Why the Youth Gathering matters

OK, I admit it, I was not in favor of doing the 2015 ELCA Youth Gathering in Detroit.

Gasp! I know, I know.

The main reason we did the Gathering is because Sam was about ready to beat me if we didn't and because we wanted to keep our commitment to doing things with the rest of the county (and they were pretty set on the Youth Gathering). Still, I had my reservations: Can we really justify spending more money for a glorified party than we do for boots-on-the-ground mission trips? Will the youth really get more out of this than they do from service?

Well, I'm happy to say that I was 100% completely wrong. And here's why:

Our group with Bishop Larry

#1- The energy is catchy
 By the end of most mission trips we're all so exhausted that we go home and have to completely decompress for several days. Well, that might happen with this trip, too, but I feel different after this one and I think others do, too. There's a kind of emotional high that carries beyond the music and the speakers and the 30,000 people in one place. It's electric but, more importantly, catchy. It's hard to come away from this feeling anything but inspired to figure out what we can do back home to rise up together again.

Which brings me to...
#2- It leaves things open-ended
As it turns out, my wife's mission trip next week needed a spot filled when I got back home, so I sent word to all our youth on the off-chance that any of them would want that spot. This was mere hours after getting off the bus from Detroit. No way, I thought, that any would take us up on the offer. An hour later I had heard from three of them. All wanted it. All wanted to go and serve in South Dakota with barely a chance to catch their collective breaths from this week. The Gathering primed them for service. It didn't discourage it and it didn't leave us so taxed that it would feel like a burden. It inspired us to greater service.

And lastly...
#3- It's about Jesus
I should probably learn to never doubt something that has God at its very core. When Pr. Steve Jerbi,  in his Friday evening talk about racism and the loss of a young black boy in his congregation, crescendoed a rousing refrain of "We claim Jesus," it became obvious that this Youth Gathering offered a narrative that is too often absent from our public discourse. Speaker after speaker inspired, yes, but offered a word deeply rooted in the good news of Jesus Christ. This was more than experiential; more than visceral; more than Skillet concerts, inspiring speakers, and Agape rapping; more even than 30,000 people and an experience of togetherness too often absent from our lives as Christians. This was incarnational, Christ-centered; this was Jesus-heavy, Gospel-heavy, promise-heavy. And Jesus-centered time will always be fruitful.

So, I confess I was wrong. This was worth it. Very worth it. It left me a better person. And I hope it did the same for you.

Reclaiming the "p" word: Praise as humility put into action

Psalm 113

As many of you know, words sometimes mean something a little different in some places than they do in the rest of the world. For example, today’s Psalm is about praise. In most places in the world—with most people—praise is a word that evokes images of joy and worshiping with abandon, but in this part of the world I’m come to find that praise is looked upon with something else—something more like suspicion. So, today, I’ve invited my cultural translator, Samantha, to translate Psalm 113. I’ll read. She’ll translate.

Ready?

Frank: ¹ Praise the Lord!
Sam: Sit still and think good thoughts.

Frank: Praise, O servants of the Lord;
   praise the name of the Lord.

Sam: Sit very reverently. Don’t make eye contact. God doesn’t like eccentricity. Just chill.

Frank: ² Blessed be the name of the Lord
   from this time on and for evermore.

Sam: <whisper> God is good all the time… just as long as I don’t have to talk about it.

Frank: ³ From the rising of the sun to its setting
   the name of the Lord is to be praised.

Sam: At least ten times a day I will consider saying something about God, then reconsider because I don’t really know what to say, because it’s better to be silent than to say the wrong thing.

Frank: ⁴ The Lord is high above all nations,
   and his glory above the heavens.

Sam: God is way up there somewhere, so dancing and clapping and whatnot are kind of pointless, because God hears me whether I whisper or carry on like a lunatic, amirite?

Frank: ⁵ Who is like the Lord our God,
   who is seated on high,

who looks far down
   on the heavens and the earth?

Sam: Rhetorical question! Like all the ones the pastor asks!

Frank: ⁷ He raises the poor from the dust,
   and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
⁸ to make them sit with princes,
   with the princes of his people.

Sam: Good, good, raising up the poor. But I’m not sure about this prince thing. That sounds like something for those people on the coasts. I mean, what would the neighbors think?

Frank: ⁹ He gives the barren woman a home,
   making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord!

Sam: <monotone> Amen. Hallelujah.

           

Thank you to Sam, my cultural translator.

