A Sermon for All Saints Sunday

Today is another festival Sunday – All Saints Day.

In the 2006 hymnal from Augsburg Publishing, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, at the front of the book, there is a list of saints and others to be remembered. For example, they have a special day (July 27) for Mary Magdalene and call her “an apostle.” The word “apostle” really means missionary. Does that title really apply to Mary Magdalene? If one is going to do that one should go to the 16th chapter of the Book of Romans where there is a woman named Junias. She was an apostle, a missionary in the normal sense of the term.

In that list of saints and others to be remembered, they don’t use the word, “saint.” The real reason for leaving out the term “saint” is like the trend of not giving grades so everyone is equal.

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John 8:31-36

A Sermon for Reformation Sunday

Is Reformation Sunday passé? Some Lutherans have said the Reformation is over, and we shouldn’t bother with celebrating it anymore. What we should do is admit it was a mistake, and those who were involved in it were mistaken.

That’s not true of course, but that’s the way some Lutherans are trying to spin it. For example, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) tries to say this (in their 1999 agreement with Rome, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. It’s all over. There’s no problem anymore.

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Luke 18:1-8

A Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

In the Gospel text for today there is this widow, and she’s pounding on the door of the unjust judge. The first thing you realize about this parable is that it’s funny. It’s classic Jewish humor. She pounds and pounds on the door. The judge thinks: “How can I get rid of her? She keeps pestering me. I’m just going to give in.”

We remember that a parable has one point, and we need to be careful not to make a parable into an allegory, that is, a story about ourselves and what we should do.

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Luke 17:11-19

A sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

We heard the Gospel text about the ten lepers, and you may have thought: The ten lepers today? Isn’t this usually a Thanksgiving text? What’s going on?

To be sure, we are marching through Luke, more or less. But the Lectionary Committee, however, had no trouble leaving out the parable of the Prodigal Son because they wanted to put it elsewhere. Why the ten lepers now?

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Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

A sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

The great British poet John Milton begins Paradise Lost with the question: How do we “justify the ways of God to man?”
How do we explain the terrible things that happen in life, the tragedies, accidents, devastating floods, and illnesses? If God is good, why does evil exist? That is the problem for anyone who seriously looks at life.

Habakkuk takes up this question. Habakkuk 1:4: “The law is slacked and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted.”

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