"Courage!" (Reflections on Pentecost 11, Year A 2026)

But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” (Matthew 9: 27)

Imagine this: You and the family take a summer vacation in Wildwood. It’s really hot, so you go down to the beach, spread your blanket, and cool off from the sticky humidity by wading into the cool Atlantic swell. The water is blue like the sky. It feels fresh and invigorating against your skin. You wade out a little further until you’re up to your armpits. You’re having a lovely time splashing around and listening to the seagulls when—suddenly—the gentle whitecaps start to turn a dirty brown and a force like a giant vacuum cleaner sucks you right off your feet and begins to pull you away from the shore. You flail around and try to dogpaddle your way back to land, but the current keeps pulling you further away. You’re getting knocked around like a rubber duck and a big wave deposits a salty gulp of water right down your throat. You cough and choke. Your strength starts to give out. You’re in a rip current. What do you do?

One thing’s for sure. If you panic, you’ll die.

In Israel’s scriptures, the sea was often a symbol of chaos. Even an inland water like the Sea of Galilee could be unpredictable, changing in minutes from a glassy calm to a violent, destructive monster causing panic even for experienced sailors.

The community to whom Matthew wrote our Gospel lesson for Pentecost 11, Year A (Matthew 14:22-33) knew its share of chaos. This nascent family of believers must’ve been considered radically dangerous. They’d turned their backs on a hierarchical social structure that ordered the society in which they lived. They ignored purity laws for the sake of inclusion. They refused to submit to an empire’s idolatry. Their reward for this was persecution and abandonment. They lived with constant uncertainty, and uncertainty is scary. After all, don’t we all fear the unknown?

We’re living with a heavy dose of the unknown at the moment, aren’t we? Just look at the nightly TV news. Floods destroy neighborhoods or entire towns. Tornados and hurricanes ravage communities. Wildfires burn out of control and destroy thousands of acres. In a single evening’s weather report, we experience all the frightening chaos Elijah experienced on Mt. Horeb (1 Kings 19:9-18). We might even experience the horrible silence the prophet experienced at the mouth of the cave—the soul-crushing experience of failure and solitude.

At such chaotic moments, we call out for God. Like Peter, we cry, “Lord, save me!”

How does Jesus respond? He says to us, “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” The words “take heart” are, in Greek, one word: tharseite. It’s the imperative form of the noun tharseo, which translates as “Courage!” Then Jesus says, “It is I.” The Greek here is ego eimi, literally “I am,” the divine name for God. Courage, he says. God is.

As you thrash around in the tormenting clutches of the rip current, you might see the still-blue sky above you and remember God is. God who made the sky and the awful, unpredictable sea has also made you. In the midst of the swirling confusion, you stop struggling against the current. You swim to the side. You relax your frenzied limbs and wave to the lifeguard who is coming to your rescue. “Courage,” he calls to you. “Don’t be afraid.” You float for a while and follow his directions when he comes near. Now you feel safe.

From Matthew’s day to our own the Church has always lived with uncertainty. This is not a problem because rarely do any of us gain wisdom from circumstances which aren’t chaotic, uncertain, or in some way a crisis.

I recently heard a podcast about the decline of mainline Protestant denominations in the U.S. The podcaster opined that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has been steadily losing members while the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has remained stable because the ELCA has embraced progressive cultural ideas while the LCMS has remained steadfast and traditional in its doctrines. When the ELCA takes down the barriers which have estranged liberally minded people from the organized church, such people do not suddenly stampede into our pews. Conservatives leave the church, but progressive don’t join. Perhaps the cultural liberals feel they can respect the LGBTQ+ community, support gender equality, and champion reproductive freedom without having to get up on a Sunday morning.

I respect those folks for their social conscience, but I think they’re missing out on what we have. We have the words of life which inspire us every week. We have a community which becomes a family. We have the traditions of the faith with which we mark the seasons of the year, which give us a sense of belonging, and which bring us comfort and order in the face of a rapidly changing world. Most of all, we have Jesus. He is our rescuer, our guide to Godly life, our model of sacrificial love, our constant reminder that we are loved and valued, and—most important of all—our never-failing hope of resurrection.

“Courage,” he says. “I am here. Do not be afraid.” May his presence be with you to give you courage this week and always.

