Living word by word

another trip around the sun

We had a lovely party on Saturday evening, put together by my dear husband. I was a little nervous about having so many people at the house, but as usual Will pulled it off. It was a group effort indeed, with my parents and in-laws doing lots of work to feed and host nearly 30 people at the house. We were graced with lovely violin music from Karin Obaid (one of our ace babysitters) and a friend, and Jonathan Rundman offered up a song as well. I feel so very blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful friends and family.

Sunday was lower key. We worshipped with my parents at Mt. Olive (aka the "big organ church"), did dishes and had a family meal at home. Then my in-laws took off for their next stop in Montana and my parents took me to Cheryl Wheeler at the Cedar. Her performance was the oddest mix of off-the-wall humor and soulful folky music, but very enjoyable.

I'm not usually moved by speculation about reincarnation, but her love song for her partner moved me, and seems appropriate for how blessed I feel as my 41st year starts:

Feel this wind blow, scatter all these leaves like paper rain.
Feel these days roll back into our winter lives again.
The tangle at the garden fence is brown and dry.
You call me out and point to your November sky.

chorus:
I must've been Gandhi or Buddha or someone like that,
I must've saved lives by the hundreds everywhere I went.
I must've brought rest to the restless, fed the hungry too,
I must've done something great to get to have you.

When the cold comes and you are by your fire and fast asleep,
I'll turn a light on, to watch the snow outside fall soft and deep.
And when the winter morning shines all white and blue,
We'll watch the dogs run through the fields like children do.

I suppose stranger things have come to pass,
Many's the forest I can't see.
I was so down and lost and fading fast.
How did you find your way to me?

finally. . . another technological leap

    My gift to myself for this landmark birthday on Sunday is a refurbished 3rd generation iPod nano. I've been of two minds about these gizmos for some time. I'm not wild about seeing half the walking/ running/ commuting public go about with their ears plugged, and I don't think I'll use it much myself when I'm running or walking, both for safety reasons and to guard my now-aging hearing.  I don't need a soundtrack every minute of the day, and my musical memory is good enough to provide one when I do.
    However, I am excited to enter the world of podcasts. I don't drive enough to hear all those wonderful radio programs that are available online, and occasionally I might watch Bill Moyers this way since I can never seem to catch a broadcast of his work. What better way to have something good to listen to while I'm folding laundry or cleaning up after the kids are in bed.
    Anyone out there have favorite uses for their iPod? Favorite podcasts I should add to the list?

new models needed

    There has been much rich conversation today about upcoming sabbaticals, sabbath, and pastoral ministry. My favorite definition so far, from David Wood, one of our co-facilitators: " A sabbatical is a time when all that has been 'background' to your ministry -- your own spiritual life, your family, the origins of your call, your passions -- is given time to be foreground, while the foreground of ministry -- the tasks of preaching and pastoral care and administration -- drop away for a time." Exactly.

    On another, crankier note, I was reminded again how little we know about doing ministry in the era of co-parenting and new gender roles. Eugene Peterson is often held up as a model for how one can be in parish ministry while still doing serious reading and writing. Here's a man who served a congregation for 28 years, with only one sabbatical in the midst of it, and still wrote countless books. His secrets? Well, he clearly had a strong vision of the ministry of the laity and handed over many tasks to his members. But there's another thing -- he has a wife, one who clearly was happy to take the traditional role of pastor's wife and see that as a calling.

    Well, I don't have a wife. I have an active father to my children, but definitely no wife, and not one eager to be an upfront pastor's spouse either (not that anyone at my congregation expects that of him). It's really hard for me not to be resentful of the many men in generations past -- and quite a few still today -- whose careers benefit from the fact that their spouses have willingly picked up the slack.

    I have to constantly remind myself that our mission is together as a family, even though our work worlds tend to pit our careers against one another. Fortunately for Will and me, our passions and commitments are blessedly compatible, even when the reality of modern life makes us feel like we're competing for time.

the last week of my fortieth year

    I'm beginning the last week of my 40th year in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Louisville Institute, which is granting me funds for my sabbatical this spring.  There's a big Presbyterian Seminary here in an old and lovely part of Louisville, on the banks of the Ohio. If it were a touch warmer I'd be reminded of my years at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where the landscape is flatter but the flora is similar. They had some tornadoes in the region a couple weeks ago, and the evidence of high winds is still around in lots of downed trees.
    I don't know what to expect from the upcoming couple days, except that I'll meet 40 other grantees and get to hear Eugene Peterson in the flesh for the first time. I've always been intrigued by how he mixed ministry and writing for so many years, though now in "retirement" he is much more known as a Bible translator and author than as a parish pastor.
    I have just finished an article with my dear husband on the issue of land use -- and I will note this about Louisville. There are two large seminaries in this neighborhood, with presumably lots of student residents, etc. I went for a walk this afternoon and after 90 minutes walking and jogging in a couple different directions, I came  across NO commercial amenities -- no grocery, no drugstore, nothing in walking distance. Talk about a car-dependent community. Ugh.

more kid evangelism

    My daughter got REAALLY into Valentine's Day this year. I have to admit I was less than enthusiastic about guiding her through writing twenty-five Valentines, since on her own she'd make lovely personal creations -- for about 3 or 4 kids. But 25? This calls for mass production, so we were reduced to a very basic "to" and "from" on each one. Most of these she wrote on Wednesday night in the middle of Lenten vespers -- in the front row.
    But the pay-off was this morning, when somehow she got hold of a pad of little Post-its, and went around writing love notes to all ages and manner of folk at church and sticking them on them. An ambush of affection. It was quite sweet.

speaking of being born again-- Lent 2A

    The Rake this month has an article about the Barna study in which self-professed "born again Christians" were found to have worldviews that  many of their fellow evangelicals deem insufficiently "biblical." So now James Dobson and friends are on a new campaign to bring these folks up to speed on what it really means to believe in Jesus.
    Isn't it ironic that Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus, which seems to be all about double meanings and highly metaphorical language for the mystery of God's love, is the origin of this litmus-test phrase for being a "real" Christian? Nicodemus doesn't get it with Jesus there in the room with him. Are we really surprised to find that contemporary Christians have vastly different takes on what the faith is all about?
    Maybe it's a cop out to avoid longer conversations, but when strangers ask me if I'm born again, I just say yes. My baptism is valid, thank you very much.

