Biblical · Confessional · Liturgical · Sacramental
Delivering Christ Jesus
and His Gifts for You
A confessional Lutheran parish and school in Random Lake, Wisconsin — gathered around Word and Sacrament since 1855.
Sundays at 9:30 a.m. · Divine Service
Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. · Divine Service
Our Church
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church in Random Lake, WI gathers at Sherman Center to receive Christ’s gifts of Word and Sacrament. We are a confessional, liturgical congregation of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, faithful to the Scriptures and the Book of Concord. Visitors are always welcome.
Our School
St. John Ev. Lutheran School in Random Lake has served families with Christ-centered education since 1855. Children grow in the faith through daily catechesis, the liturgical life of the parish, and a rich academic curriculum rooted in the Lutheran tradition.
Sermons, Catechesis & News
Recent sermons, Bible studies, and articles from St. John.
- Jeremiah Chapter 19
Last week the Lord sent Jeremiah to the potter’s house to watch wet clay wadded up and made again. This week He sends him to buy a finished flask — fired, narrow-necked, the kind that cannot be mended — and to carry it through the Potsherd Gate to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where Judah burned its sons to Baal, a thing God says never came into His mind. Before the elders and the priests he smashes it on the ground, and the word with the shards is that it “cannot be made whole again” — the Hebrew is healed (Jer. 19:11). - “He Had Compassion On You” Trinity 13 2026The lawyer answers rightly — love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself — and then negotiates the second table: Who is my neighbor? Jesus tells of a man stripped, beaten, and left half dead, seen and passed by priest and Levite, and found by a Samaritan whose guts turn with compassion, who pours oil and wine, carries, and leaves a blank check with the innkeeper: whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come again. You are the man in the ditch, and He had compassion — He came where you are, bound you in oil and wine, brought you to the inn, and paid it all.
- “Capernaum Needed to Hear ‘For You’” Friday of Trinity 12 (observed) 2026Jesus pronounces woe on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum — and says it will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment. Capernaum was His own town, the place He moved to and lived in; nearness to Christ is exactly what condemned it. What makes that same nearness a mercy at the altar rail is not proximity but the words attached to the bread and the cup: given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.
- Jeremiah Chapter 18God sends Jeremiah to a shop near the clay pits — a wheel, a kiln, and a heap out back of the pieces that didn’t come out right. The Hebrew word for that tradesman is yotzer, the one who forms. It is the same word God uses in verse 11 for what He is making now: a disaster. The Potter is still at the wheel, and the vessel is not fired yet — which is why He says, “Return now every one from his evil way” (Jer. 18:11).
- “The Sigh of God” Trinity 12 2026Of everything Jesus does for the deaf man — the fingers, the spit, the word of power — St. Mark writes down the sigh. A sigh is the sound the curse makes coming out of a human being, and ours do nothing: we can’t sigh a tumor out of a body, or our dead back to life. Jesus takes the whole weight of it into His own chest and breathes out one word. It cost Him heaven’s silence on the cross to say it.
