Movies for Preaching
Babette’s Feast (1987) – 1
Babette’s Feast (1987). Written by Karen Blixen (short story) and Gabriel Axel (screenplay). Directed by Gabriel Axel. Starring Stéphane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Bergitte Federspiel, Jarl Kulle, and Jean-Philippe Lafont. Music: Per Nørgaard. Cinematography: Henning Kristiansen. Rated G; 102 mins. Rotten Tomatoes 100%. It is a nameless place where nothing much happens, in part because it…
Wide Awake (1998) – 2
Wide Awake (1998). Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Joseph Cross, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robert Loggia. Rated PG. 88 mins. Rotten Tomatoes 67%. In big ways, Thomas the Doubtful had it right. Show me the evidence, please, in all of its gory glory. Enough already with other people’s hopeful delusions. After all, empirical…
Reading for Preaching
Mere Christianity, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
Mere Christianity, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
“Faith” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith
“Doubt” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith
“Billions and Billions of Demons”
Confessions
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Our Knowledge of God
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
“Facing Reality,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?
“Sermon 47”
Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay
“Staking All on Faith’s Object: the Art of Christian Assurance according to Martin Luther and Karl Barth”
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Our Knowledge of God
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Roger’s Version
The Scarlet Ruse
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration
Additional content related to Faith
Acts 2:1-21
It was an annual holiday and so people knew what to expect. That’s how it goes with regularly occurring events. Yes, there can be minor variations but when it’s Christmastime, we all have our typical ways of celebrating the occasion and the same goes for Easter or Thanksgiving or even the Fourth of July. We…
John 14:15-21
Separating this part of Jesus’s conversation with the disciples from last week’s helps us focus on the bonded (in the sense of stuck to/with) nature of God-with-us, no matter which particular person of the Trinity it is who is with us. The ties that bind us, of course, is the love of God. If we…
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
Sometimes the Revised Common Lectionary gives us the same Psalm somewhat frequently but each time it is chopped up in different ways. As it is, selecting some verses, skipping over others, and then including a few more is not always a great way to preach on a given Hebrew poem in that they were written…
John 14:1-14
Comments, Questions, and Observations “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” These words can apply to so many different situations, but in this particular text, they immediately follow Jesus’s prophetic promise that he is about to be betrayed by one them, will be leaving them, and will be denied by one of the most loyal…
Psalm 23
It’s not quite true but sometimes it feels like Psalm 23 pops up in the Lectionary every couple weeks. In fact, this psalm really was assigned just a few weeks ago during Lent. Psalm 23 pops up at least once—and usually twice—inside any given calendar across Years A, B, and C of the Lectionary. And…
John 20:19-31
What does it take to believe? Just that morning, Mary herself had told them that Jesus was resurrected, and the beloved disciple, having seen the folded-up graveclothes, believed something (though we aren’t sure what). Now, many of them are huddled together in fear, locked away from those who they believe want to do them harm….
