Lent is a forty-day journey where we prayerfully prepare for Jesus’ death and resurrection. We do many things as a community to take part in the prayerfulness of this season. This year we gather on Wednesday evenings to share a meal provided by our youth. After our time of fellowship, we will hold a time of song and prayer, using the Holden Evening Prayer. This is a worship service from a Christian retreat center in the mountains of Washington state.
“Wait for the Lord, whose day is near. Wait for the Lord: be strong, take heart!” (ELW, 262)
This December, we celebrate the season of Advent. From now until Christmas, we wait for our Lord, Jesus Christ, to come to us. We wait for our God to come incarnate as baby Jesus in Bethlehem. We wait for Jesus to come to our hearts and minds daily. We wait for Jesus to come again to judge the living and the dead in all of his glory.
This is the way we greet each other on Easter Sunday and on the Sundays during the Easter season. This greeting connects us to Christians over the millennia since Jesus’ death and resurrection, reminding us of the surprise and joy that Christians will always experience at that thought.
It’s easy to understand why the early Christians were absolutely astounded that, hope against hope, their Lord, Savior, and friend was ALIVE!
We have just celebrated our annual Confirmation service, also called the Affirmation of Baptism service. In our tradition, we baptize people of any age, which is consistent with our belief that Salvation is a gift which we cannot earn but can only receive. Some of the ways we bring this gift to life in us are through receiving Holy Baptism, by Affirming that Baptism when we are old enough to make our own decisions (the most recent research suggests that our brains are not fully functional until around the age of 26,
The southwest window of the Grace Lutheran Church sanctuary is one of the more dramatic scenes portrayed on the stained-glass windows of our church. The scene depicts a rugged rocky cliff. The scragly shrub, clinging to the side of the precipice, gives the feeling of steep mountainsides and deep narrow passes. Caught on the side of the sheer fall, halfway down the mountain, is the crumpled and caught body of the lost sheep.