New Starts

These are the bookshelves in my office at University Lutheran Center today.  In two days, I'll begin a new call at St. Petri Lutheran Church in Story City, Iowa.  Seems a good time to get a fresh start here as well.

There are a lot of reasons why I haven't been posting regularly over the past two years.  Most of them have to do with time: I simply haven't had much free.  Some others I won't bring up here.  I've learned a lot about ministry since about December of 2009, and much of it has been the kind of wisdom that comes from challenging circumstances. What I'm going to try to focus on in this new start is how to handle those challenging circumstances better as a minister of the gospel, leader of a congregation and child of God.  That we are broken and make mistakes should surprise no one anymore.  The problems rise, from what I've seen, when we compound those mistakes by additional misbehavior.  Humility, kindness, patience, humor, a healthy dose of self-deprecation, teamwork, and joy: these are the traits I believe every faith community must have if it is to survive into whatever is coming next for the church.  So these are also the traits I need to develop more fully in myself and in those to whom I minister.

I leave this current adventure with joy and sadness.  There have been some wonderful, wonderful moments of ministry here.  I think on the whole I've done good work.  But we could have done more, and I've been trying to reflect on why we didn't and where I'm called to change to be better in the future.  But regardless of our mistakes, I believe we've been as faithful as we knew how to be, and there's not much more anyone can ask.  That's the mission going forward as well: to be faithful to the future God has in store for us.  Please pray for me and for the members of our new church as we set out together!

Peace,
Scott

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter - "Hunger and Nourishment" (Bread for the World Offering of Letters)

Tonight our Lutheran Campus Ministry was joined by a local Bread for the World group inviting us to take part in the 2012 Bread for the World Offering of Letters.  So, fortuitously, the gospel reading addressed eating and community.  Sometimes pastors get lucky like that.  

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Easter - To Be a Child of the Light

            You know this song – sing it with me:

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

                        I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAAA.

            What if we wrote a verse about Thomas?  Would it go like this?

                        Don’t wanna be a doubting Thomas.

                        Don’t wanna be a doubting Thomas.

                        Don’t wanna be such a total wuss.

                        I just wanna be a sheep – BAAAAAA.

           

More than a Sentence

In addition to being Holy Week, last week saw the annual publication of articles from major newsweekly magazines addressing faith, the church, God, etc.  Andrew Sullivan's piece for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, "Christianity in Crisis," was a valuable contribution to the conversation about the end of Christendom and the new reality in which we who profess faith in Jesus find ourselves.  But I was dismayed by one sentence in particular: 

 For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. 

Sermon for Good Friday - "Behold the Life-Giving Cross"

O sacred head, now wounded,

with grief and shame weighed down,

now scornfully surrounded

with thorns, thine only crown;

O sacred head, what glory,

what bliss till now was thine!

Yet, though despised and gory,

I joy to call thee mine.

Sermon for Palm Sunday: Caught In The Act

Mark 12:1–34, 14.1-2

Jesus spoke to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the winepress, and built a tower. Then he rented it to tenant farmers and took a trip. ² When it was time, he sent a servant to collect from the tenants his share of the fruit of the vineyard. ³ But they grabbed the servant, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. ⁴ Again the landowner sent another servant to them, but they struck him on the head and treated him disgracefully. ⁵ He sent another one; that one they killed. The landlord sent many other servants, but the tenants beat some and killed others. ⁶ Now the landowner had one son whom he loved dearly. He sent him last, thinking, They will respect my son. ⁷ But those tenant farmers said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ ⁸ They grabbed him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

⁹ “ So what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others. ¹⁰ Haven’t you read this scripture, The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. ¹¹ The Lord has done this, and it’s amazing in our eyes? ”

¹² They wanted to arrest Jesus because they knew that he had told the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd, so they left him and went away.

Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent - "Bearing the Light"

            Let us pray:  God of light, you reveal all that we are, and we choose darkness.  You would love and redeem us, but we choose the false security of the lies we believe about ourselves.  Draw us to Your light.  Put us to death in our lies, and raise us up in truth, made new in the blaze of your glorious love.  Amen.

