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The Cosmic Clash of Jesus’ death

We know what it’s like to wait for something to happen, to feel that that familiar internal pressure and energy of a pending experience. This was the emotional atmosphere that developed around Jesus as he journeyed from Galilee toward Jerusalem for the annual Passover holiday. He had warned his disciples it would mean a deadly confrontation, and it’s these events the Christian church around the world remembers each Holy Week.

Passover celebrates the day, centuries before, when Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt by the miraculous intervention of God. It was a religious as well as political holiday that for many Jews held powerful connotations for their present day: would God ever help them rise up to cast the Romans off their backs? Provided by Rome with social and political stability but at enormous human cost, Jews were heavily taxed, forcing many into poverty. Would God one day raise up a new King, who would defeat the massive empire, just as young king David once felled Goliath?

Tensions in the city were high. The entire region was part of the Empire, and locally controlled by a governor named Pilate. Rome allowed local religious authorities some measure of influence and control, and in this city, that was the Jewish council who oversaw religious life. The strained version of peaceful power maintained in the city was easily threatened by upstart charismatic leaders like Jesus.

That betrayal then cascaded to a confused arrest, beating, and questioning by Pilate, who by then anticipated rioting. Placing the beaten and silent Jesus before the mass of pilgrims gathered outside his palace, the crowds cheered for his crucifixion. That Friday before the Sabbath, he was executed by Rome, nailed to a cross through his wrists and ankles. There he rapidly bled, suffocated, and died, a warning to the nation to fear the power of empires, religious and political. His remaining friends took his body and buried him in a borrowed tomb. It seemed such a violent and senseless defeat.

Quite early in the Christian proclamation, his death was understood as a human sacrifice in the same way that animal sacrifices were made at the temple for generations. Trying to make sense of this loss, early confessions of the church declared that Jesus was a substitution for human sin, to satisfy God’s demand for our righteousness. You can read this confession in various parts of our New Testament and preached vigorously everywhere today.

But Jesus did not remain dead. Something so impossible happened that his disciples were completely changed and declared that this dead one was now alive again. Incredible! What in the world just happened? They called a resurrection, and that experience changed history.

What if a better way to understand this mystery is to proclaim instead that Jesus’ death and resurrection was a cosmic clash between human power and God’s kingdom? Between the brutal will to own and dominate verses the eternal, expansive power that love creates? This is how I have come to believe what is celebrated in both the cross and empty tomb. That in this failure to grasp his own power, Jesus chose to surrender himself to God’s kingdom. He allowed human power to destroy him, and God’s mysterious power to resurrect him.

This is the Christian proclamation of Easter: love is stronger than death. God’s kingdom of mercy, healing, and love, while seemingly vulnerable to human powers, is the eternal light that overcomes darkness. All the brutality that humans do to one another – betrayals, wars, genocide, all of it – is not the last word. God’s love is bigger than human hatred. This is the central confession of our faith: Jesus has died, and Jesus is alive. The power of love overcomes all death. Amazing! Thanks be to God.

Grief is Love with Nowhere to Go : Therapy

One of the privileges of my therapy practice, quite distinct from many of my colleagues who work in large counseling clinics, is the ability to have long-term relationships with clients. I have several clients with whom I have worked with for over a decade. That longevity is not the norm for most therapy experiences, of course. Most of us access therapy to find help for mind/body problems that can find a great deal of relief and resolution in a few months’ time. My practice is a bit different; while I do see clients for the many common psychological problems humans have, my work is centered on our experiences within our families.

Families are how human beings form loyal connections, raise children, share culture and manage change. No matter what form our nuclear family took, we are each a product of our parents’ genetic lines, and their emotional outlook on the effort of living. The decadeslong development of human children means we are subject to the personalities, resources and behaviors of those we live with. Then in adulthood, most of us form intimate partnerships, creating the next generation of our family. The continuing influence and problems that this large network of relationships creates for each of us is the focus of family systems therapy.

A couple of weeks ago, I came close to another aspect of life families manage, death. One of my wonderful clients — a person of faith, so passionate for her spouse and children, a devoted professional, loving neighbor, co-worker, and friend — lost her life to an aggressive cancer, smack in mid-life. We had talked together about her personal challenges for over 10 years, and when the cancer that had been quiet for a while rose back up with force this spring, I knew that our remaining time would be precious and short.

