I'm thinking Congress could use a little more satire like this. . .
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
The Economy of God
Nick preached this brilliant sermon a couple of weeks ago, in the height of the demonstrations going on in Madison. I've kept intending to post it - seems especially pertinent in light of the WI Senate's actions today.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
"Humanity and death and the cross and all that is sort of messy business. . ."
Well, I made it through another high holy day in which I did not have any of the usual responsibilities. Kind of weird to wake up this morning and not have to burn last year's palms to make ashes for tonight's service.
Though, not being in charge, I did find myself paying attention differently today, noticing things I have overlooked in recent years.
For one, I realized I don't like the ELW service as much as the LBW service for Ash Wednesday. Even though we had the new hymnals, which actually prints the Ash Wednesday liturgy in the hymnal, we never used the ELW service, we printed the liturgy in the bulletin and kept on with the LBW service. I don't think I even realized until today that it had changed, but it's condensed. And of all days on the church calendar, this is not the one to condense. . .
I also stumbled into a moment of profundity during chapel. I was singing with Schola this morning, we were directed to the far side of the chapel for the imposition of ashes, which happened to be the line that Mary was imposing. There was something kind of profound and soberly perspective-granting just in that, to have my doctoral advisor remind me that I am dust. But then later in the service, Schola was directed to a different side of the chapel to receive communion, and this once again happened to be the line that Mary was serving. And it occurred to me, the same hands that had marked me in ash and reminded me of my mortality also handed me the bread of life.
And that was true in PA too - I was the one marking everybody's foreheads and the one handing out the bread. Cami was usually my assisting minister for Ash Wednesday, which meant she would have both marked my forehead and served me communion over the last five years. But I was always so busy worrying about the service as a whole, I never noticed that before. And I don't know that I would have noticed it today except for some fortuitous traffic direction.
So I basically had ashes on my forehead all day, which I am not used to. I kept forgetting they were there, and inadvertently smeared them all afternoon. By the time I got to church tonight, I needed another cross, because I had essentially - though not consciously - wiped the first one away. I wrote something about how I kept smearing my ashes on facebook, and Kristin's response was "Well, humanity and death and the cross and all that is sort of messy business. . ."
And that it is. Messiness and dustiness we'd really rather not be reminded of, if truth be told. Maybe not such a big surprise, then, that as I went about my day my hand kept unconsciously grazing my forehead, slowly brushing that reminder away. Except that didn't really get rid of the cross, it just moved the mess out where I could see it, on my hands, where I could spread it around unless I dealt with it.
That's the thing about Ash Wednesday - it won't let you escape the mess.
And that is actually its gift.
Blessed Lent,
C
Though, not being in charge, I did find myself paying attention differently today, noticing things I have overlooked in recent years.
For one, I realized I don't like the ELW service as much as the LBW service for Ash Wednesday. Even though we had the new hymnals, which actually prints the Ash Wednesday liturgy in the hymnal, we never used the ELW service, we printed the liturgy in the bulletin and kept on with the LBW service. I don't think I even realized until today that it had changed, but it's condensed. And of all days on the church calendar, this is not the one to condense. . .
I also stumbled into a moment of profundity during chapel. I was singing with Schola this morning, we were directed to the far side of the chapel for the imposition of ashes, which happened to be the line that Mary was imposing. There was something kind of profound and soberly perspective-granting just in that, to have my doctoral advisor remind me that I am dust. But then later in the service, Schola was directed to a different side of the chapel to receive communion, and this once again happened to be the line that Mary was serving. And it occurred to me, the same hands that had marked me in ash and reminded me of my mortality also handed me the bread of life.
And that was true in PA too - I was the one marking everybody's foreheads and the one handing out the bread. Cami was usually my assisting minister for Ash Wednesday, which meant she would have both marked my forehead and served me communion over the last five years. But I was always so busy worrying about the service as a whole, I never noticed that before. And I don't know that I would have noticed it today except for some fortuitous traffic direction.
