~~~~~

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).

“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.

He did, however, love to talk about the laity, whom, he believed, by virtue of their being baptized, were also therefore priests.

As far as Luther saw, and all who consequentially call ourselves Lutherans, all Christians have equal access and standing before God, regardless of whether they are called and ordained to service specifically in the church.

In Luther’s thought, there was no room or welcome for any hierarchy of holiness or blessedness or sanctify-edness, common teachings in both his day and ours, all of which suggest that some people are some how closer to God than others.

In fact, it’s one of the reasons that Luther was behind pulling the altar out away from the wall. The resurrection means that the altar is no longer a place of sacrifice for anything but praise.

So now it’s a table, around which all are invited to sit.

If you get closer to it and the wall behind you are not therefore getting closer to God.

Nope.

All are justified, said Luther, all are equal, all are loved, all are welcome before God, no matter where you sit, where you stand, what you’ve done, or what you do.

~~~~~

Now, to be clear, Luther wasn’t knocking either the expertise or the calling of the priests, or, as we call them now, pastors, as well as rostered leaders.

Luther wasn’t like those of our day who disdain experts in any given field (but somehow see no problem with conveniently appointing themselves as self-declared experts in their stead).

In fact, Luther argued that those in the pews are called to respect the office and role of those called to preach and teach the Word of God and administer the sacraments. Such people have been trained as resident rabbis, in essence, and have some things to teach and encourage that others are called to learn and absorb.

But likewise, Luther made a point of teaching that that street goeth both ways. “Every occupation has its own honor before God as well as its own requirements and duties…All the estates and works of God…are to be praised as highly as they can be, and none despised in favor of another” (LW 46:246).

What Luther was teaching here, of course, was radical for his day: those who are not ordained have the same authority and power of the Gospel within them as do those trained to be priests, and, in fact, duty to serve one another as priests of God.

Relatedly, in Lutheran liturgy, “assisting ministers” are not assisting the pastor in leading their worship, but rather, as lay people, assisting ministers assist the laity in offering their worship.

But here’s the thing that is on my mind this Reformation Weekend:

Right now, many of those called to be rostered leaders very much need those who are called to be laity to, well, to come to their assistance, actually.

Why?

So that these rostered leaders can live out their vocation, and stay well doing so, and even just plain stay.

I do believe that it’s a real possibility that the laity might very well have an additional call in these days, which is to give their rostered leaders some love and care in the form of active, vocal, tender, real support and help.

As in Big Time.

~~~~~

Here’s the situation in a nutshell.

Pastors have been called by the church at large and by congregations specifically to preach and teach and administer the sacraments.

It sounds like a great gig.

What could be tough about telling people about God’s love and baptizing babies and comforting people in their losses and getting ample cookies and coffee to boot?

But people, it’s really, really hard.

And these last few years, for many upon many, it’s been not just hard but excruciating, depleting, overwhelming, and mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually breaking.

A vast number of your church leaders are absolutely beyond spent.

If they haven’t already, many are contemplating leaving not just their immediate calls but their Call writ large, if not considering up and leaving the Church entirely.

I’m not making it up: we have a crisis on our hands, and rostered leaders desperately need lay ministers to assist them to simply hang in there another day.

~~~~~

Here’s the general scoop:

Rostered leaders understand their call not to be that they are called to serve their congregations, but to serve the gospel in their congregations.

It’s a whole different thing, you see, if you do the latter instead of the former.

If rostered leaders serve their congregations, then they become beholden to what the congregation says should happen: they become, in essence, an employee of the congregation and not a servant of Christ.

But if they serve the gospel, well…look what happened to Jesus and you get an idea of what can, and often times does, go down.

So I think any reasonable person can see why, for some time—as in decades, if not centuries—rostered leaders have opted to serve congregations instead.

But let me say at the top of my lungs: these rostered leaders are not base.

They are savvy and smart and they love their congregations and their families and they know the cost of following Jesus is really, really high, and they went into this calling even so.

These leaders get to know their particular place and their particular people and their collective stories and dreams, and rostered leaders overwhelmingly do this with sincerity and authenticity and deep love.

It’s an honorable, noble thing.

But there’s this other piece, right, this bit that generally speaking, rostered leaders have not wanted to rock the boat so very much, because it gets messy fast.

So we’ve opted to keep the boat stable (though arguably not moving it much either, and statistics tell us that more and more people are up and getting out of the boat) via the blessing of the Lutheran tradition which pretty much has summed up the gospel in a faithfully Lutheran, relatively easy thing to preach and hear: your sins are forgiven.

Who doesn’t want to hear that?

Everyone wants to hear that.

No one gets mad at that—unless, I suppose, you realize that everyone from your bum of a neighbor to someone who has truly harmed you to people who facilitate systems which generate oppression also get forgiveness.

That rankles.

But we can get through that, really.

That’s fairly easy.

The tough stuff is the stuff that has to do with all the other things Jesus was about: feeding everyone, healing everyone, welcoming everyone, clothing everyone, visiting everyone, teaching everyone, and so on and so forth.

And that he said follow me.

That super duper rankles, especially because these same sorts of pieces are the headline news pieces of our culture and politics of the day, and so it’s easier and safer to just stick with Jesus loves you no matter what.

You’re not lying. It’s true.

