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.