Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

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Beloved people of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus.

I lose things a lot. 

I’ve spent hours of my life looking for my phone, my glasses, my keys. The other day I searched for my phone for 15 minutes only to find it in my pocket. In my defense, not enough women’s clothes have pockets; so, I’m not always used to looking there!

What do you do when you’ve lost something important? How do you feel?

If it seems I’ve really, truly lost something, and not just misplaced it temporarily, I feel panic in the pit of my stomach and a growing sense of helplessness. I burn with frustration at myself and the situation and usually try to find someone else to blame.

What about when people seem lost? What do you do? How do you feel:

When you see them doing things that are harming themselves and others?

When you miss their presence and don’t understand where they’ve gone?

When their words and actions hurt the larger community?

Helplessness, fear, dread, anger?

I wonder if this sense of people being lost is what’s making life in the US so hard right now. We see so many who seem to have lost their way, especially those people who think like that, who do that.

When we’re honest, we often feel we’ve lost our way, too. But we don’t know what to do about it.

We grumble like the Pharisees and scribes in the Gospel reading today. We blame others and our- selves. We try apathy, avoidance, separation, rage. None of that seems to be helping, but we don’t know what else to do.

How does God feel when people get lost? What does God do?

Our Exodus reading shows us that God feels sorrow and anger when we get lost. God’s love for us means God is vulnerable to being hurt by us. So, when God’s people get lost, make a golden calf, 

and trust their own devices rather than God, God feels it like a punch in the gut. For a time, God seems to want distance, separation, and the protection of rage and blame rather than the vulnerability of love. Yet Moses pleads with God to not give up on the people, to channel that longing for things to be different into mercy and forgiveness. And Moses’ plea matters: It influences God, it changes things – changes God’s mind even. God recommits to relationship, love, and vulnerability.

And this is what God does again and again throughout scripture and on the cross. God chooses to be like a woman searching for a lost coin or phone getting down on her hands and knees, dumping out her purse, digging in the couch cushions. God acts like a shepherd risking everything to seek one lost sheep by throwing caution to the wind, wading through bushes and brambles, carrying the sheep home on his shoulders. When God longs for a lost son to return home, God channels that ache into beautiful mercy and forgiveness that changes everything. God even throws parties, calling together friends and neighbors to rejoice in what has been found. This is really risky. Some might be mad that there’s a party for that lost sheep, that lost son. Some may choose not to come. Yet God has invested everything into seeking us and rejoicing in us.

God’s vulnerable love makes it possible for us to love. Relationship with others – in families, communities, congregations, and a democracy – leaves us open to pain, to feeling punched in the gut as God did. It’s so tempting to try to protect ourselves from this heartache. And sometimes we do need protection and distance. There are times when it isn’t safe or good to keep seeking relation- ship. We don’t have to risk it all to try to save or be in relationship with someone who is harming us or the community. That’s God’s job. It is God’s work to find and save the lost.

And God is always doing this for us who need saving just as much as those people. When we are trapped in the brambles of anger and frustration, God is there ready to carry us home in loving arms. When we are stuck in the couch cushions of dread and helplessness, God is there on her hands and knees to find us again. God is always working to draw us into the feast, into the party where all are called friends and neighbors. At God’s feast, we find that the community is richer because of each person that is found, each one that is drawn in. We need each other, we are all lost in some ways when one is lost.

At God’s feast we are given what we need to stay in relationship, to remain open to others, to be in community. At the feast, we are changed by the witness and pleas and prayers of others. At the feast, our longing for change is formed into mercy and kindness. We’re renewed in our calling to have parties where all are viewed as friends and neighbors. As a congregation, we do that every Sunday in worship and tonight at the picnic.

Beloved, God rejoices in you.

God gives us what we need to choose the way of love and mercy and rejoicing.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

Romans 16:1-16; Acts 18:1-4, 18, 24-28

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus.

I imagine as you listened to Brain Caton read that Romans passage earlier,  you were glad that you aren’t the reader today. Am I right? That was a long list of names! Thank you, Brian!

