Ephesians 5:8-14
Lent 4A
Few Lectionary texts begin more mysteriously than this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. “You were once darkness,” Paul reminds Ephesus’s Christians, “but now you are light in the Lord” (8). The apostle seems to assert that God’s adopted sons and daughters don’t just naturally live in spiritual darkness. We naturally are spiritual darkness. God doesn’t just summon…
Psalm 22:23-31
Lent 2B
[…] Express our feelings with honestly and then later honestly praise God for God’s goodness too. Either without the other is incomplete. Note: We have additional Year B Lenten Resources, worship ideas, and Sample Sermons on our website. Illustration Idea In the film The Shawshank Redemption the wrongly accused and wrongly imprisoned character of […]
Romans 4:13-25
Lent 2B
Death continues to intimidate many people. As a result, most people will do almost anything to avoid or at least indefinitely postpone death. The Bible suggests that we’d even trade everything we have in exchange for an escape from death. We sometimes sense that many people believe that if we just didn’t have to worry…
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Lent 3B
In a wonderful sermon commentary on this text (from which I drew numerous ideas for this one), Scott Hoezee suggests that there’s a danger in spending as much time in church and around Christians as some gospel proclaimers do. That’s when Christianity becomes commonsensical to us. And we also wonder why Christianity doesn’t make sense…
Luke 13:31-35
Lent 2C
[…] a man on a mission. He is in the region of the Galilee, not yet in Jerusalem for the events of holy week, and we continue our lenten journey by following him towards his suffering death. We don’t really know the motives of the Pharisees as they warn Jesus to get out of town […]
Philippians 3:4b-13
Lent 5C
Good gospel preaching, like faithful Christian living, always leans forward rather than backwards. While some Christians long for “the good old days,” this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson expresses the Apostle Paul’s longing for the good coming days. Of course, Philippians 3 says quite a bit about that on what Paul can look back. But the apostle…
John 12:1-8
Lent 5C
Comments, Questions, and Observations Jesus is anointed around the time of Holy Week in each of the gospels, but the details of each account are markedly different. Here in the Gospel of John, it occurs earlier in the timeline, before Jesus enters Jerusalem for Passover. In fact, John’s telling of the event is directly connected…
Help My Unbelief
Rutledge discusses preaching in Lent. You preach the theology of the cross. You preach suffering. You preach the mortification of our sinful nature. And, just to show how counter-cultural Lent is, Rutledge cites an ad for a book—a transcendently expensive NY Times full page ad. It’s for John Gray’s book titled, How to Get […]
Easter: While It Was Still Dark
[…] you know that that service of shadows ends in darkness and silence. Liturgically that service is the deepest shade of purple that culminated the purple season of Lent. This Easter morning, however, you came to church anticipating the color white. You anticipated not darkness but brightness. You anticipated hearing from our brass instrumentalists. A […]
Romans 5:12-19
Lent 1A
[…] well as God’s will and purposes. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson contains very hard words that are sometimes incredibly difficult to fully understand. That doesn’t, however, shrink their Lenten timeliness. In Romans 5, after all, Paul insists that sin isn’t just a problem. It isn’t even just an ancient problem. It’s also a kind of […]
- « Previous
- 1
- …
- 18
- 19
- 20
Search Results: Lent