Lutheran Confessions

Clint Schnekloth is now at Substack

2022-03-29T21:55:00.001-05:00

If you'd like to continue to follow the blogging saga started here at Lutheran Confessions, come check out All the Things With Pastor Clint at Substack.

Follow Lutheran Confessions Now at Patheos

2019-09-16T21:18:00.001-05:00

It's been a bit, but I now blog over at Patheos. Here's the link, would love to have you follow posts over there!

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/clintschnekloth/

The Heresy of "Respectability"

2018-07-02T15:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a thought experiment: I'm sure you know churches that host soup kitchens, or groups of Christians who serve food through hunger ministries. Am I right?

Now, let me ask: do you know churches who simply get together and then go eat at soup kitchens?

The difference between serving a free meal, or gathering with all those who need a free meal in order to eat with them, is navigated according to the parameters of "respectability."

I'm going to leave "respectability" in scare quotes throughout this post, because I want to treat the word in Derridean fashion...

So...

... the demands of "respectability" diminish Christian witness. There is a general middle class captivity of the church in North America that keeps the faith trapped in a prison of its own design.

The concept of "respectability" is a function of class. And since the majority of middle class Christians rarely ponder class, it's not surprising that "respectability" is simply assumed in Christian faith communities rather than examined and critiqued. And such "respectability" is also inextricably tied up in issues of race and power.

Consider this:

White people call for “civility” when their power is challenged by people of color.

White people criticize “political correctness” when social norms don’t allow them to get away with being horrible to people of color.

These elements of political discourse are all about group monitoring and power maintenance. (Bobby Howard)

Let me offer a few examples.

One form of respectability polices language. There are things that can be said, and things that ought remain unsaid. According to "respectable" Christianity, Christians aren't supposed to swear, and discourse in Christian community is supposed to be moderate, careful, nice.

Ask a pastor how often they are in a room in which people are swearing, and when it is made known that they are a pastor, the whole room apologizes and the language "improves."

Yet some of the most powerful Christian speech in our world emerges from artists and other leaders who refuse to conform to middle class respectability, and so their art, their music, their speech is typically excluded the category "Christian", because the demand for "respectability" in liturgy and preaching supersedes other demands like truthfulness, or justice, or beauty.

Try to imagine worship music that is truly authentic, that emerges from the voice of the people, rather than from the simulacrum of middle class-ness (which humorously my auto-spellcheck wants to correct to middle crassness). It would sound like language bubbling up from the people. It would not be evaluated by committee. It would discomfit.

Some creatives are attempting such worship, like a recent Beyoncé Mass.

But of course a Beyoncé Mass only pushes out from middle class respectability in a couple of directions. But once you realize that middle class respectability is a cage with really wide bars, you can step out of it in many directions.

For example, who ever made up the idea that you had to dress up for church? It's certainly not biblical. As far as we can tell, whenever Jesus worshipped, he wore the same cloak he always wore (which was probably soiled and smelly), and entered the sanctuary barefoot.

Faith communities that demand by their homogeneity a certain way of dress, a certain type of car to park in the parking lot, or whether to drive a car at all, all of these throw off certain values of "respectability."

But "respectability" extends far beyond dress code and speech patterns. It's also about the content of speech, the form of life, the values that are assumed as dominant. What kinds of topics are off limits in your community? Who is excluded when such topics are excluded?

Pay attention to "respectability," and bring it into relationship with Scripture. You see immediately how heretical "respectability" is as a replacement for the moral vision of Scripture. The Bible cares little at all about whether you live in a single-family dwelling, drive the right car, or drop scatological terms into your conversation.

Want examples of non-"respectability" in Scripture? They are legion.

Remember those Israelite spies who go into Jericho and stay with Rahab the prostitute?

Or consider Rahab's great-grandson David. Remember that story in the Bible, when Saul needed to go into a cave to take a dump, and David was hiding in the cave? So he sneaks up to Saul while is indisposed, and cuts off a corner of his cloak, then presents the corner of the robe later to Saul to show that he had refused to kill him.

I could go on, and tell the stories of the prophets. Ezekiel laid on his left side for 390 days. Isaiah wandered around naked. Hosea married a prostitute.

Paul the apostle boasts in beatings, imprisonments, and his general foolishness. In fact, he calls himself a fool.

And then let's not even get started with Jesus, who seems at every opportunity to undermine the "respectability" of religion, even the respectability of God. The Son of God always and consistently gravitates to the least "respectable" person, typically touching or being touched by them.

I'm reminded of that song in the opening of Joyce's Ulysses (a book that itself respectably undermined the "respectability" of "literature"):

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard

My mother's a Jew, my father's a bird.

With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree

So here's to disciples and Calvary.

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine

He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.

Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all that I said

And tell Tom, Dick, and Harry I rose from the dead.

What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye!

Only the freedom of non-"respectability" allows a truth-teller to play fast and loose with traditional norms, and just so step out of the prison established by the controls of "respectability." It is only beyond "respectability" that the rich find themselves proximate with the poor, addicts feel comfortable in church pews, failures preach from the pulpit, and the dirty find their way to the font.

And not to be made "respectable," mind you. No, if the heresy of "respectability" is to be undermined completely, we need to remember the waters of baptism were already dirty to begin with, that dirt is life, and God is in the muck.

When God shows up at ICE

2018-06-21T13:32:00.004-05:00

Today we held a rally out front of the ICE offices in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I pulled up in my car, and parked right next to a friend. She works for Catholic Charities, and was bringing a young mother and her three year old daughter for a "check-in." They were rather concerned she might be detained.

Another woman was with the family, a friend of theirs and a pastor of a church in Los Angeles. She asked if we could pray together before they went in, so we did.

Lutherans at the ICE Lunch for Sanctuary
and Against Separating Families

After the prayer, our rally started gathering in the shade of a tree near the sidewalk, and the family stood at the door. ICE has offices in Fayetteville, but they keep the building unlabeled. If you want to stop by and see it, the office is at 2887 North Point Circle, right across from Saied Music.

Normally, the family would go in, and there would be a lengthy process, all with the possibility of detention. However, today the ICE employee actually came out to the front door, unlocked it, and handed the mother and three-year old a small piece of paper, and said, "See you in six months." Then she went back inside and re-locked the door.

To be clear, they all showed up worried she might be detained and separated from her three year old daughter. Instead, she went home hands in the air praising God.

God is at work, sometimes in small ways, but this was a God thing.

Then we held our rally. 40/29 news was present, so you'll probably be able to watch about our rally on the news. An immigration lawyer in town, Drew Davenport, gave us an update on the legal situation (such as it is). It's not pretty, and basically boils down to Jeff Sessions reversing protections for asylum seekers at the border for cases of domestic abuse, which then expanded into the zero tolerance policy harming thousands and thousands of families (did you know they have been detaining a 1000 people per day?!).

Representatives from Catholic Charities, Arkansas United Community Coalition, and People Power also spoke. I in particular shared that congregations are called to do their part, which means especially walking alongside undocumented people and going with them to their check-ins, etc, because it raises the likelihood of positive outcomes.

Congregations should learn how to become, and then sign up to be, sanctuary congregations.

Meanwhile, cities can also emulate Austin, Texas and become Freedom Cities.

While we met on the sidewalk out front of ICE, people working in neighboring businesses came out to watch us from afar. This was somewhat amusing. And periodically the ICE staff would peek out through their blinds. About 30 minutes into the rally, three police cars pulled up, stood around, stared at us, walked past us without interacting with us, and then left.

Which felt more like "watch and threaten" rather than "protect and serve." But we waved and smiled and used our live stream Facebook feature to monitor them while we also listened to those speaking.

It's not everything. It doesn't fix the mess we're in. But the regular gathering of such groups, especially in ways that bring to light the presence of systems of oppression, does move things in the right direction. And while we were there, the feeling was palpable. God's liberating Spirit was present among us.

Baptism and Immigration

2018-06-20T21:40:00.001-05:00

[Originally published in the Lutheran Forum in 2007. Can't believe I've been working this beat for over a decade and we're now where we are... but we are where we are. I'd probably write this differently if I were writing it today (less academic, less 'Lutheran-y', but I've decided to re-post it given the tenor of our national conversation on immigration.]

Radical Baptism

Bearing the name of Christ through baptism creates a new community that transcends traditional boundaries, especially nationalist ones. The modern nation state has done a superb job of convincing peoples the world over that citizenship is definitive of personhood. Witness the fact that the New York Times can run an article on “stateless” peoples, children born in foreign nations to undocumented immigrants who therefore have no true citizenship, nor can reliably ever expect to have such, short of the miracle of being processed by the international United Nations refugee assistance program. In the kingdom on the left, citizenship is everything, passports and identity cards are the mark of the state, and promise most of the protections and provisions of that state.

Exploding the myth of nationality as constitutive of personal identity is one of the goals of this essay. Stated otherwise, the goal of this essay is to proclaim the Christian myth of baptism as creation of a new self in Christ. Christians proclaim, and are reminded of especially in a post-Christendom context, that it is our baptism that makes us who we are, the body of Christ. Maxwell Johnson writes, “Baptism places into the world a community of displaced people, people on a pilgrimage who really belong nowhere except where they are led, a people sure of their identity as the Body of Christ, as those who always walk wet in the baptismal waters of their origin” (Rites, 365-366). It is patently the case that Christians have not boldly lived out this baptismal identity. In common conversation and usage, we state our nationality before we state our baptismal status. We are only secondarily baptized Christians, and it is the first definition (national) that most often claims our priorities and commitments and rules our imagination.

The point needs to be made clearly and strongly. So: national boundaries forcibly divide what is indivisible according to Christian theology, namely the body of Christ. The baptized on both sides of the border of any nation state should have as their primary allegiance, and have as their new border, the body of Christ into which they have been baptized. It is quite clear that much of the violence in the world, a violence that non-violent Christian community can neither condone nor be complicit in, results from the maintenance of these borders, which are the very force of death. William Cavanaugh writes, “The ancient martyrs often asserted the kingship of Christ in refusing to offer worship or service to the emperors and their gods. The church was, by its nature as Christ’s crucified and resurrected body, a challenge to the violence and idolatry of the secular authorities… the conflict is between Christ’s body on earth and the powers of the world which refuse to recognize Christ’s victory over it. Christians see acts of injustice and state violence as the continuing struggle between the people of God and the forces of death.”[1]

A pilgrim people, “sure of their identity as the body of Christ,” would not by and large be concerned about such things as “porous borders.” Secured on the rock of baptism, drowned into the one foundation of Jesus Christ as Lord, they would live on the way because they follow and are “the Way”[2]. As the obvious counter-example, most modern nation states are concerned about overly porous borders. They define persons by place of birth, by nationality, and so attempt to circumscribe personhood by reference to nation. This is their power over persons- trying to tell us who we are. Permeable borders therefore by definition weaken the state because they commingle persons the state wishes to define and exclude (or retain), and so challenge the nation’s defining power over persons. Although some nation states continue attempts to re-assert their power (defining persons as alien, illegal) and often do so through legitimate means (nationalizing, granting citizenship), nevertheless, a border either in reality or by citizenal definition, remains.

The Christian community, by contrast, because it’s life springs from the waters of baptism, calls the world to live as it does, with complete fluidity as we suffer and undergo God’s permeability. A fundamental doctrine of the church, ecumenically (and universally?) recognized, is that of “one baptism” (Ephesians). Although individual congregations may provide orientation or educational opportunities for new members who come from other communions, by definition a baptized person is a member of Christ’s church and so all congregations; most churches recognize one anothers’ baptisms, and it is baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that defines that person as new creation in Christ. As fundamental to Paul’s gospel logic as “one baptism” is his “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians).

Can the world, and institutions within it, actually live into this pilgrim one-ness? Traditional Lutheran theology, for example, found it necessary to make a distinction between two kingdoms, the kingdom on the left and on the right. This distinction was helpful in a Christendom context where it was necessary to have a theory of governmental rule (left) differentiated in some ways from a theory of God’s rule (right). It further helped because it allowed for a differentiation between values guiding the self and theories of just governmental rule. But the imagination intrinsic to such a distinction was guided primarily by a realpolitikrather than the sacramental imagination intrinsic to the life of the community of Christ. Two kingdoms is certainly true in a descriptive sense; it is my intention to call into question two kingdoms in its prescriptive forms. We all live mostly as if there were two kingdoms (although it could be argued that we mostly live as if there were only one kingdom, the kingdom on the left; Niebuhr was quite right to label much of our life together practical atheism). God’s kingdom as a reality in the world, a new creation already eschatologically accomplished prior to the end because Jesus as already come among us, is seldom embodied among us.

Take this obvious example: Can a baptized Christian fight in a war against another nation and kill another baptized Christian? Two kingdoms theology provided a place for such, taking into account certain “just war” considerations. But “pilgrim people” theology imagines an alternative, that these two soldiers, though of different nationalities, are still “one in Christ”, and just so thatis the primary claim on their lives, and their lifetaking. To kill a brother or sister in Christ is to maim and divide the one body, an action fundamentally opposed to the ethic of the gospel[3].

Just so most national defense is not a Christian ethic, but a pagan one, and the Christian witness, the life of the baptized, is one of permeable and hospitable borders.[4] It is in fact even more radical than that. It imagines one body in many places, and therefore hospitality and lack of defensiveness precisely in order to receive and live into that one body. In this sense, stringent national defense strategies and anti-immigration policies amount to the same thing. Both lack the imagination intrinsic to a baptismal spirituality, which sees a nation or kingdom being formed in each and every place because the baptized live in these places.

“Baptizenship” therefore recites the creed, not the pledge, and has as its symbol of unity a table rather than the flag. Christians, maybe especially in the United States, have been far too complicit in allowing (even maintaining) an idolatrous pledge and Asherah-like flag as central symbols of faith and comfort. Which of these two concepts primarily informs the average U.S. Christians’ ethics--patriotism or table fellowship? Although some might pay lip service to the latter over the former, in point of fact, table fellowship loses each time[5], because we have not advocated loudly for any and all of the baptized, of whatever place, to be welcome at our tables. How would they get to our tables? If they are languishing in a refugee camp, has our ethic of table fellowship led us to advocate for their quick processing and granting of refugee status? If they are undocumented immigrants, do they know our tables are safe and welcoming, or are they at risk of Christians being patriotically complicit in a system that would have us sending fellow baptized Christians through the penal system back to their “homeland.” Do the emotions that rise up around these issues give lie to our commitments? Obviously they do.

What I am calling for first of all is for us to simply imagine the possibility that baptism actually means something now, in the present, existentially, socially, bodily. Let’s at least imaginethat God’s Word is the source and norm of our life together, the first and the last word, the primary word, and that all other words (say systems of government, pagan practices of sovereignty, claims on personal identity, etc.) take second place to this first normative word. To play with the two kingdoms terminology, they are the kingdom that is “left” after the “right”-full kingdom has been lived and imagined in the way of its King. And this imagination has first claim on those of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus, have been baptized into his death, are dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6).

Then, as a pilgrim people, we might suffer at the hands of nation states or people groups who do not confess the same creed. We would suffer from living our baptism. At least then we would be suffering for the sake of the gospel, rather than forcing other Christians to suffer for the sake of our commitments to the flag, the nation, and the ethic of this world. The great tragedy in all of this is that we have become so comfortable with being powerful that we simply cannot imagine that Christ when he says, “Whoever is persecuted in my name [or for righteousness’ sake],” actually means what he says. And what he first means is that we will need to stop calling for others to suffer so we can maintain our own comfort and security. Seriously, in this era, does the nation-state need the church’s (our) patriotic mis-guided protections? Isn’t the Christian witness, “go and be martyrion,” much more at risk?

