Ashtray On An Airplane? Bypass My PIN?

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The Thoma family is counting down the days until our annual Florida vacation. It’s a little over a month away. For the record: I. Can’t. Wait.

For me, it is a time of refreshment like none other, even though I’m no fan of traveling. If someone ever perfects teleportation, I’ll be first in line to invest. Step into a pod, hit a button, and step out beside a palm tree? Here, take my money.

On second thought, I just contradicted a formal Thoma decree. Florida’s distance is part of the point. Years ago, we decided as a family that vacations needed to happen somewhere far enough away that any return for a pastoral emergency would be impossible. Traverse City was too close. Florida isn’t. Once we’re in Florida, we’re there until the return flight.

Ah, the return flight. That’s the post-vacation moment God uses to help me brace for the real world. Indeed, the world shrinks around me. For example, I remember a brief conversation I had with Jen during the flight home last year. During the flight, I went to use the lavatory. I returned having noticed one of sin’s subtle fingerprints on the plane: the ashtray built into the lavatory’s folding door.

There it was in that tiny room behind the cockpit of our giant compression chamber with wings.

Before the flight even began, as the stewardess did her best to smile while demonstrating emergency instructions that no one cared to know, a voice came over the loudspeaker stating very plainly that Federal law prohibits smoking. Not to mention, there are a whole bunch of signs everywhere, most of them illuminated, telling you that smoking is prohibited. Then there are the smoke detectors above all our heads, alarms ready to scream.

Still, there’s the ridiculous ashtray tucked into the bathroom door.

There must be a practical reason for it. The only thing I can think of is that the airlines, perhaps without meaning to, have built a tiny doctrine of original sin into the lavatory door. They know people break rules. If someone is foolish enough to light up, the airline would rather the cigarette be put out in an ashtray than dropped into a trash bin full of paper towels. So, maybe the ashtray is proof of the Bible’s credibility. The airline, like the Bible, knows human beings are self-centered, addicted, defiant, and occasionally dangerous. An ashtray in an airplane makes no sense until you remember the doctrine of original sin. Then it makes perfect sense.

Come to think of it, I noticed something similar this past week while getting gas..

Essentially, no matter which gas station I use, when I pay with my debit card at the pump, there’s always an option to bypass my PIN. The same thing happens at most grocery stores. But the card has a PIN for a reason. It’s supposed to protect against unauthorized use. The whole point of the PIN is to prove that the person holding the card has knowledge only the cardholder would have. Still, if someone stole my card, he could pull into a gas station, swipe it at the pump, bypass the PIN, fill his tank, and drive away.

Unlike the ashtray, I can’t think of an explanation for this one. I only remember standing there with the nozzle in my hand, staring at the ridiculous GSTV commercial about giving the COVID vaccine to babies, and thinking, “The ‘Bypass PIN’ option sort of feels like having a deadbolt on my front door with a button beside it that says ‘Skip Deadbolt.’”

I guess what I’m saying is that some things just don’t make sense, and yet they exist anyway. I suppose one reason for this is that we’ve more than made peace with contradiction. As a pastor, I’ve met plenty of folks who insist on principles and then give wiggle room to the wants or personal preferences that negate them entirely. Truth be told, I’m guilty of such things myself. We all are.

That said, it was demonstrated in full bloom here at Our Savior last Sunday.

A woman came forward during the Lord’s Supper. Because I’d never seen her before in my life, and because the Lord’s Supper is much more than a religious snack shared among generally spiritual people, I discreetly asked at the altar, as I always do, the appropriate questions relative to participation, and when she openly admitted to being apart from what we believe, teach, and confess, I offered her a blessing and asked for a little bit of her time to chat after worship so we could talk in more detail.

I understand that many Christians come from churches where the Lord’s Supper is offered openly to anyone who comes forward. In those settings, withholding it from someone at the altar may seem unthinkable, and I understand why someone formed by that practice would be bothered. Not angry. Bothered. Still, 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 are especially important here. They teach us that Holy Communion is participation in Christ’s body and blood, and that those who commune together are also confessing something together. They also warn that eating and drinking without discernment is spiritually dangerous. That means the Lord’s Supper is never an open-ended religious gesture. It’s Christ’s gift, and because it’s Christ’s gift, pastors are called to steward it faithfully (1 Corinthians 4). That stewardship includes care for the person approaching the altar, care for the congregation gathered at the altar, and care for the confession being made at the altar.

So, again, before offering her a blessing, I asked to speak with her after worship. I did so gently. A conversation like that belongs somewhere better than a few whispered seconds at the rail. When she became angry, others nearby were gentle, too. No one tried to humiliate her. No one raised a voice at her. No one treated her with contempt. The goal was exactly what it should have been: kindness joined to faithfulness.

But she wasn’t having any of it. In her mind, she was owed the Sacrament, regardless of any reason we might give for instruction toward altar unity first.

The result? After a scene at the altar, rather than returning to her seat by way of the side aisles with the rest, she went down the center aisle alone, if only to display her anger to everyone. At her pew, she lifted her hands and called out that she had been refused communion with her God, continuing to disrupt the reverence around her.

There’s a lot wrapped up in all of this. Some of it was anger. Some of it was embarrassment. I don’t doubt for one second that she felt wronged. But why? Well, at least in part because much of American Christianity has trained people to think of the Lord’s Supper this way. If someone has been taught that the altar should receive anyone who comes forward, then a pastor’s hesitation will almost certainly feel like offense. I understand that. Still, taking offense does not mean offense was actually given. The reality is that she walked into a church whose altar she didn’t know, whose doctrine and practice she didn’t know, and whose confession she had not yet learned, and then expected the altar to operate according to assumptions carried in from the outside.

It was as though a stranger walked into someone’s house at dinnertime, sat down at the table, objected to the menu, rebuked the host, and then announced to everyone present that she had been denied what was rightly hers because they would not rewrite the order of their home to accommodate her.

That sounds absurd in ordinary life. And yet, in American Christianity, it seems to happen all the time.

Open or closed communion is not necessarily the point here. Although I should at least say that the churches practicing open communion usually recognize some boundary, even if they draw it differently. Suppose a pastor knew beforehand that someone intended to receive the bread and wine only to throw them on the floor and trample them. I doubt many would actually say, “Well, if he comes forward, I have to commune him.” At that point, the issue would be obvious. The pastor would guard the Lord’s Supper against open contempt. My point is not that every case is that blatant. Most are not. My point is simply that once we admit the Lord’s Supper can be profaned, the pastoral question is no longer whether reverent boundaries may exist. The question is where those boundaries belong, and whether the pastor is willing to bear the burden of applying them faithfully.

I suppose another point here is that, on the other end of the exchange, too many have been trained to believe that individual sincerity outranks truth, desire outranks doctrine, and personal offense outweighs pastoral responsibility. We have been trained to think that anything with the name “Jesus” on it is automatically boundaryless. And if it does have boundaries—things a worshipping community may have in place to prevent profaning Christ—then those boundaries are automatically loveless and offensive. We have been trained to imagine the Church as a spiritual convenience store, open to everyone on each person’s preferred terms.

That’s like a “Bypass PIN” option at the gas pump. It makes very little sense to me, and yet, it exists anyway. A person can say, “This is communion with God,” and then become furious when the pastor takes seriously what God has said about His meal. A person can say, “This matters deeply,” and then refuse the very care that proves the Church actually agrees with the statement. In other words, we say the thing is serious, and then we resent the safeguards that seriousness requires, acting as though doctrines are rude whenever they slow us to self-inspection and the possibility that we could be wrong.

One of the biggest itches in my craw is that so many say they want churches to stand for something, only to be shocked when we do. But the thing is, they’re really only shocked because the stance affected them personally.

You should know, she took me up on the offer to chat after worship.

Most people who are unhappy with our practice usually go through the greeting line, tell me what a rotten person I am, and then leave. She stood off to the side and waited. I did my best to speak calmly about what God’s Word says, and why what I did was an act of care rather than cruelty.

But again, she was having none of it, thereby demonstrating one more contradiction.

She stayed to chat. But like so many in our culture who claim to want discussion, when the time came for it, the “Skip Dialogue” button was pressed, and she talked over me, doing her best to lather me in condemnation and insults. I barely got a few sentences out. Instead, I was tongue-lashed by someone who wanted order, so long as it was her order. She wanted a church with an altar, but that altar could not be misaligned with what she already believed about altars.

So, why am I telling you these things? Well, for starters, you should know this isn’t necessarily an unfamiliar experience. It does happen more than people know, just not necessarily to this degree. I suppose I’m also sharing it because, at a minimum, it’s time, once again, to remind folks that the Church is not a restaurant where the customer is always right. The pastor is not a waiter taking custom orders. Above all—and recognizing that other Christians order this differently—my Synod, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, believes the Lord’s Supper is sacred in a way that requires altar fellowship to be taken seriously. Sacred things require reverence, and reverence requires pastors and congregations to ground the Lord’s Supper in faithful practices born of God’s Word rather than in the increasingly common internet-assembled expectations of whoever happens to approach the altar.

