In the summer of 2014, I had the opportunity to travel to Israel and Palestine for a seminary class. It was simply amazing to see the Temple walls, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, and so many other places.

One day we were near Jerusalem and Bethlehem (they’re only about six miles apart), and it was a dry, rocky, desert-like area. The stones were blindingly white. Pastor Zelt, who preached for my ordination service, told a story about how when he was in that same spot a few years earlier, a shepherd emerged from the hills, leading a flock of sheep and he’d stop every once in a while at random places. Pastor Zelt came to see that he was leading them to small patches of crab grass poking up between the rocks. The shepherd was leading them to the sparse green pastures in this wilderness of rocks.

This Sunday we begin a new Bible study on the book of Psalms. We are starting with the most well-known Psalm, number 23. It’s a Psalm about God’s provision and guidance.

This Sunday is also Pledge Sunday, or Stewardship Sunday. We’ll be taking some time to consider the gifts God has given us and commit to using those gifts for the extension of God’s kingdom.

This Sunday may be challenging for you. You may feel some guilt about your giving practices of the past. You may feel like you haven’t contributed as you would like. Or you may feel some indignation toward others who “aren’t giving their fair share.”

I’d like to offer some words of encouragement and a challenge to both groups. If you haven’t been giving regularly and feel like there is no way you could give a tithe (10% of your income), I understand. I’ve been there. I’d encourage you to start small. Commit to giving 1% of your income in 2019, try for 2% in 2020, increasing the percentage until you can begin tithing. If you don’t like math, start with $10 a week or $50 a month. Establish the habit and discipline of giving, no matter the dollar amount. Your salvation is not in question here. We are simply seeking to follow Jesus and be wise stewards of His gifts.

If you have been a regular tither for your entire life and are frustrated with others, remember that we are the body of Christ which means we bear one-another’s burdens. If our brothers and sisters in Christ cannot give as much as they wish, we help the church bear their struggle by giving more. Some of us have been blessed to bask in God’s green pastures with few financial worries. Others are moving from patch of grass to patch of grass or from paycheck to paycheck. God is providing for us all. If you have been tithing regularly, consider giving 11% or 12.5% in 2019, bearing the burden of your brothers and sisters in Christ who cannot tithe right now. If God has richly blessed you in some way financially, consider giving a one-time gift along with your tithe. Your salvation won’t be made more secure by giving more money, but you will be helping your neighbors who are in need.

If you don’t know how much you can give, go to the Lord in prayer. Seek His wisdom. If you’d like to have a conversation with me about this, my door is open, my phone is working, and I can answer emails.

No matter how much you are able to give, please pray for the future and ministry of First Lutheran Church and Preschool. There is so much we can do to share the love of Christ in our area. Pray that God would bless our giving and open up a door for us to share His Gospel with others.

God’s blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy

501 years ago, Martin Luther posted 95 points of debate on a church door in Wittenberg. This was not an extraordinary event. People in his position of professor posted such things often and debated colleagues on the points in a public event. If you were to read the famed 95 theses, you would find many of them to be very disagreeable to the Lutheran faith of today. In 1517, Luther had not fully articulated a theology of salvation by grace through faith on account of Christ, but the wheels were in motion for a sweeping reform to the religious landscape of Europe and beyond.

Luther’s contribution of writings is vast and varied. We still use his Small Catechism in Confirmation instruction. I read dozens of his essays, sermons, and books while at seminary. And we sing his hymns with frequency. His most famous hymn is “A Mighty Fortress,” a paraphrase of Psalm 46, which we’ll be studying in Bible class after worship this Sunday.

The most familiar line of Psalm 46 is found at the beginning of verse 10, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Be still. Be calmed. Allow yourself to be taken care of. Allow God to be God.

It’s not easy to be calm and still in today’s world. People have overflowing schedules of work and play so that many of us end up trying to multitask just to fit everything in. There is often little time for rest and reflection.

October is nearly over. November will fly past. Before you know it, Christmas will be upon us with all of its joys and anxieties. I’d invite you to take a deep breath this week. Take a look around at life, view the sunset and the stars, and remember we have a God who is with us and protects us in the midst of uncertainty.

God’s blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy

When I was on vacation last week, I got to spend some time with three of my friends and classmates from seminary. Such time got me thinking about perceptions and life stages, about how I have been viewed in the various stages of my life. In seminary, I was seven years older than the majority of my classmates. I was an old, wise man to them. I was the guy who had seen the world and could offer different perspectives on the Scriptures or a piece of doctrine.

