Preaching Connection: Worship

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Movies for Preaching

John Adams (2008)

John Adams (2008).  HBO Mini-series.  Episode VII: “Peacefield.” Directed by Tom Hooper. Starring Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti.  71 mins.  Rated TV-14. Sometimes preaching choices are easy.  In this instance, skip the sermon to play the following three times.  Or maybe four. Old John Adams (Paul Giamatti) is pushing 90.  Despite his distinguished career from…

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Reading for Preaching

A Diary of Private Prayer in Devotional Classics

“O God my Creator and Redeemer, I may not go forth today except You accompany me with Your blessing.  Let not the vigor and freshness of the morning, or the glow of good health, or the present prosperity of my undertakings, deceive me into a false reliance upon my own strength.  All these good gifts...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In chapter 3 of this American classic, Huck Finn tells us that Miss Watson had taught him to pray, promising that whatever he asked for, he would get it  “’But it warn’t so,’ says Huck.  “’I tried it.  Once I got a fish line but no hooks.  It warn’t any good to me without hooks. ...
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Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“Those who have not learned to ask God for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones.  We must not be too high-minded.  I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”
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Confessions

Augustine is a vastly learned scholar and a deep-souled Christian man, utterly devoted to the God he sometimes calls “my sweetness.”  Few published Christian prayers to God can address God with the same power and beauty as Augustine could.  So this, very early in the Confessions, as Augustine lets us overhear what he thinks of...
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“Memorial Minute for W. J. Beeners”

Beeners was for “good American speech.” He wanted, above all, integrity, “traction,” intelligibility–and he wanted it in every part of the service, including the public reading of Scripture, public leading in prayer, and preaching. He argued that important texts have more than one good reading. There isn’t just one right reading of a text. He...
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God’s Name in Vain: The Rights and Wrongs of Religion in Politics

Tells of Hannah Arendt’s book on thinking (The Life of the Mind), and of her observation that in Plato’s dialogues, e.g., in the Crito and in the Republic, Socrates sometimes would simply stop and think. And that’s what Plato writes. “Here Socrates paused to think.” This is not what contemporary culture encourages. On TV it...
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Pray and Vote

Even before the invasion of Iraq had begun, the cry went forth through and from the churches: Pray! Pray for the soldiers, pray for the civilians, pray for peace. So I preached, and so I did. I wonder, though, if God didn’t answer our petitions with one of his own: Vote! Polls indicate that something...
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Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC

We do a lot of measured praise: Good job! Big boy! Nice work! “The way the 148th Psalm describes it, praising God is another kettle of fish altogether. It is about as measured as a volcanic eruption, and there is no implication that under any conceivable circumstances it could be anything other than what it...
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A Dresser of Sycamore Trees

(Keizer is writing of himself and a friend): “The last words my journal records Jeffrey’s having said to me were ‘Pray for me, a sinner.’ I did not remember until later that these are also the last words an Episcopal priest says to a penitent after pronouncing him or her absolved.”
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The Diary of a Country Priest

“The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist, will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up...
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The Screwtape Letters

Prayers offered in the state of dryness may please God best. “When a human, though not desiring is still intending to do God’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and who asks why he has been forsaken, but still obeys” then God triumphs uniquely.
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“A Labor Not in Vain”

Fred Craddock, retired professor of preaching at Emory, tells a story about an incident that occurred when he was pastor of a small Christian church in east Tennessee and was visiting his hospitalized church members. As he happened to be passing the room of a patient, she called to him, “’Uh, sir, are you a...
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Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Where liturgy is concerned, laymen “should take what we are given and make the best of it.” Trouble is that the clergy want to change things all the time with “incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service.” But the majority of people just want things left alone. With good reason. “Novelty,...
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Additional content related to Worship

Psalm 8

Psalm 8 swiftly sums up something that the Israelites found as amazing as anything else they could think of.  Yes, the psalm is about the majesty of God and that is awesome enough.  And the psalmist sees that majesty of God chiefly in the things that this great God created and most especially the wonders…