So I basically had ashes on my forehead all day, which I am not used to. I kept forgetting they were there, and inadvertently smeared them all afternoon. By the time I got to church tonight, I needed another cross, because I had essentially - though not consciously - wiped the first one away. I wrote something about how I kept smearing my ashes on facebook, and Kristin's response was "Well, humanity and death and the cross and all that is sort of messy business. . ."
And that it is. Messiness and dustiness we'd really rather not be reminded of, if truth be told. Maybe not such a big surprise, then, that as I went about my day my hand kept unconsciously grazing my forehead, slowly brushing that reminder away. Except that didn't really get rid of the cross, it just moved the mess out where I could see it, on my hands, where I could spread it around unless I dealt with it.
That's the thing about Ash Wednesday - it won't let you escape the mess.
And that is actually its gift.
Blessed Lent,
C
Friday, March 4, 2011
Greetings from the Land of Abstraction
I am working at the edge of my competency here, so be warned that these thoughts are long and a little half-baked, but here is what’s stewing around my brain these days.
First, a list of ingredients:
1. I am doing a PhD level independent study with Chris Scharen in which we are exploring practical theology – what exactly that means, how the field is defined, how it’s methodically done, etc.
2. I also work with Chris and Eileen Campbell-Reed on the Learning Pastoral Imagination project, and as such, spend increasing amounts of time thinking and learning about phronesis, which is embodied wisdom, knowing how to do the right, wise, prudent thing at the right, wise, prudent time (a skill that can only be learned over time, through apprenticeship and learning from failure and success). As a result of this work I also spend increasing amounts of time thinking about how theological education could/should be different to better equip the development of pastoral imagination.
3. I am also currently taking a PhD level systematics seminar on The Congregation with Pat Keifert. This week I was the presenter on David Kelsey’s book To Understand God Truly: What’s Theological About Theological Schools, which is making a case for how theological education could/should be different that all may understand God more truly.
4. The other night I was talking to my friend Sarah, who works for an ELCA synod. In the course of conversation she shared that a colleague of hers used to be a seminary professor and now works for her synod doing basically the same stuff in terms of teaching community faith formation, but this person enjoys it so much more because they are working with actual pastors and faith communities, whereas their experience of seminarians was that ministry is still entirely an abstraction for them.
5. I am also auditing an MDiv level course on Worship and the Lutheran Confessions where all these just-mentioned streams of thought seem to be coming to a head.
I would say the composition of this MDiv class is half to two-thirds first and second year students, which means they have not been on internship yet. There are also a handful of PhD and MA students, most of whom have had multiple years of parish experience. And then the rest are seniors – they’ve had a taste of ministry on a year-long student internship and are now back for one more year of class before they receive a call, get ordained, and become real live pastors.
So anyway, the class is a mixture of lecture, small and large group discussion, a good way to mix things up in a block schedule. The large group discussion is always at the end, and is always led by a group of students (the leader group rotates from week to week). Thus far the leader groups have come up with what they obviously consider to be “edgy” questions. Like, when discussing baptism, the two big questions were “Should we be reaching out to and baptizing Jews and Muslims?” and “What do you do when a family shows up to get their baby baptized, and the last time you saw them was 4 years ago when they came to get their now-4-year-old baptized?”
At the end of that class, all of us who have actually served as parish pastors were talking to each other as we were packing up and concluded, “Yeah, these are not the questions you ask or are really even interested in once you become a pastor.”
But then last night the topic was Communion, and the questions were: “What is the relation of faith and communion?” “At what age should we begin communing children?” “Should we be practicing an open table where all, even the unbaptized, are welcome?” “How should we dispose of the elements?” “Who should be allowed to preside over communion?” etc
These questions and the discussion have been bothering me ever since, and I’ve been trying to unpack why.
Partially I’m annoyed because again many of these are not the questions you are really worried about once you actually become a pastor.
