Myth-making

This past weekend, my sermon addressed among several things, the power of a unifying story, and how the LACK OF a unifying story – especially one that had been long held but suddenly got taken away – can have troubling effects on a people and on individuals within a group. I also talked about how the gospel sets about to achieve that very end – removing a unifying narrative that creates a false sense of unity based on nothing more than a pleasant falsehood. And it does this so that we can find a DIFFERENT way to gather: around forgiveness.

Here’s the “script” of a TikTok video I just posted tonight. I’m also posting the video, if I can figure out how to do that. Just keep in mind that I have zero idea what I’m doing when it comes to TikTok technology. Also keep in mind that the TT post doesn’t go into the dymythologizing work of the gospel; it only talks about a new acquaintance I have on that platform who is a professor of Public History. His posts interest me because we have a common love of teaching history outside of the academy.

So here’s the “transcript,” such as it is.
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I’ve been thinking a lot in recent days about how much of the content on Tad Stoermer’s TikTok and other platforms, I presume, refer to myth
and specifically to the Patriot Myth. You know: that the “Founding Fathers” were freedom-loving patriots who upheld the values of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (although in reality, they were more in keeping with John Locke’s list of fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property).
And even in that sense, one has to ask the questions: WHOSE life, WHOSE Liberty, WHOSE property. Both in the genitive sense of “WHOSE property” and the existential sense of “WHO IS property?”

But all of that got me thinking about Myth and everything that word entails.

Lots of folks are familiar with Joseph Campbell and his work with the concept of myth. The way Campbell looks at it, myths stand as symbols or signifiers of  universal ideals and insights that relate to the human experience.

Under that rubrik, myths can help people – both as individuals and as groups – to navigate life’s complexities and to make meaning in their lives.

Campbell’s idea of the importance and usefulness of myth really has caught fire to the extent that, I think, most people sort of work Campbell’s definition as the primary characteristic of myth in human culture.

But maybe fewer people at least here on the North American continent
are aware of French sociologist Rene Girard, who had his own ideas about myth. I find them pretty compelling.

Girard, in contrast with Campbell, focuses on the idea of mimetic desire
– the concept that humans “catch” their desires from the dominant culture. It’s almost like a contagion. We are formed, in other words, by our social models. That includes in areas like language and culture and even our desires themselves. We want what we want because we learned to want those things from other people in our environment.

Furthermore, the desires that we develop often turn into rivalries,
and those rivalries frequently turn violent, especially in the face of perceived scarcity. Scarcities and rivalries within any given society
threaten that society from within, and in order to stave off mimetic rivalries, groups will seek out a scapegoat, someone upon whom the collective sins of the society can be pinned. And with a scapegoat identified, there’s now a “safe” person or group to “eliminate.”
With the targeted scapegoat eliminated, peace returns to the group, at least temporarily.

Another piece of this is that the survivors from the society
are free to go on and create myths about how THEY were justified  in eliminating the scapegoat. It’s the old chestnut about the victor writing the story with himself as the hero and the victim having gotten what they deserved. They were so deplorable that they HAD to be gotten rid of.

The victor writes the narrative. That’s where this idea of the Patriot Myth begins to come in, and while I don’t disagree with Campbell entirely, I think Girard’s work is more far-reaching and relevant.

Though Campbell and Girard are really different in most respects when it comes to defining and characterizing myth, there’s one thing that pulls them together. For both of these thinkers,
myths get repeated and repeated, and a society finds unity in the repetition of the myths. WITHOUT these myths, or when these myths get deconstructed, it deprives societies of their unifying narratives, and shit sinks into chaos.

This is why I think so many people push back against what Tad and others are doing: They instinctively know that without the Patriot Myth, our society lacks a cohesive narrative to gather around and cheer.
British bad.
Patriots good.
When we actually begin to engage actual history, as people correctly intuit,
we lack a common narrative. And we’d rather have a false sense of unity based on myth
than to have to face the often ugly truths about our origins.

Somethng to chew on.

Another Qigong Journal Entry

I’ve been working with my teacher on several aspects of qigong these days, which are in some ways a departure from what I was doing before. But in other ways, it’s really just a deepening of the earlier work.

We’ve been focusing a lot on breath. That tracks for qigong. There’s a LOT of breathwork that happens in this discipline, as a rule. But one thing we did yesterday seems to have cracked an egg for me.

So, we were talking about letting the breath guide the motion instead of putting things the other way around. I could feel the difference in my body. We also put this into action using exercises from the 8 Brocades. When we got to the movement known as Drawing the Bow and Shooting the Eagle, we discussed how this, along with the Buddhist breathing, opens up certain muscles in the chest that are kind of canaries in a coal mine when it comes to the way we carry ourselves, both physically and emotionally, it really struck a nerve.

My teacher asked me where the inhalation and the exhalation “belong” in that exercize. That’s because this inhalation is an expansion of the body, and the exhalation is the compression/contraction of the body. To inhale is like a bellows opening up and the exhalation creates the wind that kindles the flame. When you exhale, you collapse almost, and that chest muscle – the one that resembles a spider – contracts. In terms of ailments, a lot of people are kind of stuck in the exhale phase, and so their body kind of reflects that. When people have a heart attack, they’re in that contracted position. They are smaller, more stooped. And to actively work on opening that area up actually unlocks something – something physical, but also something emotional.

