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.

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.

And to that, we ring out “Merry Christmas” and sing out “Joy to the world!”

New babies simply do that, we know: inspire laughter, smiles, and celebrations.

This baby, though, this baby ushered in joy of cosmic magnitude.

Jesus brought joy to bear not just on the woman who bore him, but to all who encountered him with openness to his presence.

His name, of course (Iēsous [Ἰησοῦς]) means “he saves.”

Of course, Christians believe that Jesus saves, but we’ve tended to tie that salvation to what happens after we die.

But wow do we miss a point, if not the point, with this take.

Think of the tangible salvation Jesus brought to the hungry, the sick, the lonely, the poor, the sinners.

And think of the joy the recipients felt in his wake!

For that matter, think of the joy that he felt, walking away from having just dropped salvation and joy in one fell swoop.

So I wonder whether this Christmas could mark a moment when we trust not just that the incarnate Jesus will save, but that he has and does in every moment.

And, given this season of joy, I wonder whether this Christmas could mark a moment when Christians see their calling as incarnating Jesus’ way of joy.

Perhaps we can see our ministries in the world as serving up joy where there is bleakness, grief, injustice, oppression, hate, exclusion, and despair.

Perhaps we could see joy as being not simplistic, but simply an antidote, not to mention an antithesis, to anxiety, apathy, and antipathy.

Maybe we could see our joy as a righteous retort to the ways and powers of death.

In the name of Jesus and in keeping with his calling, we too could drop joy when we feed, heal, attend, subvert, and forgive.

And we could, because this day, this Christmas Day, marks that Jesus is born, and Jesus lived, and Jesus is risen.

Joy to the world indeed!

Merry Christmas to you and yours from me and mine!

Two nights ago, all the restlessness and disconnectedness I’ve been feeling in the last couple of weeks got some focus, thanks to the house being uniquely empty and quiet, and George Winston’s 1982 December album playing in my background.

That morning, Sunday, Else left for St. Olaf after Thanksgiving break.

The day before, David flew back out East to be with his family for a few days.

Karl had gone to sleep.

And so there I was, for the first time in an awfully long time, effectively alone in the house.

Before you queue up images from Home Alone, instead, this was the scene:

I pulled up George Winston’s December, as one obviously does in such moments, and I walked through the empty home, a glass of red in my hand, and boxes of Advent decorations waiting to be unpacked, along with baskets of laundry waiting to be folded.

It was oddly melancholy, all the moreso because after the flurry of Else’s visit, and some pre-holiday cleaning, sorting, cooking, and bread baking, I suddenly had some time to think, and if I’m honest with myself, probably also to feel.

George Winston, you see, he always does it to me, transporting me to the simple times of high school, and countless nights listening to “December” while curled up on our living room couch late on a winter night, only the gentle white Christmas tree lights illuminating the room, cup of cocoa in my hand, probably a boyfriend on my mind, and to complete the scene—I really do remember this—snow falling outside our windows.

I felt so protected, so warm, so content.

I was so safe from so much.

But.

Although I didn’t yet have first hand experience with an alternate experience, I had an inkling of it.

I knew that there was both truth to what I was feeling, and still, I had enough sense, in every meaning of the word, to know that it was an illusion too.

The mental scenes were too idyllic, my father was no slouch at preaching—and, depending on the day, incarnating—Amos, and Dane that I am, if nothing else I knew The Little Match Girl too well.

Somehow the purity of George Winston’s music, played almost exclusively during this stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, both reinforced that comforting bubble and made me see it, even if the bubble didn’t burst until years later.

So there I am on Sunday night, listening to GW, as reflective as all get-out.

Not depressed, just…wistful. Out of sorts. Disconnected from what I wanted to be feeling on Thanksgiving and should be feeling on the first day of Advent.

I have the couch.

I have the cocoa.

I have the boyfriend (husband, actually, and I can not believe my luck/blessing/gift, but more on that happy thing in a future post).

I have the snow.

I have George Winston.

I even now have the real live fireplace.

But this year, I just wasn’t feeling “it,” this beloved, familiar, festive Thanksgiving-And-Christmas-Is-Right-Around-The-Corner spirit.

We had a feast, though not with standard Thanksgiving fare: David roasted a beautiful pork loin because no one likes turkey, and since Christmas dinner serves up many of the dishes that tend to be found at a Thanksgiving table, Else and I bagged mashed potatoes and gravy, and found some off-beat Fall-themed sides instead.

But food spread notwithstanding, that familiar Thanksgiving Day vibe still wasn’t there for me.

Oddly enough, in the few days before Thanksgiving, I began to realize that the final catalyst for my discontent was, of all things, another musician, actually, the now infamous David Haas.

Haas composed such beautiful hymns like “Blest Are They” and “We are Called” and “You Are Mine.”

I’m sure that I’ve been reduced to tears in worship on several occasions while singing his music: his lyrics and tunes are powerfully moving.

But people, the guy—this child of God who will be forgiven and redeemed, just as Haas’ own songs have proclaimed in song—has been accused of sexual misconduct by many many women over the course of over four decades.

As the accusations accrued and began finally getting the attention that they should have, distributors of his music have ceased including his repertoire in their hymnals or providing it in any way.

The ELCA has requested that congregations refuse to employ his music at all.

Debate, of course, is everywhere:

He’s in the wrong here, obviously, but isn’t the music redeemable?

Everyone is flawed; can’t we praise God with his music while condemning his behavior?

But the contrary voices point out that Haas still receives royalties, that some of his music was itself a tool of his grooming and assault techniques, and that members who have themselves been abused are re-abused when they are forced to sing this man’s music.