The Lord Will Provide (Reflections on Pentecost 10, Year A 2026)

 

“Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” (Matthew 14:19)

We at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia are extremely fortunate to number among our parishioners the Reverend Natt Pour. Pastor Natt (as we call him) is an ordained pastor from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Liberia. You might think that an immigrant coming from such an impoverished and frequently war-scarred nation might carry with him a certain aspect of melancholy, but, quite to the contrary, Pastor Natt is perennially cheerful and optimistic. That’s why we love him. There always seems to be just a little more sunshine in the room when this joyful and frequently picturesquely appareled cleric is around.

Some months back Pastor Natt made a request of the congregation for donations of old or obsolete computer equipment which could be used by the school kids at his home congregation in Africa. Bob, another parishioner with a similarly cherubic disposition, was in contact with an IT guy who had veritable bonanza of old computers, laptops, and tablets he was anxious to be rid of. When Bob dropped off this treasure trove of technology, I had to ask Pastor Natt how he would get the money to ship all this equipment to Liberia. Natt just gave me one of his iridescent smiles and said, “The Lord will provide.”

The Lord will provide, as Abraham told Isaac on Mt. Moriah[i]. That’s certainly been true in my life, even though I constantly find myself doubting the providence. I remember when I graduated from seminary—lo those many years ago—I had a Master of Divinity degree and no church to pastor.

Even those who have been Lutherans since their infant baptism may not be aware of the complexity of the ordination process for our clergy. A seminary degree does not immediately make one a pastor. There is an entire bureaucratic process to undergo. Strangely, this process moves rather swiftly until one gets to the most crucial point—the call of a congregation. You see, in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America one is not a pastor until a congregation says one is. This is where the process slows down to the speed of an arthritic tortoise. A congregation is an entirely volunteer organization, and it takes its good, sweet time about making decisions. Upon my graduation I had put aside about three months’ worth of savings. It would be six months before I drew a real paycheck.

You’ll note I did not starve. I don’t know how my meagre savings stretched to cover rent and food and utilities for an extra three months, but somehow, they did. The Lord provided. This is just one of the many times in my life when penury licked its lips in my direction but failed to swallow me.

In 2022 the church’s treasurer and I counted the beans and concluded that, should the congregation’s expenses and income follow their current trajectory, Faith Lutheran would be closing her doors for good by the following Easter. Four years later we’re still up and running. The Lord has provided.

All four of our Gospel witnesses include the story the RCL gives us for Pentecost 10, Year A (Matthew 14:13-21). The wonderful miracle story of the loaves and fish should be a reminder to us of God’s desire to see all of us get our daily bread. This is a tale of God’s abundance amidst our human fear of scarcity. I think it’s darn Christian of the disciples to care about the hunger of the crowd (v. 15), but more significant is Jesus’ reaction to the situation. He tells the crowd to sit down. Then he says a blessing over the food he has. He doesn’t lament a potential shortfall. He gives thanks for the goodness which God provided, and he trusts that it will be sufficient.

We can be grateful, or we can be fretful, but we cannot be both simultaneously. When we say grace, we are in grace. Our acknowledgment of God’s goodness doesn’t leave a lot of room for our anxiety. When scarcity exists, it's because of our lack of sharing. It's not because of God's lack of providing.

If we put this story in context, we should notice it comes right after the beheading of John the Baptist. In verse 13 Matthew tells us that Jesus, upon learning of John’s decapitation, wanted to go and be by himself for a while. Can you blame the guy? Even if you’re the only begotten Son of God the violent death of someone you love has to take something out of you. If you’ve ever been through a bereavement or some other emotionally draining experience, you’ll know how the Savior was feeling. Some things in life just suck all the emotional energy out of you like a plague of mosquitos with the munchies. But Jesus isn’t given a chance to grieve in this story. A bunch of folks with sick relatives and no awareness of personal boundaries come chasing after him. You’d think he was well within his rights to tell them to shove off and give him some space. But no. Jesus’ tank of compassion hadn’t hit “E.” The Lord provided. Even when we think we’ve got nothing left, when someone has drained the last ounce of our patience and endurance, when life is suffocating us and we can’t breathe, God’s Holy Spirit can still give us the guidance, the love, and the energy we need to get to the other side of our grief, frustration, despair, and weariness. The Lord provides.

A final thought: Who are we in this story? Who are you? Are you one of the hungry multitude or one of the disciples, worried that you don’t have what it takes to fulfill Jesus’ direction to care for the others? Jesus tells his followers, “You give them something to eat.” Would he give us this command if he didn’t think we had enough?

