Lydia Circle will be hosting their annual Christmas Bazaar in the Fellowship Hall on Saturday, November 8, from 9:00am to 3:00pm. There will be a variety of handmade crafts, wonderful gifts, knitted items, holiday decor, and more.
Your donations of craft items and/or baked goods are needed and much appreciated. Craft items may be brought to the church office. Baked goods can be brought to church on Friday, November 7. Questions? Contact Mary Brock.
CLICK HERE for a worship video for October 19
Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 19, 2025
Luke 18:1-8
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We live in a cultural moment which is filled with doom and gloom. I’m not talking about Halloween displays, though why people “decorate” their yard with all of that ugly, hideous gore this time of year is something I will never understand. What I’m talking about is the angry, fearful, despairing, doom and gloom attitude I see so often in people. I see it in people from all walks of life, and from all points on the political spectrum. There are different concerns driving this doom and gloom, but the spiritual malady underneath it all is the same: It is a lack of hope.
In our gospel reading for today Jesus gives us both practical advice and a powerful promise for cultivating hope amidst the doom and gloom. He teaches us how we can endure in hope when dark days and hard times come.
In the verses leading up to today’s gospel reading, Jesus himself lays some doom and gloom on the disciples. He tells them that there will be dark days ahead. He tells them that days are coming when they will “long to see the days of the Son of Man,” and they will not see it. He says there will be days like the days of Noah, when there was widespread immorality and lawlessness and rejection of God. He says there will be days like the days of Sodom, when Lot and his wife fled the violence-plagued city as fire and sulfur rained down. The disciples were understandably shaken by what Jesus was saying, and so they asked him: “Where, Lord?” And Jesus replied cryptically and ominously: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” Talk about doom and gloom!
I imagine the disciples sitting there, pale and sweaty, ready to buy a bunch of canned goods and head for the hills. But then Jesus goes on – and that’s where our reading picks up for today: “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
In this parable there is a judge. In the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, there are special mandates for the judges of Israel to give special attention and care to widows. But this judge, Jesus tells us, neither feared God nor had any respect for people. And so, when a widow kept coming to his court, asking for justice, he ignored her. But this widow kept coming back again and again and again. She knew what the scriptures said about how judges are supposed to treat widows. She was persistent. She didn’t give up. She knew what the judge was supposed to do, and she held him to what the scriptures demanded of him. Finally, the judge relented. He said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she will not wear me out by continually coming!”
Some parables Jesus tells are allegorical, with God usually being represented by the powerful figure in the story. Other parables, however, employ a teaching method used by Jewish rabbis to make a point differently by employing contrast, moving from a lesser example to illustrate something greater. An example of this method is found when Jesus taught that just as fallen human parents know how to give good things to their children, how much more will God give good things to those who ask.
This same teaching method is being used with this parable. God is not represented by the unjust judge, as might happen in an allegory. Instead, the unjust judge is there to provide a contrast to the qualities and character of God. Unlike the unjust judge, God cares deeply for widows and others who are vulnerable or needy. Jesus is saying that if even a godless, heartless judge will relent at the persistence of this widow, how much more will a good and loving God respond to you! “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night?” Jesus asks, rhetorically. “Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”
With this parable, Jesus gives both practical advice and a powerful promise for the inevitable difficult days the disciples will face. He recognizes the doom and gloom that will fall over them, but he doesn’t leave them mired in it. Instead, he tells them this parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He encourages them by assuring them that God will respond to their prayers, God will hear their cries and respond quickly, God will be there to help.
Like the disciples, we too experience dark days and hard times. Like the disciples, there are times when we long to see the Son of Man, but we have a hard time seeing him. Like Jesus said, there are days when we seem to be surrounded by immorality and lawlessness and violence. It does seem at times as though wickedness and confusion and godlessness are as rampant today as they were in the days of Noah. Dark days and hard times come on a smaller scale too. There are the many personal apocalypses people face that come with a scary diagnosis, or a lost job, or a broken relationship, or the death of a loved one – those times when life gets completely upended and the future is frightening and foreboding.
