Sunday, February 9, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
image source

When I first started discerning a call to ministry, my first instinct was to try to resist it.  “No, no, no,” I said; “I’m pretty sure you’ve got the wrong person.”  I thought of the people I had observed being pastors and leaders in the church, and it was really intimidating to me to think that I could be one of them.  They seemed to have patience and knowledge and wisdom way beyond mine.  And they seemed like people of deep and abiding faith, while my faith life, by contrast, often felt like a hot mess (and still does sometimes, if I’m being honest).  I was immediately ready to reach for that bushel basket and pull it over myself.  

I decided that I needed a LOT more information if I was really going to follow this path.  So I started talking with pastors and reading books that pastors had written; I started visiting seminaries and talking with other people who were thinking about ministry.  And, in the process, I got to hear a LOT of people’s call stories.  So many call stories.  I remember I was at a visit weekend at Wartburg, sitting in a room with maybe 30 or 40 other people, all taking turns telling our stories.  And after at least half a dozen people compared their call story to Jonah – who you’ll remember ran away from God’s call and got eaten by a fish – after that, I realized that I was far from being the only one trying to hide under a basket. 

Sunday, February 2, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
image source

(CN — stories of domestic abuse and alcoholism, migration-related violence)

Francisca was blessed.  She lived in a small house just outside a village in Honduras that she and her husband had moved to when they married.  The house had no electricity or running water; so, every day, multiple times a day, Francisca trekked out to a nearby stream with her buckets and hauled water back to the house.  It was back-breaking work.  Most of the food they ate depended on what they were able to grow in their small garden.  It was a hard life.  But Francisca gave thanks to God because she knew she was blessed.  

They were too poor to afford shoes, so Francisca went everywhere barefoot.  Her husband was frustrated with their lives, frustrated with the lack of opportunities in Honduras, frustrated with the violence that reached even their small village; and he chose to take out his frustrations on Francisca.  The beatings were worst when he drank.  And when he started drinking even more heavily, Francisca knew that she needed to leave.  It wasn’t safe to stay in that house anymore.  It wasn’t safe to stay in her village either; it wasn’t really safe to be a woman living on her own in Honduras at all.  

So Francisca made a bold decision.  Like many others before her – and many after her – she made the difficult decision to head north.  She decided she would try to reach the United States and seek asylum there.  It was a dangerous journey.  Francisca had to cross Guatemala and then the entire length of Mexico in order to get to the US border.  A good deal of that journey was on foot and the rest was aboard a freight train that migrants had come to call La Bestia – The Beast – because of how dangerous it was to ride.  She was beaten many times and robbed at least twice before she finally made it to the Texas border, where she was immediately arrested by Border Patrol.  And Francisca was blessed.

Sunday, January 26, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday after Epiphany

One of the fun things about being a pastor is that I now have a whole gaggle of friends who are also clergy people.  And clergy are a weird, funny bunch of people.  Many of us are on social media and we like to share funny ministry-related memes and jokes that we come across with each other.  I kept thinking of one meme that made the rounds a lot last year as I was doing my sermon prep this week.  

It’s kind of a play on WWJD – What Would Jesus Do.  There are lots of different variations on it, but they all draw on stuff that you can actually find in scripture.  It usually goes something like this: “Whenever someone asks me ‘WWJD,’ I remind them about the time that Jesus flipped over a bunch of tables and chased people with whips.”  Or “When someone asks me WWJD, I remember that time Jesus made over 100 gallons of wine and partied with people at a wedding.”  Or my personal favorite: “Whenever someone asks me WWJD, I like to remind them about that time Jesus took a nap on a boat.”  

I feel like today’s gospel reading could be made into yet another variation on this meme.  Whenever someone asks me WWJD, I remember that time Jesus got so freaked out about the path he was called to follow that he packed up his bags and moved all the way across a sea to hide out in another city.

Sunday, January 19, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday after Epiphany
image source

Whenever I meet new people and introduce myself, probably nine times out of ten I get asked the same question.  Anyone want to guess what it is?  It’s always some variation of: How in the world did you come by a name like “Day”??  Is it short for “Dana”?  Or were your parents hippies?

What I often tell people is that it’s sort of a contraction of my actual given first and middle names – Amanda Kay – and that is true.  But the full story of how I came to be called Day is a little bit longer.  

