Tag Archives: worship

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).

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.

Will the Modern American Church Survive?

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It’s becoming harder to pretend that things out there aren’t coming apart at the seams. I mean, people are no longer joking about civil war. Some commentators and podcasters have already jumped ahead to predicting how such a war would end. Of course, the media continues doing its part to up the ante.

CNN admitted last week that it adjusted Alex Pretti’s image to make him look more attractive in order to stir sympathy for his death. CNN also had to backtrack after leaving out that Pretti had initiated a violent interaction with ICE a week earlier, resulting in broken ribs. In other words, federal agents already knew Pretti. They knew he was dangerous. And so, when he leaned into the officers that day, when he pushed into them, when he spit on them as they tried to get away from him and into their vehicles (as the videos show), and when he ultimately died in the scuffle, which was unfortunate—but it was no surprise to the agents that he was carrying a loaded weapon with two additional magazines. But the thing is, CNN knew all this stuff, too. And yet, they reported everything but these details. And CNN’s original narrative is still out there, gaining traction. All wars have their martyrs.

Other media outlets carried the “ICE is detaining children” headline as far as they could before eventually retracting it. And yet, it turns out the child in the widely circulated image had been abandoned by his illegal father, and his mother refused to claim him. Rather than simply sending the child back into the world alone—a world in which kids like him are almost always trafficked—he was kept in federal custody. He wasn’t locked in a cage. He was being protected, which is most certainly the government’s job when it comes to little ones left to a world of wolves. But again, the thing is, the news outlets knew this, and yet they elected to foster a completely different narrative, stoking embers and adding kindling to an already blue-hot climate. Add to this the irony of a progressive left that would butcher children in the womb while weeping over a child rescued from the wolves, but only because the rescuer wore an ICE uniform rather than an abortionist’s surgical gown.

And so, again, “civil war” is a term showing up in my feed more than I’d prefer. But what should any of us expect? So many are actively laboring to make the climate perfect for one.

Having said all this, civil war is not necessarily my chief concern. Yes, what’s happening culturally and politically is troubling. Still, I’m thinking ecclesially. I’m wondering if American Christianity would even survive such a thing, especially a conflict in which Christianity is a primary target for the opposition. The progressive left is already doing everything it can to snuff the faith (John 15:18-19). What would happen if that side were to win an armed conflict? I guess I’m just wondering out loud if anything in the modern faith is still fixed enough to be confessed in a way that would survive through such an event.

For the record, this weekly message goes out in various forms to about 7,000 folks worldwide. I don’t pretend to have a comprehensive map of global Christianity, and so, I don’t necessarily know the liturgical practices of most of the churches and people who may be reading this. But I do know my own church. And I know what kind of Christianity formed it.

Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland, Michigan, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod with which we maintain fellowship, is creedal in nature. Creedal Christianity did not emerge from comfort. It was forged under pressure. It survived being surrounded by hostile empires, wars, internal heresies, and, most importantly, competing visions of who Jesus was allowed to be. Creedal Christianity is a faith maintained by precise statements—what we believe and what we don’t, why we do what we do, why we’re distinctly different from the world around us. Regardless of what the more fashionable Christian influencers may have told you, these things are not relics of an overly philosophical age. They are the Church’s collective memory, crystallized at the very points in history where the fires were hottest, where the culture was hell-bent on consuming and assimilating us, and where losing our identity would have meant losing Christ altogether.

While studying the Church’s creeds with the kids in confirmation over the years, I’ve often told them that confessional statements like the ecumenical creeds (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds) are very important guardrails that protect our inheritance. What I mean is that by these confessional statements, the Church was essentially saying to the world, “We heard what you’ve said about Jesus, and we’re banning that interpretation from our midst forever.” They didn’t do that because the Church is allergic to questions, but because some interpretations—some answers to very important questions about God—can kill the faith (Galatians 1:6-9). The creeds exist precisely because the Church learned, often through blood, that not every version of Jesus is compatible with the Gospel.

For example, Arius, a bishop in Alexandria, came along offering a Jesus who was inspirational but not eternal. He insisted that Jesus was not God from eternity, but rather the first and greatest of God’s created beings. To be exalted, yes. But by no means divine in the sense that He is of the same substance as the Father. In reply, the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) gave birth to the Nicene Creed, which said, essentially, “Um, no. He is the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made….”

This response was not a modern branding exercise. It certainly didn’t come from thin air. It came from God’s Word (John 1:1-3, Colossians 2:9, and countless others). It was an important clarification made to preserve the one true faith that saves. I mean, what’s the point of confessing faith in Jesus—even being willing to die for Him—if the Jesus you confess is false? Creeds are in place precisely for this reason—to preserve a right confession of faith (1 John 2:22-23).

Even better, creedal Christianity never just remained on paper. Creedal Christianity was always ritualized Christianity. What the Church confessed with her mouth, she inevitably enacted with her body. I should pause here for a moment and admit that resistance to rites and ceremonies has always struck me as weird. Enacting what we believe is natural. We already do this instinctively in ordinary life. When people love one another, they don’t merely say it. They demonstrate it. They show up, they make vows, they give gifts, they mark anniversaries. When a nation believes in its sovereignty, it doesn’t just write a constitution, and then that’s it. It raises flags, sings anthems, swears oaths, and builds monuments that enshrine it. Belief naturally seeks embodiment. It inevitably embraces postures and practices that make the invisible visible. In the same way, the rites and ceremonies that emerged were the Church’s way of training the faithful to live inside the truth they confessed, week after week, year after year. It was a very natural way for the body and mind to remain in stride with what the heart confessed to be true (James 2:17).

