Yesterday I go to do something fun

Yesterday I got to do something fun — I was invited to go into a high school class and talk about Christianity. Now, that might not sound like fun to many of you, but as a Lutheran pastor, that’s about as good as it gets. This was for a comparative religion class at the high school.

It started off as you might expect — there were some kids who were eager to ask some questions and many who were less than excited to be there. It’s high school, I get it. I wanted to make sure that I engaged with the kids — or at least most of them, the ones who wanted to be engaged anyway. And I think for the most part we had success.

How do you talk about Christianity? That’s the big question. You have limited time and Christianity is a huge topic. I went to seminary over the course of five years after all, with one of those being an internship year. My first year was part time. And throughout that, we still didn’t cover everything — it’s not possible. So how does one cover everything in a little over an hour. You can’t. So I didn’t. I talked about a few things that were important to me — living out my faith, Jesus call to love God and love our neighbor, Matthew 25 (when I was hungry, you fed me, etc), grace and mercy, etc. I talked about the spectrum of belief related to Christianity. There’s a whole range of belief that I cannot begin to do justice to. I talked about Lutheranism and what makes it unique as well — the Solas, grace and what it means (you can’t earn salvation and how that’s counter cultural to the American mindset), etc). I…