Acts 10-15 presents to the reader the full implication of what the Gospel of Jesus Messiah actually means for the emerging Christian communities, as well as for Christian communities now. In these crucial chapters of Acts Peter comes to see that membership in the church of Jesus has nothing to do with being a citizen of a particular nation or being one who observes special customs that make one acceptable to God.
Perkins Homiletics Professors on the Road!
The wonderful tale of Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch is among the most well-known stories in the book of Acts. It is at the same time an introduction to the inclusive power of the gospel and an insightful narrative of the early Christian use of the Hebrew Bible, as it was mediated through the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek version of the First Testament that almost always served as the springboard for reflection on the meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Messiah.
The author of Acts, Luke, the writer of the Gospel that bears his name, has amplified the call of the older testament to order the new resurrection community in the way that the Israelites were similarly called to shape their community under YHWH.
I chose this amazing text from Mark, because I know of no better account of the astonishing event that Easter commemorates. You may, I imagine, disagree! After all, Matthew has fainting soldiers and rising corpses. Luke offers the story of two disciples trudging toward Emmaus, disconsolate until they meet the risen Jesus and recognize him when they break bread. John tells us the touching tale of Mary and her confusion about Jesus as a gardener. And Mark? Here we get the empty tomb, a man in white, and at the end silent and terrified women. Just what sort of narrative is that for an Easter Sunday? I am glad you asked!
Welcome to another episode of Must Reads where the Reverend Dr. Maurice J. Nutt, C. a Redemptorist missionary priest and an adjunct professor of preaching and evangelization serving as a doctoral thesis advisor in the Doctor of Ministry of preaching program at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, MO, discusses a very timely book: “Preaching Racial Justice.”
I want to offer today something rather different: a 21st-century imaginative reading of Is.50 and Mark 14, surrounding the apostle Peter.
This short passage from Jeremiah has long played an outsized role in general discussions of the Bible. It did not take long for early New Testament commentators to see in these words a prediction of the appearance of the documents based on the life, death, and resurrection of the one they called Messiah, Jesus, that they thought would finally and definitively replace the Hebrew Bible as the crucial sacred text for them.
Allegorical interpretation, a method of reading long used in Bible interpretation from its earliest days, is rarely found persuasive in our time, the problem being that anyone can make the Bible say whatever they want, limited only by their wild imagination. So, what are we preachers to do with this tale of fiery serpents and sympathetic magic? It turns out that there is something unique about this story.
The Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence at SMU offers workshops for pastors who preach without being seminary trained. The goal is to provide a set of exegetical and homiletical skills, along with theological reflection on the purpose of preaching to raise the effectiveness of their sermons to the next level.
Today in Lent three, we are presented with the famous Ten. I choose the first of them for examination, because it continues this theme of the character and person of the God we worship uniquely in the Lenten season.
“When Abram was 99 years old,” is a most unpropitious way to begin a story of a promised baby! Nonetheless, that is exactly how the so-called Priestly author begins his tale of the coming birth of Isaac to the aged couple, Abram and Sarai. The older narrative, written by the J/E compiler, several centuries prior to P’s account, may be found in the chapters that follow. Such an absurd story is certainly worthy of more than one telling!
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