Fear and Faith
Well, the two weeks to “flatten the curve” of this corona virus has stretched on for quite a bit now, hasn’t it? It’s difficult at times to know what to believe about it, with experts offering conflicting and frequently changing advice as to how to stop the spread of this disease. It has helped that a number of our political and societal leaders have tried to use the situation for their own advantage. If nothing else, it certainly teaches us how much more stoic previous generations were as they dealt with disease and death. However, it remains to be seen how this pandemic will affect the Church Militant in the months ahead.
Reformed theologian Carl
R. Trueman wrote an article which was published last week at the First
Things website. He offers this observation: “In conversation with many
ministers, I have noticed one key concern again and again: How many Christians
will return to church once COVID has stabilized? It is anecdotal at best at
this point, but the figure often cited in my presence is 30 percent: Three out
of every ten pre-COVID worshipers might stay away for good. One friend told me
that his denomination’s leadership has informed its ministers that a third of
its congregations might close within the next few months. That figure may prove
to be as hyperbolic as many of the other figures that have been bandied about
regarding COVID. But it has a chillingly credible feel to it. Many of us have
heard people commenting on how watching a church service online at leisure on a
Sunday—or whatever other day of the week is most convenient to the consumer—has
proved rather attractive” (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/08/a-protestant-apocalypse).
I hope you noticed that
last line. Modern technology is wonderful; it has made communicating far easier
than in times past. While it’s nowhere nearly as slick as some church’s service
broadcasts, we’ve managed to do an acceptable job here at Trinity by streaming
the services live and making bulletins and sermons available on our web page.
But what Mr. Trueman brings up is a sincere concern for almost all pastors. As
he mentions elsewhere in his article, Trueman points out that the Gospel is
more than just words of information to be digested, at least in Lutheran,
Anglican, and some Reformed churches. God has deigned to come to us in Word and
Sacrament—that means we need to be at Divine Service to receive those gifts God
uses to create and sustain our faith.
But some people have
gotten used to the idea of tuning in the service whenever it’s convenient for
them. That, I must say, presents a real danger to their faith. The author of
the Letter to the Hebrews wrote that we ought “not neglect[] to meet together,
as is the habit of some, but encourage[e] one another, and all the more as you
see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25). Yes, there are people whose work
keeps them from Divine Service at times. Yes, there are those whose health
keeps them from services with their fellow believers. If you fir into either of
those categories, please let me know—I’d be more than happy to bring you the
Lord’s Supper. But those who have decided they simply won’t come to church for
the sake of convenience, well, that’s the problem—it puts their spiritual
health at risk.
You might reply, “But
Pastor, I’ve got a serious condition and my doctors have told me to keep away
from crowds as much as possible.” Certainly, if you fall into an “at risk”
category, you’d want to keep away from mingling with others. Likewise, if you
have a communicable disease (any communicable disease), again, you’d be wise to
keep some distance between you and your fellow parishioners. However, it’s not
too hard to come to church and keep your distance from others—we’ve a fair
amount of room here.
But what if it would truly
be unwise to come to services, either because of your health or someone you
live with? To borrow Paul’s phrase, how then shall we live? A good question!
And here is God’s answer to you: you are a baptized child of God, won by our
crucified and risen Lord and Savior Jesus. Roy Askins wrote in the Lutheran
Witness “Baptism is not a magical incantation to keep Christians safe.
But, in Baptism, the Holy Spirit unites you to Christ and His resurrection. St.
Paul writes, ‘We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order
that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we
too might walk in newness of life’ (Romans 6:4). You live like you are baptized
when you believe that nothing separates you from God’s love in Christ Jesus
(Romans 8:31–39). You live in Baptism when you laugh at the devil’s attempts to
induce you to fear and dread. As Luther says, “Send those terrors right back to
him” (LW 43:127). Be confident; you do not fear death, for you are united to
Christ.”
