God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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He finds the woman and the man in the Garden and fought back for the identity of His people.
Sometimes we try be the bad god, sometimes the good god, oftentimes a freaky hybrid of both. The result is the same: Jesus the savior just gets in our way.
If the devil took over a church, I suspect it would be bursting at the seams every Sunday, with smiling faces, clean noses, straight morals, conservative voting, institutional fidelity
It was Jesus who appeared to Hagar, comforted her, and gave her the promise of future blessings. It was Jesus who came to her when it seemed everything and everyone else had let her down.
In our time Christ has not left us bereft of unbroken signs of His promised return.
Although I was too young to have mastered the skill of lying, I also knew that I couldn’t tell this woman the truth.
We can leave all the stuff of life behind, because our great treasure God flaunts before the world on Calvary.
He lavishly pours out His rest in the waters of Baptism, in the spoken words of absolution from the pastor’s lips, in the preaching of the cross and resurrection, in the consumption of heavenly cuisine from the table at which He is host and meal.
A promise was made to my older brother roughly 50 years ago. He was just an infant and had no idea that this promise was being set upon him.
What we see in the face of this God is not a loathing expression. We find the face of a compassionate man who knew all about shame himself.
The chief verb of the liturgy is the gift of God’s forgiveness for the sake of Jesus Christ.
O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus he says to these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.