Saint Matthew's

The following is my weekly Parish Announcements article from our coming weekend’s bulletin:

(more…)

… because I finished my Wednesday night homily and posted it to the Sermon section.

Usually I finish 20 minutes before we start. For some reason, today I am done 7 hours before.

How I forgot to mention this in church this past Sunday, I don’t know.

On November 1st, this coming Sunday morning, Daylight Savings Time kicks in. That means we all have to turn our clocks back one hour, an act that will make many of you happy. Extra sleep is a good thing.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been “suffering” from a lack of sleep. I don’t have an answer for it, but basically I’ve been waking up at really annoying times of the early morning. As an example, this morning I woke up at 4:30am. Yesterday, I woke up at around 3:30am. One day last week, after falling asleep at midnight, I found myself waking up at 2am.

I’ve been asked by many people, so I’ll answer “the” question now — no, I do not have sleep apnea. I just can’t sleep.

And no, I don’t take naps during the day.

I even tried the “less caffeine” route to see if this could possibly be a cause. Didn’t work – after severals days of limiting my caffeine intake to the morning hours, I still woke up early.

Now, I am not complaining that I wake up too early; I actually have used this extra time to do house work, read the newspapers – both on paper and the internet, and work at my morning devotions prior to heading to Morning Prayer. The bad part of waking up early is that my usual sleepiness between 2 and 4 pm has been amplified greatly.

The LCMS’ Blue Ribbon Governance Task Force has released their “final” report to the Synod that includes their recommendations for restructuring. As I have written before, I am not confident that the Task Force’s focus on structuring the Synod around larger congregations and districts is a good thing. Just glancing at the final report, not much has changed from their original form and my same objections stand.

Reminder – not everything being suggested is bad. Some of the ideas (such as rewriting the preamble of the Synodical Constitution) aren’t deal breakers. just head scratchers. But some of the proposals rile me up, such as reducing the number of convention delegates from 1200+ to only 650 while giving larger churches more of a say in delegate selection.

One of the more interesting aspects in my first quick glance is that the individual district structure will remain as it current is — but a special Task Force (hopefully with a better acronym than the current Blue Ribbon Task Force has) will be set up to investigate merging or eliminating districts.

Another idea I like – making the Synodical Convention (and thus, the nationally elected offices) every four years.

The lengthy report is available at the LCMS website or click here for a direct download link.

(More over at reviovine.com)

Since I began my call here at Saint Matthew’s, our church has followed a “twice a month” communion policy. For as long as anyone can remember, communion has been celebrated twice a month, with the other weeks being a kind of “prayer and preaching” service or even Matins. When I was growing up, my home church followed the same policy. As a kid, I actually liked non-communion services because they were shorter. Yet, as I grew up and eventually entered seminary, the Lutheran understanding of our worship life and why we come to church took a greater role in my life. Reading Martin Luther’s writings, and those of other theologians, my knowledge of why we do what we do in church has grown deeply. I am not a kid any more who wants to get out of church in forty minutes.

I believe that when we come to church, we come to receive God in His fullness — and that includes not only receiving Him in Word, but also in Sacrament, our Lord’s Body and Blood.

Since I started at Saint Matthew’s, I’ve broached the idea of every week communion. The idea has been received positively by many members of Saint Matthew’s. During the past four years, we’ve instituted two new divine services during the week, Wednesday and Saturday. Both of those services are communion-based. Overall, these have been accepted and have been a central part of the worship and prayer life growth of the congregation. However, there is one last hurdle to jump – our Sunday services. These services have remained as twice a month communion services. We have made a slight change in this “every other week” policy — on those months when we have five Sundays, instead of holding a Matins service, we hold a communion service.

While we’ve gotten comfortable with this policy over the years, I believe it is time to change it.

This coming Thursday, our Board of Elders is going to meet to discuss instituting weekly Sunday communion beginning with the start of the new church year that begins on November 29th. Earlier this year, the Elders took up this challenge and for months now have prayerfully reflected on this possible change. There are a number of issues regarding how this can be implemented, including:

1. Since our Elders serve as communion stewards during our Sunday Divine Services, moving toward a weekly communion means that our four Elders would have to serve monthly (beyond the regular Elder work they do each month). Should Saint Matthew’s embark on changing our church constitution to expand the number of Elders to six?

