Additional content related to Prayer
Psalm 80:7-15
Carving out only the middle section of Psalm 80 (as the Lectionary does) has several drawbacks, not least that if you only read those 9 verses, you miss the framing refrain of this poem as it occurs word-for-word in verses 3, 7, and 19: Restore us, Lord God Almighty; make your face shine on us,…
Psalm 25:1-9
Psalm 25 has its share of ups and downs. On the one hand there are some very sunny promises here. The opening of the psalm assures us that those who trust in the Lord will never be put to shame. Were we to peer at the dozen verses that round out Psalm 25 beyond the…
Psalm 26:1-8
Most Bible scholars have serious doubts about the authorship attributions in the psalms. Certainly we know the superscriptions were added much later and are not considered canonical (like ones that claims a certain psalm stemmed from a time when David was fleeing Saul and such). And even all the psalms that are said to be…
Psalm 138
Years ago I read a wonderful novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy and one of the things I liked about the book was its great title: The God of Small Things. That title can be an apt summary for something you run across often in the psalms, including in Psalm 138. Israel praised their God…
Psalm 86:11-17
In one of her novels Anne Tyler shows a woman named Maggie attending a funeral. In the course of the service the pastor reads a psalm, and Maggie found it to be a lovely poem full of warmth and hope. This was a relief to her since ordinarily she thought of the psalms as often…
Psalm 69:7-10, (11-15), 16-18
The Revised Common Lectionary is usually a straightforward affair when it comes to selected texts. But with semi-regularity you get a text chopped up the way Psalm 69 is divided in this lection. First we jump onto the already moving train only at verse 7, then we grab 4 verses, put 5 more in parentheses…
John 17:1-11
Unity, it seems, is that elusive description for God’s church. We hear the calls for it but disagree on the terms. We know it is part of God’s solution for what ails humanity, but we cannot grasp the way of sacrifice on the road to peace. We rightly identify it as the way that Jesus…
John 20:1-18
Perhaps you have heard, or even led, the same prayer as me before preaching: it’s something along the lines of, “Lord, give us eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts and minds to understand, and hands and feet willing to go and do what we hear from you in the Word today.” These petitions are…
Psalm 130
This poem is labeled a “Psalm of Ascent” but it starts as a Psalm of Descent. It is called De Profundis in older Bibles—the Latin for “from the depths.” When last this came up for the Lectionary Year A Fifth Sunday in Lent in 2020, the initial COVID lockdown was in its second week. Some…
Exodus 17:1-7
It’s the kind of thing that could become a family inside joke. Perhaps years before, the family had taken a Spring Break trip somewhere. Except that on this particular trip the weather was disastrously bad the whole week. No outdoor activities were possible. Instead the family got stuck inside a hotel room where arguments over…
Isaiah 58:1-9a (9b-12)
Over the years of writing articles and a few books, I’ve learned a lot about grammar from my editors and from a former professor turned friend who knows more about English grammar than anyone I can think of. Thanks to folks like this I’ve finally figured out (most of the time!) the “that/which” distinction and…
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…
Psalm 40:1-11
Did David (or whoever wrote this psalm) write it backwards? You can divide Psalm 40 rather neatly into two halves (though most of the second half is left out by the Lectionary). The first ten or so verses are full of confidence and gratitude for God’s deliverance. As usual in the psalms, we cannot detect…
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 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…
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Paul packs this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson with “all’s.” In fact, he uses a form of the Greek word panta no less than five times in its seven verses. But while the apostle loads this text with “all,” nearly every use of the word carries with it both some mystery and the seed of controversy. So…
Luke 11:1-13
Coming straight on the heels of Jesus telling Martha that her sister Mary will not be deprived of sitting in the presence of God, Luke depicts Jesus as doing the same. The stories are less chronologically connected (i.e., there is no indication that this scene immediately played out after his night as a guest at…
Colossians 1:1-14
Elements of this week’s Epistolary Lesson are faintly reminiscent of Huck Finn’s experience with prayer. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck recounts how his foster mother, Miss Watson, tried to teach him to pray. “Miss Watson … took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray…
Psalm 25:1-10
In his book years ago The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom lamented the decline of true education in this nation’s colleges and universities. Bloom decried the way many professors had dispensed with the traditional canons of literature in favor of whatever was trendy and vogue. He mourned the fact that critical thinking and…
Psalm 22:19-28
Ordinary Time is just beginning yet the Lectionary directs us to a sometimes difficult psalm. Yes, we are being asked to consider only the hope-filled, praise-filled conclusion to this poem but it’s not as though we can forget its terrible opening set of verses. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” brings us…
