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The familiarity of the beatitudes presents the preacher with a challenge. Our hearers may have pre-conceived ideas of what they are about, or skepticism of our ability to say anything fresh about them. The beatitudes (...)

Isaiah 49:1-7 comprises the second of the so-called “Servant Songs” (Isaiah 42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12), a designation that I indicated in last Sunday’s commentary on Isaiah 42:1-9 to be problematic. Rather than be restricted to (...)

It is quite peculiar that a text from Jeremiah disrupts a series of Isaianic texts in the lectionary calendar. The five Sundays that precede the Second Sunday of Christmas all contain texts from Isaiah for (...)

Here is the promise: God is with us, so that we might live. God is with us, so that we might believe. God is with us, because it is hard to believe, and God knows (...)

Isaiah’s vision begins with “the mountain of the Lord’s house” (2:2). We’ve already seen this mountain: “Fair Zion,” abandoned hut, city besieged, center of a land ravaged by war (1:6-8). After this devastation follows a (...)

Isaiah invites us into a theological vision of what life can be for God’s faithful people. In the Isaiah traditions are interwoven memories of ancient truth and promises of a radiant future for Israel. In (...)

Treacherous days, treacherous texts. Treacherous days because the end is coming, as the texts insist. Treacherous texts because they will always lure some into trying to figure them out, to solve them, to determine the (...)

Anyone commenting or preaching on these well-known verses better hesitate. For preachers, at least in the Protestant world, these verses have become like clichés. How does one preach a cliché without always saying the same (...)

Last week’s Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 1 highlighted the importance of justice and righteousness. Both of these crucial words/concepts are featured again in Isaiah 5:1-7, another of the more memorable passages in all of (...)

The first verse of the book of Isaiah invites the reader to hear the prophecy in the context of the eighth century BCE. The scholarly consensus is to hear at least chapters 1-12, along with (...)