Wednesday, March 2, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Ash Wednesday
watch this service online (readings start around 9:20; sermon starts around 17:51)
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My dad is a very faithful guy.  He’s a lifelong Lutheran who made sure my brother and sister and I all grew up in the church, and he’s very much a model of faith for me, someone who was instrumental in my own faith formation.  But whenever bad things happen – someone gets bad news at the doctor, or there’s some kind of terrible accident, or some other kind of overwhelming trouble – it absolutely drives my dad nuts that people say, “There’s nothing left to do now but pray.”  “Nothing left to do but pray?!” he’ll say; “Prayer shouldn’t be a last resort – prayer should be where you start!”  

Reading our first reading, from the prophet Joel, I think the people of ancient Judah probably would have agreed with my dad: prayer is where you start.  The Book of Joel begins with some very overwhelming trouble: massive swarms of locusts have devastated the land of Judah, destroying practically everything in their path.  It is catastrophic for their agrarian way of life (not hard for us to imagine here!), and there is a lot of lamenting in the first few verses of the book.  Joel writes: 

…a nation has invaded my land,
powerful and innumerable;
its teeth are lions’ teeth,
and it has the fangs of a lioness.
It has laid waste my vines,
and splintered my fig trees;
it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down;
their branches have turned white…
The fields are devastated,
the ground mourns;
for the grain is destroyed,
the wine dries up,
the oil fails.

Joel 1:6-7, 10

But before getting into any logistical details of how to go about recovering from this loss – or even worrying about what everyone is going to eat in the meanwhile – the very first thing the prophet Joel does is to say to the people:

Sunday, February 27, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Transfiguration Sunday
watch this service online (readings start around 21:32; sermon starts around 28:54)

Today we come to the end of the season of Epiphany.  Epiphany is a season that is all about revelation.  It’s a time in which we remember and celebrate the many radical and surprising ways that God chooses to show up in the world.  We began this season with a star – the star that led magi from the East to the infant Christ, the star whose light revealed to the world the birth of God made flesh.  And today we have this gospel story: the story of the transfiguration.  

There are actually two revelations of Christ in the reading that we have for today.  The first is the obvious one.  Jesus and a few of his disciples go up a mountain to pray and, as he’s praying, Jesus’ face and clothing suddenly start shining dazzlingly bright; Moses and Elijah show up to chat with him; and the disciples are struck speechless with awe and terror.  I think I’ve mentioned before that this is one of my favorite Peter moments in the gospels – this amazing thing is happening in front of him and Peter is like, “Tents!  We should put up tents so y’all can stay here!” – and even the gospel writer is like, “Yeah, he didn’t know what he was saying.”  It’s such an overwhelming experience that Peter is just trying to capture it and hold onto it in some way that he can make sense of.  

But the moment doesn’t last.  Moses and Elijah vanish; Jesus stops glowing; and he and his disciples head back down the hill.  And as they reach the bottom of the mountain, they walk into a scene of chaos.  A huge crowd is gathered there waiting for Jesus, and among them is a desperate father who shouts out, begging Jesus for help.  The other disciples were unable to cast out a demon that has been tormenting this man’s son and he is desperate for help. Jesus scolds his sheepish disciples; and then, full of confidence and power, he heals the boy and gives him back to his father.  And in that moment, Luke tells us, “All were astounded at the greatness of God.”  It’s another moment of revelation.

Sunday, February 20, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 16:11; sermon starts around 24:51)

In our first reading for today, we get this very small snippet of the story of Joseph.  But Joseph’s story is actually a LOT longer – it takes up over a dozen chapters of Genesis.  So we’re gonna start today with a bible pop quiz: What all do you remember about the story of Joseph?

