Vacation Bible School and Me

Tonight will be a first for me. Tonight is the first time I participate in Vacation Bible School (VBS) as an adult.

For most of my adult life, I've gone to a church where there weren't enough children and volunteers to make VBS work. And during the summers that the church tried it, I couldn't have volunteered. I was teaching at night, and Vacation Bible School was also at night.

This week, too, VBS will be at night, which means I'll put in a full day at work and then go to church and try to be present for the children. I'm assisting with Arts and Crafts, so I'm hoping it won't be too difficult. I'm glad that I'm the assistant, not the one in charge.

I was asked to help back in April. Back then, my schedule in June seemed completely open. Now, of course, I've got a week of meetings and student surveys that assess teachers/classes and a personnel review. Back in April, I thought I might take some time off to be even more available for VBS. This week, I see the folly of that thought. Each of these meetings seems important.

One of my friends expressed disgust at the thought of Vacation Bible School. She said, "Oooh. You're not going to make them make crucifixes, are you?"

I said, "We're Lutherans. I feel fairly sure we won't be doing that."

I'm not exactly sure what we'll be doing, but we'll be using the Augsburg/Fortress series that my mom's church uses each year with great success. This year, we're visiting "Discovery Canyon." What does that mean? I don't know yet.

Of course, the real reason I volunteered, apart from liking the woman who asked me to assist her, is my own happy memories of VBS. Back in the 70's, when the summers stretched long, we'd often have several weeks of VBS. The sessions would last all morning. We'd make things and play volleyball and sing and do some Bible study. It was just part of those glorious summers which included swim lessons and reading stacks of books and going to the occasional movie and spending long afternoons getting sunburned at the pool at the Air Force Base.

Now that I'm older, I appreciate all the sacrifices the adults in my life made so that I could have those kind of summers. Hopefully, some child who comes to VBS this week will have some fond memories which will in turn, encourage them to volunteer, when they become adults.

Changing Church Service Start Times for Summer

We are not going to make it to church this morning. I feel somewhat bad about that. I also feel that it is partly the fault of my church. Today we start our summer service; we go from having 2 church services to one.

During the non-summer time of the year, we go to the 10:45 service. Some weeks, we barely make it to that service on time.

Now our summer service start time is 10:00. I'm sure we will make the adjustment, but we're not successful today.

I wonder why churches scale back in the summer time? I might try a different approach. In the summer, I've often felt that I have more time. It stays lighter later, and I feel like I have more energy. The tourists have gone home (in South Florida, our tourist season lasts from January to mid April, depending on weather patterns in the north), so it's not a hassle to drive. If I had kids, in the summer, many of their activities would dry up: no sports, no theatre, no test prep.

I'd be happy to devote some of that time to church, but often churches have scaled back their activities to just one service. I understand that in the past, people perhaps went on long vacations, and a church couldn't count on them being in town. Surely those days are over.

As I think about Confirmation and how Confirmation competes with so many other activities during the school year, I wonder if it might not make sense to move Confirmation to summer. Sure, there would be a week here and there where each kids would miss a session because they went on a trip, but it couldn't be any worse than during the school year. Could it?

Yesterday I read an article in The Washington Post which made a compelling case for year-round school. I could make a similarly compelling case for year-round church. Why interrupt our spiritual formation just because it's summer? Why not offer even more activities? If we do a better job of spreading out our activities across a year, maybe our church leaders, both rostered and lay, might not arrive at summer so exhausted and depleted--and for that matter, we could say the same for congregations.

Confirmation and the Church

I've only been going to my current church since July, so each holiday brings something new. This past Sunday, Pentecost, we had confirmands. I sat in my new church, trying to think about the last time I saw anyone being confirmed. It's likely to have been 20 years or more.

My last church was composed primarily of retirees, many of whom had been going there for 20 to 40 years. They had raised their children years ago, but still had memories that involved children and the church. Only a newcomer, like me, could look around and say, "Hmm. We have a problem here. Just a few small children, no youth group, no confirmation class." I had no solutions, but I attended that church regularly for 10 years and never saw anyone confirmed.

We had no confirmands because we had no teenagers. I know that other churches have no confirmands because of the stressful demands of modern lives. I started my own confirmation process in the late 70's. There were no other activities on Sunday afternoons. Nobody had sports practice or school activities. In some communities, most stores would be closed on Sundays. How things have changed.

When I was confirmed, everyone expected that we would diligently study for 3 or 4 years, that we would do this in addition to Sunday School and Church. Now, many confirmation classes have been condensed into one year, and the studies are done during the Sunday School hour. And I suspect that once teenagers are confirmed, we're not going to see them again for years, perhaps decades--if ever.

