Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
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.

This week during Vacation Bible School, one of the kids noticed the beautiful wooden cross in the Fellowship Hall. So, we went to take a closer look at it together. We talked about all the images of Jesus shown on that cross: Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the resurrection, the bread of life. I noticed one image that wasn’t there – Jesus with a sledgehammer, breaking down walls. Of course, that isn’t a popular image for Jesus, but it is one that’s captured my attention this week as I prayed with our reading from Ephesians. We’re told Jesus “has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us.” I keep picturing Jesus as God’s wrecking crew, smashing through all the hostile barriers we put up.

Jesus with a sledgehammer isn’t a warm, fuzzy image, but it’s one we really need. Our world is full of walls, fences, gates, partitions, all manner of barriers. Of course, we do need some walls for protection, safety, privacy, for large buildings to function well. Yet walls, both literal and spiritual, can also increase hostility in our world. All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God. God’s purposes, according to Ephesians, are to “create one new humanity thus making peace,” and to build us together into “a dwelling place for God”. That feels like an awfully ambitious building project, especially these days. Yet God who raised Jesus from the dead can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. God is at work to build a new heaven, a new earth, and a new humanity.

But in order for this construction project to happen, Jesus has to do some demolition work within each of us because we all help to build up hostility in our world. We are all master builders when it comes to putting up walls between ourselves and others. It’s so easy to judge other wall builders: in Israel, on the southern border, between Jews and Gentiles in ancient times. Yet when we do honest digging within, we see that we engage in the same kind of stuff. It may be on a smaller scale, but the results are just as divisive.

We draw sharp lines between us and them, black and white, liberal and conservative, gay and straight, and on and on and on. We pile on the raw materials of fear and hatred, and there’s no shortage of those very raw materials within us. We cement it all together with our stereotypes and prejudices and fortify it with our pride. The walls grow taller and thicker. Our sin cuts us off from one another and from God, for God has commanded us to love and it grieves God when we do not. But Jesus works to break the power of sin within us and free us from the tall prisons we create. On the cross, Jesus proved that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Jesus tore down the curtain, the barrier that would keep us away from God.

We now have a place in God’s household. This is a very large house that has space for all tribes and nations. It is a dwelling place that has many rooms, but no walls of hostility. We now have a place as citizens of God’s kingdom, a kingdom with wide open borders. We are no longer aliens or strangers but citizens with the saints. We have a place to belong, a place to call home. Most of the time when we belong somewhere, we are the insiders while others are outsiders. We belong to a family, nation or congregation and others don’t, we are part of the tribe and others aren’t. Yet God is creating one new humanity with no distinctions between people. To accomplish this, Jesus not only tears down walls. Jesus also preaches peace to those far off and those near in order to draw us all into God.

As Jesus brings us together with people that we would prefer to keep at a distance, he keeps chipping away at our walls. When we are in proximity with other people – when we know their names, their stories, their hopes and dreams – it is so much harder to hate them. The walls of hostility begin to crumble.

This is what can and does happen in congregations. Congregations are one of the few places that conservatives and progressives and people from all generations gather together. Here at Good Shepherd there is an assumption that everyone is liberal. That is not true. And we are all so much more than our beliefs and political views. We get to experience God’s large household as we talk and listen to one another. And since ELCA congregations also tend to be very homogenous places when it comes to race, income, sexuality, and gender identity, it’s also important for each of us to go outside our congregations and our comfort zones to be in conversation with people who are very different from us.

We need to be in proximity to those we fear, those we hate. This is so hard to do on our own, but we aren’t on our own as we do it. Jesus is our peace and he is with us. We can follow where he leads into uncomfortable conversations and relationships. In God’s kingdom we have the assur- ance of a home, a place to belong, but this assurance is not for our comfort. It is so we can stop worrying about whether we belong and start working to make sure everyone knows that they be- long to God. It is so we will stop feeling the need to build walls to protect ourselves, and instead join in God’s work of building a whole new humanity.

In Christ, we have been given the tools we need to join that work.