[Joseph was one of the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel.  Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son, born to his favorite wife, Rachel, and Jacob gave him a super fancy coat, which – depending on your translation – was a robe with sleeves, a robe of many colors (even technicolors!), or a pretty pretty princess dress.  Joseph had dreams – one with sheaves of grain, one with the moon and sun and stars – that foretold that his brothers and family would one day bow down to him.  His brothers, already resentful of Joseph, decide they’ve had enough; so they beat him, strip him of his famous robe, throw him in a pit, and plan to kill him.  At the last minute, they decide to sell him into slavery instead and Joseph is taken to Egypt, into the house of Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard.  Potiphar’s wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce Joseph and has him thrown in jail instead, where he meets two of Pharaoh’s servants and correctly interprets their dreams.  Word of this eventually reaches Pharaoh, who has started having troubling dreams of his own – dreams in which big fat cows and plump ears of corn are swallowed up by ugly skinny cows and scrawny ears of corn.  Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream as a vision of what God is planning: seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  Pharaoh makes Joseph his right hand man over all of Egypt and together they store up a buttload of grain during the seven years.  When the famine hits, they’re more than ready.  And who shows up on their doorstep?  Yep!  It’s Joseph’s brothers.  So our reading today is them finally being reunited.]

Phew!  A lot happens in Joseph’s story!  Even though he eventually ends up in a good place, Joseph spends so much of his early life suffering unbelievable cruelty and abuse.  The actual biblical narrative is pretty sparse on emotional content – the writer(s) of Genesis just kind of states what happened and then moves on.  But just imagine for a second the anguish that Joseph must have felt.  He was only seventeen years old when he was taken from his home.  Imagine the intense feelings of rejection, betrayal, fear, and just profound hurt that must have flooded through him when his brothers threw him into a pit, threatened to kill him, and then sold him off to strangers, never to see his family again.  It makes my heart ache just thinking about it.

Sunday, February 13, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 13:35; sermon starts around 18:45)
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One of the things that I love about this congregation is that nearly all of you share a passion for gardening and growing things.  It’s something we talk a lot about in council, from the lawn care at the parsonage to what kind of tree we should plant out front of the church here.  I know there are lots of green thumbs here in this room!  As for myself, I love the idea of gardening, but anyone who has been to my house will probably tell you that it’s where plants go to die.  Even as we speak, there’s a couple of dead succulents on the counter in the kitchen and a neglected spider plant hanging in one corner, barely clinging to life, haha.  

So I want to start off this morning by picking your brains:  Whenever you go to plant something, what are all the factors that you take into consideration?

Sun/shade?  
Drainage?  
Composition of the soil?  
Wind exposure?  
Hardiness zone?  
Size of full grown plant?
Weed/pest resistance?  
Needs lots of watering?  
Potential to become invasive?  
Attracts pollinators?  
Grows well w/other nearby plants?  
Seed vs seedling/transplant?  
Length of growing season?

There are SO many factors to take into consideration when planting something.  And it’s important to consider these things because we want what we planted to grow!  We want to give it the best shot we possibly can to put down good roots, to grow and thrive – to produce beautiful flowers, or shade, or a harvest of good fruits, or whatever else we may have planted it for.  You can have the finest seeds in the world, but if you don’t have good growing conditions, good soil, you’re just never going to get the results that you want.  The whole art of gardening, or farming, is to create the optimal conditions for growth – to take good seeds and plant them wisely in good soil.  

Sunday, February 6, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 19:35; sermon starts around 27:32)
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In our Training Disciples program, over the last couple of Wednesdays, we have been gathering for a meal and bible study; and the theme we’ve been focusing in on is evangelism.  We’ve been talking about how, at its core, evangelism is really about storytelling – we share our own stories of faith as a way of pointing toward the larger story of what God has done and is still doing in the world.    

For our bible study, we’ve been spending time with the story of the man born blind from the ninth chapter of John.  I love this story for talking about evangelism because of its simplicity.  Jesus comes across this man and has compassion for him; he spreads some mud on this man’s eyes, tells him to go wash, and *boom* he can see again.  The actual healing takes all of two verses.  But this man then spends the rest of the chapter, 30-some verses, being questioned over and over again about his encounter with Jesus.  And his story is consistently the same every single time: “He put mud on my eyes.  Then I washed, and now I see.”  That’s it.  The Pharisees press him for more details, but he sticks to his story: “He put mud on my eyes.  Then I washed, and now I see.”  It only takes him two short sentences to tell other people exactly how Jesus changed his life.  

