Dear Christ Lutheran Church family,

This week will mark a year since our first online services and the beginning of our attempts to continue the life of the church safely during the pandemic. We give thanks to God for the creativity, grace, and goodwill shown by our people over the course of that year. Today we're writing to update the congregation on our current situation and next steps. Please read, share, and be in touch with any questions or comments.

Where we are:

• The good news is that the vaccine rollout is ongoing and appearing to speed up. The available vaccines are extremely effective against severe COVID. Many of our members have received at least one dose and many of those have already received two. Eligibility and ease of access should be expanding soon. Daily new cases in Dallas County have fallen considerably from their January peak. If you are eligible and have not yet been vaccinated, try http://vaccinespotter.org/tx for pharmacies in addition to the local county health authorities and hospital systems.
  
• The not so good news is that the drop in new cases has levelled off in recent weeks at a level that is still quite high. The pace of vaccinations may not be fast enough to prevent one more peak in new cases, especially if safety precautions are prematurely relaxed.

How we're adapting:

• Starting in February, we eliminated the advance sign-up and occupancy limit for the sanctuary service.
  
• We open the windows (even if it's cold) for extra ventilation and continue to have full cooperation on masks. For now, two-thirds of pews are closed to maintain distance between households.
• With vaccine eligibility and availability still limited, and with children still not eligible for vaccination at all, we will continue to require masks and to enhance our ventilation even as we encourage people to return to worship, especially if you're already vaccinated. For the sake of clarity and simplicity of policy, we are continuing to require even those who have been fully vaccinated to wear masks for now.
• However, vaccinated people who wish to sit together are welcome and encouraged to do so.
• Sunday School for children and youth has moved to 10 a.m., with an in-person option for Confirmation
• Making use of our very nice courtyard, good weather, and the extremely low risk of outdoor transmission, we have begun holding coffee hour outdoors at 10 a.m., weather permitting.

What we plan to do in the coming months:

• Outdoor worship at 11 a.m. will continue, weather permitting. Outdoor transmission appears to be extremely rare, so outdoor worship is a great option for those who are not yet vaccinated or have heightened safety concerns.
  
• As more and more people are vaccinated, local transmission eventually slows down, and we continue using masks and enhanced ventilation for the sake of the unvaccinated, we encourage worshipers to return in person, either in the sanctuary or outdoors.
• We are discussing plans for a delayed 75th anniversary celebration in the Fall.
• As vaccine availability becomes general and population immunity is reached, hopefully this summer, we expect to be able to ease our precautions in a deliberate, ongoing way.
• This will end. We may end up with seasonal coronavirus outbreaks, booster shots for the various vaccines, and people taking precautions like mask-wearing when they have respiratory symptoms. Streaming worship and online education will be a part of our church life in the future. But the urgent situation under which we have been operating since last March will come to an end, perhaps sooner than many of us had been expecting, and we look forward to embracing all aspects of our congregational life again.  
  

As always, your continuing faithfulness and charitable spirit has made these steps easier to take, and our addition of in-person worship options easier to preserve, than they might have been. We remember to give thanks at all times, and to rejoice at the work of God among us even now.

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Ben Dueholm, on behalf of the Re-Opening Task Force:
Connie Uhri, Council President
Ginger Hagens, Council Vice President
Sharon Karol, Council Secretary
David Marshall, Treasurer,
Greg Nelson, Financial Secretary
Dr. Hando Nahkur, Director of Music Ministry
Dr. Tina Tonti
Joanne Osterland, Director of Christ Lutheran Presch

Last week we talked about the introduction and first petition of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." This week I want to talk about the following two petitions: "Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."

These two petitions are distinct but related. We pray for God's kingdom to come to and among us, and for this to come about or be made known by God's will being done on Earth even as it already is done in Heaven.  What is the coming of God's kingdom and the doing of God's will? We'll get to that in a minute.

But first I'm going to digress for a moment to talk about everyone's favorite topic: grammar. The Greek of the New Testament has verbs that change their mood or mode by changing their spelling, rather than by adding extra words. English speakers have to go through more work to use our verbs in all the moods available to us: You go to the store (indicative, stating information); you would go to the store if you could (conditional, stating an if-then scenario); I prefer that you go to the store rather than me (subjunctive, stating an open possibility or desire); go to the store please (imperative, stating a command or direction).