This is where the theological lesson in all of this becomes unavoidable. We need to realize that sin does more than make people bad. It also makes us incoherent. It teaches us to demand gifts while rejecting the giver’s terms. It teaches us to call something holy while treating it like it isn’t. It teaches us to interpret pastoral care as hatred.

I think I just figured out why the PIN bypass option exists. Again, when you remember the nature of sin, these things make sense. The PIN bypass exists because the world wants what it wants. For businesses, in most cases, it’s profit. To get at your dollars, most businesses prefer convenience. Convenience often wins the argument before security even gets to speak. Scenes like the one that happened last Sunday prove the same thing. Any obstacle to personal preference is inconvenient. A person with this mindset will only ever see a pastor as hateful when he says, “I need to speak with you first, because what’s happening here is far too precious to be handled carelessly.”

Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in. It’s even more unfortunate that anger can rise so quickly when a pastor is trying to be pastoral. Still, the pastor’s task remains what it has always been. We preach Christ crucified. We call sinners to repentance. We give the gifts as Christ instituted them. We guard what He has entrusted to His Church. We speak gently when gentleness is possible, and we remain faithful even when gentleness is mistaken for hate. We do this because, in the end, we already know that the real contradiction at the heart of all this is, quite simply, us. Sinners want God near enough for comfort, but also far enough away to leave us in charge.

The thing is, the Christian Faith doesn’t actually allow that arrangement. Christ draws near on His terms. And because He is no divine pushover, letting anyone do whatever he or she wants with His things, He also doesn’t ordain undershepherds to accommodate terms other than what Christ has established. That’s not cruelty on Christ’s part. That’s not cruelty on the pastor’s part, either. That’s care. One would hope that even an atom-sized splinter of Christian humility would be enough to help any of us press “Pause” instead of “Bypass” before assuming that a church’s reverent boundary is an act of cruelty.

What Else Is There To Say?

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I did a quick calculation this morning. I’ve done the calculation before, if only to remember how long it’s been.

Essentially, I looked back into the folders where I keep all these Sunday morning eNews messages. The first folder is labeled “2015.” However, there really should be a 2014 folder, too, because there are five in there that belong to the previous year.

Doing the math, that means that this coming November, I’ll have maintained this weekly practice for twelve years straight, never once missing a Sunday, even during the Thoma family’s two-week vacation. Every year on vacation, I tell myself I’m not going to do it. But then I do, anyway.

Well, that changes this year. Yeah, right. But I mean it this time. Okay, let’s just wait and see.

This morning’s note is number 654. Again, looking at the date of the very first one, and then doing a little math, it seems I’ve written a good number more than a year allows. That’s because I’ve also been writing them for special days throughout the year. For example, I write something at Thanksgiving. I write one on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas Day. Things like that. When there are national tragedies, I try to observe and then say something worthwhile—something that can nudge a reader toward Christ. We’ve had our fair share of those in the last twelve years.

The COVID years never seemed to run dry of one’s need to observe critically through the Gospel’s lens.

But whether or not anything I’ve ever scribbled has been worth anyone’s while, at some point along the way, these little jaunts became less an opportunity to communicate about a particular topic and more a habit. And by habit, I not only mean the nagging urge to type something, but also the urge to observe the world in a certain way and do what I can to bring others into that observation.

I’ve said it before. There’s always something going on. A person needs only to open his eyes and look around. We live in a world that is both wonderful and foolish all at the same time. How a person prefers to interpret what’s seen is another question altogether. I suppose in a sense, this weekly habit—my clinical need to lift the looking glass of God’s Word to my eyes, sweep the moment’s horizon, and then describe the details for public consumption—has been a way for my habit to shape the habits of others.

Habits—good ones—are necessary, especially when the world’s darker things impose. I suppose that’s one of the strange benefits of good habits. In a way, they carry us when we can’t carry ourselves. They’re there to help put things in order when chaos threatens the moment.

For example, here I am at 654. I’ve scanned the morning’s horizon. What did the world impose? What chaos loomed?

A seven-year-old girl, Athena Strand, was kidnapped and murdered in Texas by a FedEx driver, Tanner Horner, who came to her home with a delivery. He saw her, and when no one was looking, he took her.

The images from the delivery truck’s interior dash cam video are dreadful, even though the ones I’ve seen don’t show the murder itself. One in particular shows her on her knees behind him in the narrow space between the cab and the packages, small enough to be hidden there, looking over his shoulder with a face that still belonged to childhood. To me, she seems caught between confusion and trust, as though some part of her was still trying to understand whether this was strange or frightening, whether she had won an unexpected contest, and the prize was a ride in a FedEx truck, or she was actually being carried past the last safe moment of her life. Her hair, her posture, the helpless nearness to the man driving her away—it all makes the scene almost unbearable. He was taking her toward a dreadful end, and she was still too young to know how terrified she needed to be.

Horner was sentenced to death by lethal injection last week. This does not bother me. There will be time between the verdict and the needle for the kind of forgiveness that can preserve Horner through mortality and into immortality. Let’s hope that happens while understanding that such hope feels foreign to our human sense. And so, in the meantime, let the government’s sword be removed from its sheath and wielded as God has ordained (Romans 13:4), lest more monsters act on the urge to do what Horner has done.

Beyond these things, it’s stories like these that make commentary feel useless. What is there to say after all this? What sentence can bear the weight of a seven-year-old child taken while playing in her driveway? What moral observation can see clearly enough through the fog of a little girl being abducted, violated, strangled, and dumped like trash a few miles from the safety of her home? What polished paragraph can stand near her mother and father, people who’ve had to keep breathing in a world where their daughter no longer does?

Some people reach for words because silence feels a lot like surrender. Still, in certain circumstances, it feels as though human language fails us miserably because some evils are just too plain for explanation. Some things that happen don’t need analysis or interpretation. They need tears. They need the kind of groaning St. Paul says creation has been doing since the fall (Romans 8:22).

A little girl is dead. A family is shattered. A man has been condemned. And all the world’s surrounding talk feels tritely thin.

That said, I humbly suggest we let the habit carry us here. When we do—when the lens is lifted—we may not fully understand what happened, but we’ll at least see it clearly. If anything, we’ll get a sense of just how different the Christian faith is from the world’s sentiment. The Christian faith—established by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel—is incapable of pretending evil is smaller than it is. It certainly doesn’t try to convince the believer that every tragedy is secretly beautiful if we just look at it from the right angle. Personally, a little bit of crazy stirs in me when the best anyone can offer to moments like these is that everything happens for a reason.

Yeah, okay. That’s not helpful. But then again, the world is ridiculous that way.

The Word of God observes these things and calls them what they are. It sees death and calls it an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). It beholds murder and describes it as an act that screams to God from the ground (Genesis 4:10). It sees children and then warns against their harm, reminding ill-minded adults that their angels always see the face of the Father in heaven (Matthew 18:6 &10). It looks at dreadfulness and says God does not hold the guilty guiltless (Exodus 34:7 and Nahum 1:3).

And then, suddenly, right in the middle of all of it, it points us to a cross.

Why would it do this? Because the cross is where God shows us that He is serious about sin, death, and the devil’s awful and seemingly never-ending creativity (Hebrews 2:14-15 and 1 John 3:8). The cross doesn’t make evil less evil. It reveals how deep the evil goes. The Son of God is betrayed, mocked, beaten, condemned, and killed. Innocence is nailed to wood. The world does what the world does, and God takes all of it into Himself.

Then, on the third day, Jesus rises. That’s what matters most in situations like this. And only through the Gospel’s lens can this be seen. Only through Christ and His complete and perfect work, ultimately proven by His resurrection, can we take one more breath through moments that feel like all the earth’s oxygen suddenly dissipated into space. It has to matter in situations like this, or it doesn’t matter anywhere.

If Easter is only for clean grief and manageable sadness, it’s way too small. If the resurrection is as the world is minimally willing to consider it—a springtime metaphor—then it has nothing to say beside a child’s grave. Or, if Christ is raised merely to improve our mood, so that we can say things like, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” then He is useless in the face of real horrors.

But Christ is risen from the dead.

That means death doesn’t get the final word over Athena Strand. It doesn’t get the final word over the tears of her family. It doesn’t get the final word over the courtroom, the sentence, the headlines, or the long years of grief that remain after everyone else stops reading.

The final word belongs to the One who said, “Let the little children come to me” (Mark 10:14). It belongs to the One whose hands still bear the wounds of what human beings do to the innocent (John 20:27).

Admittedly, even those words don’t make the grief tidy. I can promise you that. I’ve never shared them at a funeral and seen all the tears suddenly dry up. But it doesn’t change the fact that they’re Gospel words, and only the Gospel truly soothes (whether or not we realize it) in moments of sadness and anger, and during times of rage. In fact, it’s the Gospel that gives  Christians permission to weep. The Lord sanctified our tears when He cried at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:33-36). The Gospel reminds Christians that they are also allowed to want justice (Psalm 10:17-18 and Revelation 6:10). And while doing so, the Gospel calls for Christians to know they are more than permitted to cry out in the face of this world’s atrocities, “How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1 and Revelation 6:10).