2. Our Altar Guild is small. Is doubling their work each month feasible? Should we encourage new members to join our Altar Guild?

3. During our Sunday communion services, we use individual cups that nearly everyone uses instead of the chalice. However, in our Wednesday and Saturday services, we only use the chalice. Should Saint Matthew’s move to only use the chalice on those Sundays when we’ve traditionally have not had communion?

These are just three questions that I know I have when it comes to changing our weekly communion policy.

Making this sort of change is hard. I know this. It is not easy to change a worship culture overnight. That is why, starting this week on our church blog (www.stmatthewsnj.org/blog), on my personal blog (www.reviovine.com), and starting next Sunday in our bulletin, I will begin a special series on why I feel weekly communion is important for the spiritual health of our congregation. I ask you take time and read. Most importantly, please ask me questions.

Communication is very critical to making any change work. Don’t be afraid to tell me that you disagree with me – please, the last thing I or our church needs is a silent majority opposed to anything. Let me and our Elders know about this proposal. God be with you as we walk together.

This coming Sunday, we’ll be celebrating the Reformation in church. In 1517, monk Martin Luther started a theological revolt against Roman Catholic doctrine that locked away the Gospel from God’s children and replaced it with a reliance on the law (mostly man-made). Luther’s struggle to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the forefront of Christian thought caused a split within Christendom and eventually led to a church body that bears his name.

I like Reformation Sunday. Yes, it is a Lutheran “rah-rah” day, but it is more than that. We truly celebrate the Gospel on this day!

Sunday will be fun.

I have to find time this afternoon to prepare for tonight’s Wednesday Divine Service and Bible class. After taking last Wednesday night off (went to the Rangers game at the Garden with my brother), I realized this morning that I’m really behind in my preparations for bible class. And the Divine Service – we’re reading this weekend’s coming Epistle reading from Romans 3 (before clicking the link, take a guess as to what section of chapter 3?)

In our bible class, we’re studying Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans and we’re currently in Chapter 9.

I’ve decided to make coffee and pick up cookies for tonight’s bible class.

No, it’s not a bribe. I will need the coffee by then.

(reposted from reviovine.com)

“I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to convince me that God exists,” (Bruce) Sheiman said in an interview, “but they can convince me that religion has intrinsic value.”

I saw this story yesterday in USA Today, but I was just lazy enough that I didn’t take time to comment on it.

Apparently, the recent attempt by atheists to claim that people who believe in God are just plain nuts hasn’t done much to swell their ranks. No one likes an arrogant, hard-nosed God hater. Instead, they’ve taken a new track, pushed by author Bruce Sheiman, one that puts a happier face on the non-God crowd. They now don’t want to criticize those who believe in God, but they want everyone to just get along.

Isn’t that nice? I guess the New Atheists have found that people don’t respond well when their religious beliefs are attacked as phony. Gone are the days when public religious expressions are mocked by the anti-God people — they now will speak of what unifies people of all faiths (you need a strong faith to believe that everything was creating from sheer dumb luck).

Yes, it is a public relations move.

Should be interesting…

I laughed when I read that the Roman Catholic Church is moving to allow fallen-away Anglicans who are upset at their church for allowing gays in their clergy ranks to come home to mother church to keep their liturgical worship rites they used as Anglicans.

Pope Benedict XVI approved a new church provision that will allow Anglicans to convert while maintaining many of their distinctive spiritual and liturgical traditions, Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official, told a news conference Tuesday.

Essentially, Anglicans will have to convert to Catholicism, but then they are allowed to keep their liturgy and worship style.

To me, this doesn’t make much sense.

If an Anglican converts to Catholicism, then they are no longer Anglican, but Roman Catholic.

I made a mistake during my announcements on Sunday morning — I said that our regular church schedule was in effect this week.

I was wrong.

Tomorrow night, our midweek Divine Service followed by Bible class is canceled. The reason? I am going to a hockey game at MSG. Los Angeles Kings vs. the first place New York Rangers.

