——————————————————————-

I hope you all got a chance to see the artwork from the Stations of the Cross liturgy from Good Friday. The pieces were absolutely wonderful, coming from a broad range of styles and media. They make a great visual augment to the liturgy of Good Friday, allowing us to not just literally help imagine the things Jesus went through at his passion, but also to go a step further into imagining the meanings and experiences of the story as people see it. In essence, the art helps us get into the story more, and not just hear it as historical events, but as cosmic, world-changing, life-changing events.

This is the third Good Friday we’ve done this particular format. My first year here I found the images on Google: many great works of art, but all things from outside our community and our experience. So, last year I got on the phone and recruited members of our church to make the art, which I then photographed and converted into digital pictures to be shown on the screen with each station. The pictures from last year finally got hung up in the hallway by the offices, so you can see them yourself.

Having been so pleasantly surprised by the results last year, I decided to try it again. And, again, I was impressed. Some things were different: we had an increase in the number of pieces quilted and watercolor, and had more art from kids. I hope to get these hung up as well, hopefully some time soon.

The inspiration for the Stations of the Cross came to me from reading about a small church in New Zealand called Cityside Baptist. The pastor took over an old building in the inner city of Aukland, and began to invite artists in to make full-blown installations for each station. Here, the people walk from station to station, soaking in the displays and stopping, at the end, at a prayer room to reflect. The idea inspired me not so much because I was interested in art production (I have no training and little experience myself), but because it became a way of encountering and entering into the story of Jesus’ passion: a story we hear a lot, retold, but which can lose its hard edges and subtleties in our minds with familiarity.

It also fits with a general calling I’ve felt in the past few years to bring back the artistic, the colorful, the creative to the local church. Too often, especially in Lutheranism, we avoid color because it’s too contentious (many a major church fight has erupted over carpet or wall color), and make everything as bland as possible – a sort of artistic lowest-common-denominator philosophy. If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to be offended by.

On the other hand, our theology has tended to emphasize the written word and spoken word over all else in worship. This was never Luther’s intention, but it wasn’t long after the Reformation started that people were knocking down statues and burning paintings because they were seen as idolatrous (something Luther never said) or a distraction from the sermon. Hence we had a divine reason to banish art from everything but the stained glass windows: it’s a threat to the hearing of the Word of God. In a darker vein, church art in old Lutheranism was perceived as “too Catholic”, and opposed for that reason alone.

In contemporary circles the concerns over art continue, but with different rationales. There’s the concern over orthodoxy: how do I know that painting/statue/quilt etc. is going to show right theology? I have tried to think of what a heretical painting would look like, and it’s not easy. Shock art and blatant attacks on Christian symbols – those are easy to see. But how is an abstract rendering heretical? What doctrine does it contradict? It’s not easy to peg down clear criteria. But maybe that’s part of the fear: art is hard to control.

Then there is the perennial issue of cost (bland is cheap – you can save money by buying fewer gallons of paint) and it doesn’t get outdated as quickly, requiring more money to redo. But, this would seem a minimal concern, I would hope.

The effect of having less color and art in church is what I worry about. I can still remember, vividly, the giant stained-glass window of my home church in Minnesota, of Jesus knocking at the door. I wondered about it, pondered it, and when I read Revelation, it’s still the image that comes to mind. It had a lasting impression on me. Without it, something would be missing.

I worry too that without art the church is sending, indirectly, a message about what the faith is to us: bland and predictable and risk-averse. Does our embrace of art, or the lack thereof, telegraph to visitors a message about who we are? Does it become a metaphor for the kind of church we are and the way we understand the faith?

But most of all I love art in the church because it inspires a sense of awe and wonder at God’s creative beauty. It makes you stop and think about higher things. It takes your mind away from the mundane and makes the symbols and stories of the faith come alive in deeper and more powerful ways than words can express. It reminds us of how much of our faith is not clear logical statements that can be reduced to algorithms and citations, but a living, breathing relationship to a creator who exists so much closer, and farther, at the same time than we can ever know.