When this kind of synchronization happens, the Christian faith becomes incredibly resistant to drift. Without them, almost anything can influence direction.

I suppose the thrust of my concern is that this is precisely what much of contemporary church culture has abandoned. Mainstream American Christendom seems to thrive on elasticity—on keeping Jesus just vague enough not to offend anyone and flexible enough to serve every demographic.

The irony in this is that it’s meant to promote growth. And yet, the American Church has been in free fall for decades. This free-floating, syrupy, confessionless, “deeds not creeds” landscape has not resulted in growth. It has resulted in massive erosion. But that’s what happens when your Jesus is more life coach than the eternal Son of God who comes again in glory to judge both the living and the dead (Acts 17:31).

Interestingly, even as creedal Christianity isn’t so much about growth as it is continuity, the early Church did grow—and quite rapidly. Why? Could it be because it refused what American Christianity is all too eager to embrace? The early Church did not survive persecution by becoming more appealing to Roman tastes. It survived by becoming more precise—more dogmatic, more confessional, and in my humble opinion, more liturgical. By its faith, life, and practices, it told the surrounding empires in no uncertain terms, in effect, “We will not adjust Christ to fit your world. You will have to adjust your world to Christ.”

Creedal Christianity can speak this way because it’s anchored in otherworldly things. It is, therefore, by design, capable of surviving this world’s storms. It doesn’t roll over when the challenges come. It can and does remain fixed in place even as everything else tries to pull it apart.

I know I’ve already gone on long enough. I’m guessing the skimmers left five minutes ago. For those who stayed to the end, I suppose I’ll circle back to where I started.

I’ll just say, again, that civil war is not my chief concern. Empires rise and fall. Cultures always burn themselves out eventually. Still, the real danger is not whether America fractures entirely. I’m just wondering if the American Church still possesses a faith sturdy enough to remain standing through it.

I don’t have this concern for creedal Christianity. It’ll survive. History has already more than proven that when and where the pressure mounted, a Church built on crisp confession remained immovable. Our Savior in Hartland is an heir to this hope-filled reality, and so, we enjoy that future. This is true because Christ did not promise His Church an easy path, but He did promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the fixed Gospel confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16-18). That’s a creedal statement, and where such confessions remain, so does the Church and the Lord who preserves her.

Live and Let Live?

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Unsurprisingly, what I wrote about last Sunday played out similarly this past week when protestors stormed a church in Minneapolis, demanding that the Christians within embrace their obnoxious crusade against ICE. And when they didn’t, they were shouted down and shamed. Like rainbow armbands in sports—an ideological symbol being imposed in this or that form, all with the threat of punishment if refused—the demands placed on the Christians in that church followed the exact same pattern.

I hope New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is watching this stuff. These two scenarios—the athletes refusing to comply and the Christians in Minneapolis doing the same—while different on the surface, reveal the same underlying dynamic. The shunning common to both betrays collectivism’s innermost spirit. Mamdani did say he intended to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Well, we’re watching historic Marxist collectivism being paraded in real time.

Essentially, forcing anyone under threat of punishment to submit to ideologies and their symbols is a distinctly Marxist, and therefore a readily socialist, impulse. Mamdani is an avowed socialist. He believes that the “warmth of collectivism” is the subordination of the individual conscience to the demands of the collective, and it must be enforced not by persuasion but by institutional pressure. Marxist warmth, in practice, always comes with enforcement, because collectivism only works when dissent is treated as a problem to be punished.

Taking this a step further, what I’m really thinking about right now is the symbols themselves. What’s the harm in wearing a rainbow patch on your jersey? What’s the trouble with a church’s pastor raising a fist alongside protestors to stem trouble? What’s the trouble with driving a company car with a BLM or an ICE-out sticker on its bumper?

Well, for starters, the first thing I’ll say is that every movement in history revealed its true ambitions not first through laws, but through symbols. In that sense, symbols are rarely neutral. You know as well as I do that they train the eye and discipline the conscience. Symbols have a way of testing allegiance long before force is ever required. That’s why armbands, flags, and gestures matter, even before they are compulsory. They are never just a thing.

Since I’ve already sort of wandered near to what I was concerned about last Sunday, you’ll remember that rainbow armbands, jerseys, and other such things have been forced into soccer, basketball, volleyball, football, and so many other sports. When I say forced, I mean it. They’re always framed as harmless signs of “tolerance.” And yet, the countless stories of athlete after athlete being shunned or punished for refusing to wear one expose the deeper truth. Tolerance, by definition, allows dissent. But what we’ve witnessed is enforcement against dissent. Participation is no longer optional. If a person refuses, he or she becomes an example of moral failure and must be shamed accordingly. The only way forward for such a reprobate is total annihilation in the form of cancellation.

History teaches us to pay attention when ideological movements do this—especially when they migrate from persuasion to enforced uniformity. The comparison to past regimes is uncomfortable, but symbols worn on the arm (or, thinking back to COVID, maybe on one’s face) have long functioned as tools of social sorting. Everyone is identifiable. The ones wearing the symbols of compliance are safe. The ones without it are suspect. Again, the purpose is not merely expression but visibility.

But I think it gets even worse still.

I’ve long thought that the LGBTQ, Inc. movement’s use of a flag was bad news. The same goes for the BLM flag. This is true because flags never really originated as tools of personal expression. They were militaristic. They began as tribal identifiers—markers of people, allegiance, and territorial claim. They were carried by nations and armies not just to establish sovereignty, but often to impose that sovereignty’s will on others. Historically, when a flag was raised where another flag once flew, it signaled conquest—one culture replacing another, one authority displacing a rival. When I saw that Minnesota had changed its state flag, making it eerily similar to Somalia’s flag a few years ago, I wondered about displacement. When I started to hear about the billions in fraud orchestrated by the Somali community, to which the Minnesota government largely turned a blind eye, the flag’s redesign made a little more sense. It was a quiet announcement of who’s now in charge in the state.

