- Chad Bird on the Baptism of Jesus
The Hebrew Stories Swimming Beneath Jesus’s Baptism
Co-Missioners,
Today’s post is the briefest ever, at least where our own writers are concerned. It consists of a link we want you to follow to a little essay by Chad Bird. Bird will be one of the key presenters at our forth coming conference (January 26-29). Here, then, is ...
- Sheep, Goats—and Gospel? A New Year’s Homily
Co-Missioners,
On this second day of a new calendar year, we send you a homily that a little clutch of Lutherans heard two nights ago in suburban Cleveland. It comes with a brief prefatory comment by the preacher, Jerry Burce.
We wish you a Happy New Year, as in a twelve-month stretch of days made lively by ...
- A Thought for Christmas and a Conference Invitation
A Thought for Christmas and a Conference Invitation
Co-Missioners,
Christmas is six days away, or five and a half if you launch the celebration at six o’clock on Christmas Eve. That’s exactly what most all of us do, of course. Between now and then lies the Fourth Sunday of Advent, another name for which could well be ...
- The Original “Christmas Crossing”
The Original “Christmas Crossing”
Co-Missioners,
We’ve been making an explicit effort this past year to pitch our Thursday Theology offerings for an audience somewhat wider than the subset that preaches sermons on Sundays or otherwise revels in the arcane pleasures of academic theology. Today we trifle with that rule by sending you an item that was written ...
- “When God is Silent.” A Sermon
“When God is Silent.”
Co-Missioners,
Those in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere—the majority of you, we imagine—are enduring the early winter miseries of long nights and raw, bitter days. These somehow heighten the contrast between our experience of the world as it currently is and the promises of the age to come that the texts ...
- On the Thanks We Render Today
On the Thanks We Render Today: A Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln
Co-Missioners,
This Thursday we send you a copy of the presidential proclamation that launched America’s national Thanksgiving Day, the holiday most of you are busy observing at the moment—with delight and contentment, we pray. May the turkey be succulent, the pies enticing, the conversation spiced with ...
- “How Can I ‘See’ Jesus?”
Biblical Depiction as Judgment and Promise
Co-Missioners,
“Christ for you, Christ for us.” Call this the bumper sticker version of God’s key message to the world, entrusted for delivery to folks strangely called “the saints,” the strangeness arising from the fact that no one save God would think to label them as such. How ordinary they look. ...
- Christian Decline in America: The Pew Report
Co-Missioners,
The first step in a Crossing analysis, be it of a Scriptural text or a present reality, is to identify a problem that demands attention.
Our mission correspondent, Richard Gahl, does this today in a follow-up to his reflection last week about culture shifts in the U.S. His focus now is on a recent report from ...
- Gospel Agents as “Trackers”
Co-Missioners,
“Tracking” is a term Crossings practitioners use for a process that examines the contents of an everyday life for signs of correlation with issues surfaced in Scriptural texts. It starts and ends with careful listening to people the Word of God aims to address in today’s moment.
Such listening is more important than ever in 2019—assuming, ...
- Why Luther’s First Thesis Still Matters
Co-Missioners,
On this 502nd anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, we remind you of the first of them:
“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt. 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
Such is the speck of a pebble that launched the continental rockslide we know in retrospect as ...
