“Life in the church at Corinth was a mess and getting messier.” Not much, it seems, has changed. As if the normal schisms and heresies that distress the church weren’t enough, my own church body is in the news because one of our district presidents was arrested by federal agents for crimes against children. There …
Tag: love
Stewarding Life’s Crises
“We train you here to be stewards of life’s crises.” Former chaplain and seminary professor Martin Scharlemann preached those words in chapel at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis decades before I was born. Not much has changed in pastoral ministry since he did. Pastors exist, whether I like it or not, to steward the crises …
The Cake Itself
“God makes music. It is inevitable, therefore, that the men of God whose words we hear in Scripture are singers and poets. They are not poets accidentally, not ‘also’ poets, but poets because they are men of God, the prophets and apostle[s] whose word the church receives and embraces. It is misleading to speak of …
Real Love
“A love that left people alone in their guilt would not be real love.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1990, 1995), 217. Bonhoeffer was speaking about the love Christ had for humanity. By taking on human …
What happens when they are touched by the breath of God?
From its inception nearly two centuries ago, my church body, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod was known to be a church body that, despite all the caricatures (negative or positive, rightly or wrongly attributed) was a church body that had been, to borrow from a father in the faith, grabbed by a book that would not …
Continue reading What happens when they are touched by the breath of God?
What Should We Speak?
One of the reasons I appreciate engaging in historical research, particularly related to the early to mid-twentieth century, is because it reminds me that today is not harder to live in—it only seems that way. To be fair, today is a hard time in which to live for a variety of reasons, not the least …
Love is Prior
This coming Sunday we are planning on having a couple of deaths and resurrections otherwise known as baptisms. As I read the scriptures I see baptism not as something I or others do to show our commitment to God so much as it is God’s way of making disciples of all nations, God’s way of …
The Path of Love
Twenty years before I was born the publishing house of my church body published a book called The Daily Office. It was a daily devotional, structured and rooted in the ancient liturgical traditions of the church. It fell out of use, as devotional texts do, but I was on the hunt for a copy for …
People
The congregation I serve is about a mile from a naval air station. A fairly decent portion of the people who commune with me on a Sunday have connections to that naval base either because they are or were active duty there, engage in or retired from contract work there, or have a friend or …
Today is a day…
I suppose there is no end to the number of emotions people are experiencing this morning. Some are celebrating, they are glad and joyous because the candidate they supported has won. Others are mourning, they are sad and fearful because the candidate they supported has lost. Me? I’m neither celebrating nor in mourning, neither happy …
an occasional theologian 