This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 74-77.
“The Church exists to tell anyone and everyone who knocks on her door wondering what’s inside: Come and see” (pg. 58). Such reminders make The Church a worthwhile read.
The way of the cross is the actual way of victory. Jesus absorbs the worst of what humanity and even the devil can do to him, and he spurns the shame of it all.

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Having Romans 6 as the Epistle for the Baptism of our Lord, and paired with Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism and Isaiah’s prophetically rich baptismal language in Isaiah 43, allows preaches to proclaim Romans 6 in a more appropriate liturgical context. It could only be better, were someone in your congregation to be baptized on this day. If that’s your situation, the sermon will almost write itself.
When bishops err we must not follow...We must obey God before man.
Have you ever invited someone over to your house? Most of us have either invited someone into our homes for supper.
Jesus’ coming and death and resurrection guarantee us the victory over the lies, the desire to be pitied, and the appeal of stuff.
As is usually the case with God, He uses something strange and earthly as a picture of His grace and mercy.
Advent is one big answer to the question of free will in matters of salvation. God is free. Our will is bound.
The celebration of He who came in humility, who would upend the Kingdoms of this world, was eclipsed by men grasping at the power of each other’s supposed kingdoms.
Christmas wrecks all attempts to penetrate God's hiddenness and seek him out in Heaven. He comes to us clothed in our humanity.
The death and resurrection of our Lord has indeed removed the power of all these things. But they remain for now, even so.
The Pope Leo X used the psalm description of a boar uprooting grape vines in a vineyard as a metaphor for what the upstart German monk had been doing at that backwater university.
Past, present, fututre converge in Advent. The historical coming of the Lord Jesus in the flesh, born of Mary to suffer and die for the world's redemption is indicated by having the Palm Suday account read on the First Sunday in Advent. All of the church year revolves around the cross.
Luther’s theology lets the believer in Christ dwell under the cerulean sky of God’s unchanging grace.