Genuine Love

As some of our members prepare to confirm their baptismal vows on Sunday, Oct. 3, we’re spending some time looking at the three questions of baptism and confirmation:

Do you reject sin and evil?
Is Jesus your Lord and Savior?
And do you promise to live for him?

Last Sunday, we unpacked that first question about rejecting sin and evil, and here’s the Good News that Scripture declares: There’s no such thing as a lost cause, no such thing as a person unworthy of the time and effort it takes to rescue them through the message of the Gospel. There is always hope. There is always the possibility of resurrection. There is absolutely no sin that’s beyond God’s forgiveness.

That’s just what the Gospel is all about – a good news story about passing from death into life.

And in thanksgiving to the Lord our God for undeserved, forgiving grace that’s beyond measure, we turn away from the sin and reject the evil that got us into hot water to begin with and instead splash with joy in the cool waters of baptism, which assure that we don’t avoid sin and evil to earn God’s love.

We avoid sin and evil like the plague, because God loves us still – no matter what!

This morning, Paul’s letter to the Romans helps us understand what it means to claim Jesus as your Lord and Savior and to live your life for Christ. Listen for the Word of the Lord.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:1-21)

“Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior?”

It’s tempting to say “yes” and just leave it at that, believing that you’ve done what needs to be done to assure yourself a place in heaven when the roll is called up yonder.

You’ve been baptized; you’ve been confirmed.

You’ve “accepted” Jesus; you’ve been saved.

Mom and dad are happy; grandma and grandpa give you a card with some money in it, and the sheet-cake with your name iced in red frosting offers sweet congratulations.

You can check confirmation off your to-do list, breathe a sigh of relief that the hard work and heavy lifting are done, and move on to the next big thing.

All that sounds like good news – and in a sense it is, but let me be the bearer of even-better news. Confirming that you’ll live your life for Christ is when things really start to get lit. The Holy Spirit, who comes upon you in baptism, hears your promise to live for Christ and says “OK, let’s get ’er done.”

The Spirit then goes to work changing you – bit by bit, day by day, week after week, month after month, year after year, transforming, changing and refreshing you. The Spirit spends your entire lifetime re-wiring your heart and mind so you more and more think and act like Jesus.

No longer do you take your cues from a broken and fearful world but instead follow the lead of Jesus as the two of you together walk hand-in-hand, side-by-side into a whole new kind of living that’s dead to the ways of the world and alive in the fullness of the risen Christ!

That new way of living reveals itself in a couple of ways, and the first is how you see yourself.

The Spirit helps you discover your talents – the things that you’re good at doing. In this morning’s lesson, the apostle Paul basically says this:

“Look, everybody is good at something. You might not be a good cook, but others really know their way around a kitchen. You might not be a good preacher, but others are gifted communicators. You might not be good at music, but others are talented musicians. Be grateful for what you can do, and use your gifts and talents to their fullest.

But keep it real.

Don’t strut around thinking that preaching a great sermon is somehow more important than cooking a lamp chop to a perfect medium rare and serving it up with some gracious hospitality.

Don’t think that being a great athlete is better than being a great student, a great musician,
or simply a great friend.

In other words, see everyone around you at eye level. Be humble. Play your part in the body of Christ, but know that if it weren’t for everyone else also playing their parts, too, nothing would ever get done. If God has made you good at something, that’s great! Wonderful! Celebrate it! Be thankful! Admit that what you do is important and good.

But, leave it at that. Don’t ratchet up your ego so high that you’re always looking down on others who do what you might be tempted to think is less important than what you do.

It’s pretty simple advice, really, but I’m guessing most of us know full well that living this way is far from simple. Pride and judgment remain stubbornly basic and deadly sins that often blur the way we see others.

Say you’re in line at the supermarket, and the person checking out in front of you has a lot of groceries in her cart, which is fine. But then she pays for these groceries in bits and pieces, hauling out of her purse not one, not two, but eventually five different checkbooks. Your blood pressure starts to rise as she writes out five checks for different amounts.It’s taking forever, and waiting your turn feels like slow torture.

Your “worldly” instinct is to see the situation as yet another example of someone being rude and inconsiderate to the people behind her in the checkout aisle — people who obviously have better things to do, people whose time is way more valuable.

But then, suppose that after you finally check out yourself, you go out to the parking lot and notice this woman wheeling her bonanza of groceries to a van full of senior citizens. She hands each person in the van a checkbook and then a bag of groceries.

And that’s when you realize she was serving these good folks, shopping for them when they were a bit too frail to do it themselves. Knowing what you now know, you see the whole grocery-line fiasco in a different light, and your anger and impatience leave you
in red-faced embarrassment.

And then, suppose you learn something from this experience, such that the next time you’re in an interminably long line that takes forever for whatever the reason, you choose to consider all the possible reasons why things are taking so long.

Maybe the woman ahead of you is paying in three different ways because food stamps only cover certain items, whereas WIC checks cover other things, and still other items just have to be paid for with cash. On a limited income, she’s doing the best she can to bring home food for her kids after a long day of working two jobs.

When you are living your life for Christ, you see each person and his or her talent as utterly necessary, as wonderful, as a partner with whatever you are good at doing that advances God’s kingdom here on earth. You don’t downgrade someone else or her ability. Nor need you envy someone else’s ability over against whatever you contribute to life.

Instead, and in humility, you are grateful for what God has given to you and equally grateful for what God has given to others. And together, you see it all as being how God wants it to be, how the Holy Spirit gets things done, and if you are one of the people – not the only person and not the most important person through whom that Spirit works, how cool is that!

Ours is a competitive and cynical age.

When Paul says don’t be conformed to the patterns of the world, in this current cultural moment that means resisting a sense of competition, of one-upmanship, of designer envy foisted on us by advertisers.

It means we stop looking at other people’s Facebook posts and wondering why their lives seems so much more wonderful than ours, why so many other people are on vacation in exotic places and you’re stuck at home, why so many other people seem so much more successful
than you are, and so on.

Don’t conform to those competitive patterns, Paul urges. Be changed. Be renewed. Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought.

How we size up life has a great deal to do with how we act and react, and that, in turn, becomes the avenue by which we try to let virtues like humility, patience, gratitude, and love shine through.

Which brings us to core of Paul’s message: Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.”

That’s powerful stuff, because in the course of life, you sooner or later encounter truly difficult people – individuals who wound you, wrong you, betray you, threaten you, and you want to strike back. Justice, you think, demands that those wrongdoers both know what they’ve done to you and get punished for their evil deeds.

You have the right to strike back, the world says. You have the right to take some satisfaction in seeing the guilty get their just desserts.

But in explaining what a new life in Christ is all about, Paul takes a cue from the revolutionary ethics of Jesus and says NO to all that. Sincere love must set the tone, even when your hankering for a greater justice causes your blood to boil.

Forgiving love, not tit-for-tat justice, is what sets you and other believers apart from the rest of the world. Because that’s how you embody the gospel of our God in Christ, how you do your part as a beloved member of the kingdom of God. Jesus met the evil of this world head on, but he countered it not with balled-up fists and merciless judgment but with love and grace. Living in love and harmony with this world’s difficult and evil people is simply part of what it means to be caught up in the rhythms of the Gospel. That’s who you are as a Christian. That’s how you became a Christian.

Bad things happen.

That’s a sad reality of life in this world that seems unlikely to change. Even so, the Gospel calls us to absorb such evil, to show Christ to the world not just when doing that is relatively easy but to display the grace of Jesus precisely when some in our world would surely agree that we’d have every right to slap back.

Justice demands it, the world cries, but the Gospel demands something else.

You cannot walk around as a living example of God’s graciously unfair way of doing things only to then behave like someone so fixated on fairness that you can never let even the slightest slight roll off your back. As the old adage goes, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” sooner or later leaves everyone blind and toothless.

When you live your life in such vengeful, unforgiving, tit-for-tat ways, there’s little room left for mercy and forgiveness, scant space for grace and love. But when you vow to live your life for Christ, there’s plenty of room for mercy, forgiveness, grace and love to rule the day.

For that is what God’s good, pleasing and perfect will is for you, in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit poured into your heart and mind in baptism.

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021. Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Scott Hoezee and N.T. Wright inform the message.

Do You Reject Sin and Evil?

A group of our members will be confirming their faith in worship on October 3, and during that celebration, each of them will be asked to respond “yes” to reaffirm the three questions of baptism.

