Gideon’s One Per Cent
by Dean J. Seal
For Nordeast Community Luteran Church, Aug. 30th, 2009
(Please read Judges Ch. 7)
God’s peace be with you on this last Sunday in August, and my last Sunday with this congregation.You have been through a lot in my time here, and you have further to go before you rest.
I’m sure you have considered your situation to be similar to the Hebrews, wandering through the desert. You had a home, then you were uprooted, and uprooted again. You are now getting ready to move once more, and for many of you it is an exciting prospect. A modern space, room to grow and experiment, a place to put down roots, grow into partnerships with other organizations, redesign and rebuild in a place where a new message can be heard in a new way.
I’ve been doing some research into modern trends in theology, and there is a thing called The Emergent Church. It seems that we are on the cusp of another huge turnover of ideas. It happens about every five hundred years or so. 500 years ago, Martin Luther kicked off his end of the Reformation. 500 years before that, in 1054, the Catholics broke with the Orthodox Church. 500 years before that, the Vandals destroyed Rome, and the Church was run from Constantinople. 500 years before that, Jesus was born. 500 years before that, the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and took the Hebrews into captivity.
Now we are engaged in a great reshuffling of how the Church operates. Phylis Tickle, editor of the religion section of Publisher’s Weekly, likens it to a giant garage sale that happens every 500 years, where everything is put out, and some stuff is reclaimed and the rest is thrown away.
The emergent church is one way that this is sorting itself out. There are young new Christians who don’t want to be called Christians, because of the baggage attached to it. You look around in here and you might say, Christians aren’t so bad. But when you are outside our circle, and you hear of a Christian preacher who says he goes home every night and prays that President Obama dies and goes to hell, when you understand that the Ku Klux Klan called themselves Christians, when you remember that the guards at Auschwitz took communion every Sunday, and went back to the extermination of the Jews the rest of the week, you might understand their reluctance to call themselves Christians.
These people call themselves Followers of Jesus, and there unofficial motto is, What if Jesus actually meant what he said? They don’t build churches, but meet in schools, or coffee houses, or theater spaces. Some of them meet at 5 p.m. on Sundays instead of in the morning. They focus on missions, like food shelves, or feeding the hungry, or housing the homeless, or visiting those in prison. They are mission-oriented, not theology oriented or building oriented or denominational.
They are having an influence on the denominations, though. There are Luthermergents, Presbymergents, Episcomergents. Those folks meet each other and bring ideas back to their churches. They have an ongoing conversation going on-line, on sites like The Ooze, and they use them to keep in touch.
What I think I am getting is that you folks here are doing all the right things. If you can pull off taking over that school building, you will be in an untraditional setting, with room to engage not just the feeding of the hungry, which you do now, but also partner with other people to make other things happen. You will be the kind of church that the young new Followers of Jesus are looking for.
A congregation that is only looking to preserve the past traditions of its own history is doomed. A congregation that can collect the essential elements of what is meaningful, and then move forward into the future, with the idea of creating something for that future, is going to have a future.
This congregation has traveled through the process of throwing out the excess, packing the essential, and moving to a new place. It has happened again and again. And again. And it will happen, again.
Some of you may feel tired down to your bones. That would not be unexpected. It’s kind of like what they say about the ninth month of pregnancy- it’s so unpleasant that you can’t wait to give birth. And some people have left the congregation because of what has been lost. They may have a stronger feeling about a building than they do about the faith. They may have a stronger feeling about what is in a service than they do about why there is a service. They may have a stronger feeling for the traditions of a church than they do about the future of a congregation.
That is why I love this story about Gideon. He has an army of 30,000 men, and God sends away 99% of it, because he wants them to understand something. When they achieve this victory, he wants them to know it is God’s victory. The traditional interpretation is that Gideon is too scared to go to battle until he hears the interpretation of the dream from the edge of the Midianite’s camp. It is a scared Gideon marching with 300 scared men, who don’t even have swords. Both hands are full- a jar with a torch, a trumpet and a yell is all they have to win the battle. And they do. The victory is not Gideon’s. The victory is not the Hebrew’s victory.
