Trinity IV 2026

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Most 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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St. Matthew 2025

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St. Matthew’s Gospel ends with well-known words, the so-called Great Commission. Jesus says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations.”

There’s been a tremendous tension in American Christianity for the last half-century or more about the purpose of the church. The tension is sometimes presented as “mission” versus “maintenance.” Some churches and pastors are “missional,” meaning they want to make disciples. “Maintenance” churches and pastors don’t care about that, they just want to exist for themselves. Those are the caricatures.

The mistake in this way of thinking is that being a disciple is a binary thing, either you are or you aren’t. The switch is on or off.

It’s more complicated than that. The words St. Matthew put at the end of his Gospel say a little more: “Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”

Baptism begins the life of the disciple, and it is accompanied by a continual teaching, an ongoing catechesis to observe everything Jesus commanded….

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Laetare Sermon 2024

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Today’s Gospel begins with many disciples; there is “a great multitude [following Jesus].” But by the end of the same chapter, after Jesus teaches about the Supper, almost everyone turns around and stops following Him. They loved the loaves, they marveled at the miracles – but they could not stomach His teaching. American Christianity preaches a gospel of success; Jesus is the giver of health and wealth.

But when the cross comes, it’s very tempting to turn back and follow Him no more….

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You Will Be My Disciples: Sermon for the LCMS Florida-Georgia District Convention

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All we have to offer the world is the cross of Jesus. The greatness of Luther is in his pointing to Jesus and His cross. There is the One who lays down His life for friends and enemies alike. You are by God’s grace called to be His disciples; by God’s grace you will become His disciples; and by God’s grace He will prune us to bring forth fruit – confessing His name to the world, and bearing evil with patience.

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