The Day of Pentecost – Last Sunday of Easter
June 9, 2019
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

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

Apparently, God gives interesting birthday gifts. Pentecost is often considered the birthday of the church, the day the church was born.

And on Pentecost, God gave an amazing gift to the first followers of Jesus – the gift of the Holy Spirit. But the gift wasn’t for them – it was for other people.

The Holy Spirit came upon the first followers of Jesus and allowed them to speak in different languages so that people from all over the world could hear about God in their own native language.

This was a huge gift to all those other people for two key reasons.

For one thing, just think about what it’s like to hear your own native language when you’re far from home, especially in a place where many don’t speak your language. Everything takes more work. It’s hard to read signs, get food, and make your way around much less connect with other people. When your ears are filled with sounds you don’t understand or sounds you’ve had to work hard to learn, you always feel a bit like an outsider. When you hear someone speaking your own language, it’s such a gift. It feels like home.

This happened to me once when friends and I were on a bus in Southern Zimbabwe. The bus entered into the country of South Africa and we didn’t think we were supposed to be in South Africa. Were we on the right bus? We tried asking the people around us, but they didn’t speak English or Shona, the official language that we were working to learn. I was getting a little nervous. Then we came to a bus stop where people were waiting to board, and through the open window we could hear two men speaking English in an Australian accent.

As soon as I heard their words, my body started to relax. Once they told us we were on the right bus I felt even better. But, just hearing my own language helped me breathe more easily and feel less alone. I see that same sense of relief on the faces of our immigrant neighbors in Decorah when someone speaks to them in Spanish. It’s such a gift to hear people speaking in your own native language. It makes you feel welcome and at home.

That’s how the other people gathered on the Day of Pentecost must have felt when they heard the followers of Jesus speaking in their own languages. It must have felt like home. But it wasn’t just hearing their own native tongue that was a gift. It’s also what was said. They got to hear that God’s Spirit is poured out upon all flesh, that all people can call on Jesus and be saved, that God is focused on all people.

These folks had been living as outsiders in Jerusalem, surrounded by a language not their own. They were outsiders to the Jesus movement. But through the gift of the Holy Spirit, they were drawn into the new thing God is up to in Jesus – God’s work to save, recreate and renew the whole world.

God gave the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ followers expressly for outsiders so that the outsiders could be assured that they belong to God, have a home in God, and are important to God.

The gift God gave the day the church was born was for other people. From the beginning, woven into its DNA, the church was turned outward. God’s gifts were given to the church in order to serve those outside the church.

This is how God works still today. God gives us such amazing gifts, but we’re supposed to give these gifts away. We’re to use them to help other people know they belong to God, have a home in God, and are important to God.

Good Shepherd, I love what we are doing by supporting people preparing for public ministry. We’re investing in these people not for own sakes but for the sake of the larger church and God’s world. Amalia, Angie, Daniel, Joseph, Menzi and Nathan are such gifts from God to us. We have such joy in seeing their leadership and faithfulness and in knowing we are part of their journeys. Yet, we don’t get to keep these people here with us. We get to bless and release them to share their gifts with others in Elkader and Strawberry Point, La Crosse, Dubuque, Duluth, St. Paul, and Gackle.

I also love how we are doing that with this building that we have been given. This building is a wonderful gift to this congregation. From the beginning this congregation has used its building for others – that’s part of the congregation’s DNA. The most striking example of this was when the building and the annex were used as a center for Southeast Asian refugee resettlement work and language classes.

Yet still today, this building is used by Kinderhaus preschool, Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous, Friends of Recovery, the Quilts of Valor group, NE IA Path to Citizenship, immigrant language classes, the Decorah Area Faith Coalition, Opportunity Homes, a garden club, a travel club – and those are just the groups that meet here regularly.

This May we again hosted meals for Muslim students who were fasting during Ramadan. One student said to me, “To be so far from home, fasting all day is hard. Yet to know that people are caring for us and tending to the details in order to make us feel so loved and welcome, that means so much.”

With all these groups and events and our own growing ministry, there are many days that we run out of space for everyone. The renovations will provide more workable space without expanding our footprint. We’re gaining an additional good meeting room. We’re reworking the education space to work better for our Sunday School and the Kinderhaus preschool.

Again and again, groups that meet here report how much they value having a safe place to meet. These renovations will make the spaces more private so they feel even safer and more welcoming.

In this process, we’re also caring for God’s creation by installing a geothermal-based heat pump system.

These renovations are expensive. And it is also part of Good Shepherd’s DNA to not want to spend too much money on a building so that more can be given away.

Yet, the work we’re doing will allow us to better offer the gift of this building to those outside this congregation. It will help us to live out key parts of our mission statement, our commitments to:

• Welcome all, offering trust and respect while sharing God’s unconditional love.
• Reach out to the broader community through service and responsible stewardship of all God’s creation.

God has given us such abundance, such gifts. We can use them to nurture a space that says to others: You belong, you are important, there is a place for you here.

God’s gifts are given for others.

It’s in the DNA of Christ’s church and in the DNA of this congregation to look outward and serve those who are outside.

We can do this as we support those preparing for public ministry.

We can do this as we care for the gift of this building and offer it to others.

We can do this in so many ways as a congregation and in our daily lives.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Seventh Sunday of Easter
June 2, 2019
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

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

Did you catch it?

It’s easy to miss, but here in this prayer, Jesus is praying for us! He says, “I ask not only on behalf of these (his first disciples), but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.”

