My children’s message for Reformation Sunday (October 26, 2025)
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Bring a ladder.
So it’s my tradition after the prayer of the day to bring a message to all of God’s children. And I brought with me something fun. It’s a ladder. What do we use a ladder for? To reach high things! Right. If we need to change a light bulb, paint the top of a door, hang some shelves, form a candy pipe for halloween that you can slide down candy or potatoes on Halloween – and it’s high up or you’re fun sized like me – you need a ladder. I wonder how we use a ladder. Have kids explain. Demonstrate – carefully – how we go up one step at a time.
One step at a time. And when you use a ladder, it’s good to have someone to watch and help steady the ladder for you. Each step brings us up higher and higher. You shouldn’t stand on the very stop step – that’s dangerous. And if we’re scared of heights, being on a ladder can be scary. But if we are careful, if we take our time, and if we do what we can – one step at a time can help reach us to our goal.
And that’s the general idea we do for a lot of things, right? When we’re learning to read or do math or practice sports – we talk about doing one thing at a time to get better. We’ll never be perfect – but we can practice – and we imagine we’ll get to our goal eventually. It’ll take hard work and patience to get to the top – such as being the best reader in our grade or the best player on our team. But as a way to encourage one another and to support each other, we act as if all areas of life are like climbing a ladder. And if you try – if you take those steps – you can reach your goal.
This idea has also sometimes been applied to God too. We imagine that if we’re good enough, if we say the right things, if we’re kind in the right ways, if we believe and are faithful and try our best – we can get closer to God. The closer to God, this thinking goes, will lead to more peace and comfort in our life. The more we do to be faithful, the better Christians we will become and the more God’s love will be made real in our life. Faith, then, is a ladder we climb to get to where God’s love is fully formed and available to us.
But my experience is that faith isn’t like that. We might, for example, get better at saying our prayers and hope that saying more prayers will make us, our loved ones, or our world better. And sometimes it does – but other times things get hard – or we feel as if our prayers go unanswered. We might decide to read our Bible since God wants us to read these Holy Words. But we’ll notice that we still get upset, still get angry, and still aren’t super nice to the strangers who come our way. We try our best to be more patient, more supportative, more like Jesus. Yet everytime we take a step up the ladder to get more of God’s love, we end up taking lots of steps down since being human is hard and none of us are as perfect as we know we should be. If faith is all about climbing a ladder to God, then we’ll always be climbing but not get very far. And that feels very sad, disheartening, and makes us feel if we should even be faithful in the purpose.
So, if it’s really hard for us to go up to God – what, if we were God, would be a more helpful thing to do? For God to come down the ladder. And that’s what God chooses to do. God chose to be born – living as Jesus and knowing how imperfect we can sometimes God. God comes down to us in worship, serving us at the Lord’s table, and granting us words that bring us a sense of holiness and peace. God comes down to us in God’s word through the Bible, preaching, and other words. And God shows up in the self-sacrificing acts of love that people show us and that we offer to others. God keeps coming down to us, inspiring and helping us realize that we can live differently in the world. The joy of God – the joy of being a Christian – and the joy of following Jesus comes from God coming down the ladder and into our lives.
Does that mean we shouldn’t try to be kinder or nicer or better listeners? No. Does that mean we shouldn’t try to help people grow? No. Does that mean we should be selfish and a bully? No. We should still try to be better but not because we’re trying to get God to love us more. Rather, God comes down to transform us into who God knows we can be. And it’s this insight – and making this emphasis at the heart of who we understand God to be – that forms what our flavor of Christianity is all about. It’s a hallmark of Lutheran Christianity which is what this day – this Sunday – is something we’re celebrating. What Lutheran Christians trust and hold onto is a God willing to come down to meet us as we are but who promises to not leave us where we are. And instead of going up the ladder to God, we lean into the Jesus who is already here with us – and we learn to love, serve, and forgive just like he does.