As of Thursday, Sept. 29th, the CDC updated the COVID alert level in Winneshiek county to GREEN/LOW. Good Shepherd’s response:
– Green- low: Masks optional and respected
– At all levels, communion bread and individual cups will be used. Pre-packaged servings will be available for those who request them.
GENERAL GUIDANCE
If you test positive for COVID or aren’t feeling healthy, stay home and join in worship online.
If you have been exposed to COVID-19 but have tested negative, please wear a mask in worship until ten days after your exposure even if you are vaccinated and boosted.

Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

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 makes me wonder. I have so many questions.

Why wouldn’t the rich man help someone right at his gate, someone so clearly in need? 

• He ate great food every day. He wore all the best clothes.
• He had more than enough to help.
• Why did he just pass by?

Apparently, this rich man even knew Lazarus by name!

• Isn’t it harder to ignore someone’s pain when you know their name?
• Why didn’t he stop? Why wouldn’t he help?

Was he thinking:

• Those sores are awful, I don’t want to get near them. 
• Lazarus might be angry, he might not be safe.
• He must have done something wrong to end up where he is. 
• God has blessed me with wealth, God must be punishing him.

Did the rich man feel guilty?

• He was ignoring God’s teachings through Moses and the prophets, teachings that call us to be in a right relationship with those who are poor. 

Was guilt weighing on him?

• Did he feel worse with each passing day, until finally he was paralyzed by shame?
• Did he think, Ahh, I don’t know what to do, how to help. There are so many poor people, so many problems. I don’t know where to begin.

Was he happy, at peace?

Was he lonely?

Did he experience the life that really is life? Or was he in his own private hell on earth, separated from the generous, abundant, connected life that God longs for us to know.

It seems the great chasm between these two men formed when they were still alive.

How did the rich man get so stuck?

How did we get so stuck?

• Why has a great chasm grown between us and those at our gates, on our southern border?
• How have white people become so separated from our siblings of color?
• We in the US have so much more food and wealth than two-thirds of the world, but we experience record levels of isolation and anxiety.
• People in the two-thirds world know so well how to feast and tend to community yet long for even some of the food we throw out each day.

Is there any hope of change? Of healing? Can we still be saved, here and now, from isolation and agony? From paralyzing shame? From hell on earth?

In Jesus’ shocking parable, there’s no hope for the rich man. He’s stuck in torment forever. 

He’s powerless. That’s a new feeling for someone used to getting what he wants on demand. Others have always tended to his needs, made him comfortable, done his dirty work. Resources and connections have shielded him from the worst of the world’s suffering. His problems could be easily solved with enough money. But there’s no helping him now. The chasm is fixed, firm, nothing can change. There may not even be help for the rich man’s brothers who refuse to listen.

So what hope is there for us? Is this parable saying we better start sharing or we’ll end up in hell forever? It’s important to remember what Jesus’ parables do. In last week’s sermon, Rev. Allie Scott offered such helpful insight into this. She said, “A parable is not a fable with a sweet little moral at the end of the story” … and continued, “Parables shock us out of our expectations, make us question our fundamental values in this world, and show us the ways in which God is at work.” 

This shocking parable of the rich man and Lazarus gets under our skin. It lets us experience that great chasm our sin causes, and helps us know the limits of our power. It awakens us to the hell on earth that we are living, that we are perpetuating. We are captive to our sin. We are in need. On our own, we can’t solve the grave problems we face. We can’t, by sheer force of will, overcome racism, the global wealth gap, the climate crisis that most impacts those with fewer resources. Relationships with others aren’t something we can have on demand.

We need God, the hope of the world. We need God’s kingdom to come on earth. 

In God’s kingdom the poor and downtrodden have their needs met. The rich and powerful are taken down a notch or two or ten, for our own good. In God’s kingdom, people are freed from  physical captivity, and from shame. Our eyes are opened to one another, we are drawn together. The playing field is leveled, and relationships are healed. We all experience the life that really is life – a life of abundance, relationship, joy.

As we are drawn into God’s kingdom, we see that we are never fully healed until all are well, never fully nourished until all have enough, never enough on our own. In God’s kingdom we see our need to give and receive. And this is our hope – that God is always working to bring us all into the kingdom. Jesus came to us to announce the kingdom of God is here among you. Jesus came to shock us, get under our skin, open our eyes, and gather us into life-giving relationship with God and others. And, nothing can stop Jesus from doing this, not even death, not even hell. Jesus even went to hell to bring us back, to overcome all those great chasms, all that separates us from God and one another. Jesus still enters each of our private hells on earth, each new day, to raise us to new life.

Nothing, nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This love sets you free. You are set free from guilt and shame, free from a life of demanding everything go your way. You are set free for life in the kingdom – a life of love and joy, service and generosity, real relationship.

Here today, in worship together, we experience God’s kingdom among us. We are shaped by parables and psalms that help us recognize it. We are humbled and raised up and drawn together with people we might otherwise overlook. At the table, we get a foretaste of the feast that all will share. We are sent to join God in bringing in the kingdom here on earth.

This is the life that really is life.

Let’s take a moment for silent prayer.

Rev. Allie Scott – Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

Have you ever been that kid at a pool with a beach ball? The one who pushes the beach ball under the surface, maybe sits on it, and then after pushing and struggling to keep it underwater, after letting the water go still, pulls their hands back or shifts their body weight such that the ball flies into the air and then, BAM – out of nowhere it hits some unexpecting sibling or friend? Me too. 

