Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
08/17/26
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
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08/14/26
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.
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Mark Mattes
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06/15/26
The church is not renewed when one pastor tries to do the work of the whole body. The church is renewed when Christ’s body begins to act like a body again.
02/20/26
When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
01/20/26
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
01/08/26
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.
02/13/25
This is an excerpt from Ditching the Checklist: Assurance of Salvation for Evangelicals (and Other Sinners) by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 5-7.
03/21/23
This is an excerpt from the introduction of “Common Places in Christian Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly,” edited by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2023).
06/23/21
The reformers were compelled to confess the true faith and challenge corrupt practices—this is what the Augsburg Confession is about.
03/08/21
It’s not the disciples’ faith that invented the resurrection but the resurrection that gave birth to the disciples’ faith.
11/12/20
The following is an adaptation from "Law and Gospel in Action" written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
04/09/19
The Gospel restores us to our true humanity, embeds us in the body of Christ, feeds us with Christ’s own body, and offers us a community.
02/27/19
God is used to working with colorful figures. One of the most colorful in the Bible is Balaam. Hailing from Mesopotamia, Balaam was what we might call a shaman or a soothsayer.
02/22/19
The following is an excerpt from Law and Gospel in Action written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
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