The Festival of the Reformation 2024

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The history in Europe is of church decline through tyrannical governments.

But the church in America has declined with only mild hostility from the state. What has caused the decline here? Americans view church membership with less loyalty than a gym, supermarket, or airline preference. Convenience and amenities triumph over doctrine. The politics of the community matter more than the confession of faith. In the middle ages, backs were whipped in penance, and we call it darkness. Today votes are whipped, and we call it democracy. This is not reformation.

We cannot celebrate the Reformation today without acknowledging the need for reformation in our own congregation, and for each of us to confess the need for reformation in his own life….

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Psalms of Lament: Psalm 90

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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….

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Oculi 2024

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There can be no neutrality with respect to Jesus. “He who is not with Me is against Me.” Still some want it both ways. They want to think of themselves as Christians, but they refuse to make a real break from the Old Adam, the sinful nature. C.F.W. Walther, nineteenth-century German pastor who came to America, he called those who want it both ways “half-Christians”: …

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Psalms of Lament: Psalm 6 [Lent 2024]

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Lamentation doesn’t fit the American religion. We are inculcated to seek success. Prosperity comes from work.

In the Psalter, however, we have genres that do not fit the American mindset. The Psalms address not only thanksgiving and praise, but desolation and grief, guilt and loss.

The Psalms of Lament teach us to see ourselves, in the words of Jürgen Moltmann, “Limping, but blessed”…

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The Epiphany of Our Lord 2024

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Tribulation is a gift. It doesn’t feel like it at the time. Nevertheless, tribulation is a gift. It is a gift because it prepares us for the Gospel.

The journey of the Magi (“wise men”) to the Christ shows this to us. The Magi don’t find Jesus where they are looking (Jerusalem). Instead they meet a fiendish and duplicitous Herod. Led by the Holy Spirit, the path to Christ went through anxiety and need….

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Christ Is Nothing Other than Sheer Life

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A 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

Eighth Sunday after Trinity

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The Speaker of the House visited Taiwan last week. Her visit threatened to disrupt America’s official policy on Taiwan: strategic ambiguity. I think that’s what we have going on in our own lives, especially as Christianity intersects desire: strategic ambiguity. We’re partially but not fully committed to being disciples of Jesus. Christianity is good, but let’s not take it too far.

But God demands an end to our ambiguity. “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” [James 4.4]….

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Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2022

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I’ve been listening to a lot of Miles Davis the last few years. He was a brilliant jazz trumpeter and composer who kept reinventing himself from bebop to cool jazz to funk to fusion. The seminal sound of film noir came from his score to Elevator to the Gallows, which he and his group played by just jamming while the film was playing. As far as music goes, he didn’t have many natural limitations.

I used to want to be a jazz musician. I can understand what’s happening, but to actually perform it like the pros, you need a mind that runs about 20x faster than mine. I spent years practicing, but I have too many natural limitations….

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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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