“Love is love” was the slogan that carried same-sex marriage across the goal-line. It meant that whatever love is, it’s the same regardless of subject and object. A husband’s love for his wife is the same as two members of a same-sex partnering.
The effect was to diminish love to lust. “Love is love” meant every kind of lust, every kind of desire is equally valid and beyond critique. The same arguments could—and indeed already are being made for pedophilia….
Read MoreHe’s dead. Her little boy. All she had. She’s a widow. What’s more, she’s a widow who trusted in God. She listened to His prophet Elijah.
Last week, we heard how Elijah came to her in the midst of a famine. She was literally preparing her last supper, her and the little boy. But at the Word of God’s prophet, the jug of oil did not run out, and the jar of flour did not empty. They survived the famine. Only for this to now happen….
Read MoreSt. Matthew’s Gospel ends with well-known words, the so-called Great Commission. Jesus says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations.”
There’s been a tremendous tension in American Christianity for the last half-century or more about the purpose of the church. The tension is sometimes presented as “mission” versus “maintenance.” Some churches and pastors are “missional,” meaning they want to make disciples. “Maintenance” churches and pastors don’t care about that, they just want to exist for themselves. Those are the caricatures.
The mistake in this way of thinking is that being a disciple is a binary thing, either you are or you aren’t. The switch is on or off.
It’s more complicated than that. The words St. Matthew put at the end of his Gospel say a little more: “Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”
Baptism begins the life of the disciple, and it is accompanied by a continual teaching, an ongoing catechesis to observe everything Jesus commanded….
Read MoreOn September 14 in the year 320, St. Helena supposedly discovered the wood of Christ’s cross. Helena was the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who decriminalized Christianity in Rome.
Did Helena really find the wood of the true cross? I don’t know. There were many such claims. Luther once joked that if you gathered all the pieces of the true cross in Germany, you’d have enough wood to build a barn!
I do know one thing, though: If I found a piece of the true cross, I would keep it. It would be important, because the history is important. Christ is the center of all human history. The Christian faith is grounded in history….
Read MoreWhy does it hurt? I found myself strangely transfixed by the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I would occasionally watch clips of him talking with college students. I admired his courage and charity, and his ability to confess the Gospel with great clarity. But I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about him or his work. I wasn’t his target audience.
So why did his assassination seem to matter so much? It’s more than a young man with so much promise being cut down, leaving behind a wife and two very little children. His murder is the outgrowth of a deep spiritual battle that has been raging. It signifies the descent into a new kind of darkness, where a man who simply wanted to have a conversation, and talk about freedom, and the crisis of fatherlessness, and his faith in Jesus – when a man like that can be so hated, and slandered, and vilified, that his murder is celebrated across the nation – then something has deeply changed.
His willingness to speak the truth was met with violence and lies. It makes it feel like the light is dying. So it hurts. Because it’s about more than a man. It feels like the idea of America is dying. And worse, it feels like the Gospel is losing. These are dark days.
But we cannot stay there. For Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome….
Read MoreThe man who perpetrated heinous evil at Annunciation school in Minneapolis depicted himself in his journal as a demon. Indeed, the transgender ideology is demonic. It seeks to undo God’s creation of the human person as distinctly and irrevocably male and female. In his journal he reflects on his experience of possession: “I feel like there is some kind of god … controlling me…. I suddenly start writing things that I don’t even think of myself.” He describes losing time, another experience of people who are possessed by malevolent spirits.
Demons are real. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of darkness. The devil wants to destroy humanity….
Read MoreThere’s a classic rock song where a woman is buying the stairway to heaven. The Tower of Babel was intended to reach up into heaven. The stairway or ladder represents human history: man’s attempt to achieve bliss, heaven, nirvana, through experience, conquest, lust, inebriation. Get that job, get that car, get that phone, get that girl, get the ocean view – with a moment of purchase we can climb the stairway to heaven.
Even though most of you have identified as disciples of Jesus, you’ve got the same impulse. You think that if you work hard, make the right decisions, buy the right stuff, you’ll be happy, you’ll be better, you’ll get satisfaction.
Religion sells the same thing by means of ethics or experience. The right spiritual effort, or good works, can get you up the ladder. It’s embedded in the 18th century hymn, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.”
But the whole point of the narrative with Jacob, and culminating in Nathanael’s encounter with Jesus, is that the ladder cannot be climbed by us. The ladder first of all descends, bringing God down to us….
Read MoreIn the ancient church, the renunciations at the time of baptism were more robust. Today, in many churches, when a person is baptized, he is asked if he renounces the devil, and all his works, and all his ways. But in the ancient church, there were often more extensive renunciations. One of these was the word “pomp.” “Do you renounce the devil’s pomps?”
“Pomp” comes for the Latin pompa - an ostentatious procession or display. A popular piece of music at secular graduations is called “Pomp and Circumstance.”…
Read MoreIt’s not difficult understanding the Bible, the Bible is clear – but it is very difficult to confess and do what it says. A lot of the extraneous, fanciful theology is finding interpretations around the clear teaching. Men look for some way to explain the Bible in a way that ends up rationalizing our continued unwillingness to just do what the Bible says. Let’s be honest; the first thing we think when we hear a saying like, “Turn the other cheek” is, “But what about this situation? I’m not turning the other cheek for that jerk. I want justice!” But the only footnotes to the Bible are the ones we put there. The only qualifications and rationalizations are the ones we invent, loopholes to subvert and dismiss the clear Word of God.
Read MoreChristianity “is not without good works” and “proves itself with good fruits” [LW 57: 191]. Luther said that in a sermon on this day in 1535. Faith alone is how we are saved; but faith is never alone. Luther continues in his introduction to that sermon, “the one who wishes to be a Christian must be serious about it and not hypocritical.”
Are you serious about it? That’s the question we each must ask: are we serious about being a disciple of Jesus?
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