We used this story as an example to talk about telling our own stories of faith – our “one-inch” stories of faith.  Because evangelism isn’t always about trying to share the whole big picture of God’s work or about, like, knowing the whole bible backwards and forwards.  The most powerful evangelization can happen through sharing just a one-inch piece of the picture.  We even made these little one-inch (ish) frames as a reminder (with only one casualty, RIP Jalaine’s finger, lol) that we don’t have to try to tell the whole story at once in order to be good evangelists – but we can share our stories.  We share the pieces of the story that we know: He put mud on my eyes.  I washed, and now I see.

Sunday, January 30, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 16:34; sermon starts around 23:24)
(all images borrowed from Disney’s Encanto – obviously)

A few weeks ago, my siblings and I got together over Zoom and watched Disney’s latest animated movie: Encanto. And I’ve got to admit, I still cannot get the songs out of my head! If you’ve seen the movie yourself, you already know what I’m talking about – those tunes are catchier than the Omicron variant! So, of course, sooner or later, it had to make its way into a sermon, haha.

If you haven’t seen Encanto, I highly recommend it.  The movie tells the story of a Colombian family: the Madrigals.  After the family matriarch – Alma – is forced to flee her hometown because of violence, the family is blessed with a miracle: they receive a magical, sentient house that moves and shapes itself at will and protects the family.  And along with the house, every single member of the Madrigal family is blessed with some kind of magical power: one has super strength; one has super hearing; another has the ability to talk to animals or to control the weather, and so on.  Everyone in this whole extended family receives their special power when they reach a certain age – everyone, that is, except for one person: Alma’s granddaughter, Mirabel.  For some unknown reason, Mirabel is the only one who doesn’t receive the gift of magic. 

And you can start to tell, from the beginning of the movie, the tension that this creates within the family. The tension starts to manifest physically as cracks appearing all over the house, in the walls and the floors, and some members of the family even start losing their powers. Mirabel decides to make it her mission to figure out what is going wrong with the magic and fix it. And along the way, she stumbles across her long-lost uncle, Bruno, whose gift is the ability to foresee the future. Bruno had left the family years before because his gift made had him an outcast; people in the family and in the community had started blaming Bruno for the negative things that he sometimes predicted – even though it wasn’t his fault!  They even sing a whole song about it called “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” 

Sunday, January 23, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 13:56; sermon starts around 23:03)

Whenever I’m preparing to write a sermon, I spend a lot of time digging into the texts that our lectionary (the cycle of readings we follow) chooses for a given Sunday.  And it always kind of perks my ear up whenever I notice that the lectionary skips over verses in a given reading.  I’m always curious to see what it is that got left out, and why.  You may have noticed that this has happened in our first reading for this morning: we’ve got kind of a weird mish-mash of verses from the eighth chapter of Nehemiah that leaves a couple of verses out.

There’s a number of reasons why the people who compiled the lectionary might choose to do this: sometimes they omit verses in order to condense a really long story into a more manageable reading; sometimes it’s to highlight a particular theme or idea they want to emphasize; and sometimes it’s for reasons that are beyond my understanding.  

So, out of curiosity, I looked up the missing verses from this reading – verses 4 and 7 – and I think I can confidently say that these verses weren’t left out in order to shorten a story or to highlight a theme.  Instead, I think the omission of these particular verses was an act of mercy toward lectors everywhere.  

Sunday, January 16, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday after Epiphany
watch this service online (readings start around 17:43; sermon starts around 23:51)
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This is a reflection by Pastor Elisabeth Johnson, missionary serving as a professor at Lutheran Institute of Theology in Cameroon, that was published as gospel commentary on the Working Preacher website. I adapted these words to better suit being preached out loud and added the title, but the content, organization, and most of the words are Rev Johnson’s and I’m grateful for her excellent essay.

Sunday, January 9, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Baptism of Our Lord
watch this service online (readings start around 13:37; sermon starts around 18:04)

This is the third time in a month that we find ourselves back in the wilderness, standing by the banks of the river Jordan with John the Baptist.  You might remember we actually read parts of this exact same gospel text a few weeks ago on the third Sunday of Advent: I joked about how you don’t really come to church on the “Sunday of Joy” expecting to hear about unquenchable fire!  It’s still kind of unsettling to read today; we came to worship today to celebrate the baptism of Jesus.  Yet here we find John the Baptist again, preaching about a Messiah coming to literally thresh humanity and burn up the chaff!