Of course, in the modern age, flags have been repurposed for everything from corporations to clubs, but that does not erase their original meaning. A flag still signals a collective identity that believes its vision and mission, good or bad, must be announced and then carried into the world, and maybe in ways that will assure it finds a footing as the governing one. Even General Motors would love to see its flag being flown at a Ford building.

But what if it suddenly became a cultural expectation that Ford must fly GM’s flag? That would be extremely telling.

When a group’s flag moves from voluntary display to institutional expectation—on school walls, corporate labels, in movie and TV scripts, on government buildings and athletic uniforms, or wherever and whatever—it stops functioning as a gesture of tolerance and becomes an advancing army’s sovereign demand for submission instead. I spoke in terms of war in last week’s note. Indeed, when what I described starts happening, you know a very real conflict is underway. It’s no longer a debate, but instead, warfare is underway, and territories are being taken. The occupying nation now marks its seized lands. In these territories, dissent can only be treated as resistance.

I think this is a crucial distinction often obscured in public debate. And so, again, I think one of the best forms of resistance is to refuse to display the LGBTQ Inc. flag, which more and more people are choosing to do, especially among the youth—most assuredly among young men. In one sense, I think that’s happening because common sense is making somewhat of a comeback. On the other hand, “Not the Bee,” the Babylon Bee’s source for non-satirical news, reported a study suggesting Americans are pretty much sick of the LGBTQ, Inc. agenda. America has grown tired of the stuff being shoved down our throats day in and day out. The study noted that most Americans seem to have realized it was never about “live and let live.” It was always about something more. One line in the article stood out. It said, “[Young people] have been told they are ‘bigots’ if they believe [unnatural sexual relations are not okay] … but even if they tried not to be ‘bigots,’ they were told they were bigots anyway…” Maybe another way to think of this is to say, as I already did, that common sense is making a comeback. Common sense knows that a person can affirm human dignity while also rejecting ideological compulsion. The former is humane. The latter is totalitarian and dehumanizing.

From another perspective, I should return to that “live and let live” thought. It sure seems most ideologies seeking dominance began by insisting they merely wanted to be left alone, when that’s not at all what they really wanted. The eventual enforcement of their imposed symbols made it clear.

And so, I suppose the question before us is no longer about tolerance and treating people with respect. The question is whether any movement, however well-intentioned it claims to be, has the right to force individuals and institutions to accept its ideology publicly. The Minneapolis church and the shunned athletes sure seem to suggest that this question is no longer theoretical but is already being answered in practice. The moment you are required to display allegiance before you’re allowed to belong, you are no longer living in a free society. You are living under occupation.

A Temporary Disruption, Not A Pattern

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This weekend’s forecast is shaping up to be one for the record books. The temperatures are, right now, in the negatives, and we’ll remain in this state-sized walk-in freezer well into next week. That’s not an inviting thought. And some people wonder why I long for Florida. I was just joking with Jennifer about how the sky is an unobstructed blue today, adding that even the clouds have finally given up and gone south to the coast. The kind of cold we get here in Michigan makes a guy like me question every decision that requires opening the front door, let alone climbing into a car and driving just about anywhere.

That said, Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland has never once in its 71 years canceled a scheduled worship service. In my 27 years in this place, I’ve seen some pretty dreadful weather, resulting in attendance challenges in worship. During the snowpocalypse back in 2014 (at least, I think that was the year), there were a few services with only four or five of us in a nave that seats 500. Still, the doors were open, the lights were on, the heat was cranked, and the pulpit, lectern, and altar were occupied. Indeed, where two or three are gathered, the Lord said.

You should know that the anti-cancelation precedent was set long before me. And to the credit of Pastor Pies senior and Pastor Pies junior, it came well before heated garages, remote starters, and online everything. When I was called as the congregation’s pastor, I committed to maintaining the standard. It is a good practice. Nothing will get in the way of worship, so long as I’m here. Not even protestors (wink-wink).

Of course, this instinct is far older than Our Savior in Hartland. For two thousand years, Christians somehow managed to fill houses of worship in every imaginable climate, condition, and challenge. That’s because God’s people gather in His house, just as He mandates. And so, by the power of the Holy Spirit at work for faith, the Christians first instinct isn’t to ask, “What’s the minimum requirement for faithfulness?” We want to go. And we’re bothered when we can’t.

With that in mind, it is entirely understandable that church members, for one reason or another, may not always be able to make it to worship. When it comes to what we’re enduring right now, for the elderly, if they have no one to help them through the wintry mess, it may mean risking a slip-and-fall. For families with young children, it may mean battling the latest seasonal illness rampaging through the house. For those who serve in the civil sphere, it may mean being on duty precisely when the rest of us are free to gather. These are all real situations, not excuses.

But once again, we should also be honest about the cultural air we breathe. We live in an age that trains people to look for reasons not to show up—reasons to stay home, opt out, postpone, or substitute convenience for commitment. What once required devoted sacrifice is now measured against the comforts we might lose if we go. Over time, this forms some really bad habits that feel justified, and maybe even, in some cases, virtuous. COVID was an example. People felt they were being godly by mandating barriers between God and His people, even suggesting that those who stayed home from worship were the better, more loving Christians. What nonsense.