Here at First Lutheran, nobody views me as the wise, old man. I’m perceived by most of you as young.

As a congregation, you get different glimpses into who I am than my classmates at seminary had. They saw me in the classroom, on the basketball court, in the cafeteria, and occasionally at a brewery. You see me at the altar, in meetings, and at hospital bedsides.

I haven’t become a different person, and yet you can perhaps see how the version of me that you have seen is vastly different from the one my seminary classmates have come to know. Likewise, I’m guessing that you are perceived differently by your closest friends than perhaps you are perceived by other congregation members.

Our God has called us into relationships. Trust gets built and earned in these relationships through quality time, and I’d love to spend more quality time with you all. If you’d like to get coffee or lunch sometime, let me know. If I invite you to coffee or lunch sometime, I hope you’ll say yes.

As I noted in a sermon a few weeks ago, the early church devoted itself to fellowship, to communion, to eating and drinking together, to deep relationships that strengthened the church. Let’s follow their example.

God’s blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy

I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified, and kept me in the one true faith, just as He calls, gathers, enlightens, sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.

This Sunday we celebrate a feast day entitled “St. Michael and All Angels.” We don’t celebrate this every year, only when the specific day (September 29) falls on a Sunday. There is a lot of confusion about angels in our society today, so I thought it would be appropriate to address a few myths about angels that are commonly spread around in today’s world.

Myth 1 – When you die, you become an angel.

This seems to be the assumption of every movie, television show, and cartoon out there. I blame the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life for the prevalence of this. Angels are not dead humans. Angels are created beings that serve various functions in heaven and on earth. The word “angel” means “messenger.” This is one of their primary tasks. We see angels appear regularly through the Bible and very often they are delivering messages from God to God’s people.

When we die, our hope is not to become angels. Our hope is to be raised from the dead as human beings. When Jesus is raised from the dead, He has a resurrected, perfected, human body. He is not an angel. The same thing that happened to Jesus will happen to us when Jesus returns.

Myth 2 – Everyone has their own, personal, guardian angel.

I’m not saying this couldn’t be true, but there is no biblical evidence to support this idea. Yes, some angels are charged with spiritual battles on earth that involve our protection. We see this in the book of Daniel and a few other places. Yes, some angels could easily be called "guardian angels," but that doesn't mean each person or even each Christian throughout the world has their own guardian angel only charged with guarding one person. God’s protection of you may certainly involve the use of His angels. But never forget it is God’s protection. He is the one who deserves the credit, glory, and praise.

Myth 3 – Angels are cute.

In the last 50 years, angels have become this cutesy, kitsch decoration item. They look comfortable and harmless. The picture we have in the Bible of angels is quite different. Angels are often depicted with six or eight wings, and every time an angel shows up in the Bible, people are terrified. As Luke writes in the Christmas story, “And an angel of the Lord appeared to [the shepherds], and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.” The first thing out of the mouth of whichever angel appears is, “Fear not!” or “Don’t be afraid.”

I’m not saying you should throw out decorations or anything of the sort. I just want to make sure what we are passing down to the next generation is not from TV or some marketing scheme, but rather from God’s Word. Angels are created beings that serve God. Humans are also created beings that serve God. But we are in fact very different from angels.

God’s richest blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy

This past week we celebrated VBS Sunday. The kids and adult servants led us in a service of worship and praise that reminded us to remember that God is good in every circumstance.

Since we deviated from our regular scheduled programming of Sunday mornings, we missed out on one of the most familiar stories in the New Testament: The Good Samaritan. Since the Scripture reading system we use for worship continues on with new readings for this week, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on that Good Samaritan story.

The story Jesus tells in Luke 10 is in answer to a lawyer’s question – “And who is my neighbor?”

A man falls among robbers, is beaten, and left for dead. Three people come upon the man. Two of these, a priest and a Levite, pass by on the other side and do not help the beaten man. A third person stops and cares for the beaten man, showing him mercy. The one who shows mercy is a foreigner, an outsider, a Samaritan.

Have you ever wondered why the priest and the Levite didn’t help the beaten man? I don’t think they are acting from indifference or hatred. Their actions stem from an ideology that says upholding the law is more important than helping a neighbor. You see, if the beaten man had died and the priest and Levite touched the corpse, they would have been unclean. They would have broken their religious law. The priest and Levite are doing everything they can to uphold the law, but they do so at the expense of this beaten man, even at the expense of his life.