The whole idea of separating the wheat from the chaff is pretty familiar – it’s become a common saying, even apart from scripture.  And I think it’s fair to say that when we think about “separating the wheat from the chaff” the common understanding is that this saying is about God separating the good, holy people from bad, sinful people.  But of course, as Lutherans, we know that this isn’t how God works, and it isn’t how people work; no one is all good or all bad – we are all both sinner and saint.  Incidentally, that’s not how wheat works either!  Wheat is also both wheat and chaff.  Heh, or being a good Nebraskan, I suppose you could say that it’s similar to how corn is both corn and husk.  The process of threshing and winnowing doesn’t separate good wheat from bad wheat, or good corn from bad corn.  It separates the different parts of the same plant: it knocks the grain loose from the rest of the plant so that it can be gathered up and used.  

I kept finding myself coming back to this image of wheat and chaff this week – I was even reading Wikipedia articles about how wheat is grown and harvested, haha.  And one of the things that struck me in what I read was the fact that what we call “chaff” is actually the protective casing around the seed or grain.  When the wheat plant is young and growing, the chaff is what grows up around the grain and keeps it safe.  Without chaff, we wouldn’t have wheat!  It’s only later on in the life of the wheat that the chaff eventually becomes an impediment.  The chaff becomes a barrier that keeps the best part of the wheat from serving its purpose if it isn’t removed.  

Friday, December 24, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Christmas Eve • bulletin
watch this service online (readings start around 14:28; sermon starts around 23:43)
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A year ago today was the first time in my life that I did not set foot inside a church on Christmas Eve.  It was an odd feeling.  To be sure, there were lots of joyful options for online worship – and it was fun to get to collaborate on some of them with other clergy friends of mine.  We put in a lot of work to try to make Christmas Eve worship happen safely.  But it was still so strange not to be here.  

I’m happy and thankful to get to be here with you tonight.  It warms my heart to see all the faces gathered in these pews.  After so much turmoil in the past two years, there is just something about gathering together in person for worship on Christmas Eve that feels really hopeful.  We’ve come a long way in the last year.

That being said, in many ways, 2021 still wasn’t the year that we had hoped it would be – the year that we were promised it would be.  Life didn’t just snap back to normal, the way I think many of us secretly hoped it would.  The pandemic left us with too much loss to simply move on from it.  It highlighted the extreme inequality and division and prejudice that already existed in our world and then made these things worse.  It stole our sense of safety.  And for many of us, the pandemic took away some of the people we loved most.  

Sunday, December 19, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fourth Sunday of Advent
watch this service online (readings start around 21:26; sermon starts around 26:45)

This coming year, we’ll be getting to spend a lot of time in the Gospel of Luke.  Each of the three lectionary years focuses on a different gospel: Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark, and Year C is Luke, with John kind of sprinkled in here and there for fun throughout all three years.  We do it this way because each gospel witness is unique and offers different perspectives on the life and teachings of Jesus.  So this year, we get to know Luke a little bit better.  And during Advent especially, we get to see one of the most fun things that sets this gospel apart: and that is that Luke’s gospel is a musical!

Especially in the first couple chapters of Luke, we get some really fantastic songs.  A couple of weeks ago, you might remember we read the Canticle of Zechariah: this is the song that Zechariah sings at the birth of his and Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist.  In Luke 2, we have a whole angelic chorus announcing Jesus’ birth – and when Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the temple a few verses later, they encounter a man named Simeon who had been waiting his whole life to see the Messiah – and when he lays eyes on Jesus, he also bursts into song!

And of course, today, we have this extraordinary song that Mary sings.  (We’ll actually get to sing one of my favorite settings of it as our hymn of the day!)  Mary’s song, the Magnificat, is a joyous song of praise for all that God has done for God’s people, and for Mary herself in particular.  It’s a song rooted in Mary’s deep faith that God has been and will be faithful to God’s promises.  

The Magnificat is also a profoundly revolutionary song: God scatters the proud and casts down the powerful, God lifts up the lowly and the hungry and sends the rich away empty-handed.  God sees this world’s many inequities and injustices and comes to turn the world upside down, to make things right for the outcast and the unloved.  As Mary sings this song, we see that she is much more than just a meek, obedient servant of God.  Mary is a prophet!  She’s a prophet announcing the wonders that God is working to the world, a prophet whose heart is bursting at the seams with divine hope.

