Home » Old Testament »
Psalm 93
Proper 29B
As I have noted before here on CEP, at Calvin Seminary we use Paul Scott Wilson’s “Four Pages of the Sermon” method as the grammar and structure of sermons. A key part of that is locating what Wilson calls “Trouble in the Text.” What is the tension, the crisis, the question, the issue at hand…
2 Samuel 23:1-7
Proper 29B
The so-called “last words of David” are curiously placed. For one thing, there is quite a bit more action involving David in the balance of even 2 Samuel. But there will be more words and more narrative to come in also the opening portion of 1 Kings. It’s as though the author and editor of…
1 Samuel 1:4-20
Proper 28B
It’s curious how often the purposes of God move forward not just despite familial dysfunction but sometimes even because of it. We’ve got a load of dysfunction coming up in the Samuel story through the shenanigans of Hophni and Phineas—and Eli’s hand-wringing inability to do a blessed thing about it all. But we’ve got nettlesome…
Psalm 16
Proper 28B
Probably we misread Psalm 16, or at least its most famous verses about how our bodies will rest secure. We have all been to our share of funerals that lift out verses 9-11 and put a resurrection spin on them. And maybe as Christians exegeting the Old Testament there is something right about that. All…
Advent 3: Real Repentance
Homiletics is the theological term for the study and craft of sermon making. Seminarians take a couple of courses on homiletics of course, and there are lots of books on homiletics written for the guidance of preachers. Nowadays, there’s a lot of emphasis on the introductions of sermons. The theory is that the modern audience…
Psalm 146
Proper 27B
The Lectionary likes Psalm 146 a lot and so it comes up with some frequency, including only 2 short months ago the first Sunday in September. The last couple of times that I wrote a commentary on Psalm 146 were pretty similar but this week I will take it in a different direction. If you…
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17
Proper 27B
The Lectionary has us skip the drama of Ruth 2 and then dips in briefly to Ruth 3 for the connection with Boaz and then zooms ahead to the very end of Ruth 4 for the “happy ending” of the tale and how it all points forward to King David. As preachers, we are either…
Ruth 1:1-18
Proper 26B
To my mind stopping the reading of Ruth 1 at verse 18 is the narrative equivalent of ending the movie Field of Dreams just before the moment when Ray encounters his long-dead and estranged father on his magical Iowa baseball diamond. Why stop short of the scene that brings the whole thing together!? So trust…
Psalm 119:1-8
Proper 26B
In the world of secular music, I would guess you would be hard pressed to find many songs with titles like “I Just Love Rules!” In fact the website Ranker provided their top list of songs with the word “law” in the title but songs of the variety “I’m Lovin’ the Law” don’t seem to…
Psalm 126
Proper 25B
Some of us might remember that another version/translation of Psalm 126:1 mentions specifically the time when “the captives” were brought back to Jerusalem. That framing of this psalm places this on the far side of the seventy-year exile in Babylon as the people of Israel slowly returned from captivity after Persia conquered Babylon and the…
Content related to Old Testament