There’s an article in this
newsletter with the results of a synodical survey about the effect of the Wuhan
virus; I’d encourage you to read it when you have the chance. It spells out
pretty plainly what’s going on in our church body. But whatever happens, please
keep in mind the words of Romans 6:5: “For if we have been united with him in a
death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like
his.” I don’t know what will happen tomorrow—to you or me. But I do know who
holds tomorrow and every day in His hands—and so do you. May the fact that you
belong to Jesus calm your anxieties and fears, and keep you hopeful for the
great Day. Amen, come Lord Jesus.
LCMS Stewardship
Ministry
Newsletter article – August
2020
Winston Churchill reportedly said, “we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” According to Churchill then, our lives are defined less by what we have gotten and more by what we give away.
Our Lord’s life is defined in this way. He gave completely of Himself for us. He became man for us. He taught the truth of God’s Word. He healed those with many and various diseases. He died the death that we deserve because of sin. He gave of Himself in order to save us from sin, death, and hell. So it is that by giving completely of Himself, He got us for Himself, making us citizens of His eternal kingdom by grace.
But, when we give, we do not have less, and we
do not become less. We have more and become more. Because when we give, we join
in the bond of friendship and family, the bond of service to those around us
out of love for them. And love is the fulfillment of the Law. It is the nature
of God Himself, for God is Love. Thus, we are participating in the divine
nature. As Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts
20:35).
Wyoming District
Round-Up
September 2020
District Website:
www.wylcms.org
“Here I
Stand” on the Word in the Home “...REMEMBERING YOU IN MY PRAYERS…” (Eph.
1:16) For Rev. Vernon Boehlke (emeritus, Riverton), as he undergoes a new round
of treatments for cancer. For Rev. Ralph Jaeger (emeritus, Laramie), health
PASTORS AND CONGREGATIONS St. Paul’s, Sidney is being served by Rev. Allen
Strawn (St. Paul’s, Bridgeport) during the vacancy. The congregation is
exploring options for calling and caring for a pastor. Rev. Travis Sherman
(Grace, Gordon) is serving Grace, Merriman, NE (Nebraska District) while it
considers its future. Our Redeemer, Glenrock and Zion, Douglas: On July 28 the
parish called Rev. Aaron Hambleton of Lisbon, ND. He has returned the call, and
the parish has scheduled its next call meeting for August 31. Our Redeemer is
being served by Rev. Jon Olson (Trinity, Casper) and Zion is being served by
Rev. Darren Pflughoeft (St. Paul’s, Lusk). Mount Calvary, Dubois is being
served by Rev. Gregory Sonnenschein (Wind River Lutheran Mission, Fort Washakie
and Crowheart) during its vacancy. St. John’s, Lovell is in pre-call
preparations. The congregation is being served by Rev. Jais Tinglund (Zion,
Emblem and Grace, Greybull).
Here I Stand on Marriage This month’s
article is addressed to parents. To whom did God give the duty to teach and
bring up children? To you, their parents! What does this mean?
When God created man as male and female and
joined man and woman together in His work of marriage, He also included great
gifts and duties for their marriage. From the very beginning it has been God’s
will and command that marriage bring forth children, and that the parents of
children bring up these children as pious Christians, educated for service to
home and church and society, virtuous and wise, fruitful in all good works.
This parental duty
is not an afterthought but is at the center and heart of the marriage
responsibility. God commands it explicitly in Deuteronomy 6, “And these words
that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them
diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house,
and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise”
(Deuteronomy 6:6-7, see the whole chapter). Again, in the New Testament,
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the
discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).
We call it school.
The home is God’s school. Homeschool is the original school. The parents are
God’s teachers. Children are God’s students, future adults who are to receive
an education fit for godly, Christian adults. In the Large Catechism Luther
emphasizes this point, “But He has given us children and entrusted them to us
precisely so that we may raise and govern them according to His will;
otherwise, God would have no need of fathers and mothers. Therefore let all
people know that it is their chief duty—at rish of losing divine grace— first
to bring up their children in the fear and knowledge of God, and then, if they
are so gifted, also to have them engage in formal study and learn so that they
may be of service wherever they are needed” (LC 1.173-174).