Now, before I stray from my original thought this frigid Friday afternoon, just know that faithfulness remains possible, even when there are genuine challenges that can keep us away—and this is precisely why the earlier point matters. The real danger is not necessarily that people sometimes cannot come. It’s that, over time, they forget how to be Christians who are genuinely bothered when they can’t come. They learn to see attendance as negligible.

So, how do we fight this forgetfulness?

Well, I say, when you cannot be here, have a plan for being faithful right where you are. For the LCMS Lutherans reading this, that doesn’t necessarily require online streaming. If you have your hymnal, you have pretty much everything you need. For example, just grab your Lutheran Service Book, gather the family in the living room—sickos and all—and open up to page 219, the Office of Matins. If your child attends our school, then I can promise they already know the service by heart. Even the preschoolers can sing through it, leading the way. And what joy it will be! It is a wonderful service just oozing with God’s Word. And that’s the point—to be fed, to receive the Word, to pray, to give thanks to God for His abundant mercies. What’s more, if you’re not participating in online giving, you can still set aside this week’s offering and place it in the plate next week, along with next week’s offering. In every way possible, let the absence be exactly what it is: temporary. Let it be a momentary disruption, not a new pattern.

I guess what I’m saying is that faith, by its very nature, has a goal. It longs to be with Jesus more, not less. And so, when a legitimate reason keeps it away, it abides in God’s promises nonetheless, all the while longing to return to the place where Christ has elected to administer His gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation through the verbal and visible Word—His wonderful Means of Grace!

I know it’s going to be really cold on Sunday. Still, I hope that if you’re going to venture out for anything this weekend, it’ll be to join your Christian family in worship.

It’s Not That Complicated

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There are appointments you do not miss. You do not “get around to” a court appointment. If you’ve been summoned, you do not elect to stay home because you stayed up too late the night before or because something else suddenly came up that you decided would be more enjoyable.

You go. You show up.

The same is true for so many other things in life. I don’t have cancer. But if I did, I couldn’t imagine just not showing up to my scheduled treatments. I mean, are there any cancer patients out there reading this who’d honestly skip a cancer treatment because it was maybe scheduled too early in the morning, or because it was further away than you’d prefer to drive, or because you felt like doing something else instead, like maybe fishing or gardening or whatever? Of all the people in the world, I’m sure cancer patients epitomize exhaustion, especially during treatment. And yet, none would shrug and say, “Something else came up,” or “I’m just too tired,” as though what they were facing, and the appointments in place to deal with it, were no big deal.

We show up when something is important to us—when we believe we need to be there.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Before I do, let me first say to those who’d say outright they don’t need to be in church because they can be “spiritual” without it, feel free to sit this one out. I’m not really talking to you. You’ve already made clear you will not allow the Bible to serve as an external authority to govern you. You already live by a standard of picking and choosing based on preference. And so, you’ll do “spiritual” things when you prefer, maybe when it fits your inner sense of meaning, and you won’t when it doesn’t. By the way, I don’t mean to commend you, but I suppose I’m willing to applaud your consistency at least. You are reliable in that sense.

I should make another quick clarification. For example, we just offered an Epiphany service here at Our Savior on Tuesday, January 6. Forty people attended. That’s only about 15% of what’s typical of our regularly scheduled Sunday morning service attendance. I’m not writing to the faithful Christians in our midst who could not attend our Epiphany service. I say this because even Luther acknowledged in his explanation of the Third Commandment in the Large Catechism that “there should be worship daily; however, since this is more than the common people can do, at least one day in the week must be set apart for it.” In other words, I’m not speaking to those who simply cannot attend the special services for life’s various reasons.

But what I am writing here is addressed to those who deliberately stake a public claim in Christianity and yet see no reason to attend worship with any regularity.

In short, if you confess that Christ is Lord, then I’m assuming you believe His Word. I’m also assuming you realize that the Bible explicitly commands faithfulness in worship (Hebrews 10:24-25, Acts 2:42, and 1 Corinthians 14:26). What’s more, it is thoroughly assumed throughout the rest of the scriptures. There’s no question it was an Old Testament pattern. God expected His people to assemble (Leviticus 23:3, Deuteronomy 16:16, Psalm 122:1, Psalm 84:10, Nehemiah 8:1–3, 16, and others). And for the record, Jesus maintained the pattern (Luke 4:16, Matthew 18:20; I suppose it can be assumed also in Matthew 5:23-24 and John 4:23-24). It was also maintained by the newly emerging Church (Acts 20:7, Acts 13:44, and others).

Beyond even these things, if a reader is being honest, Saint Paul more than betrays the standard of regularly scheduled worship in 1 Corinthians 11:18 when he writes “when you come together as a church” (συνερχομένων ὑμῶν ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ). First of all, not if but when. Next, the first word in that phrase—συνερχομένων —has in its root the sense of traveling to a place to be together. Where is this traveling bunch going? The destination is ἐκκλησίᾳ—church. But couldn’t this just mean that when they are traveling together to Cedar Point in Ohio, even then, they are the Church, that is, the body of Christ in the formal sense? Of course. All believers in Christ, at all times and in all places, comprise the Church. But that’s not the point here. Paul is already talking about things that happen in worship, namely, the administration of the Lord’s Supper. In this context, Paul is casually indicating that normal Christians (so long as they are not physically incapable because they are sick, elderly, in prison, or something of that sort) travel to a place to occupy it—to be in it. The preposition ἐν does not mean “as.” It means “in.” In other words, “as” the Church, they travel to be together “in” a church.

