Tag Archives: God

May 24, 2025

John 13:31-35 • May 18, 2025 • Oak Valley Lutheran Church, Velva, ND

By Bishop Craig Schweitzer

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

First of all, thank you for welcoming me into your community today. One of the things I enjoy most while serving as your bishop is getting to join congregations in worship nearly every week of the year. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a few months. It is a great joy to be with you! I’m grateful for the journey we’ve been on together. I’m grateful for the elected leadership at Oak Valley, for your most amazing community of GIFTS leaders, and, really, grateful for what God is doing today and will continue to do into the future as your new relationship with Pr. Emmy begins to unfold. God is good.

Second, I bring greetings to you from your brothers and sisters of the WND Synod – nearly 160 congregations, serving in the western two-thirds of our great state;

I bring greetings from your brothers and sisters across the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America– around 9,000 congregations serving together across the United States and the Caribbean;

and, I bring you greetings from your siblings in the Lutheran World Federation or LWF, of which our denomination of the ELCA is the only representative of from the United States.

LWF connects 149 Lutheran denominations, over 77 million children of God, serving together in 99 different countries who serve on every continent on Earth. This global communion of Lutheran churches who formed shortly after World War 2 as a way to help rebuild congregations, communities, and lives in the aftermath of the evil and horror that is war.

I know that many of you have heard those greetings from me many times before. I offer them every chance I get.

They are important for us to hear because they are just one of the ways that help us see just how important the ministry and mission that God is calling us into is. And, even though that ministry and mission might look and feel different in places outside of our local congregations, Jesus is still inviting his disciples – you and me – to have love for one another.

Which, we all know, can be a challenge for us from time to time.

An old story that I first heard from my pastoral care professor in seminary many years ago.

A teenager came home from youth choir practice at church early one evening. His dad asked, “Why are you home so soon?”

“We had to call off choir practice this week, dad. The piano player and choir director got into a terrible fight about how we should sing, ‘Let There be Peace on Earth,’ so we quit for the night.”

It was a long, long, time ago – and since I’m part of this story, I reserve the right to not share with you just how long ago it was, although we can count the number of years in decades now.

It was in a place far, far away – Wilton, ND.

Well, OK, maybe not that far away, but when you make a daily trek from Bismarck to Wilton in the depths of a North Dakota winter as a college student, it sure felt a lot further then than it does now.

I was in my final year of college, finishing a degree in music education.

This is the semester that I had worked toward and waited three and a half years to experience.

I…was finally a student teacher.

One of the highlights and great joys of my semester student teaching in Wilton was the fifth and sixth grade beginner band. I loved those kids. I loved how hard they worked. I loved how much fun they had playing together.

I loved how we walked through the ancient rituals of band practice, how we encouraged one another along the way, and how we tried to make sure that everyone who wanted to play in the band had the opportunity to play in the band.

The day finally came after weeks of hard work.

The spring concert.

The gym was packed as I walked to the front of the band, lifted my conductor’s baton, and hoped that someone, someone, anyone, even if it was just one person would remember what we had been working on, would remember something about the music that we had prepared for this concert.

That all the study and rituals we had experienced together in the band room somehow had become part of who they now were.

That somehow, they would magically follow the direction of my baton and play their instrument.

And that it would sound something like what a fifth and sixth grade band is supposed to sound like.

And you know what…they did.

And as I remember that night in the Wilton school gym, they sounded pretty darn good too.

Each week, you and I are given opportunities to walk together through ancient Christian rituals and traditions like worship. Outside of worship, we are given opportunities to live out our life in Christ through disciplines like prayer and Bible study, service in places like food pantries or giving of ourselves by breaking up a concrete driveway in ninety-degree heat.

These are sacred and holy events that form us and gather us together as a community of faith.

All of these things are reflections of Jesus’ command to the eleven disciples, and to you and me today, to love one another. But for Jesus, love is not simply a feeling that we have from time to time – like our love for chocolate or a large single-pump vanilla latte with an extra shot or that queasy kind of feeling we get when we first realize that we might be in love with someone romantically.