My wife has said to me on a number of occasions that I sometimes seem small. We’re the same height, but she’s right that I am often walking around stooped, contracted. When we worked on the Drawing the Bow exercise, in conjunction with the explanation about the chest muscle and the emotionality contained therein, I felt this release of emotion, a release of grief I’ve been holding onto for what feels like an eternity. For a moment, it was such a relief! But after a couple of hours, the grief I didn’t realize I was still carrying returned. I had just become aware of it, actually. And it filled me with a kind of heaviness.

I see this as a positive thing. I was able to FEEL the grief instead of burying it. I mean, it took a toll on me yesterday and made me really tired and kind of out of sorts, but it also felt kind of good to be in that space of awareness of why I was feeling down. And there was a release in that place. I think this was a sign of actual progress on several levels, and I’m super glad for yesterday’s lesson.

It’s amazing how much the relationship of the body to the mind and spirit affects a person. So much to reflect on in this learning!

Qigong Journal

Hi. I don’t know what motivates you to look at this blog. There aren’t many of you who do, and that’s just fine. I originally began writing here from time to time as a way of avoiding the space constraints for monthly articles for the congregational bulletin. I figured that I could be as long-winded here as I wanted. It would also then serve as a place for folks to go back and see how things I had said were panning out months later.

Well, I’m throwing that whole concept out the window. Maybe not out the window, but it’s isn’t going to be my primary focus. I’m just going to be randomly posting stuff here as it pleases me to do so. That was already happening on some level. You’ll notice that there are a lot of entries about the early struggles my family and I faced as my mom first began her dementia saga. You’ll still find those kinds of things here, and those kinds of posts still make sense in that they fit within the rubrik of “spiritual struggle,” and that’s very much in line with the original intent of the blog.

Blah, blah, blah.

Today I wanted to write because our congregation recently began hosting qigong classes at 11 on Wednesdays. This won’t be a year-round thing, at least not at this point, but attendance has been really good, and this is such a wonderful way for our church building to get some use outside of Sunday mornings and other, more traditional “churchy” events.

I’m thrilled, because I’ve long been interested in qigong, taiji, things of that nature, that comprise elements of the physical and the spiritual (and the mental, to be honest). My own official qigong journey began about 4 years ago in Tulsa when the local company that hosts floatation tank/isolation tank experiences and other energy-related services brought in Dr. E.K. Jackson to teach a class on qigong and taiji.

Since that time, I’ve learned quite a lot and have been continuing the journey. Currently I’m enrolled in an online class with a wonderful instructor up in Alberta Canada, who has been teaching me the “secrets” of heavy hands, life & death breathing, fa qi, and today we began on a path fo gui xi or “tortoise breathing.”

The last couple of sessions have effected me pretty powerfully in terms of feeling non-frantic energy in my mind and body. The kind of energy that feels good and productive without making you all jittery and spasmodic. Today, right after doing this exercise, I’m also feeling some movement in my lungs, whereas before, that area seems really stagnant and swampy.

Tortoise breathing is teaching me that the breath drives the movement. As my teacher said, whenever you’re doing qigong or taiji, you don’t synch your breathing with your movements; it’s the other way around. That makes such a huge difference in the way I feel during and after the practice. As I expand my breathing in 6 directions, it makes a lot of sense for THAT to be the driving force, because then everything else kind of comes somewhat naturally.

Anyway, that’s my qigong journaling for today. Maybe I’ll expand on this later, maybe not. But the entry is here to help me recall. If you also get something out of it, so much the better. If not, scroll on by. 🙂

Back after a hiatus – A New Thing in Our Midst

Lots of stuff has happened since my last post. I’ll save it for another time. But what I want to talk about today is how I’m envisioning some things for the current congregation I’m serving in Michigan Center, MI.

This is a fantastic assembly of people. They are doing all the right things – the stuff Jesus wants us to do. They feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty; they clothe the naked; they visit the sick. Maybe they don’t visit the imprisoned a whole lot, so that’s a growth edge, I suppose.

But this particular post is more about some internal discipleship practices. One thing I’ve noticed in particular – and this is common among every congregation I’ve served – they don’t care much for spontaneity. There must be schedules and there must be order. This is not to say that there isn’t an abundance of grace when stuff doesn’t go according to plan; It’s just that they really want to know who is going to be serving Communion a few weeks in advance, as well as who is supposed to be cantor for any given Sunday.

There’s a lot to be said for “good order.” It’s one of the stereotypically Lutheran qualities. On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of room for the movement of the Spirit.

I get it. Planning keeps us from putting folks on the spot. How would you like to be called upon to offer a public prayer without having had time to think about what you might say? Scary stuff for a lot of people. It used to be that way for me, too, until I just got beyond it through lots and lots of practice.

One of the congregations I’ve always admired and have hoped for a long time to emulate – a congregation that works very differently from this typical model – is Denver’s House for all Sinners and Saints. Yes, this is a Lutheran congregation. Yes, they are ELCA-type Lutherans. But they are less interested in planning every detail than they are in involving every participant in the worship, which is EXACTLY what I’d love for us to aspire to.

The following comes from their “How We Worship” page. I’ve lifted it directly, so you don’t have to go there to look:
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HOW WE WORSHIP

Pretty much just like a Rolling Stones concert… uhhh, we mean, nothing at all like a Rolling Stones concert.

We follow the ancient liturgy of the church  We chant the Kyrie, the Psalm and during Advent, Lent and Holy Week, the Gospel is also chanted. There’s also incense, readings from scripture, a sermon, prayers of the people, Eucharist, and a closing blessing (benediction).  You’ll also see some of us making the sign of the cross and bowing during the Eucharist.

