Sermon for Easter Evening - "Ever Walk With Me, Lord."

Preaching Texts

On the third day, after he’d risen from the dead, Jesus…took a walk. 

Sermon for Maundy Thursday - "Belonging in Love"

Preaching Texts

God uses the church to show the world what God’s reign looks like.  The church observes Holy Week to remind itself of the full story of Jesus Christ, the one who we follow, worship, and adore. 

Jesus, Self-Awareness and Stones In Need of Dropping

³The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, ⁴they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. ⁵Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” ⁶They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. ⁷When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. ⁹When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.  John 8.3-9

Ash Wednesday - Giving Up

"Create in me a clean heart, O God,
     and renew a right spirit in me."  Psalm 51.10

Gerhard Forde, one of my professors at seminary, was famous for saying, "Whenever I get the urge to do a good work, I lie down until the urge passes."  I've been thinking about that a lot this Ash Wednesday.

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany - "Foundations"

Preaching Texts

How many of you have seen a sign like this in the various places you’ve worked or studied so far in your life?

I Honestly Don't Know If I Can Do This

So here's a visual representation of the last twenty-four hours:

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany - "God-Centered Life"

            I hung a BC comic strip on the door of my study at my last call, in Minnesota.  When we moved, I accidentally ripped it in half, and without thinking I just threw it away.  Now I can’t find it online, but I remember that it said, “ser-mon: An inspired message directed mainly at those who are not in attendance.”  It’s been informing how I preach ever since I first read it, laughed out loud, and then winced. 

2011 Books: The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Eleven years ago I fell in love one long, hot summer.

FW was away at her second round of Army Reserve training, and I was working for the summer on the grounds crew at Luther Seminary.  No classes, just hours upon hours riding a lawnmower, moving sprinklers and the like. Work was done every afternoon at 4:30, which left a lot of daylight hours to fill.  On a whim, due to the advice of a friend, I picked up The Eye of the World, the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  Within a few pages, I knew I'd found something really, really wonderful.  I spent many of that summer's late afternoons on an old wooden church folding chair outside our apartment, smoking cigarettes and devouring the first few books in the series. 

Minnesota Blogger Con-Fab Thingy (In Which I Forget Proper Documentation, But Consume 1X1023g Saturated Fat. YUM)

I'm a good blogger, I'm a bad blogger.  But you knew this already.

2011 Books: The Inextinguishable Symphony by Martin Goldsmith

My goodness, am I ever on a roll for books this year.  First Driftless by David Rhodes, now The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany by Martin Goldsmith.  Both are books you should read (or hear, if you're doing audiobooks like me) soon.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany: "All the World's A Stage?"

Preaching Texts

         Did any of you have to memorize Shakespeare when you were in high school?  I did.  Mrs. Sundell made us memorize a few things, and one that has stuck with me over the years is the soliloquy from “As You Like It:”  “All the world’s a stage / and all its men and women merely players / they have their exits and their entrances / and one [person] in [their] time plays many parts…

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

This was the weekly email to our students in LCM this week.  The Quadrennial Review process is something I'd love to see required of all ELCA churches, and I wish I'd known how to do it at the congregation I served prior to this call.  Anyone care to share review procedures at their own congregations?  

Our LCM Board spent Saturday morning and afternoon beginning the Quadrennial Review process for our campus ministry.  Every four years, each campus ministry in the ELCA goes through a review process where we look at the previous four years, evaluate what's gone well and what hasn't, look at our context to see if we have a good view of the environment to which we are called, and (I might say, most importantly) identify a few strategic goals for the next four years. 

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany: "Unitas, Libertas, Caritas"

             If you hang around long enough in the church, you start to hear a lot of things more than once.  Some of us pastors call it the book of Hezekiah: the stuff that isn’t in the Bible, but sounds like it is.  “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints.”  “The gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  “Those who sing pray twice.”  One that I heard quite often during seminary was this:  in necessariis, unitas; in dubiis, libertas; in omnibus, caritas.  “In necessities, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”  According to Wikipedia, it is often misattributed to St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the great early theologians of the church, but the earliest known use of the phrase was by a  Croatian archbishop in the 1600s, more than a thousand years after Augustine was dead and buried. 

Random Wednesday Is Random

M.C. Escher.

This is a pretty good approximation of my life right now.

Just a few random observations throughout the day today.