When I was in college, I spent two summers working as a counselor at Camp Carol Joy Holling, out by Ashland.  I had only ever been to camp once before.  I got to go for a week as part of a requirement for my confirmation when I was in eighth grade – but it definitely left an impression.  I decided that I wanted to be a camp counselor when I got to be old enough.  But, by the time I was in college, my relationship with the church and with my faith had gotten complicated.  In college, I was exposed to new ideas and new understandings of religion that opened me up to realize that I had a lot of questions and doubts about the faith I’d grown up with, and I was still very much searching for answers.  But I had a friend who worked at camp as a wrangler, and she convinced me to turn in my application anyway.

My first summer working there, I was one of about five Amandas and two Kays working on the summer staff, so many of us ended up choosing to go by a nickname instead, to avoid confusion.  I took some inspiration for my nickname from the camp director at the time – whose name was Sunni Richardson – and I chose to go by the nickname Day.  Anytime we sat next to each other, it was a Sunni Day!  

Sunday, January 12, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Baptism of Our Lord

Every Sunday, we read readings from the lectionary – a three year cycle of texts that is also used by churches in many other denominations.  And I like that doing this gives us a chance to hear a variety of different texts and different kinds of texts from both testaments of the bible.  However, one of the downsides of reading from the lectionary is that we tend to get only bite-sized chunks of much larger stories, and we miss the rest of the story.

Our second reading for today, from Acts 10, is part of an amazing, but much longer story.  I think I tried about half a dozen times to summarize and condense this story so that I could preach on it in a sermon, but there’s just way too much going on in it to sum up.  So I’m going to do something a little different today.  I’m just going to read you the story – from a slightly more contemporary translation – and I’m going to let God’s word speak for itself.  And at the end, I’ll also briefly draw out some of the major things that stand out to me about the story.  So here we go.  Story time.  If you’ve got a bible with you or a bible app on your phone, I encourage you to follow along, or if you’d like, you can just close your eyes and really try to imagine the story as it unfolds. Once upon a time…

Sunday, January 5, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Epiphany Sunday
image source

The Parliament of the World’s Religions is a massive, global, interfaith convention; it has been held in various locations all over the world since 1893.  The 2015 Parliament of World Religions was held in Salt Lake City, UT, and I was lucky enough to get to go as part of a seminary class.

It was extraordinary.  There were nearly 10,000 people in attendance, and they came from all all over the world and from all manner of different religions.  As you might imagine, there were lots of different flavors of Christianity represented – alongside people from other major religions like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, and on and on.  And I was surprised by how much representation there was from faiths and spiritualities that I guess I would maybe describe as “new age,” for lack of a better term.  That was interesting.  On the whole, it was an amazing and unusual and eye-opening experience.  Every single day, we got to sit and learn and break bread side-by-side with people of different faiths from around the world.

One of the most fascinating conversations I got to be part of happened during a presentation given by a group of Zoroastrian priests.  Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions in the world; it predates Christianity by many centuries.  But these priests shared that the two religions have at least one very interesting point of connection (among many) – which is the story of the Epiphany, the gospel story that we read today.  The Epiphany story is also part of Zoroastrian tradition – and it’s because, to them, those “wise men” that we read about weren’t just any old wise men.  As it’s written in the original Greek, they were magi, a word commonly used to describe – you guessed it – Zoroastrian priests!  So their tradition holds that Zoroastrian priests were the ones who came to honor the Christ child and bring him gifts.  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only Christian in the room whose head went 🤯 after learning that.

Tuesday, December 24, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Christmas Eve
image source

Merry Christmas!  It’s wonderful to see you all here this evening.  Worship on Christmas Eve always seems to bring together an interesting variety of people, stopping here on the way to somewhere else.  With people traveling and getting together with family, this is often a time to see faces we don’t always get to see much throughout the rest of the year.  And I think it’s especially a joy when we get to have young children and little babies present among us – with all the squirmy excitedness, curiosity, and wonder that comes with them.

Normally on Tuesdays, I drive to Fremont for text study.  I meet up with a group of other pastors and preachers from around the area – and it’s actually also a pretty interesting variety of people.  We catch up with each other over coffee at a café in downtown Fremont.  And I’ll admit we don’t always get around to the text-studying part of text study, but it has become an important opportunity to check in and connect with other colleagues in ministry.  

And every so often, it also becomes an opportunity to hang out with cute babies, whose parents sometimes bring them to text study.  My friends Allison and Timothy – whom some of you have met – have an adorable little girl named Caroline, who is now a little over a year old.  Even when she is being still and quiet, it is impossible not to notice that Caroline is there.  Everyone wants to play with her or they make silly faces at her to try to get her to laugh.  When she was tiny, everyone wanted to hold her and she would get passed around from arms to arms so that everyone could get their turn.  