Most of our music is a cappella. The music is made by the community — with the exception of the 3 or 4 times a year that we have a bluegrass service, the liturgy is a capella. So, all the music you hear in liturgy comes from the bodies of those who showed up. We sing in four-part harmony and rehearse before liturgy at what we call Choral Guild (open to anyone who shows up at 4:20 before church). We sing this way because we’ve discovered that we can’t sing harmony alone. We need each other. We also sing the old hymns of the church. So there’s lots of ancient tradition at HFASS, but there’s also some innovation.

Open Space We always include poetry and a time called “Open Space” in which we slow down for prayer and other opportunities to actively engage the Gospel; writing in the community’s Book of Thanks, writing prayers, making art or assembling care kits for those experiencing homelessness in Denver.

We like to say that we are “anti-excellence/pro-participation” This means that we care more about people being involved than with everything looking perfect. You’ll find that it’s easy to find ways to take leadership roles in the liturgy from the moment you step through the door.

We sit in the round When you show up to liturgy, you’ll notice that we set up chairs in circles around the altar. The Table is the center of our community because Jesus has promised to show up for us in the bread and wine. But we also worship this way so that we can see each other, because we are all icons of Christ and when we see each other, we are gazing into the face of our Lord.

We make the liturgy ourselves Though we follow the ancient liturgy, there are seasonal prayers in contemporary language, often written by the congregation. Several times a year, we hold what we call Liturgy Guild where we decide together some of the elements of the liturgies of the upcoming season. Liturgy Guild is open to everyone in the community. Just show up! Also, when you show up on Sundays, we might ask you if you’d like a “job.” All that means is we are asking if you’d like to help lead the liturgy by reading a prayer, part of scripture or helping serve at Communion.

………………………………………..

Doesn’t that seem awesome? Maybe it seems scary. Or chaotic. Or something. But I don’t know of ANY other worshipping community in our area that worships with this spirit of openness to what God is up to. It’s the opposite of uptight, which is something Lutherans are often accused of being. Remember the old Garrison Keillor joke about how you can tell which Lutherans are the extroverts? They’re the ones looking at other people’s shoes. But really, this is less about introversion/extraversion. It’s not even about being novel or different. It’s entirely about allowing ourselves to be moved by the Holy Spirit. It’s something that we’ve been praying for a whole year now.

What I used to say about innovation was that old chestnut you’ve likely heard: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.” HOWEVER, that assumes that the whole landscape hasn’t undergone a radical shift while you’ve always been doing the sameold. Guess what? It HAS shifted. Doing what we’ve always done in the ways we’ve always done it doesn’t guarantee a single repeatable outcome. We HAVE to make changes, or we will die. It’s that simple.

Former Lutheran pastor Jaraslov Pelikan famously said something like, “Traditional is the living faith of the dead,” meaning that what we choose to carry forward shows where our priorities lie. But the flip side of that saying, according to Pelikan, is, “TraditionalISM is the dead faith of the living.” We worship a God, not of the dead, but of the living – a God for whom death is not even a thing to be considered, so overflowing with life is our God. That means that God can catch us if we screw something up while trying something new for the Gospel’s sake. Right? Let’s talk!

Justice

This is another churchy blogpost. I haven’t been on here in a while, and a LOT of stuff has gone down since the last time I posted. The biggest things are the sudden, unexpected, heart-wrenching and world-changing loss of my wife to metastatic breast cancer on September 26 and then the Category 4/5 Hurricane Ian that slammed into our town two days later. Most of everything I’ve been doing since that time has been related to the aftermath of one or both of those things. But I’m trying to find a way forward through this mess.

One of the paths that I’m taking through the mess is work. Our church building is still in disarray, so it’s not really convenient to be in the office most of the time. Plus, I have a lot of extra running around to do on account of being a single dad. So I’m really just not in the office much. But I’m still working, just in different ways. Including returning to our weekly Bible/Book Study and, now, launching a twice-monthly cross-generational faith formation “event” following the Faith5 model.

In both the book study and the Faith5 event, the issue of justice came up, albeit in slightly different contexts. We’re studying Michael Hardin’s The Jesus Driven Life, which is all about discovering the non-violent, non-retributive God whom Jesus called Abba. In chapters 5 and 6, we’re talking about … well, we’re talking about a LOT of things, but the issue of justice came up in our discussion as an aspect of “shalom.” Normally we translate that word as “peace,” but that translation fails to capture the holistic character of God’s peace, which is about wholeness and restoration, not just of an individual, but of entire communities and the whole creation.

So, in that discussion, we turned to Matthew 5 and the sermon on the mount, where Jesus radicalizes his own scriptural tradition when he tells his listeners, “You have heard it said by men of old, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, don’t resist an evildoer. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the left.” You know the passage. Walter Wink famously pointed out that, in order for someone to strike me on the right cheek, unless they are using their (forbidden) left hand, the only way to strike that cheek is to do so with a backhand, colloquially named “a bitch slap.” I’m not shying from that term because the rawness of it captures the degradation and humiliation that phrase implies. As Wink points out, it’s violence done by a supposed superior against a supposed inferior. When Jesus says, “offer him the other, as well,” it’s a way to suggest that the slap-ee demands to be met as an equal, not as an inferior. It shames the aggressor and brings the possibility of justice, equality, wholeness.