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Psalm 146

As we often note here on the CEP website and in our various sermon commentaries on the Psalms, we use the word “Hallelujah” as an expression of praise.  For us it is synonymous with the sentiment, “I am praising God right now!”  And sometimes we use it as a way to express gratitude and relief,…

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Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32

Ancient Israel was never know to be a seafaring people.  By Jesus’s day being a fisherman was clearly a common occupation on the Sea of Galilee but Israel did not have much experience with sailing forth on mighty sea vessels out into the Mediterranean or some such.  Yet the section of Psalm 107 that the…

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Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15

It gets repetitive to point out the RCL’s tendency to avert the reader’s eyes from anything smacking of judgment or the destruction of the wicked and of those who pose themselves as enemies of God.  But here it is again as we scoop out seven verses from the middle of what is already a somewhat…

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Psalm 81:1-10

Psalm 81 is God’s cri du coeur, the cry of the heart.  When we think of God’s heart, we mostly think of its purity or power.  There is a long tradition in what is now mainly the Roman Catholic tradition of the “sacred heart.”  If you have ever been to Paris, you perhaps visited the…

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Psalm 29

The Revised Common Lectionary assigns Psalm 29 for the Year B Trinity Sunday but it is by no means clear what this ode to the power of God as seen in a thunderstorm has to do with the Triunity of God.  Granted there are actually not a lot of (if any) Old Testament passages that…

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Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

“But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.”  If you look closely at the Revised Common Lectionary Psalm assignment for Pentecost Sunday in Year B, you will notice they don’t want you to know about verse 35a.  Just skip over it.  Pretend it’s not there.  It’s like an ugly belch…

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Psalm 98

“Sing to the Lord a new song.”  How often?  What about singing to the Lord some old songs too?  Obviously that is OK since what is the Hebrew Psalter if not a collection of very old songs that we have been using and in various forms singing for millennia.  Still, there can always be a…

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Psalm 22:25-31

No, it’s not your imagination: the Year B Revised Common Lectionary has put Psalm 22 in front of us now three times in calendar year 2024.  Almost this exact same lection was the reading for the Second Sunday in Lent and the entire Psalm was assigned for Good Friday.  Now here it is again as…

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Psalm 4

Psalm 4 isn’t necessarily the cheeriest Hebrew poem to consider during the otherwise joyful season of Eastertide.  Though it ends on an up-beat note, it is also a plea, a lament, a rebuke, and a challenge.  But maybe we need to encounter such realities in the midst of this Eastertide season just as much as…

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Psalm 133

Come on and admit it: I am not the only one tempted to insert one more adverb into the opening verse of Psalm 133: “How good and pleasant and rare it is when God’s people live together in unity.” We are painfully aware of why the temptation to insert “rare” exists today.  Too many congregations…

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Psalm 50:1-6

It is not difficult to see why the Lectionary has us go to Psalm 50 on Transfiguration Sunday in Year B.  There is much here about glory and shining and the splendor—very nearly we could term it the terrible splendor—that surround Israel’s God.  We are only being asked to look at the first six verses…

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Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

A pastor friend of mine who is very dapper and proper in all things, including his attire, once observed another pastor show up for a summertime seminar dinner wearing a pair of shorts.  My friend saw this and I noticed the muscles in his jaw tighten slightly before he wryly said, “I believe it is…

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Psalm 111

You have to like the fact that a psalm that claims God has worked to make sure his deeds are remembered is itself written as an acrostic in the original Hebrew precisely as an aid to memorizing the psalm!  Beginning each of the 22 lines of this poem with successive letters in the Hebrew alphabet…

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Psalm 29

Last summer a tornado ripped through our area.  It did not come very close to where I live but for those in and near its path, it was frightening.  Whole homes were destroyed and in some places so many trees came down, you could not recognize whole neighborhoods.  A man with whom I chatted this…