We have been given Jesus who is both God’s wrecking crew and God’s peace.
We have been given forgiveness, reconciliation and access to God.
We have been drawn near to those we fear, as Jesus shows us that we are held together in the heart of God.
We have all that we need.

Let’s take a moment for prayer.

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

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

So, clearly, the Bible is not a bunch of Disney fairy tales. In case we had any doubt, this troubling Gospel reading today drives home that point. The Bible is not a collection of happily ever after endings. It’s not a bunch of simple moral lessons where good is rewarded and evil is punished. If it was, this strange story about John the Baptist would have a very different ending.

A corrupt king has no regard for the well-being of the community or other people and takes his brother’s wife as his own. John, a good and upright man, speaks truth to power. He takes a stand and does the right thing. This brave stance angers Herod’s wife, Herodias.  She holds a grudge. She plots against John. She uses her daughter to get back at him. Herodias is the classic wicked witch of Disney fairy tales. And this is a classic good vs. evil story. But the ending is all wrong.

The head of Herodias should land on a platter, not John’s!  She should be thwarted. There should be some twist of fate so that the villain is the one who ends up dead. Herod should see the error in his ways and make John the chief moral officer of the realm. If this was a Disney story, it would all play out very differently.

But the Bible is about real people and the real world, not Disney characters. And as strange as this story may seem at first, it has a lot in common with life as we know it.  In our real lives, bad things happen to good people. Innocent people are detained, tortured, and killed. Corruption is not easily fixed. Speaking truth to power is rare and risky and often futile. Women are treated as possessions, their voices are ignored. Young girls are used as objects.

In real life, we have more in common with the villains than we’d like to admit. We distance our- selves from people who tell us things we’d rather not hear. We worry about losing face and im- pressing others. We choose to be comfortable and at ease instead of advocating for others. We seek revenge. And there are no neat and tidy endings to all of this, not in the Bible and not in real life.

Our culture has tried to make the Bible and Christianity into a kind of morality tale. If you do good and have enough faith, then God will bless you and protect you and you will live happily ever after.

But that isn’t how the life of faith works. That isn’t the good news of the Gospel. The good news is that God has entered the real world in the person of Jesus. Jesus has experienced all the pain, sor- row, evil and sin of this world. He was truly innocent, yet he was betrayed, abandoned, tortured, and killed. This means there is nothing that we face, nothing in our real lives that our God does not know intimately. God knows all the pain of this world.

And now, by the power of the resurrection, Jesus is not contained to life 2,000 years ago, but is alive and present in each of our own lives now. By the power of the resurrection nothing, not even death, can keep God from being present for us, from working new life for us. By the power of the resurrection, God is present with immigrant children in detention centers, with those languishing in prison who have been wrongly convicted, with women caught up in human trafficking. By the power of the resurrection, God is present in our own broken lives, empowering us to show up with love and faithfulness in our world.

Sometimes we interpret Jesus’ resurrection as a fairy tale ending. It all worked out well for him.

We will all go to heaven and live happily ever after. Yet the good news of the resurrection is about so much more than heaven one day. The good news of the resurrection is that God disrupts the pain of this world from the inside to work new life for this world. The good news of the rescurrection is that God liberates us and raises us to new lives of love and faithfulness here and now.

These lives aren’t easy and comfortable, yet resurrection empowers us to experience and share God’s gifts of peace and wellbeing. Resurrection is God’s gift of abundance and healing and whole-  ness for all creation.

Resurrection sounds like all of us singing together after a year of isolation. It looks like how the family of Ben Splichal Larson works to share his beautiful music with Christ’s church, music that assures us of God’s presence in all things. Resurrection smells like people baking krumkake to celebrate community and raise funds for mission work. Resurrection looks like the Antiracism Task Force working to disrupt the white supremacy that keeps us bound. It sounds like small groups gathering to reconnect and talk about what God is doing among us now. Resurrection looks like the people of Cedar Falls area Fredsville Lutheran Church coming together to clean up its cemetery that was vandalized recently.

