Dear Partner in Preaching, Two notes to you late in this week on this text and day. 1) I will admit that Holy Trinity Sunday is perhaps my least favorite Sunday of the year. On any given day, the doctrine of the Trinity seems remote and inaccessible, if not downright confusing, and barely touches on the realities of my life. And in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the massive and world-wide protests that has sparked – not to mention that we’re still coping with a pandemic that has now claimed more than 100,000 lives in the United States and countless more around the globe – the Trinity has never seemed so unimportant...

Matthew 18:15-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, So what do you think? Rules or relationships? I think this may be the central question to answer in our reading and preaching of this particular passage in Matthew. Is he giving us rules to live by or privileging relationships over, well, just about everything else in our life as Christians. If the former, then you have a rather neat little formula for maintaining a semblance of order in the Christian community. Someone offends you, confront them. If that doesn’t work, try an intervention. If that fails, cut them off and kick them out. If nothing else, it’s at least straight forward, which is...

Matthew 28:16-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, Ever notice that the close of Matthew’s Gospel, a passage we usually refer to as “the Great Commission,” ends with a promise? I think I sometimes get so caught up in the grandeur and import of the Great Commission that I overlook what I now think of as “the Great Promise” – “And I am with you always, to the end of the age.” I suspect this isn’t an accident. That is, I suspect that our only hope of fulfilling the great commission – sharing the good news of God’s grace in Christ with the world through word and deed and welcoming all into fellowship through Baptism – is by...

Three-in-One Plus One   Dear Partner in Preaching, Imagine with me for a moment, the delight you would experience in discovering that you had a long lost uncle or aunt who had made you the heir to their estate. Can you see it? You’d wake up one morning and discover that they had left you riches beyond count, that your major financial worries were over, and that you really didn’t have to worry all that much about the future. If that scenario happened, how would you feel? What would you do? Or, more to the point, what would you do differently? And here I don’t mean what would you run out and buy – though I suspect that most of us...