Relevant Then and Now

Love keeps giving itself away, and that is why life continues.

The following is the sermon delivered by Ivo Kask during the Reykjavík church anniversary on 10. October, 2026.

When I was growing up, some homes had a special room.

Maybe you remember those rooms.

The best sofa was there.

The best chairs were there.

The nicest carpet was there.

Sometimes there were extra covers on the furniture.

As a child, I found those rooms fascinating. Nobody used them.

You could sit in the kitchen.

You could laugh in the kitchen.

You could spill things in the kitchen.

But not in that room.

That room was being protected.

The strange thing is that the furniture survived beautifully.

Ten years later, it looked new.

Twenty years later, it looked new.

Nothing had happened to it.

Which, when you think about it, is not exactly the highest calling of a chair.

A chair has a dangerous occupation.

People sit on it.

Children jump on it.

Skyr gets spilt on it.

Dogs sleep on it.

A chair that never gets scratched may remain beautiful.

But it has forgotten why it exists.

Today we're celebrating 120 years since this congregation was organised.

And 100 years since this church building was dedicated.

And when people celebrate anniversaries, we naturally look around and say,

"Look. It's still here."

And that's true.

It is still here.

But while I was thinking about today, another story kept coming back to me.

A story about Peter.

Not Saint Peter.

Just Peter.

A fisherman.

The kind of man who usually spoke before he thought.

For months, he'd been following Jesus.

Watching him.

Listening to him.

Trying to figure him out.

Who is this man?

A teacher?

A prophet?

Something more?

Then one day, Jesus asks a question.

"Who do you say I am?"

And Peter answers.

"You're the Messiah."

To us, that's church language.

To Peter, it wasn't.

It was the moment everything finally made sense.

The Messiah was God's promised king.

The one who would put things right.

The one they'd been waiting for.

Imagine working on a puzzle for months and finally finding the missing piece.

That's Peter.

Finally.

Now he knows.

Now the future is clear.

Now the story can begin.

And then Jesus says something completely unexpected.

He says he's going to Jerusalem.

He says he will suffer.

He says he will be rejected.

He says he will be killed.

I always imagine Peter looking around at the others.

"Is everybody hearing this?"

Then he pulls Jesus aside.

And I don't think Peter starts with theology.

I think he starts with confusion.

"Jesus..."

"Messiahs don't die."

"This isn't how the story goes."

"No."

Not Jerusalem.

Not suffering.

Not death.

Not you.

And honestly, I understand Peter.

I really do.

Because Peter is not trying to stop Jesus because he lacks faith.

Peter is trying to stop Jesus because he loves him.

He has invested everything in him.

His hopes.

His dreams.

His future.

And now Jesus is walking straight toward the thing Peter fears most.

Sometimes the hardest thing is not losing something.

Sometimes the hardest thing is watching God walk away from the future you had planned.

In 1911, this congregation didn't have a church building.

The first church had burned down.

So they met in a rented apartment on Laugavegur.

Two rooms.

People entered through the kitchen.

One room was used for meetings.

The other room was a bedroom for the missionary, a young Norwegian named Olaf Olsen and his wife, Alina.

During the week, the church benches stood on end there.

Alina was expecting their first child.

And when Sabbath was over, and everyone had gone home, she scrubbed the dirt off the floor.

Did your mind go back to that protected living room?

No footprints.

No spills.

No wear.

And then picture that little apartment.

Mud on the floors.

People coming and going.

Benches carried in and out.

A pregnant woman cleaning up afterwards.

Nobody in that apartment was preserving a museum.

They were using their lives for something.

Another story.

Olaf Olsen was a young Norwegian living in New York.

He sensed that God was calling him into ministry.

To do that, he needed training at Union College in Nebraska.

For a whole year, he resisted.

Then came a banking crisis.

He had savings locked in a bank.

He prayed:

"Lord, if I get my money out, I'll go to school."

A dangerous prayer.

The story says he was secretly hoping things would stay exactly as they were.

But after questioning him, the bank manager handed him all his savings in gold.