Beyond Baptism

“The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam, page 113).

Although the Christian community’s imagination is first of all informed by its standing as God’s baptized people, the church has generally understood that the implications of this acceptance (gift) of God are for all people, not just those already included. The danger in our presentation now is that baptism could surreptitiously function as the new border, a kind-of sacramental we/they dichotomizer. Returning to the pointed ethical question: Can a baptized Christian kill a non-Christian in war? Or as regards immigrants and refugees: Should non-Christian immigrants and refugees receive different treatment at the hands of Christians than the baptized? Does the theology of baptism imply that Christians only have concern for others who are baptized, or is their something intrinsic to baptism that propels itself out and away?

The joint ministry of the Lutheran denominations, as well as the ministry of Catholic Relief Service, Jewish Relief Service, and other refugee services, answers this question in their actual practice. They help relocated refugees of any and all religious traditions. They do not discriminate. They do this because they agree with Bonhoeffer that “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of the ordering of any society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” So, we might say that baptism as a sacrament is gospel precisely in its openness. Not only does it include all those baptized and therefore transcend things that might otherwise divide; it also refuses to divide based on its own internal logic. It embraces those not yet baptized and cares for them. It is a missiological sacrament, the practice of those sent out to all nations (Matthew 28). Since it is the practice and public sign of the sent pilgrim people, it transforms now how the church relates to those to whom they are sent precisely because of what is implicit in it as sacrament.

Baptism furthermore does not function as a new “border” or we/they dichotomizer because the baptized are already de-centered by the “I AM” who names them. As a de-centered “we”, the baptized no longer make distinctions between us and them in the way the world might. Instead, the church lives by what we might term a “realizing eschatology.” A realizing eschatology is coming to the realization that the end has already come in Christ, and so those who are coming to realize this enjoy a kind of freedom vis-à-vis this realization. James Alison tells a wonderful parable that describes his realizing eschatology better than any rational argument:

Please go back in your memory to 1989. Now please imagine that you are in Albania. November comes along, and through the ether comes news that many miles to the north, in Berlin, the wall has come down. You know exactly what this means: it means that it’s all over, the beast which ran your lives is mortally wounded, has lost its transcendence, is dead. It’s all over bar the shouting It may take some time for the thrashing about of the beast in its death throes to calm down. It may take some time for the effects of that to trickle down through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, but fundamentally it’s over. You and some friends begin quietly to dance and celebrate in Albania. The very fact that you are dancing and celebrating is itself not only a sign that the beast has lost its transcendence, but is something which is, itself, helping the loss of transcendence, because you can have a party in its face. Something has been undone, somewhere else, and this means that you don’t need to undo it yourself, the rejoicing in its being already done is part of what universalizes the undoing so that you do find yourself participating in the undoing, but as a recipient who is spreading the effect.. Some people, of course, do not accept that the coming down of the wall means that the beast is dead. They want to say: no, that’s a temporary blip, and we’re in charge here. So they turn up grunting and shouting and bullying to try and make it look as though nothing has changed. But it has, and even they are losing faith in the old order. Part of the celebration may be learning to help the apparatchiks of the old order discover themselves a place in the new one Giving them a soft landing: something the old order, built on revenge and triumph over enemies, couldn’t possibly understand. While they’re around, of course, your celebration will look like, and be made to look like, dancing in the face of the evidence. And that is what True Worship implies: the beginning of the celebration of a new regime even while the old regime hasn’t yet grasped the news of its own fall (Undergoing God, Continuum 2006, 40-41)

Certainly Jesus was one who was dancing in the face of the evidence. Inasmuch as the church has lived like Christ and with Christ, it has danced this way also. This is to say that because baptism is what it is, death and resurrection into the life of Christ, it brings with it the whole burden and blessing of Christlikeness—suffering and witnessing for the “others”, precisely because in Christ there is no longer other, but only neighbors who are already eschatologically “we.” And this non-othered ordering and neighborliness includes even those who wish to maintain the old order.

Baptized, We Live[6]

So far this essay has contained enough radical assertions to keep the close reader busy with questions and critiques for some time. I have purposely asserted the issues in as direct and pointed a way as possible, precisely to bring the issue to life in our imaginations. I am aware that much needs to follow in the way of appropriation and reflection (although I also wonder if most further work I would do on the issue might seek to tame the beast). One way forward is to enter into conversation with an alternative “real” eschatology[7], informed by a more traditional law/gospel distinction.

Exemplary theologian Gerharde Forde is one who maintains that there is an end before the end (a “real” as compared to Alison’s “realizing” eschatology), and on the basis of law/gospel distinctions proclaims a paradoxical already/not yet. He writes, “Precisely because faith sees that Christ alone is the end of the law, that law correlates with sin and death and cannot be removed by our theologies, law is established this side of the eschaton” (The Preached God, 219); or later similarly, “…there is no cure other than a more radical proclamation of Christ as the end of the law who because he is the end establishes the law prior to the end” (224).

Many of the documents and ministries of the current church assume some form of this understanding of the law and its continuation. For example, a Lutheran joint statement on immigration reform reads: “We recognize and affirm the responsibility of the government to regulate immigration in a godly manner while considering the many factors that deserve careful attention.”[8] This is a clear and concise articulation of the two kingdoms doctrine, at least in its traditional formulation.

As another example, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a Lutheran organization involved in ongoing work resettling refugees in the United States and advocating for refugees and immigrants, has worked out a clear and helpful policy statement on comprehensive immigration reform. They write:

LIRS and its member organizations believe that “In difficult and threatening times, churches and all Christians have an obligation to stand with the word of God against those who use fear to deny fundamental human rights and dignity to the stranger in our midst.”[9]LIRS continues to advocate for reform of our broken immigration system, working with our partners, who include immigrant, business, labor, faith-based and human rights groups. To meet the needs of migrants and of our communities, meaningful reform must be based on the following four principles:

· Uniting families

· Protecting human rights and worker rights

· Ending the marginalization of the undocumented, making it possible for them to live openly in our society

· Giving immigrants willing to contribute to our economy and society a path toward permanence.”[10]

While recognizing that the system is broken, LIRS works within and through the current legal system, calling for reform of the laws themselves. They “recognize and affirm the responsibility to regulate immigration in a godly manner,” and then clarify their understanding of the “godly manner” through four principles.

All of these are worthy commitments. I notice, however, that the four principles are informed by concepts of “rights,” “family values,” “non-marginalization,” and “contribution.” These are important concepts in our political landscape, and they have considerable traction. What is missing (probably not unusual for a public document from LIRS or any other non-profit of its kind) is the language of baptism and sacrament in the radical sense articulated in the first portion of this essay.

Nevertheless, the baptismal imagination does seem to inform further comments in the document regarding differing House and Senate Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation. LIRS opposes legislation that criminalizes undocumented workers. It especially opposes legislation that criminalizes ministry with undocumented migrants. Their recommendations are especially geared towards providing a path to permanence, avoiding long-term or unjust detention, and protecting the least and the vulnerable- unaccompanied minors, asylum seekers, torture survivors, and fractured families. Here I am reminded once again of Bonhoeffer’s confession: “The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”

The public statement of Bishop Stephen Bouman, Metropolitan New York Synod, is another example that, although not naming baptism directly, certainly radicalizes the issue in relation to Scriptural mandates: “God calls us to welcome, protect, and love everyone in our midst. Our love for the stranger must transcend national boundaries, race, language, culture, and religion.”[11] Bouman proclaims this in relation to immigration abuses in our nation, especially out-of-control detention of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are children or young women with families. No mention is made of baptism per se- instead, in this press-release, the emphasis is on the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger. Statements from Lutheran leaders like Bouman help illustrate a necessary next step- to relate the doctrine of baptism to the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger and care for the sojourner in our midst (Leviticus 19:33-34; Matthew 25).Statements like Bouman’s also exercise us in imagining a “realizing” eschatology pushing at the edges of current ministries of the church and affiliated organizations.

Heaven is Wet

The Church is the collective living out of the opening of heaven.[12]

All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said, “I am the way.”[13]

Church imagines citizenship differently because the Christian imagination is essentially eschatological. The church is not a rival polis, but points to another time and place, the new heaven and new earth. The church may appear to be a rival polis, may even articulate a vision of the life of the baptized, translated for the sake of the whole world, that sounds “as if” it rivals other polises; it is nevertheless a vision, and is non-exclusive in its exclusive claims. It is a way, the “collective living out of the opening of heaven.” Inasmuch as it is the way of Jesus, the Son of God, it is heaven, for heaven is God and life in God.

Although this can be articulated eschatologically, it also has a point of reference in the public witness of the crucified Christ. Christ, as the holy one of Israel, in his torn open and crucified body, is crucified “in the air,”[14]as a public sign of the end of one rule and the non-violent proclamation of a new one. Our incorporation into this crucifixion is how Paul, for example, makes sense of our new life in Christ. Because we are drowned in baptism and raised with Christ, our new life in Christ takes the form of this crucified openness. A number of boundaries take on new conceptuality. We are “adopted” (adoption serving as a fruitful metaphor that compares favorably and helpfully with the metaphor of immigration I have been employing in this essay). Jesus says to the beloved disciple, “This is your mother,” and to his mother, “This is your son.” We are just so a new sibling society, brothers and sisters in Christ, and although many may try to distinguish us by what we used to be, we are who we are made, and the heavenliness of this new creation is awash with a new fluid relationality. Immigrants. Refugees. Friends. Brothers. Sisters. Pilgrims. Citizens of heaven. For God has named us in a life-giving flood.

It is specifically in the presence of this public event “in the air,” the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross, that the church discovers who it is[15]The church is who it is in the presence of this crucified one. Although it may seem an obvious point, it seems frequently lost in the telling. The point is this- the Christian proclamation inherently has a public dimension. It takes place in space and time in front of a watching world. It furthermore creates a community through the proclamation of Jesus crucified. So there is a community of people who are marked by the cross and so live as “resident aliens” or “pilgrim people.” And it is the public life of these people, their life together, that is itself political action and activity before a watching world. That is, this Christian community does not first of all need to make changes in public policy, or change the world through shrewd politicking and advocacy. Rather, the Christian community is called first of all to live differently in and of itself, as the people it is created and sustained in the waters of baptism. Changes in the world will take place inasmuch as the world a) takes note of what the church is doing and how it is living, and b) reacts by working with, or resisting, the public nature of the church’s life. But the church is called to attend first to itself, and not to the hoped for or expected impact.

A wonderful example of this in the history of the church in the United States was the Sanctuary Movement. In the early 1980s, churches of all stripes- Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—offered refugees from Central American countries social services and advocacy support.. At that time, since many of these countries were officially allies of the United States, the U.S. would have denied many of these refugees asylum, even though many of the refugees had participated in the liberation theology movement, and were indeed in need of asylum. “These congregations, united under the banner of the Sanctuary Movement, also pledged that they would not reveal the identities of these refugees, even if they were arrested or jailed for doing so.” [16]A result of this movement to provide sanctuary (in the real sense of that term) was a change in national foreign policy. But changing foreign was not the movement’s raison d’etre. Rather, it was solidarity with the oppressed, and an imagination informed by the idea that it is our new life in Christ that has primary claim on us.

The New Sanctuary Movement, initiated this past month by Interfaith Worker Justice as a response to concerns for comprehensive immigration reform, has as its most crucial element a repeating of the first Sanctuary Movement’s “prophetic hospitality.” Congregations “host” a family seeking sanctuary for three months and support them throughout that time. In the case of the New Sanctuary Movement, no laws will be broken. But in a tense political and cultural climate, even this kind of hospitality will likely meet inhospitable protests.

Such a movement has deep resonances, even if unnamed, with this proposal for the recovery of a radical baptismal theology. It is a call to the churches to provide sanctuary for people, in many cases Christian people, who live in fear because they have been marked and identified first of all by nationality and race. One can imagine that at least in some of these sanctuaries, now literal rather than figurative, the waters of baptism flow and an echo of a voice is saying, “Child of God, you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross forever.” And the congregation responds, “The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”

[1]Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, Blackwell, 1998; ???

[2]“So. Jesus the Way, the ways of Jesus. He shows the way. He also isthe way…The Way that is Jesus cannot be reduced to information or instruction. The Way is a person whom we believe and follow as God-with-us”; Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way, Eerdmans: 2007; 36, 40.

[3]I remember some years ago visiting a Druze community in Israel, and learning that although they did participate in the Israeli army, they refused to fight if they knew Druze peoples were fighting on the other side (the Druze had communities in neighboring nations, not only in Israel).

[4]Pat Robertson on immigration is a crucial example of exactly what has gone wrong with Christian advocacy on immigration policy. In a recent front page article in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley writes, “Robertson quotes an Oxford historian who noted that in 376 A.D., “in a complete break with established Roman policy,” the emperor admitted “a large band of Gothic refugees.” In the space of two years, they revolted and killed him. The emperor, Robertson observes, “had done… the Christian thing,” but not “the Roman thing.” So there you are. Robertson the so-called Christian recommends the Roman thing over the Christian thing-- Michael Kinsley, article entitled “Election Day”, Nov. 5, 2006 issue of The New York Times Book Review.

[5]In fact, I remember that after 9/11, many communion tables were draped with American flags.

[6]Daniel Erlander, self-published, 1981

[7]Contrasted with the “realizing” eschatology of James Alison and others.

[8]The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, “Joint Statement Regarding Immigration Concerns,” June 2, 2006, http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=10023

[9]Joint Statement from the ELCA and LIRS, “Evangelical Lutherans Call for Fair and Just Immigration Reform,” March 2006, http://www.elca.org/advocacy/immad0306-5.pdf

[10]LIRS Comprehensive Immigration Reform backgrounder, www.lirs.org

[11]http://www.lirs.org/News/NewsReleases/20070420WWJSAIR.htm

[12]James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination(New York: Crossroad, 1996), 81.

[13]Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1952), p. 247.

[14]According to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience." ( Eph. 2. 2 ) But the Lord came to overthrow the devil and to purify the air and to make "a way" for us up to heaven, as the apostle says, "through the veil, that is to say, His flesh."( Heb. 10. 20 ) This had to be done through death, and by what other kind of death could it be done, save by a death in the air, that is, on the cross? Here, again, you see how right and natural it was that the Lord should suffer thus; for being thus "lifted up," He cleansed the air from all the evil influences of the enemy. "I beheld Satan as lightning falling," ( Luke 10. 18) He says; and thus He re-opened the road to heaven, saying again, "Lift up your gates, 0 ye princes, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors." ( Psalm 24. 7) For it was not the Word Himself Who needed an opening of the gates, He being Lord of all, nor was any of His works closed to their Maker. No, it was we who needed it, we whom He Himself upbore in His own body - that body which He first offered to death on behalf of all, and then made through it a path to heaven (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, chapter 4)

[15]Think, for example, of the liturgical proclamation, “For as often as we eat this bread and drink of this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

[16]Faith Works, Newsletter of Interfaith Worker Justice, May 2007, page 4.

Mea Culpa Leadership

2018-06-15T16:15:00.003-05:00

Try this thought experiment with me: in our culture, what are incentives to the admission of culpability, failure, weakness, mistakes? From where I sit, it seems very few benefits accrue to those who apologize or make such admissions, and there are many disincentives. Admitting failure, apologizing for anything, is risky business. Admit a mistake, and people will pile on you.

You've seen this happen, I'm sure. No wonder its a rare occurrence to actually admit guilt or fault.

