The Play of Structure and Freedom

Pastor’s Column

December 2024

Advent comes early and short this year, a function of the calendar - just after Thanksgiving, and only 3½ weeks from Christmas. Our church calendar has a full line-up of worship services and events. We still have our four Sundays, and our Longest Night service (Dec. 18). Our music ministry has a full line-up of concerts, starting with the all-Tucson ELCA concert Dec. 1 (at Our Saviour’s), and then the Southern Arizona New Discourses and Neoteric Chamber Choir on Dec. 14. It’s fun to be host to arts in different styles, and be a place of music and creativity. Many ways to glorify God in this season.

Sunday services have a theme: “Words for the Beginning” from sanctifiedart.org. As much as I like coming up with worship ideas, they make some amazing things way beyond my skill level – paintings, poetry, liturgies, children’s curriculums and more. You know I rarely do the Advent verses from the lectionary anymore, as they feel so tone deaf to the season. John the Baptist calling Pharisees a “brood of vipers” and crying about judgment and fire, then Jesus talking about wars and rumors of wars and the beginning of the end….just doesn’t have a whole lot of hope and grace. I know there’s a time and place for all of scripture, and, yes, I know the lectionary comes from a time before December was a month of pre-Christmas everywhere. But this is our world.

So I try to make Advent its own thing, with its own emphasis and meanings. This year we get a collection of quilt patterns, one for the season, which will go on the podium, and one for each Sunday, which will go up front on a stand. Each pattern goes with the theme for the day. The quilt squares play off the idea of new beginnings, how the pieces of who we are, where we come from, what we deal with, sometimes fall apart, but God takes them and makes new beginnings, new starts.

To me, quilt squares perfectly express the back and forth interplay of creativity and structure.

It’s often taught that the two are opposites, that rules and limits stifle and oppress, and that the fullest life is lived with the least restraints. Well, some times. Of course rules can be stifling, and so restrictive that no space is left for anything new. On the other hand, when given no limits, we often don’t know where to start. If I told an art class to paint a family on the lakeshore under a tree, I’d get all sorts of interpretations, but every artist would have to figure out how to make beauty out of that particular scene (Monet made a version; it’s a classic). But if I simply said, “make anything and see you Monday” I would probably get very little. I’m sure someone would try to be clever and hand me an empty canvass and tell me the lack of paint represents the emptiness of his soul being deconstructed of the normative influences of bourgeois society. One might even tape a banana to it and call it something. But I would be suspicious they were having too much fun over the weekend, and the philosophy-babble is just covering up laziness. Limits force you to problem solve, to imagine possibilities, to think of things you haven’t. No-limits creativity doesn’t push you, and you end up with, well, a banana taped to the wall.

I picture so much overlap between good art and engineering. The city comes to the architect and says, “there’s a river this wide, and two roads to connect, and they’re not straight across, and the ground is soft, and you have to put a ship X feet high underneath it, and it can’t all break apart if one section cracks. Go”. That will take a lot of creativity to solve, undoubtedly a good deal of artistic imagination too, so the selection committee likes it.

Structure and limits force creativity. But without variation and creativity, structure becomes stale.

So it comes back around to quilt squares. I imagine it was a challenge to the original artists: how do you express this Bible reading in a quilt, using only straight lines? How do you do it with only a small palette of colors? How do you convey blue, the liturgical color of Advent, with lively colors of hope and opportunity? Now you have to get creative.

This is what it’s all about: not just being able to paint, not being “artsy craftsy” necessarily, but being willing to problem solve and imagine new possibilities within the limits life has given you, using the spiritual gifts God has given you. Worship should be like that: a structure, an architecture, that remains largely the same, but which can be redecorated, repurposed, reimagined from time to time. The predictability of the order gives the security from which to explore and imagine the possibilities of a living God with words of new beginnings.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Too Much Information

One thing that always strikes me when I look at old (1950’s and earlier) photos is how well dressed everybody is. All the women in skirts; all the men in suits. Even in the warehouses, or on the ranch, it was still a button-down shirt and wool slacks. Nobody anywhere walked around in long underwear, pajamas, ripped clothes, etc. Those things were clearly for at-home, out of the public eye. The culture had a sense that we have a public face and a private face, and they were separate, and that’s ok. It isn’t “being inauthentic” to have to dress decently in public, and then be frumpy at home. But something changed.

Now, of course, you can see anything and everything at the local big box store. And if you say something, you’re “being judgmental” and “not accepting people for who they really are.” Long underwear in public is your identity? Pajamas in the store is your personality?

