Sunday, October 6, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
source for slightly sacrilegious cover image

This is a pretty geeky way to begin a sermon, but here goes: Spiderman is the story of a boy named Peter Parker, a teenager with strange, spider-like powers.  Peter was just leading a normal life, growing up with his Uncle Ben and his Aunt May, when of course one day, he is bitten by a radioactive spider and starts developing superpowers.  As one does.

Anyway, Uncle Ben and Aunt May start noticing some changes in Peter – he starts pulling away from them, he gets into fights at school, he even joins a fighting ring to make money – and his aunt and uncle start to get worried about him.  So one day, Uncle Ben sits Peter down for a little heart-to-heart chat – and what he says to him basically becomes the moral for the whole Spiderman universe.  He tells him: “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Uncle Ben doesn’t fully understand the changes that Peter is going through, but he does see that his nephew has some kind of gifts – gifts that he could be using to help the weak and vulnerable, but that instead he’s using for his own gain.

With great power comes great responsibility.  I kept thinking of those words from Uncle Ben as I was reading through our texts for this week.  At least two of our readings speak about the great power that we have been given – the power of faith.  Granted, faith doesn’t give us flashy powers like being able to shoot webs out of our hands or leap tall buildings in a single bound – but I’d argue it’s still pretty awesome.

Continue reading “Sermon: With Great Power” →

Sunday, September 29, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
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“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced – even if someone rises from the dead!”  As I’ve been reading this gospel lesson this week, with all of this talk of greedy rich men and people rising from the dead to warn others, I have found myself thinking a lot of the story of “A Christmas Carol.”   Judging by this gospel reading, I think it’s safe to say that if Jesus Christ had been the one to write A Christmas Carol instead of Charles Dickens, the story would have ended very differently.

There are actually some striking similarities between our gospel reading for today and the story of A Christmas Carol.  This reading is almost like an alternate universe version of that story.  In A Christmas Carol, there is a rich man who dies, and in this case, it is a man named Jacob Marley.  Like the rich man in the gospel story, Jacob Marley lived a life of selfishness and greed, totally oblivious to the suffering of his neighbors.  And like the rich man suffering in hades, we also get a glimpse of Marley being tormented after he dies – he is doomed to wander the earth weighted down with heavy chains.

Of course, there is one major difference between this gospel passage and A Christmas Carol: unlike the rich man in Luke, Jacob Marley is allowed to go and try to warn his former partner of what awaits him in the afterlife.  And that’s where the story really begins.   Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley’s former partner, is visited by Marley’s ghost.  And in the same night, he is also visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.  This is a serious wake-up call for Scrooge.  He is shown a bleak vision of what the future holds for him on his current self-serving path.  And he’s also shown the love and joy and relationship that he is missing out on by only ever looking out for number one.  To use the language of our second reading, he catches a glimpse of what Paul calls “the life that really is life.”  And Scrooge realizes that the life he’s been living looks nothing like that.

Continue reading “Sermon: A Christ Carol” →

Sunday, September 18, 2022
(Sunday, September 22, 2019)
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

A few years back, another pastor friend of mine sent me a really fascinating article that still comes to my mind from time to time. It was an article about World War I and World War II – and specifically, an article talking about the pivitol role that knitting played in winning the war. Since I’m a huge crafts nerd – especially when yarn is involved – my friend knew that would pique my interest!

In this article, the author wrote about how women working with the Allied powers actually used their knitting to help fight the war. You can easily imagine that women did things like knitting hats and scarves and socks for the troops, as you’d expect – and I’m sure they did. But this article focused on women who got a little more creative with the tools at their disposal – women who used their knitting for things like covert observation and encrypted communication and even straight up espionage! Pretty wild, right?

Sunday, September 15, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Has anyone here ever heard of the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill?  I’ve been a little bit obsessed with this game lately – it’s really fun!  It’s a game for 3-6 people; you play different characters who are exploring a haunted house together.  You randomly flip over tiles to “discover” different rooms, so the house and the game itself are totally different every time you play.

At some point during the game, one of the players will trigger the second stage of the game, which is called the “haunt.”  Depending on how the haunt gets triggered, you then play out one of 50 possible scenarios – you might find yourself in a house overrun with zombies or on the run from a supernatural serial killer, or even facing off in a chess match with death itself!

But what is really unique about Betrayal is that in almost every scenario, one of the players will become a traitor.  Whoever that person is receives their own separate set of instructions – and from that point forward, they actively work against all the other players in the game.

It is a really fun and engaging game.  But it can also be really frustrating sometimes. Since the game is so different every time you play, there’s always the danger that it will be really skewed in favor of either the heroes or the villain.  And even on top of that, I have played scenarios in which I was the traitor and part of my instructions literally told me to cheat.  Because of these things, the game can sometimes get a little heated – tempers can start to rise when players feel like the game is treating them unfairly.

Continue reading “Sermon: Amazing Grace, How Profoundly Offensive” →

Sunday, August 25, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
(fair warning: LOTS of gratuitous cat pics follow)

If you ever look closely at my hands and forearms, you’ll notice that there are quite a lot of little scratches and scars on my skin.  That is because I have cats!  And they can be a bit of a handful sometimes.

For example, my oldest cat, Iago, is 13 and he haaaaates having his claws trimmed.  He was born a feral street cat and he immediately freaks out any time he feels like someone is trying to trap him or hold him down.  It doesn’t matter how I try to do it.  He squirms away and yowls at me when I try to get him to sit still and let me trim them.  He snaps instantly awake if I try to do a sneak attack while he’s napping.  And even if I pick him up and hold him so he can’t run away, he crunches up his abdominal muscles and scratches at my arm with his back feet until I let him go.

