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By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. Gen. 11:9
Living in tents vs. being rooted in a particular place. That tension dominates the history of God’s people. Temporary vs. permanent, portable vs. fixed—Abraham dwelt in tents and moved around. The people groaned as sojourners in Egypt. They wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. In fulfillment of all of it, Jesus said the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. There is a famous second century document called the Letter to Diognetes, which contains a lengthy description of Christians. A famous quote from that letter says, “Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.” Our true citizenship is in heaven, which means we can be at home anywhere in this world, even when far from home. But it also means we can’t really be at home anywhere in this world, even in our own house. This strange tension hit home to me this morning. As you know from the announcements this past Sunday, my phone died recently and I was cut off from my normal means of communicating with people. The broken phone ended up being unsalvageable, so I got a new one a few days ago. But the flaws of the old one were such that my saved contacts reverted to the beginning of 2014. That means precious few people here in Munster were in my list of contacts, but all kinds of people were in there with whom I hadn’t communicated in years. So I’ve been going through and trying to rebuild a functional contact list, which involves deleting a lot of dated contacts and trying to find good numbers for the current contacts. But here is the rub; when you decide to clean up the rolls, the phone double-checks by asking you, “Delete contact?” That’s a harsh way to think about it. Do I really want to cut myself off from someone? It seems weird to still have all these old contacts from a place where I wasn’t born but lived for 14 years, but where I no longer live. But it seems even weirder just to delete people from my contacts. At issue is where do you live? Where are your roots? What do you consider home? Is it really wise to delete old contacts? Is it really wise not to? The same sort of feeling comes when you consider where you will be buried. In your hometown as in where you grew up? Where you retired? Where you spent the bulk of your career? People are mobile. Contacts come and go. Rootedness is the exception. If Heidi and I bought cemetery plots today, where would we buy them? At Concordia in Hammond? It is a hard question. Learning to live as though at home is wherever you are, while also learning that you will never really be at home in this world—that is one of the hardest lessons of the Christian life. It is a lesson you can ponder as you visit a loved one in the cemetery, as you go through the contact list in your phone, as you look at your Christmas card list, or ponder where you will retire, or where your children and grandchildren will think of as “home.” I’m deleting old contacts and re-entering updated ones. But we all have the same citizenship, we all have the same home. We’re all sojourners in this life. And by an added gift of grace, we get to share it with other people on our respective journeys home. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard
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Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?
Job 38:31 This summer we’ve been looking at the stars with a scope from our driveway. Amazingly, with a bird scope on a tripod one can see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. It is a strange experience, actually. Isn’t it interesting that the constellations as we know them are mentioned in the Old Testament? These words, spoken by God to Job, speak to the constancy of the stars. If you can get far enough away from the city’s ambient light, you can look up to the heavens just like Abraham did, and it looks the same. Poets and painters use the stars to represent eternity because they just aren’t subject to the winds of change that govern this world. But it is also a rhetorical question. God is contrasting his own infinite power and knowledge as the Creator with Job’s powerlessness and ignorance. The implication is that Job can’t do anything to affect the stars, but God can whenever He wants. The stars are not eternal. Like everything else, they exist and keep their assigned places at the pleasure of their maker. We, like the stars, are God’s creatures. But it wasn’t for the stars that God Himself became incarnate and submitted to death. It was for us. From our perspective in this life, the stars seem eternal and our own lives seem so transient. But the real truth is that the stars aren’t eternal, and your life is guaranteed forever. You will outlive the moon and the stars. With that in mind- that your real home and citizenship is in an eternal city—the chances and changes of life in this world seem less threatening. Yes, change and decay in all around we see. That isn’t a function of our times, it is a function of time itself in a fallen world. But it is not our ultimate doom. The stars might well look at us and wonder at the fact that we will live forever, long after they are gone. The little frustrations, the complications, the changes that keep changing, sometimes overwhelm us. But the Gospel gives us peace. Fear not! The God Who can loose the cords of Orion has promised to bring you to Himself. Nothing can change that. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. I Tim. 3:14-15
