Pious Lutheran

The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus,  Fernando Gallego, 1480-1488 What is love? No, I’m not quoting a song from the 90’s, because this is a legitimate and important question. What does it mean to love? Typically love is said to be a feeling, a sympathy and affection for another. But that doesn’t actually help define love, it actually makes it harder to define. If love were simply a feeling, then love would be entirely subjective, dependent on each individual and dependent on their emotional state at any given time. Love would be defined by the heart. But what’s so wrong with that, you may ask. Well, Jesus said what comes out of the heart: “ Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. ” The heart is not exactly the prettiest place, contrary to popular opinion. When we define love based upon what we feel in our hearts, then love is defined as evil. To illustrate, we’ve legally (at least by the courts) defined love as a feeling and

The Parable of the Sower  from The Garden of Delights , by Herrad of Landsberg, 1180  Does God care about what you spend your time doing? Does He care about your hobbies and habits? We probably don’t want God to care about those things because we’re nervous about what He would say about our habits, but the simple answer is yes, God does care. That’s what this parable is showing us: God cares about how we spend our time because it’s a matter of the salvation of our eternal souls. Here in this parable God warns us of the dangers to our faith in order to direct us to Him. Before we go much further though, we do need to establish this basic fact: “ God desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. ” Jesus illustrates this with regards to the sower in the parable. “ “A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered aw

Children are very often treated as a curse in our culture; we don’t want to have “too many” of them. Fertility is regularly treated like a disease, something which we medicate against. Unborn children are treated like commodities or science experiments. For example, Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH presided over, funded, ordered, or participated in experiments on human fetuses procured from abortions, such as a University of Pittsburgh experiment which grafted infant scalps onto lab rats. These are the types of atrocities we’d expect from Nazis, yet they’re taking place in our own modern day nation.  Approximately 800,000+ abortions are performed yearly in the United States. About 3,500 abortions take place here in Iowa each year. Think about those numbers for a moment. About as many people as live in Emmetsburg are killed before birth in Iowa. More people than live in Des Moines are killed yearly in the United States. Those are some sobering numbers. Contrast that with the

Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, Codex aureus Epternacensis, 11th Century What does it mean to be a Christian? Over the past century Christianity has popularly taken on a couple different forms. In the mid to late 20th century, it popularly looked like a social or civic club, kind of like belonging to the boy scouts or kiwanis. Both churches and clubs were full during these years partly because it was all the rage to belong to a club.  But, things change. During the later part of the 20th century, and up through today, Christianity popularly looks like a “movement” instead of an institution or club. This means people identify as “spiritual but not religious,” meaning that they might personally believe in God and have spiritual beliefs, but they don’t care to attend church services, belong to a church, or practice their faith in any meaningful sense. But neither one of those notions of the Christian life is very accurate. Christianity is neither a social club nor a movement. We’r

Transfiguration of Jesus , Carl Block, 1872 The liturgical Christian year reflects the life of Christ. Because the Christian life is bound up in Christ, the liturgical year also reflects the life of a Christian. During a lifetime there are highs and there are lows, just as during the ministry of Christ there were highs and lows. In the church year we have great high feasts and low penitential seasons. Transfiguration comes as a high point at the end of Epiphany, which came right at the end of Christmas. Transfiguration comes right before the season of lenten preparation, then we reach lent itself, and holy week, and finally Good Friday before we can ultimately reach that joyous high feast of Easter. In order to endure this long penitential season of Lent we first go to the mount of Transfiguration. Similarly, the Transfiguration took place historically at the end of Jesus’ ministry; as He came down the mountain He turned His face to Jerusalem and the hill He must die on. In order for P