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Psalm 63:1-8
Lent 3C
When a psalm is as relatively brief as Psalm 63 and yet you notice that the Lectionary would have you stop reading—and presumably stop preaching—three verses shy of the actual conclusion of the poem, one might be justified in wondering what’s up. What is in those last few verses? Why the full stop before this…
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Lent 2C
Genesis 15 is full of curiosities and oddments. But right in the middle of this chapter is a verse that went on to exercise an enormous influence on the New Testament. “Abram believed Yahweh and it was credited to him as righteousness.” In Romans and Galatians this one verse became a linch-pin in Paul’s argument…
Psalm 27
Lent 2C
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would all find that our prayer life is also our autobiography. Who we are, where we’ve been, the situations we’ve faced, the fears that nag us, and not a few of the core characteristics of…
Ascension Day: How We See Things
One of the most mind-boggling spectacles I’ve ever seen is a short science movie titled “Powers of Ten.” Many of us no doubt saw this movie in a high school physics class. More recently a new version of this came out for IMAX called Cosmic Voyage (narrated by God himself, which is to say Morgan…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Lent 1C
It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age (and although the RCL only takes the first and last few verses, this Sermon Commentary will encompass the whole psalm). Talk of a “fowler’s snare” sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps…
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Lent 1C
This passage is at once lyric and heartbreaking. It’s lyric for all the reasons I will detail below in terms of how handily these verses get at some very core spiritual truths regarding our lives within God’s creation. It’s heartbreaking because you sense that things never quite worked out this way once the people of…
Exodus 34:29-35
Last Epiphany C
To understand the end of Exodus 34, you need to catch up on two things: the immediate context of this chapter in Exodus and also what happened in the first 9 verses of this 34th chapter, the final effect of which you can read in the Lectionary selection of verses 29-35. First of all, then,…
Psalm 99
Last Epiphany C
All these millennia later it is easy to read the Psalms, especially one like Psalm 99, and forget how at once scandalous and vaguely ridiculous they might appear to be. Or at least how they could appear to an outsider to Israel who was looking in. After all, in poems like this one, the psalmist…
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Epiphany 7C
Easter in the Western Church can come as early as the third Sunday in March and as late as the last Sunday in April. Falling as it does on April 17 this year, Easter’s late date means an extra-long season after Epiphany and that in turns means getting to some RCL texts we don’t see…
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
Epiphany 7C
Across the spectrum of poems in the Hebrew Psalter are prayers that fit most every occasion and season in life. Laments, petitions, confessions, praise, thanksgiving; songs that fit happy days and songs that fit rotten days; lyric expressions of trust and bitter cries of abandonment and anger. It’s all in there. That’s an important thing…
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