Luke 1:26-38 Dear Partner in Preaching, I will confess that until I read Cameron Howard’s beautiful reflection on this week’s biblical story, I’d never noticed that Mary is perplexed by Gabriel’s greeting, not his presence. And… that has stayed with me all week. Most of us, I would imagine, would find the presence of the heavenly being enough to strike terror into our hearts, kind of like the guards at the resurrection in Matthew’s account or the people of Israel shaking in fear at the thunder and lightning of the Lord’s presence at Sinai. But no, Luke specifies that after Gabriel greets her with pretty magnanimous...

Luke 1:26-38 Luke 2:1-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, Martin Luther loved Mary. You may already have known that. As a life-long Lutheran pastor, I have regularly been surprised by how few Lutherans know that. I suspect that’s because, while Lutherans often know too little about their Roman Catholic kindred, one of the things they do know is that Mary has a significant place in Roman Catholic piety and so assume Luther would not have been a fan. But he was; indeed, he was a huge fan. To Luther, Mary represented the typical pattern of God’s interaction with humans. Indeed, not just interaction, but election. That is, it wasn’t Mary’s...