That awe and wonder is faith inspiring, and, probably, a little dangerous too. It’s hard to control what someone will see in a painting or sculpture – much easier to control content with words. But that also makes it more powerful, more personal, more able to hit home in our hearts and minds. Hopefully it brought something out for you on Good Friday, and will do so again.

All 14 stations pictures are on flickr.

Here’s the song in high resolution.

I can say some of this from personal experience. While sparing you the details, I can honestly say that without spending some time seriously facing a life without God, and God’s reality, I would not be here today. It’s made me a believer in what St. John of the Cross calls the “Dark Night of the Soul”. And he would know: being locked up and tortured by other monks for his proposed reforms of the church would make most of us lose our faith. But it is after the dark night that we truly find God.

But this is hard to implement in the parish. In a very crass sense, we don’t make our living by inducing doubt, but by inspiring faith. We (pastors) may intellectually agree that our people go through periods of ups and downs in their faith lives, but to take them, deliberately, not just to the precipice of doubt but to the actual dark night, where God’s presence is no longer felt, where God’s existence is no longer an experienced reality, that’s dangerous. Why take your people to a place they might not come back from? What if they go to the dark night and give up on religion entirely? What if they confront their beliefs and come out with huge problems with what they’ve been taught? What if they don’t return from the darkness ready to be good church-goers again? It’s such a big risk, that even those of us who understand that it is after the death that there is resurrection, that after we’ve been there we’ve come back, it is still dangerous. And that’s not even talking about the whole evangelism problem: how do you market doubt? How do you fill pews, let alone stadiums, with doubt? Reassurance and comfort work so much better. Better yet, promises of blessings work best. In fact, don’t just remind people of God’s promises for earthly rewards for faith, assure them with absolute certainty of them.

In our own growth from childhood to adulthood we will, most of us anyway, go through a period of re-thinking the things we were taught and grew up with. Rarely do we stay exactly the same our whole lives. But when you have made the journey where you call into question everything, examine it, and submit to the experience of it, and come to realize its truth (even if modified from the form you knew before), you end up with a personal faith that I would say is so much stronger and authentic than continuing to repeat things without having examined them. John of the Cross went through hell. It didn’t make him an atheist: it made him a saint.

I have to say that I both enjoyed Rollins’ book, as well as being deeply convicted by it. I want people to have faith. It’s what we all want who are pastors and believers. We want everyone to know what we know and experience the love of God that we’ve found. We want others to share in the joy. But out willingness to risk doubt to bring people to that point is scary. Rollins even talks about how many pastors in their careers will go through periods of intense doubt, while still in the pulpit, but are afraid to acknowledge it. So, essentially, we lie. And for good reason. How many pastors would keep their jobs if they stood up on Sunday and said, “You know, today I’m just not really sure God exists, and I definitely and not sure he’s either just or loving”. No matter how many people in the pews agree, in secret, they are more likely to hand you a pink slip than face it themselves. So, in essence, we are all sitting and lying to each other from time to time, living a mutual charade on those days when the faith isn’t there.

But this shouldn’t have to be so. As Rollins rightly points out, Jesus himself goes through this same experience on the cross – you know that central part of Christianity that we put on all our steeples and necklaces? That part that takes away our sins. That part that we say is the essence of it, in a nutshell. And yet, Jesus himself hung there on the cross, in the midst of suffering, and asked, point blank, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He didn’t say, “My God, this is painful but I know you reward the faithful with blessings if they have faith, so here’s my extra prayer, oh great and Faithful God who never leaves me….” Rollins says (p. 29)

“Radical doubt, suffering, and the sense of divine forsakenness are central aspects of Christ’s experience and thus a central part of what it means to participate in Christ’s death. The moment we feel the loss of all that once gave us meaning is not a time in which we are set from Christ, nor is it a moment when we fall short of Christ: It is the time when we stand side by side with Christ”

Central aspects of the faith that have become sidelined by the very churches in charge of proclaiming it. I feel convicted.

Rollins does go on to discuss some structural ways to embrace a faith of doubt in his book. They’re not easy, though, and most Christians (and non-Christians too, I would wager) are not ready for it, or willing to hear it. I’m not sure I would have been, in parts of my earlier life. Doubt creates fear. Certainty creates comfort. Who doesn’t want comfort.

