Quote for the Day: "Matthew as Story"

While reading to prepare a bible study for Saturday, this quote stuck out to me from Jack Dean Kingsbury's Matthew as Story. It gets the meat of the matter in a simple sentence:

In Jesus' perspective, the debates concerning law and tradition are all to be resolved by the proper application of one basic principle, or better, of a single attitude of the heart, namely, utter devotion to God and radical love of the neighbor.

-DS

BOOM Worship :)

Today’s worship in the chapel at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia was what I like to call “BOOM worship”. The onomatopoeia, “Boom”, really means nothing other than the pseudo-emotion that I feel once in awhile during worship. Sometimes this emotion happens during high liturgical masses, but other times (often to my surprise) this happens during unconventional worship. Some would call this Boom the Holy Spirit’s presence, but I think that’s a little too proverbial for me.

The Rev. Dr. Karyn L. Wiseman Associate Professor of Homiletics and Director of United Methodist Studies at LTSP preached and presided at the Wednesday Eucharistic service. There is always much to be expected when Wiseman preaches because she was trained specifically in homiletics and liturgy. I could hardly wait to see what the Spirit would do during worship, and how Wiseman would preach the Gospel and proclaim the Word.

Wiseman’s service did not follow the traditional Lutheran ordo, which led to an early reading of the psalm and the assigned gospel text. The text that was assigned was Luke 15:1-10, the Revised Common Lectionary reading from the 17th Sunday after Pentecost.

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." So he told them this parable: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, "Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.  Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. "Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, "Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

I was minding my business while Wiseman began to read the gospel. Suddenly, one of my colleagues (and friends) stood up and rushed out of the sanctuary crying. I was concerned and within 10 seconds of her exodus, myself and three others left the sanctuary to check on our friend. When we came outside to see what was wrong our colleague was smiling and told us to go back inside because it was part of the “thing”. We were all laughing as we went back in, though we were still confused. When we entered the space others asked us what happened and if our friend was alright. We just nodded and waited to find out what would happen next. When Wiseman finished the gospel and began her sermon she quickly remarked on what happened. This served as the illustration for her sermon. It was a BOOM kind of impact that it had on all of us because it was right there in our faces. She told us that this “experiment” has been done in various religious settings and most times no one moves because they are so focused on remaining in the place where they are “supposed to be.”

This text is often preached concerning the one sheep that is lost. Instead of preaching about the sheep that is lost, Wiseman preached a sermon concerned with the fate of the other 99 sheep. By nature, sheep are not intelligent animals, or they do not appear intelligent by our standards. They are so interested in sticking together that they would die together before they moved to another place without guidance of the shepherd.

There are so many things that we lose in our lives: car keys, credit cards, cell phones…. We are tied to the things that we have because we are products of a consumeristic culture. That wasn’t what this was about though. Wiseman had individuals place items that they often lose or represent loss on a table place by the baptismal font. Many individuals brought the usual suspects. I placed a necklace on the table that was given to me by my last field education site where I spent a year in ministry with them. It represents loss for me because when I left the congregation to move to another site I felt deeply grieved. This ritual action allowed me to reflect on my experience and to let go of the grief I still held within myself. Others felt similarly and were called to remember that we don’t have to cling so tightly to things. Likewise, we do not need to cling so tightly in a herd to people who look like us, talk like us, and believe the same things as us! The sheep that wanders from the pack is the bravest of sheep.

Wiseman encouraged the community to be brave enough to go out and stray from the flock. She said that when you’ve strayed too far the Lord will come for you and bring you back into the fold. This was an unconventional exegesis of the text, but I think it worked well in this community. The message gave us all a little BOOM feeling inside and encouraged us to use that BOOM elsewhere.

- LB

Pastrix - Book Review

Book Review - Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint (2013) Nadia Bolz-Weber - ISBN-13: 978-1455527083 - List price: $22.00

This book would benefit anyone who wants to read a memoir about an unconventional pastor. This book is especially helpful for individuals who would benefit from pastoral formation or other forms of spiritual formation. One should take heed if one is easily offended by language considered foul because the author does not dance around her words. She says what she means and how she feels, which adds to the overall mood and flow of the memoir.