St. Paul said Timothy had known the Scriptures from a very young age. How? Well, we know from the Bible that Timothy learned the faith from his mother and grandmother. And we also know that more advanced Scripture learning would have taken place in synagogues and congregations. That was one of the main reasons the Christians gathered—to hear the public reading of Scripture and preaching based on it. The how of the matter can be different in different circumstances. Parents must teach their children the faith. That is a big part of their God-given duties. But whether they home-school, use a parochial school, or attempt to augment a public school education depends on their particular opportunities and gifts. The main thing is that it get done. St. Paul’s has always considered parochial schooling to be an excellent option; that’s why we’re dedicated to offering it. This year, not just the parents but the schools themselves have had to grapple with a new “how” question. Remote or in-person learning? Various schools in our area have chosen differently on that question. One option some of them had, one that St. Paul’s did not have, was to offer both and let the parents choose. Schools with multiple teachers at each grade level could retool to have some teach in person and others teach online. We only have one teacher per grade, and the requirements of online vs. in-person learning prevent one person from doing both simultaneously, at least with the prep time, training and equipment available to us. So we had to pick one or the other, knowing that whatever option we chose, there would likely be parents who would opt to remove their children from St. Paul’s in order to pursue the other option. We chose to offer in-person learning with strict protocols in place in keeping with all health guidelines and mandates. A huge amount of work has gone into making that decision possible, and we think it is the right decision for St. Paul’s and for the vast majority of our students. But neither choice was going to be able to serve everyone. Exercising their responsibilities as parents, several families have chosen to withdraw from St. Paul’s to pursue a manner of learning they hope will work better in their circumstances. We certainly hope they find what they are looking for and the children receive a high quality, Christian education. And we certainly will leave the door open for a potential return in case another option doesn’t work out. The upshot of this crazy year’s forced choices is that our school enrollment looks likely to be significantly down from what we had predicted (and budgeted on) before we knew about all the disruption. The numbers and trend line merely as statistics might look pretty alarming, but in context we know and understand the situation. We also know that school enrollments often decline suddenly but generally increase gradually. So this pandemic could be reverberating in our school environment long after the virus is contained. We have a lot of work ahead of us. But it is as worth doing as always, and nobody said it would be easy. Certainly St. Paul never told Timothy it would easy. This is a chance to remind ourselves of the importance of what we teach. We have to practice what we preach. We have to live our lessons. The sacred writings, the Scriptures, assure us that the mission of preaching and teaching Christ to the next generation will be with us as long as there is a next generation. So we need not fret, worry, second-guess, or wallow in self-pity. We simply dedicate ourselves to making Christ known however He enables us. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. Matt. 7:24
You probably noticed that Pastor Stock was doing the church service by himself this past weekend. I was up in Northern Wisconsin for our annual “work weekend” at my uncle’s island, now inherited by my cousins. It is an old fisherman’s retreat (really old—the one log cabin dates to the late 19th Century) with a lodge and cabins on it. We take a family vacation there every year in July, but it takes a tremendous amount of upkeep to make those vacations possible. Maintaining buildings in the harsh weather of the North Woods, and doing so without any road access makes for a constant challenge. Therefore, many years ago we added the mid-June, pre-vacation season work weekend to keep the island available for all the people whose memories and traditions depend on being able to visit each year. The buildings are beautiful, and two of them in particular, the rec house (dock house) and the boat house have become iconic landmarks of the scenery for people out on the big lake. The problem is that they are in a literal sense partially built on sand. The islands and shorelines up there are mostly made out of Great Lakes fieldstones, some clay, and sand with a stringy web of stubborn tree roots holding it all together. The lake level goes up and down, the piling posts rot, the ice pushes against the shore and into every crevice, the tree roots force their way in every direction, rocks shift, and the old buildings settle in ever more catawampus positions, with window and doorframes groaning futilely to keep their corners square. Our strategies for keeping walls up up involve an endless array of jacks, cinderblocks, fieldstones, lumber shims, and hope. The yearly effort is a great object lesson about Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount because we actually get to observe the futility of building on sand. But we love those buildings. We try to keep them up, but we know we are working against time and the elements, which are both relentless adversaries. In a deeper sense we also see how so often some of the major building blocks of our own lives lack solid foundations. What we think we know—about ourselves, our past, our relationships, our future—can turn out to be tentative at best when our hopes are in this world. It is okay to love the things of this world as long as we’re willing to let go of them. Your body, your loved ones, your house—they can all be a labor of love as long as you remember that love is about letting go, too. None of them can bear up under being the foundation of your life. The only Rock that never shifts is Christ. God’s love for us in Him, the forgiveness we have, the place in His family, the assurance of His presence, are all things no health situation, job situation, or relationship situation can take away. At St. Paul’s we build everything we are and do as the family of God in this place on that solid rock. For that reason, we never fear the vagaries of time and the changeable cultural moods that beat against our faith in Christ. We know nothing can do anything to Him, and He is faithful. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; Acts 20:29