I’ll finish with one quote that Rollins gives, that maybe sums up in practical terms the problem:

“The one who commits themselves to the task of helping people really enter into doubt, unknowing, and ambiguity needs to be ten, twenty, even a hundred times better than those who sell certainty. They have got to be prepared to walk a difficult and often dangerous path if they wish to invite people into this murky and uncertain world, for in doing so they bring to the surface a whole host of anxieties that we spend so much of our time and resources repressing. It is understandable that certain pastors fill stadiums with people longing to solidify their already established desires, reconverting people to what they have converted to so many times before.” (p. 17)

I guess I cannot say for certain that I have that level of courage to make a concerted effort to take everyone into the murky and uncertain world myself, in every case. Maybe it’s a little like the Matrix – it’s just too hard for everyone to get unplugged. Maybe not everyone wants to. Maybe the shock would be too much. Or maybe I don’t have the guts. Either way, I enjoyed the book, while feeling convicted. It’s exactly what I think Rollins wanted.

The Binding of Isaac by Caravaggio

I felt inspired for the mid-week Lent service to delve into the nether-world of paradoxes and seemingly contradictory readings of scripture. I’ve been preaching this Lent on John for the Sunday services, and the appointed Epistle readings from the lectionary for Wednesdays. And maybe it’s a kick I’m on, I’m not sure, but I felt inspired to dig into the most dangerous, and often hated, passage in the Old Testament: The Aqedah, or, The Sacrifice of Isaac. Genesis 22 is not the Epistle; Romans 4:13-25 is. But, Paul, in Romans, is making reference to Genesis, and how the story of Abraham and Isaac demonstrates that one is made righteous through faith (and not through works).

But, I had to ask myself, what is the act of faith that God is asking Abraham to do? Kill his son? How’s that an act of faith? It looks, rather, like an act of destruction that would cause one to loose faith – unless that’s the point….

So here is is, the sermon text, with only minor edits, from Wednesday, March 7, 2012. The bullet point-intensive format works well for me for reading while preaching, even if it makes it a little harder to read.

————————————————————————-

Tonight I’m going to take you down a little bit of a rabbit hole of thinking, where I will end up raising questions that only lead to more questions, that only lead to more questions…. and so on and so forth

• And even though I’m a pastor and I have this degree I’ll have to admit up front that I don’t have the final answer to this problem I run into when I approach the story of Abraham and Isaac

You know the basic story. God tells Abraham that he’s going to be the father of a great nation, with descendents as numerous as the stars .

• But he keeps getting older and older and doesn’t have any kids.
• So he starts wondering, “Is God really with me? Is God going to fulfill his promises?”
• I would guess that by the time he was 100, as the Bible says, and he still didn’t have a kid, that he would have started to do more than just doubt.  – I probably would have started cursing God, or giving up on God entirely, or maybe a lot of people today would have just switched to a different religion or sect years ago, when it looked like we weren’t going to get what we were promised.

But Abraham didn’t give up, and eventually he and his wife Sarai (later called Sarah) have a son named Isaac.

Then God tells Abraham to go and kill the only son he has waited 100 years for as a sacrifice – like he was an animal.

• And Abraham just does it.
• He doesn’t argue.
• He doesn’t debate.
• He doesn’t try to find out all the possible legal loopholes or decide that he probably going to go to heaven anyways so why bother…
• He takes his son up the mountain, lays him on the altar and gets ready to kill him.
• Human sacrifice. Child sacrifice. All at God’s command.

Then, the story gets a happy ending, and the angel jumps in at the last second and says, “yeah, that’s good enough. You passed the test. God now declares you righteous.”

Or, literally, “it was reckoned to him as righteousness”

This is probably one of the most revolting passages in the Bible to most of us.

• Trying to reconcile a loving God who supposedly is trying to support things like family and community and faith and good works, with a God who tells you to destroy the very thing that is the evidence of your faith.
• God’s fulfilled his promise to Abraham, and now he’s telling him to destroy it (in addition to telling him to commit a heinous crime).

