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…”

Sunday, February 9, 2020
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
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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
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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watch this service online (readings start around 12:58; sermon starts around 19:38)
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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.