Last Thoughts on Yesterday's Lessons

Yesterday the Bishop of the Florida-Bahama's Synod joined us for worship, since we celebrated 50 years of being a church. Our pastor created the service, including an interesting approach to re-consecrating our church and ourselves to our mission in the world. We had new members join. We had four acolytes, four little girls. We had a children's choir (also, all girls) and a grown up choir (yes, all women, except for my husband and the director, who also sings). I was the assisting minister:

The Bishop preached the sermon, and he focused on gratitude. Since it was our 50th anniversary, he focused on the gratitude that we should feel towards our church and the gratitude that our communities should feel for us. He reminded us that in terms of global disaster, the ELCA is usually the first to appear with help, and the ELCA usually stays long after other aid groups have left. It was a feel-good sermon, and that was O.K. with me. I spend a lot of time thinking of ways that I need to improve. I spend a lot of time worrying about the future, both mine and the future of institutions about which I care deeply (like higher education and the ELCA). It's essential to stop occasionally, to remind myself of all the progress I've made, the progress made by those institutions.

A Slide Show Celebrating 50 Years

This week-end, my church celebrates 50 years of ministry. I've only been a member of this church for 2 years, so I sort of feel like I'm crashing the party.

At last night's celebration dinner, we watched a 15 minute slide show. Various people have been going through the archives, a word I'm using loosely, and putting together exhibits, so the slide show was mostly photos. You'd think that I'd find the slide show boring, since I didn't know any of those people.

On the contrary, I found it a fascinating study of your typical, suburban, ELCA church. Here's the sign from the time when the church was still an LCA church. Here's an updated sign--now we're ELCA. Here are the pictures from the 60's, with more children than we can count. Here are the 1960's confirmands, huge groups in hideous robes. Here are more recent groups, 3-5 teenagers not wearing robes. Vacation Bible School pictures seem the same from generation to generation: only the haircuts change, but summer clothes for kids don't seem to vary much through the decades. Here we are on various trips. Watch people in the kitchen through the years.

One of the things I have always loved about church is that we socialize with all sorts of people we'd never meet otherwise. All socioeconomic groups come through the door. Through my time in church, I've even had meals with homeless people, which never would have happened to this middle-class suburban girl otherwise. If we're lucky, we attend a church that welcomes a variety of races, a struggle mostly settled, which might be akin to the struggles we face with homosexuality today. If we're really lucky, perhaps we go to a church that flings wide open the doors to transgendered people.

I must confess that the people in the slideshow seemed on the surface to be mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly dressed the same. Until recently, that's been the church, at least in the suburbs. But the church I attend on Sunday mornings is different than the church of my childhood, the church of that slide show. We're a mixed racial group, which isn't unusual in South Florida. We've got all ages, although not as many children as in the past. Some weeks, I share a pew with a person who is in the process of changing sex from male to female, and who doesn't mind talking about that process, which is fascinating to me. That person wouldn't have been welcomed in the church of my childhood. I'm sure there are plenty of people in my current church who are deeply uncomfortable.

But Jesus didn't come to make us all comfortable. Jesus came to shake up our safe little worlds. Jesus came to invite us to be part of a Kingdom where we'll eat with the homeless and sing with the transgendered. The Good News isn't that a suburban church still exists after 50 years, although I'm not discounting that achievement. The Good News is that the Kingdom is big enough for all of us, suburban or urban, any race, any socioeconomic class, all along the spectrum of gender and sexuality.

The Churchwide Assembly Decision on Homosexualtiy and the Ordinary Parishioner

A woman from a church to which I once belonged wrote to ask what I thought of the ELCA decisions on homosexuality and to express her distress about the ordination of a lesbian minister. I thought long and hard, and prayed long and harder, and wrote the following:

If we go through and quantify Bible passages, the most prominent theme is economic injustice. Throughout the Bible, we find prophets and Jesus and the early Christians telling us that what most distresses God is poverty; there are literally over 2,000 passages that talk about the subject. God doesn't require us to live in complete equality, so that everyone has exactly the same amount of money, but God does require us to work towards a world where everyone has enough: enough food, adequate shelter, a change of clothes.

We do not live in that world.

As I read God's word, I honestly don't find many passages about homosexuality, or sexuality of any kind. By my count, I've found roughly 12-20 passages about homosexuality. And I'm not sure those Bible writers were talking about the homosexuals whom I know, homosexuals in loving, committed relationships. Paul uses the word "pornea," which scholars tell us describes more of a boy prostitute kind of relationship. And the main piece of Bible text that's used in discussions about homosexuality comes from Leviticus. Leviticus is full of rules which I don't intend to follow, like separating milk from meat, and isolating menstruating women. It seems like a rule book from a very distant time, and I don't think that God intends for us to adopt those rules.

