Sunday, May 29, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ascension Sunday
watch this service online (readings start around 20:30; sermon starts around 26:42)

Whenever you crack open a bible, something you’ll likely notice as you read is that there are a lot of stories in the bible that get told multiple times in different ways.  Usually these stories are written by different authors, relying on different written and oral traditions, who are telling the story in a way shaped by their own particular communities and agendas and perspectives.  Usually.  Unusually, you get stories like the ones we read today.  Our readings for this morning include two different accounts of the ascension of Jesus, but – plot twist – both stories were actually written by the same guy: the evangelist Luke.

Insofar as the major details of what happened, both stories are pretty much the same.  But the tone in which they’re told is quite different.

The first time Luke tells the story of the ascension, it comes at the very end of the book of Luke, as he is wrapping up his gospel account.  And this version of the story has a very hopeful, feel-good kind of vibe to it.  It’s written as a happy ending: there is understanding and blessing; there’s joy and continual praise in the temple, and they all lived happily ever after, the end!

But then Luke opens the Book of Acts – which is basically the sequel to the Gospel of Luke – by telling the story of the ascension again.  Only this telling of the story doesn’t give off that same kind of happy ending vibe as the gospel version.  In this version, the disciples seem to be a lot more confused and troubled and anxious.  They assumed that they had gotten to the happy ending part with Jesus’ resurrection – and that the next logical step would be to raise the kingdom of Israel from the ashes and to throw off the yoke of Roman oppression – but now they don’t seem so sure.  

Sunday, May 22, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 13:41; sermon starts around 20:08)
r-e-c-y-c-l-e, recycle… ♻️

I spent this last week hanging out with other clergy friends at the Festival of Homiletics, the preaching conference I go to every year.  And it’s fairly easy to tell when I’ve been spending more time than usual with other clergy folks, because I notice that it affects the way I talk – I find myself using a lot of those five dollar words they teach us in seminary, words like: soteriology, kerygma, eschatology, exegesis, and so on.

One of these words that you might hear used by particularly nerdy preachers (like yours truly) is the word “pericope” (it looks just like the word “periscope” without the ‘s’).  Pericope is a word that’s sometimes used to talk about a section of scripture  – it’s basically like how we use the term “reading” or “lesson.”  The word comes from the Greek for “a cutting-out” – which kind of evokes this image of someone snipping out passages of scripture and then pasting them somewhere else.  

The group of people who put together the three year series of readings that we follow – the lectionary – are responsible for cutting out the texts that we read together each Sunday (kind of makes them sound like scriptural scrapbookers, haha).  Most of the time, it’s pretty obvious why they choose to cut texts where they do – perhaps there’s a story or a parable with a clear beginning and ending or a section all on the same theme.  But sometimes, like with our readings for today, the place they choose to cut something doesn’t make much sense to me at all.  

Like with this gospel reading especially.  The way it’s cut, we’re missing a lot of the context.  And without seeing the larger context that this piece is cut out of, it’s hard to tell where Jesus is even going with all the different things he says here.  He says some stuff about loving him and his Father and keeping their word, then he says some stuff about the Holy Spirit and some stuff about peace, and finally he hints at something bigger that’s about to happen.  

Sunday, May 15, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 16:18; sermon starts around 23:16)

Have any of you ever heard of a game called Minecraft?  It’s a pretty popular game – you might even have kids or grandkids or students who play it, if you haven’t played it yourself.  My two younger siblings got me hooked on Minecraft during the height of the pandemic.  They’re usually a little more on the cutting edge of that kind of stuff than I am – but they like to find things that the three of us can play together, and Minecraft fit the bill.

And it’s actually a lot of fun!  Minecraft is what’s known as a “sandbox game”: you’re basically dropped into a digital world and given complete freedom to explore.  You go “mining” for all kinds of different resources; and you can then use those resources to make tools, or to construct a shelter, or really to build anything and everything you can possibly imagine.  

And it’s fun because there are lots of different ways to play the game.  If you want to fight your way through zombies and giant spiders and exploding monsters all the way to the big final boss and win the game, you can do that.  If you want to build a farm and raise sheep and grow wheat and steal chicken eggs to throw at your siblings, you can do that.  If you want to build fantastical palaces or underwater fortresses, or just explore and map the world as far as you can go, you can do that!

Personally, I like the creating and exploring the best.  Every Minecraft world generates randomly, so you never know what you’ll come across: perhaps a deep dark forest, or a barren desert, or a range of massive mountains overlooking a vast sea.  And the world is virtually limitless, so there’s always more to explore.  The one downside of this is that it is extremely easy to get lost.  There’s no real logic to the way different geographical features are arranged, so if you don’t remember the way you came, it can be nearly impossible to get back to where you started.  

Sunday, May 8, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 14:32; sermon starts around 20:40)
image source

If you’ve ever found yourself feeling deeply confused or bewildered or even just plain lost, then there’s a very good chance that you have spent some time inside the Miami-Dade airport (lol).  During the years when I was living in the Dominican Republic, I used to spend a lotof time inside the Miami airport.  It was always the inevitable first stop I had to make anytime that I came home.  

Like most airports, the Miami airport is pretty sprawled out.  And especially since I came in on an international flight, it usually took a long time to get where I needed to go.  First I had to get through customs and immigration, and then I’d have to walk what felt like 500 miles from the far-flung terminal for international flights to get to the gate for my connecting flight.  It was pretty easy to get disoriented and lost along the way.

But I remember that the airport had these decals on the floor that were supposed to help you figure out where you needed to go.  They were shaped like footprints, and there were different colored trails of these footprints that promised to lead you to all sorts of places: one might lead you to baggage claim, another might lead you to the food court, still another might lead you to customer service or to a place where you could get a taxi, or to wherever else you might need to go inside an airport. 

Sunday, May 1, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 14:16; sermon starts around 23:56)

(You decide: Who preached it better – 2019 Day or 2022 Day? 😜)

Our gospel reading for this morning picks up right on the heels of our gospel reading from last week – which is a little bit odd, if you remember how that reading ended.  Last week, we read the story of “Doubting” Thomas (I hear Rick preached a pretty good sermon on it 😜).  This story comes at the very end of John chapter 20 and it ends with Jesus saying, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And John then closes the chapter by writing:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

John 20:30-31

Now, that really sounds like it’s the end of the story, doesn’t it?  It sounds like it should be the end of the book of John.  All it’s missing is “and they all lived happily ever after.  The End.”  So it’s kind of surprising then to turn the page and find that the book of John actually goes on for a whole other chapter.