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Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Lent 2A
Considering that we all love gripping courtroom dramas at the movies or on TV, it’s a wonder people don’t find parts of Romans more engaging. When you read Romans 4, for instance, it’s not the least bit difficult in your mind’s eye to picture Paul as an attorney, pacing furiously in a courtroom as he…
Romans 5:12-19
Lent 1A
Princeton Seminary President Craig Barnes has a way of opening just about each one of his sermons with a pithy one-liner that grabs your attention even as it sets the tone for the whole sermon. In one of his sermons he opened with this: Sooner or later we all face the frightening thought that we…
Romans 1:1-7
Advent 4A
“To God’s beloved ones in Rome.” Such a simple, such a commonplace way to open a letter. We read such a salutation in all of the New Testament’s many epistles. And it’s easy to breeze right past it, hurry on by to get to the meat of the letter, the real important stuff about the…
Romans 15:4-13
Advent 2A
Acoustics are everything when it comes to how a text is heard but in these days of political turmoil—a roiling pot of many feelings that is bubbling up in also the church—Paul’s call to “accept one another” for the sake of God’s greater glory is bracing. Right now a lot of people I know—including the…
Romans 13:11-14
Advent 1A
As with any number of Lectionary readings, we have a “this” in Romans 13:11 whose antecedent you cannot know unless you back up to the first ten verses of this passage. The immediate context of the “this” (as in “And do THIS . . .”) is the command to love your neighbor as yourself. The…
Romans 5:1-5
Trinity Sunday C
We forget it most of the time when we read Romans but the fact is that Paul was writing to a group of Christians for whom hope was no doubt in short supply. They lived in the heart of Roman darkness, right under the nose of the Caesar himself. They lived in an empire in…
Romans 8:14-17
Pentecost C
“She’s a free spirit” we sometimes say of a certain person. “He exudes a spirit of kindness” we might say of someone else. Or “She has a fiercely independent spirit about her.” And what we mean in every situation is that most people “breathe” or exude a certain ambiance, a certain energy or vibe or…
Romans 10:8b-13
Lent 1C
Romans 9-11 can make for tough reading. Paul is clearly tortured here where the question of the future of the Jewish people is concerned. In these three chapters it is almost as though Paul is thinking out loud, trying to write his way to a solution to a vexing theological question: now that God’s covenant…
Romans 3
No one will ever be able to accuse Paul of lacking passion. It oozes out of each of his letters in the New Testament. Sometimes though, when you’re passionate, your arguments don’t always make logical sense or flow smoothly from point to point. The opening of Romans is a good example of this. In Romans…
Romans 8:12-17
Trinity Sunday B
Comments and Observations Not many of our congregants will get excited about Trinity Sunday, because most of them think of the Trinity as an impenetrable mystery. The Trinity is a set of ideas that have befuddled theologians for centuries and, thus, leave ordinary Christians cold. With tongue firmly in cheek, one theologian put it this…
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