Home » Old Testament » Jeremiah »
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Proper 29C
Because Jeremiah 23 is about leadership, Americans may not have to squint very hard to see parallels between it and their current political situation. Having survived a bruising presidential campaign, they (as well as citizens of all nations) may even be ready to hear the gospel that God embeds in this text. Jeremiah 23 begins…
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Proper 24C
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider I am not sure why the Revised Common Lectionary’s series of passages from Jeremiah skips around the way it does (one week Jeremiah 32 but then next time around it’s back to chapter 29 and now we leap to chapter 31) but I think I can understand why the…
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Proper 23C
“You can’t go home again” is an old adage we sometimes address to people who aren’t where they long to be. Some of those “exiles” are homesick. Others have in some way grown too much to be fully comfortable where they grew up anymore. You might say, “You can’t go home again – yet!” is…
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Proper 21C
A real estate deal seldom had it so good. All through the Bible you can find a recurrent theme related to real estate, to land, to who owns what. It all began with a promise of land to Abram (who for some reason had to leave behind the land he already owned to set out…
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Proper 20C
Some Christians have traditionally thought of God as largely having virtually no emotion beyond anger at human sin. Yet such a notion is more Greek than biblical. The living God of the Bible is quite capable of feeling a wide variety of emotions, including great grief. There is great sadness in the Old Testament text…
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Proper 19C
I suspect that were Jeremiah 4 not on the Lectionary schedule, few preachers and teachers would be willing to tackle it. After all, among other reasons, relatively few of us like to talk about the kind of divine judgment it so graphically describes. What’s more, its grim apocalyptic imagery resists easy understanding and application. Of…
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Proper 18C
Almost all students work with at least a little clay while they’re in school. Relatively few of us, however, resemble the sophisticated potters of Jeremiah’s day. Some scholars, after all, compare their clay to today’s steel. Potters who were Jeremiah’s contemporaries made things like bricks, lamps and toys, as well as cooking pots and even…
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Proper 17C
Diseases that sap memory, like Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, deeply frighten some people. After all, memory connects us to those we love and even in a way to ourselves. Without memory, we largely become alone in the world. Without memory, in many ways we no longer feel like we belong anywhere. Memory, however,…
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Proper 16C
God doesn’t try to keep God’s truth to himself. God doesn’t make God’s adopted sons and daughters try to guess what God is thinking. God likes to speak. However, many of God’s experiences with speaking directly to people haven’t turned out very well. The people at Sinai, for example, just couldn’t handle it. So when…
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Epiphany 4C
My wife mentions this semi-often. For her, it’s a combination of envy and 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…
Content related to Jeremiah