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But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Acts 1:8
The entire history of creation hinges on the death and resurrection of Christ. His accomplished mission is the fulfillment of God’s purposes from all the way back in Genesis and to the end of time. The proclamation of that fulfillment began in earnest with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which is usually seen as the birth of the Christian Church as we know it. This mission continues throughout time and across the globe. The presence of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit apply to us in Munster in A.D. 2020 just as much as anywhere or any year. The same Church that began in Jerusalem and spread throughout Judea and Samaria has long since come to Northwest Indiana, and we enjoy all the blessings of faith and salvation that God has to offer. It is important to remember, though, that the Christian Church and the faith each one of us has personally in Jesus Christ are founded on a concrete event in time and place. It isn’t an idea of forgiveness or an abstract concept of grace and love. It in the Incarnation, the coming of God into Creation and His literal death and resurrection in which we place our hope. There is a perfectly worldly, seeable, tangible history and geography to the story of God. These are real places on a map. You can go there. It happened. Christians have always made pilgrimages to see places and things that God used in important ways in the history of Christianity. Luther objected strongly to the pervasive idea that one could earn points with God by making pilgrimages. He didn’t object to the desire to see Biblical and historical things and so be built up in faith by a pilgrimage, but he insisted we bear in mind that doing so is not anything that earns salvation or that anyone has to do in order to be a good Christian. We have all the spiritual gifts we need right here in Munster. Seeing the places the Bible tells us about can help us understand the Scriptures and the history of the faith in more concrete terms and bring the story to life, so to speak. Just as a Civil War buff might want to visit Gettysburg just to be able to picture the things he or she reads about, so a Christian might naturally want to see Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria even though what began there—the proclamation of Christ in Word and Sacrament-- is now available here. I have been to Israel several times and have found the experience profoundly enriching. Pastor Stock is planning to go with a group of Circuit Visitors and district officials in January, and I suspect his experience will be similar. Not everyone gets a chance to do it. It is expensive and requires time and planning, and sometimes by the time people have the time and money to make it possible they no longer have the health, energy or desire to travel. But those who do get the chance to do it tend to feel very blessed by the opportunity. Heidi and I are planning to lead another trip in a couple of years. If you think you might want to join us, the time is now to start planning. The plan is to do the Holy Land via Jordan, so we’ll see what Moses saw when he looked out over the promised land before he died as well as seeing the Promised Land itself, including Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. We plan to depart on March 21, 2022 (about 18 months from now) and be gone 10-11 days, much of which will likely be spring break here and in Munster schools. More details to follow, but if it is something that works for you, we’d love to have you join us for what we hope will be an extremely enriching experience. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard
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But all things should be done decently and in order. I Cor. 14:40
St. Paul was very familiar with the logistical issues of holding worship services. He addressed issues like how communion should happen and who should be preaching and teaching. So it comes as no surprise that a church named after him should encounter some of those issues and take his advice on how to address them—decently and in order. This coming Sunday at 9:00 we will be holding an ushers’ meeting to make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of how we come forward for communion, dismiss the sections, and even how we help people find a suitable place to sit. That’s because we’re encountering the joyous difficulty of dealing with bigger crowds. We want as many people as possible to come to church, but we also want everyone to be (and feel) safe while they are here. Yesterday at the 9:30 service we had a large crowd. We had space available toward the front, but few people willing to sit there. We also had several families who were back in church for the first time in a long time and who were therefore unfamiliar with the communion process. We definitely want to continue having greater attendance, so we’re having the meeting to make sure we can do everything decently and in good order. Some things you can do to help out if you are able and so inclined:
Also, listen for the following in the readings for this Sunday—“Do everything without grumbling or complaining.” An usher might ask you to move to a different seat in order to accommodate others. You might be asked to wear a mask. You might not agree with the procedures we have in place. But it is all doable by people of good will. But those who are contentious or obstinate will make everything uncomfortable for the larger group. It comes naturally to all of us sometimes, but especially in trying times we have to resist the urge to have a bad attitude. We have holiday services on the horizon. We all want to be able to celebrate in church with Christ as the center. And do so decently and in good order, we’ll need to hone our procedures and policies. Everyone has a role to play in that that blessed, ongoing process. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard Now in the eighteenth year of his reign, when he had cleansed the land and the house, he sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, and Maaseiah the governor of the city, and Joah the son of Joahaz, the recorder, to repair the house of the Lord his God. They came to Hilkiah the high priest and gave him the money that had been brought into the house of God, which the Levites, the keepers of the threshold, had collected from Manasseh and Ephraim and from all the remnant of Israel and from all Judah and Benjamin and from the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And they gave it to the workmen who were working in the house of the Lord. And the workmen who were working in the house of the Lord gave it for repairing and restoring the house. They gave it to the carpenters and the builders to buy quarried stone, and timber for binders and beams for the buildings that the kings of Judah had let go to ruin. And the men did the work faithfully. Over them were set Jahath and Obadiah the Levites, of the sons of Merari, and Zechariah and Meshullam, of the sons of the Kohathites, to have oversight. The Levites, all who were skillful with instruments of music, were over the burden-bearers and directed all who did work in every kind of service, and some of the Levites were scribes and officials and gatekeepers.
