theology – Inspiring Change LLC

Called to Generosity

Not long ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

Helen died over a decade ago, but seeing her handwriting and lying under the crocheted blanket she made me brings her presence back to me. What I remember most about her, though, is that she lived a generous Christianity. As she understood our faith, to be a Jesus follower meant to be someone who both rested in the love of God and embodied that love wherever she could. As I prepared her recipe, I felt her spirit, how she welcomed me, a newly ordained pastor, into her life and the life of her family, and what a quiet witness to the love of Jesus she was.

What is the essence, the core, of being a Christian? Who is that preacher Jesus, whose life so changed the course of the western world, and to whom so many confess loyalty? The New Testament gospels tell four different versions of the story of the historical Jesus, written to different audiences and in different decades following his first century death and resurrection. Each has at its core the religious message that the creator God loves the world and yearns to have all human persons know that love and forgiveness. Each tells of young rabbi Jesus seeking people out on the edges of Jewish culture for conversation, healing, teaching and friendship.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

Jesus was also a prophet to his religion, speaking words of criticism and anger at those who labeled themselves of God and used it to cloak their own grasping for security, power and ambition. It was this same group of religious men who demanded the Roman occupiers to put Jesus to death as a threat to Jewish life and to the supreme power of Rome. In three short years his preaching, healing and growing band of followers became so threatening to the entrenched powers of the empire, he was crucified in order to be silenced.

So little has changed in the human condition: as the centuries pass, the principalities, powers, and empires simply put on different clothes. Today in America, a large portion of those who claim Jesus as their spiritual guide or savior use that label to cloak and mask all kinds of abuses of human power. Using scripture as a weapon, and under the guise of the Christian church, they promote a malignant individualism, a poisonous masculinity, unbridled greed, deep racism, love of warfare and military-style weapons, a biblical gender and sexual hierarchy that enforces their disdain for women and anyone who questions this worldview. They have aligned themselves with political power, winning elections and writing laws in every corner of the country. Does this sound like Christian discipleship to you?

Your neighbor is not just the family that lives on the other side of your interior wall or property line. Not just your difficult brother-in-law or your classmate. Your neighbor, teaches Jesus, is also the one you have trouble seeing. The one you want to walk by, the one you can’t quite understand.

June is Pride month. A month that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity across the human experience. It is a hard won, bitter battle for those who don’t feel they fully fit into the heterosexual or male/female either/or that we have baked into our culture. To finally be freer to be themselves, to live their life without fear of shame, fear of even death. LGBTQIA people are your neighbors. They are among those we are called by Jesus to see, to understand, to support, and to love.

Christians are always called to decide: to align with the principalities and powers that promise a return to old values, old beliefs, security and belonging; or to know what power is for and to live as best we can with compassion and curiosity. To live with concern for the natural world, for the life of all our neighbors, for well-being of the weak, the left out, and the vulnerable.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Written for and published in the Savage (MN) Pacer newspaper, June 25, 2022.

Why Call Yourself a Christian

A couple of weeks ago our small congregation held a potluck lunch. While thinking about what to bring, I decided to bring Helen Swanson’s rice pudding. It’s a food I cherish because it brings back memories of my life as a young rural Wisconsin pastor. I found the recipe that she had written for me in my recipe box and set about to make it.

And the people Jesus most sought out were the vulnerable and cast aside of his time: the mentally and physically sick, women, children, the elderly, widowed and the chronically poor.

God in spirit calls us who profess the name of Christ to know what that can look like in our time and place. I know this is how Helen lived her faith. May it be the way you proclaim Jesus, too.

Good and Evil : God and Us

I have always thought that suffering makes theologians of us all. In times of crisis or despair, we turn to religious traditions or an intuitive sense of meaning to understand our experience.

The last few years of our social history — including the election of an unfit president, whose term culminated in an attempted insurrection at our nation’s capital, repeated police killings of Black men in the streets of our cities, an increasingly visible global climate emergency, and a two-plus year COVID-19 pandemic — has so disturbed our sense of human progress, justice, and order, that we have few words with which we can describe our current discomfort.