I've never understood why parents see Baptism and Confirmation as important, but they don't seem to see daily and weekly parts of being a Christian as important. Why baptize a child if you don't intend to bring that child to church on a regular basis? Why do we push children into Confirmation? I've often thought of my own Confirmation--at age 14, I was asked to commit to beliefs I could barely understand--but I knew that I better do it, because my family was watching.

Of course, my own life might demonstrate why we go ahead with these rituals. I went off to college, and wasn't part of regular church again for several decades. My involvement with the Lutheran Student Movement during undergraduate school and the Lutheran center on campus during graduate school meant that I didn't leave church completely. However, I didn't really return to regular church until I was well into my 30's. But I did return.

And I still wonder if there's a way to make regular church more like my campus experiences. Did we need to live in close proximity to have those Lutheran Student Movement experiences? In some ways, we were more like a monastic community in college: we ate together, worshipped together (often with worship services we created), and studied together.

My old LSM friends and I often discuss these ideas, but I've probably wandered towards a different blog post. I'm swamped by nostalgia. I think I'll be self-indulgent and dig out old photos. Maybe I'll be really self-indulgent and post one here and write a bit more about my own Confirmation memories.

Communing Our Parents

On Pentecost Sunday, my church celebrates confirmation. I'll say more about that tomorrow when I have more time. Our confirmands did all the communion assisting, which meant that some of them communed their parents.

Watching this process made me wonder about the emotional quality of the experience for both the confirmands and the parents. I wonder how it feels to receive communion from your child. I assume it must feel odd on some level--another sign that the child is growing up.

I know how it feels from the child side, although I was a grown child when I communed my parents. At the churches of my childhood, teenagers wouldn't have been allowed to be communion assistants, and the churches of my teenage years had professional staffs (pastors, assistant pastors, interns) to serve in the capacity.

At our recent retreat, I poured the wine for our Sending Service at the Braided Labyrinth. As my parents approached, I thought, oh, my, I've never given my parents Communion before! I found it deeply moving.

In fact, I found communing the whole group to be one of the most moving experiences of my Communion Assistant life. For one thing, I knew those people in a deeper way than I know most people; I've been gathering with them for 7 years. Another reason why it was moving was that we looked each other in the eyes. As I commune people at church, it's rare that anyone meets my eyes. But at the Sending Service, almost every single person looked at me directly. The whole process felt very holy and intense. I was very close to tears the whole time. Good tears.

The confirmands on Sunday might have been too worried about making mistakes to fully register their emotions. Or perhaps it takes years of communing before one feels the full impact of the Eucharist. Or maybe I'm just weird. I'll write a later post about the term I coined at Synod Assembly, when I told someone I'm a Eucharist Geek.

Mediation on this Week's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, June 7, 2009:

First Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm: Psalm 29

Second Reading: Romans 8:12-17

Gospel: John 3:1-17

Ah, Holy Trinity Sunday. It's interesting to look at various denominations to see how each one handles the idea of the Trinity. Some Christians are certainly more Trinitarian than others. I know that the idea of a Triune God is a huge stumbling block for many people.

As a child, this concept didn't bother me much. It seemed obvious that humans had many different sides, so why shouldn't God? As I got older, the idea of God being able to split those selves into various incarnations seemed a cool trick, but why shouldn't God be able to do that? I'd like to do that, but I don't want those other responsibilities that come with divinity. I'm working to be happy to let God be God, to let the mystery of the Trinity not even enter my consciousness.

Lately, as I've been thinking about community, I return to the idea of the Trinity--we worship a communal God who desires to be in community with us. I've always liked the symbolism of a braid, and Trinity Sunday seems a good time to return to that symbol. In a braid, each strand can stand alone--but what a more intriguing shape they make when woven together.

We might look again at the story of Nicodemus, a man who was a serious scholar. Jesus tells him, and us, that we must be born anew. We might look at our place in the braid of the Kingdom and wonder how we might be born anew. We are not that far from Pentecost. We should be listening for the Spirit.

I love verse 8, which says, "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit." My rational mind rebels. My rational brain demands that we make a plan, a plan for each day, a 5 year plan, a 10 year plan. My rational brain makes lists and wakes me up at 3:00 in the morning with worries.

I like the mystical promise of the Spirit. We do not have to know what we are doing; we do not need a plan--we just need to be open to the movement of the Spirit, a task which is not as easy as it might sound. God invites us to be part of the work of creating the Kingdom, right here and right now. But Christ tells us that we need to be born anew.

The evangelical movements have done a lot with John 3:16, which may be one of the most famous Bible verses. Many evangelicals can tell you the exact day and time that they were born again. However, many of us find this model lacking. Being born again is not a one-step process, when we invite Jesus into our hearts and we're done. Most of us need to be born again each day, day after day.