Sunday, December 5, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Second Sunday of Advent
watch this service online (readings start around 18:40; sermon starts around 24:28)

We have four really great texts this morning, full of good, hopeful stuff to reflect on.  But for some weird reason this week – completely out of left field – I’ve kept finding myself thinking about a totally different story of scripture, one that really isn’t directly related to any of our readings.

You might remember the story of Jacob wrestling with the mysterious stranger/angel – does that ring any bells?  What details do you remember about that story?

Basically, Jacob is camped out by himself at a place called Peniel, and a mysterious figure wrestles with Jacob all night long.  This guy is clearly very strong, but Jacob manages to hold his own, so as morning breaks, the man hits Jacob’s hip to knock it out of joint so he can get away – but Jacob refuses to let him go unless he blesses him.  This is the moment in which Jacob is renamed Israel, which means “the one who strives with God” – it’s pretty strong foreshadowing of what Israel’s relationship with God will actually be like. (spoiler alert?)

It’s a fairly familiar story.  But does anyone here remember the context of this story?  (It’s a lot less well known.)  What was Jacob doing at Peniel?  Where was he going?

Sunday, November 28, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
First Sunday of Advent
watch this service online (readings start around 21:04; sermon starts around 26:55)

A few weeks ago, I joined the club that no one really wants to be part of: I tested positive for Covid.  (Most of you probably knew this already – it’s why I wasn’t in worship a couple of weeks ago.)  I was fully vaccinated earlier this year, so my case was one of those “breakthrough” cases, but I still got pretty sick.  It was mostly like a really bad cold – congestion and sore throat and runny nose, headaches and body aches, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, and so on.  And, in classic Covid fashion, I completely lost all sense of taste and smell.  

Honestly, I’m thankful that it wasn’t worse; I’d hate to imagine how much more serious it might have been had I not been vaccinated.  This was plenty bad enough.  And several people had cautioned me to be on guard especially during the second week of quarantine, as Covid is known for sometimes taking a turn for the worse just at the moment you start to think you’re getting better.  So even when my symptoms started to improve after a few days, I stayed alert and on guard.  I bought a pulse oximeter so that I could keep an eye on my blood oxygen levels – which I did almost compulsively, at least once an hour.  I likewise kept my thermometer handy so I could keep checking my temperature.  I kept getting up and walking around to get a little exercise and keep the blood flowing.  And I kept sniffing random things around my house to see whether my sense of smell was coming back yet or not. 

I was anxious and a little scared about suddenly getting very sick, especially living by myself.  I was very attentive to the symptoms I was experiencing.  But once it seemed like I really was getting better, I was instantly impatient to be all the way better.  Especially with my trip to California coming up, to go visit my brother, I was eager to be healthy again, to be able to smell and taste again.  And truth be told, I’m still not 100%.  I still check my blood oxygen from time to time, because I am still tired, and I get that old Covid brain fog.  And I still can’t smell or taste much of anything.  I spent Thanksgiving aggressively sniffing everything on my plate, trying to convince myself that I could taste at least some of it – because I’m just so eager to be whole and well again.

Sunday, November 7, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
All Saints Sunday
watch this service online (readings start around 20:51; sermon starts around 27:06)

When I was in seminary in Chicago, I had the opportunity to take classes with other students from several different denominational backgrounds, because there are so many different seminaries in the city.  This week, I’ve been remembering a seminarian I got to know in one of my classes who was studying at the Catholic Theological Union.  He was preparing to be a parish priest, but once he was ordained he would also be living as a monk with the brothers at the monastery who had helped him go to seminary.  Even before seminary, he had gotten to know these brothers and the monastery well – and he shared stories with us in class about what it’s like to live there, and what the monastery itself is like.  It sounded like a beautiful, if challenging, way to live. 