God gave us those words because He knew we’d need them. They’re meant to be spoken often. Indeed, they make for a good habit of words—the kind we need when it feels like there isn’t anything worth saying. Because often, there just isn’t.

And so, the Church’s habits emerge from God’s Word. We pray. We confess. We sing. We gather. We speak the Creed. We hear the Word. We eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. We bury our dead in hope. We say “Lord, have mercy” when there’s nothing left to say in the presence of grief.

Considering the story I shared, the only thing left worth saying is Lord, have mercy on Athena’s family. Lord, bring justice to the wicked. Lord, protect the little ones. Lord, grant us faith to hold fast to you, even as you hold fast to us. And Lord, please, come quickly (Revelation 22:20).

No Right to Complain If You Don’t Engage

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A few years back, maybe six or seven years ago, a member here at Our Savior (or, I should say, former member) approached me to let me know in his passive-aggressive way that my friend Charlie Kirk had been listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Extremist Files.” In response, I gleefully pointed out that while Charlie himself had not yet received such a badge of honor, his organization, TPUSA, had indeed made SPLC’s “Hate Map” as an “anti-government extremist group.”

That particular conversation, like so many with him before it, did not end well, especially since I implied that being targeted by the SPLC, a group that claims to fight racial hatred, could be a good thing.

But I meant every word.

I wonder what my former friend’s thoughts are now that the SPLC’s guts have been exposed. Although I may be getting a little ahead of myself. Have you even heard the news?

If not, the essentials are that the Department of Justice leveled three charges against the SPLC, namely, wire fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. It seems that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC’s leadership secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money to racist extremist groups, most notably, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as other neo-Nazi groups. I just read some of Todd Blanche’s comments on the situation. He’s the acting Attorney General. In summary, he put it rather bluntly, saying the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

I tried not to laugh when I read his words. Most reasonable people who’ve ever crossed paths with the SPLC already knew that. Charlie certainly did. That’s because it’s an easily discernible M.O. for most of the groups out there claiming to fight racial inequality. In fact, it’s written into the DNA of almost any progressive protest you see on the news. From BLM to “No Kings” to LGBTQ, Inc., the only way these groups have managed to stay in business is to ensure that the “hatred” angle relative to their particular organization’s needs persists. And so, that’s what they do. They foment rage.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that other organizations, like the ones I’ve named, have been doing the same thing the SPLC has been doing. Of course, the SPLC denies the charges. Still, it’s not looking good for them. It’s becoming undeniably plain that the SPLC, which raised money by warning Americans about hate, was shelling out major cash to keep the machinery of hate in motion.

Wow. Shocking.

As I said before, most reasonable people already knew the SPLC to be less a sober civil-rights watchdog and more a moral-licensing agency. It has always acted with an assumed authority to decide who was hateful, who was dangerous, who belonged on the outside of acceptable society, and perhaps worst of all, who needed to be marked for public suspicion, all toward the goal of organic cancellation. Of course, to remain somewhat veritable, the usual suspects, like the KKK, were tagged. In the meantime, the rest of SLPC’s cash was being spent tagging and fighting against Christians, conservatives, and a whole host of ordinary people who held unfashionable views about marriage, gender, education, immigration, or religious liberty.

I suppose that’s what happens when an organization discovers that condemnation can become a business model. The more standards it can create and identify as hate, the more necessary it becomes to fight that hate. The longer its list of enemies grows—the more fear it creates—the more urgently it can ask donors for money.

But again, I say sarcastically, “Wow. Shocking.” That’s because none of this was lost on reasonable people—or at least the people paying attention. And I don’t offer those words lightly, especially to the folks here in Michigan. There’s an angle to this that requires some attention because it lands very close to home.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current Secretary of State and a candidate for governor, served on the SPLC board during the time period covered by the indictment. She was named to the board of directors in 2014. Her campaign has publicly confirmed that she served for four years. That does not, by itself, prove what she knew or when she knew it. Still, the indictment accuses leadership. That includes the board.

I suppose one thought here is that if someone seeks the governorship of Michigan, then that person’s associations and moral discernment should matter. I’m the Executive Director for an organization. My role exists alongside a board of directors. That board isn’t a ceremonial thing. It exists for governance. It exists for accountability. It exists to understand the organization’s mission, finances, and a whole host of other matters that help ensure the effort is acting faithfully and lawfully.

Now, having said all this, a seemingly random thought must be considered.

Not long after that image of Trump was shared—the one in which he looked an awful lot like Jesus stretching out his hand to heal someone—I read plentiful commentary from fellow Christians on social media saying things like, “This is exactly why Christians need to stay out of politics. The separation of Church and State!”

I get the aversion to the image. Regardless of Trump’s wobbly explanation, it was ridiculous. But it’s precisely because Christians have adopted that kind of retreat that organizations like the SPLC continue to get as far as they do. Yes, there are foolish and cringeworthy things that our elected officials do in the public square. But the answer to these things is never political indifference, or worse, monasticism. It’s never to leave the arena, leaving the gates open, and allowing the lions to feast on whatever they prefer.

It’s true, the government is not the Church. It cannot preach the Gospel, administer the Sacraments, or forgive sins. It cannot make Christians. Only Christ does that through the means He has established. But the government is still Christ’s servant for earthly order (Romans 13:1–4). It is still given to punish evil and protect the neighbor. And when people who hate Christ, hate His design, hate His Word, and hate anyone who confesses His truth, are the only ones willing to enter the public square, willfully disengaged Christians should not complain when the public square becomes hostile to the things of God.

On the contrary, Christians must get in the game and push back. At a minimum, that means Christians cannot shrug at elections. Even more importantly, we cannot simply vote for president while neglecting the midterms, or worse, our local elections. In fact, I’d be willing to say that the folks in charge of the local library or the people elected to your local school board matter more than anyone may realize. Even there, a Christian cannot pretend that a candidate’s beliefs and alliances will have no bearing on our lives. They do, and in the most immediately impactful ways. A school board candidate who sat on the board for an organization that believes 2 plus 2 equals 7 is not someone you want spearheading a community’s educational efforts.

And yet, concerning even greater, more life-altering things, there remain those Christians who sprinkle so foolishly across social media, “Stay out of it! God will handle it!” Those Christians absolutely own the blame when their community’s children cannot do simple math.

Yes, God will handle it. He’ll handle it through your vocation as a citizen, upholding your God-given responsibilities (Jeremiah 29:7 and Matthew 22:21). He’ll bless His world through your faithfulness, which is already something He works in us by the power of the Holy Spirit for faith. We’re already inclined to do what He wants. When we vote, we’ll be inclined to seek candidates who most closely align with Him and His Word.

In this day and age, that pretty much means choosing leaders who protect life, embrace natural law, honor the family, respect religious liberty, and understand the limits of government in light of Two Kingdoms theology.

By the way, Christians engage in the process, recognizing that no candidate will be perfect. No election will usher in the kingdom of God. And anyone who believes these things has lost grip on what the Word of God teaches. For those who hold to God’s Word, they’ll know, by faith, that Christ has already won the victory that no ballot can win (1 Corinthians 15:57 and Colossians 2:15). He lives and reigns now, and His kingdom will have no end (Luke 1:33).

They’ll also know that until He returns, we live here. We serve our neighbors here. We raise our children here. We confess the truth here. And part of that earthly calling is to engage in the public square in ways that not only protect what’s Godly, but also to act with wisdom to preserve it. One of the most powerful ways to do that is in the voting booth.

So, returning somewhat to where I began, I’d encourage you to pay attention. Do some reading. Don’t skim. Read. This is an important way to measure candidates against the Christian Faith, namely, the Word of God. Campaign slogans won’t tell you anything. Not anything of real value, that is. Most would never have learned about Jocelyn Benson’s association with the SPLC had certain folks not dug deeper and written in ways that exposed it.

Read up on it. Also, study the candidates’ voting records. Read their speeches. Look into their associations. Doing even these things, it won’t be hard to figure out who’s who.

Then, as a Christian, take that “who’s who” stuff into the voting booth and flex the muscle of your responsibility. Because if you can, but don’t, as I said before, you have no reason to complain.

Jesus Is the Way Out

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I’ll just warn you before I even get started this morning that my eyes are already tired and my brain is already fried. For those who may or may not care, I have started writing the sequel to Ashes to Ashes. I’ve been working on it off and on since October of last year. But by “working on it,” I mean tapping at it in between a thousand other things.

At this point, I have twenty-five good chapters of what already feels like it’ll be forty or more by the time I’m done. But as I already hinted, to do any of the work necessary to the story at any other time of the year than during summer’s only slightly accommodating pace is to invite a kind of mental collapse I am less and less equipped to survive as I get older.

