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1 Timothy 1:12-17
Proper 19C
In the first century—and really for a large chunk of the church’s history—most everything a given person knew had to be memorized and carried around in one’s head. There were no published materials, no pamphlets or tracts or catechisms. Not surprisingly, then, by the time the Pastoral Epistles were written it is clear that the…
Luke 14:25-33
Proper 18C
Some while ago on TV I saw a news profile of megachurch pastor Joel Osteen. Peppered throughout the interview with this pastor were brief video clips showing him preaching to his vast congregation that numbers into the tens of thousands. The people of the congregation stretch out before this pastor like a vast sea of…
Philemon 1:1-21
Proper 18C
Garry Wills’s book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, is a fascinating study of one of the world’s more famous speeches. Wills claims that in the Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln, in the span of a scant 272 words which took him all of three minutes to deliver, forever altered our understanding of the…
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Proper 17C
Tell any average child that she is forbidden to look at pages 67-82 of the book sitting on the coffee table in the living room and you can all-but make certain that the first chance that child gets, she’s going to whisk that book to her room and turn directly to page 67! The Revised…
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…
Luke 13:10-17
Proper 16C
When the truth humiliates you, you are humiliated indeed. Worse, when a truth so obvious that it can be stated in a sentence or two humiliates you, then your shame is profound. It’s one thing if a philosopher builds an elaborate argument to disprove some point you had made but it’s another thing if a…
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….
Luke 12:49-56
Proper 15C
Whoa! What a passage. We practically need asbestos gloves or very thick oven mitts just to pick these verses up. This thing is white hot! What prompted this from our Lord? It’s maybe difficult to know but from the looks of the passage, it appears that just possibly there were some who were trying to…
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…
Luke 12:32-40
Proper 14C
Luke 12 is like drinking from a fire hose, or maybe several different fire hoses at once with different flavors of water from each. Throughout Luke 12—and certainly in the nine verses of this particular reading from the Year C Lectionary—Jesus is doing some classic pearl-stringing in uttering one beatitude, saying, warning, or prediction after…
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