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Few things seem more deeply lodged within the human heart than the longing to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Few people articulated that longing more poignantly than the Irish poet John O’Donohue. In his book Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong (Harper Perennial, 2000) he wrote, “The hunger to belong is…
Psalm 15
In the Gospel sermon commentary for this Year A Sunday we are directed to think of who we are supposed to be as reflected in Jesus’s Beatitudes in Matthew 5. As theologians and biblical commentators have noted for centuries, if we want to know who we are to be like in order to fit inside…
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would find that our prayer life is also our autobiography. Who we are, where we’ve been, the situations we’ve faced, the fears that nag us, and not a few of the core characteristics of who…
Matthew 11:2-11
Comments, Questions and Observations We are a far cry from last week’s gospel lectionary text. Then, John was fire and brimstone, calling out the people of God, baptizing and supporting people’s repentance work. Now, months later in the gospel timeline, John is in a prison-cave cell at Herod Antipas’ Machaerus fortress—itself in the wilderness land…
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
As most every Bible commentary would tell you, the way Paul uses Habakkuk 2:4b (“the righteous will live by faith”) in Romans and Galatians may be a bit different from how the text “sounds” and seems to function in the original context of Habakkuk 2. Habakkuk has spent most of his prophecy up to this…
Luke 18:1-8
The “unjust judge” is the key comparison in this parable: it is the judge from whom we are meant learn something about God. This is made clear by the fact that this is a parable of comparison. If this judge, who is at the other end of the spectrum of what we know God’s character…
Luke 17:11-19
From standing at a distance asking for mercy to coming right up to his feet and lying prostrate with praise, our healed leper goes on quite the journey. The other lepers who are healed do too, of course, but they take a different direction upon the revelation that they are healed. I don’t want to…
Lamentations 1:1-6
Cheery this lection is not. The New Testament sermon starter based on Luke 17 for this week is a bit of a challenging passage and so some preachers might be tempted to swap out this week’s Old Testament reading for the Gospel one but if so, then turning to this downbeat passage might make one…
Luke 17:5-10
We plop right into a conversation already in progress in verse 5, but as you may already be aware, reading the previous verses isn’t a guarantee that you’ll immediately understand our lectionary selection! If you wish to include the first four verses of chapter 17, it’s fine to do so, since they are seemingly what…
Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15
A real estate deal seldom had it so good. All through the Bible you can find a recurrent theme related to real estate, to land, to who owns what. It all began with a promise of land to Abram (who for some reason had to leave behind the land he already owned to set out…
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
We sometimes assume that we can recognize an alien when we see him (he’s green and has antennae) or at least see her citizenship papers (they say citizen of Canada, or Mexico, the United States, or some other country of origin). Yet when Hebrews’ author speaks of people like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and others…
Psalm 33:12-22
Suppose you are a person who is leery of civil religion, of the possible idolatry that can come when people equate a given nation with God’s kingdom. Well, in that case, Psalm 33:12a might give you pause, or it might flat out trouble you a bit. “Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh.” That…
Romans 5:1-5
A quick glance at the church year’s calendar may make gospel proclaimers’ pulses race. Trinity Sunday has, after all, come again. It may make proclaimers’ palms sweat not just because, as the New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa to whose commentary I owe a great deal for this commentary, notes, “reference to the Trinity is itself…
John 21:1-19
Perhaps like you, most of the times that I have preached this text I have honed in on Peter being re-rooted in Christ and commissioned for what will come in his life and ministry. So, this year I’m focusing on what happens to the group of disciples, Peter included. It helps that our text today…
Psalm 31:9-16
Comments, Observations, and Questions It is Palm/Passion Sunday and so God’s people come to church. We Christians come to church because we believe when we do, we come into the presence of God. We believe in God and so we believe God is faithful to the promise that when we gather in God’s name, God…
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Genesis 15 is full of curiosities and oddments. But right in the middle of this chapter is a verse that went on to exercise an enormous influence on the New Testament. “Abram believed Yahweh and it was credited to him as righteousness.” In Romans and Galatians this one verse became a linch-pin in Paul’s argument…
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age (and although the RCL only takes the first and last few verses, this Sermon Commentary will encompass the whole psalm). Talk of a “fowler’s snare” sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps…
Romans 10:8b-13
Comments, Observations, and Questions Some Christians at least imply that grace is what we might call a “Yesbut” phenomenon. “Yes,” they say, “We’re saved by grace alone through faith. But people also need to oppose gay marriage or voting restrictions in order to be truly saved.” Or “Yes, people who confess that Jesus is Lord…
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Some biblical texts hit so close to home that their proclaimers find them hard to proclaim. 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 is one of those texts. I can’t read this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson without seeing in my mind’s eye dear people like Bill and Carl, as well as Sharon, Ashley*, and countless others. I, honestly,…
Psalm 99
All these millennia later it is easy to read the Psalms, especially one like Psalm 99, and forget how at once scandalous and vaguely ridiculous they might appear to be. Or at least how they could appear to an outsider to Israel who was looking in. After all, in poems like this one, the psalmist…
Luke 2:41-52
We are still in the Christmas season on this Sunday, and for many of us, this is a low-key Sunday, a “coming down” from all of the hype that has been the season. There’s a bit of that feeling in the story as well. Year after year (a more literal translation of the opening of…
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Though the power of Mary’s song always draws my heart’s cry for justice and hope, this year I’m particularly drawn to what we learn about the way of God in the support that Elizabeth offers to Mary. After Mary gives her big “YES” to God’s plan for the salvation of the world, past, present and…
Psalm 25:1-10
When I read Psalm 25, I find myself drawn to its utter realism. If you enter into the rhythms and patterns of these verses, what you will find is probably something akin to your own life. If you are like most people, including most Christian people, then the pattern of your piety is probably something…
Mark 10:46-52
A couple of weeks ago, we witnessed the rich man come to terms with reality. This week, we see a bit of a contrast in the person of Bartimaeus. Both he and the rich man are earnest and sincere in their desire to encounter Jesus, but one walks away and the other follows our Lord….
