SPEAKER_00: Sisters and brothers, uh, it is uh a remarkable and a very good thing for Renee and me to be here back at Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 100 has led you up to this day of celebration in verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, is a theme verse.
SPEAKER_00: Now, since that verse speaks of God's faithfulness to all generations, I brought with me some history from past generations.
SPEAKER_00: So I have here in my hand, this very hand, the first sermon that I preached as a vicar in August of 1977.
SPEAKER_00: I read it.
SPEAKER_00: Renee said, How was it?
SPEAKER_00: I said, Yeah, not bad for a vicar.
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, I have here in my hand another sermon preached at Trinity Lutheran Church in Benn 20 years later, 1997, when new classrooms were dedicated and we were invited to be here.
SPEAKER_00: This one was a little better, I thought.
SPEAKER_00: So now here we are uh 29 years later in this marvelous new place.
SPEAKER_00: And so as I thought about this sequence, I decided it just might be time for me to say, I think maybe we should stop meeting like this.
SPEAKER_00: I pondered Psalm 100 and I thought about the work and the ministry here in about a hundred years of believing the gospel and sharing it.
SPEAKER_00: And as I was thinking, I was trying to imagine at least some of the stories that we could tell one another.
SPEAKER_00: Stories that you have been telling one another, stories that you will continue to tell one another.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the stories would be about all kinds of things, of course.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them may be big, some small.
SPEAKER_00: But because we're Christians, we are Christians, the thread that would run through all of the stories and that would bind them all together is this the Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's the way it is with God's people, and it always has been that way, and it always will be.
SPEAKER_00: God works, God saves, God humbles us and lifts us up, he reveals his ways to us, and then when we see him at work, we rejoice in telling what he has done.
SPEAKER_00: The psalm is filled with singing and with joy, and it's rooted in a story, the story of God's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And so I have a simple task for you.
SPEAKER_00: It's an invitation during our few minutes together today.
SPEAKER_00: It's this simply to rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: Rejoice in the story of God's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna say it again.
SPEAKER_00: Rejoice in the story of God's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Now, as I said, the stories will be different sizes, some big, some small.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're aware, I am vaguely and uh partially aware of this website, earth.google.
SPEAKER_00: Has anybody ever used EarthGoogle?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's this amazing computer program that you can type in a location uh anywhere in the world, I think.
SPEAKER_00: Renee and I have used it when we want to go camping somewhere in the West, and we try to find the campground.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so what happens was the sat is the satellite image, it kind of zooms out from where it was before, and you you actually see the whole the whole continent.
SPEAKER_00: And depending on where you're going next, you see the whole globe, the whole planet.
SPEAKER_00: And then it zooms in and takes you to the place that you'd like to see.
SPEAKER_00: So IEarthgoogled Trinity Lutheran Church and School.
SPEAKER_00: And so sure enough, it came the big picture, and then down to 2550 Northeast Butler Market Road, which, if I may say, in 1977 was halfway to the middle of nowhere.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the point of that is that the stories that we tell will be big sometimes, but sometimes very, very small.
SPEAKER_00: But they are all reason to rejoice in the Lord's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I haven't been here, so I don't really know the specifics, but I just asked myself the question: what are some of the small stories be?
SPEAKER_00: Um, I can imagine that Pastor Caleb and key leaders of Trinity are rejoicing that at least for a moment you don't have to think about city use permits and occupancy requirements and things like that.
SPEAKER_00: And I've been told that there are a number of believers here who are praising God for his faithfulness, but now you don't have to set up chairs and take God is good all the time.
SPEAKER_00: So lots of stories, see, some of them easy.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them were hard, some small, some big.
SPEAKER_00: I thought and wondered how the pandemic was.
SPEAKER_00: It was a very difficult time for many people and for many churches, and yet God has been faithful to bring Trinity through that difficult time.
SPEAKER_00: I thought farther back to 1959 when Trinity Lutheran School began and then slowly, slowly grew in educating Christian children in the faith and other children in telling Bend and Central Oregon about the good news of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And then there were decades before that, in all of the ups and downs of life and history, in the hard and the easy, the joyful and the sorrowful.
SPEAKER_00: Trinity Congregation was here with people and pastors, pastors and people, since 1926, which was the year after my father was born.
SPEAKER_00: The stories of God's faithfulness are sometimes just happy.
SPEAKER_00: We all know that.
SPEAKER_00: Some of those happy stories, we've lived through them.