In the Faith5 context, we were discussing our preaching text from the Narrative Lectionary, which included the famous line from Micah 6: “You know, O Mortal, what the LORD requires of you: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”

When I preached on that text, I pointed out the thing that all the prophets made clear: authentic worship, whether here in Jerusalem or there on Mount Gerazim, or in our building, or in the park, or wherever… it all amounts to nothing and is an offense to God if it isn’t accompanied by DOING – not just talking about, but actually DOING justice.

As an aside, but a relevant one, I also talked about how doing justice is a natural outcome of walking with God, because to know God through relationship is precisely what teaches us God’s will and directs our doing of justice. That “love kindness” bit again fails to capture the fullness of the word “chesed,” which is the kind of “steadfast love” (how we normally translated that) of God, which is self-emptying, co-suffering, and radically forgiving. (Shout-out to Brad Jersak and Vladika Lazar Pohalo for those phrases!)

The same person who had asked me in the book study to define what I meant by “justice” asked me again to define it in this Micah context. I began to give an answer, and someone else had something to say, so I stopped myself. I’m now glad I did, because the whole point was this: justice flows naturally, organically, from that co-suffering, radically forgiving, self-emptying love of God, which one can ONLY know by a humble walk with the divine. One of the ways Jesus phrased this in John’s Gospel was by using the vine and branches metaphor. You can’t really separate the branches from the vine. When they are connected – or mutually abiding, if you will – the line between the one and the other is blurred. And there you have it. Walk with Jesus, who EXUDES chesed, who EMBODIES shalom, who calls on us to IMITATE him as he imitates the Father.

We don’t need to DEFINE justice when we are ABIDING in justice. Don’t ask ME to say what justice is or isn’t. Look to Jesus. Because my suspicion is, “you know what is required of you.” Jesus already told you.

Reflections on Worship Changes

Today in church, we made a couple of fairly minor tweaks to the way we do worship, and both of these were planned. We also made a third, much more unplanned change, and I want to reflect on all of this really quickly.

First a preamble: I was speaking with a council member a week or so ago, and our conversation turned, as it often does, to numbers. Both of us are well aware that numbers are, by no means, the best indicator of a congregation’s health. But we also know that numbers aren’t insignificant, if we’re going to continue to follow the model of the church that Lutherans have literally always used on this continent. Congregations are, by design, self-supporting. The offerings of the congregants pay for all of the ministries of the church, including the ministry of the called pastor. So, no, numbers aren’t insignificant.

But this conversation we were having about numbers led me to say, not for the first time and not in the first context, that tweaking things a little bit here or there isn’t going to bring about major change. We can change an entire worship style or worship time or worship location. Chances are, we are only going to continue to reach those we are already reaching. And that’s fine, if maintenance is what we’re after. But if we want change, we can’t just keep doing what we’ve always done with the same people we’ve always done it with. Doing what you’ve always done will continue to yield you what you’ve already gotten .. except with decreasing results.

I say all of that just to say that what we did in worship was really NOT change. It was tweaking. Minimal tweaking at that.

So what did we do? First thing: We moved away from what was rapidly becoming a 29-page bulletin with just about every word, every phrase, every response, every pause spelled out on the page. It was ridiculous. Not only was that an enormous squandering of resources in terms of paper and ink, but also it highlights the criticisms that some more Charismatic Christians level against liturgical churches like ours. When everything is spelled out, there’s little room for deviation and no room for the Spirit to move. Now, of course the Spirit will move where she will, but it’s not our job to make it harder for the Spirit to blow around. I’d like us to get out of the Spirit’s – and our own – way. Just a little. So we moved from the long-form bulletin to a severely foreshortened version, plus the use of the hymnal.

Second thing: We moved away from the Revised Common Lectionary to a Narrative Lectionary. The RCL has some issues. It consists of 4 readings: one from the “Old Testament,” a Psalm, a “New Testament” reading, and a Gospel reading. The OT reading is meant to link in some thematic way to the Gospel reading, but often it doesn’t do that in any clearly discernible way. The New Testament reading is supposed to fit in thematically, as well, but often it’s really just kind of wedged in there with seemingly no rhyme or reason, and then the text is chunked up in ways that absolutely rip the reading out of its context and make it less than worthless.

The Narrative Lectionary seeks to address that and other issues by reducing the number of readings to one. The one reading is longer and more contextualized than the 4 of the RCL, and it’s also meant to function over time, as the name implies, as a narrative. That is, there is a flow from week to week that is often lacking in the RCL. So we made that move today as well, and this was planned.

The more unplanned tweak we made existed as a germ in my head but I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull it off. But it involves the intercessory prayers, aka “The prayers of the people.” Well, “the way we’ve always done it” <ahem!> makes it absolutely the opposite of the prayers of the people. The people aren’t lifting up their concerns. Some writers of the prayers at Augsburg Fortress are writing those prayers. Don’t get me wrong: those are great prayers a lot of the time. But they aren’t necessarily the concerns of THIS people in THIS time and place. I want the people to offer THEIR prayers. And part of this involves us getting over ourselves and our hangups about praying in public. Look, I’m an introvert, and so I get this. But in Christ there is no slave or free, no Jew or Greek, no male and female, and no introvert or extrovert. We are the body of Christ, and if we can’t be comfortable enough to pray in front of one another, then maybe we oughta ask ourselves just what the hell it is we really believe.

So here’s how I did it. First, I invited people to sing at the beginning of the prayers. This is a practice I picked up while serving a lovely community in North Tulsa, although I didn’t ask people to do it EXACTLY the way they do it in Tulsa. In that little church back there, the people come into the aisle and join hands as they pray. I didn’t force anyone to do that. For one thing, we’re too big for that to work. But I wanted to build in some small amount of comfort, even though prayer is absolutely not about comfort.

