Last Sunday, and this next, while their righteous pastor Rev. Dr. Ben Stewart is gone for a few weeks, I’ve been asked preach at a local congregation here in Two Harbors: Emmanuel Lutheran Church.

Below is first a link to the audio of the sermon, and then its transcript.

I based the proclamation on 1 Samuel 3:1-20, but felt compelled to reference his mother’s Hannah’s song, which wended its way generations later into Mary’s song; and how Hannah’s hymn shaped his prophetic ministry; and how Hannah’s courage shaped Eli’s receptivity to Samuel’s words; and how Hannah’s and Samuel’s clarity about their God, and Eli’s spurred recollection of his God, facilitates both our courage to speak hard words and our openness to hear them too.

Peace to you in this Epiphany season!

Anna

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p6ch6f2fjnzrjhqcwkyyp/Emmanuel-Lutheran-Epiphany-2B.m4a?rlkey=7fymy8ehnwwn31t5c03xz28bm&dl=0

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

“My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God…There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil…He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor…”

Now, although you can’t see them and didn’t hear them, these words course through our text from 1 Samuel today. Indeed, they infuse everything in our passage exactly in the same way that a mother’s food becomes the child growing within her, for when Samuel’s mother Hannah was pregnant with him, she uttered this hymn in praise to God at the news that she would bear a child.  

That’s to say that Samuel’s very growing essence was steeped in Hannah’s trust in God, and in her conviction that God was a God of justice, of righteousness, of compassion, a God who had preferential concern for the meek and for the poor…and who disdained those who with their wealth and power exploited the same. 

It was baked into his very being.

Whether the crafters of the lectionary intended it or not, Psalm 139 draws upon like imagery, that of a God who works within a woman’s womb, knitting—itself a skill typically associated with women, and so here is a mother God who knits with intention one who lives all their days according to the ways of God. 

It might seem strange to begin a sermon by referencing a passage that comes a chapter before the one on the day of the sermon!

But it’s impossible to gather even a little bit of the gist of a text if you don’t know the context, and there’s a lot of context here.

Briefly, it’s this: Hannah was married to Elkanah, who—as one was wont to do in those days—had two wives: Peninnah and Hannah.  Peninnah had Elkahah’s children, but Hannah had Elkanah’s heart.  Peninnah was no fool, and out of jealousy (though at another time, the story can and should be told through her eyes) she bullied Hannah to the degree that Hannah was bereft: she was without children, and she was taunted about it.  

In despair, Hannah went to the temple to go before God to pleased for mercy in the form of a child. Of all people, there sat Eli the priest—the very same Eli we hear about in our passage today—who watched her while she prayed. And for what did she pray? She prayed that if God gave her a son, she’d give the son back to God to be dedicated to God’s service.

Trouble was, Eli, the priest, and one of the two men of the hour for us today, saw her praying lips move, but did not hear her words. Naturally, his first and in fact only go-to assumption was that she’d tipped too much ancient hooch back. “How long,” he patronizingly scoffed at her, “how long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.” Suffice it to say that Hannah had more poise than I would have.  “No…my Lord,” she said; how exactly she said that is not clear, but I like to imagine that she seethed through her deferential words, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.” Properly then chastised, Eli said the very words that sealed his fate and brings us to our text today. “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.” 

The next day, she and Elkanah conceived Samuel.  

Once Samuel was born and weaned—we do not know how old he was—Hannah made good on her promise. She dedicated Samuel to God, and brought him to Eli, but not before reminding Eli (I like to think with a bit of holy snark) that it was she whom he had seen praying on that day, oh and by the way may I present to you the very son for whom I prayed.

It was at this moment that Hannah prayed another prayer, the one which I read at the beginning of the sermon.

And it was right after then, right after then, that we learn that although Eli might not have been so derelict in his fidelity to God, those sons of his? “Scoundrels,” Scripture says.  They ate the cooked meat offered in sacrifices intended for God, and they demanded that raw meat be given so that they could render the fat rather than the priests to be offered in worship.  They threatened those who were tasked with preserving the sanctity of the rituals. They mistreated the women who tended the holy spaces.  

And Eli knew it. 

Eli knew it, and while he spoke to his sons, crucially, he did nothing to put a stop to their offenses against the people and against God.  

God noticed, and it ticked God off.

So God sent someone, first a nameless priest to alert Eli to God’s displeasure. 

Did nix.

So, still a boy, along comes Samuel, now a dedicated servant to God and therefore to Eli the priest.

Three times God called to sleeping Samuel, three times Samuel thought it was Eli, and at that third time, Eli perceived that God was afoot.  

So Eli commanded Samuel to return to his bed, and this time, to listen for and expect God. 

Eager to please not just Eli the Priest, but the very YHWH, Samuel went back, laid down, and this time when God called him, Samuel eagerly said, “Speak, for your servant is listening!” 

God did, and chances are that Samuel wished he hadn’t been so enthusiastic—a word that literally means in (en) God (theos)—to have God speak! Why? Because God tells Samuel to declare to Eli that, because of his sons infidelity to the Lord, and Eli’s lack of fire to call his sons out, that Eli’s entire family would be decimated.  

Now if I were Samuel, I’d be tempted to put my head under the covers, try to go back to sleep, and hope that it was a dream. More or less, that’s exactly what Samuel opted to do: lay awake, eyes wide in the dark, until the morning to catch Eli over breakfast.  

