Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

Rev. Albert Collver – Assistant to the LCMS President has a nice post that fits with my theme “Free Internet Tools That Really Work.”  What I like about the post is how it blends the old with the new.  Also nicely featured is a surprise. Rev. Collver writes:

While I have used Google Books for scholarly papers, I never really considered using it for genealogy. Google scanned in all sorts of public documents, including wills, court records, local histories, et al. It is amazing what can be found online. Just a few years ago, quite a lot of research and hunting in indexes would need to be done just to find a book.

Here’s the link to his article: http://abc3miscellany.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-books-and-genealogy-will-of-john.html

There are lots of free and very useful tools on the web.  Go out and find them use them and let me know what you find.

Pastor Jonathan C. Watt

Depending on where you are and how well the church records have been kept, you may have a wealth or a dirth of information to use in writing a funeral sermon.  What you will almost always have is birth date, death date, and if you’re lucky, baptism and confirmation dates.  By using that information and whatever else you can glean (livelihood of parents, etc.) and what you can find online, you can come up with a very personal funeral sermon.

I am not, of course, saying that the sermon is about the deceased.  It isn’t.  We preach Christ and Him crucified.  But at a funeral, you are preaching about Christ and Him crucified for a particular person.  That’s where the Internet can be a great gift.

As I prepare funeral sermons (especially for the elderly), I’ve found two sites to be absolutely indispensable:

1.  Sanctus.org:   Just looking at this site in a straightforward way, it gives you the upcoming readings for the historic lectionary in the current liturgical year.  It tells you when Easter is going to be, and such.  But it’s much, much, more than that.  Stan Lemon has produced an algorithm that can give you the liturgical calendar for any year.

If you go to sanctus.org, you will see a calendar for the current year.  If you then click on the right or the left arrow on the side of the month, you will be moved to a page with an address something like this:  http://sanctus.org/lectionary.html?month=01&year=2011

If you look at the last part of the address, you can see how you can find information about the year in which a saint was born.

Look for example at this link.  Here you will see the liturgical calendar for March of 1932.  Two years ago, as I was writing a funeral sermon, I learned that Fred had been confirmed on March 20th, 1932.  By pulling up the calendar at sanctus.org, I was able to learn that Zion Lutheran Church in Accident, Maryland used to traditionally do the rite of confirmation on Palm Sunday.  This information was very helpful to me as I served a vacancy at that congregation and buried eight of their members.

Sanctus.org can also tell you what readings a pastor probably used at a baptism, confirmation, etc.  It is a joy to consider some of the texts that may have been important in the liturgical life of someone who has died.

2.  Wikipedia.org.  Fred was born on November 11th, 1918.  To find out what was going on in the world then, I went here.  Wikipedia has a page like this for every year.  It’s very helpful to know what was going on when someone was born.

On the basis of the information I was able to glean from sanctus.org and wikipedia.org (and in just a few minutes) as well as little smidgens I heard at the funeral visitation, I was able to write this introduction to my funeral homily for the next day:

“Alta, Robert, James, Debbie, Leslie, Brett, Dennis, Jeffrey, Gladys, Ruth, family and friends of Fred —.  Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Fred was born on the last day of World War I.  When Jonas and Laura — celebrated the birth of their beloved son, the world celebrated that the war that had taken ten million lives was coming to an end.

“On a Tuesday, just a month and a half later, the joy went up from earth into heaven when Jonas and Laura brought Fred to the waters of baptism.  On that day God put His Own Name on Fred by the waters of Holy Baptism.  On that day Fred became not just the child of Jonas and Laura but a child of God Himself.  The Holy and Blessed Trinity gave Fred the gift of faith on that day.  He was washed in the blood of Christ, and he received the gifts of life and salvation in which he lived throughout his earthly life and which he enjoys even now.

“On that day there was joy in the presence of the angels.  Fred’s Savior, Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, rejoiced that another little one had been snatched from the clutches of death and hell and brought into His fold.

