Our Saviour Lutheran Church - Vernal, UT

06/22/2026

Sermon for The Third Sunday after Trinity, 2026
God does not brighten the old worn face; there is no face left to brighten. Rather, He strikes His emblem upon you. At the Font His Name was spoken over you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the sign of the holy Cross was traced upon your forehead and upon your heart, the King’s own mark come down upon the silver. It is not the face lost in Adam; it is the Cross of Christ, the sign that you are His: bought, claimed, and current again in the kingdom. The emblem is struck, the image begun; still, the likeness is not yet whole. Only when He raises you on the Last Day will the face stand restored, bright, without blemish, forever. Until that Day you are a coin still being minted: marked with His Cross now and awaiting His face. Found, yet rolling again by week’s end into the same dark, and swept again into the light by the same lamp.
You are never a coin that stays found. That is the whole of the old Adam’s error: to reckon the sweeping a one-time work and the bag safe thereafter. On the contrary, the One who found you is finding you still, finding you, even now. Every Lord’s Day the lamp is lit again above you. Every Absolution is the hand sweeping the dust from you. And at this altar the King who minted His emblem upon you gives you Himself, His very Body and Blood, placed upon your lips, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. The coin does not buy its way up out of the dust. It is found; the hand of the One whose emblem it bears closes round it and lifts it.

06/15/2026

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity and the Confirmation of Kashton Kerry Bird, 2026
The work, whether in the oil field, at your desk, in your shop, or in your own yard, is a good thing; cows are a good thing, as are chickens and goats and what-have-you; the retirement that was earned over decades is a good thing. Families are a good thing; children and grandchildren: blessings from on high. Even extracurricular activities, such as softball, are good things, in and of themselves. God gives all these things, and gives them richly and daily, without ceasing. Yet when these very gifts are set against the invitation, against the Word, they become the occasion of the same refusal. The servant comes, and the Word sounds forth, “Come, for all things are now ready,” yet you are somewhere else, if not in body, then in heart and mind. And the good things God has given you shut out the very God who gives them. The gifts remain good, in themselves; nevertheless, their importance in life takes precedence over the habit of hearing, the habit of heeding the invitation. Soon, weeks turn to months or years, and the habit is gone.
Still, the invitation sounds forth. It has sounded forth to Kashton. He stood before this congregation this morning and recited what he has learned, the faith into which he was baptized as set forth in the Catechism. Even so, the Feast was not waiting on his outward preparations, any more than it waits on yours. The Feast is here, already prepared.

06/08/2026

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity, 2026
Beloved, Lazarus was carried; he had always been carried. And so have you.
Consider how you came here, to the very gate of heaven. You came to the holy Font. If you were carried there as an infant, as many of you were, then you know the carrying was literal: someone bore you in their arms to the water and the Word. Your parents, grandparents; your sponsors: those who loved you, brought you, unable as you were to walk or speak for yourself, unable to confess or choose or contribute a single thing to what happened there. They carried you. If you came later, as an adult, you walked on your own two feet; yet something arranged that walk: a word spoken at the right moment, a way made plain though you weren’t looking for one. You did not bring it about on your own, and you know it. The carrying was no less real. For the Holy Spirit had been at work before any of it, calling, gathering, and enlightening you, so that you arrived here, by way of the Font, the way Lazarus arrived at Abraham’s bosom: borne by what you neither perceived nor could have brought about yourself; borne, rather, by grace.

06/01/2026

Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Trinity, 2026
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” In the wilderness, Israel stood condemned, dying: the serpents among them. Still, God appointed a remedy: look at the bronze serpent on the pole, and live. So also you, the venom of your own reasoning, strength, and pride working through you: look. The Son of Man is lifted up. He has taken what you could not answer for. On the Cross, He bore your sin into death; on the Third Day, He arose, alleluia.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The Father gave; the Son descended, was lifted up, and rose; the Spirit was sent, riding upon the Word, blowing where He wills, blowing upon Nicodemus.
You know what became of him. The ninth hour has come and gone, the sun is nearing the horizon, and there is Nicodemus, at the foot of the Cross, a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes in his arms, working against the clock beside Joseph of Arimathea to wrap the body of the One he had come to negotiate with by cover of darkness. There’s no resurrection yet, no vindication in view. There’s only a dead man and linen strips and the smell of myrrh, and the sun going down, and the cost of being seen tending to Him. The night is coming again. Yet there Nicodemus is; the Spirit had blown where He willed, and Nicodemus could not stay away.
Nor can you, Beloved.
That same Spirit, riding upon the water and the Word of Holy Baptism, blew upon you, and you were born from above, from the womb of your mother, the holy Church, into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That Name has been placed upon your forehead and your heart. What you could not answer for has been answered; what you could not bear has been borne. You now stand by His grace, not by your own reason or strength.