Now Caroline is big enough that she always wants to wiggle down onto the floor and go exploring by herself.  And she will delightedly toddle all over the coffee shop, laughing and cooing over each new thing she finds, and making friends with absolutely every person she encounters.  And I can tell you, there is just no resisting a bright-eyed, sticky-fingered baby who has decided that she wants to be your friend.  

Sunday, December 15, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday of Advent

For many summers when I was growing up, my brother and sister and I took swimming lessons, like many kids do.  There wasn’t a pool in the town we grew up in, so instead we piled in the car and headed down the highway to the pool in the even tinier town of Belden, NE.  We all three eventually learned to swim, but swimming lessons for my sister, Molly, got off to a bit of a rough start.

We were all at the pool for our lessons one day when Molly was really little – like maybe three years old or so.  Molly was lined up with all the other kids in the youngest group of swimmers, and they were standing at the edge of the pool, next to the 4ft deep section.  The lifeguard teaching her group was in the water, and one by one, she had each of the kids practice jumping into the water, where she would then catch them and help them make their way to where it was shallower.  

Eventually, it came to be Molly’s turn.  Now, there are two things you need to know about my sister.  One is that, when she was growing up, she could sometimes be a bit of a scaredy-cat: thunderstorms, loud noises, water that went over her head, forget about it.  The other thing to know is that she was – and, frankly, still kinda is – as stubborn a person as they come.  She was not into the idea of jumping into that water.  And so little Molly stood at the edge of the pool, crossed her arms, and refused to jump in. 

Sunday, December 8, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday of Advent

As many of you know, I lived in the Dominican Republic for about four years as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  There were so many things about that experience that I could never have anticipated.  But one of the things that surpised me most was the sheer amount of time that I spent during those four years eating mangoes.  

I joined the Peace Corps straight out of college and I got sent to the DR as an education volunteer.  I had all these big, romantic dreams of how I was going to make a difference and change the world, starting with the community center in the town where I had been assigned to work.  I was a 22-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in music who had never lived anywhere outside of Nebraska.  But I marched in there with confidence, completely convinced that I would know exactly how to help all the people of this poor, underprivileged, third world community.

My main assignment was to teach computer classes at the community technology center in town.  And I really wanted to do a good job!  So I carefully put together detailed lesson plans to help my students work through programs like Word and Excel and even Photoshop.  I had everything laid out and ready.  However, 9 times out of 10, I would get down to the center and the electricity would go out.  Or it might even be out already by the time I got there.  And let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to teach a computer class when you don’t have electricity.

Sunday, December 1, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
First Sunday of Advent
image source

According to Google Maps, it only takes around six hours to drive all the way from Coleridge, NE, to Davenport, IA.  But what Google Maps doesn’t show you is how long that trip takes when you have three small children in the car.  In my experience, it takes more like… nine hours.

The drive from Coleridge (my hometown) to Davenport is one my family used to make all the time when I was growing up.  My mom’s family is all from the Quad Cities area, and so we used to make the drive out there at least a few times a year – especially around this time of year for the holidays. Mom and Dad and my younger brother and sister and I would all pile in the old Dodge Caravan and head east.  It would still be a long drive even if you only had adults in the car – adults who can, in theory, hold it for six hours – and you’d still have to stop at least once for gas, especially back in the 90s.  

But with three small kids in the car, forget about it.  We stopped constantly.  I am pretty sure I have been inside literally every single Iowa rest stop along I-80.  We stopped at the World’s Largest Truck Stop in Walcott.  We stopped at Adventureland in Des Moines.  Whenever we stopped to eat, we almost always went through two or three different drive-thrus because each of us wanted something different to eat.  And we always made sure to slow down while passing Adair, IA, so that we could wave at the water tower; it’s big and yellow and it has a smiley face painted on it, and somewhere along the way, we nicknamed it “Mikey” and decided it was our friend.

As kids, it’s not that we weren’t totally excited to get to Davenport to see our relatives – we were!  But we were also interested in seeing just about everything else on the way.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022
(Wednesday, November 27, 2019)
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Thanksgiving Eve
bulletin
watch this service online (readings start around 12:58; sermon starts around 19:38)
image source

When I was growing up, I always found this time of year to be the most magical and exciting time. I loved all the trappings of the holidays: all the lights and glitter, all the excitement of Christmas stuff starting to hit the shelves everywhere. I loved all the feasting: getting to gorge myself on green bean casserole and stuffing and pumpkin pie and candy and all the other rich foods that many families cook up this time of year. And of course I looked forward with excitement to getting presents – the more plasticky and garishly colored, the better. 

