Transfiguration Sunday

Today is a festival Sunday called The Transfiguration. It’s a minor festival. Nevertheless, it is one that is celebrated every year at this time.

In Europe where they still perform operas they will perform Wagner’s opera, “Parsifal,” which has to do with the rediscovery of the Holy Grail. That, of course, refers to the Lord’s Supper.

In the season of Epiphany we have had a series of sermons dealing with how the Word of God works. We come today to the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper is seriously misunderstood among us. There are three kinds of misunderstanding.

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A Sermon on the Lordship of Christ for the Season of Epiphany

What should you do when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to your door? (They believe Jesus is less than God.) Engage in a debate with them? No, thank them and send them on their way.

It’s tempting to say to yourself: “I know a Bible verse that will settle it for them.” One such verse is 1 Cor 8:6, which is a kind of creed: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

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A Sermon on Preaching for the Season of Epiphany

1 Cor 1:10-21

The lectionary committee, the people who cut up the texts, don’t do it very well at times. That’s not entirely their fault. The original texts had no spaces between the letters, no divisions between the sentences. The letters are all in upper case (capital letters). Although there were some general sections, and there was a way of indicating a question, it was quite different from the way it’s laid out for us in chapters and verses and paragraphs.

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A Sermon on the Christian Life for the Season of Epiphany

A Lutheran woman has written an account of becoming a born-again Christian. She asks: “What does this mean?” She answers: “It means there was a point in my life where I came to the understanding that I had really offended God and that there were two ways it could go. Either through my repentance, belief, and trust in Jesus’s blood, that he paid the fine for me, or through my entry into hell.”

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A Sermon on the Christian Life for the Season of Epiphany

In the season of Epiphany we look at how the Word of God works. Today is about the Christian life. We begin with Matthew 5:1-10 where we find the nine blessings of the Beatitudes. Let’s look at the middle blessing in Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.”

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