We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.

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No, when the Lord is ready for battle, of all creatures, he commissions Mary’s little lamb.
Like any language, the liturgy has syntax—a structure that provides order and intelligibly communicates meaning through all that is said.
Take away the water, words, bread and wine. Can you be a Christian without water, words, bread and wine?
Israel’s priests were ordained with the blood of a sacrifice applied to their ear, their thumb, and their toe, for they were to hear God’s word, handle His holy things, and walk in His ways. But none was perfect, all were flawed.
What Jesus did and gives on these two Thursdays encapsulates his whole life and mission.
Over the next few months, I invite you to join me in looking at what the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions have to say about the subject of worship through the lens of language.
That man you see on the tree—he is the re-Genesis of the world. He has come to remake us alive and free and beautiful on the Friday of his crucifixion.
Thankfully, our heavenly Father sent a Champion into the game to take our place. What we failed to do, He accomplished.
He is the God who makes His glory visible in lowliness and servitude. He is the God who is so poor that He must borrow a donkey to ride into Jerusalem.
I looked up at the cross and saw what God had become to bring me home. He had become what I was.
People lamented that ancient paganism was dead, but the same people who profess that they would love an old pagan feast ignore Christmas, where the best of paganism has survived.
700 years before the first Noel, the prophet Isaiah prophesied that Christ would bear our grief and deliver us in grace. Scholars often refer to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 as the "fifth gospel" because it describes both that Christ was crucified and why Christ was crucified with incredible detail.