The Storm and the Road: Dressed in Grace - Faithfulness in Foreign Rooms

Closet History and Practical Transitions

If you walk into your home tonight, I guarantee there’s a jacket hanging in your closet that hasn't seen the light of day in years. Maybe it’s a vintage leisure suit, a heavily padded 80s blazer, or—like this high school varsity jacket I’m wearing, which I uncovered this past summer while packing up boxes during a move—a coat you keep simply because you can’t bring yourself to throw it away. Why? Because fabric holds memory.

Our church buildings work the exact same way. For Wooddale, Prince of Peace, Vista, and Spirit of Christ, our physical structures are like favorite old coats. They’ve sheltered our prayers, kept us warm through baptisms and heartbreaks, and fit us perfectly for a season. But standing in a season of building transitions feels like being caught between winter and spring—wearing a heavy parka when it’s 70 degrees outside, just not quite sure what to put on next.  

Luckily, we aren't the first ones navigating a complicated wardrobe change. If you open the Book of Genesis, you find a young man whose entire life can be measured in the garments he wore and the ones he was forced to leave behind. Listen now to the Word of God as it comes to us in Genesis chapter 39.

Now Joseph was taken down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man; he was in the house of his Egyptian master. His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to prosper in his hands. So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him; he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he made him overseer in his house and over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; the blessing of the Lord was on all that he had, in house and field. So he left all that he had in Joseph’s charge, and with him there he had no concern for anything but the food that he ate.

Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Lie with me.” But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Look, with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my hand. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” And although she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not consent to lie beside her or to be with her. One day, however, when he went into the house to do his work, and while no one else was in the house, she caught hold of his garment, saying, “Lie with me!” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and ran outside. When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled outside, she called out to the members of her household and said to them, “See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to insult us! He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice, and when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his garment beside me and fled outside.” Then she kept his garment by her until his master came home, and she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to insult me, but as soon as I raised my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me and fled outside.”

When his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, saying, “This is the way your servant treated me,” he became enraged. And Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined; he remained there in prison. But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer. The chief jailer committed to Joseph’s care all the prisoners who were in the prison, and whatever was done there, he was the one who did it. The chief jailer paid no heed to anything that was in Joseph’s care because the Lord was with him, and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper. (Genesis 39:1-23 NRSVue)

Joseph’s Wardrobe Malfunctions

Joseph’s story is practically a fashion show of divine curveballs. First, his dad gives him that famous multi-colored coat, which his brothers promptly rip off him before tossing him down a pit. Then he ends up in Egypt, dresses for success, and becomes Potiphar’s top administrator. Things are looking up—until Potiphar’s wife frames him, grabs his cloak as he runs out the door, and uses his own clothes as fake evidence to land him in a prison cell. 

Joseph gets stripped down to his undershirt—no physical status, no square footage to manage, and definitely no custom outerwear. Yet, right there in the basement of Egyptian correctional facilities, the Bible repeats a steady drumbeat: "The Lord was with Joseph." 

In our Lutheran tradition, we hold to a deep truth: God shows up most profoundly, not when our buildings look like a grand blueprint of success, but when our plans get unraveled. Joseph didn't put his faith on hold while waiting for a better season; he served inside a prison cell with the very same integrity he brought to the palace. His ministry was never defined by the roof over his head, but by the God who stayed beside him. The Lord who was with him.

Unraveling the Sacred Fabric

As we consider our buildings and properties at Vista and Spirit of Christ, we know we are dealing with a sacred fabric woven over many years. Martin Luther referred to these physical spaces as larvae Dei—the "masks" or outer garments God wears to care for the world.

Through the building of Prince of Peace, God wore a coat of community outreach that eventually transformed that land into space for childcare and affordable housing. Through the sanctuary of Wooddale, God offered a cloak of hospitality for joining Prince of Peace members.

In the world of weaving, if you want to take good wool from a cherished old piece and make something new, you have to carefully unravel it first. God’s tailoring works the exact same way. To weave a new garment for our future, the old building fabric often has to be unraveled.

Spirit of Christ is at that exact threshold today, asking: How can our building and property be reshaped as a garment to bless our neighbors now? Unraveling a physical coat we’ve worn for decades is hard, uncomfortable work. But in God’s economy, letting go of a building isn't a funeral—it’s just handing the fabric back to the Master Tailor so a new shelter - a new garment - can be sewn.

