This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 74-77.
“The Church exists to tell anyone and everyone who knocks on her door wondering what’s inside: Come and see” (pg. 58). Such reminders make The Church a worthwhile read.
The way of the cross is the actual way of victory. Jesus absorbs the worst of what humanity and even the devil can do to him, and he spurns the shame of it all.

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I think we can all agree that there is not a more popular writer on Christ Hold Fast than Chad Bird.
He was a beggar on the streets. And, he was as good as dead if he didn't receive a blessing. The words, "you're cursed" haunted his mind.
Where Jesus says, “She’s not dead, she’s sleeping,” death dies.
When we say in the benediction, “The LORD make His face shine on you,” grace is what we mean.
When our mind betrays us, our body fails us, and our soul can’t be comforted, our Jesus now saves us.
The desire to go home—or to find the place where one truly belongs—is latent in every human being.
Two major themes seem to be running through the readings for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost. The first weaves together the widow who gave of her poverty in Mark 12 and the story of the widow of Zarephath from 1 Kings 17, who also gave to the prophet everything that she had… However, the other theme comes by way of the Epistle from Hebrews 9:24-28, which is about the temple made without hands.
Jesus is the Word of God. God’s Word—on two legs (John 1:14). I’d read it in the first chapter of John’s Gospel many, many times.
Divine election hacking happens with the proposal that God’s Word is irrelevant and powerless, weak and impotent.
The salvation of wretched sinners by an omni-holy and forever-righteous God is, by all accounts, a categorical impossibility.
Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
It’s been my experience that All Saints’ Day, celebrated on November 1st and observed on the first Sunday following, gets overshadowed by the celebration of Reformation Day.