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Psalm 148

No moment on the annual calendar gets more associated with popping champagne corks than New Year’s Eve.  So it is appropriate that on this last Sunday and day of 2023 the Lectionary directs us to Psalm 148, which is in its own way a fizzing and frothing bottle of champagne in word form.  It is…

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Psalm 126

Whenever I read Psalm 126, the phrase “delirious with joy” leaps to mind.  What emerges in the opening verses here is a portrait of people whose wildest dreams somehow came true and they discover that they just cannot stop giggling over it and grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat over and over and anon.  Weeping…

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Psalm 95:1-7a

This is another one of those lections that stops just short of the place in the psalm where there is a decisive—yet probably important—shift of tone and theme.  Yes, the first seven verses of Psalm 95 are a lovely doxological celebration and a call to worship this Creator and Redeemer God for all God is…

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Psalm 96:1-9 (10-13)

My pastor during much of my growing-up years back in Ada Christian Reformed Church in the 1970s often used the middle portion of Psalm 96 as his Call to Worship.  I can still recall hearing Sunday after Sunday “Ascribe to the Lord, all you families of nations, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.  Ascribe…

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Psalm 145:1-8

With 150 psalms to choose from, it is something of a mystery why this is the third time in three months that the Lectionary has had us somewhere in Psalm 145.  Even so, here we are again.  If a given preacher did preach on part or all of the 145th Psalm in July and/or August…

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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…

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Matthew 15:(10-20), 21-28

By going to the region of Tyre and Sidon, Jesus enters a borderland—where the people of Israel give way to a more Canaanite population. Considering closely what the woman says throughout this pericope, it’s clear that she knows some things about Judaism, and she’s come to believe some things about Jesus. This borderland, this place…

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Psalm 67

When we think of getting a blessing, we tend to focus on ourselves as the recipient of something good—something that will be good for us, something that will benefit us.  The classic Aaronic Benediction from Numbers 6—that is clearly echoed in Psalm 67:1—is a good example.  When I give this benediction in church, I am…

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Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18

Across its 52 verses, Psalm 89 covers a lot of ground.  You would not sense that from the mere 8 verses the Lectionary has carved out for this lection but if you range beyond those verses, you will see a lot going on.  There is praise and thanksgiving.  There is a nod to the more…

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Psalm 100

It will never happen of course but sometimes one could wish that for certain absolutely key vocabulary words in Hebrew or Greek, all Bible translations in English (or in any language) could agree on one translation of that word that would get used consistently every time it occurs.  That way readers of the translation would…

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Psalm 121

For the second week in a row the Year A RCL has assigned a psalm that was also the Year C Psalm lection just a few months ago in October 2022.  So with modest modifications, here is a bit of a rerun on my recent thoughts on preaching this well-known—and very lovely—Hebrew poem. When I…

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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…

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Micah 6:1-8

For some years I co-taught a Bible course on the prophets with one of my colleagues from the Old Testament division at Calvin Seminary.  My main task in that course was to talk about how to preach from the Prophets and then to grade a sermon the students write on a passage from Micah.  Somewhat…

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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…

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Psalm 148

Some years back at a worship service we used St. Francis of Assisi’s poem “Canticle of the Sun” as part of a responsive reading.  There was, alas, a slight typo in the bulletin that made it sound at one point as though we were worshiping Mother Earth.  This led a rather conservative member of my…

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Psalm 96

Perhaps it counts as something of an irony that the Lectionary calls on us to reflect on Psalm 96 on Christmas Day.  After all, if ever there were a day in the church year when we do not want to do what Psalm 96:1 says—namely, sing to the Lord a new song—this day is it! …

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Psalm 122

Psalm 122 is one of fifteen psalms extending from Psalms 120-134, each of which is labeled “A Song of Ascents.” The sense of that title is that these were pilgrimage songs sung by Israelites as they ascended up to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, therefore, the terms “Jerusalem,” “Zion,” and “house of Yahweh” occur with great density…

