This week we pick up again on a theme we’ve featured throughout the past several months—namely, the preacher’s task. Our writer is Matt Metevelis, a chaplain and pastor who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and whose last piece for Thursday Theology was a book review that we posted last summer. We’re happy to share with you his thoughts on the …
#783 Reexamining the “face of God” metaphor
After we posted Steve Albertin’s sermon, “Seeing the Face of God,” in last week’s Thursday Theology, we were very happy to receive the following thoughtful response from Bruce T. Martin, who is a frequent Crossings writer. We are grateful for the light he casts on the “face of God” metaphor on which that sermon hinged, and we expect you …
#782 Seeing the face of God
This week we bring you a sermon on Revelation 22-23 delivered by fellow editorial-team member Steve Albertin to his congregation in Zionsville, Indiana, last month. In this sermon, he meditates on the notion of seeing the face of God—not just on the last day, but in the here and now. Peace and Joy, Carol Braun, for the editorial …
#781 The Awards Ceremony Address You Wish Your Child Might Have Heard
Colleagues, For this week’s offering we need you to open the attached PDF file. We got this from Cathy Lessmann of the Crossings office, who got it from it from Andrew Mueller, a graduating senior at Lutheran High School North in St. Louis. It’s a copy of a typewritten manuscript produced by his father, Pr. Richard E. Mueller …
#780 The teacher’s calling, especially in a parochial school
Colleagues, We apologize. You looked for this on Thursday or Friday. Saturday came, and it still wasn’t there. Now it’s Monday, and we’re only now getting ready to shoot it off to you. We: Carol Braun, overburdened teacher at a girls’ academy in the Hudson Valley, currently caught in the crush of extra responsibilities that attend the end …
#779 Musings on Ministry and the Holy Spirit
Colleagues, Being under the gun this week, and having already conspired with co-editor Carol Braun to dose you twice with more of Ed Schroeder, I trolled old files of my own and came up with this. It’s a snippet of a paper I wrote as a DMin student in the early ’90s. The task was to articulate one’s …
#778 Luther as Mission Theologian
Continuing our discussion of mission, this week we bring you another piece on that subject from the files of Ed Schroeder. Ed first presented these “9.5 Theses” to the Forum of Lutheran Clergy of Metro St. Louis on Reformation Day, 2005. He sent them out to Thursday Theology readers at that time, but we think they’re well worth …
#777 Some Uncommon Common Sense about “Mission”
Colleagues: “Go to my brothers and say to them…” (John 20:17; Jesus to Mary Magdalene, Gospel, Easter 1). Again, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21; Jesus to the disciples, Gospel, Easter 2). Etc. Easter entails mission. The two are inseparable. This being so, we do well to take at least one Thursday …
#776 The Preacher’s Audience: Participation in the Mystery
We were glad to receive the following thoughtful response to Thursday Theology #775. It comes to us from Bill Burrows, professor of missiology at the New York Theological Seminary, former president of the American Society of Missiology, and keynote speaker at the Third International Crossings Conference in 2010. As he explained to me in a short prefatory note, Bill …
#775 The Preacher’s Audience: Some Give and Take
Colleagues, I’ve got to call him something, so I’ll pick Fred, Fred after the late great Danker whose feistiness he shares. Five weeks ago we published a set of theses that Robert C. Schultz had penned in response to a couple of pieces that appeared last November. Two days later Fred, a lay theologian, sent along some thoughts he had …