Category Archives: Recent Sermons

November 12, 2012

“Saints are Close, but How Close is too Close?” Sermon 11.04.2012

By Bishop Craig Schweitzer

John 11:32-44 • November 4, 2012

Click here to hear an audio recording of this sermon.

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.

We celebrated a very important holiday in our life together as followers of the risen savior Jesus Christ this past week. I’m guessing a lot of us missed it because of the flurry of activity that surrounds Halloween. I missed it for many years too.

I’m talking about All Saints Day which was this past Thursday. In case you haven’t already noticed, it’s the focus of our worship together this weekend as well. I was drawn to spend a lot more time in prayer this past Thursday than I typically do in a day. Prayer for brothers and sisters in Christ whose funerals I have presided at this past year, many whom we lift up through prayer and special candles on the altar this weekend. Prayer for family and friends that I love deeply, but often fail to spend nearly enough time with. Prayer for you, fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, as we continue to discover ways in which God is making us holy and calling us in service as saints in this world. Prayer for the dozens of organizations and hundreds of people who use our facilities each week or simply stop by Good Shepherd to spend a little time in prayer before heading back out into the world.

All Saints Day is important to our life in Christ because it connects us together as brothers and sisters in ways that many of us don’t think about too much as we walk, or maybe the better term here is run, through life. The saints of God are not just people who have died. And funerals and All Saints Day worship services are not the only time when we should remember saints, or give thanks for their presence in our lives, or remember that you and I in fact are saints too!

The 11th and 12th chapters of John are kind of a crossroads in the life and ministry of Jesus. This is the turning point in John’s gospel where Jesus makes his final move toward Jerusalem, coming to the village of Bethany to care for one of his dear friends, Lazarus who has been dead for four days by the time Jesus gets there. With the raising of Lazarus from the dead, we come face to face with one of the most dramatic signs of Jesus’ power in the gospels – his power over death itself.

The story of Lazarus being raised from the dead is an announcement that Jesus is Lord – of life and death. And if Jesus can breathe life back into a man who has been dead for four days, then there’s no stopping him from breathing life into you and me for the sake of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, alive in our world today. Breathing life into you and me and setting us apart as holy, as saints of God, for God’s work to bless and serve the world.

That’s not an easy aspect of Christian faith to get our heads or hearts around. That we are holy or that we are saints of God.

As I attended the ordination of a friend of mine a few years ago I had an experience that helped me better understand this part of our life in Christ. It took place at Saint Joseph Lutheran Church in Rosholt, South Dakota. It’s the church she grew up in. It’s a little country church in the middle of corn fields that was built in 1890. There’s a picture of it in your bulletin today or on the screen.

As I walked through the cemetery of this little church, which is immediately outside the front doors of the sanctuary, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the thousands of saints of God who have walked on this holy ground, who have worshiped in this holy place, and the hundreds of saints who are buried in this sacred soil. When you worship at a place like St. Joseph, you only need to look out the windows of the sanctuary to better understand what it means to be part of the communion of saints or the body of Christ. One can’t help but have a profound sense that I am, a saint of God. Standing on holy ground.

There is no cemetery directly outside the sanctuary doors of Good Shepherd, at least not that we know about. But saints of God, do you believe that the place you are sitting in right now is a holy place? Or when you get home today, do you believe that God is with you and present where you live? Or how about the holy place that you know as the grocery store? Do you believe that your hands and feet and every word that comes out of your mouth is part of the body of Christ and is holy? That your very being, is a holy place?

The Bible calls things holy that have been set apart for God’s work. Brothers and sisters in Christ, you are holy. You are saints that have been set apart in your baptism and called to participate in God’s ongoing and miraculous work in this world. In our gospel reading today, Jesus does what is considered to be one of his most significant miracles. Note that he doesn’t let everyone stand around and gawk in awe at what they’ve just witnessed. Actually, he instructs and expects them to participate in and I’d argue, to actually complete the miracle. Jesus says to “Unbind him, and let him go.” I don’t believe that the miracle is complete until Lazarus has been removed of everything that has bound him up in death, and Jesus instructs those who are gathered around Lazarus to do just that.

As Professor David Lose said this week, “It is Jesus who has the power to heal, to feed, to restore, to bring to life, to redeem. At the same time, he seeks to involve us in these actions and, indeed, perhaps expects us to complete them.”

A major portion of the United States experienced unprecedented destruction this past week in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Saints of God, you unbind the death of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction and help bring about Jesus’ healing miracle of restoration and new life through your prayer, by listening to one another’s concern for those in need, and offering yourself financially to organizations like Lutheran Disaster Response and the Red Cross who will provide healing care directly.

Holy saints of God at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, you need to know that you help complete miracles in the name of Jesus every day. They may not be on the level of raising people from the dead like our gospel story of Lazarus today, but they are just important to God’s work in the world.

Like the amazing gift of hospitality that you provided to hundreds of young families and their children at a Halloween Festival on Wednesday night.

Or helping unbind the death of poverty in our community through simple gifts of a few gallons of gas or a bag of groceries.

Or partnering with other congregations in our community this winter to provide a warm shelter for the homeless to sleep.

Or helping build homes for brothers and sisters in Christ of Cristo Rey Lutheran Church in Santa Ana, El Salvador who have never lived in a home before with clean running water.

Or simply giving a friend a ride to work or school or a polling location to vote on Election Day.

