Movies for Preaching
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) – 3
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. Lest there be any doubt about exactly where that blockbuster E.T. The Extraterrestrial was headed the one shot suddenly, and indisputably, makes that all clear, and—surprise–what you…
Additional content related to Resurrection
Luke 24:1-12
The resurrection of Jesus Christ represents as much as—if not more so—a turning point in the life of his disciples than any other point in their journeys. The same is true for us. Yes, it was a big deal for the twelve to be called to be his disciples, plucked out of their everyday tasks…
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
It’s a juxtaposition I’ll not forget as long as I have any memory. God graciously but quite suddenly brought my dad from life through death to Life on Easter Sunday, 2021. He died, as we reported in his obituary, “in the sure hope of the resurrection.” My dad’s death was for Jesus’ followers who loved…
Time, Chance, and God
Lucky. That is not a word which Christians like very much. Our mothers taught us to resist referring to a certain person as just being “lucky” in life. Most of us were taught to avoid thinking that once we got out of college, we’d “try out our luck” at a certain profession. We prefer to…
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
The Scriptures’ “perspicuity” is for some Christians a familiar but sometimes misunderstood concept. By it Jesus’ followers basically mean that the Holy Spirit makes clear what God wants to communicate through the Scriptures to God’s people and world. So we sometimes say the Spirit makes perspicuous the Scriptures’ central truths like God’s creation of everything…
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
In 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul refers to Christ’s death, burial and resurrection as being “of first importance.” Christians generally assume that the primary importance is to our faith that receives God’s grace. But this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson suggests that Christ’s resurrection in particular is also central to our hope for life, including life after death….
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
1 Corinthians 15’s stirring recap of Christ’s resurrection and its impact is one of the great chapters of Scripture. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s portion of it introduces Paul’s teaching about the coming resurrection of Jesus’ followers. Countless preachers and others used it to proclaim Christian hope in face of dying and death. But toward the…
Daniel 12:1-3
Where and What Is It? Imagine my surprise as I went to my trusty 3-volume commentary on Hebrew Scripture written by Jewish scholar, Robert Alter and couldn’t find the book of Daniel. Obviously, I pulled his volume on the prophets but the book of Daniel was not where it belonged! So I opened his book…
Psalm 16
It is easy to see why many people associate Psalm 16 with funerals. It often gets read at funerals and one or another of the verses sometimes gets printed on the cover or the back cover of a funeral program or memorial folder. And of course sometimes we preachers are asked by families to use…
Isaiah 25:6-9
I wonder if there are many preachers who will choose to take the Old Testament Lection as their primary text on Easter Sunday morning? It seems to me that the greater gift and opportunity presented by this text is the way that it sings harmony on the song of resurrection. So I will offer my…
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
When I was a teenager, members of our church’s youth group would play a variety of games together. Among them was “Telephone.” In it a group of people sit in a circle as a message is verbally passed from person. Among the most humorous parts of the game is the way that message almost inevitably…
Mark 16:1-8
Mark’s Easter story is a shocker. Even though it’s the earliest written of the gospel accounts, it has the least amount of details and Jesus himself is merely talked about in the passage. And once you’ve become accustomed to the John’s intimate garden encounter between Mary and Jesus or the women’s quick obedience in Matthew…
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
No matter how strong Jesus’ friends’ faith is, the death of someone we love can be immensely difficult. Among other things, it sometimes forces survivors to make painful adjustments that may take many months, if not years. Death, however, also raises troubling questions about the fate of those who have died. Such questions seemed to…
Philippians 3:4b-14
The Spirit inspired the apostle Paul to pack this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson with poetic and vivid imagery. Commentaries on the CEP website from 2016 and 2020 delve into some of these images. However, preachers whom the Spirit prompts to move in a slightly different direction might consider Paul’s imagery of “taking hold” (12, 13). It,…
Romans 6:1b-11
“The baptized Christian has, in an important sense, already died. The baptized Christian has already made her ‘final exit’ and has come through on the other side.” Fleming Rutledge makes that perhaps startling profession in her lovely sermon, “The Final Exit of the Baptized” (Not Ashamed of the Gospel, Eerdmans, 2007). The Spirit could use…
Romans 4:13-25
