the Link

Gideon's One Percent

2009-08-30T17:17:00.002-05:00

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.

Movie Camp: The Parables Like Aesop's Fables

2009-08-09T20:09:00.004-05:00

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.

Bring Back Pneumonia

2009-08-08T20:33:00.004-05:00

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.

Movie Camp

2009-07-25T16:31:00.001-05:00

Movie Camp at Nordeast: Ethical, Cultural Training can be Fun by Dean J. Seal

This week had our second movie camp of the summer, and it was a treat. I used to look down on the task of teaching kids, because I wanted to work in the realm of grown up ideas. But I was wrong to think you can't do both. And as every teacher knows, the pleasure of the work is what the teacher get to learn. And when dealing n the classics, it is always wise to review them on occasion so that you remember what they are saying.
Movie camp is an idea I stole from my wife Kirsten. She started doing movie camps when our kid was in a home school environment. Kids love to make movies, and Kirsten gave them free reign. We still do a secular one every year, and the titles of the two films were "Don't Drink the Windex" and "Volcano Espionage!" Guess which one was done by Boys and which is done by Girls.
The idea here is to gather the kids together (ages 8-13) and do theater exercises to warm them up and get them comfortable. Then after lunch and some running around on the conveniently located playground, I read them several parables. Then they pick one or two and re-write them to make them contemporary. By putting the stories into their own time, they learn that the lessons of the stories are also for their own time. It's one method of learning about the Bible in a way that involves a lot of running around, putting together costumes, learning how to talk like Arnold Schwatzenegger, and going in front of the camera.
We settled on The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) , with a touch of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14). The Tax Collector, you may (or may not) recall, felt bad about what he did and who he was. The Pharisee was proud, boastful about how good he was. We made the Pharisee one of the people who walks by the robbery victim, and we made the Austrian-born Governor of California the other miscreant who would not stop; no other governors stand out enough. The Tax Collector was recast as a Foreclosure Expert.
The Good Samaritan was made a homeless person. She brings the robbery victim to a nice hotel. After two days, the Governor and the Foreclosure Expert come through the lobby. The Expert is guilt stricken, and returns the Deed to the Homeless Person, and gives her money from his last three foreclosures. This adds a Zachaeus element to the closing, which satisfies everyone's sense of justice.
What do the kids learn besides a couplke of Bible stories? Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, said "All writing is re-writing." In that sense, these classes give kids an essential skill, experience and confidence in the process of writing. Another secular benefit is simple cultural literacy. Stories like The Good Samaritan are at the center of the dominant culture, Christianity. There is also ethical instruction, the surprise that a stranger may be more ethical than the rich and powerful. And then there is the religious instruction aspect: this is how jesus taught. He taught in metaphor, which means there doesn't have to actually be a good Samaritan to make the point of the story. This teaches them to discern the difference between literal and figurative, which should be a remedial task when anyone looks at the content of the Bible.
Two of our students were from a family that does not go to church. I explained thatthte stories are taught in the mode of Aesop's Fables, the Greek stories which carried morals of that tradition. Then we weren't a proselytizing class that would be about selling smething to the kids. It makes the stories of value to anyone, no matter what your tradition is.
To me, it is obvious that the rich and powerful have less morality than the poor, but most people are brought up in America to believe the opposite. They believe that the rich are virtuous and that the wealth 9s an indicator of God's pleasure. They believe the poor are being punished for something- otherwise they would not be poor. They think people are poor because they are lazy, and others are rich because they work hard. All we need to do now is look at Bernie Madoff, Gov. Spitzer, Gov. Sandford, and any number of other headline grabbers to understand that this is not self-evident; it also makes me think the ones who are caught are just the tip of the ethical iceberg. And it shows that Christianity, practiced the way Jesus taught it, is counter to American culture. It is indeed counter-cultural, and Un-American to follow Jesus.
Comparative religion is not taught in our schools, which makes our kids less able to understand other faiths, and also to understand their own. Former President Jimmy Carter just left the Southern Baptist Convention because they still refuse to ordain women; but it's more than that. They teach that women are to be subordinate to men, which leads women to believe their faith requires them to stay with battering husbands. A faith misunderstood can be a powerful force of destruction. As Stevie Wonder put it, "You believe in things you don't understand, and you suffer."
This is why the Movie Camps are not just a nice way for kids to spend a summer day; it is part of a core mission of the Church, our mission to teach our kids to think, and to show them how the Bible can help them to reach a moral and ethical structure of their own, to inform them in the decisions they make for the rest of their lives.

The more I see the Less I Know by Dean J. Seal

2009-07-15T20:18:00.001-05:00

The More I see the Less I Know, by Dean J. Seal

There's a catchy tune on the radio, and all i can remember is half the chorus which goes, "...every where I go/ the more I see the less I know." (if you know who made that song, drop me a line). This comes to mind because I saw a friend of mine, Peter, at my home church, and he said he passed a test in actuarial work because there isn't anything happening for him in physics. This caught my attention.
I said, "Hey, i was listening to a radio show about the Hubble Telescope, and they said it had changed everything about how we (us, the deep and powerful scientist/philosophers of the universe) how we thought about the universe. What can you tell me?"
A couple things you have to know about the Hubble. It is up there because the telescope in it isn't hindered by our atmosphere. It is in space and can look into space. Second, if it is looking at a star ten million light years away, then what it sees happened ten million years ago. So that means the farther it sees, the farther into the past we can see- that means the closer to the Beginning of Time we can see. Okay? That's pretty amazing on the face of it., Now. What do we get from actually looking in it?
Peter spoke in the collective We of people who actually know what they are talking about. "First off," he said politely to me, "we used to think that the universe started in a big bang, a big explosion that started in one spot and everything is now moving away from everything else at a uniform speed that is gradually slowing. We don't think that anymore. It turns out things are in clumps, and we don't know why, and they are moving at different rates, and we don't know why, and they are actually moving away from each other at a faster and faster speed."
"Clumps?" That's as far as I got.
""Clumps," said Peter in a warm professional tone. He understood that I knew this was something amazing to not know about.
I moved on. "What about dark matter? I remember reading that Einstein was working on a theory that explained it, and he threw it aside because it didn't make sense."
"Well, what is was was Dark Energy, not matter, and he was on the trail, and he said giving up on that was the biggest mistake of his life. So, Dark Energy is something we didn't know about because we can't really see it."
"It's Dark." I added, feeling pretty smart.
"Yep," said Peter. " We can learn about stars because we can see them. So iDark Energy all over the place, and we really don't know much about that either."
Peter said more, and I'm not sure I got this right either, but I just wanted to lay out a small list of astonishments to make my point. There used to be a time when scientists all thought they had most things figured out, that there wasn't a god because we could explain everything, and that sooner or later everyone would give up this stupid nonsense of believing in supernatural superstitions. God was Dead, they said.
So let's go in the other direction. Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of a nucleus plus protons and neutrons. Protons are made up of up quarks or down quarks; up quarks are held together in a gluon field (yes, it comes from the word glue) of vector guage bosons that mediate strong color charges of the QCD... let's just stop here, because we are now talking about things that we cannot actually see or detect, but we can guestimate they exist because of the effect they have on the things we can see.
In other words, whichever direction you go, into the infinate extra-terrestial universe or into the infinate sub-atomic universe, The More We See the Less We Know. It has become, in our lifetimes, an immutable fact of science. The universe, like God and like a human soul, is unknowable.
There is a Scottish Presbyterian Minister named Philip Newell, who is bringing people back to a Celtic spiritality (Keltic, phonetically) and he says we are not so much made By God as we are made Of God. We are made in God's image, of the stardust of the universe. God is energy and matter, as are we and the universe is, and what we are going through is the change from one to the other ad infinitum.
What can we take home from this excercise?
First, no one can pin down what God is, and anyone who says they can should be left alone at the bar as qucikly as possible.
Second, if we can't define God, then we can't define who someone else's God is.
Third, God is all, God is one, God is the universe. This is not in conflict with a loving God. It actually explains a lot. Like, where was God during the Holocaust? God was everywhere in the Holocaust, feeling the pain and suffering of every man, woman and child. That means God feels our pain too, and we are not alone in our pain. We are not too small for God to know us. That makes God's love accessible.
Fourth, if we cannot define God, that does not mean God doesn't exist. We cannot define gluons yet, but we have pretty good notes on its existance. We cannot define dark energy yet, but we can begin to talk about it. And essentially, the spiritual experience is one to be experienced individually. We are neither too great or too small to each have a different experience.
Then where is relgion? Religio is Latin for coming together, and when you come together in a religion it is because you share enough of your beliefs that you can work together; for a wprship service,. or a service work project, or to pray, whatever you can agree on. And it does not mean you all have the same experience or believe the same thing. It means you are sharing the experience of a spiritual moment, and you find it healing, and bonding, and uplifting, beyond our own mortality.
And that means the Great Mystery is going to remain mysterious. And the more of it we experience, the more mysterious it gets.

