THE THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

August 26.2012

 

Joshua 24: 1-2, 14-8

Ephesians 6: 10-20

John 6: 56-69

TIME TO COME HOME

 

Well, it has been a quiet week in LAKE WOBEGON, my hometown.  You’d think that as summer reaches its peak in central MN and all the camps and cabins around the lake were full that the town itself would be hustling and bustling.  But it just isn’t so.  As soon as school closes for summer vacation in May, folks from the Twin Cities flock to LAKE WOBEGON.  The streets are full, the stores are crowded, as provisions are bought to stock the newly opened camp for another season.  But now, as another school year looms just around the corner, the lake camps are being shut down and the city folk are preparing to flock back home.  Every once in a while a pickup truck will drive into town to pick up sheets of plywood at the Bigger Hammer Hardware store.  You’ve heard their motto on radio commercials from WCOO, the call of the Loon, out of St. Cloud: “If at first you don’t succeed, try using a bigger hammer.  If you can’t find it at Bigger Hammer Hardware in LAKE WOBEGON, you didn’t really need it, now did ya.”  The plywood, nails and hammers are for boarding up the camps against the poSunday Schoolibility of another severe LAKE WOBEGON winter.  It’s the same with the locals.  They’re all out at their camps for the summer too.  So it’s been a really quiet week in LAKE WOBEGON. 

Don & Wendy Lundberg have a camp out by the point.  They were thinking about coming in to town for church last Sunday, but then noticed that the Gonzales family, from one of the Dales outside of St. Paul (Oakdale, Ferndale, Chippendale, they couldn’t remember) , who just this year bought the camp next to them, were putting up the plywood on the inside of their windows.  I gueSunday School they were kind of new to camp life and MN winters.  Don tried to be real patient as he explained that the wind blows from the outside, not from the inside.

So they miSunday Schooled church.  They were actually kind of curious to see what church was like in August.  Long before many people can remember, Val Tollefson, council president at LAKE WOBEGON Lutheran Church, had convinced the rest of the council that, since no one attends worship in August anyway, they should just shut down for the month and save on expenses by having the minister take his four week vacation then.  It started before David Ingqvist had been pastor there and that had been for 30 years.  Pastor Ingqvist never challenged the idea.  His own children had imagined that Jesus himself went on vacation during the month of August.  That’s why nothing exciting in the life of Jesus (you know, birth, death, resurrection) happens in the summer time.

But now Pr. Ingqvist had been transferred to be chaplain at the Mall of America and Pastor Liz, a young, female pastor from New Jersey, had taken over the pulpit of LAKE WOBEGON Lutheran.  She could not believe that a church would close down for a whole month and force her to take all four weeks of her vacation at that time.  So that was the first change she made.  She had argued that the summer lake people would want to come to church in August, but that never happened.  So the loyal remnant came, the Bunsens and Thorvaldsons, but that was about all.  Long-established habits are hard to change, even for the better.

As it happened, Pastor Liz did want one week off in August to go back home to New Jersey and visit her family.  She went to church with her parents last Sunday and was kind of caught by surprise when they sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as the hymn of the day.  Why she hadn’t sung that hymn in years.  It was considered far too militaristic an image among her Uppsala College and Philadelphia Lutheran Seminary communities.  But as she sang the hymn, memories came flooding into her mind of being one of the SUNDAY SCHOOL children, dressed in suits of armor, marching around the classroom, led by her mother who was her SUNDAY SCHOOL teacher.  “I don’t think children experience that anymore,” she pondered, “marching with the assurance that Jesus has conquered all the world’s evils and we can feel protected from sin and the devil by wearing the armor of God.  Was that really all so bad?  What confidence of faith do children have today with life seeming so much more complicated than it was then?”  But it wasn’t just the old hymn.  The Gospel lesson for the day spoke about Jesus teaching the people at the synagogue in Capernaum.  She had been there, stood in the ruins of that Cafer Nahum synagogue with her parents, on a trip to the Holy Land.  It was as if, after all those years, she could feel the presence of Jesus in the ruins of that holy place; and now, sitting next to her mother and father after all these years, she could still feel the spirit of God moving in her soul.