This week’s Epistolary Lesson draws those who follow it back to the theme of, among other things, hope. It does so, however, not long after we contemplated it in an earlier commentary. While that may seem repetitive, any “reading” of 21st century culture suggests that hope remains in short supply. In fact, one might argue…
Acts 17:22-31
Well, you win some and you lose some. Paul had some experience with the truth of that old adage, and some of the relevant experiences can be seen in Acts 17 and Paul’s famous conversation with the Athenians at the Areopagus. The day was not without its spiritual victories. The chapter concludes by telling us…
Acts 7:55-60
On the face of it, a six-verse Bible passage that centers on the brutal murder of an innocent man does not appear to be an edifying preaching text. Perhaps that seems all the more to be the case when we realize this passage is assigned in the Year A Lectionary for the Season of Eastertide…
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Garry Wills once wrote a fine book titled, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Wills claims that in the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln—in the span of a scant 272 words that took him all of three minutes to deliver—forever altered our understanding of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln was not even the main…
Psalm 16
Probably we misread Psalm 16, or at least its most famous verses about how our bodies will rest secure. We have all been to our share of funerals that lift out verses 9-11 and put a resurrection spin on them. And maybe as Christians exegeting the Old Testament there is something right about that. All…
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…
Acts 10:34-43
“He was not seen by all the people.” I’ll say. This is what Peter tells Cornelius in Acts 10 as he sums up the story arc of Jesus’ life, including the world-altering fact of his having been raised from the dead. Jesus was raised again! He arose!! But . . . by way of a…
Psalm 118:1, 2, 14-24
What every preacher needs on Easter Sunday is an angle. Everyone already knows the story, so it is hard to astonish people as the women astonished the disciples with the news of an empty tomb on that first Easter morning. To help people experience that primitive astonishment and the kind of joyful thanksgiving to which…
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Sample sermon: It is a sad statement on the last 100 years that we can rather easily imagine the scene Ezekiel describes in his famous 37th chapter. Whether or not the people in Ezekiel’s original audience had ever seen such a valley full of bones, we have. We’ve seen the mass graves of Auschwitz and…
John 11:1-45
Comments, Questions, and Observations The word “love” is used only three times to describe Jesus’s feelings for the siblings, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, but it permeates the entire narrative. Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus to let him know that their shared beloved, Lazarus, is ill to the point of death. Jesus tells…
Lent 5A: Neither Bang Nor Whimper
As Time magazine recently pointed out, two famous twentieth century poets both weighed in on the subject of the universe’s end. Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice. / I hold with those who favor fire.” On the other side T.S. Eliot wrote, “This is the…
Luke 20:27-38
It is interesting that the Sadducees are the ones to pose this particular question to Jesus because they did not believe in a heaven. Using this story about a wife of seven brothers, they believe, will show the absurdity of the concept. To put it in its most basic summary form, the Sadducees believed that…
John 20:19-31
Comments, Questions and Observations Often, the focus of this week’s Easter Lectionary is on Thomas. His “doubt” is rather relatable, and it seems to be what Jesus reflects directly upon when he declares a beatitude about belief. (It really is too bad for Thomas that he wasn’t there that Easter evening with the other disciples….
Luke 24:1-12
Comments, Questions and Observations When we begin reading this account it might seem like it is an anonymous group headed to the tomb at dawn—the members of the group aren’t named until all the way in verse 10. But, we know from the close of the previous chapter, as they followed Jesus’ body to his…
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Comments, Observations, and Questions Death stinks – both literally and figuratively. While such a reminder may not seem like a particularly popular (or common) way to begin an Easter proclamation, it is the context within which we begin any and every proclamation of Easter’s great news. Even after Jesus rose from the dead, death still…
John 12:1-8
Comments, Questions, and Observations Jesus is anointed around the time of Holy Week in each of the gospels, but the details of each account are markedly different. Here in the Gospel of John, it occurs earlier in the timeline, before Jesus enters Jerusalem for Passover. In fact, John’s telling of the event is directly connected…
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
One of the central questions some Christians have about the resurrection is, “Will we recognize each other’s resurrected persons in the new creation?” It echoes this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’ verse 35 where Paul quotes some people as asking, “With what kind of body will [the dead] come [to life]?” Both questions suggest that Christians sometimes…