The hard thing to do, but the right thing to do, is to sacrifice the music for the sake of those who suffer because of it.

It clicked, last week, that this grievous tale is not not a far off analogy with that told about and on Thanksgiving.

Contrary to the beloved legend of Thanksgiving, the day is actually rooted in a racist and propagandized myth.

That’s, obviously, not who we want to be.

But this celebration is ensconced in US tradition, one which not only mis-represents the history on which it’s based, but it neglects to mention the genocide that followed from that storied feast.

Schoolchildren parade about in colored paper headdresses feasting with pilgrims, and as the story goes, everyone but the turkey was content.

The clear message has been that then and forevermore, peaceful easy feelings reigned between the Indigenous people and the whites…who, in point of fact, brought disease, devastation, and destruction to the land and way of life of those who had been there for countless time.

That isn’t so much in the pageants…probably because that’s not who we want to be…but it is who we have been, and, truth be told, still are.

Sigh.

See, I can hear the same sorts of arguments about Thanksgiving that we hear related to Haas:

OK fine, the history isn’t redeemable, but can’t the intent of Thanksgiving be?

Can we not simultaneously feast and give thanks while condemning our past?

The contrary voices, though, not least of those from our First Nations siblings, are generally…ouch.

And no.

Because while there has been a magnet that hovers over Thanksgiving and removes the loss of Native culture, stories, land, and rights that is anchored to this day, there’s no magnet that can hover over the day and remove the cutting, insulting, infuriating grief of that loss.

We can read up on it (take a look at this piece in the Smithsonian, for example) and we can post sweet memes and prompts to Remember Our Indigenous Siblings, but we can’t alter that the day is fundamentally rooted in a self-serving myth of white people that intentionally ignores the harm that was and continues to be done through it.

At first, I called myself a Thanksgiving Scrooge, but…I’ve come to rethink that.

I think evaluating whether to celebrate Thanksgiving isn’t a scrooge-y thing.

It’s an honest thing, a Calling A Thing What It Is thing, an empathetic thing.

The hard thing to do, but the right thing to do, is to sacrifice the day for the sake of those who suffer because of it.

To be clear, I’m not patting myself on the back about my metanoia here: I’ve been hearing urges to abandon Thanksgiving for decades and for exactly these reasons.

White supremacy has game, I tell you what.

But now, I am convinced that it’s disingenuous to celebrate that which others mourn, and to honor a day that others ask us not to mark, or if at all, to mark with dishonor instead.

To my mind at least, just like it is wrong to continue to play Haas’ music, it seems wrong to persist in ignoring the trauma of Thanksgiving Day, and thereby continue to cause trauma.

However.

That, to my mind at least, being said and true, just like with no longer appropriately singing Haas’ hymns, I confess that man, there’s a loss there.

People talk about being ‘woke’ as being so radical and celebratory and freeing, and it is, ultimately.

But in point of fact, waking up to see what hadn’t been seen before involves some loss of cherished ways of being, of historical privilege, of idyllic myth, of a fundamentally false identity that has caused harm about which one has either ignored, rationalized, or been heretofore oblivious.

That, in a word, is a bummer.

Or, to put it another way, I’m grieving a bit.

~~~~~

It’s not lost to me that “Thanksgiving” is the first song on Winston’s December album, by the way.

The tune has always struck me as melancholy, and so it was fitting background music to mull a treasured loss, even if one gone for a good reason.

So now I’m trying to think of another way of culling the best of what Thanksgiving purports to be: the richness of family gatherings, and the intentional lifting up of genuine gratitude, and a pausing in the midst of normal frenzy to rest.

Perhaps Advent might come to the rescue.

Last Sunday marked the first day of this season.

I acknowledge that I say this about every liturgical season, but Advent really is my favorite.

I remember I was three months pregnant with Karl when we were leading Advent worship services in Germany, and gosh those texts about anticipating Jesus, and the child who leapt in Mary’s womb, just as I was beginning to wonder whether I was feeling fluttering or just indigestion…it was overwhelming to me.

I remember feeling my belly through my alb as my late husband read the texts, and I heard the words about “quickening” in an entirely new, dare I say incarnate, way.

Advent is a decadent, intense season, deeply rooted in images of light and dark, God’s anger and God’s abiding love, injustice and the overturning of it.

But the most powerful symbols are simple:

A candle for the first Sunday.

Two for the next.

Three for the third.

Four for the last.

And all the while, the unlit Christ candle waits for that flame.

Despite the psychedelic, apocalyptic, sometimes terrifying fervor of the texts, the message of Advent is, in fact, also simple.

God loves this world.

God loves God’s people.

God calls us to love one another.

When we do not, we are called to repent.

When we don’t repent, we cause others angst and God anger.

So stop harming, stop not repenting, and do justice and love instead.

Listen to just a smattering of the Advent texts, replete with words showing us God, and beckoning us to live as people of God.

Isaiah 2:4 “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Romans 13:12 “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

Psalm 72:4 “May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.”

Romans 15:5-6 “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Matthew 3:2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Isaiah 35:1-2a “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.”

Psalm 146:5-8 “146:5 Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous.”

Matthew 1:23 “‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, ‘God is with us.’”

Advent, it seems to me, is techno-color all about living life as a child of God.

It’s the season of anticipating not just Jesus, but the reign of God.

So that means, then, feasting, and welcoming all to the table.

It means giving thanks for the God of the past, and present, and future.

It means giving up gods of the past, and present, and future.

It means owning up to when we’ve been wrong, and living life from that point on in a different way.

It means living life as a righteous one, seeing injustice, doing justice, offering mercy, walking humbly.

It means seeing that everywhere, and in everything and everyone, God is with us.

It means seeing ourselves, known as Christians, as being seen as representations of God.

It means grasping that what we do illustrates who our God is, both when we do it right, and when we do it wrong.

In short,

Advent is the season when we engage ourselves, others, and the world as if the reign of God is fully here, because God is here, and we are beacons of that very God. 

Maybe, then, we can transfer the best of that which has been Thanksgiving to the season of Advent.

Maybe rather than a historically fraught Day of Thanksgiving, we can become a Way of Thanksgiving.

With that in mind, in this first week of Advent, I settle into my couch, and reach for my cocoa, and my husband, and my George Winston, and watch the snow, and light a fire, and light a candle, and give thanks for the God of even uncomfortable transformations, Emmanuel, God with us.

