Matthew 5:13-20
Epiphany 5A
At a restaurant in California some while back I asked the waitress if their cioppino was good. She assured me it was. Cioppino is a wonderful seafood stew, and the server assured me theirs contained a lot of very fresh clams, shrimp, calamari, and more. I ordered it. And . . . it lacked all…
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…
1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)
Epiphany 5A
Already on the first pages of J.K. Rowling’s first “Harry Potter” book we knew she was going to come up with a whole little universe of wild and funny things. The first such gadget we encounter is Dumbledore’s “deluminator.” It was the opposite of a cigarette lighter—you did not use the deluminator to light a…
Matthew 5:21-37
Epiphany 6A
Say the word “radical” to the average person and the name of “Jesus” will likely not be the first thing that springs to anyone’s mind. If you think about “radical acts,” the Sermon on the Mount is unlikely to come to mind, either. Radicals throw Molotov cocktails at police and stage sit-ins and carry placards…
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 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…
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Epiphany 4B
If last Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s call to “those who have wives [to] live as if they have none” seemed daunting to proclaim, this Sunday’s Lesson’s treatment of the issue of eating food sacrificed to idols may seem nearly overwhelming. It may, after all, feel as though Paul is speaking more to African or Asian churches…
Psalm 147:1-11, 20c
Epiphany 5B
Psalm 147 is a favorite of the Revised Common Lectionary. It seems to crop up at least once in each liturgical year and this is now the second time it has occurred in the still-new Year B cycle. This was the psalm—albeit with a slightly different configuration of verses—just one month ago on January 3. …
Acts 8:14-17
Epiphany 1C
Familiarity may, as the old cliche goes, breed contempt. But sometimes it also breeds a kind of blindness. I’ve written a sermon commentary on Acts 8:14-17. I’ve preached on it multiple times. My familiarity with it hasn’t yet dimmed my fascination with one of the Scriptures’ most mysterious and intriguing stories. However, my relative familiarity…
Isaiah 43:1-7
Epiphany 1C
Scholars tell us that there may have been at least two, probably three (perhaps four) “Isaiahs” whose prophetic words make up the one Old Testament book we call Isaiah. If so, then the version of Isaiah we get in this 43rd chapter is definitely the “Happy Isaiah” as compared to the doom-and-gloom Isaiah from earlier…
Search Results: epiphany