Wh We Aren't Catholic

2009-07-15T13:12:00.002-05:00

Why We aren't Catholic. by Dean J. Seal
Growing up Lutheran, I remember learning two absolutes about the faith. First, We Are Not Catholic. Second, you can ask any Lutheran for a ride to the airport because cabs are so darned expensive and a waste of money.
Luther did not address the second Law of Lutheranism, but he spent a lot of energy defining what he did not like about the Catholic Church, and as a practicing Presbylutheran, I still agree with him.
It boils down to faith, and I want to assure you this is not a finely sharpened discussion of splitting hairs. Remember,. Luther was an Augustinian Monk, a Catholic professor famous for his exciting lectures, so this was his daily bread and butter. He practiced also in a church, and one day it came to his attention that some Catholic representatives of the Pope were selling indulgences. This meant that one could pay only to the church for the redemption of sins. You could even pay for someone already dead. It was kind of like bail or a fine. He went postal- actually that would be apoplectic- because then the power to be forgiven was in the hands of humans, and he believed that only God can forgive. He notified the authorities that they had it wrong.
The Catholic Church responded, however, with the rebuttal that Luther had it wrong. The nature of Faith (here it comes) in the Catholic Tradition is that faith is the first step to salvation, that it is the intellectual assent to he truth of the church- that what the church teaches is true, and you take it on faith. Also, this in itself is Not Sufficient; you have to follow it with works of love. The goal is to become "perfected" and while sin makes this hard, it is not impossible. Doing good works and receiving the sacraments makes it happen.
Communion is the sacrament most closely associated with the ongoing perfection process, because it is medicinal. Sacraments bring grace to us, as if we were taking medicine, and it empowers us to resist sine, giving us strength and discipline because we have the power of the holy spirit put into us by this medicine. That is how God gives us grace (unconditional love). Grace changes you from being self centered and turns you out and makes you free to serve God and neighbor.
To Luther, however, this was anything but conditional. Faith is the connection between humans and God. He said if you believed this, you are deceiving yourself. We will never be perfect, . Monks and Nuns love themselves first and only care about being saved themselves. Grace and merit are antithetical. No one deserves God's love, and all the good works in the world don't make you perfect.
Luther (and John Calvin, a generation later) defined grace not as a supernatural power communicated through sacraments. It refers soley to God's love as mercy and forgiveness. Faith, then is a trust we have in the heart of God's mercy, not an intellectual assent to the church's teachings. And this is the Good News, the Gospel, that Jesus brings to us: The news that God forgives. Hence you are saved whether you know it or not, whether you recognize it or not. But if you do recognize it, then you are free to act on it in gratitude. Then good works are not tainted as some admission fee to an afterlife; they are given freely from the heart.
Now, here's a p[art that many people miss, especially many ministers. Jesus did not die on the cross to win our forgiveness; God forgives freely through grace, unconditional love. Jesus is there to show that God ha forgiven us. God gives us the righteousness of the Christ, and all we have to do is claim it, even though it is not our own. And without forgiveness, we can be destroyed by guilt.
We can see how this works out in the real world. First, the Catholic Church has only celibate men as priests. This is a teaching of the church hat was not the case int he early church- you can cite the precedent that Peter's mother in law was cured by Jesus as one of his first miracles, so the first "pope" was married. This celibacy rule has many problems, but let's look at two. First, they don't have enough to do communion to people who need it because of the shortage of priests. So the priests bless the substance that they sue for bread (wafers etc.) and then send it out to authorized lay people. This apparently suffices to transfer the power of the Holy Spirit. In my mind it brings up the old saw about the Catholic church: it has more rules than anyone, and it has more ways around those rules than anyone.
The second problem is, of course, the sex scandals of pedophilia. Mel Gibson, the anti-semitic conservative Catholic Movie Star, blamed Vatican 2 in 1962 for the sudden perversion of the priests; but there's plenty of historical evidence that it goes way back. The latest Irish scandals about orphanages goes back several decades, and Catholic boarding schools for native American children stolen from their homes were routinely raped by priests, boys and girls. This went on for years and years. Then when it got tot he general population, the sin of the church was to forgive these men and move them to another place, under the theological assumption that they had been "perfected" by a round of confession, absolution and communion. Transfered to another parish that was not informed of the past history of the pedophile, they raped again. I am not alone in the belief that if women were priests, those guys would have never been allowed to be with children again after the first episode.
But if the core of your belief is that the church is the focus of faith, you have no choice but to follow the rules. Many of those who accused the priests were spat upon and mocked by true believers who understood that the church was being attacked, because for them, the church itself was holy, the focus of their faith, and therefore the priests could do no wrong, and were already so close to sainthood that only the minions of satan could accuse them of something so horrible.
Please keep a couple things in mind as I wade through this. The Catholic Church has some amazing and wonderful things about it. When it works, it is a whirling cascade of love. Several of its institutions have long-standing deeply committed staffs that live out the love gospel for those who cannot fend for themselves. I am not throwing the Baby Jesus out with the bath water.
But we all have to be a part of the solution here. The Catholic church is Christian, and as Lutherans and presbyterians, we pray for the holy catholic church, small c, every time we say the Apostle's creed. In that sense we are part of that church, and can criticize it and encourage it to change. It is not "anti-Catholic" to criticize something you are a part of. As Calvin was a Lutheran, and as Luther was a Catholic, so we are all part of the church universal. We have different understandings of the practice of the faith, even as we have different definitions of what faith is.

