Sunday, May 28, 2023
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Pentecost Sunday
watch this service online (readings start around 19:32; sermon starts around 26:41)
photo credit: Elle Dowd

I was really glad I had the chance to get away to Chicago for a few days earlier this month. Even though it was a quick trip, I did get to spend time with several friends and just unwind for a bit. One of the most fun parts of it was that I got to go to a murder mystery dinner that some friends of mine were hosting at their house. Has anyone ever been to one of those? It’s basically like role-playing the game Clue; a group of people gathers together in character over dinner, and over the course of the evening, they try to solve a (fictional) murder and figure out which character is the murderer.

I went with my friends Erin and Josh, who I was staying with, and, to be honest, we weren’t completely sure what to expect ahead of time about how this would all go. Each of us had been given a particular character to play. My character’s name was Mrs. Withering, the housekeeper; Erin was the cook, Blanche Batters; and to everyone’s amusement, Josh – one of the few non-clergypeople in attendance – was assigned the character of the Rev. Will Beedone. 

The friends who were hosting the party gave explicit instructions in their invitation that everyone was expected to be both in costume and in character for the entire evening. However, we had been given only the barest details about these characters we were supposed to play! For instance, I knew that my character was supposed to wear a high-necked black dress with a silver locket and her hair in a bun; I knew she was an accountant before becoming a housekeeper, that she took care of her father before he died, and that her employer – the murderee – didn’t pay her very well (I mean, everybody’s got to have a motive, right?). But that was it! That was all I knew. 

Sunday, May 21, 2023
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ascension Sunday
watch this service online (readings start around 15:40; sermon starts around 21:46)

I spent a few days back in Chicago this past week, visiting friends. That drive out east always takes me back to the car trips my family used to take when I was a kid. My mom’s family is all from the Quad Cities area, as I’ve mentioned before, and when I was growing up, we used to go out and visit them several times a year. So I got to know that long stretch of I-80 that runs through Iowa all too well long before I lived in Chicago.

Driving that route as an adult is, of course, a lot different from experiencing it as a kid. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a long drive now – but as a kid, it seemed interminable. Those hours on the road just draaaaaagged on. And in true kid fashion, it didn’t take long for us to start asking every parent’s favorite road trip question, over and over again: Are we there yet?

It’s hard for young kids to be patient with long car trips like that. I know it was for me. It wasn’t just having to sit still for that long. It’s that I had very little concept of the trip as a whole – like, I didn’t know enough to be able to visualize a map of it in my head; I just knew that it was long. And so it was impossible to have an idea of where we were within that window of “long” other than to keep asking again and again, “Are we there yet?”

Sunday, May 14, 2023
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 27:23; sermon starts around 34:30)

There is at least one thing in my life for which I do not give thanks nearly often enough. And that is my smartphone. I’d hold it up right now and show it to you for visual emphasis – but my smartphone is currently back there, working at its day job, which is live-streaming this service.

It’s an amazing tool that most of us carry around in our pockets all day, when you stop and think about it. It lets us share information and connect with people all over the world. It gives us access to virtually all human knowledge, right there at our fingertips – as well as adorable pictures of cats and babies. It enables us to open up an app like Google Maps and look up directions that will lead us straight from our front door to just about any destination we can imagine. 

Now, granted, Google Maps can be a bit hit or miss in more rural areas and small towns like Schuyler. I have been trying to get Google to add that new stretch of Denver Street north of the parsonage ever since it was built – and they only just added it last week. But even despite its shortcomings, it’s still pretty amazing that you can find your way just about anywhere in the world with this little device that fits in your pocket.

Sunday, May 7, 2023
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 28:27; sermon starts around 34:35)

It was a summer night, back in the summer of 2002. I was seventeen, and my friends and I had spent the entire afternoon hanging out at the Cedar County Fair up in Hartington. It was a blast. We were on our way back home when it started to rain – at first a few drops, that then quickly turned into a torrential downpour. My friends lived on a farm place a couple miles north of town; I had driven there dozens – if not hundreds – of times. I definitely knew the way! But in the dark, with the rain pouring down, I somehow managed to make a teeeeensy little wrong turn. Instead of turning onto their road, I managed to turn onto the road one section north – a road that, a mile in, went from gravel to a minimum maintenance road (aka a dirt road). 

You can imagine how that went for us! By the time I realized my mistake, it was already much too late. I had been driving pretty slowly, but the car still had enough momentum that when the tires left gravel, the mud immediately took control and just kinda grabbed onto the wheels and guided us right over into the ditch. I shifted the car into reverse and made kind of a half-hearted effort to try to back out of it, but I knew that we were well and truly stuck.