Shepherd Notes April 2025
1Thessolonians 1:2-5a “We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.”
Our Christian faith is about change and movement. It is dynamic and transforming. Our faith is about hope and love, not just as concepts or vague emotions, but as things that happen. This action, which is the very essence of our faith, is captured in the progression of Lent into Holy Week and then into Easter. This action or progression occurs through Christ’s death and resurrection and is promised to occur in us through our baptism, that we too have the promise of our death and resurrection. This gives us both hope and love.
This “death and resurrection” thing does not happen just once a year at Easter or once for Jesus two thousand years ago. Death and resurrection happen all the time. Every day millions of the cells in your body die and millions of new ones are born. It happens when winter turns into spring and when night turns to day. It happens when lovers make up and estranged brothers come together. It happens whenever your sin is impossible to ignore and yet the one who you have hurt still forgives you. Death and resurrection are to hunger and then be full, thirsty and then be satisfied, in danger and then be safe, cold then warm, alone and then to know love, from seeing nothing to seeing all the beauty of creation, from a troubled heart to knowing peace, from lost to found, from illness to wellness, and from death to eternal life. Martin Luther described the life of faith as experiencing death and resurrection on a daily basis. The life of faith is about seeing and recognizing how God raises us to new life every day in ways both great and seemingly small. It is with such recognition of God’s constant activity, movement, and action within our day to day living that reassures our faith, fills us with deep love and gives us limitless hope that no matter what kind of death, figurative or literal, that may befall us, God delivers us. When God delivers us, when He resurrects us, we are transformed by the experience and made new. The life of faith is about starting every day old and ending it new, starting each day in death and ending it resurrected.
I pray that as we celebrate Easter this month, you encounter the promise of Christ’s death and resurrection as it occurs in your life, remembering you are chosen through steadfast love.
Pastor Brian