Lutherans believe that we know most about God through what we know about Jesus. Jesus trumps the Old Testament. And Jesus was very quiet on the issue of homosexuality or heterosexuality or any other kind of sexuality. But Jesus talks over and over again about the sin of allowing people to live in poverty when we could do something about it. Jesus talks about the sin of exclusion, as he goes about his ministry of having dinner with the outcast of society (women, taxpayers, the unhealthy). I'm not sure that Jesus would be a family values kind of guy. He talks about how we have to leave our families--and everything else we hold dear--to follow him.

In terms of what the ELCA has decided, I approve of those actions. I don't believe that homosexuality is a choice, at least not for most people (I have met several women who were terribly abused at the hands of men, who decided to only have romantic relationships with women). I can't believe that God would create 10% of the population, the 10% that is homosexual from birth, as a mistake. Lutherans believe that God gives us our sexuality as a gift and that we are required to not be abusive in our sexual relations.

Thus, I like the idea that all Lutheran ministers must be in either single or in committed, long-term, monogamous relations. It makes sense to me.

I also like that the ELCA leadership realizes that we don't all agree on this issue. I like that after decades of vicious fighting, we've agreed that we can disagree. If church members don't want to have a lesbian minister, the Bishop or the national leadership will not require it.

Again, I think that if we could have a conversation with God, God would not be as distressed about homosexuality or abortion or divorce or those other social issues which have divided the church recently. I think that God would be horrified at the rising inequality between rich and poor in our world. I think that God would be interested in hearing what we're doing to help improve the lives of the poor, whether in this country or across the planet. I think that God would look at my monthly budget and be very angry about the fact that I spend so much on frivolous things, while pregnant women sleep on the cold concrete streets down the road from my house and much of Africa suffers from war, hunger, AIDS, and weather-related ravages and across the planet, women suffer from unspeakable violence and we've never had more slaves in human history than we have right now. I imagine asking God how God feels about homosexuality, and God saying, "I really want to talk about the huge number of orphans in the world and how we should cope with that reality."

In Which I Awaken to FInd Myself an Official ELCA Blogger

No one is more surprised than I am when I ponder becoming an official ELCA blogger. In fact, when I realized that links to my blog postings regularly appeared on the now defunct website Pretty Good Lutherans, I had some moments of discombobulation. I thought back to the summers when my uncle would get so annoyed with me and accuse me of turning his children (my cousins) against the Lutheran church. I probably did. In retrospect, I wish I had kept my know-it-all mouth shut more often. As a 19 year old, what did I know about spiritual yearnings and needs that might be filled by organized religion?

My grandfather was a Lutheran minister, and I've always said my mom would have been one too, if they had been ordaining women in the early 1960's, when she finished her undergraduate degree. She's spent much of her life working for the Lutheran church as a musician and lay leader. My family spent much of my childhood in church. We were that family who went to church even when we went on vacation. I hated the sameness of the liturgy week after week. Now, of course, I see the value of repetition. I hated the hypocrisy that I thought I saw. Now I'm old enough to know that what I see as hypocrisy may not be the complete picture.

I remember my grandmother asked me once if she and my grandfather did something to turn me off of church. I hate that I caused her that pain, but I did stop having much to do with church during the decade of my 20's. It wasn't her fault. I just wanted a break.

People often ask me if I think that people can lead a moral life with no spiritual grounding. Well, sure, I reply, but I think it's harder. We don't live in a culture that encourages and rewards morality. For me, one of the values of church is the weekly reminder that I'm called to a different mission/life/outlook than the world would have me believe.

But I digress.

I had been reading blogs for years before I started blogging. I especially loved spiritual blogs, but I hesitated to start writing one myself. I worried about all the wide variety of people who might stumble across it and be offended. I worried that I might damage my chance at possible future jobs. I worried about the fact that I didn't have a seminary degree (although in some ways, my literature Ph.D. has given me firm spiritual roots of a different sort). I worried about having enough to say.

Finally, I took the plunge because I just couldn't NOT do it anymore. And to my surprise, people have showed up to read what I've written. And some days, I get links!

Still, it was a complete surprise to me when Jan Rizzo of the ELCA asked me to be an official blogger for a site that the ELCA was creating. I first said to myself, "This must be a mistake. I haven't been to seminary. I'm not worthy."