If you are in a position of leadership with an organization and you consult your lawyers, they'll probably strongly recommend you make no such admissions in writing or otherwise, lest you make yourself vulnerable to a lawsuit.

I assume this is why, in addition to the actual personality issues (pride, vanity, stubbornness), many leaders in our nation (including those at the very top) follow a simple doctrine: Never apologize.

But there's a big problem with this doctrine. Never apologizing means never changing, never growing, and rarely getting better. It's like that line in Thor: Ragnarok when Thor tricks Loki at his own tricks. He says, "You'll always be the god of mischief, but you could be so much more."

Repentance doesn't guarantee growth, but it is a practice that illustrates maturity and the potential for growth.

This brings me to Shanna Germain. Shanna is an amazingly creative writer. She makes games and stories with Monte Cook Games, plus novels and a lot more. I started following her on social media a few years ago when I got into role-playing in the Cypher System, the gaming system published by Monte Cook. I love following her on social media because she is so wise (and added bonus, she wrote a whole role-playing game with dinosaurs).

Shanna recently posted this, which I share with her permission:

I am sitting with my imperfections today. My failures and flaws. It makes me feel bruised, this self-reflection--and tender. It's always a hard space, but it's a space from which I hope to rise, better and smarter for doing the time and the work...

One hard thing about getting older is that my failures and flaws are not the simple mistakes they once were. Now they are more complex and ingrained, harder to unweave and understand. Leveling up is complex work.

There's so much truth in this short post, I feel like I need to break it down and exegete it, like Scripture. Maybe because I'm in middle age, probably around the same age as Shanna, this post felt especially close, poignant. I've been sitting with my own imperfections a lot lately, not always knowing what to do with them.

I fail all the time. Sometimes I fail because I'm leading with my strengths, and I get confused in the application. Sometimes I'm just stubbornly clinging to my flaws. They are so complex and ingrained, almost hard-wired into my operating system, I hardly know how to re-write them... I even wonder if I can.

And my failures sometimes have a much larger impact than when I was younger. As a pastor, my failures impact my congregation. As a voice in our community, or here in these social media spaces, my flaws get magnified in so many ways.

Shanna compares this work to "leveling up," which is language familiar especially to gamers. Gain enough experience, you level up. With each level, you gain extra skills, abilities, powers. Players in a game at higher levels often have to keep track of how their various new skills interact. You might gain a skill at level 4 and forget about it for a while, only remembering at level 10 that you even had the other ability in your skill set.

In middle age, it seems we're all in over our heads, literally. We don't even know what we don't know. The systems in which we are embedded are complex, and part of their complexity is actually created by our own complexity.

If we're leading really, really well, we're actually creating these challenges, because we're creating in ways that lead out into uncharted waters. Heck, really great creatives don't just lead us into uncharted waters... they actually CREATE the water.

In the midst of all this complexity, all these failures and flaws, it is the peculiar Christian notion (call it a doctrine if you'd like) that you can always apologize.

You can always apologize, because there is always grace. You can always repent, because new life shows up on the other side. Such sitting with our failures and flaws is the beginning of the Christian life, it is the center of the Christian life, and it is always available. It's a better way, even if it is the path less taken.

Imagine if our national leaders were encouraged by our culture, and by their own leveling up, to recognize mistakes, admit their failures and flaws, repent, and turn in new directions. Watching our leaders not do this is maddening, and also sad and pathetic. They look stuck, trapped. I've noticed the same pattern in myself at times. I don't like it.

I mean, it's not just that individual leaders in our nation follow the doctrine of never apologize. It's actually American Doctrine never to admit we made any mistakes. It's ingrained in us from a very early age. Just go back and read the history textbook you were assigned in school.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Scripture is how different it is from other works of "history." In some ways, the entire Hebrew Scripture is a record of Israel's failures, and God's faithfulness. Similarly, the New Testament is a story of Christ's epic failure, and God's raising him up. And Paul's letters are all about his own weakness, and God's strength in spite of Paul's failures.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to find myself at 71 years old so immature that I can't say sorry, so rigid I can't change, so righteous I have no need of God's. So with Shanna I'm sitting with my imperfections in this blog, and I'm finding such sitting then gets me up off my seat into a life I'd otherwise be afraid to live.

Finally, one caveat: I am not giving anyone the assignment to publicly apologize while in a position of leadership. As I mention at the beginning of this post, I know how risky this can be, from personal experience, and seeing it play out in the lives of others. For right now, I'm sitting with this tension in my own life: between the Christian call to repentance, and the reality that admitting weakness in public settings for leaders can, because of our cultural situation, harm sense of self, compromise the leaders' role, and leave people feeling isolated. I'm not sure how to reconcile the theology with the reality, but I know sitting with the first, and acknowledging the second, are important, and important to hold in tension.

How to do all the Christian things

2018-05-19T16:38:00.000-05:00

A lot of people in my life and in my parish are new to Christianity or the life of the church. It's not unusual to be asked a rather straightforward question: "So, how do I do this thing?"

That's a big, sprawling, epic question... what do I do now that I'm a Christian?

It's a good question, a very good question, because Christianity is indeed a "way." And if you're new to it, your heart has been warmed and you feel called but you're still feeling out how to go about doing. The "way" is frequently fraught, sometimes glorious, and often even dangerous.

When I get asked this question, I kind of of want to respond, "I have no idea!"

But that's not really accurate. It's simply more like I've spent 45 years finding various ways to attempt life in Christ. Sometimes I fall into good habits. Other times I get lazy. Through it all, I rely on God's faithfulness. And I try really hard to avoid insipid, vacuous, or pollyanna forms of the faith.

Many people are seeking simple resources and practices they can engage that will help them deepen their faith. They've seen the faith modeled in all kinds of ways, and some of those ways are less than helpful. Much of pop Christianity is just about as edifying as pablum.

So on this particular point, I really do have a few recommendations. Four, to be exact.

But these are not going to be completely straightforward. I'm not going to point readers to the first thing they might grab if they go to the Christian bookstore, or pull up on television. I'd like this list to be idiosyncratic, and therefore a bit more helpful and sustaining. Think of these as various quirky ways to live our baptismal covenant.

Read a really old book (and a lot of other books)

I don't really have devotionals or workbooks to recommend, although I have nothing against them. I just find that reading books has been THE way that I come to a deeper understanding of Scripture. So, I recommend that everyone treat Christianity like continuing education, and find a way to read good books.

Start by reading the really old book. By which I mean the Bible. You might check out the new Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version (5th edition). That's a spectacular and meaty study bible that will serve you well for years. Or read the Lutheran Study Bible, and use the wide margins to write your notes.

Where should you start? Well, it doesn't hurt to start at the beginning, and go from there. Or use a reading plan for daily readings. Or if you've never read the bible much at all, you might just start by reading one gospel, like the gospel of Mark, and then keep reading that gospel over and over for a time, to become very familiar with it.

Besides reading the Bible, I recommend reading other books. Some parts of the bible are more neglected in our culture, so you might read something about The Forgotten Books of the Bible.

Or you might try to read a book that helps you hear how a community unlike your own reads the bible. Consider Reading the Bible With the Damned. Or read a book that synthesizes information about a character in the bible who is hard to understand but worth the time. Like N.T Wright's Paul the Apostle: A Biography.

It's also worthwhile to read book length treatments of how inspiring people attempt to live as Christians. I really like Kathleen Norris's A Cloister Walk, or Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution.

Finally, it's worth reading a book that really challenges your faith and assumptions. Since he recently died, and is the father of black liberation theology, I might recommend The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone.

Basically, just read a lot of books. If you want to keep getting more and more recommendations for good books, subscribe to a magazine like The Christian Century, which is always reviewing them.

Be with people (but not too much)

Christianity really is about other people. Remember that Jesus taught the greatest commandment was to love God, and another commandment was basically identical to it: love your neighbor as yourself. Bishop Curry preached an amazing sermon today on this very topic at the royal wedding.

I love the juxtapositions in the gospels that illustrate how Jesus did this loving. He loved the little place where he lived, that rural community along and around the Sea of Galilee. But then he also set his face towards a city (Jerusalem) and ultimately guided a community of faith who launched from that city to the ends of the earth, always striving towards indigenization so the gospel would find its way lovingly into the cultures it met.

One of the primary ways we do this "love one another" is in worship. There's a good reason so many of us commit to gathering for worship once a week. It works. It focuses on a specific gathered community, and imagines Jesus Christ walking among them. Not exclusively there, as if only that community could experience the presence of Christ and the love of God. But most definitely there.

In such community, we practice the main Christian practices. We give thanks. We forgive one another. We rejoice.

Bonhoeffer, in his doctoral dissertation on the holy community, had this to say: "The Spirit is only in the church-community, and the church-community is only in the Spirit" (144). And, "`To be in Christ' is synonymous with `to be in the church-community'" (Sanctorum Communio, 140). It takes some work to unpack that, but it's really true.

So find a church, commit to weekly worship among those people, love those people, and ideally find a couple of ways to contribute to that community so it is strengthened and vital.

Then also make sure to rest and pray on your own. Find time, even if brief moments, to do things that feed your soul and offer space for self-work. There are so many ways to do this, it's almost impossible to list them all, but at the very least you might pray the Jesus Prayer, or pray the Lord's Prayer, or practice silent meditation, or just go for a walk. Personally, I like to go on runs, and sometimes sit in the evening and just listen to jazz.

You might like to use a tool for daily prayer, like this one from Hawaii, or this one from Philadelphia.

Say and do good things

Christianity is about sharing the faith that is within you and living that faith in your daily life. There's no one-size-fits-all formula for the way of this, and so much of it is about your own vocation and the work of connecting faith to your specific daily life.

But there is one thing I can recommend here of utmost importance, and it's this: trust that you live out your Christianity in your daily existence, not through special exertions. Christianity is not much about supererogation. So, if you're currently attending university, then the way you can do good as a Christian is to study, attend class, treat your classmates with respect, and earn your degree. If you work at a corporation, perform your role well and ethically, and you're living as a Christian.

The one way you are called to be different from those who are not people of faith is in your intention to do good in spite of the consequences. There are many ways we are tempted (especially in an economic system like neoliberalism) to pursue ends that are not themselves "good." But to fight against these things is not supererogation. It's simply integrity in the face of temptation.

And we're supposed to share the faith. Many Christians aren't very good at this, and those who are sometimes do it more for show than anything else. But authentic sharing of the faith is much like sharing about anything that brings you joy and gives you life. If you're telling people about your faith because it makes you happy, inspires you, and makes you a better person, then you're probably doing it right.

Don't do it to convert anyone. Nobody wants you to relate to them just so you can convert them. But everyone who relates to you wants to know the real you, and if your connection to God in Christ is part of what makes you you, then sharing about it is as natural as anything else.

Justice is what love looks like in public (Cornel West)

When Christians in our tradition make vows at their baptism, the last thing they promise is to work for justice and peace in all the world. It is this final vow of baptism that is especially squashed by our culture. First, much of Christianity has emphasized a kind of quietism that fails to live love in public. It's focused on simply getting along, and not making much of a fuss.

But much of contemporary Christianity is also simply fragile. In my own tradition, this is co-optation by white fragility in particular. Because for so long Christianity, and in particular white Christianity, has been the dominant mode, many have assumed their way is the only and right way. So in the face of challenge, the fragile retreat, get defensive, and close down. In doing so, they fail to seek ways forward in the way of Jesus that challenge themselves and their own fragility for the sake of their neighbor (which we are called, remember, to love).

If justice is what love looks like in public, then in addition to the private familial love we are called to practice in our families and places of worship, we are called at the civic level and in the polis to works of justice, which is the form of love in public life.

This will be the most difficult answer to the question, How do I do this Christian thing? Because to do the Christian thing in public, you'll have to be committed, together with others, to the slow and arduous work of justice. For that work, I can suggest nothing better than to connect to networks committed to such justice. You might start with the social justice networks in your own denomination, and then expand out to ecumenical networks like the Poor Peoples' Campaign, or Sojourners.

One day [pastoring] in middle America

2018-05-15T22:17:00.001-05:00

This is not going to be short. But it will be as honest and clear as I know how to write it.

And I'm going to start with a question I fielded recently on self-love.

Does Jesus teach self-compassion? Or was Jesus only all about compassion for “The Other” and about self-sacrificing oneself to the point of severe abuse and death?

First, one thing you are raising here is basically the feminist Christian critique of historical Christianity, which emphasized pride as the cardinal sin.

A LOT of feminist theology points out that if pride is the main sin, then we elevate self-abnegation as a virtue. But that's problematic, because so many women are self-abnegating to the point of losing themselves.

So, in the feminist theological tradition, they find resources in Christian theology and Scripture that point out that the loss of self is as much a danger as too prideful of a self, and they see in Jesus a model for the balance or centered life that is both self-loving and self-denying. Or something like that.

To me, there's a LOT in the gospels about Jesus' self-love. First of all, he seems so regularly at peace and comfortable with himself.

Second, he doesn't try to do and be everything to everyone. For example, there were probably thousands of lepers around, but he healed only a few. Similarly, when he would get overwhelmed by crowds, he would go off to quieter places to pray. He regularly changes location or context in order to care for himself and the people around him.

It is true that he ultimately sets his face for Jerusalem, and knows the consequences of that, but he prays right up until the last minute for that cup to be taken away from him. He doesn't want to die. And it seems he is able to be as bold as he is because he loves himself AND knows he is loved by God. Remember that at his baptism, there's the voice, "This is my beloved Son." Given that God is Trinity, this means that self-love and self-care is built into God in Godself, as it were.

--
Now to the one day [pastoring] in middle America

Monday was not an easy day. Just two days prior, our church was full of mourners commemorating the life of a young member of our congregation. Our sister in Christ was remembered by most of us for her smile and her strength as an activist. She did life together so regularly with so many of us, the grief of her loss was especially profound. We wanted and needed space (and still need space) to simply mourn. But because she was also transitioning gender, some of that was highlighted, especially in the media, where news articles about her death kept emphasizing her gender identity rather than her person.

This made my function as pastor complicated. I wanted to make sure and offer comfort and support to many in the LGBTQ+ community impacted by her death, while also not over-emphasizing this one facet of her life. She was a whole person just as she was. She was baptized into Christ, and also wonderfully open to other faiths.

As the pastor, it was my role to steward a memorial that would honor her, give thanks for her life, comfort her family (who I was just getting to know) and her friends (many of whom belong either to our church, or the wider networks of which many of us were a part). And in the meantime, navigate my own grief and anguish.

Then, having mourned, my job was to wake up Sunday, shift gears, and celebrate the confirmation of our junior high youth, pray for mothers on Mother's Day, preach a sermon about the Ascension, and enjoy the Mother's Day holiday. None of this was a burden, because it was all honestly so joyous, and with people I love. But it did require a massive shift in my emotional and cognitive landscape.

Finally, we come to Monday, the difficult day. Arriving at 8:15 a.m. for Morning Prayer, I prayed with our little group of retirees who then stay and do "Spit and Shine" duties around the church. Having prayed with them, I went to the office to work on (in conversation with our office manager and some volunteers) the content of our new church web site.

After an hour focused on the web site, I met my fellow carpoolers for a long round trip drive to Little Rock. Why Little Rock? Well, to gather with others for the launch of the Arkansas Poor Peoples' Campaign. So off we went, crossing the Ozark mountains down into central Arkansas.

And here's where things get complex. We stopped at a Wendy's for lunch. Imagine the scene. I'm standing with Lowell Grisham, the retired Episcopal rector from Fayetteville. He's wearing a white collar. I'm wearing the same kind of collar, but mine is wrapped in a rainbow, a piece of art lovingly designed by folks from church.