Nadia is articulate and explains the plight of a pastor, but more importantly Nadia sheds light on the plight of every human person. The problem with sin and suffering in our world, our inability to work to God, and humanity’s utter dependence of the grace and mercy of God. Over and over again the author comes back to the theology of the cross in which her entire narrative is grounded. Nadia’s chapter entitled, “Clinical Pastoral Education” was especially helpful to understand how the theology of the cross really affected her life and ministry. Another place where Nadia talks explicitly about the theology of the cross is in her narrative concerning the earthquake in Haiti. Nadia states, 

“We choose to believe Jesus was there in Haiti. We know he was there. He was there. He was there. We will not keep silent (132).”

Nadia begins the journey through her recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, and moves quickly to her search for meaning. She searched for meaning in different religious expressions and schools of thought--Nadia eventually met a Lutheran Pastor, married him, and wound up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Nadia searches deep within herself. She pulls stories out of her deepest being. Stories of not only accomplishment, but she recollects stories of utter failure and seeming disaster. This further drives Nadia to her ultimate point. She, and the rest of humanity, are utterly dependent of God and God continues to come to humanity through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ.

I recommend this book with high regard--not because Nadia is a celebrity pastor in my own denomination, but because Nadia is entertaining, truthful, honest in diction, and completely captivating.

* Theology of the cross is a term defined by Martin Luther referring to humanity’s ability to know God through the cross--through the suffering of Christ, death of Christ, and resurrection of Christ.

-LB

A short look at accompaniment

Recent events in my life have led me to ponder accompaniment and its place in theological discourse. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America defines accompaniment as, “walking together in solidarity that practices interdependence and mutuality.” In Luke 15:1-7, Jesus tells the parable of the lost sleep, which brings to light a brilliant story of accompaniment. The proverbial exegesis for this text is concerned with the sheep that is lost. The shepherd is concerned for the lost sheep and leaves the ninety-nine other sheep to seek the one that is lost. This is not an incorrect reading, in fact, this exegesis gives comfort to those who feel lost and alone. An alternative exegesis for this text could examine the other ninety-nine. They are incomplete without the one sheep that has left the flock. It is not because one more will make the flock and even hundred, or because the shepherd will lose money because he lost some of his goods. It is important that this sheep is among the flock because the flock needs the gifts and the very presence of the lost sheep. Every sheep is important and every sheep is irreplaceable.

A ministry of presence is often the term used to describe the main work of the pastor at the bedside of the dying, the main work of the pastor called because three children have just died in a car accident, the main work of the pastor who has nothing left to say. Accompaniment is similar to the ministry of presence, but accompaniment is being there all along. Accompaniment provides a hand to hold through the smaller trials of life, through the everyday working and sleeping…. Accompaniment is standing in solidarity with those who are on the margins of society, those who are right in the middle of conflict, those who live comfortable lives, those who don’t think they need help, the healthy, the sick. The act of accompaniment is being with people no matter their circumstance. Accompaniment is walking the road of the broken hearted, the healed, the lonely, the thriving--To use a trite expression, walking in someone else’s shoes.

This mutual journey begins with little expectation. This adventure begins with no plans and there in the mystery a sojourn begins. Throughout this journey one gives voice to the other, one creates a holding place for the other to stay and rest, one walks with the other through mutual understandings, disagreements, difficulties, and bliss. Accompaniment can be combined with liberation theology to say that God is with the least, the last and the lost, but it doesn't have to. Accompaniment can stand on its own in the trauma and triumph. Accompaniment theology is a place of great strength, great learning, and marvelous growth for both.

-LB

A Sermon for Sunday

Luke 12:49-56

49 "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." 54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, "It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, "There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

---

When I read this passage at first I thought to myself, “Oh no!”

This text is one that is not easily preached on because Jesus is super dramatic and angsty. At first I thought... This does not even seem like the Jesus I know. Jesus is here talking about division and breaking apart families. I mean, I don’t know about all of you... but this just isn’t the Jesus I’m use to seeing.. and if Jesus always acted like this I probably wouldn’t be a Christian. 

If someone asked me to tell them a story about Jesus, surely I wouldn't pick this one! I'd tell them a story about Jesus healing or welcoming the outcast or kissing the leper.

I attempted to figure out why Jesus was acting like this. I think that Jesus was a little nervous about the impending doom of his death. I looked further in Luke and right after this text Jesus is talking about the stress that he is feeling concerning his mission and ultimate death.