Look around you. There is no shortage of meaning making going on. Some feel a growing loss of personal power and blame Black and brown people for it all. They hoard guns and show up at street protests and state capitals armed with assault weapons. For others, anxious times call for self-protection and isolation, so they move their families ever farther away from people, stocking their bank accounts and pantry shelves so that they might turn away from the world’s chaos. Still others have chosen to frame the simple public health concept of wearing face masks in public as an assault on their personal freedom, joining vehicle convoys that clog the highways and city streets.

And then there are the rest of us. We are exhausted and worried, but still showing up for our jobs, checking in with parents in Florida, getting to the grocery store, and trying to help our kids through another unusual school year. We are just trying to figure it out.

Now the despot leader of Russia has launched an invasion of Ukraine. This country was once part of the former Soviet Union, but since that change 30 years ago has been proudly independent. Death, displacement, and destruction are the consequences of this war, begun by the maniacal greed of one man and his government. As the world responds to assist Ukraine, he threatens to use Russian nuclear weapons.

While we may be half a world away, media bring views of this suffering and chaos right into our homes. Many of us, already exhausted by the demands of the pandemic have felt an increased sense of helplessness in the face of such evil. The age-old question of evil looms large again. Where is God in this terribly broken human world? Can we expect God to be of any real help? If not, what’s the use of belief? Looking up from our televisions and laptops at one another, we wonder how all this makes any kind of sense. And then we try.

Invasions during peacetime are acts of evil. While such chaos can seem like a supernatural force, it’s not: evil is us, an embodied human event. It’s not some personified being or invisible spirit, at loose in the world, stalking the vulnerable, harassing the faithful. Evil is humans raging and running others over seeking power, seeking to hurt, get revenge, control, land, influence or prestige. Embodied evil kills lives, families, buildings, bridges, economies, history and fragile trust.

So then, where is God? We can look for God in the same embodied way. God is spirit until God embodies love in us. God is made visible, discernable, when human beings act with care, compassion, and justice. Halfway around the world, we can embody God for our Ukrainian neighbors: we can contribute money to relief efforts, we can pray, uniting our spiritual and mental energies toward peace. We can open our minds to the necessary political support of human refugees and migrants everywhere, waves of people just like us, fleeing their own land for basic safety.

As a Christian, this is my theodicy, my understanding of a divine, omniscient God in a chaotic and sometimes evil world: God can only be really known in our world when embodied: in words, relationships, and actions of human love, mercy, and justice.

This is how we see God, and how I understand who Jesus was: the unique embodiment of God’s being. In the daily struggle to be human, may love guide your decisions. That’s where you will find the divine.

(Published originally for the Savage Pacer March 14, 2022)

Serious Hope : it’s for Adults

Hope is a powerful mental perspective, best experienced by adults.

During one of the longer dark nights this winter while watching television, I came across an interview with a well-known criminal defense attorney. It caught my attention, as I recognized her name from one or two famous trials that made news over the years. I listened as familiar questions got familiar answers until one question sparked a pointed response I won’t soon forget.

“What gives you hope for the justice system,” the reporter asked the seasoned, serious attorney. Nothing, said the lawyer. Hope is for children.

I have thought often of that comment as we have been struggling with this continuing pandemic. So much of our common focus has been on the future: what to expect with this virus next, how to plan for changing work expectations, what to make of an interrupted school year, whether to schedule a surgery or vacation. We have things that must be done today to best manage tomorrow. Many of these plans have had to be scrapped as the virus spreads beyond our control, even with helpful vaccines, killing 5.6 million people worldwide since 2020.

Is it a childish thing to be optimistic about the future in a natural world like this?

Even before experiencing this pandemic, some found it helpful to expect regular trouble in life. Bad things happen and continue to happen, despite our best efforts of avoidance or preparation, they say. The best way to get through this life is to expect less so that when the rare positive outcome arrives, we are pleasantly surprised.