I’m sure the other pastors out there reading my words know exactly what I mean. Seemingly, billions of big and small demands of ordinary vocation take up the better part of whatever strength many of us have to give in any particular day. And by the time morning comes around again, there’s usually enough left in me to do the work in front of me, though rarely enough to disappear into another world and bring back pages from it.

Add to the calculus that I’m relatively new to the fiction genre. It certainly doesn’t come about as easily as stuff like this. With this, I don’t have to plan. I just have to type. And with that, I can do a lot in a short period of time. I can’t do that with a story. Well, I suppose I could. But I can assure you it wouldn’t be any good.

I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. For starters, I’m assuming most fiction writers know that no matter what their original ideas might be before starting, they’ll almost certainly change as the work unfolds. I’ve learned that a story has a way of revealing itself. I heard Joe Rogan talk about his best creativity occurring in an almost disconnected way, describing it as something that happens apart from his intentions, steered more so by a “muse.”

That may or may not be true. Well, whatever.

In my world, it just seems like the characters press forward, themes deepen, certain scenes, once their details start forming, they arrive carrying more weight than I actually anticipated. Some come to mind while driving or eating lunch. Some arrived while I was mowing the yard this weekend. Sometimes the ideas translate into more pages. Sometimes it means I wrote way too much and, even though I might like it, I have to delete it.

That’s where I am right now—when I have the time.

Again, for those who may or may not care, much like the first installment, this one is being built in part from a playlist of songs. I’ll likely include that playlist somewhere near the beginning in a preface. I’ve already included some quotations from a few at the beginning of a few chapters. I may or may not keep them there. Just like Ashes to Ashes, the songs I’m listening to now do more than provide background noise while I write. They help form the register of the story. This time around, most of them are rock songs, and they fit this particular novel because they capture the lead character’s inner turmoil while, in some cases, also giving a sense of the force and movement behind what he does. You don’t need me to tell you that a song—a combination of music and lyrics—can sometimes say in three or four minutes what it takes fifteen pages to tell. It can carry anger, grief, memory, longing, and self-destruction all at once.

One song in particular attached itself to the work early on. In fact, it landed on me a month or two after I finished Ashes to Ashes. It’s “Rise” by The Cult.

I love rock music. But in all honesty, I was never a fan of that band. Also, I didn’t necessarily intend to write a sequel. But then other things started happening—and then I happened upon that song—and Daniel Michaels’ return almost felt inevitable. If you listen to the song, especially its chorus, I think you’ll get a sense for the book’s faster pulse.

Imagine a man surrounded in an alley. He’s been tricked into the space by some very bad people. Still, he’s the only one who makes it out. The song will give you such a character in motion.

If you’re listening to the song while a familiarity with Reverend Daniel Michaels is wandering around in your brain, you’ll hear a terrible kind of resolve gathering into purpose. You’ll see that dark alley, and you’ll sense that he’s coming, and he can’t be stopped. Again, it’s the chorus that does it for me.

“It’s the way that you feel. It’s the truth in your eye. ’Cuz you’re up against the world, and still you rise.”

By themselves, the words don’t quite fill in the gaps. You need the music, too. When you get a chance, listen to the song, especially if you know the character. It’ll be a foretaste of the energy driving the action you can expect.

But there’s also something more than action in what you’re hearing. There’s a sense of determination. Listen for it. I suppose the determination part is what matters most to me. Where is a person’s determination aimed?

When a question like that is asked, the Christian understanding of humanity doesn’t permit shallow explanations. That’s because we know better than to divide sin from its potential. We know we’re not dealing with minor flaws and manageable wounds. We’re dealing with a diseased heart capable of the worst kinds of destruction. Once that truth is understood, a story moving through darkness cannot be treated as merely a tale of heroes and villains. The man at the center of the story may hate evil for the right reasons and still become entangled in evil by the way he deals with it.

Among other things, I’m interested in that. But not only that. I’m also interested in the possibility of a trajectory toward something better. I say “trajectory” because stories like this are rarely about clean transformations. While I’m not necessarily new to reading stories like this, again, I’m fairly new to creating them, and I’ve learned they’re about collision, pressure, realization, and maybe even mercy arriving where mercy seemed all but impossible. They’re about humanity falling far enough into the habitual nature of darkness that we wonder if there are any real roads back from it all.

As a person who also writes sermons for a living, it’s nearly impossible for me to do any of this without noticing God’s Word standing somewhere in the background. God’s Word names things truthfully. It exposes and accuses and strips away all excuses. It tells the truth about evil in the world and the truth about evil within the “self.” That’s God’s Law doing its thing. But that’s not all there is to God’s Word. The Gospel is there, too, and it does something the Law cannot do. It shows us Christ. And as it does, it forgives and restores. It raises those who are dead in their trespasses and sins to new life—no matter who they are or what they’ve done.

The Gospel gives us Jesus. He’s the road out.

I don’t mean to sound vain, but I think what makes what I’ve written a little better than the Hallmark Channel type Christian fiction stuff that’s out there is that I’m willing to let the Law do its work. I’m more willing to let sin appear in its fuller ugliness than the folks at Angel Studios. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong for what they’re doing. I’m just saying I don’t want to rush past the damage people do to one another and to themselves without the reader sensing humanity’s genuine need for rescue. At the same time, I want to tease out how the Gospel might address those scenarios in real time. Because that’s where we live—in real dreadfulness in real time.

That, to me, is where the real weight of the better stories lives. Human struggle means more when sin is treated seriously, and redemption means more when mercy reaches someone who has no clean way of rescuing himself.

As you can imagine, I’ve re-read Ashes to Ashes several times while working on all this, if only to maintain the world and its style. Admittedly, the first book already carried these tensions in seed form. This sequel pushes them further. The darkness is deeper here. The wounds have been around a lot longer. Plenty of other things have happened, giving Daniel’s condition more time to harden. He carries grief and guilt, and I suppose also a grim sense of obligation, and all of it presses him forward in ways that are destructive even though he’s convinced himself they are necessary. He’s trying to answer evil. He’s trying to set things right. He’s trying, in his own damaged way, to act against what should never have been allowed to flourish in the first place. And yet, there it is, in all its ugliness. And when Daniel sees it, sometimes it’s more like looking in a mirror than observing through a window.

But that’s not at all where I want this story to end. With that, I’ll use the word “trajectory” again. Daniel’s trajectory must be one of hope. People should sense hope’s presence.

What I mean is that the strength of any good character (if the character is being written within genuine humanity’s honest boundaries in mind) won’t rest in his ability to think his way back into decency through sheer force of will. If that’s where the character’s hope is located, there’d be very little reason for hope at all, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I suppose that’s where the author, who is also a pastor, can benefit the story most. I can keep these things in mind, remembering that real hope rests where it has always rested: in the mercy of God in Christ, who still speaks into dead places and calls them back to life.

In other words, if there is any road out for a man like Daniel Michaels, it’ll have to be given to him. It will have to come from outside of him. It will have to arrive as mercy does, undeserved and unearned, but real all the same. And it’ll be located firmly in Jesus.

And so, wherever any of this finally goes, and however dark some of its roads may become along the way, I hope it’ll be hard to miss that even for someone as wounded and lost as Daniel, redemption is never out of reach, not with Christ.

That’s enough rambling for today.

The Cause for Life is Advancing

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I sure hope you don’t start reading this morning’s note and think, “Oh no, here he goes again.” That said, and while I know we’re well into spring, I heard on the way into the office this morning that it could snow tonight.

Ugh. Snow belongs to winter. And anyone who knows me well knows that I despise winter. I know the comment is trite. But I mean it. And it feels like I can’t say it enough. Winter is the worst.

Why do I live in Michigan? I blame my wife, Jennifer. I met her here in 1994. It was then, and only then, that Michigan laid claim to me. Well, on second thought, it’s more accurate to say that I’m here because this is where the Lord sent me. With that, Michigan’s grip extends through the hands of God’s people here at Our Savior in Hartland.

So, again, why do I live in Michigan? I suppose, because it’s where I belong.

But none of what I just said changes the fact that I thoroughly dislike Michigan’s seemingly endless winters. And I don’t mean that in the casual way people complain about a gray day or a cold morning. I mean that I can barely get to December’s midpoint before winter has already dragged on long enough for me. I practically crawl through and into the new year carrying every ounce of its emotional weight. Everything appears dead. Everything living has, almost literally, withdrawn into itself—and I’m miles past my threshold. I’m dying for warmth. I want summer’s colors.

Did I mention that it could snow tonight?

For the record, if you happen to see me standing in tonight’s potential snow and talking to myself with a stick in my hand, I’m not actually talking to myself, but I’m poking at the earth and saying, “Wake up!”

Of course, spring will eventually arrive. Technically, it began this year on March 20. As you can see, it didn’t arrive all at once. Admittedly, however, it started with signs. The ground softened. We started getting more daylight. I went for a short walk on Wednesday evening in between rain showers with my grandson, Preston, and along the way, I showed him the small green things beginning to press up through the earth. I lifted him near a neighbor’s tree to show him the buds appearing on branches. Those branches looked dead a week ago.

