Psalm 96 (links validated 9/5/23)

New Resources

  • Exegesis (Psalm 96)

    by Richard Donovan
  • Proper 24A (2023)

    by Phil Heinze
  • Sermon Starters (Proper 24A)(2023)

    by Scott Hoezee
    Psalm 96 proclaims that God made the heavens and everything else and as a result, “strength and glory” are in his sanctuary. One could get the sense that a good bit of what constitutes that strength and glory are the things we can see around us in the physical creation. Look around! See what God has made! Revel in its beauty. That seems to be part of the idea here. We see the glories God has made and reflect some of that very glory back onto the Creator. It reminds me of the lyric words that come near the beginning of the Reformed confessional document “The Belgic Confession.” In an article titled “The Means by Which We Know God,” it says: We know God . . . by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. All these things are enough to convict humans and to leave them without excuse. The whole physical universe is like a giant book and the letters that compose the words in that book are all creatures great and small. As imagery goes, that is lovely and can sit very nicely next to the declarations in something like Psalm 96.
  • Christmas (I)(B)(2023)

    by Rolf Jacobson
  • Proper 24A (2023)

    by Kelly Murphy
  • Praise God!

    by Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson
    Three neighbourhood boys, Salvator, Julio and Antonio, lived and played in Cremona, Italy, around the mid-1600s. Salvator had a beautiful tenor voice and Julio played the violin in accompaniment as they strolled the piazzas. Antonio also liked music and would have loved to sing along, but his voice squeaked like a creaky door hinge. All the children made fun of him whenever he tried to sing. Yet Antonio was not without talent. His most prized possession was the pocketknife his grandfather had given him. He was always whittling away on some piece of wood. In fact, Antonio made some very nice things with his whittling. As the time for the annual festival approached, the houses and streets gradually became festooned with beautiful decorations for spring. Dressed in their finest clothes, people filled the streets. On festival day, Salvator and Julio planned to go to the cathedral where they would play and sing in the crowded plaza. “Would you like to come with us?” they called to Antonio, who sat on his stoop whittling on a piece of wood. “Who cares if you can’t sing. We’d like to have you come with us anyway.” “Sure, I’d like to come along,” Antonio replied. “The festival is so much fun.” The three boys went off to the cathedral. As they walked along, Antonio kept thinking about their remark about his not being able to sing. It made him cry in his heart, because he loved music as much as they did, even if his voice did squeak a little...

Resources from 2020 to 2022

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  • Proper 24A (2020)

    by Phil Heinze
  • Sermon Starter (Christmas)(I)(A)(2022)

    by Scott Hoezee
    In the sermon on Revelation 4 & 5 referred to above, my friend Trygve Johnson of Hope College invoked a clever metaphor. He said he had grown up on Whidbey Island just northwest of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. This is an area known for its rain, for cement gray cloud cover, for mists and fogs. Yet it is also a place surrounded by the grandeur of mountains: Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, the Olympic mountains. But most days they were invisible, obscured by fog and cloud. Once in a while though, the weather would break. The fog and mist would lift. The skies would clear. The sun would come out. And the folks on Whidbey Island would say to each other, “Did you see it? The mountains are out.” Oh, the mountains were always there, just hidden except for such rare glimpses. And Tryg used this in his sermon as an image, a metaphor, for what John of Patmos saw when God peeled back the curtain between this world and the heavenly throne room to show John the worship of the Lamb that was taking place right then and that, as a matter of fact, never ceases. If we could only see what John saw and maybe what the poet of Psalm 96 saw—if we experience days when the mountains are out—we too would leap to our feet and declare, “I think we need to write a whole bunch of new songs to sing to the Lord!”
  • Sermon Starters (Proper 24A)(2020)

    by Scott Hoezee
    In her short story “The River,” Flannery O’Connor wanted to say something about the drama and the power of baptism. She believed many people had become a bit blasé where baptism is concerned, that we had turned it into a cute little rite of passage for babies on a par with getting their six-month portrait taken at Walmart or something. In her story, therefore, she has a young boy who wants to be baptized but for various reasons cannot find anyone to do it. So he tries to baptize himself in a river but he slips, falls, and drowns. Baptism, O’Connor wanted to remind her readers, involves dying with Christ. When she was later asked why she used such grotesque and harsh imagery like this in this story and in many of her other stories, she replied “Because in the land of the nearly blind, you have to draw big caricatures to get anyone’s attention and help them to see.”
  • Sing to the LORD a New Song

    by Cameron B.R. Howard
  • Proper 24A (2020)

    by Nancy Koester
  • Proper 24A (2020)

    by Lisa Michaels
  • Christmas (Proper I)(2021)

    by Danny Quanstrom
  • Christmas (I)(A)(2022)

    by Beth L. Tanner
  • Christmas Eve (C)(2021)

    by Beth L. Tanner
  • Christmas Day (ABC)

    by Howard Wallace
  • Sing to the LORD

    by Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson

Resources from 2016 to 2019

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Resources from 2013 to 2015

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