So we sang the Taize chant, “Oh, Lord, hear my prayer.” We sing that through twice. And then I lead a couple of prayers following the pattern from the hymnal: For the church universal, for the world, for the community, for the sick, for the congregation, and finally, for the departed in the faith. At the congregational level, I gave folks the opportunity to lift their prayers — THEIR prayers, not some pre-written ones by a stranger back in Minnesota. Today nobody took me up on it. I’m not disappointed. This was the first time, and it’s gonna take some time to get used to it. People still got prayed for, and God knew what we needed. No worries. We’ll get used to it.

At the end of the prayers of the people, we sing the Gospel classic “I Just Want to Thank You, Lord.”

How did things go with these little tweaks? Not terrible. I had one person explicitly say, “I am on board with these changes. I think it’s a good thing.” I heard – through the grapevine, of course – a few … maybe “complaint” is a strong word, but something *like complaint. “Why weren’t the words and music printed?” There’s an easy answer for that: we don’t need it. Taize chants are designed to be singable without musical notation. These are paperless songs. I taught folks, with my messed up and very non-professional voice, how to sing the second song. And guess what? They rocked it. Especially for the first time out. It was amazing. I was literally moved to tears. You know whose work that is? The Holy Spirit’s. That’s what it’s like when we get the heck out of the Spirits, and again, our own way.

Having a bulletin at all, or a hymnal, is a PREFERENCE. It is not a necessity. Every Lutheran knows – entirely without looking at a piece of paper – that when the worship leader says, “The Lord be with you,” we respond, “And also with you.” That doesn’t need to be written out. Every Lutheran knows that when a prayer is ending and the worship leader says, “We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior,” we say, “Amen.” No bulletin or hymnal is needed here. And what Lutheran of reading age doesn’t know the entirely of the Lord’s Prayer without reading the words? I mean, seriously. There is very little else in the bulletin or in the hymnal that needs to be spelled out. Maybe the Creed. We probably SHOULD know that by now, but there is the whole issue of the similarities between the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed that trip even me up from time to time. So, I don’t really mind having a resource to look to on that one. But not much else, really.

This is really a question of preference, and preference is a question of comfort. As a worship leader, I’m getting less and less interested in comfort. Anybody’s comfort. Including my own. That’s part of the internal motivation for all of these little tweaks. The world is not comfortable, and worship is something that propels us into the uncomfortable world. The more comfortable we get with being discomforted and uncomfortable, the better we will be as disciples and Gospel-bearers.

Someone said to me today, “Have you looked at us, though? We’re old. We can barely remember our own names!” Now, that was a joke, of course, but I also heard the issue behind it: We don’t want to learn new stuff. We don’t want change. Well, of course not! Nobody wants change! But guess what? Change comes whether we want it or not. We roll with it or we die. That’s it. And I don’t think anybody called me to this church to be a hospice chaplain for the congregation. That means we’re going to have to grow. And if we can’t grow spiritually, what makes us think we will grow in numbers? First comes the one and the other may follow. I don’t make up the rules. That’s just how it goes.

So, again, we made some tweaks. The tweaks might not be enough to save us. They rarely are. My old acquaintance, Jonathan Martin, wrote a book about surviving a shipwreck, and how when the boat comes apart, we find ourselves grasping for any piece of flotsam, just to stay afloat. We cling to anything we can to survive.

But didn’t Jesus say to us, “Whoever seeks to hold on to his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it?” (Hint: Yes, he did.) Isn’t baptism 100% about dying to the old and being dragged, gasping into the new? (Hint: Yes, it is.) So, why should we be content with survival when our promise is for thriving? Why should we hope for resuscitation when Jesus wants to raise us from the dead?

Believe me: changing a couple of little things in worship isn’t dying to our old self. It’s a minor tweak, in the grand scheme of things. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a question of preference and comfort and getting used to a different way to do things. So we don’t sing a Lamb of God. Jesus didn’t tell us to sing that. So we don’t have every word and thought and direction written in a bulletin. Jesus never said anything about bulletins or worship, except that true believers would worship, not in this place or the other, but in spirit. Let’s let the Spirit work. Let’s let the Spirit enliven OUR spirits. Let’s not quibble about what Paul might describe as “skubala.” (You can look that one up for yourselves.) And let’s just let these tweaks get into our systems. I think I know what I’m doing here. If I’m wrong, we can change things later. But we need to give it all a chance first.

Okay? Okay.

Praying the Psalm

Today is my birthday. I’m not fishing for birthday greetings. In fact, I only bring it up because it happened to spring to memory today that I used to have a birthday practice of praying a Psalm. On my birthday each year, I would look up and begin to commit to memory the Psalm that corresponded to my year of life. I began this practice when I was 31, and on my birthday, I began my 32nd year of living. Therefore I would pray Psalm 32 each day of that year. Then, when I turned 32, I’d start praying Psalm 33 each day for a year and so on.

That was the ideal, anyway. In practice, things were much spottier. Still I loved this idea. I had come across it, I believe by way of Rabbi Rachel Rosenblatt, who, during her formation years went by the moniker The Velveteen Rabbi. (“One day I will be a REAL Rabbi.”) Maybe it wasn’t her blog. Maybe I picked it up somewhere else, but she’s the one, in my mind, who gets the credit.

