Kurt Jacobson
Select Sermons
Welcoming Grace
Words of Love for All
All sermons in this book were written and delivered by Pastor Kurt Jacobson at Trinity Lutheran Church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Copyright © 2015 by Kurt Jacobson. All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2643-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
FOREWORD
By Andra Palmer
This collection of selected sermons by Pastor Kurt Jacobson is a treasure that spans twenty-eight years of service. What an uplifting experience, to go back and revisit Pastor Kurt’s most powerful and compelling sermons that bring hope and good news to our lives!
For those of you who were in the congregation when Pastor Kurt delivered these sermons, you will hear his voice and see his body language as you read each one. Your readings will take you back to that year, that church service, that Bible passage, and Kurt’s moving message.
If you weren’t present for a specific sermon, this compilation will be a guiding post of hope to carry your faith through good times and challenging times. In fact, I encourage you to read these sermons aloud to experience their powerful delivery.
The congregation and guests of Trinity Lutheran Church were blessed to have Pastor Kurt’s unique mix of passion, intellect and storytelling from the altar. And he spoke from the first step of the Altar, not from behind a distant pulpit, intimately addressing everyone in the sanctuary.
Pastor Kurt’s sermons highlight current events and the daily lives of his congregants, while incorporating rich imagery and stories from the Bible.
For example, I was present in church in April 2011, when Pastor Kurt delivered his Palm Sunday sermon entitled “Two Parades Then, Two Parades Now.” Pastor Kurt presented a viewpoint of Pilate’s parade entering Jerusalem from the west and Jesus’ parade entering Jerusalem from the “opposite side of town.” What a riveting comparison! The description of the pageantry of Pilate’s parade, juxtaposed against Jesus’ humble parade, and Pastor’s relation to current events, provided a thought- provoking and deeply moving experience. Again, Pastor Kurt delivered a powerful message to all.
Now, we can all appreciate and reminisce as we read the collection of Pastor Kurt’s selected sermons from his twenty-eight-year career at Trinity Lutheran Church in Eau Claire. Thank you for this generous gift of hope and good news, Pastor Kurt!
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CONFESSION OF A BLACK SHEEP LUTHERAN UPON THE OCCASION OF A BELOVED PASTOR RETIRING
By Nickolas Butler
I suppose that I have been a member of Trinity Lutheran Church since about the age of eight, when my family moved to 309 East Grant Avenue, less than a mile from Trinity’s charismatic ski-sloped roof. In the subsequent twenty-eight years, I cannot brag of perfect attendance, passionate volunteerism, or faithful tithing. I have never once come forward to collect offerings, or sing in the choir.
The truth is I am a very flawed Lutheran. I attend church each Sunday to sit with my wife’s family, and to be close to my children. I come to church because I am reminded of my own childhood, sitting beside my father and mother, or poking at my younger brother with a stubby pew-pencil. Or paging through The Bible in search of especially violent or prophetic passages (I still turn to “Revelation” on Sunday mornings for a taste of what awaits us down the line: pale horses, avenging angels, a lake of fire – terrible stuff!) I have always enjoyed staring at Trinity’s ever-rotating collection of tapestries (they used to be much more prominently displayed back then – my favorite was the lamb and the chalice), or listening to the light drone of traffic off Clairemont.
But I do love listening to a great sermon. Sermons are why I go to church, why I will always attend Trinity. We are all inundated with entertainment in our lives: movies, TV, radio, social media… But sermons are a fantastic reprieve from all that. A time to sit and listen and reflect in ways both intellectual and spiritual. Sermons are a challenge, a charge – a plea to change our mentalities for the better, our world for the better. And for the last twenty-eight years or so, I have been sincerely blessed to spend many Sunday mornings listening to Pastor Kurt Jacobson preach.
It must be very difficult, this preaching business, delivering a compelling sermon. We’ve all endured lackluster sermons. There are so many ways a sermon can go dreadfully wrong: too erudite, too long, too repetitious, too vague, too pop-culture, too balky, too much money-talk, too much fire and brimstone… A sermon can fail before it ever begins if the pastor has a poor understanding of the guiding scripture, or no clear message that even dovetails the scripture, let allow elucidating it.
As parishioners, we suffer through this all too often with Old Testament passages: someone begets somebody who leads an army and wipes out another army and makes a fiery sacrifice to God and then dies. Huh? What can we glean from that, without leaning on hackneyed platitudes or generalities? Then too, a pastor can get far too academic, citing various theologians or articles until the congregation is having dusky flashbacks to some snoozy college course… Delivering a dynamic sermon, week in and week out for decades is tough work. And, I can truly say, that Pastor Kurt’s sermons have kept me captivated for years and years and years.
This book is a collection of just some of those sermons, and in reading all of them, I am struck by how fortunate Trinity has been to call Kurt our pastor, our leader, in some cases, our friend. In these sermons, we are reminded of Kurt’s deep and abiding intellect, his ability to connect every-day life in the 21st century to ancient scripture, and more than anything, to call our attention to the timelessness of the spirit that binds us all, through religious decency, kindness, and grace. We are also reminded of his adventurousness and daring. Kurt is a world-traveler, and in these sermons, we see him white-water rafting in Alaska or volunteering in a hospital in Haiti.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Trinity’s growth in parishioners and the expansion of its worship area happen to correspond with Kurt’s tenure at the church. As you can read in his sermons, he very much invested his own spirit, in not only the congregation as a body, but also the very building. These sermons illuminate just how passionately he cared for his flock, even for black sheep like me, playing tic-tac-toe or hangman on the back of a church bulletin or offering card.
I must admit that it is with a heavy heart that not only will I have been in attendance for some of Kurt’s first sermons as a pastor at Trinity, but now, I must face a future without Kurt’s voice in the choir, or his indefatigable, almost jolly, pronouncements from behind the pulpit. I don’t know if it was The Bible or The Byrds, but someone said, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Well, now is Kurt’s time to retire. To be closer to his aging parents
