Prompts for Prayers of Intercession – June 19, 2022
These prompts are provided for worship leaders as they prepare the prayers of intercession for weekly worship. The prompts are prepared by several leaders in the ELCA and reflect current world and national events. You are encouraged to adapt and add other concerns for your local context, including staying informed of events and concerns in your synod. Responding to recent acts of violence All Creation Sings includes several for lament including “Lamenting Gun Violence” (Leaders Edition, p. 107) and “Service after a Violent Event” (Pew Edition p. 64-66, Leaders p. 110-113) as well as several collect prayers including the one…
Prompts for Prayers of Intercession – June 12, 2022
These prompts are provided for worship leaders as they prepare the prayers of intercession for weekly worship. The prompts are prepared by several leaders in the ELCA and reflect current world and national events. You are encouraged to adapt and add other concerns for your local context, including staying informed of events and concerns in your synod. Responding to recent acts of violence All Creation Sings includes several for lament including “Lamenting Gun Violence” (Leaders Edition, p. 107) and “Service after a Violent Event” (Pew Edition p. 64-66, Leaders p. 110-113) as well as several collect prayers including the one…
‘If We Confess’
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. –I John 1.9 Without this passage as a paraclete I could not survive the Christian existence. It has been my soul-verse for as long as I can remember. I am a sinner, I confess, and I need the Savior on a moment-by-moment basis. Sometimes the intensity of my need rises when I find myself in the surd-moment of a heated sin. More than being irrational, sin is really the human incurved upon itself in all its asserted self-possessive inglorious…
Confession and hope give strength to end gun violence
The following reflections are the foundation of comments shared at the “Interfaith Vigil and Rally: Faith Acting on Gun Violence” by the Rev. Amy E. Reumann on June 8, 2022, hosted by Lutheran Church of the Reformation in Washington, D.C. by the Rev. Amy E. Reumann, ELCA Senior Director, Witness in Society I don’t know what tone to strike today. Is it to be a deep wail of grief and sadness at the blood that has been spilled, the lives lost, the communities forever changed by gun violence? Is it to be cries of holy rage at our leaders in…
Situation Report: May Tornadoes
Situation: On the night of May 30, a series of storms, including tornadoes, swept through the Central Great Plains and Upper Mississippi Valley. In Minnesota, heavily affected communities included Eagle Bend, Clarissa and Browerville, where over 100 buildings were damaged. In South Dakota, a tornado impacted the area around the city of Brandon, severely damaging Beaver Valley Lutheran Church in Valley Springs. Response: Lutheran Disaster Response is accompanying both the Northwestern Minnesota Synod and the South Dakota Synod as they respond to the tornadoes. The Northwestern Minnesota Synod will provide basic necessities to impacted community members in the…
Still Here: Forthcoming Post on the Problem of Human and Divine Competition
I am still here, never fear! Just a lot going on in life, and so my blogging has slacked a bit. I have more in the pipeline, and you can maybe expect a whole slew of them in the days to come. I just wanted to assuage any anxiety you might have had about my lack of posting. I wanted to give you a good night of sleep, once more, by knowing that, indeed I am here, and I always will be (haha). One post I’m thinking about writing is on teasing out the implications of the vicarious humanity of…
Reflecting on and Commemorating the Emanuel Nine by Bishop Virginia S. Aebischer
June 2022 — Reflecting on and Commemorating the Emanuel Nine On the evening of June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church, sat down and joined a Bible study focused on Mark 4. We all know now that he intended to start a race war. Innocent lives were taken in an act of hate, an act all too familiar in our society. That evening nine innocent people were killed in a temple of the Lord, where love was shared and life in Christ was embraced. The Emanuel Nine are saints who still witness to…
June 12, 2022–Faith Lens on Summer Hiatus
Faith Lens is not published during the summer. The next posting will be on September 6. 2022 for Sunday, September 11. ELCA Blogs
On Being Child Like, Playful, and Joyous as the Christian’s Life of Theological Existence
All of life is theological, or it should be for the Christian. There isn’t one aspect of life, for me, that isn’t consumed by the love of Christ. And this, I think, is the basis for what ought to count as genuinely theological: viz. a life grounded in the prior reality that God in Christ first loved us that we might love Him. It is out of this constraint that the Christian’s life ought to be compelled to do all that it does and thinks from. Ever since I became a Christian, as a wee lad, I have had this…
Remembering Tulsa by Bishop Michael Girlinghouse
For a long time, no one in Tulsa’s white or black communities talked about the massacre that destroyed the Greenwood district in May 1921. Those who were there remembered. A few kept the memory alive. But most simply chose to forget. Shrouded in silence for decades, it lay there in the heart of the city, eating away at it like a cancer. History — especially difficult, painful history — needs to be remembered. It needs to be talked about, studied, examined and explored. Not to make people feel guilty or ashamed, but to be honest, forthright and aware of…