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Showing posts with the label Pregnancy and Infant Loss Memorial Service

Sermon - Trinity IX, 2026 - Luke 16:1-13

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The Parable of the Unjust Steward , Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1540 Christian Wisdom Seeks Eternal Dwellings Wisdom is forward thinking and focused on the goal Christian wisdom employs every treasure, heavenly and worldly, for the sake of reaching the goal If there is a hardest parable, it might be this one; throws people off every time. The parable presents a rich man with a steward who was found wasting the rich man’s possessions. The job of a steward is to be faithful with someone else’s possessions, and this guy wasn’t cutting it. So obviously, he got fired. What’s crazy is the rich man lets the steward hand in the books, and he doesn’t hunt them down and take them from him immediately. The steward does exactly what you don’t want the steward to do, which is why normally the books get taken from the steward: the steward cooks the books. He meets some of the rich man’s debtors, probably tenant farmers, and in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors he adjusts how much they owe, ...

Sermon - Pregnancy and Infant Loss Memorial Service 2020

  My baby is with God and God is with me. When an elderly person dies, we try to comfort ourselves with words like “At least they lived a long life,” or “At least I got to spend many years with them.” Or even when a younger person dies, we can say things like “At least I got to know them,” “At least I got to meet them and spend some time with them, even if it was too short.”  But when your baby dies, you can’t even say those useless platitudes, because you never got to know your baby. All you have is maybe a positive pregnancy test or an ultrasound picture or heard a heartbeat or felt a kick or maybe even saw their tiny body, but you never got to know them. All of your hopes and dreams for your baby were extinguished while they were still being knit together; they had only just begun to live.  All you’re left with is that gnawing grief and question: Why? Why is my baby gone? Well intentioned people try to give an answer, doling out comfortless platitudes: “At least they w...