A woman approaches us and asks, "What does your collar mean?" My answer: "Well, it means the same thing as his." Point to Lowell. Smile. Prepare to explain more. She says, "Yes, but does it... mean... what I think it means?" Me: "Yes, it does, it's a pride thing."

End of conversation. The woman harumphs, and storms out of the Wendys.

It was then I realized we weren't in Fayetteville anymore. And it reminded me how hard it is to live in this America when you don't conform to the "norms."

We continued our drive down to Little Rock. We stood in the 90 degree heat together with our community, launching the campaign with speeches and banners and signs and chants and a march that concluded with civil disobedience.

If you don't know anything about the Poor Peoples' Campaign, I recommend a pause at this point. Go to their web site, and read a bit around in it. Then come back.
....

Are you back? Great! So let me tell you, I'm in complete 100% agreement with the focus of the PPC. We have deep unaddressed issues in our nation, especially focused around race, poverty, a war economy, and environmental degradation. I probably have my own list of concerns that expand out into immigration and class, but even those issues are encompassed in various ways by the PPC. So, I'm all in on their goals.

I'm less in on the strategy, especially the civil disobedience. I'm fine supporting others when they decide to engage in civil disobedience, but I'm not yet ready myself to engage in it, at least not until such disobedience is done in order to fight against an actual unjust law.

This is where joining with others in a common cause becomes so very fraught. I'd like to design my own campaign, do it "my way." To struggle alongside others means compromise, accompaniment, care. As we walked the streets of Little Rock on the way to the location for the civil disobedience, I kept lifting half-articulate prayers... for the safety of those who would be arrested... in confusion over my own unwillingness to get arrested... in puzzlement over why I have trouble, from my privileged perspective, seeing with eyes wide open.

And I can see two different issues. We want to build a coalition, and building a coalition means meeting people where they are at. Many people are not ready for civil disobedience. On the other hand, my community, the people with whom I identify, tend to believe we aren't disrupting things enough. They'd like to engage in even more civil disobedience, of the disruptive kind, and I don't disagree with them.

This is where neoliberalism comes in, and the critique of it, so now I invite you to read a quick book review, and then return. It will help you understand why I think it is so complicated to be a pastor in the 21st century, probably anywhere, but especially in middle America.
.....

Are you back?! Great! Just in case you didn't read the whole review, let me offer a short snippet:

The challenge of caring for souls:

is not the effort to fix discrete personal problems or even to redress specific injustices. It is, rather, to aid people, individually and collectively, in finding their footing—to articulate the deep meanings that ground their lives and to strengthen healthy collectives and social movements that hold some residue of transcendent values.

Rogers-Vaughn believes that much of therapy and counseling (including pastoral care) colludes with neoliberalism. He identifies collusive care as that which emphasizes

adaptation to society (rather than resistance), functioning in accord with the values of production and consumption (rather than communion and wholeness in relation to others and the earth), symptoms relief (rather than meaning-making), and accepting personal responsibility (rather than interdependent reliance within the web of human relationships).

--
Our ride back to Fayetteville was highly energized. We had a lot to discuss... about neoliberalism, the efficacy of direct action, the goals of the campaign. Then suddenly, we were back at the church, and I was walking right into the pastoring stuff, needing to shift gears once again.

Because Monday night was a BBQ put on by Shine Solar, the company currently installing our solar panels at the church. Hopping out of the car, I barely have time to say goodbye to my traveling companions, when I am caught up in conversation with the Americorps volunteers currently staying at our church (yes, in addition to worship and Sunday school and offices and such, our church is also currently housing an 11-member Americorps team), then a hello to the families coming out from the sanctuary after the high school choir concert held there, then more hellos to visiting families, and congregational members hosting the event, and some conversations about the solar with the sales team from Shine Solar, and some chasing of small children whose favorite game is "get the pastor to chase us."

Somewhere in there, I ate a burger, and eventually tried to get home in time to see the family before bedtime.

This whole time, and throughout the day (and this is an essential part of this blog post, notice that this is all woven into the day, from sun-up to sun-down), I've also fielded e-mails and phone calls and texts on at least the following items:

A family struggling through divorce
People grieving the death of a musician in town (the officiant is Lowell)
Questions about whether I believe in the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ
Some back and forth about the new screen for the sanctuary
More grief conversations
Planning the Interfaith Camp we're hosting
Scheduling an interview for a documentary about immigration to Northwest Arkansas
A conversation about self-love and Christianity (I'll post content from that below)
Scheduling the opera group who will be doing a special pop-up performance Pentecost Sunday

Now, I'm not complaining about any of this, mind you. The breadth of it all is part of what I love about the job. But by the time you consider the grief, the campaign, the drive, the solar, the various pastoral ministry concerns, the relational demands, the news of the day, etc. you can see just how broad the scope is of this pastoral work in the 21st century.

It's a miracle I handle any of it correctly at all. Only by the grace of God. And I constantly fail. Like all the time.

I also happen to think that this unique combination of ministry roles all in a short few days illustrates the extent to which our congregation is figuring out how to do all of this "ministry" stuff faithfully in a dramatically shifting cultural context. Because these days, the whole preaching and praying in public thing is more fraught than ever before.

Tuesday was my day to at least kind of try to process everything. I got up right away and had coffee with Emily Linn, the director of Canopy NWA. It's always good to sit down with her to talk. We've had a lot of refugees arrive in the past few weeks. We're blessed by their presence. We're also quite worried about the future of refugee resettlement in the United States, as the folks who currently have the power to make decisions on refugee admissions don't seem to have the moral will to commit to significant admissions (watch for a speech from Mike Pence some time soon).

And we talked about the uptick in hate related actions against our Muslim neighbors in the past few weeks. Given that Ramadan starts this week, I spent that coffee conversation brainstorming the many ways I might be able to be a good neighbor to my Muslim friends.

Then I went to the office, worked on logistics for our trip to the national youth gathering, edited a litany for Pentecost Sunday, prayed for Palestinians, for Israel, and for all the things. Worked on the curriculum for the interfaith camp.

And then I went bowling. With our sound tech at church and some guys from church, all of whom work in the music scene in Fayetteville. We'd been trying to get together socially for a couple of months, and a lunch bowling date turned out to be the ticket. We spent the time reminiscing about their friend they'd lost (the one whose funeral Lowell was officiating). We threw heavy balls down a wooden lane and ate BLTs.

Then I came home, and went on a run, and drafted the outline of this blog post, and tried to rake leaves on a remaining section of the yard that has been neglected because life and ministry has left little time for simple, mundane work. Further illustration that I'm still trying to figure this whole thing out.

A Dry Spell and a New Blog

2018-05-01T08:58:00.001-05:00

Something this spring has contributed to a lot less focus, so not as much new content has arrived at Lutheran Confessions. In the meantime I have been at work on a new blog and web site, a partnership with some blogging co-authors. You can check out new content there, including a new post on Illegal Theologians:

https://www.polifaith.com/blog/2018/4/30/caotnlmz6gh1xvt71feyza9v08sdl9

Trinitarian Easter Theses

2018-03-26T22:27:00.001-05:00

I. The cross signifies Jesus Christ's deep faithfulness to us. It is the outcome of Jesus remaining steadfast, loving the entire cosmos even in the face of persecution and torture. The cross does not signify a divine transaction. It does nothing for God. It is a real death, most certainly, God's Son dead on a cross. But the real death is in the end only confirmation of Christ's faithfulness itself.

Ia. So through the cross nothing happens "in God" but lots happens "in death." Death is changed. "To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier" (Whitman).

II. The resurrection signifies God's deep faithfulness to Jesus Christ. It is the outcome of God remaining steadfast, loving the Son even in the face of his betrayal and death. It does nothing for God. It is a real loss for God, the death of God's own Son, but this real death is in the end opportunity for God to do what God does... creation. In this case, resurrection, new creation on the other side of death.

III. So we see that Christ and the Father are one in their faithfulness. In fact this is one of the great gifts of Easter... in and through the Easter events, we discover Christ's faithfulness to us and God's faithfulness to Christ.

IV. The Spirit is the continuing faithfulness of the community of those who now live in Christ, in God. In this way Christ's faithfulness to us, God's faithfulness to Christ, is continued in the faithful.

V. Resurrection should not be especially surprising to those who already believe in creation. If God created all that is, resurrection is no more miracle (though certainly miracle) than creation itself. If God can breath into existence all that is, God can breath life back into the dead. Both show us who God is, the one who breathes life.

VI. Resurrection is in this way much more than we suspect it to be. It is not just the resurrection of one man, Jesus the Christ. It is instead the first fruits creation beyond creation, a hint at the even greater fulness of creation coming about in the continuing creativity of God, given as it is through faithfulness.

VII. So it is given to us to "practice resurrection" (Berry).

Polifaith.com

2018-03-02T22:31:00.003-06:00

Did you know we've launched a new blog, polifaith.com? Check it out, then use the tool in the top left corner of the page to subscribe for new posts. Lutheran Confessions isn't going away, but it may become more focused on denominational and ecclesial topics.

Seven Ways Faith Communities can support the New Poor People's campaign

2018-02-15T18:56:00.001-06:00

Arkansas is participating, together with groups in 30 states across the country, in a continuation of the campaign first called for by Martin Luther King Jr. before he was assassinated. A Poor People’s Campaign, A National Call for Moral Revival uniting tens of thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality.

You can be part of this campaign, and there are many ways to connect.

1. Like and follow the main social media page for updates on the Arkansas campaign: https://www.facebook.com/AkansasPoorPeoples/

2. Learn more about the campaign, and make a personal pledge to join at: https://poorpeoplescampaign.org The goal is at least 1000 pledges by the beginning of the campaign. If you sign up via the national pledge tool, you will also be connected to the Arkansas campaign, and receive updates on how you can participate at the state level.

3. Use resources in your faith community to amplify the demands of the campaign:

a) end systemic racism

b) end manufactured poverty

c) end the war economy

d) end ecological devastation

e) end false moral narratives

4. Publish an article on your blog or in your church newsletter. Pray for the campaign. Lead a forum on the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in your congregation, neighborhood group, club, or political party. Bring knowledge of the campaign to your board, council, state leadership team, or consistory.

5. Commit as a faith leader to be conspicuously present at AR Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival actions as often and consistently as possible. The campaign is particularly calling on clergy and faith leaders to show up wearing the sign of their office.

6. Bring word of the campaign to your faith leader groups, and invite your colleagues and faith family to become part of the campaign. We believe that if individual faith leaders bring an ask to their local ministerial associations and other faith groups, more clergy and faith leaders will actively support the movement.

7. Gain the support of your denominational leaders and other organizations that can support the campaign. We especially seek public letters of support from bishops and denominational leaders.

8. Join the Faith Outreach Subcommittee here in Arkansas, to lend your time and energy to the movement. Drop me a line in the comments and I'll help connect you.

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution; that is a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution of weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapon of warfare. Then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place and there is still the voice crying the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new, former things are passed away”… Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges … and new opportunities … We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses … We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists … We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that is signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic non-violent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible (Martin Luther King Jr., his last Sunday sermon).

Preparing for Lent

2018-02-12T19:49:00.002-06:00

Lent is soon upon us. This powerful, spiritual season is an opportunity to commit (or re-commit) to core Christian practices.

Lent is first of all the forty day journey beginning with Ash Wednesday (February 14th) and concluding with Holy Week and Easter (April 1st). During the forty days, we journey with Jesus through the final weeks of his public ministry, setting our faces with him towards Jerusalem and the cross.

Traditionally, Christians commit to three practices during the season: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Often, this includes using a daily devotional resource for prayer; fasting from certain foods or activities; and almsgiving, that is, giving to the poor.

This Lent at GSLC, we offer the following ways to engage the season. First, we host Wednesday evening services. Ash Wednesday is a special service focused on repentance and meditation on our mortality. The remaining Wednesdays of Lent, we host soup suppers followed by Evening Prayer. This year, we have a special theme (visit Integrating the Inward and Outward Journey) which will be the topic of the Evening Prayer services. There will also be an opportunity for a book discussion after evening prayer services each Wednesday.

Sundays during Lent, we focus on gospel texts appropriate the season, deepening our understanding of faith and Christ’s journey to the cross and resurrection. On Sunday evenings during Lent, we host weekly meals and bible study for newcomers to GSLC preparing for baptism or affirmation of baptism at the Easter Vigil. In between a potluck meal and bible study, we reflect on one portion of the catechism each week.

I especially invite all of us to find ways to fast and give during this season. One way we will model this at GSLC is to fast from coffee and treats on Sunday mornings. At the regular coffee station, in place of coffee and treats, we will have baskets featuring two hunger ministries: ELCA World Hunger, Springdale’s Samaritan Community Center, and the University of Arkansas Food Pantry. Each week, when you would have gotten coffee or eaten a cookie, instead give alms. This practice combines fasting with almsgiving, and it’s something you might also try in your own homes, perhaps donating to a hunger ministry what you otherwise would have spent on meat or dining out.

Finally, the season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and leads to Holy Week. If you are unfamiliar with these special services, I very much encourage you to check them out this year. At Ash Wednesday, we receive a sign of the cross on our foreheads, reminding us of our mortality and one-ness with the dust of the earth. On Holy Week, we host evening services on Thursday in memory of Christ’s last supper, Friday around the cross on which he died, and Saturday with the new fire welcoming new members and celebrating the resurrection light. Then Sunday morning of Easter, we pull out all the stops with celebratory worship and a morning breakfast, a breaking of the fast.

For additional devotional resources and ideas during the Lenten season, I especially encourage praying the daily offices. Take Lent for what it is, an opportunity for introspection and renewal, joining Christ in his faithful journey.

Twentieth-century Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor said, “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. What -people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

Faith is the cross. Lent is the season that centers us in this gospel truth.

Is There a Place for John Piper Near a Microphone?

2018-01-24T16:39:00.002-06:00

The answer: No!

Now to offer explanation. John Piper recently wrote a piece, "Is There a Place for Female Professors at Seminary?" where he answered a laboriously argued, painfully toxic, "No."

His basic argument: He believes in complementarianism. Church and home life from this supposedly biblical perspective is gendered. Women lead the home. Men lead the church. And church leadership should be made up of a team of "spiritual, humble, and biblical men."

He then argues that it simply isn't fitting for women to train men for a role that is primarily for men. Basically, this is the exemplar argument... that we need to see exemplified in the person training us that which we are being trained for.

So only football coaches can train future football coaches. Only dads can teach their sons how to be men. Only near-sighted people can teach near-sighted people how to wear glasses.

Etc.

This is, admittedly, a widespread argument in the church. It's why Roman Catholics only have male priests, because they believe the priest stands in persona Christi in the parish as an example of Christ. And since Christ was male, so priests should be male.

There are many problems with this argument. For one, it's not readily apparent why you couldn't apply some other category as a requirement for pastoral or priestly ministry. Like, that since Jesus was a human being, only human beings can be pastors. No cats.

And in a society and time where we have discovered the great benefits of egalitarianism, and also exposed the problems of patriarchy, arguments like John Piper's (made, of course, by a man) come across not only as retrograde, but also as harmful and toxic.

Such statements from a widely read and revered theologian will undermine the call of faithful women throughout our culture. It disrespects the amazing teaching of female scholars in seminaries across the country, and disregards the reality that many of our greatest models of faithfulness as pastors are women.