How do we respond to dark days and hard times? Jesus calls us to “pray always and not lose heart.” But what does this mean? What does it mean to “pray always”? Does it mean we should all become monks or nuns and head off to a remote monastery somewhere where we can cloister ourselves off from the world and literally pray all day long? It sounds tempting, I know! But this isn’t what it means to “pray always.”
Does praying always mean closing our eyes and folding our hands twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week? That’s not a bad prayer posture. It is how I teach our preschoolers to pray. It can help us focus. But we can’t hold that posture all day long, right? So what does it mean to “pray always?”
To pray always is to constantly keep a God-centered perspective on things. To pray always is to constantly entrust ourselves to God even when everything around us seems to be falling apart. To pray always is to constantly take all our concerns to God in prayer, trusting that God will hear us and help us. To pray always isn’t just to fold our hands, it is to open them up to God, ready to receive the future God promises he has in store for us.
The practical advice given to us in this parable is to be persistent in prayer, cultivating hope by immersing ourselves in the reality of God’s promises, day by day, minute by minute. But there aren’t just instructions for us to heed here. There is also a promise. Jesus promises us that God is not an unjust judge, unwilling to give us a hearing. Instead, God is standing by, even now, to hear our plea, to listen to our cry, and to respond. While worldly justice is a perpetual struggle, God quickly grants justice to his chosen ones. God justifies us by his grace. God makes things right with us by giving us his mercy, his love, and the promise of his coming kingdom. And so our posture towards the future cannot be one of doom and gloom. We have a God who hears us, and a promise that gives us hope.
And so, my dear friends in Christ, pray always! In a time when prayer is sometimes dismissed or ridiculed as a response to horrible events, Jesus lifts up prayer as the most important thing you can do! To pray always is to call upon the God who has promised so hear us, and the means by which we hang on to hope.
So pray always and do not lose heart. Remember that God is in control, that God will always be there to hear and to help us. There might be dark days, but God’s kingdom will come. In fact, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the glorious kingdom of God has already begun. Sin, death, and the devil, though they seem to rule the day, have already ultimately been conquered by Christ Jesus.
And so as we look to the future, we pray, trusting that God will come to make things right once and for all, to complete what he’s begun. As we look to the future, we do not lose heart, for even now he comes to us, speaking to us through his word, feeding us at his table, giving us a foretaste of the feast to come, when his goodness and grace will restore all things.
In the meantime, as Jesus’ disciples today, we don’t stay stuck in the doom and gloom our algorithms and news channels are constantly feeding us. Instead, we pray, and we do not lose heart.
Dark days and hard times will come, but we don’t run to the hills when they do. We don’t close ourselves off or retreat to our enclaves in fear.
Instead, we go out into the world to share the promise. We go out into the world to share the truth of God’s Word. We go out into the world to share hope that is in us with a world that desperately needs it.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church
To honor and remember those who have died, we will have an indoor luminaria walk on All Saints Sunday, November 2, from 5pm to 7pm.
You are invited to decorate up to three paper bags in memory of someone special to you. The walk will include a projected slide-show of some of the saints we are remembering. Bags from previous years are saved to be displayed again.
Luminaria bags are available in the narthex. Please return your decorated bags by Noon on November 2. To include a digital picture for the slide-show, email it to Beth Stephens at beth@oakharborlutheran.org by October 30.
CLICK HERE for a worship video for October 12, 2025
Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 12, 2025
Luke 17:11-19
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
As a pastor I am with people who are very sick on a regular basis. It is part of my job to bring the Word of God to people when they need it most, and so I find myself in hospitals on a fairly regular basis, meeting with people who are enduring various medical crises. And something I’ve observed over the years is that when people recover from a serious medical condition, oftentimes they are healed in ways that go beyond the physical. They are not only restored in body; something has changed in their soul too. They have a renewed perspective on things. Gratitude pours out of them in ways it didn’t before. Their faith comes into sharper focus, and so they are quicker to give praise and thanks to God. There is greater appreciation for all the gifts God gives. They aren’t just healed, they are well. They are well in a way they weren’t before, in body, mind, and spirit.
I notice this most profoundly in those who have been the most sick. I’m not going to name names, but if I were I could name at least three people in our congregation of a variety of ages who have been through serious health challenges in the past couple of years, all of whom have told me that their physical healing has changed them spiritually. And it isn’t just the patients themselves who experience this. Those who are closest to them do too. Their spouses, their parents, their loved ones often say the same thing. The healing of bodies often leads to greater spiritual and relational wellness, a wellness that is steeped in deep gratitude to God.