Or on this All Saints Day weekend, remembering the many ways that we hold each other up during times of grief and death that come before our congregation.

You and I may not see these things as miraculous or holy, but I believe God does. Brothers and sisters in Christ, as you walk out the doors of this sanctuary today and enter a new week, I pray that you remember that every place is a holy place where God’s work to bless and serve the world can be and is being lived out through you. Amen.

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October 29, 2012

Confirmation Sermon 10.30.2012

By Bishop Craig Schweitzer

John 8:31-36 • October 28, 2012

Click here to hear an audio recording of this sermon.

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

There was a time in many of our lives, water was poured into basin like this and then poured on our head or our entire body. The words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” were spoken as water flowed. A sign of the cross was placed on our foreheads. In our Lutheran tradition we say, “You are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever.” Not just for that day. Not just for the good days of our life. Forever. On that day and in that saving act of God’s love for us, we are claimed as God’s child forever. Often we are clothed in white at our baptism as a sign of being cleansed from sin and made pure in our new life in Christ. God comes to us in baptism and says, “I love you. You are my child, forever.”

Today, in your confirmation, you will stand before this congregation and make promises to God that you will continue to celebrate and live your life in Christ. New life that began in your baptism many years ago and will continue to grow and deepen in ways that extend way beyond your life on earth.

The white robe that you wear today is not a sign of your graduation from church. The white robe that you wear today is a sign of the promises that you make today. And a reminder of the promises that God made to you in your baptism, and that God makes with you today in your confirmation. A promise that God will be with you always. You don’t graduate from church today, your life in Christ doesn’t end today. Actually – it never ends.

I’ve enjoyed spending some time over the past couple of months with these fine young men and women who are being confirmed today. I don’t know if we ever asked each other directly what confirmation is, but we did talk about what it means to live our life in Christ beyond our confirmation day. In fact, many of them have spent a considerable amount of time reflecting upon what their life in Christ is after confirmation.

One part of our time together was viewing a film called Soul Searching: A Movie about Teenagers and God. It’s a film that is part of an ongoing study called the National Study of Youth and Religion sponsored by the University of South Carolina and the University of Notre Dame. This study seeks to understand better how God connects to the lives of American teenagers. In the film, they follow several teens from across the United States and try to understand how God fits into their lives. These are Jewish, conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, mainline Protestants like Lutherans and Presbyterians, and even a radical atheist to round out the group.

Overwhelmingly, this research is discovering that much of religion in America today looks and feels like something that is significantly different from what historic religions, like Christianity, have represented for several thousand years.

The leaders of this study call the new religion that is appearing in places like the United States, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism says five things about God and God’s relationship to us – first, God did create the world and everything in it, but after creating everything, God has gotten out of the way and is now simply watching over everything from some golden throne in the sky; second, God wants people to be good; third, the goal of life is to be happy; fourth, God will solve your problems when you call on him; and finally, good people get to go to heaven when they die.

Maybe the most troubling part of this as a Lutheran Christian pastor is that I don’t think this view of God is something we see only in teenagers. In fact, this view of God and our relationship to God is probably very similar to what the majority of us who are gathered here for worship today believe.

What’s significant about seeing God in the way of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is this – in this view of our relationship with God, God in essence becomes a combination of divine butler and supreme cosmic therapist. God will swoop down from heaven and take care of your problems and only get involved in your life when you call on him, he’ll help you work out your difficulties, and will never ever get too intimately involved in your life.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the God who first makes promises to us in baptism and claims us as his child is not our butler or therapist. The God who meets us in our baptism is not hiding in heaven waiting for you to call on him when you need help or want a front row parking spot at the mall. The God who meets you and I in our baptism is not interested in the bad days of life while being ignored every other day. The God who meets you and I in our baptism makes a promise us. A promise to be with us always – in good and bad, happy and sad, when we think we need God in our lives and when we could care less if God is there. God is not just a super-hero in the sky that we can call upon when we need help.

Brothers and sisters in Christ who are about to be confirmed – God was not the only one making promises when you were baptized. Promises were also made by parents and family, sponsors and godparents, and a Christian community of faith. These promises freed you to experience God through other people who care deeply for you and the world that God makes, freed you to experience God during times of worship and opportunities to serve your neighbor, and freed you to experience God in weekly confirmation classes where you were taught significant aspects of Christian faith and life like the importance of a lifetime commitment to reading and study of holy scripture and a deeper understanding of elements that are central to Christian faith like the Lord’s Prayer, the creed, and the ten commandments.

So, comfirmands, today is your day. Today, in confirmation, is your day of promise. Your day of promising to continue your life in Christ that began in your baptism. Your day of promising that you will give thanks for everyone who has helped you get to this day. Your day of promises that have little to do with a theory called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Today, you promise to pray for God’s world and ask for God’s presence in your life, to worship among God’s faithful people and be nourished in the Lord’s Supper, to read and study the word of God, to share the good news of God in Jesus Christ in all that you say and do, and to give of yourself in all ways and at all times for peace, justice, and the care of fellow brothers and sisters in this world.

It’s a blessing to be with you today as one of your pastors and to walk with you in these promises that you make to God in confirmation. My prayer for each of you today is this – that you feel the incredible blessing from God that this day is. That you always remember you never walk alone in your faith. And that each and every day you experience the unending love and grace of God in your life in Christ. Amen.

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