That’s us! We’re here today because people told us the good news of Jesus. Those people heard it from folks before them, and they heard it from those before them, and on and on back in time – all the way back to those first disciples. We have come to faith because of their word. Which means, in this prayer, Jesus is praying for us.

And Jesus is praying for us when he has a lot of things on his mind! He prays this prayer the night he’s about to be betrayed, the night before he’s crucified when he’s at the table with his disciples. (I know it’s the Easter season now and not Holy Week, but in Easter the church does some flash- backs to stories before Jesus was killed.)

So, first, they share a meal, then he washes their feet, then Jesus gives them final instructions and says goodbye – in a really long speech that fills four large chapters in the Gospel of John. (So, the next time you’re getting impatient with a long midwestern goodbye, remember, it could be worse.)

After he teaches his disciples, Jesus prays. He prays for himself, the world, the disciples and for us.

The disciples get to hear Jesus’ prayer. He doesn’t go off to a secluded place to pray alone. They get to listen in. They get to hear his prayer for them and because they then pass these words on, we, too, get to hear Jesus pray for us.

We get to hear him pray that we would be one – that we would not divide, polarize, judge, discriminate and hate, but, instead, that we would experience and model loving community.

And, oh my, do we ever need help with this. There’s so much that gets in the way of us living as one. We fall into binary ways of approaching others – viewing people as either good or bad, right or wrong, gay or straight, sick or well, friend or enemy. Of course, we know the truth is more complicated than that. We are all created good and yet marred by human sinfulness. People aren’t just gay or straight, male or female. God’s good creation includes a whole spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations. We know reality isn’t just black and white, either/or, yet we so often fall into these ways of approaching things.

I did this most Thanksgivings for a stretch. It was when my uncle was married to a woman who just drove me crazy, especially when she drank too much wine and started arguing politics. When this would happen, I’d start piling on the labels and judgements in my head or in whispered
conversations with my aunts and sister. “Why does she always do this?” I’d ask, ignoring all the times she wasn’t argumentative. “Oh, she’s so difficult, so judgmental,” I’d say, in a very “nonjudgmental” way. I tried to avoid her.

I don’t want to treat other people this way, but just about every Thanksgiving this would happen.

Fear played a part. I was afraid of what things were like for my uncle in the relationship. I was afraid my kids would watch her behavior and think it was OK to act the way she did. Selfishness played a part, too. I just didn’t want to put forth the effort. In my role as pastor, I work hard at relationships and communication; I seek to understand and connect across differences. Yet in my relaxed, downtime with my family, I didn’t want to have to expend the energy to do that with her.

Why can’t she just be more like the rest of the family, I’d think, falling into another one of the reasons it’s hard for us to live as one. We think unity requires uniformity – that people need to believe, think, look and behave the same way in order to be united.

My uncle and this woman are now divorced. Thanksgivings are easier but life in our polarized world is so hard, and the stakes are really high for so many. As challenging as I found this woman, I could mostly choose to avoid her. That isn’t possible for so many people who are the targets of hatred and prejudice. At worst, my Thanksgiving was a little less enjoyable. The stakes are so much higher when these divisions play out in national and global politics.

Yet beloved, we are not alone as we face these hard situations. Unity does not depend on our effort or good will. It is the work of God, the work of our triune God whose very being is a relationship, a community of three diverse yet united beings called Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In God’s very self we see that unity does not mean uniformity. We see how very relational God is for God’s very being is relationship.

Our triune God is always working to draw us into God and into loving relationship with one another. Jesus came to reconcile us to God. Jesus crossed all boundaries and loved without limit, Jesus prayed for us.

And he didn’t stop with that prayer long ago. He went on from there to open his arms to all people on the cross, demonstrating a fierce love that is stronger than death. With his death and resurrection, Jesus showed that nothing can separate us from the love of God, that he cannot be stopped from working to reconcile us to God and to one another.

But Jesus didn’t stop with his resurrection. He then poured out the Spirit upon the church, the Spirit that allowed the first disciples to share about God in a whole multitude of languages giving unity while honoring diversity.

And now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Jesus is still present with us in his body and blood. Here at the table he gives us courage, forgiveness, healing and nourishment. Here he reconciles us with God and one another.

Here he fills us with the power of the Spirit so that like those first disciples, we can have the strength, courage and help we need to be in relationship with those who are very different from

Here we are reminded that we are loved so that we may live out love for the world.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

May 2019

Dear Beloved in Christ,

As most of you are well aware, many states have passed or are considering legislation to restrict access to legal abortion. Talking about abortion has never been easy in this country, and the same holds true in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The members of this church have divergent beliefs and opinions about whether or not abortion should be legal.

No matter what your views on abortion are, as a church we are made up of members who have had abortions and members who have chosen not to. Among us are pastors, deacons, and others who have counseled with women, girls, and others they love. We are friends, loved ones, and relatives of people who have had to decide whether or not to get an abortion. We are all affected by the divisive discourse and the legal changes.

I commend you to study and discuss the ELCA social statement Abortion. Through this social teaching and policy statement, this church seeks to travel a moderating path by supporting abortion as a last resort.

Amid the legislative challenges to access to abortion, we must remember that this church supports ongoing access to legal abortion as well as access to abortion services and reproductive health care that is not restricted by economic factors.

I urge each of us to read, to study, to listen, to discern, and to discuss as church together. See the full statement here.

God’s peace,
The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton
Presiding Bishop
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America