While this mental frame may seem like a reasonable concession to experience, it’s a short path to emotional stress and depression. Few really live this way; human minds are not patterned to expect suffering with every breath. When all that ahead is darkness, we experience it as a slow death.

What is your natural frame of mind when it comes to considering suffering and expectations of the future? Are you naturally pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of struggle, pain and the occasional sunny day? Or are you more apt to put such ideas aside, trusting that some unreachable power determines our every move anyway?

Serious hope is for adults. I believe that a hopeful view of the future is a mature perspective, adopted by those who observe that within the randomness and chaos of the material world, there is also an observable return to center, to balance, to growth and healing that occurs in daily human life. While we may be swept away by sudden illness, or political turmoil, or personal violence, even these terrors aren’t a permanent state of being.

Everything changes, and as it changes, life has a global orientation that returns it to a new developing state.

As a Christian, I see this life orientation toward renewal a mark of God’s grace and presence in the living world. It’s because I have seen that both joy and suffering are not permanent experiences in this life, that the natural world, us included, is always working to restore and heal itself. I trust that within and underneath this life is an energy far larger than we, the life force that birthed the universe and is still creating it.

Perhaps this time of worldwide suffering has birthed a new life perspective for you. Along with fear, exhaustion and distrust, may you find an optimism that moves you toward hope and renewal. Without it, we are unprepared to embrace the life that awaits us, whatever it looks like, in communities worth living in.

Racism & Me

How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.

We value learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term “racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.

This is not a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color” as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true bigotry was on display.

When I spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.

I take my education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy; whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college admissions while wondering if it does any good.

Until I became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the pew.

It has taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.

It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13^th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.

(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)

I’m Not That Kind of Christian

I’m frequently asked by prospective clients for my counseling practice if I am a Christian counselor. I’m sad to say that it’s not always easy to answer this simple question anymore. Not because my faith has changed, but because American culture has changed. Very often those who ask are looking for a very particular kind of Christian to be their therapist. And so, to answer their question, I often need to figure out just what kind of Christian therapy they think they want.

In the last generation or so, the conservative evangelical portion of the American Christianity has so frequently attached the term Christian to their political causes that for many outside the church, to be Christian is to be a conservative, rigid, regressive social thinker. I want nothing to do with any so-called Christian perspective that is anti-science, anti-woman, anti-education and anti-neighbor. I see nothing in that perspective that points me to Jesus.

When I read and think about Jesus, I see a young, brown-skinned Jewish rabbi who turned his world upside down. He didn’t seek the rich and powerful to be his disciples; he chose fishermen and tax collectors. He spent his time seeking the company of the least powerful in his culture: women, children, outsiders, the diseased and the poor. He preached a gospel of forgiveness, love and service. He healed the sick and raised the dead, pointing to a God already in the world in a new kind of kingdom. He knew his scriptures, he understood the power structures of Judaism, and pushing at those powers is what led to his crucifixion.

When I consider how Jesus has been chronically mis-characterized throughout the generations, I really shouldn’t be surprised that we still face this problem two centuries later. My own religious tradition is based on a struggle to reform Christianity. The German priest Martin Luther, whose name later became synonymous with the 16th century European Protestant Reformation, was a serious scholar of the Bible and critic of the church. His sermons, lectures and religious tracts helped to lift Christianity out of centuries of crushing political enmeshment in which kings and princes appointed the local bishops and priests, the people never heard the scriptures in their own language and were taught to obey every law of the church in order to please God. Luther’s movement broke that world into pieces.

With such a fragmented, decentralized and diverse Christian church around the world, it seems impossible to hope for a new wave of reformation to sweep across our continent. The rigid conservative edge of the Christian community has the ear and wallet of the current political establishment, more and more of our young people are rejecting institutional commitments like congregations and seeking spiritual support elsewhere. Churches are closing, seminaries downsizing and church publishing houses are collapsing.

