Content related to Old Testament

Home » Old Testament » Page 32

Psalm 99

Transfiguration Sunday 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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Epiphany 6C

In the most straightforward sense, this snippet from Jeremiah 17 is all about trust.  Bad Trust.  Good Trust.  If you trust in mere human beings in all of life, you are on a slippery slope to ruin.  In fact such people can be considered cursed.  Nothing good will come their way.  But trust in God…

Read More

Psalm 1

Epiphany 6C

Few of us do what many monastic and other traditions have done in history with the Psalms: namely, read them straight through and in order.  Instead we bob and weave our way through the Psalms, picking and choosing to read this Psalm or another for no particular rhyme or reason.  And so it’s easy to…

Read More

Psalm 138

Epiphany 5C

The Lectionary likes Psalm 138 and slates it sometimes in Ordinary Time and sometimes in Epiphany.  I have several sermon commentaries on the CEP site on Psalm 138 but for this week I will riff on the last time I wrote about this in the Sundays after Epiphany. I have noted often in my sermon…

Read More

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)

Epiphany 5C

It was the year King Uzziah died. Or, it was the year President Kennedy died. Or it was the year 9/11 rattled the world to its core. Or it was the year the COVID pandemic began. It was the year when things fell apart, when foundations were shaken, when the markets crumbled, when all that…

Read More

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Epiphany 4C

My wife mentions this semi-often as an item of some consternation.  The issue is vocation, “calling,” and it crops up in conversation between the two of us whenever someone asks me once again to tell my “call story” to be a minister or in case some other preacher—in the course of a sermon perhaps—tells her…

Read More

Psalm 71:1-6

Epiphany 4C

There is a part of the well-known story (and the popular Sunday School story) of “Jacob’s Ladder” that most people don’t know about or just ignore.  The outlines of the story are familiar and are also accurate enough to the biblical text in Genesis: Jacob is on the lam, fleeing the fury of his brother…

Read More

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Epiphany 3C

Quick!  What is your favorite verse from the Book of Nehemiah? Ask that of most churchgoing Christians and the answer is likely to be, “Ummm . . . Not sure.”  Although some people may be familiar with the overall storyline of Nehemiah, mostly the specifics are not widely known.  So if you said to someone,…

Read More