SPEAKER_00: But I want to say that more often or not, they are colored with grief.
SPEAKER_00: And they're colored with struggle.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes when that version or that episode in the story is over, you still have questions that have not gotten answers.
SPEAKER_00: And you may never get answers to those questions.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when we tell and remember the stories, the place of human weakness and human sin almost seems to take over the story itself.
SPEAKER_00: We all know about the frailty and the failing of Christians.
SPEAKER_00: We all know about the hatred of the world for Christ and sometimes for his people.
SPEAKER_00: You could tell stories like that.
SPEAKER_00: I know stories like that too.
SPEAKER_00: But through it all, the one thread that binds us together and binds you together for a hundred years is the goodness of the Lord, the steadfast love of the Lord, and his faithfulness that never gave up, and how he never went back on a single promise, even when you couldn't see it happening, even when you had no idea how God could bring good out of this thing.
SPEAKER_00: So, little stories that you all know and live through, but then there are much larger stories as well.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to zoom out a little bit now, more than a little, actually.
SPEAKER_00: A centennial is an impressive event, right?
SPEAKER_00: Um, but the Bible does actually say that with the Lord a thousand years is as a day, right?
SPEAKER_00: You know that verse.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if a thousand years is as a day, then how long is a hundred years?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I did the math.
SPEAKER_00: It's two hours and 24 minutes.
SPEAKER_00: And uh uh that's a plug for the school children children to do their arithmetic homework.
SPEAKER_00: Yes?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you never live a day without doing algebra.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's my motto.
SPEAKER_00: But let's let Psalm 100 help us to zoom out on the big picture.
SPEAKER_00: Now you can't put a precise date to some of the Psalms you can.
SPEAKER_00: The Psalms of David, we know when approximately they were written.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 100 is not attributed to David, we can't precisely date it.
SPEAKER_00: It does speak of entering gates and the courts of the Lord, so it seems like the temple has been built, right?
SPEAKER_00: So if we just suppose that Psalm 100 was written maybe shortly after Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem, that would be actually almost exactly 3,000 years ago, or about three days, according to the algebra.
SPEAKER_00: But what is the story of the Lord's faithfulness that's embedded in Psalm 100?
SPEAKER_00: Why was ancient Israel invited to rejoice?
SPEAKER_00: And interestingly, the story is kind of contained in its entirety in the way verse three begins.
SPEAKER_00: Verse three says, Know that the Lord He is God.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's all caps, L-O-R-D.
SPEAKER_00: And as you probably know in our English Bibles, when the Old Testament has that, all caps, L-O-R-D, that is the personal name of Israel's God.
SPEAKER_00: That's the personal name of the one true God.
SPEAKER_00: We would pronounce it today in English as something like Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: Yahweh, he is God.
SPEAKER_00: This is the name that the Lord revealed anew to Moses at the burning bush, and the name by which he led Israel to the reading in Exodus 34, where he brought them to Mount Sinai and made them his people.
SPEAKER_00: So Yahweh, he is God, not the gods of Egypt, not the gods of the Canaanites, no other God except this one, the faithful God who chose Israel to be his own.
SPEAKER_00: And he brought them to the mountain, and he said to them, I will be your God, and you will be my people.
SPEAKER_00: He had promised this to Abraham centuries before, centuries before he parted the Red Sea.
SPEAKER_00: For centuries the promise seemed to lie hidden and obscured and almost forgotten.
SPEAKER_00: But the faithfulness of the Lord endures to all generations.
SPEAKER_00: And when Pharaoh oppressed them in the name of his gods, the promise awoke, and they cried out to the Lord, and he saved them.
SPEAKER_00: And when they were hungry in the wilderness, they cried out against the Lord, and they were faithless.
SPEAKER_00: And after they entered the land, they ran after other gods, and God gave them over to their enemies who oppressed them until they turned again and cried out to him.
SPEAKER_00: There were times in this story where the faithfulness of the Lord seemed to be the farthest thing from anybody's mind, because they chose their own faithlessness.
SPEAKER_00: And we know something about that too.
SPEAKER_00: But the Lord, Yahweh, he is God.
SPEAKER_00: And he was running the story even when they didn't know it, the story of his faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And he brought that story down in a remarkable and an unusual way.
SPEAKER_00: We may be used to this because we know the scripture fairly well.
SPEAKER_00: But he brought the story down, the huge big story, down to a very particular point.
SPEAKER_00: He brought it down to a particular person.