But the one thing that stuck with me most from his stories was his description of the main sanctuary at the monastery.  Their chancel had a raised platform with the table on it, much like ours here.  But they also had a long communion rail; it was made of polished wood and it ran all the way around the chancel in a big semi-circle.  All the brothers could fit around it together as they gathered to receive communion.  But that circle didn’t stop at the wall.  Outside the sanctuary, on the other side of the wall, the railing continued on around in stone, forming one big ring around the table.  On the stone side of the circle was the monastery’s cemetery.  Every single time they gathered for communion, that one big circle reminded the monastery’s living brothers that they were still connected to the brothers who had gone before them.  They were reminded that God’s love and mercy and provision aren’t only for the living – that we belong to God forever, in our life and in our death.  

I’ve mentioned this monastery communion rail before in my sermons – it’s such a powerful image.  But it’s been on my mind again this week – because today, we actually have something kind of similar set up here in our sanctuary.  This table where we have photos and memories of our loved ones who have died, today will also be the table where we take communion together.  Like the monastery communion rail, continuing around into the cemetery, today this table is a reminder that we are still connected to those who have gone before us.  Together with them, we are all still part of the one communion of saints.  

Sunday, October 31, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Reformation Day
First reading • Psalm • Second reading • Gospel reading
watch this service online (readings start around 19:40; sermon starts around 26:04)

I talked a little bit about the Re:Formation conference (AKA TheoCon) in my sermon last week: how Bishop Rinehart spoke about this time as liminal space, a time of transition, time for rest and listening and discerning whatever it is that comes next.  One other really fun thing I got to do at the Re:Formation conference was to go to a workshop led by the one and only Lisa Kramme, the Synod Director for Faith Formation.  (Council members might actually remember meeting Lisa at our retreat back in July – she is a delightful human being!)

Lisa’s workshop was a story lab – a hands on kind of lab with lots of different activities to help us work on our storytelling skills.  The very first activity we did was to write an autobiography of sorts.  We  didn’t have to write a comprehensive life story, but we did have to share something meaningful about who we are – and we had to do so using exactly twelve words. No more, no fewer.  

I had been joking around a lot with Lisa all morning (we used to work together, so she and I know each other pretty well) – so for my twelve word autobiography, I ended up writing: “I’m from a family of people who like kind-spirited, irreverent jokes.”  I felt like I had done a pretty good job capturing an important slice of who I am, what makes me me.  But then the assignment changed.  Keeping our words in the same order, we were then asked to cut them down to just six words… then three… then finally just one.  My autobiography shrank from “I’m from a family of people who like kind-spirited, irreverent jokes.” to “I’m from people who like jokes” and then to “people who joke(s)” and finally just “jokes.”  

Sunday, October 24, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 17:01; sermon starts around 22:15)

I have almost never missed a Christmas at home with my family.  And, considering all the different places I have lived, that has often taken some doing.  

When I lived in the Dominican Republic, it took me almost 24 hours to get home.  The DR isn’t that far away from the US, but it took me two bus rides and a taxi just to get to the airport.  From there to Omaha, it usually took at least three flights, and then over a two hour drive to actually get home.  So, as you can imagine, I got to spend lots of long layovers getting to know airports in Miami and Atlanta and Dallas and Chicago and so on.  But I always found fun things to do.  I’d walk up and down the concourses and eat snacks; I’d chat up friendly-looking people to find out why they were going where they were going; I’d look through the gift shops and thumb through the books.  To this day, I still have a collection of scarves I bought in airport gift shops because after four years of living in the tropics, I got cold very easily – even in Miami!  

But I never missed a single Christmas in the four years I lived in the Dominican Republic, even though it took me a whole day to get home. 

The one year I didn’t make it home for Christmas was actually the year I was on internship in New Mexico.  I had to work on Christmas Eve and it was just too far away to make it home afterward.  Instead, I flew home about a week after Christmas, on December 31st, New Year’s Eve.  I preached that morning at a church in El Paso and went straight from the church to the airport.  I made it as far as Dallas – and then a massive ice storm hit.  My two hour layover stretched from two hours into four, then six hours, then eight hours.

