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The saying Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities. While we are under a much different “attack” there is still a certain truth to the statement. I have been listening to all kinds of briefings, trying to figure out the plan. Yesterday I sat in on a webinar for church leaders giving guidelines for re-opening our churches when the time comes. To be honest, it was informative but daunting. One thing’s for certain, it’s going to be a lot of work and will require a good bit of flexibility from all of us. I will admit, it’s all been pretty intimidating.

Here’s what we need to remember. Our Lord is good all the time. He walks with us through this life and leads us all the way home. We need to remember He is Sovereign and even in difficult times, He knows exactly what to do and do you know where that leaves us? We need only to keep calm and carry on. We need to trust the Lord, do what we can, serve Him in faithfulness and understand, none of us are going to get it right the every time. Instead we need to show each other grace and work together.

There will be differing opinions as to what to do. Some will want to jump right in as soon as possible and that’s okay. If that’s not what you think we should do, love those who do and be kind. Others will want to hold back a bit and continue to stay home. That’s okay too. If you disagree with that tactic, love those who’s ideas differ and be kind. In my time with you, and we’re approaching five years together, I have known you to be a kind and loving congregation. Continuing in that will serve us well. We’ll weather this storm best if we hold on to Jesus and love each other through it.

The original Keep Calm and Carry On poster featured a crown at the top. I suppose that represented the king or the empire. That was fine as far as it goes, but let’s remember we serve a far greater King, and under Him we really can keep calm and carry on in faithfulness. Our God is supremely good and He’s got this.

We live in a world of great complexity these days. Everyone around us is telling us we need to be apart, by at least six feet and never in groups of more than ten. It sounds simple enough until you decide to go to work, or have a celebration, or be the church. That can be a real head scratcher. In these nearly unprecedented days, it begs the question “What do you do?” Now the answer to some is to rebel. I saw there was an arrest warrant issued for a pastor in Florida who kept his church open. Truth be known the church ended up being full. The comments ran the gamut from a man standing for our constitutional rights to everything that is wrong with the church. I will leave that up to His God to decide. At Springfield we have taken a different tack. Part of what makes this complex is we have a pretty clear Scriptural command. Some will say you can worship God anywhere, and that is true and you should, but the Bible also says in Hebrews 10:25: “Do not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” It seems pretty clear that the Bible is telling us that gathering for worship is not just important, it’s commanded, especially when the world, and the church for that matter, are in need of encouragement in a way I can scarcely remember in my lifetime, as least sing 9/11. So how can we be together when we can’t be together. It seems to me we need to learn to be together/apart. For example, one of the things that brings people together is shared experiences. It is for this reason that we have started to share our services on line. Our facility is such that wi-fi does not work particularly well. Old buildings with two foot thick walls tend to not be as conducive to bouncing signals off of satellites. For this reason, live streaming is not really a good option, but nonetheless we can make sure that everyone hears the same message and sees the same images. For those who do not have internet access, we mail the messages so that they too can keep up with what’s going on. Another way to be together apart is to have our Bible study on Zoom, which we are also doing. That way we can have some face to face contact even though we are separated by quite a few miles. We are also making efforts to connect more via social media and my hope is in creating all this very sharable media, that we are also creating tools to take the Gospel beyond our walls. Other than that we have to go with the old tried and true methods. We can call each other, write letters and send cards. Now I’ll be the first to admit, none of these solutions is perfect, but what is in a pandemic situation? All of us are learning as we go. We will get some things right and we will get some things wrong. My prayer is that nothing we do will go too wrong. Please know, we’re trying, even as we pray this soon comes to an end. I long for the day when we can worship together again, but until them, There may be a “shelter-at-home” order in place, but we can still stay connected and if we do that, we can still be together even when we’re apart. God bless, Pastor Dave

I didn’t want to do it. The last thing a pastor ever wants to do is cancel a worship service. Of all the things we pastors do, I, at least, consider preaching God’s Word to be the most vital. This has been an immense internal struggle for me. A large part of our congregation is not online, so creating a virtual service of some sort would be most difficult and questionably effective. That being said, we have decided to cancel services and activities for the next two weeks.

Our district leadership recommended this course of action. Much of our congregation would be included in the most susceptible group and so this action is likely prudent. So while we are separated, what can we do? Well for starters we can check in on our friends and neighbors. The utter hysteria and hoarding that have come as a result of this illness will leave some short on resources, so please share what you have with those in need. Lastly, there are a lot of quality ministries on TV, be sure to tune in, study God’s Word and of course, pray.

I won’t lie, there’s a part of me that feels like I’m caving in to the hysteria in cancelling services, but I feel it’s a better course of action than putting those we love at risk unnecessarily. Between the information and the misinformation it’s hard to know what the truth is. Friends, the truth is God is in control and this too shall pass. Romans 8 reminds us: “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” Trust God. He will bring us through.

Welcome to 2020! It’s a brand new year. I was contemplating what this new year brings and I started to focus on that word, “NEW.” It implies something that is a the very least improves and quite possibly even something that has never existed before. It’s exciting when you think about it. New years are often times of new beginnings, when people tend to focus on turning the page, making changes or maybe even starting over completely. Then another thought occurred to me. What does God call new?

There were a couple of scriptural things that came to mind.

Consider Isaiah 43:18, 19:
18 
“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
19 
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

This reminds me so much of all those folks turning over a new leaf, yet the speaker in this case is God. His people went astray, again. He sent Isaiah to them with a message of warning. Keep going on your current path and disaster is coming. Yet even in the midst of this prophecy, God showed them that He still loved them and had something fantastic for them. I love this passage, because it speaks to freedom. Yes ultimately it is freedom in Christ, but there is something else. How many of us are haunted by our past? Maybe it’s something we’ve done, or maybe it’s something that’s been done to us, but regardless, it keeps us stuck. This is often a prison of our own making. Oh we’re not necessarily the one who caused the problem, but we are making the choice to dwell there. God has something new for us. Something better. This verse is at least in part a prophecy of a coming Kingdom, the Kingdom of Christ, the one who came to set the captives free. Maybe today is the day to trust Christ and step into a new thing.