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Paul calls Jesus’ resurrection “of first importance.” Yet does it really matter whether Jesus rose, in John Updike’s lyrical words, “as His body” (Seven Stanzas at Easter), or as Gerd Ludemann insisted in a 2012 debate, the Scripture’s accounts of it were just a “legend, not objective description”? Does it really make any difference whether…
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
I am a child of the North American 60’s who grew up watching some Saturday morning cartoons. So I can hardly hear 1 Corinthians 15:10a without hearing Popeye’s, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” That might seem like a rather strange onramp to a consideration…
Psalm 147:12-20
As we lurch into 2022 after another difficult year globally, we realize with a sense of startlement that we are technically now entering Year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic. A couple years ago not a few of us hoped the worst of it would not last 3 weeks. Even 3 months seemed hard to fathom. …
Psalm 16
Probably we misread Psalm 16, or at least its most famous verses about how our bodies will rest secure. We have all been to our share of funerals that lift out verses 9-11 and put a resurrection spin on them. And maybe as Christians exegeting the Old Testament there is something right about that. All…
Four Pages: The Incognito Christ: the Walking Partner
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him. Luke 24:30-31 Many of the risen Jesus’ friends to whom he appeared just didn’t know who he was. So at least initially the risen…
Luke 24:36-48
The end of Luke’s Gospel sums it all up pretty well. In swift strokes of Luke’s quill, we move from Easter Sunday evening directly to the Ascension of Jesus (just beyond the bounds of this lection). We learn from Luke’s other New Testament contribution, Acts, that Jesus lingered in physical form for a good forty…
Psalm 4
It is easier so see in some Psalms more than others but many of the Psalms were written for two or sometimes three voices. Psalm 4 is clearly to be understood as having two speakers (at least two): the psalmist and Yahweh, the God of Israel. It’s pretty obvious that the psalmist is speaking in…
Acts 4:32-35
Very early in my preaching ministry, I was producing one theological/exegetical masterpiece after another (in my own mind). My wife wasn’t so convinced. She put up with it for about a month, when she nailed me with this simple question. “So what? What difference does all that make?” In the Old Testament (?) readings for…
Isaiah 25:6-9
What a delightful, even delicious alternative reading for Easter Sunday! The regular (Old Testament?) reading is from Acts 10:34-43, Peter’s proclamation of the Easter message to the Roman centurion, Cornelius. I wrote on that text last Easter, so I thought I’d give you an alternative way to proclaim the familiar message of Christ’s resurrection—not a…
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tries to clear up some theological misunderstandings about the resurrection. Yet he insists that the Corinthians’ confusion about it isn’t just one among many problems that he’s already addressed. Lack of clarity about the resurrection isn’t like confusion about, for example, sexuality, food offered to idols and lawsuits that plague…
Psalm 114
[Note: The Year B Lectionary assigned Psalm 118 for both Passion Sunday and Easter. I chose to post on that for Passion/Palm Sunday last week and the Easter evening Psalm for this week. If you want to see last week’s post on Psalm 118, click here.] Psalm 114 is a curious choice for Easter Evening…
Mark 16:1-8
[Note: John 20 gets assigned by the Lectionary for every Easter Sunday in the three-year cycle. Since I have posted sermon ideas on that text often over the years, this year I will go with the alternative text from Mark 16. But if you want to view a John 20 sermon commentary from last year,…
John 20:19-23
My friend the Bible teacher/commentator Dale Bruner is a wonderful teacher of biblical stories. He is largely retired now but years ago part of Dale’s teachings usually included some dramatic re-enactments of the story at hand. He always elicited a chuckle from the class at this point in John 20 when he reaches a certain…
Acts 1:6-14
On this Seventh Sunday of the Easter season, it is fitting that the first reading is about the Ascension of Jesus. There is a real sense in which Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension are two parts of one glorious act; he rose from the dead and he kept rising into heaven. Between the two risings…
Acts 17:22-31
On this sixth Sunday of the Easter season, we continue our reflections on the Resurrection of Jesus with this fascinating story which shows us how Paul preached the Risen Christ on the continent of Europe. Directed by the Holy Spirit to leave Asia, Paul worked his way down the coast of the Aegean Sea to…
Acts 2:42-47
We are in our fourth Sunday of reflections on Easter, using the book of Acts as our guide. We began on Easter in Acts 10, where we saw the world-changing significance of Christ’s Resurrection in Peter’s startling realization that God includes people from every nation in his covenantal embrace. Then we backed up to Peter’s…
Acts 2:14a, 36-41
As I said last week, the RCL doesn’t want us to celebrate Easter for one glorious day and then move on to something else. It invites us to spend 7 Sundays reflecting on this world changing event with a leisurely journey through the book of Acts. We began on Easter Sunday with Acts 10, where…
Acts 10:34-43
