A Dangerous Report: Challenging Sermons for Advent and Easter

This volume is tightly packed with surprising insights one simply does not normally hear from the pulpit but yet are so obviously implied in the biblical narratives of Christmas and Easter. Dr. Ellens has a unique way of cracking open familiar biblical sentences and stories and spilling out an entirely fresh cornucopia of life-changing insights about the radical nature of the good news about God's grace. Ideas and metaphors from the Bible that we have heard or read so often that they have become routine and cliche suddenly flower with refreshing new meanings and intimations. Dr. Ellens' carefully and cogently expressed biblical interpretation and sermon oratory incarnate God's truth and bring to lively new vitality a vivid experience of the God as the driving force of Divine Spirit in our personal lives and in history. Preaching has seldom been this engaging, powerful, and spiritually empowering in a long time. This warm hearted book is a clear and clarion call for one central theme: God's radical, uncalculating, unconditional, and universal forgiving grace. Claims for God's redemptive presence and intent for our world that pulpiteers have often feared, avoided, or failed to see in the center of the gospel are here set forth with unapologetic boldness. Dr. Ellens' trumpet is not muted at any point. Obviously this hearty soul has a passion for souls, a stimulating mind, and an informed pastoral appeal for life-changing encounters with the biblical story of the insinuation of God's self into human and history life at Christmas, Easter, and all the rest of the time.