#ELCA

[many-sparrows]

So much of my work rn is making me a direct audience to Palestinian Christians who are begging, pleading even, for our help. Christians, you do not get to look away from this. They are incredibly clear about what they need: ceasefire, prayers, protection. Do not look away, do not look away, do not look away.

[lovelyunknown]

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

This is My Song, a Christian hymn, verse 2

This made me weep today in church. In the rise of nationalism, the message of this hymn strikes me. How terrible the pride of superiority and apathy is! Lord, aid us to be peacemakers. Lord, make our hearts too uncomfortable to bear inaction. Lord, guide our love cast out the darkness. Amen.

[divinum-pacis]

Members of St. Lucas Lutheran Church participate in Toledo Pride in Toledo, Ohio, on Aug. 18, 2018. Chirag Wakaskar / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

[cazort]

As someone for whom both spirituality and religion (having a community and an institution with its own traditions, structure, and resources, centering around spirituality and a shared value system) is important, I am really frustrated at the direction religion has gone in U.S. society.

We all know and agree that there are really deep problems with organized religion in the U.S.

What pisses me off though is that, instead of people changing and reforming the religion while keeping the good aspects of it, I see people digging in their heels behind the bad aspects while throwing out the good.

As an example, I attended a Lutheran church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the year I lived there. I found the church meaningful and supportive in multiple ways. The church hosted events, including contradances, and I met some friends at events hosted in the building, during a time in my life where I was having trouble meeting people. I liked the services too. The pastor would give thought-provoking sermons that I felt challenged my value system and helped me to grow. Also, the church had a rich and ancient liturgy. People would sing hymns in four-part harmony, and many of the words were very old and poetic. The archaic language made me reflect on it in a way that helped me find meaning. I appreciated it on a lot of levels. It was a rich sensory experience and a comfortable one, and it inspired a sense of awe and wonder.

But there was an unfortunate negative side to this church. The congregation, not the pastor, harbored extensive homophobia. The pastor supported same-sex marriage and would sometimes preach about the need to welcome gay people into the church and support them. A majority of people in the congregation didn't like this, so they banded together and ousted him. Then young people like me started leaving the church.

And you know what the church did? They decided that they needed to change something about the church to try to attract and retain young people.

So they changed the liturgy.

They got rid of the ancient hymns with four-part harmony, the hundreds-of-years-old structure to the liturgy, and brought in a projector and started having the service be projected on powerpoint slides.

I hated this so much. I already had to watch powerpoint presentations during business meetings and I didn't want to be exposed to more of this during my off time. I hated the new music too; it was insipid and I was bored out of my mind singing stupid praise songs. Furthermore, I had bad mental associations with the new music, because I associated it with right-wing evangelical Christianity, box churches, and cult-like campus ministry groups. I had started going to this church because it offered the combination of rich, ancient traditions, being faithfully preserved by a community, with progressive, thought-provoking theology and value systems.

First the church rejected the progressive aspects of the value system, and then they rejected the aesthetic and cultural elements of the service that I found helped me to get in touch with deeper spiritual feelings.

I also find it interesting and relevant that the homophobia did not come from the top down, but the bottom up. The church was an ELCA church, which not long after this all went down, started officially recognizing same-sex marriage, and the denomination voted to explicitly welcome gay and lesbian people as early as 1991. It was the members of the congregation that ruined things.

Some years after I had moved away, I went back on Google maps and I saw that the church had closed, and its building sold and converted to condominiums. This made me really sad.

I remembered the time in my life, right out of college, where I had lived within walking distance to this church and walked to it. I remembered when it used to host contradances at night and I remember meeting my two friends who I made at those dances, who were important to me during a time in my life where I was vulnerable and had few friends. My life was hard enough even with that church. After all this stuff went down, I visited a number of other churches in the neighborhood but I didn't find another one that I liked as much. Although the church kept hosting the dances until it closed, the dance also has not been replaced. There is English Country Dancing and Scottish Country Dancing at two churches in the broader vicinity but no Contra Dancing anywhere near that neighborhood any more.

And all of this is gone and won't ever be replaced.

[buggie-hagen]

I think it odd when Lutherans use the word "progressive" for their churches and their theology. Like, there is like no other word that could fit us worse. We are not progressing. We are not even getting "better." We are rot gut sinners, dead and being raised from the dead.

[nnrc-elca]

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[ailelie]

"So when we sit in church and talk about how God loves everyone, but then claim that saying “black lives matter” is too political? That’s covering the light.

When we listen to God’s words according to the prophet Isaiah “is not this the fast that I chose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” but are opposed to prison reform? That’s covering the light.

When we say that humans are made in the Image of God, but then say like but it’s ok if you think queer people are an exception to that, like it’s ok we can just agree to disagree.  That’s covering the light. 

Instead Jesus says we need to put that light on a lamp post.

Not because it’ll get us some extra cool reward from God and grant us a place in heaven. No, you have that already.

We need to do it for the same reason you put a city on a hill:  so that others can see it and find it more easily, even when they’re still far off or they’re in a strange place and don’t know where they are.

They can see that light shining forth in you and your actions and that can help them experience God’s love.  And can know deep in their bones that that absolutely God’s love includes them."

~Vicar Vicky, Wicker Park Lutheran Church , 2/5/23

Full sermon is here:

[lovelyunknooo]

Have you ever made communion bread? I recommend it. Making bread is fun.

[market-insider]

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REX MEDICAL

[marcella-delaney]

The Jenny Lind Chapel in Andover, Illinois. Once belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod, a predecessor body of the ELCA, the chapel was named for a famous Swedish opera singer. The churchyard holds the body of Rev. Jonas Swensson, second president of the Augustana Synod, and his wife Maria.