It’s just not the whole kit and kaboodle, and silence about that truth has been and is harmful to the Church and to those who need that word to be spoken and heard.

~~~~~

For reasons that are, for lack of a better word (though the irony isn’t lost on me) justified, rostered leaders haven’t preached this piece with wild abandon, this truth that the gospel also means that, no longer afraid of death, and assured that no matter what we and all are saved by grace, we are freed to serve Jesus’ agenda rather than our own.

And that means that Christians are called to act always always always always on behalf of the Least of These, which frees the least from their least-ness and, as it turns out, the greatest from their greatness.

How the gospel washes out for the greatest is the kicker, of course.

Because of that, we haven’t done a great job so very much in teaching that that sort of message isn’t only spiritual, only theoretical, but it affects everything we do and say and are, just as it did Jesus, and just as it did Jesus’ followers, and just as it did those in the early Church.

Our faith claims all of all of us.

So, frankly, who can blame rostered leaders for keeping this sort of news on the DL?

Even if you take out the obvious and universal truth that conflict is not so very often on the Fun Scale, so let’s stay away from that then, there are real risks in preaching the implications of the Gospel.

People, especially wealthy people, will stop coming.

They will stop giving.

They will leave.

And when they do, congregations can’t cover a mortgage.

Can’t cover lights.

Can’t cover heat.

Can’t cover Sunday school supplies.

Can’t cover paying the youth director, the secretary, the custodian, and can’t cover the pastoral staff.

And that means that the youth director, the secretary, the custodian, and the pastoral staff can’t cover their own mortgages, lights, heat, or school supplies.

They also can’t cover the educational loans that they took out to get them in this prophetic pickle to begin with.

And the church also can’t cover the needs of the Least of These, like food shelves, homeless shelters, and support for the needy near and far which tithes and people bring into being.

That’s not even mentioning the annual reports that need to be turned in which request to know how many people are in the pews and how many offerings have been taken in—both relevant metrics if you are serving a congregation, but neither relevant metrics if you are serving the gospel.

Nor is it even mentioning the stresses and strains of Covid, which have pitted rostered leaders between their call to preserve life and also to hold worship, as well as pitting them between those who are pro-masks, pro-vaccines, and pro-virtual worship until this horrid Covid-thing is over, against those who are anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-anything that isn’t in person and as it always was.

And let’s put back in that conflict, some of it quite hostile, even the mundane stuff, not to mention the rising anger these days that the pastor is getting too political…to which the preacher sighs, and even cries, and says for the countless time, “It’s biblical. Take it up with Jesus that they are political biblical texts.  I’m simply doing what you called me to do. I’m preaching the texts. And I’m inviting you to live into your baptismal promises to follow Jesus, which is also what you called me to do.”

To make it all the more intense, we are sitting in a political, cultural, social, economic storm like no other, and within a Church which—across denominations—was already declining even before Trump and Covid hit the early 21st Century scene.

It’s a horrible, horrible bind in which these rostered leaders, called by the Church, are stuck.

They are pitted between preaching the gospel and thereby sabotaging the church and their call, or preaching that everything is awesome and sabotaging the gospel and their integrity.

Here’s the wrenching piece of it: every single person who holds any of the above convictions, every single one of these people, is a member of any given congregation.

So how do you serve the congregation when it is split?

You don’t.

You serve the gospel instead of the congregation.

That’s the right answer, of course.

As if that’s easy.

Just ask Jesus how slick that works.

~~~~~

Many laity, especially conservative laity, have felt in recent years as if they have been hoodwinked, played, duped, double-crossed, bait-and-switched, and/or betrayed by the Church.

The Church, they think, has done one of two things:

a) Strayed from what it has been, an oasis of kindness where we hear that Jesus loves you and that we are forgiven;

b) Misrepresented itself all along, now maintaining that the gospel has always been about social justice and advocacy as much as justification.

To be honest, I think their anger is on point and right.

I think that the Church hasn’t been forthright about what it is called to be and what rostered leaders are called to do.

No wonder that so many people are rankled with their church, their congregation, and their rostered leaders.

For all the above reasons and more, we were supposed to tell them and, on balance, for all the above reasons and more, we didn’t.

No wonder people are ticked.

And no wonder rostered leaders are so very, very tired.

They’re doing their work and the work that should have been done for generations before them.

~~~~~

So here are but three reasons why many rostered leaders really could use the assistance of the laity.

1) They are stuck, as in Catch-22-ain’t-got-nothin’-on-their-daily-reality stuck, between the weights of the expectations of the congregation and the weights of the calling of the gospel.

They are legit afraid about the consequences for their congregations, and for themselves, and for their families, if they do what they believe they were called to do.

2) They know, deeply know, of scriptural and more recent mentors of the faith, like Bonhoeffer, and Kaj Munk,and MLK, and Seminex students and faculty, and people who have spoken up on behalf of the ordination of women, and courageous leaders in the GLBTQIA community, all who have with great risk to themselves and their families and their congregations said “Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me.”

And they can’t do the same.

And they feel horrible about it, as in deep in their soul despondent about it.

3) They are coursing with cortisol, and have no time or way to expunge their bodies of the stress.

Too much cortisol, it is no lie, causes all sorts of threats to mental health, physical health, and it can even shorten one’s life.

Rostered leaders are stretched beyond healthy limits, and they have few if any ways to get healthy, because they are called to serve in a congregational call which, paradoxically and painfully, won’t easily let them live out their call.

So here are but three ways that the priesthood of all believers could really minister to the rostered leaders.

1) If you are supportive of your called leaders, and moreover want to hear them preach and teach the implications of the gospel all the more fervently, then please, tell them.

Make an appointment.

If you know of others in your congregation who feel as do you, connect with them and together saturate your rostered leader with private and public support.

Let them and let others in your congregation know that you are grateful for their vision, their courage, and their faithfulness to gospel news and claims.

2) Up your support, in every way: financial, moral, spiritual, tangible, and in presence.

Even, and this is a big Woah Nellie for many Lutherans, even applaud during or after a sermon if you hear something especially gospel bold.

Seriously, we have come to this people.

Lutherans applauding in worship.

It’s that bad.

3) Give your rostered leaders more vacation time, continuing ed time and money, make them meals, gift them with cards to coffee and, for that matter, liquor stores.

Not making it up.

4) Ask them how they are, not as in the perfunctory after worship sort of way, but really.

Listen to them.

Receive what they say.

Perhaps people reading this could add more suggestions in the comments, but I’m calling it a wrap now, because even I can see that the blog has already gotten too long.

But the upshot is this:

Reformation Day reminds us of the good news that we are justified.

Alas, only in recent years have we been prompted to recall that that good news also means that we are freed to be sent out to advocate for and to enact justice.

Privileged people, which, to be honest, is what most of the ELCA membership is, like hearing about justification way more than justice.

But right now, I believe that the priesthood of all believers is called to announce to their rostered leaders, loudly, publicly, unabashedly, that they are called to preach both.

Justification and justice.

And while you’re at it, please let your rostered leaders know that you have their baptized, called, sent, and justified backs.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Matthew 13:34

~~~~~

Thinker and commentator Heather McGhee has her fingers on the pulse of politics and economics, but feels for the blood of racism flowing through both.

This morning, she posted this piece: Witnesses Should Not Have to Apologize for Not Saving George Floyd.

McGhee can’t shake the wrenching words and tears from those on the witness stand, innocent people who saw Derick Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, citizens who were going about their normal day-to-days: shopping, strolling, working, and even simply being a nine-year-old girl who simply happened to be standing right there simply wearing the T-shirt she picked out that day: “LOVE,” it said, simply, across the front.

She noticed the guilt that wracked these people, that cracked their composure on the stand when they had to reenact what happened on that day, a day that began in an ordinary way, when they were ordinary people going about their ordinary business until the moment when they couldn’t counteract the killing.

They couldn’t save George Floyd—even though they tried.

They couldn’t, McGhee points out, because of the law of the land which threatened them as much as it did George Floyd.

“In the middle of the night,” she writes, “I lay awake wondering: What are all the laws and institutions that stop us from being able to do what our humanity cries out for us to do? To protect one another, to cherish the lives of our neighbors?”

