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Throughout All Generations
Few scientific facts amaze me more than what Albert Einstein discovered about time. Each year on New Year’s Eve we briefly pay attention to the ticking of the clock, counting down the minutes and seconds until midnight. Mostly, though, we don’t watch time pass that intentionally. The watch on my wrist, the clock on my…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Lent 1C
At first blush Psalm 91 seems an odd choice for the Year C First Sunday in Lent. After all, Psalm 91 is one of those psalms that makes lavish promises as to the constant well-being and prospering of anyone who makes God their refuge and strength. If you are on God’s side, God is constantly…
Psalm 99
Transfiguration Sunday C
Psalm 99 might seem to be a better fit for the Reign of Christ Sunday later this year than for Transfiguration Sunday. There is really nothing in the accounts of Christ’s transfiguration that point to God—or Christ Jesus—as King. But that is what Psalm 99 is all about. Probably if we wanted to make a…
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
Epiphany 7C
Psalm 37 is a little bit all over the place. The Lectionary would have us skip 27 of this poem’s 40 verses but to preach well on this psalm, we need to at least read through verses 12-38. And if we do so, then we see that Psalm 37 is at once highly realistic and…
Psalm 1
Epiphany 6C
The Book of Psalms begins with a beatitude. But unlike Jesus’s well-known Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount that begins in Matthew 5, Psalm 1’s beatitude is not for what a person is or for what a person does. Instead, this blessing concerns what a given person does not do. Principally a person is…
Psalm 138
Epiphany 5C
The honesty of the psalms is always refreshing. In the case of Psalm 138, such honesty comes through most especially in the final line of the poem. Mostly this psalm brims with enthusiasm for God. Whole-hearted praise begins the psalm followed by joyful observations about how he will continue to worship God, how God always…
Psalm 71:1-6
Epiphany 4C
Even just the half-dozen verses that the Lectionary selects for us from the larger text of Psalm 71 capture the essence of most of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Psalter. Consider all of what is spoken and expressed in the span of just these few verses: Images of God as refuge and rock and…
Psalm 19
Epiphany 3C
Law. Decrees. Statues. Commands. Precepts. Once the writer of Psalm 19 switched his focus from the wonder of creation to the wonder of God’s law, he dug deep into his Hebrew thesaurus to use about every synonym for “law” as he could find. But he used this variety of terms not merely because he did…
Psalm 36:5-10
Epiphany 2C
Psalm 36 contains a striking line about God: “In your light we see light.” It is a curious turn of phrase, seeming very nearly tautological. What does it mean that we can only see light when we are in the midst of some other light? It may be a way of saying that we cannot…
Psalm 29
Epiphany 1C
This is the Sunday to observe things related to the Baptism of Jesus and each of the four assigned Year C readings tie in with baptism. The Acts 8 passage is a little bit of an outlier in that no water is involved but instead baptism is mentioned even as the Holy Spirit gets poured…
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