Claimed, gathered and sent

It's been a long time, hasn't it? I have been in the process of rehabilitation from back surgery in November and December 2020. The doctor said it could take up to a year to be completely healed and he wasn't kidding! I'm now back to work as pastor of St. Timothy Lutheran Church for only 15 hours/week and that I find exhausting. So...I haven't posted my first couple of sermons since coming back or my midweek reflections on the text, but that changes, as of today. This is what I sent to the people of St. Timothy. Gospel: John 11:32-44   32  When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33  When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34  He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35  Jesus began to weep. 36  So the Jews said, “See how he

Here are some thoughts about this Sunday's second lesson that I shared with the St. Timothy Lutheran Church family. Second Reading: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 10 And in the spirit [one of the angels] carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.   22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25 Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. 26 People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27 But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.   22:1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright a

That's right! This is the message I shared with St. Timothy Lutheran Church I preached the same message at St. Mark Lutheran Church with minor changes. The text is Ephesians 2:1-10. Humanity has a problem. That problem is death. Our situation was desperate. We too were dead. However, in today's reading from Ephesians, Paul is not speaking about physical death, but spiritual death. Paul's imagery is vivid concerning our former condition without Christ. We have the images of the corpse, the slave and the condemned prisoner demonstrating how bad things were. Each image portrays a devastating predicament which they are powerless to change. Helplessness pervades these first few verses. We followed the course of this world and the ruler of the power of the air, in other words, Satan. Paul has a solution to our spiritual death. It's summed up in two words: But God. It is upon these two words that everything hinges. But God is the game changer for u

This is the sermon I preached this past Sunday at Bethel Lutheran Church, Portville, NY. It is based upon John 11:1-45 .  “Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs...Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign” sang the Five Man Electrical Band. In John’s gospel, we don’t encounter parables, but there are plenty of signs. Jesus performed miracles, but they were not the big picture. They were signs, which do not point to themselves, but elsewhere, to Jesus. John’s gospel surprises us with frequent and personal expressions of Jesus’ self-disclosure. This week’s reading too is fraught with double meanings and further revelation of who Jesus is. The raising of Lazarus signals the beginning of the end of Jesus’ teaching and signs. It was the tipping point of Jesus’ relationship with the Jewish authorities and the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, putting into motion the events that led to Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus’ enemies shifted from generalized oppo

This is the gospel text for the sermon I preached this morning at Grace Lutheran Church.              I have a story to tell you. It’s a true story about sheep and goats and a shepherd. In the 1980s I lived in Bethlehem, in the Holy Land. The sight of shepherds and their sheep was common in our neighborhood. From the balcony of my second floor apartment, I could look down into a field where one young shepherd boy frequently took his sheep and goats. This boy had formed a caring and playful relationship with his flock, with one of the goats in particular. If you watched them for any length of time on any given day, this is what you’d see—a miniature soccer game going on between the boy and one of the goats. The boy would throw or kick the ball to the goat and the goat would butt it back to him. This would continue for quite a while. This shepherd had a connection with his flock—sometimes dutiful, sometimes stern, and sometimes playful.             We often have our romantic notions