Rev. Tucher

Text: Ephesians 1:3-14

                                                                                    Blessings in Christ

        Grace,
mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ. Amen. The text for the sermon this morning comes
from the Epistle, which was read earlier.

        In our
modern age of today, letter writing has gone out the window. Now, we send an email to a person, using
Internet lingo that if you didn’t use it, you would have no idea what it was
you were reading. Our life stories are
now on our blogs for everyone to read. Most of our emails or blog entries are short, disconnected pieces that
make little or no sense to those who don’t know us. In our Epistle reading for this morning, Paul
does the complete opposite. His letter
to the church at Ephesus is concise, it has a purpose. Paul sees
life from a cosmic perspective, giving us a God’s-eye view of things. He begins by seeing the individual
Christian’s life in the light of eternity. Our present faith has an eternal cause, God’s gracious choice of us in
Christ before the foundation of the world. It leads us to an eternal goal; that we may live forever to the praise
of His glorious grace.

        Paul
clearly wants to teach the readers of this letter to look beneath the surface
of life and understand its true nature. Life’s true nature is known only to God, summed up in Christ, and revealed
to us through the apostolic Word. The
impressive depth and breathtaking vision of the letter is all the more
remarkable in view of Paul’s confinement while writing it. Only faith in the promised love of God can
soar to such heights or sound such depths.

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It has been one week since The Feast.  I have to say that it was a great conference.  We had three youth from our congregation attend.  This is the first year that we have participated in a Higher Things conference.  During the week, we had catechesis by Rev. Peter Bender and our plenary speaker was Rev. Prof. Brian Mosemann.  The theme of the conference was The Feast, focusing on the Lord’s Supper.  Each speaker had 3 45-minute sectionals where they addressed the entire conference, some 1265 participants. 

Since most of my work as a pastor is working with youth, I attended the HT-U sectionals, all about working with youth, resources that Higher Things has to offer, ways to get involved with HT and a general discussion about The Feast and how to make HT better.

There were also in-depth sectionals.  One that I attended was A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Liturgy by Rev. William Cwirla.  The three youth that I had also attended this sectional.  Even as I finished my first year in the ministry, I can say that even I learned something from this!  Rev. Cwirla took us through the history of the liturgy and broke down each part of the liturgy.  First class stuff here.  Even my youth thought that it was good.  So if they liked it, then it must have been good!

The other in-depth sectional I attended was Decoding the Code by Rev. Scott Stiegemeyer.  He went through The DaVinci Code and showed where Dan Brown failed in his research and debunked Brown’s entire premise of the book.  Again, my youth attended this and thought that it was very good.

If you have the opportunity to attend a HT conference, I strongly encourage you to do so.  The next conferences will be July 24-27, 2007 in Minneapolis, MN and July 31-August 3, 2007 in Asheville, NC.  Plan on attending one now.

While I was at The Feast, I picked up several books from the CPH store. One of the books I picked up was “Worshiping with Angels and Archangels.” It is a nice little book that leads the worshiper through the Divine Service I. It has explanations of every part of the liturgy, with Scripture references where the liturgy is derived from. Each page has artwork appropriate to the various pieces of the liturgy. Some might argue that the artwork is geared toward very young children, but I think that the artwork is appropriate for all people. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated to get the point across. I highly recommend this book for all people, even pastors. This can be used as a quick Bible study to explain the liturgy to your people.

Worshiping With the Angels and Archangels
Author(s): Kinnaman, Scot
Item Number: 22-3094WEB
Number Of Pages: 48

Today marks my one-year anniversary at Trinity Lutheran Church. My first year at Trinity has been a very busy year, but a very good year. During the “honeymoon” year, a pastor can do pretty much about anything and get away with it. When the start of year 2 begins, the pastor can now make mistakes and will be called on them.

Today, we left for Colorado Springs for Higher Things: The Feast. We had three other youth groups join us last night at the church. Unfortunately, one of the groups, a group from Canada, had their back windshield of their van broken out. I feel bad that this happened to them at the church. Not a very good way to say “Welcome to Gillette.”

Text: 2 Corinthians 5:14-21

The Great Exchange

        Grace,
mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ. Amen. The text for the sermon this morning comes
from the Epistle which was read earlier.

        It’s
hard being a pastor. We get up each
Sunday, stand before our congregations and we preach about sin. We preach about the sin that first came
through Adam and Eve, we preach about the sin that we have, we preach about the
sin that Jesus doesn’t have. In our
ministry, people don’t like to hear about sin. If a couple comes for marriage counseling and we ask if they are living
together, the answer has a strong possibility of being yes. When we tell them that living together before
or without marriage is a sin, we become the bad guy. Who are we to judge them? What right do we have to judge their
behavior?

        When
people are unhappy about not being able to take communion because they are not
a Lutheran, we tell them that we are not a “members only” club, that we are
following the words of Scripture. We do
not commune them for their benefit, not because you have to be a card-carrying
member of The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod.

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