It’s not at all controversial to note that Christmas, as a cultural phenomenon in the United States, does not always resemble the Christian festival celebrating Jesus’ birth. Commercial interests have exploited the season for profit, and it seems like all of us have agreed to make the month of December the most hectic and least peaceful season of all.

On the one hand, this misplaced emphasis on capitalist greed and frantic busy-ness at least holds Christmas up as important, and as long as Christmas is at the forefront of the cultural consciousness there is a chance its main message - that God has become human to recur his human creatures and creation - might break through the barriers.

But its worthwhile for Christians to push back against the noise and pace of “American” Christmas and spend more time quietly meditating on what it means to wait on the Lord, to find our happiness in the arrival of Jesus to save us.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Luther expands the “father and mother” of the fourth commandment to also mean “other authorities.” His reasoning for this is that all human leadership flows out of the leadership and responsibility God gives to parents over their children: parents cannot teach their children everything so they hire schools and teachers to represent them in training their kids; parents cannot defend their homes and children from the threat of foreign invaders so they pay taxes to the government who cares for national defense. So for Luther, the government the citizen lives under is just as much a function of God’s authority as the parents a child lives under.

For that reason, governments must never be rebelled against or overthrown. This does not mean, though, that governments must always be obeyed. While the Christian’s vocation is citizen, his or her identity is baptized into Christ, so the Christian must always obey Jesus before any other human authority, but this must be done with the respect and honor that God’s chosen agent for each country, state, or city is due.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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All of us know what it’s like to be humbled, and almost all of those times of humiliation have been forced upon us - after all, no sane person would willingly choose to be humiliated in front of other people. But Jesus’ humiliation is active: “he humbled himself” Paul says in Philippians 2. But why would he do this?

Paul insists that the path of salvation - in other words, the path of exaltation - is and was necessarily the path of humiliation. Jesus humbled himself, becoming the servants of those very people whom he created, sustained, and who rebelled against him, in order to rescue us who could not rescue ourselves. This also provides a model of what it means to love self-sacrificially, to give up our glory and exaltation to serve others who do not deserve it.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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A person’s appetite for and willingness to change can frequently be a matter of personality - some people are by nature more conservative in their personality and tend to resist change by nature, while others have personalities that are more progressive and tend to embrace and even pursue change.

The former group have the advantage of not being easily swayed into making bad changes in their life but the disadvantage of being unwilling at times to make necessary good changes. On the other hand, the latter group have the advantage of being willing to embrace much-needed changes but the disadvantage of sometimes rushing into unnecessary and even harmful changes. Both groups, of course, need each other to temper each other’s weaknesses. But how do we know what is bad change and what is good change?

The answer the Bible gives is that their is an unchangeable touchstone, Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He never changes because he is perfect and thus needs no change. But we are not perfect, so we must be ready to change when needed, and we know we need to change when our thoughts or behavior does not match up with the perfect, unchangeable Jesus. So, with Jesus as our North Star, we can know when changing is necessary and when changing would be wrong.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fundamentally an agreement with God, that he is right and we are wrong.

These confessions carry with them a lot of benefit for the individual human: first, by turning us away from the fake “reality” that God is wrong and we are right and orienting us to true reality, we can know that we are right with God; and second, this right orientation to God’s reality produces psychological comfort as the individual human begins to experience much less dissonance in his life as he moves throughout God’s world.

Chuck and Aaron also discuss the benefits of private confession to God, corporate confession, individual confession with a pastor, and confessing our sins to those we have sinned against.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Every human belief or opinion is based upon a presupposition - a faith commitment that cannot be proven but can only be assumed. For instance, the difference between Christianity and atheism is not the difference between “faith” and “reason”, between opinion and fact, between superstition and rationality; instead, both positions are based on unprovable, faith-based assumptions - presuppositions. Christians believe God exists, atheists believe God does not exist. Neither can prove their position is correct, so both hold their position based on faith. And starting from those presuppositional foundations, each builds out logical explanations of how the universe works based on those presuppositions.

The question is which presupposition makes for the best logical conclusions; does faith in God or does faith in no-God make best sense of the universe? Does Christianity or atheism make best sense of the inborn sense of justice all humans have? Does Christianity or atheism make best sense of the quest for beauty that all humans strive for?

For Christianity, the logical conclusions of belief that God has revealed himself in Jesus make sense of our world in ways that no other presupposition can.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Some Christians have held that cremation is not permitted by the Bible, on the grounds that bodies buried intact, or “sleeping”, are a concrete anticipation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day. But the Bible never expressly forbids cremation, and in at least one place cremation is approvingly performed (1 Samuel 31:11-13).

The key issue is the question of what the resurrection from the dead means: if the body has been created by God and is fundamentally good, then our funeral and burial practices must center around and focus on the belief and confession that God will raise all the bodies of his children someday to new life in his new creation, whether they have been buried or cremated.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Virtue, in the ancient world, was the word for moral and physical excellence. Those who were brave, those who were honest, those who accomplished great things, were excellent, therefore virtuous.

The Bible, too, picks up on this ancient idea and calls humans to pursue virtue. But the Bible, unlike the Stoics and other ancient philosophies, holds that virtue is something that is only located in God’s character. In 2 Peter 1, Peter first claims that glory and virtue are something that are God’s alone, and then calls God’s people to live in His virtue, making ever effort to supplement our faith with this excellence. And if Christians are living in Christ’s virtue, then there is no need for “virtue signaling” - having to tell people we have virtue, to cover up our lack - because the genuine virtue and excellence of Jesus will be manifest in our day to day living.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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