Now is the time for a different approach to this effort of being born again. We could greet each day, asking our Triune God to help us be born anew to be braided into community and Kingdom building. We could end each day by thanking our creator for the ways that we've been shaped that day.

Church Shootings on Pentecost

I was surprised to find out that the murdered abortion doctor was Lutheran. Actually, the first surprise was that he was shot while serving as an usher at his church on Sunday. It's become sadly common to hear about school shootings or shootings in neighborhoods. But a church?

I think of my own church, and I realize that I have no idea what most of my fellow parishioners do for a living. Of course, I'm fairly new to this church. In my old church, it was easy to know what most of us did for a living. Most of us were retired. Only about 10 of us adults worked outside the home (and there were only 50-70 people worshipping on any given Sunday).

As a teacher, I've come to understand that I work in a dangerous profession. Until recently, I've taught 5 courses a term, 25-30 students per class. That's a lot of students, any one of whom could be mentally unstable. And even if they're all pictures of beautiful mental health, it's likely that several of them are dating unstable people.

Still, I would expect workplace related violence to happen in the workplace, not in church.

And I keep thinking that the shooting took place on Pentecost Sunday. I wonder if the shooter chose that Sunday on purpose.

I realized that the victim was a Lutheran when I received an e-mail that had a message from our ELCA bishop. If you'd like to read it, go here. It's short and to the point. I like these sentences: "We pray for the courage to be peacemakers, rejecting violence as a means of resolving differences. We trust God's promise that neither death nor life nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)."

I must confess to queasiness over the fact that the victim performed late term abortions. I haven't done the research to find out how late in the term. My views on abortion have changed since seeing my sister's sonogram images of her son early in her pregnancy, and my views on end-of-life issues have changed since my mother-in-law's lingering death. I have always had respect for the views of Cardinal Bernardin, who promoted the seamless ethic of life, and events in my life in the last four years have moved my views closer to Cardinal Bernardin's.

But I still think abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. I'm still confused by the fact that we'll act to put our pets out of their misery as they're dying, but we don't want to do the same for humans. I can't figure out how to reconcile all my conflicting beliefs.

However, I certainly don't think we should go out and shoot people who are behaving in ways we can't approve of. That way madness lies.

For a discussion of the law and civil disobedience, go to Kirby Olson's blog post. For a background on the news element of the story and links for more background on the victim's life, go here. If you want some social science statistics about murder rates of abortion providers, go here. For a painfully honest and searing (and weeping-inducing) discussion of why women need/choose late term abortions, go here, which will also give you links to the first two parts of the discussion. In part two, Ayelet Waldman reminds us that women rarely need these abortions because they're flighty and forgot to take their birth control pills and waited and waited and waited: "I've continued to be open about this both because the pain is real, and I don't want to pretend it isn't, and because I worry that the bile-spewers like Randall Terry and Bill O'Reilly have managed to characterize late-term abortions as something women do on a whim. Like, 'Shit, am I pregnant? Thirty weeks? Damn, better get that taken care of.' But you and I are the face of late-term abortion. You and I and my friend whose baby had a fatal form of dwarfism diagnosed at 24 weeks. Or my friend whose babies (two of them) had such profound physical and mental malformations that they would not have survived more than a few minutes outside her womb." There's a reason why these issues tear us all apart.

Changing out Prayer Books

I use Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours for my fixed hour prayer. It's a 3 volume set, so three times a year, I trade out prayer books, taking book marks from one and adding them to the next one. Each time, I shake my head at how quickly time zooms by.

I've been using these wonderful books since Advent of 2005. In 2004, I went to Mepkin Abbey, and I really wanted something to help me pray through the day. I picked up a book in the bookstore. I was attracted to its small size. But each prayer encounter was almost too short. It didn't really replicate the Mepkin experience.

As I was reading Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary, I realized that I really wanted a prayer book that was calibrated to the liturgical seasons. I wanted to be reading Advent verses at Advent, for example. And so, I made the leap.

I'm happy to have also discovered these prayers on an Internet site, so that I don't have to carry the books around with me. Would I have bought the books had I known of the Internet source? Probably. It's nice to be able to pray without a computer.

Of course, some of you would say that you don't need a book to pray, which, of course, is true. But for those of us who need the structure, fixed hour prayer can work well. For those of us who can't figure out what to say when we pray, fixed hour prayer can work well. I love the idea of being part of a world-wide prayer web.

And of course, the Tickle volumes are just one of many resources. As I've blogged before, many people are rediscovering the value of this ancient discipline, people of many different denominations. Perhaps summer is a good time to try something different. When I was a child, summers at church seemed to be "a long green season" with nothing to break up the liturgical season of Trinity, as we called it then. Trying a new spiritual discipline for a season might be a way to break up that monotony.