“After Fred’s baptism, his parents faithfully brought him to church and Sunday School here at Zion.  His mother taught him to pray when he went to bed.  Every night Fred would say, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

“Fred was able to pray this prayer with confidence.  The confidence wasn’t because of Fred’s faith, though he had it.  It wasn’t because Fred was growing into a devout young man, though he was.  Fred was able to pray with confidence because of who His Savior was.  Jesus had won every good gift of life and salvation for Fred when He bore his sins to the cross and suffered the penalty that Fred deserved.

“As Fred grew in years, he was instructed in the Christian faith and confessed it on the day he was confirmed at the age of thirteen on Palm Sunday.  After Fred’s confirmation, God continued to give Fred great and wonderful gifts.  Fred received into His mouth His Lord’s true body and blood, and when Fred received this gift, he also received all that God promises to give through it:  the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.”

From here I talked a little bit about Fred’s wife, children, work, and hobbies (about two paragraphs).  Then I transitioned with these words:

“But all Fred’s virtue could not prevent the hand of death from closing around him this past Friday.  During all of those years, and even while God was giving Fred all of those blessings, death was lying in wait.  Death was there because Fred was a sinner.

“From the moment that Fred had been conceived, he had been soiled with iniquity.  Even on the day of his birth, Fred was a sinful man in need of the Lord’s mercy.  And sin longed to pay Fred its wages.  Those wages, as we know, are death.  And so now, ninety years later, the grave has claimed Fred.

“This brings us to today’s Old Testament reading from Hosea. “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”  Hosea gives us the Lord’s answer to death.”

What follows is the bulk of the sermon, and you can probably guess where it’s heading.  The cross and our Lord’s resurrection.

The Internet has provided us with some wonderful tools that can be used to add a personal touch to our funeral homilies.  By preaching the specificity of the person who has died, we are also able to preach the specificity of the Savior who has done all that is necessary for their salvation.

Now for Something Completely Practical.

One of the most important aspects of Pastoral care is the home visit.  I remember old time pastors telling me “A home going pastor makes a church going people.”  While I reject the idea from a theological standpoint (only God working through the Spirit in Word and Sacrament makes peoples’ faith grow) it is true enough from a sociological view.  A congregation whose pastor is regularly in their homes is a congregation who knows the pastor loves them and is concerned for their spiritual welfare.

The problem with home visits?  Scheduling.  Phone call after phone call yields little in the way of appointments.  Cold calls most often fall on empty houses.  Society isn’t just mobile in the sense that people move from community to community, people are active outside of their homes many nights (especially if they have children at home).  I don’t have a solution for the busyness of people.  I do have a simple way to help you plan, schedule and keep track of your visit schedule.  Once again we turn to a free web service “Remember the Milk”.  (http://www.RememberTheMilk.com)

One of the great things about RTM is its simplicity.  As far as to-do lists programs go, this one works the way I use a to-do list.  (Frankly before RTM, I used about a hundred slips of paper shuffled about my desk, this was not organization this was chaos).   It is a testament to RTM’s flexibility that I have found ways to use it that I hadn’t planned.

Scheduling Home Visits with Remember the Milk.

I’m going to outline three steps here to help you create and maintain a visit schedule using the free web service Remember the Milk.

Continue reading

Lectionary at Lunch at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

You don’t get more geeky than the internet and original language bible study.  Well, I’m a geek and proud of it.  Next in my series on “Free Internet Services that Really Work” is Concordia Seminary St. Louis’ “Lectionary at Lunch.”  When I was a lowly Seminary student every Wednesday I used to sit at the feet of the Exegetical (bible study from the original languages) Professors  at lunch time and listen to them translate and explain the Old Testament (in Hebrew) and the Gospel Lesson (in Greek) for the upcoming Sunday’s readings in church.  It was a great way to prepare for when my teachers called on me to translate passages of the bible in class.

When I became a pastor I discovered that keeping up on translating the bible for preaching became very difficult.  The parish ministry has many demands on a pastor’s time.  Unfortunately, it’s very easy to let the deep study of God’s Word in the original languages slide because it is very time consuming.  The thing is, in preparing to be a pastor that kind of deep study was a daily occurrence.  I spent countless hours parsing verb, diagramming sentences, and memorizing vocabulary.  None of that time spent was useless as it has paid off in spades every time I open the texts in Hebrew and Greek.  As one of my professors said, “Reading the bible in English is like kissing your wife through cellophane.” (I think it was Gibbs).