As I recall, praying the Psalm of one’s life year is a Hassidic practice. Maybe it isn’t something that the entire Hassidic community does. Maybe it’s just something instituted or spoken of by the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter. It’s still a neat idea.

Over the years, I had forgotten about doing this. In the First Half of Life I had a very different approach and outlook on prayer, in general, but in this Second Half, I hold all of that much more loosely. I’ve learned to hold pretty much everything more loosely. And so this practice became much less important, much less urgent.

But something told me this morning as I woke up to look up my Psalm. Today I turn 53, so my Psalm this year is #54, and here it is, according to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible:

Prayer for Vindication

To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Maskil of David, when the Ziphites went and told Saul, “David is in hiding among us.”

54 Save me, O God, by thy name,
and vindicate me by thy might.
² Hear my prayer, O God;
    give ear to the words of my mouth.

³ For insolent men^[a] have risen against me,
    ruthless men seek my life;
    they do not set God before them. Selah

⁴ Behold, God is my helper;
    the Lord is the upholder^[b] of my life.
⁵ He will requite my enemies with evil;
    in thy faithfulness put an end to them.

⁶ With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to thee;
    I will give thanks to thy name, O Lord, for it is good.
⁷ For thou hast delivered me from every trouble,
    and my eye has looked in triumph on my enemies.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 54:3 Another reading is strangers
2. Psalm 54:4 Gk Syr Jerome: Heb of or with those who uphold

So, there it is. An imprecatory Psalm. A prayer for vindication before one’s enemies. I dunno. Do I have any enemies? I have a lot of people I disagree with, not to mention a lot of people who disagree with me. But enemies? Not really. There are some folks that have treated me unfairly, and I even hold a fair amount of anger against them still, but I don’t see them as enemies. I’m not a wealthy person by First World standards. In that sense, I don’t even have a lot to complain about, so the concept of enemy is pretty far removed from my life. In other words, this Psalm, on this occasion of my 53rd birthday and the start of my 54th journey around the sun, just doesn’t really speak to me. Not right now anyway.

And so, as with all prayers and approaches to prayer, I will acknowledge this Psalm, but I will hold it loosely. Maybe holding it loosely enough while putting it out there like this will enable *you to grab hold of it, if your life situation feels different from mine. Maybe this is YOUR blessing. May it be so.

Kids in Worship and Hospitality in General

Hi. I’m Rob. I’m a pastor. You guys called me here a little over a year ago. We’ve had some time to get to know one another. I like you all, and I think you like me. At least some of you do. Are we at a point in our relationship that we can talk openly? Let’s give it a shot.

When your call committee was interviewing potential pastors, you put together a profile of your congregation. It’s something every congregation is required to do, just as every pastoral candidate is required to complete a Rostered Leader Profile. It’s part of the speed dating process. The potential pastor looks at the Ministry Site Profile and says, “OK, I think I can work with that,” and the congregation looks at the RLP and says, “Fine. This could turn into something.” The RLP highlights some areas of a minister’s strengths and “growing edges,” and the MSP lists a number of the congregation’s ministry priorities.

I have never, ever, never seen a Ministry Site Profile that doesn’t state, in one way or another, that the congregation hopes to attract young families with children or rebuild a youth and family program that has fallen away in recent years. Never seen it. Children are ALWAYS listed as a priority.

Why? I think the assumption is, that families are looking for a place where they can plant themselves, raise their kids in the faith, and those kids will either stay in the same town where the parents planted roots, or move away from that town but come back some day when they have kids of their own, or at least have a solid faith foundation to carry with them as they move somewhere else as grown-ups. It’s seen as hopeful to have kids in worship. It feels like a sign of security. And it’s completely delusional.  Charming, but delusional.

The reality is that people are more mobile now than ever. Just in my adult lifetime, I’ve lived in 6 states and two countries. Twice. And I’m not in the “young family” demographic anymore, despite having two young’uns at home. The still younger set is even more mobile than my generation.

Before you say it, yes, every congregation has one or two examples of kids who have grown up, gone to college, and then came back. But for every one of those people who came back, how many never did? And those that left, how many have left the denomination for one reason or another? How many have left all things religious for one reason or another?

I don’t say any of this to make people feel bad or feel like failures when it came to raising kids in the faith or protecting the institution they worked so hard to build or maintain. It’s simply the way things are. Did previous generations make mistakes? Oh, you betcha! But that’s not the point at all. The point is just that our old assumptions about church and family are as outdated as kerosene lamps and coal cooking stoves. It might feel nice to wax nostalgic about “the good old days,” but that kind of thinking both fails to recall the struggles that came with the good old days, while also failing to engage with current realities. It’s not helpful.

What does that have to do with kids in the church? Well, everything. People under the old model used to say, without a hint of irony, “the children are the future of the church.” Even if they were right back then, they’re wrong now. The children, if we’re so lucky as to have any, are the PRESENT of the church. They are every bit as important as the 85-year-old member who gives 10% weekly, serves on the Council, works for the Altar Guild, the Finance Committee, and every other thing that congregations typically do. The only difference: they are children.

Because they are children, they act like children. They are silly; they are fidgety; they are moody; they are often socially “inappropriate.” (Well, they’re not, really. If they were adults and acting that way, it WOULD be inappropriate. But as it is, they’re kids and that’s all there is to that.)

