First Sunday of Advent 2025
One problem with transgenderism is it embraces the lie. A man presents himself as a woman (or a woman a man), and demands others go along with the illusion, or delusion….
Read MoreThanksgiving 2025
When resources are scarce, anxiety is over food. Jesus asks, “Why do you worry about what you will eat?”
There’s no scarcity in America. But there’s still anxiety. And the anxiety still often connects to food. We eat our feelings. Or drink our feelings. Or find other ways to make ourselves numb – doomscrolling, binge watching, cyber shopping – something to distract us from our meaningless lives trapped on the conveyor belt, ending in a nursing home reeking of urine and loneliness.
“Do not be anxious about anything,” the Epistle for Thanksgiving says. How? Anxiety is our daily bread….
Read MoreThe Last Sunday in the Church Year 2025
In today’s vernacular, virgin is synonymous with loser. Something is wrong with you, the culture assumes, if you remain thus until marriage. God’s Word declares the opposite. He made intimacy for marriage.
Some are, indeed, called to celibacy. There is nothing wrong with remaining unmarried. Yet, married or not, God made us for community….
Read MoreTrinity 26 (Observed) 2025
“I think I’m going to hell.” A text like today’s can provoke such a thought.
One wonders if the invention of purgatory was in part to deal with texts like today’s. I don’t meet the standard of the sheep, but perhaps if I can work off my sins in purgatory, then I might stand a chance.
But there is no purgatory. It’s taught nowhere in the Bible. It’s taught nowhere in the Apocrypha. It’s not nowhere in the first few centuries of Christianity. The Lord Jesus presents two stark realities – the sheep and the goats, the blessed and the cursed, the eternal kingdom or the everlasting fire, punishment or life….
Read MoreAll Saints 2025
“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” [Gen 2.25]. So ends the creation narrative. Our first parents did not know evil. They knew only the good.
They fell. And in falling, they hid. From God, and from each other.
“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings” [Gen 3.7].
It was insufficient. They blamed each other. They hid from God. But you cannot hide from Him. He sees. He hears. He knows….
Read MoreTrinity 18, 2025
“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 MoreThe Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 2025
He’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 2025
St. 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 MoreHoly Cross 2025
On 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 MoreCommemoration of Charles James Kirk and Vigil for Our Nation
Why 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….
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