Oops. Sorry.

O God, hear my prayer; give ear to the words of my mouth. Psalm 54:2

Earlier this week, I was sitting down talking with someone and by the grace of God, our conversation turned to prayer. I inquired if, outside of a church setting, she prayed to God.

“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t pray a lot. Maybe when I’m sick or something bad happens. But no, I regularly don’t pray.”

This topic moved me to ponder my own prayer life. Of course, as a pastor, I always find myself praying. But … I always have this nagging thought in my head that my prayers aren’t good enough. This is, of course, a dopey statement for one important reason: God hears all prayers and when they may sound like babbling or the words don’t seem right, the Holy Spirit is taking our babble prayers and making sense out of them. Our Father in heaven, with our intercessor Jesus Christ at His right hand, hears all of our prayers and makes sense of them and He truly answers them in His own way.

Even with that confidence, I still find myself thinking that my prayers, and my prayer life, needs a little work.

Throughout the course of my day, I find myself praying little prayers. They are like murmur prayers.

I say “murmur” because that is what it is — a prayer that is not said loud enough for people to hear or soft enough that when people look at me they just see my lips moving. Most times, these murmur prayers deal with personal issues or problems that have arisen in my life; other times, my prayers deal with situations I was dealing with at the time. For example, routinely after completing visiting someone, I say a murmur prayer.

When I assess my strengths and weaknesses, one of my weaknesses is prayer. At times, I find myself struggling to find the right words to say or to say the prayer in some meaningful way for those with whom I am praying. There are times when my petitions to our Father in heaven sound worse than babbles; I mix and match grammatical rules in each petition; and when I finally finish, I feel like God is in heaven looking down and thinking to himself, “What did he say?”

Outside of my struggles with “off the top of my head” prayer, my consistency with daily prayer drives me up a wall. While I do pray many times before each meal, before heading out for the day, before I lay my head down to sleep at night, my big problem is consistency. There are way too many times when I fall asleep without saying “my prayers” at night. It is not because I don’t want to — it is because I just get tired and conk out.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Many Christians have a problem getting into a daily prayer routine. One of the big reasons we started daily Morning Prayer, our Midweek service, a weekly printed and expanded prayer list, was to impress upon all of us the importance of spending even a little time each day in prayer.

Praying is our talking to God. It is something we should all feel comfortable doing.

That is why, after my talk earlier this week, I started focusing more on my prayer life. I am pushing myself to remember to pray daily, especially in the evenings, my biggest weakness. So far, so good.

Early on Friday morning, I spoke with the woman from earlier in the week.

“You know, I actually prayed last night,” she informed me. “It was kind of weird, but I have a rough day ahead of me and I prayed that I would be able to get through the day in one piece.”

It is a start. God loves us and wants to hear from us…from all of us.

Just as a reminder, I am still writing about sports and about Lutheransim — I am writing over at my personal blog, reviovine.com.

The following are links to specific category pages I have set up:

Hockey thoughts (or my term, “Pastoral Puck Droppings”)

Lutheran thoughts

This weekend at church, we will begin a month long collection for money to help the LCMS World Relief and Human Care deal with the disasters in the Southeast Asia/Pacific region. Just this week alone, an earthquake caused a tsunami, wiping out villages and towns in the American Samoa area; horrendous flooding in the Philippines from a storm that eventually became a typhoon that pounded Vietnam; and a typhoon that hit Taiwan.

We will collect donations after church during Fellowship Hour this weekend and starting next weekend, we’ll collect a goodwill offering during our new “Coffee Hour” after church.

It is impossible for Gospel-rendered faith in Christ to be idle, and thus thousands of congregations and individuals assist us with their gifts that we might offer assistance to people in need all over the world. As we do so, we are ambassadors for Christ, his Gospel, and the magnificent confession of that Gospel in the orthodox Lutheran faith. The conservative Lutheran confession of the faith and liberal love of the neighbor belong together in the life of the individual Christian, the local congregation and the national church body.

For more information, and to watch a video with LCMS World Relief and Human Care Executive Director Matthew Harrison, please click here.