The Delicate Dance between Ye and You

What to do when you are completely wrong?  I didn’t realize this till the two comments below.  I could just remove this post, but the damage may have already been done.  If you haven’t read this post, just skip to the comments.  They are right.  I am wrong.  In the Greek it’s always you drink (plural), and literally it’s “you drink out of it all.”  It turns our my delicate dance is a polka or perhaps a mosh pit.

  I realize that thees and thous have as much chance of coming back where they’ve been lost as fins on cars do, but where they are let them remain particularly in the Divine Service.  As there is a rhythm in the versicles and responses, so there is a dance between ye and you. Continue reading

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A Tiger By the Tail

This is another one of those stories that has words one is tempted to use as double entendres.  I will resist because the story is about what is not being said. Continue reading

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Theology is Everywhere

A hospital is not a strange place to find theology.  Where men are suffering and dying is a good place to find theology.  What is remarkable to me is that the theology of the theologians is expressed so clearly. Continue reading

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Mamma Said

“Mamma said there’d be days like this,”  I probably first heard that phrase when The Shirelles released the song in 1961 but I don’t remember hearing it till 1976.  It was March and I was in the mountains of New Mexico on a Ranger training exercise. Continue reading

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A Mourning Person

People will usually describe themselves as either a morning or a night person.  The Lord doesn’t care for as the hymn says, “Day and night are both alike to Thee.”  Some people do, however, care.  Lord help you, and I don’t mean this in a frivolous manner if you are night pastor in morning country.  People who get up with the chickens think this is the only way to be.  But whether you’re like the morning or night you’re still a person.  It’s a different manner when it comes to being a mourning person.  These are the only kind that rightly value the ministry. Continue reading

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It started with the goddess

It started with the self-proclaimed “Digital Goddess” Kim Komando.  It was exacerbated by sports commentators saying this or that player was a “god.”  It burst into flames when the PBS cook referred to another as the “goddess of flambeau.”

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Laughing and Crying with Strange Bedfellows

Either I’m not being sent the memos or I don’t know where to pick them up.  I didn’t get the memo that the confessional position had changed on the order of creation.  The roles of men and women now apply only in the home and in the pastoral office not in the world or in church offices made by man.  Apparently I also  wasn’t sent or failed to pick up the memo about the new understanding of Romans 16:17. Continue reading

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Food for Thought

A cereal named Ezekiel 4:9 has just shown up on my grocers shelf, and even for a town that prides itself in keeping things weird, this is weird.  Here’s what the package says, “As described in Holy Scriptures ‘Take also unto thee wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and spelt and put them in one vessel and make bread of it…..’This Biblical Cereal is truly the Staff of Life.”  Continue reading

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Setting Out for Elert but Not Even Making it to Akron

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Austin, Texas wants to be a confessional Lutheran congregation.  You might say they want to get to Elert, but they don’t even make it to Akron. Continue reading

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There’s a Bathroom on the Right

A Lutheran woman once told me she grew up thinking the chorus to Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969 hit “Bad Moon Rising” wasn’t “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” but “There’s a bathroom on the right.”  I use to think that was because her hearing was poor; I now think it’s because she was a Lutheran. Continue reading

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