Sunday, June 14, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (gospel reading and sermon start around 23:46)

Our gospel text for this morning is all about compassion and courage.  Here we find Jesus in the midst of a massive campaign of teaching and preaching and healing all over the country.  His twelve disciples are with him and his ministry has drawn huge crowds of people everywhere they’ve gone.  Jesus is on a mission.  

Yet we see that Jesus’ mission isn’t just driven by his own need to spread the good news of the kingdom; his mission is deeply rooted in compassion.  Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw these crowds that had gathered, he had compassion for them.  He listens to them and feels their pain and he responds to their needs.  And he consciously models this behavior for his disciples to imitate.  And he points out to them that there is still a lot more work to be done.  He tells them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest.”

The disciples may have wondered where on earth Jesus was going to find these laborers – not to mention what sort of harvest they would be gathering in.  But it soon becomes clear that Jesus means them.  They are the ones that the Lord of the harvest is going to send out to bring the harvest in.  And Jesus tells them what they’ll be doing: “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons,” you know, just basic, everyday ministry kind of stuff.  Can you imagine how overwhelming it must have been to be handed that to-do list?  If I were one of those twelve disciples, I would definitely be wondering how on earth Jesus expected me to be able do all that.

Sunday, May 24, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ascension Sunday
watch this service online
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Easter has come and gone – and all the teaching and healing, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the confrontations with religious and political authorities, the cross, the tomb.  Jesus has died and then risen from the dead.  There were rumors of his resurrection, then surprise sightings, then bread broken together: the whole gang reunited at the table. (Well, almost the whole gang.)  The disciples have been pulled in every direction by wonder and fear and grief and hope.  To say that it has been a rollercoaster of a time for them would be putting it mildly.  

But, after all the ups and downs of the journey they’ve been on, Jesus has emerged victorious.  He has triumphed over death itself once and for all.  So now what?  The disciples ask him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  When are you going to stomp some Romans and throw down the emperor and take back the homeland?   You know, Messiah kind of stuff!  When can we go back to the glory days?  When can we go back to the way things were before?

I can imagine this question is one that has become familiar to a lot of us in the last couple of months, if not all of us.  When can we go back to the way things were before?  It has been a rollercoaster of a time for us, with rising cases and a falling economy and a flood of information and guidelines from various sources that often conflict and contradict one another.  We are sick and tired of being sick and tired, tired of being cooped up, tired of being afraid.  We long to go back to the lives that we were living before.  

Sunday, May 17, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online
image source: Holding onto Hope by Isabel Emrich

When I was really young, I was actually a fairly shy, nervous child.  For people who know me now, that’s probably kind of hard to imagine, but it is true.  I was especially anxious about the prospect of starting school.  I felt like I wasn’t prepared enough to go yet, and I worried that I wouldn’t know anyone there.  

My mom took me to school on the first day of kindergarten prep – and I clung onto her like a second skin.  I literally had hold of her leg as she stood in the doorway.  She tried to convince me to let go, that I was going to have so much fun; finally she said, “Look, there’s your friend Valerie over there; why don’t you go say hello?”  I let go of her leg for one second to wave hello – and by the time I turned around, Mom was gone.  At first, I definitely felt like I had been “left orphaned”; but of course my mom was right and I ended up having a great time.  (And she did come back to get me later!)

No matter how high or low the stakes are, venturing into the unknown is often scary.  And that can be true whether you are a kindergartener on the first day of school, a worker who has recently started – or lost – a job, a cancer patient on the first day of chemo treatments, or literally anyone living through  a global pandemic.  I’m sure you probably don’t have to look very far back in your mind to come up with a time that was full of anxious uncertainty for you. 

Sunday, May 10, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online

In our gospel reading for this morning, we hear Jesus talking to his disciples – and the first thing we hear him say to them is: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”  I don’t know about you, but for me, as a person living in this particular moment of history, I have to admit that my knee-jerk reaction to this kind of statement is: “Easy for you to say, Jesus!”