It’s a Maundy Thursday set of questions.

~~~~~

Today is called Maundy Thursday, Maundy being directly related to the word ‘Commandment,’ meaning, well…commandment. The original Latin is mandatum (hence, also ‘mandate’) and carried then sense of a “legal order.”

So in the sphere of the liturgical church, we pay this day attention because on it, Jesus gave two new commandments, two, if you will, new laws, i.e., “Do this,” namely give thanksgiving to God and share Holy Communion with one another (see 1 Corinthians 11:23-25); and love one another as God has loved us.

But in McGhee’s sphere, she pays attention to every day.

She pays attention to how the commandments, that is how the laws, of prevailing systems circumvent, supersede, suppress what those in the Christian tradition might see as God’s Maundy Thursday law (though rooted far into the Old Testament) to love God and love your neighbor.

It’s difficult no matter what, sometimes, but she knows it’s especially difficult always if you aren’t white.

McGhee begins her article by speaking of empathy, this remarkable capacity with which humans have been given to know someone else’s perspective, to care about someone else’s experience, to feel someone else’s emotions, and to therefore be invested in them.

But in this case, it’s exactly empathy which causes these ordinary people extraordinary pain: they knew George Floyd’s helplessness, they cared about his life slipping away, they felt his fear, and they were invested in saving his life.

See, I think these witnesses did exactly as God commanded.

They loved George Floyd powerfully.

In that moment, even though they’d never known him, these children of God, loved by God, loved George Floyd.

And oh, did it, does it, hurt.

~~~~~

On that first Maundy Thursday, Jesus wanted the disciples to understand that love is risky.

He was not talking saccharine Precious Moments-like love here.

Jesus was talking about the sort of love that recognizes that every moment is precious, and every moment is precarious, and every moment calls us to passionate love.

Christians call this week “Passion Week.”

It causes some head tilts, because the word ‘passion’ is typically associated with sensual, sexual love.

But it’s rooted in the Latin word passionem, which means suffering.

To love is to suffer.

These people, these unwitting witnesses and would-be rescuers, they loved George Floyd and they suffered for it.

Any of us listening to this trial are also suffering, for we have come to love both George Floyd and these bystanders, and we suffer for our love.

~~~~~

McGhee ends her reflections on the witnesses who have wept on the stand with this observation and this question:

“We are all bystanders. How are we going to take our stand?”

I think what she’s saying is this: We are all witnesses to injustice, all the time.

I think what she’s asking is this: How are we going to love?

This Maundy Thursday, I think Jesus is saying and asking much the same thing.

It has been far too long since I have blogged!

Covid—not the virus, but the consequences of its broad scale havoc played out in our little world—has claimed our family’s attention, complicated by a significant three-fer brain, spine, and abdominal surgery for my son in mid-July, which happily resolved issues that have been causing us consternation and deep concern for about ten months.

We’re just now catching our breath, right in time for the breathless beginning of school—however that will look!

While I haven’t been able to write as I’d like, I do have several blogs in my mental queue.

But the below is the first of several in the upcoming weeks that I’ll put forth.

It’s a sermon I preached last Sunday, August 30th, at my beloved home congregation, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church.

You can find the video of the worship service here, although it is a trimmed version of what I have written below.  The sermon begins at 33:30 into the service.

Here is also an audio link of the sermon, recorded while I was sitting crouched on the floor in a second-floor very Harry-Potter-esque and quite full closet, because my beloved 83-year-old father was downstairs, bamming nails into a floor he’s brilliantly installing for us, because he’s amazing.

So if you don’t watch the video, that scene can be your substitute visual!

In it, with great assists from Soroya Chemaly, Hannah Arendt, and, of course, the texts (found at the end of this blog, from Jeremiah, and the Psalms, and Paul, and Matthew) of the day and the contexts of the day, I fuss with the uncertain, uncomfortable relationship Christians have with anger.

Despite our reluctance to express, let alone recognize, our own anger, anger itself is a force for justice, a calibration to righteousness, and a rejection of acquiescence to the powerful and corrupt.

In the texts from the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, we hear that very notion powerfully expressed, in more ways than one, from Jesus.

With that:

~~~~~

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

Siblings in Christ, we Christians, we have an anger problem.

And our problem with anger, our anger issue, is that we have no idea what to do with anger.

And I am here to say that, at first blush at least, the texts for today are not in the least helpful to us to sort matters out.

Jeremiah, in not one of his most bright-spirited, optimistic moments, prays for retribution upon his enemies, and lays the reasons for his own indignation squarely at God’s feet.

And not mincing a single word or leaving anything to the imagination, the psalmist condemns the worthless—among whom, he makes a point of noting, he has not “sat” (using a Hebrew word which doesn’t mean, literally, to ‘sit’ with, like on a bus or park bench or coffee hour table, but rather “hung out with,” or, more starkly, “became like,”) nor did he cozy up with the deceitful, and moreover, the psalmist even ‘hates’—hates!—the evildoers!

That all seems to give anger some room to do its thing, and with some measure of divine blessing.

But then along comes Paul, far more placid, far more diplomatic—and far more pleasing to and resonant in our ears—who speaks not of hating the evildoers but of hating evil, and of living in peace, of feeding enemies and giving them refreshment, and of overcoming evil with good.

And yet along comes Jesus, who seems to have known the freedom of Jeremiah and the psalmist, and he steamrolls right in to our lectionary on this day, this paradigm of love, this model of benevolence, seen in our collective minds’ eye as laughing with his head thrown back, as gently carrying that lost and forlorn sheep, as gathering the (always well-behaved) children around him, we see this one whirling around to Peter, the one he’d just called the Rock, and up and call him a stumbling block, of all things, instead. 

Like, clever as that is, what an epic slam: from rock to block. 

But even more shocking, Jesus bellows out, “Get behind me SATAN!” 

Satan! 

He called Peter Satan!

Were Matthew to have had a wide-eyed emoji at hand, he would have totally whipped it out onto the sheepskin parchment, right here, I tell you what.

Yet as often as not, we hear the text read, “Get behind me, Satan.”

But if you have enough energy to say those sorts of words, you absolutely have enough energy to yell them.

Get behind me Satan, said our Lord Jesus, the Christ, to Peter. 

That is not Minnesota nice. 

That is not tactful. 

That is not “appropriate.”

How, we might wonder, as these days is often expressed with a shaking head and scolding finger and with wishes for civility instead of anger, how will Jesus win Peter to his side if he raises his voice?

If he speaks so bluntly?

If he speaks truth?

If he calls a thing what it is is?

He should just be nice.

~~~~~

So what’s the collective Scriptural take-away here?

Is anger ok or not? 

Is rage holy or unrighteous?

It’s a question, of course, that’s presently pressing upon us politically, culturally, socially, and even within our own families. 

En masse, we are in every one of those very spheres steeped in anger, like a bag of tea left too long in the cup, the hot beverage becoming thick and bitter.

But we tend drink it, we drink it anyway, lips pursed in both disgust and forced politeness. 

“No, no, it tastes fine, really,” we say, swallowing the sludge down with a taut smile.

Everything is fine.

Everything is awesome, we say politely.

In fact, of course, everything is everything but fine, and few things are awesome.

~~~~~

So our ambivalence about anger has to do with many things, I believe.