No, the education
of your children is not the right or duty of the government, just as the
government has no right or duty to feed and clothe them, house them, put
band-aids on their wounds, lead them in prayer, or teach them God’s Word. This
is your duty, dear parents. If the government can help you to raise your
children as virtuous and godly Christians, then you may enlist their help. But
when the government school undermines an opposes God’s command and Word, then
it is your duty to withdraw them from that school and provide for the education
that God commands. You must do this as your “chief duty—at risk of losing
divine grace.”
Nor is it the duty
of the church to raise and educate your children. The church must certainly
help, for God has commanded the church to baptize your children and to teach
them to know and keep everything He teaches in Holy Scripture (Matthew
28:18-20). You would certainly do well to enlist the help of your pastor and
your church in educating your children. “Where a father is unable by himself to
bring up his child, he calls upon a schoolmaster,” Luther observes in the Large
Catechism (LC 1.141). We have a Latin phrase that describes the teacher
employed to assist parents: in loco parentis, “in the place of the parent.” Any
teacher other than you, the father and mother of your child, teaches in your
place and by the authority God has given you.
It is no easy task that God has appointed for
you parents. But He gives you the promise of His help and strength, forgiveness
and restoration, courage and zeal, if you continue in His Word and obey Him in
this duty. He will sustain you by the preaching of Christ and His holy
sacraments. And your home, the original homeschool, may through God’s Word be a
nursery of Christian virtue, a garden for the cultivation of faith and love and
all good works, a gymnasium for the exercise of piety and discipline, and a
homestead for inheriting and passing on our heritage of God’s Word and all
useful knowledge. God bless you in this duty with joy and zeal.
Three times in
Romans 1:18-32, God the Holy Spirit announced this curse on those who refuse to
acknowledge God in His creation and His created orders: “God gave them up”
(verses 24,26,28). This is what we see in the modern feminist goal of
overcoming the natural, created distinction between the sexes, including the
divine gifts of marriage and childbearing. In achieving the supposed victory of
female liberation and equality, our culture has been “given over” by God to
divorce, bitter and loveless marriages, abysmally low birthrate and its
corresponding loss of hope for the future, and more. God grant us repentance,
forgiveness, and a return to His blueprint for our humanity in Scriptures. God
give us true freedom from enslavement to these evils and bring us at last as
Jesus’ Bride into His eternal home.
REFORMATION 500: 1520 in Review
500 years after the Reformation, it
is difficult for us to comprehend what a herculean labor it was for Luther to
escape the maze of philosophical theories and false doctrines taught and
believed in the church of his youth and to rediscover the pure truth of God’s
Word. We rightly focus on things like justification, the authority of
Scriptures, and the use of Scriptures and worship in the language of our birth.
Numerous other articles of Biblical doctrine and practice are added to these.
Luther and the reformers had to examine each teaching in the light of God’s
Word, reconsider where it fit in the whole body of Christian doctrine, and then
determine how to attack and remove the errors while keeping and restoring the
truth of Scripture. And while they were laboring in the study of God’s Word,
they were being attacked first by the Roman papacy and church, and then by
innumerable radical reformers and fanatics on every side.
The Lutheran reform of the doctrine
and practice of the Lord’s Supper illustrates the difficulty of this labor.
Although Luther had written about Communion previously, it was only in the
summer and fall of 1520 that he understood and began to attack the errors of
the Roman church. Luther’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper would not fully mature
until 1527. Controversies over the Sacrament of the Altar would continue all
his life, as also now in our own day.