I suppose in another sense, spring is also messy. Anything messy is rarely spectacular by the world’s standards. But for me, the signs matter more than the mess. For me, they testify to life. They tell me that summer is coming. In a grander sense, they’re a reminder that what appeared dead was not beyond renewal.

I should mention that while spring is hopeful, it also brings its own kind of trouble for me. The extreme barometric pressure swings that come with the season always bring migraines. In other words, even in the season that finally feels like relief, there’s an element of pain. But there, again, is a lesson for me as I wait for summer. In a sense, spring tells the truth about growth. Life’s return is a beautiful thing. But it’s also messy, and often enough, struggle is a part of its process (Romans 8:22).

I’m thinking in this way this morning for a reason.

I spoke at the Lenawee County Right To Life dinner in Adrian this past Thursday, and, essentially, some of my remarks focused on how easy it can be to become discouraged in the middle of any long moral struggle. Discouragement settles in slowly, and after a while, all the surrounding winter-like noise can easily become mistaken for seasonal permanence. Relative to the cause for life, if folks aren’t careful, especially in the ungodly state of Michigan, it can eventually feel like the cultural winds only blow in one direction, and that the best anyone can ever expect is to brace for things to get worse. Over time, that kind of discouragement can become its own form of surrender. People continue doing the work outwardly while inwardly assuming that nothing will ever change.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the presence of struggle doesn’t mean that nothing is growing. And spring itself is the perfect reminder. It’s messy, but even in the mess, there are signs of growth showing that, no matter the noise or the seemingly slow pace, the work is bearing fruit (Galatians 6:9).

I saw a few of those signs in real time on Thursday evening in Adrian. The evening itself is not necessarily the point here. The point is what the evening suggested. At the start of the dinner, the Lenawee County affiliate president, Julie, mentioned that the event had grown from 20 to 25 tables. That means forty more seats were filled than the year before. That’s 25 percent growth. I know those are some relatively simple numbers. But it’s a relatively simple story to tell. In short, more people came. More people wanted to participate. Most importantly, in a time when people are shunned for taking stands against abortion’s ungodliness, more people were willing to attach themselves publicly to the cause of life.

That alone is a spring-like bud on the cause’s tree.

During the dinner, Jennifer and I sat beside Amber Roseboom, the president of Michigan Right to Life. I’ve known Amber for a while now. I mentioned a statistic I’d read recently in passing. It was from Gallup’s 2025 age-trend data on abortion. One number in particular stood out. Among Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine, 37 percent identified as pro-life. At first glance, we might think that’s an abysmal number. And yet, in 2022, that number was 26 percent. That’s an eleven-point increase.

I ended up sharing that statistic during my talk, if only because nobody should pretend that an eleven-point shift in a younger age bracket is meaningless drift. It’s a sign of spring. It suggests an emerging openness. If anything, it suggests that younger Americans are not as uniform in their thinking as so many in our culture insist.

Interestingly, Amber mentioned both in private and during her moment at the microphone that the Michigan affiliates are growing. All of these details—the table count, the percentage increase, and the affiliate increase—together hint at a pattern. They suggest that the cause of life is not in retreat. It’s not even just barely holding the line. It’s advancing.

For far too long, the culture has spoken as though the rising generation belonged almost entirely among abortion’s defenders. They’ve treated that assumption as a settled fact, like it’s some sort of already rendered verdict, and that only the backwater idiots are the ones failing to recognize it. For my part, I try never to forget that human beings are far more complicated than the scripts the culture writes for them. Not to mention, God made us. His Law written into our hearts is still a thing. His natural law is still a thing, too. And so, the sight of vulnerable life still stirs something in people. The moral weight of what abortion actually is, when presented truthfully, still bears down on hearts and minds, even when every available euphemism is deployed to soften the reality. Younger people, like every other generation before them, are still capable of seeing through lies and changing their minds.

I appreciate Albert Camus’ famous saying, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Some consider it overused. I don’t see it that way. I think the words are a near-perfect description of hope. Relative to what I’ve written so far, in the seemingly perpetual dreadfulness of abortion’s winter, they speak of hope’s presence, and they anticipate hope’s emerging buds. A local dinner grows by 25 percent. State affiliates increase. Younger adults show a measurable increase in pro-life identification. Each sign by itself may seem small to someone determined to dismiss it. But like a grampa lifting his grandson to the tree to see for himself, God does the same with us on occasion. He lifts His children to these small signs and encourages us, “Keep going. Summer is coming.”

For Christians, I suppose this hope reaches even deeper still, especially so close to Easter. By faith, we know our hope is already fulfilled in Christ. He has already entered death and shattered it from the inside. He has already secured the victory over sin, death, and hell by His cross and resurrection. Which means every small sign of life, every bud of renewal, and every encouragement along the way arrives to us as more than wishful thinking. They come as reminders of a future already guaranteed by the risen Lord (1 Corinthians 15:20). Indeed, summer is coming because Christ is risen, and in Him the final spring has already begun.

With that knowledge tucked into our hearts, we can endure the lingering cold, keep watch for the buds, and go about the business of defending life, assured that the Lord who has promised the summer is already bringing it.

Thomas Was At Least Willing

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I suppose it wouldn’t be the Second Sunday of Easter if I didn’t stop to tell you how I feel the disciple Thomas gets a bad rap. I say that because, as anyone familiar with my thoughts on the matter already knows, while it’s not a good thing that he doubted, he was the only one of the remaining eleven disciples asking all the right questions.

He was the only one asking to see the proof of what the Lord had already promised He’d accomplish.

Now, rather than get into that for the fiftieth time, while preparing for this morning’s sermon, I noticed something else in the text worth talking about. I won’t share all of it here because it’s intended to be heard from the pulpit. Still, one thing that tapped on my mind’s shoulder this time through the text wasn’t so much Thomas’s honest skepticism, but more so the location and Christ’s timing.

If you think about it, Jesus could have appeared to Thomas when Thomas was alone. The text tells us he wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus visited the upper room the first time. But did he really need to be? Jesus is God. He could’ve appeared to him privately wherever he was.

I’ve preached before that, in his “Well, it is what it is” mindset, because that’s the kind of man Thomas seemed to be, it was very likely he went home after the crucifixion. Knowing the Pharisees were on the hunt, he was likely just waiting to assume whatever consequences he felt he deserved for following a failed Messiah. Whether or not that’s where he was, Jesus could’ve interrupted him in his private grief, settled the matter in a moment, and spared him a week of stubborn unbelief and whatever possible embarrassment came from saying out loud what the others who’d seen Jesus must have found at least a little offensive: “Unless I see… unless I touch… I will never believe.”

But Jesus didn’t do that.

Instead, our Lord waited. More importantly, He chose to reveal Himself in the company of the disciples—when they were all together in the same place. I think that matters, especially when I know there are Christians out there who think their faith is a private thing that exists apart from the company of believers, the Church.

Unfortunately, that’s a dangerous belief brought on by modern mainstream evangelicalism. We’ve been led to think of faith as something worked out almost entirely in the private interior world of the individual, as though the threshold between belief and unbelief can only be discovered between me and my thoughts, me and my feelings, me and whatever other sensitivity may be dominating my emotions in the moment.

I’m not saying faith isn’t personal. It is. That’s why the creeds begin with “I believe,” and not “We believe.” But that right there, a creed—a public confession of what’s true in the Christian Faith and what isn’t, meant to be spoken by the community—reminds us that faith is not less than communal, either. Thomas is not restored by being left to himself. He’s restored in the midst of believers.

A week earlier, he had been absent when Jesus came and stood among them. Again, we aren’t told precisely why Thomas wasn’t there, so we don’t know for sure. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was disappointment that had turned into detachment. But whatever the reason, what we do know is that he simply wasn’t there. And while he was gone, he didn’t see Jesus. When he came back, he did.

That should resonate for all of us.

I know there are folks out there who fervently believe they can be a Christian without being part of a gathered church. But remember, when the Bible wants us to know something, it includes the details. I think there’s something quietly sobering in this particular detail. In other words, I think it speaks volumes that the disciple who missed Christ’s appearance was the one who was absent from the other believers.

Of course, I can already hear the usual suspects saying that I’m turning this detail into a crude moralism about church attendance. Well, read it as you will. The Bible does mandate church attendance (Hebrews 10:24-25). Genuine believers, by faith, tend to try to align with what God wants. Apart from that simple fact, common sense shouldn’t lead anyone to avoid the point here. Even Saint Paul says rather plainly that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known” (Ephesians 3:10), and by “manifold wisdom,” he meant the Gospel, both in its verbal and visible forms. This is to say that the Lord appoints the Church—the gathering of His people—as both the locale for giving and receiving the gifts of mercy He has established and desires to give.

And so, someone might ask, “Why would God do it this way?” I think a better question would be to ask, “Would you expect God to work in ways that leave you guessing?” Or perhaps better, “Would you want to go looking for God in places He hasn’t promised to be?”

