Sermons (Page 162)

We’ve all done it. We all have checked ourselves in the mirror. Before a big day at work or a night on the town, we adjust our clothing, check our hair, and make sure everything matches. “How do I look?” we wonder. Sometimes we look damn good; and other times we just hope to pass. We hope our client is captivated by our personality enough to overlook the massive pimple. We pray that our bad hair day doesn’t turn into a bad date. We hope that the black clothing really does make us look a bit slimmer. Mirrors have this way of reflecting back to us reality. They can be unforgiving, and sometimes they enlarge or distort reality, but generally they’re reflecting back to us a glimpse of the world…

Suppose you’re looking to buy shoes, where might you go to find them? Maybe a shoe store, a department store, or online. If you need a high quality recipe, what would you do? You could talk to a friend, go to a cookbook, or go online. Now, if you want to figure out if that weird skin thing is something to worry about or not, where would you turn? Maybe you’d turn to a doctor, a friend, or… online. (Although if you’re anything like me, looking online almost certainly means I’ll diagnose myself with a terminal illness. So, I’m learning to avoid that “online” answer for medical advice.)Finally, if we want to experience God, where do we look? Before we give some quick answers, like “look online”, let’s dwell on that question today. “Where do we look to experience God?”…

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a healthy number of questions. I wonder things like: Why didn’t Trump use a better word than “wherever” to describe the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly? Or why do I have to pay Hulu to watch commercials? And I’ve often wondered, “Why should I care about Mary, the mother of Jesus?” After all, as a Lutheran Mary has not played anything more than a passive role in my life. So when I went to a Roman Catholic high school I would ask a lot of questions about her. I’d talk with my teachers about their answers, especially since most dogma about Mary was codified quite recently and isn’t explicitly supported Biblically…