In baptism and confirmation, we first say “yes” to turning away from sin, then “yes” to the lordship and salvation of Jesus, and finally, “yes” to living our lives first and foremost for Christ above all else.

Between now and then, I’ll be preaching sermons that focus on those game-changing questions, and this morning, we’ll be unpacking that first question, “Do you turn away from sin and reject evil?” And along the way, we’ll also shed some light on what it means to trust in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, the second question of baptism.

My hopeful goal is not only preparing confirmands to take this important step of faith, but also reminding all of us that we, too, have been baptized. And the significance of our baptisms impacts our living long after the waters of the sacrament have dried from our skins and the family celebrations are over.

So, let’s jump into the waters of baptism with both feet!

That first question – turning away from sin and rejecting evil – suggests that sin and evil more than anything else are conditions – conditions of the heart. Our sinful condition is a cocky attitude that insists we can live our lives without God.

Whenever we make someone or something more important than God, whenever we organize our lives around anything other than God, whenever we do or say something that pushes back against God’s always-good purposes, whenever we believe or carry out thoughts and ideas that drive wedges between us and God and between us and others, then sin and evil have taken hold of our hearts, and that sorry state of affairs breaks God’s heart.

But believe it or not, there’s good news in all that, because God in Jesus Christ came into this world and became one of us to rescue us from the vise grip of sin and evil.
The Cross of Jesus washes away your sin and mine, and brings us back into right relationship with God and with those whom God calls us to love – friend and enemy, neighbor and stranger.

In your rejection of sin and evil promised in baptism, and in your ongoing, honest prayers that confess your brokenness and seek forgiveness, God celebrates with a kind of joy and thanksgiving that stretches beyond the edges of the universe:

“You were dead but now are alive again. You were lost but now are found. You are mine, and you belong to me!”

Rejecting sin and turning away from evil thus become all about rescue and resurrection,
and those blessings play important parts in this morning’s Scripture lesson from the apostle Paul’s first letter to his young protégée, Timothy. Let the truth of God’s rescue and resurrection help you better understand what it means to turn away from sin and reject evil and to trust in Jesus as your Savior as you listen now to the Word of the Lord.

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.

But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost.

But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (1 Timothy 1:12-17)

“Christ Jesus Came into the World to Save Sinners.”

It’s a veritable bumper sticker of a saying and perfect fodder for a social media meme.

“Jesus saves” – short, direct, on point, and spot on in explaining why Jesus came to earth
and become one of us. Jesus comes to save us from ourselves – to free our hearts of their sinful condition.

Jesus doesn’t come for those who are convinced they had no sin.

Jesus doesn’t come for those who’ve got their spiritual acts together.

No, Jesus comes to clean up the moral train wrecks that we all become when we’re left to our own fallen devices.

The Lord’s arrival in this world is most welcomed – or should be most welcomed –
by those who know – or at least somehow or other can be convinced – that they really and truly are lost.

Try thinking about it like this:

If all the plumbing in your house is working just fine, then the unannounced arrival of a plumber at your door won’t be a welcome moment in your day. So, you politely tell the plumber to go away.

But, if your basement is filling up with filthy, stinking water from a clogged sewer pipe,
then you embrace the plumber’s arrival with great excitement and rejoicing. Indeed, something can be done to fix your unhealthy, foul-smelling problem, and you welcome the plumber in with open arms! Thanks be to God, you found someone who can drain your rotten, putrid swamp of a basement.

The Gospel is really pretty straightforward: Our spiritual pipes are clogged and broken; our spiritual basements are filled with raw sewage, but our God wants to clean up the mess, repair the damage, and fix the problem. And in Christ, God most surely does. Our relationship with God went south a long time ago, but Jesus enables a reunion.

Of course, there’s way more to the story than just that, but yet, there’s something simple and basic about it, too: We’re broken and separated.

But in Christ, we are fixed and reunited.

And by the Holy Spirit of Christ, we find the energy and courage to turn away from sin and reject evil and live lives that better reflect the image and purpose of the Lord who created us to be his holy people.

Who better to illustrate that truth than the apostle Paul himself?

Young Timothy knows enough of his mentor’s past that Paul doesn’t have to fill-in the details of his dark days as a hater of Jesus and a persecutor of Christians. A mere allusion to his violence and blasphemy is enough.

Back when Paul was known as Saul, he was a textbook example of a vicious, mean-spirited bad actor. That Saul carried out all his violent abuse against Christians in the name of the very God he’d later come to know as the Father of his Lord Jesus Christ only made his crimes all the more heinous. God would have been well within divine rights to swat Saul to deepest hell forever.

But that’s not what God does. Why? Because Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Jesus saves. Jesus doesn’t cast off.

Saul surely is the poster boy for unholy behavior, but he’s also the exact kind of person
Jesus most wanted to save by grace alone. And now that he’s saved by grace, Paul assures anyone and everyone that there’s no such thing as a lost cause, no such thing as a person unworthy of the time and effort it takes to rescue them through the message of the Gospel.

There is always hope.

There is always the possibility of resurrection.

There is absolutely no sin that’s beyond God’s forgiveness.

That’s just what the Gospel is all about – a good news story about passing from death into life.

And in thanksgiving to the Lord of our God for undeserved, forgiving grace that’s beyond measure, we turn away from the sin and reject the evil that got us into hot water to begin with and instead splash with joy in the cool waters of baptism, which assure that we don’t avoid sin and evil to earn God’s love. We avoid sin and evil like the plague, because God’s loves us still – no matter what!

The pyramids of Egypt are some of the most famous structures in the world. They served as burial chambers for the Pharaohs.

But archaeologists say that preparation for death was important all across Egyptian society, not just for Pharaohs. For the Egyptians, the path to eternal life was fraught with dangers, demons, and dead ends. One had to be well prepared, and the Book of the Dead provided tips, instructions, and incantations for the soul on its journey to the underworld.

Excerpts from the book were often placed on coffins, or sometimes, complete scrolls were placed in tombs. The last ordeal on the path to eternity, supposedly, was the weighing of the deceased’s heart. This would determine a person’s fitness for joining the land of the gods. Applicants who passed were welcomed by O-si-ris, the Egyptians’s god of the afterlife. But a heart too heavy laden with evil was devoured by a monster, and the spirit was banished into darkness.

Christian faith, of course, sees death very differently. The path to eternal life is not fraught with danger, but has been made simple and open by Christ. And while our hearts may be weighed down by sin, it is not the degree of sin and evil found within them that will matter. What matters is the presence of faith in Christ, who forgives all our sin and welcomes us into his presence.

Turning from sin, rejecting evil, and relying on the Lord’s grace is to admit that you can’t bridge the sinful gap between you and God on your own. Thanks be to God that Jesus bridges the gap with grace upon grace – in this world and the next.

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, Sept. 12, 2021. Scholarship, commentary and reflection by James D.G. Dunn and Scott Hoezee inform the message.

King of the Road

Oskar Schell is the lead character in Jonathan Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The 9-year-old boy’s father has just been killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and Oskar is understandably heartbroken over losing his dad.

In the days after the attack, Oskar is poking around his father’s closet and discovers a small key mysteriously hidden in a non-descript envelope that’s inexplicably labeled with the name “Black.” The discovery piques Oskar’s curiosity, and the boy begins a quest to find the lock that the key will open. Oskar is convinced that whatever he finds kept under lock and key will reveal something profoundly important about his dead father and perhaps somehow assuage his grief.

So, unescorted, all by himself, at age 9, Oskar sets out to visit every person in New York City with the name “Black.”  He scours the phone book and maps out his route to accomplish his mission of confronting total strangers and asking them if they own the lock that fits the key.

Oskar’s boyishly willful determination surely triggers breathless, heart-pounding worry. How in the world could he engage in such dangerous travels all alone? And where on God’s green earth is his mother in all this?

In the end, after a tortuous set of plot twists and turns, Oskar learns that it wasn’t his father’s key after all. It simply was an enveloped key hidden in a vase that Oskar’s father had bought at a rummage sale. Angry and upset that he searched for naught, Oskar destroys everything associated with his fruitless effort.

But that’s when Oskar discovers that his mother knew all about his unchaperoned travels from the get-go. In fact, she had contacted everyone in New York City with the name Black and told them what Oskar was doing. They all knew ahead of time that Oskar would be knocking at their doors, and thus they all were well prepared to offer him the basics of hospitable reception.

