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Isaiah 43:16-21
Lent 5C
All four of the Lectionary readings for this Fifth Sunday of Lent share a “past and future” theme. Psalm 126 talks about the restoration of Israel’s fortune in the past and calls on God to restore Israel’s fortunes in the future, so that those who “sow in tears can reap with shouts of joy.” In…
Psalm 32
Lent 4C
Most of his friends had been hanged. But despite his central role in helping to construct Adolf Hitler’s Nazi nightmare, Albert Speer somehow managed to receive from the Nuremberg trials only a twenty-year sentence at the Spandau Prison in Berlin. Not long after arriving in Spandau, Speer met with the prison chaplain. To the chaplain’s…
Joshua 5:9-12
Lent 4C
Why in the world would you preach on this text, when the Lectionary offers you the options of Jesus’ dramatic Parable of the Prodigal (Luke 15) and Paul’s magnificent doctrine of new creation in Christ (II Corinthians 5:15-21). I mean, this text from Joshua seem so small and insignificant. Plus, preaching on it will make…
Psalm 63:1-8
Lent 3C
When a psalm is as relatively brief as Psalm 63 and yet you notice that the Lectionary would have you stop reading—and presumably stop preaching—three verses shy of the actual conclusion of the poem, one might be justified in wondering what’s up. What is in those last few verses? Why the full stop before this…
Isaiah 55:1-9
Lent 3C
An old farmer once told me that there are two ways to break an egg—you can smash it with a hammer in a second or you can put it under a warm mother hen for a few days. An old preacher once told me that there two ways to call a sinner to repentance and…
Psalm 27
Lent 2C
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would all 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…
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Lent 2C
This is one of the great seminal passages of Scripture, on a par with Genesis 1, Psalm 23, and John 3:16 in importance for both Jews and Christians. But what a mixture it is, filled with peculiar ancient inheritance customs (adopting a slave to become your heir), divine promises that still shape international politics today…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Lent 1C
It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age (and although the RCL only takes the first and last few verses, this Sermon Commentary will encompass the whole psalm). Talk of a “fowler’s snare” sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps…
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Lent 1C
Like all good preachers, Moses knew how important it is to end your sermon with a story. After multiple chapters of “do this and don’t do that,” Moses is coming to the climactic end of his sermon to Israel. They are at the last stop in their wilderness wandering, standing at the brink of the…
Psalm 99
Last Epiphany 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 some outsider to Israel who was looking in. After all, in poems like this one, the psalmist…
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