II Chron. 34:8-13 Probably many of you merely skimmed the above paragraph from II Chronicles. It is one of the many boring paragraphs in the Old Testament that people who want to read the Bible stories tend not to pay much attention to. It is filled with humdrum details about the nuts and bolts of religious life. It reads like the minutes of a church council meeting, which is sort of what the Chronicles were. This paragraph never comes up in church services. Plus, it has a lot of names of people that most people have never heard of and that are hard to pronounce, so nobody ever volunteers to read these paragraphs aloud in Bible studies, either. What the above paragraph does for us, however is to help us realize that God works in both wondrous and tedious ways. God uses famous people and obscure people. His people do dramatic things in amazing ways, and they do everyday things in a workaday manner. Even Solomon’s Temple faced the people with organizational issues. They had stewardship campaigns, job descriptions, committees and organizational charts, and had to deal with payroll issues involved with hiring laborers to do basic things like make general repairs. It might disillusion us to think of people serving the Lord by punching a clock, but those people made serving the Lord possible for everyone. The Temple and its purpose was fulfilled by the death and resurrection of Christ. The Romans utterly destroyed the building (per Jesus’s prediction) about forty years later, in A.D. 70. Our churches today are not exactly the same kind of thing as the Temple in Jerusalem about 2650 years ago as described in this passage from Chronicles. But worshiping God and receiving the fulfillment of the Temple in His gifts of Word and Sacrament still involves committees, organizational charts, stewardship campaign, payrolls, building maintenance, and so forth. Sometimes we might get the impression that such things have no place in a truly spiritual, religious life, but the fact is that they do and always have. Kings and Chronicles explain how Temple worship went through all kinds of ups and downs of disrepair and restoration through the centuries. The same is true of congregations and church buildings. Right now, of course, we face a lot of uncertainty as we go through the regular fall routine of trying to put together a budget for next year. We’re going to have stewardship emphasis this fall as we seek to emerge from the pandemic without having to curtail our ministries or let things fall into disrepair. Your own spiritual life probably goes through ups and downs as well. Sometimes your prayers uplift your soul, other times you feel like you’re just going through the motions. Sometimes you can almost feel the Spirit’s presence in worship, and other times you’re bored and checking your watch. But God never gives up on you. His gifts are real and true no matter they feel like, and the Spirit works through them. And your participation, your input, and your offerings make this ministry possible for everybody whether it seems like you’re part of a bold, amazing story, like some parts of Kings and Chronicles, or just keeping things clean and helping to make payroll, like other parts of Kings and Chronicles. Christ is King, and all of history, the exciting and the boring, is the chronicle of His salvation and grace toward sinners like you and me. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Col. 3:17
The day after Labor Day used to be a smaller version of New Year’s Day, at least in terms of the cultural calendar. It marked a distinct change from one season to another. Traditionally it is/was the first day of the school year. It marked the end of “the season” in touristy and resort areas. It was the day after which fashionable people no longer wore white and changed over to their earth-toned, autumn wardrobe. Of course, some of those traditions no longer apply. We start school in August. We tend to vacation earlier in the summer, and wear whatever colors we want. There is no right or wrong to these traditions and our observance of them or lack thereof. But we ought to know why we do what we do. And this shows how there can be spiritual, Christian significance to a perfectly secular holiday like Labor Day. Labor Day got started in the late 19th Century as a celebration promoted by the labor movement, which was behind the unionizing of the labor force in the aftermath of last stages of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, when we think of it in deeper terms than a three day weekend and chance to barbecue, we usually think of it in terms of blue collar labor particularly. And in secular terms the holiday does focus on large scale manual labor in factories. But what we Christians can celebrate, should we choose, is better understood as our vocations. Our labor is whatever God has given us to do—as individuals, family members, church members, employers and employees. Maybe we should call it Vocation Day. Most of your vocations get covered in the Table of Duties in your catechism. That is, what does the Bible say about how you should be clergy or laity, a husband or wife, parent of child, government official and/or citizen, employers or employee, neighbor, and so forth? It references various verses that talk about how to fulfill those roles in God-pleasing ways. But I really like the catch-all phrase from Colossians—“whatever you do.” God doesn’t send you a daily to-do list, at least not with any specificity to it. We all have different jobs, interests, and obligations. But whatever we do, we are to do in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. You can’t cheat people, insult them, belittle them, take advantage of them, ignore their needs, or anything like that in the name in the Jesus. Whatever your job is, and whomever you interact with, you are to speak and act as though you are sent to bring Christ to the situation. You’re doing it for Him, in His Name. As you head into a new season and year (sort of, in a way) celebrate the work God has given you to do. Give thanks for the opportunity to serve. Look at even the most boring or mundane parts of your routine as a means of serving the Lord. We have a holiday called Labor Day, the real labor of being Christians takes no holidays; it is the thing the holidays celebrate. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard |
AuthorRev. Peter Speckhard, Senior Pastor at St. Paul's Ev. Lutheran Church, Munster, Indiana 
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