Sunday, October 17, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 15:24; sermon starts around 22:45)

When I was a small child, I was very excited for the day that I would finally get to start going to school.  School was where my mom worked – and I loved hanging out with her, reading and making craft projects and playing silly games and having fun.  But as excited as I was to start school, I was also equally as terrified about the prospect.  My dad has even told me in recent years about how anxious I was about the fact that I didn’t know how to read yet – and no amount of reasoning could persuade me that school is, in fact, the place you’re supposed to go to learn how to read.  And beyond that, I just had no real idea what school would be like – for me, it was a venture into the unknown.

On the first day of kindergarten roundup, Mom took me to school, all dressed in my new school clothes, with my new little backpack on my back.  At first I was excited, but with every step closer to the classroom, it felt like my excitement was slowly replaced by terror.  Finally we stood in the very doorway of the classroom and I was so filled with fear that I would not let go of her.  She turned to leave and go to her own classroom, and I literally wrapped my arms around her leg and clung on like a second skin.  Eventually she pointed out that another little girl I was friends with was there, and she got me to let go just long enough to wave hello – and when I turned around, poof!  Mom was gone.

Looking back now, it’s a pretty cute, funny little story.  And, obviously, I survived a whole lot more schooling after that.  But at the time, I was really scared.  I didn’t know what was going to happen or what it would be like.  And so I did what humans tend to do when we’re afraid – I grabbed for something familiar and I held onto it for dear life, with both hands.  

Our instinctive fear reaction comes from one of the oldest parts of our brain – the amgydala, located near the brain stem.  As we learn and grow older, we develop more and more of our higher brain function, like reasoning and logic and language – we literally learn to “use our words”!  We grow into being able to view and interpret the world around us in more rational and abstract and imaginative ways.  

Sunday, October 10, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Twentienth Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 21:05; sermon starts around 28:05)

Several weeks into my Peace Corps service, I was still waking up every morning and having to actively remind myself that I wasn’t in Nebraska anymore.  By this point, I was living in our community-based training site on the eastern side of the island – we weren’t even done with training yet! – and I was already feeling ready to come home.  

Don’t get me wrong – the Dominican Republic is a beautiful country, and at first I was really excited to be there.  I remember riding in on the bus from the airport for the first time; I stared out the windows with my mouth hanging open, taking in the palm trees and the ocean and the brightly painted buildings and the merengue and bachata blasting from the radio.  I was excited to try Dominican food, and to try out my Spanish skills talking with Dominican people, and just generally to immerse myself as much as I could in Dominican culture.

But a month or so in, the newness of everything I was experiencing had started to wear off – and I was tired.  I was tired of speaking in Spanish all the time – it was exhausting!  I was tired of eating beans and rice every day.  I was tired of people always staring at me or standing too close to me.  I was tired of it always being too hot or too wet or too loud.  I was tired of constantly feeling out of step with the people around me.  Sometimes I would even imagine to myself that this whole thing would turn out to be one huge prank: like a game show host would step out from behind a curtain and be like, “Surprise!  You’re on Candid Camera!” and everyone would suddenly start speaking English and acting like “normal” people.

Sunday, October 3, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 14:37; sermon starts around 21:55)

For the last several weeks, we have been steadily making our way through the Gospel of Mark, following Jesus and the disciples as they draw closer and closer to Jerusalem.  And it seems like the closer Jesus gets to Jerusalem – and to the cross – the more difficult his teachings are becoming.  Just in the last few weeks, we have heard Jesus say that anyone who wants to get ahead must be last of all and servant of all; we heard him say that we must lose our lives in order to find them; and just last week you might remember his teachings that if your eyes or hands or feet cause you to stumble, you should cut them off!

Today’s reading from Mark manages to hit us even closer to the heart with this difficult passage about divorce. You can tell that even the disciples find this teaching harsh, because they bring it up again with Jesus later – like they think that maybe when the Pharisees asked him, Jesus was just a little hangry or something and needed to have a snack and relax.  But when they ask him about it in private, Jesus not only reaffirms this teaching, he doubles down on it and makes it sound even harsher.

It’s hard to read this text. It has been used in such harmful ways in the church: especially against the many people whose lives have been touched by divorce and against members of the LGBTQ community.  I’m sure there are people sitting here who know exactly how it feels to have this text used against them – people who have been made to feel shame by other people wielding this text like a weapon.  I’m not here to do that.