One Lutheran theologian that I’ve read often over the years believes that “We have cheapened love by using the word carelessly. We have confused the sentimentality of the Hallmark card with the deep, dark mystery of love that is manifested for us in the incarnate Christ. Yes, love can be warm, enfolding and sheltering. Yes, love can feel good. But,” she wrote, “love can also be strong and difficult. It can be an impossible challenge.” [Rev. Margaret Guenther, “No Exceptions Permitted,” article in The Christian Century, May 3, 1995]

So it’s important that we take time to look closely at the fine print in our gospel reading today. Jesus says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus wants these eleven disciples, the first community who follow Jesus, to have love for each other.

Throughout all four gospels, it’s pretty easy to see that this seems to be something the disciples really struggle with.

How are you and I doing with this? Love for each other?

If we take even a simple look at Christian history, love is not always the first thing that we are known for. And I’m not just talking about the crusades or the protestant reformation or even the recent history across many congregations in Christian churches across the United States.

How are you and I doing with this command from Jesus to have love for each other?

What happened in your life just a few minutes before you came to worship today or what happened on Tuesday afternoon last week. As followers of the risen savior Jesus Christ, our track record on the love that Jesus is commanding us to live out today isn’t always very good.

That’s why I hope you also heard Jesus saying to the disciples, and to you and me still today, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” “Just as I have loved you,” Jesus says.

Did you catch that?

Did you hear that good news from Jesus?

God doesn’t love us because we’ve got this love thing all figured out and are always perfect at living with the kind of love that Jesus is talking about today and models for us throughout the gospels.

The good news of Jesus Christ is that God loved us first.

And God continues to love you and me in spite of all the mistakes we make along the way.

And just like that fifth and sixth grade band who made beautiful music in a school gym many years ago, God will never give up on sending us into the world to share the beautiful music of God’s love with others.

I am so excited to get to witness the amazing ways that beautiful music will flow from the mission and ministry of Oak Valley Lutheran Church in Velva, North Dakota as you begin a new chapter in your history today with the installation of Pastor Emmy Swedland.

Thank you once again for the invitation to be with you today. And thank you for the many ways that God’s children experience the love of Christ throughout the world because of you.

Our worship together today will conclude in the same way that Christian worship has concluded for centuries. Your newly installed pastor will stand before the followers of the risen Jesus Christ at Oak Valley and offer a blessing. A blessing with ancient words that send us out with God’s love and a command from Jesus for us to share that love with others.

“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” is what we will hear.

To which the children whom God loves will respond. “Thanks be to God.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, let it be so.

Amen.

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July 11, 2012

“Stay There Until You Leave” 07.08.2012 Sermon

By Bishop Craig Schweitzer

Mark 6:1-13 • July 8, 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.

President Franklin Roosevelt was known to endure long receiving lines to greet guests in the White House. We’d never imagine a president, especially not since 9/11, doing something so unprotected. Roosevelt was said to have complained that no one really paid any attention to what was said, so one day, during one of these receiving lines; he decided to try an experiment. To each person who passed down the line and shook his hand, he murmured, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” The guests responded with phrases like, “Marvelous! Keep up the good work. We are proud of you. God bless you, sir.” It wasn’t until nearly the end of the line, while greeting the Ambassador from Bolivia, that his words were actually heard. Without flinching, the ambassador leaned over and whispered, “I’m sure she had it coming.”

Sometimes I think the mission of the church is a little like that. I worry that the mission of Christ’s church isn’t being heard. I worry that those who are called and sent to carry out the mission of the resurrected Jesus in the world haven’t even heard the story or don’t really know what the story of Jesus is or that Jesus loves them.

I worry that the mission of Christ’s church is more about sustaining massive institutions rather than empowering deeper relationships between all people whom God loves. I worry that the mission of Christ’s church is more about designing the perfect program or event in order to attract people that look and act just like us rather than opening our hearts to ministries that don’t necessarily fit the molds that we’ve used before, even though these new ministries are right in front of us.

Or worse yet, I worry that we are waiting for someone else to come along. Someone else who we think is more qualified to carry out this mission or insist that Christ’s mission for us can only be carried out by paid professionals like pastors and church staff. Even Jesus, of which you and I are not nor will we ever be no matter how hard we try or think we can be like Jesus. Even Jesus, sought help to carry out his mission to heal and restore life and bless this world. Jesus’ first disciples, and you and I today as well, are called to be part of that mission.