Thanks for stopping by this week. Give thanks to the Lord in all things and leave me a comment if you wish.

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[i] Gen. 22:14

RIP Lindsey Graham (Reflections on Pentecost 8, Year A 2026)

 

“Let both of them grow together until the harvest…” (Matthew 13: 29a)

The South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham passed away last week and the media has been full of tributes to the senator’s storied career. You may have divined that the late senator and I might not have been in agreement on some issues; nevertheless, the reminiscences of his senate colleagues seem to suggest that—politics aside—old Lindsey was a pretty good dude. Republicans and Democrats alike testify that he was mostly friendly and apparently blessed with a tremendous sense of humor which made him great company. I certainly admire the fact that he served in the United States Air Force, and after tragically losing his parents at a very young age, he took charge of his little sister and raised her himself. That’s pretty impressive and certainly worthy of praise. We all have our opinions and we don’t all get along all the time, but rarely do we encounter anyone who is 100% saint or 100% jerk. We’re all a mixture of wheat and weeds.

As a pastor who does a lot of neighborhood funerals, I’m always amazed when I pray over the remains of talented, intelligent, sweet, caring, sensitive people are also alcoholics or drug addicts or who have taken their own lives. Why is it that those who have been blessed by God with so many gifts also cause the ones who love them so much pain?

Shakespeare famously wrote, “The evil that man do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones[i],” but, in my experience, the opposite has been true. It seems people are far more forgiving, far more ready to give the benefit of the doubt, far more willing to cling to the virtuous wheat of our lives and cast the uncomfortable weeds into the fire.

I think that’s the takeaway from the Gospel Lesson for Pentecost 8, Year A in the RCL (Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43). If we take this reading on its face, we may superficially summarize it as “Someday there will be a Day of Judgment and good people like me will go to Heaven, and bad people will go to Hell.” I think we need to dig a little deeper into the text. Smart Bible scholar guys think Matthew, our Gospel writer (whoever he was), was writing to a community of early Christians who were living under some real nasty persecution[ii]. Some members of the community might’ve felt the pressure to abandon this Christianity stuff and accommodate themselves to the local culture. You know. They chose to go along to get along. You can’t really blame them, can you? I mean, if someone told you to abandon your faith or lose your life or go to jail or get fired from your job, what do you think you’d do? We all think we’d choose martyrdom, but if it came right down to it…?

Scholarly dudes[iii] point out the parable of the wheat and the weeds appears in Matthew and also in the gnostic gospel of Thomas. Thomas, which may be an older source, doesn’t include any explanation, so we wouldn’t be blamed if we guessed that Matthew made up the gloss in verses 36-43 to speak to his own community. You can imagine the burning question this nascent church had about its members. “If someone denies the faith, do they go to Hell? If that coward turned his back on our community, should we ever let him back in? Are there people in our church we can’t trust?”

Matthew uses the parable of the wheat and the weeds to remind his folks that there will always be good folks and not so good folks living together, but it’s not our place to say who is worthy and who isn’t. Any crusade to root out the slimeballs from the devout is only going to ruin the community. Playing ecclesiastic gestapo is the surest way to destroy a church.

I don’t think the parable need be only about the community of believers. The wheat field could relate to our own lives. Each of us has good and bad growing side-by-side. We know Luther’s doctrine of simul justus et peccator—simultaneously righteous and sinner. Even Luther himself had his own emotional weeds growing among the wheat of his intellect and compassion. He was a gifted teacher and theologian who deeply cared for the souls of his people. He could be extravagantly generous and at the same time short-tempered, caustic, stubborn, and obnoxious when people didn’t see things his way.

The parable encourages us to be a little more charitable in our judgments, but it also offers us the promise that a day will come when God will erase every flaw sown by our sinful nature. Someday our guilt will be absolved, our sin forgotten, and our defects burned away. Every cause of shame and everything we hate about ourselves will no longer burden us. It will all be forgiven when we enter into the Father’s glory.

I may not have agreed with Lindsey Graham’s politics, but when the day comes when I meet him, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.

Peace be with you, my friend. Please come and see me again.

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[i] That’s in Julius Caesar Act 3 sc. 2 for you Shakespeare geeks.

[ii] See Griffith-Jones, Robin, The Four Witnesses (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2000).

[iii] I’m relying here on one of my favorite “go-to” sources: Funk, Robt. W. et al, The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1993).

