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…
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…
Fittingly, the season of Epiphany ends with Transfiguration Sunday. With the possible exception of his resurrection, Christ’s Transfiguration was the most spectacular exhibition of his glory in his life. Indeed, the Transfiguration was arguably even more glorious than the Resurrection, because Jesus resurrected body did not have about it the unmistakable glory of his transfigured…
Across the spectrum of poems in the Hebrew Psalter are prayers that fit most every occasion and season in life. Laments, petitions, confessions, praise, thanksgiving; songs that fit happy days and songs that fit rotten days; lyric expressions of trust and bitter cries of abandonment and anger. It’s all in there. That’s an important thing…
The theme for this Sixth Sunday of Epiphany is the same in all four Lections—reversal of fortune. Psalm 37 and Luke 6:27-38 talk about loving enemies, thus reversing the usual response to those who abuse us. I Corinthian’s 15:35-50 expounds the great doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which reverses the apparent victory of…
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