Usually, we buy moderate gifts for ourselves, our children, siblings and parents, inexpensive gifts for others, orphans, widows, the needy and people in our church family who need help. Not all of us can afford it. Not this year. We’re struggling to keep our mortgages, utilities and necessities paid. Many are on a fixed income. Even the giving of our church in general has dropped almost 16% from last year. We are behind in many bills. Expenses exceed income and Christmas is coming. So, what do we do? What do you do? We don’t like this position we’re in. But God makes way where there’s no way. He is the provider.

A Christmas Story

Through prayer and Bible study I continue to discover God’s direction even in these economic hardship times. God wants us to stop fretting and remember that this celebration is not about gift giving. This celebration is about Christ who is considered the most precious gift God has ever given to humankind. He wants us to be aware and thankful for the birth of the Christ child, the One who saved our wretched, sinful souls. He wants us to rebuke the spirits of depression and anxiety that desire to bring us down into the pit. When we are at peace with our plan and walk in the Spirit, we don’t feel like failures. However, we exist in this material world and in this flesh. As Christmas day draw closer, invite Christ into your hearts, churches, homes, work places, and schools. He will give you peace, joy and satisfaction. What a wonderful gift.

We Don't Need to Fear

As always, worrying doesn’t change anything and is not glorifying to God. We must remember not to focus on our circumstances because we can easily become fearful. Fear invites the enemy to paint an ugly, gloomy picture of our lives. The fear of man brings a snare, but he who trusts in the LORD will be exalted. - Proverbs 29:25 (NASB)

He is Our Provider (Jehovah Jireh)

All things belong to God. He has the power to give us what we need and enjoys blessing His children. The gifts we receive including our own very lives are beyond material value; they are the gifts of kindness, love and compassion. Abraham called the name of that place The LORD Will Provide, as it is said to this day, "In the mount of the LORD it will be provided." - Genesis 22:14. God will provide. Keep Tithing Through Financial Difficulties; Give Offerings When You Can. I request that you continue to tithe on what income you have. Thank you so much for giving for God’s ministry at this church. Tithing is between you and God. According to our treasury its only 12% of our regular church attendees that tithes on a weekly basis. Would you please consider giving a special offering to Reformation during this time of the year? I had previously gone through a spiritual phase of life where God opened my eyes and brain to understand that He owns it all. I learned to return to Him the portion required (10%) for His church and am able to do this with joy. It is a blessing to give than to receive.

You have a blessed Christmas and Happy New Year.

Shalom.

Consequently, even here in the United States, one of the great challenges for our generation is to learn to relate the Gospel effectively across cultural differences and in the urban setting. Under the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, the United States only resettles those who fit under the United Nations’ definition of a refugee, which is a person with a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. US receive between 70,000 and 80,000 refugees annually. The United States resettles more refugees each year than all the other nations in the world combined. Refugees come from Near East and South Asia, followed by East Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia.

Churches do not remain static. A church is a moving, growing, living organism. It functions in the midst of neighborhoods and cities that change."(1) These changes present opportunities to your church, if you have eyes to see them. The population of the neighborhood around your church may be quite different than it was just a few years ago. Are you ministering to the new arrivals?

"In His sovereignty over men and nations, God has allowed the United States of America to be a land where peoples from all over the world seek a new life. Your ancestors and mine came from far away. The flow continues. Every city and every region of our country is being touched. Our churches are being given a marvelous opportunity to look on fields already to harvest, for immigrant groups are especially open and responsive to the Gospel.

I believe that there are great possibilities for growth in the church in the large cities, where old, English-speaking churches in changing communities have the vision to add people of color or other language group departments to their outreach.

Reformation Evangelical Lutheran Church is located in the Roseland community on the South Side of Chicago. The church was organized on December 2, 1885, as the Elim Lutheran Church and met the need of Swedish residents working at the Pullman Palace Car Works in and around the area then called High Prairie. Reformation Evangelical Lutheran Church grew from the merger of Elim Lutheran Church with the German People’s United Lutheran Church on February 15, 1972. As the demographics of Roseland changed over the years so has the membership of Reformation with African Americans now comprising 98 percent of congregants.

