κήρυξον τὸν λόγον

Have you pondered the mystery of your Christian faith lately?  Have you ever given just one thought to it? Maybe one why? One when? One how?  What puzzles you most about your faith?  Is it the mystery of who Christ really is, and what faith in him really means?  Let’s get this right: Christ is both God and man; fully God, fully man; 100 percent God, 100 percent man. Talk about a mystery! He is all knowing, all powerful, all present. But he is like us. And you can’t separate the man Jesus from God and God from the man Jesus. God lives, God dies, God rises again, and He promises to come again. That blows my mind! He’s both finite and infinite at the same time. And whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold this faith: Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, neither confusing the persons, nor dividing the substance. ... The whole three persons are coeternal with each other and coequal, so that in all things, as has been stated, the Trinity in Unity and the Unity i...

[And Jesus said:] But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and cause you to remember all things that I spoke to you. Peace I release to you. My peace I give to you.  And now you have that peace.  Brothers and sisters in Christ, is there any doubt in your mind about this today? The peace of God which transcends all understanding ... quite literally, the forgiveness of your sins ... is yours in Christ. The Lord of Peace has given you this peace at all times in every way (2 Th 3:16). You who confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you have been saved. He has set you free from sin, death, and the power of the devil; you have eternal life now. So today we celebrate the abundance of that peace, His peace. This is what the Feast of Pentecost is really all about.  I might have surprised some of you last week when I said that this day is one of the three most important days...

[And Jesus said] these things I have said to you in order that you may not be scandalized. The world loves a good scandal. Scandals make us feel good about ourselves.  The most prominent scandal making rounds on the Internet seems to be one about Bill and Melinda Gates. The word on the street is that two of the richest people in the world are getting a divorce. Until I put a stop to it, my newsfeed was flooded with he said this, and she said that; he did this, and she did that. Oh, the scandal of it all! It’s terrible how we scandalize each other.  Not all scandals are created equal. I saw one opinion that said the most prominent scandals of our time ... in no particular order ... involved OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, the Royal Family, and anything one of our presidents said or did. It’s terrible how we scandalize each other.  Society’s scandal scale, though, is always sliding. Twenty five years ago, teen pregnancy was derided as our most serious social scandal. That issu...

Amen, Amen, whatever you ask the Father, he will give it to you in my name.  Let us pray: Open my heart, O Lord, to the joy and worship of your house. Attend your people as they rejoice in your presence around Word and Sacrament. Hear me, O Lord and Savior, because of your grace and in your name. Amen. I wonder how many people have given up on prayer. A growing number of people think prayer is a waste of time. They say every hour spent in prayer is an hour that could have been spent reading, or visiting friends and family, or going out into the world to help people. They say they have more important things to do than to pray. Are you one of those people?  Would you even admit it?  There are people who think that ... since God’s will is always done, even without our prayer ... there is no point in praying. So they give up. Or they say, I don’t need to pray because the Holy Spirit will do it for me . ... I don’t need to say the Lord’s prayer, even if Jesus taught me to pray...

Preached to the saints at Mount Olive Lutheran and Grace English Lutheran Churches in Bovey and Marble, Minnesota on Cantate Sunday, May 2, 2021: I still have many things to say to you, but you are not able to bear them now. But when the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you in all truth, for he will not speak on behalf of himself, but as much as he hears, he will speak and will announce to you the things coming. He will glorify me, because he will take of mine and announce it to you. Many things happen in our lives and in the world, it is sometimes hard to make sense of them all. Some things bring happiness and excitement; and other things bring difficulty and sometimes even pain. So much of it is confusing, frustrating, and troublesome. Who can understand it all? With everything changing all the time, it is difficult to navigate this sinful world and follow after the things of God’s good pleasure. Even when you open the Holy Word of God to gain some semblance of the truth, someti...