My heart is deeply troubled these days.  And even though I don’t know exactly what you all have been experiencing over the last couple of months, I can easily imagine that your hearts are pretty troubled also.  This whole pandemic – and everything that comes with it – is a trauma that we are experiencing together as humans on a global scale.  The constant, elevated baseline level of stress we are experiencing leaves us all feeling exhausted and irritated and anxious and afraid.  And that’s even before you pile on the regular stress of work and home life, the grief of caring for loved ones dealing with illness, and just the regular human business of living and dying.  What a burden!  Can you feel the weight of all that tension that you are carrying in your body?  I invite you to just take a moment and sit with that feeling; find where in your body you are most carrying that stress and just hold it for a moment.

This is the weight of the collective grief that we are sharing: our longing for things to go back to the way they were, our uncertainty about what is going to happen next.  And this grief hardly makes it easy for us to hear Jesus say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”  That is something that is much more easily said than done.

Sunday, May 3, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (gospel and sermon begin around 19:20)

I mentioned earlier my ball of wool yarn that I brought. (At the beginning of worship, I invited folks to find an object in their home that helped them to think of God as their Good Shepherd.)  This is something that I can look at and touch and hold onto that helps me to remember that God is my Good Shepherd.  And I chose this particular item for a lot of reasons.

For starters, well, to state the obvious, it came from a sheep.  This is natural, undyed wool.  And it actually came from local sheep!  I bought this at the Brown Sheep Company out in Mitchell, NE, by Scottsbluff.  And knowing where it comes from reminds me that God, our shepherd, is not some far-off, distant, inaccessible deity; God is up close and tangible.  

We know through the sacraments that God comes to us in humble, everyday things – things like water, bread, and wine: things that we can see and touch and taste.  And God is often portrayed in scripture as a shepherd, which was certainly a humble profession – Jesus even paints himself as a shepherd in our gospel reading this morning.  

And beyond being a humble line of work, being a shepherd was a common line of work.  The image of God as a shepherd places God squarely in the middle of our everyday life.  And since I really love to knit and crochet, you can imagine that yarn is a pretty big part of my everyday life!  I am actually about 90% sure that there is currently yarn in every room of my house.

Sunday, April 12, 2020
Easter Sunday
Salem Lutheran Church, Fontanelle, NE
Preachers: Pastor Day Hefner, Pastor Allison Siburg, Pastor Shari Schwedhelm, Pastor Heidi Wallace
Watch video of this service
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Pastor Day Hefner
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE

Good morning and happy Easter once again to you all!  It has been a delight and privilege to get to gather with these wonderful colleagues as we walk through the journey of these days of Holy Week and now Easter morning together.  

We realized what a neat opportunity it is to have four female preachers coming together to proclaim the good news, just as the good news was first proclaimed by women on that first Easter day, standing outside the empty tomb.  (Admittedly, it did take the lone male of our entourage to point this out, haha.)  So rather than have just one of us give the sermon this morning, we decided that all four of us would offer our own perspectives, and share the good news with you in our own particular ways. 

Sunday, March 29, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday in Lent
watch this service online (gospel reading and sermon start around 16:53)

Even though our texts for this week are serious and heavy – dealing with life and death kinds of stories – weirdly enough, the one thing that kept coming to my mind all week was one of my favorite movies to watch when I was growing up: the 1993 cult classic The Sandlot.  

In the movie, a nerdy kid named Scotty Smalls moves to a new city with his parents.  He ends up making friends with a group of neighborhood boys who are all completely obsessed with baseball.  They all gather down at the sandlot to play baseball nearly every day.  The sandlot, as its name suggests, is a vacant, sandy lot that the boys have turned into their very own baseball diamond.  

One of the important features of the sandlot is a fence.  Beyond their outfield, there is a tall, ragged fence – maybe 7 or 8 feet tall; it’s an impenetrable barrier cobbled together from rusted old junk and corrugated metal sheeting and lengths of chain link and it’s all grown over with vines and brambles.  It’s a gnarly-looking old fence, and all you can see beyond it is some overgrown trees and the top of an old, dusty house.