Calvin at 500

2009-07-15T12:35:00.001-05:00

Calvin at 500 by Dean J. Seal

John Calvin is famous for many things, like predestination, the Total depravity of humans, and putting a guy in jail for smiling at a baptism. Modern Calvinists don’t actually follow (or do) any of those three things, but we are still stuck explaining them. Allow me to explain.
First, you should know I grew up a Norwegian Lutheran (not Swedish or German, for God’s sake). That’s a pretty dour line of theology right there. After several years of abstinence, an agnostic atheism, my wife and I decided we wanted some sort of spirituality to counter the overwhelming materialism and selfishness of Manhattan. We ended up at a Presbyterian church because of the great preaching and the emphasis on education.
Here’s the kind of funny spiritual cultural joke: Homer Simpson’s church is Prebsylutheran.
So anyway, you might say, what’s the dif? We’re all on the same team, aren’t we? Don’t we read the same Bible and quote the same guy and have Christmas on the same day?
Well, yes and no. And here we start looking at the hair-splitting we call theology, or the search for meaning in the interpretation of these texts.
I’ll try to be brief, but here’s a rundown to make it complicated before it gets easy. Luther was a Catholic, an Augustinian monk who wanted to reform the church, not start a new branch. Calvin was a Lutheran, and also a lawyer, and in setting out to define the methodology of the church he disagreed with a little of what Luther said, which the Lutherans saw as too far gone. Consequently, Calvin’s theology is called Reformed, even though Luther started the Reformation, because he was reforming the reformation thoughts of Luther.
Let’s go deeper before we come back up. The Roman Catholic Church likes to frown on the Lutherans for breaking up the church, but in fact the first schism in the church was between the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church. Originally, the Orthodox churches had one patriarch for each major city, and they met on occasion t come to some consensus about how things should run. As Constantine was the Roman Emperor who made the empire Christian, and he moved the capitol to Constantinople (where else?), Roman bishops were a little ticked off. They decided that Rome had been the center of the world for several centuries, that Paul and Peter died there, and that they should be first among equals- in fact the Bishop of Rome should be calling the shots. That was the first break, when the rest of the patriarchs told them no dice.
Remember this; the Pope is still called the Bishop of Rome. He is also called the Pontiff, which comes from pontifex, which was the high priest of the Roman pagan gods who were responsible for the power of the Empire. So the Catholic power structure was born, in rebellion to the other churches, and it set itself up on a model based n the Roman army. That accounts for the structure and the authoritarian modus operendi.
Why do i bring this up? Because it is key to the Roman Catholic understanding of Faith. On the Catholic Church, faith is defined as assenting to the church’s teaching. This is very much specific to the existence of a structure, in understanding the church as the Body of Christ on Earth, and thier teaching, big surprise here, supports this idea.
The Lutheran (and Presbyterian) definition of faith is trust that God is merciful to sinners. This is a much more direct relationship to God for us humans. We don’t have the church as a mediator.
How do these differences work themselves out? Let’s start with Luther’s other revolution; he translated the New Testament into German, so that anyone could read it. The Catholics were against that, and stayed against it up until very recent times. Thier idea was that the Bible is easily misinterpreted, that the individual would get it wrong, and as a friend of mine put it, the priest was saying, “Put that down! Shut that book! I’ll tell you what you need to know!” It was the church’s job to teach, and it was the human’s job to have faith that God would be teaching through the church.
Luther thought this was wrong, because the church made so many mistakes. The selling of indulgences, where you can get remission from sin by paying the church money as a penance, was what galled Luther to the breaking point (the Romans are bringing that back, by the way). The Roman Catholic Church was using that money to build St. Peter’s Cathedral, the one where the Pope says mass and makes his speeches, where the Sistine Chapel is. The next time you see that building and that art, as beautiful as it is, remember they paid the price with the fracturing of Western Christianity.
Luther came back with the idea that it was faith alone, not the church, which gives us redemption and salvation. It’s the Good News, the Good Spell, the Gospel, that tells us of the love and mercy of the Creator God.
I’ll get farther into the differences between Lutheran theology and Catholic theology in the next blog. We need to touch on Calvin before his birthday week is up. Forgive me for dramatically oversimplifying; remember Luther told us to “sin bravely” knowing that God is merciful. Wikipedia’s summation suffices here:
We may summarize the three uses [according to Luther] as follows:
1 To restrain external evil...
2 To show us our sin (pedagogical, theological, ...or convicting use [or as a] mirror).
3 To show us God's character and will as a rule and guide to holy living, empowered by the Gospel alone (didactic use) or (rule).

Reformed view
In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Reformer John Calvin likewise distinguished three uses in the Law. Calvin wrote: "That the whole matter may be made clearer, let us take a succinct view of the office and use of the Moral Law. Now this office and use seems to me to consist of three parts."
1 By "exhibiting the righteousness of God, — in other words, the righteousness which alone is acceptable to God, — it admonishes every one of his own unrighteousness,... convicts, and finally condemns him."
2 It acts "by means of its fearful denunciations and the consequent dread of punishment, to curb those who, unless forced, have no regard for rectitude and justice."
3 "The third use of the Law. . .has respect to believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns. . . . For it is the best instrument for enabling them daily to learn with greater truth and certainty what that will of the Lord is which they aspire to follow, and to confirm them in this knowledge. . ."

Lutherans freaked about point number 3, that one could use the Bible to guide one’s actions. To Lutherans, this was unknowable, and also a centering of behavior on Works’ Righteousness, that you could earn your way to salvation through your own power. To Calvin, it was self evident that those who felt they were in the power of a loving God would look for ways to live out the scripture’s guidance.
In my mind they both make sense and aren’t mutually exclusive; but in the days of yore, things were very much either/or. Either Luther was right about works Righteousness and we shouldn’t seek special knowledge and grace though our own efforts; or Calvin was right that grace is a gift from God and we should be motivated by it to do good in this world.
Let me close with a bit of a surprise: Both Calvin and Luther believed in predestination, that one’s salvation was known by God, determined by God, and out of our hands. It’s the Calvinists and the Reformed movement that got attached to it because that became a problem when some more reformed Dutchmen began to break off from he Reformed movement (note: at this point the Catholics say, why did you all break off from he Roman Church? Just to make smaller and smaller churches? And the Protestants say, why did you break off from he Greeks? So you could speak Latin?).
These differences, while occasionally infuriating and seemingly quibblesome, as also the rules that guide our churchs, thier preaching and their actions. The core issue here is that we are all theologians, we are all philosophers, and some of us have had the chance to study them and some of us agree to take the word to the experts. But we still have to decide which expert we listen to. Is it the Pope? Or is it your local parish preacher?
Or is it God? Or is it you?

Forgive Us Our Debts

2009-07-15T12:34:00.001-05:00

Forgive us our debts by Dean J. Seal

Christians love to fight. We seem to be able to fight over anything. I think the Hundred years War was about the different viewpoints on Communion between Catholics and Protestants. Good thing to be killing each other about, innit?
Another example. I have a son, and we say the Lord's Prayer together almost every night. He learned the Lutheran way, somehow, and I still go the Presbyterian Way. He justifies his take on theological grounds, that God forgives sins; I justify mine on text analysis and metaphor. The true translation is "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" and this is especially true now. What if we did forgive debts? I read somewhere that before the latest crash, up to 30% of the profits of Corporate America was on interest and debt service, so this reading is going to make many Corporate Christians uncomfortable. Sins can be kept off the books.
So every night when we get to that part, he pipes up a little louder "... forgive us our SINS..." and I say "... forgive us our DEBTS..." and we then continue on in ecumenical harmony.
What is the dif?
I think it is important to know that taxes, loaning and debt service was how the Roman Empire financed its wars, and was a huge piece of motivation for conquering people. They hired Tax Farmers to go out and collect money from people, and if they couldn't pay they would have to borrow money. Now remember, taxes in the Roman Empire were not about building schools and creating parks. They were about national defense and building hghways, but that part was about posting armies in your town to keep an eye on you. And although they built highways, and had a postal system that actually worked better than what Europe has now, the main point of taxes was to enrich the Governor and the Roman Senate. So the goal was not necessarily to rub out your business, because then you couldn't pay taxes . The goal was to squeeze you, though, and it you got too far behind, they could take your land. Oops.
So when Jesus was saying "forgive us our debts" he was making an economic statement. A lot of what he taught came out of economics. Give money to anyone who asks. Loan money to those who cannot pay you back. Give something to God, even if it is your last two copper coins. Invite to dinner people who cannot return the favor. Render to Caesar that which is Caesars, and render to God what is God's. And don't get the two mixed up. Forgive us our debts was both fiscal and metaphorical.
The metaphorical content is clear as well. If you are in debt to someone for a favor, you want to pay them back. If you forgive me my debt to you, fiscal or non-fiscal, I am freed to move on in my life. But if I am trapped by a sense of indebtedness, it becomes a drag, an anchor on me.
This is actually the core of the Good News, the Gospel, that God loves us enough to forgive us our indebtedness to God. To me, the idea of forgiving our "sins" leaves a lingering sense that we are sinful, which we are, but I don't think we have to obsess over it. My Norwegian Lutheran upbringing was focused on making us feel bad about ourselves all the time."Don't make such a big deal of yourself." "Oh, so now you're all hoity-toity." "Who do you think you are?" My new understanding is that God created us in God's image, male and female he created us, and he saw his Creation and said it was Good. And when we fail God, and are indebted to God, God forgives us this debt. It is a cleansing forgiveness. At that point we should feel good about who we are, and go on in a life of joy. Jesus asks us to live life abundantly. That doesn't mean making ourselves as small and miserable and as invisible as possible.
God forgives both sins and debts, and we need to do likewise. Otherwise we are like the manager who was forgiven a debt and then threw people who owed him money into a debtor's prison. I don't know if you have ever asked a Christian to forgive you a debt, but it is not a pretty sight. The look reminds me of someone saying, "Don't you quote scripture to me!" We need to forgive, because we have been forgiven. We need to not hold differences against each other, even if we know the other person has it all wrong, because we may find out later we were the wrong one, on another occasion or even the one that is in dispute. And because God has forgiven us, we have the wherewithal to forgive others.
So the next time you find yourself disagreeing with another person of faith, find a way to silently forgive them for disagreeing with you. It's a way to acknowledge the debts you have been forgiven.