           

Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Lent: "Baptized for the World that Is

We celebrate a baptism today!  [Name] receives the gift of baptism tonight.  Baptism is water joined with God’s promise, connected to the story of the flood by our reading from 1^st Peter.  God is making a promise to [Name] tonight, a promise we are privileged to witness and which we will be pledged to support and cherish.  But this is not a safe, lovely promise of fuzzy rainbows, clouds and happy little cartoon Bible people.  God’s promise in baptism is perhaps best seen in what happens in our reading from Mark:  Jesus is baptized, and then is driven out into the wilderness.  When God claims us in baptism, God isn’t just inoculating us for the life to come: God is claiming us for the world that IS, now, a life in this time, in this world.  Baptism claims all of us into a covenant of steadfast love, God’s promise to God to have mercy, to forgive, to heal and to send us back out into the wilderness where the wild beasts live. 

An Evening with Shane Claiborne

 Tonight I had the rare privilege of meeting and listening to Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistable Revolution, Jesus for President and Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.  Here, posted without comment, are some of the many noteworthy things said throughout the evening.  What a night!

"This country spends $20,000 every second on war. Don't you think that's a little messed up?"

"We're gonna stop complaining about the church that we see and start becoming the church we dream of."

Quoting a judge who ruled in favor of The Simple Way against the City of Philadelphia: "If it weren't for people who broke the bad laws, we'd still have slavery."

"Everything in the world is going to push you away from suffering."

"How do we re-imagine our lives in the light of pain and suffering?"

[American soldiers in Iraq, asking why their Christian Peacemaker Team would want to go into Iraq to visit friends]: "No one crosses this border without a gun in their hands." [Response]: "Well, that's part of the problem, isn't it?"

Quoting Tertullian, "When Jesus disarmed Peter [at the garden of Gethsemane], he disarmed every Christian."

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Happily Weary, Ready for Rest

http://www.imagesbyjasonandtonja.com/

This seems to be the picture of a pretty happy guy.  Thankfully these days I'm the one who gets to be that guy in the picture.

"Half a Mile a Day"

So, worship at University Lutheran Center last night was stumbling, to put it kindest.  Halting singing - unfamiliar hymns - a discombobulated delivery of the sermon - there was a general feeling of unsteadiness to the entire affair.  I say this not to denigrate our musicians, the students or myself, but just to acknowledge what was there.  As one community member put it afterwards, "Worship isn't a 'performance' but every performer knows that some nights you're just off - it happens in churches, too."

Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany - "By Whose Authority?"

            A few years ago, my brother and his wife gave me a Stephen King book on tape for Christmas.  It was an early Stephen King book, so it’s got all the subtlety of a freight train; he goes straight for the throat with blood, guts, nightmares and boogeymen.  One of the stories involves a machine at a commercial laundry that is possessed.  The main characters try to drive out the demon in “The Mangler” without success, mostly because they don’t know the kind of demon they’ve got on their hands. 

Friday Five: Odds and Ends

Sally from RevGalBlogPals has had a crazy week. Just like all of us, I suppose.  :-)  She asks what, in the past week, has:

1. Inspired you

2. Challenged you

3. Made you smile

4. Made you cross/ made you want to weep

5.Kept you going?

To Ainsley, the Day AFTER Your Fifth Birthday

Sermon for the 1st Sunday after Christmas - "At the Name of Jesus"

Simeon said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant go in peace…for my eyes have seen your salvation…”  What did Simeon see?  How is it that Simeon knew, in one instant, that something of God was at hand?

Today is the first day of a new year.  Sure, in cosmic terms there’s little difference between yesterday and today, but we begin the new year in hope all the same.  What do we see?  What are your hopes?  Your fears?  Where might God meet those hopes and fears in this place, at this time, in this life you’re living?