It’s like he forgets how much happier he is when his claws aren’t so long that they click on the floor when he walks and get stuck in things.  It’s like he forgets that he’s known me for over ten freaking years and that I’m where the kibble comes from!

But I love that little stinker.  We’ve been through a lot together.  He was my Peace Corps cat in the Dominican Republic, and it was a huge hassle to get him back to Nebraska.  But I was happy to do it, because I love him.

Continue reading “Sermon: Bad Kitties” →

Sunday, August 18, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Several months ago, back in May, I gathered with some of my colleagues from around the synod for our First Call Theological Education conference, up at the St. Benedict retreat center.  One of the things we did together that was really helpful was that we went through almost all the gospel texts for the entire season after Pentecost, which is like half the church year.  Our presenter, Dr. Rick Carlson, was a professor out at the Gettysburg Lutheran seminary before accepting a call at First Lutheran out in Kearney – so he really knows his stuff.  He had some really great advice for how to preach on our gospel text for this morning; he told us: “This is a great Sunday… to be on vacation.”

Continue reading “Sermon: Pax Romana, Pax Americana, Pax Christi” →

Sunday, August 11, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Can you think of a time in your life when you felt really, really homesick?  You know that feeling of longing deep in the pit of your guts?  It’s that longing to be home, the longing to be someplace where you feel like you belong.

I don’t know about you all, but that’s definitely something I’ve felt at different times in my life.  For many years, I was basically a nomad, just moving around from place to place.  And there were a lot of moments in there where I felt sad: missing home, missing the people that I know.

Continue reading “Sermon: Kingdomsick” →

Sunday, August 4, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

When I was very young, my home congregation actually had a pretty good sized Sunday School program.  Once a month, they would gather us all together in the basement for an assembly.  We sat in neat rows, from the little preschool kids in the tiny folding chairs at the front, all the way to the big, cool ninth-graders in the back, in their last year of confirmation.  I don’t remember a ton of what we did together, if I’m being honest.  I’m sure we sang songs and read scripture and all that good stuff.

But the one part of those assemblies that has burned itself forever onto my brain was the part where we took the offering. Every month, in Sunday School, we would pass the basket down our neat little rows.  And the reason I remember it so well is because we always sang the same verse of the same hymn:

We give thee but thine own,
Whate’er the gift may be;
All that we have is thine alone:
A trust, O Lord, from thee.

Continue reading “Sermon: We Give Thee But Thine Own” →

Sunday, July 28, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

I think I was in maybe third grade when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer by heart.  I liked it because it was pretty simple and straightforward.  Though, if I’m honest, I think I mostly liked it because it was a lot shorter and easier to memorize than the Apostles’ Creed!  These words have been with me for a long, long time, as I’m sure they have been with many of you.

However, for me, that deep familiarity can also mean that it’s easy to look at this gospel text – which is one of the places in the gospels where the Lord’s Prayer appears – and think to myself, “Ok, yeah, I know pretty much what this text is about.  This’ll probably be a sermon about the importance of prayer.”

But the more I read over this text this week, the more I noticed how annoying it actually is.  Almost everything and everyone in this passage is incredibly rude!

Continue reading “Sermon: How Rude” →

Sunday, July 21, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
image credit

Many years ago now, when I was in college, I spent a couple of summers working as a camp counselor at Camp Carol Joy Holling. I remember my very first summer at camp; I was a nervous wreck.  I just wanted so badly to do a good job and to make the experience as special as I possibly could for these kids.

One of my first weeks at camp, I was placed with a very special little tribe of seven campers, whom I counted like this: three girls, three boys, and Kenny.  Kenny was a sweet boy who had some attention and learning difficulties. He tried to stay focused and sit still, but it was hard for him, especially during bible study and worship. But Kenny brought two important gifts to camp with him: immense creativity, which he liked to express through drawing, and a passionate, undying love for the Lego story franchise Bionicle.

Continue reading “Sermon: We’re So Vain (We Probably Think This Sacrament Is About Us)” →

Sunday, July 14, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
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Okay, show of hands: who here has heard this gospel story before?  Haha, that’s what I thought.  The story of the good Samaritan is one of the most familiar stories in all of scripture. There are congregations and organizations named for this parable.  We even have laws called “good Samaritan” laws to protect people who are trying to help other people.  We know this story well.  But I think the very familiarity of this story can actually hinder us from hearing how radical and even upsetting it actually is.  So let’s take some time this morning to really dig into it.

Continue reading “Sermon: Who Isn’t My Neighbor?” →

Sunday, July 7, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
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The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  It might be a little harder than usual this year for us to relate to the harvest image that Jesus uses here.  In the wake of the floods and heavy rains this spring, so many fields have been planted late or not planted at all that it’s hard to know what this year’s harvest will even look like.

But of course, that’s not the kind of harvest that Jesus is talking about in our gospel reading for today.  Instead of a harvest of corn or beans, Jesus is talking about gathering in people; he’s talking about those who are ready to receive God’s word and be gathered into the kingdom.  He sends his followers out into the field – the mission field – to bring this harvest in. And you’ll notice that he gives them some unusual tools for doing this.  What does he send them out with?

That’s right – basically nothing!  No purse, no bag, no sandals.  They are barefoot, with no money, no food, no change of clothes, nothing – they have to be totally reliant on the hospitality of others.  They have nothing to give people in return – nothing except for the peace of Christ and the word of God.  And without a bag, they can’t even receive anything from these people either, except for their hospitality and their open ears.

Continue reading “Sermon: Barefoot and Bagless” →