I know how to walk with those at the end of life as a pastor. I know how to provide spiritual care at this mysterious, liminal passage. But I had yet to grieve a client who had been in current therapy with me. As her last difficult weeks passed, even our brief conversations had to give way to more critical ones with physical medicine providers. One of my client’s final acts of grace toward me was to put her pastor in touch with me, who could share her experience and keep me informed of funeral plans. Then my client died as she had hoped, quietly in her own home. Her pastor as well as her husband lovingly reached out to me later with the funeral plan.

On a hot Friday morning, I drove to her church. Hundreds of us came together to grieve and remember. I was an anonymous mourner, known by sight to only two people in that large sanctuary. And yet, I belonged. It was perhaps one of the best funerals I have ever attended. Gorgeous music she chose; loving, true words spoken about her; and God’s gracious love for us spoken and shared in word and sacrament filled the sanctuary with quiet hope. It was a wrenching, heartachingly joyful service for someone gone too soon from those who needed her and need her still. Need her still.

We live in an increasing isolated culture, each stuck in our pockets of neighborhood, home life, children’s activities, workplace, political concerns and a thousand small but essential obligations. While there may be so many times in your life when you feel unseen, forgotten or left out, I want to remind you of the power of your most essential relationships. Human beings hold one another together, and while it may go unspoken so much of the time, we are the world for one another.

And yet, we don’t often say it. Or believe it could be true that we are that important to others. We have so many hundreds of thoughts and concerns we manage just to get through each day. We have deep cultural belief in the myths of individualism and independence; we may live quiet, solitary lives. But, as this experience of loss has reminded me again, our lives are so unique and irretrievably short. We don’t know the length of our lives, and yet we barrel on as if we can live forever.

Nothing matters more than love. Loving ourselves for our own mental and spiritual health, loving our neighbor for the sake of our shared world, loving our friends for the deep and varied connections they make and loving those who share our daily life in family. What is that beautiful and true saying about grief? Grief is just love with nowhere to go. May you love with breadth and abandon and may you know that deep love in return.

Written for / published in the Savage PACER 9/30/2023

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.

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.

What the Church Must Now Do : Listen

The Church is so accustomed to preaching to the culture. It needs to listen.

For the first time in Minnesota history, a white police officer has been found guilty on three counts of murder of a Black man. The killing of George Floyd, captured on video, ignited a year of protests and riots, memorials, local distress and international outrage, all during a historic worldwide pandemic. It was horrible, and the impact, frightening and exhausting. The verdict, braced as we were for more violence, gave a sense of victory and relief.

Many are hopeful that this verdict is the signal that white Minnesotans are finally ready to confront innate racism, an implicit fear of people of color in general, and Black men in particular. But while we celebrate this milestone of difference and change, the deaths of Black citizens during interactions with police has not stopped, and the trials continue. Several weeks ago, 20- year-old Daunte Wright was killed during a traffic stop and arrest in Brooklyn Center.

How did Minnesota, a state proud of its progressive politics, the land of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone, a culture that continues to claim the Christian value of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and is proud of its tolerance and high quality of life, create a culture where darker skin color seems to automatically signal inferiority or threat, even to police officers who carry weapons and are trained in use of force?

Implicit bias began long ago with European colonialism, its slave trade, and 250 years of slavery in the South. The struggle to end slavery sparked our Civil War. What followed — Emancipation, the South’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, federal Reconstruction, and Reconstruction’s reversal — soon made room for the policies of widespread legal racial discrimination.

Inequity based on skin color was routinely written into American family and marriage law, banking and mortgage lending, employment, voting rights, education, housing, public transportation and accommodation laws. All of which was routinely supported by teachings, sermons and policies of most Christian churches. These practices and attitudes effectively created a two-tiered American society, based solely on perceived skin color.

Minnesota was not immune. That century of legal segregation and migration out of the South shaped where children attended school, what families lived near whom, and where Americans worshipped, worked and played. It shaped where poverty was concentrated, where resources were located, how schools were funded. It has been such a part of our culture that our religious life has unwittingly reinforced these racial divisions.

What can we do as people of faith in response to this terrible legacy? We in the Christian church are quite accustomed to speaking to our larger communities with the words of our faith and traditions. Many of us are coming to realize we have been tone-deaf to the impact of our attitude and practices on people of color. It’s time we listen more than we speak.

