Colleagues, With burdens come gifts. If preaching most every Sunday is often a pain in the neck—it’s meant to be: see the stole, and the yoke it represents—it also rewards the preacher now and then with little bursts of unexpected insight into aspects of the Word of God that he or she hadn’t penetrated before. Call them “Aha!” …
How the Parable of the Good Samaritan is Good News, aka Gospel
Colleagues, The Parable of the Good Samaritan has been featured before in Thursday Theology, most recently in 2013, via a sermon by Candice Stone. Luke was the featured Gospel in the Revised Common Lectionary that year, as it will be, once again, when Advent rolls around a mere four and a half months from now. In pulpits that follow the RCL, …
Augsburg and Charleston
Colleagues, I don’t suppose that too many U.S. Lutherans paused this past Thursday—this post’s putative date, when it was supposed to have gotten to you—to recall its significance as the anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession. The talk in this country this past week was about the murders in Charleston the week before. Those of us …
Ed Schroeder on the Tim Frakes Documentary, “Seminex: Memories of a Church Divided”
Colleagues, I sit down to write with the news of Wednesday night’s obscenity at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston hanging heavy in the air. It stinks. It oppresses. It calls in the present space for a bellow of angry protest—against whom, or what?—and after that for a stream of thoughtful words about God’s Law and God’s Gospel as …
Getting Back on Track, with a Report from the Mockingbird Conference
Colleagues, Nine dry Thursdays. That’s what you’ve gotten since Maundy Thursday, when we last posted. It’s not the first break you’ve seen in what’s meant to be a weekly sequence, but it’s certainly the longest. Other tasks have intruded. So has a stubborn writer’s block. To say that we’re back on track would be promising too much. So …
On Faith. Eleven Bertram Theses, Newly Unearthed.
Colleagues, First, a passing thought— I write this on Wednesday of Holy Week. Many of us listened this past Sunday to St. Mark’s account of our Lord’s Passion. Many of us will listen again two days from now as St. John unfolds the story. The words will wash over us. We’ll think. We’ll pray. After that we’ll go …
Death, Life, and Baptism (3)
Colleagues, Today brings the third installment of Craig Simenson’s extended essay on baptism as God’s best gift for the challenge of living well in the face of death. All God’s gifts are woefully underused, and this one more than most, an observation that prompted Craig to write the essay in the first place. As we noted in the …
Unearthing Gospel Gold: Remarks on What It Is, and How to Find It
At the 2015 Crossings Seminar, Shrine of our Lady of the Snows, Belleville, Illinois by Jerome Burce, D.Min. + + + There is gold; and then there’s fool’s gold. There is Gospel; and then there’s faux gospel. I wish I could take credit for that phrase, faux gospel, but I can’t. I stole it from my Crossing …
Death, Life, and Baptism (2)
Colleagues, Last week Craig Simenson critiqued American funeral practices, Christian ones included, for their failure to take bodies with the seriousness that bodies deserve, even when they’re dead. Today he starts challenging us to do better than that. See below for his cogent argument A little more about Craig: raised in Wisconsin, he majored in Political Science and …
Death, Life, and Baptism (1)
Colleagues, A brilliant full moon made shadows on the snow in Northeastern Ohio a week ago last night. The sight was beautiful. Tonight we’re well into the waning, a persistent reminder to people like me, on the far side of 45, that darkness comes soon. Too soon. Our topic for the next three weeks is death, and God’s response to it in …