Revelation 5:11-14
Easter 3C
[…] stop spreading at Revelation 5 or 1 Corinthians 15’s ends, the ripples of praise for Christ’s worthiness don’t stop spreading. What begins in Jerusalem on the first Pentecost and slowly spreads out from there to the whole world just keeps spreading, by God’s grace and the work of the Holy Spirit. Revelation 5’s good […]
Revelation 7:9-17
Easter 4C
[…] beloved people can’t yet see the full “holy catholic church.” We can’t yet see the Church that extends all the way back to (at least) the first Pentecost and forward into eternity’s glory. Christians can’t yet fully see the Church that wraps all the way around the globe. So if we are to see […]
Psalm 67
Easter 6C
[…] on that night in the upper room to hear Jesus say “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” What became more startling still after Pentecost was a further, related truth: if the world sees the Father at all, it will be through what they see in now us. Psalm 67 may […]
John 16:12-15
Trinity Sunday C
[…] Trinity, we’d very likely see how our Christocentrism has led to a lack of knowledge and awareness of both Yahweh and the Holy Spirit. Last week was Pentecost, and if you preached the gospel lectionary text, then you know that Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit to his people after he went away, […]
Psalm 84:1-7
Proper 25C
[…] the farther from Jerusalem = the farther from God (such that you always prayed toward Jerusalem, albeit sometimes from long distances). There is a sense in which Pentecost democratized the presence of God for us (something pointed to in this week’s Old Testament reading from Joel 2). The New Testament reveals that we are […]
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Proper 29C
[…] the earth. For Christians today, it really should be the case that the way we celebrate the Reign of Christ—the way God used the Holy Spirit of Pentecost to establish a Church and a Kingdom that knows no boundaries or limits—really should outstrip the Exodus from Egypt as well as most anything else you […]
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Epiphany 6A
[…] need to major in God and in grace. Social justice liberals and evangelicals alike tend to give us shoulds, musts, and have-tos. “We don’t get enough Easter, Pentecost, Ascension. We get Emerson under other names. We get self-reliance preached to us, and it can’t save us. Preachers avoid grace because it ‘lets people off […]
Acts 10:34-43
Easter Day A
[…] on uneducated fishermen, women (whose witness was always suspect in a patriarchal society), and the rest of the somewhat rag-tag group of people who went on after Pentecost to tell the world a truth that the man at the center of that truth did not do himself? I think we too often fail to […]
Acts 1:6-14
Easter 7A
[…] now and so the first order of business was to ask for the guidance and the energy to do it well. This all happened a week-and-a-half before Pentecost, of course, but really the church’s posture has not changed that much in 2,000 years. We’re still down here, Jesus is still at the right hand […]
Matthew 10:40-42
Proper 8A
[…] of blessings to those who received God’s prophets well. In this sense, we can see a link here to the Old Testament lection for this Sunday after Pentecost in the Genesis 22 story. For more on Dr. Holwerda’s observations, see “The Lectionary Commentary: The Third Readings: The Gospels” Eerdmans, 2001). Illustration Idea On the […]
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