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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…
Hebrews 3
Observations The journey of God’s people in the Old Testament from Egypt to Canaan is a pattern and a picture of the Christian life. In the Old Testament they were moving toward promised rest, and in the same way we are moving toward promised rest when we will see Christ and be made like him….
Hebrews 7:1-22
Comments and Observations Were it not for the book of Hebrews, Melchizedek would be little more than an interesting footnote in commentaries on the book of Genesis, a bewildering moment in the life of Abraham when this shadowy figure emerges briefly to bless Abraham, only to return to the realm of obscurity. In Hebrews Melchizedek…
Hebrews 6:1-12
Comments and Observations In the well-known and well-loved musical The Sound of Music, the governess Maria spends some time teaching her young charges how to sing. She starts the lesson by saying (in song, of course) “Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start. When you read you begin with”….
Hebrews 10:5-10
Advent 4C
Sometimes you just have to wonder where the inventors of the Revised Common Lectionary got their ideas for the choices they made. I mean, here we are, 5 days away from Christmas, surely one of the most pregnant times in the church calendar. The other readings for this Fourth Sunday of Advent are clearly about…
Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25
Proper 28B
Comments and Observations All right! Enough already! For what seems like the 10th time, the author of Hebrews comes back to his theme that Christ is better than the whole system of the Jewish faith (a theme that will seem politically incorrect to many a contemporary reader and listener). He covers the same ground again…
Hebrews 9:24-28
Proper 27B
Comments and Observations The lectionary reading for this Sunday is the high point of the argument of the letter to the Hebrews, but for many people today, including many Christians, it is the low point. Way back in 1926 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a now famous sermon in which he labeled the whole idea of…
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