Random: Posting a Friday Five

One possible way to get back to more regular posting is to use the memes like I had done in the past.  One of my favorites was the Friday Five at RevGalBlogPals - which is just random this week.  Count me in!

1.  I might actually reach my goal of 50 books read/heard/digested this year, if I work particularly hard over the next few weeks.  Unfortunately, some of the books on my upcoming "to read" list are rather thick, but they aren't particularly taxing, so we'll see if I get it done or not.  This year 50, next year 60, right?  In the next few weeks I'm going to go through my book list for the year and give short reviews of everything I've read - hopefully I'll get through it all before New Year's Day.

2.  The past few months have been pretty rough in the exercise department.  It's hard to find the energy when you're only getting 5-6 hours of sleep per night, but I don't know any other way to do what I need to do in a day.  Here's hoping sometime soon I can look back on the past few months as one of those "it was rough but we lived through it" times in our life.  At any rate, I'm back up to "hefty" size right now.  I'm hoping to drop five pounds in the next month by choosing my moments for holiday splurging wisely.  Task #1 on that list will be getting all the leftover cookies from last night's Open House out of the kitchen, right?

3.  I had a lovely hour reading by the fireplace at the Lutheran Center this morning, even if it did get interrupted a couple of times.  I haven't had time to sit and read at work in a long, long time, but there was time and a need for it today.  Hopefully I'll find some time to do more of it after finals week.

4.  Ainsley will be 5 in January.  That just doesn't seem possible.

5.  Alanna has to have her tonsils and adenoids removed on the 23rd of December.  On the good side, at least we get it in this year and insurance should cover most of the cost.  On the bad side, that means no trip back to Nebraska for the holidays.  After our wonderful Thanksgiving in Oregon on vacation, we were looking forward to quality time with the other half of the family for Christmas.  Here's hoping we get back sometime soon!

2011 Book List: December Update

Pretty much my idea of a perfect day.

For those with rambunctious children in church, let us pray to the Lord: Lord, have mercy.

My earliest memories of church revolve around two things.  I was four when the Lutheran Book of Worship was published, so I remember the old, worn red Service Book and Hymnal giving way to the new green book.  I think I learned to read going to worship with my family.  I know I learned to sing in church.  I remember standing and singing, first on the pew, then at my parents' side, holding the book and saying the creeds, the Lord's Prayer, the wonderful hymns.  Earth and All Stars!, Children of the Heavenly Father; Love Divine; All Loves Excelling; these are some of my happiest early memories.  That's the one thing I remember.  The other?  Being regularly dragged out of church by my parents for misbehaving.  Dreading Sunday mornings and getting dressed up, knowing at some point I would be in trouble.  Not wanting to go to church at all.

See this?  This is not my child.  Not even a little bit.

Sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost - "Having Nothing and Having Everything"

I have to make a confession: I really, really don’t like this parable. This story of the three slaves and their master raises as many questions as it answers. The profit-seekers walk away righteous and the one who plays it safe is cast out of his master’s house. There is nowhere to hide in this parable: the master is as harsh as he seems, the prudent slave is punished, and the rich get richer. But perhaps this is a chance for us to think about what we have and what we do not, and how our fears, prejudices and trust can shape the life we live. Let us pray: Heavenly Father, the life you’ve given us is one of uncertainty. We don’t know if we’ve been given seventy more years or seven. We can’t see to the end of the day, much less the end of time itself. But we know that you have blessed us with gifts beyond believing, and we ask you to help us number our days in wisdom and trust. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Why We SHOULD Celebrate Reformation Sunday

It's Reformation Sunday this week in Protestant circles, which for us Lutherans means we're into the season of questioning the benefit of the thing.  One particularly well-stated article was posted by Clint Schnekloth at LivingLutheran.com:

As it stands, Reformation Sunday is the only Sunday of the entire church year that commemorates a moment in the history of Christianity rather than a moment in the narrative of Scripture itself. It is elevated and idealized precisely because it is so unique. This needs to stop.