Authors /
Luke A. Powery
Luke A. Powery is dean of the chapel and associate professor of the practice of homiletics at Duke University.
Look to the rock (Isaiah 51:1-6)
Isaiah invites us to remember our origins.
God's foreign service (Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8)
God builds “a house of prayer for all peoples.” All means all.
Welcome across race
For this Sunday's Living by the Word column, I focused on the theme of hospitality in the reading from Romans.
For my own sermon on this text, I almost went with the title "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
Sunday, August 31, 2014: Romans 12:9-21
While this is not the exuberant rhetorical surplus we find in 1 Corinthians 13, love is still Paul's guiding principle.
Everybody is somebody
The church is still uncomfortable with human bodies. It does little to promote the rich connection between bodies and Christian spirituality.
Paul uses "body" as a metaphor, and contemporary Christians do the same when we say "the body of Christ." This metaphorical usage generally takes precedence in the church’s practice.
Sunday, August 24, 2014: Romans 12:1-8
Bodies matter for Paul. And they matter for Christian discipleship. Paul foregrounds the human body as critical for the Christian response to God's mercy.
Human and holy: Texts for preaching
At this point in my preaching journey, I find myself drawing on or being informed by the writings of theologian Howard Thurman, novelist Toni Morrison and poet Langston Hughes, as well as the musical literature known as the spirituals.
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