I don’t believe in trying to predict the future. But it is not unreasonable to try to perceive what will happen in a given course of events. I believe that this congregation will achieve a victory. It will not be a victory because of the work of your minister, although he is doing a very good job. It will not be the victory of the committees that have been meeting, although the work they are doing is thorough and fair and being done well. It will not be the victory of the people who are members of the congregation, though you have toughed it out through several setbacks. The victory will be God’s victory. It is God that inspired your minister to tackle this intense process of consolidation and resurrection. It is God that keeps the committees meeting and making painful but necessary decisions. It is God that renews your right spirit as a congregation, to keep moving forward, because you have something to offer to this community and this town and this world.
So I hope you take this message of Gideon, who was scared, and had 1% of what he already thought was not enough, who won the battle without losing a soldier. He won the battle because he was filled with the Holy Spirit of God, and went to where God told him to go, and he listened for what God would say to him. He was open to God’s victory, and God was victorious.
So let me leave you with a doxology that I’ve known my whole life, a text from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 51. When we feel we need some energy, this is a prayer to remind us we are not doing this alone.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not, away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me, the Joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Amen.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Movie Camp: The Parables Like Aesop's Fables
Nordeast Luteran hosted three movie camps this summer, and I felt a great deal of satisfaction with how they went. There was action, learning, progress, and comedy.
My espousal unit, Kirsten, started this several years ago in a home-school coop, and the kids liked it so much she kept on doing it, even hiring me to handle the cats we were trying to herd. That was the secular version.
I was inspired to steal the idea when I was a youth minister in my MDiv Internship, when I asked my three teen guys if they had a favorite parable. They said, "What's a Parable?" There are enough parables, and enough kids who don't know about them, that I thought we should try making something happen.
Here's how it works. For the uninitiated, what we do is take kids from about 8 to about 13. It's a four day experience. Day one, we do theater warm-ups and exorcises, improvisation games that give the kids a sense of shared experience and the freedom to try ideas. After lunch, I read them four or five parables. Luke is best, but if you have repeat customers like we do there's plenty to dig through in Matthew. We talk about the message of each story, without being religious about it; but let me emphasise, we are very clear that these are stories about Ethics with a Capital E, and the kids really go for it. The jumpy and short-attention-span assumptions about kids disappear because they are being engaged with real ideas. I have to credit Rev. Scott Stapleton for this; he said to me, "If you don't challenge them, they aren't going to get it."
He was totally right. The challenge is to pick one story, maybe two, and rewrite them for our time and our place. That is, after all, the method a good church takes to the text; what does it mean for us today? Who would be the Good Samaritan now? How about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector?
The stories have to be explained first, and then we start generating ideas. The Good Samaritan needs to be someone that would be a surprise if they stopped to help someone; they picked a Homeless Person. The Pharisee needs to be someone powerful who is proud of themselves; they picked Gov. Schwarzenegger (a funny accent goes a long way). The Tax Collector, the unpopular minion of the powerful and oppressor of the poor, became the Foreclosure Specialist. It was really good stuff.
The first one was done with a small cast. The Widow and the Judge is about a widow who pesters a judge, who cares nothing for justice, and bugs him until she gets what she wants. Jesus tells this about prayer; that God loves us more than this judge cares about the widow, but we should pester God with our prayers until hey are answered. It's not about getting what you want, it's about praying for action that needs to happen, praying for Justice, and not giving up until justice is done.
The kids were from different places. One our very own Tommy, has been in every movie camp because he loves movies. He has gone from being a shy actor with lots of props to being a much better actor and in fact the editor of our last movie, when our VHS camera (built in 1492 with stone knives and bear skins) stopped working. Tommy's camera and Tommy's computer gave him a promotion, and we go the movie back on DVD in time to see it on our last day. Rachel came for her first one, and had the idea to be the homeless person who saves the robbery victim.
One kid, Gavin, had been to the secular movie camp and then did two Parable movie camps. He mused one day, "You know, in these stories we do here, the robbers always get away." And I thought to my self, "YESSSSS! Jesus is still up to date!"
