24^th Sunday after Pentecost – November 11, 2007
75^th Anniversary of Unity Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bel Nor, Missouri
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

            Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  What an honor it is to be invited back to my home congregation for this 75^th anniversary celebration. “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown,” Jesus said to his own hometown crowd.  Since you have honored me with the gracious invitation to preach on this festive occasion, I think that must mean that I am not much of a prophet.  But you did invite me to preach, and the calling to preach, an extension of the calling that each of us have in Holy Baptism to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a calling to speak for God, which is the essence of prophecy.  And so, whether I like it or not, and whether you like it or not, I will have to undertake the daunting task of speaking for God – the task of prophecy in my hometown – before I sit down. 

            But first, I want to speak for myself, and to share with you what an important and formative influence Unity Evangelical Lutheran Church has had on my life.  I was baptized right here in this room 44 and ½ years ago, on the same day that my father was ordained as a pastor of the church, and became the assistant to Pastor Mack.  I was confirmed 13 years later by Pastor Hohenstein, right up there somewhere – it’s hard to tell, because this room looked a bit different then.  And because dad was a pastor here, and mom – as far as I know – has always sung in the choir, I was constantly in and out of this building as a child, and I think I knew almost every nook and cranny of this place as it used to be before the fire (except, of course, for the places I wasn’t allowed to go – and maybe even some of those.)  And then, eight years ago, I was ordained here in this room as my family and I embarked on four years of missionary service in Russia.  Unity has also been the place of my sisters weddings, the baptism of my eldest child and five nieces and nephews, and the place of my grandparents funerals.

            But as those of you gathered here this morning know very well, Unity is so much more than just a building, or a place for familial rites of passage.  Unity is and has been, by the grace of God, a remarkable little community of faithful people who have touched the lives of those who have been a part of it, as well as those outside its walls, in the local community and in the larger church.  I can’t speak definitively about that, or objectively.  But I can talk about how Unity has touched my own life over the years, how this congregation has helped form and sustain me in the Christian faith.  And there is so much about that that I have simply taken for granted.  When I was in seminary and learned about how some Lutheran congregations were still finding it hard to move away from quarterly or monthly communion to even a bi-weekly schedule, I had my own difficulty in understanding what the issue was.  I couldn’t remember that transition being a big deal at Unity.  Years later when that same issue came up again in another context – in fact I think it was only a couple of years ago – I finally asked my dad when it was that Unity made that change.  And his answer surprised me.  “Unity has always had weekly communion,” he said, by which he meant “always since he’d been associated with the congregation.”  And that was 1963!  It was not at every service – it alternated between the early and late services.  But Unity was way ahead of the curve in the 1960s in recovering the traditional Lutheran emphasis on the importance of the sacrament, and that emphasis, that value, I think, was woven into my very being as I grew up in this congregation. 

            Unity was also ahead of the curve in being one of the minority of LCMS congregations in the mid-70s that were able to recognize, in the midst of the struggles for power and the clashes of personalities and cultures that surely clouded and complicated the issues, that it was the very Gospel of Jesus Christ that was at stake in the Synod controversy in those years.  And the people of Unity were willing to act upon their convictions, to risk their very existence as a congregation in casting their lot with the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the students and faculty of Christ Seminary – Seminex.  It was that emphasis on the gospel, that conviction about the gospel’s centrality in the life of the church, that led me to the seminary in the mid 1980s, following the bulk of the Seminex faculty to the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. 

            Unity also led the way in accepting the leadership of women in the life of the church, including the ordination of women.  I suspect that this acceptance was nothing more (or less) than a manifestation of this congregation’s grounding in the gospel.  In the late 70s, when women clergy were still rare in Lutheran circles, Unity got it’s first women field workers from Seminex.  One of those was Sally Albrecht, who, incidentally, went on to become the pastor at one of the congregations that merged to form the congregation where I am now the pastor in Carbondale, Illinois.  As a result of this early experience with women in a pastoral role, I was well prepared to receive the gifts and ministry of my campus pastor at Purdue University, a wonderful woman named Mary Rowe – and that same experience has prepared you as a congregation to benefit from the many women, both lay and clergy, who have faithfully served as leaders in this congregation in subsequent years.