These are more so intellectual questions, I know. Thomas’s problem was more than intellectual, by far. He was away from the fellowship into which the news of the resurrection was first promised and had, even then, already come—and he thought that was best.

But now, keep reading. Thomas didn’t vanish from the narrative after his doubting episode. He didn’t make his separation permanent. That’s something else I really like about him. Too often, people get angry with me when I come to them, wondering where they’ve been for so long. Of course, I never come without an invitation. Still, it’s becoming more and more common for folks not only to lash out with something like, “Who the h*#% do you think you are telling me how to live my life?” or “I’ve been gone for a long time and no one reached out. What an unloving church!” as if the responsibility for faithfulness has nothing to do with them. But both of these are usually followed by the worst kind of response—a doubling down on the idea that they can maintain a healthy faith apart from the fellowship, apart from the Means of Grace that Christ gives to actually serve and sustain that faith.

With that, here’s another very important detail.

Thomas didn’t get angry when the others invited him back. He was at least willing to entertain his fellow believers’ invitation and return. And as a result, he’s there the next Sunday. He’s back in the room. However unconvinced, however guarded, he has returned to the company of believers. That’s no small thing.

I suppose I should’ve also added “however bruised” to the list, too. That’s another ready excuse today.

To that, I’ll simply say, we all know what it feels like to be let down by someone. The Church is made up of people, and people do fail each other. But is that really a sufficient reason to stay away altogether? I once heard someone say that McDonald’s can get a person’s order wrong fifty times and they’ll still keep going back. But then, someone at church makes one mistake, and they’re gone for good. I’ve also heard it said that anyone looking for the perfect church shouldn’t join it if they find one, because doing so would ruin it.

These sayings are more truthful than most would admit.

We all get offended. And we all cause offense. That’s what sin does. But we have bigger problems when we let sin decide our location relative to Christ. The ordinariness of life that comes with living among sinners is never a valid reason to abandon faithfulness in worship. Besides being trapped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a deserted island, one of the only reasons a person should remain apart from a congregation and its worship life isn’t even on the list of the most common reasons people actually do it. The biggest reason should be false doctrine, and even then, a person should only leave after fighting to correct it, if only for the sake of concern for other Christians being infected by it (Romans 16:17 and Titus 3:10). That said, a person also doesn’t leave a church teaching false doctrine to never end up in a faithful one. That would bring into question the person’s own understanding of faithfulness.

I’m already wandering further than I planned. The point is that Christ has already shown us by His Word how much wiser it is to remain where we are best sustained: near that same Word and among the people of Christ born from and immersed in it (Romans 10:17 and 1 Thessalonians 5:11). This is true even when the Christian heart is struggling to find value in being there. Thomas, for all his confusion, even when it seemed like there was no good reason to return, at least had the honesty to bring his confusion and concern into the place where Christ had promised to be with His own, ultimately seeing his concern eventually become joy—or better said, his unbelief become belief.

And by the way, the rest of us can take a hint from the other disciples. Notice, they invited Thomas, and then they didn’t shame him when he actually returned, as if Christ had made and kept promises to them that He wouldn’t keep for Thomas.

That’s probably the best part of the whole narrative. Jesus knew the foolishness in Thomas’s behavior just as much as he knew it among the others in that room. Do you remember what Peter did? Jesus did, and still He came. He knew exactly what Thomas said, too. In fact, he repeated the words back to him almost verbatim. He knew every condition Thomas had set, every demand dressed up as an excuse. Still, the Lord came to be with Thomas.

So, yes, Thomas gets a bad rap. And much of it is earned. He is usually only remembered for the first half of the story rather than the second. Not only was he asking all the right questions, but he also returned to where those questions could be met with answers, the kind that sustain a living faith.

There’s a reason John included this story of Thomas in the account. It wasn’t to embarrass his friend. At the very least, it was to show the rest of us an important pattern. At its maximum, it was, as John himself said, that we might also believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing we might have life in His name (John 20:31).

Easter 2026

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Last night’s Easter Vigil service here at Our Savior was, as always, extraordinary. For one, most of the service occurs in the dark. No lights. Only candles. Until a particular moment. Then, there’s nothing quite like having gone nearly nine weeks without speaking the word “Alleluia,” as is the tradition for the churches embracing the better traditions, when suddenly, after the Gospel Proclamation “Christ is risen!”, all of the lights come on in a blaring flash as the congregation shouts, “He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!”

It’s a splendid moment, to be sure, adorned with Christian hymnody, as the congregation continues directly—powerfully—into the Hymn of Praise, singing, “This is the feast of victory for our God!”

And yet, what is it that makes the moment so arresting? I think part of it is located in the Church’s historic wisdom, in the sense that worshippers are meant to experience the very real contrast between darkness and light. And maybe even mourning silence and jubilant song. It’s so startling that it’s hard to ignore.

Although I suppose it isn’t just these contrasts. I think, in the Church’s wisdom, she grew to understand, through the centuries, the weight of what was carried during the days before the Resurrection vigil. That first Alleluia, after weeks of somber reflection, doesn’t return cheaply. It’s not like it’s merely added back into the service. We certainly don’t just stumble upon it. It has literally been buried—intentionally silenced—because the Church has spent her time walking in solemnity with Christ to the cross. In that moment when the lights come on, and the Christians shout “Alleluia,” we understand that the absence has done its work. It has trained the heart to actually sense the cost of our redemption.

In other words, even during the Easter celebration, we don’t lose sight of what sits at the heart of our confession. Good Friday lingers behind every note. The echo of the hammer, the finality of “It is finished,” the stillness of a tomb sealed and guarded—all of it locks arms with the Easter proclamation. Which, again, I’m guessing, is precisely why the joy is not thin, nor is it merely sentimental. It’s a sense, maybe even a microscopic taste, of joy that has passed through death and come out the other side carrying something indestructible. When the lights blaze on, and the Alleluias return, they do so as defiance to sin, death, and all of hell’s battalions.

Jesus won. They lost. There’s the proof—a living, breathing Jesus. My Jesus. Alleluia!

I won’t speak for the folks who attend our Easter Vigil service, but for me, it’s not some sort of reenactment or merely a highly liturgical remembrance. It’s more of a participation. I’m not even a spectator to what I’m seeing. I’m a direct recipient of the Resurrection’s ongoing reality. Because of Christ’s Easter victory, sin not only lost, but it can never have the last word. Death and hell not only lost, but they no longer have a final claim on me—on any believer! The grave was not the end of the story for Christ, and therefore it isn’t for those who are in Him.

I suppose that’s why the joy feels almost too large for the room where it all happened last night. And if you’ve ever been to Our Savior in Hartland, it’s a big, wonderful space. Still, no matter how many are in attendance at the Vigil, the joy spills over into the kind of thunderous song I’m willing to bet leaves the devil without question. When the Vigil bunch starts singing, the old evil foe knows for certain that his house has been ransacked, that what was lost has been found, and more than found—redeemed and restored.

Admittedly, when it comes to the emotion of it all, there’s no earthly Good Friday or Easter service that will match the scale of what Christ accomplished. And after looking back at everything I just wrote, I should be careful to mention one more thing—something I already made a point of clarifying during the Good Friday Tre Ore service.

Keep in mind, no matter the century, the goal of genuine Christian worship has never been about making you feel something. At least, not worship born from a biblical understanding. That’s partly because genuine Christian worship doesn’t begin with you—with what you do for God. It approaches God with empty hands extended, knowing there’s nothing we can bring into worship that He needs, but instead, we need everything He can give.

I like how Rev. Dr. Norman Nagel explained it in the Introduction to Lutheran Worship, the LCMS’s hymnal prior to Lutheran Service Book. He wrote so crisply: “Our Lord speaks, and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. Faith that is born from what is heard acknowledges the gifts received with eager thankfulness and praise. … Saying back to Him what He has said to us, we repeat what is most true and sure. … The rhythm of our worship is from Him to us, and then from us back to Him. He gives His gifts, and together we receive and extol them” (LW, p. 6).

Unfortunately, many churches have it the other way around, inevitably falling into a trap. And when they do, they lose sight of something important. The goal of worship is always to deliver something: Christ for you, crucified and risen! This happens through a Law and Gospel message that establishes the need and then delivers the means to overcome it! They’re means that are placed into ears by the preached Word, and into our mouths by the Lord’s very body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins.

When this is our understanding of worship, that it’s about God serving us, rather than the other way around—not from the moment’s emotion, but from the divine means; not from what we bring into the space, but from what He gives objectively, concretely, outside of us—when this is the understanding, Christian joy holds. It holds even when the lights go out again, we get into our cars and drive home, and the alleluias fade into the ordinary days that follow Easter’s exceptional festivities.

