This is Keith, and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Our topic today is I'm Lutheran. Let's talk about it. This is because we have reached a milestone. We are releasing a T shirt, and you'll find links, of course, to that in the episode notes and on our website, in our social media, wherever we'll put it. And we're going to talk about what the T shirt is intended to do. It's not really to promote ourselves all that much. It does give a link for it, but really it's for another reason. So. So we'll start with talking about the T shirt. So it's. It's blue. We were aiming for the same color of blue that's in the. The Lutheran crest in the seal. And there's sort of a blue. I think that's for the water, if I remember right. We'll offer that in more colors one of these days. It is $19. You'll have to pay tax and shipping on that, of course. So we are planning to release more colors, most likely related to the other colors in the Lutheran crest that are in our. In our logo as well. So the red, the yellow, and we'll see where we go from there.

Part of this concept for the shirt, the I am Luther. Let's talk about it, was in response to Tim Walls when he was running for vice president alongside Kamala Harris. And at one point, he was asked about his faith, and he jokingly made a not inappropriate response about, you know, I'm a Lutheran. We don't talk about that, and it wasn't inappropriate for the context. But it also, you know, it struck Ben and I as. As sort of a missed opportunity in terms of being able to. To share why you're a Lutheran and. And what it means to be a Lutheran. So we're not really making fun of Tim Walls, just springboarding off of him in what we think is a better direction.

Yeah. And I think he missed an opportunity not just for us ELCA Lutherans, but also for himself. That was an unsatisfactory answer for folks that it isn't a question that you would not be prepared for. And so to have that as your prepared answer is not the best. So. So what we want to do is provide a T shirt that will spark that conversation. And so on the back, it says, I'm Lutheran. Let's talk about it. And then it lists five different things that we consider to be core Lutheran ideas.

Yeah. The first being, we are saved by grace through faith.

Yeah. So how do we explain that? To folks when they ask us about that.

Yeah, I think it's. It really just gets back to that notion that. That we are saved by God. We are. We are eternally loved by God purely because God chooses to. Not in response to anything that. That we have done to earn that. In fact, anything that. That we do is really in response to already being saved, loved, forgiveness, not in order to earn it. That's absolutely, you know, one of the core tenets of Luther's theology.

Yeah. And, you know, we've had some discussions about this on the podcast, for sure. Probably. Some things I would point out to somebody who was asking me about that is that it is God's grace, It is our faith. But the faith is a gift from God that has grown through our baptism, through our participation in our community, through the Holy Supper, through communion, and through reading the Scriptures. Right. And so those are. That is how our faith has grown. Not from our own doing, but from things that God has provided to us through our baptisms.

Yeah.

So we're simultaneously saint and sinner is our second one.

Yeah. How does that work?

Well, it acknowledges that while we are all imperfect, we are also saintly in that God loves us and believes that we can redeem ourselves, that we have been redeemed, but that we are not. That there is good in us. God sees us as perfect as well as good. From the creation stories that it is good and we are good because we are God's creations. Right. But we are all flawed. And so my own church, Unity in Southgate, Michigan, says that all people are flawed, but God works through flawed people. That's part of our mission statement, and I think that sums it up pretty well.

Yeah. Yeah. We are still capable of doing great things and godly things on behalf of the love that's in us. It's funny to me that I'm not sure if this ever occurred to me before, but of those two words, saint and sinner, you know, one of them is a. One of them is a. Is a, you know, a noun, form of a verb, you know, to sin.

Right.

And so when you are sinning, you are a sinner, but the other one is. Is not like that. And I wonder if it would have been better if they were. And yet there's no verb form of sainting.

I wonder if that is more a translation issue.

It may well be. Yeah. But what I'm getting at with that is there, you know, we talk about, in the last point, about being saved by grace through faith, how it's not about anything that we do.

Right.

But the hang up that both Lutherans and non Lutherans come to when confronted with that teaching is then, well, then what do we do? And this is it. Well, we. We go and do things, and some of them we're going to do very well, and some of them we're going to do very badly.

And actually the last three of these touch on that in very different ways.

Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, it's really this notion of, you know, being simultaneously saint and sinner is really talking about what we do, how we respond to the first one about. About being saved by grace.

Yeah.

So, yeah. All right, so let's talk about the other three. What's the next one?

So the next one is we are always open to Reformation. And I think Dave Daubert spoke to this in that episode, that maybe one of the things that separates the ELCA from the other forms of Lutheranism in the United States, at least, is that we believe that Reformation is a continuing process. We acknowledge that the church has done things that are not so good. Things like, well, we'll talk about the Indian boarding schools or the native boarding schools and some of those programs that the church did and was wrong and that we need to come to reconciliation and healing with, just as one example.

Yeah. Or like the notion that there are things that the church has not done before that we've decided are worth doing, like the ordination of women and the ordination of LGBTQ folks and Heaven Forbid.

A new hymn, too.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And I think that plays right into number four. We will never get it perfect, but we won't stop trying.

That's right. And that's definitely part of the simultaneously saint and center. We keep trying, and hopefully we keep trying better. We recognize where things have failed and we keep going. And that sort of explains some of our churches. When folks are interested in our ELCA churches, they want to know where we acknowledge where things have been messed up. There are a lot of folks out there that are very cautious around Christian churches, and one of the ways to be honest with them is to say we have messed up as a denomination, as an individual congregation, perhaps we've messed up and we are going to keep trying. You don't want to have a church that says we messed up and we're going to just close someday, so join us until that happens. That's not what we're about. We believe that all our congregations are called to specific ministries that they can continue to do and improve upon or maybe pivot and serve something in the community. That's New. And then the last one on our thing is the longest one and it might be one of the most dramatic ones too. So we love and help our neighbors, especially those who hate us, even though there is no reward.

I really like that one.

Yeah. And, and it's true.

Yeah. At least the sentiment behind it is. I, I think that's one of the things that we really strive to do. You know, Lutherans are known. I, I think ELCA Lutherans are known for being people who show up in order to help out. You know, whether it's after a natural disaster or in response to a hate crime or, you know, whatever it is. We find our congregations moved to do something to support people in need. And it doesn't matter whether they know who we are or not or would necessarily be people that, what did that they would expect to come and help. There was a shooting, this was in the national news a couple of months ago at a local hospital here in York, which is a big deal in that we don't have the kind of community where this sort of thing happens in these, they're not small town hospitals, but they're not massive hospitals either. And there were several people injured and one police officer killed in this incident. And, well, as the, no, the, I'm misremembering the news now. The, the shooter was also, was also killed. You know, a couple of weeks later, the chaplain at this hospital, who happens to be a Lutheran elc, Lutheran deacon, she sent out an email to several of the local congregations saying people have been asking what they can do to help. And, and here's something that would be really helpful. Send cards, Send greeting cards just to my office and I'll distribute them to the staff because all of the staff, whether they were directly involved in this incident or not or traumatized, of course they are. And so, you know, I, I'm sure that St. Matthew is not the only church that's on this, but we went out and bought, you know, I don't know, 50 greeting cards, put them out on a table. A couple of Sunday mornings people signed them and we sent them back and, and you know, we're told that that really gives a sense of encouragement to these by and large complete strangers. But our neighbors who went through this horrible ordeal and just need a little love and encouragement to help get through it.

