Living word by word

deep church, occasional church

    Make no mistake, I'm a church geek. Long before I was ordained I went to every Holy Week service available. Easter Vigil was not part of my childhood church life, but once I discovered it as an adult, it became indispensable.
    Vigil is wonderful for a lot of reasons. It engages all the senses and both the sacraments. It moves one physically from a womb-like darkness to the bright loudness of resurrection joy. It rehearses some of the most dramatic stories of the Old Testament, including  my all-time favorite, the farcical tale of Shadrach Meschach and Abednego. (Try reading it some time with the rhythms of Dr. Seuss.)
    I've wished for years that we could get more people engaged in this service, but, of course, it's usually just church geeks like myself who show up. This year, however, Easter's early arrival gave us an opportunity to draw in our Sunday School families in a new way. Hardly anyone was on spring break yet, so every class was given a story to tell, and no one was exempt since it was just part of the Sunday School time during Lent. And, in deference to small children, we started at 6 and kept the service short. We had 133 people there on Saturday night -- easily three times our average.
    A good Easter Vigil is really all the Easter I need. (I made a point of telling families that Saturday night "counted" as Easter church). I have long admired the Holy Week practice of  St. Gregory of Nyssa in  San Francisco. Easter Vigil is unquestionably the year's highlight, and the next morning there is no liturgy -- only a community picnic. (They also make the eminently practical move of having "Maundy Tuesday," partly to spread out the liturgical commitments of the week.)
    After gathering with the most involved members of the community around the most central part of our faith for a few hours at Vigil, Easter morning often feels almost a letdown to me. Sure, there are 500 people through the doors, but many of them are people I don't see very often the rest of the year. It's hard not to be cynical about the ratio of energy put out to community return. I'd much rather have a picnic with the folks who just helped make Holy Week happen.
    But, of course, the hospitality of Easter morning is undeniably a resurrection practice -- maybe an indispensable one. All those people who only show up two or three times a year are not going to come to Easter Vigil. They come Easter morning, and the Gospel is for them, even if they do see it as an obligation to be done before brunch. In fact, one could argue that Jesus' resurrection appearances focus on those whose faith is most at risk -- Thomas and his doubts, Peter after his denials, and the two leaving  the disciples in Jerusalem and heading to Emmaus. Jesus spends his limited post-resurrection time on them.  It makes sense for the church to do the same.

Zen cross

One of our favorite picture books, Zen Shorts, offers a zen master in the form of a panda bear named Stillwater. He befriends three children and tells each one an appropriate Zen tale as they deal with questions of fate and forgiveness. Jon Muth’s watercolors and ink drawings are a delight.

The story of the “Farmer’s Luck” has been running through my head as I contemplate Good Friday coming up. In this tale, a series of events befall a farmer, and after each one, his neighbors respond with sympathy or joy.

 “What good luck!” they say when wild horses appear on his land.

“Maybe,” he replies.

“What horrible luck!” they murmur when his son breaks his leg trying to ride one of said horses.

“Maybe” the farmer replies.

“What good luck!” they say, as the army shows up to conscript young men into war, and the son with the broken leg remains free.

“Maybe,” the farmer replies, and Muth’s lovely ink illustration shows the son ensconced in a La-Z-Boy in front of the TV.

 The story captures for me the uncertainty that the cross casts across all our assessments of what is really going on in the world. As far as I know, the English language is the only one that calls this Friday “Good.” In German, French and Spanish it is simply called "holy."

To me, “holy” seems a better fit with the mystery that is the cross. Is it “good” that Jesus died? Maybe. Yes, we can say, God accomplished our salvation on the cross. But no, to call such torture and injustice ‘good’ is a bit of a stretch.

 As a lens for looking at our own suffering, the cross puts a great big “maybe” on all those things we simply declare bad, unfortunate, outside the pale. If God can be at work on the cross, then maybe even those moments when God seems most distant to us are not what they appear.  Maybe – maybe – they are where God is at work most profoundly, most powerfully.

