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Psalm 150
Easter 2C
Psalm 150 is the giant exclamation mark that closes out the Book of Psalms. In six swift and short verses the psalmist looks back on the previous 149 songs in the Hebrew Psalter and then as much as says, “Here’s what this whole book has been saying all along.” The psalms—each of them and all…
Psalm 114
Easter Day C
Last week our Psalm commentary was on Psalm 118, one of the options for Palm/Passion Sunday. This week the Year C Easter Psalm is 118, the only option. So for this commentary we will take up Psalm 114, which is the Psalm assigned for Easter evening. Psalm 114 is in its own way a somewhat…
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Palm Sunday C
The Year C Lectionary—like all three Lectionary cycles—gives us two options for this final Sunday in Lent. We can focus on the Liturgy of the Palms to celebrate Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or we can make it Passion Sunday / Liturgy of the Passion and focus more on the upcoming crucifixion and death of Jesus…
Psalm 126
Lent 5C
The first half of this short psalm does not seem to fit the Season of Lent very well. This begins as a psalm of rejoicing and praise, remembering the time the exiles returned from Babylon. Those verses paint an almost delirious picture of happiness, laughter, and people feeling as if their dreams had at long…
Psalm 32
Lent 4C
According to the old saying, “Confession is good for the soul.” The psalmist who penned Psalm 32 would agree but would also add that not confessing is bad for soul and body. The psalmist here famously declares that for that season of his life when he refused to own up to and acknowledge the sins…
Psalm 63:1-8
Lent 3C
Even in the middle of the Season of Lent, the Lectionary would just as soon as have us turn a blind eye to anything having to do with punishments for sin and evil. That has to be why they lop off the final few verses of Psalm 63. True, there may be some due hesitation…
Psalm 27
Lent 2C
At Calvin Theological Seminary for the past two decades we have used as a kind of homiletical template Paul Scott Wilson’s “The Four Pages of the Sermon” format. As some of you reading this may know, Wilson uses what he calls Trouble and Grace as the two primary components of a sermon. Page One (or…
The Elegant Universe
It was exactly 100 years ago in 1905 when an unknown patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a series of papers detailing what he called “special relativity.” In one fell swoop, Einstein shattered centuries’ worth of scientific theories about the fundamental nature of reality. The theories of Isaac Newton and his mechanical understanding of the…
How Majestic!
The poet of Psalm 8 stared into the night sky and was properly dazzled at what he saw. But to put it mildly, what he did not see was a lot! Had this psalmist been able to spend a scant ten minutes looking through a telescope he would doubtless have fainted in wonderment. Ancient astronomers…
All Cry Glory!
Thunderstorms. Even as we sit here in church, right this moment there are likely upwards of 2,000 thunderstorms going on across the earth. On average each day 45,000 such storms occur. They are among the most powerful forces we know. In the simplest sense, but also in perhaps the most boring sense, a thunderstorm is…
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