And then I try to get over the fact that Abraham could be considered good for being willing to do this, instead of telling God to take a hike, or calling into question God’s motives, or goodness, or whether it even was God talking, and not some other, darker force.

The whole things just stinks all over.

• At least there was a happy ending.

But that doesn’t leave me much comfort.

Being willing to kill your kid is and act of faith that makes you righteous?

There’s something twisted about the logic here.

And maybe that’s the point.

Was it a test to see if Abraham would still have faith even if God took away the thing he loved most, and the evidence that his faith worked?

If Abraham had succeeded, and God didn’t send the angel to do the last-minute rescue, then everything that God had promised would have come to an end.

You can get into a lot of what-if’s here. What if Abraham really knew the angel was coming? What if Abraham would have stopped the knife a little lower down? What if he would have missed? What if Abraham was testing God.

But underneath all that, which you can never know, is the utterly revolting idea to us that God would deliberately ask us to destroy the very thing that is the proof of our faith

• That God would tell anyone to do an act which would be a really good way to prompt someone to loose faith, and give up.
• That God would tell you to kill the thing that has been the evidence of your faithfulness in life – how stupid is that?

I thought God wanted people to have faith?

• I thought God wanted us to be happy?
• I thought God wanted me to have blessings, and get rewards for following him.

But now it seems that God wants us to kill the thing that most closely proves to us that God exists and loves us and keeps his promises.

It’s like God’s telling us to kill off our own faith.

That would be bad for business. If you can get people stuff as a reward for faith, or as an assurance of faith, or as a proof of faith, then you’ll get a lot more people.

If you tell them to kill off things that are valuable to them, with no foreseeable replacement in sight, you’re going to have empty pews.

I’ve heard the question asked in other ways, the whole “would I believe if bad things happened to me, and God didn’t just give me all good things.”

It’s what Satan asks God about Job – “Sure, Job loves you because you give him everything he wants, but if you take away everything he holds dear, he’ll curse you”

And it takes a few chapters, but Job almost does, until God swoops in at the last minute.

But what’s really disturbing about Abraham and Isaac is that Abraham is told to do the destroying himself.

It doesn’t happen to him, he’s told to do it himself.

This is where you really start to wonder what’s going on?

Does God want Abraham to destroy his faith?

Or, if I ask the question of myself, and take this story as some sort of a general parable with a lesson for my life today, “Does God want me to destroy what is most important in my faith? And if I’m willing to destroy my faith, will that make me righteous?”

If I answer that question at face value, then I’m left having to say “yes”. God wants me to take what is most important in my faith, the things of my faith life that most connect me to God, that most reassure me and comfort me and remind me of God’s blessings, and take all those things and take out a big knife and hack them to bits?

Or, does God at least want me to be willing to?

But, what’s the point then?

Why worship a God who wants you to destroy your faith and give up your blessings for him, without making a promise to replace them?

• which God doesn’t give Abraham. He doesn’t say, “wack Isaak and I’ll give you another” – there’s just that same original promise of having lots of descendents
• So Abraham has to trust that God’s going to figure something out, but I’m sure I would have wondered at the point of almost killing my son if God’s promise was metaphorical or spiritual or something like that, since I would be over 100, and running out of patience.
• And if it was just metaphorical, that I’d be the father of the nations “in spirit” then I’d ask “why bother?”

But maybe that’s the point. That loving God is not about getting things – anything – not even the comfort and reassurance of faith

• Not even the reassurance of a loving God who always is looking out for your best interests
• Not even the knowledge that “it’s all going to work out in the end”
• Not even the guarantee that it’s a cause that’s worth it.
• Not even for anything.

Maybe God is showing Abraham that loving God is about just that – loving God – nothing else.

• That as soon as love has a reason, an ulterior motive, an agenda, a personal reward, then it isn’t love, and it isn’t faith, it’s just me doing something to get something.
• So we should love God for nothing.
• No, wait, Abraham was made righteous not just for nothing, but the opposite of nothing – for evil.
• He loved God and obeyed God even when he was told to do something evil and criminal.
• And doing something criminal made him righteous?

Paul says in Romans, that Abraham is the model of faith……

Romans 4:3-5  ³ For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ⁴ Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. ⁵ But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.

