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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Sometimes we have to strain hard to hear words deeper than our hearts. Words not from inside, but outside. Words from God, not our own self-spun narratives.
The end of the pursuit isn't regeneration, but degeneration. We're fighting fire with bottles of gasoline.
God says, “Cross,” and we say, “Glory!” Sometimes – a lot of times – he knocks the glory glasses off our faces.
Ultimately the Christian life isn't about progress, it's about promise--the Pilgrim's Promise.
This article begins an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
Virtue, like all good things, can easily be weaponized. And not only can, but constantly is. Indeed, I would argue that, for churchgoing, rule-following, tradition-honoring, morality-applauding people, virtue often becomes the cancer that we deem a badge of honor.
The Church gathers around the Word and Sacrament in order to receive Christ and each other.
His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.
It would do us well to expand what we mean when we say catechesis and consequently broaden the reach of theological education into daily life.
The gospel is the good news that in Christ we have been given the very righteousness of Christ himself. This means that everything God commands of us is given to us in Christ as a gift.
Pelagius maintained an orthodox appearance while rejecting original sin and the distinction between law and gospel.