countercultural – This is the Day

Sunday, November 3, 2024
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
All Saints Sunday
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 27:29; children’s sermon starts around 30:51; sermon starts around 37:25)

Reading: 1 Kings 17:1-24

For the children’s sermon, I talked with the kids about All Saints Day – what’s a saint? Why do we spend all this time talking about dead people? I pointed out that we actually talk about saints every Sunday, though we might not pay much attention to it. In the last part of the creed, we confess “I believe in… the communion of saints.” We then go on to confess our belief in some truly mind-boggling things: “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Those are some pretty bold beliefs – but we believe in them because of stories handed down to us by people we trust and love; and it’s those same people who help us remember what and why we believe on the days it’s hard for us to do so.

My two best friends in high school were a pair of twins named Amanda and Emily. They lived on a farm a couple miles out of town where their family (the Fraases) raised sheep. I spent a lot of time out at their place growing up, and it was awesome. They always had boxes of wool and yarn to play with, and we’d run all around their place dancing and playing games.

Sometimes there would be sheep chores to do and I would get to help out (I was a town kid, not a country kid, so it was a novelty for me, haha). Mainly I remember helping when their parents were moving the electric fence around – my friends and I would run and make noise to chase the sheep into the new grazing area. (The experience definitely left me with some interesting insight into all the biblical passages about us being God’s sheep – because, let me tell you, sheep are dumb.)

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Sunday, June 30, 2019
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Third Sunday after Pentecost

I was flying home one time to visit family, back when I lived in the Dominican Republic. My flight had a six hour layover in Miami, and the Miami airport isn’t exactly the most fun place to spend six whole hours (not that any airport is!). So I decided I’d call an old Peace Corps friend of mine who lived in Miami to come pick me up.

I had been living in the Dominican Republic for about three years at this point, and I found that being back in American culture was a little overwhelming. Between the heat and the sensory overload, I stepped out of the Miami airport with a massive headache. So my friend and I headed to the nearest Walgreens to pick up some aspirin.

Now, in the DR, I had gotten used to just going down the street to the little corner store whenever I needed something for a headache. I could usually count on having one or maybe two options for painkillers. But the painkiller aisle in that Miami Walgreens seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon, painkillers as far as the eye could see. They had aspirin and ibuprofen and acetaminophen and naproxen; they had tablets and capsules, bottles and packets and boxes of every size and quantity imaginable. It was ridiculous. I just wanted to feel better – but by the time I finally picked something out, I felt like my head was literally going to explode.

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Tag: countercultural

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Sermon: Choices