Politeness, for one: it is not polite to be angry. 

Anger is not nice.

And in the land famous (infamous?) for being nice, being angry is out of decorum, is a breach of ethic, it defies the code.

And anger causes conflict…though more precisely, this perceived emotional problem child is only recognizing and naming conflict.

Anger forces people to wrestle in the open with disagreement, to own what one says and to dispute that which is claimed by another.

Anger is neither pleasant nor pretty: red faces, raised voices, rapid pulses, and sometimes irreparable breaches.

And so it is better, we tend to think, it is in fact best, of course, to gloss the problem over.

To ignore it.

To pretend it doesn’t exist. 

But here’s the thing.

The reasons for the anger do exist. 

There are legitimate reasons, not least of all during these deeply troubled, troubling days, to be angry, and, like Jeremiah, like the psalmist, to be angry precisely in the very name of God.

See, I read Paul’s words and I worry about the women and girls who perhaps just last night, perhaps even this morning, have been abused verbally, physically, emotionally, sexually by men in their lives, by people who should be trusted but have squandered that privilege, and they come to hear the Word of God on Sunday which, they might think, tells them to bring their abuser another latte to them in the early morning and it will get better, promise. 

And I want to say to them: wait! Wait! 

No, no, that’s not what Paul meant. 

That’s not what God meant. 

You are not meant to be harmed. 

You, too, are to be loved, to be tended, to be safe.

Instead Paul’s words are, in part, a promise to not doubt that God knows justice, and will wield it.

It’s a reminder to, as Michelle Obama so famously said, go high when they go low.

Do not sit with them.

Do not become like them.

Do not let your anger be denied so that you lose hope and lose yourself.

~~~~~

It turns out that the more that we suppress our anger, that we gloss it over, that we stay silent instead of speaking up with righteous indignation at wrongs in the world at large or in our small, personal world, the more we end up protecting those causing harm rather than those suffering it—including ourselves.

We write them a carte blanche, we give them a pass, there are no repercussions for their actions, we allow it and thereby endorse, and empower, whatever it is that in fact is reason for, gives root to, legitimate, righteous anger.

But even that, even that, isn’t quite the full story, because a competing truth is that the more that we suppress our anger, that we gloss it over, that we stay silent instead of speaking up with righteous indignation, we even leave the harm-causers vulnerable to their own harm.

Our silence, our fake smiles, our let’s-pretend-that-didn’t-happens, our it’s-best-to-be-nice-s, it all continues not only to allow the sufferers to continue to suffer, but it continues the harm-inflicters to continue to harm. 

They never know it’s not ok. 

They never see the pain that they inflict on others and therefore that they inflict on themselves.

The “pinned tweet” on the ELCA Twitter page says about the rampant killings of black people, “This is an existential threat to people of color. It must be an existential threat to white people too.”

So who’s gonna tell ‘em?

Someone’s got to tell them.

~~~~~

Recently, for some research on a project I’ve got before me, I picked up Soroya Chemaly’s book Rage Becomes Her. Chemaly has dived into the study of women’s anger: the way we suppress it, the way it is disdained and disallowed by the world, and how instead we, and the world, ought rather to pay acute attention to it. 

In 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin in 2012, Alicia Garza inadvertently founded the Black Lives Matter movement, simply by ending a Facebook post rueing the verdict with the words “black lives matter.” Seven years later, with the hashtag #BLM, adorned with T-shirts and pins and bumper stickers, people are walking the streets, kneeling in stadiums, postponing games, and, moreover, painfully, still needing to.

Chemaly spoke with Garza about her activism, and what inspires her to engage with the Powers That Be. Garza replied, “Anger at injustice is one part of what motivates me. But it is not a sustainable emotion in and of itself. It has to be transformed into a deep love for the possibility of who we can be. Anger can be a catalyst, but we cannot function on anger alone. When it’s not used properly, it can quickly become destructive. That’s why love is important: love connects us to what we most care about; what we yearn for,” (251).

See, says Garza, and Chemaly throughout her entire book, anger is an emotion that lets a person know that something is off: there is an unacceptable distance between what is and what should be. Justice is wanting, and righteousness is therefore too.

And anger is an indication that you care enough to notice, to react, and to do something about it.

But what is the ‘ït?’ 

What deserves anger?

Our texts today begin to give us some ideas.

The anger with which the texts dance is not capricious anger, is not petty anger, is not anger that is mistaken for aggression or unhinged, unfounded violence.

It is righteous indignation based not on our evaluations of what should be vs. what is, but on God’s.

Jesus hauled off and called out Peter, with the added nice-touch detail of calling him ‘Satan,’ because Peter didn’t believe that following Jesus means you’re going to run into discomfort, awkward moments, conflict, and even death.

He still didn’t grasp that Jesus’ ways are not the world’s, by and large.

Arguably, we who call ourselves Christians still don’t either.

For example: 

Jesus welcomed strangers, and exhorted us to too. 

Instead, we build walls. 

Jesus said to let the children come to him. 

Instead, we put them in cages and tear them from their parents. 

Jesus said to feed the hungry. 

Instead, we cut SNAP funding.

Jesus said to heal the sick. 

Instead, we scream at employees who insist that customers wear masks, and we create policies which make access to health care an impossibility for the poor and unemployed.

Jesus said to love our neighbors, and instead we segregate neighborhoods.

It is outrageous.

While Jesus was informed by his heavenly father, let’s be clear: his earthly mama shaped him too, this woman who declared in the name of God that the powerful did not deserve their thrones but deserved rather to be thrown from them, that the rich would learn of emptiness while the poor would learn what it is to be sated, that the proud would be humbled and the humble would know pride.

She understood the agenda of God. 

She spoke uncomfortable truth.

She lays out the grounds for righteous indignation: where you see disparity in any of these ways, there is reason to rise up in holy anger, because if you do not, you acquiesce to evil or succumb to a dangerous, willful obliviousness to it. 

Peter, of course, Peter knew the risks.

He knew that the powers that like things the way they are do not like to have holy, and contrary, truth pointed out. 

Peter knew that if Jesus felt it incumbent upon him to, as years later brother Martin Luther would say, “call a thing what it is,” he’d die.

And we can’t have that.

But here’s the thing: one of the most harmful tendencies of the Christian Church is to spiritualize death, or at the least, to restrict it to “taking a last breath.”

Any of us know, however, any of us who have an aversion to, say, anger, we know you don’t need to croak to die. 

Speaking out, calling out, being outraged at injustice will cause death. 

That’s a promise.

Righteous anger can and will cause the death of friendships, of love relationships, of familial relationships, of collegial relationships, of Facebook friends, of security on any number of levels. 

But here’s the freeing thing: naming evil can also bring death to evil.

You expose evil for what it is.