Who Will Say What Needs to be Said?

 What follows is not a reflection on the Bible or a sermon. It's just something which has been on my mind, and I needed to say it. 

When I was a kid, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school. We followed the Pledge with the singing of a patriotic song like “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful,” and we all knew the words by heart. I read Captain America comic books and watched Combat and The Rat Patrol on TV. I was proud of the way Americans—my own father included—had fought victoriously against the evils of fascism. I believed that the Americans fighting in Vietnam were battling for a virtuous cause against the forces of oppression. I saw public service announcements urging us to donate to Radio Free Europe or join the Peace Corp so the benefits of American democracy could be shared with everyone all around the globe. Our nation was on a moral mission, and it meant something to be an American. Something noble. We were the Good Guys.

Never, in those innocent days, would I have imagined America would be the aggressor. I believed we’d live up to our moral responsibility to openly oppose totalitarian regimes, to uphold international law, and to be an open hand of mercy to smaller nations struggling out of the swamps of poverty. Never could I imagine that my country—whose ideals I’d been taught in school—would sow economic chaos around the world, show a callous and depraved indifference to human suffering by cutting off life-saving food and medical aid, cozy up to ruthless dictators, abandon our friends in their time of need, insult allies who’d come to our own aid, murder foreign nationals on the high seas without proof of their committing any crime, invade the territory of a sovereign nation and overturn its government, and start a war without first being attacked. Never could I imagine the United States would change from being the defender of democracy to the world’s bully.

But here we are. My question is: Where will we go from here? A time will come, whether it be by an impeachment and removal or simply by the expiration of his term of office, when Donald Trump will be no more. What will the United States do then? As a Christian clergyman I believe absolution requires contrition. Will the next American president have the moral courage to apologize to the world for the damage we have done?

I say “we,” because I believe our nation bears a collective guilt which can’t simply be blamed on one man. After the shameful attack on the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021—an attack instigated by the defeated president himself—it should have been unmistakably clear to anyone with eyes that there was no depth of perfidy to which Trump was unwilling to sink in order to retain power, continue to profit off his office, and perpetuate his self-delusion that he was qualified to govern this nation. We saw in that moment who he was and what he was capable of doing, and yet we returned him to office four years later. Since then, many of the representatives we have elected have become his myrmidons and have done virtually nothing to halt his rapine and criminality.

I believe America owes the people of the world an apology. If we are unwilling to take responsibility for what our government has done and is doing, we will never regain our standing in the community of nations. Who will be the leader who is willing to make confession and ask for absolution? Will our next president be willing to admit defeat in our conflict with Iran? Will he or she apologize to the families of the service members we’ve lost and to the people of Iran for the civilian deaths caused by this illegal and unnecessary conflict? Will America be willing to face the International Court of Justice and abide by penalties imposed? Could our next president stand before the United Nations General Assembly and ask the world’s forgiveness, understanding that we have lost the trust of other nations and that we must earn our way back into their fellowship? Can we admit that we have forfeited our position of leadership in the free world, and that we must commit to humble cooperation if we wish to regain it?

Or will we simply jut out our chin and pretend the people of the world have not seen what we know they saw?

Who is that man or woman willing to do the unpleasant and distasteful task of acknowledging our errors and seeking reconciliation? Who will have the integrity to call our land to repentance? Doubtless the president who is willing to speak the embarrassing truth will invite vitriolic condemnation. He or she will be accused of hating America or even of treason. Such sincere humility may be political poison, but I believe it will be one of the greatest acts of statesmanship in modern times—and an absolute necessity.

Keep Seeding (Reflections on Pentecost 7, Year A 2026)

 

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

    and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

    it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose

    and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

Can I just say that I’ve found lawn care to be one of the most anxiety-producing responsibilities of home ownership? I have been locked in mortal combat with spotted spurge, dandelions, mushrooms, and a plethora of diabolical vegetation answering to the description of “weeds.” I constantly face the conundrum of watering. When to water? How much to water? Is my irrigation sensor working? 

Last fall the Bride and I sowed some grass seed on our lawn. Heat or fungus or some insidious blight or other turned the fecund green of our lawns to a sickly brown, requiring us to shell out about nine hundred bucks to have seed scattered and sown in hope of reviving the lawn to something approaching health. Wouldn’t you know it? Just as the seeds were starting to sprout, the landscaping company that services our development sent some bovine-brained Gen-Zee on an ATV to treat all our lawns with weedkiller. This wannabe Evel Knievel did a doughnut on our front lawn and tore up a good patch of recently seeded grass.

