Our Saviors Lutheran Church - Beldenville, WI

January 8, 2023

          Back in college, I had a friend who took a class on astronomy, and one of the assignments they had was to memorize the major constellations. It’s pretty amazing, really, because the same constellations they had to memorize were the ones named by the ancient Greeks over 2500 years ago! And honestly, if you took me out in the middle of the night, pointed me to the night sky, and told me to name as many constellations as I could—I could get about two. But centuries ago, knowing the stars was really crucial business.
          The magi—the “wise men,” as we’ve called them—were exactly those kinds of people. Their whole job was to track the stars. They were astrologers, charting where the stars and planets were in the heavens, and determining how the positions of heavenly bodies were affecting things here on Earth. So when a brand new star appeared in the sky, they consulted their books and determined that a new king had been born. The star was above Judea, so they knew a new king was born there. And they set out to find him.

This Sunday's sermon is a series of scripture readings and poetic reflections for the first Sunday after Christmas, which was January 1, 2023 this year.

December 25, 2022
Christmas Day

          Merry Christmas! Oh, it’s been quite a wait to be able to say those words on this day! It’s been a whole season of waiting, really. We marked the days for the last month, waiting for today. At our house, Hazel would move a star in the calendar one day at a time as we approached Christmas. Here in the church, we lit the Advent wreath, one candle at a time, one week at a time. I’m sure many, if not all, of y’all have some kind of countdown that was happening at your house—whether for the joy of Christmas or being ready for its business and stresses to be over with (I’ll leave that to you). But what is important is that the day is here, and Christmas has arrived!
          And this year is a little different from other years. This year, Christmas falls on a Sunday, an event that only happens every seven years or so. It’s pretty special, getting to wrap our Christmas celebrations with the hymns of praise and celebration together, and telling the story of Jesus on this holiday. But you’ll notice that the story we told this morning from the gospel was a bit different from the story we heard last night at Christmas Eve service.

December 24, 2022
Christmas Eve

          One piece of advice that I remember getting some time ago was that nothing good can happen after 2:00 am. I’ve also heard it pushed to midnight, but the sentiment is the same. It’s advice for people younger than me. No, but really. The later it is, the more likely you are to get into trouble. It’s a piece of advice that assumes something about people who are up late at night, what those people are up to, and what kinds of things can happen in the nighttime. And I think we have that basic assumption—nighttime isn’t the time for good, important, or helpful things to happen.
          But we also know, on some level, that isn’t always true. Good things can happen even under the cover of darkness. Things that make the world better have happened in the night. Think of Harriet Tubman, whose work with the underground railroad led to the freedom of countless slaves—always moved at night. European Jews under Nazi rule slipped away under the radar only when night came. Good news that can’t wait till morning, good news that changes the world, comes at night sometimes. Like when shepherds were in a cold December field, huddled with their sheep and defending them from roving predators, when the sky suddenly changed and they heard something amazing being said.

​December 18, 2022

           I love my girls. They are, to me, absolutely irreplaceable blessings that God has given me, and there is nothing in the universe that could possibly get in the way of my love for them. But as I was reading the gospel for this week, I wondered about how Joseph became the father of Jesus. Not in the “traditional” way, but he did become Jesus’s father. Joseph was like a stepfather, or an adoptive father, to the savior. I know that there are families in this congregation who have much more experience with what that looks like—whether it’s the remarkable circumstances of adoption that made you part of the family you are now, or marriage bringing stepkids or half-siblings together—whatever made your family look the way it does, you can see there is something remarkable, holy even, in the way Joseph rounds out the Holy Family.
         Joseph is this fascinatingly complex, completely silent character in the gospels. We know that he’s a righteous man, and from everything I can tell he was a guy who wanted a quiet life, didn’t rock the boat, liked things to stay simple. He was quiet, but steady. It seems like he wanted to get married, settle down, and live that peaceable life that let him stay in the background, doing his carpentry work and caring for his family. So it was quite a shock when he learned about Mary’s pregnancy. 

