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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The resurrection of Jesus was the moment when the one true God appointed the Man through whom the whole cosmos would be brought back into its proper order. A man got us into this mess; the Man would get it out again.
From mountain to mountain, from meal to meal the LORD God points us to His banquet, already prepared; the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which shall have no end!
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
That is why we dance on graves. That is why we smile in the midst of sorrowful tears. That is why we retell old stories and share humorous memories.
When Christians die, heaven does not “get another angel.” We cannot become angels any more than we can become giraffes or ocean waves or stars. We are people and will remain so after this present life. God did not make a mistake when he made us human.
Spoiler alert! Jesus rose from the grave with the assurance that all believers will rise bodily with Him on the Last Day. And truth be told, Easter wasn't the first spoiler.
Shaking off our sleep, bright and clear, we will open our eyes and huge smiles will come over our faces as we see the familiar faces of so many friends.
The more we demand from Christ, the more of Himself He gives to us. When we demand a glass of grace, He gives us an ocean of Gospel.
When talking about God’s ultimate destination for us, we’ve grown sloppy in our language, nearsighted in our gaze, and un-Easter in our hope. We act and speak as if dying and going to heaven is what the faith is all about. It is most emphatically not.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
If the resurrection were just a repetition of this world, then it would be ridiculous, indeed. But the resurrection is different. It is a world without death.