Northern Crossings

Coincidences are those things that happen that make us all a little uneasy.  You get up in the morning and think about someone and remind yourself to call them and later you get a call that they are in the hospital.  You hear a...

Evidently the EPA came out with a declaration that people should leave their Air Conditioners on 88 when they are gone and turn it down to 85 when they go to bed and turn a fan on.  They had some other crazy ideas about the...

  There is much covered by Luther’s axiom that we should let God be God.  It is a good definition of sin when we don’t.  Mercy work where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing is also a...

Gaffes are those things that happen that ought to embarrass folks, assuming they can be embarrassed.  When Mary spent all day making Veal Oscar for a dinner party and Mr. Grant loaded over half the dinner onto his plate on the...

  Preaching to preachers was a famous theologian named Oswald Beyer. He was trying to convey the truth that for preachers all we have to offer is the Gospel, the good news about Jesus. There are word structures that simply...

We wrote last time about the hubris of folks who look around everyday and see incompetence and sloppiness and still think there is a capability to do stuff that only God can do.  Luther talked about that kind of thinking as a...

  I always thought that “suicide watch” was meant to prevent suicide and not to watch one.  I thought that was a good line and then I find out that this Jeffrey Epstein character was taken off of the watch. ...

  This is from The Milwaukee Independent. com Hundreds of members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) became the latest religious group to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies on August...

There are always questions about the nature of faith.  Is it a performance?  Is it knowledge?  Is it a response to a command?  Here is the definition from Hebrews. I hope Pastors spend a lot of time working on the nature of...

The Old Testament lesson for this Sunday is Genesis 15:1-6.  ‘I am your shield and great reward” God tells Abraham.  I love that image and the promise of descendants like the sand at the seashore and stars in the...

Since there is a lot of name calling and “Nazi” language being bandied about and the casual dropping of the word “values”, usually by people who urge pitch forks and torches outside the home of those with...

  In the Preface to “A Vision of Judgement” (1821), Robert Southey wrote: “Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have...

There was a time when “your mother wears army boots” hurled like vindictive in the face of some urchin would get you a fight or a kick in the shins.  Calling someone a sissy had much the same effect and telling a...

The celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson learned as many have before, that the collective frustration of what some have come to call “the mob” are not interested in perspective, objective factoids, and a...