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Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13)
Proper 24A
“A scribe to the Lord . . .” At least that is what I heard my minister say when I was a young boy attending a church in Ada, Michigan. Rev. Angus MacLeod began more morning worship services than not with that portion of Psalm 96 that repeats the call to “ascribe” to the Lord…
Exodus 33:12-23
Proper 24A
Stories like this are nearly unbelievable for your average church goer and literally unbelievable for your average neighbor, because God doesn’t talk this way to us today, “face to face as a man speaks with his friend (33:11).” Very few of us ever hear God’s voice over a lifetime of faith. That’s why several years…
Psalm 23
Proper 23A
This is now at least the third time Psalm 23 has popped up in the Year A Lectionary and across also calendar 2020. The first time was during Lent and the second time a couple weeks after Easter. The first time was before we knew the world was going to get turned upside-down due to…
Exodus 32:1-14
Proper 23A
In this text, Paradise has almost been regained. Oh, yes, Israel is in a dry desert, not a lush garden. But so much of what had been wrong has been put right. Israel has been released from the house of bondage. Their covenant Lord is leading them to the land of milk and honey, providing…
Psalm 80:7-15
Proper 22A
“The Lord make his face to shine upon you . . .” That’s a line from the great Aaronic Benediction originally given to Israel in Numbers 6 and it is a line with which many Christians are exceedingly familiar on account of having heard it at the end of a church service so many times. …
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Proper 22A
What a massive text for one sermon! I’ve preached ten-part series on these verses, spending much time on each word of the successive commandments. No wonder the RCL tried to help us by leaving out the crucial theological material connected to the second and fourth commandments, which is unfortunate given how important those verses are….
Psalm 25:1-9
Proper 21A
Samuel Johnson is reported to having once said something to the effect that we need more often to be reminded than instructed. Intuitively probably most of us have a pretty solid sense of what he meant. It’s not that I don’t know the basics of knife safety when I am slicing and dicing vegetables in…
Exodus 17:1-7
Proper 21A
Israel is wandering in territory that is all too familiar to us—in the great wilderness of In Between, between release from bondage and possession of the Promised Land. As the New Interpreters Bible puts it, this passage is “a paradigm for the crisis of faith that occurs between bondage and well-being.” Thus it is relevant…
Psalm 145:1-8
Proper 20A
Yogi Berra is the one who famously coined the phrase “It’s déjà vu all over again” but of late it is the Revised Common Lectionary that seems to be making us live that out. As I looked at the Psalm selection for the Year A Proper 20 or the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, I knew…
Exodus 16:2-15
Proper 20A
This text is about grumbling and grace. To preach it powerfully, we need to hold those two opposites in dynamic tension. On the one hand, it is easy to be so tough on Israel’s ungrateful grumbling that we miss how completely human their complaints were. If we do that, we won’t see ourselves in them. …
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