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Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Proper 19C
Silent Spring. Or better written, Silent Spring in italics as befits a book title because that was indeed the title of Rachel Carson’s well-known book that was among the first cries of the modern ecological movement. Years ago, before I knew what that book was about, upon hearing the title I pictured some serene setting:…
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Proper 18C
The image of a potter at a wheel molding a wet lump of clay into various shapes is both a vivid image and one that most people can picture easily in their minds—it even cuts across multiple cultures seeing as the art of pottery making is quite ancient. Skilled potters are downright amazing in their…
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Proper 17C
According to the old adage, “You are what you eat.” But parts of the Bible, including Jeremiah 2, give voice to a different point of view: You are what you worship. In Jeremiah 2, one of the prophet’s initial broadsides against the people of Israel was the sad fact that in worshiping gods that were…
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Proper 16C
It sometimes seems as though Jeremiah 1 means more to preachers than to average church-goers. There is something about this pre-natal call to ministry—not to mention the lyric image of God’s filling the prophet’s mouth with his Word—that strikes a chord for lots of us who preach. But since the church long ago began to…
Jeremiah 17:5-10
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…
Jeremiah 1:4-10
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…
Jeremiah 31:7-14
2nd Sunday after Christmast C
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…
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Advent 1C
Acoustics are so key. How does a text sound? Usually you need to pay attention to the context to figure that out. But when you dive into the middle of a text like this lection, you can so easily miss or forget that wider context. But remembering it can change the acoustics pretty significantly. After…
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Lent 5B
This remarkably sunny text may seem a peculiar choice for the dark journey of Lent, unless we see it in the light of theme of covenant on which the RCL has been focusing during this Lenten season. We began with God’s covenant with Noah and all of nature, the covenant on which all life on…
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Christmas 2B
It takes so long for Christmas to get here. We wait and wait through the long season of Advent for the coming of the Lord. Then in one day we celebrated his coming, and we’re done. No wonder many non-liturgical Christians simply ignore Advent and spend a month celebrating Christmas. Such a miraculous event deserves…
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