It’s worth noting that each time that the Lord called out to Samuel, Samuel eagerly responded, “Here I am!” But this time, when Eli summoned him, Samuel said the same words, but I imagine they sounded more like “Here I am…”

Eli asked, then, to hear what God said to Samuel. He’d set himself up for this moment all the way back when he blessed Hannah’s hope for a child, and again by blessing Samuel as a prophet. See, here’s the remarkable thing: Samuel, the vulnerable boy; Samuel, the one knit by God in his mother’s womb; Samuel, knit by the same God who was on long record (and still is) of speaking of truth to power through the meek; Samuel, whose mother praised God as the God of the vulnerable, of the poor, of the faithful; this boy Samuel had to tell Eli the venerated priest that his rule was a desecration!

Two key textual takeaways here: 

First, Samuel did! He did as he was called to do: he told the truth to the one in power, reminding him of the way of God and his departure from it. 

Second, Eli received the rebuke! He heard the truth and he accepted it. 

How positively refreshing!  there was no denial, no cries of fake news, of politically motivated moves; there was no defensive anger or threats of retribution. There was humility, and there was even gratitude that in the name of God, Eli had been called out and called back.

And so also a proclamatory takeaway here: 

We, we gathered right here, we are rooted in the same tradition as Eli, as Samuel, and as Hannah. 

In her commentary on the text, the Episcopal priest Callie Plunket-Brewton reminds us that it is Hannah’s prayer and her pregnancy to a prophet which are set at the onset of Israel’s period of tumultuous monarchs. Her words told of a God who “breaks the bows of the mighty” and “girds the feeble,” who feeds the hungry and “raises up the poor from the dust. Hannah’s prayer, says Plunket-Brewton, “represents the central focus of YHWH’s leadership of the people: concern for the poor and powerless, and judgment of those who prey on the vulnerable and abuse their power.“

And as for Samuel, says Plunket-Brewton, throughout his vocation as a professional truth-teller, he “warns [the people of Israel] against kings who seek after their own good more than the collective good of their people. A king ‘will take the best’ from his people and use it for his own betterment (1 Samuel 8:11-18). The ideal ruler of the people [Samuel reminds] seeks only the good of the people and reflects the concern of YHWH for the poor and powerless.”

Anyone who identifies as a person of faith and who votes—or chooses not to—in 2024 should hearken to the tale in this Sunday’s text because it is apt, it is prophetic, and it is cautionary.

See, here’s the thing: at any given point, we may find ourselves channeling Hannah, or Samuel, or Eli. We might be praying that that whom—an adopted child or child by birth—or which—an idea, a position, a vocation, a vote—which we usher into the world reflects God’s intentions for the world; we might be summoned to speak hard words to hardened people; and we ourselves might be people of power and privilege, the hardened ones, who need to hear and receive a harsh word of reprimand and reorientation.  

We, of course, we are gathered here, we are steeped not only in the words and the faith and even the experiences of Hannah, Samuel, and Eli. 

We are also steeped in the faith of Mary, who, when she learned that she was carrying a certain baby named Jesus sang another song, one which clearly echoes Hannah’s. It goes something like this: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants [like Hannah, Samuel, and Eli] forever.”

We are steeped and baptized in the words and the deeds of Jesus, whose entire ministry was dedicated to the preaching and the teaching of righteousness that was grounded in service, justice, sacrifice, mercy, welcome, humility, and unbridled love. 

See, it is not too much to say that there are any number of leaders in the world who bring the audacity of Eli’s sons and the obnoxious passivity of Eli and the selfish greediness of Israel’s monarchs to mind. 

Nor is it too much to say that the fear that Samuel felt when summoned to speak the Word of the Lord, and the courage that he found to do so, is known to many of us. 

Nor is it too much to say that any number of us feel the despair of Hannah—be it, say, for the lack of a child or for the lack of a world which is safe for children—and yet who nonetheless trust that God is not just present, but active in this same world, stirring a word, stirring a deed, and stirring hope within us and from us.  

We find grounding for our hope in the history of God with us—Emmanuel!—a history which Hannah, Samuel, Mary, and Jesus knew, trusted, and stewarded. 

But as Christians, we also find grounding for our hope in, actually, the future. 

We believe that Jesus is risen. 

That means that we believe that death does not win: be it the death of a loved one, or our own death; the death of a hope or an ideal; the death of fear wielding its power and greed and power seeming to win again and again and again.  

God told Eli that his corrupt family would end, and unpleasantly.  

Jesus’ resurrection tells us that sin, death, the devil and all its empty promises will also meet their end. 

That’s news that doesn’t just greet us when we meet our own demise, but when we are summoned to tell someone else that their unrighteous ways will, and should, meet their demise. 

Embedded in here, actually, is good news. 

Our God cares about the least of these, hears the meek, sees the arrogant, and reminds both the humble and the proud of the essence of who they are, and whose they are.  

Our God frees us to speak words that to some sound harsh, but to others—the faithful, the humble, the receptive—are liberating. 

Our God creates community which welcomes not only the poor and the meek, but also the sinners, and invites all into a life of mutuality, justice, forgiveness, and love. 

Emmanuel in Epiphany.

God made manifest in honest speech, in the humility to hear, and in the hope to a return to the righteous ways of God.

This blog, I am revealing my second and also very much my last tattoo.

People tell me that I’ll come to feel differently about it, but nope: I said what I said.

This will do it, though I’m bracing myself for the few planned touch ups to this latest one.

Tattoos remind my of my late mother, who, as we pulled in to a station to fill up the car, would say, “I hate getting gas, I love having gotten gas.”

Cars need gas, though, and I don’t need another tattoo.

But I did want/need this one.

This delightful woman rests on my right arm: Mary sings her Magnificat on my left because the tattoo artist refused, although not in so many words, to have her facing backwards as the artist Ben Wildflower drew her. The flow of the tattoo is intended to go with the flow of the body, I’m told, and so Mary is on my left and the dancing woman on my right, each facing forward, as most of the time I (try to) do too.