Don't Call Me White

2009-07-15T12:32:00.001-05:00

Don't Call Me White, by Dean J. Seal

So I'm filling out a form somewhere, and it seems it's the same thing every time. When they get to asking for demographic material, they ask are you African American, native American, Hispanic American, or.......White?
Here's what bugs me about that. It implies, very strongly that White is Normative. Normative is a technical term that means this is what is normal. It is normal to be white, and we are just tracking the rest of you non-whites to try to be fair, because you are not Normal.
What is that about? Why can't they say European American? BEcause us Whiteys don't want to think about the fact that we Came Over and stole this land from the Native Americans. We hate to be reminded of it, because we are taught that the natural progression of history was that European culture improves and progresses and is a gift tot he world, and we came over from Europe so that wee can make peace with each other and create freedom of speech and press and religion.
Well, we denied freedom of speech and freedom of religion to native Americans. We actually made it illegal for them to practice their faith from about the 1880's to the 1970's. That's pretty un-American, if you ask me.
The assumption was that these "poor" people would be happier if they were like the White Man. That' why we stole their kids and put them in boarding schools, to take their language and culture away from them because it was "pagan" and "uncivilized" and "backward" and "ignorant."
Why do I bring this up on a church website? Well, ladies and gentlemen, for most of Christian History, Christian institutions have acted the same way. We are Christian, Christian is normative, anyone who isn't needs to be converted. There is nothing of value in "pagan" "heretical" non-Christian wisdom, they have nothing to teach us.
This means if Indians ( it's okay to use that word, if it is said with respect. As a technical term, it originated in the description of anyone west of Spain) say a place is sacred, the courts of the US do not recognize it because there is no Anglo documentation for it. Well, what if the indians don't write stuff down? Are they automatically assumed to be lying about it? Read "God Is Red" if you want a long list of harrowing stories about how the White Christians have kicked native Theology into the mud for several centuries. Even now, if an Indian is killed, it is not in the news. They are invisible. But if a white woman age 17 is killed, it is headline news for weeks.
Let's bring this back home. How do we feel about people who are non-Christian? Do we think jews should go to hell because they don't accept jesus as their lord and Savior? That's not what Paul says. Paul says they have their own deal with God. Read through Romans 9-11, where Paul is discussing the Jews who do not accept jesus. He talks about them as missing out, but they are not condemned. "In 11: 26-29, he says this:" And so all of Israel will be saved....As regards to the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake, but as regards to election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." It is not for us to decide who has what deal with God. Paul saw it as rebellion, but he also saw it as another opportunity to show God's mercy to the jews.
o. If the Jews are okay not being a part of the Christian faith community, how far can we read that out? Paul does not talk about Hindus are Buddhists, or anyone else. Bu the implication, in my reading, in my interpretation- and you will have to make your own- is that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about anyone else. We should focus on being the best followers of Jesus we can be, focus on bringing the word to whoever is interested around us, and live by example, so that we bear witness in our actions. Jesus says, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You shall know them by their fruits." (Matthew 7:15-16). We can allow him a mixed metaphor here and there; this is a famous sayiing. Jesus is teaching about good and also false prophets; he is telling us to pay attention to what is said and to what is done. Dr. King looked to Gandhi for wisdom, and Gandhi looked to jesus. So, who are we to say gandhi is going to hell because he was not a Christian by profession?
We have better things to do than assume we are right because we are Christian. We have better things to do than assume that European-Americans are normal. Being a Christian is not normative, any more than being white is. Let those of us who are white, and those of us who are Christian, and especially those of us who are white Christians, move forward with a sense of humility, open to learning from all people, from all faiths. In my humble theology, it makes us better followers of Jesus.

Loving When it Ain't Easy, by Dean J. Seal

2009-05-17T20:37:00.005-05:00

A New Commandment.
You may or may not know this, but I am a fan of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s remembered as a social activist, the mouthpiece for the movement that ended legalized segregation in the United States. But sometimes people forget that the first title in his name was Reverend. He was a Minister of Jesus, and in that light he did not preach to conquer the enemy; he preached that “The most powerful force it the universe is love, because it is the only thing that turn an enemy into a friend.”
He had a few great little quips, one of which I’d like to share with you.“Jesus told us we must love our enemies. Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t say we have to like them. Because some of those folks are pretty unlikeable.” For Dr. King, this meant loving the racist. That’s pretty hard, harder than anything I have to do. But his point was that Jesus doesn’t ask us to do things that are easy. He’s asking us to love people we don’t like. At the same time, Jesus is not asking the impossible.
Here’s another thing you may not know: Dr. King’s original name was Michael; but he and his father decided to change their names to honor Martin Luther. Luther is seen by many as the founder of the Baptist Church, because of his emphasis on the freedom of the personal conscience. So Dr. King did that to honor the founder of the Lutheran Church; it would not hurt us to do something that honors Dr. King.
Northeast Community Lutheran Church is a church on the move. Like it or not. If you are a visitor today, or new to the congregation, I’ll give you a thumbnail sketch where we are. Three congregations could not make it on their own, and decided to merge. One minister retired, and we still have two. One building was sold, and we still have two. The congregation also decided to move into one building, on 13th St. Some work was evidently needed, with walls warping and chunks falling off. In doing a responsible overview of the entire building, it was discovered the main trusses, made of wood, had cracks in them. They might have been there for 20 years, and they might stay there for another 20. But no one in their right mind would use the space for gathering people under those trusses for Sunday, or any other day.
I firmly believe no one can predict the future; in fact, Jesus backs me up on this in Matthew 24: 35 “But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. ” All my experience says you don’t find out till you get there. So once we got there, we found out we could not stay.
Now we are faced with a great question: Where are we to build our church? What kind of building do we want to build it in? What exactly is the kind of congregation we want to be? That last question has to be answered first.
I’ve been in a similar situation before. When I was an intern, I worked for 9 months at a congregation that was made up of two merged congregations. They sold one building and used the income as an endowment to subsidize their new congregation. However, the minister in charge made a point of preaching only from the Bible. He had no interest in engaging the new world of information, in connecting with the youthful population in the neighborhood, in connecting to modern problems or new thinking or innovative theology. His hypothesis was that the church was the only place to teach the Bible, so the Bible should be the only thing the church would teach.
We don’t have ministers here who think that way, and thank God for that. But this failure to envision the future of the church, should be a lesson to any congregation looking to survive in a tough environment like we have today.
That congregation had no shortage of new visitors, but no one came back. The endowment shrank every year. Prospects faded, and last month they filed to close the church. Their deficit was never resolved, their vision of a church of the future never attempted.
I spoke about this with another minister of a successful Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis. His congregation had enough money to plant aa new congregation about 30 blocks east. He said it was controversial because the new spot was near three other Lutheran Churches that were all dying. Some of them thought he was poaching on their turf. But the new congregation was about being in a storefront church, no stained glass, no organ, blue jeans welcomed and relaxed atmosphere evident. The minister who sponsored the new church said “Those other congregations are committed to preserving the church they grew up in, and they would rather die than change.” Consequently, those congregations are all dying.
The struggle of every church, everywhere, is the tension between saving what we think is important, and changing what we believe is unnecessary. Every church, every denomination struggles with this. Twenty years ago, in the Presbyterian Church, USA, there was a movement to ordain women as ministers. Several dozen congregations broke off and became the Presbyterian Church of America. Now some congregations want to have the right to ordain gay people, and there is a movement of others to move out again. These struggles are not unusual. They are in every church, in every congregation. Only the details change.
This congregation has to make some decisions this month, and some of us aren’t ready for it. We’d like more time, we’d like more information, we’d like a chance to discuss it more thoroughly. I was not around here for the initial process of merging the three congregations, but I can empathize with you about being in this long drawn-out process that we all wish was over.
But keep in mind that when the congregations merged, not everyone came along. In the merging of churches, a friend of mine said, “50 plus 50 never equals 100.” In other words, it’s never the case that everyone agrees and moves in together.
And this is not a great time to be working over these ideas. It’s a hard ecomomic time, and the margin for error is thin. We are faced with a pair of hard problems too- we have a deficit, and we have to pick a building. Each building has good points and bad points, but they have to be seen in the light of the future.
Northeast Community Lutheran Church does not have to survive. It could vote to dissolve, like the church I interned at. There is no shortage of Lutheran Churches in Minneapolis, and no shortage of alternatives in Nordeast. If we are to survive as a congregation, it is because we have something special that gives us a reason to be.
I submit that we do have something special. I think this congregation has a special vibe. It has a mission to the neighborhood. For example, the food shelf came in when people were having trouble feeding their families even when they had jobs. Things have only gotten worse since then. And our commitment to the food shelf has only strengthened. The community meal is a part of that vision too. The original symbol for the church was not the cross- that came in with Constantine. Before that it was the fish, and that was because we met over meals, and we shared our food. It’s at the core of our tradition, and part of our mission: To serve.
I also am a fan of, and a participant in, the arts ministry outreach of this church. This neighborhood is crawling with artists; actors, sculptors, painters, musicians, writers. Low prices in housing makes life possible for artists, and artists can be a powerful force in strengthening and rehabilitating neighborhoods. If we are to connect people to our congregation, I believe art is an important and powerful means to make that connection. That’s why the church hired Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Bach to make beauty part of the life of the church,and they made stained glass windows to tell the story. It’s part of our mission: To Tell.
Finally, I feel a great vibe when I come in here to teach my one or two or four students in confirmation, and I see a dozen kids being taught to sing together and to do Bible stuff together. Bishop Hanson of the Minneapolis synod said, “Children aren’t the future of the church- they Are the church.” So kids like we have aren’t just something we have to take care of- they are the reason we are here. All religious traditions begin with this question: What are the things I want to pass on to my kids before I die?
So the future of this congregation will be forged by facing two questions. First, how can we make this a place where people with kids are going to come? We also have seniors to serve, and adults to educate, but that’s about the present. Our future is in building a home for families. A place where the kids are getting a feeling of a church community, while parents can have a quiet hour to think about their spirituality, before they have to go back to diapers and laundry and work. A place where kids get trained in on the ethical core of the faith, where the story of the Jews and the story of Jesus, our Messiah, are taught carefully and completely. A place where kids get the idea that the love of Jesus is something that fills us with joy. Again, part of our mission : to Tell.
The other determinate is in how well we work together in finishing this process. There are always going to be differences of opinion. There are probably going to be some people who decide that they don’t want to go along with whatever decision is made, and they decide to go elsewhere. 50 plus 50 never equals 100. No matter what the decision is, there are going to be people on the other side of the question. They’ll have to ask, should I stay or should I go?
The question that will determine the life or death of this congregation will be this: Will we love one another? Will we speak respectfully to people we disagree with? Will we approach the questions and answers with kindness, politeness and courtesy? When the vote is taken, and if we are on the side that does not prevail, are we going to try to carry through the commitment of this new congregation, to love, to serve and to tell? And if sme of us must part, can we do it respectfully and graciously?
Jesus does not ask us to like one another. Sometimes that is too hard. But we are to love one another, and that is not a request. It is a commandment. We are to love our enemy, even if we are enemies only in the process of deciding the future of this church. We are to love one another, even and especially when we don’t like one another. Jesus calls us to rise above our natural instincts, to put aside being mad with people we disagree with. If we cannot do that, what does that say about our faith? We are known by our fruit, says Jesus. Let us be faithful to that, so that we have a church we want to be a part of, no matter what building we are in. This congregation has a mission, to Love, to Serve and to Tell. In the conversations we have, in the decisions we make, let us first follow the New Commandment, to love each other, as Jesus loves us.
Amen.

