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Visit our Sunday worship services at 8 or 10:30 am. Sunday school and adult Bible class at 9:15. We are "Making Christ Known" by faith, worship and witness to get the message of Jesus Christ to all people.

December 2017

On: By: Rev. G. Michael Rose

“Let you face shine upon us, and we shall be saved.” Ps. 80:7

 

Dear Redeemer Family:

In two days, it will be Thanksgiving. Three days later, it will be Christ the King Sunday, and the completion of yet another Church Year. For the following Sunday will be the First Sunday in Advent. My how the time has flown by! But, a year is a cycle. Each season has its own themes and emphases. Advent is both a wonderful and a challenging season. We begin a new Church Year while the world is busy finishing a calendar year – and the month is filled with shopping, pageants, and parties beyond what our energy and time can handle. But while society urges us to hurry and spend; scripture and tradition beckon us to slow down and wait. The hard part of this time of year is to focus and wait.

 

Enter the wheel. Author, theologian, and artist Gertrud Mueller Nelson doesn’t tire in her enthusiasm for the Advent wreath as the season’s most powerful symbol. She wrote about its significance in her book, To Dance with God, and now in her eighties speaks of it with the same passion. The wreath can be traced to the Romans’ ancient rite of waiting in the darkness for the return of the sun, and for the Feast of the Sun on December 25. The ancients, Nelson says, took a wheel off their wagons and fastened torches to it to see them through the darkness. The only thing alive in the winter, evergreen, was brought inside and fastened to the wheel. To those huddled in darkness, it was a sign of vegetation and springtime. More than three hundred years ago, German Christians fashioned the same elements into the Advent wreath – the greens a sign of hoper and eternity. What was once a Feast of the Sun has become for us the Feast of the Son.

 

Today our Advent wreaths are often purchased, as are Advent calendars. Even the local secular bookstores have those (sometimes filled with chocolate). Both are symbols and tools of what Advent urges us to do: mark the passage of time as we wait. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Advent is about the art of waiting. But holiday decorations have been on some store shelves since well before Halloween (I can think of one place that had them up in August!), and the world declares virtually everything after Thanksgiving Day the “Christmas season.”

 

Thou all of us are tempted to ace otherwise, now is the time for slowing down and leaning together. As with the ancients, we gather in darkness to wait for the light. If our ancestors removed a wagon wheel for torchlight, consider what it would be like for us to take a wheel off our car, truck, or minivan. Instead of rushing to the stores or a mall, we would stay home but also gather with friends to sing ancient hymns and hear readings of prophecy and promise.

 

This season of Advent, slow down and wait. Slow down, or you may miss the importance of the season. Wait, wait for the coming of the light. For it comes to us shining in the face of the child in Bethlehem.

In Christ,

Pastor Rose

November 2017

On: By: Rev. G. Michael Rose

“Blessed are ….” (The Beatitudes, Matt 5:3-12)

Dear Redeemer Family:

 

On November 5, All Saints’ Sunday, the gospel comes in eight “Beatitudes,” or eight statements that proclaim commandingly, no holds barred, what life in the kingdom of God is and is to be like. “Blessed are …,” we hear: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. This is no “pie in the sky by and by” theology. Jesus doesn’t say “Blessed were,” “Blessed will be,” or “Blessed should be.” No, these almost hardnosed blessings make no mistake about saying that blessing comes in the present moment, however complicated and compromised that moment might be.

 

In the other gospel readings for the month, Jesus speaks in parables, again, through them, giving pictures of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is like a bridesmaid. Some of the bridesmaids are prepared to wait for the groom even long through the night; other miss him altogether because they aren’t prepared. We wait for Jesus, no doubt about it, but that waiting implies taking action now, in this day, this very day, even when our efforts seem futile, maybe misguided.

 

The kingdom of God, too, is like a man who gives out talents to his slaves, each according to their ability, in the promise that as they sow their gifts, their talents will prosper. The first two slaves make good on the money, investing it well. The third hides it in the sand, afraid of what might come of it, fearful of making any lasting decisions with it. The last one is judged, not the first two. God doesn’t care about any sort of worry about justice coming our way, one commendation and then more for each talent used. God wants us to remain present in the day, giving whatever we have been given to give, unhindered by thoughts of where it’s all going or what’s going to come of it. Generosity with ourselves, not fear, is to be the word of the day, regardless of how it looks like things are shaping up around us.

 

And a last sort of parable, on Christ the King Sunday: Jesus tells a story about a king who separates the “sheep” from the “goats” on the last day. But it is not the last day that has the emphasis, only the present. Those who ignored the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned have missed the nature of the kingdom altogether, and even missed the king himself when he came in the present, through those who suffer. But those who tend to the hungry, thirst, and sick now, in this day, without thought for any sort of future glory through their actions, are the ones who see the king now, right now, right before them. They don’t even really need to wait for that future day when he comes to separate the flock. In their care for those who experience life as a burden, who have nothing to offer to life but their pain, they have seen the king, truly, already, in all of his glory. Christ the king comes in the now, not so much when life is pulling together, one happy thread after another, as when it is unraveling. But he is always there with us, protecting and guiding his flock.

 

In Christ,

Pastor Rose