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We must start with love
We hear all these other things about who we are and what we’re supposed to be, but there is one place we all must start: Love beyond ourselves. Of all things, we must start with love. It is our hermeneutic, our fundamental. Our North Star and compass. Love is the start and our predictor. Most…
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Love Against the Wind
Why we know to love, but not how or when. We often think of love as the antidote to chaos, but it isn’t so related to the chaos. Proper 25A | Matthew 22:34-46 This year, we gathered at the river for Convention. Down in Jeffersonville and New Albany, just across the Ohio River from Louisville,…
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A Common Sin
29. To fulfill the missio dei, Catholics and Protestants must repent of their common sin to power. Martin Luther saw something in the church others couldn’t. He found a flaw, running through the foundation of the faith. A flaw which influenced both the theology and practice of the church. Luther’s discovery was simple: that the common belief…
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Our Common Need
28. To repress our common need for the sake of personal piety is no lesser a sin of power when reformed. It is impossible to pin all of the Great Reformation on a moment. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses did not start or embody the Reformation in its totality. But they named a need unaddressed by the…
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A Faith Which Imprisons God
17. By faith alone imprisons a God of redemption without transformation or enfleshed mission. I never really understood the idea of justification by faith alone. At one level it made sense, I guess. Reading Paul alongside the Jesus revealed in the gospels, it sorta sounds like that. Believe in Jesus and you’re good. And as…
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Not Faith Alone
13. The indulgences Luther despised were no more dangerous to souls than elevating faith alone. Nearly 500 years ago, Martin Luther (may have) pounded a piece of paper to a church door. A mighty symbolic act of strangely low significance. Imagine hammering your own theses on your church door. It might spark a local stir,…
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Time to Reform Again
12. Reformers sought to end the arrogance of Catholicism with the arrogance of individualism. Reading through Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, you get the impression there’s more than a little irritation there. He’s not just a little upset. Moderately perturbed. Slightly irritated. No. The dude was pissed. He was pissed at his church. He was pissed…
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The Idolatry of Individualism
11. And our communities have driven the divine into individual pursuits. If the command is to love God and neighbor, and if Jesus is present when we are together, and the missio dei (mission of God) is to build the kin-dom, then individualism is the stumbling block, the temptation for power, and anti-Christ. Individualism defined Let…