Yeah, I, I think of, it's, it's been the last couple months anyway. There's a car that parks in our parking lot at church on Sunday mornings that is covered with stickers, a lot of them. Racist and LGBTQ oriented. Right. This person is part of the AA group that meets in the church during our worship service. And it has struck me that we haven't had any suggestion that we try to confront this person. I believe that this person has put flyers on the windows of cars during our worship service, even advocating for things that are things that our congregation is very explicitly not in favor of. And so that we haven't had any suggestion of taking action about. This is an example of this idea that we love and help our neighbors, especially those who hate us. Trip Fuller, the man who does the Homebrewed Christianity podcast, talks about when he was a youth director at a UCC church in California, he was teaching the kids about loving our neighbors. And so they suggested. Well, he suggested to the kids, and they started a prayer text chain where they asked people on this text chain to pray for the people that they are having difficulty with. Right. That maybe they themselves were having a difficulty praying for that person they were having a disagreement with or had, you know, had a conflict with. And so they'd offer that person, you know, maybe by name, but maybe not to this prayer list, and everyone would pray for them. And this happened daily that this. This group would. Would pray for folks that were suggested. And so they wanted to be an example to the congregation. So when Youth Sunday came around, he talks about how they had wanted to pray for our enemies, and so they had some sort of representation of Osama bin Laden. And this is somewhere in the early 2000s when the kids would know explicitly who that was. But Trip didn't think about it. They'd been praying for their enemies for more than a year, and the kids didn't think about it at all because it's their enemy. They should be praying for this person. But they had a representation of Osama bin Laden in the front of the church during these prayers. And after the service, he says he was going to go out to the front to greet the parents and the parishioners and in the service, and the lead pastor kept him in the back so that he wouldn't go out there, because Tripp hadn't realized how offensive that was to so many people in the congregation. Right. And he said that the lead pastor said, you know, this was the most Christian service I've ever been part of. Because of that, you very made that incarnate, loving our enemies and loving the people who hate us. But it takes a little more time to get that settling in to the people in the service. And so there were some rather disgruntled folks, I think he said they had people who were active in defense, the defense industry, that were members of the congregation, and they were specifically out to maybe end his career at that point. And so the pastor held him back so that that wouldn't be a risk because it was such a great example. Of course, that's not a Lutheran example, but it is an example of what we profess.

So that's our shirt.

That's our shirt. It's blue. It's got those things on it. Hopefully, if you decide to get some. If you get one and you wear it, maybe you'll be at the grocery store, and maybe the person at the grocery store in line behind you will say, what does that mean? And you'll be able to tell them. That's our goal, is that we can inspire conversations that we as. I'm not going to say as Lutherans, I'm going to say as Americans, we try. Well, maybe as mainline Protestant Americans, we don't do a very good job of initiating conversation. And so if a T shirt does that for us, then great. If you have another way to do it, we would love to hear how you start these kind of conversations. It'd be great.

Of course, you know, we want to make money on it.

Oh, we're not going to make money on this. If we sell a million of them, then great. But if we sell a million of these, then the ELCA will be a massive church and we won't need to do this podcast anymore.

Right?

Yeah. This shirt will put us out of business.

Yeah. All right, on to our catechism question, then.

Yes. So in our last episode with the great pastor Ollie Berg, we talked about the Divine Offices and we asked the question and this got disrupted. I'm sorry about the audio corruption. I may change that. I might go back and re edit that because I think I've got a clean copy of that file somewhere. But the question was, what are the names of some of the Divine Office liturgies? And we had Matinsford, Sext and Vespers and Laud's Prime, Gnome and Vespers, Chevelle, Compline, Sex and Lauds, and the correct answer of Matins, Lauds, Vespers and Compline. Or Compline. So that's the correct answer there. Lots of different service names there.

Right? Yeah. This week, looking at the idea of this concept of being Lutheran, wanting to talk about it, this dug back into our history episodes a little bit. Martin Luther disliked the idea of this new church being named after him. And so we thought we'd ask what name did he prefer. Instead, our options are the Evangelich Kirka, which is German for the Church of the Gospel, the Melanchthonist Church, the church for saints and sinners, or those heretics who got themselves excommunicated the Thw gte. So those are the options and you can let us know what you think is the correct answer.

And if you can spell melanctha straight.

Yeah, because I'm pretty sure we can. So that would, that would be helpful. Yeah. So you can let us know in the socials or by email or our phone number, all of which are available in the episode notes.

Yeah. As well, if you want to suggest to us topics we actually received a suggestion for a topic on Reddit just this past week and, and we're we're pursuing that. We're happy to take on some of those things. You can call us at our phone number that you'll find in the episode notes. And all that do share our podcast with other folks as well, if you feel so inclined. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fot, and the show is produced by Phote Media Productions. You can find all of our contact information, links and a transcript in the episode notes. Until next time, go in peace, Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.