Pastor Schroeder

Sermon text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

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Love never fails.  Let’s start today’s sermon with an evaluation.  I’ll give you a short statement, and you can think about it, and then try to decide in your mind if you think it is absolute truth, sometimes truth, or not truth at all. The short statement happens to be the words I just read, from 1 Corinthians 13:8…Love never fails.  One more time, is that short sentence always truth, sometimes truth, or not truth at all?  Where do we put it?  As we weigh our options, is there some conflict, some internal conversation going on? 

Pastor Bitter

Sermon Text: John 10:11-15, 27-30 

Do you believe all the books of the Bible to be the inspired Word of God?  Do you believe that the teaching of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, as you have learned to know it from Luther’s Small Catechism, is faithful and true to the Word of God?  Do you intend to keep steadfast in this teaching and endure all things, even death, rather than fall away from it?  These are just a few of the promises that you intend to make in a few minutes.  Perhaps the wording has been adjusted slightly over the years, but these are the very same promises that most of the adults gathered here today made in past years.

I’m guessing that over the last couple of days you have spent at least a little time thinking about these promises.  Maybe you were a little more preoccupied with the examination questions up until Thursday night, but once that was over I hope you had the chance to spend a little time thinking about these promises that you are going to make this morning. 

Pastor Leyrer

Sermon text: Revelation 7:9-17 

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Dear Friends in Christ, Of all the images we associate with Jesus Christ, possibly none is more endearing or more comforting – or more popular – than the one serving as the focal point of our worship today: Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

Pastor Bitter

Sermon text: Revelation 5:11-14

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“…and now you know…the rest of the story!”  Famous words that closed many broadcast segments from popular talk radio host Paul Harvey.  Even though he died back in 2009, his material is still played on the radio from time to time today, and I’d suspect many of you here this morning have heard it for yourselves, as I did when riding in the car as a kid.  Harvey was a master storyteller, and his most famous segments told stories – from the news, from politics, from history, from celebrity news, always with a unique perspective that forced his audience to think.  His style was such that his listeners didn’t always know just which person or event he was commenting on until the very end, when he would close with his famous words: “…and now you know…the rest of the story.” 

Pastor Schroeder

Sermon text: John 20:19-31

²⁴ Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. ²⁵ So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

I don’t know how many of you go to espn.com and read sports news on a regular basis, but one of the stories on the website last week had very little to do with sports.  You may have heard about it from one of the local news channels, because as we all know, Wisconsin loves anything related to the Packers, even in the middle of the off-season. In case you haven’t heard, apparently Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers did a recent interview where he claimed to have seen a UFO.  It was back in 2005 in the skies over New Jersey.  Here is his description: "It was a large orange left-to-right-moving object and ... because of the overcast nature of the night and the snow, you couldn't make [it] out.  It was behind … the clouds we were seeing, but it was definitely large in the night sky moving from left to right."  Rodgers also reported hearing military fighter jets flying over and alarm sirens going off shortly after, which in his mind, confirmed what he and a friend had just seen.