I think about that image when we read parables like today’s gospel reading. Today’s parable of the dishonest manager is a strange one, a surprising one – like that beach ball. We don’t really know where it’s going until it shoots up from the surface in Jesus’ last statement, and even then we’re not entirely sure what happened. 

Let’s unpack it a bit. So there is this wealthy man whose household manager has been embezzling, or overspending. As scripture says, he was “wasting his estate.” We’re not entirely sure how, or to what extent, but word has gotten back to the “master,” and he’s not pleased. So he demands that this manager give him a full account of his accounts on his way out the door. To be clear: The manager has been fired. He’s done.

Well, this dishonest manager starts freaking out. He may be dishonest with his boss, but he’s very honest with himself: He knows he’s too weak for hard labor, and too proud to beg. But when it becomes public knowledge that he’s an embezzler, he’ll never be able to find another management job again. He knows that. So he starts laying the ground- work for his future by ingratiating himself. He goes from house to house, reducing debts owed to his current former boss by as much as half, so that once word gets out, some- one else will still think well of him, hire him, maybe refer him to another household, may- be start the whole cycle over again.

This is not a person you expect to be the good guy in the story. And yet, the story ends with the master commending the dishonest manager for acting shrewdly. Certainly, embezzling your boss’ profits and then reducing the principal his debtors owe him is clever; but it’s certainly not honest and doesn’t help the master in any way. This parable is not a lesson in good business strategy, that’s for sure. 

But then Jesus, contrary to expectation, compliments the children of this age, rather than the elders who strive to follow him, as having more capacity for this same shrewd- ness. Jesus tells the disciples, and by extension us, to use our wealth for the present help of others, even by dishonest means, because you cannot serve God and wealth.

BAM. There’s that beach ball. Jesus just launched it out from under the water, and we’re all sitting here a little stunned, confused about what is happening, and it stings a little bit. You don’t expect Jesus to commend people for being dishonest, but that’s exactly what happens. So what are we, as followers of Christ, supposed to do with that?

First things first: A parable is not a fable with a sweet little moral at the end of the story. A parable does not provide us with rules that will make our lives neat, orderly, and easy; nor does it teach us how to go about our day with dignity. None of that exists in the story of the dishonest manager, or frankly in any other parable. How many of us have lost a dime and scoured the house for it? We’re far more likely to cut our losses and go about our day. How many of you have paid your workers the same whether they’ve worked an hour or a day? There we are with the bad business models again. I’d wager that you’ve never picked your mortal enemy up off the side of the road from an injury that they probably had coming, and then paid their hospital bill, either. 

No, a parable is not a fable. A parable is a story that demonstrates the kingdom of God at hand, as Jesus proclaimed. Parables shock us out of our expectations, make us question our fundamental values in this world, and show us the ways in which God is at work. 

So if we’re looking at the dishonest manager, we need to look at the larger context of expectations and values that surround him. He is one player within a larger, unjust economic system – a slaveholding system. He manages the books for a wealthy slaveholder, whose wealth is built up on the oppression and debts of his neighbors. Which is to say, there is not simply one unjust man in this parable. 

Of course, this sort of economic system, in which wealth is built on the backs of the poor, is not unique to this parable. One only needs to listen to Jeremiah’s lament from 600 years prior, crying over the cacophony of the poor who, even after the harvest has ended, after money has been made, are stuck in their poverty. I’m also reminded of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed, from 20 years ago, in which she worked minimum wage jobs in the United States for a year and wrote about what it’s like to patch together a life on the bare minimum. In it, she harrowingly describes what it does to an entire class of people when the American economic system is built on their backs and their poverty. She wrote: 

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you …The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a name- less benefactor, to everyone else.

Just like the world in which Jesus lived, the systems in which we live our lives are harsher for some and more complex for all than any one of us can fix. And for too long, the church has tried to convince itself, we have tried to convince ourselves, that as long as we go to church, as long as we follow the rules, we are good, we are set. Heaven is the goal. 

Heaven is not the goal, at least not entirely. Heaven is not just the reward for following the rules, like dessert after you eat your vegetables. Again and again throughout his ministry, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It is ours, here and now. The opening message of the gospel is not about what will happen someday but what is happening now to all of creation, to our neighbors, to ourselves, to all that surrounds us. We can choose to build hell every day as we support systems that divide and oppress, under the guise of following the rules and not rocking the boat. Or, we can choose to build heaven on earth and love the hell out of this world.

It’s our call. It is tempting to think that our only options for living within complex and troubling systems are accommodation or resistance. But the reality for most people, whether in the Roman Empire or the United States, is more akin to negotiation, choosing who or what to prioritize with less-than-ideal options. When nothing seems great, all you can choose is the next right thing.

Parables like this one remind us that as followers of Jesus, our values, our actions should step toward the all-embracing love and liberation of all God’s children. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s complicated. Even when it overturns long-held, deeply embedded societal expectations. 

But look: The entire crux of our faith is that a convicted felon, a man executed by the state, is the bearer of God’s forgiving and transforming love. We expect our God to show up like a king – with wealth, and power, and authority – and instead we get Jesus: Blessed are the poor, love your enemies, let me wash your grimy feet Jesus. BAM. There’s that beach ball again. 

With regard to the dishonest manager, the point isn’t that he’s good. The point isn’t that he’s bad. It’s that, in this one instance, he didn’t focus on upholding an unjust system. He put people ahead of money; and the kingdom of God is filled with people who do the same. 

Thanks be to God, and Amen.

Rev. Amy Zalk Larson

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church    Decorah, Iowa

Click here to read scripture passages for the day.

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.