English used to be a little more flexible than it is now, and when our traditional version of the Lord's Prayer was translated, you could do a lot of this just with the order of words. "Thy kingdom come" could mean "that your kingdom might come--we'd like that" (subjunctive) or "Come now, kingdom" (imperative). We don't really use our language this way much anymore outside of church. In prayer, it's easy to fall back on a softer way of saying this. "May your kingdom come; may your will be done." But the original Greek version is in the imperative mood: "Come, Kingdom! Be done, thy will!" or maybe "Make your kingdom come and make your will to be done."

For Luther, the coming of God's kingdom means "whenever our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit, so that through the Holy Spirit's grace we believe God's holy word and live godly lives here in time and hereafter in eternity."

And God's will being done means "whenever God breaks and hinders every evil scheme and will--as are present in the will of the devil, the world, and our flesh--that would not allow us to hallow God's name and would prevent the coming of his kingdom...."

I would prefer to expand on that, so that we see God's kingdom and will being made real to us not just in our own faith and in our own behavior but in the flourishing of human well-being around us, and the sanctification of the world through our actions and prayers.

When I wrote about prayer in my book Sacred Signposts a few years ago, I dwelt on these early Christian prayers and what they may have meant to those praying:

Whatever we mean when we say these words, or whatever we imagine their effect is, they express an important longing for a redeemed world and for redeemed selves. The 7th century theologian Maximus the Confessor says this about "thy will be done":

This Sunday we get some great readings. Up first, the Prophet Isaiah has a word for people being oppressed by earthly rulers:

Isaiah is a book that unfolds in the shadows of Israel's domination by great regional powers. And here the words of God through the prophet take a vast, even cosmic perspective. The rulers of the earth may seem to be dominant, even permanently so, right now, but they are frail plants, no sooner planted than plucked up.

For Americans, who are favored citizens of an imperial power, this may not sound like an oracle of hope. If anything, we have come to over-identify with our elected leaders. It is not hard to attribute the wrong kind of religious significance to our own rulers, good and bad. The words of the prophet here are meant to encourage people who believe themselves to be overwhelmed by the forces of history:

Our second lesson for Sunday continues Paul's address to the church in Corinth. Paul can be a bit defensive about his credentials and career as an apostle and evangelist. He explains himself rather poignantly and eloquently this week:

Martin Luther borrowed from this passage in his famous treatise "On Christian Liberty," in which he says that the Christian is a perfectly free ruler of all and a perfectly obedient slave to all. This is a central theme for Luther, but I suspect Paul is making a more modest claim. He writes here of his apostolic mission. He has approached people, so to say, on their own terms. He addresses them from a place of solidarity. He speaks as an insider and an outsider. He comes in weakness to the weak. "I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some." This can sound manipulative or inauthentic to our ears, as if Paul were engaging in some kind of subterfuge, like Steve Buscemi's character on 30 Rock:

But I don't think that's the right way to read this. Charity and piety forbid us to simply assume that Paul is impersonating people. Rather, we might look to the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to address everyone wherever they may be, and whoever they may be. The apostle has to meet them, as we might say today, "where they are" to show that this message is really for them. 

And while the Gospel passage each week is thematically connected to the Old Testament rather than the New Testament reading, maybe we can hear some of this in the story of Jesus in Capernaum:

Jesus can barely get a few hours' respite from the demands of his community. The people need healing, the casting out of demons, and the preaching of hope. And Jesus could retreat to the deserted places. He could stay in Capernaum and become a respected local holy man, no doubt drawing visitors from all Galilee and Judea, if not beyond. But instead he goes out to where the people are, in the villages and towns, to meet them on their own turf and their own terms. Paul becomes all things to all people for the sake of saving some. Jesus remains one thing to all people, for the sake of saving all.

I'm not sure what I'm going to preach about all this, but I hope you'll join me in person or online to hear what God has to say to us this week.