This led me to really consider what stress does to humans. Jesus is God, yes, but Jesus is also fully human. God becomes a human to live among the people and ultimately save the people. We live in a world filled with stress!! So, What is stress doing to all of us?

During my time as a chaplain I met an individual whose mother just died. Whenever I would enter the room of someone who just died and their family was there I could instantly feel the stress. The woman who had died was on hospice and dying for about two weeks. Her daughter would visit her regularly and I considered her a faithful daughter. When I arrive, about ten minutes after her death, her daughter had just arrived. When she realized that her mother had died she began to cry, really cry. I was surprised by this reaction because in previous encounters she told me that she was at peace and wanted to see her go because she was suffering. I asked her how she was feeling, and she broke down even more and told me if she hadn’t done her hair this morning she would have been there for her mother’s death. WOW... What can I even say to that. I said all I knew to say... “You couldn’t have possibly known.” But the stress still ran high in the room and I could tell that she would carry this with her as she left the room that day. 

This is but one example of the stresses of life. We see stress in so many aspects of life. Kids feel stress, adults feel stress, the elderly experience stress. It's everywhere and it's doing a number to our bodies. 

Stress can make it difficult for us to get up in the morning, to continue throughout the day, to go to bed at night. Stress makes us eat, stress makes us starve, stress makes us cry, stress makes us cold, stress makes us sick, it makes us distant, it causes us to fight with people we care about most... It’s not good for us. And it was not good for Jesus either. This section of Scripture presents us with a Jesus who is struggling with his mission. Jesus expects the disciples to at least understand the “season” that they’re in... but they don’t get it. 

I don't think we get it either. We are distracted by issues in our communities. We see young children dying on our streets, we see single mothers and fathers struggling to provide for their children, we see people who don't have homes, who suffer from addiction, there's so much pain in our city and even within the walls of this church. Don't get me wrong, we should be concerned about these issues, but how do we continue to see the risen Christ through that pain?

I was feeling a little cynical this week as I thought about this text. I started to feel a little like Jesus. A little stressed... A little worried about how God is working among us. I felt a very real sense of division.

The division that this text speaks of is just the division that Christ tears down with the cross! Christ is tearing down our walls to bring forth the kingdom of God. Christ will work through our issues, our inability, and Christ will make all things new. It thanks this division for us to really see the goodness and newness in life.

I was at the ELCA’s churchwide assembly this past week where we elected a new presiding bishop and secretary, adopted a social statement, and approved various memorials. This work was exhausting but totally rewarding. Through this assembly, being among so many people that truly believe that God is real.... was incredible! It reassured me that God is still working and, to steal a phrase from the Ucc church, God is still speaking!! The Spirit moved through the conference center in Pittsburg and raised up leaders to embark on a new and exciting future.

Look what God is doing here! In this place!! Despite the issues we face...God is finding ways to make things new! 

Kelsi is about to embark on a year long trip around the United States bringing God's word to people through music.

Hannah is traveling to South Africa to accompany the people in her assigned village.. To be part of their community. To accompany people in their pain and joy.

God is using Kelsi and Hannah, but God is also using all of you, even if its on a small scale and in ways you may not know. Even when you don't think God is working through you, God is! God gives all of us to one another in love and service. Christ died so we could live. We don't serve our neighbors because we want God to reward us. We serve one another because we can't help it! The need flows out of us!

Over this past year I saw amazing things happening within this congregation! The young adults now gather to share fellowship which turned into an incredible community of faith. The new pantry church ministry on Tuesday evenings is feeding the bodies and the souls of individuals! The bible school that happened a few weeks ago lit kids on fire and helped them to see how God loves and protects them! So many things are happening here!!

We have a living, daring, confidence in God’s grace! God is moving and working within these walls and outside. God is making all things new in our lives because the God we serve is a God of resurrection! We aren't tied to sin, we can work through sin, and God can work through our brokenness because God is bigger than our wildest imagination!

This congregation has a missional heart. It sustains the community within and outside. The love of this community pours out of the doors of this church. Love is not for the faint of heart because loves asks us to sacrifice a lot, but the Holy Spirit gives us the strength to love and to be loved, to serve and to be served...

Amen!

