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A single voice speaks to us in this text. Its words ring of agony, pain, desperation, brokenness, and great remorse. The speaker directly addresses God himself, but God says nothing. Instead, this text invites us (...)

Psalm 139 is classified as an Individual Hymn of Thanksgiving. In this genre, singers praise God for God’s goodness in delivering them from various life-threatening situations, such as illness, oppression, enemy attack, etc.  Here, the (...)

“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”–the hymn, which according to Ulrich Leupold, “more than any other epitomizes Luther’s thought and personal experience”–is a rather free paraphrase of Psalm 46. For that reason, the psalm is (...)

How can this text from Hebrews, an obscure writing in thought and language, compete with the gospel for this Sunday on Jesus’ healing of blind Bartimaeus, the one who follows Jesus “on the way” of (...)

The psalm text for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost is the “promise” section of the famous Eagles’ Wing poem, Psalm 91. The concrete, particular promises that this ancient liturgy proclaims provides a perfect opportunity for (...)

The last line of Job 2:1-10 (last week’s first reading, 18 Pentecost) reckons Job’s behavior, above all his speech, as righteousness: “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” This evaluation is not (...)

This week’s psalm selection is the closing section of one of the great lyrics of the Bible–Psalm 90. It is the only poem in the Psalter that is associated with Moses; the Hebrew in the (...)

The lectionary tries to steal this psalm from us, but we don’t need to let it. We lose verses 1-6 in the prescribed reading, which makes Psalm 19 an altogether different psalm. To be sure, (...)

As I have done with the previous three Psalm lections, I again tie the theme of worship with some other theme of the passage. Worship is obviously an appropriate concept to anchor Psalm 146, the (...)

The lectionary’s desire to include the story of David and Goliath in the Sunday lessons is made difficult by the length of the story in the Bible. The Septuagint itself does not contain verses 12-31, (...)