One woman listened to a rebellious angel, and she likewise rebelled.
Another woman listened to an obedient angel, and she said, “Amen.”
One man fell, and brought the world to ruin.
Another Man came down from heaven to raise up the fallen world.
One tree infected mankind with bitterness.
Another tree appeared bitter but restored sweetness to our race.
Read MoreLuther once called the emperor “that poor mortal maggot sack … who is not certain of his life for a single moment” [LW 59 p95]. His point was the exalted rulers can suddenly die, and they cannot truly defend us. At that time, the Ottoman Empire was the great military threat. But Luther saw this in theological terms. The forces of Islam were attacking, and this, he believed, was divine judgment, because the Holy Roman Empire, and the Pope, placed their trust in money and arms, not the Word of God. To place your trust in horses or men—that is, to place your trust in armies—is to trust in maggot sacks. …
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When that denomination led by the Bishop of Rome took away the blood of Christ from the laity, it demonstrated its ability to err. Here Luther argues that the only fully trustworthy and infallible man is Christ Jesus. To Him alone are we commanded to listen:
The fallibility of the church has been borne out by the fact that it accepted, and approved of, the pope’s proposal to restrict Holy Communion for the laity to one kind. The church did not resist this move or contend against it. But Christ nonetheless preserved the church by reason of her daily petition for “the forgiveness of sins” in the Christian Creed, as we still pray in the Lords Prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Therefore regard the church as holy. Nevertheless, I do not trust myself to her; for the spectacle of the church in the papacy prevents me from doing so. If they teach Christ properly, I, too, shall believe and trust her; for in Christ I know no sin, no error, no lie. He alone is the Truth and the embodiment of the Father’s will. For of Him the Father says: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him” (Matt. 17:5). If I were to give ear to anyone else, error would certainly come in.
LW 22, pp258f
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….
Read MoreThe whole power of the mass consists in the words of Christ, in which he testifies that…
Read MoreOn 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….
Read MoreChristianity “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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A gem from Luther:
We have Easter as often as we celebrate the Mass, preach, and administer the holy Sacrament. With us Christians every day is Easter, except that for ancient memory’s sake we observe a special Easter once a year. And that is not wrong but good and laudable, to observe the time when Christ died and rose again, even though our remembrance of His suffering and resurrection is not restricted to such a time but may be done on any day. As He says: “As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of Me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
LW 13, pp355–356
The “celebrations of life” people hold now pretend that what has happened isn’t real. The funeral homes with flowers everywhere—flowers that themselves will be dead in mere days—cover with their sickening sweetness the stench of death in a corpse we’ve filled with formaldehyde to pretend none of this is really happening….
Read MoreThere are many congregations, but one church. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic church finds its expression in local assemblies. That’s what the word church means: assembly. Today’s Epistle reading is a letter to one of those local assemblies: “To the church of God that is in Corinth.”
We tend to think of Christianity in individual terms, a private faith, a personal experience or decision. Certainly the individual is involved, but Paul writes to Corinth as he does to all the other local congregations: collectively…
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