I want to teach my children...

Dan, you can deal me in - but only if we can get more than two people at the table!  Meanwhile, here is my offering for February.

A month ago Josh brought over a few boxes of Joe Vold’s school notebooks and sermons.  At first glance, Dad’s sermons were not well organized, maybe partly from being moved from parish to parish and from file cabinets to boxes, but probably this was more a reflection of the Joe Vold way of life.  He always liked Abe Lincoln, who was said to have written the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope, and throughout the Concordia years Dad seems to have taken this to heart.  Everything is written on 5.5 x 8.5 half sheets, usually recycling the backs of bulletins, always handwritten in a single draft.  Sometimes the 5-6 page sermons were stapled, but when they were loose they did not always stay together in the box.

I did not set out to dive into these sermons, but on first browse I was immediately intrigued.  For all that went on in the late sixties, Dad did not go off the message of salvation too much, which was intriguing enough, but then there was also a sermon just after the Apollo 11 moon landing, and references to flower children, Mai Lai and Vietnam War, tensions in the middle east, race relations at home, a political convention in Chicago.  And then, within only minutes of opening the second box, I came across the sermon that I am sharing with you all today, the message Dad delivered on the day of Joshua’s baptism.  I’ve already given Josh a copy of this, and it is at Mom’s suggestion that I am posting this to the Symposia.  So here you are, a Joe Vold sermon fully transcribed.

I have since spent a few weeks of evening hours doing my best to put the Concordia Scandia years in order.  The sermons were sometimes dated but more often they had only cryptic clues of their season.  I now know, for instance, that Oculi Sunday occurs before Exaudi Sunday.  Yes, there was also a three year lectionary cycle of scriptural texts, except that Dad would not regularly write down the specific text reference. When one is not writing to the future and is speaking to people who have bulletin references in front of them, not much more needs to be said on the sermon page than a self-direction to “Read the Text.”

So, thanks to the lectionary calendars that were also in the boxes, I did.  And thanks to all the stray pages, when paper styles and ink colors weren’t enough to reorder things, I read more of the sermons than I had first expected to.

After Concordia, Dad seems to have started dispensing of formalities, perhaps not needing to write out the sermons as much, or being less inclined to preserve the paperwork.  There are still quite a few loose pages with Bejou references, though, and I look forward to getting to these.  But so far, I am just through the end of 1969.

I will post the baptism sermon separately, but here are a couple of notes and quotes from various other sermons that jumped out at me.

At least twice, Dad brought up the hymn Joy to the World out of season, in October and February.  “Isaac Watts was a forgiven man --a free man --a man who couldn't contain himself.”

Written six months before Josh was born: “I want to teach my children that they have a name and a goal.  They have names, Jonathan and Daniel, but they have another name, and it is Christian. ...Christian, do you know your name?”

In a sermon on how all “ask-seek-knock” prayers are answered:  “What is it to pray if it is not to pray in the Spirit, with the Spirit, for the Spirit?  ...For when a man asks and seeks and knocks for this, he asks for everything there is.”

In a sermon titled “Your Life Is In God’s Hands”: “There will be a triumphant end ---a harvest that is abundant.  I am thinking of my brother, Paul, who has been in surgery this week. ....The insignificance of the beginning and the triumph of the end!”

After Apollo 11: “To have the power to live in love for and in peace with those around you --with your neighbor --that is greater than walking on the moon.”

On a Sunday before Thanksgiving: “People don't give thanks because they have plenty... They give thanks when they clearly recognize that what they have is a gift.”

On “Refreshment Sunday”: “My father was a simple man.  He loved the Gospel of John and he taught me to love it too.”

“When you hear the words, This is my body given for you, and you believe that God loves you so much he died for you, you will know what it was like for the poor man who found a treasure in his field....”

Lastly, I can still hear Dad speaking often of the “little ones” who are, as we all are, children of God.  How neat is it to see that phrase first appear prominently in a sermon for Joshua’s first sign of the cross!