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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It's easy to forget that today, just like then, most people who laud Luther publicly as a reformer, revolutionary, and so on, secretly reject his teaching because it's too much to take.
This evening we will together take a very abbreviated look at what led Luther down the long road to the discovery of the Gospel.
Lose trust in the free grace of the righteousness of Christ alone, and the holiness of the Church and all in her is lost.
True freedom, Luther discovered, is found in Jesus crucified who sets us free.
We who fall within the Protestant camp of Christianity have longstanding issues with ritual. I get that. Ritual is often abused. Idolatrized. It can easily devolve into a hollow act of religious farce.
Fairy tales are but one chapter in the book we call storytelling. We may prefer reading other kinds of stories (mystery, science fiction, and so on).
Not long ago I was having a conversation with a friend. She was facing a big decision about her career with a deadline looming for a decision.
I love books. I love authors. I love the way putting words down on paper incarnates ideas that might otherwise remain ghosts of the mind, flitting here and there in our gray matter.
Before long I was deeply involved in the trilogy (the reader is invariably "drawn into" the story in a unique way, and for a good reason as we shall see).
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.
As the story unfolds we see Luther’s Heidelberg theses on display, even before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell.
What Jesus did and gives on these two Thursdays encapsulates his whole life and mission.