Enter Lectionary at Lunch.  In the old days those lunch reading sessions were recorded and posted to the internet for download.  Now they are podcast and available through many different channels on the net (see list below).  They have since removed the Lunch and added the Epistle reading.

Lectionary at Lunch is no substitute for personal deep original language study of scripture but it is a great way to begin preparation for preaching.  The professors read and translate the texts from the Lutheran Service Book Three Year Lectionary and then add a few suggestions for preaching.  One of the best features is the variety of ideas and emphasis that come across as the Exegetical professors take turns in the task.

As a side benefit, a busy pastor is able to keep his hand in the original languages even when his schedule is packed.

Concordia Seminary Web Site http://www.csl.edu/Resources_AudioVideo_LectionaryatLunch.aspx

Concordia Seminary on iTunes

http://itunes.csl.edu/

Pr. Jonathan C. Watt

Open DNS Logo

A few months ago (back in December), Google rolled out Google Public DNS and it encouraged people to use it for a faster Internet experience. This was the first time for many that the term DNS became a household word. DNS stands for Domain Name System (click for Wikipedia Entry). DNS is sort of like a phone book for computers on the Internet. It looks up the web address that you type in and turns that into a number computers can use to locate the website. For instance, when you type “google.com” into your web browser address bar, DNS turns that into the number 72.14.213.147. If you enter that number in your web browser, you will go to Google’s home page. Without DNS, we would have to type in a series of numbers for every web page that we visited — sort of like looking up the name in a phone book and punching in the number on the phone.

So why would you want to use Google’s Public DNS or another service like OpenDNS?

The two basic answers to this question are speed up your Internet experience and improve security.

A third answer is available if you use a service like OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com) – web filtering. This is a great option if you have children at home who have access to the Internet. Both of my kids have Nintendo DSi’s that can access the Internet. The Nintendo DSi has a web browser built by Opera on it. My nine year old son likes to search YouTube and Google for funny videos like boys making funny noises or things blowing up, etc. It isn’t too hard to imagine him typing in something “innocent” and receiving a picture or video that is completely inappropriate or downright nasty. Or he might hear something on the playground at school or on the bus and type it in … next you know, something you don’t want the kids exposed to is on the screen. While every parent should supervise their kids on the Internet, it isn’t possible to do it every moment — especially if your kids have a portable device that can access the Internet. OpenDNS solves that problem for our family. If the kids accidentally (or purposely) type in something inappropriate, the web page is automatically blocked based on criteria my wife and I set. All in all there are about 50 different categories that can be blocked ranging from academic fraud (paper mills) to gambling to lingerie to sexual themes. In addition to these sorts of categories, OpenDNS automatically blocks illegal activities and malware.

OpenDNS has two basic options that will interest the home user: the free account and the $9.95 per year (that’s right — per year) Deluxe account that gives you more customizable options. Besides the “custom” option, where you decide by selecting from 50 categories what to block, there are four basic pre-set options: High, Moderate, Low, and None. High level filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters. Moderate filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity. Low filtering: Protects against pornography. None: Blocks nothing, but still offers the benefits of faster DNS service and malware protection, etc. With the Deluxe version you can add Whitelisted sites, etc. My house uses the “Moderate filtering” option with some minor customization.

One of the best things about OpenDNS (besides its price) is that it requires no special software, etc. Instead, you change the settings in your router to point to the OpenDNS servers. This provides protection to any computer, even guests’ computers, in your house. So you don’t have to worry about your children’s friends coming into your house with their computer or portable Internet device and downloading the latest album or movie leaving you to get in trouble with the RIAA or a large fine to pay for piracy.

The Internet offers many wonders but also many dangers for the family. It is great to have a tool like OpenDNS for the home to help keep your family safe from bad and dangerous things on the Internet. Another advantage is faster Internet surfing, protection from Malware and illegal activities. Considering you can use it for free, go give OpenDNS a try.

(originally posted here)

– Rev. Albert B. Collver, Ph.D.