And so, with that, I pray the Lord’s blessings upon you and yours as you celebrate this wonderful day. May it be for you a day of days, one that fills you to the brim with Christ’s merciful love. It was a hard-fought fight. But it wasn’t hopeless. Again, there He is. He is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

Good Friday 2026

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Here at Our Savior in Hartland, we spend Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, and Holy Wednesday making our way through John 12:20-50. The context of the reading is Palm Sunday. It’s the Lord’s immediate beginnings in the temple after He entered the city to fast-fleeting fanfare. He’s there teaching.

We handle the reading in sections. Monday considers verses 20-36. Tuesday, we hear 37-43. On Wednesday, we digest 44-50. I’ve been doing it this way for a while. It works, if only because the Lord’s words here are wonderfully bottomless. And their point? His truest glory. His death on the cross for sinners.

Right now, I’m thinking about Tuesday’s reading. It ended with John telling us, almost in passing, that “many even of the authorities believed in Him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (vv. 42-43).

As a pastor, those words are familiar. I’m not trying to be negative. However, the plain truth is that there is a kind of belief that teeters dangerously at the edge of unbelief. John more or less describes it as the kind that never quite finds its voice, but instead, stays hidden. His words are a passing indictment of something that’s far more dangerous than we may realize.

Most often, we might assume things like open hostility to God’s Word or flat-out rebellion against this or that are the real dangers leading to unbelief. Maybe they’re the worst of the bunch. But they’re not the only pavers on the path to destruction. Some are much subtler. Here, John references the deadly nature of self-preserving hesitation. He describes the kind of faith that remains hidden because it’ll cost too much if it’s seen.

Today is Good Friday. Good Friday presses directly into that space. That’s because, regardless of those in the churches who’d prefer to keep the crucifixes hidden because they seem offensive, the fact is, the cross doesn’t allow for a private allegiance. It doesn’t leave room for a faith that exists only in the interior life, safely insulated from consequence. The crucifixion of Jesus was public. It was out in the open and very public.

That’s right where it belonged, making it, in every sense of the word, costly.

I think that’s the real reason some churches, even some here in my neighborhood, shrink from displaying crosses in their buildings—and why they jump from Palm Sunday straight to Easter, without even the slightest glance toward Good Friday. It’s not that they don’t believe. I won’t go that far. John was clear. They did believe. Something in them knew and recognized the Savior. Something in them was drawn to Him. But belief—the kind refusing to confess the glory Jesus had been describing all along—it began to bend. It began to accommodate. It learned how to survive without ever having to embrace Christ entirely. It might not be unbelief, but it’s really darn close.

“They loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”

That’s the fault line right there. And it should sound familiar. It describes competing loves, and we all know that sensation. Jesus warned against this in the Sermon on the Mount. He preached, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24).

But what does this look like in a practical sense? I already mentioned the churches near me that have openly expressed disdain for displaying crosses, one in particular having been quoted in a local newspaper a few years back. For the rest of us, the reasons are not far removed. Christ takes a back seat to the desire to be thought well of. He’s pushed aside by the instinct to remain inside the popular circle. We do quiet calculations that weigh what faithfulness might cost against what acceptance provides. And when those scales tip—even just a little—keeping quiet about our faith in Jesus begins to feel reasonable, or in certain circumstances, maybe even necessary.

“If they know, I’ll never get the promotion.”

Good Friday weeps over this reasoning even as it refuses to let it stand. Because on this day, the One in whom they believed is no longer teaching in parables or confounding His critics in the temple courts. He’s lifted up in the open. He’s stripped of all dignity before the crowds. He’s nailed to wood while the masses mock Him. He’s cast entirely from everyone and everything. He’s openly and publicly rejected by every man-made structure this world uses to define belonging. Indeed, it is as Isaiah foretold: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).

I know it couldn’t have been an easy scene. Of course some people hid their eyes from it. But that doesn’t change the fact that the crucifixion of Jesus was the “hour for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23), and that according to that hour, as Jesus continued, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (v. 32). John explains, “He said this to show by what kind of death He was going to die” (v. 33).

The Christian Church has no more important day than today. Yes, the Resurrection is crucial. But in a sense, it’s proof of today’s significance. The crucifixion of Jesus is the moment of moments for the Christian faith. It’s where the Son of God exacted what was necessary for your salvation. And in that moment, every believer, open or hidden, is forced to reckon with something the world will never embrace. Behold what the Christian faith finds so beautiful! The death of God’s Son for me!

The devil hates everything about the crucifixion, most importantly, what it earned for us. He’d love for it to become something we avoid, interpreting it as little more than jewelry-worthy while, at the same time, convincing us to prefer a version of faith that never disrupts our place in the world.

As is often the case, the Bible provides real-life examples so we know better. John 12 is just such an example. Some of the Jewish authorities believed, but they stopped short of faith’s confession. And in stopping short, they forfeited something essential. Because faith that never speaks or moves or risks anything—it almost always conforms to the very pressures it fears. It becomes quiet enough to coexist. It remains safe enough to go unnoticed and, as a result, steps away from Christ’s insistence that believers have been recreated by faith as salt of the earth and lights in the world. Christ would have us as recognizable conduits—a means for the unbelieving world to see and meet Him and, ultimately, give glory to the Father in heaven (Matthew 5:13-16).

Good Friday stands entirely against the kind of belief John described—the kind that’s weak enough to disappear in every crowd. Again, John doesn’t scold it in his account. He simply presents it as a dangerous reality that we shouldn’t ignore, if only because the One preaching in the temple at that moment didn’t remain hidden to preserve His standing. He didn’t adjust His mission to avoid trouble. He embraced the hour of true glory—His death for sinners. And lest you doubt what I’ve said about the hour of His glorification being His death, read our Lord’s passionate announcement in verse 27: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour.”

I suppose part of my point this morning is to invite you to step a little closer to the Lord’s hour. Go to church today. Make time—not as a formality, or as an obligation squeezed into an already crowded day—but as a deliberate act of open alignment. Ask your boss. Invite a friend. Make time and go to the place where so many others in your church family are going, a place where the cross is not background noise, but the central reality of the faith we are to live before others each and every day.

Today—especially today—go! Refuse to remain at a distance from what stands at the center of history. The intense Gospel rendering of this day strips away the lesser things you’re prone to holding onto, even the ridiculously simple things like the need for approval, the fear of exclusion, or the quiet compromises you’ve made to keep everything around you safely intact.

Let Good Friday interrupt you and give you something better. Let it press on you. Let it ask more of you than is comfortable. Let it show you more than what you’re willing to see.

If you don’t have a church home, or your church does not offer Good Friday services, I’m sorry. Rest assured, you’re welcome to join us here at Our Savior in Hartland. Our first Good Friday service, Tre Ore, is at 1:00 PM. The next, Tenebrae, is at 6:30 PM. I’m preaching at the 1:00 service. Our headmaster, Pastor Scheer, so graciously offered to help by preaching at the 6:30 PM service. Attending either or both, I promise you’ll be blessed with all that’s necessary for a faith that can stretch its legs beyond the borders of anything this world might call belonging.

A Better Toughness

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I’ll admit, the news of Chuck Norris’s passing ten days ago in Hawaii hit pretty hard. While I wasn’t a devoted fan of all his films and television shows, I more than appreciated him. When I was younger, if one of his movies was playing, I watched it. Because he wasn’t just tough. He was emotionlessly cool in his toughness. I’m guessing that’s why he became a kind of cultural shorthand for invincibility.

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard the jokes. Everybody has. My wife, Jennifer, has a favorite. It goes something like, “Chuck Norris is so tough, he can pick an apple from an orange tree and make the best lemonade you’ve ever had.” Jokes like that one, while ridiculously silly, certainly do laud what a tough and determined man can achieve. For many, Norris seemed to embody what winning looked like.

That said, I’m also Gen-X. Regardless of the current generation’s memes, we owned Chuck Norris’s myth in real-time. For me personally, legends like him, especially the ones built around genuine toughness, don’t go quietly from my imagination. While not exactly the same, I felt the same way when Patrick Swayze died. I wasn’t a fan of his later films. But no matter how many times Hollywood remakes Red Dawn, Swayze will forever be Jed Eckert, the backwater nobody who led a group of high school kids against foreign invaders. Even today, when I experience a personal victory, you might hear me whisper a subdued shout, “Wolverines!” I have a sticker on my Jeep Wrangler that does the same.

Now, before I steer too far off course, again, I was genuinely saddened to hear about Norris. In a world that admires strength, he stood as a towering symbol of it, and for all the right reasons. Not only a cultural icon, but he was also a man of conviction—open about his Christian faith and intent on living it out before the world. That matters to a guy like me. If anything, it adds depth to his legend. It’s a reminder that behind the myth of his invincibility was a man who understood that, apart from Christ, he was nothing, regardless of his worldly feats. It seems that the real Chuck Norris knew that strength, real strength, isn’t always demonstrated as we’d expect.

Considering today’s date—Palm Sunday—the point resonates. Not every hero’s entrance looks like a victory parade.

