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While the use of a lectionary cycle provides preachers and pastors with prescribed scripture passages that adhere (to some degree) thematically to one another, and offers congregants each week a “sampling” of both Old and (...)

The season that we anticipate as the COVID pandemic seems to ebb gives the listeners to this text a context: a new hearing of the instruction of God. At the last stop for Moses there (...)

[Note this semi-continuous first reading is one of two options for this lectionary date. Find past commentaries on 1 Samuel 17:[1a, 4-11, 19-23] 32-49.] “And Saul feared David” (1 Samuel 18:12): Witnessing the tragedy of (...)

Our narrator places the Bread Discourse in the middle of the Book of Signs (John 1-12). It feels like a centerpiece. The present verses include two miracles: John’s version of the multiplication of loaves for (...)

Where I live, it’s time to plant summer vegetables. The fig trees, eager to awaken early, have already unfurled their leaves. Dozens of artichoke, pepper, eggplant, and tomato seedlings have been growing inside since March, (...)

Dear Working Preacher, Thank you for all you do to preach the Word of God in a spiritless, dispiriting world. And welcome to Pentecost. May the Holy Spirit stir up new life you. No, that’s (...)

Lamentations is rarely read or sung in any American churches, but when it is, it’s the passage in today’s lectionary reading. Beautiful hymns such as “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” have helped the church for hundreds (...)

God’s two responses to Job don’t answer the questions Job asked in his long and painful speeches, and neither do they defend God from Job’s brutally honest accusations. But they do reveal one of the (...)

The exile looms large in the Old Testament, and for good reason: it marked the symbolic and material destruction of everything that structured Judahite identity and faith. When Nebuchadnezzar ordered King Zedekiah blinded and deported (...)

My children are in the habit of asking, when they hear about a person in the news that they don’t know, “Is he a good person or a bad person?” I usually try to explain (...)