In July 1520 Luther published A Treatise on
the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass (AE 35.79-111). He emphasized that
everything that is taught and practiced in the use of the Lord’s Supper must
come from the Word of God, especially from the Words of Institution. Faith must
take hold of God’s Word and keep it. The Lord’s Supper is a promise and a
testament which God gives to man. It is not man’s work or man’s sacrifice to
God, but rather the last Will and Testament of Christ. It includes 1) “the
testator who makes the testament (Christ), 2) “the heirs to whom the testament
is bequeathed” (Christians), 3) “the testament itself” (the Words of Christ),
4) the bread and wine “which are His true body and blood,” 5) “the bequeathed
blessing . . . Namely, remission of sins and eternal life,” and 6) “remembrance
. . . that we should preach his love and grace, hear and meditate upon it, and
by it be incited and preserved unto love and hope in him” (86-87).
Progress toward purity in teaching God’s Word
came hard. Early in the 1520s Luther still sometimes taught the old
philosophical idea that the bread and wine, or the body and blood of Jesus,
were “signs” that pointed to the “reality” of forgiveness and eternal life.
Later in the 1520s Luther corrected this philosophical idea in the Lord’s
Supper because the blasphemers of the Sacrament among the radical reformers
wanted to teach that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper only signified or
represented the body and blood of Jesus. Luther, and we Lutherans with him,
utterly reject this horrible teaching. The Lord’s Supper is “his own true flesh
and blood under the bread and wine” (86). Or to state it plainly, the
consecrated bread is the body of Jesus.
But Luther’s attack on the Roman
Catholic errors, begun in this Treatise, were stated yet more sharply and
clearly in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (AE 36.11-126), published
September 1520. This work entered the heart of the papal church’s worship and
attached its entire sacramental system. He especially condemned three
“captivities” of Christ’s church in the Lord’s Supper: 1) that the papists
forbid giving the blood of Christ to the laity; 2) that they teach the
philosophy or “metaphysical triviality” (45) that the bread and wine in the
Sacrament cease to exist when they become Christ’s body and blood; and 3) worst
of all, that the Sacrament “is a good work and a sacrifice” which man works and
offers to God.
Instead, Luther taught that in the
Sacrament “God comes to us through the ministrations” of the pastor and gives
to us this inheritance and bequest. The
(October 2020 issue).
service of the Lord’s Supper “is
part of the gospel: indeed; it is the sum and substance of it” (56). It is
“provided only for those who have a sad, afflicted, disturbed, perplexed and
erring conscience.” It is given for faith in Christ, the “one remedy against
sins,” and this “faith alone means peace of conscience” (57).
THE NEXT ROUNDUP The next Roundup
will be delivered to congregations around September 20(October 2020 issue).
September
2020 Everyday Faith
Kyla Rodriguez August 28, 2020
My
social media feeds have been filled with school-related posts for the better
part of this year. When the statewide shut-downs first occurred because of the
pandemic, many posted about the experience of suddenly doing all schoolwork
using exclusively digital mediums. As spring turned to summer and the
uncertainty of fall loomed ahead, posts began to primarily feature the thoughts
and feelings surrounding all of the details and decisions for the upcoming
school year.
Fall Schooling Decisions Some
parents have had to choose between in-person school or online school. Some
parents have chosen to formally switch to homeschooling. Some parents have had
fewer options to choose from because their schools have decided to meet
completely online. And this list only covers some of the options for schooling in the fall. I am a little weary just writing this and thinking
about all of these hard choices—and I haven’t even scratched the surface
regarding the posts shared by friends of mine who are in school administration
or teaching. Whew.
These
conversations have hit close to home in our household. My husband is a pastor
at a church with a school, my dad is the principal of a Lutheran grade school,
my sister-in-law is an elementary school teacher, my son starts preschool this
fall, my niece starts kindergarten, and I have several brothers still in high
school and college. Conversations about school have been more than just filling
our social media feeds—they have been filling our in-person conversations too.
The First Month of School
In light of the heaviness these
school conversations have held among my friends and family, I was struck by
this recent sentiment shared on Instagram by a mom sending three boys back to
school this fall:
We’re ready for the first
month of school at the Smith* house. That’s right. I said MONTH. Tomorrow we
start but we’re not going to talk about the first DAY of school. That’s too
much pressure. Makes us think we’ve got to get the apps perfected and never
miss a zoom and have every single scenario figured out for in-person
instruction.