Since hardly anybody would be at worship at LAKE WOBEGON Lutheran anyway, Pastor Liz had asked Pr. Ingqvist to fill in for her.  Maybe some of the old timers would come out to welcome him back.  But there weren’t many in the pews to hear Pr. Ingqvist preach on the Joshua text for the day.  He called their attention to a quilt hanging on the church wall.  Many years ago, all the families of the church were encouraged to submit a square that would represent their family to be woven together into a big quilt.  Pr. Ingqvist had created a square with a picture of a church and its steeple surrounded by the names David, his wife, Judy, and the two kids and then on the bottom he wrote Joshua 24: 15, which if you looked it up would read “as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.”  He rambled on about how he wished he and Judy would have had nine sons who would all become pastors and then they could form a barnstorming clergy baseball team to play during the month of August, when there was no church anyway.  And they could establish a Lutheran dynasty to equal the Boumans or the Wangerins or the Martys.  But that never happened.  It was hard being PKs (preacher’s kids) and having to sit in the front pew of church with their mother, while Dad preached against the evils of the world from above their heads, sometimes feeling the spray of his spit if he got really worked up about something.  Now both his kids are grown up and doing well with families of their own, but they hardly ever attend church.  At best they are C&E Christians; Christmas and Easter, doncha know.

He wondered if that’s how Jesus felt when he preached at the synagogue in what Pr. Ingqvist pronounced as Caperni-um.  Jesus’ first real effort at outreach, feeding over 5,000 hungry people, had resulted in everybody turning away from him.  Jesus, in teaching about eating his body and drinking his blood for everlasting life, had been an evangelism failure, go figure.  People wanted and believed that they deserved food to fill their bellies, while Jesus was offering undeserved grace to feed their souls.  Then Pr. Ingqvist grew very serious.  He said that the trouble with people today is that so many believe that what they have is what they deserve, what they have worked hard for, and don’t acknowledge or appreciate that we live in community and that we depend on one another.  That was in the heart of those lost Norwegian explorers who settled LAKE WOBEGON and established this church in that same pioneer spirit.  Now everybody does their own thing and that does nothing but reduce a community of thousands to one.  That’s why so many churches today have to have plywood nailed over their stained glass windows because there is no spirit blowing on the inside.

When the disciples of Jesus were confronted with such decline they realized that they, alone and left to their own devices, could do nothing to change the trend.  It is Peter who finally realizes when Jesus asks if they also want to leave him, “Lord, to whom else shall we go?  You alone have the words of eternal life.”  That was not what they deserved or worked hard to earn, but that was what Jesus had to offer for free for all who trusted in him – eternal life.  “The danger,” preached David in a power he had never before displayed, “is not to the Church.  The Church belongs to God and will always be what God wants it to be.  No the danger is to each one of us; that we become lonely, isolated and self-serving.  The Church will exist wherever the Gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed.  The Church will exist wherever the praises of the Lord are sung.  The Church will exist wherever those in need are served as Christ would serve them.  Within the community of God’s Church you will find meaning and purpose.  Within the community of God’s church you will find your hope and your future.  Within the community of God’s Church you will find Jesus alive and working among his people.  (He was starting to spray a little now)  Within the community of God’s Church you will find your home.”  Then he sat down and thought to himself, “Woah! Where did that come from?” and wished Arnold Thorvaldson would have been awake for it and more would have been there to hear it.

Yesterday Pastor Liz flew from Newark to Minneapolis/St. Paul  and then drove her car north to LAKE WOBEGON.  The traffic heading south from the lakes of Minnesota was bumper to bumper.  All the summer folk were heading home.  And she was going in the opposite direction.  “No,” she thought, that’s not really true.  Although I’m returning from visiting my family in New Jersey, I’m also on my way home…home to LAKE WOBEGON.”  She pulled up to her home and as she began unpacking her car, Wendy Lundberg and her three girls walked by.  “Hey, Pastor Liz,” she greeted,” welcome home.  How was your trip?  Hey, when does SUNDAY SCHOOL start again?”

Pastor Liz replied, “September 9, first Sunday after Labor Day weekend.  That will be our Rally Day.”

“Good, we’ll be there,” said Wendy, “We’re back home from camp now.”

Yes, thought Pastor Liz, someday we’ll all be back home.  Then she started thinking about Rally Day.  Maybe she’ll have all the SUNDAY SCHOOL children create armor and shields out of construction paper and march around the church singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  I betcha that’s something they would never forget.

And that’s the news from LAKE WOBEGON, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

AMEN.