Mother Schell gave her grieving son the freedom to conduct his search alone, but she was watching over him all along the way by going ahead of him and setting up his appointments. Oskar naively decided to go it alone, but his mother prepared the way to ensure his safety.

That kind of concerned-but-not-controlling overwatching is what this morning’s Scripture lesson proclaims true of the God who us our guardian and guide. Psalm 121 is fuel for a long, hard journey along dangerous and possibly even deadly roads. Listen now for the Word of the Lord.

I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?

My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 121)

When our children were younger, and Julie and I found ourselves cooped up with the three of them on long car trips or family vacations,

we often sang songs together to pass the time and keep our littles occupied when they inevitably lost interest in the vast overstock of toys, books, Legos, and super-hero action figures that seemingly filled every square inch of available space in our navy-blue minivan.

The songs for our journey were old standards: “Old McDonald,” “B-I-N-G-O,” and several classic favorites from a group called “The Wiggles.” And when the kids got older, the endlessly irritating “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” became part of our playlist whenever we were going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house.

So also it was for the Old Testament people of God and their children as they slogged through the hills of Judea on their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the great feasts of Judaism. By no measure were they taking pleasant Sunday drives over smooth ribbons of highway in air-conditioned, surround-sound comfort. They were making spiritual pilgrimages aboard donkeys or on their own two feet, traversing rocky and uneven paths both narrow and dangerous.

So, they didn’t simply sing pleasant little ditties to pass the time and ratchet down the frequency of their kids’ whining, “Are we there yet?” No, they sang songs rippling with spiritual muscle like Psalm 121 not just to pass the time but also to teach their children something about God. For together, they were on a journey to the Temple, where they expected to experience the very presence of God.

You and I also are making physical and spiritual journeys similarly fraught with personal threat and emotional challenge –

all the while wondering, especially at particularly rocky mileposts, if and how our God is present in the messiness of our days, and the brokenness of our world, and the fear and loathing of our hearts and minds.

Yes, God has delivered us from evil’s bondage through the parted Red Sea of Christ’s blood. Yes, God has led us into the Promised Land by the power and light of the Holy Spirit of God in Christ. Yes, we have been abundantly blessed by heavenly ways and means beyond measure.

But yet, God, at times, still feels distant. We surely believe in God but also surely don’t experience the divine presence as fully or as often as we should, could and want. We walk by faith, not by sight, and our journey into God’s presence is neither short, nor easy, nor safe. So, as we follow behind God’s Old Testament people on a likewise long and arduous pilgrimage, we, too, sing their songs, which intend to lift, sustain and nourish along earthly life’s way.

“I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where does come my help?”

The Israelites literally are looking up at the hills through which they climb their way to the Temple. Their help comes from high above the hills, high above Jerusalem, high above the Temple. Their help comes from the Lord, the Great I Am, the maker of heaven and earth, the creator of stars and planets. Because God has that kind of power, you can be assured that no matter whoever and whatever you encounter on your journey, God can and will help you, so that you finally will experience something of the presence of God.

On what kind of help can you count?

Well, the constant refrain of Psalm 121 suggests that God watches over you.

As you travel through this world on your way to a face-to-face encounter with your Maker and Redeemer, you can count on this: God watches over you – not from a distance, but as the lyrics to an old hymn go, God watches over you as a constant friend whose eye is on the sparrow as much as the divine gaze watches you.

Psalm 121 assures, first, that God’s watching “will not let your foot slip” as you make your way. The slipping here isn’t physical but spiritual – in the sense of the Lord not letting you slip off the path to him and be lost forever. While evil from time to time surely will cause you to slip off the path to the Lord and the road to heaven, God nevertheless will steady your gait, correct your course, and enable your journey into the fullness of his presence to reach its destination.

Psalm 121 assures, second, that God is “your shade at your right hand.” Neither the heat of the sun nor the cold of night, neither the dangers of the day nor the madness of the moonlight, neither depression nor anxiety, neither cancer nor stroke nor COVID, will keep you from finishing your journey into the presence of God. Yes, those things might come crashing down into your life like a ton of bricks, but the Lord will shade you, protect you, and watch over you in such covert ways that all the dangers filling the world by day and by night will not keep you from reaching your destination.

Psalm 121 assures, finally, that God is your ultimate help. “The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will watch over your life.” Those lyric words might stick in your throat, because, of course, all of us have experienced harm in this life. We all bear scars from the multiple wounds of life. But a better translation of the word “life” is “soul.” Which puts the real spiritual meat on the bones of Psalm 121: “The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will watch over your soul.”

As you journey toward your ultimately intimate encounter with God, you can sing of God never letting evil harm your soul.

The journey is long, and hard, and painful, but God will keep evil from destroying your soul. The Lord will help you on your journey into his presence, so that even in the valley of the shadow of death, you have absolutely no reason to cower in fear of evil. God watches over you, so evil cannot keep your soul from meeting God face to face.

And it’s no stretch to take it a step farther: God isn’t just watching. God is “overwatching.” Overwatching!

President Bush used the word in a speech about the war in Iraq. “Our troops,” he said, “will shift from leading operations to partnering with Iraqi forces and eventually overwatching those forces.”

“Overwatching” isn’t just a political buzzword. It’s a tactical strategy in which one unit of a military force is positioned to support the efforts of another unit with immediate firepower. For example, a squadron of tanks is engaging in direct battle with the enemy. Lying in wait up on the hills surrounding the battlefield are several more groups of tanks that can, at a moment’s notice, rain down overwhelming fire on the enemy if needed. Those supporting units take positions where they can scan the terrain, watch as events unfold, and provide effective cover for their comrades below. Those tanks on the hills are overwatching the situation — not leading, not partnering, but overwatching.

Sometimes when he watches over us, the Lord gets directly involved and actually fights our battles for us. Those moments are what we call miracles.

Sometimes when he watches over us, the Lord partners with us, so that we fight along with him in the sense of cooperating with God as co-creators.

And other times when he watches over us, the Lord actually is overwatching, and we relish a sense of assurance that we are not in the fight alone. We might think that God isn’t watching over us in heat of those battles, but indeed God is overwatching us, surveying the whole terrain of our lives, and standing ever ready to provide effective help whenever and however we need it most.

For such steadfast love from the overwatching King of the Road, let all glory and praise be to Father, Son and Spirit.

Amen, and amen! 

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021. It is the ninth and final in his series “Summer in the Psalms.” Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Walter Brueggeman, Stan Mast, and J. Clinton McCann Jr. inform the message.

Like Glass Before God

The very thought of being known for who you really and truly are as a person cuts like a double-edged sword of bane and blessing.

On the one hand, 94 percent of respondents to a recent poll agreed with the statement, “Nobody really knows me.” While some folks might take clandestine comfort in such anonymity, experience tells me that most of those feeling unknown to others are speaking from marginal places of deep loneliness and tearful isolation.  

On the other hand, most of us are understandably uncomfortable with the prospect of total strangers having access to our personal and private information. With just a few clicks on a computer screen, any number of bad actors can hack their way into any number of ubiquitous, worldwide databases and discover plenty of confidential or downright embarrassing things about each and every one of us. Our fear and loathing of such invasive possibility provide plots for at least two popular stories.

In Franz Kofka’s early-20th-century novel “The Trial,” the main character, Josef, finds himself living in a world where authorities are able to track his every movement. Every single thing he does is known, tracked, and recorded, and Josef feels like the entirety of life has become a kind of extended courtroom-like trial where his every act, decision, and utterance stand accused.

Closer to our own time are the John Grisham novel and later Tom Cruise movie “The Firm.” Lead character Mitch McDeere is a newly minted, hotshot lawyer who gets hired by a prestigious law firm that showers him with gifts and encouragement. They even buy Mitch and his wife, Abby, a new home.

But soon it becomes clear that the law firm is knee-deep in risky business and shady dealing, and eventually, Mitch discovers an appalling, spine-chilling reality: The lovely new home he shares with his wife is bugged in every corner with hidden microphones that are recording everything. “The firm” is privy to every burb and sneeze they loose, every conversation they hold, every private thought they share, and every sigh they utter while making love. When Mitch whispers this disturbing revelation to his wife, Abby momentarily becomes unglued and flees their new house at a pace to rival the fastest of Olympic sprinters.

