One year later and Covid is on the wane and I find a church where masks are optional. I visited Cornerstone Lutheran church in Fishers for the 11AM service. I didn’t take a notebook to write on but wanted to soak in the service without interrupting myself.
It was their praise-worship service so the band was involved. The songs haven’t changed. If you’ve been to a praise service you know which songs were played. Not being raised on praise songs I don’t know many titles nor did the people running the video boards offer the titles. Cornerstone doesn’t provide programs so it’s up to you to figure them out. One song included the line, ‘The lion of Judah’, so some of you probably know what it is called. I left the service at the beginning of the final song because I’ve not attended this type of service where the final song didn’t go on and on. Praise band leaders love their bridges, I guess. I’m not saying praise songs are wrong, just not what I was raised on, that’s all.
The service followed the liturgy of the Divine Service for the most part but of course there was no chanting or response verses.
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The Sermon based on 1 John 3:16-24
16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
19 This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: 20 If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. 24 The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
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In essence, Jesus asks us to serve one another as He served all who came to Him. He understands that it is easy for us to see pain and suffering of others, whether rich or poor, but is difficult for us to how to appropriately respond to them.
Pastor asked us a series of questions as an example of ‘knowing’ those we want to help. He broke them down into three classes – upper class, middle class, and lower class. If you’re in the other two classes would you be able to answer questions upper class persons would know the answers to?
“Which spoon is used for caviar?”
“How do you charter a jet?”
Would you know what a middle class person is familiar with?
“How do you finance an automobile?”
“How much does it cost to go through the car wash?”
What questions might be relevant to a lower class person?
“Which buses would you need to get to work?”
“Where can you go to get free shelter and food?”
While any of these answers could be learned the questions suggest that it’s not always easy to know what kind of help any particular person needs. It is why Jesus wants us to get to know the people we serve. When you understand a person it helps us understand their issues.
Pastor’s preaching reminded me of the M.A.S.H. television episode, Death Takes A Holiday, where Charles Winchester wants to continue a family tradition of delivering chocolates to down-and-out children in the neighborhood but this ‘neighborhood’ being in a war-torn Korea. Charles sees ‘helping’ others from his own upperclass point of view. He discovers that the candy he delivered to an orphanage has ended up in the hands of soldier in camp. He demands of the soldier to tell him where he got the candy and the soldier tells he bought it on the black market. He goes out to confront the man running the orphanage.
Mr. Ho: “Please. Your generous gift and insistence that it remain anonymous touched me deeply. The candy would’ve brought great joy to the children for a few moments but on the black market, it was worth enough rice and cabbage to feed them for a month.”
Charles: “Rice and cabbage?”
Mr. Ho: “I know. I have failed to carry out your family tradition. And I am very sorry.”
Charles: “On the contrary, it is I who should be sorry. It is sadly inappropriate to give dessert to a child who has had no meal.”
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Communion
I took communion for the first time in nearly a year. What a joy it was! It opened my heart to His love all over again. Below is a picture of how communion is addressed during these Covid times. Some persons sneer at this invention. “Who dares confine God to a small package?” they will ask. I’m no Martin Luther, Pastor Sattler or Mācītaijs Lazdinš, who can explain it way better than me, but if you read The Words of Institution:
“Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when he was betrayed, took the bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said: Take; eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way he also took the cup after the supper, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, Drink of it, all of you. This cup is the New Testament in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.“
It makes it clear that His words are ‘in action’, if you will, during the sacrament. There was no Jesus’ ‘blood’ in the cup or ‘flesh’ left on the table after supper and the homeowners cleaned up the dinner table after He left for the garden of Gesthemane that evening. In the communion package pictured here there was no ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ present as it sat on the seat next to me nor in the trash can I dropped it into after service.
I found an article in a recent Lutheran Witness magazine. It discusses the ‘infinity of God’ in Communion.
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So Luther took up the issue in his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528). Luther addressed Zwingli’s insistence that the Communion wafer or a human body is too small to enclose the infinite God:
There is no need to enclose him here, as this spirit dreams, for a body is much, much too wide for the Godhead; it could contain many thousand Godheads. On the other hand, it is also far, far too narrow to contain one Godhead. Nothing is so small but God is still smaller, nothing so large but God is still larger, nothing is so short but God is still shorter, nothing so long but God is still longer, nothing is so broad but God is still broader, nothing so narrow but God is still narrower, and so on. He is an inexpressible being, above and beyond all that can be described or imagined.
(LW 37:228)
This is Luther at his most mind-blowing. God is infinitely large, but He is also infinitely small. To be infinite transcends everything that our reason or imagination can conceive.
Outer space with its far-flung galaxies seems infinitely vast, and yet everything that makes up those galaxies — every atom, every quantum particle and wave — seems infinitely small. But the universe is not infinite at all. Only God, who created it all, is infinite. And He fills His entire creation.
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It was nice to be back in The Lutheran Church.
The Purging Lutheran 