Primetime Lutherans

I don't watch TV...other than Friday Night Lights...and even then, it's usually on-line in 10 minute segments over the course of two days.  Ever since we disabled the cable / dish two years ago, I have removed television watching from my daily routine.  

Due to an exhausted family, I was able to watch FNL tonight on the TV in relative peace and quiet.  Imagine my surprise when, in the closing minutes of the episode, I see 

Coach Taylor thumbing through a With One Voice hymnal (otherwise known as the Book of WOV) at a church.  Apparently everyone in Dillon

, TX is Lutheran!  I just hope they get the new Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal before the end of the season.

Then, I caught the opening segment of an hour-long Dateline special about a murder that took place in a rural Lutheran church Pennsylvania.  I had no intention of watching it, but once I saw the teaser, I was hooked.  

It was a really well-done piece, even if correspondent Keith Morrison's writing was a little over-the-top.  The feature was on a murder that took place in this small, rural parish.  One of the members of the church was convicted of murdering another member, apparently because she was jealous of all the attention the ot

her person was getting.  It was pretty intense.  I really appreciated what Pastor Greg Shreaves had to say at the end:

God's grace is not beyond the door of a jail cell.  She's on our prayer list, and we pray for her every week.  We'll heal in our own time.  People are angry.  I'm angry.  But that doesn't mean God's grace is being withheld from her.  She's where she needs to be and I've learned, in my own way, that there is grace even in that.  Even in her incarceration.  I trust and believe that.