Law, Gospel, and Participatory Preaching Dec11

Law, Gospel, and Participatory Preaching

One of the comments to this week’s Dear Partner in Preaching, on “Practicing Advent,” raised a great question: is inviting people to practice sharing their faith law and, if so, where is the Gospel? I ask this kind of question myself all the time. But to help you ask and answer it with me, I’ll offer a little bit of background. I am a Lutheran preacher. And when it comes to preaching, the most important thing for Lutherans is to distinguish rightly between law and gospel. (Actually, it’s not only Lutherans who focus on this distinction, but we certainly talk about it a lot!) In short, law stands for all those things that come to us...