The Feast of the Holy Innocents

“These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” This day’s liturgy applies those words to the little children of Bethlehem cut down by Herod’s sword. “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” The little children suffered the great tribulation. But it is not limited to them. The great tribulation is a vast span of terror, from the babies Pharaoh ordered thrown into the Nile, to today’s little children dismembered by the billion-dollar abortion business….

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Christmas Midnight 2025

And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him….

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Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols 2025

“If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else.” G.K. Chesterton wrote this in his 1908 essay Christmas. “If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else.”

Chesterton was responding to early twentieth-century rationalists, who wanted to celebrate a holiday without all the old “superstitions” of a virgin birth, angels, and wise men. I’ll admit, Christmas is something I’ve struggled with…

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Thanksgiving 2025

When resources are scarce, anxiety is over food. Jesus asks, “Why do you worry about what you will eat?”

There’s no scarcity in America. But there’s still anxiety. And the anxiety still often connects to food. We eat our feelings. Or drink our feelings. Or find other ways to make ourselves numb – doomscrolling, binge watching, cyber shopping – something to distract us from our meaningless lives trapped on the conveyor belt, ending in a nursing home reeking of urine and loneliness.

“Do not be anxious about anything,” the Epistle for Thanksgiving says. How? Anxiety is our daily bread….

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The Last Sunday in the Church Year 2025

In today’s vernacular, virgin is synonymous with loser. Something is wrong with you, the culture assumes, if you remain thus until marriage. God’s Word declares the opposite. He made intimacy for marriage.

Some are, indeed, called to celibacy. There is nothing wrong with remaining unmarried. Yet, married or not, God made us for community….

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Trinity 26 (Observed) 2025

“I think I’m going to hell.” A text like today’s can provoke such a thought.

One wonders if the invention of purgatory was in part to deal with texts like today’s. I don’t meet the standard of the sheep, but perhaps if I can work off my sins in purgatory, then I might stand a chance.

But there is no purgatory. It’s taught nowhere in the Bible. It’s taught nowhere in the Apocrypha. It’s not nowhere in the first few centuries of Christianity. The Lord Jesus presents two stark realities – the sheep and the goats, the blessed and the cursed, the eternal kingdom or the everlasting fire, punishment or life….

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Is SMP the "Only Option" for Certain Kinds of Churches?

Pastor Zach Zehnder published a video on YouTube today taking exception to the age requirements for the LCMS “Specific Ministry Pastor” program [SMP]. The SMP is a (mostly) non-residential program for pastoral formation that relies heavily on local mentoring and online classes. Advocates for the program (and its expansion) have typically focused on the need for certain “specific ministries” to have someone uniquely suited for a particular context, along with the inability to relocate to a seminary for classes and a one-year vicarage (pastoral internship).

Toward the end of his video (starting at about 9:18 in the video), however, Zehnder says something interesting:

“The large churches do not want to send candidates to the residential program right now - and this is what nobody is saying, that the data is saying - they don’t want to send them to the residential seminary program because they don’t believe that the pastor they will get in the end is a pastor that will work for their ministry. And so the only option is [SMP] - and now that’s not an option.”

The residential programs at Concordia Seminary (St. Louis) and Concordia Theological Seminary (Fort Wayne), Pastor Zehnder is saying, are forming pastors who will not “work for their ministry.” SMP is “the only option” for these churches, presumably because the formation these churches provide is qualitatively different. Is the real issue the mode of education (online vs residential)? Or is there something about the residential program that makes a man ill-suited for a certain kind of church? What is it about these pastors—or their formation—that “will not work”?

Responding to the Transgender Revolution: Brave Men Needed

From the chapter “Responding to the Transgender Revolution” in my book (Dis)Ordered: Lies about Human Nature and the Truth That Sets Us Free (CPH 2023):

“A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” Never in the history of the world have we more needed brave people to call things what they actually are. A social contagion has spread through the West, causing children to mutilate their bodies and receive hormone treatments with drastic consequences….

The transgender movement … involves the final overthrow of biological reality. It claims that you are not what your chromosomes or sexual organs say you are. You are whatever you feel you are….

When meaning is defined by feelings, childhood is extended indefinitely, and everything is sexualized, confusion over identity is inevitable. This problem is exacerbated by human existence being reduced to gender and sexuality by the sexual revolutionaries. Since this is a matter of will and not body, the transgender revolution is the final triumph of the Gnostic conception of reality, which subordinates the body to the soul and renders the material world something from which we must be liberated. Once one accepts the premise that a biological male can be a woman born into the wrong (i.e., male) body, then it follows that the body is a prison. A person’s true identity is entirely disconnected from creation….

Always with love, God calls Christians to call things what they really are. Men are men, women are women, and these are immutable truths. Jesus is the truth (John 14:6). If what He says is not true, then nothing is. The Nicene Creed confesses about Him, et homo factus est: “And He was made man.” The incarnation of the Son of God is for the healing of the human race. He heals every dysphoria, and His redemption is for every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

(Dis)Ordered is currently on sale at CPH. It is also available at Amazon.

All Saints 2025

“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed [Gen 2.25]. So ends the creation narrative. Our first parents did not know evil. They knew only the good.

They fell. And in falling, they hid. From God, and from each other.

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings [Gen 3.7].

It was insufficient. They blamed each other. They hid from God. But you cannot hide from Him. He sees. He hears. He knows….

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