The Good Days to Come

A Church article with View Comments posted 19 April 2009.
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Occasion: Epiphany, Year C
Text: Isaiah 60.1-6

This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 15 April 2009.

The passage we have before us this morning comes from the third part of the book of Isaiah, which was likely written immediately after the end of the Babylonian Exile. A significant chunk of the people of Israel were forcibly relocated to Babylon decades beforehand, and now they get to go home. It’s a time of unalloyed rejoicing for these people.

And what’s not to rejoice about? The people’s very identity was threatened by exile. By being kept in Babylon for all those years, they ran the risk of being subsumed into the Babylonian culture and disappearing utterly as a people. Their customs, traditions, and religion were all interrupted by the exile. A huge amount of ink is spilled in the Hebrew Bible exhorting the children of Israel to remain faithful in the midst of exile. This is when the finishing touches get put on a lot of really important Biblical texts. The great histories of the Deuteronomic historian get put in something close to their final form in the Exile, and the key to it all is faithfulness. Their intended message: remember that God is faithful, even when every indication tells us that we’re in Exile.

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A Human Point of View

A Church article with View Comments posted 22 March 2009.
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Occasion: Lent 4, Year C
Text: 2 Corinthians 5.16-21

This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 18 March 2009.

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a service trip to Charleston, South Carolina. At the time, I was studying computer science in college, and when we visited a local Lutheran Social Services center, it turned out that they had computer problems galore. That was bad news for them but good news for me: who said that service trips can’t be fun? So I set to work on fixing up the computers at the agency. While I was busily fixing computers, I also got set on the task of getting all of the computers networked together. This was the age when wireless internet hardware was still pretty expensive, so we decided to use wires to hook everything up.

The only problem was, there were three buildings to connect together. I knew my way around a cable puller and drill well enough to run the cabling inside the buildings, but I had no idea how to get the cables to go underground between the buildings. That’s when I met a guy I’ll call Mike.

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Hospitality

A Church article with View Comments posted 28 February 2009.
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Occasion: Lectionary 14, Year C
Text: Luke 10.1-12, 16-20 (a slight modification to the lectionary)

This sermon was prepared for an assignment for my Preaching class at Wartburg Theological Seminary and was delivered on 25 February 2009.

Several years ago when I was in college, I had the opportunity to go on a spring break mission trip out to a little outdoor ministry site called Lutheran Valley Retreat outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. However, driving from Missouri, one must make the dreaded trip through that one location that strikes dread into the hearts of all drivers: Kansas. Imagine this scene: we have five full size adults, myself included, crammed into a Geo Prism. We have a trunk full of luggage, the lead driver in our caravan has a lead foot (and by that I mean we’re going at least 90 miles per hour), and unbeknownst to us all, the Prism has a slow oil leak. So here we are, humming along (huminahuminahumina) and suddenly, BANG! The engine threw a rod, and we’re stuck on the side of the road. To make things worse, I was driving, and it was not my car.

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