Remember when most churches taught that homosexuality was an aberrant, shameful, sinful lifestyle? That majority religious opinion changed only when many of us began to really listen to the life experience of gay neighbors and friends. Opinions about sexual orientation have changed faster than during any other social movement in American history. While racism is decidedly different, it is our calling, as Jesus followers, to repent and renew ourselves for the sake of our neighbors’ lives and dignity.

These times call for the courage to relax our loyalties to the past and wonder how we might better embody the grace of God in a world of diverse history, race and experience. I believe we are being called by God’s spirit to humility as we consider how Christianity has been used to bolster the cause of slavery before the Civil War, and again, during the generations since. Even in our own state, in our churches, and in our families.

It’s not easy to shift our primary focus from indifference to curiosity, from speaker to listener, from confidence to humility. It means working against our own mental habits, our language, our assumptions about people and their experience in the world. But if we want to live lives of authentic discipleship, we must respond to the world around us as it is. We can work to listen and learn from neighbors we have excluded, judged and dismissed. Even when what they tell us confuses us. We may have tried to create churches that embody the gospel of Jesus, but our own history, revealed in eyes of those we have systemically excluded, shows us all otherwise.

Originally published as Spiritual Reflections column, The Savage Pacer, May 8, 2021

Getting back to community

As we move toward a more mobile and interactive lifestyle again, how do you imagine your need or preference for social gathering has changed?

At last, some good news: we seem to be slowly crawling our way out of the pandemic. Even with new variant strains, our community rates are low, hospitalizations have decreased and fewer Americans are critically sick and dying. More of us are vaccinated every day as supply increases. Schools, gyms, airlines, restaurants, museums and churches are starting to welcome people back.

But after a full year (and more) of limitations on our social gatherings, many wonder how our cultural institutions will look when we finally emerge through this crisis. We can’t just snap back after half a million people have died, countless numbers of businesses have closed, more millions have lost their jobs and our nation’s children, parents and teachers are exhausted by the loss of classroom learning.

As we move toward a more mobile and interactive lifestyle again, how do you imagine your need or preference for social gathering has changed? Will you embrace your earlier habits of frequent restaurant dining, attending crowded basketball games, or elbow to elbow live music concerts? Will masks become part of our normal attire at a doctor’s appointment or plane flight? And for people of faith, what will become of in-person worship when we can all get back together?

Church statistics have shown that even before the pandemic restrictions, Americans were changing their habits of worship attendance and affiliation to Christian communities. A sharp decline in participation has been measured in the last 20 years, and the loss of in-person participation in this last year has increased that loss.

The Barna Research group (barna.com) has discovered that while half (53%) of active church members report that they have streamed their church’s worship service in the last month, a full third (32%) of active members have never participated online in the last year. Even more disconnection is reported among members in the millennial generation (18-29 years old) as a full 50% have stopped any church participation since the start of the pandemic. While some churches report a number of new online participants this year, the number is too small to be statistically significant.

These numbers simply prove to me the obvious: that full human life, including religious activity, is meant to be lived with and among each other, not separate, isolated and apart. Video conferencing, while a wonderful technology and alternative mode of communication across distances, can never replace the experience of being together.

When we are in proximity to another human body, we share essential emotional information with one another about who we are and who we see the other to be. We communicate with more than our words: our bodies have a social language expressed in our posture, gestures, tone of voice, tilt of the head, the gaze of our eyes. We stand close, we hug, we step apart. We laugh, cry, roll our eyes, make a face, drop into silence, listen or shout together. The energy of these emotional expressions is felt in our nervous system, and we have the power to co-regulate one another as we connect with close relationships.

This is what I hope many more of us have learned in this last, very hard year together. That to be fully ourselves is to be seen and felt and known as we are when we are physically together. That to save our lives, we had to stay apart. But to be fully alive, to create human community together, we need to be physically present in one another’s space.

It has been a terrible year in so many ways. Staying connected to spiritual practice and people has been challenging, even as I have loved being together on Zoom on Sundays or talking books and culture on Tuesday nights. I will be forever grateful for our pastor and musicians’ optimism, consistency and focus as they pivoted from in-person to online in a flash. But when we can, churches will be gathering body to body, heart to heart, to sing, to pray, to listen for the word spoken. Because that is how our God has made us: spiritual people in physical bodies.

I pray you can find your way back to your faith community to regroup with others and be restored into the body Jesus called us to be. May it be so, and may it be soon.

