Movies for Preaching
The Apostle (1997)
Written by Robert Duvall. 134 minutes. PG-13. Starring Robert Duvall, Farrah Fawcett, June Carter Cash, and Billy Bob Thornton. Forty years a preacher, an apostle full of brimstone and sweet Jesus, and Euliss “Sonny” Dewey still doesn’t get it, specifically the nature of the “Holy Ghost power” he has relished and exalted his whole long…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011)
Written by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling. 130 minutes. PG-13. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Alan Rickman, Ralph Fiennes. Hebrews 11 details the lives of some of the Bible’s biggest saints and heroes of the faith, concluding finally by claiming there are too many more to mention in any…
Reading for Preaching
A Diary of Private Prayer in Devotional Classics
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Mere Christianity, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
“Holiness Necessary for Future Blesedness,” in his Sermons and Discourses (1825-39)
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet
Churches that Abuse
The Collected Sermons of William H. Willimon
From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
A Dresser of Sycamore Trees
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“An Overdue Reminder that Not All is Relative”
The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World
“Men Need Church Too”
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
Additional content related to Church
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson brings to mind the novelist William Faulkner’s lament about the post-Civil War American South: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It also in some ways resonates with the historian and philosopher George Santayana’s “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” If Christians didn’t know…
Psalm 122
Psalm 122 is one of fifteen psalms extending from Psalms 120-134, each of which is labeled “A Song of Ascents.” The sense of that title is that these were pilgrimage songs sung by Israelites as they ascended up to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, therefore, the terms “Jerusalem,” “Zion,” and “house of Yahweh” occur with great density…
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Just beyond the ending point for this particular Old Testament Year C reading is a rather striking line in Jeremiah 23:7-8. Anyone who grew up hearing the Ten Commandments—as well as other Old Testament passages—read on a fairly regular basis in church or at the dinner table knows that one of the most famous catch-phrases…
Haggai 1:15-2:9
Things in the church are a little different these days. Some years ago at my alma mater it was decided that after nearly twenty-five or so years without having an on-campus chapel—a dedicated worship space—it was high time to build one. In the years since the college had moved from its original campus, most everything…
Psalm 84:1-7
In the Calvin Seminary Chapel above and behind the pulpit area is a large clear-glass window with a cross in the center. A few years ago during a May Term preaching class in the chapel, we all noticed that a large Horned Owl had made a nest in the uppermost window pane near the top…
Acts 2:1-21
COVID-19. Has anything in our experience ever made us think as much about the act of respiration, of breathing, than the global pandemic we have been in for over two years now? Way back in 2006 I visited Japan. At that time there was no particular flu bug worrying anyone. Yet I was struck to…
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Balkanization is a concept we generally link to the breakdown of countries, regions or even society into various, often competing factions. Careful observers of the 21st century Church, however, also sense balkanization within the Body of Christ. North American Christians who label themselves “evangelical” or “progressive” often view each other with suspicion, if not outright…
Micah 5:2-5a
When the Lectionary dishes up just 3.5 verses, skipping the first verse of a chapter and stopping just halfway through the fifth verse, you just know it’s like putting blinders on us readers to keep us from seeing something on either side of the lection. I don’t know why they made this choice but lyric…
Mark 12:38-44
Our two sections are directly connected by the mention of widows. In the first section, the widows are made destitute at the hands of the scribes, and in the second, a poor widow gives the last of her financial goods as a contribution to the faith community. Jesus clearly condemns the scribes in the first…
Ephesians 2:11-22
Could Paul say anything more counter-cultural yet hopeful than Christ has made the two one? (14). We live, after all, in a world that’s deeply divided along so many lines. In fact, the gaps those fault lines create also seem to be widening. Democrats vs. Republicans. Liberal Party members vs. Conservative Party members. Vaxxers vs….
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
Paul certainly had lofty ideals for the Christian Church. At the beginning of his first letter to Thessalonica’s Christians, he describes the Church as a community loved and chosen by God. That community, the apostle adds, draws its life from God and lives that life with faith, love and hope. When Paul concludes this letter…
Psalm 122
Psalm 122 is one of fifteen psalms extending from Psalms 120-134, each of which is labeled “A Song of Ascents.” The sense of that title is that these were pilgrimage songs sung by Israelites as they ascended up to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, therefore, the terms “Jerusalem,” “Zion,” and “house of Yahweh” occur with great density…
Colossians 1:11-20
What a weird place to start our lectionary selection for Reign of Christ Sunday and the close of Ordinary Time. We get the last few verses of Paul’s thanksgiving prayer section, then all of the Christ hymn, but not the verses that describe the community’s reconciliation. If it’s “application” that we’re after, wouldn’t verses 21-23…
Joel 2:28-32
As we near the end of Ordinary Time, the Lectionary begins to point toward Advent with prophecies that are more distinctly Messianic. After 9 hard weeks in Jeremiah which was addressed to a nation on the brink of Exile, we turn to the Minor Prophets, beginning with the one about bugs. Joel rose out of…
Psalm 84:1-7
In the Calvin Seminary Chapel above and behind the pulpit area is a large clear-glass window with a cross in the center. A few years ago during a May Term preaching class in the chapel, we all noticed that a large Horned Owl had made a nest in the uppermost window pane near the top…
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
So here we are at the most intimate, and soul laid bare, part of Paul’s letters to Timothy. In these sermon commentaries, we’ve hinted all along about what Paul reveals in these verses—that he’s at the end of his earthly life, abandoned by fellow ministry partners, waiting on his imminent death. The lectionary selection leaves…
Acts 9:36-43
Reading Dr. Luke’s account of the growth of the early church is a bit like watching a frog hop from lily pad to lily pad—from Jerusalem to the Gaza Strip to Samaria to Damascus to Joppa, from Peter and John to Philip to Stephen to Paul and now back to Peter. OK, maybe the image…
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
When asked to define “church,” at least some people answer by talking about a place like a building, an event like a worship service, or even a kind of organization that people join. But when Paul defines “church,” he speaks of a living organism into which God’s children are born again, by God’s grace. He…
Matthew 2:1-12
Strange, isn’t it? For ever-so-long now the Church has often been seen by those outside of the Church—and not infrequently by even a good many folks inside the Church—as being a kind of exclusive club. Too often it all comes down to who’s in, who’s out. In history popes and other religious leaders have used…
Preaching Connection: Church