Body Language: Distinction and Unity in Christ

Now the Pharisees, having heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered around him, and one of them, an expert in the Law of Moses, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment of the Law?” Now he said to him: “‘You will love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your whole mind.’” This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You will love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments the whole Law hangs—and the Prophets.” –Matthew 22:34-40, translation by DS

Go into any bookstore, and you’re bound to find a section dedicated to books on self-help. Many, if not all of them, focus on how to access your emotions. Our society is obsessed with getting in touch with how we feel. This obsession, more than likely, points to the fact that we have a hard time doing just that—getting in touch with our feelings.

But we sure like to think we that we know how, though. We like to think that when we get in touch with our feelings, then we’ll really be able to make headway into conquering the problems facing us individually and as a race. I’m not quite so convinced.

Last summer, I completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) as a requirement toward ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The purpose of this experience was twofold. On the one hand, it was about providing me an opportunity to get practical experience in providing pastoral care to people from all different walks of life and faith backgrounds. On the other hand, it was about reflecting on the theological and personal “baggage” that I bring into any and all interactions with other people, both inside and outside the pastoral relationship.

I found the CPE experience frustrating not long after it began. Of my fellow chaplain interns (that’s what we in the CPE summer program were called) and my supervisor, I was by far the most “thinking” oriented of the group. It’s no wonder to me—when I took the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, I scored INTJ. Out of twelve possible points, I scored eleven on T, which stands for “thinking.”

I’m a thoughts guy—one who thinks about things and operates on my thoughts about whatever matter is at hand. Many other people tend to be more “feeling”—F is the counterpart to T in the Myers-Briggs world—than me, and so operate more readily on their emotions than I do.

In my CPE experience, I was frustrated because I naturally worked in my head when others around me challenged me about being genuine because I wasn’t fully in touch with my feelings. Once I began asserting myself about who I am, Daniel the Thinker, and owning my cognition as integral to who I am, I found it easier in fact to delve deeper into my feelings. In this case, it was my feeling of frustration at “feeling over against thinking” that I learned to appreciate and articulate.

Part of accepting this component of my personhood was helping my group understand who I am—and who many people are. I used the passage from Matthew above to do so. When asked what the greatest commandment of the Law is, Jesus responds that it is loving “the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your whole mind.” It’s not about loving God with just your heart, just your soul, or just your mind. It’s about loving God with your whole being. That’s why it’s important to get in touch with your emotions if you’re a heavy thinker like I am—I can love God more deeply when I get in touch with the emotional part of my life experiences. At the same time, it’s important for the feeling types out there to think about their beliefs—what they believe and why they believe it. God commands us to love with our whole beings—with both heart and head—and embrace that wholeness as a fulfillment of the Law.

The church is made up of all kinds of people. It’s full of diversity. St. Paul uses the masterful metaphor of the body to refer to the church—the body of Christ. In his letter to the church at Corinth, he writes

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. –St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 12:14-26

We as the church must be careful not to privilege particular ways of approaching the world over another. We must be careful not to say, “Those who are more in tune with their emotions have a more genuine experience of the Holy Spirit.” We must be careful not to say, “Because I have the Holy Spirit, I have no need to ponder and think over the nature of God.” We are all members of the body of Christ and each members of it—members whom God calls with our individuality, our personalities, and our gifts. To some God has given the gift to be able to think deep thoughts. To others, God has given the gift to be able to experience the raw majesty, glory, and transcendence of the Divine in a way that our intellects can’t articulate.

We need all these expressions of God’s graciousness toward all of us individually in order to create a complete body—a complete body of Christ. The very diversity of gifts, experiences, and personalities that marks us a complete body, many would amputate and cast away as unnecessary, unfaithful, or ingenuine. Nothing can be more opposite or farther from the truth of reality that that misguided, inoperative assumption belies.

The unity of the Trinity—the three in one, and the one in three—is archetypal for the unity of the body of Christ, whose members are diverse and distinct from another, yet nonetheless one with God and one another.

God has called us, with our distinctive personalities, be they thinking or feeling, to love—to love God and to love one another. As a church, we are called into unity, unity as of a body that is Christ’s presence in the world, unity with one another and with God through Christ Jesus—whose unity with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit didn’t preclude his distinction from them.

Our separateness from another doesn’t mean our alienation from one another. Our diversity doesn’t mean our disunity. Our differences of seeing, experiencing, and recognizing our world and God’s love don’t mean incompatibility. For in truth, all these gifts make us more whole and reflect the glory of uncorrupted creation as God first intended—a creation rich in diversity yet harmoniously one with itself.