~~~~~

Below are some links to articles by Indigenous writers who, for similar reasons, are giving up or re-imagining Thanksgiving, and inviting us to do the same.

“Why I’m Not Celebrating Thanksgiving This Year,” Vogue, 2020 By Christian Allaire

“The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie. As a Native American, I’ve Found a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday,” Time, 2019  By Sean Sherman, “The Sioux Chef”

”Stop Celebrating Thanksgiving,” by Prof. Stephanie Masta

So on Twitter a few days back (no idea what I’m going to do with my post-Elon Twitter account these days, as an aside) when I saw an event with this title, “Transformative Justice Seeks the Healing of All Parties,” and all the moreso when it was plugged by David Dark, it was maternal catnip and vocational clickbait all rolled up into one.

Dark publishes his blog “Dark Matter” (catchy) here; he’s a dabbler in many things, but a good dabbler, and a righteous one too. He cares deeply about justice, and always from the vantage point of faith, service, vulnerability, and hope for reconciliation and transformation.

It’s that latter word “Transformation” that caught my eye in the title of this conversation he was hailing and having with Rev. Stacy Rector. She’s a Presbyterian pastor who directs Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sadly, an organization that our society has made necessary to be.

In his blurb for the event, Dark wrote this:

“If policy is liturgy writ large, what do the liturgies                                                                                                  of retaliation, incarceration, and killing                                                                                                                       tell us about ourselves?”

Deep. Exhale.

“If policy is liturgy writ large…”

I have not been able to shake that phrase off, and immediately sent the passage off to my daughter and to my husband, whom I love and who loves me in part because we both like provocative thoughts and rabbit holes.

It wasn’t just that phrase, though, but the following one: “…what do the liturgies of retaliation, incarceration, and killing tell us about ourselves” that sucker-punched me.

In a righteous way.

Transposed, it seems like one could also read that sentence like this: “if our politics and consequent policies are the way that we reflect our selves, our valuation of one another, and our worship of God to the broader world, what do our politics and consequent policies say about our view of ourselves, of each other, and of God?”

I mean, ooof, people.

“If policy is liturgy writ large…”

If this phrase doesn’t keep you awake at night, especially just days before the midterms, what meds are you taking and can I have some?

~~~~~

A couple of years ago, I was invited by the ELCA Youth Ministry Network to reflect on ministry in a time of a pandemic.  You can find the whole article here, but this blurb of Mr. Dark’s called certain parts of the gist of it to mind.

In writing that piece, I learned what should have already dawned on me, namely that that both pan-demic and epi-demic spring from the Greek word ‘demos.’

Demos means people, as in ‘demographic,’ and, well, ‘democracy.’

I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t really thought about it, but the more I got to thinking about that, the more I cocked my head like my dog Gimli does when he’s confused, which is most of the time.

Because if demos means a people, what about laos, another Greek word, from which we get liturgy, a word that literally means ‘work [ergos] of the people?’

What’s the difference then between the laos of liturgy and the demos of pandemic?

Turns out that there are a couple of answers, and also I can hop through rabbit tunnels like no hare ever did.

The ancient Greeks used the term laos to refer to ordinary people, the regular joes and jolenes, the folks you run into at the corner olive and baklava shop.

But more than that, the laos lived together as a demos, a collective and geographically connected community with one another: the laos shared a common language, government, culture, and mores, which defined them as a demos.

Relatedly, here’s a bit of trivia for you: the word ‘liturgy’ as we associate it, namely as a form of ritual worship, didn’t show up until the 1590s. 

This is most certainly true.

Sure, you can find the word in the New Testament: leitourgia. But the sense of it means a service, or a ministry, rather than an order of worship.

In fact, [and get this] the word originally referred to the work, namely the business, service, and donations that privileged people in Athens and beyond offered to and for the well-being of the people of the community.

Moreover, it was considered a mark of pride and privilege (in the best sense) to offer from one’s plenty to those who had little to none.

There was no resentment about it: there was thanksgiving for it.

In its original sense, then, and the key take-away and upshot here is this: liturgy is work done by the laos on behalf of the well-being of all the demos.

~~~~~

Officially, All Saints’ Day is celebrated on November 1, but in the liturgical calendar of the Church, we remember the saints on the first Sunday following.

That would be tomorrow.

I find it terribly moving that two days following that, namely on Tuesday November 8, we have Election Day.

See, with this calendar coincidence in mind, behold words from the late Jewish writer, theologian, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who in this interview spoke (as he often did) about memory, and about the sacred duty to remember the generations who have come before us:

In memory you are not alone.

You are surrounded by people.