Hebrews 4:12-16
Even adults are, in some ways, masters of hiding. We generally no longer hide in closets or behind furniture as we did when we played “Hide and Seek” as children. Yet we still manage to keep a lot of things hidden from each other – and, sometimes, even ourselves. So those who proclaim Hebrews 4…
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
There is not much Esther in the Revised Common Lectionary, and few pastors have ever complained or requested more. The Lectionary likewise does little with Song of Songs or Jude, and if you follow only the Lectionary, you would be unlikely to generate a long series of sermons on Nahum or Revelation, either. And it’s…
Psalm 116:1-9
For many of us, we cannot read the opening verses of Psalm 116 without thinking of the lovely song based on it that has become popular in recent years. What the song gets right is the lyric words of the first two verses because the psalmist swiftly moves from the grateful observation that God heard…
1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49
As we continue to trace the development of the monarchy in Israel and use that history to reflect on the relationship between human leadership and divine sovereignty in our own lives, we come to this famous story of David and Goliath. It is the second chapter in the story of David’s rise to power in…
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17
The end of Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson has taken on perhaps extra poignancy over the past fifteen months or so. That’s partly because, at least in the United States, the global pandemic, political partisanship and struggles for racial justice have added new chapters to the story of what its verse 16 calls “a worldly point of…
John 1:6-8, 19-28
“Among you stands one you do not know.” Those were John the Baptist’s words as recorded in John 1:26. Of course, at that time it was literally true that a quiet carpenter’s son from the backwaters of the Roman Empire was rubbing shoulders with lots of people—including the crowds that jostled together at the banks…
Philippians 3:4b-14
“Are you becoming perfect?” is the perhaps strange way Carole Noren, to whom I owe many ideas for this Commentary, begins a sermon on Philippians 3. It is, however, also an appropriate question, in light of the amount of attention the New Testament pays to the issue of perfection. While Christians may sense that the…
Psalm 23
Psalm 23 is hands-down the most famous of the 150 psalms in the Psalter. In terms of recognizability, Psalm 23 is probably right up there with popular ditties like “Roses are red, violets are blue,” with Shakespearean sonnets like “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” and well-known song lyrics like “Happy birthday to…
Romans 4:1-5,13-17
When I was a teenager, we liked to sing a song that also had motions. With arms and legs flailing, we’d sing something like: “Father Abraham/ Had many sons;/ Many sons had Father Abraham;/ And I am one of them,/ And so are you,/ So let’s all praise the Lord.” Now once you got past…
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Our text marks what may feel like a rather abrupt change in tone. After all, in the Epistolary Lesson the RCL appoints for this week, Paul portrays the Corinthian Christians quite differently than he did at the beginning of his first letter to them. In chapter 1:4-9 the apostle refers to them as graced by…
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
In a fine sermon commentary on this text (from which I drew numerous ideas for this commentary), Scott Hoezee suggests that there’s a danger in spending as much time in church and around Christians as some preachers and teachers do. It’s that this whole Christianity business all starts to make too much sense to us….