Palm Sunday

This morning our congregation celebrated Palm Sunday with singing from our smaller ones and the passion reading done by some of our high school youth. It felt good not only to have their involvement in the liturgy, but to have their particular voices in the midst of this cycle which can feel so familiar to those of us who are not so young. Here it is the fifth year of the war, and we are still praying for peace. Here it is, Holy Week again, and the papers are still full of scandals. Here it is, another election year, and we know that our hopes ultimately cannot rest in political leaders. But somehow these young voices do bring something new, something hopeful which is not like all the other years.

I'm not preaching Easter this year -- just Good Friday. So my working kernel of thought for the week is this: the story of Jesus' passion shows us how quickly we want to identify with the powerful, and how quickly that desire makes us betray Jesus. The story doesn't give us many alternatives: either we call for Jesus' crucifixion, or we are with him in suffering and death. Either we shout out "save yourself!" or we humbly suffer on our own cross and say, "Jesus remember me."  Either we stand by a condemned man and take his own mother into our care, or we deny that we ever knew him at all.

I'd like to think there is more middle ground, that there can  be more innocent bystanders. But the Gospel stories don't really offer us that kind of alternative. The cross forces us to look at our world and see where Jesus really is -- suffering, powerless, alone -- and decide if we will be with him.

random thoughts from Holy Week

We made it through Holy Week. Random thoughts:

• Pastors have an intimate knowledge of people's foreheads that probably no one else does. It's also fascinating how differently folks approach the moment of individual absolution on Maundy Thursday -- some with direct eye contact, some smiling, some staring at the floor the whole way.
• I had about 4 Easter sermons and had to whittle it down to one short one. I made use of John Chrysostom's famous Easter homily, which I have to agree is tough to beat.
• Our church choir director's sister had an intriguing sermon title that seems to be similar to one of those ideas I chose not to pursue: "the blessed but" I assume she was working on the "buts" in Luke's Easter Gospel.  I considered but did not complete a sermon aruging that Easter is God's "Doch" -- one of those words English has no word for.  You can read more about doch here. Some day I also want to do a sermon based on But Not the Hippopotamus.  Easter is God's big "but yes the hippopotamus!" -- and yes the armadillo, and the planet, and the seas, and so on. . . maybe another year.

post Easter stress disorder

Thanks to IC for this apt note on PESD. I'm afraid I may not have been adequately appreciative of my husband yesterday, who invited guests and took complete responsibility for Easter dinner in the afternoon. It was luscious, but I was sooooo tired. The PESD continued this morning with a broken glass on the kitchen floor (I'm always a klutz when I'm tired). Fortunately both my children are sleeping now -- PESD is a family affair.

great collar experiment winding up

So it's Holy Wednesday, meaning it's the last day of Lent that I wouldn't be wearing my collar anyway in Holy Week, and the line-up of the morning was this: a visit with a family wishing to join the congregation, a visit to the dentist because I cracked a molar on Monday, followed by a funeral. I had to explain at the first two destinations why I was dressed in a funereal fashion. At the dentist's office, it led to the following exchange with the hygenist:

"So. . .you're  a priest?"

"I'm a pastor."

"Are you Catholic?"

"Uh, no, Lutheran."

"Oh. . . do the Catholics have women priests?"

"No. They still don't."

"Oh. . . .I was rasied Catholic."

Is it just me, or is it stunning that someone raised in the Roman Catholic church could be so removed from it now that they don't even know where Rome is with women's ordination? Is the church really that far off the radar for people, even people raised with some faith background? Wow.

Needless to say, any serious dental work is going to have to wait until next week. Hopefully the pain that has been on-again/ off-again with this tooth will hold off that long too.