Add to this the other reasons why Paul would encourage the Church to gather. Mutual edification is one that seems rather important to him (Ephesians 4:15-16, Colossians 3:16, Romans 12:4-5, and others). But even beyond this, God’s Word does not hide the warning of what can happen when we drift from faithful attendance in worship. Our hearts are more easily hardened (Hebrews 3:12-13), spiritual decline occurs (Judges 21:25), and we become more vulnerable to sin and Satan’s snares (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

For the Lutherans reading my words, consider your creedal and confessional heritage. Again, Luther reminds us in his explanation of the Third Commandment in the Large Catechism that “God insists upon a strict observance of [regular Sabbath worship] and will punish all who despise his Word and refuse to hear and learn it, especially at the times appointed.”

For those less familiar with Luther and more inclined toward others in mainstream evangelicalism, consider Billy Graham, who said so very plainly that “if you are a Christian, you should go to church.” And why? He continued that a Christian “has no right to neglect the church. It is God’s plan for the nurture and strengthening of His people.” And in another place, Graham wrote, “The church is the place where believers are fed, encouraged, and strengthened to face the world.”

Now, if Billy Graham isn’t enough for you, consider others from across the Christian spectrum—folks like John MacArthur, who said, “If a [church member] shows prolonged negligence in gathering with God’s people… how can he say he loves God?” Or maybe even someone like Dwight Moody, who insisted that “Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.” Or Paul Washer, who preached, “A believer who refuses the local church is a contradiction.” Or John Piper, who maintained, “The corporate gathering of believers is the single most important event in the life of the Church.”

Apart from Luther, I’m not in strict theological unity with any of the above preachers I just mentioned. And yet, it sure seems that faithfulness in worship is one thing that has not slipped through any of our theological divides. That’s because it’s a pretty straightforward standard that can only be set aside deliberately.

In the end, it’s really not that complicated. If Christ is real, and He is truly preeminent in your life, then none of the above proofs could ever be suggestions. Instead, they are divine appointments. Sure, we may not feel like keeping the appointments. Still, we know they’re important—and they’re good for us—and so, we show up. And so, our deliberate disregard or neglect of these things could never be interpreted as neutral behavior. Instead, it reveals something else altogether, and it does so rather crisply. Compared to the other practical examples I shared, it shows that, functionally, Christ is less significant to you. It reveals that forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are nice, but not as nice as, perhaps, one’s bed after a long Saturday night of this and that with friends.

As a pastor, the saddest part here is that deliberate disregard for worship is a public demonstration of unbelief. Maybe not necessarily unbelief in the sense of open denial, but, at a minimum, it is unbelief expressed in practice. Both are public. The first is at least honest. The second is simply hypocritical. It is an observable contradiction, sort of like Washer pointed out. By staking a claim in Christianity, one assumes devotion to God and His body, the Church. And yet, there is no desire to show up as part of that body. So, what gives?

Well, belief orders life. What we choose and what we neglect reveal what we do and do not truly believe or consider valuable. To absent oneself so carelessly can be nothing less than to declare that God means very little to you by comparison to all the other appointments in life you’d never in a million years consider blowing off.

Again, no one would say, “I believe my cancer treatments are crucial, but I’ll only go when it feels convenient.” No one would ever say, “Your honor, I respect you and all, but I have some friends coming over this morning that I haven’t seen in a long time, so I’ll have to catch up on this court case a different time.” No one would ever call a beloved daughter right before her wedding and say, “I know it’s important for me to be there, but I haven’t been to my cabin up north in a while, so I’m not going to be able to make it.”

Do these things, and see what happens. Actually, I can just tell you what will happen. There will be trouble.

New Year’s Day 2026

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I wasn’t going to write and send anything out today. But then, here I am at my computer, tapping away. This morning’s worship service isn’t until 10:00 a.m., and so, apart from other preparations, I guess I do have some time. Besides, it felt wrong not to reach out and at least share something that might help with your first day of 2026.

I suppose I can start by telling you that the first words out of my mouth when I woke up this morning were a prayer of thanksgiving. I thanked the Lord for my family. I thanked the Lord for the congregation I serve. I thanked the Lord for all the blessings He has granted to me—both known and unknown in my past, present, and future. Then I got up, took a shower, got dressed, and headed out into the familiar but unpleasant Michigan tundra.

Waking up and praying is always a good way to start one’s day. But my first meal, that was something else. Despite my secret intentions for the new year, which is to try eating better, the first thing I consumed was a greasy hashbrown from McDonald’s at 5:55 a.m., followed later by my usual bowl of cereal here at my desk. Most mornings, a bowl of cereal in my office is part of my routine before I get started on anything else. But I don’t usually eat McDonald’s hashbrowns. However, I saw that the Hartland McDonald’s was open, so I stopped for coffee. The hashbrown sounded good. With that, I slid backward in my intentions before I even got started. So much for a perfect start. Well, we win some and lose some. Although anyone who thinks personal growth means instant consistency has never tried to live faithfully for more than a few hours at a time. Saint Paul understood this well when he spoke of the conflict within us—the desire to do what is good, set against the pull of the flesh that resists it (Romans 7:15-19).

And yet, Paul’s point isn’t perfection. It is a right knowledge combined with willful direction. It is choosing, again and again, to fight against the worst desires and to embrace the better ones. Paul writes that the flesh and the Spirit are opposed to one another. (Galatians 5:16-17). He doesn’t share this critical detail so we can excuse our failures. He wants us to be aware. Awareness allows for preparation and action. For starters, it grants that the Christian life is not the absence of temptation, but the daily, often quiet decision to walk by the Spirit rather than surrender to what comes most naturally. When, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we’re aware of the sinner/saint struggle, we can embrace prayer before complaint. We can lean toward obedience before personal comfort. We can know to do the better thing even when we don’t feel like doing anything at all. I suppose in one sense, sometimes faithfulness looks less like complete victory and more like simply showing up and trying, all by God’s grace, of course (Romans 8:1-4).

