Monday, March 25, 2013

Sermon Audio, 3/17/2013

Fifth Sunday of Lent, Lectionary Year C

Isaiah 43:16-21

On Saint Patrick's Day we were blessed with the opportunity to baptize a family of three, two young adults and a six-month-old baby. It was pretty awesome, and that's the context for this sermon.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Sermon Audio, 3/10/2013

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Lectionary Year C.

Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

The story known as the Prodigal Son. Such a familiar story to so many, yet there are always new ways to hear it. How can we be the prodigal church?

OR

In which I attempt to embarrass myself by singing Journey in the course of a sermon. (Mission accomplished!)

OR

In which I admit my unhealthy bias toward firstborn children (Lord, have mercy!)

Sermon Audio, 3/3/2013

Third Sunday of Lent, Lectionary Year C

Isaiah 55: 1-9

We read this passage from Isaiah 55 every year at the Vigil of Easter, as one of the great Hebrew Scripture stories of God's mercy and faithfulness through all of human history. Set alongside such rich, popular tales as the creation story, Noah and the flood, crossing the red sea, Ezekiel's dry bones, and Daniel's friends in the fiery furnace, what is it about this Isaiah reading that makes it an annual requirement at our most sacred gathering of the year?

Note: I think this sermon starts off slow but turns awesome toward the end. 

March 2013 Newsletter Article

Lutheran Church of the Savior newsletter article for March, 2013



My song is love unknown,
my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown that
they might lovely be
Oh, who am I that for my sake
my Lord should take frail flesh and die?

-          Samuel Crossman “My Song Is Love Unknown,” ELW 343


In the heart of our Lenten journey toward Jesus’ death and resurrection, I can’t help but pause and recognize what God has done for us. I’m generally pretty pessimistic about human nature. As many, many people have heard, one of my favorite sermon refrains is, “People are people, and people are dumb.” I mean this as a humorous way to point out something much darker, lifted up again for me this week in a blog post by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my very favorite writers.

In discussing the history of racism in America (found in this article, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/a-flawed-america-in-context/273546/, which I highly recommend), Coates notes that “the history of white racism and its attendent victims is horrifying, but it should be seen in scale.” He then quotes at length a history of the 30 Years War written by C.V. Wedgwood, in which Wedgwood describes the thousands of starving people dying in the streets, resorting to eating rats, raw horse, and even human flesh. The 30 Years’ War was Europe’s most deadly until the 20th century, and it is the war that made Lutheranism possible in its wake. If you claim either Lutheran identity or white western European ancestry, this war is your history. It certainly is my history.