I love that Romans passage and our Acts reading today because they each highlight the ministry of women. Paul names ten women in that Romans passage. (I can give you the list later if you’re interested.)

It’s good to hear about Phoebe, an important woman deacon and the apostle Junia, prominent among the apostles. Did you know there were women apostles? An apostle means one sent to share the good news, so actually Mary Magdalene was the first apostle. At the empty tomb, Jesus sends her to go tell the others that he is risen. She is the apostle to the apostles. Mary and Junia are the two women apostles mentioned in scripture and I’m guessing there were more.

It’s good to hear about Priscilla, also known as Prisca, who shares in God’s work with her husband Aquila. Most of the times that the couple is mentioned, Priscilla is named first – something rare in the ancient world and still today.

Women have always played an important role in the ministry of the Gospel, even when church leaders haven’t recognized it. God has blessed all of us, of every gender, with gifts needed for God’s work of loving and tending the world. Whatever your gender, sexuality, race, whatever your identity, you have a role to play.

I also love our readings today because they highlight that being a Christian is not an individual affair, not something that’s just between me and Jesus. As we journey through this life as followers of Jesus, we need travel partners. I was reminded of that so often on my sabbatical this summer! I missed this congregation, especially on Sunday mornings! I’m so grateful for the time I had to read, reflect, and go deep into a topic. And it’s so good to be back in community with you again. Community is so important for our lives of faith.

I’m grateful that we can provide online worship for those who need it as the pandemic continues, those who are always homebound, those traveling. But I hope we remember what a gift it is to gather as the body of Christ and to bring our whole selves into a space together. Online, people can be muted. We can hide ourselves, turning off the camera. Our beautiful, complicated bodies, with all their varied shapes, sounds, and smells, are kept at a safe distance.

Living as the body of Christ is not a sterile, one-dimensional, safe experience. It’s messy and life- giving, hard and wondrous. All of who we are is welcomed, drawn in, and transformed by God.

We need to gather and stay connected to those who cannot gather. We need travel partners who encourage, teach, and correct us as Priscilla and Aquila did for Apollos in our Acts reading today. We need to live as the body of Christ.

This week, the Worship and Music Committee pondered one important way we do that. We confess the creeds of the whole Christian church. There’s something healing and powerful about saying the ancient words of faith together. Certainly, there are some issues with the creeds. They arose out of church conflicts. They’ve been used to persecute and exclude. They can give the impression that faith is about assent to doctrines rather than relationships of trust with God and the body of Christ. They use masculine imagery for a God who is beyond gender.

Yet, as we confess these ancient words, we’re united with people from across the ages and around the world. We’re reminded that we have many travel partners we’ll never meet, many who lived long ago yet who are part of Christ’s body with us. As we confess, we also experience connection with those around us in this place as our bodies and voices together proclaim good news for the world, good news for each of us.

Sometimes we can’t say some or any of these words because we’re hurting, angry with God, or just don’t believe them. That’s OK. It doesn’t depend on us. It isn’t about us. These words are gifts of God who holds and carries us all. And the body of Christ that confesses these words also holds and carries us and proclaims the words even when we can’t.

These days there are many alternate confessions of faith: Some that use feminine or non-gendered language for God; some that speak of Jesus’ life and teachings, not just his birth, death, and resurrection; some that highlight wisdom of indigenous cultures and more. I respect this work and these efforts. But I do wonder if alternate confessions also reinforce the individualism and arrogance of modern American society. We assume we’re more enlightened than those Christians long ago. Yet there were women in the early church, there were mystics, radicals and free thinkers, scientists, scholars, musicians. They found a home within the ancient confessions of faith. We can as well.

In a world that’s so polarized, it’s easy to feel divided from those with whom we disagree. The ancient creeds show that there’s lots of room in the Christian faith. We don’t have to agree with it all, we don’t have to believe it all. It doesn’t depend on us. It isn’t about us. These creeds proclaim that God is at work to create, save and heal this world; that Christ has faith in us, that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. This summer at Good Shepherd, portions of our Racial Justice Statement have been confessed in place of the Creed. I’m grateful for our Statement, our Antiracism Task Force, and our commitments as a congregation.