Seems like a strange verse for a daily update or devotion. It comes as St. Paul is getting ready to leave after spending a long time teaching the faith to a group of people. The parting of ways is an emotional one for Paul because he knows he won’t see them again and desperately wants them to remain strong in the Gospel after he is no longer there to help them. And he knows it won’t be easy for them. The thought of what false teaching will try to do to them makes him want to go over everything again one last time. But eventually you have to let go. I think in some ways on a smaller scale we experience that emotional parting every year at graduation. Young men and women to whom we’ve taught the Gospel for years depart into the next stage of life. Granted, we aren’t physically parted from them and we hope to continue in ministry together, so that isn’t the same as in Acts. But we have to acknowledge losing hold of them in a way and letting go the way St. Paul had to let go. We know what we’ve taught them and how important it is. But we also know from our own personal experience and from many years of watching our graduates head through high school and beyond that the fierce wolves of life and the falseness of the Zeitgeist are not likely to spare them. I once adapted the lyrics of the table blessing song from Fiddler on the Roof for Christian use, and I always think of that song at confirmations and graduations. “May the Lord protect and defend you. May He always shield you from shame…” At our graduation service the fierce wolves were on my mind, and how desperately I wanted these kids to stand firm in the Gospel. Our principal Barb Mertens even started crying (or at least got something in her eye and needed to clear her throat) in speaking about the class, and I suspect that emotion only increases year by year through any person’s ministry. But at the end of the day, you have to let go. They aren’t babies or kids anymore, and yes, it is a spiritually dangerous world. We can’t put our confidence in how well we’ve taught them or how well they’ve learned it. We have to model the faith for them by letting go with confidence that God never forgets His promises and that His plans for us are always good. The wolves and this world’s prince may still scowl fierce as they will; they can harm them none…one little word can fell them. We pray that our graduates and their parents do not suddenly become strangers to St. Paul’s but continue to be nurtured and fed as part of our Christ-centered community. And we wait upon the Lord who answers prayer. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain… Heb. 6:19
Today is the last day of the school year. We used Heb. 6:19 as a theme verse talking about how our souls are anchored in the Lord. Certainly we have all needed this anchor for our souls in turbulent times. Life teaches us this lesson again and again; there are no fixed certainties, there is no place of refuge, nothing can hold fast in the storms of life except the grace of God won for us by Jesus Christ. Nobody in the first semester of school could have foreseen how the second semester would go. The whole school year was suddenly disrupted. But in terms of Christ being an anchor for our souls, nothing changed. Sports seasons were cancelled, restaurants closed. But our relationship to God in Christ and His eternal mercy and grace toward us held fast. The terrible events of the last week in Minnesota, in which police inexcusably killed a man in custody and local residents inexplicably burned down an auto parts store in protest seem merely to add to the general idea of things going wrong and nothing being safe. But even that whole terrible situation is something Christ knew about when He agreed to take it all to the cross. If you anchor your soul and try to find lasting peace in anyone or anything apart from Christ, including yourself, it disappoints you. You end up adrift. But when you are safely anchored in the storm, you need not fear. 2020 has thrown everyone for a loop, and many things may never be the same. The world is changing quickly and in some cases furiously. Anyone whose peace depends on politics, business, money, entertainment, comfort, health, safety, familiarity, or any worldly thing has reason to fear. But Christians do not. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So it will be interesting to see the St. Paul’s students move on to another grade or off to high school. This will always be a memorable year for them and for all of us. Long after I’m gone, they’ll probably be telling their grandchildren about the pandemic year when they were in grade school at St. Paul’s. (And who know how laughably old-fashioned our technology will seem to those grandchildren!) And in the near term, they’ll hopefully come back to school in the fall not too far behind where they need to be to keep learning. But no matter what happens, I hope for all our students, as I’m sure do you, that the truly eternal things, the central reason for St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and School, will be the thing that stays with them no matter where life takes them or what future years may bring. We can give no guarantees to these young people about their future in terms of health, jobs, college, marriage, or anything. But we can give them the sure and solid anchor for their souls, the Lord who promises to weather every storm with them and see them safely home. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard …He ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty…