Rather than allowing injustice to prevail at the expense of the least of these, who depend on your voice—and let us not forget that you yourself might deserve your anger on your own behalf—, rather than trusting the power of death more than you are trusting the promise of life, rather than ceding death a win, your anger can recalibrate a situation so that it is aligned not with evil, not with death, but with gospel hope and life.

See, here’s the thing that Jesus knew, and what he longed that Peter knew, and that I long for Christians to know is this: the Gospel is not “be nice.” 

The Gospel is not “avoid conflict.” 

The Gospel is that Jesus is risen from the dead. 

And, if that is true, as my mentor Walt Bouman said time and time again, “Now that you know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.” 

“Now that you know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.” 

When, that is, when we refuse to give expression to our anger, we are preserving our lives, and we are preserving, we are protecting, the power of death. 

That’s no way for a Christian to be, for we are resurrection people. 

We live according to the call of Jesus, which, as this text makes clear, will call us to death, but which also calls us to life.

Jesus was angry with Peter because when push came to shove, quite literally, in the end, Peter trusted death rather than Jesus.  

When our mouths stay silent, when we let dysfunctional systems stay intact, when our silence, our our apathy, or our pleasant smiles allow leaders and those who support them to, for example, pass white supremacists as very fine people, we are no better than Peter.

And you can bet that Jesus is not saying to us gently, sweetly, nicely, “Get behind me Satan.” 

He’s bellering it out! To us! “GET BEHIND ME SATAN!”

Because Satan, the ambassador of death, lives off of benign silence and feigned politeness.

That’s how Satan gets its power.

 A Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke of that very thing when she detailed the Nürnberg Trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s Nazis, and an architect of the Holocaust.

Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil,” as she mused about how ordinary people, folks like you and me, can empower totalitarian regimes of hate, racism, bigotry, and violence.

Evil can become, and in some cases arguably has become ordinary. The norm. Tolerable.

But not if you follow Jesus.

Chemaly writes, “Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility.” (xx) “In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth…Anger is the expression of hope” (295).

Anger is the expression of hope. 

Now there’s a plot twist.

Sort of like the dead guy rising again.

See, when we are angry, whether we realize it or not, we are announcing to ourselves and to the world both truth and that there must be a better way. 

And as Christians, we announce to ourselves and to the world that we know that there is a better way, for our selves, for those crushed by systems of violence, degradation, bigotry, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-absorption, and also by those who wield such things with finesse, willfulness, and neither compunction nor consequence. 

Anger, that is, is just as Chemaly, just as Jeremiah, just as the Psalmist, just as Jesus, and if you squint, even Paul in this text says, anger is an indication that something is not right. 

And if it is not right, it is not righteous. 

And if it is not righteous, it is an ambassador of some form of death. 

And Christians, in contrast, are ambassadors of life, are those who defy death, are those who call a thing what it is, are those who get angry, and in so doing, do not reward evil with evil, but rather reward it with goodness and truth and life.

~~~~~

The Texts for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, August 30, 2020

FIRST READING                                                  Jeremiah 15:15-21

15O Lord, you know;
remember me and visit me,
and bring down retribution for me on my persecutors.
In your forbearance do not take me away;
know that on your account I suffer insult.
16Your words were found, and I ate them,
and your words became to me a joy
and the delight of my heart;
for I am called by your name,
O Lord, God of hosts.
17I did not sit in the company of merrymakers,
nor did I rejoice;
under the weight of your hand I sat alone,
for you had filled me with indignation.
18Why is my pain unceasing,
my wound incurable,
refusing to be healed?
Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook,
like waters that fail.
19Therefore thus says the Lord:
If you turn back, I will take you back,
and you shall stand before me.
If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless,
you shall serve as my mouth.
It is they who will turn to you,
not you who will turn to them.
20And I will make you to this people
a fortified wall of bronze;
they will fight against you,
but they shall not prevail over you,
for I am with you
to save you and deliver you,
says the Lord.
21I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,
and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.

PSALM                                                                             Psalm 26:1-8

 1Give judgment for me, O Lord, for I have lived | with integrity;
I have trusted in the Lord and | have not faltered.
2Test me, O | Lord, and try me;
examine my heart | and my mind.
3For your steadfast love is be- | fore my eyes;
I have walked faithful- | ly with you.
4I have not sat | with the worthless,

  nor do I consort with | the deceitful. 
5I have hated the company of | evildoers;
I will not sit down | with the wicked.
6I will wash my hands in inno- | cence, O Lord,
that I may go in procession | round your altar,
7singing aloud a song | of thanksgiving
and recounting all your won- | derful deeds.
8Lord, I love the house in | which you dwell
and the place where your glo- | ry abides.

SECOND READING                                                  Romans 12:9-21

9Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
14Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

GOSPEL                                                                   Matthew 16:21-28

21From that time on, [after Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah,] Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
24Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? 27“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Christians (Lutherans perhaps especially) like to talk all the time about forgiveness.

We love love love forgiveness.

And as an extra bonus, we can even talk about forgiveness in polite company.

But unless we’re reading those super uncomfortable Advent texts featuring John the Baptist (that wild-haired, wild-eyed, wild-mannered guy in our lectionary about whom we’re always a bit embarrassed, looking at each other with wide eyes whenever Sundays in December come around, knowing that this strange man got in our scriptural tradition somehow, and so apparently the right thing to do is to figure out how to welcome him into our lecterns, even though we all know we’re not so sure we’d even let him into our pews, and definitely not our pulpits), this man who wields the word ‘repentance’ all the time (much to our chagrin), we have (in stark contrast to ‘forgiveness’) gotten away for far too long without talking about repentance so very much at all.

But this is good, we think.

To tell someone to repent, you see, is awkward.

It’s impolite.

It’s even insulting.

It’s definitely conflictual.

And Christians aren’t supposed to make people feel awkward, and we are not about being impolite, and we shouldn’t insult, and of course we ought not cause conflict in the name of Christ, no matter what this John the Baptist said and did.

But on this tragic, grief-ridden day of the Emanuel Nine, a day that is bundled into other days that have spilled into weeks where our nation has begun to name and claim our racist underpinnings and undertow, it is precisely a moment, in fact a very, very, overdue moment, to speak directly about repentance.

You see, as unwelcome as repentance is as coffeetable, let alone pulpit, discourse, to indict someone by announcing that they must repent…well, arguably, you can’t really get more Lutheran.

Why?

Because telling someone to repent means that we are Calling A Thing What It Is.

Martin Luther used this phrase in the 21st Thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, a series of propositions he presented to his Augustinian Order after he caught a little attention the prior year by nailing some 95 other theses onto a certain door in Wittenberg.

Point is, in this particular thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, the 21st, he wrote this:

“The theology of glory calls ‘evil’ ‘good,’ and ‘good’ ‘evil.’

A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”

Telling someone that they need to repent simply calls a thing what it is.

White people, and we as a nation, and we as the ELCA, must repent of our racism, and we can’t do that unless we call it what it is.

~~~~~

Today we mark the Emmanuel Nine, and we say their names.

