New Houses from Old Bricks

How we ‘rocked’ Palm Sunday

April 18, 2011 · Bible, Worship, ministry, spiritual life · 57 comments

In worship at my congregation we try to engage all of the senses, but that’s not easy. Hearing is the easiest one to engage in traditional Lutheran worship; that’s what we tend to do best. But when we get out of that comfort zone–how do I put this?–cool things happen. Especially when the original worship plan doesn’t work.

Yesterday, on Palm Sunday, we decided to engage both eyes and hands in the experience of the Passion Story—Jesus’ suffering and death as told in Matthew 26:14-27:66. It’s a long story and difficult to just listen to all at once, but it’s central to Christian faith and central to this Holy Week leading up to Easter. Our congregation has experienced various and powerful dramas in past years as well as choral readings. But this year I wondered if our imaginations could be freed up to enter the story, and let it enter us, by a different use of the senses:

Hearing the story read,
Seeing thematic images and words on the screen (a palm branch, a garden, a rocky path), and
Holding a large rock in our hands as a concrete focus for our imagination.

Instead of trying to digest the story all at once, we broke it up with brief interludes from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, played live. (Many people in our congregation had recently experienced the musical when it was produced in town.) Those interludes became times to imagine the place our own rock might have in the story: underneath Jesus as he threw himself on the ground to pray at Gethsemane, for example. (You can read the script of readings and reflections here.)

Lutherans say we worship in “Word and Sacrament”—“Word” meaning both the Word of Scripture and the Word who is Christ—but people aren’t all wired to receive “words” in the same way. Some of us are much more visual than auditory, and some of us learn with our hands. (Touch regularly happens in worship through sharing the peace—handshakes or hugs—and receiving communion, which engages smell and taste too.)

But all of that is background to what I really wanted to say today, which is what I learn from such multi-sensory worship experiments. Every time you bring objects into worship, you open up Pandora’s box of what the objects will actually turn out to mean to people. In the context of corporate worship, the objects don’t always mean what you had envisioned, and people don’t always interpret your instructions the way you had envisioned, either. Continue reading →

Question-ing ministry, part 2

March 21, 2011 · Bible, Community, ministry · 60 comments

Also last year, we asked some questions about how people come to belong (to this congregation, in the Christian Church, with the Lutheran tradition, etc.) We began a brand new ministry called “Journey with Christ” (in the tradition of the catechumenate, preparing adults for baptism or affirmation of baptism), and we were also asking parallel questions in existing ministries. How do people come to belong to the Biblical story, and know/feel that it belongs to them? And, How do young people specifically—kids and teens—come to belong?

The second question was addressed in a new confirmation curriculum called re:form. Rather than being organized by what teachers want young people to know about faith and tradition, it begins with (appropriately!) questions: what young people themselves might actually want to know. Video segments that go with each session have titles such as, “Why do I have to follow Jesus, can’t I just say I believe in him?” and “Does God still create stuff today?”

Beginning with questions has made a remarkable difference in our Wednesday night confirmation gatherings. The quality of engagement and real-life discussion rivals any adult education I’ve ever been a part of. And, the challenge for us as confirmation leaders now is one that the whole church faces in every area of ministry: if we start with the questions people actually have, do we ever get around to talking about the Bible and Lutheran Christian tradition? For example, I’m used to teaching the Bible and Luther’s Small Catechism in confirmation—now, can I still do that (i.e. “teach them what we want them to know”) AND address their actual questions?

So far, I’m hopeful that we can. Which is good, because if I (and we) can’t identify the connection between tradition, Bible, and the real lives of people of all ages, then the church really does have a problem. As another example, in preaching I’m used to starting with Scripture and then applying it to life—but what if people’s actual questions don’t start with Scripture, but somewhere else? The dilemma reminds me of my favorite quote from German theologian Dorothee Solle: “I am often afraid that theology is answering questions that people are not asking.”

Could this be why it’s so important to pay attention to the questions, even more so than the answers? How would ministry change if we not only asked good questions, but also listened better to the questions that surround us in our various communities, families, nation, and world—among people of all ages? And wondered together what the Bible and Lutheran Christian tradition might contribute to the conversation, through individuals and through the ministries of a congregation?

Whose story is this, anyway?

January 4, 2011 · Bible, Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · 150 comments

As I’m preparing the sermon for this Sunday’s celebration of The Baptism of Our Lord, this line jumped out at me in a commentary on the gospel, Matthew 3:13-17:

“The writer of Matthew strives to link the story of Jesus’ life with the story of God’s people as told in the Hebrew Scriptures.”

