Saint Paul Lutheran Church - Wheaton, Illinois

ACTs Newsletter

Worship & Music

Witness/Nurture

A message from Senior Pastor, Melody Eastman		A message from Associate Pastor, Mark Williamson
Walk the Whole Journey Are you hoping for a little more experience of Easter resurrection in your everyday life? The promise of Easter, after all, isn’t only for resurrection after the physical death of our bodies. It’s also for renewal of spirit, for the hope of unforeseen possibilities here and now. It’s for forgiveness, and reconciliation, and new beginnings . It’s for a lot of things a lot of people spend a lot of time longing for. Which explains, I suppose, why the sanctuaries are so packed on Easter morning. But it’s a sad truth that a lot of people come on Easter, looking for something they don’t know how to find. What are people looking for? Well, it’s not so much something that magically makes everything all right. Most of us know better . We’re not seeking a message that changes the world. We do come seeking the message that changes us—that makes us walk through the same old world (the one filled with pitfalls and mistakes and worries and darkness and death; you know the one I mean) in a new way. We come seeking a Word, a change, that makes us see—and live--a new hope in the old places. It makes sense that people would come to worship particularly on Easter, hoping for that hope. Sometimes folks are confused when they don’t find it in the way they thought they would. The great hymns don’t ring the same way anymore, or the new hymns don’t sound like the old hymns, or the sermon doesn’t connect, or communion feels disorienting because there are so many “strangers” around. But I suspect that people’s frustration at not finding more hope in Easter comes from something they didn’t realize: if we miss living the rest of the story, it’s really hard to feel like we’re part of the big finish. Easter simply doesn’t make sense on its own. Standing alone, it’s a moral without a story, a target without a purpose. To actually experience resurrection, you have to be willing to own the reality of the death that precedes it. That’s why we have a Triduum—a series of services that blend together over several days, to tell one story. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Celebration of the Resurrection—none of them make any kind of real sense on their own. A lot of people avoid Maundy Thursday and Good Friday—because (they think) they’re not that important, or they’re too much of a downer, or because it’s just nuts to go to church three times in one week, especially when you’ve got little kids and Easter dinner to prepare and the house to clean and laundry to do and suitcases to pack and travel to plan. But here’s the thing: if we want the power of new life in our life, we need to name the power of the old death that so often holds sway. The Triduum helps us do that, as a community, together. We gather, and we name the reality that each of us lives individually, privately, secretly. Because we gather with our community of love, we find the courage to admit that the darkness is our reality no matter how much we hate facing it. And when we can claim that, that’s when the Easter Word can really claim us. Parents, do you have children you think are too young to understand this? Trust me when I tell you: age doesn’t matter . Our kids absorb and intuit more than we realize, and they get this rhythm and pattern — even if they seem squirrelly . Bring ‘em to all three services, and as they grow they’ll have a much better chance of actually understanding how they can live Easter every day. Adults, have you drifted from the practice (the discipline) of attending all three services? Try this: make it a priority this year and see if there’s anything you needed more that can’t still happen. Jesus walked the whole journey with us, for us. Join us while we re-discover him, still walking the whole journey. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. Resurrection. I hope to see you there.		What Happens at Camp “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all.” --Psalm 104:24 As I write this, I’m sitting in the Retreat Center during some afternoon free time at Lutherdale Bible Camp near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. This is the first week of Living Waters Confirmation Camp, a tradition of outdoor Christian education St. Paul has been a part of for many years now. As a compliment to ROOTS (our middle school Sunday school program), and Making Disciples (the 9th grade mentoring program), we strongly encourage our confirmands to spend a week here at Lutherdale at least one of the summers following their 6th, 7th, or 8th grade year. This summer six of our confirmation youth are here along with about 120 other kids from churches in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Occasionally I hear a parent say that getting a kid to church camp “just isn’t realistic” in this day in age. A full week is just too precious. I agree with the part about a full week being precious; there are all kinds of opportunities for spiritual growth that take place in a week of camp that just can’t happen in a single hour on Sunday morning. It’s a week so precious it can change the course of a young person’s life. Take our theme at Living Waters this year: “Keeping the Earth.” We can talk a great deal in our families, at school, and in church about how important it is to recycle, conserve energy, support sustainable agriculture, and the like, but a retreat to a place of natural beauty transforms those “shoulds” into a real relationship with God’s creation. Playing team-building games in the woods by the Eagles Nest Activity Center; helping to take care of the animals at the Lutherdale barn; praising God with song in the Tree Chapel—these things are not only good medicine for what one writer has called “nature deficit disorder”; they bring home the reality that God the Creator has entrusted us with the sacred vocation of tending and keeping God’s good earth. Similarly, when it comes to learning the meaning of the sacrament of holy baptism, I can do my best to creatively teach what the Bible and the Catechism say on a few Sunday mornings at ROOTS, but it just can’t compare with the experience kids will have tonight at camp when down at the lakefront, as the stars are just starting to appear, their pastors and youth ministers will meet them knee-deep in the lake to trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads with water from Lauderdale Lake, saying, “Remember that you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Now that’s catechesis. In late July, I’m anticipating another great ELCA camp experience, this time with twenty-two of our high school youth at Atlantic Mountain Ranch in the Black Hills of South Dakota. What makes the AMR trip distinctive is that it’s a Servant Camp. So, in addition to forging a deep connection with God’s creation and praising God in the outdoors — as we’re doing at Lutherdale — at AMR we’ll put special energy into doing those words we’ve heard in church: “The one who wishes to be great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43). We’ll offer our service to someone we don’t even know yet who is in need of housing assistance through a Habitat project. And we’ll serve the creation itself through a conservation project in the Black Hills National Forest. Don Richter writes in the book Mission Trips That Matter, “Christian faith is not simply a set of beliefs and doctrines, important as these are. Christian faith is a way of life shaped by practices, by what Christians do in the world in response to the gift of God’s grace.” At camp our youth learn to believe what Christians believe by doing what Christians do. And in the doing, they offer their whole selves—minds, hearts, hands, and bodies — to the God who loved them first. That’s what happens at camp.

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