An Ironic Sermon/Blog Post about the Cheapness of Words

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-11

            There are many things in life we never fail to undervalue. Among them are natural things—plants and animals; rain and snow—that we take for granted, and then there are personality traits—faithfulness and humility—things that we enjoy in other people but rarely repay in kind—and finally there is something closer to our essence as human beings that we also tend to minimize: our words. One of the great casualties of this busy world with all our talking heads, tomes of print literature, and innumerable websites is the thoughtful word. There are fewer and fewer poets, even as there are more and more bloggers. There are fewer great wordsmiths, even as there are more text messages composed each day than all messages in any format in any year prior to the 20^th century. Anaphorisms like “Talk is cheap” and “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me” are common and accepted.

            In the 21^st century you can say anything and find an audience. The more controversial, the better. The less time you spend considering other opinions, the more response you will get. When it comes to words we have made thoughtfulness and clarity expendable and too often consider the measure of an author her volume and provocativeness. Thoughtfulness doesn’t sell very well anymore, and so all words are cheapened; a casualty of our race to the lowest common denominator.

The power of the "certain place" in fishing, hunting, and worship

Scripture: Genesis 28:10-17

            “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set” (Gen 28:10-11).

            When I go fishing there are many things that go into the best kind of fishing spot. We look for rock piles or weed lines or drop offs or saddles between islands—those kinds of things—and we do this because certain species will relate to these features of the lake at certain times. This is what separates an angler who knows what they’re doing from a person who’s out to have a few beers under the guise of fishing. The same principles hold for hunting or wildlife viewing. The good angler or hunter or photographer looks in certain places at certain times with certain conditions, because that’s where the fish or the deer or the wildlife are likely to be.

            This is so commonplace for anglers and hunters that we often fail to consider why the fish or the deer are there in the first place. What is it about this place that attracts them again and again? Probably it has something to do with food and shelter, or something biological that triggers them to return to that spot for mating or spawning purposes. Many of the same fish—and many of the same deer—visit many of the same places again and again so, naturally, it pays to look in those spots first.

Being present in the present: The real challenge of "Always being made new"

Scripture: Revelation 21:1-7

           This year the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America celebrates 25 years of ministry, and as part of this year-long celebration the church has picked the theme of “Always being made new” with the theme verse which we just happened to read today from Revelation 21:5, “See, I am making all things new.” I’m not going to pretend like this isn’t an intentional message for a church that has sometimes struggled to be proactive in anticipating the future. We are being made new every day, but as a church both nationally and locally some of that newness has been challenging. Locally, our churches have had our share of new and difficult challenges in the last twenty-five years. In fact, the one thing I have heard perhaps more than anything else since taking over this call a year and a half ago is that we have been in need of a new start. A year and a half later, some of my newness has worn off, which means with every passing day it’s a little harder to focus on always being made new, to be the church which Martin Luther called “semper reformanda”—always reforming.

            Of course, there is an underbelly to this idea of always being made new; I know some people have a bone to pick with this theme. Always being made new does not mean we do not honor the past; it does not mean newness for newness’ sake; and it does not mean that new is equated with “better” and old with “useless.” We are made new not because new things are inherently better but because, left to our own devices, we make poor choices and are in need of a word of forgiveness every single day—newness every day.

Lutherans are weird

Scripture: Revelation 20:11-15

Being a Lutheran is a strange thing. If you are one you probably know this. We have potlucks and sing German and northern-Europeans hymns; we meet in church buildings with hard-backed pews; we revel in the good ol’ days when confirmation was tougher than school and nobody—and I mean, nobody—dared approach the pastor to ask how he was doing (and it was always a “he”). This is our heritage. It’s very strange, but so are we. Ours is a story of hard work and piety, which is also strange come to think of it, since Lutherans then turn around and preach that nothing we do makes any difference for our salvation.

Weird.

Lutherans live life straddling a barbed-wire fence between grace and good works. Life is much easier if you camp on one side of the fence or the other. One side of the fence is for those who like to demonstrate their faithfulness through action. For these folks, what they do and say defines who they are, demonstrating that they are good people—good Christians. The other side of the fence is for those who believe that God loves them just the way they are, who believe absolutely nothing is required of them, especially when it comes to God’s love and salvation. 99% of the world lives on either side of that fence of good works and grace, but Lutherans are just a little slow. We go out of our way, mind you, to sit on top of the barbed wire, straddling both sides. Culturally we are a people of hard work; theologically we are a people all about grace.

We are so weird.

