I am mindful we now are living in – we pray we are living through – straightened circumstances, the like of which few if any of us have experienced previously. We well may be discovering within ourselves a need, or at least a longing, for an appearance of a messenger (angel) of Yahweh in something like the immediacy of the Akedah (“binding”) event we ponder in this lectionary portion. Of course, Abraham and Isaac’s encounter cannot be repeated; we would not wish it to be. Yet it carries...

Preparing to begin, my first thought was, “What can I say to this audience about the Twenty-Third Psalm?” If we memorized Old Testament passages when we were youngsters, Psalm 23 probably was one of them. W. Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 was first published almost fifty years ago, and has sold more than 2 million copies. Most ministers know Keller, if only in broad outline. (Some of his insights do not apply to shepherding in the Holy Land, but the volume remains a helpful...

Every lectionary text contains much more than we can note in these postings, or in any sermon we could preach from it. From this text, we’ll note briefly the geography of Isaiah’s “coastlands” and “peoples from far away” (v 1), then consider three issues, the first at some length, the second and third only briefly. Other than their Philistine and Phoenician neighbors, the nearest “foreign” coastlands/isles to Israel lay west and northwest–Cyprus, the astounding irregularities of the north...