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Up one levelLeaven in the Lump: A Sermon
In the refrigerator of my childhood lived a jar. A big Mason jar with a screw-top lid not fastened down all the way. Inside the jar lived what we called “our pet.” The pet had been living for almost forty years by the time it got to us, handed down from my great-grandmother. Each week, my mother would remove the jar from the fridge and carefully lift the lid, remove the waxed paper from under the lid, and measure out a cup of grayish-white, gloppy substance, which she would then set aside in a bowl covered by a damp kitchen towel. Back into the jar went a half-cup of flour and a half-cup of warm water. Sometimes, she would pour off a sour-smelling yellowish liquid. Sometimes, she’d stir the liquid back into the goop in the bottom of the jar. She never needed to add anything else, and frowned upon my aunts who also had a jar of the pet, but fed theirs yeast water and sugar with the flour...
NEW! Print archive
Studies have shown that nothing depresses a faithful Lutheran Forum reader more than remembering that fantastic article sometime last year, was it in the summer issue? and then discovering, after a careful perusal of all the shelves in the house, that it's gone missing. Probably some eager if dishonest fellow clergy stole it at the last pericope study. And other local readers are far too zealous about the whereabouts of their own past LFs to lend their copies out, even for an IOU inscribed in blood...
In Statu Embarassmentionis
Six months have now passed since the event which will go down in history as the shoals struck in the slow, miserable shipwreck of the ELCA. It will be a slow, painful drowning, not a dramatic plunge like the fishing trawler at the end of the movie “The Perfect Storm.” It is a confused and confusing situation, a compound of panic and denial. Today we find ourselves not so much in statu confessionis at an apostate and persecuting church, but rather, so to speak, in statu embarassmentionis in a disintegrating one which has made us all de facto congregationalists...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Judas
There’s actually quite a number of Judases in the New Testament: Judas the brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55), Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13), Judas not Iscariot (John 14:22), Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), the Judas who sheltered Paul (Acts 9:11), Judas called Barsabbas (mentioned three times in Acts 15), and the epistle-writer Judas whom we in English prefer to call Jude, most of whom are basically good guys, but you won’t find Christians naming their sons after any of them. When we say Judas we mean Judas Iscariot, the sneaky low-down traitor, so oily that he betrays the Son of Man with a kiss, so cheap that it’s Mary of Bethany’s extravagant anointing of Jesus with nard that drives him as thief and keeper of the moneybag to bargain with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver in exchange for his teacher...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Peter
Peter is the icon of the sinner-saint. We always find ourselves in his shoes. He’s the one who leaps out onto the water because of his great faith in Christ, and then halfway there—when the miracle is evidently working just fine—that’s when he panics and starts to sink. He’s the one who confesses first that Jesus is the Messiah, not a prophet or Elijah or John the Baptist, for which the Lord praises him and the blessing of divine revelation that granted Peter this insight; yet within three verses Peter’s telling the Messiah that he’s not allowed to go to the cross, which is Satan speaking from within him...