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Showing posts with the label Year C Lent 1

Sermon - Trinity IX, 2026 - Luke 16:1-13

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The Parable of the Unjust Steward , Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1540 Christian Wisdom Seeks Eternal Dwellings Wisdom is forward thinking and focused on the goal Christian wisdom employs every treasure, heavenly and worldly, for the sake of reaching the goal If there is a hardest parable, it might be this one; throws people off every time. The parable presents a rich man with a steward who was found wasting the rich man’s possessions. The job of a steward is to be faithful with someone else’s possessions, and this guy wasn’t cutting it. So obviously, he got fired. What’s crazy is the rich man lets the steward hand in the books, and he doesn’t hunt them down and take them from him immediately. The steward does exactly what you don’t want the steward to do, which is why normally the books get taken from the steward: the steward cooks the books. He meets some of the rich man’s debtors, probably tenant farmers, and in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors he adjusts how much they owe, ...

Sermon - Lent 1, Year C, 2025 - Luke 4:1-13

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Baptism and Temptation of Christ , Paolo Veronesse, 1580 Fighting the devil’s temptations with the sword of the Spirit The temptations of worldly comforts The temptations of worldly glory The temptations of presuming God’s mercy That the devil is at work in the world today is not the least bit shocking to you. Afterall, his works of darkness are quite apparent to any of us, and there’s no need to describe the devil’s evil ways since unfortunately we often experience his darkness in our own homes, let alone throughout the world. Regardless of how obvious the devil can be, what’s more dangerous to us is that he often disguises himself as an angel of light, and his temptations appear to be righteous and pious. And so it’s easy enough to figure out that it’s wrong to kill babies, but it’s far more challenging to recognize the devil when he’s quoting the Bible. To show us the devil’s tricks, Jesus fights the devil by battling against temptations. “ And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, return...