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Psalm 96:1-9
Proper 24A
In the mid-1970s when I was a boy, our congregation in Ada, Michigan, got a new minister who tended to begin worship services using Psalm 96:7-8 as his Call to Worship. Over and over and more weeks than not I heard Rev. MacLeod say, “Ascribe to the Lord . . .” multiple times. I…
Psalm 23
Proper 23A
All things being equal, I suppose it would be OK if we preachers did not find anything overly new or original to say about what may be the most famous, best-loved psalm of them all. In fact, sometimes our efforts at being innovative can lead us astray even as being overly zealous to share some…
Psalm 80:7-15
Proper 22A
This week the Lectionary is carving out the middle section of Psalm 80 beginning at verse 7 and its call for God to make his face to shine on his people so as to restore them. If we zoom out and look at the entire psalm, then we see that verse 7 is a refrain…
Psalm 25:1-9
Proper 21A
Some years back I was asked to preach at a worship service in a congregation that was celebrating that day the launch of the new church education year as well as the start of the new academic year at a local Christian day school. To tie in with that theme, I eventually found my way…
Psalm 145:1-8
Proper 20A
Recently as I read the first 8 verses of Psalm 145, I found myself oddly enough wondering what is the antecedent for all the “they” references in especially verses 4-7. On the one level it is almost certainly the case that the “they” refers back to the next generation. One generation commends God’s works to…
Psalm 103: (1-7), 8-13
Proper 19A
The first half dozen verses of Psalm 103 are familiar to some of us because a lot of churches use those words as the words of Thanksgiving following a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. At our church, the pastor reads the words and the congregation then echoes them. They are such fitting words following…
Psalm 119:33-40
Proper 18A
A few weeks back, for the last Sunday in July, the RCL took us to a snippet of Psalm 119 (verses 129-136), and now here we are again – but this time verses 33-40. So to review all the basics: Psalm 119 is the longest of all the psalms clocking in at 176 verses. Those…
Psalm 26:1-8
Proper 17A
Probably it is the Calvinism that is fairly well ingrained into my being that makes me hesitate over parts of Psalm 26. I mean, I just cannot imagine coming before my God in Christ and saying, “I have led a blameless life.” Were I to pray along the lines of saying to God, “I wash…
Psalm 138
Proper 16A
In the film The Godfather Part II, we see in flashbacks the rise of the mafia kingpin Don Vito Corleone back in the early 1900s. At one point a friend of Vito’s wife was being kicked out of her apartment because she had been keeping a dog against the apartment rules. So Vito talks to…
Psalm 67
Proper 15A
Psalm 67 is one of the shorter songs of all the 150 psalms. Yet twice in these brief verses—at the end of verse 1 and again at the end of verse 4—we find the mysterious Hebrew word selah inserted into the text. No one to my knowledge claims definitively to know what this word means. …
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