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Exodus 12:1-14
Proper 18A
Illustration Back-to-School season has evolved since my day. A trip to Walmart for a Trapper-Keeper and new colored pencils, maybe a special new outfit has been elaborated with specific first-day-of-school social media posts, maybe a clap-in at school, a “Blessing of the Backpacks” at church. None of it is wrong … it’s just become elaborate,…
Exodus 3:1-15
Proper 17A
From the banks of the Nile to a parched mountain (the literal translation of Horeb), we find Moses settled into the humble lifestyle of a nomadic shepherd just about as far from Pharaoh’s court as humanly possible. The King James tells us that, as the curtain rises on this scene, Moses is hanging out with…
Psalm 26:1-8
Proper 17A
Probably it is the Calvinism that is fairly well ingrained into my being that makes me hesitate over parts of Psalm 26. I mean, I just cannot imagine coming before my God in Christ and saying, “I have led a blameless life.” Were I to pray along the lines of saying to God, “I wash…
Psalm 138
Proper 16A
In the film The Godfather Part II, we see in flashbacks the rise of the mafia kingpin Don Vito Corleone back in the early 1900s. At one point a friend of Vito’s wife was being kicked out of her apartment because she had been keeping a dog against the apartment rules. So Vito talks to…
Exodus 1:8-2:10
Proper 16A
Image It matters a great deal where you place yourself in the Biblical narrative. Some of our worst theology comes from placing ourselves wrongly: always the hero, never the needy. Always the righteous, never the meanie. Erna Kim Hackett refers to this as “Disney Princess Theology.” “As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as…
Psalm 67
Proper 15A
Psalm 67 is one of the shorter songs of all the 150 psalms. Yet twice in these brief verses—at the end of verse 1 and again at the end of verse 4—we find the mysterious Hebrew word selah inserted into the text. No one to my knowledge claims definitively to know what this word means. …
Genesis 45:1-15
Proper 15A
It matters how you tell the story. After chapters and chapters of some narrator telling us Joseph’s story, with very few places where Joseph, himself, gives meaning to the unfolding events. After the most recent 3 chapters that focus on the brothers’ strange experience in Egypt, where we get to hear the whole story from…
I Kings 19:9-18
Proper 14A
This week, I am mixing it up—because the Lectionary does—by switching to an alternative reading from Hebrew Scripture: The story of Elijah meeting God in a still, small voice. If you are still tracking the story of Genesis, you might see my previous commentary on Joseph here. Commentary The placement of this Elijah narrative matters…
Psalm 85:8-13
Proper 14A
Here is another Lectionary example of a relatively short psalm that for some reason is not recommended in its entirety. Since there is nothing in verses 1-7 that say anything different than the assigned verses here, there’s no harm in just doing the final six verses but equally there’d be no harm in reading the…
Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
Proper 13A
Psalm 145 pops up four times across Years A, B, and C in the Lectionary though never as the entire psalm and always with a different configuration of verses included and verses bracketed out. There is not a lot of rhyme or reason to it near as I can tell but unless you plan to…
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