Those who are not here anymore, naturally, but they are there in your memory.

They live.

And you hear them and you speak to them.

And when you need a presence it’s their presence.

Of course, it’s a dead presence, but still it’s a presence.

The presence of the dead is also a presence.

And without memory, then what is worse than to live without a future?

It’s to live without a past.

And I think memory is that past.

We are, that is, not primarily individuals, Wiesel wants us to know.

We are instead part of peoples, laos who are connected to those who have come before, those found in our memories (and, perhaps he would agree, those whom we have forgotten?), and we are likewise connected to those present to us now, and to those in our futures.

We are saints shaped by saints, and we will bequeath what we have received and who we are to the laos and to the demos yet to come.

To use the concept of Mr. Dark, our liturgies—religious and political—shape and will shape laos and demos long after we’ve gone.

As we stare down Election Day, this is the kicker, right?

We dare not forget that our collective liturgy—the ergos (work) of the laos (common people)—will decide the fates of the demos.

Our vote in a demo-cracy is the kratos (strength and power) of the demos (people who live in the same geographical space).

In other words, our leitourgia on November 8 is a form of service and ministry to all the saints.

In still other words, if you want to see who someone is, see what they do.

It’s basic Beatitudes stuff, conveniently one of the texts assigned for All Saints Day, which is celebrated the day before election day, which should preach.

~~~~~

The best liturgies shape what happens when we aren’t in active worship.

So do the worst, by the way.

With that in mind, spurred to think about it in this way thanks to Mr. David Dark and Rev. Stacy Rector, let us not pretend that there isn’t a liturgical ritual of election day.

You show up to the polls, you enter the stall, you make your mark, and you leave, one in a long line of people coming to the altar of democracy, of sorts, to give what they can offer, and make your mark on what happens next in the lives of All The Saints.

Christians are the laos of God, of course.

But we’re also the demos of the US.

And in that voting booth, the liturgies of both collectives coincide: we cast our vote informed by the faithful collective who have come before us (laos), and we cast our vote to inform our collective political present and future (demos).

Make no mistake, then: your vote is a liturgy, an act of worship, and a reflection of who you are, and whose you are.

Remember who you were, and are, and are promised to be.

Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.
(1 Peter 2:10; Hosea 1:10, 2:23)

Remember those who have come before.

Remember who you are thereby.

Share the mercy.

Be God’s laos.

Do the leitourgia of God in the demos.

Vote.

“Be still, then, and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10.

Sunday, October 29 is Reformation Sunday, a High Feast Day of sorts in the Lutheran Tradition.

This year, we mark the 505th Anniversary of the day, this auspicious moment when German monk and scholar Martin Luther published a…few…objections to the practice of selling “indulgences.”

These, of course, were pieces of paper given out by Catholic priests of the day, notes which promised that any post-death misery brought on by sinfulness would be, to one degree or another, lessened.

But the Church wasn’t just giving these indulgences out like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers Bars on Halloween.

Nope: any sinner wanting to stave off or tamp down eternal judgment had to pony up some pennies—the more the better—to earn God’s grace.

To brother Luther, this practice seemed like a heretical if not well-played racket.

So Luther, never one to mince words, decided to point out 95 ways that the buying and selling of grace was theologically and biblically skiddelywompus.

Here was what got under his craw:

If you have to purchase grace, if you have to earn grace, it’s many things, but it is not grace.

For that matter, no one, not even the pope of his day (especially the pope of his day, actually) is without sin.

When you get right down to it, it’s a matter of definitions, and they aren’t even theological.

A reward is based on merit.

Grace is straight gift.

That’s not to say that there isn’t theology in play though.

Luther was a biblical theologian, and after spending more than a little time in Scripture, Luther (and, now by extension, Lutherans) came to believe that the biblical witness makes it clear that ultimately, God doles out grace rather than rewards.

This discovery is a super fortuitous thing, because when you get right down to it, no one could ever have enough merits to earn any reward from God anyway.

Now, this thesis of Luther’s was, and 505 years later remains, a hotly disputed point among various religious traditions, but to make it, Luther only had to turn to passages like the Romans text above, a passage happily assigned for Reformation Sunday.

”For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”

Lutherans are all over this take.

We hold this banner high and proud and with huge sighs of relief: there is nothing that we can do to “save ourselves” from our sinfulness or from God’s judgment.

To say otherwise a) renders Jesus’ death and resurrection for naught; and b) renders everyone totally and permanently without hope and screwed.

To trust the idea that works “make up a difference” implies that an intangible and unsullied part of us can carry the rest of our sloppiness through.

But in order for that to be true, there would have to be a sliver of purity within us not in need of redemption, some part that urges the messy parts of who we are, the potentially irredeemable parts of us, to engage in good works—be they indulgences, acts of piety, generosities, etc—to make up the difference and to prove our worthiness to God.

An E for Effort and (if God’s paying attention) Eternity.

Buuuuttttt…mind-bending though it is, at the end of the day, these good works themselves would be in need of redemption!

Their expressions would not be altruistic, but actually be veiled acts of self-preservation rather than pure manifestations of one’s faith and desire to follow God.

In some measure and to some degree, we’d do them to prove to God that we are deserving of heaven and not of hell, as if God trucks in rewards and not in grace, and as if God wouldn’t know that, if we’re honest with ourselves, at least a teensy weensy part of the drive to do good and be good is the hope of being spared rather than scorched.

So that part bugs us Lutherans, yes it does.

And very much along this line, we don’t like equating God to the Big Santa Claus in the Sky, a divine figure with lists of who is naughty and nice.

Luther and Lutherans know that life is messier than those binaries, and God is more nuanced, not to mention charitable, than Santa.

Bonhoeffer, the closest we Lutherans have to a saint, wrestled with this question of the dualistic Good and Bad, not to mention the matter of grace over against works.

His answer—and his execution—was grounded in radical trust in the grace of God over against his own futile efforts to earn it.

But we don’t need to be faced with the stakes of Auschwitz to know something of the wrestle too:

• Does God want us to enjoy a late-Fall hike, to build a bonfire with family, to bake an apple crisp to savor, OR, looking around at all the suffering there is in the world, would God rather that we use that time to volunteer at a food shelf, or advocate for the Least of These, or transform that spare room which no one uses into a space for a homeless person?
• You need a certain phone service or streaming source or retirement investment option, but the more you poke around, the more you learn that the meta-companies fund harm in this world, and so your support of these necessities funds their hate and hurt.
• Do you speak faithful words of prophetic speech from the pulpit as we were baptized and called to do, assuaging the oppressed and suffering but annoying the powerful, or do you remain quiet, to appease the privileged and those who fund the righteous ministries that would be otherwise threatened?
• Do women drink red wine because it is healthy for our hearts, or abstain because alcohol can cause cancer?
• Carbs or no carbs?
• Cloth diapers or disposable?
• Wood heat or propane?
• Be fruitful and multiply or, with an eye toward overpopulation, abstain from bearing children?

Phew.

It’s exhausting to strive for righteousness, or to be righteous, or even to know what righteousness is!

So Luther named all that, and Lutherans claim all that:

• You are justified.
• You can’t accept God, or Jesus as your personal lord and savior for that matter, because God has chosen you.
• You can’t be saved because you already are saved.

Because this theological thrust is so significant to our history and our identity, Lutherans have come to equate the gospel with the statement that our sins are forgiven.

Ask most any Lutheran, lay or otherwise, to preach or identify the gospel, and they will proudly proclaim that we are saved by grace and not works.

We are justified by faith.

And this makes sense, right, because Martin Luther radically re-oriented believers’ trust, wrenching it from faith in ourselves and our own works and to faith in God and God’s mercy.

And this is all right and good and true.

But the trouble is, right and good and true message that the forgiveness of sins is, it isn’t the gospel.

The gospel is that Jesus is risen.

That’s the good news, that’s the thing that makes Christians Christians, that’s the piece that allows Christians to radically enter the world with a new awareness of death and a new definition of life.

Sinfulness is a form of death (obvs), but we are freed from it because Jesus is risen, rendering any death, due to sin or otherwise, ultimately impotent in the face of God’s triumph over it.

See, it’s not like there is some asterisk that hovers next to Jesus’ resurrection leading to some fine print statement that “*some conditions may apply.”

But.

Here’s the thing:

That tendency of ours to trust in grace has made Lutherans almost allergic to works.

We are so acutely aware of how easy it is to fear that God is watching and taking notes, and therefore how a person could be tempted to do a good work in hopes that one would earn an extra notch in our ‘pro’ column, that we have tended to misunderstand grace to mean this:

Because we don’t have to do any good works, we ought not do any good works.

Which, spoiler alert, is malarky.

Lutherans have leaned on grace so much we’ve become prone.

Quiet.

In fact, there’s even a name for it: Lutheran quietism.

We remain still when we could be, should be, at work, stewarding God’s reign in the world.