The late Danish artist Bjorn Wiinblad brought the woman into being.  You can find the original artwork here and here.

Turns out that she has a name, and a story: Myrine is her name, and her counterpart, seen from the backside in the second of Wiinblad’s sketches linked above, is Kleonike.

Apparently Wiinblad took his inspiration for these drawings from the Greek comedy Lysistrata, an ancient play which tells of women who revolted against their husbands who had long been battling it out in the Peloponnesian War.

The women on all sides were over the extended battle, and so banded together across factions to ban their men from their bodies and from sex—a pastime which both the women and men very much enjoyed—until the warring soldiers called a truce.

I swear I did not know this history when I opted for this tattoo.

What I did know is that I love Bjorn Wiinblad.

I have candle holders and posters of his art on my walls, and the logo for the Spent Dandelion (designed by the amazing graphic artist Heidi Mihelich, whom you should use for all your logo needs) takes inspiration from his art too.  (After I showed her some of his art while we were trying to hone in on the logo vibe, she joked that I now had to pay an upcharge to fund her Bjorn Wiinblad habit.  You can see his influence in the whimsical dots found on the dandelion!).

This particular work captured my imagination because of Myrine’s rounded hips and breasts and belly and thighs; she’s sensual and sexual without being reduced to that; she’s playful and beautiful and confident; she loves life in all its color and delight.

She’s fleshy.

I am some of that and wish I were more of all of that, and so Myrine represents a reminder of what I am and what, with some practice and re-prioritizing, I could even more so be.

~~~~~

Those of you who have been following me for a spell know that I understand the gospel to be the announcement that Jesus is risen.

Perhaps Easter seems an odd reference to make on Advent Four/Almost Christmas Eve, but when you get right down to it, it isn’t, so very much.

The Gospel announces that death has a word, but it is not the last one.

As an obvious extension of that, Christians believe that God:

~is the God who brings life out of death;

~offers beauty where there is bleakness;

~rejoices when there is abundance for all;

~called creation into being not with a monotone palette but with vibrant hues;

~creates tunes and beats and rhythms of music of wild and wide variety;

~summoned into being foods and flavors that may include bland, but also delights in the spicy and buttery and sweet and tart, with juices and oils and gravies and creams and beverages that make the tongue and the spirit sing;

~is fleshy. God arrived as a baby, burping and farting and crying and growing and defying his parents and loving good food and good wine and good humor and good snark and inviting people to feast and find safety and forgiveness and radical welcome extended to all.

It’s all so ridiculously glorious: tangible, edible, visual, audible, celebratory, gratuitous grace.

~~~~~

Now, I realize that there is so very much in the world, especially these days, which give powerful reason for despair and righteous rage.

Every day I watch the news, and/or write letters, and/or give money, and/or blog or post or speak or simply cry with the weight of it all.

I can never do enough, but there is always so much to do.

Mary on my other arm knows of that truth.

She calls us to stand defiantly with her against all that threatens, undercuts, and maligns the will and the ways of God, and to invariably stand with the oppressed, to harbor unwavering hope that the oppressors will be open to redemption, and to actively work against them when they are intransigently against mercy, generosity, humility, welcome, justice, and kindness—a stance which, of course, in the end even harms themselves.

But Myrine reminds us that we can protest death in more than one way.

We can protest it by joyfully defying it.

We can embrace the goodness that God has made—and made known—for us, we can embrace the bodies that are ours, we can embrace each other, and we can share and welcome others to the whole lot of it all as a way of celebrating, thanking, telling of, and making incarnate the God who loves life and the richness of it all.

I love being “balanced” by Mary on my left and Myrine on my right: defiance and joy; hope and gratitude; restlessness and contentment; action and rest, each representing something of the woven reality of living into and out of the Gospel, and illustrating women’s complexity, strength, wisdom, power, and beauty.

~~~~~

Today is a trifecta: we are wrapping up Advent Three, which is traditionally designated to lift up the theme of joy.

We are entering into an awkward handful of hours of Advent Four, a time set aside to especially treasure the notion of love.

Then, this evening and for the next 12 Days of Christmas, we collectively cherish the notion of God With Us, Emmanuel Who Has Come, Jesus the Christ, the Prince of Peace.

Joy. Love. Peace.

The baby Jesus came into the world by way of blood and tears, as well as welcome and wonder.

He arrived as the heavens showed off and ragtag shepherds showed up.

He was awaited by a ruthless paranoid ruler and those who enacted the violence the ruler condoned and incited.

Hope, cynicism, fear, comfort, fatigue, courage…it was all there, just as it is today.

Today, it’s still all true.

Nobody knows that more than Mary.

But Myrine has a word for us too: whimsy, sensuality, beauty, delight…these are all pieces of God’s intentions too.

To forget, overlook, set aside such things, even if for righteous reasons, is to forget or overlook or set aside that God loves the world, and the world is fleshy, worthy of love, and is lovable.

I think that today is especially a day to lean into the fleshiness of Myrine.

God loves the world.

The word became flesh.

God loves the fleshiness of the world.

We are fleshy.

So, given that, let us rejoice, and let us be glad in it!

May the joy of Advent Three, the love of Advent Four, and the peace of Emmanuel, Jesus the Christ, be with you all!

This much, actually, I’d managed to grasp for some time, but I hadn’t really ever put it in contrast to more traditional theology, the theology that, short of Pentecost, is generally heard in the Church.

The light went on when I found myself singing the table grace I love so much, and wow, can my family and can the Lutheran family sing this baby in harmony:

Be present at our table, Lord!
Be here and everywhere adored!
These mercies bless and grant that we…

And here, of course, comes a decision that has to be sussed out before the prayer even begins.

Will the collective sing:

May feast in paradise with Thee!

Or will it be:

Be strengthened for Thy service be!

It matters, of course.

The first version is classic low-church piety, a hope that despite and through the trials of life, there will be rest and gladness to meet us at the end.

The second instead recognizes that the food we are about to eat nourishes us for a life of faith, which might, in fact, throw us into and call up a few trials.

Either way, centered in the good Lord and the good singing, we settle in to good food.

But I got to wondering what a different vibe we’d have if the prayer were sung like this:

Be active at our table, Lord!

Be active, Lord.

Move and move us, Lord.

Be a holy verb and form us into holy verbs which act in your holy name.