One day, one of the boys hits a baseball clean over the fence.  And to Scotty’s surpise, the other boys treat this hit like an automatic home run.  They don’t even try to go over the fence and get the ball back.  Scotty is already out in the outfield, so he yells to the other boys, “Wait a sec, I’ll get it!” and he starts to climb the fence.  In response, the other boys all scream, “NOOO!” and they all immediately run across the field to Scotty and physically drag him back down onto the ground.  Scotty is annoyed and confused by this, but the boys all hold him back, shouting in chorus, “What are you doing??  You could have been killed!”  

As Scotty learns, the boys all live in fear of a huge, mean, baseball-hoarding dog who lives on the other side of the fence, a dog whom they have nicknamed “the Beast.”  And so, anytime they hit a baseball over the fence, it’s considered gone for good.  To these boys, that outfield fence has become the point of no return.  Once you cross over that barrier, there’s no coming back.

Sunday, March 22, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday in Lent
watch this service online (gospel reading & sermon start around 18:01)
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I really struggle with a verse like John chapter 9, verse 4.  In this verse, Jesus responds to the disciples’ question about sin, saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  A statement like that one feels dangerous to me.  On its face, this verse kind of makes it sound like Jesus is saying that God deliberately chose to inflict suffering on someone – like God chose to make someone suffer simply because it would make Jesus look good later. 

There is a lot of toxic theology out there that follows this idea.  I’m sure you have probably heard some of it at some point in your life.  It’s the “everything happens for a reason” school of theology; it’s the kind of theology that teaches that even suffering comes from God – that if you are suffering, it’s either because you deserve it or because God is trying to teach you a lesson or to make an example out of you. 

But that’s not what I believe.  I don’t believe that suffering is ever part of God’s plan for us, because that simply does not square with the God of love and grace that I know and trust.  That’s not who God is.  The God I follow does not inflict suffering on people just to prove a point; instead God is present with people in their suffering, supporting them and loving them unconditionally.

So how do we make sense of what Jesus says here?  Jesus tells his disciples that this man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  

Sunday, March 15, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday in Lent

Our gospel text for this morning picks up just about half a chapter after our gospel reading from last week.  And there is a LOT going on here.  

Last week, you might remember, Jesus was in Jerusalem, where he received a nighttime visit from a Pharisee named Nicodemus.  In the first few verses of John chapter 4, Jesus learns that trouble might be brewing with the rest of the Pharisees, so he and his disciples decide to hit the road.  In verses 3 and 4 of chapter 4, John writes that “[Jesus] left Judea and started back to Galilee.  But he had to go through Samaria.”  And that is where our story begins.

John writes that Jesus “had” to go through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee – and if you look at a map of the area, that seems totally logical.  These three regions were all right next to each other, between the mountains and the Mediterranean sea, with Galilee to the north, Judea to the south, and Samaria right in the middle.

But that is not the route that most Jewish folks would have taken.  That map would not show you the long history of religious and political division between these people.  And because of these divisions, Jewish people would do practically anything to avoid having to set foot in Samaria.  Instead, to reach Galilee, they would cross the mountains to the east, travel up the Jordan River until they reached the Sea of Galilee, and then cross the mountains again.  And remember, this was all on foot!  

So when Jesus decides he “has” to go through Samaria, he’s not talking about geography.  He seems to be deliberately choosing to cross over this division between people as part of his mission and ministry.  He is choosing to cross the barriers that these peoples have placed between themselves.  And that choice opens him and the disciples to some wonderful and bizarre encounters, like the one we read about today.  

Sunday, March 8, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday in Lent
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Nicodemus really doesn’t get it.  Bless his heart.  In our gospel reading for this morning, he shows up on Jesus’ doorstep in the middle of the night, wanting to have a conversation.  I’m not sure why he came by night – it might be that he didn’t want the other leaders to see him there; or it could be that there was something weighing on Nicodemus’ heart, something that was keeping him up at night.  

Whatever the case, he comes to Jesus, eager to talk.  Nicodemus starts off by acknowledging Jesus’ authority, saying that we – not just “I,” but “we” – know that you are a Rabbi, a teacher like us, one who has come from God.  Even the other Pharisees have to admit the evidence in front of their eyes, because no one could do the signs you do apart from God.  

