Together Through the Storm

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for Reformation Day and Confirmation Sunday on October 26, 2025.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Well, I want to thank Pam Tracy for making it possible for my family and I to get away last week for some vacation time. It was a great experience.

We went down to Kirksville, Missouri, which is where Jennifer and I attended college at Truman State University. We did a campus visit there. We visited the church that Jennifer and I attended when we were in college. There were even some people there who still remembered me, which I thought was pretty cool.

And then after all of that, we also went camping for a couple of days in the state park down there. And we got to do some other fun stuff.

We went on campus. There's a sunken garden. It's actually sort of like the basement of a building that burned down 100 years ago. But in that sunken garden on campus, they say if you have your first kiss in the sunken garden, that's the person you're going to marry. And that's where I proposed to Jennifer too. And we did. We did get married. And we've been married for 20 years.

So we had to embarrass the kids a little bit about all that and be kind of smoochy and romantic. (Mostly me.)

The Camping Adventure

But we went camping out at this wonderful park. It's called Thousand Hills State Park. And it's beautiful. I mean, it probably does actually have hills, the rolling hills of Missouri and everything was still pretty green down there.

The temperatures were amazing. It was mid 70s during the day and like 60 degrees at night until a storm came through. Now, it wouldn't be the first time that we've been camping in a storm. That's not a big deal to us.

But this was a pretty intense storm that came up. And the same weather came through here. You remember last week when suddenly the weather kind of, you know, suddenly got a lot colder and it was pretty windy? That same front came through Missouri.

And when it came through Missouri, we ran into a hailstorm. And so we knew the storm was coming up. We were trying to get everything undercover. It was dusk and we had finished dinner and we were trying to get everybody in the tent.

And I was kind of standing guard at the toilets. And as the kids were coming out, I was sending them: run, run to the tent! And Anneliese was second to last of the kids out of there. And she went running.

And when she got almost to the tent, we took a U-Haul trailer with us to carry all our gear so we could only take, you know, so we only took one vehicle. And she accidentally tripped over the trailer tongue in her hurry to get to the tent and really gouged up her knee.

And so she's, but she ran back, you know, to the, and got in the tent. And then I sent Rebecca and it's starting like right as she gets to the tent, it starts to hail and it starts hitting me a little bit.

Facing the Storm

And we get inside the tent and the wind starts to pick up. The wind started to pick up and it started to rip the stakes out of the ground.

The rain fly on our enormous tent. (We have what they call an eight person tent, which means it barely sleeps six.) And it started to pull on the stakes that were guy lines to held our tent down.

And then the hail began. And this was not tiny little hailstones. This was marble sized hail. And it came thundering down on us.

And because the rain fly had come loose, the water began to leak into the tent, right? And the water was began trickling into the tent and it started to rain inside the tent, which is the opposite of the point of what a tent is for.

And so we grabbed some bath towels that we had and we started, and I started throwing them to the kids and we stood up and we started pat drying the ceiling because we knew it wasn't going to take long, but if we keep the rainwater out of the tent long enough, we knew we were going to be okay.

Anneliese had a towel, and I'm really proud of her because she had this towel and she was, originally she was using the towel to staunch the flow of blood from her knee. I mean, she was bleeding like a stuck pig. It was crazy. And then this, she's taking this bloody towel and then she's dabbing it on the ceiling and then she's putting it back on her leg and she's dabbing it on the ceiling. It was wild!

It was about 15 minutes of this. So loud that we're shouting at each other inside this tent to be heard as the hail comes pounding down.

Lessons from the Tent

And even though that tent was not perfect - it wasn't perfect when we put it up and we didn't put it up perfectly - even though the hailstorm came and it was far more than that tent was rated for, even though the bathtub floor of that tent, which is intended to keep the water out, did a really good job at keeping it in. And even though I had a fairly cold and somewhat damp night that night, in my sleeping bag, it was okay.

In fact, as the storm was pounding down on the tent, we were all laughing! As we're blotting up blood and staunching the flow of water into the tent that threatened to overwhelm us, we were having an amazing time! Why? Because we knew it was going to be okay as long as we were together.

And it was. The hail stopped. The storm trailed off. I went out and got a first aid kit and we used a better thing than just a bath towel to pack into a bandage up Anneliese. And it was okay.

Not because the tent was perfect. Not because the way that we had set things up was exactly the way it ought to be. But because we were together. And we were family.

Confirmation Sunday

Today we are gathered to confirm seven more young people into the confirmed membership of our church. And as we confirm them, what we're doing is we are saying to these seven young people who are now, who have been our members, they have been baptized into Christ. They have all of the promises of God already applied to them in the water and the word in baptism.

But now, as they come now to the altar, they are proclaiming their own faith. They're declaring that they have been baptized into Christ. They have learned what we believe. That they are a fully mature part of this family of faith. They're declaring that when the rain starts and the hail starts to pour, they will be with us. They will be our family. And they will help us staunch the flow of waters that always threaten to overwhelm us.

I had a conversation with a person this week who was telling me that they had been really hurt by the church. Not this church in particular, but hurt by church. And they felt like the church was a place that wasn't perfect. And I was able to tell this person, they're right. The church isn't perfect. But it's redeemed.

It's not about our righteousness, but it's about what God has done for us. It wasn't about how good a tent we had bought or how well we had installed. It's a Coleman, folks, it wasn't anything fancy. It was about us being together and making the best use of what we had been given in order to make it through the storm.

This is what church is. A collection of sinners gathered together so that we might be family to one another as we pursue fidelity to our Lord Jesus Christ. Not because we are a place where all the saints gather to be perfect, but because this is a hospital for sinners. Not because we have it all together, but because we know we don't.

Biblical Insights

And for that then, in the light of that confession, when St. Paul teaches us that we are not justified by works of the law, he puts it this way in verse 28 of our reading today, "for we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law."

We recognize in that that it's not about how good a tent our lives have been, nor is it about how good we have done in staking ourselves to the ground, but that in the Gospel, what we have is a promise from God, not that we can hold on to Him, but that He is holding on to us.

Not that we make ourselves right for God, but at the right time, "Jesus Christ died for the ungodly" among whom you are in good company. That you are justified not by how good a person you are or desire to become, but you are right. You have the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ as you believe in His promises.

This is who we are and who we are called to be. This is what we are about.

And today we welcome these young people to be fully mature members of this society, of this community, of this church.

Jesus said to the people who were following Him, to Jews who were believers, "If you continue in my word, then you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free." But these folks who were following Jesus hadn't realized that they were slaves. They took offense at the idea that they were to be freed, which means that they aren't free now.

And one of the critical insights that Martin Luther had is that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves, that we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone, that we haven't loved God with our whole hearts and our whole minds and with all of our strength. That we haven't loved our neighbors as ourselves. If that describes you, then welcome, because you belong here.

But then Jesus said, "while everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin, the Son can make you free." He's speaking of Himself. He goes to the cross for you. He makes you free.

Free from your sin and all that divides you from God. Free to live what it is to be truly human. Free to be a part of His people. To worship around His throne. To find your meaning and purpose in the One who gave Himself for you.

May you experience this freedom as we celebrate today, the freedom in the Gospel that we have been given through the Reformation, as we celebrate these young people who are coming to the altar to confess their faith.

And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord, to life everlasting. Amen.