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1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)
Epiphany 5A
Already on the first pages of J.K. Rowling’s first “Harry Potter” book we knew she was going to come up with a whole little universe of wild and funny things. The first such gadget we encounter is Dumbledore’s “deluminator.” It was the opposite of a cigarette lighter—you did not use the deluminator to light a…
Matthew 5:1-12
Epiphany 4A
There are several ways to approach the Beatitudes. You could fruitfully consider them one at a time or you could look at the overall sweep and direction of these blessings. Since the Lectionary gives us the whole smack for just one Sunday, our best option is to look at the bigger picture and consider, in…
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Epiphany 4A
Drinking from the proverbial fire hose, that’s what these verses from 1 Corinthians are like. In verse after verse Paul scales ever higher theological heights and ever grander rhetorical flourishes as he stares, mouth agape, at the mysteries of God that all coalesce around the cross of Jesus Christ. Few passages in Scripture so swiftly…
Matthew 4:12-23
Epiphany 3A
We’ve come to call it “the Holy Land.” From the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the country of Jordan in the east, from Syria in the north to the Sinai in the south, travel companies, tour groups, and tourists treat this piece of Middle Eastern real estate as a unity. It’s where Jesus walked…
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Epiphany 3A
In the previous sermon commentary on the first 9 verses of 1 Corinthians 1, I riffed on Tom Long’s suggestion that Paul wrote those opening verses with tongue firmly embedded in cheek. He praises the Corinthians for the very things Paul knows full well they were in deep trouble over. He names as would-be compliments…
John 1:29-42
Epiphany 2A
“The world was made through him,” the apostle John wrote earlier in this chapter, “but when he was in the world, it didn’t recognize him.” Indeed, it didn’t. Jesus existed as just another face in the crowd. Even his own cousin, John the Baptist, almost missed recognizing him. And yet hidden inside that one man…
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Epiphany 2A
If what we call First Corinthians were a contemporary letter, then a good bit of this reading would be like focusing not on the shank or the primary content of the letter. Instead, it would be like focusing on the part of the letter at the very end that begins with “Well, that’s about all…
Matthew 3:13-17
Epiphany 1A
Poor John. It didn’t look right. What was going on here? This was not the public appearance of Jesus that John had set everyone up to see (cf. Matthew 3:1-12 for goodness sake!!!). As Matthew 3 ends, you can almost picture John the Baptist carrying on with the rest of that day’s baptisms with a…
Acts 10:34-43
Epiphany 1A
It beats me why the Lectionary—on a Sunday celebrating the baptism of Jesus—cuts this reading off at verse 43 just BEFORE there is a wonderful scene of baptism in Acts 10. In fact, I was so sure it was a typo on the one Lectionary site I consult each week that I looked up the…
Matthew 2:13-23
1st Sunday after Christmas A
There’s nothing like kicking off a new year with a story about slaughtered babies . . . But there it is. New Year’s Day 2017 falls on a Sunday, and if bleary-eyed people who stayed up for champagne and the Times Square ball-drop manage to get to church the following morning—it’s really the same morning—and…
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