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Starting Over Again…

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sunrise-among-snow

I am restarting my efforts, and so I’ve redone the look of the blog and I’m going to go in a new direction, at least for a while. I really enjoyed some of the historical work I did in many of my previous posts, as well as the work with Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, but ultimately I reached a block…for the Place of Authority work the next logical step would be to look at the rise of Islam in the 600s, but that and the period that follows are areas that I need to do more reading in before I feel adequate to give a post that I feel could be fair. I still think it is important work and perhaps I’ll return to it but for now I need to start writing again.

Going forward I plan on working on a couple different things: much of my writing lately has been working with scriptural texts and trying to bring together a sense of the world of the text and our modern world. Blogging allows me to combine some of these things with my fascination with art and so my goal is to do two chapters a week over several posts and then supplement these with posts of other short topics and ideas that come to me as I read, listen and live. I may integrate some of the ideas I glean from fiction, things like TED talks, reading from other sources or reflection on some of the experiences I’ve had. In all of this I don’t claim to be the expert, but rather one person trying to engage my faith and the world in which I live. The scriptural work is not intended to be a running commentary, although it will have some elements that a commentary would and I will be engaging other’s work as I read, but rather it is more a meditation. I also may include sermons for the times when I do preach, but I am attempting to do this as a learning tool for me, not as some hard fast rule that I feel guilty for breaking. As a full time pastor and a single dad, my time is not always my own, so if I don’t maintain the pace I intend, I hope that I can come back to this and extend myself a little grace.

Before I started again I wanted to make sure I had some work ready to go, for times when I might fall behind, so as a preview we will start with some of the lesser encountered parts of scripture: first up will be the book of Haggai, one of the post-exilic prophets, then Esther a story set in the Jewish diaspora of the post-exilic time (if you didn’t understand post-exilic and diaspora don’t despair, I will explain that in each of those words and more as we engage the writings) and then the major prophet Jeremiah. I’ve got a fair amount done in each of the three, and how I did it evolved but rather than go back and rewrite Haggai or some of the early Jeremiah work I am simply going to allow it to show its evolution as I go.

If you have followed me before and waited for me to post since November, I hope you enjoy this. If you are encountering this for the first time welcome.

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Something Different: Church As A Farm Without Fences

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I will continue on with my growing project on authority tomorrow, but since I haven’t completed the next post in that series I’m going to do something different today. The question of authority is a very live question, and it is very present in our popular culture-not surprisingly my first listen Linkin Park’s new album Living Things has several of its songs  seem to deal with authority (it was just released yesterday so I’ve only listened through once)…but today let’s talk about boundaries.

In Kendra Creasy Dean’s book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (which is an interesting book in its own right) she includes this story from an African Christian:

You Americans think of Christianity as a farm with a fence. Your question is, ‘Are you inside the fence or outside of it?’ We Africans think differently. We think of Christianity as a farm with no fence. Our question is, ‘Are you heading towards the farm or away from it?’ “The church’s identity is not defined primarily by its edges, but by its center: focused on Christ, the sole source of our identity, no intruder poses a threat. No alien hops the fence, because there is no fence.

I would give a page for the above quote, but since I am reading this on an e-reader this is one of those books not set up with page numbers.

I think there is something very revealing about this change in perspective. One of the gifts of modern thought was the increase in specializations, but that was also one of its greatest challenges. Let me explain what I mean by this with a medical illustration: if I need to have a surgeon do a bypass of the arteries around my heart or do brain surgery after an accident I really don’t want this to be the only time they will do heart or brain surgery this year—I want someone who has experience in this and knows what they are doing, hence if the problem is with my heart I go to a cardiologist. Yet I am around hospitals a lot, and while this is improving there are still times where you have a whole team of doctors caring for a patient and the patient feels a little like a chemistry set or a lab rat. The cardiologist may do one thing, and yet that may require something else from a doctor who knows about kidneys, something else from physical therapists, and as a problem becomes more complex each person may know their part but no one can integrate all the parts together.