The post is embarrassing because it so clearly elevates a dogmatic construct, complementarianism, and places enforcement of that dubious construct as the highest value. Instead of honoring the call of his many female colleagues, he feels it necessary to defend his toxic thesis. Then calls that biblical.

I call it a failure of love.

By contrast, a more faithful approach to women in the church is hosted by many denominations, including our own. I highly commend to all readers the draft social statement of the ELCA on Women and Justice. Patriarchy and sexism prevent abundant life for all. Complementarianism participates in such sexism, inasmuch as it enforces, for one, just two gender categories, without any recognition of fluidity both in gender identity and gender roles, and also because it denies the freedom offered in Christ to the whole church, the whole people of God.

This will be silly, but no more silly than complementarianism. If we take Jesus as our example, and if we think the exemplar path is the path to follow... then remember Jesus never talked on a microphone. Humble, spiritual, biblical men like John Piper should follow Jesus' example, and step away from the microphone. They might take some time to listen to the many faithful women leaders in the wider church, and discover how powerfully those women inspire all people, women, men, and more, to take up the mission of working for God's coming kin-dom. Even leading it.

Is there a place for John Piper near a microphone?

Absolutely not. Step away, John, step away.

Being a Christian on Social Media

2018-01-20T10:48:00.001-06:00

I don't know about you, but lately I've been in an analog state of mind. As much as I love experimentation in digital and social media, I've also simply wanted to do more tactile and face-to-face things. I'd rather have coffee with you than browse Facebook (and often I'd rather read a book than read Facebook). I am trying to be present in the moment with family and friends and not distracted by devices. It's hard, and I often fail. But I want to do better.

Partially this is because I know much of new media is designed to keep us facing our screens. I don't want to be manipulated, but I know the psychological strategies of some of the larger media companies far outpace my own resistance.

Partially it's because I think I'm simply maxed out on media. I just can't keep up, there's only so much to which we can all attend, and at the end of the day, I wonder, do I want this day, this month, this year, to have been filled with scrolling through posts, or doing something else.

A few years ago I wrote a book on faith formation in new media. Since then, I've continued to ponder how new media is forming our minds, our hearts, and our communities. I continue to believe, as I wrote there, that we are still very much learning the effects of new media on our brains, on our faith communities, on our hearts. Right now we are still observing the effects of the transition to a life where much of our shared life is mediated through digital media.

Given that reality, it is important for us to always keep in mind that what we are doing here in social media--on Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, or even this e-mail--isn't about Christian ministry, as if we lived our faith in real life, and this were just commentary on faith.

No, all our e-mails, all our posts, all our tweets, they are how we communicate faith, they are how we share human life with each other. They mediate the faith between us.

So, for example, although the Fayetteville Women's March that will take place tomorrow is a powerful analog moment of hundreds of humans present and marching together, the pages and posts from the leaders of the march (one of whom is GSLC's own Autumn Tolbert) are also part of that march. They aren't just about the march. They participate in the march and mediate it. They help us understand and celebrate it better.

Church can be mediated in such fashion also. You and I can post prayers and pray with others, by e-mail and in social media. We can use social media to share and encourage kindnesses. When we join groups, participate in chats, we engage spaces where we actively practice both articulating our faith, and find inspiring others who model faith for us.

You can read the bible, and even prepare for the Scripture lessons that we read each Sunday in worship. And unless you read books in theology and social ethics, you probably pick up a lot of your theological insights here.

As I've been preparing to preach Sunday, I came across a quote from a commentary on the gospel of Mark. I noticed it because a friend and colleague who pastors in California posted it on Facebook. This is how new media works, we influence each other (as we always have) but at greater distances and in new ways.

Here's the quote:

"To become 'fishers of men,' despite the grand old tradition of missionary interpretation, does not refer to the 'saving of souls,' as if Jesus were conferring upon these men instant evangelist status. Rather, the image is carefully chosen from Jeremiah 16:16, where it is used as a symbol of Yahweh's censure of Israel. Elsewhere the 'hooking of fish' is a euphemism for judgment upon the rich (Amos 4:2) and powerful (Ezekiel 29:4). Taking this mandate for his own, Jesus is inviting common folk to join him in his struggle to overturn the existing order of power and privilege." - Ched Myers, "Binding the Strong Man"

I think being a Christian on social media likely means this also, joining Jesus in his struggle to overturn the existing order of power and privilege. Social media can do a lot of different things, and amplify such a voice for such a mission is one of them.

Blessings in Christ to each of you this weekend, and I hope to see you in that most analog of spaces this Sunday. The sanctuary.

Naming Donald Trump's and Steve Womack's Racism

2018-01-12T22:32:00.000-06:00

ELCA Presiding Bishop responds to reported racist comments

I am very disappointed and disturbed by the remarks that President Donald Trump is reported to have said yesterday – and confirmed by others who were present – in the context of a discussion about immigration.

Regardless of the context, references of that kind have no place in our civil discourse and, if true, reflect racist attitudes unbecoming any of us, but especially a president of the United States.

Instead, we should be fostering a world where each of us sees every person – regardless of race, origin, ethnicity, gender or economic status – in the image of God and, therefore, worthy of dignity and respect. Our church has relationships and partnerships with Christians and others on six continents. These are our sisters and brothers. We strive to accompany them and they us, across boundaries and cognizant of our diversity, yet all seeking the common good. In working for a healed, reconciled and just world, we all should faithfully strive to participate in God's reconciling work, which prioritizes disenfranchised, vulnerable and displaced people in our communities and the world, bearing witness – each of us – to the love of God in Jesus Christ.

"We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization" —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

God's peace,

Presiding Bishop Elizabeth A. Eaton

At the local level, here was Representative Steve Womack's response, equally racist in its perspective:

What I think the president is saying is that if you're only appealing to people from countries that are behind the times, depraved countries, if that's the element that you're appealing to, and of course a lot of those folks are wanting to come to America and pursue the American dream, then he feels like that we should make the same or a better appeal to people from other European countries et cetera that can come in here and actually fit into the society as we know it and do the kinds of things that will make America a prosperous nation. (http://www.4029tv.com/article/rep-womack-responds-to-pres-trumps-comments/15072136)

Together with my presiding bishop and many world leaders, I condemn and reject these racist, nativist comments from Trump and Womack. If our elected leaders would like guidance on how to speak of our neighbors around the world, they might consider the widely respected priest James Martin.

The Climate Change | Refugee Connection

2018-01-10T09:37:00.000-06:00

One of the salient features of climate change is how it affects all of life. Here are some connections between climate change and the global refugee crisis, which our congregation has committed to ameliorate through its partnership with Canopy NWA.

In the video series, Years of Living Dangerously, the segments by Thomas Friedman make this connection in the starkest manner. For example, a short segment from Season 1 is particularly on-point for how climate change affects the war in Syria and the refugee crisis that resulted.

Syria was a very advanced country and very rich before the worst drought in more than a millennium changed everything.

Here is a brief segment that Thomas Friedman did on Yemen and a city that is running out of water, which causes a conflict that contributes to the war there.

Here is Thomas Friedman reporting in a longer (28-minute) segment on Sub-Saharan Africa’s climate crisis and the connections to refugees fleeing the region and heading to Europe.

Now, add to these stories the experience that we observe in Springdale among the Marshallese community. The Marshall Islands are being flooded by sea level rise. My Friend, Chris Balos, is dealing with his Grandmother, who makes him promise to bury her in the Marshall Islands, land of her birth (see below the excerpt from a recent graphic novel published by the Weather Channel on the topic of climate change and the Marshallese community in Springdale, Arkansas).

The problem is that his other Grandmother and Grandfather were buried in the Marshall Islands in a historic cemetery. Since their burial a few years ago, their bodies have been washed away by high tides.

Excerpt from the United States of Climate Change

So, when I write that climate change exacerbates the current global refugee crisis, I am not exaggerating. These are strong motivations behind the urgency I feel regarding the need to clean up our sources of electricity, including installing solar PV arrays. The Church must be the leader in making these connections between our actions and the suffering of people all over the world.

The church can lead in a manner that demonstrates our faith values and the connections between refugee ministries and problems caused by climate change in exacerbating droughts that drive wars in Syria and Yemen and refugee flight from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Guest post: Terry Tremwel, ph.D. chairman of the board Picasolar and adjunct instructor of sustainability at the University of Arkansas; Terry coordinates our adult forums Sunday mornings at 10:15 a.m. at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Immanence

2018-01-04T16:25:00.001-06:00

I have a friend who organizes the month of 100 things each January. Her practice is to identify 100 things she owns she can give away or sell. It’s a small counter-measure against the onslaught of accumulation that seems a part of our daily lives, and especially strong over the Christmas holiday.

I’m not one of those who believes things are themselves bad. Although most of us wax and wane, first committing to lives of simplicity, then giving in and purchasing that book we’ve wanted to read. Our connection to things is neither perfectly pure nor particularly bad in and of itself. We are conflicted consumers, sometimes paralyzed by options, but we are also human and appreciators of beauty, and many of the most beautiful things are, well, things.

It might even be true that in an era when the stuff of life has become ever more ephemeral, residing in the cloud, digitally mediated, untouchable yet present, that the aura of things takes on even greater poignancy. My cashier at the grocery store today told me they only have a record player and LPs in their house—no CD player. Tactile board games have seen a resurgence the past few years, even outpacing video games on a fund-raising platform like Kickstarter.

Many of us in the new year have committed to more tactile practices of daily life. Face to face with friends more, online with Facebook less. Such changes can themselves be idealized, inasmuch as there are many goods that have come along with a shared life in social media, but the impulse to connect physically, to touch each other and physical objects, speaks to a real spirituality of material things.

All of this has left me thinking about the spiritual movement of our times, what we can call immanentism. Immanence is the sense that the divine encompasses or is especially, maybe even exclusively, present in the world itself. When we experience some material objects, other human beings, natural settings, we have this sense of immanence. We see the moon, the face of a friend, a landscape, or even an especially beautifully rendered video game or hear a powerful music composition, and we think, God. Divine. Wow.

In fact we need such a sense of immanence. With the lack of it, you have brinksmanship like that between North Korea and the United States, with two leaders threatening button-pushing on Twitter with little recognition that the material results of such nuclear action would be the murder of millions and the destruction of large swaths of our planet.

This then sends me back to the accumulation of things. We feel the weight of things themselves, their aura, in their immanence, their awe-ness. We also feel their weight in another way as an over-whelming pressure, too much stuff, stuff to get rid of, stuff we felt compelled to buy and then lost the love of almost immediately.

Newspapers exist somewhere here in the mix. They arrive new each day on the driveway, delivered and ready to read. They are then something to be recycled by the Monday following. There is something divine about a coffee and the newspaper at morning breakfast. Bagging them up to recycle is a burden.

The spirituality of every day life resides in this precise dialectic. Transcendence in materiality. The weight of too many things wasted, and periodically transfigured. The art of our life is in maintaining this balance, always with an eye to the beauty of all the immanent things freighted with freeing weight of transcendence.

Social media trends influencing ministry in 2018

2017-12-31T22:24:00.001-06:00

The first trend I'm noticing: lots of writers are committing to less time in the daily grind of social media, with the goal of creating better and more enduring content.

I'm making that commitment also. Personal practices I'll be changing in 2018:

No social media sharing other than content I've created myself or that was created by someone I know.

More focus on group work in smaller channels, especially Slack.

If I share a post in social media, it will be long. Longread long. Probably on a blog. Like this one.

Mostly, I just plan to be on less so I can write longform again. A book. I'm at work on a book.

Then there are some predictions in the larger social media world worth considering as they pertain to church ministry space. Here they are:

From Entrepreneur, there's an emphasis on visual story-telling, especially on Instagram Story. Faith communities have always engaged the visual and the verbal. It may be that this kind of story-telling is the emerging way not only to share our lives with one another, or promote brands, but also proclaim the faith.

Livestreaming and interactive broadcasting: There's nothing in social media that has ever more closely approximated the live and interactive nature of preaching than live-streaming. But like preaching, it's harder than we might think to create interactive streaming content. It's going to take practice. Seminaries and synods will probably start hosting live-streaming clinics the same way they currently clinic preaching.

Declining organic reach and fatigue from tools and tactics: It's probably ironic to include this in the list, because my list is itself a set of tools and tactics, but we really are fatigued. We like to talk authenticity in the church. We are now seeing an emphasis on the authenticity of our media reach itself, and the users of it. Our influencers are going to help share faith in social media more than the tools or techniques. In the past, these influencers were called apostles and evangelists.

Ephemeral content is going to provide higher engagement: This one makes me super curious. I don't know how it translates. But all the platforms are shifting to ephemeral content because the next generation (Z) and a wider set of users seem to prefer it. It's worth experimentation. It's also probably why I'm more interested than ever in live theater.

Addressing pain points: Can you describe the pain your faith community solves–and why anyone should care–in just a few words? Can you then invite those in need to consider your message using your simple explanation? These are the actual kinds of issues marketers are pondering, something the church and people of faith are always working on. But are we doing it well? Tight messaging can contribute to healing.

So, what are you thinking about in social media and church ministry for 2018?

A message from our refugee resettlement director

2017-12-23T09:47:00.001-06:00

Dear faith leaders, and fellow brothers and sisters in Christ,

“When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.”

This time of year, as we all gather to celebrate the gift of Christ’s birth, I ask you to remember this part of the Nativity story: Our Savior and his Earthly parents were driven from their homeland into the arms of strangers under pain of death. Our King was a refugee in Egypt.

There are 65 million refugees in the world today: that's millions of families just like our Savior’s family who have been forced to flee for their lives—and they are knocking on our doors. What is our response? As a Church? As a country? As a community?

As many of you know, I work for Canopy NWA, a new nonprofit started by our community to welcome and care for refugees. We have had the chance to welcome 55 refugees so far, and there are 75 more we are expecting this coming year. We know 32 of them by name. Many of these families were assigned to us last winter but have not been permitted to travel because of three separate refugee bans. Even though some refugees are starting to be admitted again, we are worried by the current pace of admissions: currently, we are on track to admit a paltry 15,000 this year instead of the 45,000 promised by our President. If nothing changes, we worry that some or all of our families might not make it in this year.

I’m writing to you all as my brothers and sisters in Christ to ask you and your churches for three things this Christmas, in the name of the 65 million displaced:

1. Will you pray with me? Pray for the 32 men, women and children who are being kept from their homes here in Northwest Arkansas. Pray for their safety: already, we are grieved to know that one young man we were expecting has passed away in a refugee camp from an illness that would have been easily treated here. Pray for peace for them as they wait. Also pray for the families, co-sponsor teams and churches who have been waiting for nearly a year to be able to receive these people here in Northwest Arkansas. And above all, pray that they would be permitted to join us here soon. Pray for change in the hearts of those who are barring the way for these families to enter into their promised home. Ask God to change our rulers’ hearts to “let His people go.”

2. Will you give to support our work? Since our founding, we have relied on the support of faith communities like yours, but never has this support been more crucial than in this moment. Our government funding is tied solely to newly-arrived refugees. If we are not permitted to welcome any refugee families this year, that funding—which also allows us to continue serving those who are already here—will disappear. We are facing the possibility of a loss of up to $75,000 if none of our expected families are permitted to travel. I ask you all and your churches to consider supporting our ministry this coming year. It is becoming clear that we simply won’t be able to continue without you all.