~~~~~

This brings us to the second text above, the verse from Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

I have long confessed, at the risk of being accused of irreverence (and, to be fair, of actually being irreverent) that I am not a fan of this verse.

But for two reasons, this verse has gotten under my craw.

First, I have had these words said to me—offered in good faith and as good advice—in times when I have been beyond overwhelmed, tapped out, and unable to find a way forward.

These folks meant it well.

But the fact was, had I been still in those times, especially as a single mama of two small and one very wounded children, nothing would have been done by nobody, including by God.

In order for some order to come into the midst of chaos, some reason for hope in the midst of despondency, some actual balm over some actual wound, some body needs to do some thing.

Second, stillness been a dangerous partner to the Lutheran tendency to avoid works and instead to be quiet and trust in God.

The train of thought goes like this: if we don’t have to do any works, because God’s grace prevails, and we do have to be still, because God’s got this, then we can, with God’s blessing, do nothing.

It’s a perfect combination for divinely blessed passivity.

Turns out, though, that the word rendered “still” might not mean what we think it means.

Rather than bidding us to be inert, instead, the word (רפה) rapha is perhaps better understood as “be weak,“ or “be vulnerable,” or “be open,” or “let go.”

In fact, the plural has been used to refer to “the place of the dead.”

See, now I can totally get behind that sort of understanding of ‘still.’

It’s a stillness that is brought about by humility rather than passivity.