December 11, 2022 

          Have you ever seen one of those videos that sometimes pops up on the Facebook feed (or whatever social media you use) where it’s just a video of someone making something? It might just be my algorithm, but I’ve seen pretty awesome videos of people building benches from the log to the finished product, or someone putting together a Lego Titanic. But recently I saw this amazing video, fitting with the holiday season, of a person who made a whole Victorian mansion-style gingerbread house. And it was amazing! All I could think the whole time was how patient this person was. How dedicated they were to the eventual outcome of all their hard work. And I’ve got to say, it looked amazing at the end.
          Patience, even though we’ll talk about what a good thing it is to have, isn’t really encouraged by the culture around us. Have you noticed? We have fast food that’s meant to be almost completely ready by the time we pull around in the drive thru. We have the constant push for faster and faster high-speed internet—the new fiber optic cable is being laid—and we want it now. There are instant credit checks, one-click purchase options online, highways to get us there faster, and two-day shipping to get it to us faster. Patience is sort of a lost art in the midst of all that.

​December 4, 2022

          My neighbor and I have an understanding about our mailboxes, which are located next to each other, but across the street from our houses. See, every spring and into the summer, there’s this woody shrub that has been growing up in the midst of our mailboxes. And we take turns, through the summer, to occasionally cut down the shoots of this shrub so that we can get to our mailboxes easier. But the shrub just keeps growing back, and I know that if we could just pull it up by its roots, we wouldn’t have to take turns cutting it down anymore. But the roots remain. So the shoots keep growing.
          It’s a constant reminder to me that when God wants something to grow, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’s going to grow. I can cut this shrub down to nubbins but because God has decided its roots will sustain it, that thing keeps growing back. And that’s true of the prophecy we heard from Isaiah this morning, the prophecy about a shoot growing from the stump of Jesse.

November 13, 2022

          Today’s gospel opens with how people around Jesus were gushing over how amazing the Temple looked. It was a spectacular architectural marvel, really. The Temple was over 150 feet tall, made with stones sometimes fifteen feet long. It was decorated with the kind of fervor and splendor you’d expect from the physical location of God’s presence on Earth. All around the Temple was the Temple Mount—a huge platform bigger than the Roman Forum—and that was ringed with 100-foot-high walls. The whole thing had taken eighty years to renovate. It was, honestly, an amazing sight to behold.
          But all this gawking and fawning of the Temple happened right after Jesus had spent several chapters teaching about God’s gracious provision for the poor; about the justice of God that lifts the oppressed; about the call God gives to serve faithfully, not just to go through the motions of sacrifices. As soon as he heard the crowds complimenting the Temple, he issued the warning that it was all going to come crashing down. Not a stone would be left on stone.

All Saints Sunday
November 6, 2022

          All Saints Day is celebrated in different ways around the world. One celebration I’ve loved for a long time is the Mexican Day of the Dead. There’s something about the way the holiday turns death into this bright, flowery, multicolored experience that fascinates me. In 2017, Pixar put out a movie that talked about the Day of the Dead, Coco, which followed the story of a boy named Miguel who magically finds himself in the land of the dead as he pursues his dream of becoming a musician like his great-great-grandfather.
          The whole movie is a phantasmagoria of colors and songs that gives this particular view of the afterlife where the dead are sustained by the offerings of their living relatives and friends. Famous people like Miguel’s purported great-great grandfather, a famous musician, had a giant mansion on a hill and enough offerings from his adoring living fans to throw a massive party. Meanwhile, a guy named Hector who agrees to help Miguel lives with his friends, half-forgotten, in shacks and shanties on the edges of the land of the dead. And it’s an interesting take, because in so many ways, the land of the dead looks remarkably like the world of the living, once you take away the fact that they’re all talking skeletons. 

Reformation Sunday
October 30, 2022

          Zacchaeus is an interesting character in the gospel story. He is only mentioned this one time, in this one chapter, only in Luke’s gospel—and yet, we all know about him! It’s crazy what a simple song can do to make something or someone easy to remember. Like the smell of lutefisk, a catchy tune lingers. And when we learn it in our childhood, it really sticks! But here we are, hearing the story of Zacchaeus—what do we know about him?
          Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector of the region in and around Jericho. Now, obviously that meant he was in charge of collecting taxes—but not like some regional IRS agent. Instead, Roman taxes were “farmed out.” Rome would invite the richest men of the region to bid on how much money they could raise in taxes, and whoever could raise the most was given the contract—and Roman power—to collect those taxes. They put down the cash to cover the whole tax bill for a region, and in return they were given the legal right to collect that tax money from the population and pocket it. Plus, they could collect whatever more they could get away with on top of that. Zacchaeus was the guy in charge of that racket.