In our gospel reading for today we encounter ten people suffering from the disease of leprosy. This horrible disease causes your skin to tighten and shrivel up around your extremities, causing fingers and toes and even noses to fall off. Leprosy is still around today, and not fun to have in our own time, but it was an especially devastating diagnosis in the ancient world. Once you were diagnosed with it, you were immediately sent away. You were banished from your town, banished from your home, banished from your family, made to beg and roam about with other lepers. To be diagnosed with leprosy meant you would never again kiss your spouse. It meant you would never again hold your son or daughters’ hand. It meant you would never again be embraced by a friend. For Jews, to be diagnosed with leprosy also made you ritually unclean. As long as you had those lesions, you couldn’t attend worship, which meant you couldn’t make sacrifices of atonement for your sin. This meant that, for all practical purposes, you were cut off from God. And so it was a disease that went more than skin deep. There were relational and spiritual implications too.
These ten lepers called out to Jesus as he was traveling between Samaria and Galilee. They approached him, but they followed the rules. They didn’t come too close. They kept their distance. They called out to him saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
And Jesus did have mercy on them. Jesus had mercy on all ten of them. He told them to go and show themselves to the priests. They knew what this meant. The priests also functioned as de facto public health officials. It was their job to verify that their disease had been cured and then administer the rites of purification which would allow them back into the company of others and back into the worship life of God’s people. To be told to go and show themselves to the priests was a way of telling them that their healing was at hand, and sure enough, as they went, they were made clean. Their lesions vanished. They were healed.
One of the ten turned back. This one who turned back praised God with a loud voice. He knelt before Jesus and thanked him. And this one who turned back was a Samaritan. St. Luke, being a master storyteller, holds this important detail back from us until now. One of the ten – a Samaritan of all people – loudly praised God and knelt at Jesus’ feet, expressing his gratitude.
You can hardly blame the other nine. Jesus asked where they were. He asked why this Samaritan was the only one who returned to give glory to God. But the nine were only doing what Jesus told them to do! He told them to go show themselves to the priests, and that’s exactly what they did!
So what was it about the Samaritan that made him turn back? Perhaps it was because the Samaritan knew he had received the most mercy from Jesus. After all, Samaritans had no reason to expect anything from a Jewish healer. Jews weren’t supposed to interact with Samaritans at all. The Samaritans were the descendants of those who had been Jews from the northern kingdom but had intermarried with the Assyrians and had adopted many of their religious beliefs along the way. The Samaritans had cobbled together a hodge-podge spirituality of their own making and drifted away from the true God their people once knew. And so Samaritans were widely regarded as traitors and heretics. Perhaps the Samaritan knew he was in far worse shape than the other nine, and had received far more mercy from Jesus.
Jesus granted him physical healing, curing his leprosy. But there was more to it than that. Through this physical healing he had been given a whole new perspective. The Samaritan now praised God – the true God whom Jesus was making known. The Samaritan fell as Jesus’s feet in humble adoration for this gift he did not deserve, this gift of complete and utter grace. The Samaritan overflowed with gratitude.
And in response, Jesus said to him, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” The Samaritan wasn’t just healed; he was made well. His healing wasn’t just skin deep; it went down to the depths of his soul.
Martin Luther was once asked to describe the nature of true worship, to which he replied: “The tenth leper.” That was his response! He just said, “The tenth leper!” That’s what true worship is!
This answer makes a lot of sense, actually. After all, we follow the ancient traditional pattern of Christian worship by singing the Kyrie on most Sundays, which is the very same plea as the ten lepers. Together with them we cry out: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We sing this plea because we all have a spiritual sickness which makes us unclean, a spiritual sickness which separates us from God and often gets in the way of our relationships with one another too. We are all afflicted with the spiritual disease of sin. And it is here in worship that Jesus extends to us his great mercy. It is here that Jesus, our Master, hears our plea and responds with his grace, healing our sin-sick souls. He forgives our sin, he restores us to God, and he goes to work rebuilding our relationships with one another too. And so we offer him our thanks and our praise. We kneel before him in humble adoration. And then we rise to live a life marked not only by the obedience of the nine, but the deep gratitude of the tenth.