We will continue to keep that Statement before us in our bulletins and on the walls soon. We will often incorporate it into worship, sometimes as a part of a confession of sins and a commitment to change at the beginning of worship. Yet your Worship and Music Committee and pastor have discerned that it’s time for us to return to confessing the ancient creeds of the church together. That is a powerful way that we can be strengthened for the journey and be in community with our travel partners.

As we confess these words together, may you know that you are held and carried by the body of Christ, and by God who will not let you go.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Rev. Amy Zalk Larson – Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

Acts 17:22-31

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus.

Paul says, in God we live and move and have our being. Really? Those words are so beautiful and poetic, yet they often don’t describe my lived experience. How about you?

Mostly, I experience living in the United States, being in Decorah, moving around Iowa and the Midwest. Those places are where I live and move and have my being. Usually, I’m not conscious of how much I’m shaped by them. Often it takes travel away from these places to see it.

When I go to Minneapolis, I still look at the passing cars assuming I will know people in them, like I do here. I do not. When I traveled in New York, I realized Midwesterners really want strangers to have a nice day and New Yorkers do not share this concern. Twenty some years ago when I lived in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, I was surprised when people asked if life in the US was unsafe because of all the gun violence. I felt very safe here until I considered things from someone else’s perspective.

Often, we’re unaware of the forces that so powerfully impact our lives. This is especially true about the deepest reality, the most central truth. We really do live and move and have our being in

God. Yet since this is all that we’ve ever known, all that we’ve ever experienced, we often can’t see it. We live unaware of this profound good news about our lives.

I’m reminded of a story told by author David Foster Wallace in a graduation speech at Kenyon College. “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water’?” As Wallace puts it, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about …”

The most true thing about you and me is that we are in God always. As we move through our days, as we travel through this world, we are held in God’s love always, surrounded by God’s presence in every way, in all things. This is what is most true about us. It isn’t where we are from or what we achieve, think, or believe. What matters most is that we are in God always. This isn’t something we have to do or earn, we don’t get to live in God if we’re good enough. This is just a given reality.

As we start a new school year, as we show up for our lives day in and day out, as we navigate health challenges and family tensions and political upheaval, we are always, always held in God.

God is the water in which we swim, the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand. God is how we are alive, why we move, the source of our being in every moment.

It is such good news, yet it is so hard to see. As David Foster Wallace put it in that speech, “The capital-T Truth is everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding our- selves over and over.” This is what we do as people of God. Together, we become more aware of God’s presence. We remind each other that we belong to God, that we live in God. What help you to be aware of this? How do you help others to remember?

During my sabbatical I got to spend some time with Sr. Nancy, a healing touch therapist at Prairie- woods Spirituality Center in Cedar Rapids. After she prayed over me, she told me to go take a walk in the woods. She said, “You know the trees are an important way that God loves us.” Ever since then, I’ve been imagining what God is saying to me through the trees. Sometimes I feel like the trees are reaching out with a wave or even a hug. (Yes, your pastor is officially a tree hugger.)

Sometimes trees remind me to be quiet and grounded, still other times they help me to just delight in beauty and remember that God delights in us. In the fall they remind me to surrender, let go, and trust.

Last week, when I was in Columbus, Ohio, as a voting member at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, I hardly saw trees. We spent our days in the convention center. The view outside my hotel room was just one large hotel after another. I was reminded then of how often we crowd out an awareness of God’s presence and of how many people live each day in environments that are starved of beauty, nature, and peace. This awareness gave me the passion and drive I needed to testify on the assembly floor about the importance of caring for God’s creation.

Even when we aren’t aware, God cannot be stopped from loving and holding us. God raises the dead, God is always working to bring new life as our reading from Acts proclaims.

What helps you know God’s presence?

What reminds you of the loving water in which you swim, the centering ground on which you stand, the life-giving air you breathe?

How are you called to help others know of this presence?

You belong to God.

You live in God.

May you know this deep in your bones.

May you help others to know.