It’s a stillness that acknowledges death, but refuses to cede power to it, because we know that God is God, and that this God is a God who brings life out of death, who does not deny our reasons for fear, but who bids us to rise through and above the fear even so.

~~~~~

This Reformation Sunday, one could and should dwell on the grace of God which meets us in the moments of our greatest depravity.

And there is gospel to be found there, to be sure.

If it weren’t for that radical insight, that transformative news that we are:

saved by grace and not by works;

chosen and even as babies sealed by the Holy Spirit in our baptisms;

and justified,

we would have no reason to remember Luther, to celebrate Reformation day, or to live without anything but dire fear of God.

But as grateful as we can be about Luther’s kicker of a theological claim, it is possible that, as people of the Reformation, we could also use this opportunity to reform our definition of the Gospel, and of how we steward that gospel in the world.

It is possible to consider that the gospel, as we’ve typically understood it, is pretty narrow.

So maybe we could use this Reformation Day to reflect on the possibility that:

• Left with Luther’s take on it—key though his take was—we are left with a gospel that is only relevant to the sinners, and not those sinned upon, or who grieve, or who fear, or who hurt, or to the groaning of creation;
• In our reduction of the gospel to the forgiveness of sins, we have also reduced sinfulness to those of the individual, rather than also those of the collective;
• Thanks to Luther’s context (which is not ours) maybe we’ve have focused on the idea of personal post-death salvation, rather than present personal and communal well-being too;
• By focusing on justification we have neglected it’s corollary, namely justice;
• If grace is all there is to say in the matter, it implies that there is little to no need for repentance, and little to no need for judgment;
• Cheap grace means that sinfulness doesn’t matter, because we’re all in, but costly grace claims that although grace wins the day, there is some confession to be offered, some hard truths to be told and heard, and some repentance to be had;
• Lutherans can celebrate Luther’s re-orientation of the Church toward grace, while also, as people who are predisposed to reformation, do some re-orientation of our own toward a new notion of gospel news in today’s context.
• Apart from all conversation and thought about sin, we can engage in joy, delight, appreciation, and celebration of all things beautiful, creative, and which point to the love of God.

Paul was right: we are justified by faith and not by works.

The writer of Psalm 46 was right: we can rest in the trust that we are finite, and that even in the places and times in which we are dead, God is present and active.

Luther was right: we cannot save ourselves, but are already saved.

But this proclamation is also right, and more right than any of these other claims: Jesus is risen.

As followers of Jesus, we trust that death is powerful but not most so; that we follow Jesus into places of death to steward life; and that nothing, nothing in the greatest or in the least, can separate us from the love of God.

(To see me stand even higher on this soapbox, pick up my book I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here We Stand Moment, published by Fortress Press).

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Psalm 22:9-10

Once you’ve been betrayed by someone whom you’ve trusted, two things happen, and it’s hard to know which is most devastating.

First, you learn that this person, or relationship, or institution, or Way Things Have Always Been, render your investment of time, vulnerability, and faith as utterly dismissible, utterly misplaced, and utterly for naught.

Second, you learn that if it’s possible to be betrayed by this one whom you trusted with all your being, it is possible to be betrayed by anyone whom you trust.

With that in tow, you can never trust in the same way again.

You can lose faith in faith.

~~~~~

 The two verses topping the blog come from Psalm 22.

It’s the psalm from which we hear these wrenching words on the dying Jesus’ lips, words lifted from the very first verse of what is nothing less than a hymn of betrayal:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

In these three holy days, we tend to focus on this verse, and perhaps also on the writer’s words a bit further down the psalm’s pike, verses which describe not just the psalmist’s despair, but Jesus’ despair, anguish reflected centuries later in his torment on the cross too.

But this year, it’s the above passage, these two verses quoted at the very top, that won’t let my spirit go.

Look at them again: “Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.”

They’re astonishing.

First, God is identified as a midwife.

A midwife!

This God rendered almost exclusively in the Christian tradition as male, as father, as baptized omnipotent Zeus, here this God is the woman who ‘took’ (but all the more literally, in the Hebrew, ‘pulled’ or ‘yanked’) the child from the womb (belly [!] in Hebrew).

And—as midwives are wont to do—this God knew to bring the safely delivered infant safely to the mother’s breast to suckle.

In that move, God the Midwife provided milk, bonding, and oxytocin to shrink the uterus and calm the spirits of mother and child.

But, magically and suddenly, in the next verse, God the Midwife morphs into God the Mother.

God now becomes the breast-bearer, the life-giver, the embracer.

(And people say that God is male.  Harrumph.)

I often draw people to scriptural references and to theological notions that God is a woman and mother, not because I feel God is female rather than male—God transcends gender—but rather because when one thinks of a woman and a mama one naturally conjures up images of tenderness, of suppleness, of softness, of fierce protection, of enveloping arms and hands that wipe tears and exclaim in joy.

It’s a stark welcome and faithful contrast to images of God the Father, which can be naturally associated with sternness, criticism, judgmentalism, power, authority, and evocable fear. To make the point, for a week—better more—pray to Heavenly Mother rather than Heavenly Father, or Mother God rather than Father God, and see if or how your perception of and relationship to God changes.

So how radical is this: the writer of Psalm 22 grounds their understanding of God as woman, first as midwife, and then as mother.

But how all the more disorienting, then, that it’s this God, this life-creator/life-bringer/life-sustainer/life-cherisher to whom the psalmist cries out for protection, who suddenly, no longer laying the psalmist on the mother’s breast, later lays the hymnist in the “dust of death!”

From life-giving breast to death-dealing dust.

That right there is a betrayal of archetypal power.

And that right there is precisely what Jesus felt on the cross.

For all the times that Jesus called God abba, ‘father,’ at his moment of death, he called to God as imma, as ’mother.’

That’s breathtaking, and breathtakingly tragic.

Reading the texts in these Holy Days, those who loved and followed him felt the same tragic betrayal too.

They knew the psalm.

They trusted Jesus.

They put their faith in them.

They gave their lives to him.

He’d given them new life.

But now, there they were, in the dust at the base of the cross, in the dust of the road bringing his limp body to the tomb, in the dust that swirled as the stone was rolled before the cave’s mouth.

