Sept. 14, 2025

Salem Lutheran – Invitation to Extended Service

Pastor Ian McPherson – United Church of Christ

Matthew 22:34-46

I am so grateful to be with you today Salem Lutheran. Human beings have always needed joy and real celebration and our need for such moments is heightened now. What’s more, I know that this day of celebrating this next chapter with your new pastor comes after a season of good and holy discernment. 

Last Wednesday and Thursday I was in Boise with an ecumenical group of faith leaders for the Interfaith Countering Hate Summit hosted by Interfaith Alliance and Western States Center.Whether we call today’s service the fake installation or “Invitation to Extended Service,” what is clearer to me than ever is that our ecumenical and interfaith relationships are going to become increasingly important in the years ahead as we continue to proclaim and work collectively for God’s shalom. 

I am delighted that Pastor McPherson selected these familiar verses from Matthew for today, because they mirror the ethos of Salem Lutheran in West Central and they inform the mutual ministry that a congregation and pastor share.

Matthew’s gospel submerges us in a series of encounters Jesus has with religious leaders who oppose him. First, he is asked about paying taxes to the Roman Emperor, then comes the question of whether or not the dead are resurrected, and next we overhear the question about the greatest commandment. 

Jesus answers by quoting Deut. 6:5, the Shema of Israel. The commandment to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, and might is prefaced by “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God. The Lord alone.” The command to love God is a command that presumes God’s love of Israel. Such a love is no vague generality but rather is manifest in the concrete and daily care of God for God’s people. We know what it means to love God only because of God’s love for us through the law and the prophets, Stanley Hauerwas wisely writes. This love can be harsh and dreadful, because to be loved by God is to be forced to know ourselves truthfully. 

Jesus continues by quoting Lev. 19:18, that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. On these two commandments, Jesus tells the lawyer, hang all the law and the prophets. This is the same Jesus who told us in the Sermon on the Mount that he came not to abolish the law and prophets and that not a letter of the law would pass away until all is accomplished. 

If we have any questions about what neighbor love might look like, or if we want to write our own edition, we can look back at the same chapter of Leviticus where we are commanded not to steal, deal falsely, lie, swear falsely by God’s name, defraud, revile the deaf, put a stumbling block before the blind, or render unjust judgment. 

Now here is a crucial layer of the text that I’m not sure I heard growing up in my Lutheran church in Western South Dakota but I am confident has been proclaimed from this pulpit or shared in Bible Studies at Salem: to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, means me must learn to love ourselves as God has loved us (1 John 4:11). To learn to love ourselves truthfully is not easy because we most often desire to love ourselves on our own terms. The challenge that Jesus presents by joining these commandments it to learn that one is loved by God so that one is thus able to love God and others.

I think I finally understood the relationship between these loves when I first read Martin Luther’s Freedom of a Christian, in which he declares, “The Christian is a completely free lord of all, subject to none. The Christian is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all (Freedom, 10). For Luther, everything begins with God’s actions towards human beings. We are loved. How then can we not spontaneously share that love with others?

I know that love is not just an intellectual exercise in this community of faith. Pastor Ian, you have probably kept learning, from the interview through today and into to tomorrow, that this is a space where love is truly embodied—from the Lord’s Supper to soup and bread brought to those hurting, putting your bodies in harms way, splashing in the font to remember your own belovedness, and the list goes on.

I’ll be honest, the reality of God’s love for me is something I have to keep learning and leaning into. Perhaps because I grew up in the forest and have spent hours in the out of doors, it was the stuff of faith that came with physicality that resonated with me most. I remain eternally grateful that the triune God we worship somehow understood that we human beings would need promises paired with simple water, bread, and wine to be reminded of Gods’ abundant love for us. The language we hear at the font and that we will hear today at the Lord’s Supper is pure gift and God’s love for creation. That love received, then is shared when we leave this place.

Salem Lutheran in West Central has been, is, and will be an incubator for love. Through sacred friendships, hearing the old old story of God’s love for you and all of creation, in the love feast that is the Lord’s Supper, you receive God’s love and are sent forth to love. You are freed from sin and brokenness and death and freed for love. And oh how desperately our world needs that love right now, as events each and every week remind us.

Any reflection on these two interconnected commandments Jesus points to is a reminder that we simply cannot follow Jesus on our own. To love well is really hard. To know we are loved can also be hard. We need the Holy Spirit and we need that Spirit moving through local expressions of the body of Christ, a congregation.

Today we rejoice that new mutual ministry between Pastor Ian McPherson and the people of Salem Lutheran is beginning. Congregations, like people can have multiple callings throughout their existence. As the world, nation, Spokane, the West Central neighborhood have changed, so have specific callings changed here, as some of your long-time members can recall. One of your tasks together is to faithfully carry out Word and Sacrament ministry so each of you is strengthened and nourished for ministry in your daily lives. The ELCA model constitution for congregations describes this in the purpose section: “Nurture its members in the Word of God so as to grow in faith and hope and love, to see daily life as the primary setting for the exercise of their Christian calling, and to use the gifts of the Spirit for their life together and for their calling in the world.”

You will also discern what your collective love is calling you into here and now for your community and the world. Again the constitution states that you will “Serve in response to God’s love to meet human needs, caring for the sick and the aged, advocating dignity, justice, and equity for all people, working for peace and reconciliation among the nations, caring for the marginalized, embracing and welcoming racially and ethnically diverse populations, and standing in solidarity with the poor and oppressed and committing itself to their needs.” 

Thank you for your ministry for so many years in this neighborhood and thank you for the mutual ministry you have embarked on for the next chapter. As we will now sing, to God be the glory.