You can hardly blame her. Who wouldn’t literally follow in Abby’s harried footsteps if caught up in such a sweeping, tightly woven web of highly intrusive surveillance? The personally violating scenarios of “The Trial” and “The Firm” fit the very dictionary definition of “creepy” like a glove.

And “creepy” is one way of hearing this morning’s Scripture lesson, which lays out the deeply intimate information that God freely accesses and closely holds about each and every one of us. Psalm 139 lays out verse after verse of potentially disturbing truth that God knows everything about us, and sees everything we do and leave undone, and hears everything we say or leave unsaid.

What’s even more alarming, none of us can do what Abby does in “The Firm.” Neither you nor I can run away or get away from God. Go high, go low. Go wide, go deep. Juke left, juke right. Stand in daylight, cower in the shadows. None of it matters! God is here, and God is there, and God is everywhere. And God is watching, and God is listening. We stand before God like crystal-clear glass with our brokenness splayed wide under the scrutiny of heaven. And yes, that’s more than a little bit eerie and creepy.

But, of course, the Bible doesn’t serve up the all-knowing God of Psalm 139 to creep us out. The psalm affirms an all-knowing God as a supreme good and incredible gift! Its author finds comfort in the all-encompassing knowledge and always-everywhere presence of God.

Why? How come? What for?

The answers are as obvious as hidden microphones and stealthy cameras are as camouflaged: Only God can be trusted with knowledge of our innermost thoughts and closely guarded secrets. Only God is wise enough, compassionate enough, forgiving and gracious enough, to know all of our dirty little secrets and hidden faults, and yet still be able to be our loving and faithful God.

In that spirit and by the Spirit, experience, now, the tenderness of God in the Word of the Lord that most surely is Psalm 139.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them – they are more than the sand; I come to the end – I am still with you.

O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me – those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil! Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139)

Go figure! God knows us better than we know ourselves! That’s downright extraordinary!

It is testament to the trust that this psalmist holds for God, and it is an invitation for each of us to follow the psalmist’s lead. Because God can handle the full knowledge about ourselves – up to and including even the most gory details of our lives that even we find difficult and embarrassing to bear.

God’s knowledge of you and me isn’t merely intellectual. God’s knowledge of you and me is relational. The frequency of the pronouns “I” and “you” in Psalm 139 highlight that relationship.

God is not an idea, or a force, an “it.” God is a divine person of three in one who can and should be addressed personally and spoken to as “you.” The psalmist, as well as you and I, are not merely faceless ciphers mixed randomly among the billion grains of sand on the beaches of heaven. Each of us is, to God, a distinct person, an “I” who’s known by name. God knows us not “from a distance,” as the lyrics to an old Bette Middler song once put it. God knows us up close and personal as a lover cherishes his or her betrothed.

The God that the Holy Spirit urges us to adore is not an idea to be comprehended but a divine person who has acted concretely in real, physical events happening in, around and through all our lives. The Lord is known far and wide by his deeds.

And though the relationship that the Lord strives to establish with his people is as close as close can get, that relationship nevertheless is not equal.

We can never know God in the way that God knows us. God hems us in, but we can’t hem God in. We are utterly dependent; God is completely independent. God is, after all, Yahweh – the great “I am who and what I am.” That difference makes the intimacy of God’s covenant with us all the more glorious and gracious. That the eternal, self-sufficient creator and ruler of the universe should commit the divine self to us so completely is mind-blowingly beyond human comprehension.

And that’s OK.

Because completely comprehending God is not the key to life. God’s knowledge of me and you is the key to life. The knowledge that creates a life abundant and eternal is the kind of relational knowing that Psalm 139 is all about. Which explains why the Gospel of John early on proclaims, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (John 1:18) God not as an idea but a person – at first, solely divine, but through Jesus, a person knit together in his own mother’s womb.

What a comfort to know that Somebody really knows me – just as I am, that Somebody really knows you – just as you are, and that this Somebody is the Savior who in flesh and blood entered your space and time as well as mine to save me and you from our sins.

That reality makes Psalm 139 an ode to grace, a celebration of the No. 1 divine trait for which all the psalms give the most consistent praise: God’s lovingkindness. Absent that, the sentiments expressed of Psalm 139 just go back to being creepy. But given God’s innate lovingkindness toward us, the feelings of Psalm 139 end up providing comfort in the extreme.

And in the end, despite the psalm’s major hiccup of concluding insults against the enemies of God and the psalmist, it’s as if the author comes to a full stop, takes a deep breath, moves away from worrying about other people and says to God, “But tell you what, Lord. You just search me, and know me, and find what’s wrong with me, and then help me become your better and more faithful follower, as we together walk down the path of life everlasting.”

Yes, we surely can and do fret about the brokenness of others until the cows come home. But when all is said and done, God has enough work to do on and within each of us, re-casting every blessed one of us more closely into the divine image that God intended us to bear at Creation’s get-go. And since God knows each of us better than we know ourselves, God knows just what to do. So, go ahead and trust that God’s got this – and us.

Indeed, great things happen when God mixes with us! Great and beautiful, wonderful things!

Not-so-ancient words mixing with ancient words, but ever true as they’ve always been – just like God – from this time on and forevermore!

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2021. It is the eighth in his series “Summer in the Psalms.” Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Doug Bratt, Scott Hoezee, Tim Keller, Stan Mast, and J. Clinton McCann Jr. inform the message.

From the Pastor: Leaving the Nest, and Learning to Fly

“May the LORD bless you and keep you.
May the LORD’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May the LORD look upon you with kindness and give you peace.”
(Numbers 6:24-26)

Two years have passed since Julie and I sent our oldest child off to college. So week before last, when it came time to send No. 2 down the same path, I expected letting go and saying goodbye would be easier this time around.

But it wasn’t.

As Ryan marked his “lasts” at home in preparation for his “firsts” at college, my eyes welled with tears and my throat lumped with emotion just like they did when big sister Mary packed her bags back. The emotions of an anxious parental heart — anticipation, regret, nostalgia, resolve, and love — were on full display in a fitful mix of excitement, terror, and blind hope.

Ryan was among seven of our congregation’s sons who are college bound this month, so I know that Julie and I aren’t the only ones roaming around nests that feel a little emptier and more eerily quiet. With parental memories of leaving campus — without our sons — forever etched on our hearts, let me share this prayer, which I adapted from one written by Kami Gilmour.

Gracious and healing Lord, loss is loss, for whatever the reason.

So, take away the overwhelming grief that I’m feeling right now and replace it with hope and excitement as you begin writing the next chapter of my son’s life.

Free me from feeling like parenthood is over — even with another son still at home and in high school, and help me to find meaningful ways to stay connected and deepen my relationship with my college-age son in this new season of our lives.

Keep me from feeling heartbroken if I don’t hear from him as often as I’d like. (And help me figure out how better to text, instant message, and Snapchat so I can stay connected with him on social media.)

Rid my mind of worrying about things beyond my control — like him falling off the top bunk; or sleeping through his alarm and missing class; or becoming a victim of fraternity hazing; or contracting meningitis, COVID, or any of the other nasty bugs that lurk and prowl the hallowed hallways and shared bathrooms of higher education.

Remind me that you are guiding and directing his path, especially when he faces the inevitable challenges that’ll surely come his way. Protect him when he refuses to carry an umbrella or wear his winter boots. Keep him safe from natural disaster and cult abduction, and from poor choices that he, like the rest of us, are bound to make.

Release my grip when I hug him one last time and don’t want to let go, and reassure me anew that his mother and I have raised a young man who’s more than ready to leave the nest, spread his wings, and fly solo.

And one last thing, Lord. Hold me tightly in your peace and grace tomorrow, as I release him to you today — even though he’s always been yours from the very beginning.

Amen, and amen!

Be a good friend and a good learner, my son!

Pastor Grant

Thirsty for God

Last week found me living the bachelor life.

My wife and sons were out at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake to attend Synod School, the annual educational and fellowship gathering of Midwest Presbyterians.

Alone at home, I felt no need to prepare any meals from scratch. The refrigerator held scads of leftovers, so I figured I’d be all set food-wise. But by midweek, I was running low on milk and eggs, and the car needed some gas, so I cruised over to KwikStar to provision myself for the remaining short duration of my bachelorhood.