~~~~~

Preparing for Advent, the season of preparation, I got my first tattoo.

It only took a decade or so for me to finally get one, and to figure out why I kept being stirred to get one.

As I’ve fussed with the idea over the years, I’ve loved listening to or reading people’s tattoo story, and why they got them.

Threaded through all the takes was that a tattoo marked externally something that was key internally: an intentional scar that, like all scars, comes with a story.

Perhaps it’s a visual tale of an event, a person, a conviction, a symbol that represented a moment or belief or identity; regardless, tattoos are a perceptible memory and/or reminder for others, but most of all for the person who carries the tattoo.

When I came across the work of Ben Wildflower, and specifically the image here, I almost heard it say, “This one belongs on you,” and I did say, “You know, I think this one belongs on me.”

Strangest thing, actually, and I know it.

But Wildflower’s Magnificat manages to synthesize most everything I hold dear about theology: God’s commitment to those on the margins and who suffer under unjust systems; our call and blessing to be an ambassador of God’s intentions for the world; and the power of women, power which God recognizes even if patriarchy doesn’t.

Seems to me, as a not-very-aside, that if a woman bears God in her belly for 9 months and bears God from her womb in a stable, that she can also bear the Word of God from her mouth in a pulpit.

Anyway.

Wildflower is not just an artist, but a theologian.

I invite you to read up about him and his art here and in the Washington Post here and, regarding his Magnificat, here, and heck for that matter just do a google search for “Wildflower” and “Magnificat” and then get comfy because there’s a lot to discover and absorb.

Elizabeth Johnson, Roman Catholic theologian and Professor Emerita of Fordham University, wrote a reflection on Mary’s song: you can it find online here, and regardless of whether Wildflower himself has ever read it, the gist of her words is in his work.

The Magnificat, Dr. Johnson writes, is deeply, inherently, and necessary political.

Listen—really lean in here—to her:

“Rooted in the biblical heritage of Palestinian Jewish society, this is clearly a revolutionary song of salvation whose concrete social, economic, and political dimensions cannot be blunted. People are hungry because of triple taxes being exacted for Rome, the local government, and the temple. The lowly are being crushed because of the mighty on their thrones in Rome and their deputies in the provinces. Now, with the nearness of the messianic age, a new social order of justice is at hand. Mary’s canticle praises God for the kind of salvation that involves concrete transformations.

People in need in every society hear a blessing in this canticle. The battered woman, the single parent without resources, those without food, the homeless family, the young abandoned to their own devices, the old who are discarded–all who are subjected to social contempt are encompassed in the hope Mary proclaims.”

There are those who say that faith is not to be political.

To them I can say nothing but read the prophets, perhaps chief among them Mary.

She—herself quite possibly enslaved—knew that salvation wasn’t about the bye and bye like pie in the sky.

Mary knew that God had been transformative in the lives of her Jewish ancestors, and she knew that, in the one she was now bearing, God would be salvatory in the lives of her people again.

The form of her hope is concrete, because her life which was in so many ways oppressed was concrete.

Johnson takes it on:

“Here [Mary] takes on as her own the divine no [ital. mine] to what crushes the lowly. She stands up fearlessly and sings out that it will be overturned. No passivity here, but solidarity with divine outrage over the degradation of life and with the divine promise to repair the world. In the process she bursts out of the boundaries of male-defined femininity while still every inch a woman. Singing of her joy in God and God’s victory over oppression, she becomes not a subjugated but a prophetic woman.”

In Mary’s theology—Dr. Johnson has called her a theologian, which I do believe she is—God is not passive, and neither does God believe she herself should be.

God is active.

And so is Mary.

For this reason, take a look at how, and why, Wildflower transforms the Magnificat.

It’s not the past tense—the holy recollection and grounding in Mary’s hymn of God’s history (for you theology nerds out there, God’s Heilsgeschichte) of transformative action—that we see in Luke 1:51-53:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

In his visual Magnificat, he’s rendered in the imperative:

Cast down the mighty
Send the rich away
Fill the hungry
Lift the lowly

So, yeah.

About that.

Wildflower writes:

“I changed it from the past/passive…which is something I first heard done when we attended St. Marks, Locust St., an Anglo-Catholic church on Epiphany Sunday and the liturgy phrased it as “Cast down the mighty from their thrones. Amen. Lift up the lowly. Amen. Fill the hungry with good things. Amen. Send the rich away empty. Amen.” This really stuck with me as St. Mark’s is in an extremely wealthy neighborhood and attended by lots of folks not lacking in material means. By singing these words there was an admission that the words of Scripture really do call us to economic justice.

This is why I put her fist in the air. There are enough images out there focusing on the lowliness and meekness of Mary. I wanted to make one that highlights her holy rage and her indictment of an economic system built on idolatrous ideas about what kind of people do or don’t deserve things like food and shelter. I like that Mary.”