Images and information not mine.

[many-sparrows]

Friends, does anyone here knit or crochet or make prayer shawls? I have heard from Pastor Sally Azar in Jerusalem and I will be sending her some prayer shawls for her congregants who have lost family in Gaza, and refugees as they trickle through the rafa border crossing, and maybe people sheltering at the Augusta Victoria Hospital and so on.

Do you want to participate, expressing solidarity and care for our siblings in Palestine? Does your church have a prayer shawl ministry that would like to contribute? (I'm looking particularly at you, clergy and div school friends). I will do everything in my power to facilitate this, I will literally pay your shipping costs if you need me to. I have a super fast crochet pattern I can send you.

Participation is open to all! Please let me know!

[sriramakrishnahospital]

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[stlukelutheranrichmond]

[laced-in-grace]

Resurrection Sunday 🌈🥳🗣💐🦋🌬🪦🧔🏾‍♀️🧕🏽

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A post shared by Paxton Stewart (@laced_in_grace_)

[buggie-hagen]

Sermon for Second Sunday after Epiphany (1/15/23)

Primary Text | 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

-------------------------------------------------------

Dear People of God,

            God is faithful. That is a promise he has made to you. When God makes a promise, God keeps it. We lose sight of this all the time. When things go wrong God is the first one we blame. Never mind all those other blessings that he has given us every day of our lives. Food and water, a place to live, peace in the land, family and friends, and all the necessities for this body and life (SC 2:2). In the moment, at the first sign of trouble, when the lights go out, we easily forget the good things God has given us. With our binoculars on we focus on the problems we have. Very few can be found who trust God when the hard times come. This happens because we use our eyes, our experiences, the voices in our head, to determine whether or not God will stay true. This leads many astray. It is not our eyes, but our ears that are necessary to know whether or not God keeps a promise. This is what he says to you today, in this moment, right now: “I am faithful.”

When God speaks God cannot lie or deceive. There is a quote of Martin Luther that is very helpful, he says: “We do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.” Therefore God’s faithfulness does not depend on our strength. Even if we are strong and healthy today, tomorrow we will be weak and ill. When it comes to our strength we are but grass in Wyoming—it doesn’t stay green long at all. God’s faithfulness does not depend on our conscience. We do not depend on what and how we think, what we feel, what we tell ourselves. Feelings come from inside, but they too are not dependable. We need something that comes from beyond ourselves. We need God’s word of promise. God’s faithfulness is also not determined by our experience. Going through the throws of depression, the suffering of cancer, losing one’s stability in life for any reason, in spite of all outward appearances, God does not abandon you. Our own person does not affect God’s faithfulness. That means, whether we are stubborn, or if we are a king, or if we are barely scraping by—God does not use that to determine whether or not he will keep faithful. Nor do our works determine the faithfulness of God. God does not care how religious we are, he doesn’t wait to see if we’re interested in him, he doesn’t put a ruler on you and determine if you are a good enough person. God is faithful because he has made his promise to you and he follows through on it. This God we have, the one who has made himself known in Jesus Christ, is a faithful God. He has given you his grace—his favor through faith in Jesus Christ—and that is the greatest thing ever to be given.

Nothing in all the world is more worth your time than this God who has called you. There’s an arcade game. The claw machine. You toggle the claw over the toy you would like, then it lowers and you hope it picks the toy you want and not another, and then you hope it doesn’t drop the toy too early on its way to you. It is a very finnicky and terrible game that no one should play. It’s meant not to work. I think maybe I’ve got a toy out of it once ever. But anyway, though I’ve lost the toy practically every time I’ve ever tried, the claw game is one that God wins every time. He grasps you in his word, he grasps you in baptism, he grasps you in communion, and he grasps you in the absolution. And he will not drop you. He will bring you to himself no matter what. He’ll bring you to himself even if your kicking and screaming. For it is up to him, not up to you.

And what is it that you have been called into? What has he chosen to bring you into? Where is our strange God putting you? It says, “into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9).  Ah, yes. That is why I bring up the word, baptism, communion, and absolution. These are the things that our Lord Jesus uses to attach himself to you. We can’t get ourselves out of the claw machine. We’re stuck. We depend on Another—the Faithful One. In the word, God takes his great claw—his claw that never fails, that is to say, the power of his gospel, and in his word proclaimed he grasps you, pulls you out of the miry bog, and places you on safe ground. When God calls you into the fellowship of his Son, when God chooses you with his word it cannot be undone. What then, does it mean to have fellowship with God’s Son, Jesus Christ? It means you have been made an “heir of all Christ’s blessings” (LC 2:52, n. 156). Whatever sin you have, whatever shame you carry--he takes it away from you and puts it on himself. In exchange, by sheer grace, he puts new clothes on you, his own righteousness. In this way, by the forgiveness of your sin, he will strengthen you to the very end, he will be the one to keep you blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:8).

This is the meaning of when John the Baptist pointed his long, bony finger and said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). He’s here now. Right now. In his word. The Lamb of God is here now in your baptism, in the word proclaimed, in the Lord’s Supper that goes into your mouth. For in all these God graciously approaches your ears and places his promise inside you. “I have called you. I have chosen you. I am faithful. I forgive you your sin. I bless you with eternal life. I have made you holy. No matter what you face in this world, what troubles you, what darkness you have gone through or will go through, no matter what you have done or not done, I will keep my promise. Do not depend on your eyes, depend on your ears. I am the Faithful One. I have used the strong power of my gospel and put you in the fellowship of my Beloved Son, Jesus Christ. I will not drop you; I will not leave you. My peace I give you now.”

[nnrc-elca]

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