Recently, as I did my morning chore of pulling up the mushrooms which are sucking the nutrients away from my poor lawn, I asked myself, “Why? Why don’t I run up the white flag and surrender? Why don’t I just let this lawn go and do its own thing? Why can’t I let what will grow grow and what will die die? Who says I should try to control nature?”

The answer, of course, is my HOA. They want everyone’s lawn to look like the eighteenth green at Augusta, and they send you an intimidating letter if your lawn doesn’t measure up. So I guess I’ll be scattering more seed this year. But that’s okay. I’ve come to a place of peace with this. All I can do is scatter the seed. It’s God who gives the growth.

I love Jesus’ parable of the sower which we hear again as the Gospel lesson for Pentecost 7, Year A (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23) because it’s really a tale of hope. The “seed” is a metaphor for God’s word, and Jesus assumes that some of this seed is going to take root. It’s a mistake to dwell on the seed that doesn’t seem to be germinating when every seed has the potential for growth.

Saint Paul taught us that faith comes from what is heard.[i] No one hears the Word unless we proclaim it. If we’re to cast ourselves in this parable, we’re the sower of the seed. We can scatter the seed through public proclamation, but we also scatter it through our actions and our demeanor. When we do works of charity, when we show patience and forbearance, when we forgive, we are sowers of the seed. We sow when we are advocates for justice for the poor and marginalized, when we are neighbors, and when we show welcome and inclusion. I would hazard to guess that for everyone who is drawn on a Sunday morning to hear more of God’s Word there was a person in the past whose kindness or empathy or sense of internal peace was a seed of inspiration. Can you think of anyone who embodied the Word of God in your life? I can.

The Word of God is a word of love and forgiveness and healing. In the words and works of Jesus we learn and are called to love, patience, acceptance, compassion, mercy, sacrifice, and faith in eternal life. God’s Word is God’s work. When that seed takes root in our hearts, we can’t help but spread it around.

I’ve joked that we at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia have been growing our Christian Education program back from seed. After the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic our Sunday School pretty much vanished. But then, God decided to send us some infants and toddlers and a few primary grade kids. They’re too little to start reading the Bible on their own, let alone tackle the theological intricacies of the Augsburg Confession or even Luther’s Catechism. Nevertheless, our heroic Sunday School teachers—two Gen-Zees who were baptized and brought up in our congregation—are doing their best to plant the seeds of faith by involving these tykes in our Sunday liturgy. Do the kids have a sense of the sacred? Not so much yet. But they’re learning that they are welcome in church, and church is a safe and fun place to be.

Yes, I have also lamented that many of my former confirmands have shot out the door of the church right after affirming their baptism like someone was giving away Taylor Swift tickets. But some of them have stuck around. Some of them have even returned from time to time. My job is to sow the seed. I can’t force it to grow. When I do funerals for unchurched folks, I always try to explain a little about our faith. I also hand out the church’s business card to the bereaved. Do they ever come through our doors on a Sunday morning? Once in a great while someone does. But, I think, I may have just planted a seed of faith in some of the ones who don’t. That’s up to God. My job—our job—is to keep on spreading the seed.

Yes, I will probably have to reseed my lawn again this fall. My HOA will insist, so surrender is not an option. It’s not an option for Christians, either. God doesn’t give up. Neither should we. There may be a seed lying dormant under the soil, waiting to sprout in God’s good time.

I hope I’ve spread some good seed to you this week. Please come and see me again.

 

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[i] Romans 10:17

Celebrate with Kid Wisdom (Reflection on Pentecost 6, Year A 2026)

 

“I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…” (Matthew 11:25

I love the Fourth of July. When I was a little kid, this holiday was always special to my family because my maternal grandmother, the child of German immigrants, lived with us. She’d been born in the U.S. on July 4, 1884, so Independence Day at the Griffiths home always involved a celebration. I seem to remember a picnic meal on the back patio of our Long Beach, California home. At night our neighbor, Mr. Gallagher, would set off fireworks for all the kids on our street[i]. Some of the dearest memories I have were of events on or around the Fourth of July.

This particular Independence Day is pretty special for us. It’s America’s 250^th anniversary. We’ve lasted a quarter of a millennium, and representative democracy still has a beating heart. I think that’s kind of special, don’t you?