Holy Monday

What does a pastor-mom crave most during Holy Week? QUIET! After 3 days of rain my children are especially loud today -- exuberant and happy, but loud. Add to that the constant twitter of my mental to-do list for the week, and some monastic silence sounds good about now. I can't get that, but I'll settle for a morning at the seminary library.

I'm preaching on Luke's Gospel for Easter. I think I'm going to have to include the story of the road to Emmaus too, because our lectionary doesn't include it otherwise, and you really need to get most of chapter 24 It's one of those texts that is rich but also overworn, so I'm struggling a bit to find a place that grabs me.

Fellow preachers, there's good food for thought at Dylan's lectionary blog for Easter Year B. That's Mark's Gospel, but some of the same historical and theological points apply, and I love her analogy about the role of dramatic irony and horror movies.

I'm also reading Miroslav Volf's latest book on Memory (thanks, Erik!). The End of Memory is about his own experience of interrogation and abuse in Yugoslavia and a theological reflection on what it means to remember rightly. It dovetails nicely with something from Rowan Williams' book on Resurrection I read this morning, namely that the Eucharist means that we have to find Christ in the victims-- OUR victims. It's too easy in our culture to "identify" with the abused without rightly remembering that all too often we are the victimizers. Christ resurrected means the victim is the judge. . . and yet that judge is forgiving and merciful.

I'm praying I will have the courage to know who the victims of my life -- and my "lifestyle"-- are.

Lenten mothering dilemmas

Spring is nearly in the air, and we're halfway through Lent, so I'm pulling out the Easter books and putting the Christmas ones away (yes, it takes that long at our house), and facing the yearly dilemma of how to tell the passion story to a young child.

There are waaaay more kids Christmas books than Easter ones (at least, ones that are vaguely biblical), for good reason. The story of Mary and Joseph and Jesus is so accessible to a child, but crucifixion and resurrection is another matter altogether. It's not just the violence that bothers me -- the complete Christmas story has a violent edge to it too, what with King Herod's murderous intent and all. (Katie lately has enjoyed asking me to play the part of King Herod, coming to find small children in their beds. She hides under the covers and I run away at the sound of beautiful music playing in her room). What's hard about the passion story is to present Good Friday as good in a way that neither glosses over the horror of it nor betrays our belief in redemption. We have a couple hand-me-down Arch books around  the house that tell the story of Easter with the same doggerel rhythm as Dr. Seuss, and it just seems incongruous and wrong. Yes, I believe that ultimately the cross is good news, but I believe that is possible only in the most paradoxical sense. It's good news precisely because we don't expect God's glory to work this way; it's good news precisely because it's perfectly awful, yet God enters into our man-made awfulness.  But how do you convey that to a five-year old?

I'm pretty sure picture books won't do it. When I was a kid I went with my parents to Tenebrae Good Friday services. I only gradually came to understand them, but I knew something profound was going on. I was sometimes a little scared, usually pretty sad, but I could experience it all from my mother's lap and be surrounded by others in community who also felt it was important to walk through this story again.

resurrection good-byes

It seems I'm reaching that stage in life when mentors and teachers begin to join the communion of saints in greater numbers. In the past few years several wonderful teachers who I've encountered -- Tim Lull, Don Juel, Howard Harrod -- have died. And just this Lent two more -- Robert H. Smith of PLTS and William Sloane Coffin, who was a visiting prof when I was at Vanderbilt, have also died. You can read far better obits at the links above than anything I could write. In fact, I can't count any of the men listed above as mentors per se -- I had at most one class with each of them. . and yet their minds and spirits were bright enough that I feel blessed to have known them and real loss at the news they are no longer in the land of the living. 

The burden of having learned from someone now gone is that you feel some obligation to carry something of what you gained from them forward. . . I hope I will.

Diary

I used to love the feature on slate.com known as diary. For a week people of varying professions would be asked to journal about their daily work and schedule. But this was pre-blogs, and, come to think of it, largely pre- reality TV. As far as I can tell there is no longer such a feature, even though the vast majority of blogs (including this one) are nothing like a journal in which, say, a fashion editor writes about what they DO, instead of just what they think.