The ungodly?

Is Paul saying that the great Father Abraham could have been ungodly? His act was evil.

• Or is he just talking about the rest of us who do evil things?

Or is he talking about God being so loving that he justifies those who are so faithful they will destroy the faith?

Ouch, my head hurts.

Examining one’s self for mixed motives is one of the keys to living an honest and authentic existence.

• We all agree that loving to get something isn’t loving, it’s gold-digging or co-dependency or something
• But loving to not get, but to actively hurt, what do you call that?

What do you call it when you love and trust God even when there is not just nothing left, but a downright evil-looking God left?

What do you call it when you trust a God who not only gives you nothing, but tells you to destroy good things that are meaningful to you?

For Abraham, it was called “righteousness”.

On our way back we stopped to check out the pictographs at the Redemptorist Center for Renewal. Abigail got a chance to walk the labyrinth, and get her first taste of contemplative spirituality. I figure it’s never too early to teach your kids about spiritual practices and encountering God. And, a labyrinth doesn’t require sitting still, which is just about impossible for 4th graders (or, frankly, for a lot of us).

I just finished another session there last week of teaching “Theology for Spiritual Directors” with good friend Teresa Blythe and the Hesychia School for Spiritual Direction. It’s always fun to talk theology and spirituality with people who really live and breathe it.

We had the added bonus of having some art displayed by our own Lisa Rynda. It was all stuff that she had made herself, with some help from the kids at our Friday night elementary youth group we call Kids Club. Even the quilts had help with the stitching and layout from the kids. She’s offering to teach these skills to teenagers as well, no cost.

I put my collection of pictures of the art on flickr.

From Pastor Lars

Recently I’ve been thinking about the use the phrase “all are welcome” on church publicity materials and web sites. We do it, as does pretty much every church I know. Even if they don’t say it, they never say something contradictory, like “only some people welcome here” or “interview here first to see if you’re welcome material” Yet it seems that as easy as that phrase is to say, it’s much harder to put into action.

Take, for example, the whole issue of welcoming convicts released from prison. Some may have greater offenses than others, but 98% of all convicts will be freed eventually. And, with almost 5% of the country in prison at any given time, that adds up to a lot of people with a past. Are they welcome? Really? Or are we thinking, in the back of our minds, “I didn’t mean them….”

What about those whose political views are opposite ours? Or those who have a radically different lifestyle, even one we don’t approve of? Or those we don’t even like? I could go on.

It’s not as easy as it sounds to welcome all. That means that we would be just as excited to see at worship (or any ministry) someone who has no money at all as someone with tons. We would invite the homeless family to brunch as willingly as the ones with nicer clothes.

But that is not always how the church works. In the book of James, they have this exact problem:

James 2:1-4 My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? ² For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, ³ and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,”  ⁴ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

We can easily scoff at the people in James’ church, but we’re human beings. We live in a world that makes distinctions, and we have mixed motives that sometimes we don’t even understand consciously. The ex-con scares us, the poor person doesn’t have money to give us to pay our bills. But the person with money, that benefits us as a church to get them to join. A few more families like that and we might pay off the mortgage. A few more homeless people and, well, we’ll still have that mortgage for a few more years.

There are many arguments used to justify not welcoming all equally. Some say that there are safety concerns, or that certain churches just aren’t “equipped” to deal with “certain people,” or that discrimination is something we do to ourselves – the whole “birds of a feather” logic that says that people really only want to be with people like themselves – regardless of welcome. We can’t, of course, always tell the back story of a person by clothes and language and outside factors (many very dangerous people look very professional), but it doesn’t mean our minds don’t go there.

And then what do you do when some people say that they just aren’t comfortable being at a church with “those people” – whoever they are – and will just have to go somewhere else if “they” start filling the pews. Now you’re going to lose either way, in effect making a decision that will cause someone to leave: so who has to go? Politically, those already here have the edge over those who are new, so to protect the institution the new people are given a less-than-enthusiastic welcome.

And yet, there’s another side to it that makes things complicated. All people are welcome, but not all behaviors are. You can be of any income, but you can’t run around destroying things or attacking people. In theory, you shouldn’t be able to run around gossiping or forming exclusive power cliques or playing manipulative games, but churches don’t always have the best track record for enforcing that.