After filling the car’s tank with fuel, I went inside KwikStar to pick up my milk and eggs. Those two items really were all I needed. But then, as I stood in line waiting for my turn with the cashier, there to the right they sat: Cranberry, white chocolate chip cookies, a dozen of them, neatly stacked in two piles inside a plastic flip-top container. And they were calling my name!

A little treat would be nice, I thought to myself. By that point in the week, I was starting to miss my family, and what better way to lift my spirits than a cranberry, white chocolate chip cookie. I figured I’d just nibble away at one or two cookies and save the rest as a kind of welcome home gift for my family.

Ya, well, that didn’t happen.

Much to my enduring shame, those dozen cranberry, white chocolate chip cookies disappeared after a couple nights of binge-watching movies on Netflex, and the plastic flip-top container is nestled somewhere in the recycling bin. And we’re out of milk again.

As I went to bed those two nights, having had more than my fill of cranberry, white chocolate chip cookies, the distant rumblings of tummy aches were poking over the horizon, which likely accounts for the sour stomachs that oh-so-ungraciously provided o-dark-thirty wake-up calls a couple mornings last week.

My embarrassing nights of bakery debauchery seem part and parcel of humanity’s never-ending quest to find something that satisfies and provides meaning in life.

It’s as if we’re endlessly plagued with this nagging feeling that our lives are lacking something. We sense within ourselves a longing and a hunger for something, but we’re never quite sure exactly what that something is.

So, we go searching. And searching. And like the lyrics to Mickey Gilley’s old country classic, we usually end up “looking for love in all the wrong places.” And once in all those wrong places, we’re never shy about savoring thing after thing in hopes that something will scratch the itch of our finicky, listless, prone-to-wander hearts.

But the truth is, nothing ever does truly satisfy. Things like food, work, sex, status, possessions, or thrill-seeking are not what give shape, purpose, direction, and meaning to our lives. Yet, some people – maybe many of us – conclude that the problem is not in the “thing” itself but in the fact that we currently don’t possess the “thing” in sufficiently satisfying and life-affirming quantities.

One or two cranberry, white chocolate chip cookies taste pretty darn good, so naturally, a dozen cranberry, white chocolate chip cookies will be even better, and life will be great. So, we gorge ourselves on the excesses of life hoping they’ll satisfy our ravenous appetites. But they don’t.

Christian writer Ravi Zaccharias describes the emptiness that overtakes us during our overindulgent wandering: “The loneliest moment in life,” he writes, “is when you experience that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has let you down.” Sixteen-or-so centuries earlier, St. Augustine echoed the same phenomenon with these words: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And long before St. Augustine, the author of this morning’s Scripture lesson declared that finding meaning and satisfaction in earthly living is solely and completely centered in seeking and serving God.

Listen, now, for the Word of the Lord in Psalm 63. But let me issue a caution: The first eight verses – the parts about seeking and serving God – slide down the gullet like sweet honey. But the last three verses of this expressive poem make a hard turn that just might sour your stomach.

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So, I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

So, I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me. But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth; they shall be given over to the power of the sword, they shall be prey for jackals. But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouths of liars will be stopped. (Psalm 63:1-11)

Imagine sitting down around the table for a big holiday meal with your family.

The patriarch or matriarch takes his or her place at the head of the table and silences the conversation with an invitation to bow heads and say grace.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we receive from thy bounty. Bless this food to our use and us in your service. And slaughter all our enemies. Amen.”

You’d likely be able to hear a pin drop in the stunned silence that would follow, as all heads turn to the head of the table to try and figure out why grandpa or grandma concluded such a lovely prayer about God’s goodness and provision with a request for God to wipe out the opposition.

That’s the effect that Psalm 63 has on its listeners. This otherwise lilting poem that expresses both utter longing for God and complete satisfaction in communing with God wraps up with definitely less-than-poetic statements about having one’s enemies smitten from the face of the earth.

On one hand, it’s a real head-scratcher as to why this psalm ends in what at first blush sounds like some very un-God-like terms. It’s surely a whole lot neater and tidier to hopscotch over such harsh biblical talk.

But here’s the thing: The closer you get to God, the more you begin to sense God’s holiness.  And the more you sense the glory of God’s holiness, the more you see how tawdry and crude our fallen world is by comparison.

So, when you conveniently skip over the parts of the Bible that mention God’s judgment on sin and brokenness – or the need for God to judge evil and those who perpetrate it, the end result is reduction in the shining splendor of God’s grace.

Grace shines all-the-more brightly when we truly understand what sinful people like you and me would otherwise deserve, all things being equal.

No one likes pondering thoughts of God’s judgment and punishment of evil. But something of the holiness and righteousness of God gets lost in the bargain if and when we ignore the reality of God’s wrath against evil. And if we let that happen, the steadfast love of God that saves us by grace and grace alone woefully becomes a little less amazing.

Those who willfully stray far away from God should expect some kind of response from heaven’s throne.  To try and tap dance around the idea that a holy God of power and glory will just let evil slide on by without a reckoning just ain’t right. We cannot avert our eyes forever and a day from the prospect of judgment, from the surety of wrongs being righted, from the reality of injustice being addressed. If we let that vision of God’s Kingdom fade away, then we effectively jettison our hope that God will, in the end, bring justice to our living in the final righting of every wrong.

As Christians, the Spirit of Jesus inspires us to hold good hope for all, fully recognizing that any “evil” people we might name need no more or no less of Christ’s saving blood and God’s amazing grace than we do. We wish for all to be saved. We do hope that those who’ve left the fold return to Jesus, so that God’s response to wickedness and injustice can be seen by these people also as having ultimately fallen upon Jesus alone. 

Because it was the Cross that carried the full weight of God’s justice and righteousness, and it furthermore was the Cross upon which the necessary judgment on evil fell. Evil and wickedness, and those who sin high-handedly, cannot be winked at or waved away lightly. Indeed, we need to know about the reality of judgment in order to savor God’s grace the way it deserves to be relished. And when we recognize that we ourselves are saved by that very same grace, we desire it to wash upon all others, too – even those who wish us harm and do us wrong.

Pondering these dimmer realities of faith – acknowledging the senses in which all of us have been, and to some extent still are, enemies of God – maintains the bubbling effervescence of grace as the intoxicating elixir of divine love that it really and truly is. That’s what it means to repent daily, to unlearn continually the patterns of sin and the rhythms of evil, as we seek to become holy people, forgiven of sin and forgiving those who sin against us.

In the end, just as the psalmist declares, when God is all you have, you have no need to search for anyone or anything else.

Thanks be to God!

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, Aug. 1, 2021. It is the seventh in his series “Summer in the Psalms.”  Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Scott Hoezee, Gregory Jones, J. Clinton McCann Jr., St. Augustine of Hippo, and Ravi Zaccharias inform the message.

In Perfect Harmony

Native Americans of the Cherokee Nation tell a story called “The Wolves Within.”

In it, a grandfather tells his grandson, “A fight is going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson considers the story for a minute then asks his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The wise old man simply replies, “The one you feed.”

The moral of the fable points to the capacities for good and evil that lie within each of us. Those things in ourselves and in our world on which we choose to focus give shape to the kind of persons we are and will become.

But suppose your evil wolf is winning the fight, and you find yourself stuck in a rut of sadness and negativity, feeling low and struck down by unfortunate events or ill-made decisions, caught up in nasty circumstances of your own or someone else’s doing. How does your good wolf manage to muster up the strength and courage to gain the upper hand?

How exactly do you lift yourself out of the pit into which you’ve fallen and where you seem to have been forced into permanent residence?

How do you stave off being overwhelmed by all the evil you see and brokenness you experience out in the world and within your own body, mind and soul?

That’s where this morning’s Scripture lesson enters the fray. Psalm 100 is a potent weapon that allows the good wolf to turn the tide.

Psalm 100 is a gracious invitation to praise God and give thanks for God’s abundant goodness – even if and especially when it feels like God is distant and disinterested and the Dumpster fires are raging out of control.

The circumstances that gave rise to this psalm are unknown. Perhaps the news of the day was little more than an endless, soul-crushing string of one depressing headline after another. Perhaps its author felt overwhelmed by sin or complicit in making bad situations even worse. Perhaps the psalmist felt defeated by life, wondering if he or she would ever catch a break, if anything good was ever going to happen, if fate intended life to remain stuck in neutral forever and a day.

Those are but a few of the agonizing what-ifs that plague and haunt many of us. Which makes Psalm 100 a sermon unto itself that tells us to start focusing more on God and everything that God has done, is doing, and promises to do. Psalm 100 is a call to bless God by trusting in and relying on the Lord.