And before Nicodemus can continue, Jesus says to him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Huh? This abrupt turn in conversation completely baffles Nicodemus.  He takes it in the most hilariously literal direction and asks Jesus: How can it be possible for someone who has already grown old to somehow go back into their mother and be born again??  What???  But instead of helpfully explaining his statement, Jesus doubles down and says again that one must be born again or be born of water and Spirit, in order to enter the kingdom, and he continues on in that vein from there.  It quickly becomes clear to Nicodemus that he, Jesus, and the other Pharisees are not operating on the same level at all.  

Sunday, March 1, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
First Sunday in Lent

Something that I am really grateful to my mom for is that she instilled in me a great love for reading.  She was a teacher – no surprise there – and some of my earliest memories of her are of seeing her curled up on the end of the couch with her big, owl-like reading glasses perched on her nose and a book in her hand.  And of course, she always used read to me, especially before bedtime.

As a little girl, I wanted to be just like my mom, so I was really, really eager to learn how to read.  I was obsessed with the idea of being able to read before I started school – and I was bound and determined that I was going to make that happen.  I remember bursting into my parents’ room one day when I was maybe four or five years old, excitedly yelling, “Mom, Mom, look; I can read!”  I insisted that I was going to read to her for a change.  So I made her sit down on the bed and I ran to get one of my favorite books – The Little Red Caboose – and I sat down next to her, and page by page, I excitedly “read” the whole story to her. 

Mom let me down gently.  She chuckled at my enthusiasm and thanked me for wanting to read to her.  But she also pointed out that I wasn’t really reading quite yet; I had just heard the story so many times that I’d basically memorized more or less what was on each page.  I got so mad when she told me I wasn’t doing it right.  But she told me that it was something that would just take time and practice and patience to get better at.  (My three least favorite things)

Wednesday, February 26, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ash Wednesday

I live by myself, so not a lot of people usually see what I look like or what I do when I go home at the end of the day to relax.  Usually, the first thing I do – after I feed my cats – is to change my clothes.  In my head, I think of it kind of like Mr. Rogers on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: he comes home singing and he carefully changes out of his suit coat and work shoes into a cardigan and tennis shoes.  Except in my case, it’s not usually quite that charming.  Usually it’s just me taking off my pants and slipping into some old sweatpants and a grungy pair of slippers, before flopping down on the couch to chill out for the evening.  It’s not terribly pretty – but it is pretty comfortable!

In strong contrast to this, my friend Zainab has a home routine that looks completely different.  At home is where she’s more likely to get dressed up.  Zainab coordinates services for refugees and immigrants at the Good Neighbor Community Center in Lincoln, and she does a lot to help the community, especially to help other Arabic and Muslim women like herself.  I met her many years ago when I was working for Lincoln Literacy.  I used to coordinate English classes at the Good Neighbor Center every Friday, so I had a lot of opportunity to sit and talk with Zainab and get to know a little more about her life and her faith.  

Sunday, February 16, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
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I am not a big sports person.  I don’t follow any sports teams or watch a lot of games; it’s just not really my thing.  And because of this, it often surprises people to learn that I actually played a lot of sports when I was growing up – I even enjoyed some of them!  I was never a great athlete or anything, but it was fun to be part of a team, fun to hit things and throw things and just run around outside together having a good time. 

I played softball every summer, starting from about when I was in second grade.  And the fact that I was never a very sporty person did not stop me from getting into a competitive spirit.  We may have been a bunch of little girls playing against other little girls, but we still developed rivalries with teams from neighboring towns and we worked hard to win!  And when we were out on the field, it was easy to let the faces of the other team kind of blur together while we focused on cheering on our own.  

But one thing I will always vividly remember is what happened at the end of each and every game.  No matter who won or who lost, the players and the coaches of both teams would line up in single file; and then they walked across the field and and high fived every single member of the other team, telling each one of them, “Good game, good game, good game, good game…”