For the church, in the enlightenment and following eras there was a movement towards a precision of thought who God was and how God acted that may seem strange to us now. Boundaries were drawn between Lutherans and Reformed, Catholic and Anglican, Baptist and Presbyterian and as things progressed it got a little out of hand as the differences became more and more trivial.  I am not saying that the histories of each of these groups are not important, but it is too easy to become focused towards the fences the boundaries that separate one from another. Certainly this has been an age of walls lowering between the older faiths and the discussion has been fruitful…but are we missing the point? I’m not saying that myself as a fairly liberal (at least in some aspects) Lutheran minister and a conservative Southern Baptist are going in the same direction (to be honest there are times when I wonder if we are even talking about the same God or Jesus) but can I and others give up my need to say this is authentic and this is not…or to go a step further this person is on the inside of the church or salvation (whatever one means by that term) by putting up walls of saying who is in and who is out (as if we get to make that decision).

Maybe rather than focusing on the boundaries/fences and differentiating ourselves from that which is outside the boundaries (to use a mathematic term-rather than trying to be a bounded set) what would it mean to focus in on the center and to invite the intruder and the alien to walk into our territory and join us at the table (being a centered set in mathematics).

One final note: David Lose, who teaches at Luther Seminary, had an interesting post coming at this from a very different direction which is worth some thought and caused a lot of discussion in a group I am a part of. For those who want to read it, it was re-published here in a more refined form : Do Christian Denominations Have A Future.

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Why the sign of the rose?

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The rose was a symbol of the last Great Reformation, which we most often associate with Martin Luther and the posting of the 95 Theses and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.  In Luther’s seal the predominant image that gives form to the overall seal is that of a rose.  A rose was often worn as a mark to identify oneself as an adherent to the reformation in those early days of the conflict that would come to dominate the shape of the next 500 years of Christianity.  Protestant and Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Episcopal, Baptist and every other heritage of the Western Church found themselves reshaping their practices and life together in the midst of the impact of the Great Reformation of the Church.

It should go without saying that the world has changed dramatically in the last 500 years, that many of the questions of the reformation are not the questions of a society that is predominantly visual and digital rather than oral, a society that went through the enlightenment, capitalism and communism, modernity and post-modernity, from a printing press to the iPad.  The world is in a state of rapid transition and along with it the lives of those who attempt to live faithfully also are in a state of upheaval.  This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it probably be the last.  Phyllis Tickle in her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why points to the reality that about once every 500 years society goes through a ‘rummage sale’ and re-examines what it believes and why it believes what it does.  I agree that we are in the lead up to another Great Emergence, that  who we are as people and what matters is going through a period of upheaval and re-evaluation. For me this is a place to put down some of my early reflections on what I as a reflective person of faith see, and my initial thoughts on what it means.

So why the sign of the rose?  In the first case these reflections are sub rosa (under the rose) in the sense that they are the musings of an heir of the last Great Reformation, as an ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) minister I take very seriously the gift that my particular and the worldwide church has given us throughout the past 500 years, and indeed I am an heir to the church’s roughly 2,000 years of both great triumphs and colossal missteps.  This is a voice on the emergence of a new reformation coming from under the faithful services of one shaped by the history of the past reformation.  It is also sub rosa in a second sense, it is somewhat covert at this point.  In espionage there is the sense that something done sub rosa is covert, and these reflections may well be viewed by some as dangerous, unfaithful, heretical and any number of other adjectives.  But in a time of great change, there is and will be conflict over the ideas that take form and shape the world going forward.

The questions of meaning, of God, of life are not solely the property of the church, in fact I have found in recent years that some of my best conversations have been with people outside the church and people of other faiths. I have certainly seen the church and people of faith struggle to engage difficult (and sometimes even trivial questions) and I am going to tackle some foundations that may be very uncomfortable to many, but may be liberating for many others.  As a blog this is a work in evolution, it is asking the difficult questions, not attempting to provide the one unequivocal answer (as if such a thing could exist in post-modern mind).  The reality is that if you agree with everything I say, you probably are giving me too much credit. Welcome to an encounter with one person’s reflective faith and encounter with the world and with God.

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