Rely on the Spirit to let these ancient words resound with the gracious love that abides in God’s own heart for you.

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth.

Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing. Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. (Psalm 100:1-5)

On one hand, you have to love Psalm 100.

It’s short, sweet, and to the point – a downright perky little psalm that calls for all of Creation to sing together in perfect harmony, one big, happy choir entering God’s gates with thanksgiving on the hearts of its singers.

On the other hand – and maybe it’s just me, but singing in perky, perfect harmony doesn’t seem to fit the mood one finds in most corners of the world these days.

A disgusting litany of sin and brokenness understandably has curdled moods and soured outlooks for many. As if you need reminders, that list includes but is not limited to the resurgence of COVID-19, a climate changing not for the better, ongoing political and social tensions and divisions, crime and corruption infecting not just homes and streets but also the very halls of power, and personal heartbreak and tragedy of every stripe – not the least of which is the sorry state of our individual and collective mental health.

Shout to the Lord? It surely feels like we’d rather shout at each other!

Come before the Lord with joyful songs? We can’t even agree on a common hymnal much less get ourselves singing on the same page!

Enter his gates? Pretty hard when the doors of hearts and minds are locked in anger and ignorance and when walls around and against communities and peoples – built on fear and distrust, both real and imagined – are popping up here, there and everywhere!

So, in some ways, Psalm 100 feels like yet another example of incredibly great theology mixed with really bad timing. Psalm 100 just doesn’t quite seem to cut the mustard for our anxious days, which are not ordinary in any sense of the word, and no one is completely sure when – or if – some semblance of decency and orderliness will return.

Ours is one of those moments in history – surely not the first and probably not the last – when full-throated songs of praise stick in your throat at least a bit and maybe a lot. You surely are sitting within arm’s reach of people who, for any number of reasons, are experiencing the worst of times, and the prospects for better days ahead look mighty dim.

Is now the time to call for global praise?  Is now a moment to ask God’s people to shout to the Lord, because we are the sheep of his pasture?  Can we praise God during a season that otherwise seems far more prone to lament?  Should we, like we’ve done over the last couple Sundays, flip open the Bible to one of those psalms of anguish and weeping instead of the lively and bouncy Psalm 100?

Maybe. And maybe it’s more than OK to admit that even the most faithful and hope-filled among us are singing praises these days with slightly less enthusiasm than might otherwise be the case during better times when there isn’t so much suffering cascading around us at every turn.

Still, as believers, we are called to acknowledge God as our Sovereign – the One who’s in charge and abounding in steadfast love and goodness.

We can still sing “This Is My Father’s World” and know that the earth and everything in it belong to God, even though it is, for now, such a fractured and wounded planet. The cure for what ails is a Psalm 100-like preview of the fact that, at the end of the cosmic day, it will be praise, not lament, that will have the last word.

Actor John Krasinski, who played Jim Halpert on TV’s “The Office,” hit on a spirit-lifting idea just as the pandemic hit early last year. He began producing a little weekly online program called “Some Good News.” It became something of a sensation as Krasinski and his staff scoured and culled the internet for videos of ordinary folks sharing how they were getting by in quarantine, how they were reaching out to people despite all the obstacles, how encouragement, good humor and poetic acts of kindness were not going to be derailed by COVID-19.

Soon after, people worldwide were producing knock-off versions of the Krasinski’s show for friends and neighbors, even as others posted pics, videos and stories to the “Some Good News” pages that were popping up on social media. The tagline that umbrellaed it all was simple and basic: Even when times are tough, there’s always some good news to report.

Our local radio station broadcasts a similar feature called “Upbeats.” The name of our church newsletter, PresbyUpbeats, borrows the name and the intent.

Such heartwarming stories don’t vanish all the shadows and banish all the fear, but they do keep us all going with an elixir of things we all need: Hope. Inspiration. Assurance. A reason to get teary-eyed now and again over stories of good rather than word of sorrow.

If John Krasinski and company can do it, you and I surely can, too. We hold not just everyday good news, but we are the custodians of the Good News that is none other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And his Gospel assures that, although the Son of God had to get dragged through the mud and the muck of this ugly world to do it – indeed, the Son of God had to go clear to hell and back to do it, Jesus Christ did, in fact, win the victory! 

Singing songs of thanksgiving and entering God’s courts with praise are both still possible and quite viable, simply because the Lord Jesus died and rose from the dead.

As the apostle John experienced in a grim time of exile in his own life, God can and does pull back the curtain of history to reveal the heavenly choruses of praise that are going on right now and that are, in fact, never-ceasing. 

That’s what John saw on an otherwise desolate island: Not visions of what will be, but a glimpse of what is right now! Choirs of angels and saints singing “Worthy is the Lamb!” Right now. And the songs go on: “He Has Made Me Glad,” “Let All Things Now Living,” “Now Thank We All Our God.” Their lyrics are precisely what Jesus himself proclaimed during his time on earth: “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” And that kingdom is not future’s maybe but rather today’s reality.

Equally real is our singing of Psalm 100 with all the gusto that we can muster from the many places of gut-wrenching emotion in which we find ourselves these days, even as we go out and about into our fragmented, grasping and hurting world.

So yes, at first glance right about now, given the downer moods that many of us are in, Psalm 100 sounds like an ear-splitting mix of all the wrong notes. Or, maybe it’s the other way around: Given the forlorn moods we’re all in, Psalm 100 plays all the right notes in perfect harmony!

Those of us over a certain age remember a Coca-Cola commercial that ran virtually nonstop in the early 1970s. A similar, updated version hit the airwaves in 2015. In the ad, a choir of people from all the world sing a song about global unity, about teaching the world to sing “in perfect harmony,” about apple trees, and honey bees, and snow-white turtledoves. And somehow, buying everyone in the world a Coke was going to be the right ticket to make it all happen.

Obviously, however much the marketing and advertising folks at Coca-Cola might have believed it so, Coke is not “the real thing” that’ll unite the world and help us sing in perfect global harmony.

But Psalm 100 does connect us to the real thing, to the real deal, to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who can and will, in the end, help us all shout to the Lord in perfect harmony as we enter his gates with thanksgiving.

And who knows? Maybe there will be Coca-Cola in our next life – regular, diet and Coke Zero to boot! But thanks be to God, a wide array of soft drinks won’t be the main event.

The spectacle that’ll capture our rapt attention and quench our generations-long thirst is watching the bad wolf – anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego – get knocked to its knees and put down for the count by the good wolf and its more-muscular gifts of joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

That, indeed, will be something worth shouting and singing about! Until that great day, let Psalm 100 feed your good wolf in a fight that’s well under way.

Ancient words, ever true.

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, July 25, 2021. It is the sixth in his series “Summer in the Psalms.”  Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Scott Hoezee and J. Clinton McCann Jr. inform the message.

When Wounds Are Deep

When heartbreak and tragedy strike our lives, the pages of Scripture come alive with fresh meaning and new power.

The Bible tells the story of God’s interaction with God’s people, and that story is rife with heartbreak and tragedy: Slavery in Egypt, wandering and grumbling in the wilderness, life under the jackboots of depraved and oppressive kings, scads of cruelty and injustice, even worse horrors of invasion and exile, persecution and imprisonment of apostles and disciples, and, of course, crucifixion and martyrdom of the very Son of God himself.

So, it should come as no surprise that Scripture feels most familiar when our circumstances feel most difficult.

When opposition comes, or plans fall apart, or relationships fracture, or peace collapses, or death befalls, the Word of God swells with the gracious sweetness of heaven’s strength.

The Lord gives us his Word not only to carry us through heartbreak and tragedy, but the Lord also allows heartbreak and tragedy to happen, I believe, to open our senses to the truth of his Word and the closeness of his presence.

This morning’s Scripture lesson, Psalm 94, was written by and for a suffering community beset with heartache and tragedy.

The wicked have God’s people under assault, and then, as if to rub salt in their wounds, their assailants are getting off scot free – sometimes even getting away with murder. In no way does it feel like God’s in charge, for the criminals apparently are flourishing, and crime seemingly does pay.

Listen, now, with the help of the Holy Spirit, as the Word of the Lord lifts up the lament of broken hearts and sagging spirits. But don’t be surprised when the Word of the Lord also changes our perspective and serves up a measure of hope amid overwhelming heartbreak and tragedy.