The church’s mission to reach out to Roseland manifests itself in several Reformation-sponsored programs. In response to the growing needs of the community, Reformation developed a summer lunch program in 1994. It provides community children, many from low-income families, with nutritious meals. Upon further assessment we determined that a need existed for assistance with medical care and in 1996 a Parish Nurse initiative was added to our programs. To further our goals of providing proper nutrition to children and their families, the church opened its emergency food pantry in 1998. Also to address the needs of seniors, a support and advocacy group funded by the Retirement Research Foundation was developed in 2000. The Teen REACH after-school program was developed in response to assist the community’s children with schoolwork. Responding to the behaviors of the children enrolled in the after-school program that Teen REACH staff was unable to address, Reformation began to provide counseling services in 2002. In our endeavor to lessen the Digital Divide in the Roseland Community a 20-computer lab was also opened in 2004.

Reformation hosts the Tumaini Swahili Chapel worship service in Chicago. The State of Illinois, specifically the city of Chicago is an adopted home to more than 1,000 Swahili speaking immigrants from countries including: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Sudan, Burundi, Congo, Mozambique and Zambia. Many of these immigrants stop going to church for cultural reasons when they arrive in the US. Although, far away from their motherland, many seek places of worship were they could continue to worship in their own cultural setting, and feel at home being able to share their diverse cultural experiences and backgrounds, and pass on these values to their children who were born in the USA. Swahili worship service has a potential of attracting and reaching the majority of these individuals and thus, is the sole purpose that led to the formation of the Swahili worship service.

You can expect to find a warm, friendly, and compassionate group of diverse community of faith. You can also expect, through the teaching of the Word, to be challenged to follow and serve God, of which is a wonderful experience. We are a people who are called, gathered, and sent by God into the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ beyond boundaries, culture, and class. At the same time our community looks forward to what God does and will do among us, we seek to celebrate our heritage, so that our shared past can anchor us in the traditions and wisdom of those who have gone before us. If you have any questions or would like to know more about us, please contact me at josephbocko@sbcglobal.net.

There’s something about serving others which gives me spiritual strength. Serving with our hands takes what we know, feel, and experience about Jesus and translates it into action that is tangible to us and to other people around us. James 1:22 says “Be doers of the word of God, Not simply those who hear. Otherwise, it’s like a man who looks in a mirror and forgets what he looks like when he walks away ''which I would find a blessing''. Faith without works is dead. Now, that doesn’t mean that in order to get right with God we have to do a lot of good works to get into heaven. That would contradict the whole New Testament. What it does mean though is that faith, real relationship with Jesus, will result in some tangible deeds in the world, or it’s not alive. If we don’t act on what we believe, then how strong is our belief?

That’s the reason why Reformation Evangelical Lutheran Church provides social services. We provide parish nurse ministry, summer feeding program, seniors program, out of school time program, computer training program, men’s ministry, youth and children ministry, women’s ministry, outreach & evangelism program and Swahili worship service. The greatest command of all is to love others. As I said before, Jesus loved us first, if He loves us so much, we ought to love others. Serving our neighbor is one way of showing that kind of love. "If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you." (John 13:14-15).

When we follow Jesus with our hands by serving, Jesus becomes more real to the people around us. 7 out of 10 Americans think that Christianity is irrelevant, and I think the reason they think that is because they’ve heard us Christians talk about it, but they haven’t really seen us do anything about it. We haven’t lived it out; we haven’t served them as Jesus would. In our post-modern culture, that isn’t going to show anybody Jesus. Words are very suspect these days. We’ve seen politicians and the media spin the truth, and unfortunately some church leaders have also turned out to be hypocrites. Only action convinces in our culture. As it says in the scripture, if someone is in need, and we say, "Go in peace, keep warm, and eat your fill," but don’t supply their bodily needs, what good is that? That’s why it says: let us love not in word or in speech, but in truth, and in action.