Reverend and Senator Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

Mrs. Cynthia Graham Hurd

Mrs. Susie J. Jackson

Mrs. Ethel Lee Lance

Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor

Reverend Clementa Pinckney

Tywanza Kibwe Diop Sanders

Reverend Daniel Lee Simmons, Sr.

Mrs. Myra Singleton Quirles Thompson

These black children of God died because Dylann Roof, a 21-year old far-right white supremacist and member of an ELCA congregation—and, lest we forget, also a child of God—sought to incite a race war by massacring black people whom, he believed, were “taking over the world.”

Somehow his online far-right radicalization held more power over him than did the call—if one was uttered clearly, or loudly, or at all?—to repent of it.

It is overwhelmingly poignant that the commemoration of this horrific crime falls just weeks after George Floyd was murdered and our country—even including the NASCAR community (!!)—is beginning to notice our entrenched, latent, systemic racism.

That’s the first step, of course, to Calling A Thing What It Is.

Noticing.

But we can’t notice, really, unless things are pointed out, unless things are named.

Only then do we have a chance to engage the holy act of repentance.

~~~~~

Rostered leaders are called to be pointer-outers, to be name-ers, to be Calling-A-Thing-What-It-Is-ers.

They are called by the Church at Large and then are called by specific congregations to steward the gospel which, contrary to a pretty decent share of Lutheran understanding, is not that your sins are forgiven.

The gospel, instead, is that Jesus is risen.

So when you invite someone into your community to a ministry of Word and Sacrament or Word and Service, you are calling them into your community to preach, teach, and live out the gospel.

That latter part, of course, this living out the gospel thing, isn’t just their professional vocation, but is their—our—baptismal one too.

The thing of it is, of course, is that the gospel would be positively irrelevant and in point of fact unnecessary if everything were fine, fine, just fine.

There is no need, that is, to pronounce life if life abounds for all anyway.

Nope.

But the thing of it is, the gospel is precisely relevant because there is still death, and an abundance of it.

And be not mistaken: death is present not just of the six-feet under kind, but of the kind that steals hopes, and spirits, and possibilities, and even our very humanity.

Racism is a tool of death.

And we need leaders of and in the Church to Call That Thing What It Is, because they are called—by all baptized Christians, including you!—to be theologians of the cross, to know that where there is death, precisely there is where there can be possibility of life.

If you want a theology of glory, if you want to be told that all is well when it is not, if you want a (self-proclaimed) leader who says “Peace, Peace,” when there is not peace, go MAGA (and look up Jeremiah 6:14 and surrounding verses).

MAGA puts babies in cages, and separates children from parents, and builds walls, and removes rights, and calls the KKK good people, and after violently forcing peaceful demonstrators off of the streets uses a holy church as a mere backdrop to score a political point with an upside down Bible held by a man who neither opens the book nor enters the building, and MAGA calls all such evil good.

(The leader of that Church’s synod, by the way, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Called a Thing What It Is about all that nonsense, I’ll tell you what.)

But if you want a pastoral leader whose primary vocation is to proclaim the gospel, which means announcing life, you also called a leader who, inherent to that very call, needs to announce death.

So sit tight, then, because leaders are themselves becoming all the more aware that we all have some repenting to do.

That means it’s about to get awkward, and impolite, and insulting, and conflictual.

We can now appreciate how the crowds who heard John the Baptist felt.

But perhaps unbeknownst to them, and even to us, it is also about to get life-out-of-death-y too.

~~~~~

As it turns out, of course, it’s not just the primary vocation of a pastoral leader to announce and engage in repentance: it’s the primary vocation of any baptized Christian.

Pick up your cross, says the one who was himself baptized by, of all people and inconveniently, John the Baptist, yes, the one and the same, this wild-eyed, wild-haired, wild-way-ed man who at most every turn announced repentance as a mark of the reign and way of God.

“Be willing to die to all that is not of God, and follow me,” says Jesus.

Don’t follow MAGA.

Don’t follow racism.

Don’t follow white privilege.

But follow, rather, Jesus.

Repent, you see, repent of all that is not of God.

