Tag Archives: Lutheranism
Righteousness
I understand where all this comes from. It’s good to be personally holy, it’s good to be inclusive, it’s good to be active. I know what our denomination is trying to say by telling people that being Lutheran means doing God’s work. But I rankle when I hear it all the same.
Lambs and Wolves
But what if these three assumptions are not always true? What if people don’t feel the need to build their Sunday—much less their life—around God? What if people have reason to believe they will not be greeted warmly at a church, whether because of their sexual orientation or their ethnicity or anything else? What if people really have felt unwelcome and unwanted, even among good church goers?
Confessions of a Failed Evangelist – Let’s Talk
[I wrote this in 2011] At a church council meeting a couple of years ago, we found ourselves discussing friends and neighbors of our city church and their prospects for eventual membership. One neighbor in particular seemed like he should really be coming to church because, as someone observed, his brother is a Lutheran pastor. […]
“Religionless” Again for the First Time – Let’s Talk
[Note: the date of the issue is incorrect. I wrote this in 2011] I have made two visits to St. Augustine’s House in Oxford, Michigan. The first was in 2006, after my second year of divinity school and my summer clinical pastoral education unit with a hospice care provider, and before my endorsement interviews and […]
The Right-Handed Marriage
It is the strangest thing that we have in our holy book. It’s not a story of worldly success–much as preachers have tried to make it out to be just that. It’s not a story of patiently resigning ourselves to worldly evil. It’s a story, told in a hundred different ways, of giving the world up and then getting it back again. If we actually had to live it ourselves, how would we bear it–the walk to Moriah with Abraham and Isaac, the flight to Zarephath, the warning against the people who organize God’s worship, the chaos and terror of Golgotha?
Righteous
This verse is like an explosion. How do we get right with God? How do we attain that righteousness with which God judges the world and condemns the wickedness of humanity? Do we have to humble ourselves before our husbands? Do we have to lord it over our wives? Do we have to follow “Biblical life principles”? Do we have to pray an hour every day? Will that get us to the righteousness of God?
What Are We Doing Here?
What if the alleged indifference of the age to questions of God’s righteousness is not the age’s wisdom, with which we must catch up, but rather the age’s folly, which we are duty-bound to try to break through? What if people are putting themselves and their world in serious danger by ignoring those questions? And what if, after all, the wisdom and the virtues and the forms of fellowship we wish to salvage from our little household end up being no more necessary or appealing than the rest of it?
Brutally Ordinary Things 