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 MoreThe whole power of the mass consists in the words of Christ, in which he testifies that…
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 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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A gem from Luther:
We have Easter as often as we celebrate the Mass, preach, and administer the holy Sacrament. With us Christians every day is Easter, except that for ancient memory’s sake we observe a special Easter once a year. And that is not wrong but good and laudable, to observe the time when Christ died and rose again, even though our remembrance of His suffering and resurrection is not restricted to such a time but may be done on any day. As He says: “As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of Me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
LW 13, pp355–356
The “celebrations of life” people hold now pretend that what has happened isn’t real. The funeral homes with flowers everywhere—flowers that themselves will be dead in mere days—cover with their sickening sweetness the stench of death in a corpse we’ve filled with formaldehyde to pretend none of this is really happening….
Read MoreThere are many congregations, but one church. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic church finds its expression in local assemblies. That’s what the word church means: assembly. Today’s Epistle reading is a letter to one of those local assemblies: “To the church of God that is in Corinth.”
We tend to think of Christianity in individual terms, a private faith, a personal experience or decision. Certainly the individual is involved, but Paul writes to Corinth as he does to all the other local congregations: collectively…
Read MoreA gem from Luther:
Christ is nothing other than sheer life, as his saints are likewise. The more profoundly you impress that image upon your heart and gaze upon it, the more the image of death will pale and vanish of itself without struggle or battle. Thus your heart will be at peace and you will be able to die calmly in Christ and with Christ, as we read in Revelation [14:13], “Blessed are they who die in the Lord Christ.”
LW 42:104
“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” It’s not an example. Many of our dreams are the fruits of anxiety or indigestion. I once had a dream that Fritz Pauling and I were in Italy stealing a pipe organ. I don’t plan to do what I dreamed. (Although it might make a pretty good buddy caper movie.) The kind of dream Joseph has is extremely rare. But it should remind us of another Joseph: the son of Jacob who had that amazing technicolor dreamcoat. His dreams got him thrown into a pit, then sold into slavery. To where? Egypt. See the similarities? With this new Joseph, and the Mother and Child, God is going to redo the Exodus.
So the “Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying.…” Angel means messenger. An angel speaks; that is his purpose: he brings God’s Word to particular people. What’s the message?
Read MoreThere’s always a bit of a letdown after the holidays. The Bible stories that come after Christmas are no exception. From glad tidings of great joy, we move to King Herod plotting the murder of the infant Jesus. When he cannot ascertain which boy he is, Herod responds with horrific ruthlessness: “Kill them all.”
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