Essays on Preaching (82)
  1. One now finds Edwards frequently commenting on the beautiful things about nature, life, and Christ, and he also manifests a creative perception of beauty when considering the most morose of topics: Death.
  2. The Ascension of our Lord teaches how Heaven and Earth overlap and interlock and finally will be visibly joined together forever.
  3. Rituals, like the liturgy and the sacraments, resist domestication and confront us with a world and worldview brought forth from the Bible and through twenty centuries of Christianity for the purpose of arresting our contemporary worldview through its self-sameness.
  4. Preaching the inseparability of Jesus and Jerusalem is to proclaim God’s Messiah and the fulfillment of the Scriptures.
  5. Whatever happened to things not liked? Can there be such a thing anymore? Does the desire to have a sermon “liked” factor into the craft of preaching?
  6. Sin affects body and soul, right down to the core of our humanity. It calls for a drastic cure, for extreme measures.
  7. The outward sins we do all begin with Sin hidden in our hearts. But we cannot see that, it has to be revealed to us by a spiritual scan, an MRI from above.
  8. Jesus is taking the Law and setting it forth in such a way that we get a good look at what is going on in us.
  9. The Magnificat invites us to enter into, consider, and embrace the worldview of a teenaged Jewish girl and her geriatric aunt: The one bearing the prophet Elijah which was to come and the other carrying within her womb the God whom she and her nation worshipped and feared.
  10. Other non-Jews received healings, and these miracle-events illustratively preached the Gospel each time. Certainly, Jesus will jump on this opportunity, right? Wrong…at least for the moment.
  11. Preaching justification by faith should not exclude the truth of regeneration, as if justification were an altogether separate phenomenon that took place sometime before and regeneration taking place later.
  12. In order to respect both liturgical consistency and the role of the homilist in the drama of the Divine Service: Let the pulpit be for proclamation, not personal prayer.
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