Let that die, so that you and others may live.

~~~~~

All of this is true.

But what is also true, on this tragic day five years ago, is that righteous people, faithful people, sisters and brothers in Christ people, died so that racism, rather than righteousness, could live.

Today, that is, there are nine six-foot-under deaths—nine of them—which need to be recalled.

Their deaths matter.

Remember their deaths, and remember their names.

And then in their honor be willing to also name the death-dealing ways of racism and our unwillingness to call it—on personal, congregational, denominational, national, and systemic levels—what it is.

And then repent.

If we can find the courage to hear racism be called what it is, namely not of God, not good, and in fact evil, we will discover that John the Baptist, as wild as his hair and his eyes and his ways were, was right.

Repent, he said, for the Reign of God is, indeed, near.

It can skillfully drape itself in righteous speech, all the while really cloaking its comfortable and contented status.

But privilege also cunningly hides, even from the people of privilege themselves, death-dealing anxious determination about maintaining societal advantages.

So with that said, and as a shining example, I bristle, truly I do, when I hear rostered leaders talk about needing to “meet my people where they are.”

I just heard it in a couple of private and distinct conversations the other day, as a matter of fact.

“I’ve gotta meet my people where they are.”

That’s the phrase, right there.

Now it -sounds- good.

It sounds righteous even.

It certainly sounds pastoral.

It definitely sounds like what a leader of a specific community is called to do, namely meet their people where they are.

And I do believe that for the most part, rostered leaders mean well when they say it.

But I’ve come to decide that there’s a decent shot that actually, it’s -not- always good, righteous, pastoral, or what at leader in a community is called to do.

Thing is, when we decide to “meet ‘our’ people where they are,” we can’t help but simultaneously (albeit cloaked in that wily-privileged way) leave -other- people, the very people who need the -rest- of us to move from where -we- are, well…we can’t help but leave them where -they- are.

So when we hear the phrase “I need to meet my people where they are,” I think what we should actually hear, especially these days, is less even-the-best-of-intentioned pastoral move, and more the hidden message—hidden even to the leader, I do believe—that we’re supposed to be ok with that, down with it, content with it, because those are not ‘our people,’ they are not ‘us.’

They are ‘other.’

The wretched thing of it is, -nobody- is where they are supposed to be.

Moreover, the white rostered tendency to want to meet people of privilege where they are is precisely what keeps the status quo, which is precisely that which keeps everybody where they aren’t supposed to be.

I will say again and again and again that the pastoral is the prophetic, and the prophetic is the pastoral.

Black.

Lives.

Matter.

Insular preaching and teaching, that which is offered to meet privileged congregants and congregations where they are, protects White Lives from knowing about and caring about Black Lives.

It shields White Lives from knowing about and caring about -and- -rejecting- -in- -the- -name- -of- -the- -Gospel- the White System of Privilege which contributes to the injustice, poverty, inequity that Black Lives endure.

It buffers White Lives from knowing and caring about the names of people who have died at the hands of their White Privilege, that which congregations and congregants, under the rubric of meeting them where they are, have been led to believe affords them the luxury of not knowing, because the time is “just not right.”

“They’re just not ready for that yet.”

“We have to meet them where they are.”

In the complicated book of Hosea, Israel had forsaken God by falling into a cycle of normalized lying, and murder, and violence, such that even the land and sea and the creatures upon and in it suffered.

After a long enough period of waiting for this situation to turn around, God’s response, albeit conveyed in troubling metaphor, was finally to call Israel Lo-ammi: not my people.

Remember, of course, that we hear God say, “I am your God, and you shall be my people” in any number of texts, like Exodus 6:7; Leviticus 26:12, and Isaiah 5:15-16.

But no longer, says God.

What you have done, God says, is enough.

The relationship is severed.

And what had Israel done?

Among other sins, Israel had opted to align themselves not with God, but with Baalistic culture, which included a nasty habit of placing economic success for the few at the expense of the many, and of the land.

So God abandoned Israel to its enemies, and to the consequences of their unfaithfulness.

Note that it was -they- and -their- actions which terminated the relationship; -not- God.

God did not decide against them.

The ones formerly known as the people of God decided -against- God, and -for- other gods.

It’s possible that in the same way, now, in our streets we are seeing the consequences of -our- unfaithfulness.

We have, of course, tolerated a corrupt, malicious, and weak-spirited president, and political leaders who abide, aid, and abet him, and the agendas which they push at the expense of others.

Some Christians have even voted for them.

But we have also aligned ourselves with other gods, including those in the headlines of recent days, most especially that of White Privilege.

And we as rostered leaders have all too often opted to align ourselves with the god of Meeting People Where They Are, which has enabled and unleashed many an evil thing at the now normalized expense of People Who Are Not Where They Should Be.

So back to Hosea, it turns out that God’s disassociation from Israel was temporary—not inconsequential, but not permanent.

God opted, and even in the very next verse of this judgment, to make us God’s people again.

The message of Hosea is of judgment, but judgment that sends us into a way of repentance -and- -then- -restoration.-

The ironic thing is that the same phrase which has allowed rostered leaders to dance around dicey subjects can in fact throw them right into the whirl of it all:

Meet your people where they are.

If you’re the leader of a white congregation, that’d generally be a life of white privilege at the expense of black lives which do, in fact, matter.

So go ahead.

Meet them where they are.

And when you do, meeting them where they -really- are as opposed to where they -think- they are, you help lead your people into repentance, you announce the possibility of restoration to -all- the People of God, and you help bring -all- the People of God to where everyone ought to be.

That’s embarrassing: three of the highest holy days of the Church, I’m a theologian of the Church, annnnnnnnd…..I didn’t get a blog done.

Turns out that the legs of my son Karl, who has a TBI, are acting up.

Happened in January, too. Then, the trouble stretched over two interminable weeks.

Gosh, I hope that we aren’t entering into a repeat of that: this poor boy, his legs bicycle, intensely springing up and down, and almost constantly, day and night.  Poor kid hasn’t had any sleep to speak of for the last two nights.

We don’t know why it happens, and we don’t know why it stops, but we do know that it’s all related to the brain injury of nigh upon 16 years ago.

When I asked Karl how he felt about this whole matter, and named a variety of possible emotions, Karl, normally happy, content, never one to want to cause concern, said, for the first time about anything near as I recall, “mad.”

Low. Whistle.

And who wouldn’t be?

I’m mad too. This son of mine suffers every day the unwelcome effects of a trauma he incurred by absolutely no fault of his own.

And I’m sad.  I’m sad that the three of us had been so looking forward to making our Easter feast—it’s one of our favorite family bonding times—and instead, I’m in the bedroom with my boy, trying to calm his poor legs down and help him rest, and my girl is in the kitchen, making our meal alone.

I’ve been through way worse.

Others have been through way worse.

But man, still and even so, it’s just not right, on so many levels, and we are beyond ready for a TBI cure.

~~~~~

In the seminary class I’m teaching on the Lutheran Confessions, we got to talking on Maundy Thursday about ‘atonement’ theories, the fancy name for the different, what…reasons…why Jesus died on the cross.

Traditionally, there are about three that are most often floated around, and naturally have labels: the Classic Theory, the Substitionary Theory, and the Subjective Theory.

In the Classic form, Jesus is considered to be a victor over death. It’s very dualistic, very bad vs. good, very Satan vs. God, and often very violent. It’s a way of thinking about the cross that informed C.S. Lewis’ notion of the White Witch and Aslan, and the Deep Magic and the Deeper Magic.

Jesus is Aslan, so to speak, who on behalf of the enslaved, in-bondaged humans, fights the good fight, and ultimately vanquishes the enemy and saves humanity.

It’s not like there aren’t Scriptural texts for it: Genesis 3, the tale of the servant who taught Eve and Adam the difference between good and evil, and tore their allegiance from God; John 8, especially verse 44, in which Jesus says that he is from the Father, but that our father is the Devil, for we do our father’s bidding, and not his; and Hebrews 2:14-18, in which the author tells of how we share flesh and blood with Jesus, who on our behalf destroyed the devil and thereby freed us.

The Easter human “Welcome, Happy Morning” expresses this theology: “…Hell today is vanquished, heav’n is won today….” and “Source of all things living, you came down to die, Plummed the depths of hell to raise us up on high….Died as a mortal man to save us by your love…” and “Free the souls long prisoned, bound with Satan’s chai; All that once had fallen raise to life again….”

For that matter, so is “A Mighty Fortress.” “He breaks the cruel oppressors rod, and wins salvation glorious…” and “No strength of ours can match his might! We would be lost, rejected.  But now a champion comes to fight, Whom God himself elected, You ask who this may be? The Lord of hosts is he! Christ Jesus mighty Lord, God’s only Son, adored. He holds the field victorious.”

So, as we’ll find in all of these forms of atonement theories, there’s scriptural tradition, and there’s historical tradition. But there are also problems afoot.

For example, we really don’t need to do anything but watch the battle from the sidelines.  We can be grateful to the vanquisher, because without him we’d still be the vanquished, but still, the change was made outside of ourselves, rather than within us.

Too, given that, we really have no motivation to change. “The Devil made me do it” cuts it, in this model.

So there’s neither much motivation to make structural and personal changes, nor, as far as that goes, much reason to form a framework of ethics.

Jesus’ got this one, and therefore we don’t have to.

But wait!

There’s more.

There’s the Substitutionary model too.

We might know this approach musically best as “Ah, Holy Jesus.” The folks at Live From Here did a beautiful rendition of it, which you can find here.