He is doing all of this right here for you today. His mercy and grace are for you too, no matter who you are.
It is wonderful when God grants physical healing. We are right to pray for it. We are right to seek it through medical professionals. But as we all know all too well, sometimes physical healing doesn’t come. Sometimes it comes only in part. Sometimes it comes imperfectly. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
But when it doesn’t come, it does not mean the Lord Jesus has ignored us. It doesn’t mean he has forsaken us. Jesus never fails to notice those who cry out to him, and he comes to us all with a healing that is more than skin deep. Jesus ultimately came for the healing of our souls.
No matter how far you may have drifted from God, no matter how unclean your life has been, Jesus has come to give you mercy. Jesus Christ took your disease upon himself on the cross, and he rose again to cure us from sin and death so that we could be with God forever. If that isn’t a healing that gets you to turn around and give thanks and praise God, I don’t know what is!
Trust in his mercy. Trust in his grace. This is the faith that makes us truly well.
And then watch as your entire perspective changes. Watch as you come to a greater appreciation for all the gifts of God. Watch as your life begins to overflow with gratitude. Watch as you find yourself more and more saying, “Thanks be to God.”
Amen
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church
CLICK HERE for a worship video for October 5
Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 5, 2025
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:1-10
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have a golden thread running through our scripture readings for this morning, and that golden thread is faith.
In our first reading we hear from the prophet Habakkuk. This is the only reading we get from Habakkuk in the entire three-year lectionary cycle. But while he only makes a triannual appearance before the church, the problems he describes are perennial. They are always with us. Habakkuk laments the violence that is all around him. He points to destruction and strife and contention he sees everywhere. He complains that the law has become slack, and so justice never prevails. It is hard to tell the difference between these verses and the news we watch or hear or scroll through every day, right?
Habakkuk cries out, “How long, Lord?” He cries out with brutal honesty: “How long shall I cry out for help, and you will not listen?” The Lord then replies with a promise. The Lord says to him, “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”
In our epistle reading we hear the Apostle Paul writing a letter of encouragement to his young protégé, Timothy. It is hard to know exactly what is troubling Timothy, but we can infer some things based on what Paul writes. It is pretty clear that Timothy is upset about Paul’s imprisonment. He is probably worried about his beloved father in the faith. He doesn’t have the same access to his mentor. He is now responsible for the Christians in Ephesus and is probably feeling overwhelmed, especially as persecutions are starting to ramp up.
And in order to comfort and encourage Timothy, Paul points him to faith. He encourages Timothy to hold on to the faith that first lived in his grandmother and his mother, and now lives in him. He encourages Timothy to rekindle this gift of God that is within him, to blow on that coal that has started to cool. He reminds Timothy of what faith really is, which is relying on the power of God, especially in times of suffering and struggle. Paul points him to the promise, the promise that Christ has ultimately abolished death and brought life and immortality to light, and so he has nothing to fear. Paul describes faith beautifully when he says to Timothy, “I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what I have entrusted to him.” Do you hear how many times Paul uses variations of the word “trust” here? That’s what faith is. It is not a generic optimism. It is not self-confidence, confidence in your own power. Christian faith means putting your trust in Jesus. It means putting your trust in the power and the promises of God.
In our gospel reading, when Jesus tells his disciples they will need to forgive others over and over again, they ask Jesus to increase their faith. It’s funny, actually. If you read Luke’s gospel before this, Jesus tells the disciples they will cast out demons and heal people of their diseases, and the disciples are like, “Really? Cool! Let’s do it!” And they do! But when Jesus calls them to forgive those who sin against them, that’s what they think is impossible! And so they say to him, “Increase our faith!”
But Jesus says it is not impossible. Not with faith. And you don’t even need a lot of faith to do it, Jesus says. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea!’ and it would obey you.” This is an obviously absurd image meant to illustrate that faith can do things that seem impossible. Faith is not magic! This is not the Force we’re talking about. This is not Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker to use his mind powers to lift his X-Wing out of the swamp. This is obviously an illustration. But what the illustration points to is absolutely true – even a little faith can accomplish the seemingly impossible things our Lord Jesus calls us to do.
