Living word by word

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. . 

true confessions part 2

On Holy Monday I wrote the following - - but it being holy week I didn’t get around to posting yet:

 

The cobbler’s children have no shoes. Or, you could say, the pastor’s children aren’t in church. Well, my children are in church – more regulary than most for sure. But what worries me is that our home reflects the classic split between liturgy as something we do at church and home as a place where more worldly concerns rule the day. The reason, in our case, is quite simple: in the “holiest” seasons of the year, I simply haven’t the time or energy to create a lot of home observance. We don’t serve a big Easter dinner and welcome friends and family. (Heck, we generally don’t have anyone over on ANY sabbath, though we do at least refrain from going to the mall.) My daughter will probably go to preschool this Good Friday because I am going to need the child care in order to get my sermons done and retain my sanity.

 

I grew up in a pastor’s family, and we were no holy rollers, but I do remember a sense of time being different. We were quiet on Good Friday. We had Sunday dinners. Yes, my mother DID work outside the home through a good part of my childhood. But she was not the pastor. My dad was. Maybe that’s the difference. Like it or not, the creation of family holidays – or even Sabbaths -- has traditionally been the work of women. And this women can’t do it for both a parish and a family at the same time. And my husband, no matter how good his intentions, has no gender-conditioned training in how to do such things. He just doesn’t think of it. He lives in guy time, which is basically “I’m either working or I’m not. And when I’m not I can play, and help out around the house. But I don’t plan.”

 

So the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Our children’s sense of sacred time is no better than that of any other family consumed by the daily demands of keeping the house reasonably safe (if not clean), food in the fridge and the parents reasonably sane. Maybe it will be easier when everyone in the house can feed and dress themselves. . . maybe.

 

NOW, on Good Friday, I’m re-thinking this confession. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday arrived all on their own at our house. Yesterday as Katie was playing with a neighbor girl, and since she was excited about going to an evening service with me (a privilege we can’t always grant due to bedtimes and her brother’s low tolerance level for anything after 6 p.m.), their first game was getting her magnetic dress-up dolls ready for church. Later as they were eating at the dining room table Katie pointed out her nativity set Jesus (Christmas is never over around here). “No!” Anneka replied “that’s God!”  and then, “God died.” There you have it – Trinitarian theology right at the dinner table.

 

Then the real fun began they decided it would be a fun game to “make Johann cry”. Though I repeatedly said in no uncertain terms that that was not an acceptable game, the high spirits of a 4 and 5-year-old (the older of whom is herself a youngest child and doesn’t get much chance to bully a younger child) are hard to dampen. Despite my best oversight an opportunity to push the little one down (he’s top-heavy, so it’s pretty easy) presented itself, and Katie took it. There were tears, first from the baby and then from Katie when I angrily reprimanded her and suggested it was a good time for her playmate to head home.

 

And then we went to church.

 

The thing is, I in my J-ness often assume that faith formation is going to happen by my plan, and if I don’t get around to making my plans, then it’s not happening. But of course moments like these speak far more about what our faith is about than what we will eat on Easter. Sure, it helps to be prepared, but children and life in general are not a virtual template I can impose my teaching moments on. The cobbler’s children will grow at their own pace, just like everyone else’s.

holy week confessions part 1

Lent is nearly over and it’s time to come clean. I failed pretty miserably at my annual attempt at reducing consumerism during Lent. This practice started a few years ago when I realized that food restrictions did nothing for me spiritually – as a type A introvert I didn’t find that this kind of practice got me out of myself very much at all. So I decided to do something entirely different – I stopped buying books for Lent. If you have ever seen my house you know that this is no small thing. It was a helpful reminder to focus on what I already had, to stop looking over the horizon for the next idea, and it really saved me time browsing in bookstores and on line. (And no, it didn’t result in a book binge on Easter Monday – though going to the Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing every other year does seem to have that effect)

I liked the result so much that I expanded it the last few years to include other kinds of unnecessary spending – music, clothes, etc. Last year I threw away catalogs as soon as they arrived in the mail. This year, I imagined, I might actually call the companies and get off the lists permanently.

Well, that didn’t happen. And what I learned is that I’m very, very good at rationalizing behavior, and that I’m very very bad at getting “back on the wagon” once I’m off.

It was clothes that was the problem this year. And here’s my excuse: I’ve been either nursing or pregnant for the last 5 years, and I was finding that lots of my clothes don’t fit, or were hopelessly out of style. I honestly think I only had one pair of pants whose waistline didn’t go all the way up to my navel.

I started out thinking I would just clear out the old stuff – no need to buy new stuff right away. But the rush of clearing out the old got me so excited to fill the gaps that I went shopping one day – and then another day, and then another.

Now with 2 small children I can’t be in the mall very much. In fact, I hate malls so I only went there once. But a little bit of consumerism led to more. And then I was reading the catalogs again, and then I was actually paying attention to the fashion pages in the Star Tribune (why does a newspaper even need to cover fashion?). The low point came when I found myself not only perusing, but actually buying Lucky magazine at Walgreen’s. Why does a magazine entirely about shopping qualify as a magazine anyway? You’d think it would just be a big free ad circular. AND I PAID MONEY FOR IT!

So there you have it. I failed.

The point of Lenten disciplines is not to deprive oneself simply to remember Jesus’ misery and to feel bad. Nor is it to improve oneself in the classic American fashion. I think ideally Lent teaches us something about the state of our souls. By paying attention for a defined period of time we learn something that will hopefully carry over into the next season even when we’re not paying as much attention. Kind of like scales for a musician – you’d die of boredom if that’s all you ever played, or if you played them for hours a day. But by focusing for a period of time on the basic practice, you’re freed up to concentrate on the music when those same patterns appear in sonatas or nocturnes.

I haven’t done so well on the scales this year. But maybe I’ll be a little less dismissive of my fellow musicians when they are distracted by the latest shoe sale as well.