Styled in Grace

The Augsburg Confession reminds us what the Church actually is. It’s not brick, mortar, or a specific architectural style. The Church is simply the gathering of believers where the Gospel is proclaimed and the sacraments are shared. That is the one outfit that never goes out of style and never suffers from deferred maintenance.

Two chapters later, when Joseph finally gets pulled out of prison in Genesis 41, Pharaoh dresses him in fine linen and a gold chain. But those high-end clothes weren't given to him so he could strut around—they were his larvae Dei - the garments given to him by God for his vocation through which he would feed a starving world.

Our ultimate legacy isn't holding onto real estate. It’s taking the equity wrapped up in our bricks and mortar and using it to clothe our neighborhood in practical hope—feeding the hungry, supporting families, and sharing grace.

Dressed for the Future

God’s presence has never depended on the specific sanctuary we’re standing in or the architectural style of our walls. Whether Joseph was in the foreign halls of a palace, the damp stone of a prison cell, or stepping out into an unknown future, the constant thread throughout his story remained the same: The Lord was with him.

And the Lord is with us, too.

We don't have to erase our history to step into what’s next. We can cherish the old coats that sheltered us—the sanctuaries where we wept, celebrated, and encountered God—while still having the courage to lay them down when the season changes. We don't need to fear standing in this middle place, this quiet waiting room of transition. The One who clothes the lilies of the field is the Master Tailor who is already gathering our threads, unraveling what was, and weaving our future together in grace.

So let us step forward with open hands and confident hearts. Let us trust that as the outer garments change, the Body beneath them—the living, breathing Church of Jesus Christ—remains warm, vital, and ready to clothe this world in love. Amen.

Preached Sunday, September 27, 2026, at a joint worship service with Vista and Spirit of Christ Lutheran churches.

The Storm and the Road: Leaving the Baseline

In the house where my brother and I grew up, there was a heavy, battered trunk sitting up in the attic, covered in decades of dust. When we were kids, my brother pulled it down and restored it as a 4-H project—painstakingly cleaning off the grime, fixing the iron hinges, and bringing the wood back to life. Today, that trunk sits in my home, a constant reminder of our shared history.

Every time I look at it, I am reminded of what it actually represents. It wasn't built to be living room décor or a project to win a ribbon at the county fair. It was built for survival. My ancestors, perhaps like yours, packed everything they owned into that box, locked the latch, and walked away from their homes in Northern Europe to cross an ocean into a completely unknown future. So many of those early immigrant families wrote back home in their letters and journals comparing their trek across the Atlantic and onto the Midwest prairie to Abraham’s journey, truly believing they were seeking a new "promised land."

We tend to look at old family heirlooms with a kind of cozy nostalgia, but that trunk was born out of sheer risk. Leaving the familiar was terrifying for those who came before us. But they did it because they believed God had a future for them that couldn't be found by staying put.

We often fall into what we might call the baseline fallacy—the subtle belief that our original starting point, our comfortable home or familiar past, is the only ideal state in which to exist. But our ancestors understood a hard truth that we so easily forget: We cannot follow God into the future if we are married to the way things used to be.

Long before that trunk crossed the Atlantic, an elderly couple stood in the dust of Mesopotamia facing the exact same choice. We read of them today in Genesis, chapter 12. 

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot and all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.  And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. (Genesis 12:1-9 NRSVue)

Notice what happens when Abram finally arrives in the land God promised. He doesn't build a fortress. He doesn't lay a concrete foundation. He does two very intentional things: he pitches a tent, and he builds an altar.

The tent is a statement of transience, signaling that we are not settling down into comfort, but ready to move whenever God says move. The altar is a statement of faith, declaring that God is right here, in this temporary place, right now.

When Abram built those altars along the road, he wasn't trying to build a fortress or guard his self-interests. He was simply taking what he had in his hands and using it to mark the places where God had met him. His whole life was given to the journey, not to playing it safe.

We naturally crave the fortress. We want permanent walls, predictable routines, and the safety of what worked yesterday. But throughout Scripture, God rarely meets God's people in static comfort. God shows up on the dusty road, in the wilderness, and in the transition—the places where we are forced to depend on God because our usual safety nets have been pulled away.

This hits close to home for all of us.

Seven years ago, Wooddale and Prince of Peace gave up their individual identities to merge into Vista. That was not a simple administrative decision. It was a loss. It meant closing doors, moving furniture, and grieving spaces that held decades of weddings, baptisms, and quiet prayers. Then came the storms of cultural shift and the isolation of pandemic years.