But sometimes I wish we believed it more than we do.

There’s a story of a fantastic salesman who sold a complicated filing system to a thriving business in town to try and help them become more efficient and even more of a thriving business.

About three months after the sale, the salesman checked in with the company to see how the new filing system was working out.

“Magnificently,” was the response from the company’s owner and president. “Out of this world!”

“Well, how is business?” asked the salesman.

To which the owner replied, “We had to give up our business to run the filing system.”

Has the church of Jesus Christ created so many filing systems that we forgot about the thriving business we had originally been given? That we have stopped listening to each other or become so distracted that we fail to hear God saying to us, “You are mine. I love you. I’ve called you. I send you.”

Jesus mandate to his disciples is to travel lightly and keep moving. Nowhere in scripture do we see Jesus sitting down with the disciples and a map, or a snakebite kit, or an extra suitcase with provisions that have been allocated for in the budget, or a feasibility study, or even a specific set of goals, strategies, or objectives. Jesus gives the disciples what they need. The disciples – a group of ordinary men that are at times one of the most confused and unaware collection of misfits the world has ever known, just like any man or woman sitting in this worship space today. Jesus gives the disciples, and you and me, only what we need most: a mission and the authority to carry it out.

The disciples’ success in carrying out this mission has nothing to do with their own abilities to achieve success. It has everything to do with the authority of Jesus and the confidence that Jesus has in them to carry out the mission and move the kingdom of God forward.

But what is a disciple anyway? Up to this point in Mark’s gospel, the main objective for being a disciple is following Jesus. Jesus is changing that today. Professor Rolf Jacobson defines a disciple in this way in his book Crazy Talk: A Not So-Stuffy Dictionary of Theological Terms. Jacobson says that a disciple is “a person who follows Jesus, who is, of course, pursuing us. So being a disciple is always to know that Jesus is on a mission to us – to love us, to save us, and to bless us. And being a disciple is always to know that we follow Jesus on this mission and that Jesus is on a mission through us – to love through us, to save through us, and to bless through us.” [pg. 53-54]

But I’m not a disciple, you may be thinking. I argue that you in fact are and that Jesus has already given you everything you need to carry out his mission in this world.

And how is that possible? Well, Jesus says that you won’t need anything for the journey, so you don’t need to pack. Pastor Eugene Peterson translates Jesus’ words from verse 8 like this: “Don’t think you need a lot of extra equipment for this. You are the equipment.” [The Message]

Barbara Brown Taylor helps us go a little further as she offers this insight. “Our call, as followers of Jesus, as those sent with power and authority (that derive from him) is to do the same: to heal, to attack the demons that plague our society and the world that God loves, to share the good news.”

And finally, in his commentary on Mark, Lamar Williamson, Jr. says, “Our resources do not accomplish the work of God, nor, finally, does the quality of our own lives. What counts is the power of God conferred on us by Jesus Christ. That is why he dares to send us, why we dare to go, and why remarkable good still comes through the obedience of inadequate messengers.” [Mark, Westminster John Knox Press, pg. 121-122]

You and I are called to be disciples in order that Jesus’ mission to bless and save and heal the world may be fulfilled. Not because of anything we have done, but because of what Jesus has done and is doing through us.

Faith in Jesus is important to our life in Christ as we try to be disciples who carry out a mission. But have you ever given much thought to Jesus’ faith in you? He must have had at least a little faith in the disciples to send them out to cast out demons, anoint the sick, and share the good news wherever they were.

Here’s a great question that I was asked recently by Pastor Rob Bell. I think it’s a great question for all of us to think about today, “Do you believe that God believes in you?”

You and I don’t stay in one place very long. We’ll only be in this place for about an hour. So what other places will you find yourself in this week? Do you believe that God believes in you in those places to share a little bit of Jesus’ mission with people that you meet in those places?

At the grocery store? Smile and give thanks to the cashier who is helping you and is working three jobs just to pay her rent right now.

Your office or place of work? Serve your co-workers and customers as the hands and feet of God in our world.

The kitchen table in your home? Listen deeply to one another as you try to live out of the love you have for one another in all that you say and do.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, don’t stay in any one place too long. But before you leave, make sure that you’ve shared a little of God’s love with those that you’ve met.

Amen.

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