Today’s the day the Church commemorates our Lord’s ride into Jerusalem. It begins His walk to the cross. The crowd shouts. The road is paved in their cloaks. The palm branches wave. In all of this, there is, unmistakably, a sense that something powerful is happening. And yet, a donkey? Where’s the war horse? The prophetic scriptures called this particular rider humble and lowly. Where’s the physical dominance? Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was weeping as he entered. That’s not very manly.

So, what’s going on here?

Well, none of these details is incidental; rather, they steer us toward a particular point. What we see is a deliberate subversion of everything we instinctively associate with strength. Kings ride stallions. Conquerors arrive to chest-rattling kettle drums and banners. But Jesus comes lowly. He’s unthreatening, at least on the surface. Everything about Him threatens this world’s powers. Still, in His humility is the better strength and authority we need. We don’t need laser lights and smoke machine spectacles. We need someone to submit Himself into the lowliest station to bear our sins and take hold of a victory we could never grasp, not even in a million lifetimes.

I guess what I’m saying is that if Chuck Norris represented the kind of strength the world instinctively understands, Palm Sunday presents something altogether different. We behold a strength that refuses to serve the self, even when it could. This is part of the tension inherent to the moment. It’s easy to admire the man who cannot be defeated. It’s harder—and far more unsettling—to reckon with the One who chooses not to win the way we expect.

I suppose this is why it was so easy for the crowds that were shouting “Hosanna!” to grow quiet—and then hostile, and then complicit in our Savior’s death. They wanted Jesus to come into Jerusalem wearing a black belt, ultimately kung-fu-ing the Romans, overturning their earthly rule. But Jesus came to overturn something deeper. The crowds wanted mortal victory. He came for eternal redemption.

I’m so glad Chuck Norris knew this. I watched an interview shortly after his death in which he told the interviewer, essentially, how his mythic toughness was nothing compared to Christ’s unwillingness to yield in going to the cross. Wow.

His inherent point was that the world actually needs the Lord’s kind of strength more than the muscle of any action star. We certainly need regular people of strength who can step into the world and take control. But we need the otherworldly kind that removes threats, settles scores, and makes things right in ways that matter for eternity. Sin, death, and the devil have us surrounded. Christ comes to our rescue. He does this by His humble submission to the cross. It looks like defeat. But it isn’t. Chris enters Jerusalem bearing the exact kind of toughness we need most. It’s the kind of toughness that’ll keep fighting even as it’s entirely misunderstood. It’s a toughness that’ll keep going, even when it’s rejected. It’s a toughness that makes its way into and through, not away from, an unspeakable suffering, the likes of which no one has ever experienced before. And ultimately, it’s a toughness that lays down its life for enemies, doing so to make them friends.

In other words, what looks like weakness is, in fact, the most unassailable strength imaginable. Perhaps more importantly, it has in mind a very simple premise. Christ, the Son of God, does not lack the power to end a world of enemies. He could obliterate everything with a wink. The thing is, He’s motivated by divine love. He has not come to destroy sinners, but to redeem them.

I should add, regardless of Christianity’s strength through the ages, what I’ve just described is the reason the cross, not the sword, has always been the defining image of Christianity. It’s not because Christ lacked strength. It’s because His strength was of an entirely different order. It’s cruciform strength. It gives rather than takes. It endures rather than escapes.

The world likes stories of men who cannot be beaten. But there’s the simple truth that no mortal man can outwit or outmaneuver death. It is, as Saint Paul said, “the last enemy” we all will face (1 Corinthians 15:26). Chuck Norris faced it recently, and like everyone else before him, could not outmuscle the reality.

But then again, in a sense, Norris did outmaneuver it. Well, he didn’t. But his Lord did, and by Christ’s strength, just as Norris believed by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Gospel, he was not beaten. Death had no final say for Norris because it had no final say for Norris’s Lord. That must be the last word here.

Action movie legends like Chuck Norris are strong in so many ways. They can take on armies carrying two Uzis and donning perfectly feathered hair and a well-groomed beard. But in the end, there’s only ever been one kind of strength that could carry the weight of this world’s sin. Behold, he comes to you, “righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).

But Then I Actually Thought About It…

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Saint Paul is the one who wrote, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15). The “foremost” of this saying applies to all, if only we’re willing to admit it. I can certainly share how easily it applied to me recently. I’m not afraid to tell you. I just preached a few weeks ago that repentance without confession is still sin in hiding.

This is my repentance coming out into the open.

Essentially, I was scrolling through Facebook. I noticed a photo, someone’s selfie with a friend. It was just a simple photo. Both in its frame were smiling widely, clearly enjoying the moment together. But the one taking the photo had something in his teeth. It wasn’t overwhelmingly obvious. However, it was noticeable enough to me. And so, now, my confession.

My first instinct was to chuckle and say to myself, “You might want to check your teeth before posting selfies.” And that, friends, is how easy it was for me to fall short.

I suppose the only upside to the response is that I restrained the urge to post what I was thinking. I could’ve done it. I could’ve justified it, too, believing I’d be preserving them from further ridicule, maybe giving them a chance to swap the photo with something else. It would have been easy enough to wiggle into that perspective.

But then, I actually thought about it. I didn’t just react. I thought. And the more I did, the more I looked at the image. And the more I looked at the image, the more obvious something else became. These two people weren’t posting a dental advertisement. They were sharing a moment of joy between them. They captured an image of friendship. And while I was busy capturing the flaw, they were busy demonstrating something so much better.

This is my sin. Not yours. Still, the overarching realization that occurred sheds light on the times in which we live. We live in a culture that has nudged us toward noticing the wrong thing first. Social media rewards it. News cycles feed off of it. Someone makes a mistake, says a clumsy word, posts an imperfect photo, and instantly, the comments fill with negative criticism. Everyone becomes a certified inspector of someone else’s flaws or understanding. Everyone becomes an expert in pointing out what someone didn’t get right or should have done better.

I’ve said it a thousand times that this is one of the worst parts about writing for public consumption. There’s always someone waiting in the wings to take what was meant for good and convert it into something dreadful. They’re lurking there, not to correct or improve what I’ve said, but to tear it down—to tear me down. It is almost reflexive now. People see before they think. They condemn before they understand. They correct before considering whether the correction is actually even necessary.

And sometimes the thing they miss is the very thing that mattered most in the first place.

I think that’s just one more reason why the season of Lent is so necessary. It’s not only about penitent postures relative to sin and, ultimately, the grace of our Savior who took those sins into and upon Himself, to free us from their decaying bondage. It’s also about the promised recalibration born from that wonderful Gospel. Lent, compared to all other Church seasons, is one where the Lord gently exposes the habits of the heart we barely notice anymore. Unfortunately, it seems far too many seem disinterested in Lent, even as it’s perfect for a social media world. It reveals the small reflexes of pride, the quiet hunger to appear clever, the subtle impulse to correct others rather than rejoice with them.

Lent slows us down long enough to actually see through the lens of the Gospel in some incredibly practical ways. Relative to the photo I mentioned, and as I hinted at before, social media prompts us to be clever when maybe we should be quiet and think. It prompts us for praise when what would better suit us is humble and thoughtful restraint. The good in the photo was obvious when I did that—when I stopped looking for the flaw and remembered my own failings. Now, through that lens, it was better seen as two friends enjoying life together. It was a small, happy moment, entirely undeserving of the conflict and criticism and outrage that social media demands we iterate over every ridiculous little thing.

And the thing is, I left that moment feeling better. That’s because faith’s choice is always so much better. Faith knew the better response in that situation was not to point out the speck in the guy’s teeth. The better response was simply to smile and be glad that joy still exists. Indeed, that’s one of the quiet disciplines of Lent. It’s a season for learning to see again. It helps us to see our own hearts honestly. It helps us to look upon our neighbors with charity. It absolutely helps us to see the good gifts of God that we too easily overlook when we are busy inspecting imperfections.

That said, you and I both know that the world already has enough critics. What it needs more are people who can bring the joy of Christ’s wonderful love into the darkness. And so, we do. We do it strengthened by faith’s humble repentance. We recognize that we, like Saint Paul, are the foremost of sinners in need of grace. Through that penitent lens, the landscape of God’s grace—all the undeserving joys He provides day in and day out—becomes far more visible through this world’s fog than the things that might bring sorrow. That’s because the grace of God has a way of reordering our sight.

When the Gospel steadies the heart, the flaws that once seemed so urgent lose their power to dominate the moment. That’s what repentance does. It doesn’t simply make us feel sorry for sin. It teaches us to see rightly again. It reminds us that the greatest flaw in the picture was never the thing in the guy’s teeth. The greatest flaw was the pride in my own heart that was so ready to point out what was really no big deal at all.

And that is exactly why Saint Paul’s words remain so trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. Christ came into the world to save sinners. Not just the most scandalous among us. But sinners like me. Sinners like you, too. It’s far too easy for any and all of us to drift toward small cruelties we might otherwise excuse as harmless. Yet, Christ came for those, too. Even better, He came to bear the sins we barely notice and the sins we cannot forget.

Let my failure, no matter how insignificant it might seem, be today’s reminder.