And yet, those of us who remain, who joyfully call ourselves Jesus followers, are called to continue to be a light to the world. To know down in our bones the kind of gracious, liberating God we follow. When I despair that one person can’t be of much effect, I find great inspiration in the witness of Pope Francis, who walks the streets, visits the poor, speaks several languages, opens his treasury for audit, holds his priests accountable for crimes, believes science to be the way we can understand our world, and advocates for the distressed with every president, prime minister or dictator who would meet with him.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of another reformation, when the old is collapsing and the new is coming. May we not lose heart, for the world still cries out for light and hope and peace. I am a Christian, but not like you may have come to expect reading the headlines from Washington D.C. I follow a Prince of Peace, a savior to the nations, a healer of the wounded, and one who welcomed the stranger. He calls us to bear witness to the light. His name is Jesus.

(Originally published Saturday, February 17, 2018, Savage Pacer )

Biblical Literalism is the Disaster

September came hard as massive hurricanes slammed into our nation’s Gulf coast. Like many, I found myself completely distracted and immersed in the round-the-clock news coverage of the damage. When it comes to bearing witness to destruction, we seem unable to look away. While the information does soothe our need to know and connect with important people and places in our lives, too much information can damage our emotional balance. We must turn and turn again to the present of our own life, and help as we can with donated blood, money and specific resources to relief agencies. This is how communities recover; this is how we can help.

Yet we are meaning-making beings. We naturally tell stories of what happens in the world so we might order and understand what can feel like chaotic circumstances. Some of those stories involve theology, or talking about God. Preachers pounding out prayers, sermons, articles and social media comments, as they do. Believers repeating them. And some of these God stories make me sad and upset.

Despite centuries of passionate and careful study of the Biblical texts by both Jewish and Christian scholars, research that helps readers understand how this big library of old stories, poems, hymns, histories, letters and Jesus narratives is put together into a single volume, there are still those who read the Bible as if it were dictated word for word by Jesus himself to a single scribe somewhere. They pull verses and stories out of their original context, ignore the subtleties of language, form, history, and culture and proclaim the words as current truths about God.

This literalism has led one strain of popular theology to declare that hurricanes, earthquakes and destruction of land and people as evidence God’s wrath. This way of reading scripture has harmed untold numbers of people who have sought comfort, direction and help from God in times of disaster. This perspective takes as a starting point the way that the people of Israel, over 3,500 years ago, made sense of their own suffering.

The Jewish people are descendants of a tribe of people who believed they were God’s chosen nation. The only way those ancient people could reconcile that closeness to God and their suffering was to tell the story that both good and evil come from God. That included natural disasters, physical and mental disease, and war with neighboring tribes. Suffering? That must be God’s punishment. It made sense three millennia ago. It makes no sense now.

Jesus came fifteen centuries later and challenged that older way of thinking. If you read through the different versions of his story in the New Testament, you will read how he frequently challenged that theology. In several healing stories, people wanted Jesus to tell them who was to blame for someone’s suffering: a tower fell and killed several men; a child was born blind; a man was lame from birth. Part of his healing ritual was to tell the suffering that not only were their sins forgiven – the old way of thinking – but to “get up and walk.” There are dozens of these stories of Jesus’ compassion and healing, most of whom he heals without a judgmental word; just a command, and a touch.

Christians can disagree about much, but to continue to use meaning making from 3,500 years ago to talk about contemporary disasters and suffering is irresponsible and useless. Historic storms? They are a result of our complex dynamic atmosphere, now threatened by human environmental pollution and ocean warming. Earthquakes? Science has long ago discovered the massive pressures of our earth’s crust’s plates moving over time. These are scientific stories of meaning we can trust.

Is God our creator? Oh yes. But to assume that God’s action in the world is toward destruction is to fail to look at Jesus. Jesus’ life and death was a song of praise to a God of love and mercy, of healing and hope, of struggle for the sake of this difficult human family. If you’re hearing anything else from your church or religious media in these difficult days of natural disasters, wars and rumors of war, you’re not hearing the Good News.