That’s because faith is not trusting in ourselves. It is not trusting in our own power or strength or abilities. Christian faith means putting our trust in Jesus. It is not so much a matter of how much faith we have, but where we put it! When we put our trust in Jesus, his power is at work in us to accomplish things that we could never accomplish on our own.
It makes sense that forgiveness would be the thing that the disciples would balk at. Forgiveness is, in many situations, the most difficult thing we are called to do as Christians. I hear from people all the time who have spent years struggling to forgive. They know they should. They want to, but it is so hard. I know this struggle myself. There are people I think I’ve finally forgiven, letting the past go, and then something stirs up those old resentments again and I’m back at square one. So this isn’t easy. It is completely understandable for the disciples to ask Jesus for help with it. It isn’t easy, but with Christ’s power at work in us, it is not impossible.
A few weeks ago, a young political activist named Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a live debate on a college campus in Utah. His wife Erika and their young children witnessed it first-hand. Charlie might not have been your cup of tea, but I’m going to ask you to take off your ideological lenses for a minute. You can put them back on later, if you must. Take off your ideological lenses and put on your human lenses. Better yet, put on your Christian lenses. Because what happened a few days after this gruesome murder in broad daylight was nothing short of a miracle. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, which was held at a football stadium in Arizona, his wife Erika took the stage. As she memorialized her husband, at one point she took a deep breath and said, “My husband Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life.” She paused as the audience offered some subdued applause. She took a few more deep breaths before continuing. “That young man,” she said, “That young man.” She paused again, and then said, “On the cross our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do….That man, that young man, I forgive him. I forgive him because that’s what Christ did.”
Just days after this wife witnessed her husband’s murder, she publicly forgave the assassin, and it is estimated that more than 20 million people around the world heard her do it. There were lots of things said on that stage, but that was the headline that came out of it. For a grieving young widow to be able to say those words on a stage in front of millions of people seems impossible, but it happened! And it happened, as Erika herself said, because of Christ. It was his power, not hers.
This forgiveness does not mean that there will be no consequences. Jesus himself talks about the need for rebukes and for repentance. He even discusses millstones for the worst of unrepentant offenders. St. Paul teaches us in scripture that worldly authorities have the God-given responsibility to restrain evil by holding people accountable for their actions, and that they do not bear the sword in vain.
To forgive is something different. To forgive means to let go of the anger and the hatred that only poisons you. To forgive means to seek reconciliation whenever possible, but to pray that your enemy might be reconciled to God, even if they can’t be reconciled to you. To forgive means to hand the person who hurt you over to the mercy of Jesus, when what you really want is for them to be condemned to hell. To forgive is to respond to the worst in others with love, because that’s exactly what Jesus has done for you.
This is not easy. It isn’t easy for me, and I know it isn’t easy for you. Sometimes forgiveness takes years. Sometimes it is a life-long struggle. Sometimes we need to do it again even after we already did it. Forgiveness might not come immediately – but never let it be said that it is impossible. Faith makes it possible, because faith means relying on Christ’s power and not our own. It isn’t a matter of how much faith we have, but where we put it. And when we put our trust in the Lord Jesus, he makes the impossible possible.
Violence and strife continue to dominate the news cycle. Strife and contention continue to plague our lives. But with Habakkuk we wait on the Lord, trusting in his promise, because the righteous live by faith.
We continue to worry about those who are dear to us, as Timothy did. Like him, we experience tragic separations. Like him, we experience anxieties and discouragement. Like him, our faith needs to be rekindled from time to time. And this happens as we listen to God’s Word and are reminded of the promise and the power of the One in whom we place our trust.
We are asked by our Lord Jesus to do things that seem impossible, and so we ask for more faith. We worry that we aren’t up to it. And we aren’t. But Jesus is. He has already forgiven you. He has seen the worst in you, even the worst that is still there, and he has responded to it with his self-giving love and his saving grace. He died and rose to forgive your sin and make you his own forever. To trust in this good news, to have faith in this Savior, even just a little, is all he needs to begin to go to work in us, accomplishing all that we could never do on our own.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church