Today’s post is from Jim Honig, Pastor at Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church, Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.

The quirks of our family schedule meant that we were often on vacation in the middle of June. So, after a day of hiking or canoeing or biking, we’d be sitting around the table enjoying some grilled hamburgers and one of our sons would say, “Oh, Dad! By the way, Happy Father’s Day!” It was more a sign of busy fun than a lack of care.

For many families, and I suspect many congregations, Father’s Day carries a different feel and different expectations than Mother’s Day. Still, congregational leaders may feel the pressure to put this cultural holiday front and center. And that pressure may be accompanied by expectations to hold up some sentimental image of fatherly perfection.

If that’s the image you want to project, then stay away from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures where the icons of fatherhood are a bit tarnished. Abraham was at the altar with a knife over his head about to engage in child sacrifice. The young boy on the altar became the old man Isaac who was duped by the younger of his twin sons into giving away the family inheritance. Or how about Eli, the high priest who is depicted as unable to control his unruly sons who were reported to “lay with the women who served at the tent of the meeting.” What to do with the fact that Jesus’ own father is hardly mentioned after the infancy and childhood stories.

Add to this the fact that for far too long in the church, “Father” has been nearly the only way we refer to God. It’s language that is carved in the stone of the three ecumenical creeds. Is this what has led us to the popular view of God as an elderly man in a white robe with a long beard who sits on a cloud benignly watching over things?

So, if the biblical record and church history give us a mixed record of what to celebrate on Father’s Day, what shall we do?

For one thing, Father’s Day ought not to be first, front, or center, which is a general rule for any cultural holiday that we decide needs at least to be mentioned in worship. Let the lessons for the day govern the theme and the proclamation of the gospel for the day.

Then, let whatever mention there is of Father’s Day have the ring of truth and honesty about fathers. In fact, the imperfections of the fathers in our biblical stories remind us that all fathers bring their simul justus et peccator brokenness and baptismal new life to the fatherly vocation. We give thanks for the gift of those who have fathered well, whether they happen to be our biological fathers or not. We acknowledge the hurt of those who have not been fathered well. And we all confess our sin and brokenness. Such both/and acknowledgment might be made in the Confession and Forgiveness or in the Prayers of Intercession.

Maybe a hymn during distribution can give a nod to the fatherly vocation. Consider singing the hymn,“Our Father by Whose Name” (ELW #640, text by F. Bland Tucker). This short 3 stanza hymn offers a sung prayer for fathers, mothers, and children, and points us to the work of the Spirit who binds us together in bonds that are stronger than flesh and blood.

And maybe that’s most important gift to which Father’s Day points. Our relationships in the body of Christ and the mission to which we have been called together are front and center for the entire ordinary season; they are the gifts that we will celebrate and reflect on not for just one day, but for as long as we are church together.

Today’s post comes from Rev. Christopher Laughlin, chaplain at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

I was an Army Reserve chaplain and a parish pastor; I served a small, rural parish in Michigan. I currently serve as a basic training battalion chaplain at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; I’m one of three chaplains who lead worship at the “Liturgical Protestant Service.”

Attendance at this service fluctuates between 50 and 200, and it’s the youngest, most diverse congregation I can imagine; it is truly representative of “every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9). While there are a few soldiers and families who are permanently assigned to Fort Leonard Wood in attendance, most are trainees who will attend our service for less than 22 weeks (many for only 9) while they complete Basic Combat Training (BCT) and/or Advanced Individual Training (AIT). They hail from every state and nearly every continent.

Some attend because this service is the most comfortable for them, coming from a liturgical or sacramental background (this was why I attended a similar service while in BCT and AIT). Others attend because they prefer hymns over praise music. Still others attend because of the relationship that they form with their chaplain, or because they are exploring different Christian traditions of worship. The singing fluctuates wildly in quality, as trainees are often hoarse from “being motivated” (yelling) all week.

Then there are those trainees who attend because congregations and individuals from all over the North/West Lower Michigan Synod send me cookies for the fellowship time which follows worship each week. This has been a real gift to the trainees – those cookies are a taste of home and comfort in what is, for many of them, the most difficult and trying time in their lives.

My opinions are my own and do not reflect those of the 2^ndBattalion, 48^thInfantry Regiment, the 3^rdChemical Brigade, the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence, the Training and Doctrine Command, the Chaplain Corps, or the United States Army.

Today’s post is by artist Robyn Sand Anderson.

Painting has become a very spiritual practice in my life. And, I believe it can be for you, even if you aren’t an artist. 

My friend, Pastor Kathie Nycklemoe (ELCA, St. Stephen, Bloomington, MN), and I sometimes lead a retreat we call “Art & Soul.” She leads a couple of sessions on different ways of praying, like Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina. I lead a session using art as a way to pray or meditate and a hands-on session where everyone uses watercolors to paint their prayers. The movement of your brush and the swash of color across paper become a vehicle to open yourself up, to listen and to release. Color, movement and texture can speak of the Mystery that words can’t explain.