We don’t get happily ever after endings.

We do get resurrection.

We get Jesus present in everything that our real lives hold.

We get God working new life always.

We have all that we need to live with hope and courage in this real world.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

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

It may make me sound uncultured and unintellectual, but I really love superhero movies. It started with Superman when I was a kid. My favorite uncle and I had a standing date to see every single Superman movie that came out. He didn’t yet have kids and I realize now that he might have need- ed an excuse to go see a comic book movie, but I was always on cloud nine during those dates.  Good vs. evil, a smart woman reporter, and my cool Uncle Mike? I was all in. My current favorite is the first Wonder Woman movie. She’s so powerful and good and there’s some great Lutheran theology at the end.

Superhero movies are a lot of fun.  And sometimes I wish they were true. When people act like monsters and evil seems to lurk around every corner, when goodness looks to be on life support, could someone please just swoop in and save the day? If not a superhero, then how about Jesus.  Could Jesus just make everything better, and quickly please?

As he heads into his hometown in our story today, Jesus looks a lot like a superhero. He calmed a storm, freed a man plagued by two thousand demons, healed a woman who was hemorrhaging for twelve years, and restored a little girl to life. He looks unstoppable. Yet the people in his home- town reject Jesus. The folks who’ve known him since birth aren’t open to experiencing Jesus’ healing and power among them. Instead, they snipe and critique and take offense and make catty comments about his unusual birth, saying he’s the son of Mary while pointedly leaving out any reference to a father. Because of their disbelief, Jesus can do no deed of power there.

I don’t understand this. It troubles me. I want Jesus to be all-powerful, all the time, to work hope and healing no matter what. Yet Jesus isn’t some super-charged action figure. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus makes clear that his purpose is not to swoop in, do powerful things, and make everything right. Rather, Jesus’ purpose is to announce that the Kingdom of God has come near and to empower us all to participate in that kingdom. It seems Jesus doesn’t want us to just be passive recipients of his deeds of power; Jesus wants to make us agents of God’s kingdom.

Recently my family has gotten into watching Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Marvel produced the Avenger superhero movies about Captain America, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Black Panther -characters with superhuman powers fighting bad guys. I love those movies, but what I like about the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show is that it is mostly ordinary people who train and work together for the sake of the good.

That is our call as the church – to be a community that works as agents of God’s kingdom. And God’s kingdom is not about the supernatural, though sometimes it’s portrayed that way. It is about our creator’s intentions being realized. God longs for all of creation to know well-being and peace, to live in harmony with God and all that God has made. Instead, we are driven by forces within and around us that lead us away from what God desires. The evil isn’t just lurking in back alleys and in villains; it is within each of us. Jesus’ work is to draw us into God’s kingdom so that we will be healed and set free, so that we will live in God’s ways and help to bring about God’s well-being for all.

Sometimes this work of Jesus looks miraculous and dramatic: People are healed, storms are calmed, 5,000 are fed – stories fit for the big screen. Most often Jesus’ work is more slow and subtle as he opens our unbelieving hearts and minds to new possibilities. Jesus relentlessly persists in this work, even when we aren’t willing participants.  When Jesus encounters rejection in his home- town, he doesn’t plot revenge, he changes course. He focuses on training and sending his disciples.

In his instructions to them, we too are guided about how to live as agents of God’s kingdom. Not surprisingly, we aren’t to act as if we are heroes who stand in judgment above the world and use power to fix everyone else. We aren’t to use force, coercion, or manipulation. Instead, we are to be vulnerable and dependent upon others. We are to enter people’s hearts and lives.  We are to take nothing to protect our hearts from them, but rather walk with them, learn and be loved and receive from them.

When we do this, others can live as participants in God’s kingdom as they show care and welcome.

When we do this, we and those who welcome us experience healing and freedom. As we do this work, we don’t get a superhero, we don’t get superpowers. We do get Jesus. We get Jesus who wel- comes us, forgives us, and loves us always. We get Jesus who sends us out with real transformative power: the power of vulnerability, the power of grace, the power of welcome, the power of love. These are endlessly powerful gifts. They really do change things.