Lenten clearing

    I've decided, on the whole, not to blog much about my lenten disciplines this year, on the theory that Matthew 6 doesn't really endorse a lot of trumpeting when it comes to spiritual disciplines.

    I will share, however, that I'm excited about one prospect. Most recent years I've made an attempt during Lent to reduce my consumerism, buying not at all when I can and buying used when I must. Each year I've also thought, "I should call all these catalog companies and get off their lists too." But I haven't done it. Catalog Choice just made that a lot easier. And this year, there's even more motivation because we'll be leaving the country for a while, and who wants all that junk mail to return home to? Plus I'm phasing out the email account to which most of my junk mail has gone for the past couple years. I can't wait to just eliminate the account and say good-bye to all those reminders to buy! It feels great to clear the desk and the mind.

Lent 2A -- what is a gift anyway?

A couple weeks ago we heard David Rhoads of the Lutheran Seminary in Chicago "perform” the book of Galatians. It was enlivening to hear that familiar book with new ears, all at once, but what grabbed me most were his concluding remarks, in which he spoke about the power of the Gospel to free us. So often in the church we have defined the “problem” as guilt, a category that made sense, perhaps, to first-century Jews and our immigrant forebears. But increasingly our culture has lost a sense of guilt -- or pathologized it where it exists. Shame, on the other hand, is alive and well for people across the cultural and religious spectrum. And the Gospel, Paul makes clear, frees us from shame as well.

This came to mind reading the second lesson from Romans for this Sunday, where Paul in his later letter details how Abraham was reckoned as “righteous” through faith. This is a dense enough passage as it is – a daunting one to preach, especially since one has to exegete Genesis at the same time. But I'm considering it. In our Lutheran framework, the focus on being “righteous through faith” has so often turned faith into just another – if more vaguely defined – work. It wasn’t Abraham’s circumcision that saved him, the argument goes. It was that he believed God. For a modern person struggling with faith defined as believing the Creed, that’s not good news. It only leaves us feeling unable to spiritually measure up, not good enough – in other words, ashamed.

But what if this righteousness that God gives truly is something given? What if, as Paul writes, God “justifies the ungodly”? Not the believing, repentant ungodly, just the plain old, mixed-up, not even sure I want to believe ungodly?

If that is so, then we, like Abraham are living into a whole new reality, one that doesn’t fully exist yet, like the child and country still longed for. And living into that reality, created by God and held in God’s hands, is all the righteousness we need.

lengthen-ing Lent

I understand that this is the earliest Lent has begun in over 100 years, and it will not be this early again for another 150 years. Truly a once in a lifetime experience!

In Minnesota one is never sure whether signs of spring will coincide with Easter morning, but it is less likely this year.  We are just as likely to have snow Easter morning as warmth.

But one thing is certain. . .it will be lighter. It's 10 below this morning, but the days are growing brighter. May your lenten journey through the lengthening days lengthen your hope and stretch your vision as well.

Blessed Ash Wednesday

That thing you thought would save you, is killing you.

The margarine you ate for all of the 1980’s was worse for you than real butter and still clogs your arteries. The marathon training that made you feel so healthy turns out to have ruined your joints and reduced your immunity. The diet that they said would turn around your health messed up your metabolism for good. The drug  therapy that you thought would make your life better now turns out to raise your risk of heart attack.

The time-saving devices that our forefathers developed to save their backs now mean that we don’t get any exercise.

Remember the prediction that personal computers would give us  a paperless society?

The international alliances of a generation ago come back to bite us, and the children of those allies are now dreaming of jihad against us.

We live in a time with so much information and so little reason to trust anything we read. We can get practically anything we want from anywhere in the world, but half the time we don’t know anything about how it was made or whether it is safe.

And even our best intentions can come back to bite us.

A few months ago my husband and son were in a car accident one block from his nursery school. They slammed into the side of a moving truck at an uncontrolled intersection. They were fine. The car was not. Not having faced any decisions about cars in nearly ten years, we immediately began the research on what to get next for our one and only family vehicle. Hybrid or not? Compact or wagon? Side airbags too? What about diesel?

One thing we were certain of – it would not be a new car. Both for financial and environmental reasons, we did all our research in the used car market. We even contemplated buying a compact diesel station wagon from a few states away for its stunning gas mileage.  In the end, we found an acceptable conventional vehicle from a local small dealer, still second guessing ourselves about forgoing the diesel.

And then, a few days later a new report was released. It turned out that diesel fumes, because of the soot they emit, are so bad for their effect on climate change that any savings in gas mileage is canceled out. That thing you thought was so righteous? It’s not.

That thing that you thought would save you, in fact is killing you.

Forgive us Lord, for all our efforts to save ourselves. We make terrible messiahs.