Jeff Gibbs, “The Myth of Righteous Anger”
What the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about human anger
What the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about human anger
Jeff Gibbs on how to preach the Gospel of Matthew during the upcoming church year (Series A)
By Jeff Gibbs This lection from John 16 shows how important it is to first interpret what a text meant before one can take in hand the question of what it means. These words of Jesus address his disciples in the upper room the night that he was betrayed, the day before he was crucified, ..
Does the phrase “pro-life” simply mean “Republican” and “angry”?
This essay, by Jeff Gibbs, aims to describe what the Bible actually says about human anger, offering some personal and pastoral reflections on how to deal with it
Planned Parenthood, the law of the land, and Christian response
By Jeff Gibbs I say to my students with some regularity, “Careful exegesis often makes the text harder to preach.” What I mean, of course, is that the concerns of a particular text of Scripture might not, at first glance, be the sorts of things that concern a Christian/Lutheran congregation in twenty-first-century North America. When this is the ..
By Jeff Gibbs It would be tempting to regard this text, a series of short imperative clauses, as a random series of “inspired one-liners” that exhort the Thessalonian believers (and us) to general Christian behaviors and attitudes. To be sure, there’s some truth in such a description, for there is no complex argument involved and the hardest structural ..
In some ways, it can be easy enough to be faithful. Some people find it easy to be creative. To bring the two together in worship, however, requires insight and skill that is hard to come by. In daily chapel toward the end of Winter Term, I was edified by the worship service faithfully created by ..
This Old Testament reading for Transfiguration stands as the complement and climax of the covenant ceremony that begins in Exodus 19. In broadest strokes, the text illustrates what it means for the God of Israel, after bringing his people out from bondage to the Egyptians and to their gods, to say, “I will be their ..
Editor’s Note: The following homiletical help is adapted from Concordia Journal, October 1998. By Jeffrey A. Gibbs Textual observations: The historical situation at the time of Isaiah’s prophecy isimpossible to determine. Oppression by Assyria is one possible setting. These verses are matched with Isaiah 34 as oracles regarding Edom’s doom and Israel’s salvation; the present text is ..
By Jeff Gibbs Colossians 3:1–13 divides neatly into two sections. The first (vv. 1–4) calls believers to focus their attention on Christ, in relation both to his finished work (v. 1“sitting”), as well as the coming work of Christ on the last day (v. 4, “whenever”). The second (vv. 5–13) commands believers to act on ..
This week, I’m thinking about his hands. They were large, strong hands that loved to work with wood—strong hands that were “skilled at the plane and the lathe.” Many of the items in his house were created by his labors on the lathe, at the saw—“dovetail” is a term that had a literal meaning for ..
By Jeffrey Gibbs Textual Notes (using English Bible versification) One of the challenging issues in translation occurs in verse 10, the first verse of the appointed reading. The second line reads, literally, “And whoever loves abundance, not revenue (or income)—also this is vanity.” James Bollhagen suggests that since the particle לֹא normally negates a verb, ..
Thinking about death, and what we believe about life
Just read the article yourself!