It is also worth remembering that even this willingness—to try, to lean in, to turn toward what’s better—it’s not something we manufacture. Again, it’s the Holy Spirit who creates willing hearts. And He does so by the Gospel (Philippians 2:13, Romans 10:17).

Now, you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you? Well, since you already know, I won’t dress it up.

Go to church. Being present where the Gospel gifts are given matters more than anything else at any time of any given year. God has promised to strengthen and sustain His people through His visible and verbal Word. That means if one really wants to step in and fight the flesh, being where Christ is preached and His gifts are administered should not be a second thought but a priority all year long (Hebrews 10:24-25).

So, if your year has already begun imperfectly, take heart. The only flawless beginning or ending we require is securely located in Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Savior. By His person and work, the perfection that saves was accomplished. Through faith in Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit at work through the Gospel, our hearts are recrafted to trust Him, and thereby to receive the merits of His incredible work.

And then into the daily struggle we go. As we do, we remember that while the outer self may scrap against the sin-nature, God is at work within us, shaping endurance, humility, and hope right there in the middle of the fight (2 Corinthians 4:16). Indeed, “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).

With that, I encourage you not to become downhearted in the new year when you fall short. Remember, an all-important muscle in the struggle is repentance itself. Keep choosing the better things. Keep turning toward what’s good. And when you stumble, don’t quit. Repent, receive Christ’s forgiveness, and then rise and keep going, mindful of the divine encouragement, “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

I’m praying for you. I trust you’ll be praying for me, too.

A blessed New Year to you!

New Year’s Eve 2025

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I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more New Year’s Eve loses its luster. It feels less like a party and more like a bedtime challenge. Can I make it to midnight? Can I even make it past 9:30? I think William Vaughn said it best, “Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.”

For the record, I stopped trying for midnight years ago, especially with a worship service in the morning. Still, the moment has never been lost on me. New Year’s Eve—the day itself—has always been a moment to pause. It can be sort of a held breath between what was and what will be, if only we’ll take the opportunity to consider it. Right now, I’m sitting at my dining room table. Even with a quick glance around the room, I’m reminded of just how quickly things can change.

For example, right across from where I’m sitting, a poster-sized photo hangs on the wall. Jennifer snapped the picture. Essentially, she captured a moment we can never revisit.

The photo was taken on a beautiful, sun-washed day at a beachside restaurant near Lemon Bay, Florida—one we visited with some relatively newfound friends at the time who knew the place and loved it. In the image, there’s a wooden post planted in the sand with forty or so signs nailed to it, each pointing somewhere else—cities across the United States, and a few beyond its borders, all measured in miles from that very spot. A bird is perched on one of the top signs, palled by a nearby palm tree’s shadow. It’s as if the bird’s deciding which of the cities he’ll choose to visit next. The sky is bright blue, interrupted only by a handful of clouds. Everything about the picture feels calm, steady, and permanent.

But permanence is a lie we tell ourselves when the sun is shining and things are easy. Hurricane Ian erased everything in that photo back in 2022. The sign, the restaurant, the familiar stretch of beach, it was all pretty much gone overnight. It was reduced to ocean-soaked debris and memory.

That said, I can promise you, the Thoma family loves the image all the more, if only because everything in it is gone. In a way, it’s not just a photograph for us anymore. It’s a reminder that certain moments don’t ask our permission before they become history. We will never stand there again. We will never see that post in the sand exactly as it was. We’ll never be able to visit that restaurant and relive that moment.

New Year’s Eve has a way of turning our attention toward that same kind of truth. We look back at the year behind us and realize how much of it has vanished without much ceremony. I think of my dear Christian friend, Alex Bak, who died just before Christmas. We had recent conversations together that I never suspected would be our last. Like the signs near the beachfront restaurant, I lived as though Alex would always be there. I just assumed I’d always see Alex sitting in his same pew near the post on the pulpit side of the church’s nave. Indeed, plenty of other things have happened all around me that felt ordinary at the time but now feel sacred because they’re gone.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that time moves forward with or without my consent. The clock ticks with absolute indifference to my nostalgia.

But I have an upper hand on the clock’s cruelty. As a Christian, I know Christ is present in every moment. “Behold,” He said, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Everything we love in this world is fragile. I’ve been known to say from the pulpit from time to time that everything has an expiration date. Everything is subject to wind, water, decay, and time. But the thing is, Christ stands right in the middle of the storms. He’s a fixed anchor right in the middle of all our victories and losses. He’s unshaken and unchanging. He does not promise that the signposts will remain standing. He doesn’t promise that the forthcoming year and its moments will be gentle. But He does promise Himself. And with that promise comes the impenetrable truth of a kingdom that cannot be washed away, grasped by a hope-filled strength that does not weaken or erode.

So as 2025 becomes 2026, just as I won’t cling to the misapprehension that I can stay up until midnight, I won’t hold to the illusion that the coming year will somehow be free from struggle or loss. Time has cured me of that naiveté. There will be storms I didn’t see coming, moments I assumed would last that didn’t, and conversations I didn’t realize were final until they already were. But those potential realities are not hollow or hopeless when viewed through the lens of the Gospel. The calendar can change all it wants. Christ remains the same—yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

Indeed, the world may lose its landmarks. Favorite places and moments may disappear into the Gulf, maybe even becoming portraits on our dining room walls. But in the middle of all of it, the cross still stands, unmoved by this world’s winds and waves, untouched by time’s inevitable erosion. And that’s enough for me. I have everything I need in Jesus, which means I’ll have everything I need in 2026. My prayer is that He’ll be enough for you in the new year, too.