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Psalm 98

Reading Psalm 98 is like uncorking a well shook-up bottle of champagne.  The cork rockets upward and the bubbly inside the bottle fountains forth in exuberance.  We’ve all seen those locker rooms after a team wins the World Series or the Super Bowl when players spray each other with such bottles—some years ago someone finally…

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Haggai 1:15-2:9

Things in the church are a little different these days.  Some years ago at my alma mater it was decided that after nearly twenty-five or so years without having an on-campus chapel—a dedicated worship space—it was high time to build one.  In the years since the college had moved from its original campus, most everything…

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Psalm 84:1-7

In the Calvin Seminary Chapel above and behind the pulpit area is a large clear-glass window with a cross in the center.  A few years ago during a May Term preaching class in the chapel, we all noticed that a large Horned Owl had made a nest in the uppermost window pane near the top…

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Psalm 121

When I was a little kid, I remember Psalm 121 being read in church or sometimes at our dinner table.  Back then various versions of the Bible translated that first line, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”  The sentence is in the indicative mood.  Read this way, it is…

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Jeremiah 31:27-34

I am not sure why the Revised Common Lectionary’s series of passages from Jeremiah skips around the way it does (one week Jeremiah 32 but then next time around it’s back to chapter 29 and now we leap to chapter 31) but I think I can understand why the Lectionary saved this passage from the…

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Psalm 146

In contemporary music there are few crescendos quite as dramatic and raucous as the one that concludes the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.”  A somewhat wild cacophony of strings, brass, and percussion all come together to end this remarkable song with a bang followed by a very long sustain on a piano that…

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Jeremiah 2:4-13

According to the old adage, “You are what you eat.”  But parts of the Bible, including Jeremiah 2, give voice to a different point of view: You are what you worship.  In Jeremiah 2, one of the prophet’s initial broadsides against the people of Israel was the sad fact that in worshiping gods that were…

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Hebrews 12:18-29

What might Christian worship look like if each service began with Hebrews’, “Let us … worship God acceptably with reverence and awe”? What affect on worship might a sticky note on preachers, worship planners and leaders’ computers that read, “Let us … worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” have? Those who proclaim and hear…

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Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

To get the full impact of Isaiah 1:10-20, you need to back up to verse 9 (left out regrettably by the Lectionary) in which the people of Israel say to themselves (in the wake of great desolation in their land) that with at least a few folks still living, they were not quite as bad…

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Psalm 15

By my count nearly one-third of the 150 Psalms—44 out of 150—never appear across the three-year Cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary.  But there are some that come up with frequency, and Psalm 15 is one such poem from the Psalter as it occurs once in each of the Lectionary Years A, B, & C….

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Psalm 66:1-9

A bit cheeky.  A goodly dose of chutzpah.  A tad forward.  You have to admire the psalmists who on many occasions are not the least bit adverse to ordering the whole world to praise the God of Israel.  Make no mistake: all those “Praise the Lord” lines in so many of the psalms are in…

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Acts 2:1-21

COVID-19.  Has anything in our experience ever made us think as much about the act of respiration, of breathing, than the global pandemic we have been in for over two years now?  Way back in 2006 I visited Japan.  At that time there was no particular flu bug worrying anyone.  Yet I was struck to…

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Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Sample sermon: You wouldn’t think a wasp could do so much damage. Unless you are allergic to bee and wasp stings, getting stung by these bugs, though briefly painful and annoying, does not generally create any lasting effect or damage. However, about 150 years ago there was one particular kind of wasp that appears to…

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Psalm 97

A few years ago the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship produced a new hymnal based on the Psalms.  Its title is “Psalms for All Seasons.”  The title is apt because as most of us know, the Hebrew Psalter is a collection of varied prayers that matches life’s many and varied seasons.  As C.S. Lewis and…

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Psalm 150

Whether it’s a Broadway play like Les Miserables or a classic movie like The Sound of Music, most people enjoy a good musical. But have you ever wondered what it is about such productions that appeals to us? After all, musicals are decidedly unlike real life. In The Sound of Music people burst into song…

