Dear Friends in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

As we celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Lake of the Isles Church, I will be sharing stories that may have been forgotten or overlooked in the written history of the congregation.  Today, I would like to continue with the story of the first pastor at Lake of the Isles, the Rev. Louis P. Penningroth. There would have been no church building here today without him, yet he never preached a sermon in this sanctuary and only visited the church once 40 years after its completion. He was truly the overlooked good shepherd who had a heart for his lost sheep.

Regrettably, Penningroth was not dealt a good hand when he was appointed to serve at Lowry Hill Congregational Church.   In 1922, a year after the 34-year old, newly ordained Presbyterian pastor had arrived with his wife Ethel Blythe Penningroth arrived in Minneapolis, the church building at the corner of Dupont and East Franklin was destroyed by fire.  Although plans were made quickly to rebuild in a new location on 21st Street and Lake of the Isles Boulevard, the construction was uncertain.  Even with a burned out building, the congregation was not of one mind.  Critics of the location stated that it was too far away from the city center and would be forever isolated and attract few visitors. Some of the opposition was so hostile that, at one point, Penningroth arranged to have the church blueprints removed and protected in a secret hiding place in an Iowa farmhouse.  On November 8^th, 1925, the cornerstone from the old Lowry Hill Congregational Church was placed together with the new stone for the Lake of the Isles Church at this place in a service announcing that the foundation was erected and the basement appointed for worship. The ongoing conflict, however, remained so acrimonious that the Council refused to give him a $10 raise for his growing family. So hoping that by his own sacrificial act to remove himself as one of the personal sources of antagonism for the completion of the church, he resigned in 1927.  Two more years would pass before the church formally opened for Easter Sunday in 1929.  Pastor Penningroth was mentioned in the dedication booklet as the man whose vison and energy had brought the enterprise to success thus far, but he was also remembered as the pastor who resigned before the work was done. The congregation simply didn’t know the whole story behind the man nor, were they allowed to. But I can assure you that if there had been no Pastor Penningroth, there would be no Lake of the Isles Church.

Louis P. Penningroth was an Iowa farm boy born to a German speaking family on November 19, 1888. During World War I, he volunteered in Austria for the YMCA war relief, working with POWs from the Eastern Front, including Russian prisoners of war. It was from this experience that he learned Russian. Once the United States entered the war, in April 1917 Penningroth was expelled from Austria.. He returned to the United States briefly, then travelled to Russia to assist the troops in Moscow and St. Petersburg, serving as the YMCA Secretary of War Prisoners Aid. He was one of the last Americans to leave Russia during the October Revolution.

At the height of the ensuing Russian Civil War, Britain, France, and the United States secretly landed troops at Murmansk and Archangelsk in an attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks. For more than a year, these Allied soldiers fought a series of arctic battles against the Red Army. During this campaign, a number of Allied prisoners were captured. Since the Allied governments had broken all diplomatic relations with Russia, these prisoners of war were soon forgotten and abandoned by their governments.

Penningroth, who was serving with the YMCA in Copenhagen in early 1919, after the war in Europe had ended, heard word of these Allied soldiers still in POW camps. As a good shepherd, he felt compassion for them. Traveling first to Berlin, he met with the Inter-Allied Commission, seeking permission to go to Moscow to bring relief. They applauded the idea but declined to help. Penningroth got the same response from the American charge d’affaires in Denmark. Penningroth’s own friends and coworkers were equally discouraging. They said he was “either drunk or crazy,” and warned “you’ll be killed the minute you cross the border.” Nonetheless, Penningroth left Copenhagen for Helsinki, where he asked permission to cross the border into Russia. The Finnish officials said, “We’ll not stand in the way of your helping American prisoners, but we want to warn you. You are walking into the mouth of a cannon in going into Russia.”