Looking back over thirteen years of sermon manuscripts, I found a few sermons on this week's readings. But it turns out I haven't preached on the passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. So I've been thinking about that a lot this week, because it's a fascinating and challenging passage. Paul is writing to a local church with plenty of internal differences and conflict, part of which falls along the lines of people who are "wise" or philosophically inclined versus those who are not. The behavior of some of the more sophisticated and worldly members of the community is damaging to the faith of those who are not so knowledgeable. So Paul begins his argument with a sort of thesis about knowledge and love:

Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

Paul here turns the tables on the wise and sophisticated members of the community. Knowledge without love is not a blessing or a virtue, because it leads to pride and self-regard. Indeed, claiming to possess knowledge is itself a symptom of a deeper ignorance. We should seek to love God, and therefore be known by God, first and foremost.

This is important because the community is in conflict over how its members relate to the customary religious practices of the city:

Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that ‘no idol in the world really exists’, and that ‘there is no God but one.’ Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

"Food offered to idols" may be the sacred meals of pagan temples, or oblations placed before household shrines to departed ancestors. Christians acknowledge only one God. So the question is whether eating food offered to idols is itself idolatry (the worship of idols), or whether it is just plain old eating, since the idol itself is an illusion. Some Christians in Corinth eat, some refrain, and there is conflict about what those choices mean:

It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. ‘Food will not bring us close to God.’ We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.

So Paul is clear that the actual food is indifferent. It can't harm or help you. So the consideration is not in the food itself, nor even the idol to which it has been offered, but in the conscience of the brother or sister who still experiences the pull of idol-worship:

But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling-block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed.

Paul is saying here that the exercise of your liberty, in good conscience (eating food offered to vain idols) can become dangerous because it can cause those of weaker conscience and understanding to stumble. So your Christian liberty needs to be weighed against the effect of your actions on your siblings:

But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.

The word here for "I may not cause one of them to fall" is skandaliso, which we recognize from the English word "scandalize." There are acts that are permitted in themselves, but that are destructive to the brother or sister and therefore must be given up. So Christians are obligated to bear the burdens of sisters or brothers who are struggling in their conscience, weak in their faith, or otherwise entangled with the world and not to add to them by making a license of our freedom.

I actually think about this a lot. "Freedom" or, if you prefer, "liberty," is a big an often under-discussed aspect of Christian faith (especially if you don't happen to be worshiping in a Lutheran church or attending a Lutheran seminary). It is very important for us to recognize that the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross and his life-giving proclamation of God's kingdom set us free from vain taboos and destructive religious compulsions. 

But for Paul (and for Martin Luther), this is not "liberty" in the secular political sense we often use it today. It doesn't mean "you can't tell me what to do" or "I can do whatever you can't stop me from doing." Instead, it delivers us to a relationship of care and obligation for our neighbor, starting with the Christian community itself. I am free to eat, and yet obliged to bear with my sister who will fall if I do. Therefore I do not eat. 

It's worth thinking about how this applies in our own lives. It's easy for Christians to adopt a morality of strict purity, or at least of the appearance of purity (especially with respect to women's bodies and sexuality), often justified by the danger posed by anyone setting a bad example or creating scandal. And it's easy, though less common, for Christians to express simple scorn for norms and public decency. I think here of the seminary professor who would drop the occasional f-bomb in class to reassure himself that his salvation owed nothing to his own merit, or of the many pastors and teachers these days who take evident delight in being "politically incorrect" and insulting or demeaning their siblings as a show of freedom and dominance.

But I think Paul points us to another way, which is to start with love. How will my actions, even if they are neutral in themselves, affect my neighbor? If I wish to contribute to the welfare of my brother's soul, and not just mine, how might I speak and act to foreground the love for God that is the basis of all knowledge? Even if I have understood that profanity* is just a convention of language and not a moral issue, how will my words affect those around me?

These are the things Paul pushes us to consider. I hope you'll join me on Sunday as we ponder what this means for us, in a world of infinite options and limited rules.

*note: not blasphemy, which is an actual sin (believe me, I'm not any happier about this than you are)