Trinity 13, 2024

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Man was made in the image of God. When man rebelled, his own hubris damaged the image. Man, steward of the world, was wounded, throwing the world into disarray. Creation’s harmony was disrupted. If we think of harmony in musical terms, what we get now is dissonance. It grates, and unresolved, it drives us to madness. So the world is filled with insanity, corruption, and death. It is disordered, and man—who was intended to maintain the world’s order and harmony—fulfills not the task God gave us. All this, some of the fathers called trauma. ...

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Holy Thursday Divine Service 2024

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Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread and gave it to His disciples. And the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ immediately started to quarrel.

St. Luke tells us, “Now there was also a dispute among them, as to which of them should be considered the greatest.” (Luke 22:24 NKJV) After this, instead of praying, they slept. Then they fought the guards, Peter slicing off a man’s ear. Then they ran.

But first, they argued. About who was greatest.

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Cantate 2023

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Most people sense that something is deeply wrong in the world; everything from riots in the streets to the incredible rise of depression and suicide indicate this. The US surgeon general recently declared America has an epidemic of loneliness.

What’s been the response? American Christianity from Evangelicalism to the mainline churches set forth a vision of God as a feminized fuzzball of felicitous friendship. All have won and all must have prizes. Meanwhile, the “Tolerance” bumperstickers are gone, and politicians only make demands for reparations, recriminations, or retribution….

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Rogate 2022

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Sometimes you’ll hear folks slander Luther by saying things like, “He took James out of the Bible.” That’s nonsense. He included James, and the entire apocrypha, in his German translation of the Bible. But even if he had removed a book from the Bible, one of the great things about being Lutheran is we don’t have to regard him, or any man, as infallible. But did Luther in his later years keep saying the same things about James? …

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Invocation for the Investiture of the Honorable Liam P. Hardy

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The honorable Liam Hardy is indeed an honorable man. A devoted husband and father, he is also deeply devoted to the mission of this court to balance the needs of the military with an impartial application of constitutional protections to those who appear before this bench. He gave me a certain liberty to give a few remarks prior to our prayer of invocation. As a Lutheran, I’d like to very briefly reflect on the nature and source of law through the lens of a Reformation controversy….

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