But I have found as I’ve gotten older that the charm of this time of year has a tendency to fade a bit with time. The excitement just isn’t quite the same as an adult. I still enjoy the feasting, but some of those rich foods now give me heartburn – and sometimes worse… And if you happen to be one of the people responsible for making sure that that feast finds its way onto the table for everyone else to enjoy, you probably tend to feel much more stressed out than excited about the holidays. 

It’s all still lovely – the lights, the glitter, the toys. But I just find myself hungering for something more. Now that I am all grown up and living alone, I often find myself hungering for time spent connecting with others, for time spent with my family – which was something I totally took for granted when I was a kid. I hunger for love and connection and meaning. I hunger for more. And if you find that your expectations for the holidays tend to get overtaken by stress and family drama, by consumerism and commercialism, by the pressure of expectations, I can imagine that, on some level, you might be hungering for something more too – hungering for something that actually satisfies.

Sunday, November 24, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Reign of Christ
image source

What do you think of when you hear the word “king”?  What kind of images does that word bring to your mind?

Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, also known as Christ the King Sunday.  But, reading a gospel text like this one, you might never guess that that was the case.  In this passage from Luke, you don’t  exactly find a lot of images that we might think of as “kingly”; there are no thrones or crowns or fancy clothes, no legion of knights – people don’t bow down before Christ or respect his power and authority.  In fact, they strip him and beat him and mock him and give him sour wine to drink as he is literally tortured to death as a criminal.  

It’s an absurd text for us to read today.  Our other three texts sound much kinglier.  From Jeremiah, we have:

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”  

Jeremiah 23:5

In Psalm 46, the psalmist writes:

“’Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.’  The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”  

Psalm 46:10-11

And in Colossians, we read that:

“[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers–all things have been created through him and for him.”

Colossians 1:15-16

Now that sounds kingly AF!

Sunday, November 17, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost

I am not embarrassed to admit that I spend a lot of time on social media, especially on Facebook.  It allows me to keep in touch with friends and family who live all over the country; there are a whole bunch of different clergy groups where I can find support and camaraderie from other colleagues in ministry; and of course it’s a great place to find knitting and crochet ideas and cute pictures of cats, lol.  

But I also get to see some really beautiful things happen on social media from time to time.  There’s a whole informal network of people online who have found ways to help each other out.  I think of it as a sort of Facebook “underground railroad.”  A friend of someone’s friend reaches out asking for help, usually needing money, and this network mobilizes to respond.  Last month, we helped a single mom in Chicago who was struggling after her car was impounded over a ticket.  Earlier this year, I put the word out on facebook to help a friend of mine who was trying to escape an abusive partner.  We raised over $6,000 for her in a matter of weeks.  

There’s no formal organization at work here.  It’s just a bunch of regular people who are connected by compassion, by the recognition that as humans we need each other and that none of us is in this alone.  And the folks who volunteer their time and resources don’t ask a lot of questions about the requests that come through for help.  People just trust that the need is there and they give if they can.  And I often see the same people stepping up again and again to chip in and/or spread the word.  It doesn’t seem to matter how many times the Facebook community gets called on or what else people have going on in their lives – someone is always ready to step up and help however they can.

Sunday, November 10, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost

This is such an odd gospel text to have to preach on.  I’ve been chewing on it a lot this week.  This strange math problem that the Sadducees ask Jesus to solve has lots of details that sound just straight up bizarre to our 21^st century ears.  In a weird way, they’re asking him about the future, about what happens after we die.  So, naturally, the thing it keeps making me think of is one of the most classic movie trilogies in all of cinema: Back to the Future.  

Specifically, I keep thinking of Back to the Future II.  Now, full disclosure, it’s been a while since I actually sat down and watched the whole movie.  But the second movie of the Back to the Future trilogy is notable because, despite being a franchise that has “future” right in its name, Back to the Future II is the only movie of the series where they actually go to the future!

In the movie, our hero Marty McFly, his girlfriend Jennifer, and their pal Doc Brown travel forward in time to the far distant future year of… 2015!  Woo!  And watching it now, in the really distant future year of 2019, it’s pretty funny to look back and see what people in the 80s thought the future was going to be like.  