Suddenly, the problem was no longer the bank.

The problem was that the future he had asked for had arrived.

Four years later, on his twenty-fourth birthday, he was stepping ashore in Reykjavík.

He learned Icelandic.

He spent the next thirty-six years leading the Adventist work in Iceland.

People came to know him simply as "Iceland Olsen."

And he was the one living in that little apartment on Laugavegur.

Peter knows that feeling.

One moment, he says,

"You are the Messiah."

The next moment, Jesus starts describing where that road leads.

Jerusalem.

Rejection.

A cross.

And Peter discovers that the future Jesus is talking about is not the future Peter had imagined.

If these walls could speak, what stories would they tell?

I don't think they would tell us what we'd expect.

We'd ask about famous people.

The walls would probably tell us about somebody who locked the building after everyone else had gone home.

Somebody who taught children for twenty years.

Somebody who sat beside a grieving person.

Somebody nobody remembers except God.

We'd ask about important decisions.

The walls might tell us about quiet prayers.

We'd ask how the church survived.

The walls might say,

"You're asking the wrong question."

Because the people who built this place were not trying to create a building that would still stand a hundred years later.

In 1925, they turned down the builders' offers and decided to build it themselves.

Members carried cement.

Bucket by bucket.

One member, Loftur Sigurðsson, made the windows and the pulpit.

People gave days of wages.

People gave evenings.

People gave strength.

Not because they loved carrying cement.

But because they loved something else more.

Nobody carried buckets of cement because they loved carrying buckets. 

Alina did not scrub church dirt off her floor because cleaning was her hobby. 

Jesus didn't walk to Jerusalem because suffering is attractive.

Love is what ties those stories together.

Peter was not afraid of suffering.

He was afraid of losing Jesus.

Love is what makes all those stories painful.

And that is where Peter struggles.

The future Peter imagined was a good future.

The traditions we love are often good.

The memories we treasure are good.

The furniture that has served us for decades is good.

The comfort of being among people who know us is good.

That's not the issue.

The issue is whether we love those things more than the purpose they were given to serve.

A chair exists to be sat on.

A home exists to be lived in.

A church exists to be used.

For the city.

For neighbours.

For strangers.

And that is costly.

Not because change is costly.

Love is costly.

It takes time.

It takes attention.

It takes patience.

It takes opening your life to people who may complicate your comfortable plans.

Mission is never neat.

Neither was that apartment on Laugavegur.

Neither was Jerusalem.

And here is the part Peter could not yet see.

Jesus was not merely teaching a lesson.

He was not saying,

"Watch me sacrifice."

He was saying,

"I'm doing this for you."

The cross looked like failure.

But Jesus was carrying something heavier than the wood.

He was carrying us.

Our guilt.

Our sin.

Our failures.

Our distance from God.

Peter thought Jerusalem was the end of the story.

Jesus knew it was the place where God's love would be revealed most clearly.

And that love is for everyone.

For people who have spent their whole lives in church.

And for someone sitting here for the first time or rarely.

For someone who knows all the hymns.

And for someone who knows none of them.

For someone who feels close to God.

And for someone who wonders whether God even notices them.

Jesus went to Jerusalem because he loved people.

That's the Gospel.

Not that we give ourselves to God first.

But that God first gave himself to us.

So today, as we celebrate 120 years of this congregation and 100 years of this building, perhaps the real miracle is not that it survived.

Perhaps the miracle is that generation after generation, ordinary people offered their lives to something larger than themselves.

The people who organised this congregation are gone.

The people who built this building are gone.

The people who first worshipped here are gone.

But because they were willing to spend themselves for something beyond themselves, we are here.

Peter wanted to keep Jesus.

Jesus gave himself.

And because he gave himself, life flowed into the world.

That same life flowed through a rented apartment on Laugavegur.

Through people carrying buckets of cement.

Through ordinary believers whose names most of us no longer know.

Relevant then.

Relevant now.

Not because someone carefully preserved a museum.

But because someone loved enough to give.

- Ivo Kask