Today is Ascension Day, which used to be one of the big festivals of the church calendar. Ascension commemorates what amounts to a celestial coronation. Some scenes in Revelation depict this triumph from the perspective of heaven, while the picture of it from an earthly perspective is what ties together the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (also by Luke). It always falls on a Thursday, though, since the Ascension happened forty days after Easter, so as church participation has waned in recent years, fewer and fewer and people ever participate in Ascension services. Our tradition here at St. Paul’s has been to celebrate Ascension with our whole circuit of sister congregations. For those who don’t know, our national church body is divided into districts (mostly named after the states, so we’re in the Indiana District) and subdivided into circuits. We’re in Circuit 1, which is the Western half of Lake County. Anyway, we take turns each hosting the service, all the pastors are invited to participate, there is one big, joint choir, and everyone is invited. The service normally ends up outside, weather permitting, then there is some kind of social event afterwards involving desert. Our Ascension tradition was always a good way for those who participated to get a sense of the wider church. Trinity and Concordia in Hammond, Redeemer in Highland, Grace in Dyer, and Peace in Schererville, have often participated. This year, Pastor Gumz of Trinity in Hammond (whose kids come to St. Paul’s school) volunteered to continue the circuit tradition by putting together an Ascension service and filming it in various circuit churches, then splicing it into one service. Please be sure to watch (and by watch I don’t mean like a tv show, but in a participatory way) the Ascension service. And don’t let the technology of it be the focus. Yes, it is a neat service, but the point of it is not to be a gimmick. The point of it is to attend (such as we’re able) a heavenly celebration of the victory and eternal reign of Jesus Christ. Blessed Ascension Day to all! In Christ, Pastor Speckhard “This is most certainly true.” Luther’s Small Catechism
What is most certainly true? Death and taxes? True love? That you can’t go home again? That you can do whatever you set your mind to? That you’re another day older and deeper in debt? What you think is most certainly true indicates pretty well who or what your real God is, because your real God is what you rely on when you don’t know what to rely on and everything seems unreliable. A.D. 2020 has thrown a lot of things into turmoil. Things we took for granted as though it went without saying that they were most certainly true have proven unreliable. For many people, the bedrock of life, the most certain of certain truths, has suddenly started to wobble. For others, life has gone on pretty much as normal. But even those whose lives haven’t changed much have had to reassess what things can be taken for granted. Jobs, school, hobbies, plans, weekly routines—none of them are guarantees. None of them will be there no matter what. “True” means faithful and constant. A true statement is faithful to reality. A true love is faithful to the lover. A true friend is constant-- a friend not just in good times but in bad times, too. Even fiction can “ring true” or not in terms of the deeper realities it tries to express. The catechism reserves the famous phrase “This is most certainly true” for the triune God. Each of the explanations of the three articles, which correspond to the three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—concludes with “This is most certainly true.” The confirmands have to memorize the longer paragraphs, and they always struggle to recite them together, but when it comes to that last line, they always say, loud and in unison, THIS IS MOST CERTAINLY TRUE!” As their instructor, I always find it a bit frustrating, were it not so humorous, that they express such confidence in the truth of the statement that they were so uncertain and hesitant about mumbling their way through. But even that function of memory illustrates something true. It isn’t just that the content of the memorized paragraph that is true. It is true, of course, and it matters, which why we want the confirmands to know it. But in another way, the God being talked about is true. The triune God is true to His promises, true to His people. We cannot say of ourselves that we are certainly true to Him all the time. We mumble our way through, rely on things that prove unreliable, taking for granted things that disappear suddenly, and just generally not being worthy of the God we have. But He remains certainly true. The confirmation class struggling to recite the memory work but then closing with a resounding “This is most certainly true,” illustrates something profound about the grace of a God who remains eternally true to a people who can never deserve it. God is true to you. We had just over 100 people in church in the three services combined, and a few hundred more participated via live-stream. His Word went out to all kinds of settings—old and young, rich and poor, healthy and sick, content and desperate—yet none of them deserved the promise they received. But it was true for all them. Anyone who hears and believes the Gospel can join with our 8th graders as they prepare for confirmation at the end of the month by reviewing the catechism memory work, and if nothing else, proclaiming that our God is most certainly true. “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—“ Col. 4:3
