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Dear Faithful People of Christ the King Lutheran Church:

A new Church Year begins at this Saturday’s 6:00 p.m. Contemplative Eucharist on the Eve of the First Sunday in Advent, and with that new year’s beginning we will be introducing what we hope will be a helpful change in our weekly email communications. Right now, there are two such communications, Monday’s Grace Notes focused on what’s going on in our congregation during weekdays and Friday’s Worship and Announcements focused on the coming weekend’s worship and activities. Into each we also add updated information and invitations to participate in our many and varied service and care ministries in our local community. This practice often makes for long emails, which are seldom read in their entirety. 

Beginning next Wednesday, December 3, 2025, we will add a third weekly email completely focused on our service and care ministries, on advocacy issues and special commemorations which we often fail to acknowledge, and with additional information on each month’s mission offering recipient, which will enable our newer members to know who and what we are regularly supporting with our financial gifts, volunteer time, and prayers. 

Our goal for each email is that each of these emails has no more than seven separate items. 

As we are preparing for our Nation’s Day of Thanksgiving, please remember that there is a Thanksgiving Service at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 27, 2025. This is followed by a Thanksgiving Dinner in our Parish Hall for which you are asked to register in a separate notice in this email. Given the divisive times we are in, I offer you the following prayer, based on Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural address, which I think you and your fellow diners might find particularly helpful:

Grant, O merciful God, that with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as you have given us to see the right, we may strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds,…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations; through Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. Amen.

I also want to invite you to attend Holden Village Evening Prayer for Advent at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday evenings December 3, 10, and 17, 2025. Those who wish are invited to join me for Advent-focused conversation following each service.

Finally, I apologize for failing to properly observe Transgender Day of Remembrance last Thursday, November 20, 2025, a commemorative day to remember the transgender and gender-diverse people who have been murdered in acts of anti-transgender violence. I know that whatever our politics, we all abhor acts of violence against any human being for any reason. I close this Grace Notes article with a prayer of remembrance from that day and with Advent hope pray for the day when the lion lies down with the lamb and swords are beaten into plowshares and the waste of our wraths and sorrows will cease.

God of love, you weep with us in our grief and fear. Enfold in your loving embrace all those in our trans community lost to death this year. You know their names. You claim them as your children.

God of peace, give comfort to those who mourn. Give courage to trans communities in the face of cruelty and harassment. Bring to justice those who perpetrate this violence. 

Challenge us, O Holy One, to speak out for those who are silenced, to stand with those who are bullied, and to go with those who face danger. 

God of wonder, you are beyond gender. You made each of us in your image. Be with us today and always as we long for a day when every individual is safe and known and honored.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, who brings us all together in one human family. Amen.

God grant you a joyous, peaceful Thanksgiving and a year ahead filled with renewed and renewing hope.

Peace and Joy – and Courage!

Amandus J. Derr

Interim Senior Pastor