Bruce Epperly on the Lectionary, Pentecost + 8 (C)
This is a very interesting Adventurous Lectionary.
This is a very interesting Adventurous Lectionary.
Two of the lectionary passages today, at least if you go with the United Methodist selections, involve romance and sexual attraction. One, of course, is Song of Songs 2:8-13 and the other is Psalm 45, which has a foreign princess marrying the king of Israel. The second involves romance at least as far as an…
There are times when I understand why we select verses to read in the Lectionary, and there are times when I don’t. In this case, I don’t. We have James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a. I don’t see adequate reason not to read 3:13 – 4:10 as a whole, and if I were to preach/teach on this passage…
This passage has created quite a few problems over the years. There are women who feel really oppressed by it. Others feel this truly describes the perfect woman and try to get women (and girls) to live up to it. I encountered these various attitudes in a discussion group yesterday. My strong suggestion is to…
As I have mentioned before, I like to check out gospel passages with Darrell Bock’s notes in Jesus According to Scripture in order to see the best possible options for reconciling the various stories. In this case, I don’t find the results very promising. The only possible way to reconcile the synoptic tradition, with a…
We often read the Psalms legalistically, i.e. all the discussion of the law leads us to believe we’re talking about some sort of righteousness by works, or better earning God’s favor through accomplishing certain works. If we read Psalm 1 as a sort of flat discourse rather than as structured poetry, we can easily read…
It’s been about six weeks since my last post, and unfortunately that’s actually a fairly short gap for the way I’ve kept this blog up. But the two Old Testament passages this week (Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Psalm 19 or Psalm 119:94-107) as well as the epistle caught my attention. In the modern church we read…