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Psalm 32
Lent 1A
It was only a few short months ago that the Year C Lectionary assigned most of Psalm 32 as the Psalm Lection. Now here it is again assigned in its entirety for the First Sunday in Lent in the Year A Lectionary. Since I don’t have any new thoughts on this psalm since last Fall—and…
Psalm 2
Last Epiphany A
Thanks to Handel’s oratorio Messiah, Psalm 2 often gets associated with Christmas as traditionally it is during Advent that many choirs/orchestras present this well-known piece of music, including the thundering and fiery solo “Thou Shalt Break Them.” Yet here we are on Transfiguration Sunday looking at this very psalm. And if applied to the Messiah…
Psalm 119:1-8
Epiphany 6A
In the world of secular music, I would guess you would be hard pressed to find many songs with titles like “I Just Love Rules!” In fact the website Ranker provided their top list of songs with the word “law” in the title but songs of the variety “I’m Lovin’ the Law” don’t seem to…
Psalm 112:1-9 (10)
Epiphany 5A
About all I can say after reading Psalm 112 is that it’s one thing to wear rose-colored glasses but quite another to fuse those glasses to your head so you can never take them off! Psalm 112 is by no means the only poem in the Hebrew Psalter to paint a glowing portrait of what…
Psalm 15
Epiphany 4A
In the Gospel sermon commentary for this Year A Sunday we wondered what a person would be like if you could combine all of the traits of Jesus’s Beatitudes into one individual. What would Mr. or Miss Beatitude look like? Now in Psalm 15 we see something similar: what would a person be like if…
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
Epiphany 3A
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would 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 who…
Psalm 40:1-11
Epiphany 2A
Did David (or whoever wrote this psalm) write it backwards? You can divide Psalm 40 rather neatly into two halves (though most of the second half is left out by the Lectionary). The first ten or so verses are full of confidence and gratitude for God’s deliverance. As usual in the psalms, we cannot detect…
Psalm 29
Epiphany 1A
Psalm 29 is an ode to a thunderstorm. But this poem is not just that. The primary aim here is to move through the storm to the Lord of the storm, to the King of Creation, to the one, only true, sovereign God: Yahweh. As such, Psalm 29, for all its lyrical and poetic beauty,…
Psalm 147:12-20
Christmas 2A
Two rather striking features to this psalm leap out at you. First, there is the singularly positive, sunny statements about how God has strengthened Jerusalem, given peace within Israel’s borders, and just generally provides a warm and safe environment for God’s people. The second striking feature is the celebration at the end of Psalm 147…
Psalm 148
Christmas 1A
The time between Christmas and Epiphany is one of those flex times in the Revised Common Lectionary—sometimes there are two Sundays after Christmas and before January 6 and sometimes just one in case Epiphany falls exactly on the second Sunday after Christmas. So sometimes Psalm 148 is in the Lectionary mix and sometimes it isn’t. …
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