(Originally written for / published in / the Savage Pacer, Feb 20, 2021

Gender Control & Body Shame: The Purity Movement

Nothing makes me sadder than the way a part of the Christian family, the conservative evangelical community, has shamed women for their gender, leadership and sexuality. In the 1990’s, a bizarre, controlling movement spread in churches to have young women be told that sexual purity was their responsibility alone; that young men were so weak that they couldn’t control their sex drive. Girls were trained to pledge their “purity” until marriage at the cost of their integrity and sense of self. Girls were indoctrinated to such a degree that their sexual expression was wrapped in shame, guilt and fear to traumatic degree.

I hope that any woman for whom this story is a personal one will seek care with a good, skilled mental health therapist who has religious training and deep background. I work with such women.

Want to learn more about the way women have been shamed and controlled by this movement? Listen to this recent Fresh Air broadcast in which Teri Gross interviews the author of the new book, “Pure.” https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/09/18/649070416?showDate=2018-09-18

My Christian Faith IS Political

How does human culture change? If we tell the simple story, the kind that gets written for elementary school textbooks, change looks explosive, like it was shot out of a cannon. Continents are discovered by a single explorer, wars end with the stroke of a pen, inventions burst onto the market. But that simple moment is far from the entire story. What lies behind human change are innumerable people, their imaginations, choices and behavior, and the repeated sharing of new information which shifts many toward a converging point of difference. Something new has begun.

Yet while human creativity moves us toward discovery and difference, there is an equally powerful force in human life to prefer the known, the familiar, the past. We are fiercely loyal to what we have been; it has formed our identity. The current presidential administration, with its failure to denounce white supremacist groups, ignoring the danger of climate change, dismissing professional journalism’s historical integrity, isolating our country from our international allies, starting a massive trade war, soft pedaling the rising numbers of school shootings, separating children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border, and attempts to restore glory to the old technology of coal mining, is all about amassing power, promising renewed security and courting those who feel they are losing their assumed, rightful place in America. It is government for those who are fundamentally afraid and believe that security can only be found by returning to an imagined, familiar past.

Unfortunately, nowhere is this drive to preserve the known and idealized American past is more visible than in the life of many Christian church leaders and members. For generations, local congregations have reflected the majority culture and resisted any real move to change the status quo. At every crisis point of growth, a majority of leaders and members hold on to the past. Slavery? Post-civil war racial segregation? Women’s suffrage? Civil rights? Vietnam? Birth control? Treaty rights with native tribes? LGBTQ rights? At every turn, among the loudest and most vociferous supporters of maintaining status quo have been church-going, educated, Bible-quoting, privileged middle-class adults .

Nearly every mainline church in Europe is empty on Sundays. Why? They have failed to respond to the world around them. The generations of children born following the horror of World War II found the focus of church life to be rigidly focused on reestablishing the past, a past that was not important to them as Europe recovered and turned outward. This same loss of importance and impact is happening in our country, too. The old systems are losing ground, and every day churches are closing.

I believe we are in the midst of major culture change, much like that which occurred following the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam protests and Watergate. There is a split in the culture between those who do not fear the present — new technologies driving an ever increasing economic globalism, a lessening of white majority population, smaller and more flexible institutions, an economy based on renewable energy, invention and service, and increased urban populations – and those who want life to return to the last century’s industrial economy fed by mining and burning coal, a massive military, a stable white majority population, clear racial and gender roles, a conservative judiciary, and rigid institutionalism. These tensions led to Donald Trump’s election and now play out dramatically in the news every single day.

I believe that the good news that Jesus preached is a message for all time, to every culture. It is news that God, who is the divine energy of all life and creation, is a God of love, welcome, healing and renewal. And that those who feel that power are called to live into those values in every time and place. The church began as a response to the resurrection appearances of Jesus and to the way his gospel life reshaped his disciples into people of peace, community, healing and hope. If our churches are not about proclaiming and living out this gospel, if all they do is maintain the status quo, it’s time to leave them empty. What many courageous people of faith are doing in this culture now to respond to this cultural change is messy and inspired. I am eager to see what the American church will become. It may need to die in many ways in order to reborn to its original purposes. God give us courage to speak when so many demand the church stay “out of politics,” as if politics, the way we use power to order our common life, was of no concern to Jesus.

(my Spiritual Reflections column, originally published in the Savage Pacer, 6/30/18)

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.