The most important detail in the parable is in the summary: he laid up treasure for himself. And that is the heart of anxiety: we are looking to the self for stability, we seek a place of rest for and within the self.
What’s beneath that? We have forgotten we are creatures. Creatures have a Creator. Man is in the passive position in that equation. He depends upon Another. …
Read MoreWhat can we do? Cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Much of the church’s liturgy is just an expansion of those words. “Lord, have mercy!” over and over again.
Jesus hears. Jesus answers. The lepers are healed.
One comes back. Why? Is only one of them polite?
That’s not quite right. …
Read MoreModern theories of relationships rest on ideas like compatibility. But this is the compatibility that matters: a common god, a common worship.
Personality quirks, thermostat preferences, the degree of melanin in the skin, no difference matters if you confess together the Nicene Creed, believe in the forgiveness of sins, and agree to submit to your husband and love your wife as Christ loved the church….
Read MoreThis man, the Lord Jesus, is the center of all human history. You can learn every fact about Alexander the Great, about Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the founding of our great nation - but without Jesus at the center, you won’t really understand any of it.
Because human history isn’t the story of empires and generals, wars and constitutions, musicians and poets. Human history is the story of man who lost his way, and the God who entered our history, became Himself a man, and descended into our darkness.
Read MoreWhen God made man, He outlined man’s purpose: Get married, have babies, cultivate the world into an ordered and beautiful garden, essentially expanding Eden.
That purpose doesn’t go away. But it becomes horribly hindered. Our desires are corrupted, and death like a weed is choking all life east of Eden.
That catastrophic fall is embedded in the parable….
Read MoreIn many ways, the controversy surrounding the forgiveness of sins in the sixteenth century was driven by money. Pope Leo needed money to pay off the loan he had with the Fuggers, a prominent banking family. The indulgences he put up for sale were to help with that loan, along with completing the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome. Charles V was getting a cut of the indulgence money to fund war with the Turks. When Luther preaches that you cannot buy forgiveness, the flow of German money to Italy dries up. Money has a tendency to corrupt theology.
I hadn’t been a pastor for very long before a woman asked me a question that flabbergasted me. She’d just had a baby, and we were scheduling the baptism. “How much does it cost?” she asks. “What do you mean?” “What’s the fee for the Baptism?” “Fee? There is no fee.” In the church she grew up in, there was a fee. I had no idea. It’s not for sale….
Read MoreThis month we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This formational political document invokes “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Political independence for the founders never meant independence from God. And He has put our Synod here for this moment. The Creed we confess is a Declaration of Dependence….
Read More“First be reconciled to your brother.” First. Wouldn’t you rather it be last? When someone is angry with you, do you want to go to the person and get it resolved right away?
It’s easier to tell someone else. To complain. To spin the narrative such that the other person looks bad. “It’s not my fault. It’s never my fault. Everybody else around here is terrible.”
Read More“Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” That was man’s original work. Get married, have babies, make the world beautifully ordered.
But there is a great difference between work and labor. Work is good. Labor is what happens when death enters the world, and creation becomes hostile.
Read MoreMost of the parables Jesus tells are stories. Today’s parables are just brief images. They have the Lord’s characteristic absurdity. You have a blind man being led by another blind man. And you have an eye surgeon who is going to remove a splinter from a patient; but the surgeon has a beam sticking out of his eye, the kind of long board you’d pick up at a lumberyard. This is camels going through eyes of needles kind of stuff, or a farmer who just throws the seed everywhere. Jesus uses absurdity and hyperbole to make the point: Blind people shouldn’t lead the parade, and people with logs in their eyes shouldn’t be surgeons. He applies that to life in the church. Deal with your own blindness. Deal with the beam in your own eye.
What’s happened in recent years, though, is the splinter and the plank have been reinterpreted to mean little sins and big sins.
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