Sunday September 27th, 2026 Worship

One of the papers you were handed when you walked into worship today was a survey designed by our anniversary planning chairs to help collect stories and input regarding how we want celebrate this congregation’s 75th anniversary in March 2027. As we were preparing all the materials for the Fall Kick-off today and I was doing my sermon prep, I kept coming back to how the last few weeks have continued to remind me just how much Scripture still speaks to our lives today, that this is the Living Word of God, not just something that was set in stone 2,000 years ago. Because we don’t normally have our Fall Kick-Off this late; it’s often closer to the start of the school year, but we were working around my surgery and the time off I would need to take for recovery. Yet, I couldn’t help but inwardly rejoice a bit, because, just like last week, I see the intertwining of what we are doing here at church with the larger messages of our Scripture readings that were assigned in the lectionary for this week.
As I was reading these passages this week, the phrase that kept floating through my mind was: “The future is influenced by, but is not dictated by our pasts.” It pulls together what I hear about in the Scripture readings about God’s enduring forgiveness when we don’t get things right, with our very human wrestling with what it means to discern where God is calling us and how we are supposed to move forward. This notion of the way that past and the future are intertwined is both individual and communal, since we were created to be in relationship with one another, not exist in a vacuum. But, it all comes back to the promises that God is making, that the very nature of God is one who is full of compassion and mercy, the one whose love is steadfast. The one who gives us a chance to try, and also turn around when we make mistakes; who empowers us to choose a different way forward.
Our God, the one to whom these descriptors apply, is the same God who desires for us to have life abundant. The problem here comes back to humans, as it usually does. Because, even when God offers us these gifts of grace and mercy, we often have a hard time accepting them. There are so many real barriers that get in the way of this, including: other peoples’ comments to or perceptions of us; the entrenched systems of capitalism, racism, ableism, and all the other “isms” that try to dictate our value and worth; shame and guilt that keep us bound; and a fear of “failure,” of not being able to do enough or be enough to feel worthy of these gifts that we don’t want to try to change since we assume we will just mess it up again anyway. Just as we can get in our own way in life, we also can get in the way of our relationship with God and creation when we keep repeating the idea that we are too broken, too flawed, to be loved by God and one another.
In all of these messages about repentance and forgiveness from the readings today, it often comes back to people who think that they are too far gone, that their fate has been sealed, or that there is no hope of them ever being able to change. Ezekiel’s proclamation today: “Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (Ezekiel 18: 4), is an incredibly profound, society shaking claim. While it may not sound like extraordinarily good news to us, in fact it still might feel a bit harsh, it is a breaking from tradition that claimed children were held responsible for the sins of their parents; that sin was something generational for which the punishment could be passed down. This declaration is a promise in which God declares that no one is too far gone for God to stop caring about! That our great-grandparents actions don’t dictate our ability to be loved or not by God, but our relationship with God is exactly that, our own.
This proclamation, declaring a new way for the community shows how following God means being able to follow God’s example and change directions. Jesus even proclaims to the religious leaders trying to trap him in his teachings, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the dominion of God ahead of you’ (Matthew 21: 31b). That’s one way to make a statement to the religious leaders; to declare that those who have been cast aside and judged for their behavior, seen as beneath these religious people, of not worthy enough to be a part of the religious community, thereby being deemed as unlovable by God, are not only welcome in the dominion of God, but will be going ahead of them! Despite what others want to declare, no one is “too far gone” for God to stop caring about. It doesn’t matter what we have been told in the past, God’s grace is unfathomable and is extended to all of us, inviting us into this relationship.
One of the important distinctions here, though, is that these readings continue to talk about repentance, of turning around. God’s forgiveness is unending and we are allowed to screw up in the process of turning around, but what matters is that we desire to change the ways we are behaving. This process doesn’t exempt us from any of the work; it isn’t a pass to go off and do whatever we want with our lives without thinking of any of the consequences. Instead, this process of turning around requires us to face hard truths, instead of taking “the easy way out.” Just as the Israelites of old wanted to claim that what they did had no impact on their relationship to God or those are around them because of what their parents had done, a mentality of “it’s already been decided, so why try” (Ezekiel 18: 1-4, 25-32), so too do we want to make excuses for the way that we act, often relying on the same ones over and over for why we can’t or won’t ever change. But, our future is not already written for us, we get to decide how we want to live, what we want our relationships to God and creation to look like. And, we have the power to turn around, knowing that this may be incredibly difficult to do and we might need to reach out to others for support. It’s a process, a journey, not just a switch we can flip and change everything overnight. And, this isn’t something that only has to be done on our own, through our sheer willpower, because often we need more than that, we need one another.
This is part of what is means to exist as a community too. Because, while we are wrestling with these things in our personal lives, we are then also trying to figure out what it means for us to exist as a group of people with and for one another. Which is part of why I love the tie-in to our 75th anniversary that we are bringing into the Fall Kick-Off. Our anniversary is a time of great celebration; it’s an incredible milestone in the life of our faith together! And, as we prepare for our anniversary and we start our fall activities, we get to discern the future of our church together, leaning on our history, but not being constrained by it. We get to explore even more deeply on the communal level what it means to have our past influence our future, but not dictate the way our future looks. We get to look back and see all the ways this congregation has changed over the years, as we figure out how we want to move forward. We are able to see how our past traditions get to have an influence, but we do not have to do everything “the way it has always been done,” in order for this place to still be Luther Memorial.
Every time someone new joins this community or someone departs, our congregation changes! We get to be this living example of what it means to walk alongside one another, to support each other, as we continue to use the values of our faith to help us in our exploration of what it means to live as a person of faith in our world today. We get to help hold one another accountable to knocking down the barriers we place in front of ourselves, and have some help breaking down the ones that others put up for us, that get in the way of us accepting that we are all God’s beloved. No matter what our future brings, we get to keep proclaiming that this promise of grace and forgiveness, this unending love isn’t just for this person or that person, but for all of us, as we share Christ’s love in community. And that, my friends, is a beautiful gift!