(Published first in the Savage PACER 9.16.2017)

Good Pastors, Bad Congregations

Parish ministry : It’s good I left when I did.

I was shaped as a congregational leader in the 1960’s and 70’s: heady days of steady church membership, confident budgets, and familiar ethic traditions holding everyone together. Despite the daily pain of Viet Nam, race riots, assassinations, and a rising violent drug subculture, middle class Americans believed in the power of their institutions. It was this general optimism that brought the votes to ordain women in my Lutheran tradition in 1970, to start new congregations in blossoming suburbs, and to grow the church publishing houses that served tens of thousands of congregations.

By the time I was a few years into ordained ministry, I could see that church culture had started to change; America was changing. The explosion of affordable, personal technology began to change the way we communicate, socialize, learn, do business, and understand the world. We’ve become a worldwide, 7 days a week economy. We have seen the rise of extremist religious groups around the world threaten our allies as well as our own nation, with youth from our own region joining them. At the same time, religious conservatives calling out for us to become a “Christian nation” ignore the almost daily media stories of clergy sex abuse, its cover-up and current lawsuits.

Our culture has not stopped adapting. In a matter of a generation, church seems completely unnecessary to large numbers of people. Congregations have been slow to notice, even as theologians, seminaries and clergy have scrambled to adapt.

Our churches still use models of volunteer, non-profit, church building- and clergy-centric ways of being church, while our children hold in their hands tools that open the whole world to them. Their schools, their sports teams, and the internet, social media, e-publishing, and online gaming, are the communities that connect our children. While my children have been in worship with me their entire childhood, they do not connect with that community ritual the way I do. The prayers, hymns, creeds and sacraments that shaped me are just a small part of the huge flood of words, music, beliefs, actions and symbols their lives encounter every day.

We as members of churches must stop behaving as if these changes will all go away. If we keep electing lay leaders to manage our congregations who have this perspective, that “we just have to keep doing what we have always done,” we will continue to have buildings that are too big for the budget, clergy who get sick or quit from the stress, and lots of meetings where people wring their hands, demanding some shiny new youth program in order to bring in younger families. We need the best, brightest, most faithful lay leaders to join their pastors in helping recreate congregational life. We who care can’t give up.

Those who live, breathe and study the changing church point to the opportunity for us all to grow into what we have always claimed to be: people set free by grace to embody grace in the world. We must somehow take the best of our institutional life – our worship, our education, and our service – and do that well when we are together, and then keep living our faith in our lives. That’s what we need our clergy to be doing; equipping us through worship, conversation, training, teaching and example to live Christian lives. Not sitting in their offices, overwhelmed by the endless phone calls and paperwork of a shrinking intuition. If you have a pastor who is a good teacher and preacher, who loves God and is constantly out in the community meeting with people, trying to grow the church in the world, love them and join them. They know what they are doing.

“Bound Conscience” is Theological Bullshit

SERIOUSLY? I won’t start fights on Facebook. But a post I read has me fuming.

A female pastor claiming that being against women clergy in the church isn’t really sexism, it’s just “bound conscience,” and we have to respect those folks who believe this way. I have been trying to craft a response to her post for an hour and I have just come to this:

I see “bound conscience” as racism, sexism, and homophobia all dressed up in fancy theological clothes. The incarnation of Jesus isn’t just about God’s love for the male, privileged body. It is about God’s redemption of all human flesh – whatever color, race, gender, ability or age. And those who preach this gospel ought to reflect the diversity of this God-loved human race.

Bound conscience?! That is the power of discrimination : it creates self-hatred in those who are hated by the majority. Our blindness to our own condition continues to amaze me.

Here’s my bottom line: It is not OK with me that an ELCA pastor, called to preach and teach, misstates or misunderstands the power of discrimination about gender, race or sexual orientation, when talking about Scripture.