Once I worked through all my weird emotions, I wrote back to accept the offer. I wrote one blog entry, but the site wasn't up, so I didn't announce the fact that I'd been chosen as an ELCA blogger. I wrote the second blog post, but the site still wasn't up. I began to wonder if it would happen. I didn't regret writing the blog postings; after all, if the Church didn't use them, I'd just post them on my own blogs.

Yesterday, I got the news that the blog part of the site is up and running at http://www.livinglutheran.com/. If you go to the site it looks like we've all been posting since August.

I've written two posts. My first assignment was to write about Lutheran spirituality and what it means to be Lutheran. It's posted here. I decided to focus on the Lutheran concept of grace, which I think sets us apart throughout Protestantism--and in some ways, gives us more with which to wrestle. Why be good if God will forgive/love us anyway? You can read the whole text wherein I talk about the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard: "But what if we changed the metaphor? What if instead of laboring in a vineyard, we talked about people at a party? The people who get there early get the freshest food and their choice of drinks. They get to enjoy the party for more hours than the people who stagger in late."

My second assignment was to write about vocation, so in this post, I focused on my childhood love of heroes like Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman and with feeling like I'm not living up to my full potential: "Many of us feel that some jobs are more spiritual than others. I used to think that monks and pastors enjoy more spiritually important jobs. But now I realize that we all have the same task. For many people who will never darken the door of a church, the only face of Christ they will see will be the face of Christians out in the world."

My next assignment is to write about the daily spiritual practices of Martin Luther and what they might mean for modern people. When that's posted, of course, I'll link here.

My life has taken me to many places which would surprise my younger self. Imagine my sneering adolescent self, sunk deep in her Nietzsche phase, imagine how shocked she would be to discover that decades later, she would be an official ELCA blogger. It makes me wonder what to expect for the next 20 years--what surprises are in store?

Meditation on This Week's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, October 10, 2010:

First Reading: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

Psalm: Psalm 111

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 66:1-11 (Psalm 66:1-12 NRSV)

Second Reading: 2 Timothy 2:8-15

Gospel: Luke 17:11-19

It's always interesting to see what other theologians focus upon for each week's Gospel. This week, I'm surprised by how many scholars focus on the fact that Jesus sent the lepers off to the priests, and they were cured while they were on their way. Why didn't Jesus just heal them there? Did it have something to do with purity laws? Did it have something to do with the larger society needing to be part of receiving the previously outcast? Was Jesus trying to include the religious institutions of his day in his vision for the world? Apparently, these types of questions fascinate many theologians.

These questions don't interest me as much as what happens later. Ten lepers leave and only one comes back to say thank you. And the one who comes back to say thank you is a Samaritan, one of the lowest of the low in Jesus' society--the one you wouldn't expect to come back and say thank you. Notice that the 9 lepers weren't punished for their ingratitude. But Jesus does notice their ingratitude.

We've spent a lot of time wrestling with texts which offer us guidelines for discipleship which may seem close to impossible for modern people to follow: give away our wealth? Surely Jesus didn't mean that.

Today's Gospel gives us a task which should be easier. We need to practice gratitude. It seems like it should be such an easy thing, but some people find it easier to give away their money than to be grateful. We focus on the prayers that we perceive of as unanswered. We find ourselves obsessing over people who seem to receive better blessings than we do. We nurse our disappointments, our hurt, our anger. We are in spiritually dangerous territory when we do this.

If you can pray no other prayer, get into the habit of saying thank you. If you think you have nothing over which you'd like to offer thanks, think again. Do your body parts work as well as can be expected? Even if you're not in the best health, you can probably focus on something that's a blessing. I'd like to be naturally willow thin, but I never have been. I could spend a lot of time making myself miserable over that, or I could focus on my genetic predisposition for low blood cholesterol and low blood pressure and say a prayer of thanks. Once I saw Arthur Ashe on the Phil Donahue show, where he had appeared to talk about his recent diagnosis: he had AIDS. But he seemed so cheerful, and when asked about that, he said that he focused on what his body could do. He grinned and said, "I've never had a cavity." If only more of us could follow his large-spirited lead.

When you think about what's lacking in your life, you might focus on your lack of funds. But compared to the rest of the world, you've extremely wealthy. Want to know just how wealthy? Go to http://www.globalrichlist.com/ to see. Even if you're in the lower tiers of poverty in the US, you're still fairly well off compared to the rest of the world. You're still likely to have safe water and electricity and some sort of roof over your head--even a TV!