The Bible tells us that he who the Son sets free is free indeed, and further it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Maybe today is the day to leave that cell you’ve been living in behind and step into the freedom of the Children of God.

There is grace and forgiveness in Christ, and there is freedom. This new year, why not step into God’s new thing?

Be free!
Pastor Dave

I think many people would agree, “O Holy Night” is a wonderful song and one of the best loved songs of the Christmas season, but if you think the song is great, you really need to hear the story behind it. The song has its origins in France, when a parish priest a approached a poet from his congregation named Placide Cappeau to write a poem for Christmas mass. Cappeau was a little surprised to have been called upon, as he was not among the most regular church attenders. Still he was honored to be called upon to offer his gift to the church, and so he jumped in. He finished with a piece called “Cantique de Noel.”

Cappeau was so pleased with the poem, that he decided he must set it to music. He enlisted the services of a friend named Adolphe Adams, who was a sought after composer of the time. This song about the birth of Christ, was a challenge to Adams, who was Jewish. Cappeau’s poem represented a day Adams didn’t celebrate and a man he did not view as the son of God. Still, Adams poured himself into the effort and came up with the tune that we all know and love today, but there was trouble in store.

Poet Cappeau walked away from the church to become part of the socialist movement. Not long after, church leaders discovered the composer Adams was Jewish, and the song which was becoming one of the most beloved Christmas songs in France was suddenly denounced by the Catholic church and deemed unfit for church services. Even so, the song remained popular with the French people who continued to sing it.

A decade later an American writer named John Sullivan Dwight, heard the song and felt it needed to be introduced to America. Dwight, was an abolitionist and was especially impressed with verse three, “”Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in his name all oppression shall cease.” It was Dwight who translated the song into English, with the title O Holy Night. By this time the song had been banned in France for almost 20 years.

On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden–a professor and former chemist for Thomas Edison–did something long thought impossible. Using a new type of generator, Fessenden spoke into a microphone and, for the first time in history, a man’s voice was broadcast over the airwaves: He read a portion of the Gospel of Luke. Up to this point radio waves only carried coded signals that had to be translated and never voices. Imagine all those radio operators suddenly hearing a voice over their radios for the first time, totally unannounced and reading from the Christmas story. After finishing his reading, Fessenden picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night,” making it the first song ever transmitted on radio waves. Music had found a new medium to take it around the world. Today the song is one of the most recorded and played songs in all of history. This incredible work–requested by a forgotten parish priest, written by a poet who would later split from the church, given soaring music by a Jewish composer, and brought to Americans to serve as much as a tool to spotlight the sinful nature of slavery as tell the story of the birth of a Savior–has become one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever created.

December 22 Advent Reading
We Three Kings

You’re not going to believe this, but this favorite hymn of the Christmas season was brought about by a visit from St. Nicholas. You see once upon a time the Episcopalian church decided to build their first seminary in the U.S. They had decided to build in New York City, but they were looking for a location. At about the same time, there was a man who was the son of an Episcopalian bishop who was also an up and coming real estate developer. His name was Clement Moore. Moore had recently become famous not so much for his real estate skills but for a poem he wrote that started with the words, “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

As a result of the poem, Clement Moore became quite famous and quite wealthy. He ended up using a good portion of his wealth to buy a large estate in Manhattan. When he found out the church was looking for a site for their seminary, he donated some of his land, and because he was a linguist, Moore became a professor of biblical languages at the seminary. One of the seminary’s first students was a reporter from Pittsburgh named John Hopkins. Hopkins later became professor of music at the school and eventually wrote the song We Three Kings for a Christmas program held at the seminary.

This all seems a little too coincidental. A man famous for writing a poem about Santa Claus, the legendary giver of gifts, ends up giving a gift of land for a school, which teaches a man with a gift of music to create a famous song about some very famous givers of gifts. It seems like gifts are a recurring theme of this story and of course there is a great emphasis on gifts at Christmas. Now to be sure, we have to keep our priorities and our budgets in check with all this gift giving, but as we consider this song about the wise men and the gifts that they brought, and even more as we consider the greatest gift of all in Jesus Christ, gifts can surely find a place in the holiday. The wise men came bearing gifts across the miles, but when they saw the ultimate gift, their reaction is telling. They bowed down and worshipped him. Even their amazingly opulent gifts paled in comparison to the gift who stood before them. So in this season of giving, let the gifts remind you of the ultimate Giver and His ultimate gift and be thankful.

Well this Sunday marks one of my favorite services of the year, our Friends and Family service. It’s always time to meet new people and share the message and mission of this church, but what I think I love the most is it gives people a chance to meet this congregation that has become friends and family to me. See I am convinced that God has allowed me to be the pastor for a bunch of genuinely wonderful people and that there is something wonderful about this church.

Oh we’re not the coolest church in town, or the hippest or the youngest. We don’t have all the amenities that some folks are looking for. What we have is a group of people who genuinely love God, His Word and each other, and while we are a close knit group, there is always room for one more. We take God and His Word very seriously, but we also have a lot of fun with each other. We’re a family. More than that, we have a lot of people who just plain want to help people come to love and follow Jesus.

I’m not saying other churches don’t have this. What I am saying is I love this church and if you’re looking for a place to learn and grow in your faith, well we have room for you. Come on in friends and join this family!

May God bless you richly,

Pastor Dave Weiss