Lessons from the Lutheran Tradition for 2024

The church of the twenty-first century needs to cultivate an expectation of suffering, with two particular focal points. There is individual suffering of the kind that comes to us all at some point. No matter how healthy, wealthy, and happy we are today, at some point we will find that we cannot escape the mortality of our bodies, part of the universal human condition. The task of the church is to prepare each of us for that reckoning.