Psalm 15
In the Gospel sermon commentary for this Year A Sunday we wondered what a person would be like if you could combine all of the traits of Jesus’s Beatitudes into one individual. What would Mr. or Miss Beatitude look like? Now in Psalm 15 we see something similar: what would a person be like if…
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would find that our prayer life is also our autobiography. Who we are, where we’ve been, the situations we’ve faced, the fears that nag us, and not a few of the core characteristics of who…
Romans 1:1-7
God saves God’s adopted children by grace alone that we can only receive with our faith in Jesus Christ. However, God always calls those whom God loves to express that faith with our obedience. Someone once said, “Make a good beginning and you’re half the way to winning.” Certainly, then, Paul seems halfway to winning…
Isaiah 7:10-16
On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, just 3 days away from Christmas, our reading from Isaiah 7 doesn’t seem very Christmasy. Oh, it does if we focus only on verse 14 and the way our Gospel reading for today interprets it (Matthew 1:18-25). But if we read our text in its context, there’s no hint…
James 5:7-10
This is a season of the year that we don’t generally link to patience. Children are chomping at the bit to open their presents. Some of us are impatient for holiday visits from family members and friends who live at a distance from us. A few of us may even feel impatient to be done…
Matthew 11:2-11
“The War on Christmas.” We have heard about this a lot in recent years. Some while back people assailed Starbucks for removing the word “Christmas” from their holiday coffee cups. Some were upset some years ago that the White House wished a blanket “Happy Holidays” instead of specifically mentioning Christmas. And some while back the…
Isaiah 2:1-5
What a text for this first Sunday in Advent! What a text for this moment in history! This promise of universal peace arouses hope in our war torn world. Or it sounds like an impossible dream. As I write this, President Trump has just removed all US troops from northern Syria and Turkish forces have…
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
This passage is part of an extended dialogue between the prophet Habakkuk and his God, whose ways with God’s own people are a mystery to the prophet. In the first 4 verses, the prophet passionately voices his complaint to God. In 1:5-11, God answers that complaint with a truth that Habakkuk finds unbelievable. So in…
Psalm 33:12-22
Suppose you are a person who is very leery of civil religion, of the possible idolatry that can come when people equate a given nation with God’s kingdom. Well, in that case, Psalm 33:12a might give you pause, or it might flat out trouble you a bit. “Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh.” …
Galatians 3:23-29
Too many white Americans including Christians have made a mess of race relations by endorsing the horrors of things like Native American displacement, slavery, Japanese-American internment camps and even real estate redlining. In fact, whether it’s in connection with the abomination that is racial profiling or the controversy that surrounds affirmative action, we still manage…
Psalm 97
A few years ago the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship produced a new hymnal based on the Psalms. Its title is “Psalms for All Seasons.” The title is apt because as most of us know, the Hebrew Psalter is a collection of varied prayers that matches life’s many and varied seasons. As C.S. Lewis and…
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
How can we understand Christ’s promise to come “soon” that he makes not once but twice in just this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s seven verses? After all, few of our definitions of “soon” would include the two thousand years that have elapsed since he made first it. In Revelation 22 John’s dazzling visions of that coming…
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…
John 20:1-18
A friend of mine who is a true believer in the Gospel once confessed to me that Easter services can be a little hard on him. There’s just something about all that exuberance, all that blaring brass, all those bright lights and white lilies that combine to go sufficiently over the top in ways he…
Psalm 31:9-16
It is Palm/Passion Sunday and so God’s people come to church. We Christians come to church because we believe when we do, we come into the presence of God. We believe in God and so we believe God is faithful to the promise that when we gather in God’s name, God is among us. Certainly…
John 12:1-8
In Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of the characters keeps saying over and over to the character of Big Daddy that you can just smell “the mendacity in the air.” This was a play with many layers of deception and lying and it became so very nearly palpable to some…
Psalm 126
For a Lenten selection, this psalm is pretty sunny-side up and cheerful. Maybe as Lent is coming to a close, we are supposed to see in this poem the promise of restoration beyond the cross toward which we are journeying this season. This is, after all, one of the “Songs of Ascent” in the Book…
Isaiah 55:1-9
An old farmer once told me that there are two ways to break an egg—you can smash it with a hammer in a second or you can put it under a warm mother hen for a few days. An old preacher once told me that there two ways to call a sinner to repentance and…
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
This is one of the great seminal passages of Scripture, on a par with Genesis 1, Psalm 23, and John 3:16 in importance for both Jews and Christians. But what a mixture it is, filled with peculiar ancient inheritance customs (adopting a slave to become your heir), divine promises that still shape international politics today…
Preaching Connection: Faith