Worship never existed as escape from the world, but preparation for life within it.
For many years, I held piety as my god.
The reasoning was always the same. The gods were angry. The gods were hungry. The gods required payment.

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For many years, I held piety as my god.
A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
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.
What do such callings look like? They are ordinary and everyday.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.
There’s a difference between refusing revenge and refusing responsibility.
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.
The story of your life stretches beyond the dash on the tombstone.
To know the cure is not to become immune to sorrow.
If Psalms 1 and 2 reveal the Christ who reigns, Psalms 3 and 4 reveal the Christ who remains.
While Thoreau’s Walden is seen as a central text of that most American of virtues—self-reliance—quiet ambition as envisioned by Tinetti is exactly the opposite: dependence on God.
For the Christian, the iron gate of death was opened by the blood of Christ and the empty tomb.