SPEAKER_00: He gave Israel a king.
SPEAKER_00: He chose as king the youngest and the least impressive of the sons of Jesse, David from Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_00: And then God sent his promise on David.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Through this man I will rule over my people.
SPEAKER_00: Through this man and his seed I will save my people.
SPEAKER_00: God set his story and he linked his faithfulness to David.
SPEAKER_00: And the story went on.
SPEAKER_00: Solomon, perhaps, king when Psalm 100 is written.
SPEAKER_00: But Solomon started well and he finished very badly.
SPEAKER_00: And over and over again in the history of God's people, the story seemed to be dying, destroyed by Israel's rebellion.
SPEAKER_00: And as you tell the story, you can zoom out.
SPEAKER_00: You can zoom out to the scale of empires Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome.
SPEAKER_00: And when you look at it from that perspective, it seems like the faithfulness of the Lord has disappeared.
SPEAKER_00: But the Lord is good.
SPEAKER_00: His steadfast love endures forever.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot stop him.
SPEAKER_00: His faithfulness endures to all generations, and his promise to that young king lived on.
SPEAKER_00: And in time, at just the right time, in the fullness of time, the story of his faithfulness became so small that you couldn't even see it with the naked eye.
SPEAKER_00: A son of David, the son of David, the size of an embryo, a child, conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the goodness of God, the steadfast love of the Lord, his faithfulness to all generations, brought all the way down to one, to one.
SPEAKER_00: You see, the old slightly corny joke is actually true in a profound way.
SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard this.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell it anyway.
SPEAKER_00: The pastor says, or the DCE says in the children's message, girls and boys, what's small and furry and stores up nuts for the winter?
SPEAKER_00: And the church weary ten-year-old says, Well, it sounds like a squirrel to me, but knowing you, the answer is probably Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, the goodness of the Lord has a name.
SPEAKER_00: The steadfast love of the Lord has a name.
SPEAKER_00: His faithfulness to all generations has a name.
SPEAKER_00: And the name of the Lord's faithfulness is Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In a world that did not receive him, he was faithful.
SPEAKER_00: Faithful to the plan by which he would take the evil and the weight of sin onto himself, the weight of all of it.
SPEAKER_00: Faithful when all around him were faithless, faithful when the church and the state combined to put him to an evil and unjust death.
SPEAKER_00: Faithful to trust in the Father's plan, faithful to overcome death and live forever as Lord and King our brother.
SPEAKER_00: Faithful, risen from the dead and ascended to the Father's right hand, he has all authority in heaven and on earth.
SPEAKER_00: His goodness, his steadfast love, his faithfulness takes all of our stories and binds them together and draws them down into his own story.
SPEAKER_00: We are, as the scriptures say, in him.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus and Jesus alone gives meaning to all of our stories.
SPEAKER_00: And he and he alone is the reason why we can believe in the up and the down and the back and the forth and the good and the bad of a hundred years.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the reason that we can say and believe that the Lord is good.
SPEAKER_00: His steadfast love endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations.
SPEAKER_00: So dear friends, rejoice in the stories of God's faithfulness, including the stories that haven't been told yet.
SPEAKER_00: What does the future hold here at Trinity Lutheran Church and School?
SPEAKER_00: The answer is I don't know, but I suspect big and small as Jesus continues to gather you together in love for each other and for all people.
SPEAKER_00: How will God's faithfulness continue in the days to come?
SPEAKER_00: The answer is I don't know, but God will uphold you when you grieve, and he will comfort you in your distress.
SPEAKER_00: And the good news of Jesus for you will be at work and through you.
SPEAKER_00: So be on the lookout for new stories.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, be on the lookout.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, watch.
SPEAKER_00: Be ready.
SPEAKER_00: For the time of full salvation is nearer than when we first believed.
SPEAKER_00: The day is coming when God's goodness, his steadfast love, his faithfulness will appear.
SPEAKER_00: The day is coming when Jesus will appear in power and glory, and he will raise the dead, and he will renew the face of the earth, and complete the good work that He has begun in you.
SPEAKER_00: So rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: Rejoice and tell the stories of God's faithfulness here among you, big and small.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to one another as you tell the stories and rejoice that it's all drawn down into and then caught up again into Jesus' story for you, for the ends of the earth until the end of the jade.
SPEAKER_00: Rejoice in the stories of God's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is risen.
SPEAKER_00: I invite the choir to come forward, and the offering will be received.