Luther felt the reform of the church could not simply remain a matter of aesthetics and practice. Something much deeper needed to be rooted out.
While God can, and often does, appear to people face to face, he also often employs the use of several types of messengers.
The “further up and further in” we go, the table keeps getting bigger, the guest list keeps getting longer, and the grace keeps on flowing.

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Belief at Christmas is neither neat nor safe. It is the path that leads to the manger and, from there, to the cross.
Are you looking for rest? Is your heart cluttered? Are you searching for comfort? Just look at the King-sized bed.
The Great King comes for us.
While Christmas may or may not have pagan roots, it will certainly have a pagan future if Christians lose sight of what it is all about.
Longstanding tradition must be bolstered by something outside of ourselves that also lies outside of the traditions of men.
In Scripture, laments are raw expressions of grief, but they always point to hope. What if our culture’s obsession with holiday lights is an unconscious way of crying out, “We need good news, and we need it now”?
We love hearing about Jesus, but we also love hearing about how much effort we need to exert to truly pull off this whole “Christian life” thing.
No matter how many times we hear this good news, it never stops being good news.
Our faith is precisely where Paul puts it, namely, in the blood of Christ.
This is an edited excerpt from Addendum A, “The Church Year,” On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service, written by Michael Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023), pgs. 113-120.
This is an excerpt from “Confession and Absolution” by John T. Pless in Common Places in Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly, edited by Mark Mattes, (1517 Publishing 2023).
One way or another, Rod always found a way to bring whatever story he was telling back to the gospel and God's grace in Christ.