Lectionary Leanings – Sixth Sunday of Easter – 10 May 2026
Texts: Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, Jn 14:15-21
In keeping with my Big Substack Ramp-up announced yesterday, I introduce a new feature for lectionary readers and preachers — and any who are exploring the possibility of anchoring their scriptural work in the lectionary. In keeping with my training and commitments, I will look especially for ethical themes but also just try to follow the texts where they lead.
My plan is to jot down some reflections about the texts and then some “preaching angles” for how I will or would preach these texts. I hope to do this by Tuesday or Wednesday of each week that I am working.
The goal is to provide at least a bit of help for busy homilists, beginning with myself when it is my turn to preach. After all, we all face Sunday every 7th day whether we are ready or not.
This week I will be preaching, so here goes. Here are my thoughts.
ACTS 17:22-31 (all texts NRSV)
22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor[a] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God[b] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
29 “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
In the Church of England, homilists are instructed that Acts 17:22-31 must be used as the first or second reading. Clearly, the Church is communicating emphasis here. They want this text read and probably preached.
Paul here – as depicted by Luke – has a shot at the learned ones and seeking ones of Athens. He looks for a point of connection in their “extremely spiritual” worship of many gods. He seems a bit moved or at least finds a jumping off point with the inscription to an unknown god.
He then makes the turn to God as Creator. His rejection of “shrines made by human hands” is sufficiently broad as to raise questions about temple worship in Jerusalem (still standing at the time of the narrative, almost certainly not at the time of the composition of Acts) or really any built structure where it is supposed that God’s presence especially dwells. That has potentially radical implications.
The universality of God’s creation is morally significant. This is a key text for the idea that all humans come from a common ancestor and thus are all kin. The text goes on to suggest that God puts the hunger for Godself within the human heart, but that humans fumble about trying to find God, not knowing that God is all round us, in us, and we in God.
General revelation gives way to special revelation as Paul moves to make the claim that this endless perennial human history has been interrupted by God’s sending of a man appointed to judge the world and vindicated by being raised from the dead.
These texts open the possibility of emphasizing the enduring human spiritual dimension, the (post)secular era in which we find ourselves, the way Paul connects general human patterns with the claims of Hebrew Bible and Christian Scripture, or even the way Paul attempts to meet his audience where they are. One could also move ahead a bit and mention the rather tepid response Paul received. There is a lot here.
PSALM 66:8-20
Bless our God, O peoples;
let the sound of his praise be heard,
9 who has kept us among the living
and has not let our feet slip.
10 For you, O God, have tested us;
you have tried us as silver is tried.
11 You brought us into the net;
you laid burdens on our backs;
12 you let people ride over our heads;
we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.[a]
13 I will come into your house with burnt offerings;
I will pay you my vows,
14 those that my lips uttered
and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.
15 I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatted calves,
with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams;
I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah
16 Come and hear, all you who fear God,
and I will tell what he has done for me.
17 I cried aloud to him,
and he was extolled with my tongue.
18 If I had cherished iniquity in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened.
19 But truly God has listened;
he has heard the words of my prayer.
20 Blessed be God,
who has not rejected my prayer
or removed his steadfast love from me.
This text appears to reflect the aftermath of a communal and personal-within-communal crisis followed by divine deliverance that evokes gratitude for answered prayer. It may be that this psalm was placed by the lectionary with Acts 17:22ff. because of the call to all peoples to bless God. Not seeing how to really weave this into the sermon. Let’s see what happens next.
1 PETER 3:13-22
13 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? 14 But even if you do suffer for doing what is right,[a] you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear,[b] and do not be intimidated, 15 but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you, 16 yet do it with gentleness and respect. Maintain a good conscience so that, when you are maligned,[c] those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. 17 For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. 18 For Christ also suffered[d] for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you[e] to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20 who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight lives, were saved through water. 21 And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for[f] a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.
Note the textual variants here, though none are all that significant. This text is a manifesto of resistance for a community under pressure, perhaps the beginnings of persecution: Live clean. Give your enemies no ammunition. Prepare for being attacked but do not be afraid or intimidated. Get ready to offer your defense but without hostility or disrespect.
The moral exhortations are rooted in an expansive account of Christ’s innocent, redemptive suffering, with the very unusual claim about preaching in the netherworld to the souls of the dead, and then up through resurrection and ascension. The Apostles Creed picked up this claim but it was dropped in the Nicene Creed and sounds unfamiliar to most Christians now. One could pull on this thread in scripture but this seems a bit much for a Sunday homily.
Finally, the Gospel reading.
JOHN 14:15-21
15 “If you love me, you will keep[a] my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,[b] to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be[c] in[d] you.
18 “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
This is two weeks in a row that the lectionary Gospel has been in John 14. I have to say that John’s looping, mystical prose is always a struggle for me. Last week (Jn 14:7-14) when preaching I emphasized the liminal space both Jesus and the disciples found themselves in. His death is coming, but not yet; all that they have known is ending, and what is to come is not present yet. Jesus offers comfort within that liminality. (I think it was my dear friend Jonathan Merritt at the Post-Evangelical Conference that took me to that theme when he spoke in Boston.)
Here the comfort continues. The Advocate (Holy Spirit) will be sent and will stay with them forever, and this is how Jesus will continue to be spiritually present.
Here as well moral exhortation follows: show your love by keeping Christ’s commandments. This is how we show and know that we love Jesus, by keeping his commandments. A classic Johannine theme.
POTENTIAL PREACHING ANGLES (PREVIEW)
It looks to me like one could go theological or ethical with these texts, but it would be a stretch to do both in a homily.
Theological: The human quest for God but/and the biblical revelation of God as Creator, Incarnate One, Holy Spirit. Humans reach up to God from below, God reaches “down” to us from “above” and “around.” And we often miss each other anyway. Add the psalm text and you get God as both allowing oppression and delivering from oppression. That could link to 1 Peter. Some very rich exploratory theology is possible around the descent of Jesus to “prison.”
The Acts passage has the implication that all murder is fratricide, matricide, parricide, because we are all kin. Note that the Nazis were among those who tried to destroy this idea of the common parenthood and thus the kinship of all mankind. I have a copy of the Nazi Primer, an actual grade school text, which says that such an idea is a pernicious myth that must be replaced by believing in the “fact” of racial hierarchy. Relatedly, Acts 17:26 should be read as emphasizing God’s sovereignty -- and not, as tragically once held by some, the idea that the “races” or “peoples” should live segregated into God-given territories. This idea should be explicitly rejected if this text is preached.
The 1 Peter passage is instructive in shaping nonviolent, loving, resistant Christians. Not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Not motivated by hatred but by Jesus’ example. There’s a version of Christian public ethics here, like this: live blamelessly, set apart, gentle, trusting in God yet always aware that the public arena may turn hostile; ready for this, too.
The John passage like elsewhere in the Johannine literature essentially reduces the content of Jesus’ moral teaching to the command to love and makes everything a test proved by love or its lack. I am attracted to the idea of focusing in a sermon on how radical and praxis-oriented this is: do you love God? Prove it by your love. Want to experience God’s presence? Only if you love.
I think that I will center that theme in John 14 and then work in Acts 17 and 1 Peter around it.