Worship Transition Team Update - September 1, 2021
Returning to in-person services: The dramatic rise in virus cases precludes us from even considering any form of in-person services until at least after Christmas. We all wish it wasn’t so. The transition team will keep the congregation updated if anything changes between now and Christmas. The church council, worship team, and others are exploring ways to invigorate our Zoom worship experience.
The Worship Transition Team would like to encourage everyone to get vaccinated unless a physician has said you shouldn’t. Getting vaccinated is one way to love your neighbor. Also, if you are exposed to COVID-19 or have any symptoms, please get tested before interacting with others.
Below are links on how to find testing locations near you:
Again, get vaccinated if you can be, this is one way to love your neighbor.
Below are excerpts from a letter Martin Luther wrote in 1527 during the Bubonic Plague.
To the Reverend Doctor Johann Hess, pastor at Breslau, and to his fellow-servants of the gospel of Jesus Christ (1527 A.D.):
Others sin on the right hand. They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so without medicines or our carefulness. This is not trusting God but tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health.
It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best he is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have.
No, my dear friends, that is no good. Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city. What else is the epidemic but a fire which instead of consuming wood and straw devours life and body?
You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence.
If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