So we say that all are welcome, but you’re not welcome to do whatever you want. But this gets tricky too. How do we define this? Egregious crimes, sure. But what about politics, ideology, theology? How much do you have to agree to be welcome as a full member? How much disagreement do we allow? Are you welcome only until you change to become like us? Churches are accused of loving you as you are only for a probationary period, at which point you need to get with the program.  But certainly, the Gospel is transformative, and changes us, so shouldn’t we expect some conformity at some point? But in what ways?

If you look at Jesus’ own ministry, he seemed both very welcoming and very exclusive at the same time. On the one hand, his own followers were a mixed lot, of those who seemed very upright (Nathanael, in whom there is no deceit), those with no money (Mary Magdalene), those with radical political agendas and violent pasts (Judas Iscariot and Simon the Zealot), and those who were loaded with cash (like Matthew the tax collector and Mary and Martha). His followers were a diverse bunch. And yet, many people who came to follow him were flat out turned away and told to go home, while others were given huge conditions to meet first, like the rich man who was told to sell all his possessions and give them to the poor.

I have come to the conclusion that Jesus was perfectly willing to turn away those who were going to try to hijack his ministry, control his agenda, or try to dictate how things would be done. He was comfortable turning away those who were not ready, or who were too attached to worldly things. But, those are behavioral criteria, and they were never permanent. The rich man could have sold his stuff and come back. It was his choice. But he didn’t want to make it.

Which is why we will always need to keep revisiting the question of welcome. We will probably never do it perfectly well, and will inevitably fall back into thinking of welcoming (and evangelism in general) as getting people to support our church institution, rather than a purely selfless act of trying to spread the Gospel for the sake of the kingdom, regardless of the cost/benefit for us. But if we are going to say “all are welcome”, we will need to always stand convicted before those words, re-evaluating and praying and asking again and again for God’s guidance to do as Jesus did. Some may not want to follow Christ, or may not be willing to act in a manner that’s conducive to life in community. There is nothing we can do. We can’t change the Gospel. But we can try to live it like Christ did, and truly, actively, welcome all – not as the world welcomes, but as Jesus did.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

As part of my examples I talked about the RED Campaign, with Bono and Oprah as it’s public faces, with the ever-prevalent problems of diarrhea and water-related diseases in Africa that are very cheaply treated, but which lack the social respectability of celebrities. Who wants to wear a brown ribbon for diarrhea awareness? Speaking for myself, it’s something I’d rather not talk about. But that doesn’t make the suffering it causes any less. So, don’t get me wrong, I applaud Bono and Oprah for raising awareness, and money, for AIDS treatment in Africa, which is a huge problem. But, the kids with dysentery are my neighbors too, even if their disease isn’t allowed to be mentioned at cocktail parties.

Oftentimes, as a preacher, you wonder if anything you say ever gets heard, or really matters, or if anyone actually changes their lives based on what you say (that could be good or bad). But then an individual in the church came up to me, a couple weeks later, and offered to donate $3,000 as a matching funds grant for the church to raise money for clean water projects, primarily in Africa.

Well, it took us a little while to get all our ducks in a row and get the campaign started, but we finally are a go. This Lent (from February 26-April 7) we’re making it a sort of theme. Incorporating change offerings from kids in the Sunday School, special donations from the men’s group at Lord of Grace and others, our plan is to raise another $3,000.00 from our church and write a $6,000 check to Lutheran World Relief this Easter for their clean water projects. The amazing thing is, third world costs being what they are, $500 can supply a whole water system for a village. I don’t think I could even get the permits for a well here for that amount. But it goes to show how much can be done with what to us, in the wealthy West, is not really all that much money.

I’ve preached before on my philosophy of churches that we are at our best when we are looking out for others, and focusing our energies on the good we can do for the world, in the name of Christ, more than the things we forbid and avoid and ban and, in short, don’t do. This is a one-time only project, but, I hope, the beginning of a trend towards thinking and reaching outside ourselves.

Here’s the web site for Lutheran World Relief