Babylon and the importance of community in the digital age

Scripture: Revelation 18:1-3, 21-24

    One of the most frequently used metaphors in the Bible for the kingdom of God is the “city on a hill.” The city on a hill metaphor resonated with people in the Middle East because it recalled the city of Jerusalem, which was built upon a hill, and the “New Jerusalem” which the book of Revelation tells us will be the centerpiece of the reign of God on earth. But to understand why Jerusalem matters so much requires going beyond the important events that happened there. Of course Jerusalem is an incredibly important historical city because of the temple and Jesus’ triumphal entry on Palm Sunday, the crucifixion and the resurrection, but this vision of the city on a hill looks well beyond the past into a future that is bigger than geography and history. The New Jerusalem is a place where God promises to build a community open on all sides where all peoples will worship as one. It is a city on a hill in the sense that it is both a vision of a future and a reality just out of our reach.

    But if we’re honest with ourselves this is a really tough metaphor for us to get, and it’s not only because Hallock, Minnesota looks nothing like Jerusalem. Part of the trouble stems from the strange idea of what a “city of God” will look like. Not everybody likes the idea of a “city” to begin with because of the crushing congestion, the politics and the sheer overwhelming speed of life, so the idea of the zenith of creation culminating with God creating one big city may not exactly be our preferred vision of the afterlife. And that’s OK, because the New Jerusalem—and everything it represents—could just as easily be called a community.

This is worship. This is worship.

Scripture: Revelation 7:9-17

In heaven there are no committees.

Now, I know for some of you that is a pretty blasphemous way to start a sermon, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. I love what committees do for the sake of the church and for my sanity as well. We have many dedicated, hardworking and genuinely necessary committees in this church. They mostly function very well together and I could not do my job without them. However, in spite of these things I am sorry to say that heaven still has no need of committees.

This is why.

If a committee were charged with organizing this giant worship service with the Lamb on the throne in Revelation 7 it would have been bogged down in all sorts of disagreements, and it never would have happened. The idea of opening up worship to great, uncountable multitudes from every corner of the world, every tribe and tongue, would have paralyzed the heavenly worship committee. How could we possibly all worship together? And, most importantly, how could we make enough coffee and bars to serve them all?

What is the church? People + Worship + ... Evangelism??

            I’m going to ask a question. It’s such a completely obvious question that it seems almost like a silly thing to bring up, but then again the most obvious questions tend to be the ones that never get asked. So, here we go: What is the church?

            OK, so there are a few levels to that question. Most often when pastor-folk ask ‘What is church?’ they are trying to get you to say this: “The church is not the building but the people.” Gold star. 100% on your confirmation test. Congrats. That’s a great answer. In fact, it’s an answer we need to give more often. We tend to revere our church buildings too much. Like Peter following the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, our first thought in the midst of something holy is to build a dwelling place for God (Luke 9:33). But (of course there’s always a “but”) the church is also more than just people. What are those people doing? Why are they gathering? What is their purpose? So many questions...

Why should I go to church?

The following is an adapation of an article to be published in the Kittson County Enterprise on February 20.

Why should I go to church?

Honestly, I don’t get asked this question often, but I think it’s behind a lot of the questions I do get asked. “Why should I be in worship on Sunday morning and not at the lake cabin?” “Why does God care?” “Why does it matter?” Those are the questions I sense behind the talk of busy-ness and exhaustion, behind the excuses and guilt. It seems that every time I meet members of the churches I serve they have a laundry list of excuses for why it took so long for me to meet them. The truth is I don’t know all the ins and outs of your lives. I don’t know what feeds you and what drains you, what gives you life and what takes it away, so honestly, I'm not judging. Really, I'm just more curious than anything.

It used to be, not that long ago, that people would go to church out of a sense of duty. If you’re a regularly attending church member over the age of 55 you may very well be a part of that generation. To go to church is, for you, second nature because church is the only place you’ve ever gone on Sunday morning. You did it because your parents did it and they required you to be there in tow; they did it consequently because their parents did it and so on and so forth for generations immemorial. However, the culture has changed. No longer is church the sole center of the community. We can mourn that—and maybe we should—but it doesn’t change the fact that it is so. What’s most important is how we react.

