clair090

A while back my mother sent me some things that were made by her mother and her grandmother.  They were nothing special to most eyes but pure gold to me.  To think my great-grandmother, who died when my grandmother was only 13, has passed this bit of her stitching and handiwork all the way down to me and it survived in pristine condition.  Those are keepers and will be carefully preserved.  They belong not really to me but to those who come after me, a golden thread to tie us to our past.  In this case, an immigrant past from a man and woman who left Sweden behind to come to America and in doing so began a new life among strangers without any blood relatives here.  What a story! My house is filled with these mementos of our history, from my wife's side and mine.  They are all over the walls and shelves of our home.  The folks from HGTV would tell us it is time to declutter and perhaps some would send over a therapist to talk to us about our hoardi...

I hesitated to post it because, well, frankly, the Episcopal Church has become an easy target and a seemingly endless source of goofiness, apostasy, and foolishness.  That said, I had to repost some of what Jeffrey Walton reported.  It is old news but such strangeness is never old news.  It is an oddity if it existed side by side with the faithful truth of Scripture and the authentic Gospel of Christ crucified.  In the absence of Scripture's truth and the Gospel's life, it is worse.  It has become the substitute for God's Word and sits in place of Christ in the Church He established with His blood.  It may be fun, relevant, and even edgy but it is the mark of a hollow and empty church.  How sad it is when you see a once mighty church reduced to an earth worship cult in place of the true and essential mission of proclaiming Christ and Him crucified! From Jeffrey Walton September 17, 2018 Episcopal Grace Cathedral Goes Green in Liturgical Eco-...

With these words, the cause of preaching among us Lutherans (at least of the Missouri stripe) is lifted up and connected to our 500th Anniversary observance of the shot heard round the world in the 95 Theses of Martin Luther.  It is a noble endeavor.  My own circuit of pastors has plodded through about half the modules that cover everything from content to delivery in what is by all means one of the most central of the pastoral tasks and solemn responsibilities. P reaching is challenging business. Everyone can use some encouragement and fresh ideas.  Preach the Word (PTW) will help pastors work together to improve their preaching through video modules with accompanying resources and by interacting with seminary professors and fellow preachers. Pastors can gather with brother pastors to watch and discuss the modules. The power of the Lutheran Reformation was the Word of God. Pastors may commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by honing th...

Sermon for Advent 1C, preached on Sunday, December 2, 2018.     Everyone knows Advent means coming but hardly any of us know what to do with Advent.  It seems such a waste to put off Christmas until, well, Christmas, when the stores have had Christmas since August and the sounds of Christmas have long ago become old in our ears.  For many of us Advent has come and gone and with it Christmas.  Part of us wishes it was over already.  It snuck up on us, we are too busy, and it got old a long time ago. Even Jesus got lost in the mess.  So it would seem to be a fools errand to have us try to restore Advent preparation and Christmas joy. Or would it?     The Lord’s coming is not simply to a manger in Bethlehem.  In fact, this coming in flesh is His first coming.  He came in meekness to save us.  Humble, mounted on a donkey, Mary takes Him in her womb to Bethlehem and then some thirty years later He came again on a donkey, ...

The press upon us is so very great to accept homosexuality, indeed the whole pantheon of GLBTQ variations, same sex marriage, serial marriage, cohabitation, and everything else promoted in the name of sexual freedom.  What are we to do?  What choices do we have?  Are we limited to a wholesale caving into the secular forces of change in replacing what was once unchallenged (though broken by sinful desire and practice) or the affirmation of traditional values which refuse to accept any of this at all and distances the Church even more from the world around her? I should say that I wish this were theory but it is not.  We have no luxury of debate about the what ifs of a world that might be.  For the world has already changed and not simply outside the Church in the wilderness of a world without the Light of Christ but even among those who sit in the pews.  What we face is a broken ideal both in the witness held up to a world by those who affirm the Creator's w...

Advent is less a reminder of the Christmas already past than it future still to come.  Amid a world caught up in the present, the Church lives through the past and directs the present to the future still coming.  He is coming.  He is coming.  It seems like an irrelevant message to a people who are almost weary of the sound of Christmas that has been playing since Halloween, at least, and tired of the look of Christmas that has been seen in stores since before Labor Day.  It seems like a superfluous message to those who think things are okay as they are, life bearable, happiness achievable, death tolerable.  It seems like a strange message to those who no longer think sin a problem or even frame their lives in such terms.  It seems like a old message to those who, like Israel was when Christ was born, have stopped looking for or anticipating any fulfillment of God's promises. He is coming.  The sad truth is that a Christian world content to have it...

G. K Chesterton famously once wrote: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. (1929, The Thing , in the chapter “The Drift from Domesticity”) I wish we paid more attention to this wisdom.  Americans in particular are prone to tear down and build new.  Perhaps it is the fruit of a frontier life of building where nothing had been -- in contrast to Eu...