I like that Mary too.

That Mary indicts me, liberates me, empowers me, connects me, encourages me, sends me.

And now, every morning when I get out of the shower in the morning or get ready for bed at night, that Mary reminds me whose I am, and who I am.

In a sermon preached on the Third Sunday of Advent, December 17, 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of Mary and her song.

He might not have been a process theologian, but he sure understood an active God.

Bonhoeffer preached, “If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas happening, we cannot simply be like spectators at a theater performance, enjoying all the familiar scenes, but we must ourselves become part of this activity, which is taking place in this ‘changing of all things.’ We must have our part in this drama. The spectator becomes an actor in the play. We cannot withdraw ourselves from it.”

He also proclaimed this: Mary’s song, he said, is the oldest Advent song, and is “at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung.”

Mary the revolutionary.

That’s a different take on the woman, isn’t it.

As it happens, Advent begins another revolution of the Church year.

Maybe Advent, and maybe Mary, can begin a revolution of our hearts, minds, voices, ways, and priorities, and—as we stare down an election year when come November our democracy, justice, and even basic kindness is on the line—a revolution of our votes so that the mighty, the rich, the hungry, and lowly will each experience a revolution, and also a restoration, of who they are intended to be.

The Divine No to passivity, power, and wealth that oppresses.

The Divine Yes to activity, liberation, and justice.

Welcome to Advent.

~~~~~

I know I’ve been a bit off grid lately—life has been awfully busy, mostly for wonderful and good reasons (a link to one of them below!).

But publicly quiet though I may have been, privately or in smaller corners of my little world, I’ve been actively musing and in conversations about many a thing related to the present moment within the ELCA.

As I watch the stakes of the 2024 election grow higher and higher, coinciding with a rise in Christian nationalism (and the rise of Christian nationalists, like our new Speaker of the House, as detailed here and here and here), anti-semitism, hate against the 2SLGBTQIA community, climate crises, and the reduction of women’s rights and safety…well, public theologian that I am, it’s in my vocational bones to look at the role, state, and trajectory of the ELCA.

In a word, I have thoughts.

Happily, if you’re a Lutheran, October is the season of Theses, and tomorrow, Reformation Day, is when we go positively bananas about them.

I don’t have 95 of them laying around, but I do have 28, and I’d like to throw them out for your consideration.

Theses 14 and 22-24 are the crux, so to speak, of the matter, and I hope to return to them in another blog (especially 24).

So.

With that, and with some gulps, I offer:

28 Hot Takes About The State of the ELCA

1. Despite the Lutheran well-deserved fixation on the forgiveness of sins (and with all due respect to Luther and his 95 Theses, especially today), the gospel is not, actually, that our sins are forgiven.

2. The gospel is that Jesus is risen.

3. To say otherwise reduces the good news of the gospel to one consequence—forgiveness—and therefore makes its message relevant only to sinners.

4. While, yes, we are all sinners, it turns out that life is messier, more multi-layered, and far more nuanced than just that singular claim.

5. Left at forgiveness, those who are sinned upon, or those who grieve, or those who linger in fear, or who are lonely, or struggle, or suffer under systemic evils, and (all too often overlooked) even creation tormented by human harm; all of these and more are untouched by a gospel that is only about the forgiveness of sins.

6. Instead, the risen Jesus—the gospel, that is—frees us to see death in all its forms, and then (to quote Luther from his less-sexy-than-the-95-Theses-but-way-key Heidelberg Disputation) to “call a thing what it is,” namely to renounce that which is not of God, to tend to those who mourn or suffer, and, in Jesus’ name, usher in comfort, hope, justice, an announcement of grace and something new.

7. Precisely, I believe, because Lutherans have been historically focused on justification rather than justification and justice, the ELCA is now struggling and, I believe, dying.

8. Our focus on forgiveness rather than a broader notion of the gospel both sustains and sanctions the structure of the ELCA, a structure undergirded by white supremacy.

9. We who benefit from white supremacy like forgiveness waaaayyy more than we like repentance.

10. In recent years, we have seen increased irritation and anger from many ELCA members, people who are dismayed by the renewed attention to justice raised by rostered leaders. Such a focus has no place in the pulpit, they say, because they come to church to hear that Jesus loves them and that they are forgiven.

11. We would be wrong to dismiss their anger or diss them, because in all fairness, generations of Lutherans have come to church to hear that we are justified, period. There’s been little to no emphasis on justice. The reasons for that are many, but among them:

a. Luther’s context of rebuking indulgences, hierarchy, and any work as a way to salvation still shape our identity even 500+ years later;

b. Righteous justice work has been misidentified as works righteousness.

c. Allergic to anything that smacks of works, and content with a social, political, and religious system which has largely benefitted people with similar privilege, it’s—consciously or not—to the benefit of most Lutherans to be quite fine with focusing on forgiveness.

d. (To be abundantly clear, forgiveness is a Word, has a Word, and offers good news that needs to be heard!).

12. For these reasons, among others, many ELCA members are understandably caught off guard by hearing something not only new, but often threatening to their way of being and their self-understanding, and many are therefore angry.

13. Meanwhile, ELCA rostered leaders are increasingly restless, stressed, and leaving ministry, because they find themselves enmeshed in a system that calls them to leadership in the service of Jesus, but which structurally and systematically undermines their call to do exactly that. (It really is a crisis)

14. Under our present system, because rostered leaders are aware of congregational and missional dependence on rich supporters—many/most of whom have reason to be offended and off-put by Scripture’s relentless proclamation against power, privilege, wealth, and economic justice—rostered leaders have complicated and conflicted motivations not to preach and teach justice along with justification.

15. Despite promises yoked to both baptism and ordination, there are real reasons—not at all base, but very real—for rostered leaders to fear severe and harmful financial and conflictual repercussions were they to steward their broader vocational and baptized identities.

16. These very same vocational and baptized identities, more fully embraced, could, in real time, affect the viability and (superficial, anyway) peace of their congregation(s). This truth undermines the communally understood commitment of rostered leaders to build up the congregations or contexts to which they are called. Think church mortgages, heat, electricity, staff salaries, choral music, Sunday School materials, and missions beyond the congregation: all and more are put in jeopardy if conflict rises and offerings drop.

17. Too, rostered leaders know that to preach the social and political implications of a gospel far broader than the traditionally limited Lutheran equation of gospel with forgiveness will engage personal risks, risks like:

a. having to leave their call (which could affect not only their own life but also the lives of related loved ones);
b. facing no guarantee of another call in the vicinity or at all;
c. and receiving little to no assured denominational financial support for the consequences of their faithfulness.

18. These competing claims are taking immeasurable tolls on the mental, emotional, vocational, and spiritual well-being of rostered leaders.

19. We Lutherans are swell at swirling the concepts of saint and sinner, the already and the not yet, the both/and of life. But for some reason or another, we remain quite comfortable with making strict binaries out of law and gospel, and (very much relatedly) the prophetic and the pastoral.

20. However, (as but one biblical example) Mary’s song—which announced the advent of Jesus, the one who grounds our gospel—announced law and gospel right along with the prophetic and pastoral truths that wealth and privilege oppress the rich as much as they do the poor.

21. The same can be said of white supremacy, which (albeit in different ways) harms white people as well as those who are not. Likewise, patriarchy suffocates men as it does women. And so forth.

22. But somebody needs to tell them. That rostered leaders hesitate doing so is not only a sign that our structure is beholden to the wealthy, the white, and the patriarchy, and that our system holds captives servants who individually rail against the same, but it also signals that en masse we don’t understand or trust our own theology which (ostensibly) proudly transcends other binaries.

23. When we avoid preaching and teaching boldly against the various interests of the privileged, powerful, and rich—callings in keeping with Scripture’s consistent and overwhelming message against economic inequality and other injustices—we participate in the oppression of the poor and marginalized.

24. Also, by insulating the privileged from the clarion and chronic Scriptural calls for solidarity with the Least of These and against injustice, we also oppress and dehumanize the wealthy by transforming them into mere objects and tools for our own institutional needs.

25. The painful binds described here illustrate that the structure of the ELCA reflects and fosters an institutionalized theology of glory (e.g., the size and financial resources of a congregation, and the overt lack of conflict, are signs that God is at work) rather than a theology of the cross (if we pick up our cross and follow Jesus, we -actually- run the real risk/probability of—at least initially—having fewer people, way way way less income, and uncomfortable conversations).

26. No amount of tinkering with this system will transform its love of glory into love of the cross. It needs to be dismantled and begun anew. And we need to look to womanist, black, mujarista, liberation, indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA, and Dalit theologies, not just for inspiration but for transformation.

27. The ELCA dedication to a theology of glory, which is a theology of white supremacy, will be its undoing.

28. Paradoxically, a theology of the cross says that this undoing might be exactly a sign that God is at work, bringing into being something as of yet unimagined, and something more consistent with and worthy of our Lutheran theology, a theology which, in a word, rocks.

