Nebraska Synod ELCA

By Deacon Timothy Siburg

 This past weekend, congregations across the ELCA participated in “God’s Work, Our Hands” Sunday. This Sunday has become synonymous with Rally Sunday, but also with living lives as disciples freed to serve through Christ to walk alongside one’s neighbors as signs of God’s deep and abiding love. If your congregation participated in it, I wonder what you might have done? Was it a service project? An act of charity? Responding to a need near or far? All of these are good things and signs of connection. But connections are just a starting place.

In doing God’s Work with our Hands, we respond to needs. But we are then invited to not only connect with our neighbors but to grow in relationship with them. Relationships take time and intentionality to build. Relationships like the Nebraska Synod enjoys with the Northern Diocese of Tanzania, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in Argentina and Uruguay. Relationships like that have been forged through decades of love and care in this synod through the Followers of Christ Prison Ministry and the Lakota Lutheran Center and Chapel in Scottsbluff. Where together as God’s people we have responded to our neighbors in need, connected with them, come alongside them, listened, listened some more, and grew into relationship as disciples and siblings in Christ together.

The thing about relationships is that they take time to grow and nurture. They don’t just emerge after one chance encounter. I’m reminded of one summer evening years ago. It was probably my wife’s and my first summer in Nebraska, back in 2017. A storm had rolled through with green skies. It’s the first time I remember ever going to the basement. It turned out we had just really strong “straight line winds,” but they were strong enough that things and trees were down everywhere.

After the storm had passed, we found ourselves outside taking stock of all the destruction, and that’s when we saw them- our neighbors, from all across our village. Some we knew, some we didn’t. The chainsaws came out, and beverages of choice were shared. The village rallied, and the community connected. That was a starting point in making connections, and a steppingstone in building relationships. I suspect something similar was experienced by many of you over the past many months after any one of the storms that have gone through our state. Since then, some of those connections made that evening have turned into friendships and relationships. Some have not. But either way, we are neighbors who are grateful to be and have good neighbors.

As we think about cultivating love through connections this month, I am reminded that we are all connected. We are connected as God’s people, as Christ’s church together. We are connected as God’s beloved children, siblings in Christ together. We are connected as Lutherans. We are connected as one in fifty people in this country each year is helped, aided, or served in some way by a Lutheran organization, social ministry, or serving arm of the church. We are connected as citizens. These connections matter. And like a lot of things we aren’t very good about talking about them, but these connections are signs that together we do consequential work in the name of Jesus, our friend and savior.

This good work is a starting place. Connections matter. But they are just that, a starting place. How might God be inviting you to move from connection to relationship? What might this look like for your congregation? How might this move, cultivate God’s abiding and abundant love for your neighbor?