Sunday, September 26, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 16:41; sermon starts around 25:00)

I’ve talked a bit about my mom in my sermons and about how she was diagnosed with cancer around the time I was five or six. My whole childhood was significantly shaped by her illness and death; but yet, as an adult, I have been amazed to keep discovering just how little I understood about how hard and painful my mom’s battle with cancer really was. I knew that she had chemotherapy that made her hair fall out – I remember getting to play with some of the fun wigs that she had – but I had no idea how rough the chemo and the radiation treatments really were on her body. It was basically a race to try to kill the cancer before the cancer – or the treatment itself – killed her. 

And I knew that Mom had had a mastectomy.  As a kid, that part of it seemed pretty straightforward to me: that’s where the cancer is right there, so just – boom – chop it off and you should be good to go!  But now, as I’m getting close to the age my mom was when she was battling cancer, even that choice hits me kind of differently.  I’m still a relatively young person – and so was my mom – and I can’t imagine having to make that choice whether to literally cut off part of my own body.  That could not have been easy.

But in my mom’s case, that amputation was the most hopeful thing that they could do.  She was barely 40 and there was every reason to expect that she still had decades of life ahead of her.  She was a beloved elementary school teacher and had a huge community of support behind her, praying for her to get better.  And, of course, more than anything, she was a wife and a mother with three young kids at home all under the age of ten.  We needed her.  We loved her.  And so the doctors fought like hell to save her life.  They tried everything that they could to help her, exhausted all possible options, even experimental treatments.  And some of those treatments were extremely invasive and aggressive and painful, but the doctors decided it was worth it – because her life was worth saving, and it was their best chance of doing so.

Sunday, September 19, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 17:34; sermon starts around 23:13)

For the last several weeks, we’ve been reading a lot of passages from the book of James (Luther’s least favorite epistle, lol).  The letter of James belongs to a category of biblical writings known as “wisdom literature” – this also includes books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.  While wisdom literature can sound like something that would be really abstract and esoteric, one of the things that actually characterizes biblical wisdom literature is that it is often very practical and down to earth.  This is the tone that James sets in the very first verse of our second reading today.  He writes, “Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.”  For James, wisdom is more than just words – wisdom is about our actions.  The true test of wisdom is in how it is reflected – or not reflected – in our day-to-day lives.  

To help draw this out and make it clearer, James asks his readers to consider three questions:

1. Who is wise and understanding among you?
2. Where do all the conflicts and disputes among you come from?
3. What does God want?

These are important questions in the life of faith.  The first time I can remember really wrestling with these questions was way back when I was in sixth grade.  I’ve talked a little bit before about how unpopular I was growing up, how I was bullied a lot.  I grew up as a member of a small class in a K-12 school in a tiny town.  There weren’t exactly a lot of rungs on our social ladder back then, but you can bet your bottom dollar that whatever the lowest rung was, that’s where you’d find me.  

Sunday, September 12, 2021
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
watch this service online (readings start around 20:02; sermon starts around 27:23)
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One morning, when I was in high school, I was hanging out in the school’s computer lab. I was about sixteen years old; it was my junior year, and I was by far the fastest typer in my class – because unlike many of the other students, I actually bothered to practice. I was deep in the middle of one of the typing lessons when one of my younger brother’s friends – Mason Kalin – came into the lab. He saw me sitting back in a corner of the lab and came over to talk to me. I was kind of annoyed by this – I was trying to concentrate on what I was doing! So I only kind of half-listened as Mason started going on and on about whatever it was he was talking about. It sounded like maybe he was talking about one of the video games he and my brother had been playing recently – all kinds of explosions and chaos and who knows what else – I was pretty sure I had already heard my brother going on and on about it at home, so I didn’t feel like I really needed to hear it again. 

Eventually Mason wandered off and I went back to my typing.  After a while, the bell rang, and I closed out of the computer and gathered my stuff and prepared to go to my next class.  But when I stepped out into the hallway, it was like a ghost town.  Nobody was at their lockers, nobody else was walking to their next class – it was weird.  So I walked down the hall a little ways to try to find out what was going on.   And I discovered that everyone – students, staff, faculty – the entire school was all crammed into the library; and they all had their eyes glued to the TV.  I walked in to see what was going on – and I got there just in time to watch the second tower fall.