~~~~~

We sit on the eve of Reformation Sunday.

It’s a high feast day to Lutherans, that’s for sure.

We say, of course, that Luther didn’t start out to begin a new church.  He wanted to reform the one already there.

True though that is, I think that saying that makes us feel less bad for all of the chaos that ensued ;-).

But still, at the end of the day, in fact, Luther…well, he pretty much started a new church.

Again, the word ‘catholic’ means ‘whole,’ or ‘universal,’ which, in a general-sweep sort of way, is why pre-Luther there was the Catholic Church, and post-Luther there was the Roman Catholic Church, annnnnnd the Lutherans, annnnnd later every other denomination or clusters of belief we have, which are all part of the catholic Church.

The ELCA is not The Church.

But it is a church.

And it might be that a reformation, as in a Systems Tweak with a capital T, isn’t enough.

It could be that this Reformation Day, we within the ELCA would benefit by considering the possibility that our present structure undermines the work of the Church.

Fortunately, we are Lutherans, and we know that church structure isn’t salvatory—for that matter, neither is church.

But as the Church, we believe that the gospel, namely the good news that Jesus is risen, is.

And we believe that the import of that salvatory news isn’t just—or even mostly, and some would say at all—about what happens after you die.

It has everything to do with what happens when we live, and how we live. 

That’s because the gospel is that death doesn’t win, not in any single form, even death that manifests in the form of a system that centers the rich, marginalizes the oppressed, and in so doing, oppresses even the wealthy too.