05/25/2026

Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost, 2026
Blood and fire and v***r of smoke. The sun darkened. The moon turned to blood. Peter doesn’t soften it. He stands before the crowd with the full weight of a world under judgment, groaning under sin and death and the ancient enemy who wields power against it, and declares: into this world, this blood-and-fire world, your world, the Spirit of the living God has come.
Into your world. Into this one. Into the grief that attends you here today.
And then Peter recites the last verse of Joel’s prophecy, the one that answers death and the grave: “And it shall be that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Everyone. You, with your grief, your doubts, your prayers answered other than you hoped, your suffering that hasn’t lifted. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Yes, you, Beloved; you have been calling on that name. Every time you’ve returned to this place, every time you’ve confessed your sins and heard the Absolution declared over you by Christ’s own minister, every time you’ve knelt at this rail and received what Christ gives, you’ve been calling. The name of the Lord has been on your lips and in your heart, given there at your baptism, when water was poured and the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit was placed upon you and made yours: yours to call upon, yours to cling to, yours on the days when everything gives way.

05/21/2026

The Funeral of Michael David Goddard
Michael spent years going out into the dark toward the lost, carrying out those who couldn’t carry themselves; he knew what it took to find someone and bring them home. Yet Michael himself had been found, not on a mountainside; rather, in the waters of Holy Baptism, where Christ named him, claimed him, and carried him out of the domain of sin and death and into life. There, at the Font, his sins were forgiven, declared gone by the voice of God. That forgiveness, that spoken Absolution, was renewed again and again throughout his life, spoken to him in this place by Christ through His called ministers. And at this rail, Christ testified to him week after week, month after month, year after year of that same forgiveness, strengthening his faith through His own Body and Blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins. Then, when the illness advanced and prevented him from coming here, it was to these he clung: to the Name placed on him in Baptism, to the forgiveness spoken into his ears, to the sign of the cross traced over and over again on his forehead during those last visits, the same cross inscribed on his forehead and heart at the Font on May 1, 1956. The promises did not depend on his strength to remain in force. The rescuer had himself been rescued. The one who bore others out was himself borne Home on May 12th. He was carried, from the Font to the last breathed Absolution: “My grace is sufficient for you.” It is. It was.

05/18/2026

Sermon for Exaudi, 2026
[Jesus said,] “These things I have told you, that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you.”
Remember. Not overcome. Remember. And that remembering is not left to you; it is the Spirit’s work. He brings to your remembrance what Christ has said. He testifies of Christ. “Of Me,” Jesus says. And the Spirit does so, not from within you. No, rather, He speaks to you, from without: through the apostolic word, the word that has come down through the centuries, the word that sounds in your ears this day—in this place, the word that the devil cannot silence, that death cannot stop, and that your own doubt cannot put out. Because it isn’t your word, your remembering. It is His.
St. Peter, writing to people who are suffering in their faith, at the hands of a world that doesn’t know the Father or the Son, doesn’t tell them to be stronger or to believe harder or to find it within themselves to contend against the trials. He declares something completely opposite. “If you are reproached for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” The Spirit rests upon you: present tense; in the midst of the reproach, in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of the doubt, the Spirit rests upon you. Not will rest, when you’ve gotten through it; no, now.

05/15/2026

https://www.ashleyvalleyfuneralhome.com/obituaries/michael-goddard

View Michael David Goddard's obituary, send flowers, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.

05/05/2026

Sermon for Cantate, 2026
“For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.” His going away is the condition of that coming. And what comes, or more precisely, who comes in His going away is the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, the One who will take what is [the Lord Jesus’] and declare it to you. Namely: the forgiveness Christ won on the Cross, the righteousness He earned in that perfect life laid down, and the life that burst from the tomb on the Third Day. None of it reaches you without His going away. All of it comes to you through it.
And so the unanswered prayers, the silence, the absences and heartbreaks that have filled you with sorrow: consider what may be happening in them. Not that God has forgotten you. Not that your cry has gone unheard. Rather, He works in the going away, in the dark, in the silence from which no prayer seems to escape. Jesus worked that way once, definitively, on the Cross. He works that way still. The darkness has not overcome Him. The silence is not indifference. He who went away into death for you has not stopped entering the dark places, even yours.
You cannot see what He is doing in it, not yet. You cannot bear it now, as He Himself says to the Disciples here. Sorrow fills the darkness, sorrow which threatens to choke off your prayers. Nevertheless, He bids that you not stop asking, even when the asking feels useless, that you not seal yourself off from Him who speaks into silence.

04/27/2026

Sermon for Jubilate, 2026
Thus, Jesus appeared after periods of “a little while.” Seven times the phrase is spoken in this Gospel—seven, a number which calls to mind the days of the week. So that we might learn what it is to live in that “little while,” between His coming to us in the Gospel and the Sacraments.
This cannot be overemphasized. It has profound significance for you in your daily life. It’s not that the “little whiles” disappear, or that the waiting ends, or—even—that you are lifted out of it. Rather, the “little whiles” are now filled: filled with His speaking, filled with His giving, filled with His coming to you. He comes in His Word. He binds His Name to water. He gives you His very substance under bread and wine. So that the “little whiles” are not empty time; they are filled with Him, for you. Therefore, when you experience trouble, sorrow, anguish, pain, and the threat of falling into despair, remember what the Disciples went through, and how Jesus taught them and came to them just as He said He would, with these words: “A little while, and you shall see Me.” Not as an empty promise. Not as some vain hope. Not as something distant or delayed. Rather, as something given, certain, and present, for He is here even now as He has promised to be.