God helps those....who listen.

2009-04-29T11:59:00.002-05:00

This is a perpetually interesting line of inquiry. I say "perpetually" because it seems reasonable to assume we won't ever know the bottom line, not in this life, to the question of whether our prayers are "heard."

I often pray in the form of a petition, as in "please can I have" or "please protect" or "please assist." I also try to pray outside that format -- to consider my prayers as a good practice for focusing my thoughts where they need to be. In that sense, praying for "the greatest good" and maintaining "positive energy" makes sense to me, even if the language used by the aforementioned landlady is a little too New Age pour moi.

There are lots and lots of books written about prayer as meditative practice. There are at least as many books written about "the habits of highly successful people" which devote chapter after chapter to mindset, goal-identification, visualization of the desired outcome. One book is written in the context of faith practice while the other is not, and both are valid; often the phrases used to describe "prayer" or "mindset" seem interchangable. Self-help books have their place in faith formation.

Does God always help those who help themselves? I can't answer that question, though people with a sense of empowerment and determined ambition do seem to do better overall than people who feel relentlessly oppressed by circumstance.

As I pray my petitions, I try to keep in mind the underlaying reason for my prayer. Do I need reassurance, some sense of relief from constant anxiety? Perhaps praying gives me a sense of control, or even a sense that there's someone I can really be honest with about my fears. Every morning I watch my young son being buckled into his car seat by his father, and as the two of them drive away, to daycare and work, I pray to God to protect them out there on the road, to be with them through their day apart from me. What will I feel if one of them is injured in a car accident or some other unforeseeable situation? Will I feel ripped off by God, as though all my prayers had been bitterly pointless? I don't know, but I'm inclined to think not -- because it seems to me that there are rules even God has to follow. Of course, I'm praying I won't have to find out.

It makes sense. Life is full of rules, abounding with principles that can and should guide our behavior. As a parent, I know my kid is going to break the rules, because kids learn best sometimes by getting into trouble. If an adult breaks the rules -- say, by exceeding the speed limit -- and hurts my child, is that God's fault? If my child grows into adulthood, and in the course of careless behavior harms himself or someone else, would you blame me? Do we blame "God the Father" for not giving that adult child a better upbringing, one that would have made him more careful and considerate of others? In this culture, that's what we do -- we blame our parents for our failings, all our lives. We lay the accountability for our problems on everyone else's doorstep, and with the expertise of the kitchen psychologist we determine ourselves to be victims to at least some extent. But for me personally, it makes a whole lot more sense to blame the guy driving the car for that car accident. It wasn't God behind the wheel, and I suspect there are rules against divine intervention that are seldom broken. If I do everything for my kid, and never make him accountable for his own actions, he will be a failure as an adult. The human race could never advance, morally or philosophically, if God intervened to protect us from the consequences of our actions every single time. We were created to learn, and that's the only way we can grow, as individuals and as a society.

So what's the point of praying?

In my experience, God is relational. If I'm listening, God is there to point the way and to reassure me, most of the time. Petitioning happens; but I suspect real prayer is about listening. And I believe real listening is rewarded. When I take my problems to a friend, it's only polite to listen to any advice they might want to offer. I'm not sure it should be any different with God.

Praying for the 'Greatest Good'

2009-04-21T22:19:00.004-05:00

My very eclectic and a 'poco loco' landlord mentioned recently that she was praying for the "greatest good." Now, she said this in relation to finding successful, nice, compatible renters for the unoccupied upstairs apartment in the duplex where I live (need a pet friendly apartment in NE? Call me, Dahling!).

Thinking about praying for the "Greatest Good" is pretty interesting (and a bit perplexing!) when you start to think about it - or at least when you start to think about it in relation to any specific problem. In this case, for example, what if the true 'greatest good' was that the place burned down so that a home for disabled children could be built? Or what if the greatest good means that she won't find renters for that apartment for several months?

My delightfully quirky and granola landlord insists that this thinking is perpetuating the "energy of fear and doubt" and that praying for the greatest good "contains the vibration of success". She also says, that the answer to my 'energy of fear and doubt' is "Faith! Buh-LEEVE!"

I am very willful. Stubborn. Obstinate. And I'm REALLY bossy - so it chokes me everytime I say "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Hey! What if I don't like God's will? Huh? What if I have a better idea? How about *MY* will be done? Could we try that for a while?

I suspect that I choke on this partly because I am currently unemployed, and have been (mostly) unemployed since last September. Many very well-meaning people have tried to comfort me with assurances that God just has something else in mind for me, that the right door or window just hasn't opened yet. I long to have that kind of faith and that kind of calm acceptance. I'm impatient. I'd like it a whole lot if God could just get on with it, because what I'd really like is a PAYCHECK and HEALTH INSURANCE. It might not be the GREATEST good, but it'd be pretty darn good! Darn-it!