3. Will you plead with our leaders along with me? Every one of our elected officials—from our members of Congress, to our President and Vice President—call themselves Christians. So as leaders of the Christian faith, I ask you consider how you might be able to use whatever influence you have to remind our leaders that our faith commands us to welcome these strangers, fleeing for their lives. Our elected officials are not infallible. Like the kings of Israel, they are humans who sometimes need to be reminded of what is true and right. God often used His prophets to correct the rulers He had put in place and call them back to obedience. Likewise, I believe God is calling us—calling the Church—to speak up for His children. We cannot be silent anymore. Please. This Christmas, join me in pleading with our elected officials to do what is right and to allow the 45,000 who have been promised refuge here to enter into safety without delay. I invite you to start by signing this statement, if you haven't already. After that, I would ask that you prayerfully consider who you might have in your sphere of influence who might need to hear this message this Christmas.

Thank you, brothers and sisters for taking the time to read this and listen to the Holy Spirit's leading. Please feel free to reach back out if you would like to speak to me about any of this in person or over the phone.

For the sake of our Refugee King,

Emily Crane Linn

Resettlement Director, Canopy NWA

A few apposite comments on the "call to ministry"

2017-12-18T22:05:00.003-06:00

This winter I'll have been ordained fifteen years. Way back in the day, before children, a move to Arkansas, and the advent of social media (though not before blogging) I knelt near the altar (that no longer exists) of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa (the church in which I was raised).

Many bishops and clergy laid hands on my head that day (the weight of those hands still startles me in the remembering). The words: teach and preach in accordance with Scripture and our confessions. The act: apostolic succession into multiple historic episcopacies, mostly by the happy accident of which clergy and bishops were present that day (Porvoo, Latvian, and Episcopal), The prayer: calling for a special measure of the Holy Spirit. The reality: all of this qualified me for employment by congregations so I could do what I've been doing professionally since then.

Our denomination likes to use some fancy language to say all this: I'm a rostered minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, ordained into the ministry of Word & Sacrament. This means I'm on a special list and there's a special job in churches only people on that list can fill.

They call us pastors.

At the capitol in Little Rock speaking against the death penalty

Like many professionals, over the years I've had to re-evaluate what I thought I was doing when I was pastoring. I think early in my career, I thought I was stewarding some ancient things that might otherwise get lost: liturgy, theology, the sacraments, radical Lutheranism. I liked church camp, visiting people and such, and was finding my feet as a Christian progressive (rode a bus to protest the Iraq war, participated in actions against Walmart, attended meetings between hotel workers and their employers, etc.)

I also just loved the people. I grew up on a farm, so serving rural congregations in southern Wisconsin was a real joy. I loved life as a kind of adopted Norwegian, and of course still wear the sweaters and miss the cheese curds and lefse and people.

Over the years, I think I've changed a bit. Ministry tempers you. I don't get all highfalutin as I did early on (though I still love books), and I've got the cassock on mothballs.

But I think the context for ministry, what it means to be a pastor, has changed even more than I have.

So at this anniversary, I've been trying to articulate a bit of that. Why is it I think the context has changed more than I have? And why is it so important to name the contextual change?

The bottom line: I have parishioners and even one staff person who are considering pastoral ministry. So I need to give an accounting to them of what they're getting themselves into. I mean, they're adults, so it's their decision. But I'd like to be honest, and clear. They say they may be called to ministry. So what is ministry? And what is a call?

Let's start with seminaries, because almost anyone who starts discerning a call to ministry starts thinking about seminary. Seminaries still are really cool places. Where else can you devote three or four years to the study of religion, with a fighting chance of finding a job on the other side? I loved seminary, and even if all you do is go to seminary and get the degree, and then go back to what you're doing now, I'd say that was time well spent. Especially if they have a cool library and pray every day, and if you avoid going deep into debt while there.

You might be called to ministry if...

But seminaries are changing, drastically. Residential is out. Distance learning is in. This is of course a larger trend in education. Many seminaries are struggling, even failing, and some are relocating to their historic context: the university. So if you are considering seminary these days, know that you are entering into an academic context that is in a high state of flux. Faculty and administrators and everyone are trying to figure out what to do with themselves.

Be okay with that. If you are, it will be a great ride. Alternatively, come talk to me or somebody near you about starting a new church or ministry as a tent-maker, because it costs a lot less and is just as much of an adventure. We can read some good books with you if you want.

Calls are changing too... although neither as fast as some are warning, nor as quickly as others hope. I mean, churches are aging, fast, especially the mainline Protestant ones. So it's likely that a lot of churches are going to shutter their doors, or shift to calling part-time clergy. But the church is a stubborn entity, and it doesn't look like the church will change very fast, so if you are thinking you just want to land somewhere and love a group of people, that very traditional desire of the pastor is still a solid option.

And a lot of churches are growing, quickly, like ours here at Good Shepherd Lutheran, as more and more Christians come to a clearer understanding of their own faith and commitment to Jesus, and either return after long absence, or come to faith for the first time.

But while we're still on the topic of finding a comfortable call... you may want to second guess pursuing such ends. Ask yourself, did the quiet and traditional approach to church of the last century steward a level of discipleship we hope to continue and deepen in the 21st century? I mean, the church in which I was raised was comfortable and fun and energizing... but I'm not convinced that overall Christianity as practiced in the majority churches in our communities instilled deep levels of biblical literacy, or formed people ready for resistance.

For example, the church hasn't done very well at offering an alternative to capitalism. Wendy Brown, political theorist, criticized academic theorists for their 'theoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism.' And as R. Rogers-Vaughn argues, "Pastoral theologians have participated in this retreat" (19).

The clergy's complicity in this retreat has primarily occurred through political co-optation. Clergy attempt to keep everyone and everything together. They tend to be, and were historically trained to be, conflict-avoidant. And avoiding conflict rather than leaning into the truth is the primary manner in which pastors retreat from the problem of the domination of not just capitalism, but also heterosexism, racism, nationalism, and a variety of other heresies.

So one thing I've learned during these fifteen years: sometimes surviving the split that happens if you stick to the truth is the way in which you will truly thrive. It's death and resurrection, for real.

I do get uncomfortable with all the discernment language and soul-searching and hand-wringing that accompanies conversations about the call to ministry. I think such language, highly individualistic as it is, forces the ministry into one class-based mold: the middle class.

If pastoral ministry is captive to any one thing, it is definitely captivity to the middle class.

We truly need more working class clergy, who think more in terms of systems and participation and solidarity rather than meaning and words.

I've learned there are lots of ways to do this gig, but probably a majority of clergy tow the line and are overly careful. They ride the rails of the already established. Pastoral ministry is a set of relationships with tasks embedded, whereas many other vocations are a set of tasks with relationships embedded. So if you can sort out how to have the relationships, you can spend your time doing a wide variety of things among a wide variety of people. You've got to love people. And books. But people, people you believe are alongside you on a mission of fidelity to the way of Jesus.

The new parish is the public. Perhaps never before in the history of pastoral ministry did every pastor have an opportunity to consider all the world a pulpit. New media now offers such opportunity. This requires considerable and careful planning on the part of the pastor. Clergy now need to understand platforming. Courage and curiosity are also required. Keep trying stuff (podcasts, tweets, manifestos) to see what works.

I'm not convinced the whole narrative of "resisting" the call is helpful. I've heard a lot of clergy say, "Only do this if you can't do anything else." I don't think that's a very helpful perspective. I mean, really, wouldn't that be true and not true of almost every vocation? Such narratives of call set the ministry apart in a very non-Protestant way. I think we'd be better served if more clergy would say, instead, "Everybody can do this. Here, let's talk about how you can do it too."

Why should we pay people to do this? Well, that's a good question, given that I just said everyone can do it. But the truth is social organizations function thus. Non-profits need directors. Almost all organizations, from businesses to schools, seem to need principals or CEOs. So some people are going to organize together and realize they want to pay somebody who is really good at a percentage of what the church does, and then spend all their time doing it. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the person so hired keeps giving it back, while also stewarding the unique role they have as the paid person who keeps reminding everyone the real head is Jesus.

What about releasing the ministry to the whole people of God? Yes, do it. Do lots more of it. But keep in mind the old business mantra that the holy grail of systems is the self-actualizing work-team. It's not all that easy to give it all back. People are people. It's still worth trying.

I think the way congregations will inspire more people to the ministry is, in the end, by doing really good ministry. When the neighbors of your congregation start saying, "I love what your church is about. You all do great work!" I can almost guess that in that congregation, multiple people will be thinking about ministry. Because who doesn't want to go study and do the thing they're already a part of that they love?

I think early in my ministry I was trained to value doctrine and orthodoxy. And those aren't bad things. But recently a colleague criticized our statement of unity for refugees and immigrants as elevating compassion over orthodoxy. And I thought, "If I ever think that you can elevate compassion over orthodoxy, then there's probably something wrong with my orthodoxy."

That's the real struggle of every pastor right there. To keep the faith, the actual faith, in the service of the love we've learned in Christ.

And I hope you like to read. I hope you'll keep reading. Because books.

The Creation of Advent

2017-12-01T08:19:00.000-06:00

An Invitation to the Season

Salvation extends far beyond the human. Although we humans are attracted to the salvation peculiarly offered through that human being Jesus Christ, we realize that salvation is more than just a promise of eternal life for humans. Salvation is bigger: it is all of creation restored, made whole, healed and at peace. And this is in part because we are a part of, and not separate from, creation itself.

As a preacher, I probably make the mistake of too frequently focusing on how the gospel impacts human beings. It’s a natural mistake. It’s easiest for us to think out of our own frame of reference (the human), and harder for us to consider how the gospel connects with the non-human: mountains, angels, stars, forests, creatures of all kinds.

And yet the poet reminds us in Joy to the World that “heaven and nature sing” and “fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy.”

The Scripture we hear during Advent focuses our attention on God’s loving connection to all of creation. Mountains quake at God’s presence. Clay is formed by the potter. Even boiling water and kindling for fire participate in the praise of God (Isaiah 64:1-9). At the great and glorious day, the sun will be darkened, stars will fall, angels will fly out, the winds will gather, fig trees will teach, roosters will preach (Mark 13:24-37). The river Jordan becomes the means of forgiveness and atonement, leather and camel hair amplify the baptist’s message, the wilderness itself becomes the pulpit (Mark 1:1-8). Valleys will be lifted up, mountains will be made low, uneven ground will become level, grasses and sheep become the communities over which God’s Word hovers and cares (Isaiah 40:1-11).

And those are just the creation references for the first two Sundays of Advent. Clearly, all of creation is part of the gospel message, and it is all of creation that sings the Advent song.

There are many references to creation in the liturgy also… and even more than the creation we can directly experience. Even as we discover more and more stars, galaxies, universes, planets, quarks, and elemental particles, I am reminded that every Sunday in the liturgy the pastor names the cherubim and seraphim as members of the great choir together with whom we sing around the throne of God. Although most of us have not directly experienced cherubim or seraphim (or dragons or unicorns for that matter), naming them in the liturgy becomes a way to live in the space between what we can see and know, and what we cannot see and yet can name and trust.

God’s creation is always far larger than we know. The maps used to read “here be dragons” along all the regions as yet unexplored. Advent is an excellent season to set sail into the lesser known regions and meet, God-willing, the better angels of our fantasy, and all creation with them. Perhaps in this way, mindful of salvation as the healing of all of creation, we might better participate in such healing, experience such healing ourselves, created as we are, beloved creatures God is currently healing.

Here are the ways you can experience Advent at Good Shepherd:

On December 3rd, 10th, and 17th, we host Advent worship services at 9 and 11 a.m. In these liturgies, we sing the great songs of the seasons, light the Advent wreath, and reflect on texts from the gospel of Mark and Isaiah that accentuate all of creation’s participation in Christ’s healing work. On December 10th, during the 10 a.m. education hour, our Sunday school program hosts a Puerto Rican Christmas Pageant and Disaster Relief Fundraiser. On the 17th, our choirs and ensembles host their annual Christmas Concert at the 11 a.m. service.

On December 6th and 13th, we host Advent soup suppers. These simply suppers are a fund-raiser for the high school youth traveling to Houston next summer for the ELCA National Youth Gathering. Bring a soup to share if you wish, supper is at 6 p.m., Holden Evening Prayer at 6:30 p.m.

On the 20th of December, we host a Longest Night service. While Advent is a season of hope and Christmas is a season of joy, not everyone feels hopeful. Grief, illness, aging, depression, loneliness, unemployment, and loss are magnified. In the Northern Hemisphere, December 21 is the longest night, the winter solstice. It marks the shortest day of the year, the official start of winter. Tradition says that nature and all her creatures stop and hold their breath to see if the sun will turn back from its wanderings, if the days will lengthen and the earth will once again feel the sun’s warmth. On this darkest day of the year, we come with our honest yearnings seeking the return of light and hope.

We conclude the Advent season with the great celebration of Christmas Eve, with a contemporary service at 9 a.m. Sunday morning December 24th, and two candlelight services at 4:30 and 7 p.m. The following Sunday, December 31st, we host a special 9 a.m. service of Lessons and Carols.

Throughout all of it, we will remain mindful of the depth and breadth of God’s saving work, who in and through Christ is working the healing of the whole cosmos.

Southern - Christian - Progressive - Loud

2017-11-28T12:19:00.000-06:00

As a Christian pastor, I have some recent experience with the interplay of regionalism as it engages new media forms and informs our civic and religious imagination. That’s the story I wish to tell here. As a Gen Xer raised on a farm in rural Iowa, my move to Fayetteville, Arkansas constituted a transition from one significant regional culture in the United States to another--from the Midwest to the South. I am regularly discovering that the social imaginary I inhabit does not always align with my newly adopted region's imagination and self-perception. Midwesterners do imagine differently than Southerners. From our forms of speech, to our religious commitments, to our sense of communal identity, we are a nation of diverse regional cultures. And part of regional imagination is delimiting and correctly describing the regions. In Colin Woodard’s memorable remapping of the American “nations,”[1] I actually moved not from the north to the south, but from the Midlands, where people designate their ethnicity by their European or other ancestry (German, Norwegian, Polish, Vietnames, Pakistani) to Greater Appalachia, “rendered perfectly in the Census Bureau’s map of the largest reported ancestry group by county: its inhabitants virtually the only counties in the country where a majority answered ‘American.’

However, the regions of our nation are not what they once were, if they ever were what we believe them to be. The flattening of globalization is redrawing all the lines. The Midlands and the South have become more diverse, with an influx of immigrants and increased levels of internal migration. Their religious landscape has also changed, with increasing numbers of people in both places self-identifying as secular or non-religious.

There is a new mind of the South, one perhaps even more noticeable to a transplant from the north, but nevertheless captured succinctly by southerner Tracy Thompson, who writes:

[There is a] mismatch of history and identity that so many Southerners up through my generation have had, this vague sense of cognitive dissonance that comes with growing up in a world where nothing you see around you quite fits with the picture of history made available to you.^{^[2]}

As just one example of this, after the tragic shootings at Mother Emmanuel in Charleston, many across the country called for the removal of Confederate flags from public places. Predictably, as a form of protest many individuals flew Confederate flags on their own property. However, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, you would have been hard-pressed to find a Confederate flag flying. Later that summer, however, when I was back in Iowa visiting relatives, I went for a jog in Des Moines, Iowa, and ran past no less than five Confederate flags flying in front yards. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Lyndon B. Johnson famously remarked as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that “we have lost the South for a generation.”^{^[3]} Although his prediction was a bit early, by the time I arrived in Arkansas, it had basically become reality. Mark Pryor’s senate seat (a Democrat) had flipped to Tom Cotton (a Republican) and in 2017, “in a region stretching from the high plains of Texas to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, Republicans controlled not only every Senate seat, but every governor’s mansion and every state legislative body.”^{^[4]} This is a regional imagination finally catching up with shifting political reality, but it has also taken by surprise many people in a state that proudly birthed Bill Clinton.