I see these powers at work in this congregation and in our church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). As a church, we are committed to the practice of accompaniment in this country and around the world. The practice of accompaniment means we don’t swoop into places of pain saying, “We’re here to save the day.” Instead, we show up day in and day out over the long haul building relationships, walking with others and learning from them, working together so that more can experience well-being and wholeness.

This is what we are working to do as an AMMPARO congregation. We accompany our immigrant neighbors through legal clinics and community support efforts. The relationships that have devel- oped through this work have been transformative for our neighbors and for Good Shepherd mem- bers.

This is what we’re doing in supporting the Young Adults in Global Mission program in Hungary. Young adults who are sent there to serve others are also opened to a deeper sense of how to work for God’s justice in the world.

This is how we’re living as a Reconciling in Christ congregation. We’re seeking to be a community in which trust and understanding grow between people of different backgrounds and identities, where together we practice living out kindness, respect, and compassion.

We don’t have to wait for a hero to fix everything.

We don’t have to try to protect ourselves from the pain of the world.

We are sent out to participate in the healing of creation by taking risks, extending welcome and following Jesus. As we live as participants in God’s kingdom, we are healed and healing flows through us to others.

Beloved of God, you are forgiven, loved, and set free.

You have all that you need to live out God’s love for the sake of the world.

Let’s take a moment for prayer.

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – Welcoming Sunday
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Guest Preacher Amalia Vagts, First Call Candidate

Gospel: Mark 5:21-43

Last week, David and I drove through a rainbow. We had been traveling through a series of rain storms. Bands of rain would pass through, then we’d have sun and blue sky and then rain again. We saw about three rainbows, off in the distance, like usual, one getting pretty close. Soon we could see the rainbow – literally the end of the rainbow on the shoulder next to us.

We both were like, “We’re driving through a rainbow!” And then it was over. Had that actually just happened? As soon as I got home, I Googled it. Yes, it’s possible! It had happened! But how to talk about it?

First, I had to try to understand it. Rainbows, of course, are the effect of reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in droplets of water. All these things happen together to cause the seemingly magical event we call a rainbow.^[1] It’s not magic, of course – it’s physics. The water causes a change of speed for the light and scatters the white light, creating the rainbow. There are the parts we see, like the visible light, and the causes we know about, like the rain and the sunlight. And then there are the parts we can’t see – the infrared and ultraviolet light. Or the parts we may not know about: For example, did you know every rainbow has another one over it, much fainter and not always easily visible, but very much there?

So there are facts and science, but I was feeling the wonder. All I could think to say about it was, “WE DROVE THROUGH A RAINBOW!” Some experiences, even the best ones, are just so overwhelming we just can’t really explain what happened. When we come close to the Divine, we are often left speechless by the mystery. In today’s Gospel story, the woman who had been restored was shaking with fear and wonder, filled with the knowledge of what had happened to her. The young girl’s parents and Jesus’ companions were “overcome with amazement” when they witnessed Jesus restoring Jarius’ daughter to life.^[3]

The translator Sarah Ruden, who seeks to faithfully bring ancient languages to life puts it this way: They were stunned almost beyond their capacity to be stunned. ^[2] Rudolf Otto calls this holy experience the mysterium tremendum – words that delight all first-year seminary students and somehow get at the sense of awe, fear, mystery, wonder that we feel in the presence of the Divine.

I kept coming back to that idea of holy awe not only in the Mark text, but also when I thought about why it matters that we have welcoming congregations. We’re celebrating today the fact that Good Shepherd is intentional in its welcome to lesbian and gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying people. Our celebration is happening in the context of LGBTQ Pride Month across the United States. There’s lots of places a LGBTQ person can go these days to find community. Is a welcoming church that special?

