This past Sunday, November 19th, I had the pleasure of preaching at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Grand Marais, MN.
Let me be clear:
Psalm 147
1Praise the Lord! How good it is to sing praises to our God; for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.
2The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel.
3He heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds.
4He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.
5Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
6The Lord lifts up the downtrodden; he casts the wicked to the ground.
7Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving; make melody to our God on the lyre.
8He covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth, makes grass grow on the hills.
9He gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry.
10His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the speed of a runner;
11but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.
12Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion!
13For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you.
14He grants peace within your borders; he fills you with the finest of wheat.
15He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.
16He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes.
17He hurls down hail like crumbs— who can stand before his cold?
18He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.
19He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and ordinances to Israel.
20He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his ordinances. Praise the Lord!
So, Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday as our next president.
This morning, I announced to my daughter Else that today was finally Epiphany!
Dear followers of OMG,
A year or so back, thanks to my first cousin once removed (that’d be my cousin Peder’s daughter Solvei: I had to go to a website to make sure I had that relationship term right), I learned about the band Postmodern Jukebox.
“Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.” Elie Wiesel, Nobel Lecture, Hope, Despair and Memory
Below are photos from my home office (I’ve discovered that you can see them a bit more clearly if you click on them.)
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, to be sure, in the news here and abroad.
Google yields only one pop song, and an iffy one at that, with the word “finitude” in its lyrics.
“We pray for the Holy Spirit to come, and then, when she does, we want her to go home!”
Today, Economic Justice is the OMG topic du jour.
So in the wake of Newtown, tsunami waves of debate around gun control have already flooded our national conversations.
This blog will be laced with obscenities.
So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.
Many years ago, my Grandma Madsen got fired from the Brookings South Dakota jail.
This blog is a posted version of the sermon I preached this morning at Springdale Lutheran, and in light of the events in Colorado, and in light of the day-to-day lives of so many suffering sisters and brothers in the world.
On another note, one of my mentors, Murray Haar, at the peak of craziness post-accident, told me that one of his favorite NT tales is of the woman who anointed Jesus.
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