Feasts for the Kingdom: Sermons for the Liturgical Year. By Khaled Anatolios. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. 318 pp. $19.99 (paper).
In Feasts for the Kingdom, Khaled Anatolios offers the Church a gift that is increasingly rare: sustained, theologically rich, and genuinely liturgical preaching. Across forty-one homilies ordered to the feasts of the church year, Anatolios helps the reader—and hearer—enter the life of Christ as it unfolds through the rhythms of the liturgical calendar: his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection. These sermons are not merely reflections on isolated texts but invitations to participate in a coherent, canonical, and ecclesial vision of Scripture as it is received, prayed, and enacted by the Church across time. The result is preaching that does more than explain; it forms.
What makes this volume especially valuable is its clear demonstration of what good liturgical sermonizing actually is. In an evangelical-heavy culture where preaching is often reduced to topical relevance, verse-by-verse exposition, or abstract dogmatic instruction, Anatolios models a different—and older—homiletical logic. His sermons certainly draw on exegesis, doctrine, and thematic focus, but they do so within a larger theological horizon shaped by the practices of the historic Church: liturgy, sacrament, feast, and fast. Scripture is read canonically and ecclesially, not as a static historical artifact but as a living word that gathers the community into something enduring, objective, and eschatological. Doctrine is laid out clearly, yet always in service of participation—drawing the faithful into the mystery proclaimed rather than merely informing them about it.
For Anglicans in particular, this book arrives at a timely moment. As Anglican priest-theologians continue to retrieve the roots of the ecumenical Church and deepen their engagement with a truly catholic Christianity—one marked by sacramental continuity, dogmatic coherence, and ecumenical authority (not Roman in the narrow sense, but catholic in the fullest sense)—Anatolios proves to be a wise and constructive interlocutor. His homilies provide a concrete model for preaching that is liturgically grounded without being obscure, theologically ambitious without being inaccessible, and historically rooted without being rigidly bound to the past. Feasts of the Kingdom will reward careful reading and imitation, especially for those seeking to recover a homiletical practice that forms communities not only to understand the faith, but to inhabit it.
