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Psalm 119:1-8
Epiphany 6A
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…
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Epiphany 6A
This is one hard text to preach. On the one hand, it seems so simple that it doesn’t even need a sermon. I mean, what more can we say about a text that is this straightforward. On the other hand, its simple straightforward message is so demanding and absolute that it will be unpalatable for…
Psalm 112:1-9 (10)
Epiphany 5A
About all I can say after reading Psalm 112 is that it’s one thing to wear rose-colored glasses but quite another to fuse those glasses to your head so you can never take them off! Psalm 112 is by no means the only poem in the Hebrew Psalter to paint a glowing portrait of what…
Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)
Epiphany 5A
On some liturgical calendars, we are in Ordinary Time right now. But the Revised Common Lectionary helps us keep the glory shining for a bit longer by calling this the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany. The Lectionary throws us a curveball, however, with this hard-hitting text about fasting. What on earth does this social justice passage…
Psalm 15
Epiphany 4A
In the Gospel sermon commentary for this Year A Sunday we wondered what a person would be like if you could combine all of the traits of Jesus’s Beatitudes into one individual. What would Mr. or Miss Beatitude look like? Now in Psalm 15 we see something similar: what would a person be like if…
Micah 6:1-8
Epiphany 4A
In the midst of the glory of Epiphany we encounter this sobering and bracing text about God’s lawsuit against his sinful people. How is this an Epiphany text? The only connection I could find lies in that little word “showed” in verse 8. After the whole court proceeding laid out in verses 1-7, God reveals…
Four Pages: On A Hill Far Away
This sermon was preached on January 24, 2019 at Washington DC Christian Reformed Church. Theme: God sends unwilling prophets and a willing Savior for love of the whole world … yes, even “those people”. Doctrine: “For God so loved the world.” Image: “Those people” Need: To repent of being unwilling prophets Mission: To question the (spiritual,…
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
Epiphany 3A
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would 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 who…
Isaiah 9:1-4
Epiphany 3A
Consistent with the season of Epiphany, the Lectionary readings from the Old Testament continue to focus on the Servant Messiah as the light of the world. It’s a message we need to hear because we live in particularly dark times, as did the nation of Judah to whom these words were addressed. The time of…
Four Pages: Us
For many years across the mid-twentieth century cartoonist Walt Kelly provided humor, satire, political wit, and social commentary through his popular cartoon strip called “Pogo.” Pogo Possum led a cast of animal characters who lived in the Okefenokee Swamp somewhere in the southern United States. But of all the thousands of strips Mr. Kelly produced…
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