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Hebrews 4:12-16
Proper 23B
At least some Christians generally think of corporate worship as relatively sedate. I suspect that the worship services of most of us who write and read these sermon commentaries leave worshipers feeling pretty safe. However, the author Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, writes about the dangers of meeting God in…
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Proper 22B
Until relatively recently I’d never preached a series of sermons on the book of Hebrews. That’s partly because I’ve struggled to relate it to life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Hebrews has always seemed to me to be so impractical and theological. So I’ve shied away from much of its talk about things like…
Hebrews 5:1-10
Lent 5B
It should count as a bit of an irony that just beyond the end of the assigned lection in Hebrews 5 we find the writer giving his readers a bit of a rebuke. “You probably don’t understand what I just wrote,” verse 11 essentially begins, “and that’s too bad because by now you should be…
Hebrews 2:10-18
1st Sunday after Christmas A
God’s power cannot cut it. That’s both the bottom line and the upshot of this part of Hebrews 2. Isn’t that weird, though? Isn’t that counter-intuitive? How often haven’t most of us said or thought something along the lines of “If only I were in charge . . . If only I were in control…
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Proper 17C
No one knows exactly who the audience of Hebrews was. We tend to think of the earliest Christians as something of a rag-tag group made up mostly of people of modest means at best and perhaps populated primarily by poorer folks. Yet there are just enough warnings in the New Testament about not getting carried…
Hebrews 12:18-29
Proper 16C
Reading this passage creates the sensation of watching a tennis match. In tennis if a good volley is going back and forth, then those in the stands are constantly swiveling their heads. They look right, then left. Right, then left again. Right, Left, Right, Left. Now Serena hits, then Venus. Serena, Venus, and so on….
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Proper 15C
There is a terrible moment early in the movie Saving Private Ryan. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and most of his men have somehow survived the utter carnage of the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach and are now on a high bluff overlooking a scene of utter destruction. One of Miller’s men says “That’s quite a…
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Proper 14C
Technically one of the confessions adhered to by my church (The Belgic Confession) semi-commits me to believing the Apostle Paul wrote Hebrews. But we now know to a high degree of certainty that is incorrect. We don’t know who wrote Hebrews, or even if it was a single author. Some think it’s a collection of…
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