So, for the moment, I will continue to pray like I'm writing a letter to Santa: "Dear God! I've been a very good girl! Can I please have a JOB for Christmas? "

Interfaith Chocolate

2009-03-24T23:30:00.004-05:00

by Dean J. Seal

The use of Chocolate (the movie) is a great idea that pastors Evelyn and Craig are employing in Lent. Lent becomes a season of withholding if we turn it into a competition of who can give up the most, and feel the worst. Feeling bad is how you measure what you have given up, innit?

What we are learning from the film is that the radical atheist chocolatier is more generous, more giving, more adventurous than any of the petrified Christians in town. They are not just petrified with fear, the fear of doing something wrong, the fear of losing face and being shamed. They are also petrified stiff with following the rules that have been around so long no one knows where they come from. Petrified in their paths. Not to spoil the ending, but by then end there is liberation for the lot of them. Chocolate4 has arrived. And fear of joy crumbles.

Fear of Joy is how an old buddy of mine used to describe the Twin Cities before she left for the West Coast. Why should it be bad for us to enjoy ourselves? Enjoy chocolate? Enjoy new ideas and all that jazz? She was a dancer, and there was a very palpable fear of enjoying the process of watching a body, usually female, do all kinds of cool and unusual stuff. It seems obvious now, but a recent study (published somewhere near France, I don't know) said that women would much rather look at another woman's body in motion, whether it be dance, basketball, tennis or just running, than look at a man's body pretty much any time. This town has improved since my pal left (about seven years ago) and in fact the Big Twin Towns are very much a Dance Mecca. Ask James Sewell. So we are learning, we do move, even at a glacial pace.

What Am I talking about? you may ask yourself, and me. Here's the Interfaith Message for today. In the Movie Chocolate, the Petrified Forest of Christians was liberated by a self-described atheist. She had something to teach them, and it was compassion. Also, the church we go to is reaching beyond the bell book and candle format to learn from a movie. That is a format-style of interfaith dialogue; learning from a different resource. We can also learn from plays, from dance pieces, heck, even other religions have something to teach us. The Native Americans had it all over the White man in respecting the earth, right? Dr. King studied Gandhi, and Gandhi studied Jesus. They all picked up stuff that was theme-compliant with the work they did, and made it their own. King did not become a Hindu, and Gandhi did not become a Christian (someone asked him why, and he said, "I might have become a Christian if I had not met so many of them.")

So. I'm a guy who has no problem saying there are many paths up the mountain. There is something wrong with every religion, every faith tradition, including my own. With patience, with some mild study or chance encounter with another person's viewpoint, we can pick up stuff that makes sense that helps even if it isn't in our Bible. Jesus said, " I have called you to live abundantly." Go get 'em.

I Love Nordeast Luteran

2009-03-17T00:47:00.001-05:00

by Dean J. Seal

Why oh why do I love Nordeast? It's not an easy situation that it finds itself in. After deciding to take up residence in the big old German location on 13th St. we find some cracks in the beams that cast doubt on the viability of the space. We have to run for cover at the smaller, less equipped Swedish place on Lowry.

Galling for me; I'm a youth minister without a place to teach. Adult Bible Study gets pretty raucous, doncha know- lots of laughs and messing around. Me and the Young Adults are pretty serious- or at least we want to hear each other. So we huddle in the office of the Ministers, and I try not to spill coffee so we get invited back.

And being in two locations is not the optimal environment for bringing in new people. It's like when the Lakers were a Minneapolis team, and they played in three different auditoriums; once their star player came to the wrong building and missed the game. How are newbies supposed to know where to go, when we get confused sometimes ourselves?

Still. What follows is a partial list of why I find this congregation to be interesting, attractive and, let's face it, sometimes even adorable.

First, because it is a merging congregation, they make an effort to be new. New things are hard to spring on a congregation, and this is three congregations trying to merge, and old habits die hard. But everyone is very much committed to making a new thing, or as Isaiah puts it, "I sing a new song." In other words, by living in the present, we understand we are building a future. Knowing that the three traditions created three shrinking congregations, there is a move afoot to create something new that will grow.

Second, that experimentation is alive in how the services are put together. Our new Music Director, Kristi, is amazing. She brings a mix of traditional and modern stuff, and she does them both right. She can sing, she can bring in musicians who add to the mix, and it seems fresh and vital every week. I have to tell you, I have always thought of the flute as a boring, wimpy instrument, unless it was played by Ian Anderson in Jethro Tull. But Kristi plays it so well I actually forgot i hate flutes.

It isn't just music by Kristi, though. When John Koski gets inspired to knock off a New Song, Isaiah-like, they let him go up and do it. And each minister gets to experiment with delivery, and they each get to follow their own muse.

I really like how cookies after church has become Actual Food with Actual Substance. I remember when fruit was served, the kids went straight for it; they don't have to feed on sugar all the time. And as the food improves, I think the temptation to linger and chat increases. My wife is fond of saying: Food Is Love. As we show this generous hospitality to whoever walks in the door, as we gather at table for a snack of soup or fresh bread, it's like hanging out in each other's rec rooms.

So this is where I end up, at table during the coffee hour, where I feel a community emerging from the dust of three former congregations. We are gathering, laughing, sharing, consoling each other on Sundays. We become Community, because we want community. We reach out to the community of people who have not enough to eat; we welcome the stranger to our table; we work with new ideas and make them our own.

It's a lively, living church.

Background Check

2009-03-15T23:31:00.005-05:00

by Dean J. Seal

So. It has come to my attention that writing for an established blog might benefit from introducing myself. It sounds like the only polite thing to do. If one was conducting a Background Check, it might include some of the following.

At Northeast Community Lutheran, I am the Youth and Drama Minister. I am actually ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) to work in Interfaith Dialogue through the Performing Arts. So that is something I pursue.

In the past, I was an award-winning Producer of the MN Fringe, and Director of the Bryant-Lake Bowl Cabaret Theater. I was 50% of Mr. Elk and Mr. Seal, which used to perform a lot in NYC with the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Rosie O'Donnell, Lewis Black, Dennis Leary, Ray Romano ( I was chatting with the Queen of England yesterday and she and I both agreed how much we hate name droppers). I wrote for the Prairie Home Companion for about 6 months too. Mr. Elk and myself were in a band with Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller, called Bongos, Bass and Bob. Our only LP was called "Never Mind the Sex Pistols, here's Bongos, Bass and Bob (what on earth were they thinking?)" And it was produced by Kramer at Noise New York. We were on MTV, Comedy Central, and America's Funniest Videos, and we shot a pilot for HBO (who chose instead to take Def Comedy Jam).

But show biz was a task that I found to be weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. So I became more enamored with low-budget theater.

Currently, I am an Artist in Residence at City Passport in St. Paul, a drop-in center for aging Americans. I run a little theater company called the Passport Players. We are people with chronic pain issues, and we are performing a 20 minute musical (it has two songs) called "My Ex-Husband is Married to Your Ex-Husband's Ex-Wife." We perform in senior centers where the residents feel trapped and are starved for entertainment.

I also teach Religion as an Adjunct Instructor for Augsburg College. I teach 100, 200 and 300. It is about three things: The history of Christianity, the Interfaith Dialogue, and finding a sense of vocation in your own life, no matter what belief system you have. 100 and 200 are required courses, and 300 is a combination of the two taught to nurses in the nursing program. I love nurses, in the best, most platonic agape-esque sense of love. More on that later.

There's more. I am at present a consultant to the congregations that sponsored the Downtown Interfaith Forum, which is looking for new ways to make the Interfaith Dialogue more present. I am also Executive/Artistic Director of Spirit in the House, a producing entity that among other things manages an annual festival of film, storytelling, theater, dance and music where the artists express their spirituality through their art.

I wrote a book about using the Bible as a source of ideas for theater (Church & Stage, Cowley Pubs. 2005), and how to use that as a youth ministry program so the young people understand that there is valuable stuff for them in the text. Otherwise, the Bible is a Dead Book. Like a 1953 Encyclopedia.

I've seen some amazing stuff in this line of work, and I hope to make it more visible and available. Unfortunately, many of the people who do this kind of work are not ambitious. So I can't always build on what succeeds.

Such a delicate flower of a project. Let me know if you have an interest.