My take is that it started in the 1970’s with the emphasis on being “authentic” and “true to yourself”. We were going to sit in a circle, with a group of strangers, and they would poke and pry us emotionally until we opened up about our deepest secrets, and then everyone would spill all their personal beans, and we’d cry and sing kum-ba-ya and smoke some leafy stuff and break free of those social restraints that tell us to behave certain ways in public. From there came the idea that we should never worry about presentation in public, then vulgar language in public, then to dressing however we feel is “truly me”, then to the pajama party in aisle 5.

And you can call me a fuddy duddy or grumpy old man, but I don’t, honestly, want to see that much of you, or always know that much, or have to look at that much. Some things are ok to keep private. If you’re my friend, my lover, the rules are different. If you’re a stranger, some decorum is good.

But this is our culture, where we are told that any self-censoring is oppression and any public face is a form of lying.

Then came the internet.

Now everyone had the tools to “authentically” share their innermost everything with everyone. Shameless self-revelation met free public broadcasting, and the results have not always been pretty.

On the one hand are people who are isolated and bullied being able to find community that’s safe and affirming.

On the other hand is more bullying and attacking and some of darkest thoughts you never thought people could have.

What can work for good can work for evil.

I remember Facebook as a college pastor in the mid 2000’s. It was a way to catch up with your high school friends and get pictures of the grandkids, then it became a place for angry rants and lies generated by Russian hackers to spread hate and division.

The same has become true of all the other forums. 4Chan, said to be a bastion of free speech, has become the favorite of school shooters and terrorists to find other people with creepy, violent fantasies and plans to get validation. That crazy guy who used to rant at the hardware store used to just get the small town telling him to chill. Then he would go back to the basement, alone, to sit with his dark plans by himself. Now he has a computer in his basement, and can share with everyone his plans, and find people all around the globe to validate them and help him find the best way to commit a mass murder.

Some things, I will argue, should not get a public audience.

If you can’t say it in a group of people, to their faces, and have to sit and listen to their reactions, you maybe shouldn’t say it at all. Unless, again, you’re the kid being bullied and you’re looking for support, or the person with a unique disease and you need to find support with others for whom the bloody details are not Too Much Information but part of a constructive conversation.

It’s a good rule to keep: don’t say it online if you wouldn’t say it in person.

But when it’s me behind a keyboard, I don’t have to fear the response. I might get it in the comments, but it’s not the same. Easier to blow off hateful comments than see a reaction to my face. At least in the 1970’s “encounter group” I couldn’t bash everyone there and not have some kickback. I could be authentic, spill TMI, but I still had some accountability.

I have to admit that when I first got on Facebook in the mid 2000’s, it was kinda fun. I found old friends from high school and college and camp. I caught up with people I probably wouldn’t see in person because of distance. I enjoyed the debates about theology, Bible, politics. I even used to like to stir the pot, get things going. Now, I’ve pulled back. The longer it goes, the less I post, and the less I reveal, and the less I say, because I’m no longer feeling that it builds up. It just wears me out. It’s becoming less is more.

This all becomes an issue for us churches, too, as we try to figure out how to promote what we do on social media, while also dealing with the creeps and trolls and haters who want to bring you down. How do you stay positive in an ocean of negativity? How much do you talk about? What do you show?

As a general rule, I don’t post on church sites a lot of pictures of people. I never know how much people want to be posted. And when I do, the faces are often small or hard to see. I try hard to always project a good image, and keep church business off line. I don’t want to see how the sausage is made at my restaurant, nor do people want to see it at church. It’s the nature of public relations that you have to never show weakness, always make everyone think everything’s great – even when it isn’t. Curating an image and brand is a bit of a game in lying by omission. But if I was truly honest, nobody would ever come. They’d go to the place where everything looks perfect.

Martin Luther has a great line about bearing false witness in the small catechism:

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way.

We don’t do enough, in my opinion, of remembering the second parts of these explanations – the proactive parts. Christian ethics gets reduced to a list of don’ts, when in fact discipleship is supposed to be active – taking up your cross and following. Yes, don’t lie on the stand, don’t slander people, don’t bully and demean. But that’s passive. Not enough. We should be actively speaking positively of others, building them up, and defending their reputations.

I wish this was how everyone was online. But, alas, that’s for Magical Golden Unicorn Land. More and more it’s the opposite, the airing of too much private information, personal thoughts, and negativity about others. I never thought the Small Catechism would be so relevant. When you see bullying, slander, hate – call it out – then respond by building people up. When you have thoughts that aren’t terribly upbuilding of people, don’t put them online. Don’t participate in the pile-on.

