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A proclivity for paradox
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all (Martin Luther in…
What it means to be Lutheran
Lutherans don’t often garner much media attention. In this country we don’t make up a big segment of the population. When groups of Lutherans began arriving on these shores in…
From persecution to witness
For many months now people have been asking for some kind of statement about the persecution of Christians around the world. It seems to be a straight-forward issue. Christians are…
Love your neighbor
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and…
Holy Saturday
They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the…
Time to get to know each other
Sometimes I just don’t get us. We are the least likely of all people to speak enthusiastically about our church. I don’t know if it is some cross-cultural Lutheran modesty…
Putting the pieces together
It has been just more than two years since I began this call. I’m often asked what has been the greatest surprise. Certainly the amount of travel has been a…
The unsettled season of Advent
O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 257). Advent. We were just here…
Coming to grips with happiness
In her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the relentless pressure she faced to be upbeat while undergoing treatment for…
What is ‘Lutheran’?
For the past two years, I’ve organized my work around these four emphases: we are church, we are Lutheran, we are church together and we are church for the sake…
If God is enough
From time to time I am invited to celebrate congregational anniversaries. It’s wonderful to see the church in action and to meet members from all across the country. It is…
There is no curtain obscuring plots
At a Conference of Bishops meeting a few years after the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, bishops shared some of the most outrageous suspicions they had heard about the churchwide office. One…