• I watched the movie "Shutter Island" Monday night.  I thought it was really good, especially after overcoming a clumsy first act.  Beloved would have hated it, for reasons I won't go into here, as they'll spoil the movie for those of you who haven't seen it.  But when I went to check out the book at our library this morning, I couldn't find it.  The library computer insists there are copies in the building, but not on any of the shelves on which it's listed.  Considering the movie deals with our perceptions and the nature of identity and reality, I found the experience just a bit unsettling.  Which, I'm sure, would make the author very happy to know - any time art impacts life that deeply, the artist should be proud.
• It's no secret I'm quite the europhile.  Matter of fact, if I hadn't met Beloved during seminary, I might have tried to find a call in Germany or Ireland.  I believe very deeply in the roundabout, government-run health care, pension and social benefits, and much of what I've seen in trips to Ireland, the UK and Germany.  That having been said, I stopped reading Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan about halfway through.  I agreed with his central argument:  the European way of life, particularly the German version, is a far better fit for people like myself.  But his writing was so convoluted, and his argument so incredibly subjective and lacking statistical analysis (other than the ones that prove his argument, of course) that I just kept getting more and more annoyed.  It's bad enough when I find someone with whom I disagree annoying; it's much worse when it's someone who tends to see things the way I do!
• If you're looking for good "sit in my office and get lots of work done" music, the Palestrina channel on Pandora is a good place to start.  Sometimes I think I was born 450 years too late.  Then I go use the toilet, take a drink out of the tap without wondering if it'll kill me, and give my kid some medicine instead of wondering if she'll survive her most recent infection, and I remember why I've got it so good now.
• The switch to Sunday nights for worship is mainly going well.  I particularly enjoy the opportunity to break bread together, worship, then spend time around the fire talking theology (our schedule is Sunday Night Supper at 5:00, Worship at 6:00, Fireside Theology at 7:30).  I'm surprised at how much I enjoy having Sunday mornings free at the moment, but I'm also nervous that none of the congregations I've contacted about supply preaching have even responded to my queries.  And, as you might expect, our student numbers have dropped for worship.  More promotion seems in order, and as with most changes, steadfast patience during the uncomfortable first days.
• I went for my first run in over a month Monday morning.  Chris' post about running was so inspirational I decided my kvetching about running this year just needs to stop.  Now I read that he's struggling a bit, too.  This is the running life: you can only enjoy it one or two strides at a time, it seems. This could also be a metaphor for real life, not just the part of it I spend schlepping my fat ass around Ames.
• Tonight will be our second week using the "Prayer Around the Cross" liturgy from Susan Briehl and Tom Witt.  Last week I put together a very basic cross using planter boxes filled with sand, and arranged kneeling pads around the cross.  Unfortunately, there's some sort of short in our lighting in the sanctuary, so the central floods remain lit at all times.  Hopefully this will be fixed tonight and we'll be able to worship by candlelight alone.  I hope the students were as moved by the experience last week as I was - this is a wonderful addition to our worship life.

2011 Books: Driftless by David Rhodes

Every once in a while, you take a chance on a book without having a single solitary reason for doing so.  No one recommended it, no one mentioned it, you've never heard of it, but something about it grabs you.  That's rare for me - I usually have a list of recommendations far longer than I have time to even contemplate.  But last week I took a chance, and was rewarded with an even less common experience:  a literary surprise. 

Driftless is David Rhodes' first novel in 30 years.  He came back strong, if you ask me.  This was an incredible novel from start to finish.  Rhodes creates characters so accurate, so pitch-perfect you'd swear he's writing a biography of Words, Wisconsin and not fiction.  Any resident of any small upper Midwest town will recognize and appreciate the honest portrayal of small town living Rhodes composes.  Driftless is neither petty nor apologetic:  it is populated with characters who feel as solid as the dirt, trees and hills for which the novel is named. 

It's not just the characters that make this novel wonderful, however - the story is also worthy of praise, from the laugh-out-loud moments (of which there are several) to the heart-stoppers (only one or two, but they are whoppers). 

I won't say more so as to preserve the story for you to enjoy.  Driftless is the finest novel I've read since The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and I hope to see it on your reading list soon, friends and neighbors. 

Grace & peace,
Scott

Campus Ministry News - December 2010

Every semester we send out a newsletter reporting on the semester at Lutheran Campus Ministry.  This year has been particularly...tumultuous, and writing this fall's newsletter article has been difficult for me.  This morning I finally forced myself to sit down and put it on paper. 

Familiar Voices

I subscribe to the Writer's Almanac - you should go sign up before reading the rest of this.  Go ahead - I'll wait.  

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent: "What Do You Expect?"

Preaching Texts

“He emerged from the metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.” [1] 

Desktop Diaries

Jan Edmiston at A Church for Starving Artists posted an interesting thing last week - a picture of her desk, with no tidying or dressing up done.  Apparently NPR presented Oliver Sack's desk on Science Friday last week, and she was inspired.  I thought it sounded like a fun thing with which to play along, so here's my Desktop Diary for today.

Like Jan, I don't do a ton of writing in my office.  Work, yes, but the kind of thing during which I don't mind being interrupted.  Worship planning, professional reading, administrivia, phone calls and setting up schedules, that sort of thing.  Occasionally, because my library is in my office, I'll do my preparatory exegetical work in my office, but during afternoons when I know that my train of thought is unlikely to be derailed. 

There are a few things I love about my office.  First is the light - in the afternoon, like you see here, there's no need for the fluorescent lights and their "just-below-audible" buzz.  Even in the morning, with my four windows I only need the lights if it's cloudy or rainy.  Second, the comfy furniture.  I have two recliners, one overstuffed chair and my desk chair, all of which are good places to spend a lot of time.  I've never understood why you would want to furnish an office with chairs in which no one feels comfortable.  Third, the plants.  I'm developing a little bit of a green thumb at the church; that is, when I can keep my youngest from ripping the plants out of their pots.  The peace lilies you see will soon be going into the big pots and back into our sanctuary, and hopefully we can keep little fingers away from them until they're good and toughened up.

Anyway, that's where some of the magic happens.  Tomorrow or Friday I'll send a picture of my sermonating table at Cafe Milo - I know, I know, you'll be waiting with bated breath.  All three of you.  Until then -

Grace & peace,
Scott

The Feel of Peace

Every night when we put the girls to bed, we lay down with each of them for a short while; five, ten minutes, tops.  This started with Ainsley, who would cry for close to an hour if we didn't stay with her for a little bit after we read a book, said our prayers and hugged and kissed good night.  Ten minutes of snuggling with your toddler is a far better use of our time than listening to one or both of them scream for thirty minutes.