 

So what would a pastor’s journal for Holy Monday look like? I know you’re all just dying to know. (Actually, at last count most of the 10 of you or so that actually read this blog ARE other clergy, so I’m sure you’ll find this eminently boring, but here goes anyway):

 

I had the morning routine all to myself today because Will was up til 3 a.m. (I do not exaggerate) finishing a proposal. So I fixed oatmeal, made coffee, kept up minimal conversation with the kiddos while I read Doonesbury and Baby Blues, and then finally locked the one year old in the bathroom with me for 4 minutes so I could get a shower. By the time I was out of the shower Katie had engrossed herself in a collection of papers I had lying around and had decided to start in on making a book -- i.e. cutting a gluing scraps of paper into a spiral bound notebook. Although I gave her fair warning before the babysitter arrived, when Peg walked in the door Katie was still unwilling to put on her shoes and get into the car for preschool – now that that weather is actually warm, and the dressing for the ride to school doesn’t actually take 15 minutes, now when it ought to be easy, it gets hard. After a few warnings I declared that I was leaving, ready or not. Usually this gets her moving. Not today. So rather than make an idle threat I left without her. She’s four. A day without preschool won’t kill her. And I was just to *$% irritated to wait any longer. It’s Holy Week, for God’s sake!

 

But then of course I felt badly all the way to work. It’s holy week, and a four year old does me in.

 

I was met at the door by two volunteers loading up a van full of our Lenten Minnesota Food Share donations. We’ve been nearly tripping over cans every week as we serve communion, people have brought so much food. I helped load a few boxes and ten headed in to the office. Mondays are generally quiet, since only a couple of us are in the office that day.

 

Our liturgies for the end of the week are almost done – but don’t tell our office manager that. She gets to interpret the editions of two pastors and a musician, working from last year’s bulletins. I spent a bit of time contemplating whether we shouldn’t be using more traditional Lenten hymns in our children’s Good Friday service instead of the With One Voice fare we almost always use the rest of the season. I’m making a plea for two old versions of the Agnus Dei, on the premise that they are repetitive and eminently singable. 

 

I also spent a bit of time – again for the sake of children we hope will attend – editing the texts for Easter Vigil. The trouble is that many of these old Hebrew texts – Genesis 1, the Noah story, the exodus, and the 3 men in the fiery furnace – are by their natures repetitive, rhythmic and, well, long. You can get the story line across faster, but much is lost. In the case of Genesis the repetition creates the sense of divine order being imposed upon chaos. In Daniel, the ridiculous lists of empire officials and instruments to be played is farcical; their repetition makes the wretched power of Nebuchadnezzar and all his kind laughable instead of terrible. I don’t want to lose that. . .

 

The rest of the morning was spent on people – visiting an 87 year old gentleman who marked the 1 year anniversary of his wife’s death yesterday, checking in with folks about to have surgery and recovering from surgery, passing on the news of pregnancies in the congregation and comforting a family dealing with miscarriage, and spreading word on our prayer chain that the 18 year old son of another member is in the hospital in Belize. And more. Oh yeah, I also de-briefed last night’s West Wing with a friend by email.

 

I had to come home by noon because our nanny was headed to a funeral this afternoon. . . so that was it for pastoring until this evening, when I made a few more phone calls to parishioners, and we learned that the 18 year old in Belize is being medivaced to the states because his heart is not doing so well. . . now we’re awaiting word on more.  Things like this have an uncanny way of happening during Holy Week.

I can see why nobody blogs like this regularly. . .who really cares? A weekly rotation of diaries like Slate's was more intriguing. But should anyone really want to know  more about what  a pastor does all week, write a comment. . . as you may have noticed, I'm not yet locked in to one mode of what this blog should be about. .