Pastor's Devotion Blog

Groucho Marx once quipped to a priest, "I want to thank you for all the joy you've taken out of this world." Is there joy and anticipation when you think about church? The Psalmist thought so as the group of pilgrims was approaching the temple in Jerusalem. 1 I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!” (Psalm 122) Apparently the church in Rome had the purist Christians who tried to do everything right and tried to get everyone else to do everything

People in mainline Christian churches don’t talk about the Holy Spirit very much. This is puzzling because we, according to our creeds, consider the Holy Spirit to be co-equal to the Father and the Son. This got me thinking—Why don’t we talk about the Holy Spirit more? Let me suggest that it is because the Holy Spirit points to the Son and the Son points to the Father. Let me further suggest that Lutherans mention Jesus more than the other two because of our focus on the grac

We like joy and happiness. We certainly try to avoid pain and suffering. We do whatever we can to avoid pain and suffering. And so we like to jump from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday and avoid the negative vibes of Good Friday and all of the pain and suffering that is expressed there. However, without Good Friday there is no Easter Sunday. There can be no resurrection without a death. Some religions try to suggest that Jesus didn’t really die. If that were the case, then Jesus

John the Baptist and Jesus both proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” So, where is it? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. As Jesus went about His ministry healing the sick, forgiving sin, touching the outcasts, eating with sinners, washing feet, and finally going to the cross, he was showing us what the Kingdom of God looks like. We usually think of a Kingdom as a region where a powerful figure rules and everyone is subject to that person. That is not the kingdom that

We, humans, tend to be selective in whom we love. We have experienced opening our hearts to someone and been hurt, sometimes deeply, in the process. Loving someone makes us vulnerable. So we are careful about whom we love. We categorize people into various levels of love. And we also categorize people into levels of those we dislike. We clearly remember those who have hurt us. Often, then, we dislike all those who are like the persons who hurt us even without know

As we look around us at all of the hatred, violence, and self-centeredness in the world, a common question is: “Where is God in all of this?” Has God abandoned us? Has God given up on this world? Over the centuries there have been many ways of addressing these questions. In ancient times there were philosophies, often attributed to the Greeks, that the physical world is evil and the spiritual world is good. Even though this ideas was rejected by the church, aspect