When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.
The life we are trying to manage, improve, and secure is not something to be mastered. It is something to be surrendered. And this is where everything changes. Because in Christ, the approval we are seeking has already been spoken.
It is within this charged atmosphere that Luther’s writings take on their full significance. His responses to the Turkish threat were not merely reactions to military events; they were rooted in a deep theological reflection on the nature of God’s rule over the world, the responsibilities of Christian rulers, and the role of the Church in times of crisis.

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In the beginning I was the Word, and I as Word was the Beginning. By me all things were created, both in the heavens and in the earth, visible and invisible. All things have been created by me and for me (Colossians 1:16). Therefore, already in the opening word of the Hebrew Bible, Bereshith, I am.
I’ve come to realize at the tender age of 47 that sometimes church doesn’t work.
I was asked to write one on Hebrews 4:14-16, to be read on Thursday, February 20. Among the finds that Luke and I discovered this weekend was that meditation.
If you haven't seen this video clip yet (and even if you have), it's worth watching (again) regardless of your taste for Colbert's style of humor. In it, he trounces the typically smug fundamentalist-turned-liberal Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, who is so used to being fawned over by members of the media that Colbert's defiance leaves him at a near loss for words.
But there’s more to this movie than excellent Lego graphics and artistic; in other words, imaginative storytelling.
I sin more in thirty minutes than those of the “victorious Christian life” supposedly sin in thirty years.
An understanding and appreciation of the goodness (and given-ness) of place and family, and the vocations attending each, can of course be taught and learned in a classroom or by means of a book.
The thing is, not only is fixing our past impossible; who’s to say we wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes? In fact, who’s to say we wouldn’t make matters even worse?
Waits wants to pen the songs with beautiful melodies and lyrics dark as sin. Whatever his church background, he sings “the big print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
For all our best efforts—political and evangelistic—our approach should always be through the Theology of the Cross. Our gardens are still bloody, but the blood of the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world will one day restore peace to our gardens.
What we confess concerning a corpse confesses much about how deep, or how shallow, is our understanding of the importance of the incarnation of Jesus, his death, and his (as well as our own) resurrection.
The concept of Theology as science is foreign to our ‘enlightened’ century where the subject has been removed to the Liberal Arts category.