Customer Reviews

Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol. 2

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Having just finished my training as a lay pastor (PCUSA), I am, for the time being, serving area churches as pulpit supply. I have found Feasting on the Word (both volumes one and two) to be invaluable in preparing a sermon. All the Revised Common Lectionary readings for each Sunday are printed and for each reading there is a theological, a pastoral, an exegetical, and a homiletical short essay --- that is 16 essays for each week --- written by experts in the field. I bought these with the future in mind and am very pleased that they include all the Sundays even the ones that aren't used this year ---- Volume One includes the 7th, 8th, and 9th Sundays in Ordinary Time. These are very helpful and I plan to purchase each volume as it becomes available.

As a pastor from a congregation that uses the lectionary, I find this resource very helpful. For each of the four Scripture passages assigned to each Sunday--Old Testament, Psalms, Gospels and New Testament--there are four articles--exegetical, theological, homolectical and pastoral. That makes a total of 16 different authors available as resource for each Sunday's sermon. Since purchasing this resource, I have come across new insights into familiar texts, which helps in preaching. I'm excited to use the resource more regularly. I can imagine that a few lay people might even enjoy reading some of the essays devotionally in preparation for Sunday.

I am a tri-vocational, part-time local pastor in the United Methodist Church. Besides my church and my day job, I also serve as a City Councilman for my city-ward. So I keep a fairly busy schedule. I am something of a book-addict and have literally hundreds of books that I will never live long enough to read, including many commentary sets.

This is by far the best set of books that I have come across for sermon preparation. I especially like the commentaries for the homiletically and pastoral perspectives. They are so good at getting the mind working as to how to most effectively relate specifically to my parishioners the scripture text(s) I am going to use for the week. Even if I am not going to use a particular passage in any way during the week, I still like to read the commentary as there is so much to learn in these volumes.

I have followed the lectionary since beginning my church ministry two years ago, but have veered off for the season of Lent. As someone previously mentioned, there is scripture index in the back of each volume, that I have used; and as luck would have it, the text I needed yesterday for the First Sunday in Lent, was in one of the three volumes already issued. I greatly look forward to receiving each volume as they are issued. The price (especially with the Amazon discount) is money well spent.

This is the best materialfor sermon preparation that i have ever used. Every person who preaches the Common Lectionary should invest in this series.

I've enjoyed what I've read so far. Good writers and a great idea of breaking up the four ways of seeing the scripture right on the same pages.