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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…
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…
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…
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,…
Psalm 19
Epiphany 3C
Almost 120 years ago an unknown patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a series of papers detailing what he called “special relativity.” At 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 universe’s functioning were swept away,…
Psalm 36:5-10
Epiphany 2C
One of my Christmas gifts to my wife was a cookbook on making bread written by Paul Hollywood, one of the judges on the much-loved Great British Baking Show. When I put a picture of the book’s cover on Facebook along with a picture of my wife’s first and fantastic looking loaf, a couple people…
Isaiah 62:1-5
Epiphany 2C
These first verses of Isaiah 62 are like a geyser erupting in hopefulness and wild abundance. This is like a prophetic fireworks display with a never-ending grand finale as color and light fills the skies, eliciting a long string of “Ooohs” and “Ahhhs” from those seeing the spectacle. This is one of those passages so…
Psalm 29
Epiphany 1C
Psalm 29 is a favorite of the Revised Common Lectionary. Indeed, if you search the Sermon Commentary Library here on CEP, you will find not fewer than ten such commentaries from recent years. Psalm 29 comes up most every year on the Baptism of our Lord Sunday after Epiphany and it pops up here and…
Isaiah 43:1-7
Epiphany 1C
Scholars tell us that there may have been at least two, probably three (perhaps four) “Isaiahs” whose prophetic words make up the one Old Testament book we call Isaiah. If so, then the version of Isaiah we get in this 43rd chapter is definitely the “Happy Isaiah” as compared to the doom-and-gloom Isaiah from earlier…
Psalm 147:12-20
2nd Sunday after Christmast C
As we lurch into 2022 after another difficult year globally, we realize with a sense of startlement that we are technically now entering Year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic. A couple years ago not a few of us hoped the worst of it would not last 3 weeks. Even 3 months seemed hard to fathom. …
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