O LORD, you God of vengeance, you God of vengeance, shine forth!

Rise up, O judge of the earth; give to the proud what they deserve! O LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult? They pour out their arrogant words; all the evildoers boast. They crush your people, O LORD, and afflict your heritage. They kill the widow and the stranger, they murder the orphan, and they say, “The LORD does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive.”

Understand, O dullest of the people; fools, when will you be wise? He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?  He who disciplines the nations, he who teaches knowledge to humankind, does he not chastise? The LORD knows our thoughts, that they are but an empty breath.

Happy are those whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law, giving them respite from days of trouble, until a pit is dug for the wicked. For the LORD will not forsake his people; he will not abandon his heritage; for justice will return to the righteous, and all the upright in heart will follow it.

Who rises up for me against the wicked? Who stands up for me against evildoers? If the LORD had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence. When I thought, “My foot is slipping,” your steadfast love, O LORD, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.

Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who contrive mischief by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous, and condemn the innocent to death. But the LORD has become my stronghold, and my God the rock of my refuge. He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness; the LORD our God will wipe them out. (Psalm 94:1-23)

Where do the weary and wounded stand when evil is running amok? We stand on the promises of God!

We stand on the promises of God that were strong enough to hold, protect, and sustain God’s people long before any of our own heartbreaks began and tragedies struck.

Psalm 94 names several of God’s promises, and two in particular feel just right for our moment.

First, even our worst heartbreaks, tragedies and trials are bursting with God’s love.

In the end, the wickedness of the wicked and the evilness of evil will serve to demonstrate God’s penchant for justice and righteousness, which are manifestations of God’s mercy and love for the wronged and oppressed. But for now, as strange as it sounds, the brokenness of the world helps us grow in understanding, mature in faith, and stand strong in belief – further evidence of God’s love through the work of the Spirit.

To one extent or another, we all are victims and survivors of all manner of heartache and tragedy, and we wait anxiously for God to pounce upon those people who hurt and wound us and to eradicate those forces that do us wrong and cause us harm. But God often defeats and humiliates our perpetrators in more profound ways. God uses even their worst and most wicked efforts to reveal God’s loving hopes for us.

Whatever pain we feel or tragedy we experience, God works together unto good in the midst of those evils, and God’s loving kindness points us toward peace that surpasses all human understanding and the restoration of joy and assurance.

“Happy are those whom you teach and instruct,” the psalmist declares. “You give them relief from troubled times until a pit is dug to capture the wicked.” (Psalm 94:12-13)

Even our worst heartbreaks, tragedies and trials are bursting with God’s love, and second, even when we want to give up, God will not.

When we’re under attack, when heartbreak and tragedy strike, it’s mighty tempting to give up and walk away. It will always be easier to opt out of conflict, out of painstaking reconciliation, out of dying for the sake of others – especially those who have hurt us. Face it: We all grow weary in relationships. But God never grows weary in loving us, and God never considers walking away. Never will God ditch or desert, and justice is one day coming.

“The Lord will not forsake his people,” rings the voice of the psalmist. “The Lord will not abandon his heritage; for justice will return to the righteous, and all the upright in heart will follow it/” (Psalm 94:14–15)

Our worst heartbreaks, tragedies and trials are bursting with God’s love, and God will never give up, even when that’s all we want to do.

Those two of God’s many promises feel particularly poignant right about now.

We gather this morning feeling as we’ve felt for most of last week – numb with shock, inundated by tears, overwhelmed with grief – as yet another suicide traumatizes our community. And this one hits really close to home – the horrific and untimely death of Patsy Kerndt’s grandson Ben, leaving us to wrestle with questions of “why” that seem to have no satisfying answers.

As for me, the only way I can understand and make sense of what has happened is to believe that Ben didn’t do what he did. That’s not to deny the reality that death has come crashing down on him, his family, and his friends, but rather it is to assign rightful responsibility for last Monday night, when everything that seemed right with the world was shattered. The responsibility and blame for last Monday night falls squarely on the wretched shoulders of evil.

That’s not to say that Ben was filled with evil.

Quite the contrary! I always experienced Ben as being filled with the goodness and kindness of a child of God. But one of the particularly nasty and vicious ways that evil works on us is when evil tries to rot the fruit of the Spirit and spoil the work that God gets done through us.

It is particularly nauseating and malicious when evil makes thicker our fog of despair and lights a false beacon that leads us toward rocky shores and away from the deep waters that give and sustain life.

When evil succeeds in fooling and tricking us into taking the wrong course, when evil knocks us to our weakened knees, when evil deals us a blow that puts us on the ground, we can look to the promises of God in the cross of Jesus Christ and know that the Lord has never let go of our hand. Even though we’ve been led astray, the Lord’s never-ever letting go. The strong hand of the Lord is there to pick us up, dust us off, and hold us ever-so-tight in his loving arms – today and forever, for we belong to God!

And nothing – nothing – even a deed committed by our own hand or the hand of another – is going to stand in the way of that belonging, for that, my friends, is part and parcel of God’s merciful, loving promises. It may appear that evil has notched a victory in battle, but thanks be to God, Jesus Christ has already won the war!

When our wounds are deep, God’s ever-available healing goes deeper.

When our troubles are broad, God’s ever-present help runs broader.

When our cares are great, God’s loving consolations are greater.

As the lyrics to an old hymn go, when the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet!

Ancient words, ever true!

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, July 18, 2021. It is the fifth in his series “Summer in the Psalms.”  Scholarship, commentary and reflection by James Mays, J. Clinton McCann Jr. and Marshall Segal inform the message.

Walking a Tightrope

It’s mighty tempting to forget that God rules the world and we do not.

Instead of praising God and giving thanks to the Lord for the merciful, loving order that he brings to Creation, human inclination – more often than not – is to pat ourselves on the back for being so great, and to trust first and foremost in ourselves and our own wits, and to grab for ourselves all we can when opportunity presents itself, and to trample over anyone or anything that stands in our way – include maybe even the Lord himself!

But, like pressing a reset button, this morning’s Scripture lesson in our “Summer in the Psalms” series reshuffles the deck of relationship between heaven and earth.

Psalm 33 deals out two trump cards: A call to humility, and an invitation to trust in God rather than human ability, power or wisdom. Those seemingly authoritative worldly institutions in which too many of us place too much trust – politicians, armies, weapons, governments and corporations – are all merely alluring-but-impotent mirages that disappear in light of God’s authority and control over all the world.

The astounding good news of Psalm 33 is this: The real power that’s the driving force of the universe, human history, and personal existence is the steadfast love of God filling the earth. The ultimate reality and authority in all of Creation is love, which – as the Cross stands in testimony – is made perfect in weakness.

Even so, you and I aren’t allowed to just sit back and watch God’s reign unfold. We all play active roles in God’s salvation drama, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But, for now, harness the power of the Holy Spirit and listen for the Word of the Lord in Psalm 33.

Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright.

Praise the LORD with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.

Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.

For the word of the LORD is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.

He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the LORD.

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses.

Let all the earth obey the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.

The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.

Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.

The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind.

From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth – he who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds.

A king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

The war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.

Truly the eye of the LORD is on those who fear obey, on those who hope in his steadfast love, to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.

Our soul waits for the LORD; he is our help and shield.

Our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.

Let your steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us, even as we hope in you.

Indeed, God looms large and in charge over the world, and God wraps everything tightly in love. Period. Full stop. End of sentence.

Yet, the spot where the rubber of that truth meets the road of daily living points to a kind of balancing act – a veritable tightrope walk that all believers gingerly tread every day.

On the one hand, yes, our ultimate trust is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.

But on the other hand, it’s foolish to believe that we can rest on our laurels and not have to do a blessed thing so long as we trust in God for all good things.

Holding fast to faith does not mean kicking back, doing nothing, trusting God, and thinking all will be well. If so, then why try to get a good education? Why try to hone skills that can land you a good job?  Why take out insurance on your house?  Why save for retirement?

Why do any of that?

Because blessing often comes in the form of opportunity, provision in the form of preparedness, protection in the form of hospitality, and we need eyes fully trained on the hope of God’s promises to recognize when God rewards the fullness of our trust with the reality of holy openings that create way for God’s loving care to blossom and flourish.

