Sunday, July 14, 2024, Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
“Chosen Ones”
Psalm 65:1-8; Isaiah 41:8-10; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 15:9-17
Divine Service III, without Communion
Hymns: #904 “Blessed Jesus, at Your Word”; #583 “God Has Spoken by His Prophets”; #826 “Hark, the Voice of Jesus Crying”; #744 “Amazing Grace”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
Jesus told His disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
Where have 25 years gone? Time goes by so fast. Someone suggested that to celebrate my 25th anniversary in the ministry, I should give you a short bio about how I got started, where I’ve been, and how I came to be here. I can do that, I guess, but I don’t want this day to be about me, since it’s really all about all of you. But maybe I can show you, with a little bit of my story, how God does His choosing, and how God in His wisdom and mercy works things out – for me, for you, and especially for His Church.
I was raised a good Lutheran kid, with eight years of Lutheran day school at St. Lorenz in Frankenmuth, Michigan. (Go, Spartans!) When I was 12 years old, the Lord put the idea in my head – and in my heart – that I’d be a pastor one day. Back then I thought that was just absurd. I was a really shy kid, a book nerd, an introvert. Me, get up in front of people and talk? Terrifying! No way!
My high school years came along, and I did the teenage rebel thing. I quit going to church once I was too big for my mother to make me go. I didn’t walk into a church, except for a wedding or a funeral, from the age of 15 until I was 25. In between, I got married, and spent three years in the Army. Kim and I had three children, a boy and two girls.
After the Army, I worked restaurant jobs, and retail, and did warehouse work for a few years; and I went back to school to try to make something of myself, though I didn’t really know what that something might be. God’s original call to that 12-year-old kid was still in my heart, but I was still doing the “Jonah thing,” running away from God in the opposite direction. I still thought getting up in front of people to talk was the last thing I’d ever want to do with my life. (An introvert who works with people; what could the Lord have been thinking? There must have been some mistake!)
Then one day I looked down at my little children and thought, “Lord, what am I doing?” We started looking for a church to belong to, and had our little ones baptized. We attended a few different churches, looking for a place to belong; then one Sunday we attended a new church someone had told us about, St. Martin Lutheran in Birch Run, Michigan. We really liked it. The pastor was nice, and the people were nice, so we signed the guestbook (which is a bigger step than you might think). And on Monday afternoon, three lovely ladies showed up on our doorstep with a plateful of cookies, to thank us for our visit and invite us to come back next Sunday. You just can’t believe how impressive that was.
We did go back the next Sunday, and the one after that. We started going to Bible studies, and our children went to Sunday school. After a while, the music leader invited me to sing in their praise band. Terrifying! Me, singing in front of a crowd? No way! But I gave it a try, and it turned out to be fun. And the Lord, ever present nag that He is, said, “Son, if you can sing for Me, you can speak for Me, too.”
Eventually I had a talk with our Pastor, Bill Eickhoff (a wonderful man) about what I felt the Lord was calling me to do; and he said, “If you really want to do this, you won’t just go to Seminary – we’ll send you!” So I said, “OK, it can’t hurt to give it a shot.” I took the test for graduate school, and I passed it. I went through the Seminary application process, and all the oral interviews and such; and surprise, surprise, they let me in! OK, now what? I’d sort of backed myself into a corner (or God did!) Summer Greek classes started in June, 1995, and it was already April. We started calling around about finding a place to live down in Fort Wayne, and we couldn’t come up with a thing; which should, to any rational person, have been a roadblock.
But we did what they call at the Seminary “the stupid move.” We quit our jobs and packed our belongings in a U-Haul truck, and I took my frightened wife and protesting children off on our grand adventure. When we checked in at the Seminary office – homeless! – they’d just had a call from a third-year student who was going out on vicarage and had a house to rent. (Thanks, Cory!) So, by a minor miracle, we were in, with a roof over our heads and everything. (God looks after idiots and Seminary students).