Funeral to Festival, to Funeral

2009-03-14T23:49:00.006-05:00

by Dean J. Seal

The Festival is Spirit in the House, which is about spirituality expressed by artists through their art. Theater is the core, with storytelling being a major vehicle, and dance, movement, testimonial, all chipping in. This year we had 14 live shows, and 14 films. Also, five workshops. Lest you become muddled in thinking it is all Xtian, let's mention the list of Faith Traditions in the past five years: Quaker, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim Dervish, Mormon, Sikh, Baptist, Goddess, Jewish, and lots of Non-denominational experiential. Also, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist. See the site: Spiritinthehouse.org for details.

The Funeral, this year, was my mother-in-law, Ann. Last year it was my mother, Elaine. Both died just before the Festival. Both had suffered somewhat from pain and debilitating health pictures; my mom was 88 and Ann was 73. But neither wanted to live in a residential nursing home, and both went fast, within an hour for Ann and about 12 for Elaine. It was a blessing for them. It's been a tough year for my little family.

Why the odd pairing? I have no idea how it happened that way. I do think I can juxtapose the events and learn from them. I can recommend a book on the afterlife, not written by a goofball. It's called Forever Ours, by Dr. Janet Amatuzio, who is a Forensic Pathologist. For those unacquainted with the term, she's the one who will inspect each and every stab wound when someone is killed by a freak. Forensic pathologists will not put up with any crackpot ideas from anyone; yet she writes movingly about what she has heard from those who have left and come back.

This is what I talk about when people ask me about it. I don't think there is a hell. I think we go to God, and when we get there, we have a chance to understand out lives, and we bathe in the love of the Eternal Being, the Creator, El Shaddai, the Uncreated. Those of us obsessed with vengeance in this world will be disappointed that there isn't some place where pointy-eared guys with tails are stabbing people with tridents. But they can take that up with the discussion groups when they get there.

My experience here is that I have no trouble with death. Sometimes it looks pretty good; as Liz Lemon said once on 30 Rock, "When will death come?" We have nothing to fear but fear itself; fear is actually a major component of pain, and if you aren't afraid of whatever is causing the pain, you can reduce the amount of pain you actually experience. The shows we produced in the Festival are about how people deal with life in a manner that is attempting to be meaningful; more than a material victory over our pals, more than comfort and time off. What if we felt that compassion was more important than envy?

That's what I'm talkin' bout.

Then, on the last weekend of the Fest, I attended the funeral of a guy, Rev. Don Meisel, who was a fan of my work. He came to hear me preach when I had the pulpit at Central Presbyterian in St. Paul. He did not have to do that, but he wanted to encourage the young talent (hah, younger than him, anyway) because he was comfortably retired, and comfortably headed to the Great Round-Up. With his death fully in mind, he could move peacefully from commitment to commitment to make the world a better place after he was gone. He also could speak clearly; when the new minister was being installed, he gave the congregation a charge: "Show up."

So, knowing we will die, this is our charge. Be alive while we are alive. Be aware of the many paths to wisdom, of the many styles of spirituality, give them their due, and learn your own way by being intentional about the pursuit. Listen to the suffering in this world, and be not afraid of sharing that pain. And when there is a need, show up.

a mild response

2008-09-22T23:29:00.002-05:00

I'm disappointed in some of the comments I heard at this past Sunday's Congregational Meeting.

Is it true that church is just a place to show up on Sunday for 90 minutes; sing your hymns, drink your coffee? Then you drive home and heed not the gospels for the next six days?

I've heard it said that this is so; that we in the church should not trouble ourselves with "service to the community" or "relevance to our neighborhood." I've heard it said that the church is a building only, in which we praise and pray together. Of course, I've also heard it said that the church is anything but a building; that we ourselves are the hands and feet of Christ, and must always be consciously thus, regardless of the building we meet in.

I've been asked why I spend so much time managing our ever-expanding food shelf program when I should be "in my office" taking care of real church business. And I've heard the criticism of my elders, who ask why we give so much away to the community, when they give seemingly so little to the church in return.

I've never been a Sunday Christian, it's a luxury I simply never had the chance to take for granted. I for one have spent most of my life speaking against the church, against organized religion, and have associated all Christians with the most ignorant, self-serving and richly deceptive televangelist types. It was easy, because I never set foot in a church or gave anyone the chance to prove my bias even a little bit wrong. But then God shook me awake one night, and I took a job working for the church; so now I have to be a Christian all the time, because God's work leaves room for little else in a world where the need for God's mercy and strength screams to us from the streets all day, every day. Is that too strongly phrased?

Of course it's important that the church as institution should endure; that we should manage our resources wisely and take prayerful time in considering each step along the path of growth and service. But who among us at NEC has not yet felt the Spirit moving in this place?

For that matter, who among us has not yet seen the relieved smiles of those members and non-members we serve with food, clothing, and other types of personal and economic assistance? Who among us has not yet felt the need in our own lives to reach out for help, and when did the church stop serving you in your need? Who among us has not felt the need for community, for the fellowship of those who share a concern for the world we live in? Who among us has never faced uncertainty, the kind that challenges our most basic sense of self: where will I live? How will I feed my children? How can I make my life better?

If all God wanted us to be was a "Sunday church," we would never have consolidated. We could each have done things the way we'd done them in our little churches for years and years, until our ministries died the inevitable death from spiritual attrition that I think we all really wanted to avoid. Instead we and our collective resources were brought together, to love God and one another, to serve the community, and to tell the story of Jesus Christ. We were sent to find one another, and to go then into the community to find others who needed us. We were sent to bring them the church, and to be the church in all its glory. Were we sent merely to survive? I doubt it, myself.

So let's try to think again about the church God calls us to be -- look at the ministries that have taken flight without any assistance other than a willingness on our part to serve -- look at all the wonderful people who have joined the church in just the past year -- look at the seven-day-a-week church we have become, because so many individuals and groups want to think of us as their church, even if they aren't part of our Sunday worship community. And then tell me if you can that NEC is not called to be a part of the larger community, the bigger world, and the grace-filled heart of our Lord.

Thanks be to God.

a big night

2008-08-05T23:20:00.000-05:00

I've had the most wonderful time tonight.It's odd, because in fact what I did was spend three-plus hours painting faces at the church's National Night Out event. My hips hurt, my back hurts and I suspect there's a mess I'll have to clean up at work tomorrow. But I had the most amazing time. In part because, in the background, three other churches were doing their part to make National Night Out an amazing event -- with lots of food, great local entertainment, park-run games and fun, a series of prize drawings... and of course the face-painting. There might have been even more, but I was only able to glance over my shoulder occasionally as the night unfolded. I could hear the awesome music of Leonard Knight & family, and the puppet performances from Bethel Christian Fellowship that everyone apparently loved -- and maybe there was more, again, I don't know. Kids were running and laughing and having a good time. No one seemed unduly stressed out. Hundreds of people attended. It was everything we could have hoped for. I give my thanks to God that I'm so blessed, to be so ridiculously overworked these days, in the service of love. Face-painting beats bookkeeping any day, but I'll take all that and more -- if we can keep giving out food and care for so many, with such success. I'm grateful too for all the hard work of so many volunteers from my church and others -- the Churches of Logan Park. Without every single person on hand tonight, it couldn't have gone so well. I think we can be proud of this event, and I particularly think NECL can be proud of how far we've come in just a little over a year. We are truly blessed in this work. What a joy it is to see the faces of so many little kids -- children of every hue and background -- eating and smiling, having a good time -- and to see their parents smiling too. How wonderful.

the church as community

2008-07-09T00:23:00.003-05:00

In the long years of ramp-up towards actually finding an excuse to join a church, my most conscious motivator was the desire to belong to a community: a defined community, with a tangible sense of inclusion. I wanted a church "where everybody knows your name," and where a shared set of values could be found. Having made a place for myself in such a community over the past two years, I realize that this notion of what church does for me is working just fine. Moreover, the church seems to do this for me in the way it should: it equips me to turn around and go "be the church out there," acting out my faith publicly in a variety of ways. I've learned in just the last few months how many of my fellow members also find this to be true; and it's been a pleasure to discover all the less visible and more quiet, but no less profound, ways in which they too are "the church out there." And what I wonder now is this: Should the church be a constant operating platform for each member, a continuity in their lives outside its walls, or should some people "graduate" from one church to the next?