But there were kids from outside the congregation, which is very much part of the idea. One kid was in a family that does not go to church, and has good reasons not to, but they liked the idea of their kid getting some ethical training. And that's how it's taught. That concept drew two more kids from another family. There was another from a family in the neighborhood who had a recommendation from the first family mentioned here. The church may or may not draw new members from outreach like this; but like the food shelf, we are making a difference in people's lives. I think it's a safe bet that these kids would not have encountered the teachings of Jesus in a way that was fun, creative, and useful. Storytellers say that when someone is preaching or speaking that we get as little as 14% of the information from the words (did I mention that before? Well, here it is again). The rest comes from tone, gesture, inflection, body language. So drama is an effective means by which the story can be installed in someone's head, instead of bouncing off. These kids, I believe, have a better chance of remembering.
This isn't a new idea, by any means, but it is new to these kids. It brings the story to where they are int he world, instead of trying to force them into something alien. And it may not change the world- but it will change Their world.
My espousal unit, Kirsten, started this several years ago in a home-school coop, and the kids liked it so much she kept on doing it, even hiring me to handle the cats we were trying to herd. That was the secular version.
I was inspired to steal the idea when I was a youth minister in my MDiv Internship, when I asked my three teen guys if they had a favorite parable. They said, "What's a Parable?" There are enough parables, and enough kids who don't know about them, that I thought we should try making something happen.
Here's how it works. For the uninitiated, what we do is take kids from about 8 to about 13. It's a four day experience. Day one, we do theater warm-ups and exorcises, improvisation games that give the kids a sense of shared experience and the freedom to try ideas. After lunch, I read them four or five parables. Luke is best, but if you have repeat customers like we do there's plenty to dig through in Matthew. We talk about the message of each story, without being religious about it; but let me emphasise, we are very clear that these are stories about Ethics with a Capital E, and the kids really go for it. The jumpy and short-attention-span assumptions about kids disappear because they are being engaged with real ideas. I have to credit Rev. Scott Stapleton for this; he said to me, "If you don't challenge them, they aren't going to get it."
He was totally right. The challenge is to pick one story, maybe two, and rewrite them for our time and our place. That is, after all, the method a good church takes to the text; what does it mean for us today? Who would be the Good Samaritan now? How about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector?
The stories have to be explained first, and then we start generating ideas. The Good Samaritan needs to be someone that would be a surprise if they stopped to help someone; they picked a Homeless Person. The Pharisee needs to be someone powerful who is proud of themselves; they picked Gov. Schwarzenegger (a funny accent goes a long way). The Tax Collector, the unpopular minion of the powerful and oppressor of the poor, became the Foreclosure Specialist. It was really good stuff.
The first one was done with a small cast. The Widow and the Judge is about a widow who pesters a judge, who cares nothing for justice, and bugs him until she gets what she wants. Jesus tells this about prayer; that God loves us more than this judge cares about the widow, but we should pester God with our prayers until hey are answered. It's not about getting what you want, it's about praying for action that needs to happen, praying for Justice, and not giving up until justice is done.
The kids were from different places. One our very own Tommy, has been in every movie camp because he loves movies. He has gone from being a shy actor with lots of props to being a much better actor and in fact the editor of our last movie, when our VHS camera (built in 1492 with stone knives and bear skins) stopped working. Tommy's camera and Tommy's computer gave him a promotion, and we go the movie back on DVD in time to see it on our last day. Rachel came for her first one, and had the idea to be the homeless person who saves the robbery victim.
One kid, Gavin, had been to the secular movie camp and then did two Parable movie camps. He mused one day, "You know, in these stories we do here, the robbers always get away." And I thought to my self, "YESSSSS! Jesus is still up to date!"
