Preaching Connection: Sacrifice

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Reading for Preaching

Craddock on the Craft of Preaching

Craddock was a firm believer in “the pool of common experience.” The people in Deuteronomy or Revelation are not so far from us. We have at least some common experiences in the pool. Same with great authors of fiction. Why may they reach out from their very specific locale and touch people quite different from...
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Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Christianity, following Judaism, is a bloody religion. Moses used to sprinkle the altar with blood and then sprinkle the people with blood too. Ministers in your more advanced churches don’t do that. We’ve lost the “power in the blood.” One of Norris’s friends abandoned Christianity because (p. 114) “the blood symbolism seemed a form of...
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Additional content related to Sacrifice

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Although one would think the Old Testament offers up lots of compelling possible Lectionary texts for Palm/Passion Sunday, the RCL likes Isaiah 50 for this particular day and so assigns it in Years A, B, and C.  It is definitely a text that tilts away from all things “Triumphal Entry” and more definitively in the…

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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…

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2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

So here we are at the most intimate, and soul laid bare, part of Paul’s letters to Timothy. In these sermon commentaries, we’ve hinted all along about what Paul reveals in these verses—that he’s at the end of his earthly life, abandoned by fellow ministry partners, waiting on his imminent death. The lectionary selection leaves…

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Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

It’s fairly easy to trust God to keep God’s promises when things are going well. But when things don’t go well, even Jesus’ most faithful followers sometimes wonder how God will ever keep God’s promises. It’s at those difficult times that trust is a particularly precious gift. The Abram whom God told to leave his…

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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…

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