Please hear my first-person testimony – Yes! LGBTQ affirming sacred space creates that experience of finding your place and your people – the freedom of being who you are. It’s hard to put into words. I first had that experience myself in 2001 at an LGBTQ welcoming worship service during the ELCA Churchwide Assembly. I’d almost given up on organized religion at that point.

I had plenty of places to affirm my emerging bisexual identity. Who needed church? I did. At that church service I experienced the Holy as I heard the names of countless LGBTQ ministry leaders cast aside by the church called into the center of the assembly. As the community was drawn together, I was experiencing restoration and wholeness through God’s presence.

For those of us who are queer and Christian, it can be like a double homecoming to find a church family that truly welcomes our full selves. We understand the double rainbow – the rainbow that shows God’s promise of steadfast love for all people. And the rainbow that makes clear a church family’s open commitment to speaking against the history of hatred, discrimination, and teaching that wrongly separates God’s people based on sexuality and gender.

Increasingly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is at a place where we have started seeing the visible spectrum of the rainbow – the bright red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet variation of the classic Gilbert Baker flag. We’re seeing the expanding colors, the black and brown of the Philadelphia flag which visibly acknowledge the way people of color have been marginalized within the Queer community. We’re seeing the pink and purple of the bisexual community and the pastels of the transgender and gender nonbinary communities.

Like ultraviolet of the cosmic rainbow, there are colors not yet visible to us, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t there. BUT. What if you haven’t found your place in this expanding rainbow of God’s beloved community?  Not everyone feels part of the group. Not everyone feels ready to be in the crowd. Some of us wonder if we’ll ever find our place in the community. The woman at the center of this morning’s interwoven Gospel story of center and margins is at the edge, or even beyond the edge of the community. She can barely reach out. She does what she can with what she has at the time. She knows that Jesus will bring what means restoration and wholeness to her. She wants that. She reaches for it.

Or what if you’ve always had what you’ve needed, but suddenly things change? As a prominent leader in the synagogue, Jarius has the position and the authority to get what he needs. But he submits to the authority he sees in Jesus. He falls to his feet, pleading and begging. He knows that Jesus will bring what means restoration and wholeness to his daughter.

One pastor I know talks about this story this way: the church as the risen Body of Christ. We are Christ’s body, walking through the crowd of today’s world. As we move through the crowd, who is reaching out for the edge of our congregation’s garment seeking restoration?^[5] Who in power is pleading at our feet, saying, “I need help!”

Jesus working through the church, the Body of Christ, brings restoration and wholeness to our world. Jesus brings to you what means restoration and wholeness for you. Jesus restores you to new life. The woman knew what happened to her, and she told Jesus the whole truth. The girl got up and walked, to the wonder of those who witnessed it. What does Jesus do in the face of this amazement? Jesus has seen this before. Wait to talk about it, Jesus seems to say. Let the amazement and wonder of what you’ve seen sink in before you talk about it. Let yourself be stunned. And don’t forget to eat something.

 Jesus meets you in the in-between, knowing your need. Nourishes you. Restores you to life. At the edges, in the center, and somewhere in between going through the rainbow, somewhere over it, or still looking to find it, Jesus turns to you and says, “Child – you are made well, be on your way in peace and wholeness.”

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* Variation delivered online for Lutheran Church of the Reformation, Washington D.C.

^[1] https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/science-rainbows

^[2] Sarah Ruden, The Gospels: a new translation, (New York: Modern Library), 2021.

^[3] One of the original words used here is ecstasis – yes, like our word ecstasy – meaning to a displacement of the mind.

^[4] Elizabeth Edman, Queer Virtue, 112-113

^[5] Stephen Bouman introduced this idea in his book, The Mission Table.

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Decorah, Iowa
Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

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

This story raises a lot of questions for me. I know Jesus calms the storm and that’s all good, but why does he sleep through the storm at first? Why doesn’t he do something sooner? And why isn’t he a little kinder with the disciples?