The Spirit and the Messiness of Worship

Text: Joel 2:12-13, 28-29

            Last Wednesday the Nativity Scene at Grace blew over. It was so perfectly poetic I had to take a picture of it lying there flat on the ground. Jesus is not in the manger yet; we still have a few weeks of Advent. So I’m OK with subtle divine hints that maybe that nativity scene can wait. And besides, it was particularly appropriate that it was the wind that knocked it over, since the Hebrew word for “wind” (ruach) also means “spirit.” It was as if the Holy Spirit were saying, “No. Not yet. Slow down. Wait.”
             Lo and behold, now we have the prophet Joel this Sunday, again preaching on the Spirit. Joel is probably one of the least familiar books in the Bible, so I’ll forgive you if you aren’t Joel experts. Still, some of what we read today should be familiar. There’s that Lenten refrain: “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” Lent and Advent share some commonalities. They are both about reflection, they both involve turning or returning to God, and they are both times awaiting God’s in-breaking into the world. We understand that this is the season where we are anticipating Jesus, but God's in-breaking into our daily lives requires also the Holy Spirit. We don’t really talk about it much—because honestly we don’t talk about the Spirit much ever—but in this time of the year when we’re completely fine with angels and heavenly choruses it's astounding that we still manage to ignore the Holy Spirit.

Why Being a Midwestern Lutheran is Hard

Midwestern Lutherans have ourselves a BIG problem this time of year; an insidious date that creeps up on our calendars after the High Holy Days of Easter and Mother's Day; a day so frightening that we do our best to cover it up on Memorial Day weekend in the hope that nobody will actually show up for worship and discover what it is all about. Pentecost--hereafter referred to as The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

This Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named is near-universally celebrated by the Christian Church as the time when the Holy Spirit entered into the world and christened the church, but as the good Midwestern-Lutheran knows any good thing must come with strings attached, and in this case the Spirit's "good works" only cover the depth of the sinister plot that leads to good Lutheran boys and girls speaking in tongues and/or saying "Amen!" in church. Midwestern Lutherans know that this must be stopped at all costs.

But at this point I should admit that I have a little problem: I really like The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I like talking about the Holy Spirit, and perhaps I should enter an AA program for saying so up here, but I like getting excited about things generally in church. This is a most counter-cultural stance in Midwestern-Lutherandom

I know. I am one of us. For our people, showing excitement over anything, least of all the workings of some foreign "Spirit," is a sin of great magnitude. We're lefse people: a little sugar hidden in the cavity of our mixed-marriage of potato-bread is about all the excitement we can handle. Too much enthusiasm may lead to sin, or worse yet, it may cause people in town to look at us strangely. Better to never do anything unusual or exciting in life than be shamed by one's neighbor. This is why being a Midwestern Lutheran is hard. It's an exercise in internal self-righteousness via external self-restraint.

The funny thing is that people here mostly don't see it that way. There is a kind of salt-of-the-earth humility that allows Midwestern Lutherans to experience a multitude of wonderful blessings and manage to remain stoic in all encounters public and private. On the Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named we remember that some people have the gift of speaking in tongues while we have the gift of Eeyore-ism.

But on days like The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named we are also left in a bit of a quandary. We can't break out of our shells, which is undoubtedly what the Holy Spirit will do to us if we let it loose, but we also want to remain good and faithful Christians. So what do we do? We make a big fuss about the color of the day and we make certain that all of our banners have stitching with flames! Happy Red Vestment Day! Then, we treat the Holy Spirit like it's our honored guest. We allow one day (that's actually the language we use... "allow" ... as if God needs our permission) to keep the Spirit happy lest it start to do crazy things with us.

Being a Midwestern Lutheran is oh so hard.

This is all cultural and engrained. It's not that we choose to sit quietly in our pews and smirk silently every time something amusing happens in worship. It's not that we choose to glance around and make certain that nobody is looking at us whenever we get up for any reason. It's not even that we choose to avert our eyes when somebody in worship doesn't know the proper decorum and we're embarrassed for them. It's just who we are. And it's hard. Really hard.

You see, it would be much easier to celebrate The-Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named with praise and dance and loud, out-of-tune singing. It would be much easier to show emotion, but we just can't do it. It's who we are. Most churches have realized that this kind of movement of the Spirit is really quite freeing. They understand that it allows people to be less self-conscious, which happens to be near to the heart of the Spirit's activity in seemingly every place and time. Most churches understand this. But we can't. We're too stoic, too weary, too fearful of what will happen if we say "Amen!" a little too loudly.

Being a Midwestern Lutheran is hard.

It is my prayer that this Sunday the Spirit is going to burst through the chains we have strapped to it and cause the very walls of the church to thunder with its movement. Many Midwestern Lutherans would be very careful with such words. I can imagine them saying, with slow, Fargoan accent and all, "Hey now, pastor, be careful what you pray for! It might just happen then!" To which I say, finally and absolutely: good. I hope it does. I hope we are shocked and appalled by what the Spirit does, because this Sunday-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named holds the key to our church's future, the key to breaking through the cultural bonds that hinder our proclamation of the gospel, and the key to dying to ourselves.