One of the great things about kids is that they live in the moment. Yes, they think about the future, but mostly, they’re much more present in the moment than adults. And they’re always learning. I’m not talking about formal learning here. Whether you have a structured Sunday School class or not, kids are learning from the adults. Mostly they’re not learning facts or processes, either. They’re learning from adults how they, the children, are being perceived and received. “Am I welcome here? Am I unwelcome? Can I be a kid, be myself, be silly, fidgety and all the rest, or do I have to be Old? If I don’t behave the way the Olds expect me to behave, am I still accepted, or do I really need to conform until I can get out of here at the first available opportunity and never look back?”

Recently someone said to me, “Yeah, they’re kids. We get that. But isn’t there some middle ground?” I’ve thought about it. At first I thought there must be. But the more I ponder, the more I believe there is NOT a middle ground. Because kids don’t process like adults. They are very self-centered. (Well, maybe they’re not too different from adults, after all!) And they’re trying to fit in. But if they are too structured and too hemmed in, all they’re learning is, “I don’t feel welcome among these people.” That’s reality. I honestly don’t care how it used to be in the old days of “Do what you’re told.” To think that way now is to engage in delusional thinking. It’s not Back When I Was A Kid times anymore.  Back When I Was A Kid, I hated church and I left it as soon as I moved out of my family home at age 17. Now, eventually I did come back, but I’m not most kids.

Look, all I’m saying here is this: We can’t expect kids to act like grown ups. We can’t expect them to treat all of our religious pageantry with the same reverence that was forced into us and that made us superstitious and terrified of an angry God. It’s not healthy, and it’s not the character of God to scowl at children who actually WANT to be involved in worship. They won’t always want that. If we can make it pleasant for them while it’s still something they want to do, it’s going to have a far better, less traumatic effect on them as they grow up and move away than forcing them into a rigid behavioral box that makes US more comfortable. One of the things that all of us churchy people need to learn is that it’s really not about us. It’s not about what makes us comfortable. Think about Jesus and his teaching, and let’s allow HIM to be our guide in this.

If you see a kid in worship doing something you don’t like, first check your trigger. Then, when you’ve calmed down, maybe say to the kid in a kind and encouraging way, “Hey, I’d like to help you understand what you’re doing a little better. Here’s how *I* do this and here’s why.” That’s going to carry a lot more weight than a complaint to the council or to the pastor. Be proactive. Encourage one another. Build one another up.

By the way, just so we’re clear: It is not the pastor’s job to raise your children or grandchildren in the faith. That’s the parents’ or grandparents’ or other caretakers’ job. MY job is to help you do your job. To encourage you as you encourage one another. So please regard this whole “letter” in the encouraging sense that I intend it. If you feel challenged, that’s OK. If you disagree, that’s OK, too. We don’t have to agree on everything, because our unity isn’t in our agreement on every jot and tittle, but rather it’s in Christ, who is our Lord and teacher.

I’d love to have more conversation about this with folks in a one-to-one or small group setting, but I’m going to leave it up to you to set that up. One of the things I’ve become convinced of over the years: People will either care enough to make a conversation happen, or they’ll be content to gripe behind a person’s back. One of those ways is befitting a follower of Jesus. The other … not so much.

Anyway, I hope to chat with folks about this or any other concerns/questions in the very near future. Don’t be a stranger!

“I Guess God Doesn’t Want Me to be Married.”

Two weeks ago, I headed back to my hometown in Michigan because my step-father, Bill, had had an “incident” on May 1, which prompted my mom to call 911 for him. At the time, we thought it was a heart attack, possibly a stroke, perhaps a reaction between his many and various prescriptions and the alcohol in his beloved beer. It was none of those things, and precisely what caused the initial event may remain forever a mystery, though we all have a hypothesis. But the point is, it was becoming clear that he wouldn’t be getting better after this episode.

That was a reality that my mom struggled to cope with. Mom has Alzheimer’s, and while her long-term memory is as sharp as a tack, she can’t remember things that happened yesterday or this morning or 30 minutes ago, sometimes things that happened seconds ago. But she remembers pretty much EVERYTHING from her past. That memory includes the deaths of her first two husbands.

When my mom was 18, she married Richard. Dick. Both a name and a fitting pejorative. Dick was a “mama’s boy,” whose mama was extremely meticulous. Like, literal “white glove on the door tops to search for dust” meticulous, and she had raised her son likewise, so when Mom married Dick, his standards were high. Each morning she was to fix his breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal with a perfectly square pat of butter placed directly in the center of the bowl. If the butter shape or placement didn’t meet his standards, he would throw the bowl to the floor and mom had to clean it up. This explains a lot about her later housekeeping habits, which were essentially non-existent and which I also seem to have inherited.

The 18 year old turned 19 and had the first of my siblings, Desi. Two years later, along came Sharee. Not long after that, Dick and my mom separated and were living in two different houses. On top of – perhaps related to – his meticulous standards, Dick struggled with alcohol and mental unhealth, specifically, undifferentiated Schizophrenia. This was a bad combination, and Dick died by suicide when Mom was about 30.

At 32, Mom remarried. John was my dad. He had been in the 101st Airborne, became a cop when he got out, started the police Union in our town. But dad also struggled with alcohol and mental health issues, including PTSD from his upbringing. Grandma Martin, I’m told, used to discipline both of her kids by flushing their heads in the toilet. Grandma was literally a grade-school bully. She was also a bit of a terrorist in ways that I won’t get into now, but the short version is that she had both my cousin Marty and me terrified to go into public restrooms since about the age of 5. Well, Dad’s mental unhealth caught up with him, and he, too, died by suicide.

