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.
But while scholars are right to focus on the bond between Martin and Hans, the evidence of Martin’s own words suggests their relationship may not have been as troubled as some suppose. For Hans Luther was not a cartoon villain but a normal human being attempting to make his way in the world and raise his children to the best of his ability.
Jesus offers something infinitely better. He tells us to put down our gavel—not because sin isn't real, but because the only Judge who has the right to condemn is the very One who was condemned for us.

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It is the strangest of morgues—people arrive dead as doornails and leave alive.
In his Gospel account, Luke challenges us to play "Where is Jesus?"
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.