It is often noted about Matthew that, of the four gospel writers, he is the one who quotes Hebrew Scripture most frequently, and perhaps that is why his gospel was placed first in the New Testament, as a bridge from the Old to the New. But that’s not why this line jumped out at me.

I think it was because, as a reader of Scripture, I am always looking for something similar: the link between my life and the story of Jesus and God’s people as told in the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. And, as a preacher of Scripture, I’m always looking for ways to help others find those links too. That’s not often easy, and sometimes it can seem almost impossible. But I keep looking, because the effort is always worth it.

With the story of Jesus’ baptism, the easy way to link our story with his is to focus on what happens last: God says of Jesus, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Then the preacher points out how God says the same thing of us at our baptisms: we are God’s beloved sons and daughters. Voila! Stories linked.

But that seems too easy. It ignores several major differences between Jesus’ story and ours. For one thing, Matthew’s point here is not about God’s love per se. It’s that Jesus is actually Son of God, in a way that the rest of us are not.

More concretely, in today’s churches (at least, in Lutheran churches), we don’t experience baptisms like Jesus’ baptism. The landscape is different, obviously. And for us, the heavens usually do not open. The Spirit does not descend like a dove and alight on the one baptized. We do not hear the voice from heaven.

So, as I keep looking for a new way to think about the link between our own lives and this story, I wonder if I might look here: The same God who was present at Jesus’ baptism is also present at baptisms today. Perhaps we get so focused on looking for the concrete links (i.e. Jesus was baptized by immersion in a river, so we should baptize by immersion in a river) that we miss the bigger picture: the God who was present then is also present now, doing the same kinds of things that God always does.

The work of interpretation, then, becomes the work of paying attention to the ways God is acting today: in this case, sending the Spirit and revealing Jesus to the world again and again. With this story and many others, that work is always worth it.

Don’t speak, just wait

December 6, 2010 · Bible, Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

If a pastor is going to get laryngitis, she might as well get it during the Advent season. At least there’s Biblical precedent for this combination of speechlessness and waiting in the very first story of Luke’s gospel: the story of Zechariah, father-to-be of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5-24). When an angel tells him that his barren wife, Elizabeth, will bear a child, he’s doubtful; who wouldn’t be? But the angel Gabriel is not impressed by the extent of his doubts, and those doubts have consequences: “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur” (Lk.1:20). And so Zechariah spends his time waiting for the birth, speechless.

I used to think the speechlessness was a punishment, along the lines of “if you can’t say anything nice (or faithful, or theologically appropriate, or whatever), then don’t say anything at all.” But today, as I face my own temporary time of not-speaking, I wonder if there is also grace in this consequence. When you can’t speak, you can listen better. You have time and space to wrestle with your own private doubts–of which Zechariah had plenty–without speaking them into public reality along the way. You can enter into the silence of waiting in a more concrete way. Which, after all, is what Advent is all about.

In my line of work, you can’t get as much accomplished when you can’t speak, and perhaps this too is what Advent is all about–not the busy-ness of Christmas preparations, but the slow darkness of the winter solstice and, eventually, the hopeful lengthening of days when the Christ child’s birth will be celebrated, when the “new thing” will be born.

Recently I’ve been watching and listening to Brian McLaren’s song “To Be Born.” Words such as “do not push or rush, do not fight or strive” seem to go well with speechlessness. Just let it be. Let the new thing be born. Do not try to determine its identity or its timing or its purpose with so many words. Welcome it with openness. Welcome it with humility. Welcome it with silence.

There will be plenty of time for speech, as Zechariah discovered (Luke 1:57-80). For now, we wait.

Photo by Anders Printz (flickr/Creative Commons).

Jesus’ faith in us

September 28, 2010 · Bible, Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

The gospel text for this Sunday, Luke 17:5-10, presents some challenges. For me, the biggest challenge is the way this parable seems to glorify “duty”–which I frankly have never found to be a very powerful motivator.

Just before this in Luke 17, Jesus has been talking to the disciples about two particularly challenging “duties” of discipleship: 1) correct one another when you’re wrong, and 2) forgive one another as many times as it takes. Given those difficult responsibilities, it’s no wonder, in verse 5, that the disciples cry out, “Increase our faith!” Jesus’ response does not seem particularly helpful, or at least not particularly comforting: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.” Huh? Then I guess we don’t even have that small amount of faith.

