Pious Lutheran

  In the Garden of Eden God created man in His image. Thus Adam and Eve were able to converse with God, just as freely as you and I might chat with our friends. God would speak and Adam and Eve could hear Him and then respond right back!  I can hardly imagine strolling along and having a conversation with God, but that’s how it was, at least until the Fall into sin. At that time Adam and Eve chose to listen to Satan and each other rather than God. Henceforth all of their descendents from Cain, Abel, and Seth, to you and me, all have been born deaf and mute like the man in the region of the Decapolis. Like that man, Christ opens the deaf ears of our hearts to believe the Gospel and loosens our tongues to rightly declare His praise. Let me ask you a question: why do humans have ears and mouths? Is it just so that we can converse with one another or hear danger coming and run away? If that were the case then we would be no different than the beasts of the earth. Animals have ears...

  Sometimes the parables can be hard to figure out. Not this week, since the parable’s preface clarifies the issue for us: “ Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt. ” The point Jesus makes here is that trust in oneself leads to pious or impious damnation, but trust in God leads to a contrite heart, justification, and pious living. Jesus illustrates this by means of a common Biblical trope, namely that of a pharisee and a tax collector. The way this trope is typically understood today is that Pharisees are the bad guys, the upper class elites, the high brow, hoity toity, jerks who don’t let the common people come and associate with them. The tax collectors then are the underdogs, the ordinary, humble Everyman, just trying to get along and escape from the long arm of the Pharisees. So many a Christian reads the Bible and would rather identify with the tax collectors and prostitutes, than with the phari...

(The following is a newspaper article published in Emmetsburg and Algona, IA on differing dates.) “Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter”( 2 Thess. 2:15).  American culture has long been skeptical of tradition, believing that we humans are progressively improving from one generation to the next. So we discard the old simply because it’s old while we believe that the new must be better. Perhaps this is in part due to the industrial revolution and many recent technological advances: Eg, a car is better than a horse-drawn buggy.  But too often we apply this “newer is better” principle also to other facets of our civilization. We’ve come to believe that Google is better than memorization, colored lights are better than stained glass, listening to music is b...

A handful of generations after God created the world, He looked at the state of man and saw that “ the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart. ” So the Lord warned man, and said that in 120 years He would blot out every man and animal on the earth, unless they repent.  At the conclusion of 120 years, out of billions of people, only eight faithful souls were found living lives of repentance. Thus the prophecy which our Lord had given about the great flood came to fruition. “ Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils had the breath of life died...only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark. ” We see a similar thing foretold in our Gospel today. Jesus drew near to Jerusalem and wept over it, saying “ Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are...

“ There was a rich man who had a manager , and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. ” In this parable the rich man, the master of the house, is God our heavenly Father. What are the riches which belong to the Lord? “ The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. ” Everything created by God, from the concept of time to the atoms which makes up everything, all of it is the Lord’s.  The house-manager, the steward in the parable, is each and every person on earth. We all share the charge given to our first parents, Adam and Eve: “ Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. ” Typically, a rich man hires a steward to take of his stuff because the rich man has too much stuff to take care of on his own and needs to employ others because he’s not sufficient for the task.  That’s not the case with God though. God is more than capable of taking care of all of this earth Himself. So the reason Go...

Christians are altogether a different sort. On the one hand, our Lord describes us as a flock of sheep and He is our Good Shepherd. But on the other hand, we’re not supposed to be just a flock of gullible sheep, rather we’re to be wise and cunning soldiers, armed with the sword of God’s Word to be on guard against our enemy Satan. Jesus desires that His Christians would be good sheep, doing the will of His Father, and astute soldiers equipped against the wiles of the ravenous wolves. It’s a strange picture, but we’re a flock of heavily armored sheep, grazing in the pasture holding swords in our cloven hooves.  Christ paints us this illustration today towards the end of His sermon on the mount. “ Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ” The first assumption here is that we’re sheep. This is a comparison made throughout the scriptures: we all like sheep have gone astray and the Lord is my Good Shepherd, I shall not want, He lay...