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Gottesblog

A blog of the Evangelical Lutheran Liturgy

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Pray for Laborers

The emphasis has been on the fewness of the number of people. I submit that we should emphasize not the fewness in terms of number of people, but the fewness in actual laborers. What you are being called into is labor. It is work. By the sweat of your brow you will eat. It is a daily picking up of your cross. It will be difficult, challenging, exhausting. It is work, which is fitting for a laborer.

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What Preaching Is Not

In our current (Easter) print issue, my Liturgical Observation column provided an analysis of preaching, and some common preaching practices that cannot even legitimately be classified as preaching. The article is posted here, in hopes that a wider discussion of these matters can be generated, toward the hope that in the end, better preaching might be result.

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De Coniugio Sacerdotum

This article about the ongoing current debate about clerical celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church made me think of the same debate embedded in our Book of Concord - namely Article 23 of the Augsburg Confession, it’s response by Rome in the Roman Confutation, and our counter-response in Apology 23.

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Larry BeaneComment
Elders Banning Books?

I read something on social media recently, that if true, is a disgrace, and an indictment of both our polity and lack of erudition in the LCMS. An LCMS layman reported being summoned to a meeting of the Board of Elders of his congregation and was castigated for reading Thomas Aquinas and sharing the above two quotes on social media.

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Larry Beane Comments
Making a Mockery of Death

This sermon was preached by Fr. Eckardt at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Kewanee, Illinois, on Easter 2017.

 Alleluia! Christ is risen!

 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Answer me! You, O death, who have paraded yourself and boasted that you were unstoppable, whom no one could undo, for whom no one had an answer,

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Touch me not? Why not?

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

And we have heard the sweet reports of his resurrection, we have heard them! Sweeter than honey to our taste are they! So let us recount these glad reports again on this glad Easter Day. And especially the report of the first witness to the resurrection, Mary Magdalene, as we recounted in the ancient Sequence Hymn for today: Dic nobis Maria, quid vidisti in via?

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How Lutheran Hymns Train For Martyrdom: Meditation on Jesus’ Wounds

 The hymns of the Lutheran Church teach us how to be martyrs for Christ.  Martyrs are witnesses.  The most extreme form of witness is shedding our blood to seal our testimony to Christ, but before a Christian can do that, he must (usually) learn to be a faithful witness in smaller things.

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