For the last seven years, it has often felt like we’ve been living in a holding pattern or a long waiting room. But waiting rooms are not wasted space. In Scripture, those holding patterns are where God deepens our faith, shapes our character, and prepares us for what comes next.

Now, seven years in—entering this holy Sabbath cycle of processing our shared memory—this fall is our dedicated season to pause on this journey. We are here to do the sacred, necessary work of looking back together. We are here to reflect on where we have come from, to give ourselves full permission to grieve what has been lost, and to also name the new, positive life that has emerged along the way.

Today, we are launching our Merged Timeline Wall in the hallway. Each one of you is invited to step up to that timeline wall over the next few weeks, to map your own origins and history, to tell your own story. And, together, to honor every single stream that has brought us into this room in this moment. 

Right now, in this fall season, our primary task is to pause, reflect, process, and offer our lives to God right where we are, getting our hearts ready for wherever the road leads next. Taking that road forward doesn't mean forgetting where we came from. It means honoring the legacy of those who went before us by exemplifying their courage, not just preserving their old structures. 

So, let us honor our story, build the altar where we find ourselves today, and trust that the God who called Abram into the unknown is the very same God holding us now.

May it be so. Amen.

Preached September 20, 2026, at Vista Lutheran Church, St. Louis Park, MN.

The Storm and The Road: Beyond the Flood

Friends, welcome to a new year in the Narrative Lectionary! Over the next few months, we are doing something vital: immersing ourselves in the Hebrew Scriptures, the very Bible Jesus read and prayed. Too often, people think the God of the Old Testament is harsh and angry, while Jesus comes later to soften God up. But this story shows us one continuous arc of divine love—a God who longs for relationship and never gives up on a messy world.

Today, we jump right into a storm—not with the bright morning of creation, but with the world falling apart. We read this morning in Genesis.

6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.   9 These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.   11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw that the earth was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. 13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above, and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. 17 For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up, and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.   8:1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. 6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made 7 and sent out the raven, and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out the dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground, 9 but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. 10 He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark, 11 and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. 12 Then he waited another seven days and sent out the dove, and it did not return to him any more.   9:8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

                                                                                                  --Genesis 6:5-22; 8:1, 6-12; 9:8-17 (NRSVue)

Earlier, you talked in small groups about what it means to make a promise. As we move into our text, I invite a quick thought from your conversations: How does making a real covenant promise change the way two people relate to each other?

When we make a covenant promise, a relationship shifts from tenuousness to commitment. That same shift from uncertainty into trust is the exact shift we see in God’s heart today.

When Genesis tells us the world was filled with violence, God didn't look down with cold anger. The text says God was grieved to the heart. The Hebrew word used here ('asav) describes the agonizing pain of labor. God’s reaction isn't the fury of a judge, but the heartbreak of a parent who loves us too much to watch us destroy each other.

Then comes the turning point: God remembered Noah. In Scripture, when God remembers (zkr), it means taking compassionate action to rescue the vulnerable. God sends the ruakh—the same breath of life used in creation—to bring dry land out of the chaos.

I know many of us understand what it feels like to live in the ark. It’s that deep fatigue of surviving year after year of adaptation. When we are in survival mode, it's easy to think that just guarding the boat is the whole point. But stewardship isn't about hoarding our love or our resources out of fear; it’s trusting that God sustains the vessel so we can step onto dry land and plant fresh vineyards on a new mountain. Just like Noah.

When the storm ends, God makes a covenant. A promise. To mark this promise, God puts a rainbow in the sky. In ancient times, people saw a rainbow as a war bow—a weapon used to shoot arrows. But in this story, God takes the bow and hangs it up in the clouds, pointing it away from the earth. God disarms. God chooses mercy over punishment, promising to always treat creation with love and peace.

This promise isn't just words in the sky; it is a call for us to move past survival and start planting for the future. Today is "God's Work, Our Hands" Sunday, which fits this story perfectly. Right after service, we are jumping into three hands-on service projects. This isn't just about preserving what we have—it is us rolling up our sleeves, stepping off the ark, and planting new seeds of hope as the caring hands of a faithful God.

May we all serve today with open hands, bringing fresh life and hope to a world God loves so deeply.

Let us pray. God of promise, you sustained Noah through the storm and you sustain us today. As we use our hands to serve, move us from fear to trust, so we can plant seeds of new life in our community. Amen.

Preached Sunday, September 13, 2026, on God's Work, Our Hands Sunday, at Vista Lutheran Church, St. Louis Park, MN.