Partially I’m bothered because, while on the surface these questions were about pastoral practice, in reality they were all meant to go after the theology underlying the practice. Which is not an inherently bad thing – I mean, part of what I’m exploring with Chris is how we understand and talk about practice as embodied theology. But the way the questions were asked and discussed, the real concern and debate was over right doctrine (which everyone seemed pretty rigidly convinced they had) and making sure we had right practices to reflect that right doctrine.
Partially, I’m disturbed because the whole conversation was such on such an abstract level.
Which, ok, you could argue they don’t know any better, they haven’t had any or enough experience to have this conversation on anything more than an abstract level, and there are a number of ways in which both the candidacy and curricular processes of Lutheran seminaries make almost everyone into little Lutheran Nazis (rigidly obsessed with correct doctrine) by the second year, so perhaps this is all understandable.
But at a point in the discussion about whether the table should be open to the unbaptized, I piped up and shared a story from my experience in the parish, about a relative of the congregation who lived far away but was a fairly regular visitor, who never took communion in the five years I knew them. That whole time I just assumed it was because they were a skeptic or had some other reason for not wanting to participate, but I never actually asked them why they never came forward, because I didn’t want to be nosy or make them feel uncomfortable or pressured to take part. Around the same time that I announced I was leaving, this person and I finally had a conversation about it – turned out all this time they had wanted to come forward but didn’t because they weren’t sure if they had been baptized, and they didn’t want to offend the church or me or God by participating in something they weren’t sure they had a right to.
Long story short: my own theology (and what I would argue is good Lutheran theology) is that it’s Jesus’ party and he invites everybody to come, who am I to stand in anybody’s way? It’s an open table and this person was more than welcome to participate. I think the welcome to the table that I speak embodies that theology, but there was a contradiction in the bulletin, a little line in fine print that said this is a meal for the baptized. I hated that line and at various times pulled it out (I wasn’t the one who put it in), but it would pop back up when the secretary would use an old bulletin as a template, I wouldn’t always notice that it reappeared, and I would hope no one actually read the fine print. But this person did, and it kept them from coming forward.
I’m pretty sure now they probably do participate in communion, not only because of our conversation but because the conversation prompted some family research and they discovered they were indeed baptized. And that’s awesome and is hopefully a meaningful change and practice in this person’s life now, but we both lamented that we hadn’t had that conversation five years ago, so that they could have been participating all this time.
So I shared this whole story as a piece of wisdom from my own experience, that this stuff is not just an abstraction or word game about keeping doctrine pure, but it really matters in the messy, in-the-flesh, everyday reality of actual people’s lives. A spoken or unspoken implication of a closed table cuts hungry people off from the grace Christ offers them in his supper.
And the response I got, from a second-career student twenty years my senior (who I suspect was a little pissed that I had played their normal conversational trump card of experience, and had actually trumped their trump by discussing pastoral experience as opposed to general life experience) was, “Well, in five years of wanting to come forward for communion, why didn’t they find a church near where they lived and go talk to that pastor about it?”
In other words, when faced with a concrete, embodied, pastoral reality, when looking at the question of what the wise pastoral move is in the situation, they wanted to throw the responsibility back onto the parishioner and throw the discussion back into the abstract and hypothetical, and speculate on history that at this point can’t be undone. Instead of having the imagination to see what, pastorally and theologically, is really at stake in the sacraments – that they are a means of grace, events in which God promises to meet us, acts that create both a space and a place for the Holy Spirit to work, so why in heaven’s name would you want to box them up or rope them off? – they just wanted to be right in the safe, sterile environment of the seminary classroom.
I think that’s what’s really bothering me, is that they’re not asking the phronetic question, how then shall we live? On the surface it sounds like they are, “Should we practice open table” sounds like a “how then shall we live” kind of question. But they weren’t going after that aspect of the question, they were essentially using the question to practice articulating Lutheran doctrine, and the clear focus was on making sure we get the rules right.
And maybe that’s just where they are at, developmentally. I mean, you’ve got to learn your scales before you can do anything with them. Learning how to articulate doctrine and theology is not a bad thing, it’s rather important, actually. Maybe I just need more patience, especially when I hear them sound a “wrong” note.