Our theology is, we are, better than that, and there’s no better opportunity for Lutherans to consider that possibility than on Reformation Day 2023.

~~~~~

(And to the good news, and more to this on another later post: David and I have begun a business on Karl’s behalf. Karl, as many/most of you know, suffered a traumatic brain injury almost 20 years ago.  We are determined to honor in every possible way Karl’s joy, fortitude, and love of service and people, including by way of discovering a vocation that provides meaning and purpose.  To that end, we’ve begun Karl’s Wheelhouse, which you can find on FB, and also online under Two Lugs and A Nut Workshop. I invite you to check it out! *insert proud mama emoji*)

(Another plug that might be shameless but is certainly on point: if you want to take a deeper dive into my thoughts on the above, check out my book I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here I Stand Moment, published by Fortress Press).

This place, people, oh this place.

Also known as “Ratisbona,” this ancient town, situated on the northern most point of the Danube, essentially preserved from destruction through two world wars, holds within its boundaries tender, breathtaking, complicated histories, certainly personally (both of my children were born there, my doctoral work was done there, and the accident which changed everything occurred there), and on cultural, political, and social terms as well.

Marcus Aurelius, for example, meandered up that way in 179, the furthest north his Empire reached, the remnants of which are still visible today.

Obligatory photos:

And, for anyone affected by the Reformation (which would be…everyone…now that I think about it), the final shot, the last gasp, the Dust-Shaking-Off-The-Sandals Moment that held any hope of a rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the Reformers happened here in 1541.

It was then that a “Famous Religious Debate” between Johannes Eck and Philipp Melanchthon occurred.

Below, except with super horrible resolution, is a pic of the mural commemorating the occasion: it’s a still from a video I made for Gather magazine as part of my Summer Bible Study on John.

(Trouble is I was sure I already had a picture of this mural [which reads, “In this house Dr. Philipp Melanchthon and Dr. Johannes Eck led their famous religious debate in 1541”], so I didn’t bother to take one this time around, but apparently I do not have such a photo, and so you’ll just have to adjust your glasses, squint, and trust me that it happened here.)

Also, Don Juan was conceived here, and Napoleon slept here.

I also slept here, but for some reason *harrumph*, no one has made a plaque yet about that event.

But Regensburg also contains more troubling history, not least of all as it relates to its Jewish citizenry.

You can find much of this part of its past here and, for those who speak German, here, and for those of you on Facebook, a post I made about the Stolpersteine, literally the “stumbling blocks,” bronze plaques scattered throughout streets of German towns which mark the sites of the abductions of Jews, their names, their birthdates, and the cities in which they were murdered.

In fact, this very week, the 100,000th—read that number again—Stolperstein will be laid in Nürnberg.  You can follow news of that event here.

On this site, you find this photo I’ve also put below.

It depicts, as the carried sign (a sign Jews themselves were forced to lift up) states—I can’t write this without exhaling—a “Parade of the Jews,” right here in Regensburg.

The forced march took place during the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, a despicable day on which Jews were pulled from their homes, homes which were then wrecked or burned.

The women and girls were taken to police headquarters, and the men and boys were “marched” through the streets of the “Altstadt,” the center of the city, and then loaded onto trains.

Many of course, were not seen again.

The women and girls, once released, returned to nothing and to no one.

You can find that traumatic history detailed here, where you will see this very photo with clickable embedded information.

Please do so.

But in the rendition above, zoom in and see the smiling soldiers, the bare legs of a Jewish man taken by surprise, the onlookers draping themselves from windows and the well-dressed pedestrians staring, jeering, doing nothing from the sidewalk.

The street captured in this photo is the Maximillianstraße, now mainly a pedestrian street, a gateway from the train station, the same one from which these men and boys were forcibly sent to concentration camps, which leads to the beautiful, beloved, cherished, vibrant Old City.

I’ve traversed it countless times without knowing of, seeing, or hearing the many and various spirits present in the photo above.

So.

David and I did some research about this very scene, and discovered that it took place exactly here:

In a shot that we saw at an exhibit on Maximilianstraße, one taken a few moments after the one above, we were able to isolate the building to this present day discount clothing store.

The irony, of course, is that the people, those women and men gawking out of their apartment windows and standing along the street in that decades-old haunting, haunted photo, did nothing more to stop the evil traipsing before them than are these inanimate mannequins doing anything about anything, anything at all.

~~~~~

This Sunday, Christians celebrate Pentecost.

It’s the day when the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, shows up in all Her glory.

Wind, fire, tongues are Her calling cards, as is the confusion, the cacophony, and the chaos She leaves in Her wake.

As I’ve written about so many times before, with necessary nods to the late Walter Bouman, the word ‘Spirit’ is utterly meaningless without an adjective before it.

Christmas, Community, School, Teen: each of these define what sort of spirit we mean to reference, and if you try hanging ornaments on your tree with Teen Spirit, well, you’ll understand my point.

But on Pentecost, though, Christians ostensibly pay especial attention to the Holy Spirit.

This Spirit is the Spirit of the living God, the one of whom Paul writes in Galatians 5 as being all about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

This Spirit is about bringing life into being where there is death, hope where there is despair, change where there is stasis, and justice where there is none.

She is unruly and yet rules with power wielded through Her tether to the Trinity and through those tethered to the same.

What we have, however, people, in this photo above?

This is no shot of the Holy Spirit in action.

What we have above is a captured moment of an evil spirit.

A flash of a mob spirit.

Painfully true is this: just as the Holy Spirit is not still, neither is that of a mob spirit, or one driven by an evil spirit.

Both spirits, these days, are very much afoot.

These days, mob spirits, evil spirits, are everywhere, attacking the rights of LGBTQIA+ people and women; going after books and US history; thriving on maligning immigrants and the poor and those who are not white; upending democratic norms and embracing autocratic ones; attacking our nation’s capital.

Of course, targeting Jews is a mob M.O. mainstay.

Given that, and given the stakes, we dare not, on this Pentecost Sunday, miss that in addition to these kinds of spirits, the Holy Spirit has announced Her presence.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon us.

She is here, She is active, She is en-couraging, and She is upending everything.

For those who care and have the courage to notice, Acts 2 is being re-en-Acted in real time.

And while the Holy Spirit is many things, being patient at apathy, tolerant of hate, or down with Christians who miss the radical nature of the living God who is here not just to proclaim peace but to enact justice…these are not Her strong suits.

