Whether a Christian enjoys high church, low church, or something in between, aesthetics in the Church are not about any one individual person and their particular tastes. Aesthetics are, fundamentally, not a matter of legalism, but of edification—that the Gospel of Christ might be preached and taught to all peoples, unhindered by its medium.
Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.

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The Church is called to be counter-cultural, to stand out in order that the world might see and hear the truth and be brought into the Kingdom.
Paul says he would inherit the entire world, not merely a little plot of land between Egypt and Syria. This is what God is after in the Messiah: All people and the entire Earth.
Jesus promises to work for you, forgiving your sins, but He also promises to work through you, forming you into a witness to the world.
The original sin of Genesis 3 was not gutter-style-sin, but glory-style-sin. It was more of an upward grasp than a downward fall. - Nathan Hoff
There’s a delicious freedom to wrongdoing. It taps a primal desire within us for rebellion. We feel liberated, unshackled by demands to be this way, do this, avoid that. We become masters of our own destiny.
Ash Wednesday confronts us with our true nature, our mortality, and marks us with the only escape from it: the cross of Christ.
God says, “Cross,” and we say, “Glory!” Sometimes – a lot of times – he knocks the glory glasses off our faces.
We all share a common hope. The same hope that converted Augustine, drove Martin Luther out of the monastery and calls horrible sinners to new life every day.
But this is not a story of Jesus being taken many places. This is a story of Jesus remaining in one place and deepening in His love of the Spirit and the Father.
The main point Paul has been getting at in Romans is what God has done in the One man Jesus the Messiah—the rightful heir of God’s earthly kingdom—is far, far more than simply putting the human race back where it was before the intrusion of sin.
The Seed of the woman is he who will crush the head of the evil one and restore man to a right and proper relationship with God.
This article is the second installment in 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.