Generational lines, "All Star" clergy, and reaching the aliens

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10, 7:1-11
The following is a transcript

I'm going to start with a little poll. How many of you are subscribers or regular readers of The Lutheran magazine? Anybody here? Alright, we have some people who read The Lutheran. For those of you who do not (or for those that do but did not read this month's issue) they had a big issue on the clergy retirement wave, and the age demographics of clergy (and implicitly also congregations) in the ELCA. This became something of a controversial issue, because never did they say anything negative about the next generation--my generation--of clergy, but they did kind of imply things--like we're in the process retiring the "All Star team" of clergy. That's a message that many of us heard loud and clear, saying "Oh, so we're the minor league team, I guess." What ended up happening was a lot of good discussion already--and I expect more in the future. But what came up more than anything else is a sense of frustration at how easily we fracture along those lines of demographics and age.

So this call of Jeremiah that we read about today is a call to somebody who is extremely young. I think we fool ourselves if we think that God only calls people that are extremely young, but we also fool ourselves if we think that the only people who ever receive worthy calls from God are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. I think that God calls people of all sorts. There's no such thing in God's mind as too young or too old. In fact, in the Jeremiah reading God says that he set him apart before he was even born.

Are "All" really welcome?

            I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what it means to be welcome (a colleague who I knew from seminary is partly to blame for this; read her--no doubt better--reflection here). Like when we say “All are welcome!” or “Anybody can come!” or “Open to all!” and how that is, or is not, reflected in how we actually act. Is everybody welcome in our church? Is everybody welcome to become a member? To come forward for communion? To serve on council? To sing in the choir? You name it.

I know the nice thing to say is, “Yes, all truly are welcome.” But just because it’s nice doesn’t make it true, or even right. And also, come to think of it, are we really so sure saying “All are welcome” is even nice? Isn’t saying “All are welcome” actually kind of condescending when our actions don’t bare it out? I tend to think so, and I would be willing to bet that some folks who have drifted away from the church probably have similar thoughts.

It’s much easier to say “All are welcome” than to make it so. When we put it into practice welcoming people often comes with strings attached--i.e., you need to look more like us, or you need to talk more like us, or you need to believe more like us, or you need to work in one way or another on becoming more like us. You might say that you don’t actually believe that, but isn’t that exactly why we teach Confirmation, or send leaders to seminary, or teach deacons to serve communion?

See, this is what I’m getting at: It’s OK that not everybody is welcome to everything. Really, it is. An example: it’s OK that a person who refuses to confess a faith in Jesus is not allowed to become a member of the church. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be in the church at all. It doesn’t mean we don’t have room for “seekers.” It just means that there are doctrinal boundaries for the sake of defining who we are. It’s also OK that we create rules around people in our community who have issues with emotional or physical boundaries; it’s OK that we protect victims by helping to maintain good boundaries with those who have victimized them (in fact it’s more than OK; it’s necessary). It’s also OK that we have our own practices about when a person can take part in the various milestones of the church.

But that’s not usually what we mean when we say “All are welcome.” We’re usually not talking about the creedal stuff (what we believe) or the legal stuff (who we need to protect). We’re usually talking about people who are nominally Christians, or former Christians, or people who could become Christians, but they don’t come to church. If we consider this ideal imaginary person whom we are welcoming then I would hazard to guess that he/she is a person who looks, acts, and thinks like us, but who, for whatever reason, has never discovered this church that will feed him/her with exactly what he/she needs. Rarely do we consider that every person we are welcoming is a person who is necessarily different from us. Rarely do we consider that every act of welcoming a person is an act of changing who we are.

Bullying into prayer, swords into plowshares

Scripture: Isaiah 36:1-3, 13-20; 37:1-7, 2:1-4

            This is a story about bullying. Sure, it uses kings and nations as the characters, guys with long names that distract us. Who names their kid Sennacherib? All of that merely serves as a distraction from a story about a person with a loud voice, shouting “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” This is a story about bullying, about fear, and about all the terrible, awful, untrue things that people say to try to grab your attention. So this is a perfect story for our age.

