Northern Crossings

  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...

In these grey and latter days when we need folks whose life is praise and doxology to God’s great mercy and grace, we have many folks who are wobbly and timid and don’t want to be confrontational with the...

      So Paul in Colossians talks about Jesus defeating the principalities and the powers that sought to destroy us blotting out the hand writing of transgression that was against us, knocking aside every thing...

  The image of Paul gathering fuel for a fire after a shipwreck and having a viper come out of the wood and bite him is evocative in so many ways.  The fact that he shakes it off and acts like nothing happened is a...

I came across an interesting statement on a blog concerning Acts 28;1-10.  Paul’s journey to go to Rome to finally be executed is a fascinating bit of travelogue and a lot happens in the ten verses.  The author stated that...