Fast forward to 1978. Mom met Bill through mutual acquaintances, and they hit it off from the beginning. They got married in July of 1979, and we all became a blended family. Not quite like the Brady Bunch. You can start imagining there, but you’ll have to go darker. Like, add in some Addams Family and maybe a touch of Manson Family … no, I exaggerate. We were weird, but it all worked. It was really a good match.

The other day, as I was sitting with Mom in her living room, where she had the TV turned up to 11 (mostly to keep her from being able to think), she said, “I wonder why God is doing this to Bill. He never hurt anybody.” I said, “Why do you think God is doing this?” She said, “It just seems unfair. It’s so horrible! I guess God doesn’t want me to be married.”

“Ma! You and Bill were married for over 40 years! If God didn’t want you to be married, don’t you think he would have done something about it before now??” But her thinking is beyond logic now. Mom also has never been much of a theologian. She converted to Catholicism in 1976 so that she’d qualify for a St. Vincent de Paul Society scholarship that would allow me to attend the Catholic School that became my “pedagogue” for 12 years. One of the “benefits” of being a Catholic is, you don’t HAVE to be a theologian. There are guys who are willing to do all your God-thinking for you, if that’s your desire. Even though Mom taught CCD for a couple of years, she never really thought deeply about God. Her theology was and is the acquired kind, not the deduced or wrestled with kind. Which is fine as far as that goes. But when you run up against having survived 3 husbands in a life-time, maybe it would have been better for her to have developed a healthier view of faith and our relationship with the Divine.

I may be coming across as unfair to our Catholic siblings. Surely there are more than a few non-Catholics who inherited a bad theology along the way and never really had the tools to question it. I’m not saying people are dumb. By no means. Mom is really quite intelligent, for example. But she has never been equipped for faith when it meets a big challenge like the ones she has faced in life.

Here’s what I’m really getting at: Faith isn’t what most of us were taught that it is. We tend to think of it as a set of precepts that we need to believe in – i.e. give intellectual assent to – in order to “be saved” – another phrase that we aren’t really taught to deal with the meaning of. Faith isn’t about “belief” at all, really. It’s about TRUST. And trust comes from relationship, and this is something that’s built over time. We don’t just automatically trust anyone or anything. Someone needs to prove trustWORTHY over time before we can fully put our trust in that one. But when we do, our trust doesn’t waiver due to bad circumstances. It may be tasted, and it may be strained, but it doesn’t break.

When we think about our faith/trust in God, we come to that through a relationship with God in Jesus that proves God to be trustworthy over time, in our lives, in human history. But the question becomes, what can we trust ABOUT God? If we think we can trust God to pop out of the box at the end of the play and to save the day (a “deus ex machina”), then we’ve placed our trust in a God that doesn’t exist.

So what CAN we trust God to do or to be? Remember when we said a few weeks ago that God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything? THAT is how God is trustworthy. God can be trusted to be self-giving, because God shows Godself to be self-giving on the cross and in every circumstance. God can be trusted to be radically forgiving, because this has been God’s character forever, and we’ve seen it both in the scriptures and in our lives. And God can be trusted to be co-suffering, as we have seen on the cross and again in our lives as we face every kind of struggle. God doesn’t rescue us from our problems or save us from hardships, but God loves us so much that he accompanies us and struggles alongside of us in everything. That includes the loss of 3 husbands and two children.

I know Mom is kind of beyond comprehending that now, though I wish she had been given the tools to explore all of this in her own lifetime and test how it’s true. God didn’t take Dick away from Mom, but God did help her and my two sisters survive … for a time. And when they died, God was still beside Mom, weeping with her. God didn’t cause my dad to kill himself, but when Dad pulled that trigger, God was present with him in his final moments, suffering his pain along with him. And God was present again with Mom and me, quietly bearing our burden, too. Just as God was with Bill in those excruciating final weeks as his body craved the food that he couldn’t eat and as he felt the pain of his metabolic systems shutting down much slower than any of us would have hoped for him, for mercy’s sake. But God was there, co-suffering in it all. And God is here now in our loss and in our mourning. Weeping alongside of us again. Loving us still.

This isn’t something I “believe” with my mind, but rather it’s something I “know” in my innermost being. I trust that it’s true, because I’ve been here before. God is worthy of that trust. It’s literally the only thing I can “give” back to God. And even that is a gift.

Maybe it shoulda been a Facebook post

This is just a quick chuckle from the Dementia outpost. My niece Lindsey recently bought a house. I’ve seen the pictures. It’s a really nice house! New carpet and everything. She brought my mom over to spend the night after my step father landed in the hospital, cuz Mom gets a little nervous about staying alone at night. Plus, given her mental state, she doesn’t need to be alone in any place longer than absolutely necessary. But to take her overnight somewhere, she has to bring her dog, Buddy, the 100 lb Boxer.

Well, because the Old Folks are either to deaf or too enfeebled to let Buddy out every time he needs to pee, he has resorted back to some puppy habits, including doing various numbers (number 1 and number 2, in case I need to spell that out. I’m talking about pee and poo, you see.) indoors, including on the carpets.

Clearly Lindsey is not happy about this, but you can’t correct Buddy in front of my mom, because that’s animal abuse or something. And Mom had the audacity to say, “He’s just helping you decorate. To give the house some “character” so that you don’t get too snooty.”

My brother and I were laughing about this today and how ridiculous the whole thing sounds, but the silver lining in the whole deal is that we now have a new euphemism for “number 2”: it’s “character.” This led us to start howling about having to take a character and about finding character stains on our kids’ undies.

If you don’t laugh at this stuff, you will cry.