Her
post reminded me of how easy it is to become so consumed with a decision or a
day that we lose sight of where we place our trust. If we place our trust in
the protocols a school has in place going into the fall, we will end up
frustrated. If we place our trust in our ability to provide a good learning
environment at home, we will end up feeling defeated. If we place our trust in
a positive in-person school experience, we will end up disappointed.
Gaining Freedom through Trust
So
how do we rightly place our trust and gain freedom from the weight of what this
school year holds? We turn to the Creator of trust and safety. Isaiah 26:4
reminds us to “trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting
rock.” Psalm 112:7 reminds us that the righteous man is “not afraid of bad
news; his heart is firm, trusting in the LORD.”
God’s
Word is full of reminders that anchor us to the truth at all times. We can move
into the fall and this new school year without fear because we do not have to
place our trust in our school choices or personal ability to provide
high-functioning at-home learning environments. We can feel confident about
taking each day at a time because we trust in a God who
holds all days and time in His hands.
Proverbs
3:5 reminds us to trust in the Lord with all of heart and not to lean on our
own understanding. We gain this ability to trust through seeing God’s
promises fulfilled on the cross and in the empty tomb that held our Savior’s
body. That same mighty Savior goes with us into this school year, one day at a
time.
Sunday School News
Trinity
Sunday School has started with the “Lift Off” Sunday, on August 30,2020. Our classrooms have a theme of balloons in
the nursery and astronomy in Elementary, leading us to “Lift Off” Sunday. “Your
love, Lord reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.” Psalm 36:
We
enjoyed fellowship with our congregation after church with ice cream and snacks
outside on the lawn. As we start the new quarter our Sunday School Lesson will
be Unit 3: Jesus teaches His Church, with lessons in the New Testament of the
Bible.
Please
invite children to join Sunday School teachers Kylie Wilson in Nursery and
ZanDee Hendren in Elementary classrooms.
A special thank you to our Sunday School teachers as you start a new
year.
LWML Corner
1. Next meeting is Sunday,
September 13 a 2:00 pm. Program to be determined.
2. September-Closing
Devotions: Sandy Heine. Hostesses: Nancy Wohl & Sandy Heine.
3. Trinity LWML will be
taking on a mission project each quarter and would like to invite the congregation
to assist us in this undertaking. It is a great way for us to work together to
help those less fortunate than us!
For the current quarter, we
will be collecting items to complete Orphan Grain Train Christmas boxes. The
lists will be available on the table with the list for the school bags. It is
imperative that you stick to the list, as the boxes are usually opened by
government officials at their destination & if they find anything not noted
in the customs log they will confiscate the shipment! We will be doing
this project through the end of September. Bring the items in a bag & we
will get the boxes for shipping.
FYI-for those of you who may
not be familiar with Orphan Grain Train, they are primarily a volunteer
organization. That means that over 95% of monies they collect go to the
charities they serve & not for administrative costs which is not true of so
many other organizations!
September 2 Virgil & Karen Ritz Anniversary
September 2 Sandy Heine Birthday
September 3 Geneva Johannes Birthday
September 4 Jacob Powers Baptismal Date
September 13 Amanda Kaufman Birthday
September 14 Tristina Neumann Baptismal Date
September 16 Harlan & Joanne Kurtz Anniversary
September 18 Riley Kaufman Birthday
September 21 Helen Engebretsen Birthday
September 22 Michelle Hill Birthday
September 25 Riley Kaufman Baptismal Date
September 26 Heidi Landreth Birthday
September 28 Peyton Wilson Birthday
September 30 Wes Bowlin Birthday
Please
notify the office to have a date added.
Join us for Bible study and fellowship on Thursday
mornings, we get started at 9:30.
Elders meet September 17 at 6:00 PM followed by the
Council meeting at 7:00 PM.
