The Crossings Blog

Getting real about sin on Reformation Sunday

I. Colleagues, I know just enough Greek to be dangerous. On the one hand, when I browse a text in a Greek New Testament I can spot angles that translations obscure. On the other, I can’t vouch altogether for the reliability of the things I seem to be looking at. The danger enters in when I start ...

Colleagues, Some weeks ago I met a young woman who had just earned a master’s degree at a local university in the technicalities required to earn a living as a translator. She had grown up in Switzerland speaking German and came to the U.S. as a college student. Her conversational English was impeccable. So was her ...

The Hallmark Channel would like to get its hands on Stefan and Cindy Munker’s love story for one of its movies. Stefan, a native of Fuerth, Germany, was a theology student at the University of Munich when he left to study for a year at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, PA (now United Seminary) ...

Preaching is not unlike the courtroom drama Jesus faced before Pilate. The audience we face is no less cynical. Jesus, testifying to his kingship, said, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate answered with post-modern cynicism, “What is truth?” Pilate was schooled in the real politic of empire in which, might ...

Colleagues, I learned early this morning that a pathophobic phillumenist is a matchbook collector who is scared to death of getting sick. While I can’t suppose the rest of you were aching to know this too, still, there it is. The source of this revelation was the daily note I get from Anu Garg’s team at wordsmith.org. ...

Colleagues, I have opined a few times, most recently three weeks ago, that I find ungodliness ensconced in the Oval Office these days. On each occasion I’ve gotten a rebuking counter-response from one or more readers. Hence this bit of essential introduction: Our vocation as citizens with opinions to vent and votes to cast entails a peril ...

Colleagues, A week ago yesterday I trotted a class through the Book of Revelation in an hour and a half. I felt like an insect must when it tries to comprehend a ten-acre pond by touching down on the surface in a few places here and there. May it be that the folks in attendance went ...

Colleagues, This is a continuation of the item you received a week ago, in which Matt Becker laid out an argument between Crossings’ own Robert W. Bertram and another Lutheran theologian, Ronald F. Thiemann, a former Dean of Harvard of Divinity School. As Matt pointed out (and will do so again as you continue reading), this ...

Colleagues, Pentecost is upon us. Would that preachers everywhere might catch and transmit the Pentecost point this Sunday, but many won’t. The essential gift of the Spirit is not that we do the right stuff but that we trust the Right Doer. First faith, then works, to use some older language. The Right Doer, of course, ...