Because, you see, that’s who Jesus is. He’s a servant, God himself, who came in human form, who came to serve us. He taught us, he loved us by word and deed. He died for us to show us how much he loves us, because he wants to be in a relationship with us. That’s who he is. Emmanuel, God with us. He doesn’t stay in up there in an air-conditioned heaven; he came down here to serve us so we could know him, so we could be in relationship with him and others. That’s what he wants. No matter how contagious we are, and we all have the disease called sin, no matter how rich or poor, bad or good, sinful or sinless, anything that we might be, that’s who Jesus is. And when we serve we show that to ourselves and to the world around us. Incarnation, is the foundational doctrine of Christianity, God himself became human. It is such a blessing to have an opportunity and ability to serve others.

Lent is a special season of grace that calls us to a life of holiness and closer union with God by focusing on the events of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. As Christians let us focus on our moral and political responsibilities and keep ourselves in solidarity with the people in need.
The Gospel proclamation for the First Sunday of Lent (Matthew 4: 1-11) tells of the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness preparing for his ministry of announcing the good news of the Reign of God. As we begin our Lenten observance this year, we would do well to fix our eyes on Jesus, to enter with him into the spirit of those 40 days in preparation for the celebration of the Easter mysteries.

At the close of the 40 days, Jesus moves from the wilderness to Galilee. From that point forward, it seems that he is nearly always surrounded by people. Crowds gather around him. Whole groups follow him. They press in on him. We might say that people were always “invading his personal space, his privacy?” We also know from the Gospels that Jesus took time for himself, time away from the throngs, in order to pray. But the Gospels most often portray Jesus together with others.

Those 40 days in the wilderness were devoted to praying, fasting, and undergoing the harshest kinds of temptation. But the 40 days can also be understood as a period of intense preparation, a time for Jesus to make room in himself for all those he would meet in the course of his public ministry, for all those who would draw near to him, come to him, plead with him, ask him for mercy and healing and help.

So many of us live amid so much clutter, so much noise. We travel through life at breakneck speed. Lent is time to slow down. Lent is the time to empty ourselves not only of the seemingly never-ending stuff, sound and speed in our lives, but also of our pettiness, our prejudice, our anxiety, our fear. It is an opportunity to make room, not only for God, but also for those who come our way. How open is our door to those who come to us? Is there room enough in our hearts, our church, and our homes for those in need? Lent is time to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

To the question: “Who is my neighbor? Jesus’ answer is clear. As his disciples, we are called to attend to the last, to the little one, to the lowest and least in society and in the Church. This Lenten season, join me in committing our Lenten practices to making room for the stranger in our midst, praying for the courage and strength to offer our spiritual and pastoral ministry to all who come to us, offering our prayer and support for the ones in our midst who, like Jesus, have no place to rest their heads (Matthew 8:20).

February 18, 2012

RE: A LETTER OF RESIGNATION

Today, I am presenting my resignation from Reformation Evangelical Lutheran Church pastoral position. I have prayed over this decision for quite some time, and the Lord made it known to me that it is time to move on. This comes nearly fourteen years since I was called as pastor in 1998. I also served as an interim pastor for one year. The fifteen years here have been joyful ones as I’ve seen God at work in so many areas in this church, South Conference, synod, neighborhood and city.

Together we started after school program, mentoring program, emergency food pantry program, seniors program, computer lab, and advocate parish nurse program. Through administering sacraments, preaching the word and providing social services we have impacted so many lives. It is because of team work that we were able to achieve all these accomplishments.

I have accepted a full time position as the ELCA African National Ministries Program Director effective March 9th 2012. My last Sunday at Reformation will be March 4th, 2012. Between now and then, I will be meeting with the council to discuss transition matters. I truly believe that the best days for Reformation are still ahead of her. God has gifted you with spiritual leaders who will help to shepherd the flock during the time of transition in the weeks ahead.

Be assured that each of you will be missed by my family. Our friendship in Christ is not merely lifelong, but eternal. We will be united again, never to be parted, in God’s eternal kingdom. Please remember to pray for me and my family and we will do likewise.

In Christ,