#794 More Ways Than One to Preach a Text

Colleagues, I shouldn’t be surprised if today’s topic strikes lots of you as odd, not to say silly. Statements of the obvious tend to have that effect on readers, and it’s hard to imagine anything more obvious than an observation that any one text will yield many sermons. Has there ever been a seminarian who failed to discover …

#792 The ELCA’s New Bishop

Colleagues, I get to this a few days late, the week having been filled with much else, chiefly the work people pay me to do, but also some distractions. Of the latter the main one was a sudden urge on Wednesday to spend some time watching the video feed from a churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church …

#791 Sin, Sight, and a Vision of God

Colleagues, Two months ago today I was at a Lutheran church in Cape Town testing the patience of delegates to an assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa (Cape). I hope one of these Thursdays to tell you a little about that adventure and the saints I encountered in the course of it. For now I …

#790 1) A Christ-confessing Mystery. 2) A Brief Christ-confessing “Aha!”

Colleagues, Ed Schroeder is back this week with a couple of gifts. The main one is a book review that leaves him uncharacteristically scratching his head over a confessional conundrum: how, where Christ is concerned, can one profoundly “get it” and just as profoundly “not get it” at one and the same time? You’ll notice that he leaves …

#789 The Gospel Lives!

Colleagues, I’m at the age where arrogance and world-weariness start combining in what John Bunyan would call a slough of despond. I read and hear the rubbish that gets peddled in the church these days under the rubric “gospel,” and wonder if anybody forty years hence will still get it as we did in our day. (Implication, God …

#788 An Exemplary Conversation (2)

In Thursday Theology #787, we presented a letter from Pr. Tim Hoyer to Pr. Matt Metevelis in response to Matt’s brief essay on the preacher’s task of presenting Jesus as the ultimate goal. Now, as promised, we bring you Matt’s replies to Tim’s letter. Matt followed the e-mailer’s stylistic mode of inserting his replies directly into the text of Tim’s original …

#787 An Exemplary Conversation (1)

Colleagues, Three weeks ago we sent you a brief essay by Pr. Matt Metevelis of Las Vegas who used some interesting reflections on Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric to critique poor preaching and push hard for the goal of preaching Christ. I should mention that Matt was trained at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, where he drank deeply from the wells of …

#786 Kumbaya Revisited

Colleagues, This week’s treat is intended especially for any of you who learned as I did, somewhere along the line, to despise the song “Kumbaya.” It was hot stuff in the popular culture of the ’60s, thanks to the likes of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. In the ’70s it became a fixture in the folk masses that …

#785 A Life and Ministry Shaped by the Good Shepherd

We’re happy to share with you this week a sermon we received recently from Bishop Marcus C. Lohrmann. Marcus is bishop of the ELCA’s Northwestern Ohio Synod, and his writing has appeared numerous times in this space—most recently in Thursday Theology #773. Marcus preached this sermon last month, at the funeral of one of his mentors, the Rev. Dr. …