In this (Old Testament?) reading, we hear not the original story about how Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified by Roman soldiers, but a retelling of that story to a Roman soldier. If you want to emphasize the fact of the resurrection in your Easter sermon, choose the Gospel readings for your text. …
Ezekiel 37:1-14
At first glance, this famous vision of the valley of dry bones seems more like an Easter text than a Lenten text. I mean, if the text left us with a valley full of dry bones, it might fit the somber mood of the last week of Lent. But it doesn’t, because the bleached-out bones…
John 11:1-45
Sample Sermon: “Just about Everywhere” : In one of her short stories the writer Annie Dillard has a scene in which a family is sadly gathered at a grave to commit a loved one’s body to the earth. At one point the minister intones the familiar words from I Corinthians 15, “Where, O Death, is…
Romans 5:12-19
It’s always humbling for my wife and me to have a problem with our computer or cell phones. After all, we, on whom our sons depended for so many years, must now largely depend on them to help us. I’ll never be as technologically savvy as our thirty-something sons. Fleming Rutledge, who lent me some…
Luke 20:27-38
“And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” That must have come as a great relief to Jesus in that he had lately been pummeled with one tricky query after the next. Technically that line in verse 40 falls just outside the lection prescribed here, which ends in verse 38 (why it ends…
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Paul gives Timothy three commands and a saying in the lectionary section for this week. Remember God… Remind others… Do your best. Maybe I’ve watched too many cheesy movies—the ones where someone is leaving on the train and never coming back and they stick their head out the window and yell, “Remember I love you!”…
Psalm 30
A friend of mine, when noting life’s oft-difficult circumstances, likes to sound a hopeful note by saying, “Ah well, joy cometh in the morning.” Or at least joy may come in the morning but most of us know altogether too well that sometimes it doesn’t. Or the “morning” in question ends up being pretty far…
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Some biblical texts deal with rather ordinary things such stealing, eating and even caring for animals. Other texts, however, open readers’ eyes to far bigger issues. While Paul talks much about daily concerns early in his first letter to the Corinthians, he closes it by talking about bigger concerns. As Daniel J. Price to whose…
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
It may be a good thing that the Epistolary Lesson the Lectionary appoints for this Sunday comes up only about “once in a blue moon.” Its sections of 1 Corinthians 15 contain, after all, what N.T. Wright, to whose book, Paul for Everyone: I Corinthians, (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003) I owe great deal…
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Few things are sadder than the sight of people who place their hopes in something that can’t deliver that for which they hope. Think, for example, about the sad specter of people lined up to buy lottery tickets, pinning their hopes for wealth on a generally worthless piece of paper. Or think about terminally ill…
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
In the Epistolary Lesson the Lectionary appoints for this Sunday Paul describes his theology of the resurrection. Yet he insists that the Corinthians’ confusion about it isn’t just one among many problems that he’s already addressed. Lack of clarity about the resurrection isn’t like confusion about, for example, sexuality, food offered to idols and lawsuits…
Psalm 16
Commentaries. Sometimes they are a wonderful help to the preacher, sometimes they are a hindrance. I looked through a few commentaries on this Psalm, and came away somewhat more confused than when I started. Commentaries often try to figure out the background of the Psalm in question. Who was the author? What was the occasion?…
2 Corinthians 4:5-12
In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recounts what she thought about during the year following her husband’s sudden death. Near the end of December 2003, Didion and her husband were sitting down for dinner, having just come back from visiting their gravely ill daughter in the hospital. Her husband John was…
Acts 3:12-19
When our family visited China a number of years ago, my wife had a hard time keeping up with our sons who all stand over 6 feet 4 inches tall. So we’d often walk a few steps behind them. As we did so, we lost count of how many people passed them, turned around and…
Acts 4:32-35
Acts 4 is enough to break your heart. Was it really true at the earliest stage of the Christian community that the believers were completely one in heart and mind? Did they really share absolutely everything even as they fell adoringly and reverently at the feet of the apostles, hanging on their every word (and…
Genesis 32:22-31
God graciously meets and accepts God’s adopted sons and daughters wherever and whoever we are. But God never just leaves us where we are. That’s no less true of God’s 21st century adopted daughters and sons than it is of Jacob. The first time God meets Jacob, he’s fleeing both his homeland and his twin’s…
Matthew 28:1-10
We are accustomed to associating Easter Sunday with travel. What we are perhaps not accustomed to realize is that the Easter story involves travel, too. Today we don’t mind traveling in order to see loved ones, including on holidays like Christmas or Easter. Some of us routinely pack up our cars and hit the highway…