See, injustices, hate, malice, and evil are being paraded right in front of us as blatantly as the Jews of Regensburg were paraded in front of those lingering on the sidelines.

The spirit of the day is not holy.

Mob spirits have been let loose.

Fortunately for us, the Holy Spirit has as well.

All seek to stir you and sweep you into the streets to do their bidding.

Come Holy Spirit.

Move ours.

With this good news, although death has a word, to be sure, it’s no longer the last one.

Our perception of everything, therefore, has shifted:

~our concepts of what ought to be treasured, or abandoned, or feared;

~our definitions of power, or status, or the beautiful;

~our trust from our worthiness, to God’s;

~our distrust that we are worthy, to God’s resounding declaration that indeed, we are;

~the way we care for the earth, the creatures within it, ourselves, our enemies;

~whether we bide our time or steward it to love the world as God so radically has;

~our alertness to seeing God acting in the midst of despair, and our calling to do the same in God’s name;

~our courage to express righteous truth and righteous anger where unrighteousness abounds;

~our definition of what is righteous and what is not;

~our self-understanding as not just followers of Jesus, but ambassadors of Jesus the Christ.

His resurrection, you see, frees and compels us to notice where death threatens the world, so that both in spite of and to spite death in all its forms,  Christ-ians bring health, healing, wholeness, and hope into the mix—even our very own.

So.

Jesus is risen!

We are Easter People!

The boxes in which we’ve been put, the fences which we’ve put up, the walls that have been built, the tombs in which we and those whom we love lie: they are no more.

So go!

Live and love with the radical resurrection freedom that this day has gifted us all!

On this day, everything touches everything.

The devastating truth of Good Friday is fundamentally interlaced with the life-effusive truth of Easter.

You can’t, it turns out, live permanently in either day, because each day would eclipse the truth of the other, and that’s no way to live.

For that matter, there is no way to live if firmly, exclusively anchored in either day.

Left alone, see, each day is a false rendering of life.

But on this day, and if we’re honest, on every day, everything is all of a singular piece.

That’s a Deep Life Truth.

Every day we can be touched by grief, loneliness, disease, regrets, hurts, injustices, and the absence of delight.

And every day we can be consoled and uplifted by joy, comfort, relief, redemption, reconciliation, justice, and beauty.

Holy Saturday reminds us, you see, that God is not just present in death or life, but that God is active in each of these truths, and in their in-betweens.

Faith in that truth pulls us from our despairs into trust that although death is ever so real, life, ultimately, is real-er.

That’s the Holy Saturday truth which emboldens us to enter another day, every day, with hope.

It’s called ‘Maundy Thursday’.

I.e., ‘Commandment Thursday’.

Not ‘Suggestion Thursday’.

That’s it.

That’s the blog.

1 Corinthians 11:23-26 and John 13:1-17, 31b-35

When our first year seminary Old Testament class got to this verse, Exodus 3:5, our professor didn’t pass by it quickly.

It’s a rare command in the First Testament, so the exact point of it in the tradition of Moses remains unclear.  Certainly in other cultures the gesture is a sign of reverence: any number of religious customs expect worshippers to remove their shoes before entering a sacred space.

Even without heaps of internal reference to the practice, then, most scholars seem to think that that’s precisely what’s going on here: the removal of sandals to honor a sacred space.  The little word ‘for’ is a big clue for that case, carrying the water for this hefty meaning: because you are on holy ground, therefore you must act with according reverence.

Buuuut the guy was in a desert, not in a temple.

And for Rev. Dr. Nakamura, this was exactly the point.

God is everywhere.

Therefore everywhere is holy.

Even in the wildernesses of life.

The import of that interpretation, that “brief but spectacular take,” has shaped me profoundly.

Granted, at the time I’d anyway been reading a lot of Annie Dillard, John Muir, and Sigurd Olson, so was steeped in the notion that nature is sacred, but Dr. Nakamura helped me take it a step further in my bare feet: there is no place that God is not, and so every place should be entered as if it were holy, for it is.

Relatedly, though, I confess that ever since I’ve been a bit uncomfortable with the term “Holy Land.”

I know exactly what is meant by it, so much so that to even meekly raise a tiny hand to talk about the phrase seems itself a bit blasphemous. But while it is the locus of so much of three great traditions, I can’t quite shake the notion that everywhere is Holy Land, not least of all because of God’s activities in that Holy Land, actions which were quite specifically dedicated for whole world.

For that matter, I can think of any number of events and places before and after, joyous and devastating, rooted in Jewish and Christian history or that of other religious convictions, which beheld the presence of the Holy.

And perhaps, just perhaps, if we saw all land as Holy we’d treat it as such.

But I digress.

The point is that today, Palm Sunday, begins Holy Week.

It’s a flurry of days which concentrate key events of the Christian story: professed love for Jesus, hope in Jesus, disorientation about Jesus, clarity about Jesus, distancing from Jesus, conflict related to Jesus, courageous fidelity to Jesus, self-protection, fear, betrayal, grief, hopelessness, and renewed joy and trust in Jesus.

The thing of it is, though, as Holy as this Week is, that list right there?

That’s every week, and, depending on, that’s an average Thursday.

As Christians begin this week, then, I encourage us not to relegate its events to the past.

Don’t simply re-enact them as if they were part of a scripted play.

These events were the locus of the story that we Christians tell, of course, but they are our everyday story too, even still.

So take off your shoes.

Stay for a while.

We are in Holy Week, and we are on Holy Ground.

God is as present here as God is anywhere, and everywhere, and anytime, and every time.

Peace to you in these and all your holy days.