Our Thursday Bible study meeting via Zoom has been going through the book of Hebrews. This morning the topic included the natural inclination we all have to drift away from the Church and from faith, and how we all need the mutual consolation and exhortation of the family of God. We concluded by talking about opportunities for evangelism to a society that has been drifting away for some time. St. Paul’s words from Colossians strike an interesting note. Our namesake prays for an open door for the Word, for the proclamation of the mystery of Christ. Now, if I were prison, I think I would pray for an open door for me. The whole point of a prison is that the doors are closed to the prisoner inside. But St. Paul in prison urges everyone to pray for open doors for the Word of God to get into people’s hearts. His own imprisonment isn’t the issue. It is his inability to preach and teach in prison that concerns him, though he hopes that even in prison he will find opportunity. We learn elsewhere in his letters that his imprisonment provided an opportunity to share Christ with the guards, just like his shipwreck in Acts provided an opportunity to introduce sailors and merchants to his God and Savior. We aren’t in prison, but it can feel like it during this pandemic. We certainly are not able to preach and teach the way we had been before. We need everyone praying for God to open doors for the Word. One answer to such a prayer came in the mail this morning. I think you’ll find it encouraging, and evidence that what we think of as setback and problems, like Paul’s imprisonment, do not obstruct God’s plan. We got a very nice letter and contribution from someone who is not a member of St. Paul’s and whose church has not been able to offer services. This person has been participating with us via our livestream every week and wrote to express appreciation for all our church has been doing to proclaim the Word and make it available to families like theirs during the pandemic. Of course, before the pandemic we weren’t livestreaming the services at all. That was something we did because we couldn’t meet in person. But God had other ideas. The pandemic rendered us a church building with closed doors, but through it, God opened other doors. You get the impression that God isn’t bothered by worldly limitations. Today’s was not the only such note we’ve received. Member and non-members have written to express great appreciation for what St. Paul’s is doing. But the timeliness of the letter that came morning was striking, coming as it did right after we had been discussing the drifting away of the society and the limitations and opportunities for building people up in faith. Keep praying for God to open doors at St. Paul’s-- the literal, physical doors to the sanctuary and the opportunities to get the Word into people’s hearts in other ways. Keep your own doors open to such things as well, as we all exhort one another to remain steadfast in faith no matter what trials and temptations or inclinations to drift away may beset. Your God and His love for you will not be thwarted! In Christ, Pastor Speckhard “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” Neh. 8:10
When you’re told to “be strong,” you know something scary, painful, or disappointing has happened or is about to happen. Usually, “Be strong!” does not refer to your muscles. It refers to the mental focus or emotional toughness needed to face some hardship, be it something little and momentary like getting a shot at the doctor’s office or something big and traumatic like attending the funeral of a loved one. We’re so used to thinking of this strength in terms of toughness, discipline, will power, and endurance that is seems almost a tad silly to think of the joy of the Lord being our strength. But in this Easter season you’d be amazed how much hardship, suffering, disappointment, or grief can melt away when you put it into the context of our risen Lord. “Safely, joyfully, and differently.” That’s the answer to the “how?” question I sent out today telling the confirmation class how we’re going to do the rescheduled confirmation service. That is also the answer to how we’re going to do all the services here in the near future. The need for safety affects people differently. People grieving the loss of loved one to preventable illness or accident place a higher premium on safety. The joy of the risen Lord is their strength to endure, and the promised resurrection remains the context in which they grieve. As a church family we not only mourn with those who mourn but honor the need to do things safely despite the fact that doing so can make everything more difficult or less enjoyable in some ways. The need to do things differently is a far littler hardship. But is still requires a different kind of strength. We have to overcome force of habit, personal preferences, and attachment to some beautiful and meaningful things, things like kneeling together at the rail for communion or gathering to share our lives over coffee after the service. But you will be amazed at how easily the joy of the Lord gives you the strength to do things differently, in ways that would prove to be major obstacles to you if you attempted them with some other source of strength besides the joy of the Lord. How long will some of these things last? Who knows? Will we eventually go back to doing things the old familiar way, or will we incorporate some of the different things into the usual routine going forward? Again, who knows? What I can guarantee with certainty is that worship at St. Paul’s will always bring you Christ in Word and Sacrament, and the joy of that can be your strength. Yes, we strive for accompanying joys, like beautiful choirs, appropriate art and decorations, and comfortable, upbeat fellowship time. But none of those joys can ever be your strength. Only the joy of the risen, reigning Lord can provide that. When we practice finding out joy only in what truly matters, we appreciate the tangential joys even more and put up with the tangential irritations with a good attitude. More importantly, we train ourselves to face big hardships in life without gloom or despondency. In these unique times willed with strange hardships, live your life safely, joyfully, and differently with the joy of the Lord giving you strength for whatever comes. In Christ, Pastor Speckhard |
AuthorRev. Peter Speckhard, Senior Pastor at St. Paul's Ev. Lutheran Church, Munster, Indiana 
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