Colossians 3:1-4
No one likes being accused of “being so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good.” Karl Marx has his own version of this (religion = narcotic) as have any number of cynics and critics of faith. Yet there it is in Colossians 3: if you have been raised with Christ, set your minds…
Romans 8:6-11
Romans 8: is there a better loved, more soaring passage in the New Testament than this one? There is much here to linger over, savor, celebrate. The Lectionary carves out only six verses but the truth is, Romans 8:1-17 form such a logical—and also lyric—unit that I would suggest reading all 17 verses, and indeed,…
Luke 20:27-38
“And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” That must have come as a great relief to Jesus in that he had lately been pummeled with one tricky query after the next. Technically that line in verse 40 falls just outside the lection prescribed here, which ends in verse 38 (why it ends…
Psalm 30
Easter and Eastertide have now passed this calendar year and yet in the Sundays after Pentecost the Lectionary provides us with some wonderful poetry to help us continue living into and celebrating Easter. With its imagery of death and resurrection, Psalm 30 is a perfect post-Easter Psalm. Its purpose is to keep the memory of…
Luke 7:11-17
The incident in Nain recorded in Luke 7:11-17 is like one of many gospel snapshots we find in the four gospels. At the end of the fourth gospel, the Evangelist John flatly stated that Jesus did far more than anyone had ever written down. It seems that sometimes the evangelists threw in this or that…
John 21:1-19
Mark rings down the curtain on his Gospel before a single human being has as yet shared the news of the resurrection. That was sufficiently frustrating to some in church history that they tacked on a few more verses both to try to spice things up a bit and round the Gospel of Mark off…
Psalm 30
In this Easter season, the lectionary readings call the church to explore and live into and celebrate the impact of Easter. With its imagery of death and resurrection, Psalm 30 is a perfect post-Easter Psalm. Its purpose is to keep the memory of our deliverance from death alive by voicing the deliverance again and adding…
Acts 5:27-32
Most 21st century North Americans enjoy nearly unprecedented religious freedom. So it’s rather easy to forget the high price some Christians have paid and still pay for their faith. However, it’s also easy to forget that confrontations between the Christian faith and the political establishment flared up even during the history of the early church….
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Many times I have questioned the lectionary’s choices for specific Sundays or seasons, but not this Easter Sunday. With good reason, Psalm 118 is the Easter Sunday selection from the Psalms for all three years of the lectionary cycle. Even a cursory reading reveals numerous connections with Jesus’ last days and with the first day…
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
One of the most difficult sermons of the year to write is the one to be delivered on Easter morning. The homiletical challenge we preachers face is obvious: the resurrection of Jesus is like the sky above: it really covers everything in the Christian faith. As a result there is a sense in which every…
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…
Hebrews 7:1-22
Comments and Observations Were it not for the book of Hebrews, Melchizedek would be little more than an interesting footnote in commentaries on the book of Genesis, a bewildering moment in the life of Abraham when this shadowy figure emerges briefly to bless Abraham, only to return to the realm of obscurity. In Hebrews Melchizedek…
Revelation 5:1-10
Comments and Observations If one searches Google Images for the phrase “Jesus’ second coming,” the top results all have a few things in common: 1) there’s a lot of light, 2) there’s a lot of horses, and 3) Jesus is white, both in clothing and skin color. One of my personal favorites even has what…
John 2:1-11
Apparently we are going to have to revise our definition of “glory.” Sometimes things happen in life that make us update long-held notions and definitions. It reminds me of the scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind in which the socially inept genius mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) haltingly proposes to his girlfriend…
Psalm 22:25-31
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider Psalm 22 is poignant prayer of lament of a persecuted child of God. It begins with the anguished cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet throughout much of the psalm, the psalmist prays as though she’s not entirely certain that God is even listening to…
Luke 24:36-48
Comments and Observations The end of Luke’s Gospel sums it all up pretty well. In swift strokes of Luke’s quill, we move from Easter Sunday evening directly to the Ascension of Jesus (just beyond the bounds of this lection). We learn from Luke’s other New Testament contribution, Acts, that Jesus lingered in physical form for…
John 2:13-22
Comments, Observations, and Questions We are impressed very often by all the wrong things. In John 2 everyone was impressed with the physical Temple. It had been undergoing construction for over four decades already and was not even finished. It reminds me of the Ken Follett novel The Pillars of the Earth that narrates the…
Preaching Connection: Resurrection