-DS

The Relevency of the Gospel

It’s not a secret that I’m a word guy. By my senior picture from high school, the yearbook has my “best known” quality listed as my “grandiloquence and lexophilia.” I’m okay with that designation. I like words (hence “lexophilia”). The longer or more arcane the word, more often than not, the more impressed I am when someone uses it correctly (hence “grandiloquence”). I have dictionary definitions committed to memory—sometimes multiple variants of the same lexeme (that’s the linguistic term for “word” for those who were wondering), and I commit a vast array of etymologies (another linguistic term, this time meaning “study of word origin”) to memory. I love to use words made up of several parts according to those parts’ original meanings, even if their not used quite like that today. Words are my thing, you might say.

grandiloquence - from the Latin grandis, "grand" or "great" and loqui, "to speak" or "to talk"

lexophilia - from the Greek λεξις, "word" from λεγειν, "to speak" and φιλια, "love" or "affection"

I say all this by way of introducing this post because I’ve been thinking about a hip topic in the church lately—relevancy. The term is thrown around a lot, but when I really think about what people are talking about, I’m unsure of what it is they mean. “What does it mean to be relevant?”—that’s the question I found myself asking over and over and over again. And then I ask myself an even more fundamental question—“What is relevance?”

Now, we hear in the church that the church is irrelevant to people’s lives. That the number of nones is on the rise. That people not born into faithful families they will more likely than not grow up and never have a Damascus Road conversion. That these sorry facts point to the decline of the faith. I could counter those claims by pointing to the massive crowds who congregated for World Youth Day with His Holiness in Rio de Janeiro. Or I could point to the return of young adults to traditional liturgical traditions—despite their oftentimes “liberal” social policies—as evidence that the death knell hasn’t quite yet sounded for the future of Christian ritualism. But those examples still don’t really answer the question about what relevance is. They tell us that someone thinks the church and its message is relevant, but what does that mean?

So I decided I could look at the word itself—relevant.

(Caution: the next paragraph might get linguistically technical, but bear with me.)

It’s an adjective that tells us about a noun. In our case, the church. This adjective comes from Latin and is made up of two parts—the prefix re- and the verbal form levant. This verbal form comes from the noun levis, which means “weight” or “burden.” The prefix re- on Latin words and their derivatives designate that something is done again or repeated many times. When the speakers of Latin made a verb levare out of levis, they used it to mean “raise.” When we attach the prefix re- to levare, we get a word that means to “raise again and again.” In the strictest linguistic sense then, "to be relevant" means that something keeps lifting again and again. In our case, we can say the church is lifting again and again.

This might not seem too helpful at first glance, but it holds breakthrough paramounce for us in understanding what it means for the church to be relevant. Let’s look at Scripture for a moment. Christ says

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” –Matthew 11:28-30

Christ promises us that in him, we will find rest from the burdens of our lives, from the things that weigh us down time and time again. Christ will lift the burden from us and take it on himself. We see that in the cross—Christ takes on the sins of the world to himself and becomes sin where he was not sin, and gives us his blamelessness where we deserved blame. Christ takes our burdens and makes them his own. When Christ was crucified, he suffered the burden of death so that we don’t need to fear death anymore because by his death, he destroyed death. He rose victorious on the third day proving to us, the world, and all those forces that defy God that life in its abundance is the original intent of this world’s creator and that nothing can stand in the way of that. We need not fear death because Christ promised us we will share in a resurrection just like his.

The message of Jesus Christ, the message the church proclaims, is nothing but a message of relevance—a message that shares the good news that Christ lifts from us the burdens of this world and frees us for life in peace.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for his deception by being made to roll a boulder up a hill each day only to have it fall back down each night for eternity.

Not a peace that means we have no worries or concerns about the day-to-day cares of living, but a peace that transcends human words and expression—a peace that gives joy when it resides in us and makes us a new creation in Christ. The message of Jesus Christ is the proclamation that in Christ we no longer live in fear of irrelevance, in the sisyphean fear of endlessly pushing our burdens before with no rest in sight. Instead, the message of Christ is the proclamation that we are time and again freed from the burdens that weigh us down in this earthly life and elevated to a higher existence knowable only in Christ Jesus. That’s what it means for the message of Christ and his church to be relevant.