up like a bad burp. So much of 1 John is lyric. Few passages talk better about the meaning of love than ones you can find in John’s first epistle. The opening verses of this third chapter likewise are simply gorgeous, waxing eloquent on the love lavished on us by God our…
1 John 1:1-2:2
Easter 2B
This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s proclaimers might lead into their presentation of it with a story of how they needed an intercessor. A number of years ago I traveled to sit with members of our church during their family member’s major surgery. Using an inaccurate map, I became lost in a maze of one-way streets. After…
1 John 5:9-13
Easter 7B
One of my kids once had an assignment for a high school religion class: they had to find at least one Bible passage in the New Testament that matched each one of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. There are probably multiple options for each of the commandments but most students—including my child—quickly settled on…
1 John 5:1-6
Easter 6B
A friend of mine who teaches preaching says that whether we can see it with our physical eyes or not, a whole lot of people come to church each week spiritually bent over at the waist. They come with so many burdens on their shoulders. They are weighed down by them. What burdens? A spouse…
1 John 4:7-21
Easter 5B
If you preached on the Lectionary selection from 1 John 3 last week—and if you read the sermon commentary for that text that I posted here on the CEP website—then you will know a hard truth as we face this text: we probably both shot our wad on “love” last Sunday! So much of this…
1 John 3:16-24
Easter 4B
“Love” is a word everyone knows and everyone understands. Or so we think. But if that is so, why is it that when we are called to preach on “love,” it can feel so daunting? Maybe it’s because we use the same word for so many things. It would not be unusual, for instance, to…
1 John 3:1-7
Easter 3B
It keeps coming up like a bad burp. So much of 1 John is lyric. Few passages talk better about the meaning of love than ones you can find in John’s first epistle. The opening verses of this third chapter likewise are simply gorgeous, waxing eloquent on the love lavished on us by God our…
1 John 1:1-2:2
Easter 2B
John wants us to be serious about sin. Of course, some Christian traditions—my own Reformed Calvinism perhaps leading the pack—have perennially been pretty good about having such seriousness. As the late Lewis Smedes once wrote (tongue firmly embedded in cheek), “Anyone who knows he’s totally depraved can’t be all bad.” In a more serious vein,…
1 John 2
I find the letter/sermon in 1 John to be exceptionally pastoral and truthful. Scholars have helped us piece together the conflict that prompted all three letters with John in the name: it’s clear that the community of believers were being bombarded with challenges to core beliefs about Jesus and the nature of things by people…
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