I’ll confess I’ve had a bit of a hard time getting my “whoopie!” on this year. My anxiety for America has been crowding out my enthusiasm for her birthday. There’s this god-awful debacle in the Middle East. We’re seeing climate disasters throughout our nation which no one seems to be doing anything to address. And, even if it’s come down a smidge, the price of gas is still way too high, and a huge chunk of my pay is still going into the tank of my 2017 Corolla.

Ambivalence, however, has always been with us. Even when I was a kid watching Mr. Gallagher’s fireworks, the grown-ups were taking sides over the direction of our nation, just as grown-ups have done since Jesus’ time and before. In our Gospel lesson for Pentecost 6, Year A (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30), Jesus expresses his own pique with a bunch of folks who’ve seen the goodness of God with their own eyes but still have to whine and bitch about something. They criticized John the Baptist. I can just imagine them saying to each other, “What’s up with this loony-toon preacher? He keeps telling us to repent and give money to the poor. We’re not made of money! We’re doing the best we can. Not everyone can live off eating bugs like this guy. And why’s he always complaining about King Herod? He’s just going to start trouble!”

They weren’t that pleased with Jesus either. Can you hear them? “Who is this Jesus dude? He’s eating with tax collectors and sinners! Why, in my day, boy howdy, when a person was ritually impure, they stayed ritually impure! And nobody healed anyone on the Sabbath. Back then we had rules, by golly, and we followed them! What’s all this mercy and forgiveness crap? In the good old days, you pulled yourself up by your sandal straps!”

You get the idea. There are some folks who don’t like to hear John preach the law or Jesus preach the Gospel. Their happy place is in the quicksand of their own critical indignation. You may have met people like this (You may have met some of them in church!).

Jesus tells us in the Gospel that wisdom sometimes is revealed to children. I think it might be a good idea sometimes to recapture a bit of childhood wisdom. While watching Mr. Gallagher’s fountain blast a geyser of multi-colored sparks over Stevely Avenue, I wasn’t thinking about the war in Vietnam or whether Humphrey or Nixon would be a better president. I just thought the display looked really cool. The Fourth of July was America’s birthday party, and birthdays are fun.

Maybe this Independence Weekend I can try to recapture a little of the joy I felt as a kid. It’s our country’s birthday, and—by the grace of God—our Republic has lasted another year. Our neighbors are still our neighbors. Even if we disagree with them, they still love their children like we do. They still take their trash out to the curb like we do. They still pay their taxes (we hope!) like we do. And they still might give us a lift if our car breaks down and we ask them nicely.

We still have hope in the ideas which founded this wacky experiment in self-governance. Mr. Jefferson—slave holder that he was—put his quill to parchment and gave us these magnificent words:

“We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

However imperfectly this idea has been realized in our 250-year history, it remains our aspiration, and one worthy of celebrating.

The Hebrew scripture lesson for Pentecost 6 is from the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 9:9-12), a guy who found himself in a geo-political situation worse than anything we could imagine.[ii] Nevertheless, ol’ Zech had a child’s ability hope for tomorrow. He could look beyond the goat rodeo he was experiencing and see a time when peace and humility would be the order of the day, when a new King would come riding on a baby donkey. Like the prophet, let’s all keep that childhood dream alive, because God never stops being good even though we haven’t noticed the goodness. Let’s look beyond today and rejoice we are still “prisoners of hope.”

God bless America, and God bless you, my friend. Please come again.

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[i] The firework display was, technically speaking, illegal in Long Beach. Mr. Gallagher did it for years, and no one ever called the police to my knowledge.

[ii] Okay. If you’re a Bible nerd, you’ll know that the author of this lesson in chapter 9 of the book was probably writing about 100 years after the guy who penned the first eight chapters. Chapter 9 and following are known as “2^nd Zechariah.” I doubt one guy lived long enough to write both parts, and it wasn’t uncommon for writers to write in the name of their teacher or one who inspired them.

