Movies for Preaching
Superman (1978) – 2
Superman (1978). Directed by Richard Donner. Written by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, and Tom Mankiewicz. Music by John Williams. Starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, and Marlon Brando. PG, 143 min. Just when and where we least expect a significant something or Other is…
Superman (1978) – 1
Superman (1978). Directed by Richard Donner. Written by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, and Tom Mankiewicz. Music by John Williams. Starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, and Marlon Brando. PG, 143 min. It’s there in plain sight from the start, at least for those with…
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) – 2
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Directed by Steven Spielberg, Written by Melissa Mathison. Music by John Williams. Staring Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, and Peter Coyote. 115 mins. Rated PG. Ordinary light, the thing by which those who can see view the world all about. Mostly, all that light (and vision) is just there, pretty much taken…
Additional content related to Incarnation
Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35
In a classic scene of the old TV sitcom M*A*S*H Hawkeye Pierce decides to play a trick on his nettlesome bunkmate Frank Burns. Lately Frank had been bragging about how his stock market portfolio had been getting richer. But it is clear—to the consternation of the more pacifist Pierce—that the reason is that Burns is…
Hebrews 2:10-18
If Jesus had been born not in some kind of livestock shelter but a hospital, how would anyone have been able to pick him out of the other babies in the nursery? Would he have been the baby who, as we sing at Christmas, made no crying? If Jesus’ friends had been choosing sides for…
Titus 3:4-7
I suspect that few preachers will employ this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson as a Christmas Day “stand-alone text.” That doesn’t, however, mean that Titus 3:4-7 has no place in a Christmas message. It, in fact, offers a way for Jesus’ friends to think about just why Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is so important. While many worshipers…
Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)
Here we are, Christmas on a Sunday. Merry Christmas! This year, I’m especially appreciating the way that Luke subtly weaves together various postures and social positions in his birth narrative. As Luke Timothy Johnson aptly puts it, “Luke’s manner is to show how God’s fidelity is worked out in human events when appearances seem to…
Christmas: Home
“Are you going home for Christmas?” What question has been more commonplace in recent weeks? Some while ago in December I was at the grocery store and as I walked through the store, I heard some version of that very question over and over. A cashier glanced over to a bagger, “So, you going home…
John 1:(1-9) 10-18
There is overwhelming emphasis in this passage on how things “from above” are received here on earth. In the advent season, we remembered that we are actively waiting to receive the gift of the Word in full, and that God is actively at work to bring about his Kingdom on earth. In John’s prologue, it’s…
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…
Hebrews 10:5-10
On this last Sunday before Christmas, the RCL (finally) turns its Epistolary Lessons’ eyes from that to which few North American eyes naturally turn toward that to which most Christians’ eyes have been turned for almost a month already. Hebrews 10, after all, turns our eyes away from Christ’s second coming and toward his first….
Hebrews 9:24-28
Hebrews’ proclaimers as well as our hearers may by now feel a little burned out by Hebrews. That’s the way my colleague Len Vander Zee begins his thoughtful and insightful 2018 commentary on this week’s Epistolary Lesson. Hebrews’ preachers and teachers may feel a bit like investigators at a crime scene that’s so covered with…
John 1:43-51
Sample Sermon: “The Child’s Leading” Don’t you wish sometimes you could have been there, could have seen them in person? I mean the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself. You hear people say things like that once in a while. Wouldn’t it have been something to have been able to meet Peter, to shake Matthew’s…
Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35
Most of the time when the Psalms start to go on and on about God’s scattering enemies and crushing foes, the Revised Common Lectionary politely has us hopscotch right over such sentiments to focus on the nicer, gentler sentiments of praise and thanksgiving. Most of the time if the Lectionary assigns verses 1-6 and 12-25…
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
After 29 chapters of gloom and doom with only an occasional glimmer of hope, we have come to Jeremiah’s Book of Consolation (chapters 30-33) in which some words of hope brighten the darkness of the present and the future. And here in this text, the words of hope become a deed of promise. It’s as…
Zephaniah 3:14-20
As I read Zephaniah, the memory of a bumper sticker came back to me. It said, “Jesus is coming soon, and is he ever ticked!” (It actually used a more vulgar term that gave the sticker more punch, but you get the point.) That is exactly the mood of most of Zephaniah. Indeed, if our…
