Claimed, gathered and sent

This is the sermon I'm preaching on Sunday, 5/31/20, Pentecost Sunday at St. Timothy Lutheran Church's Drive-In Service. The text was John 20:19-23.   Looking back, is this how we thought we would commemorate Pentecost this year? It’s normally such a celebratory time. After all, it is the Christian church’s birthday! We have a party! But not this year. Rather than a party, don’t we feel a bit like the captives in Babylon who cried out,  “…we cried and cried, remembering the good old days in Zion…That’s where our captors demanded songs, sarcastic and mocking: Sing us a happy Zion song!’  Oh, how could we ever sing God’s song in this wasteland?” (Psalm 135: 3-4). Have you felt sometimes like this time of not being able to gather inside our church building being in a wasteland? A quiet Pentecost; not that of Acts 2, a riotous Pentecost party, given the time we are living in, given the deaths of so many in this year of Coronavirus, given the death of George Floyd and ...

Here are a few thoughts I have on this Sunday, Pentecost Sunday's gospel. What are yours? Gospel: John 20:19-23 19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  I love the gospel of John. One of my Greek professors in seminary warned all of us who chose this gospel to study and translate that we would regret it. I still am in love with John! John sets the stage for us in this way: following Jesus’ resurrection, the d...

This is the devotion I sent to the people of St. Timothy Lutheran Church . With Pentecost approaching, our minds move to thoughts about that mysterious, hard to grasp Holy Spirit. We have a better handle on the Father and the Son, but that Spirit is something else again. You just can’t pin the Holy Spirit down. Even gender associated with the Spirit can’t be understood as with the Father and Son. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for wind or spirit is feminine, so it’s completely proper to refer to the Holy Spirit as she and her, right? Ok, then we move to the Greek language in which the New Testament was written and what do we find? Feminine? No, neuter! In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is an “It.” Hmm, as Luther wrote, “What does this mean?” It means that the Holy Spirit has a nature that just refuses to be pinned down. When Jesus and Nicodemus were talking, Jesus put it this way, “’The wind [same word as spirit]  blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it,...