Think in terms of the well-told story of a man who finds himself in dire straits: Floodwaters are rising all around his home. The man cries to God for help as he moves from his home’s first floor to the second to escape the rising water. He cries out again as the water keeps rising, and he flees to the attic, and eventually all the way out to his rooftop.

Then someone cruises by in a boat and offers to ferry the man to safety. But the man refuses: “No, thanks. I’m OK. God will take care of me!” 

A helicopter flies overhead and lowers a ladder to the man, but he waves off the arial help: “No, thanks. I’m OK. God will take care of me!” 

Later, as the floodwaters begin to carry him to his death, the man lets out a final cry to God: “Why didn’t you help me, Lord?” And from the heavens comes God’s reply: “I sent you a boat and a helicopter! What more did you expect?”

Clearly, this hapless man placed his trust in the right place but let that trust blind him to the reality of God’s help in the answer to his frantic prayers.

That’s where this balancing act on the tightrope of faith gets tricky.

We do, for sure, need to work hard to make our livings. We do need to take out insurance policies and build retirement portfolios. We do need to take precautions to keep ourselves healthy. We do need to pursue all prudent measures to make our homes secure of burglars and our community safe of crime. Some of that, in fact, reflects good stewardship.

But as we do all that, if we fixate only on those outward things, we’ll fail to make the spiritual connection that, if God is not our ultimate security – if God is not in, through, under and behind all of that outward activity and whatnot, then ultimately whatever we do is all finally futile, fragile, and one day fruitless.

Every now and then, a sports reporter will approach an athlete and start the interview with a compliment about the athlete’s sunning performance on the field, court or course. And it can be a little off-putting when the athlete shrugs off the compliment, points to the sky, and says, “It’s not me.  It’s ALL God!” It would be almost as jarring if the athlete said, “Yes, I know. I am truly great, aren’t I?”

Like the man caught up by floodwaters, surely there’s some middle ground here.

Yes, a Christian athlete is right to locate God as the ultimate source of his or her athletic gifts and talents. But the athlete still must do her or his part to nurture those gifts and talents, to hone and refine them through a lifetime of practice and discipline. 

So, maybe, like a lot of things these days, it’s not either/or but both/and – both all God and all athlete, or at least both all God and a good measure of athlete. Both entities – divine and human – are proper and worthy recipients of congratulations, gratitude and praise. The athlete cannot do much without God’s gifting, but God cannot do much to make an athlete excel if he or she refuses to get off the couch and put in the effort to develop the core gifts that God has given.

Psalm 33 nails it: Our ultimate hope and security do come from God. It’s foolish and faithless to believe otherwise.

At the same time, we would be equally foolish and faithless to not see how God works through the ordinary things of life, too, and through our efforts, and through our works. Absent that understanding, it’s really easy to fall off the tightrope to the right or to the left.

One final example: When the famed cellist Pablo Casals was around 90 years old, he still practiced the cello for hours each day. By that age and after his storied musical career, Casals surely had nothing left to prove. So one day someone asked him, “Why do you still practice so much?”  “Because,” Casals replied, “I think I’m getting a little better.”

A great gift from God is no excuse to slack off and avoid hard work. And for believers, faith and trust in a great giving and loving God are no excuses to not also recognize that we still have much to do in our lives to cooperate with God in caring, protecting and nurturing our bodies, minds and spirits, and in loving, welcoming and serving friend, neighbor and stranger.

So, no, don’t put your trust in earthly things. But neither should you fail to shore up things on earth. That’s not always easy, and what to do isn’t always obvious. But there’s always room to get a little better. And, by grace, one of the Holy Spirit’s many jobs in our lives is to do just that – by helping you and me keep our balance on the tightrope walk of life.

Ancient words, ever true!

Amen, and amen!

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Sunday, July 4, 2021. It is the fourth in his series “Summer in the Psalms.”  Scholarship, commentary and reflection by Scott Hoezee and J. Clinton McCann Jr. inform the message.

Funeral meditation: What’s in a Name?

Pastor Grant shared this message during the funeral service for Kenneth D. “Kenny” Lough on Saturday, July 3, 2021. You can read Kenny’s obituary at MartinFunerals.com.

One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor is sometimes only getting to “meet” people in death.

And so it goes with Kenny and me. Due to his death, I’m just now coming to know who Kenny was and what he was all about.

And that saddens me. Because I’ve come to realize something that all of you already know: Kenny was one mighty special guy who made a difference in the lives of many others.

Particularly telling of Kenny’s soul and spirit is something his granddaughter Courtney posted to Facebook: “I was a grandpa’s girl through and through since the day I was born. Grandpa was always in my corner no matter what.”

Would that the world had more grandpas like Kenny!

Beyond that, you’ve told stories and shared memories about Kenny’s always-on-the-go life that paint a vivid picture of someone who had quite a zeal for living and a zest for making the most of out of life – so eager and excited to be part of the world and soak up all its blessings that he just couldn’t wait for his in-labor mother to get to the delivery room, and he ended up being born en route to the hospital in the back of a taxi.

The one story about Kenny that leaves me most in awe arises from his long tenure as a school bus driver. To have spent a couple decades wending your way along the hilly, curvy – sometimes icy and snowy gravel roads of Allamakee County with precious cargos of noisy, wiggly, occasionally snotty kids speaks volumes not only of Kenny’s driving abilities but also of his patience, tolerance and fortitude.

I sometimes could barely tolerate going on family vacations with our three kids in the back of our minivan, so I can’t but help admire someone who willing traveled probably thousands of miles with dozens of other people’s kids twice daily – home to school and back – day after day, year after year.

But one bus-driving skill, for me anyway, sets Kenny apart: His desire to know the children, teen-agers, and athletes entrusted to his care. As I’m told, Kenny knew each of his young passengers by name.

So, what’s in a name?

To her lover, Romeo, Shakespeare’s Juliet asks and answers the question: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Juliet is telling Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention easily discarded at will with nothing lost.

Is that really “what’s in a name?”

The Bible would beg to differ. Scripture proclaims names as powerful things – anything but artificial and meaningless. In a nutshell, names matter.

The name “Kenneth” is of Scottish origin, and it means “handsome.” Which likely explains why it wasn’t just the sight of a fancy purple car pulling up to her house that turned a young woman’s head, one day back in 1966, when Kenny and some friends drove clear-across Iowa to meet the “pretty lady” in Waukon whom he’d seen in a photograph.

Two years later, that “pretty lady’s” name would change: Gloria Gramlich would become Gloria Lough, and the rest, as they say, is history – a long, loving story blessed with children, grandchildren, and plenty of husband-and-wife adventures along beautiful country roads, and to the “boat,” and to Menard’s, and to North Country Steak Buffet.

So, yes, names matter. You are your name, and your name is you – in more ways than you might realize.

More than simply what someone scrawls on a birth or marriage certificate, our names hold deep spiritual meaning. Our names matter, because our names hold power, and our names hold promise. Our names come as close as anything else in identifying who we are and – more importantly – whose we are. Our names reveal something of who God is and what God is all about.

When you and I were baptized, we were given new names. We were marked, named and claimed as unique and beloved “Children of God.” 

That means we’re one with Jesus Christ – the One whom God anointed to profess God’s name.

That means God in Jesus Christ is forever transforming us into new creations.

That means we put our good hope for the future in the Lord’s promises of the past, which are made real in the present by the Holy Spirit.

I’m reading to you from the Old Testament’s Psalm 139. With the help of the Spirit, listen for God’s promises about the past, the present, and the future for you, for me, and for Kenny:

O LORD, you have searched me and known me [by name].

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the pit, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them – they are more than the sand; I come to the end, and I am still with you.

It’s what makes grace so amazing:

The love of God knits each of us together in our mother’s womb and hems in each of our lives with hands that are nail-scarred. God, apparently, isn’t yet graciously done with any of us – no matter who are or aren’t, no matter what we’ve said or left unsaid, no matter what we’ve done or left undone.

Generations after the psalmist wrote those words of Psalm 139, the Gospel of John collects all those thoughts together in one place and one person: “My sheep listen to my voice. I know them [by name], and they follow me,” Jesus says. “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand.”

For that undeserved favor, for that unearned mercy – let all thanks and praise be to Father, Son and Spirit who know us by name – in life, in death, and from this time on and forever more.

Indeed, names really do matter – particularly the hope and assurance of resurrection that names hold for those of us who, like Kenny, will always be called a “Child of God.”

Amen, and amen!