Philippians 4:4-7
The Bible is full of commands to “Rejoice.” Yet they’re not always calls to God’s people to just “be happy.” After all, the Scriptures’ calls to rejoice sometimes seem to come in the context of the least happy times and places. For example, the Paul who writes the Epistolary Lesson the Lectionary assigns for this…
Luke 3:1-6
I love Luke. The man has style. And he displays that style in narrative after narrative in his Gospel and in his sequel, The Book of Acts. Tradition has it Luke was a doctor. He clearly came mighty close to missing his calling. Thankfully, the Spirit used Luke’s considerable literary powers after all to give…
Malachi 3:1-4
A number of years ago I preached a series of sermons on the Minor Prophets entitled “The Gospel in a Minor Key.” Obviously, that was a play on words, but it also reflected the fact that these unusual little prophetic books proclaim the Good News in unexpected, dissonant, almost off-key ways. Our text for this…
Luke 1:68-79
Someone once said that visits always bring pleasure because even if the arrival of a certain visitor didn’t make you happy, his departure will! The comedic pianist Victor Borge also touched on this topic when he once noted that the mythic figure of Santa Claus has the right idea: you should visit people just once…
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
The theologian Robert Jenson passed away recently. “Jens” as he was known had the ability to see through to the core of many theological and historical matters. He once made a curious point in the course of a seminar I attended one week. Jens said that in history, the Christian Church has, of course, found…
Philippians 2:1-13
I have heard a certain story several times, each time involving different people so I have no idea if it ever really happened to anyone or not. But one version of it that I heard was from the old “Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson. The famous singer Frank Sinatra was a guest and in the…
1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23
The wonder of grace. That is what this brief passage is all about. At the end of these verses Paul once again loops back to previously sounded themes about the wisdom of the world versus the apparent foolishness of the cross. He also hits for a third time the silliness of the Corinthians in balkanizing…
John 1:(1-9), 10-18
The Lectionary may get the last laugh here, and savvy preachers can curl up the corners of their mouths to join the mirth. Because here it is the first Sunday of a new year with Christmas now officially past us by about a week-and-a-half. For weeks now, starting well before American Thanksgiving even, it’s been…
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…
Hebrews 10:5-10
Sometimes you just have to wonder where the inventors of the Revised Common Lectionary got their ideas for the choices they made. I mean, here we are, 5 days away from Christmas, surely one of the most pregnant times in the church calendar. The other readings for this Fourth Sunday of Advent are clearly about…
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Comments, Observations, and Questions I used to watch a TV show that was quite compelling and enjoyable but it did have one feature to it that I did not much like: on some episodes the show’s characters would find themselves sunk very deep down into dreadfully complex circumstances. The episode would devote something like 92%…
Philippians 4:4-7
Comments, Observations, and Questions Growing up in a family of modest means, I learned early the value of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. We couldn’t afford the real thing, those lovely complete books, so we read those abbreviated and edited versions of bestsellers and classics. They were very helpful, though not nearly as graceful as the…
Malachi 3:1-4
A friend of mine who is an English professor once told me that he suggested to a friend that he might enjoy reading the great works of the author John Donne. So this man did so. Some while later the two met up again and the English professor asked him “What did you think of…
Luke 1:68-79
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Has the Lectionary lost its way already on the second Sunday of the church year? The “psalm” the Lectionary appoints for this Sunday is, after all, not actually a psalm, but the song that Zechariah sings at his son’s birth. He was, of course, an elderly priest who was…
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Comments and Observations In all the Bible studies I’ve been part of for the last 40 years, I can’t remember anyone exclaiming, “Let’s study Hebrews!” At least once a year someone will urge the group to study James, the focus of the lectionary last month, because “it’s so practical!” Hebrews is so… impractical, so theological…
1 John 5:9-13
Comments and Observations Many scholars have noticed that I John reads more like a sermon than a letter, since it lacks so many of the elements of other New Testament letters: the greeting that usually identifies both author and readers, the introduction that so often previews the issues to be covered in the letter, and…
Preaching Connection: Incarnation