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Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Lent 2C

A Tribal Leader without a Tribe This text invites us to enter into Abram’s story between promise and fulfillment.  Genesis 12 lays out God’s plan: to take Abram and make a great nation and a great name by which all people will be blessed. However, a lot of life has been lived between chapter 12…

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Psalm 27

Lent 2C

At Calvin Theological Seminary for the past two decades we have used as a kind of homiletical template Paul Scott Wilson’s “The Four Pages of the Sermon” format.  As some of you reading this may know, Wilson uses what he calls Trouble and Grace as the two primary components of a sermon.  Page One (or…

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The Elegant Universe

It was exactly 100 years ago in 1905 when an unknown patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a series of papers detailing what he called “special relativity.” In one fell swoop, Einstein shattered centuries’ worth of scientific theories about the fundamental nature of reality. The theories of Isaac Newton and his mechanical understanding of the…

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How Majestic!

The poet of Psalm 8 stared into the night sky and was properly dazzled at what he saw. But to put it mildly, what he did not see was a lot! Had this psalmist been able to spend a scant ten minutes looking through a telescope he would doubtless have fainted in wonderment. Ancient astronomers…

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All Cry Glory!

Thunderstorms.  Even as we sit here in church, right this moment there are likely upwards of 2,000 thunderstorms going on across the earth. On average each day 45,000 such storms occur. They are among the most powerful forces we know. In the simplest sense, but also in perhaps the most boring sense, a thunderstorm is…

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Throughout All Generations

Few scientific facts amaze me more than what Albert Einstein discovered about time.  Each year on New Year’s Eve we briefly pay attention to the ticking of the clock, counting down the minutes and seconds until midnight.  Mostly, though, we don’t watch time pass that intentionally.  The watch on my wrist, the clock on my…

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Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Lent 1C

Deuteronomy is a beautiful and unique book of the Pentateuch.  Whereas the preceding four books can be read as a kind of biography of the people of God, Deuteronomy is fashioned more like the people’s memoir.  No biography is complete, of course. Certain elements are left out or glossed over but, by and large, you…

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Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Lent 1C

At first blush Psalm 91 seems an odd choice for the Year C First Sunday in Lent.  After all, Psalm 91 is one of those psalms that makes lavish promises as to the constant well-being and prospering of anyone who makes God their refuge and strength.  If you are on God’s side, God is constantly…

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Time, Chance, and God

Lucky. That is not a word which Christians like very much. Our mothers taught us to resist referring to a certain person as just being “lucky” in life. Most of us were taught to avoid thinking that once we got out of college, we’d “try out our luck” at a certain profession. We prefer to…

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Exodus 34:29-35

Transfiguration Sunday C

Commentary: It’s instructive that the season of Epiphany, which begins with a bright star in the East, leading the Magi to worship the Christ-child concludes with Transfiguration Sunday, in which glory and shining, brilliance and light are, again, prominent themes. This imagery would have been at home in the Ancient Near Eastern imagination as, according…

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