By the way, if your church doesn’t offer a New Year’s Eve service, stop by Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland, Michigan. Ours is at 4:30 pm. For the record, I’ve never met anyone who was disappointed they went to church on New Year’s Eve.

Worship is Incarnational

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Before I begin, a clarification is in order, if only because people asked for a recording of the hymn I described in last week’s eNews message.

For starters, yes, we do record our worship services. The audio recordings are kept and given to those who genuinely need them, which I’ll come back to in a moment. In the meantime, know that the device we use to capture the service is fed straight from our thousand-year-old microphones directly to a flash drive. In other words, the recordings are, by no means, a spectral capture in crisp Dolby stereo. Above and beneath and around the liturgy’s voice, there are a multitude of ambient sounds you’d expect in a room bearing several hundred people. Thankfully, the spoken word survives the ordeal reasonably well. You can hear the lector reading and the pastor preaching clearly enough, and without much annoyance. But what does not fare so well is the music. It sounds like it’s being performed and sung from inside a gigantic oil drum.

In short, the recordings do what they are meant to do, which is to preserve the Word of God preached and read. However, they do not showcase the liturgical experience—and I’m perfectly okay with that, for a couple of reasons.

One of the reasons we do not share our services with anyone other than shut-ins or other folks in genuine need became especially clear during COVID. Not long after so many in society became terrified, even as we gathered in person, I warned the Board of Elders that providing a virtual alternative would inevitably give people an excuse to stay away—not out of necessity, but out of convenience. And as it turns out, I was right. While it didn’t necessarily happen to us, plenty of studies have discovered it did, in fact, happen to countless others. Indeed, American Christendom experienced a significant shift. Duke Divinity School’s Faith & Leadership initiative found that most congregations that normalized virtual worship during COVID never fully regained their in-person attendance, ultimately returning to in-person worship with 10% fewer people than before. The COVID Religion Research Project found that as many as 25% of regular churchgoers in America now regularly rely on online worship as a viable substitute for in-person gatherings.

Gathering these things into a singular thought, my sense is that what began as an emergency measure became, for many churches, a long-term standard for deliberate displacement. People settled into watching rather than attending, observing rather than gathering.

And yet, the Bible does not treat worship in this way. That’s because it does not consider the actual assembly as optional (Hebrews 10:24-25). Christian worship is, by design, incarnational. We do it together, in person. It is God’s people gathered in one place to hear, confess, receive, and sing. We do this in one another’s presence. We’re the Body of Christ, and that’s how a body works, together with its other parts (1 Corinthians 12:12-27).

So, what about service recordings? Well, we record and share our services as a care for those who truly cannot be there—the shut-in, the homebound, those whose bodies no longer allow them to gather without real difficulty. These are exceptional cases of care. I’ve always considered the service recordings as functioning sort of like an artificial heart. It’s not ideal. It more or less sustains when what should be there cannot be. In the meantime, for the healthy among us, we resist broadcasting beyond this threshold because we do not want to train anyone to believe that artificial substitutes are equivalent to the real thing. Again, an artificial heart does not replace a healthy, living one. In the same way, virtual presence can serve in cases of genuine need, but it is not the same as real presence.

But there’s still more to this.

Returning to where I started, after last week’s note, more than a few people asked if I had a recording of the service. I was going to disregard everything I just said and share a short clip of “What Child Is This” from our Children’s Christmas service. I really was. But then I listened to the recording. As I did, I ran squarely into what I mentioned before.

Our service recordings are not very good—and I like that they’re not. Yes, the hymn as it was sung that night—the children’s voices, the organ, the words—all these parts were technically present in the recording. But at the same time, they weren’t. The recording did not capture the moment. To understand what I described last week, you had to be there. If you weren’t there, then, well, you missed it.

Along the same lines as what I’ve already written here, there’s something about being in the room. It’s something no microphone can seize, and no speaker can reproduce. I can only tell you about it—the way the sound moved, the way the congregation was pulled into carrying the lyrics, the way time seemed to slow during the second stanza of “What Child Is This,” as though its words really were pressing down on all of us with a theological weight you could actually feel. Sure, I could play the recording for you. You’d hear the music and singing. But you cannot experience the surge of a moment when truth lands heavily, and everyone in the room is caught in its blast radius.

That only happens incarnationally. It only happens when you are there.

This is not a critique of recordings. They serve a purpose. Again, we consider it a kindness to shut-ins, travelers, and those whose bodies or circumstances truly prevent them from gathering with their Christian family. Thanks be to God for such tools. But they were never meant to replace presence. They cannot. They do not.

Christian worship is far more than content delivery. It’s not something you consume efficiently while cleaning the kitchen or working in the garage. It is not background noise for Sunday morning coffee or something you “catch up on” later in the week. Christian Worship is a holy and deliberate interruption to everything else in your life. It is God gathering His people to Himself at a time and in a place to feed and sustain them with His gifts of forgiveness.

Even better, Christian worship is where the Word is not merely read but actually addressed to you personally—where the Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood is not something thought about but actually received. You open your mouth, and you eat and drink. It’s a place where forgiven hearts sing praises to God, and what they sing isn’t just sound, but it’s borne by the space itself—by breath and wood and pipe and stone and people standing shoulder to shoulder confessing and resonating the same truths together (Colossians 3:16).

The night we sang “What Child Is This,” the hymn was not so moving or impressive because it was technically flawless. It was powerful because, in a sense, it was inhabited. Indeed, Kantor Newman painted the text gloriously. And yet, the text was painted not only by him, but by the space, by the gathered Church, by the shared attentiveness of people who had come expecting God to do what He has promised to do. And He did (Isaiah 55:10-11). That’s something you cannot download and listen to during the car ride to work.