Two thousand years after this story, we are still asking the question – “And who is my neighbor?” Oftentimes, we ask it for the same reason as the lawyer in the story. We are seeking to justify ourselves. We are seeking to call our current behavior right and good and in no need of changing.

But Jesus tells us the same story. Jesus tells us exactly what He tells the lawyer: You go and likewise show mercy. You go and have compassion for those who need it. You go and be a neighbor.

Though we live in a different time and place, we can still hurt our neighbors by our inactivity, by passing by on the other side. We can still get ourselves into trouble by trying to hold to an ideology rather than showing mercy.

Your neighbor is anyone in need of mercy, regardless of race, ethnicity, legality, language, clothing, or religious belief. I hope we can prove to be neighbors like the Good Samaritan.

Over the past few weeks, we have talked about stewarding our talents and skills, our relationships, our time, and this week we talk about financial resources.

Oftentimes stewardship reminders are heard simply as pleas for people to “give more money.” But my responsibility as your pastor is not to fundraise more dollars. My responsibility is to walk with you as you grow in faith. And (whether you want to hear this or not) how you steward the financial resources God has given you is a pretty good indicator of your (hopefully growing) faith.

God has put each of us into different situations where we have varying financial resources as well as varying responsibilities that demand portions of our financial resources.

Some people are given massive amounts of financial resources and are able to give vast quantities to the church and other non-profit organizations without ever being in any financial danger.

Others (probably most of us) have been blessed financially, but we still have to be careful about the money we spend. We can’t go out to eat for every meal. We can’t be on vacation constantly. We don’t have an infinite amount of resources. We have to be wise with what we’ve been given.

And there are others who are truly struggling financially, who aren’t sure how they are going to pay their bills this month, who can’t fill their gas tanks entirely full and have to hover between quarter and half a tank in perpetuity.

No matter where you land on this spectrum, faithfulness in giving is part of the Christian life. That doesn’t mean that everybody has to give 10% (commonly called tithing) as a hard and fast rule. For a person struggling financially 1% of their income may be too much. Faithfulness in giving might mean starting to give at a dollar a week or five dollars a month. For a person who has been abundantly blessed financially, 10% might not affect them at all. Faithful giving likely means far more than 10% for people in such situations.

But faithful giving isn’t about dollar amounts or about percentages. Faithful giving is a matter of the heart. It’s about trusting that God will provide, that we can depend on God for our daily bread, that God gives us all that we need to support this body and life.

No matter where you are with giving right now, no matter what the dollar amount is or the percentage is, I want you to prayerfully consider stepping out in faith and increasing that giving. There are many reasons people may ask you to give more, but my reason for asking is for the sake of spiritual health, for the sake of depending less on money and more on God.

C.S. Lewis puts it this way in Mere Christianity:

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

You might not be ready for that this year. But I hope you’ll step toward that, or at least begin to lean towards it.

God’s blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy

When it comes to stewardship, the typical tagline I usually hear is “Time, Talent, and Treasure.” Indeed, these three things are very important gifts for us to steward. We need to use our time wisely, committing to the true priorities in life. We should be using our talents and passions, not just for earning a living, but also for the extension and strengthening of God’s kingdom. And we must steward our money wisely as well. Jesus talks about money way more than you might expect. He knows that money is one of the things that trips us up. We invest too much in things that have no lasting value.

But there is (at least) one gift missing from this “time, talent, and treasure” tagline. Relationships.

God has given us a variety of relationships, and just like with time, talent, and treasure, our relationships are good gifts from God that we must steward wisely for the extension and strengthening of God’s kingdom.

Some of you are parents, and you must steward your relationships with your children. There are dozens of decisions you need to make every day in this regard. What do you feed them? What do you teach them? What do you let them watch on TV? Or if they are older, how often do you call, text, write? How available are you to watch grandkids? 

Some of us are married, and we must steward that relationship, nurturing it toward continued growth and health and love. 

All of us have friends. Each friendship requires varying actions and activities to show and share our care for our friends.

Stewarding relationships is in my opinion the most challenging part of being a steward of God’s good gifts. If a friend doesn’t know Jesus, how and when do you say something about it? If one of your adult children has walked away from the church, how do you bring that up in a loving way? How do you help people move closer to Jesus without harming your relationship with them?

That’s a lot of questions that I don’t have the answers to. But this Sunday, we will look at two people who stewarded their relationships well, resulting in the extension and strengthening of the kingdom of God. Their names are Eunice and Lois.

God’s blessings on your week.

Pastor Andy