So, after three years of classes, and working a warehouse job in the evenings, the time came for vicarage assignments. Where would we go? Where would the good Lord choose to send us next? I’d been teasing my family for weeks, telling them we were going to Moosejaw or Saskatoon. As it turned out, I was only off by a few hundred miles. You should have heard my children wail when the announcer called my name and said, “Emmanuel Lutheran Church, New Rockford, North Dakota.” O Lord, have mercy! But again, we packed up and went, and spent our one year in vicarage purgatory, and found out what it was like to live through a North Dakota winter.
Our first call out of Seminary was to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Lakeview, MI, and also Hope Lutheran Church in Stanton, MI, a dual parish. It was close to home and close to family, which was good, and we were there for six blessed years. Not perfect years by any means; there are some things they can’t teach you in Seminary that a rookie Pastor has to learn the hard way. But it was good.
Our next call was to Peace Lutheran Church in Owensboro, Kentucky. Kentucky, Lord? Seriously? We’ve never heard of Owensboro, Kentucky; we don’t even know where it was. But any pastor who’s paying attention to the “voice of the Spirit” goes where the Lord chooses to send him. So we packed up our stuff again, and off we went to live in the land down south. Nice people, nice church; we had five really good years in that place.
Then the Lord called us to come to Wisconsin, to Prince of Peace Lutheran down in Racine. That call was a little rough, for reasons I won’t get into here; the Lord never promised this job was always going to be easy. We were in Racine for two years, and then we got a call to – where? Oxford? What’s a ‘Packwaukee?’ Never heard of ‘em; we could hardly find you guys on a map. But God is good, and God knows what He’s doing; and here we still are. I had to ask my wife the other day how long we’d been here, because I’d sort of lost track, and she answered, “Eleven years in October.” Really? Eleven years? How did that happen? We thank you for making this place home for us, and if the Lord allows it, we’ll be here for eleven more years, and maybe more. So, says Jesus, “You did not choose me, but I chose you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
St. Paul says in our reading from Ephesians, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” He chose us, He selected us, before the world was founded or created or laid down. Before we were born or had a thought for God, God was already thinking of us. This choosing the Lord does goes, way, way back. “I knew you before you were knit together in your mother’s womb,” God says. He knew from the beginning who we were, and where we were going to live, and what we were going to be.
Because of His love for us, He predestined us, foreordained us, marked us out beforehand, to be divinely adopted as His children. (That means to be made a full and true member of His family.) And He did this, writes Paul, “To the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves.” Our adoption, our selection, our choosing, is though the love and grace of Jesus Christ and by no other means. “Greater love has no one than this, that He lay down His life for his friends,” Jesus says. “Friends” is what He calls us, and laying down His life for us is what He did. We didn’t choose God, but He in His love chose us, just as we were; and it will be His good pleasure to turn us into is whatever it is we’re going to be.
And just what does He want us to be? While we’re here on earth it could be anything; a teacher, a farmer, an ordinary working man; a police officer, a fireman, or a soldier; a father or mother or grandparent. Wherever the Lord sets you down on earth, you’ve been put in that place to serve Him. The Doctrine of Vocation, we call that.
Being called to be a pastor is a little different, though, because it’s a divine and holy calling, and not something anyone should do without a clear say-so from God. Every other vocation in life a person has something of a choice in, but not this one. At our first assembly together as a Seminary class, Professor Bollhagen, a wonderful old pastor, told us, “Gentlemen, if you can go do anything else with your life and be happy, now is the time to go do it. If God hasn’t called you here, go home.” I remember looking around at my new classmates thinking some of God’s choices were a little odd; but He does the choosing, not us. I was talking to a District President once who was tired of listening to complaints from churches about their pastors (some of which were about me), and he told me, “You know, I don’t have a Billy Graham to send to everyone.” There are no perfect pastors; but then again, there are no perfect churches to send them to! I guess we’ll all have to do our best to get along.
