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.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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It is the words the pastor speaks that send the dead out alive.
Looking back on the year, the narrative we’re fed is that we should be able to show how much we’ve grown, how much we’ve done, all the successes we’ve had, how improved we are.
God cares for us because we’re created in his image, but he also cares for us because the second person of the Trinity, the Son, became one of us.
The real power of his hymn comes from the fact that Bonhoeffer does not offer a rosy picture of life or any of the tropes so typical of cheap piety that tell us that everything is always right, that things happen for a reason, and that we should try to stay positive.
Into the suffocating prison of sorrow, God sends his Breath, his Holy Spirit to help us. We may suffer, but we will not be alone.
It is that Christmas carol, the curious “We Three Kings” that we are looking at today in our examination of the origin and meaning of Christmas carols.
We think that if we are good enough, brave enough, or at least if we try hard enough, we will be someone who can be both fully known and fully loved.
As Christians, we are not cold ascetics, depriving ourselves in the here and hereafter. We are given good things from our heavenly Father in heaven, and even a foretaste of the things to come.
On the other side of Christmas, we find (1) senseless suffering and (2) unstoppable salvation. A sermon on these verses should be honest about both.
Should we really be surprised that it would happen this way, that the servant would suffer for our salvation and die for our forgiveness?
In some measure, if Luther had any success during his last two decades, it happened because of the woman who’d insisted on him as her bridegroom.
Our regrets and anxiety, self-abuse and addictions, violence and endless lists are signs that we don’t have an answer to the question: "Why am I here right now, alive, existing?"