At the same time, if theological education is in need of reform (and it seems almost everyone thinks it does), isn’t this a place to start? Isn’t part of the problem that seminary education just teaches the scales and expects students to figure out what to do with them, and what’s at stake in them, on their own? So how do we change that? How do we pull them out of the land of abstraction?
I’m not saying I have any good answers – I warned you at the top that these thoughts are only half-baked. I’m just feeling like the events of the past couple weeks have been clarifying the problem. . .
First, a list of ingredients:
1. I am doing a PhD level independent study with Chris Scharen in which we are exploring practical theology – what exactly that means, how the field is defined, how it’s methodically done, etc.
2. I also work with Chris and Eileen Campbell-Reed on the Learning Pastoral Imagination project, and as such, spend increasing amounts of time thinking and learning about phronesis, which is embodied wisdom, knowing how to do the right, wise, prudent thing at the right, wise, prudent time (a skill that can only be learned over time, through apprenticeship and learning from failure and success). As a result of this work I also spend increasing amounts of time thinking about how theological education could/should be different to better equip the development of pastoral imagination.
3. I am also currently taking a PhD level systematics seminar on The Congregation with Pat Keifert. This week I was the presenter on David Kelsey’s book To Understand God Truly: What’s Theological About Theological Schools, which is making a case for how theological education could/should be different that all may understand God more truly.
4. The other night I was talking to my friend Sarah, who works for an ELCA synod. In the course of conversation she shared that a colleague of hers used to be a seminary professor and now works for her synod doing basically the same stuff in terms of teaching community faith formation, but this person enjoys it so much more because they are working with actual pastors and faith communities, whereas their experience of seminarians was that ministry is still entirely an abstraction for them.
5. I am also auditing an MDiv level course on Worship and the Lutheran Confessions where all these just-mentioned streams of thought seem to be coming to a head.
I would say the composition of this MDiv class is half to two-thirds first and second year students, which means they have not been on internship yet. There are also a handful of PhD and MA students, most of whom have had multiple years of parish experience. And then the rest are seniors – they’ve had a taste of ministry on a year-long student internship and are now back for one more year of class before they receive a call, get ordained, and become real live pastors.
So anyway, the class is a mixture of lecture, small and large group discussion, a good way to mix things up in a block schedule. The large group discussion is always at the end, and is always led by a group of students (the leader group rotates from week to week). Thus far the leader groups have come up with what they obviously consider to be “edgy” questions. Like, when discussing baptism, the two big questions were “Should we be reaching out to and baptizing Jews and Muslims?” and “What do you do when a family shows up to get their baby baptized, and the last time you saw them was 4 years ago when they came to get their now-4-year-old baptized?”
At the end of that class, all of us who have actually served as parish pastors were talking to each other as we were packing up and concluded, “Yeah, these are not the questions you ask or are really even interested in once you become a pastor.”
But then last night the topic was Communion, and the questions were: “What is the relation of faith and communion?” “At what age should we begin communing children?” “Should we be practicing an open table where all, even the unbaptized, are welcome?” “How should we dispose of the elements?” “Who should be allowed to preside over communion?” etc
These questions and the discussion have been bothering me ever since, and I’ve been trying to unpack why.
Partially I’m annoyed because again many of these are not the questions you are really worried about once you actually become a pastor.
Partially I’m bothered because, while on the surface these questions were about pastoral practice, in reality they were all meant to go after the theology underlying the practice. Which is not an inherently bad thing – I mean, part of what I’m exploring with Chris is how we understand and talk about practice as embodied theology. But the way the questions were asked and discussed, the real concern and debate was over right doctrine (which everyone seemed pretty rigidly convinced they had) and making sure we had right practices to reflect that right doctrine.
Partially, I’m disturbed because the whole conversation was such on such an abstract level.
