Redeemer Lives‪!‬ Redeemer Lutheran Church

A handful of summers ago, Mel Bock visited Redeemer with her spouse and two children. They had heard about us through a story about our bees on NPR's local affiliate radio station, WUWM. The elder Bocks serve on council and the younger Bocks delight us with their curiosity about the world and their thirst for justice.
For 16 years, Mel has worked as a registered nurse. The COVID pandemic has rocked her vocation and led her into an advocacy role she could not have predicted. I asked her to come on the pod to describe, from her unique vantage point, just what it's like to treat a COVID patient who requires hospitalization. I've heard voices from the medical community asking the media to share stories like these rather than only recording numbers of cases and trend lines. Yes, I know we are not exactly "the media," but with this episode, "Redeemer Lives!" is striving to do its part.
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I’m joined today by Vince Prantil, who with his wife and two children has attended Redeemer for the last decade or so. These days, he is a weekly volunteer at Redeemer’s Outdoor Pantry, and he recently auctioneered our wildly successful RedeemerFEST fundraiser for the embryonic Mental Health Resource Center being planned at our location. Vince recently has a Lazarus-like experience that he is willing to share with us today. 
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Before the pandemic hit, Tristan and Kiara met with me or Intern Mark Fraley, or both of us for an hour or so after church to go through a curriculum for Confirmation that is the rite of passage for young people often around their early teens to review and question our understanding of the faith tradition and then, as they choose, to affirm their faith before the congregation and have a big celebration afterward. During the pandemic we decided to postpone confirmation meetings till we can get together. Now there’s just a big review, bread-baking with me, and a session with male mentors of the congregation before the big day, which we are working on scheduling.
I cannot overemphasize how important these young men are to our congregation. Tristan (over the years, leading worship) and Kiara (asked to be baptized and then got all four of his siblings baptized too.) Shepherd and Joseph in the Christmas program, helped with the bees. They are beloved by the congregation and to my mind their future should be bright, bright, bright. That’s why I’ve titled today’s podcast “Young, Gifted, and Black.”
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When you serve as pastor of a church that worshipped an average of 30 people when you started ministry back in 2011, when conversations over closure were very relevant, you can forgive me for watching the numbers is the subsequent years of redevelopment. One little fact I love about Redeemer’s story in the last decade is this: our highest attendance for a worship service was not Christmas or Easter! Our biggest services where days when the children of a certain extended family were baptized: the Tesfai family. Brother and sister, now in their 30s and each with their own spouses and children, are part of a bountiful network of people who show up for baptisms! On those Sundays, the congregation never looked so beautiful--dressed in the colorful garb of their homeland, they packed the pews. Add to that sight the smells emanating from the kitchen below--a feast for everyone with the authentic dishes and homemade honey mead--fantastic occasions--some of my favorite Redeemer Memories. We worship a God of Abundance at Redeemer and the Tesfai family baptisms made that abundantly clear.  I’ve asked Solomon Tesfai, the father of twin daughters baptized here, to come by and share his perspective on a very full life.
Solomon serves as treasurer of Redeemer and so has his finger on the pulse of this scrappy congregation’s financial picture. We have a huge challenge before us--to renovate and restore our physical structure so it can face up to the rigors of ministry in decades to come. In my mind, Solomon approaches all of life--faith, family, finances--from place of realistic optimism. Abundance and bounty where others might lean into scarcity, lack, impossibility instead. Since so many good things emanate from baptism, I asked him to join me for this podcast: “Bountifully Baptized.”
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The Bible--and much of Western Christianity that uses it as its touchstone--is full of binary pairs of assumed opposites: light and dark, good and evil, clean and unclean, life and death, male and female. The Western culture that developed largely around the Mediterranean Sea--Northern Africa, the Middle East, and up through Europe--leaned into binaries as a key way to categorize our lived experience. It can be hard to question it or escape it--and many might wonder, well, why fight it at all? It’s simple, it’s manageable. Well . . . let’s explore that. Now Lutherans are known to embrace paradox, which begins to question the Either/Or of binaries (it’s either dark or light) by saying sometimes two things that seem opposed to each other can happen at the same time. Our shorthand is often “both/and” and the classic is that we are each, at the same time, Sinner *and* Saint. It’s possible that the ideas about God on this podcast reaches one step further: both/and . . . and also. And then some. Confused? Understandable. Better get my guest in here.

I first met Aaron Musser when he was working along with my daughter at Good Earth Village, a Lutheran summer camp in southern Minnesota. I drove the two of them across the state to spend July 4th weekend in Milwaukee the summer of 2016. Within minutes, Aaron and I were talking theology and the church and Maddi was quietly smiling to herself, knowing that this would happen. After graduation from St. Olaf College, Aaron moved to Milwaukee and began serving as Redeemer’s Director of Music in July 2019.  I’ll let him tell you about what spurred him to apply to seminary and begin preparing for ordained ministry . . . he’s completing his first year as we record this. I’ve asked Aaron--who is usually the voiceless technician behind the scenes--to get in front of the microphone for this week’s podcast: Joyfully Queer and Christian.


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