Lent and Holy Week 2013

Lent and Holy Week 2013

Our journey with Jesus to the cross and through the resurrection begins this year on Transfiguration Sunday, February 10^th. That morning we will “bury the alleluia.” Alleluia is the word the church uses to best express our celebration and joy we feel at the rising of our savior. That morning our Sunday School kids will create an alleluia banner, and during our children’s sermon we will “bury” it, keeping the alleluia in a box on display as a reminder of our buried hope until Easter morning, when we will open the box and again rejoice in shouting our alleluias to the heavens. This ritualized loss of an important word becomes part of our communal Lenten discipline. After worship we will also burn palms this morning to make ashes for Ash Wednesday, so bring in last year’s palms if you have them. Did you know that Pastor Andrew has used last year’s palms as office decoration ever since last Palm Sunday? 

Next comes Ash Wednesday, when we will supplement our usual 7pm Ash Wednesday worship at LCS by joining with our friends from Sunnyside UMC to offer Ash Wednesday worship all day long in various locations around Kalamazoo. Stay tuned for details of times and locations, but the idea is to bring worship to the people where you live and work and spend your day, and to be a public witness to the power of God’s love in our lives. 

November 2012 Newsletter Article

The following is reprinted from Lutheran Church of the Savior's monthly newsletter.

Treasure, too, you have entrusted,

gain through pow’rs your grace conferred;

ours to use for home and kindred,

and to spread the gospel word.

Open wide our hands in sharing,

as we heed Christ’s ageless call

healing, teaching, and reclaiming

serving you by loving all.

-          Robert L. Edwards, , “God, Whose Giving Knows No Ending,” ELW 678

In the past year, I have received so many blessings that I barely know where to begin. Sarah and I had just finished our amazing wedding and moved to our rented house in Battle Creek to start the often-hilarious process of transforming from two independent adults into one family. We had a baby, already three months old, who loves to smile and laugh (taking after his mother) and stare at brightly-colored moving objects (after his father, of course). I am thankful to have received six weeks of paid parental leave, time to learn now to be a dad, to change diapers and teach my kid to smile and tell him about how much fun it will be for him to mow the lawn in a few years.

God has also richly blessed Lutheran Church of the Savior. We have supported the Free Store from dream to reality. We have greatly increased our number of volunteers there and at our nearby Loaves and Fishes pantry, and have given record support to local ministry partners like Kairos House and Ministry With Community. We have welcomed new visitors, baptized babies, and commended into God’s eternal care some of our most beloved older members. We hosted our first-ever Family Fest in September, gathering some 70 people of all ages for fun, games, and elephant ears. We paid off our mortgage just last month, and began completing long-awaited building upgrades while planning how to better use our resources for mission and outreach. We deepened our relationship with our neighbors at Sunnyside United Methodist Church, from service to the community to the most vibrant, wonderful Easter Vigil worship Kalamazoo has ever seen.

2012 Lent 14: Holy Week

Holy Week is Coming Soon!

This year Holy Week is the first week of April, and Lutheran Church of the Savior will be celebrating Palm Sunday / Sunday of the Passion and the Three Days, or the Triduum, of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter on Saturday evening. Each of these worship experiences is unique and features ancient ritual in current expression. 

·         Palm Sunday / Sunday of the Passion (4/1/12) will begin with a procession of the congregation featuring new Eco-Palms, fair-trade plants that benefit Lutheran World Relief, handed out by our Sunday School kids. We'll stay with the Palm longer than usual, allowing that celebration to shape our entire gathering until after Holy Communion, when we will turn to an interactive reading of the Passion of Our Lord. As if all that is not enough, this is also the Sunday we will welcome BenJammin and Analisa Gauthier to help lead music. Our plan is that they will join us one Sunday morning per month, enhancing our worship experience with instruments and interactivity.

·         Maundy Thursday (4/5/12) will again include the ancient ritual of foot-washing, emphasizing our humility before we partake in Holy Communion as Jesus and his disciples did on the night in which he was betrayed. This year we will partner with Sunnyside UMC on this day. Sunnyside will host a noon Maundy Thursday gathering, while LCS hosts one at 7:00pm

2012 Lent 12: Love and Justice Are Our Future Because They Are God's Present

Below is the manuscript of the sermon I preached on 3/25/12 at Lutheran Church of the Savior. Normally I don't publish sermon scripts because I preach from notes or scribbles, but this week I have a nearly-passable script. I even stuck to it, though certainly not word-for-word. The text is Jeremiah 31:31-34, which is quoted in its entirety (NRSV) in the body of the sermon.


1.    This past Monday, my wife Sarah and I were at a continuing education event in Chicago, listening to Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Nadia founded House maybe three or five years ago, and it’s the hippest (hipster-est?) church in the whole ELCA. Anyway, at one point on Monday, the bishop of Metro Chicago Synod got up and asked her a question about where her congregation is going. Her response really stuck with me: “I’m good at the present. I’m not very good at the future,” she said, which is quite a way to tell a bishop to buzz off. I laughed & thought, Who IS ‘good at the future’? What would that even mean?

2012 Lent 7: Gathering for Worship

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to worship God and celebrate Holy Communion in three very different settings.

The first, of course, was the regular Sunday gathering of Lutheran Church of the Savior. We instituted some changes to our worship on Sunday in an effort to increase the visibility and experience of some central parts of our gathering. Our Assisting Minister carried our lectionary book - the book from which we read Scripture together - in our opening processional, following the Cross, to demonstrate the centrality of the Word of God to our gathering.

Later, our ushers also carried the elements for communion - bread, wine, grape juice - in our offering procession, along with monetary gifts. The idea here was to recognize that not only our money, but our whole lives and all of creation are part of our offering to God. Grains from the earth and fruit of the vine, fashioned by human labor into bread and wine, all come from God. We offer the first fruits of the earth and of our labors, our time and our money, to God the giver of all good things.

2012 Lent 4: Get Out!

Get out of the building, I mean.

Today marked the soft (as opposed to grand) opening of the Free Store of Kalamazoo, a new ministry on the east side of Kalamazoo Lutheran Church of the Savior shares with some of our local United Methodist partners - Sunnyside UMC, Stockbridge UMC, and Chapel Hill UMC. I had the chance to volunteer today, meeting folks, building and tearing down clothes racks, breaking down boxes, and whatever other behind-the-scenes and skirting-around-the-edges-of-the-scenes work folks could find for me. As much as I love being a pastor, leading and doing that important work, I also love the opportunity to just be a part of the team, helping out where necessary and supporting the leaders of this wonderful ministry.