On the bridge marking the border between Finland and Russia, at Vyborg, Penningroth unloaded his boxes of food and supplies he had gathered for the Allied POW’s.  A Bolshevik officer in a heavy leather coat appeared at the other end of the bridge. Penningroth’s Finnish guide said, “We have turned people over to him and never heard from them again.” He handed Penningroth’s passport to the Bolshevik officer, who took it and waved for Penningroth to follow him. Unsure of what would come next, he recalled offering a prayer that he might at least be given a chance to state his case on behalf of the suffering prisoners of war. But even then he remembered stories of men in Russia being shot first and then searched to find out who they were later.  After he was questioned, Penningroth was given permission to board a train for St. Petersburg, where he managed to get his luggage taken to the American embassy, manned only by its caretaker, a man named Ivan.

The next day, Penningroth was on a train for Moscow where he met with the Soviet commissar of the foreign office, Georges Tchitcherin, who granted him a permit to go the camp where American soldiers were among the prisoners as prisoners-of-war. When he arrived, he learned the POWs were given a hunk of bread every other day to eat. They made tea in a homemade samovar.

After many days of visiting with the POWs and Tchitcherin, Penningroth asked, “Will you turn these American prisoners over to me, not as soldiers but as my friends?” Surprised by the request, the Commissar said, “It’s never been done. I don’t know what Lenin will think of it. But I’ll do it. Penningroth then asked for an equal number of British POWs, and the request was approved. The POWs and Penningroth then boarded a special train and, four days later, were at the Finnish border station Penningroth had passed through about a month before. The Russian guards were perplexed as to why 14 POWs were no longer in prison. They called St. Petersburg and were told to let them pass. As they crossed the bridge, the Finnish officers were willing to let Penningroth through but refused to let the POWs in because they had no passports or papers. After lengthy negotiations, Penningroth made a deal with them. “I am a Christian minister, and I ask you to take my word that these men are who I say they are, and to let us into Finland,” he said. “You can verify my story, and if by tomorrow you find that anything I have told you about these men is not true, you can take me out and shoot me.” The officers acquiesced, and the prisoners crossed the border to freedom. His final travel group included the twelve liberated POWs, one woman, and a bulldog abandoned by an American business man. In April 1919, Penningroth turned over the liberated men to the American and British ambassadors in Stockholm and returned to the United States.

Unfortunately, Penningroth, with his personal convictions that the Russian were still Christian in the time of the first Red Scare, was bombarded with anti-Bolshevik sentiments.  He was unceremoniously expelled from the YMCA for his unauthorized, political actions in Russia and was required to remain silent by the US State Department on his experiences abroad. These developments overshadowed and strained his ministry at Lake of the Isles Church which ultimately led to his resignation.

It is a remarkable story of valor and conscience which could not be communicated publicly until after the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the US’s recognition of the USSR.   In 2015, nearly 100 years after the historic event of World War I, and 40 years after his death, Penningroth’s full story of sacrifice and courage was finally captured in a novel written by his grandson Phil Pennigroth, “Fugitive Moment- The True Story of an Unsung Hero.”

Jesus’ Parable of the Good Shepherd never tells us how the brave shepherd was treated by his fellow shepherds afterwards when he returned with the one lost sheep.  We don’t know if they congratulated him, or if they told him instead, “Never do such a daring, foolish thing again. You were lucky this time.” No, we are merely told that the Pharisees and Scribes refused to celebrate when the lost sheep was found.  It is perhaps the most daunting challenge for faithful Christians today. You know that you are to celebrate when the lost are found, and you know that you are to be thankful when God finds you in the wilderness and brings us home.  That’s the easy part. But there are times when your faith and conviction and deeds may not match the opinions and attitudes of those around you. Your faith may have its price.  You may even be called to seek the lost that everyone else has chosen to abandon.  How you answer God’s call in that critical hour is the true measure of your faith.

My friends, Pastor Penningroth never considered himself great, but he walked in the footsteps of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and that empowered him to do great things. Amen.

May the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.