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…
Psalm 27
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would all 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…
Luke 9:28-36
Comments, Questions, and Observations Given that this passage is often on the Sunday that immediately precedes Lent, I have often thought of it as a story that is mostly about Jesus giving his disciples a strong picture of him to hold on to as they enter the dark days of his suffering and death in…
Psalm 1
Few of us do what many monastic and other traditions have done in history with the Psalms: namely, read them straight through and in order. Instead we bob and weave our way through the Psalms, picking and choosing to read this Psalm or another for no particular rhyme or reason. And so it’s easy to…
Psalm 71:1-6
There is a part of the well-known story (and the popular Sunday School story) of “Jacob’s Ladder” that most people don’t know about or just ignore. The outlines of the story are familiar and are also accurate enough to the biblical text in Genesis: Jacob is on the lam, fleeing the fury of his brother…
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
The Sunday text near Epiphany is the Sunday we commemorate the Baptism of the Lord. And yet, in the gospel of Luke, we pretty much miss the whole thing! Luke describes it in the past tense: Jesus was one of “all” the people who were baptized by the John the Baptist. Instead, Luke’s baptism account…
Philippians 4:4-7
The season of Advent is, for many of Jesus’ friends, as well as the culture in which many citizens of the global west live, a perhaps especially busy one. Many of us are busily preparing for various holiday celebrations, even as a global pandemic and political strife continue to rage among and around us. So…
1 Samuel 1:4-20
It’s curious how often the purposes of God move forward not just despite familial dysfunction but sometimes even because of it. We’ve got a load of dysfunction coming up in the Samuel story through the shenanigans of Hophni and Phineas—and Eli’s hand-wringing inability to do a blessed thing about it all. But we’ve got nettlesome…
Hebrews 7:23-28
Few promises mean more to hurting people than, “I’m praying (or I’ll pray) for you.” We long to have someone “put in a good word for us” before God. In fact, I’ve even people whose faith is fragile or apparently non-existent seem to often appreciate the thought behind a promise of prayer, if not necessarily…
James 5:13-20
Were “community” in the deepest sense of the word a commodity that’s traded on some kind of stock exchange, it would be soaring in value. That’s partly because of the law of supply and demand. Genuine community the word is in such short supply that the demand sometimes exceeds the supply. So many things isolated…
Ephesians 3:14-21
This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s first five words, “I kneel before the Father” (14) suggests that its hearers are eavesdropping on Paul’s prayer. However, the Scriptures’ prayers always almost make me wonder, “How do you preach about an inspired yet overheard prayer?” and “Should we even preach about an overheard prayer?” But Jesus’ friends might argue…
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…
Matthew 16:13-20
Matthew 16:13a is not important, right? We can just skip to verse 13b, yes? We can just start with the question “Who do people say that I am?” That’s the core if it all here, right? Wrong! We cannot skip the geographical marker in this incident. If we do, we miss the key piece of…
Psalm 40:1-11
Did David (or whoever wrote this psalm) write it backwards? You can divide Psalm 40 rather neatly into two halves (though most of the second half is left out by the Lectionary). The first ten or so verses are full of confidence and gratitude for God’s deliverance. As usual in the psalms, we cannot detect…
Psalm 25:1-10
In his book years ago The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom lamented the decline of true education in this nation’s colleges and universities. Bloom decried the way many professors had dispensed with the traditional canons of literature in favor of whatever was trendy and vogue. He mourned the fact that critical thinking and…
Psalm 22:19-28
Ordinary Time is just beginning in the early summertime of 2019 yet the Lectionary directs us to a sometimes difficult psalm. Yes, we are being asked to consider only the hope-filled, praise-filled conclusion to this poem but it’s not as though we can forget its terrible opening set of verses. “My God, my God, why…
Psalm 27
C.S. Lewis said somewhere that when you add it all up and consider it all together, in the end we would all 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…
Luke 9:28-36
Not for nothing are they called “Mountaintop Experiences”! In the Bible, when a story takes us up to a mountaintop, it’s a fair bet that something dramatic is going to happen—indeed, it’s a fair bet that something deeply revelatory is going to happen. Luke 9 is no exception. But the drama up there on that…
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
Across the spectrum of poems in the Hebrew Psalter are prayers that fit most every occasion and season in life. Laments, petitions, confessions, praise, thanksgiving; songs that fit happy days and songs that fit rotten days; lyric expressions of trust and bitter cries of abandonment and anger. It’s all in there. That’s an important thing…
Psalm 138
