January 27

Welcome.

We are glad that you have come.  May you be blessed by your time with us. 

News:  The new calendar year is already almost 1/12 past and much continues to happen at Lamb of God and in our lives.   The church year is 1/6 past and as we measure time by what God is doing, we are immeasurably enriched.   The new people among us bring us to look again at how faith transforms lives and to see the Spirit move like the wind,  we know not whither it comes or whither it goes.   Having children in church every Sunday is truly a marvel and we give God thanks for sending them to us.  We are discussing the need for a Sunday School so that little ones and those who care for them can all learn who Jesus is and the whole story of salvation and what it means for us.   The highlights of the past few months include our caroling with members of other churches and the community on December 16,  a little Christmas Eve celebration on December 23 with music and dinner,  Epiphany and dinner on January 6, and all that the quilting days have brought us with new people joining us at different times and so many quilts completed now, the most we have ever done and we still have a lot of time before the Spring Ingathering.   There are 25 quilts gracing our sanctuary now.   The pictures above include Reformation Sunday and Chrismas and Epiphany.  The Creche on the altar was not completed until the wise men arrived from their travels around the church,  Epiphany being the day on which we observe their arrival.  The holy family and the shepherds were in place on the 23rd,  but the baby had to wait until Christmas had come.   We enjoyed moving the little wooden figures forward during Advent and 
not only the children but the adults joined in the journey to get them to the stable.  The creche is made of wood, especially designed to be safe for small hands to hold and to move and thus to have the story take life among us.    

We have new neighbors living in the trailer park next to us.  A family has moved in and we now have two sisters in high school catching the bus in front of the church.  We were happy to be able to give them boots to make it through the deep and sometimes wet snow in something more cold and water resistant than tennis shoes or house slippers which had been their previous footwear.    


 
Schedule 

January 29  10:00 Lutheran World Relief Quilting. Other quilting dates to be announced.  

February 3   10:30 Worship with Althea Sondahl 
                      Lunch following

February 10   10:30 Worship with Althea Sondahl 
                       Lunch following 

February 13  Ash Wednesday 
 

February 17  1st Sunday in Lent  10:30 Worship with Althea Sondahl   
                                                         Lunch following 

February 24  2nd Sunday in Lent  10:30 Worship with Althea Sondahl 
                                                          Lunch following 


Reflections:  Epiphany, January 6th, is a church observance that pre-dates Christmas.  Starting in the East, this day was chosen to celebrate both the birth and baptism of Christ.   Later on in Rome, after Christianity became the religion of the Empire,  Christmas was created to replace the pagan festival celebrated around the solstice relating to the sun god. Thus the birth of Christ came to observed on December 25th rather than with his baptism in January.   Then, in western Christianity,  the 6th of January came to be the date associated with the arrival of the magi to Bethlehem and the texts used for that day are now that story from Matthew.  The Baptism of Christ is now observed on the Sunday after the Epiphany, though the Eastern church still observes the baptism of Christ on Epiphany itself.  This year  the principal festival of Epiphany fell on a Sunday and so at Lamb of God we were able to rejoice in the tradition of the wisemen and the star.   In parts of the Lutheran church the Epiphany signals a time to focus on the mission of the church in evangelizing the world,  since Christ was revealed to the non-Jewish world as symbolized by the wise men from the east.   The Sundays after Epiphany have texts showing how Christ is made known.   At Lamb of God we are trying to revive that Lutheran tradition and make our mission of sharing the Gospel more clear as we reach out to those who are seeking Christ in their lives, not from foreign lands but from our neighborhood.