            My connection to Unity has also given me a richer experience of the larger church than I might otherwise have had.  I am continually amazed by the people I encounter in various places who have some connection to this congregation.  I used to regularly run into Mike Marty at history conferences.  Pastor Mack’s granddaughter, Carey, was a student at the seminary in Chicago as I was finishing up my doctoral degree.  Marcus and Chris Felde were in Chicago for a couple of years while Marcus was working on a doctorate at the University of Chicago, and I saw him again this past January at a conference in Belleville.  Robert Farlee was associate pastor and director of music at my uncle’s church in Minneapolis.  Susan Wescott chaired an ordination anniversary committee at my friend’s congregation in Cleveland, and she wrote the letter inviting me to preach there for that occasion two years ago.   And the list goes on and on – I met Marty Seltz at the churchwide assembly in Milwaukee four years ago, and only then learned of his connection to Unity.  And I’m sure I’m leaving out some others.

            All of this is to say, as St. Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonika in our second reading today – that I “give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord,” both that God has blessed you as a congregation throughout these past 75 years, and that God has blessed me and many others through you.  For that is what we celebrate today, God’s activity in our midst as a people chosen, called, and claimed by God through baptism into the death of our Lord, Jesus Christ, as a people fed and nourished at the Lord’s table, and immersed in the life of the church.  But we do more than celebrate and give thanks.  While anniversaries are by definition occasions for looking back, anniversaries in the church must always be about looking back for the sake of looking forward.  That, after all, was the pattern of preaching in the earliest church.  Take, for instance, the sermons delivered by Peter and Paul and Stephen in the book of Acts.  They recounted the history of God’s people and God’s activity on their behalf – and maybe as in Paul’s case a little of their own personal history – in order to show more clearly what God was doing now in their midst, and to call them to participate in the new life and the newly revealed reign of God in Jesus Christ from that time onward. 

            So that is what we are really doing today, what you have really been doing this entire anniversary year.  And the theme that you have chosen for this anniversary year reflects that reality.  “Open to the Spirit.”  Being open to the Spirit means being open to the future – the future that God in Christ is even now creating by the Spirit, through the church.  But as you have been exploring that theme in the scriptures this past year, I hope you have noticed that being open to the Spirit is not something that you can actually do.  So it does no good for me or anyone else to tell you this morning, “be open to the Spirit.”  Being “open to the spirit” only happens, by the grace of God, through the gospel proclaimed and embodied – through the word and the sacraments, as though through means, the Lutheran Confessions tells us.  Paul says as much in our second reading when he first gives thanks that God has chosen the Thessalonians for salvation through the work of the Holy Spirit, and then says that it was for this purpose that God called them through the proclamation of the gospel.  You, the people of God at Unity Evangelical Lutheran Church are open to the Spirit and open to God’s future because, and only because, the gospel has been proclaimed  in your midst for these past 75 years and the sacraments have been administered among you as signs and embodiments of God’s grace and mercy for Jesus sake.  And  it is that gospel, the great good news of God’s reconciling love in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that will continue to open you to the Spirit, and  to the future that God has in store for you in the years to come.  So Paul’s word to the Thessalonians is my word for you this morning, or rather it is God’s word for you: Stand firm, brothers and sisters, and hold fast to the tradition of the gospel in which this congregation was founded three quarters of a century ago, the doctrine of grace upon which the church stands or falls.  May our Lord Jesus Christ indeed comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.  And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus from this day forth, and forever more.  Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Arthur C. ("Chris") Repp, Pastor
Epiphany Lutheran Church (ELCA), Carbondale, Illinois
e-mail: epastor@mac.com; web: elcas.org