But there were kids from outside the congregation, which is very much part of the idea. One kid was in a family that does not go to church, and has good reasons not to, but they liked the idea of their kid getting some ethical training. And that's how it's taught. That concept drew two more kids from another family. There was another from a family in the neighborhood who had a recommendation from the first family mentioned here. The church may or may not draw new members from outreach like this; but like the food shelf, we are making a difference in people's lives. I think it's a safe bet that these kids would not have encountered the teachings of Jesus in a way that was fun, creative, and useful. Storytellers say that when someone is preaching or speaking that we get as little as 14% of the information from the words (did I mention that before? Well, here it is again). The rest comes from tone, gesture, inflection, body language. So drama is an effective means by which the story can be installed in someone's head, instead of bouncing off. These kids, I believe, have a better chance of remembering.
This isn't a new idea, by any means, but it is new to these kids. It brings the story to where they are int he world, instead of trying to force them into something alien. And it may not change the world- but it will change Their world.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Bring Back Pneumonia
by Dean J. Seal
This is about my own personal viewpoint on end-of-life issues. Having spent some time around people when they reach the end of life, I have developed an interest in how people handle it. It's more than professional curiosity.
I heard a radio story the other day about a woman who was 92, in her own house still, but her body was starting to wear out. She was getting nursing visits, but she was worried that her insurance was going to run out (surprise! Having insurance doesn't solve every problems!. They asked her if she was going to live with family; she said there were a lot of kids there, so it would be inconvenient for the family. But she also said "...they don't want me to be exposed to pneumonia."
There was a time when pneumonia was called "the old man's friend" because it was fast, painless, and you usually transitioned while asleep. Isn't that the way a lot of us want to go? But her prospects were thus: living alone, isolated from children and grandchildren, fading in independence, worried about being a burden to the kids, worried about money, worried that resources would run out before her time did.
When we talk about these issues, the radically paranoid will insist that any such discussion is really about suicide and euthanasia. And it's not. It's about planning, freedom of choice and making your own decisions. Some people are suited to fight the good fight; my wife's grandmother is 102 and she says "the only thing that still works is my mouth." So she spends a lot of time on the phone and has a very active social life. But she has been saying for ten years that she is ready to go. I knew another woman who made it to 101, and she said "God don't want me and the Devil don't want me." She died trying to escape from the hospital they put her in when she broke her hip.
In the hospital, nurses and chaplains have said several times that it is the Christians who are afraid of dying more than anyone. Native Americans are the least afraid, because they consider it to be a natural event (is that primitive? Or advanced? I consider it to be the latter).They describe it as moving across a line, and it doesn't remove the deceased from their presence.
Why are Christians so afraid? Is it because they have been raised in fear? That a loving God will send them to hell for some slight, some unrepented morning where the paper and a cup of coffee seemed like a better Shabbat than church?
A study on lying says we average 3 lies every ten minutes in a conversation, and that the ability to lie is marked as a sing of maturity, of being able to cope with he person you are talking to (MPR). Is God sending us to hell because we told someone they look great when they don't? Or I'm fine when I'm not?
I do not want to be one of those whose body outlives their brain. I helped wheel 35 people like this into a room for a chapel service they mostly had no response to, and then wheeled them back out. Dozens and dozens in one building.
A conservative Rabbi told us in chaplain training that "life is sacred, and it is important to do what you can to sustain someones life. But- there is nothing sacred about prolonging someones death."
Medtronic tried to launch a line of heart stents in China, and it didn't go very well, because most of the patients decided not to rob the next generation of those resources to bring a few more years of ill-health. In the USA, I heard an unverified statistic that we spend 40% of our health care money extending someones life for less than another year (someone should look this up). I know my dad had a quadruple bypass which gave him another year, and a lot of pain. A great deal of pain. I asked him later if he would do it again, given the choice. "NOOOOO!" he said without hesitation.
Anecdotal evidence about people who have been revived with a defibrillator indicates they never really come back all the way. The question when going into intensive intervention like chemotherapy and heart surgery is, what kind of quality of life is being restored? Are you doing something For somebody, or doing it To somebody? Only you can answer these questions going in, for yourself or aq dearly loved person. But these are the questions, and rather than deal with them on the fly, in crisis, it is much better to meditate upon them and discuss them with the people who will be making those decisions for you when you can't.