My friend Sue used to do a type of gratitude exercise with her children. When they saw a magnificent sunset or a field of flowers or a tree ablaze in autumnal leaves, they’d yell, “Great show God!” It could be a bit startling if you were the one driving the car and not expecting this outburst. Yet the spirit was infectious. Even today, when I see something beautiful in nature, I murmur, “Great show, God.”

The beautiful thing about cultivating a garden of gratitude is that it opens our hearts in a unique way. Being grateful can lead to those other spiritual disciplines that seem so hard taken out of context. We’re saying “Thank you” more often, which puts us in a space where prayer comes more naturally. We are aware of all the blessings that we have and we’re more inclined to share. Our hearts and our brains and our hands move in unison to work with God to create the kind of reality that God wants for each of us to experience.

Noah, He Built Him an Arky-Arky

On Sunday, our Sunday School Improv team took on the story of Noah. We gave the children puppets, so that they could act out the act of going into the ark. We had some children act as rain clouds. We had a child who played the dove.

We did not sing the song that lasts forever, the one about Noah, Who Built Him an Arky-Arky Out of Hickory Barky-Barky. We ended up with extra time, and I wished that I had looked up the lyrics. I still remember some of them, but not all of them.

To me, that's the message here. The things we teach children really do stick. I can sing all sorts of songs that I learned in Sunday School. I remember a 5th grade teacher teaching us that men have one less rib than women, because Adam had to give up one of his ribs. You probably say, "Surely he was joking." He seemed serious to me, so much so that when I got to Biology and Anatomy classes later, I was a bit shocked to find out that we all have the same amount of ribs in our ribcage, unless something strange and/or dreadful has happened.

I'm always amazed at how much children seem to love Vacation Bible School. It seems a bit too much like school to me, full of boring worksheets. But I forget how much some children love those kind of things.

I love this Sunday School experiment that we're doing. We stay energized and fresh; I'm rereading some of these Bible stories for the first time in a very long time. I'm in charge of the week that we do Jacob and Esau. I'd forgotten how much deception was in those stories. My approach will be to remind the children that we don't need to trick God into blessing us, that we don't have to worry about God liking someone else better than us.

For me, the ultimate Good News in these stories is that God loves us, and even with our imperfections, God has a good use for us. That's the message that I hope our youth remember into adulthood.

Blessing Our Pets in Church

Across the country this week-end, many churches will be having services to bless pets. We do this ostensibly to celebrate the life of St. Francis, although I think a pet blessing service trivializes the life of St. Francis (I wrote about it a year ago here). Today, I'd like to think about pets and whether or not we should have a service to bless them.

I once attended a church that incorporated the pet blessing into the regular service, which meant that we all attended church with a variety of animals that day. I confess to being nervous. What if some of those less-friendly animals got loose? What if someone in the church was deathly allergic to the hair of one of those animals? I was deeply distracted that day and relieved to get out of the sanctuary. Worship should not inspire those feelings.

Many churches do a separate service these days. That means that people like me can avoid the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate animals, and if I lived by myself, I might want a pet for companionship--but only if I worked fewer hours and travelled less.

Moving the worship service to a separate time, and perhaps a separate place, still doesn't solve the theological question. Why are we blessing our pets? I'd ask a harder question: why do we welcome pets into our sanctuaries while not welcoming the most destitute members of our society? Let's be honest: what would your church members do if a deranged homeless person walked through the doors or a skinhead or a family who didn't speak the language of members?

Maybe a pet blessing service opens our hearts to those who don't speak our language or look like us? But I'm also troubled by the knowledge of how much money we're spending on our pets. Gone are the days when you'd spend a chunk of money for shots and that would be the extent of your vet bills for the life of the pet. I know people who cook for their pets because they're horrified at what goes into pet food. Yet I don't see that passion for food safety translate into other areas of life.

What does it mean that we spend so much on our pets and so little on the poor? What does it mean that we care more about the health of our pets than our own health or the health of our fellow humans or the health of the planet?

I worry that our pets are shrinking our human contact. I know several people who are happier to spend an evening with a pet than with a friend. What does that say about our society?

A good pastor could address some of these elements in a pet blessing service. A good pastor could remind us that as we care for our pets who are thoroughly dependent on us, we are called to care for the poor amongst us, who are also thoroughly dependent on our generosity.

Yes, a good pastor could make all kinds of connections so that a blessing of the pets service avoids insipidness. But I fear that most pastors don't take advantage of this opportunity.