Father Knows (Reflections on Pentecost 4, Year A 2026)

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows." (Matthew 10: 29-31)

Most smart Bible scholar folks agree that the community to whom Matthew (whoever he really was) wrote his gospel was having a pretty sucky time of it. Matthew quotes Jesus a lot on the subject of persecution. In the Gospel appointed for Pentecost 4 Year A (Matthew (10:24-39), Jesus warns his friends that people won’t always take kindly to them. Hey! If people call your rabbi “Beelzebul,” just think what they might call you! “Beelzebub” was a reference to a Canaanite deity whom the Jews referred to as the “Lord of the Flies” or the “Lord of Dung.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the U.S. lately about “anti-Christian bias.” Frankly, whenever I hear that term, I want to say, “Oh just shut up!” The folks who say this have no idea what an anti-Christian bias is. Go to North Korea if you want to see anti-Christian bias. You can be imprisoned or executed for owning a Bible in that country. Same goes for Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and any number of countries in the Middle East or North Africa. You think it’s hard to be a Christian in America? Try being one in Palestine where you have to pass a checkpoint to get to church[i]. I’d say being a Christian in the U.S. is pretty easy.

Of course, there will always be those who will accuse the Church of hypocrisy or other acts or wrongdoing. Like trying to “Christianize” indigenous people and wipe out their culture, or being anti-LGBTQ+, or anti-woman[ii]. They may bring up some unpleasant things like the Crusades or the Inquisition or the Thirty-Years War or the Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal. All I can say is we have been guilty as charged on all these counts, and some denominations still don’t seem to have grasped that basic “Love Thy Neighbor” thing. We should be honest about this. Jesus told us there is nothing that is covered up which will not be uncovered.

Nothing, however, should keep us from proclaiming the love of Jesus. It’s appropriate that we admit the errors of the past. An open discussion of the Church’s history could prove a very good opportunity to share the Jesus you know. The Church has managed to survive over the centuries in spite of ourselves. We’ve made it through real persecutions, barbarism, schisms, the Enlightenment, militant atheism, and our own uncanny ability to make stupid, self-serving choices. We’ve survived a whole lot of rotten stuff, but we can’t survive timid silence. Proclaiming from the housetops might be a little excessive for your average Lutheran, but a quiet discussion about what you believe and why it’s important to you might just be what someone else needs to hear.

Now let me switch gears.

In addition to being the Furth Sunday in Pentecost and the commemoration of Onesimos Nesib[iii], it’s also Father’s Day. The Gospel reading makes me think of a student a I had when I was a grad assistant at the University of Wisconsin. Brian’s dad was a lawyer, and in Madison, Wisconsin in those days for every citizen there were about four attorneys. Brian’s dad had left a government position to go into private practice, but his practice never flourished and he became depressed. Eventually he started up the family car inside a closed garage and asphyxiated himself. I have vivid memories of Brain crying on my shoulder when I came to his dad’s funeral. But Brian’s family tragedy made me more grateful for my own dad. He had his financial and employment woes too, yet, for all his faults—and he had plenty of them!—I have to give my father credit for never giving up. When he found himself laid off, he did everything he could to keep us in Fruit Loops and Hamburger Helper. He was an engineer, but he worked as a janitor. He tried a number of self-employment schemes, all of which ended rather disastrously. But, like Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, he had an unshakeable faith that something would always turn up. And it always did.

On this Father’s Day I give thanks for my illustrious Old Man whose faith and optimism often annoyed my more practical mother. I can picture him doing yard work or cooking something in the kitchen while lustily belting out one of the old gospel hymns from his Primitive Methodist childhood, and I am reminded that God knows what we need even before we know it ourselves. Even the hairs on our heads are numbered, and not a sparrow falls apart from our Heavenly Father. Our circumstances are temporary. Our citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven is eternal.

There’s a whole lot to unpack in these fifteen verses from Matthew 10, and I could probably talk for an hour about each one (which would not set well with my congregation should I chose to do so. They have definite views about how long a sermon should be). I would sum it up, however, by saying we should be on our guard not to be lost  in the opinions of the world, but to find ourselves in the goodness of God. This we should proclaim with boldness.

Keep the faith, and come back and visit with me again.

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[i] Please pray for Natalie Abudayyah, a Palestinian Lutheran college student who was abducted from her college along with three other young women on June 1 by the IDF. She has--as far as we know—been imprisoned without any charge being filed against her and without access to an attorney. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land has demanded her immediate release.

[ii] Yup. Just check out what the Southern Baptist Convention has done to outlaw women pastors.

[iii] Onesimos Nesib (1856-1931) was  a Ethiopian Lutheran who translated the Bible into the Oromo tribal language. The Oromo are a people of Ethiopia and Northern Kenya.