Only then will we be able to say, "Being a Midwestern Lutheran isn't so hard, after all."

Concord: Evolve. Don't Change

The following is an article that appears today in the February 2012 issue of Luther Seminary’s Concord theological journal. To check out the entire issue head on over to http://www2.luthersem.edu/concord/.

Evolve. Don’t Change

            “Pardon me, but that’s bulls---” said my internship supervisor, responding to a colleague’s claim that worship is the ideal space for evangelization. Actually, I misquoted him. I doubt he said “Pardon me.” The idea that worship is the time or space for intentional evangelism was, to my supervisor, blasphemy of the highest order. He believed that worship is a time to gather together in the promise that God is present in the bread and the wine and in the word proclaimed, and any intention for it otherwise is bologna. I want to suggest that this is true but insufficient. What we need is more than good theology of worship; we need to understand the evolution of worship and to put to death the language of “change.” Allow me to explain.

            The church has always had tension between welcoming those on the margins and maintaining established practices. This is the fundamental challenge in multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-generational ministry settings (which, to my mind, covers every setting there is): those things that have deep meaning to one group of people have no meaning to another. How then shall we worship together?

            It’s easy to say that the older generation needs to change—that they need to be willing to give way to a younger group of people with fresh ideas of how to do worship, that the old music needs to go and finally that they need to relax their grip on all those things we have come to consider traditional. Yet, this solution only encourages division, spawning worthless nomenclature such as traditional and contemporary.

            In a place like the Twin Cities it’s well and good to have different churches offering different forms of worship. Mercy Seat can coexist quite nicely alongside Mt. Olivet. Yet, much of the church lives in places where different worship equates to division in the community that is unwanted and often painful. In small-town America there are already far too many things that pull people apart from one another. Worship should not be another of these. Thankfully, in some ways we have no choice. Attendance numbers and pastoral sanity often require a single service, a single time to come together to worship God, to break the bread and drink the wine and to re-member (that is, become members again) the body of Christ.

            The pertinent questions regarding worship in Hallock, Minnesota are the same questions everywhere in small communities: How do we faithfully gather together when so many of us have so many different spiritual needs? How do we allow space for the Holy Spirit to work in a broad way without watering down the message? These are our struggles, and adequate answers are usually lacking. I’ve visited enough churches in my twenty-five years to know that most are doing a poor job of generating answers.

            So maybe that’s the point; maybe there are no good answers. Maybe the congregations that are alive and vibrant haven’t so much figured out the magical formula to do the most effective worship, but have learned to live the questions. Every Sunday is an opportunity to look around and ask one another, “I’m here because worship means something to me. Does it mean the same thing to you?”

            If we ask the question, then we have to admit the possibility that someone could say, “No,” in which case we should resist the urge to fix them. We are not the Borg, assimilating the ones who do not give in to the purported superiority of our liturgical model. Instead, we are the body of Christ in desperate need of members at the margins. Members with different spiritual needs require us to step back and ask ourselves, “Are we doing this for the glory of God, for our own fulfillment, or because we see our church like a sports team and affiliation matters more than salvation?”

            I think the latter is the underlying philosophy of many—perhaps most—worship practices. If you’re a sports fan, you have undoubtedly heard fans deriding other fans of the same team for “jumping on the bandwagon” or, in other words, cheering only when their team is winning. Likewise, we have people in the church who have acquired a sense of ownership after having devoted themselves even when it seemed like a lost cause. Now, they are quick to turn on the bandwagon followers—i.e. the folks who haven’t been so sure about church—and they have denied them a voice. Yet, for a healthy congregation (or, for that matter, a healthy fan base) we need the participation of both. We need the margins as much as we need the center, and the center has to be willing to move; not flip inside-out, mind you, but it cannot be set in one place. Culture and practice evolve through time. The center has to shift with the times or else the margins will disappear.

            This is where the rubber meets the road for worship, whether in Hallock, Minnesota or on the campus of Luther Seminary. Those with a controlling stake have to be willing to evolve. We throw around the word “change” too much and it evokes all kinds of negative emotions, and this is in part because it is the wrong word. Change suggests something that we do. What we need is evolution, a process beyond our control marshaled over by God and not by us. Evolution teaches us two things: 1. we are not in control, and 2. new life requires death. Things will slowly die out of favor—evolution does not happen overnight—but the best way to honor how we have worshiped in the past is not to try to live it over again. Instead, the best way to honor the past is to understand that the present relies on the past like a pyramid whose capstone cannot stand without those that have been laid before. Worship is like this, and when it is at its best it remembers its past without attempting to revive it.