Which, ok, you could argue they don’t know any better, they haven’t had any or enough experience to have this conversation on anything more than an abstract level, and there are a number of ways in which both the candidacy and curricular processes of Lutheran seminaries make almost everyone into little Lutheran Nazis (rigidly obsessed with correct doctrine) by the second year, so perhaps this is all understandable.
But at a point in the discussion about whether the table should be open to the unbaptized, I piped up and shared a story from my experience in the parish, about a relative of the congregation who lived far away but was a fairly regular visitor, who never took communion in the five years I knew them. That whole time I just assumed it was because they were a skeptic or had some other reason for not wanting to participate, but I never actually asked them why they never came forward, because I didn’t want to be nosy or make them feel uncomfortable or pressured to take part. Around the same time that I announced I was leaving, this person and I finally had a conversation about it – turned out all this time they had wanted to come forward but didn’t because they weren’t sure if they had been baptized, and they didn’t want to offend the church or me or God by participating in something they weren’t sure they had a right to.
Long story short: my own theology (and what I would argue is good Lutheran theology) is that it’s Jesus’ party and he invites everybody to come, who am I to stand in anybody’s way? It’s an open table and this person was more than welcome to participate. I think the welcome to the table that I speak embodies that theology, but there was a contradiction in the bulletin, a little line in fine print that said this is a meal for the baptized. I hated that line and at various times pulled it out (I wasn’t the one who put it in), but it would pop back up when the secretary would use an old bulletin as a template, I wouldn’t always notice that it reappeared, and I would hope no one actually read the fine print. But this person did, and it kept them from coming forward.
I’m pretty sure now they probably do participate in communion, not only because of our conversation but because the conversation prompted some family research and they discovered they were indeed baptized. And that’s awesome and is hopefully a meaningful change and practice in this person’s life now, but we both lamented that we hadn’t had that conversation five years ago, so that they could have been participating all this time.
So I shared this whole story as a piece of wisdom from my own experience, that this stuff is not just an abstraction or word game about keeping doctrine pure, but it really matters in the messy, in-the-flesh, everyday reality of actual people’s lives. A spoken or unspoken implication of a closed table cuts hungry people off from the grace Christ offers them in his supper.
And the response I got, from a second-career student twenty years my senior (who I suspect was a little pissed that I had played their normal conversational trump card of experience, and had actually trumped their trump by discussing pastoral experience as opposed to general life experience) was, “Well, in five years of wanting to come forward for communion, why didn’t they find a church near where they lived and go talk to that pastor about it?”
In other words, when faced with a concrete, embodied, pastoral reality, when looking at the question of what the wise pastoral move is in the situation, they wanted to throw the responsibility back onto the parishioner and throw the discussion back into the abstract and hypothetical, and speculate on history that at this point can’t be undone. Instead of having the imagination to see what, pastorally and theologically, is really at stake in the sacraments – that they are a means of grace, events in which God promises to meet us, acts that create both a space and a place for the Holy Spirit to work, so why in heaven’s name would you want to box them up or rope them off? – they just wanted to be right in the safe, sterile environment of the seminary classroom.
I think that’s what’s really bothering me, is that they’re not asking the phronetic question, how then shall we live? On the surface it sounds like they are, “Should we practice open table” sounds like a “how then shall we live” kind of question. But they weren’t going after that aspect of the question, they were essentially using the question to practice articulating Lutheran doctrine, and the clear focus was on making sure we get the rules right.
And maybe that’s just where they are at, developmentally. I mean, you’ve got to learn your scales before you can do anything with them. Learning how to articulate doctrine and theology is not a bad thing, it’s rather important, actually. Maybe I just need more patience, especially when I hear them sound a “wrong” note.
At the same time, if theological education is in need of reform (and it seems almost everyone thinks it does), isn’t this a place to start? Isn’t part of the problem that seminary education just teaches the scales and expects students to figure out what to do with them, and what’s at stake in them, on their own? So how do we change that? How do we pull them out of the land of abstraction?
I’m not saying I have any good answers – I warned you at the top that these thoughts are only half-baked. I’m just feeling like the events of the past couple weeks have been clarifying the problem. . .
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