Life to dust, the lot of them.

~~~~~

Holy Saturday is not Easter.

It’s not Good Friday either, of course.

On this day one enters this liminal space between experiencing the bewilderment of betrayal and the recognition that one must trust again to live again.

On this day we encounter the disorienting sensibility of knowing that one has good reason to have lost faith…

…and yet.

See, that’s it.

Holy Saturday is the day of ‘and yets’ and ‘still and even sos’ and ‘neverthelesses.’

It’s a day when, despite it all, one still feels the stirrings of faith pulling oneself into belief—dare we say trust?—that despair must be refused, cynicism must be quashed, hope must be given room to root.

~~~~~

Roman Catholic theologian Anthony Kelly writes:

“Optimism is no bad thing in itself. It is a kind of implicit confidence that things are going well in the present situation…Optimism is happy enough with the system.  In contrast, genuine hope is always ‘against hope.’ It begins where optimism reaches the end of its tether.  Hope stirs when the secure system shows signs of breaking down.  Hope is at home in the world of the unpredictable where no human logic or expectation is in control…In this respect, it is never far from humility, for it acknowledges that in birth and in death…human existence is never a realm of total control.  We are not the center of the universe that has brought us forth, and the ultimate.” (Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, Orbis Press, 2013. P. 5. 

Holy Saturday is a day for honesty and for hope.

Optimism has reached the end of its tether.

Hope, like grace, is what comes about precisely when a very different response seems to be called for, reasonable responses like despair or fear.

But hope bridges the abyss of betrayal and begins to lead one to faith, maybe even joy, again.

~~~~~

Turns out that the psalmist discovers this truth too, even within the confines of the hymn.

This God “did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted,” but rather showed the divine face again, and heard the writer’s cries.

So not only does the psalmist wrap up the hymn by saying “I shall live for him,” but the author speaks of those who are not yet born, of “posterity” and “future generations.”

Betrayal be banished, despair be damned.

That psalmist is throwing his/her/their lot to life.

~~~~~

The truth is we want to rush to that sensation, that posture, that way of being.

We want to rush to Easter.

But the truth also is, the day-to-day truth is, there are good reasons to feel despair, to feel abandoned, to feel betrayed.

Whether we are talking the ravages of illness or of tyrants or of zealots or of capitalists or of victimizers or of cancer, brain injuries, ticks, the stomach flu, and unnecessarily complex tax forms, life is not what we want it to be, and is not what it should be.

I’ll be the first to tell you, no one has a good answer as to why these hardships exist, and if anyone says that they have it figured out, walk away.

There is good reason to feel betrayed by God.

If Jesus felt betrayed, as did the psalmist whose words were in Jesus’ mouth while dying, then so can we.

And yet.

Though I won’t be the first to tell you—that would be the women on Easter morning, thank you very much, not the men, who skedaddled and were content with wallowing despair and self-imposed impotence—I will tell you this:

Brimming with the news that arrives with the dawn of Easter, we know that God is not a God of betrayal but of promise.

We know that God does not will or create suffering but calls life out of it.

We know—by faith and sometimes even by experience—that this is true not just by looking back at God’s intentions as seen in the first stories of creation, but by looking forward to, leaning in to, our own discovery of the empty tomb.

Today, it’s all true.

The disorienting betrayal.

The asphyxiating despair.

The defiant hope.

The anticipatory joy.

Today, and, in fact, every day, the whole lot of it is true.

~~~~~

Commentaries by Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, a womanist theologian who studies the First (Old/Older) Testament; readings by Rev. Dr. Soon-Cha Rah, particularly his book Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times; insights from  Second (New/Newer) Testament Theologian Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope; and insights about the feminine metaphors of God in Psalm 22 as noted by Jonathan D. Parker in The Expository Times, October 19, 2019, in his article “‘My Mother, My God,’ ‘Why Have You Forsaken Me?’: An Exegetical Note on Psalm 22 as Christian Scripture,” were not only helpful for my reflection on these Holy Three Days, but also are worth the read—especially by white and white male Christians—to be all the more informed and enriched by womanist, black, Asian, and feminist theologians and theological perspectives.

These good and faithful proclaimers were hoping I could perhaps offer a bit of an overview of the themes of this year’s Epiphany texts, and so I gave it a decent whirl; they’ll be the judge of whether the whirl was worthy!

I love Epiphany, as an aside, though I fear that it’s the season that, when we breezily rattle off the liturgical year, we say, “and…and…wait…there’s one more…give me a sec….”

Advent and Christmas we get, and Lent is easy.

It’s possible that we might overlook Easter as an actual season rather than just a Feast Day, but no one forgets Pentecost: its stretch is interminable.  I once knew a pastor who, at the tail end of the season, would give up the count and just date his bulletins with “The Umpteenth Sunday after Pentecost!”

But Epiphany…were it a person, I’d fret that it might have a complex.

It’s a bit ironic, because Epiphany is the season of God-Made-Knowings, of God Made Manifest, of catching sightings of God’s intention for and Word to the world.

Still, when we do think about Epiphany, we tend to think about miracles (as in our text tomorrow, the changing of the water into wine…though, not a minor quibble, the Greek does not call it a miracle but rather a sign of the reign of God, but that’s for another blog…) or undeniable bursts of God’s radiating light, as on Transfiguration Sunday.

But as I prepped for this group, the texts for next Sunday and the Sunday following (the Third and Fourth Sundays after the Epiphany, January 23rd and 30th, respectively) were the ones that particularly caught my attention.

The passages run from Luke 4:14-21, and then (interestingly, picking up again with the exact last verse of the previous week, but more on that in a moment) Luke 4:21-30.

Luke 4:14-21 tells us of Jesus, the rock star come home.  People were fanning and fawning all over the guy upon his return to Nazareth, and so followed him to his first stop, his favorite haunt: the Synagogue.

There, he was given a scroll from which to read.

Jesus’ eyes fell upon these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

All 21st century influencers should take note and pointers from what Jesus did next.

The guy rolled up the scroll, Luke tells us, and he handed it away, and he sat down.

He. Sat. Down.

And, says Luke, “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”

Of course they were.

Jesus had them exactly where he wanted them and he knew it.

Over two thousand years later, our eyes are still fixed on him.

But Jesus wasn’t done.

“Today,” he announced, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Mic. Drop.

In him, Jesus said, the expectations that the people of Israel had held all of these years, the words of Isaiah’s that they had treasured in hope, namely that the poor would receive good news, the enslaved would be released, the blind would be healed, and the oppressed would be free, were fulfilled and went down.

And that’s where the text ends.

With that line.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That’s all we’re given as an epiphanic moment.

Jesus is the one for whom we’ve been waiting, and Jesus brings equity, recovery, and freedom.

This sounds awesome, right?

Who doesn’t want that?

Well, our next week’s text tells us exactly who.