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Psalm 126

For a Lenten selection, this psalm is pretty sunny-side up and cheerful.  Maybe as Lent is coming to a close, we are supposed to see in this poem the promise of restoration beyond the cross toward which we are journeying this season.  This is, after all, one of the “Songs of Ascent” in the Book…

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Psalm 99

All these millennia later it is easy to read the Psalms, especially one like Psalm 99, and forget how at once scandalous and vaguely ridiculous they might appear to be.  Or at least how they could appear to an outsider to Israel who was looking in.  After all, in poems like this one, the psalmist…

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Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)

It was the year King Uzziah died. Or, it was the year President Kennedy died. Or it was the year 9/11 rattled the world to its core. Or it was the year the COVID pandemic began. It was the year when things fell apart, when foundations were shaken, when the markets crumbled, when all that…

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Psalm 148

When I was a pastor, I liked every sixth year when Christmas Day fell on a Sunday.  First, it eliminated the need for an extra service and second, it eliminated conversations with leadership as to whether to hold any extra services in case . . .  well, in case Christmas Day fell on a Saturday. …

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Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25

The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to mitigate it have changed the way at least some Christians have met or are currently “meeting together” (25). Restrictions have forced at least some of us to meet together remotely rather than in the same building.  Restrictions have also forced some Christians to worship somewhat differently even when they…

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Psalm 34:9-14

It is not at all clear to me precisely the thinking behind dedicating three August Sundays to a single psalm.  Preachers are challenged enough this month on the Gospel side of things with five weeks’ worth of sermons from John 6, all pretty much on the same theme.  But now we are getting a triplet…

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Mark 1:21-28

It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, the Jews of Capernaum went to the synagogue. Some of them went sleepily, others went with a great weariness following a busy week of work.  Still others trekked over in a rather irritable mood for who knows why–maybe it had been no more than that they were out…

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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…

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Four Pages: All-Surpassing Power

This sermon was preached at the Calvin Symposium on Worship, January 30 & 31, 2014 Theme:    God’s all-surpassing power is our hope in every weakness. Doctrine:    Hope Image:    Jars of Clay Need:      To own that we are fragile & ordinary. Mission:    To celebrate that God’s all-surpassing power is enough. Introduction to Scripture Brothers and…

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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…

Explore

Psalm 98

Reading Psalm 98 is like uncorking a well shook-up bottle of champagne.  The cork rockets upward and the bubbly inside the bottle fountains forth in exuberance.  We’ve all seen those locker rooms after a team wins the World Series or the Super Bowl when players spray each other with such bottles—some years ago someone finally…

Explore

Psalm 84:1-7

In the Calvin Seminary Chapel above and behind the pulpit area is a large clear-glass window with a cross in the center.  A few years ago during a May Term preaching class in the chapel, we all noticed that a large Horned Owl had made a nest in the uppermost window pane near the top…

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Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Though the lectionary epistle cuts out the middle verses of this section, the ones we are assigned today tell the church what to do in order to stay together through hardship. If you believe that the text of Hebrews is a sermon, then just minutes earlier we heard the preacher remind the congregation about their…

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Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Our reading for today is arguably the most important of the Lectionary’s 69 selections from Isaiah, because it summarizes the message of this truly “major” prophet.  Verse 1 reveals the author, place and time of this prophecy.  Most significantly, it tells us why we should listen to the prophet—what he writes is the “vision” he…

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Psalm 66:1-9

A bit cheeky.  A goodly dose of chutzpah.  A tad forward.  You have to admire the psalmists who on many occasions are not the least bit adverse to ordering the whole world to praise the God of Israel.  Make no mistake: all those “Praise the Lord” lines in so many of the psalms are in…

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Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

How can we understand Christ’s promise to come “soon” that he makes not once but twice in just this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s seven verses?  After all, few of our definitions of “soon” would include the two thousand years that have elapsed since he made first it. In Revelation 22 John’s dazzling visions of that coming…

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