Movies for Preaching
American Beauty (1999) – 2
Written by Alan Ball. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, and Chris Cooper. 122 mins. Rated R (graphic language and sexual situations). In the film, American Beauty, though most of the focus is on Kevin Spacey’s Lester, we also meet Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the weird boy next door and perhaps the…
American Beauty (1999) – 1
Written by Alan Ball. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, and Chris Cooper. 122 mins. Rated R (graphic language and sexual situations). So mid-life Lester (Kevin Spacey) has got himself into a horrible, very bad fix. Though a husband and father, he has fallen, as through a trap-door, into a state of…
Reading for Preaching
“Gratitude Grows as Salutary Habit”
“God and a Grateful Old Man,” from My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir
“God and a Grateful Old Man,” from My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Additional content related to Gratitude
Isaiah 63:7-9
We have all seen this on the walls of someone’s house. Perhaps it is done in counted-cross-stitch. Perhaps it is done in calligraphy. But we have seen these framed squares or rectangles hanging in a living room and containing a Bible verse shorn of its context. Most of the time this works fine—the verse functions…
Psalm 17:1-9
Those of you who read the Psalm sermon commentaries here on CEP know that I frequently observe that different psalms fit different seasons of life. And so we always have to nuance upbeat songs of praise with the downbeat psalms of lament such that no one in the church gets the impression that true believers…
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…
Psalm 113
In Robert Duvall’s film, The Apostle, we see a vignette of what could be described as a very “in your face” style of praise. The revival worship services of a certain stripe of Deep South fundamentalism are high-decibel, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, gizzard-piercing spectacles that are most decidedly not for the faint of heart! And yet, in…
Joshua 5:9-12
These four verses from Joshua 5 are rather innocuous looking. There is a lot of high drama in Joshua—and not a little of that drama is the stuff of deeply troubling matters involving holy war and total war and violence perpetuated by God’s people. But these verses appear to be mostly devoid of drama. They…
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
It would be very difficult to pick a more fitting text for this last Sunday of Advent. After focusing with ever growing intensity on the coming of God’s salvation, we are just 5 days away from our celebration of the birth of the long-promised Messiah. This text is “the mother of all Messianic prophecies,” “the…
Luke 18:9-14
“I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves ME!” “How vast the benefits divine which WE in Christ possess!” “Blessed assurance, Jesus is MINE!” We sing such sentiments in church all the time. So before we get all squinty-eyed in regarding the Pharisee in Luke 18 as the quintessential spiritual…
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
The theme for this Sixth Sunday of Epiphany is the same in all four Lections—reversal of fortune. Psalm 37 and Luke 6:27-38 talk about loving enemies, thus reversing the usual response to those who abuse us. I Corinthian’s 15:35-50 expounds the great doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which reverses the apparent victory of…
Colossians 3:12-17
The Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a good day to find a guest preacher to fill in for you. I mean, after all the hoopla of the holidays, people are exhausted and after exploring the depths and heights of the Incarnation. So is the preacher. What do you say on this first…
Preaching Connection: Gratitude