Now, may I say something plainly and pastorally?

As we stand on the doorstep of a new year, if you have been away from church, come back. If attendance has slipped into something occasional, make it deliberate again. I’m all about New Year’s resolutions. I’m already planning mine. Perhaps you could embrace and use the tradition to recommit to attending church.

Now, be careful. Don’t do it because you feel attendance somehow checks a box and proves your devotion. Don’t do it for any reason other than you know you need what God gives you there. You need to be where the hymnody—God’s Word put to music—is not just captured, but encountered. You need to be where your sins are forgiven out loud (John 20:22-23), where death is named from the pulpit and defied from the pews, where joy is shared by the rest of the Christian body who believe and confess the body’s head, Jesus Christ, together (Ephesians 1:22-23).

Quite simply, nothing compares to being present.

You know as well as I do that this coming year will bring its share of noise, distance, and disembodied substitutes for real life. Resist the lie that these are enough. The Christian faith has always insisted on incarnational truths. So go. Stand. Sing. Listen. Receive. Let the gathering of God’s people in holy worship do what it was always meant to do—which is not merely to pass through your ears, but rather, to take hold of you completely (Psalm 95:1-7).

I assure you, nothing compares.

Christmas Day 2025

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Merry Christmas to you!

I think the best place to start this morning is with a little bit of honesty. I suppose quite plainly, the Bible never pretends that the world is other than it is. From Genesis onward, it describes a creation that groans beneath a weight it was never meant to endure. A glance to one side or the other in our surroundings reveals weariness. It’s not hard to identify. It’s in the headlines. It’s in families. It’s along the streets we walk. It’s in the human heart, too. That alone tells us something important. This world requires Christmas.

Now, to say that we need Christmas is to confess something far more than sentiment. It’s to admit that something decisive absolutely must interrupt the long fatigue I described.

On the surface, Christmas brings a rare pause. Even in our culture, which is so often bent inward, this day still nudges people toward generosity, reconciliation, and maybe even a little bit of genuine goodwill. For a brief moment, the rhythm of take-take-take slows, and the instinct to give emerges. People wrap and give presents to others. Dinner tables are set for more than just the immediate family. Indeed, people make room in their homes, even for people they’d prefer to see only once a year. These traditions, however imperfect, testify to something deeper than the mushiness of human nostalgia. They’re winks to a world that’s supposed to be something so much better than it is.

That said, there’s still more. Traditions do not exist in a vacuum. They always point somewhere. For one, a gift is never meaningless. It assumes a reason. And the reason for Christmas—regardless of what its underminers would say—has never changed. Long before the décor and melodies, Christmas had a name. To remember the day is, at some level, to remember Him. Christ is not one of many accessories to the holiday. He is its origin.

Christians know this, not necessarily by intuition, but by faith. That is why the Church gathers on Christmas Day. The pews are not empty because the promise is not. At Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland, Michigan, there will be people who understand that the world’s deepest hunger cannot be satisfied by even its best seasonal traditions.

I admire the people who set aside everything else for worship on Christmas Day. Those are the ones who seem to know, truly, that no amount of giving or receiving, no feasting on holiday ham or snacking on Christmas cookies can quiet the concerned conscience made weary by sin. That’s because none of these things can conquer sin’s wage—the last enemy we all face, which is death. Only Christ can do that. Faith recognizes that without Him at the center, even the joy of a fabulous Christmas gift fades quickly. With Christ, however, joy endures long after everyone has gone home, the ornaments are back in their boxes, and the tree is out at the street awaiting the garbage truck.

All year long, believers live from the same confession the Apostles proclaimed. With Saint Paul they trust that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). With Saint John they cling to the truth that “the Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Christmas fixes a moment in history and declares that rescue entered time itself (Galatians 4:4). God did not shout salvation from a distance, but sent His own Son into the world (John 3:17). He stepped into the darkness to overcome it. Indeed, “the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:5, 9). And He did just that!

So yes, Christmas brings warmth to a frigid landscape, both literally and figuratively. Yes, it has always involved gifts. But Christians know the heart of the season lies elsewhere—in something entirely different. Worship invites you into that “something.” It invites you to God’s house, where the order of giving is wonderfully reversed. We arrive empty-handed, and the One we celebrate supplies all the gifts. Life, forgiveness, salvation—these are the heavenly treasures He delivers. These are the gifts He just cannot wait to give!

This is why we need Christmas. This is why, no matter how the world recrafts it, Christmas will forever remain as the greatest news—the best invitation! By the power of the Holy Spirit for faith in this Gospel, receive that invitation. Do not set it aside as the world does. Instead, rejoice in the Savior who exchanged heavenly glory for a manger, and who would later exchange His innocence for your guilt. That work saves you.

I began by mentioning this world’s weariness. Maybe this is where Christmas finally meets with it. Like the Word of God in which it rests, the Christmas narrative does not pretend the burden isn’t there, nor does it ask weary sinners to carry it a little longer on their own. Instead, Christmas announces that rest has entered the world in the flesh of God’s own Son. The world may remain tired, and hearts may still feel heavy, but they are no longer without help or hope. Into our exhaustion, God has sent His Son, Jesus. Into our darkness, He has given His Light. Into the world’s prolonged fatigue, He now speaks a promise meant for sinners like you and me, saying, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). That rest is not found in a day on the calendar or in a season that fades, but in the Savior who came—and who remains.

I hope you’ll think about these things. Even better, I hope you’ll be immersed in them in a church pew.

I’ll leave you with that. And once again, Merry Christmas!