And then, this parable:

“Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’ ” (Luke 17:7-10, NIV)

Here is where I find it very, very helpful to read the Bible with people of different ages. How we read the Bible–or how the Bible reads us–depends on many things, one of which is the stage of life we’re living. Continue reading →

Coveting my neighbor’s talents

August 8, 2010 · Bible, Community, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

I just returned from the Invitation to Service event, where I experienced yet again a reason I need to keep talking about finding one’s calling: because I forget key principles myself if I go too long between telling others about them.

For example: One of the principles of calling (”vocation”) is that you start with the gifts and talents you get, which are not always the ones you want. I’ve spent much of my life and ministry mourning the gifts I didn’t have or wanted more of, which diminishes the gifts I do have. This makes it hard to follow wherever my calling is taking me because I’m always wanting to go somewhere else. (It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s line from Let Your Life Speak: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”) I was hoping that I’d be immune to this by now, but I needed another booster shot this weekend. Continue reading →

Hospitality to young adult stories

April 30, 2010 · Bible, Community, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

After a great two-week trip to talk vocation discernment and the Treasure Hunt in southern California and Washington, D.C., I’m slowly processing all that I learned and continue to learn from many conversations. I’ll do that in the next series of posts–which should come a bit more frequently now!

A good companion for last week was Nanette Sawyer’s book, Hospitality–The Sacred Art: Discovering the Hidden Spiritual Power of Invitation and Welcome. As the title promises, it’s more of a spiritual guide than a practical how-to. For her, hospitality means making room in ourselves for people’s stories, joys and pains, and idiosyncracies. I agree with her that that inner work of “making room” is inseparable from the “making room” that happens in community–the practical welcome that people associate with the word.

It got me thinking about how the Church and individual congregations “make room” (or not) for young adults’ stories and journeys, and the particular joys and pains, and often transitoriness and chaos, that come with that stage of life. Continue reading →

Resurrection faith: trust + openness

March 30, 2010 · Bible, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

As I circle around an Easter sermon for Sunday, the mixture of familiar and surprising, old and new, is fascinating me about the resurrection story this year.

Each of the four gospels has a unique way of telling the Easter story of Jesus rising from the dead. This year is Luke’s turn to tell the story, and I was struck by his emphasis on “remembering.” Isn’t the whole point of resurrection that we don’t have to remember the horrific events that came before it–Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion and humiliation? And yet the “two men in dazzling clothes” at the empty tomb say this to the women who had come to finish their embalming work on Jesus’ body: ” ‘Remember how (Jesus) told you…that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words…” (Luke 24:6-7).

Whatever is happening now on this first day of the week, it has continuity with what has come before–with Jesus’ words. The empty tomb signals that something has changed, but some things have remained true and trustworthy: God’s promises and will to save and make whole. The love and friendship of Jesus. The call to follow him and serve one’s neighbor.

I had started preparing a sermon about this continuity, with the help of a commentary I read which calls resurrection “the vindication of Jesus’ preaching and the validation of his ministry.” In others words, what was true before the resurrection is still true now. But then I noticed a totally different sermon getting woven through it. This was a sermon about discontinuity. Continue reading →

Extravagant love: experiments in stewardship

March 23, 2010 · Bible, Community, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

At my church, we’ve been talking about “Experiments in Grace-Full Living” during this season of Lent. That’s forty days before Easter of pondering and practicing what it means to be faithful–to go out on the limb of uncertain results for the sake of Love–to “sin boldly,” as Martin Luther famously said, “and believe in the grace of God more boldly still.”

I think it’s my lifelong Lutheran wiring that always eventually turns my attention from what we are called to do (”experiment in grace-full living”) to what God is doing in and with us. In last Sunday’s sermon, I raised the question of whether God, in a way, also conducts such experiments in grace-full living. Continue reading →

“Inconceivable!”

March 16, 2010 · Bible, Community, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

For any fans of the great ’80s movie The Princess Bride, that title might call to mind the character who repeats “Inconceivable!” each time a turn of events surprises him. Having already happened, however, the event is hardly “inconceivable.” So finally, a traveling companion says to him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I’ve used this sentence in sermons, and it comes to mind often when I’m digging into a Scripture text–especially one on a popular story such as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) or, as last Sunday, the so-called Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). The more I dug into the parable, particularly with the help of Barbara Brown Taylor, the more I thought, “I do not think this means what I think it means.” It turns out the parable is probably not what it has become: the paradigmatic “sowing your wild oats and then returning home” story we often tell about some modern American young adults who go off to find themselves. As often happens with the Bible, the parable sounds quite different when you read with ears for community rather than individualism. You can read the sermon here.

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