“Sacred Self” was created in 2012 for my exhibit called “The Suffering of Becoming.” This body of work explored what I had learned from living through my diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. RA is a chronic disease of great physical pain, exhaustion and muscle weakness. I painted four exhibits working through my experience of suffering and finding threads of hope. This painting began with a sense of deep, dark, primordial forest. In the midst of this darkness, pain and sorrow, I wanted to convey the presence of God that I experienced in the midst of my own suffering. Light in the darkness. 

Robyn Sand Anderson © 2018 All Rights Reserved.

The presence of the Trinity became apparent in the steps I was taking to convey the Mystery of it all. Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. In the center of the Holy Trinity, I placed a small, moving blue and white sphere of sacred life. Sacred Self. I knew God’s presence in my darkest moments and I knew in that Presence that we are all a precious, holy creation of God. God was with me in my suffering. Jesus, who suffered great pain, was with me in those darkest of moments. Finally, God’s Holy Spirit surrounded me and lifted me from my dark forest. In the creation of this painting, I experienced the thread of hope I needed.

www.RobynSandAnderson.com

Today’s post is by Amanda Highben who serves as Pastor at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Dublin, Ohio.

Mothering God, you gave me birth

in the bright morning of this world.

Creator, source of ev’ry breath,

you are my rain, my wind, my sun.

–  “Mothering God, you gave me birth,” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, #735

When I gave birth to our daughter Cecilia, I was still in seminary and serving as the youth director at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Zanesville, Ohio. Needless to say, it was a full and challenging time as my husband Zeb and I balanced our jobs, my education, and our halting, on-the-job education in parenting. One of the clearest things I remember is the exhaustion. In the first months of Ceci’s life, I was convinced I’d never sleep again.

Thankfully, our St. John’s community was a great source of strength and support for us. The parishioners delighted in Cecilia’s birth and helped us in countless ways, from simply holding her during worship to bringing us meals and offering to babysit. The congregation nurtured us through this time of transition and we will be forever thankful for such a gift.

Still, St. John’s is not unique in this regard. Many churches do a wonderful job of welcoming and supporting families. As Mother’s Day nears, congregations are once again preparing to bless and honor the mothers in their midst. Because I’ve served five different churches, I’ve seen mothers recognized in worship in various ways. I have even heard entire sermons devoted to Mother’s Day, though there is nothing in the lessons to warrant such preaching.

It is critical to be aware that Mother’s Day is not joyful for everyone. Remember the diverse and complex life stories of your people—The couples struggling with infertility. The children and adults whose mothers have died tragically. Those who have been hurt by or have strained relationships with their mothers. Women who cannot or chose not to have children, but have been endlessly told by contemporary culture that only motherhood can truly fulfill them. Families with two fathers. Women struggling with post-partum depression. All of this is complicated by our cultural determination to “romanticize” motherhood, which makes it difficult for mothers to talk openly about their challenges without feeling ashamed. In other words, if we fail to be thoughtful in our worship planning, a variety of women, men, and children might feel hurt or excluded when we intend exactly the opposite.

Yet: The commandments tell us to honor our parents, and the desire to bless mothers is good and Christ-like. It is an impulse that springs from a place of love. If we ignore it altogether in worship on the grounds that it is a secular holiday and not part of our liturgical calendar, then we risk conveying the implicit message that reasons for celebration in people’s everyday lives don’t matter to the church; we risk conveying the harmful belief that the Christian faith is disconnected from the world beyond our sanctuary walls.

This year, then, as we celebrate Christ’s resurrection on the seventh Sunday of Easter consider how your congregation might recognize mothers in ways that are sensitive, inclusive, and faithful to your context. Perhaps this means focusing more on the act of mothering, or lifting up Biblical images of our mothering God (see Isaiah 49.14-16 and 66:13, or Luke 13:34). The petition for mothers in the Prayers of Intercession is also appropriate and poignant (Sundays and Seasons, Sunday May 13, 2018). Above all, pray that everyone who gathers for worship on this day will encounter Jesus’ unfailing, all-embracing love.

Today’s post is by Rev. Amy E. Reumann, Director of Advocacy for the ELCA.

The Feast of Pentecost starts with a blast of fast rushing wind. The season itself can seem to go on forever. Entering my first parish call, a colleague warned me about “the dog days of Pentecost.” They theorized that the kind of lethargy that can accompany the heat of summer would affect our worship and ministry, too.

By mid-season, I understood. At the time I was preaching through several weeks of Gospel texts about Jesus as the bread of life. I was running out of things to say about what seemed to be a lectionary stuck on repeat. The organist left for an extended vacation without a substitute, leaving a cassette tape on which she had recorded the service music. Nobody sang along when I pushed the button. On Sundays the church was too hot, worshippers too few, energy was low and the season ahead seemed to stretch on forever.

The long distance run of the Sundays after Pentecost means we may gather to worship even when we don’t always feel like it. We persevere even when enthusiasm is running low and grace may not seem so amazing. It is ordinary time, far from the mountaintop experience of festival days, bringing us down to encounter God in the flow of daily life.

