Holy Cross 2025

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On September 14 in the year 320, St. Helena supposedly discovered the wood of Christ’s cross. Helena was the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who decriminalized Christianity in Rome.

Did Helena really find the wood of the true cross? I don’t know. There were many such claims. Luther once joked that if you gathered all the pieces of the true cross in Germany, you’d have enough wood to build a barn!

I do know one thing, though: If I found a piece of the true cross, I would keep it. It would be important, because the history is important. Christ is the center of all human history. The Christian faith is grounded in history….

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Commemoration of Charles James Kirk and Vigil for Our Nation

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Why does it hurt? I found myself strangely transfixed by the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I would occasionally watch clips of him talking with college students. I admired his courage and charity, and his ability to confess the Gospel with great clarity. But I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about him or his work. I wasn’t his target audience.

So why did his assassination seem to matter so much? It’s more than a young man with so much promise being cut down, leaving behind a wife and two very little children. His murder is the outgrowth of a deep spiritual battle that has been raging. It signifies the descent into a new kind of darkness, where a man who simply wanted to have a conversation, and talk about freedom, and the crisis of fatherlessness, and his faith in Jesus – when a man like that can be so hated, and slandered, and vilified, that his murder is celebrated across the nation – then something has deeply changed.

His willingness to speak the truth was met with violence and lies. It makes it feel like the light is dying. So it hurts. Because it’s about more than a man. It feels like the idea of America is dying. And worse, it feels like the Gospel is losing. These are dark days.

But we cannot stay there. For Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome….

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The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2025

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The man who perpetrated heinous evil at Annunciation school in Minneapolis depicted himself in his journal as a demon. Indeed, the transgender ideology is demonic. It seeks to undo God’s creation of the human person as distinctly and irrevocably male and female. In his journal he reflects on his experience of possession: “I feel like there is some kind of god … controlling me…. I suddenly start writing things that I don’t even think of myself.” He describes losing time, another experience of people who are possessed by malevolent spirits.

Demons are real. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of darkness. The devil wants to destroy humanity….

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St. Bartholomew 2025

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There’s a classic rock song where a woman is buying the stairway to heaven. The Tower of Babel was intended to reach up into heaven. The stairway or ladder represents human history: man’s attempt to achieve bliss, heaven, nirvana, through experience, conquest, lust, inebriation. Get that job, get that car, get that phone, get that girl, get the ocean view – with a moment of purchase we can climb the stairway to heaven.

Even though most of you have identified as disciples of Jesus, you’ve got the same impulse. You think that if you work hard, make the right decisions, buy the right stuff, you’ll be happy, you’ll be better, you’ll get satisfaction.

Religion sells the same thing by means of ethics or experience. The right spiritual effort, or good works, can get you up the ladder. It’s embedded in the 18th century hymn, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.”

But the whole point of the narrative with Jacob, and culminating in Nathanael’s encounter with Jesus, is that the ladder cannot be climbed by us. The ladder first of all descends, bringing God down to us….

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Exaudi 2025

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It’s not difficult understanding the Bible, the Bible is clear – but it is very difficult to confess and do what it says. A lot of the extraneous, fanciful theology is finding interpretations around the clear teaching. Men look for some way to explain the Bible in a way that ends up rationalizing our continued unwillingness to just do what the Bible says. Let’s be honest; the first thing we think when we hear a saying like, “Turn the other cheek” is, “But what about this situation? I’m not turning the other cheek for that jerk. I want justice!” But the only footnotes to the Bible are the ones we put there. The only qualifications and rationalizations are the ones we invent, loopholes to subvert and dismiss the clear Word of God.

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Rogate 2025

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Christianity “is not without good works” and “proves itself with good fruits” [LW 57: 191]. Luther said that in a sermon on this day in 1535. Faith alone is how we are saved; but faith is never alone. Luther continues in his introduction to that sermon, “the one who wishes to be a Christian must be serious about it and not hypocritical.”

Are you serious about it? That’s the question we each must ask: are we serious about being a disciple of Jesus?

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Cantate 2025

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The epistle of James has always been controversial. One of the earliest lists of canonical (or, accepted) books of the NT comes from the end of the second century, in Rome. James is not mentioned. Put differently, the Roman church did not accept James in the first centuries of Christianity. James gained widespread acceptance when Jerome included it in his Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, early in the fifth century.

It’s not uncommon today to find papal apologists slandering Luther by saying he removed James and other books from the Bible. This is not true. Luther, whose doctorate was in Biblical studies and patristics, was well aware of the controversial history of James. And he was aware of how the Roman priests pitted James against Paul. You really cannot understand Luther unless you’ve had a learned professor who says outrageous things to force you to reevaluate everything you believe. …

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Jubilate 2025

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We should not expect great success or worldly prosperity. Sorrow and crosses come to conform us to the image of Christ. When a sculpture is being fashioned, much stone is chiseled away. When the branch is pruned, the scissors bite. In suffering we experience the chiseling, the cutting.

Jesus said it would be like this: “If anyone wishes to follow Me, let him take up his cross and follow Me” [Mt 16.24]. And St. Paul says, “All who wish to live piously in Christ shall endure persecution” [2 Tim 3.12]. And he says that even in the visible church, the Antichrist will rule until the final judgment. And especially for today, Jesus teaches us not to be surprised when we now have sorrow while the world rejoices. That’s how it is in an upside down world….

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Misericordias Domini 2025

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Today’s Epistle is from 1 Peter 2. What we heard drops us into the middle of a conversation about putting others ahead of yourself. In 1 Pt 2:18, God’s Word tells servants to “be subject to your masters with all respect.” Then ch. 3 opens, “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.” All of this is highly un-American! We live in a culture of self-assertion, self-promotion. But God’s Word teaches a hierarchy inside the family, where the wife respects her husband as the head of the family….

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The Resurrection of Our Lord 2025

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On Friday, the weeping women heard His last words.

“It is finished,” Jesus said, and they believed Him. It’s all over.

You’ve heard those words. “We’re finished!”

What’s finished is over. Done. Dead.

“It is finished,” Jesus said. They believed Him.

The priests win. Rome wins. Death wins….

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