Many also believe that the United States is quickly losing religiosity for a generation, with significant percentages of the emerging generations identifying with no specific religious tradition.^{^[5]} For those in the Christian tradition who remain committed to the faith but whose civic imagination aligns closely with the progressives (a larger percentage of whom are "nones")”^{^[6]} some basic questions present themselves. Does it matter whether Christianity offers anything different or other than secular humanism? The question is necessary, and made even more necessary by the rise of what Charles Taylor maps as the new conditions of secularity.

The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.[7]

The conditions for secularity are distinct from secularization. Taylor is not describing a world that is increasingly secular in the non-religious sense of that term, but secular in the sense that many forms of religiosity can live side by side and even mutually support one another. We might remember the classic dictum of that famous Christian humanist, Nikolai Grundtvig, who frequently stated: Human first, then Christian. The world increasingly recognizes shared interests across multiple religious and secular perspectives. Even as we traverse regional variations in our religious traditions, this holds true. Emerging progressive Christian communities across the United States and in each region are discovering they share much in common with the interests of secular humanism. There are many shared ends even if the faith behind the ends differs.

Yet for Grundtvig, there was still "then Christian." What is this "then Christian"? This remains the continuing civic imagination question emerging progressive Christian communities are puzzling out in their regional contexts. I believe the answer hovers around issues of resistance and sanctuary, both resources in Christianity not as clearly present in or adjacent to various kinds of humanism. I will return to these at the end of this analysis. Digging down to actual Christianity also includes disambiguation from dominant forms of Christianity in the United States, forms of the faith that allow a co-optation of Christianity by “moral majorities” who believe the perpetuation of racism, sexism, and homophobia part and parcel of the maintenance of Christianity as the dominant religion. Christianity in my (progressive) way of imagining it contains within itself unique resources for repentance and resistance focusing Christians on a preferential option for the poor and migrant, and radical neighbor love that overturns the morality of capitalist self-interest.

Throw all of this together with the additional layering of new media, and you get a sense of why people of faith, transplants to our region, or natives to the South whose identities do not align with the external stereotypes of it find it difficult to map a civic imagination, and why there are in fact contested versions of such an imagination. Many southerners feel like they are engaged in the Sisiphean task of repeatedly disambiguating themselves as southerners from the stereotypes of southerners. “Arkansas has for one reason or another undergone more caricaturing and stereotyping in the American imagination than has just about any other state.”^{^[8]} The main stereotype that makes an average Arkansan self-conscious is a negative one, that they are low class and uneducated and poor. Such stereotypes Arkansans have learned are dealt with most effectively by way of humor, so that Brooks Blevins ends the introduction to his book with the rejoinder: “Even if we don’t get to the very bottom of this, perhaps we’ll be better able to laugh at ourselves… at the very least, you found a friend to read this book to you, and I found a friend to write it. Yee-haw, indeed.” ^{^[9]}

This issue of what I might term representational hyper-awareness has significant political ramifications. For example Senator Tom Cotton, at a recent rally in Fort Smith, Arkansas, had this to say:

Go home tonight and turn on one of the nighttime comedy shows. Tomorrow morning, turn on one of the cable morning-news shows. This Saturday, watch ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said. “All the high wardens of popular culture in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him. They make fun of his hair, they make fun of the color of his skin, they make fun of the way he talks—he’s from Queens, not from Manhattan. They make fun of that long tie he wears, they make fun of his taste for McDonald’s.” He went on, “What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.[10]

Although this is a breathtaking leap, Tom Cotton is right about one thing: inasmuch as southerners perceive themselves to be subject to ridicule by the "high wardens of popular culture," and perceive Donald Trump to be also, they then are tempted to imagine a kind of solidarity between Trump and southerners, even if on every other level (his wealth, his (im)morality) he diverges from a Southern Christian imaginary. Their solidarity under ridicule unites them, and it is precisely the interplay of the regional social imaginary with the forces of media that informs their voting habits and political preferences even more than their religious commitments.

So let us consider a recent case, a moment where all this regionalism and religion and new media collide. During the February 2017 congressional recess, Republican Senator Tom Cotton returned to his home state and hosted a town hall meeting in Springdale, Arkansas. Springdale is part of the “new" or emerging South, population 70,000, 40% Latino, 8% Pacific Islander. It would certainly fit in Tracy Thompson’s chapter in The New Mind of the South she titles “salsa with your grits.” Cotton was taking a lot of heat, along with many other elected officials, for his support of a repeal of the ACA, and proposal of the RAISE act that would dramatically curtail immigration and refugee resettlement.

The history of refugee resettlement in the United States is rather storied. The United States, although historically the landing place for migrants from all over the world, especially Europe, did not begin to resettle significant numbers of refugees until it was forced to by the Holocaust and the great need to provide a safe place for Jews to flee during World War II. Since World War II, the United States has slowly and steadily increased its commitment to offering refuge those fleeing various kinds of danger around the world. Working in partnership with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, over the last decade the United States has resettled on average around 75,000 refugees. These refugees come to the United States because each year the executive designates admissions levels. The actual resettlement is then overseen by one of nine primarily faith-based refugee resettlement agencies, one of the largest of which is Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS).

In 2015, when the Syrian refugee crisis became a part of the global conversation, a large group of us in Northwest Arkansas began looking into establishing a refugee resettlement center. Although the last time Arkansas had welcomed refugees in significant numbers was during and following the Vietnam war, we knew our community and region to have many positive resources for refugees, and to be in general a welcoming community. So, in conversation with LIRS, the governor of Arkansas, and the state department, I started work, in addition to my work as pastor, serving as the acting director for Canopy NWA, our newly incorporated refugee resettlement center. In just a year, we built the non-profit, and in 2016 we began welcoming refugees to Northwest Arkansas. Then Donald Trump was elected president, and his first action in January of 2017 was to announce a Muslim ban, which also include a pause on the entire refugee resettlement program in the United States. Suddenly, we were looking at dropping from 110,000 refugees arriving in the last year of the Obama administration, to a maximum of 45,000 refugees, and possibly less, arriving in the first year of the Trump administration. This was potentially devastating for our new non-profit, harmful to national resettlement agencies, and of course tragic for all those families anticipating and needing refugee resettlement to get away from war and persecution.

Because we had recently begun resettling these refugees to Northwest Arkansas, and because our congregation participates in a lot of social justice ministry in alignment with immigrants and refugees, my presence at the Town Hall was essential. I got there early, and stood in line with the thousands of other (mostly anti-Cotton) Town Hall attendees. It was exhilirating, and frightening, and a media frenzy. All the national networks were there. To my surprise, I had the opportunity to ask a question at the Town Hall advocating for expanded refugee resettlement not only in our state, but in our nation and did so out of the biblical imagination that recommends providing hospitality for the stranger, for "you were once strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19).

Now imagine this scene. Thousands of attendees in a high school auditorium in Springdale, Arkansas (which incidentally has more Marshallese and Latino students than Anglo) chanting in support of refugees and immigrants. I say to Cotton over the microphone, “We love Muslims!” in response to his characterization of Muslims as a threat. The noise at this point is deafening. The media, caught by surprise at the breadth and depth of the progressive (Christian) support for immigrants and refugees in our state (remember those media elites and their perceptions of us), followed up with televised interviews in the days that followed. Standing in front of a camera for MSNBC^{^[11]}, I again became mindful of this deep truth about the South: when we speak on the national stage, we are always concerned for our image. There is this representational hyper-awareness. I wanted to make the South, or at least Arkansas, look good. Do them proud. We wish not to live into the stereotypes. I’m not sure all regional peoples feel this way when they emerge on the national stage, but I know Arkansans do. “Arkansas people remain first and foremost cognizant of the state’s place in the American consciousness.”^{^[12]} And many progressive Christians are equally cognizant of the perception of Christianity on the national stage.

The southern imagination functions in a circular fashion, with the south mirroring to the world, and then sometimes undermining and sometimes reinforcing the imagination the world has of it. So in this instance, the remarkable aspect was not only Arkansans aware of how they look to the world (including the frustration by some that it is a person with views like Tom Cotton who represents us in the Senate), but also the perspective of those outside the South toward us, their fascination at the size and tenor of the town hall, the surprise of Rachel Maddow to the Arkansas pastor making a comparison between the town hall and Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Lords.^{^[13]} Parallel this again with the progressive Christian community, who frequently encounters surprise in public settings when articulating their faith perspectives. "You're a Christian, and you believe that?"

This small moment on the national media stage serves as a microcosm of how our progressive faith movement operates at the regional level in cooperation with other progressive organizations, religious and secular. Living in an increasingly metropolitan region (Northwest Arkansas), the sense of state or regional pride ties in tightly to the form of Christianity on offer, as well as the forms of Christianity that are free to emerge through our imagining of them. As just two examples, our congregation in the past year has launched Canopy NWA (mentioned above), Such resettlement work has developed through the cooperation of many interfaith partners, including the Islamic Center, the synagogue, and many local secular non-profits and businesses. Additionally, two years ago our congregation became the first Reconciling in Christ[14] congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in the Deep South. Here again such a commitment opened doors to cooperative work with non-religious LGBTQ+ affirming groups. It was a changed imagination--that there was a critical mass of LGBTQ+ and their allies, that there was widespread ecumenical and interfaith support for refugee resettlement in Arkansas--that facilitated our congregation taking steps towards full inclusion and refugee welcome, steps we knew to be the right ones, both on ethical and strategic grounds, but that were made possible by a changed context and emerging alternative imagination of the possible.

The resources for social change are grounded in the way media layers and re-centers regional and religious imaginations, with institution building, television and newspaper presence, and new social media platforming all interlocking in a seamless fashion to energize religiously informed civic imagination. So, for example, the development of our refugee resettlement agency, Canopy NWA, only happened because we began local conversations after a Twitter post from the governor of the state opposing refugee resettlement, and was strengthened and made more streamlined by our ability to organize like-minded people of faith to form the non-profit and solicit resources. Our presence on television, radio, and in the newspaper^{^[15]} has meant not only that our model is inspiring others to replicate the development in other locations, but the widespread media coverage is affecting our regional identity and external stereotypes of our region. Transform how the wider world perceives the southern Christian imagination, and just so recursively expand the civic imagination of contemporary Christianity on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. As John Edge describes such a transition in his recent book on the changes in southern food culture:

The South was once a place that did not brook intrusion. Now it’s the region with the highest immigration rates. When I was a boy in 1970s Georgia, a barbecue sandwich and a Brunswick stew with soda crackers was my go-to meal. Jess (my son) prefers tacos al pastor, hold the cilantro, and cheese dip with fryer-hot tortilla chips. In his South, Punjabi truck stop owners in Arkansas fry okra for turban-wearing reefer jockeys. And Korean bakers in Alabama turn out sweet potato-gorged breakfast pastries. His South is changing. For the better, mostly. In fits and starts, yes. New peoples and new foods and new stories are making their marks on the region. In those exchanges, much is gained. What was a once a region of black and white, locked in a struggle for power, has become a society of many hues and many hometowns. His generation now weaves new narratives about what it means to be Southern, about what it takes to claim this place as their own. Given time to reconcile the mistakes my generation made with the beauty we forged amid adversity, his generation might challenge the region of our birth to own up to its promise.^{^[16]}

Take as another example the growth of Indivisible, an activist group started after the presidential election of 2016, locally focused, implementing a defensive congressional advocacy strategy to protect their values. A founding member is actually from Arkansas (Billy Fleming) and their model for developing the Indivisible movement was to publish reproducible resources (an “indivisible guide”) that could fuel a progressive grassroots network of local groups to resist the Trump agenda.^{^[17]} Although the guide was published on-line and designed for the entire social media network, by offering a replicable model that local groups could put in place in each district, within months Indivisible had become a national movement with chapters (sometimes multiple chapters) in each congressional district of the United States. In Northwest Arkansas, the chapter meets regularly at our church building, and we find creative ways weekly and monthly to fuse the mission of the church with the advocacy activities of Indivisible. Clearly going mass media actually facilitates going local, if those using new social media forms are savvy. Indivisible goes big by going small and local, with a continuing focus on national issues energized at the local level.

Over the course of the last nine months, our progressive advocacy groups and religious groups have continued to work on effective strategies responsive to regional issues, strategic in their use of new media, and energized (at least in part) by religious values. Lots of us are asking how in this moment the new south can imagine a new regional and national identity? And what role do faith communities play in the development of such an imagination? And where does media fit in the equation? One model effectively being implemented across the country and beginning in North Carolina is the New Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Rev. Dr. William Barber.^{^[18]} Their current strategy includes both a national campaign of civil disobedience, and regional organizing state-by-state. As a faith-based progressive group, they are committed in particular to continuing the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. They have taken up strategically a state-by-state organizing approach, and their focus is centered out of a deeply Christian and biblical imaginary, "offering a platform for people to speak who are affected by four interlocking issues: systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation."[19]

One mantra I have been learning as I continue this work comes from organizers at Arkansas United Community Coalition, an immigrant rights advocacy group. They frequently say, “Nothing about us without us,” a slogan first popularized in the disability rights movement.^{^[20]} As a white pastor in a predominantly white church who spends significant time in refugee and immigrant spaces, I have had to learn repeatedly how to listen, support, walk-alongside, amplify. It’s a slogan I wish prominent leaders in this moment might heed: whether it’s the evangelicals publishing their Nashville Statement, or multiple attorney generals and President Trump threatening to end DACA, something that could keep the human first in more of our imagination would be the slogan, “Nothing about us without us,” coupled with that other slogan of Grundtvig, “Human first.” Christians hoping their message might be life-giving and attractive can learn much from both slogans, not the smallest of lessons being the first shall be last, the last shall be first (Mark 10:31). It’s awfully hard to build a progressive Christian movement when the largest and loudest voices in Christianity are busy encouraging strategies quite opposite those of progressives--and Jesus. Nevertheless, it has probably ever always been so. Effective progressive movements are finding ways to keep their imagination indigenous to the region (the actual region rather than the stereotype), open to the resonances of the wider movements with which they partner, amplified by new media in order to be even more effectively local, cognizant of the traditions of all and respectful of the humanity in each.

At this point, it may sound like I have been more focused on the "human first" than the "then Christian." And in fact on many levels I am. Accomplishing shared social justice goals in a secular context requires implementing a language accessible to all regardless of religious tradition. On the other hand, even those outside of Christianity may benefit from an understanding of the equipment Christians in particular bring to the table for such organizing work. So I conclude with some reflection on the way the peculiarly Christian social imaginary plays in this space.

First, we might remember that "there has been consensus for several decades among political historians of the early modern period that European theories of resistance found their first articulation in the Lutheran tradition."[21] One of the more significant moments in the Reformation was the emperor's push early on to suppress reform. When Martin Luther died in 1546, Charles V published the Augsburg Interim which put all German lands back under Roman Catholic rule. All the cities and towns acquiesced to this interim, with the exception of one--Magdeburg. The pastors of Magdeburg published a confessional document explaining the "why" of resistance, why the magistrates of Magdeburg were right to resist. Although not as well known as some other confessional documents of the early modern period, the Magdeburg Confession functioned not only as a first example of regional resistance to empire, but even became a source for the articulation of forms of resistance like the Declaration of Independence itself. It even informed the thought of such a significant resister as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote:

There are thus three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-à-vis the state: first, questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. Second is service to the victims of the state's actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. "Let us work for the good of all." These are both ways in which the church, in its freedom, conducts itself in the interest of a free state. In times when the laws are changing, the church may under no circumstances neglect either of these duties. The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. Such an action would be direct political action on the part of the church.[22]

It is certainly too much of a stretch to claim that all forms of resistance have Christian origins, but it is fair to claim that a very significant resource for resistance that has inspired much of the Western imagination is in fact the Christian imagination. For a contemporary example, one could could consider the practice of sanctuary.