What God wants for all of us, regardless of our vocation in life, is for us to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus and forgiven for our sins, and to know the riches of His wonderful grace. That’s the reason behind all God’s choosing, and the reason for all the choices God makes. He chooses whom He chooses for reasons of His own, and we’re not always in on the plan. He’s the Author, the Architect, the Builder of everything, the One weaving His heavenly tapestry together, thread by thread and string by string, until this beautiful work He’s doing is finished at last. You’re a part of that blessed, heavenly work of art, and so am I, wherever God decides to paint us into the picture. Martin Luther wrote that if your vocation, the place in life God gives you, is to shovel stables, then wield that shovel joyfully and with all your heart. And if your work is to clean latrines, then make them sparkle and shine to the glory of God.
St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4: “To each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it… It was He who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.” My vocation, the job God has chosen for some reason to give to a shy and introverted kid like me, is to tell all of you the Good News, so you can go out into the world and share it. God has lavished, poured out, overflowed, His wisdom and understanding, and made it available to all of us. “Our cup runneth over,” the Psalm says. Some of us He calls to be a mouthpiece, and some of us He calls to be the hands and feet; but all of us have work to do and a part to play.
What God wants us to know, what His will is for us, and where He’s taking us, is all in the Book we call the Holy Bible. Paul says the “mystery of God’s will” is in His Book; and it’s my calling and joy and privilege to open it up for you and let you know what the Good Book says, so you can know it and understand it and believe it, too. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I do. That’s my particular calling.
The mystery of God - the sacred thing - the awesome, incredible, good-news-beyond-belief thing - is that God loved us so much, He put His only Son on a cross to pay for our sins and for all the sin in the world; and better still, that God has raised Him up in glory from the dead, to bring us the promise of living in Heaven forever. That’s what you and I and everyone need to know. So Jesus, before He ascended in glory, gave His apostles, pastors, and preachers the mission to go out and teach and preach and baptize everyone they could, and pass that mission on from generation to generation until Jesus comes again – until all things in heaven and earth are at last brought together in Christ.
Until then, we all have our work to do until “the times will have reached their fulfillment,” Paul says. What that means is that we’re all called to make the most of every Gospel opportunity that comes out way, and to make the most of the time God gives us here on this earth, until Christ comes to finish the job at the end of all things. I have my own part to play, with this life I’ve been given, until the Lord says it’s time to hand the mission off to someone else. That’s what I’m doing here. I’ll be 63 years old next month, so how many years do I have left to stand up here in this pulpit, bringing the Word to you? Ten more years? Twenty? If God is good, and if you’ll put up with me that long, why not?
“In Him we were also chosen,” Paul says. Not just me, but we, in whatever place in life God has called us to be. We’ve all been predestined, foreordained, marked out beforehand, to hope in Christ and to praise His glory in the world around us. You also were included in this wonderful plan God has for us all, when you heard the Word of Truth in this place, from me and from all the pastors who have stood up here before me. “Faith comes by hearing,” Paul says. And having heard, and having believed, “you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of His glory.”
“Marked in Him with a seal” is what happened at your Baptism, folks. I’m here to do that for you, too; to baptize your babies and children, and even an adult once in a while, and to remind you every Sunday that you’re baptized children of God. (That’s why we begin every service by saying, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”) That mark that God has put on you and me - the name of Jesus that’s been written on us in our Baptism, the body and blood we’re blessed to eat and drink every first and third Sunday, the Holy Spirit that lives inside us by faith - is our guarantee, our down payment, our deposit, on all the good things God still has in store for us. If I’ve accomplished anything in my years in this place, I pray that I’ve pointed you to Jesus, and showed you the hope that you have in Him. “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete,” Jesus says.
“You did not choose me,” Jesus says, “but I chose you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” Lord, help us, together as Pastor and people, to bear good fruit for You. In Jesus’ name; Amen.