            The Rabshakeh always gets a lot of attention. He’s the guy—or gal—who yells the loudest, who is the most threatening, and who seems the most sure of himself. I’m reminded of a time on The Simpsons when all the characters are bemoaning that nobody listens to them and Homer Simpson chimes in, saying, “I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.” That’s what it feels like when there’s somebody yelling from a place of power. We feel like we need to engage with the person shouting on the TV or the radio because he or she is loud and given air time; even though that engagement only gives them more power.

            There are a lot of bullies out there. Some of them live in our schools—that much is still true. More and more of them live online these days. Plenty of them, like the Rabshakeh, are willing to stand up on a chair and scream to instill fear in the masses. Isn’t that what we expect from our legislators when they are passionate about an issue? Stand up and shout to show us how passionate you are. The loudest voice is the one that gets heard, after all.

Does fear of the Lord still matter? (And other leading questions)

Scripture: Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8

The book of Proverbs reminds us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now, that doesn’t get much play these days. I suspect most people would say that the beginning of wisdom is found in college, or the beginning of wisdom is discovered in the process of aging, or the beginning of wisdom is starting a career, or having a family. Fear of the Lord may be biblical but we rarely consider fear of a thing to be good—not today—and certainly wisdom must start somewhere else. “Why should we be afraid of God?” we might ask in our best modern voices. We love God, or we have faith in God, but fearing God? No, no. That’s something for less civilized folk.

We’ve done our best to make God into the flavorless communion wafers that we serve as his body. He can be loving, and powerful, and good, but fearful? Nope, no good. We have become afraid to ascribe to God any attribute that we do not consider proper in our fellow human beings, and the end result has been a kind of arrogance in our understanding of who God is and what God does. We first decide what it is that a good God will look like, then we decide which parts of our God fit that description, and finally we only believe those things we have already decided befit the God of our choice. In this way we make God in our image. God has all the traits we like and likes the people we like.

Because this Old Testament God doesn’t act like the God we have created in our image we make this God out to be a different God that, because of Jesus, we can ignore. We do this even though Jesus seemed perfectly happy to pray to this God whom he called “Father” and even though our creeds confess this God to be one and the same with the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This is important when it comes to reading the prophets, like Micah, because our weakened images of God mean that we are tempted to take shortcuts and find in the prophets what we want to find. When Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” we read that as if it is a moral-ethical imperative. Do these things and you’ll be right in the sight of God. Perfect. After all, that’s exactly what Jesus says when he’s asked what a person has to do to inherit eternal life: “Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Not politics as usual: Election Day and the story of Naaman

Scripture: 2 Kings 5:1-14

           So it’s election season, and, as such, we know to drown out the incessant political ads, the editorials and letters to the editor that read as if the person writing in is standing on a chair screaming, and the substance-less promises of people in far off places looking for our vote. Closer to home we have friends and neighbors seeking elected offices of one sort or another, which is a whole other thing that, while not nearly as obnoxious as campaigns in St. Paul or Washington D.C., still contributes to a good deal of local stress—even if we’re all too polite to acknowledge it. It’s that political time of the year, and all I can think is, “Thank God it’s not a presidential election year.”

            It’s also a confusing time for churches because we aren’t allowed to endorse candidates but we can, apparently, take stands on issues; hence the churches who put up banners saying “Vote Yes on measure such and such” or “Vote no on something else.” These are the kind of razor-thin ethical distinctions that only politicians could create. The church lives in the world, so we are political in the sense that all people making decisions about how to live are political, but we are also apolitical—in that we do not put our trust in elected leaders or legislation to tell the world about Jesus.

            This is a good time to read from 2 Kings for that reason. Naaman, who is introduced as a commander in the army of the king of Aram, has a skin problem. He has some really bad acne. The translation we just read suggests it is leprosy, but since leprosy was more or less unknown during this period it could be as serious as that or, more likely, it was something like psoriasis. Either way, Naaman has a skin issue and he needs some help. Hearing that there is a prophet in Israel—that lowly country that he has been raiding again and again—who can heal his disease, he sends word to the king and asks for an audience with the prophet.