Traditional Lutheran sermons have always been grounded in a Law/Gospel dialetic. (One Lutheran website frames this in medical terms -- symptoms, diagnosis and treatment.)

My pastor and I were ain't-it-awfulling the other day about church people who seem to have no sense of boundaries or healthy shame. He mused about how to embue people, especially the children in church, with a sense of the Law, so that the Gospel means anything real to them. (I'll add that we're having an issue right now -- frequent fliers here will know this -- with young families who don't seem to care very much about their children's spiritual formation, either at home or in church.)

How do you see this yin/yang, Law/Gospel dynamic working out in your own church's preaching and teaching?

Sky: That's an interesting concept. Especially considering that our pastor, in trying to get a bead on what the issue is with young parents -- and, really, with the community in general -- has been thinking of getting them together in a meeting ("Good luck," I thought) and talking to them about creating a covenanted group, within our church, that agrees to make the spiritual formation of their kids a priority in their lives.

I know some people will read this and say, "Isn't that what the liturgy of Holy Baptism does?" to which I'd respond that , yes, that's what it's supposed to do -- but that we can't seem to get parents to take it seriously. They seem more interested in Farmville.

I was thinking about this, and my first reaction is that my pastor doesn't preach much about the Law.  But I suppose that in her sermons she does point out the brokenness in humanity/human relations/human society, and God's ability to heal that brokenness, evidenced in the life and resurrection of Jesus.  So I suppose that sort of fits a Law and Gospel format, though not in the traditional 'convince them they're all sinners deserving of hell, and then sock 'em with the Gospel' sense.