I imagine myself as one of the disciples on that boat. As the wind starts to whip and the waves beat against the boat, I’m a little nervous. But Jesus is here, it’ll be OK if he’d ever wake up. Then the boat fills with water and starts going under and I panic a bit. Jesus just keeps snoring away on his cushion. Finally, some of us wake Jesus asking, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing?” Jesus does get up and calm the storm. But then he turns to us and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

If I had been on that boat, I’m pretty sure I would’ve reacted badly at that point. I’d have been tempted to snap back at Jesus, “Umm, we almost died while you took a nice little nap. Go easy on us! Have a little compassion please.” Except maybe these are honest questions from Jesus. Maybe Jesus is genuinely trying to understand why the disciples are afraid, why they are struggling with faith. Maybe he is practicing empathy.

Empathy involves working to understand what others are feeling. Sympathy involves feeling bad yourself when others are hurting; but empathy involves focusing on the other person and their experience of the situation. Jesus has no sympathy for the disciples. He doesn’t feel bad because they’re scared. Yet I think Jesus really does want to understand why they are so afraid. I think he has real empathy for them.

Empathy has been on my mind a lot recently. This week Vicar Kathryn and I had conversations with the Good Shepherd members who have served as Shepherds to the congregation during the pandemic. I was struck again by the Shepherd’s empathy for those in their flocks. They worked to understand what you needed, what would be helpful and not intrusive. They’ve been thoughtful and sensitive as they’ve carried out their roles.

Now as we bring the formal Shepherd and Flock program to a close, we asked the Shepherds about their hopes for Good Shepherd. One man said, “In a culture where empathy is increasingly rare, I hope we at Good Shepherd are always known as empathetic people.” That comment struck me as so helpful. I hope we will practice empathy as we move into a new normal after the pandemic. I hope we’ll be guided by empathy as we enter more deeply into antiracism work together as a congregation. I hope we who have white privilege will seek to understand what it’s like to be black, indigenous, Asian, Hispanic – what it’s like to be viewed as “other” because of the color of your skin. We can practice such empathy because Jesus does this for us. Jesus has entered into everything we face as human beings seeking to understand it, focused on us, focused on what it is like to be human.

But Jesus doesn’t only show empathy. He also has a non-anxious presence amid the storms of this world. A non-anxious presence is a way of being, a way of standing when things are difficult. It involves having one foot in the hard situation and one foot grounded in hope and calm. This allows someone to be with you in something painful and not get swallowed up by it themselves.

I think this is what Jesus is doing on the boat with the disciples. He is with them in the storm and yet he isn’t swept away by the fear and panic. He is grounded in God’s peace and God’s power. From that place of calm, Jesus can be a helpful presence to the disciples, even if he sounds a bit harsh. Jesus can help the disciples, and help us, to not be consumed by fear, to put our trust in God.

A key message throughout all of scripture is “do not be afraid.” That phrase is repeated more times than any phrase in scripture. Yet how are we supposed to not be afraid when there are storms, vi- ruses, car accidents, cancer, injustice  – so many fearful things? “Do not be afraid” can be a hard message to hear when we just want some sympathy amid all our fears.

Yet Jesus’ challenging, empathetic, and non-anxious presence helps the disciples to know that fear does not have to consume them. They can have fear and yet not be afraid. As my friend Stacey Nalean-Carlson says, Jesus’ presence assures us that “you may fear, but you are not afraid. Fear doesn’t define you. Fear isn’t who you are.”^[1] Jesus helps to ground us in something greater than the chaos and pain of this world. Jesus grounds us in God’s peace and God’s power. Jesus shows us that God is always present, always at work. And, as another of our Shepherds told me this year, “Sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes God calms the child.”

Beloved of God, we face many storms, many fearful things in our world, in our country, as a congregation. Yet we can engage all that comes in an empathetic, non-anxious way together.

Jesus is present with us, focused on us.  Jesus’ calm presence helps us to face our fears and not be swallowed up by them. We have all that we need.

Thanks be to God.

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¹ From Pr. Stacey Nalean-Carlson’s sermon for Easter 2020, April 12, 2020. http://staceynaleancarlson.com/2020/04/12/fear-and-great-joy/