Before we consider sanctuary, however, we need to briefly consider another Christian practice, that of repentance. We need to acknowledge that of the many cities in Germany, only one resisted the Augsburg Interim. During the Holocaust, it was a small remnant (the Confessing Church) that resisted the Nazis. So also with sanctuary, it is a small percentage of the whole of congregations in the United States who have actively participated in offering sanctuary.

But repentance is in Christian tradition something ever before us. It's the first call of the 95 theses of Luther, in fact, that the whole life of the Christian is to be one of repentance. So, when Christians heed their own tradition, they can confess their failure to live into their own best practices, and re-center themselves on the very social imaginary that defines them.

One of these Christian imaginaries, sanctuary, may in fact become even more important in this next era, as immigrants and others seeking refuge approach the church in time of need. The original Sanctuary Movement was "a religious and political campaign to provide safe-haven for Central American refugees fleeing civil conflict in their homelands during the 1980s."[23] Reverend John Fife, one of the architects of the Sanctuary Movement, still works along the border, leading efforts to protect the undocumented in their perilous travel. Fife is a strategic trouble-maker. He is living out a pecular way of practicing "then Christian." In a nation that has for decades understood Christianity to be the dominant cultural form of religiosity, it may be surprising to lift up disruption of the status quo as an especially Christian practice, but nevertheless, there it is--part of being Christian is being "a royal pain in the ass... shout[ing] from the mountain top what is supposed to be kept silent, and audaciously refusing to stay in [the] assigned place... upsetting the prevailing Panopticon social order designed to maintain the law and order of the privileged."[24] In this instance, practicing sanctuary, providing actual physical sanctuary to undocumented immigrants or refugees in church sanctuaries becomes both human and Christian at the same time. Human because it is simply doing the right thing. Christian because it makes use of the religious space itself (sanctuary) precisely in the way it is named--as sanctuary. When sanctuary breaks the law, precisely there it is sanctuary. A community wrestling around how to do it, and how much to sacrifice doing it, will expand the progressive Christian social imaginary in ways we have yet to imagine. And if you make fun of us for our disruptive activity, we will join you and exercise self-mockery, which we will then use strategically to our advantage.

[1] American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Penguin Books, 2012).

^{^[2]} Tracy Thompson, The New Mind of the South (Free Press, 2014).

^{^[3]} https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/10/remarks-president-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit

^{^[4]} https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/upshot/demise-of-the-southern-democrat-is-now-nearly-compete.html

^{^[5]} http://www.pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/

^{^[6]} https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/democrats-religion-jon-ossoff.html

[7] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007), 3.

^{^[8]} Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (The University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 4.

^{^[9]} Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (The University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 10.

[10] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/is-tom-cotton-the-future-of-trumpism

^{^[11]} https://www.facebook.com/joshuacmahony/videos/vb.20613111/10102580240803747/?type=2&theater

^{^[12]} Brooks Blevins Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (The University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 186.

^{^[13]} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister%27s_Questions

[14] https://www.reconcilingworks.org

^{^[15]} https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/us/trump-refugee-ban.html

^{^[16]} John T. Edge, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South (Penguin Press 2017), 350.

^{^[17]} https://www.indivisibleguide.com

^{^[18]} https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/new-poor-peoples-campaign/

[19] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/news/william-barber-and-liz-theoharis-take-poor-peoples-campaign-on-the-road

^{^[20]} James Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (University of California Press, 2000), 3.

[21] DeJonge, Michael. Bonhoeffer's Reception of Luther (Oxford University Press, 2017), 198.

[22] Ibid. 210.

[23] Miguel De La Torre. Embracing Hopelessness (Fortress Press, 2017), 130.

[24] Ibid. 151.

This essay forthcoming in a collection of essays from the Civic Imagination Project.

Bonhoeffer's Reception of Luther: A Review

2017-11-05T07:44:00.004-06:00

Bonhoeffer's Reception of Luther. Michael P. DeJonge. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran. Say it again. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran. Although his long-standing association with his contemporary Karl Barth has sometimes led us to believe Bonhoeffer was more Barthian than Lutheran, and although evangelicals (that bastard Eric Metaxas chief among them) like to claim him for their cause, the truth is simple: Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran.

DeJonge opens his book with simple statistics. Bonhoeffer quotes Martin Luther more than any other theologian--870 times, and usually approvingly. Karl Barth, by contrast, gets fewer than 300 citations in Bonhoeffer, and theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Calvin each get only a few dozen citations.

Frequency alone fails to establish influence, so DeJonge offers a more nuanced and compelling thesis. "Bonhoeffer thought his theology was Lutheran, and he was justified in thinking so" (7). DeJonge believes this thesis has interpretive value, because taking Bonhoeffer's Lutheranism "seriously generates better interpretations of his texts in their context than readings that do not" (7). It especially facilitates coherently interpreting what are otherwise especially difficult problems in Bonhoeffer scholarship.

Offering this thesis, DeJonge then unpacks first how Bonhoeffer understood himself as a Lutheran, and second what it might mean for Bonhoeffer to consider himself a Lutheran. Much hinges on this method. It offers itself as a compelling model for interpreting any theological figure. Consider first how the author gives him or herself, their own self-understanding. Engage their self-understanding charitably. Then consider more broadly whether their self-understanding comports with a broader historic understanding of the tradition. Or, as DeJonge once more summarizes it, "Bonhoeffer understood his own thinking to be Lutheran (in a narrow, insider sense of Lutheran), and he was justified in that (in a broader, outsider sense of Lutheran)" (10).

Failing to notice the Lutheran character of Bonhoeffer's thinking results in a variety of interpretive problems. For DeJonge, chief among these is the inattention to the connection between Bonhoeffer's theology and Luther's two-kingdoms thinking. Similarly, attending to the influence of Luther on Bonhoeffer highlights Bonhoeffer's academic phase focus on "the church as the present Christ or, what is the same, the place where the gospel is preached and heard" (14).

The book opens with a consideration of Luther Renaissance scholars' impact on Bonhoeffer, with particular attention to Karl Holl. Although Holl is not widely known today, he is recognized as the initiator of the Luther Renaissance. Bonhoeffer's close engagement with Holl illustrates how early and deep Luther is in Bonhoeffer's thinking. Intriguingly, Bonhoeffer even offers a correction to Holl's hyper-focus on conscience, and instead grounds justification in Christ rather than the conscience, a move that has significantly influenced our theology of justification yet today.

Christology takes center stage in the book as a whole. DeJonge maps the influence of Luther on Bonhoeffer's single-agent Christology. "The heartbeat of Lutheran christology is the christological 'is'--this man is God--which translates into the exclusive agency of the person of Christ... if there is anything about the Lutheran tradition that Bonhoeffer sees with [special] clarity and pursues with abandon, it is the exclusive christological agency of the person of Christ" (67).

Then, from "Christ is" DeJonge notes that Bonhoeffer moves to "Christ is present" and finally to "Christ is present as Word, sacrament, and church-community." Sound Lutheran? You bet!

Something I particularly love about DeJonge's approach: he has a way of situating Bonhoeffer, placing him within a particular tradition and historical moment while also reading him generously. Having outlined a variety of theologies of two-kingdoms that arose in the 20th century, he says of Bonhoeffer that his "two kingdoms thinking is of course of a particular type... from early through the late period of his thinking, Bonhoeffer thinks in terms of the two kingdoms, although his thinking adjusts, to borrow a phrase from Ethics, in accord with reality" (102-103). This is the kind of author and scholar you want to spend time with, somebody who generously reads his subject of inquiry, and even enlists that author in the interpretation of his own development.

In the late portion of the book, DeJonge takes time to disambiguate Bonhoeffer from the Anabaptist theological lens, especially the work of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. Such disambiguation is essential, because the association of Bonhoeffer with Anabaptism "leads to a number of misinterpretations. " So he takes time in the Anabaptist chapter to demonstrate Bonhoeffer's non-commitments to nonviolence over-against the misinterpretations of Hauerwas and Yoder (143).

A book on Bonhoeffer necessarily must include notes on resistance. "There has been consensus for several decades among political historians of the early modern period that European theories of resistance found their first articulation in the Lutheran tradition" (198). So even if much has been and needs to be said about Luther's influence on Hitler and the system Bonhoeffer was resisting, failures to note the connection between the Lutheran articulation of resistance and Bonhoeffer's commitment to resistance result in a misinterpretation of the theological grounding of such resistance.

For Bonhoeffer, as for Luther, an authentic understanding of the doctrine of justification results in an abiding commitment to the vocation of a Christian, which Bonhoeffer interprets as responsibility. DeJonge quotes his World Alliance Lecture: "vocation is responsibility, and responsibility is the whole response of the whole person to reality as a whole" (249). Over-against a pseudo-Lutheranism that divides reality into independent spheres, with Christ an authority over only some of those spheres, DeJonge sees that Bonhoeffer in a deepening of Luther's key insight centers in on this concept of responsibility (Stellvertretung). Bonhoeffer is not just influenced by Luther. He also offers a "critique of Lutheran according to what he considers its own best standards" (248). In theology, there's really no better form of reception than that.

[review forthcoming in World & World: Theology for Christian Ministry]

What if every day is a tragedy?

2017-11-02T14:52:00.000-05:00

The American Psychology Association just published their Stress in America™ survey. It's not good.

More than half of Americans (59 percent) said they consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember — a figure spanning every generation, including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

So. Just think about Sept. 11th. Churches across the country created the space we all needed to process our grief and fear. But what if the grief didn't have an arc arising out of a single tragic moment? What if there was a new grief every day?

As a clergy person I am convicted (but not surprised) to learn that over half of Americans of all generations (and all political persuasions) feel this is the lowest point in U.S. history they can remember. I am convicted because the church today has a significant pastoral care opportunity and responsibility. I am not surprised because, well, good Lord, can't you just feel it? I can!

But what is our responsibility? How do we minister among a people who are experiencing low-grade tragedy and trauma every day?

There are many sources of trauma. We are aware more than ever that climate change is increasing the frequency of major weather events. We wring our hands, not knowing what to do, as North Korea gains nuclear weapons. We watch the president of the United States politicize the most recent tragedy in New York City.

And it is this last low point that is most on my mind. If we're honest, I think we can recognize that we are at the lowest point in U.S. history largely because of Donald Trump... and our reaction to him. And it is honestly both of those, the president himself and our reaction to him.

Donald Trump

Even Donald Trump's emotional state is the top of the news, with articles today indicating he called the New York Times to tell them he isn't angry.

It's like the mom whose husband has bouts of anger, so when the kids come home from school, she says to them, "Don't go in the living room, and be quiet in the kitchen, because your dad is in a bad mood."

Except the dad is almost always in a bad mood, so the whole family adapts their behavior to the mood of the mercurial father. This is what it is like to live in a Donald Trump nation. But in this case there's an added factor. Trump invades all our spaces with his daily Twitter-storm, and the press amplifies everything he writes by making his morning tweets the basis for daily news.

This can't be good, and takes us to the flip side. He's a bad president, and nothing should deflect us from the dangers of a Trump presidency, but we are also called to consider our reaction to him.

Our Reaction To Him

The APA report goes on to say:

The most common issues causing stress when thinking about the nation are health care (43 percent), the economy (35 percent), trust in government (32 percent), hate crimes (31 percent) and crime (31 percent), wars/conflicts with other countries (30 percent), and terrorist attacks in the United States (30 percent). About one in five Americans cited unemployment and low wages (22 percent), and climate change and environmental issues (21 percent) as issues causing them stress.

Adults also indicated that they feel conflicted between their desire to stay informed about the news and their view of the media as a source of stress. While most adults (95 percent) say they follow the news regularly, 56 percent say that doing so causes them stress, and 72 percent believe the media blows things out of proportion.

With 24-hour news networks and conversations with friends, family and other connections on social media, it’s hard to avoid the constant stream of stress around issues of national concern,” said Evans. “These can range from mild, thought-provoking discussions to outright, intense bickering, and over the long term, conflict like this may have an impact on health. Understanding that we all still need to be informed about the news, it’s time to make it a priority to be thoughtful about how often and what type of media we consume.

The survey also found that 51 percent of Americans say that the state of the nation has inspired them to volunteer or support causes they value. More than half (59 percent) have taken some form of action in the past year, including 28 percent who signed a petition and 15 percent who boycotted a company or product in response to its social or political views or actions.

So the actual stressors are not the president or other politicians, but rather a set of concerns: health care, crime, war, trust. But almost all of these topical stressors are exacerbated by, if not created by, the politicians. Then it is the media, which in this case includes the actual media, plus social networks and the use of such networks by leaders themselves, that amplifies everything in a pummeling downward spiral.

So the APA wisely recommend making it a priority to be thoughtful about how often and what type of media we consume. Personally, I recommend 14-year-old Gabe Fleischer's Wake Up to Politics, and long-form journalism.

As a pastor, I've landed on what I hope is a balanced and engaged approach, a shape for Christian witness that is pastoral and caring while also justice-oriented and active. It looks like this.

We must offer and receive challenge.

We cannot be disengaged. If the noise of the present moment lulls us into inactivity, or if we quietly avoid doing what is right, we are complicit through our silence. In a future post, I'm going to address the quietude of the American church of the 20th century that resulted in the loss of voice from which we are still recovering. Somehow Christians have forgotten that if we are walking in the way of Christ, we will meet resistance. Christians should expect to be challenged. Regularly. And they should challenge each other.

When you are silent at the neighborhood party or on the golf course because you don't want to make waves with your neighbors, inevitably you are then contributing to a culture through your silent complicity that makes minorities and other groups far more unsafe in our community than you will ever be in your silent complicity. This is neither right nor fair. You don't get a pass.

Happy are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happy are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me. (Matthew 5)

Heed challenge and translate it into action. Repent. Get over guilt. Then "do." This reduces the stress.

It is very stressful to feel responsible while living in the absence of a possible. If you can't change anything but know things need to change, this is disempowering and frustrating. But we can always do something even if the doing isn't huge. Your letter to the editor might not change the mind of a senator, for example, but it might make your immigrant neighbor feel safer.

The APA noted that lots of people very wisely found ways to get more involved, volunteering or taking action of some kind. I do not believe we have yet gotten to critical mass action. We need many more people to get out out of their stuckness in silence and complicity, and do things.

If you can't write a letter to the editor, then identify a sick member in your congregation and take them a meal. Don't know how to advocate for a better relationship to Muslims in America? Then start by visiting your local mosque to meet some new friends.

Judge for yourself.

You might be going through a lot in your life right now. Maybe you are caring for an ailing loved one. Maybe you are snowed-under at work, or dealing with a health crisis yourself. Maybe you are deep at work on your dissertation. We all have to prioritize. So if you hear the call to action, but you already believe you have to stay focused on a different set of concerns for your own well-being and the well-being of those you love, then by all means, judge for yourself.

I truly believe we are at this low point because collectively we have not and are not speaking up enough, acting enough, on behalf of vulnerable groups, or even on behalf of our best self-interests. But that is a statement about the collective, not individuals, and individually we can show each other (and ourselves) the grace to recognize that there are times and seasons in our lives when we do what we can, and that is good enough.