“Ah, holy Jesus, how hast though offended/That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?” “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee/‘Twas I, Lord Jesus/ I it was denied the/I crucified thee.” “Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered. The slave that sinned/and the Son hath suffered/For man’s atonement/while he nothing heedeth/God intercedeth.” “For me, kind Jesus, was thine incarnation/Thy mortal sorrow/and thy life’s oblation/Thy death of anguish/and thy bitter Passion/For my salvation.”

Roots for it are everywhere in Scripture. Mark 10:45, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many;” 1 Timothy 2:5-6 “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all…” Revelation 5:9, ““You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation,” and that’s just for starters.

An infraction has occurred, and a price has to be paid.

It’s our fault, but Jesus takes one for the human team. (Here also Aslan can be a reference). For this reason, it is called the Substitutionary Model, because Jesus, pure and sinless, is substituted for sinful people.

It’s arguably the theological bent that has made the cross such an element of the faith of Christians, over against that of Easter: we are so horrible, Jesus is so pure, Jesus sacrificed himself for us, and we are (literally) undyingly grateful.

But it’s got troubles too:

God the Father (always the Father—I do believe we’d realize a bit more quickly the troubling elements of this approach if our primary notion of God were as Mother) is nothing but an angry executioner, appeased only by righteous blood. We have every reason to still live in fear, because that sort of divine being already has the street creds for capricious decisions.

Too, sin is nothing but immorality, and makes the reconciliation of it violence rather than mercy born out of love.

And again, because the change took place this time in God (rather than the devil), we don’t have reason to change, to do anything else.

It’s been done.

And last, the Subjective Theory of Atonement.

This framework has a different spin on matters, for here, the goal of Jesus’ death on the cross is that we are changed.

“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” is thoroughly grounded in this approach: “When I survey the wondrous cross/On which the prince of glory died/My richest gain I county but loss/And pour contempt on all my pride.” And “Forbid it Lord that I should boast/Save in the death of Christ, my God/ All the vain things that charm me most/I sacrifice them to his blood.” And “Were the whole realm of nature mine/That were a tribute far too small/Love so amazing so divine/Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

You can surely find textual basis for it in Scripture: John 13:15 says, “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” and 1 Peter 2:21 “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”

Here, Jesus is a teacher, and we are the students.  We most of all have to learn to love. We have to learn because we are sinful, and weak, and thick-headed.  Jesus loves God this much, and so should we.

But while more liberal theology is more comfortable with some elements of this take on the cross, it is ultimately insufficient, just as the two prior atonement theories are.

Here, we are reduced to being blockheads.

The depth of sinfulness, therefore, is not just relativized, but is rejected.

So, all of these approaches: Classic, Substitutionary, and Subjective, have truth, and none of them quite do the trick, and none of them entirely quite tell my son whose legs are tremoring or my daughter who is in the kitchen by herself what the cross has to say to them.

~~~~~

I’m not audacious enough to say that I have it all figured out.

I definitely don’t have it all figured out.

But there are a couple of things that have bugged me about these three approaches, these three takes on the cross that get, in one form or another, or in a Venn-diagram-esque-y way, the bulk of attention in the life of faith.

All of them have to do with sin.

None of them have to do with my boy’s legs.

None of them have to do with my girl’s default love and default sacrifices for her brother.

None of them have to do with the immeasurable grief at the deaths of thousands of people who died because of accidents, of cancers, of Coronovirus.

None of them have to do with the starvation and the desperation of those utterly at the mercy of robber barons and base politicians and the voters who are down with it all.

None of them have to do with those suffering from depression, bi-polar, alcoholism, abuse, or prejudice.

These theories speak to sin, and only to sin.

But here’s the thing: there is suffering to be had, injustice to be had, victims of sin to be had, and sweet Jesus the cross must have something to say to them!

It must have something to say to my son.

And it must have something to say to my daughter, who rather than making a meal with her mama has been (and ever so gladly, for which I am so grateful) helping her brother by stretching his legs, by rubbing cream on his skin, by sleeping downstairs in case I need her in the night, and by readying for Easter in the kitchen alone while I sit with my spasmodic boy.

~~~~~

To write this blog, I flipped to my old, old systematic lectures, written by Walt B.

In them, he teased out all of these atonement theories, more or less as I have above.

At first, his lecture notes didn’t seem to notice this pesky detail, though, this piece that each of these theories, while decidedly different, reduce the cross just various ways of thinking through forgiveness.

That they speak to the sinners, but not to those sinned upon, nor to the sufferers.

That they don’t speak to the why of forsakenness felt not just by Jesus, but by people still, every damn day.

But then I came across these points, three of them, all under his Point D: The Cross of Jesus is something that happens to the world. He wrote:

1. The world—all of humanity—crucified the Messiah: religion and politics, Jew and Gentile, enemies and disciples, men—women—children.

2. Jesus’ death on the cross calls the whole world into question.  Jesus is, in some sense, vindicated in the resurrection.  But the unmasking of false gods is in the dying.  “Pilate and Herod are revealed” (Gollwitzer). The world is revealed as “old alone” IN the death of Jesus its oldness—its way of death-dealing in order to cling to the illusion of power—is revealed. The old has passed away; it has come to an end (II Cor. 5:17).

3. In the death of Jesus God has made a final and irrevocable decision about the world. He will not abandon the world.  He will not give up on the world.  Atonement means that the world has been changed by God’s identification with it in the depths of its oldness.

That, all three of those points, that helped me, as I sit in this bed mid-afternoon, my legs wrapped around my son’s, trying to press the tremoring muscle groups with my toes and knees, and by knotting his legs around mine in hopes that this odd position will perhaps break the tone.

At the very least, perhaps after two sleepless nights, he’ll rest?

But these points reminded me that God did not kill Jesus: we did with our quests for power and our fear of its loss; our hubris and our anxious unwillingness to transform hope into a new way of being.

I was reminded that death can come naturally or it can come with violence—and one doesn’t even need to lose one’s breath for this to be so.

And I was reminded of how easy it is to make despair the god, the thing I trust most.

I was reminded that death is real, and that God entered into it.

And I was reminded that the way of God is not the way of the world: We crucify. God raises up.

So as I sit here with my boy, yet one more twist of my ankle to help untwist his, all the while listening to my girl clatter away in the kitchen making the meal that we had so looked forward to cooking together today, I am reminded that that’s exactly what Holy Saturday is about.

Death is real.

God must not just know that, but enter into that, for I need God to ache with me as my son’s TBI-born muscle spasms tremor into my own heart, and I need God to ache with me as that same heart reaches to my girl in the kitchen around the corner.

And I know that my son’s tremors and my daughter’s loss once again of mama-daughter time is someone else’s virtual farewell because of COVID, someone else’s inability to access water to cleanse their hands, someone else’s frightened self behind a locked closet door of a raging abuser, someone else’s despair at being alone.

The cross must speak to that.

But there must, there must, be more to the story than that.

We can’t make sense of the cross if we don’t hold out hope for that.

If there isn’t reason to hold out hope for that.

If there isn’t the possibility that perhaps, though death is real, life is real-er.