Worship never existed as escape from the world, but preparation for life within it.
For many years, I held piety as my god.
The reasoning was always the same. The gods were angry. The gods were hungry. The gods required payment.

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Jesus is the only answer to the nagging question. He is the only way to make sense of this unsettling story in Exodus 4.
If it’s all a fiction spun by disappointed disciples, if it’s a mere symbol for the idea of an inner awakening, if it’s not a fact that Christ has been raised, then our grief and loss have no end, and we have no hope.
This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
In Memory of My Friend, James Arne Nestingen
While the world is full of horizons and endpoints, for Christians, there is always tomorrow, and there are people in that tomorrow waiting for us as we wait for them.
We ache in eager anticipation as we see Christ in action and as we take in the snapshots of his life, death, and resurrection.
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
Whatever else may be said about the Last Day it consists of these two inseparable things: Christ’s coming and His kingdom people being gathered to Him.
There is no true life and meaningful community apart from forgiveness.
Both now and forever, the bruised and crucified Lord nailed to a cross is our assurance of deliverance.