Sunday, November 3, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
All Saints Sunday

One of the actual classes I took in seminary was a pastoral care course called “Caring for the Dying and Bereaved.”  That was a whole class.  And as you can probably imagine, it was often pretty intense.  One of the very first assignments that we had in the class was to write our own living wills.  We had to put down in writing our wishes for what we wanted at the end of our own lives – things like what kind of medical treatments we did or didn’t want, who would make decisions for us if we couldn’t do it ourselves, what to do with the stuff we’d leave behind, even plans for our own funerals.

That on its own was already hard enough to do.  But on top of that, we had to write our living wills as a letter to the person or the people in our lives who we would want to actually carry these instructions out.  And then we had to let them read it and actually have a conversation with them about it.  That was really, really hard.

Sunday, October 27, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Reformation Sunday
First Reading • Psalm • Second Reading • Gospel

This past Thursday evening, I went downtown to the After Hours at the museum annex to celebrate the grand opening of the museum’s newest addition: the Okey Room.  Sadly, I got there too late to see the official ribbon cutting – but I did get there in time to get a thorough tour of the room from Mr. Lloyd Brichacek.  It was very interesting!  I never got to know Dr. Okey, because he died a few months before I moved to Schuyler, but it was fascinating to learn more about his veterinary practice.  There was a lot I didn’t know.  Even though I grew up in Nebraska, I was a “town kid” – so a lot of the instruments in the exhibit were new to me; and some of them were downright horrifying.  (Although I have to admit that I did find the bloat needle a little bit amusing – I’m not to old to laugh at the idea of a mechanically assisted cow fart.)

But Lloyd said something during the tour that kind of stuck with me.  He made the comment that Dr. Okey himself probably would have been really surprised to see the exhibit.  He would have been surprised to see all his veterinary tools laid out so neatly on shelves in a museum, each with its own little label to explain what it was used for.  For 54 years, he’d just been doing his job.  The objects in this museum exhibit were just the tools of his daily life.  They were just part of the messiness and unpredictability and craziness that I would imagine comes with being a veterinarian in rural Nebraska.  He probably didn’t think of his own life as “history” to be preserved in a museum.

Continue reading “Sermon: Living History” →

Sunday, October 20, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I don’t know about you all – but I am already feeling sick and tired of the 2020 election – and it’s still over a year away!  Now, I consider myself to be a pretty civic-minded person, and I definitely think it’s important to engage in the political process, but this election season has been over the top.  It’s only October 2019, and there have already been six primary debates!  That is absurd.  I am already seeing campaign ads all over facebook and TV, and even getting campaign texts on my phone.  I went back through my email and counted up over 30 campaign related emails that I received in just one 24 hour period!  That is waaay too many.

Even if you’re not that plugged into what’s happening with the election, it’s almost impossible not to be aware of it.  The candidates and their teams are relentless about keeping their campaigns in the public eye.

And even though I am already annoyed by this election season, with over a year still to go, I have to admit:  I get it.  I get the passion and the need for persistence.  I myself have even worked on a few political campaigns in the past – I have been one of those annoying people making phone calls and knocking on doors.  Obviously, I didn’t do it to be annoying.  I did it because I really believed in the candidates I was supporting, and I was passionate about the issues they represented.  And when you really believe in something, you push for it, you fight for it, even if it means being a little obnoxious.

Continue reading “Sermon: Campaign for the Kingdom” →

Sunday, October 13, 2019
(Sunday, October 9, 2022 in absentia)
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

When I was growing up, I used to spend a lot of time up in South Dakota. My hometown is just under 40 minutes away from Yankton, and we used to go up there to the river all the time, especially up by Gavin’s Point Dam. I have so many fond childhood memories of going up to the river. We’d load the fishing poles in the back of the van and throw some ice in the cooler and head up to go fishing and camping every summer. Every Fathers Day, the whole family would go up to the river to have a big picnic. And as I got older, my best friends from high school and I used to go swimming and canoeing up there in Lake Yankton all the time – I still remember getting stuck and having to drag that silly canoe through knee-deep mud! I loved going up to the river. To me, it has always been a beautiful and peaceful place.

A few years ago now, my brother Ben was home visiting from California, and he brought his girlfriend Monique with him for the first time, so that she could meet the family. And Ben wanted to show her around the places where he grew up – so naturally, we had to take her up to Yankton to go visit Gavin’s Point Dam!