By this I mean that maybe our church, NECL, could and should be a launching point for certain members to branch off, or just leave the nest entirely. Maybe that's what makes the most sense in the spiritual growth cycle of some members. If so, what should we graduate to? Is there already a common destination (sort of a "grad school" church) or is it determined individually? Is "graduating" part of the normal church-seeking process, as one's needs and interests change and other churches start to look like a better fit; or is the process less lateral and more intentional?

What's the goal of going to church and being a member of the church community? How is that goal tied to who we are in our public lives? That might seem like a funny question from the point of view of a life-long member, but I do wonder.

a quick update

2008-07-09T00:12:00.002-05:00

It's been some time since a new topic was posted, and I invite users and visitors to get involved! This is a new project, with a slow start, but we think a fair number of readers stop off here on their way to other sites. Let's think about ways we can up our participation. Thanks!

Checkout Line Evangelism

2008-04-27T16:52:00.002-05:00

During Bible study this morning our little group discussed the efforts of the early church as narrated by the book of Acts. We also read Hebrews 12 verses 1 through 3: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God." The question was asked (if I remember correctly) "what was the joy set before Jesus?", responses to which included the love of God and more to the point, the Resurrection. In thinking more about the message of the verses -- the race to run, and disregarding the shame of the cross -- my mind went to thoughts of being a Christian in the world outside the church walls.

"The shame of the cross" -- Jesus as "a model of endurance in the face of hostility" (according to the notes in my Bible) should "encourage the reader in their plight" to run the race, live life as Christians despite the hindrance of sin. And also, I expect, the other challenges of living that way -- everything from the raw negativity that the world throws up at one quite often, to the delicate nature of personal relationships with people who simply want to live their lives differently from you.

I don't get many opportunities to be the church outside of the immediately personal sphere and church itself, because church is also my job. "The shame of the cross" probably meant something else in context; but it made me think of fear of rejection, fear of disconnect between myself and people I care about, when the subject of faith comes up. I am friends with many more non-religious people than otherwise, and I used to be one of them, so finding the boundaries and the space to talk about faith in those relationships can be challenging. It was suggested during the conversation at Bible study that too much evangelizing in one's personal life can actually be abusive, and while there are undoubtedly extremes there that I haven't approached, it's still alarming to think I've abused anyone with my desire to communicate "the good news." I mean, it's not enough to be afraid of opening my mouth, I also have to watch out that I don't knock anyone down before I shut myself up. Yeah, that's important too.

Cathie expresses her own thoughts on all this with admirable clarity, and seems to have the right idea -- just do your thing, and let people respond to you as the Christian they see in you. I know that the "living out," the "walking the talk" is the most important proof of your good news for most people.

Two people have asked me, in the past week, if I had a college education. The first was a woman in the check-out line at Lunds, who at first glance looked young and stylish and quite sane; but as she went on, I found out that she doesn't like people who don't go to college, particularly older people who never went (though it wasn't clear why); and that she's "the type of woman who would date my son" (age four, standing next to me holding my hand.) I nodded politely as she left. The second person was someone I know from church, who went on to compliment me on my public speaking skills and administrative abilities. Generous compliments, but they also made me stop and think specifically about speaking out -- in fact, I didn't learn this in college. I didn't learn it anywhere. I can, and often enough I do, when I'm feeling so inspired. Lately I'm thinking I need to shut up and be less visible. Was the lady in the checkout line a missed opportunity to be a better Christian, or was it enough just to listen and nod attentively? Is speaking out on social justice issues or blogging on matters of faith sufficient unto evangelism, or is there more expected of me? I don't wear a cross all the time -- what constitutes "telling the story?" I know it's about living out the love of God -- I just don't want to be the one in the checkout line getting the polite nod from my neighbor, when I gracelessly throw in a comment about my new boyfriend Jesus.

Secret Christians - or the secret handshake?

2008-04-21T00:03:00.003-05:00

Going to church (voluntarily) is pretty new to me - or, newer than most stuff in my life. Newer than my job. Newer than my newest dog. Newer than my car. I went to church as a teenager until I was confirmed only because my mother made me. This is the woman who would drop off my older brother and I, and pick us up after church and Sunday School. Hurmph.

I have lots of doubts and questions about God and Jesus and being Lutheran, and I have a plain old stubborn streak that makes me wrinkle my nose and roll my eyes about all things "church."

Nevertheless, this church-going, cross wearing thing has been just a little bit like learning a secret handshake. I know we say, "Love. Serve. Tell." at NECL. I'm all about the lovin' and the servin'. I could love and serve until the cows come home, (and then leave again). The "Tell" part makes me feel like those awful dreams where you've ended up somewhere absolutely naked, or (my personal favorite), it's the end of the Semester, and I have to take a final for a class that I never attended.

Consequently, the only place I'm likely to do much Tellin' is in another arena of my life - which is dog rescue. One of my most common refrains is that the love of a dog is the closest thing to the love of God that any of us is likely to experience on this side of Heaven. (I can evangelize about DOGS a LOT.) This tiny little statement, and the itty bitty cross I wear around my neck, have suddenly opened up a whole lot of hearts that I probably wouldn't have known before. People ask me to pray for them, or their dogs. People tell me about how they have prayed about adopting a dog. People send me their blessings, and call me an "angel" and a "saint." (I'm not letting it go to my head.... I don't think.)

I'm pretty sure that I haven't been sucked into an alternative reality inspired by televangelism - it's just that now people feel comfortable sharing this with me. They feel closer to me. They can identify something that they relate to besides just the dog. And it makes me wonder about the years between high school and when I started going to St. Paul's, and about how I missed out on this side of people. This very sweet, and well-meaning, and hardly-ever sanctimonious part of people. I'm pretty sure that it's not that I'm just suddenly meeting more Christians - I think it's just that now people tell me about it.

So - what does that mean? And isn't it interesting and hopeful that one little sentence and one tiny cross make people feel comfortable enough to share this part of their hearts with me?

It's very late - but I hope to hear what some of you might have to say about this.

Evangelism: Testifying or Terrifying?

2008-03-31T16:39:00.002-05:00

Our Evangelism team at NECL is starting small. We all agreed on paper to a vision and mission encapsulated by the "Love. Serve. Tell." tagline, and many of us are Serving like crazy. We're open to dialogue about Love too, and I think we all have some level of comfort discussing the place of Love in our lives and in our faith. But the "Tell" is a tough task, difficult for me at any rate. Ask me about Love and I'll talk until you tell me to shut up. Ask me how God is at work in my life, and I'm apt to crawl under the table.

Mind, that's if we're in the same room. I can write it easily enough, in a blog or an email; because I don't have to experience the immediacy of your reaction that way. It's not that I don't want to tell; it's that I'm fearful of the response, or a lack of response, to something so deeply personal. It doesn't yet feel to me like a gift I have to give, this Telling. I have all the predictive traits for evangelism avoidance: German, Lutheran, private, easily shamed. I'm curious to hear from someone who came to it reluctantly and now finds joy in it -- I'd like to know how that journey was made.

So - What's church FOR?

2008-01-31T13:57:00.002-06:00

What's the purpose of going to church? Why do you go to church?

I've been thinking about this lately - mostly due to my own curiosity, and definitely because it clearly has a different meaning and purpose in my life than in the life of other people who attend my church.

There are a bunch of people who seem to follow the vitamin/exercise philosophy of church: i.e. "Church is Good For Me, But I Don't Really Like It." They show up most Sundays because they think it's good for them, but they don't particularly enjoy it, and they're out the door as fast as possible after services. These are not the kind of people who drop by between Sundays, or volunteer for church events. Like running on a treadmill, they just want the service to be over so they can go home and watch football, or go to the mall, or whatever. (Lots of men in this category)

I suspect that there's a big spectrum for church-goers, so I'm really curious about what it means, and why people go - or don't go - to church.

I started going to St. Paul's, and now NECL, because I wanted a bigger community and a place with some infrastructure where I could try to focus some energy on helping other people. I started with helping at Community Dinners and with Children's Sabbath. It's also a focus (and locus?) of many of the things that Jennifer and I do together.

NECL is part of who I am and how I spend my time. I hope that my participation is a manifestation of my values. NECL helps me examine my values and think about what it means to live on this earth at this time in history.

This is part of why I go to church.

Why do you go? Or, why don't you go?