Engaging in advocacy can also require the same, long haul persistence. An advocacy colleague once shared the good news that her organization had helped pass the Dream Act in her state, offering educational opportunities to undocumented students. We were just starting to work on a similar bill and I wanted to know how they had done it, hoping for a magic solution. “It took ten years, you know,” she said. “You have to be committed to keep going, even when there is no end in sight.” Advocacy is slow work. There are more defeats and repetitious labor than wins. It means showing up and persevering during a long season, even when you feel stuck and like you are not going anywhere.

Advocacy’s scriptural foundations tend to rely on Jesus’ concern for the poor, the call of the prophets to justice or the actions of the early church. I think we are missing a vital connection by not looking more to the Festival of Pentecost, too. The Acts of the Apostles account begins with the Holy Spirit descending to loosen tongues of people from all corners of the earth. The presence of the Spirit unleashes testimony to the risen Christ. It reminds us, in our day, that there are many ways to let loose with our own witness to Jesus, including in unexpected ways and places.

Advocacy, too, is an untying of tongues. It is spirit-inspired testimony to the God who justifies, who in turn sets us free to do justice. We advocate with and for our neighbors and the rest of Creation to preserve their dignity and protect their integrity. Faith-rooted advocacy is witness to our faith by proclaiming solidarity with the suffering of Christ’s body in the world and witnessing to God’s resurrection hope for a world transformed. This is evangelism and proclamation of the good news, just as surely as knocking on doors. Only this advocacy may take place at a town council meeting, a school board session or in the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

We don’t often connect advocacy with the worship during these Sundays after Pentecost. But this ordinary time is chock full of texts in which Jesus upends social customs and the social order to eat with outcasts, touch lepers, heal the sick and show compassion to those who are poor.  Ordinary time reveals ordinary ways we can show solidarity with the people with whom Jesus spent most of his earthly ministry. And it brings fresh opportunities to heed God’s call for responding to hunger and injustice with witness to the God of justice. With the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, of course.

How might you practice advocacy as persistence, presence and proclamation in service to the One who sends the Paraclete, the Advocate, to be present with us?

Today’s post is by Omaldo Perez, Director of Music at Zoar Lutheran Church in Perrysburg, Ohio.

Grafting, as a horticultural technique, is defined as the joining of different plant tissues in a manner that makes possible their future growth together. As far as we know, grafting has been used from the times of the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia, and it is still widely used in our day. There are always two components in a graft: the rootstock which provides the nourishment, and the scion which bears the fruit.

In many aspects, but especially regarding my professional development, I have become a small scion grafted into the great rootstock of Lutheran worship thanks to the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM). I joined ALCM at the behest of my pastor, George Yoder, who in 2002 correctly intuited that I needed mentoring. Fast-forward sixteen years and I can only marvel at the blessings of a journey punctuated with many face-to-face encounters with living practitioners of the craft, people who passionately care about the role of the cantor in the church. On more occasions than I can count, I have been inspired by their gracious examples as teachers and as friends.

Many, if not all the ideas that I hold dear regarding music ministry have had their genesis at an ALCM conference, either from a workshop, a plenary presentation, a choral reading session, or a book recommendation. Sometimes it was an insightful speaker that lit up my imagination. Other times, it was an imaginative and eloquent musical offering that gladdened my spirits. Very often, during our liturgies, it was the brief brush with what the poet Wallace Stevens once called “the holy hush of ancient sacrifice.”

Thanks to these ALCM experiences, I have been blessed to be a blessing to my community. At Zoar Lutheran Church we are in the process of introducing a teaching bulletin for our congregation, something we have been wanting to do for a long time. Our teaching bulletin is just the latest in a series of tweaks and small improvements. In that sense, we consider the newly designed publication the fruit of our most recent harvest.

This summer, ALCM will offer numerous Hearts, Hands, Voices local workshops for church musicians. I hope by now you have heard of the almost fifty locations nationwide where these one-day events will take place. Hopefully, there will be several workshops within driving distance of where you live and worship. Here in my little corner of Northwest Ohio, church musicians will be able to attend three different events, each offering a variety of resources and presenters. And that is only in the Cleveland-Toledo-Columbus corridor! Therefore, allow me to enthusiastically encourage you to attend and to identify others, who, like me, can benefit from these continuing education events. If a larger event appeals to you, check out the three-day Hearts, Hands and Voices conference at Valparaiso University, July 23-26, 2018.

We cannot overestimate how life-changing a mentorship can be; I am living proof of it. I am reminded of the expression, “passing it on down,” which jazz musicians use to speak of the oral tradition they embody in their playing. We have heard the apostle Paul speaking of running the good race. I would add that ours is a relay race where we learn and “pass it on down” to the next person. Learning is no small part of our vocational journey as church musicians. Fortunately for us, this education happens best not as solitary individuals, but in a community of caring and passionate people, such as the ones you will encounter at any ALCM conference. If you decide to join us for one of these special events, and we hope you do, we trust you will discover new insights into ministry, draw strength from collegial exchanges, and find yourselves, as it has been my experience, refreshed in the bonds of new friendships.