Here are my final instructions: Do not resuscitate. Do not defibrillate. Do not allow my body to absorb nutrients after brain death. Do not give me chemo if it is going to be less than a 20% chance of recovery. If a miracle happens, great. Otherwise, I would dbe glad to depart from this veil of tears at the appointed time. I love my family, and we will miss each other, but I don't want to be taking their life away in order to hang desperately onto mine.
I have no fear of death. When we die, we go to God.
This is about my own personal viewpoint on end-of-life issues. Having spent some time around people when they reach the end of life, I have developed an interest in how people handle it. It's more than professional curiosity.
I heard a radio story the other day about a woman who was 92, in her own house still, but her body was starting to wear out. She was getting nursing visits, but she was worried that her insurance was going to run out (surprise! Having insurance doesn't solve every problems!. They asked her if she was going to live with family; she said there were a lot of kids there, so it would be inconvenient for the family. But she also said "...they don't want me to be exposed to pneumonia."
There was a time when pneumonia was called "the old man's friend" because it was fast, painless, and you usually transitioned while asleep. Isn't that the way a lot of us want to go? But her prospects were thus: living alone, isolated from children and grandchildren, fading in independence, worried about being a burden to the kids, worried about money, worried that resources would run out before her time did.
When we talk about these issues, the radically paranoid will insist that any such discussion is really about suicide and euthanasia. And it's not. It's about planning, freedom of choice and making your own decisions. Some people are suited to fight the good fight; my wife's grandmother is 102 and she says "the only thing that still works is my mouth." So she spends a lot of time on the phone and has a very active social life. But she has been saying for ten years that she is ready to go. I knew another woman who made it to 101, and she said "God don't want me and the Devil don't want me." She died trying to escape from the hospital they put her in when she broke her hip.
In the hospital, nurses and chaplains have said several times that it is the Christians who are afraid of dying more than anyone. Native Americans are the least afraid, because they consider it to be a natural event (is that primitive? Or advanced? I consider it to be the latter).They describe it as moving across a line, and it doesn't remove the deceased from their presence.
Why are Christians so afraid? Is it because they have been raised in fear? That a loving God will send them to hell for some slight, some unrepented morning where the paper and a cup of coffee seemed like a better Shabbat than church?
A study on lying says we average 3 lies every ten minutes in a conversation, and that the ability to lie is marked as a sing of maturity, of being able to cope with he person you are talking to (MPR). Is God sending us to hell because we told someone they look great when they don't? Or I'm fine when I'm not?
I do not want to be one of those whose body outlives their brain. I helped wheel 35 people like this into a room for a chapel service they mostly had no response to, and then wheeled them back out. Dozens and dozens in one building.
A conservative Rabbi told us in chaplain training that "life is sacred, and it is important to do what you can to sustain someones life. But- there is nothing sacred about prolonging someones death."
Medtronic tried to launch a line of heart stents in China, and it didn't go very well, because most of the patients decided not to rob the next generation of those resources to bring a few more years of ill-health. In the USA, I heard an unverified statistic that we spend 40% of our health care money extending someones life for less than another year (someone should look this up). I know my dad had a quadruple bypass which gave him another year, and a lot of pain. A great deal of pain. I asked him later if he would do it again, given the choice. "NOOOOO!" he said without hesitation.
Anecdotal evidence about people who have been revived with a defibrillator indicates they never really come back all the way. The question when going into intensive intervention like chemotherapy and heart surgery is, what kind of quality of life is being restored? Are you doing something For somebody, or doing it To somebody? Only you can answer these questions going in, for yourself or aq dearly loved person. But these are the questions, and rather than deal with them on the fly, in crisis, it is much better to meditate upon them and discuss them with the people who will be making those decisions for you when you can't.
Here are my final instructions: Do not resuscitate. Do not defibrillate. Do not allow my body to absorb nutrients after brain death. Do not give me chemo if it is going to be less than a 20% chance of recovery. If a miracle happens, great. Otherwise, I would dbe glad to depart from this veil of tears at the appointed time. I love my family, and we will miss each other, but I don't want to be taking their life away in order to hang desperately onto mine.
I have no fear of death. When we die, we go to God.
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