~~~~~

So the next week, namely the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany (January 30th), our Gospel reading begins with this same verse and these same words!

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In a moment of wisdom, the creators of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) made an overt point of linking the previous week’s text with this one. (Well done RCL!)

So, Luke goes out of his way to note that initially, “all spoke well of him.”

Heck.

Of course they did.

Christians, all of us, speak well of Jesus.

And so we should, right? After all, we say we follow him, and so speaking well of Jesus seems to follow too.

But then the well-speaking ceased.

Why?

Jesus began to tell of the consequences of this text from Isaiah, and the consequences for those who opt to throw their lot in with Jesus, the fulfiller of these words, the one over whom the crowd had just ooh-ed and ahh-ed while nudging each other saying, “I knew him when he was running around in swaddling cloths just around his bum!”

When they listend, really listened, this is what they heard:

The ‘outsider’ widow rather than the Hebrew insiders was visited by Elijah.

Moreover, Elisha didn’t heal a Jew, but rather a Syrian.

A Syrian!

And in a flash, dots were connected.

Jesus has no time for privilege.

Jesus rejects exclusion.

Jesus is beyond over the presence of hunger, unhealed disease, or loneliness.

Jesus would like a word with those—especially those who purport to be God-fearers—who foster or remain silent in the face of any of it.

Jesus has an eye turned toward systems which uphold inequity, and is here to take. them. down.

So.

From that point on, it pretty much went as you’d expect, especially these days:

“When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.  They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”

No, keep in mind, right, that these were the very same people who had sat in rapt attention of Jesus’ words, believing him to be a righteous and holy man.

They leaned in to hear him speak the Word of God.

They said they wanted a revelation.

Yes they did.

But what they, namely the people who have access to money, to health, to privilege, to power—and therefore what a good lot of we—instead got was a revelation of a revolution.

See, who chased Jesus out of town and toward that cliff?

Everyone who was going to distinctly not benefit from his revelation, that’s who.

These (we) are the people who refused to hear or see God Made Manifest because to hear, see, and act on this God means that they (we) have to open up hands to release power, open up hearts to welcome the stranger, open up our minds to a new way, to new systems, and to an entirely new way of being that solely reflects the reign of God.

It’s not to be missed that these are pretty much a decent chunk of people who sit in the pews of most mainstream churches, or have crafted how denominations are structured, or who make up the rules and regulations of our nation.

When God’s revelation, it seems, is of a revolution, we tend to run representatives and representations of Jesus right on out of wherever he and we are.

~~~~~

So as I sat with these texts, and how his revelation—pronounced before people who asked him for it—played out, a couple of distinct but related thoughts occurred to me.

1) Although we think of Epiphany as a gentle season of illumination, of the presence of God appearing in our midst, of our lives being brightened by God’s Word, these texts from Luke suggest that we might not actually, when you get right down to it, want or welcome God’s revelation.

In fact, we’ve got a pretty good track record of doing everything we can to squelch it, ignore it, or kill it.

This Epiphany season, then, might be an opportunity to ask whether we really want an epiphany, like we pietistically say we do, or if, when Jesus enters our community, our room, our lives, we only want him speaking as long as his revelations are just manifestations of affirmations of how things are streaming along just fine, thank you.

2) It is possible that, despite the assumptions that the Epiphany of God comes with sweetness and light, an Epiphany of God might come in the form of us crumpled up in tears huddled at the end of a couch realizing we can’t do x, y, or z anymore; it might reveal itself in a fit of anger as we see for the first time an injustice; it might appear in the form of the dissolution of a relationship, a work relationship, an institution’s structure; it might occur in Sidon, in Syria, and in the secular streets (as my friend and former professor Dr. Don Luck, I believe it was, said, “Women’s ordination didn’t finally come about in the ‘70s because a bunch of male theologians gathered in a closed room to swill bourbon while they discussed the biblical and theologian reasons for ordaining women—though there are plenty of those. No, women were ordained because bras were being burned in the streets!”

Perhaps, that is, when we see the limits of structures we’ve known and loved, when we see our own limits, when we realize that whatever is burdening our spirits or others’ well-being is simply neither sustainable nor just, that’s not when we are being abandoned by God.

It’s when we are seeing God.

You say you want a revelation?

Get ready for a revolution.