Our prayer life should be our autobiography, C.S. Lewis once observed. But that is also why Lewis thought the Hebrew Psalter was such a fitting prayer book since it contains prayers that fit a wide variety of life’s experiences. Were the 150 Psalms all in one particular emotional register, what help would it be for…
Psalm 71:1-6
There is a part of the well-known story (and the popular Sunday School story) of “Jacob’s Ladder” that most people don’t know about or just ignore. The outlines of the story are familiar and are also accurate enough to the biblical text in Genesis: Jacob is on the lam, fleeing the fury of his brother…
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…
Philippians 1:3-11
This second Sunday of the month of December seems like an appropriate time to explore Philippians 1:3-11. Its theme of thanksgiving is, after all, consistent with the Thanksgiving holiday that Americans recently celebrated. What’s more, this Sunday is also near the beginning of the Advent season in which we look forward to “the day of…
Hebrews 7:23-28
This may not seem like a particularly appropriate Sunday on which to preach about priests. After all, Protestant Christians are preparing to celebrate the birth of the Reformation that the corruption of the Roman Catholic priesthood in part fueled. What’s more, the Reformation emphasized the priesthood of all believers. Since Protestant Christians recognize that all…
Psalm 123
Psalm 123 is the fourth of the Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134) and the first that is a prayer. Most scholars think that Israelite pilgrims from all over the Promised Land (and perhaps beyond, if this is an early post-Exilic Psalm) sang these words as they journeyed up to Jerusalem and maybe even as they…
Matthew 16:13-20
Matthew 16:13a is not important, right? We can just skip to verse 13b, yes? We can just start with the question “Who do people say that I am?” That’s the core if it all here, right? Wrong! We cannot skip the geographical marker in this incident. If we do, we miss the key piece of…
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
As this is being written, grim news fills our media. Terrorist attacks. Police shootings. Ambushes of police officers. Civil wars and attempted coups. They remind us that while the text the Lectionary appoints for this Sunday may be nearly 3,000 years old, both its context and the sins it describes are nearly as contemporary as…
Psalm 27
While this Psalm has been the source of inspiration and consolation for many believers, there’s a sense in which it is a troubling Psalm. There is a great tension in it. Perhaps dichotomy is a better word. It is composed of two entirely different parts. The one is a magnificent confession of unshakeable trust in…
Luke 9:28-36
Not for nothing are they called “Mountaintop Experiences”! In the Bible, when a story takes us up to a mountaintop, it’s a fair bet that something dramatic is going to happen—indeed, it’s a fair bet that something deeply revelatory is going to happen. Luke 9 is no exception. But the drama up there on that…
Matthew 6:5-15
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider: Helmut Thielicke preached to the church in Stuttgart in the declining days of Germany’s “reign of terror.” Screaming sirens, underground bomb shelters and fear surrounded his congregation. When Rev. Thielicke started a sermon series on this very text, his congregation was still worshipping in the Church of the Hospitallers….
Habakkuk 3
To really understand the gravity of the prayer that Habakkuk offers in this chapter, you cannot skip over the two preceding chapters. This is easily avoided when you preach this text in a series; but if you’re highlighting chapter 3 only, you’d do well to lay the groundwork of Habakkuk’s questions to God from earlier…
Luke 1:5-25
Introduction of important themes – teeing up the text Luke’s gospel begins with his acknowledgement that he is not an eyewitness but a researcher, corresponder and narrator of what he will share with us. The author has done his homework. Seen as a unit, Luke and Acts reveal a keen awareness of important theological themes…
Nehemiah 1:1 – 2:6
If one reads the Bible with a view for the whole it is clear that God has a heart for the city. Jesus talks about cities as he says to his followers, “you are the light of the world, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden.” He says that in the city there…
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…
Hebrews 7:23-28
Comments and Observations The Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and the recent sex scandals in the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church will make this text (and much of Hebrews) a real challenge to preach. With its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, the Reformation made the intercession of human priests unnecessary. All believers…
Psalm 123
Psalm 123 is a poignant plea for God to show the poet mercy. However, this is also a prayer that he offers on behalf of the entire embattled worshiping community. It’s a good reminder that even those who find themselves under duress should never forget to pray on behalf of others who are also experiencing…
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Note: The Common Lectionary during Eastertide substitutes readings from Acts for Old Testament lections. Pentecost hasn’t happened just yet and so maybe we can give Peter a break for an exegetical exercise that you simply have to assume would not pass muster in the average seminary Bible course. Replacing…
Preaching Connection: Prayer