The Marriage of Louise Gebel and Kyle Shideler

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We want to own the thing we love, to possess it, to control it. But that only shows the love of self.

The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel show us a different kind of love. “I know My sheep, and am known by My own.” The ones Jesus calls “His own” are not possessions (like a collection of trophies) but people – the people He Himself created. His love for us He demonstrates by self-giving. “The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.”

That’s marriage. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her.” There’s no ownership here in the sense of domineering control and a demand to do things my way. It is self-giving to the end, the end where the shepherd lets himself be bitten and clawed by the wolf attacking the sheep. The husband doesn’t care about himself, only about his wife.

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Baccalaureate Vespers 2019

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After sitting through dozens of graduation speeches that were a terrible waste of time, the brilliant educator and critic Neil Postman wrote the sort of commencement address he wished would be given but never is. In it he talks about two groups of ancient people, the Athenians and the Visigoths. This is because, Postman said, you soon must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other. You must choose between the Athenians or the Visigoths.

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Misericordias Domini: The Third Sunday after Easter 2019

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“The hireling,” Jesus says, “does not own the sheep.” But the Good Shepherd—the true and perfect shepherd—sees the sheep as belonging to Him. “I know My sheep, and am known by My own.”

The sheep, Jesus says, are His – His own. Here Jesus expresses more than mere ownership. This hymnbook is mine; it has my name on it. But more is happening here than just possession. I suppose that’s at the heart of what we call sin – seeing possessions, positions, and even other people as ours, such that we are masters, and everyone else is there to serve us.

But not so with Jesus. When He calls the sheep His own, two realities are coalescing in that one little phrase “My own”: The first is creation, and the second is incarnation.

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The Resurrection of Our Lord 2019

If we dare ask ourselves this question—“Why do I live this brief and fragile life?”—then the next thought is to accuse God, blame God for the problem – even insist we do not believe in Him, like a teenage son shouting at his father, “I hate you!”

So, into this world He made, the world which now hates Him – God comes. He has heard the cries, the accusations, and the laments. God walks to the tomb of His friend Lazarus. He listens to the accusations of Lazarus’ sisters. “Where were you? Why didn’t you come? If you had been here, this would not have happened!” The words sting like slaps to His face.

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Vigil of Easter 2019

Immanuel Lutheran Church
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When a child is adopted, he gets a new family and also a new story, the family’s story, with its history, and hardships, and heroes. 

You who are baptized learn the story, your story. It’s the story of all mankind. But the unbaptized, and those who have wandered away from their baptism, have forgotten the story, the family history. Some have even developed competing stories, a falsified account. It is as though they came upon a beautiful mosaic, depicting with glittering tiles the image of a king. With malice they rearrange those tiles into the image of a fox.

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Judica 2019

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“The lie is the death of man, his temporal and his eternal death.” Thus wrote Hermann Sasse in 1933. Sasse was among the greatest theologians of the 20th century, and vigorously opposed the Nazis, a dangerous position for a German pastor to take. But Sasse saw the lies of the National Socialists as part of a larger lie – a single great demonic lie that holds the world captive.

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Catechetical Sermon on the Second Article of the Creed

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In the hour of darkness—when your career is collapsing; when your marriage is on the ropes; when you come face to face with the ugliness of your sin; when the stench of death cannot be sanitized by the wretched sterility of hospital antiseptic—when in the hour of darkness you despair, you don’t need a concept or a philosophy. A platitude won’t help. An ethic is worst of all, for the accuser gleefully reminds us that we have failed.

The supposed comfort of a nebulous better place I find revolting. Who are you to say there is a better place, and that my loved one is in it, or that I will go there? How do you know?

Leave me alone, incompetent comforter! I need a Lord, a real redeemer who is actually mine, who is coming for me!

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Do you believe in monsters?

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Do you believe in monsters?

Our word monster comes from the Latin monere, which means “to show” or “warn.” I’ve never seen for sure, but I suspect that monster stories arose to warn people about dangers in general. The monster put a scary, if imaginary, face on the general danger that is outside the safety of home and village.

So our history is filled with monster stories: Leviathan, the sea monster; Cyclops; Beowulf’s Grendel; up to more modern monsters like Tolkien’s Smaug.

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