Put on a good public face for Jesus and the church. When you speak up for justice, and build up those in need, and refuse to participate in evil, you do the work of the Gospel.

Peace,

Pastor Lars,

Seeking the Common Good in Politics

Original ABBA outfits

Last summer on sabbatical, when Kristie and I were in Stockholm, we made sure to visit the most quintessential Swedish thing ever: the ABBA Museum. Yes, there is a museum dedicated to the band. And it’s everything you think it is. There’s the histories of the musicians, a replica of the recording studio, complete with the original soundboard, a theater showing old concerts, and, of course, a whole room with the outfits – all blinged out and flared at the ankles. They were deep in a basement, with no natural light, so as not to destroy all the polyester with the ultraviolet light of the sun.

One exhibit caught my eye, and that was about a later work done by Benny and Bjorn, after the band broke up, called Chess. It’s a musical set during the cold war, a US vs. Soviet chess competition. The assistant to one falls in love with the other player and both love and chaos and politics and heartache ensue. It’s pure ABBA genius.

I’ve been nostalgically listening to some of its numbers on YouTube, and got stuck on a super-ear-worm song called “Nobody’s Side”. Here’s the refrain:

Never make a promise or plan
Take a little love where you can
Nobody's on nobody's side
Never stay too long in your bed
Never lose your heart, use your head
Nobody's on nobody's side

Never take a stranger's advice
Never let a friend fool you twice
Nobody's on nobody's side
Never be the first to believe
Never be the last to deceive
Nobody's on nobody's side
And never leave a moment too soon
Never waste a hot afternoon
Nobody's on nobody's side
Never stay a minute too long
Don't forget the best will go wrong
Nobody's on nobody's side

It's the ultimate personal philosophy of cynical realpolitik. Trust no one. Nothing lasts. No loyalty. Get what you can while you can. All set to ridiculously catchy music.

I see and hear this in the world, and my first question is the same one the kids ask: who hurt you? What horrible thing did people do to you to make you so untrusting and uncaring? In the musical, it was the Soviets who steamrolled her hometown. Of course, love will break through (it’s theater) and the cynicism will melt. It’s not a French noir movie; it’s a Swedish musical.

I imagine a life like this filled with endless chasing of pleasures, and glaring absence of friendship and love. Debauched and lonely, successful and empty, cold but charming. It is, in almost every way, the exact opposite of Jesus. It’s also a good way to succeed in politics.

When I interned in the House of Representatives for a semester, I came in thinking I would find lots of really intelligent and capable people. How else did they get so far? What I found, instead, was a mixed bag. Some really were trying to do good, and some were the most arrogant, rude, selfish, calloused people I’ve ever met. I had to listen to tapes of the guy I worked for because he felt it was beneath him to have to identify himself to staff (even though we rarely saw him). One representative yelled at me with a loud “do you know who I am?” on the phone. Ugh. It was obvious they could turn it on at the state fair, in front of the cameras, and then became monsters when dealing with people for whom there was no transactional gain.

Is this what life is? We’re just individuals in a sea of individuals trying to get what’s best for us?

Are relationships just transactions? Is there no real love? Kindness? Compassion? Common good? And what about higher ideals? Self-sacrifice? Service?  What about that whole cross thing? Giving up everything?

If your view of things is a series of quid pro quos, then Jesus is the ultimate chump. He is the ultimate sucker who teaches us to let others walk all over us and get things from us without getting anything in return. What a wuss.

For those who are transactional, any giving without getting is not just frustrating; it’s humiliation. It’s getting played. It’s getting taken. And you’re convinced that, once the deal’s done, they’re snickering behind your back and laughing at you in disrespect. Giving is just letting people use you. Demand something for everything, then you can walk proudly.

We are in the midst of an election season, as we all know too well. I’ll admit I get tired of it, but I wouldn’t trade it for any other system. I may not always get the results I want, but no gain is worth having a dictator. And I’ll admit, too, that I feel such a deep grief at the total lack of thinking about the common good, the poor and the needy, the disadvantaged, the immigrants and refugees and homeless. The debates end up becoming a race between two people who have to win votes on selfishness: who will get me the most for me?

When did you hear a debate about whose policies will bring the most good to the most poor, and prevent or cure homelessness? They will argue, when pressed, that this or that policy they advocate will have that effect, but that’s ancillary. I don’t hear any “most good for the most people”. It’s always “are you better off than you were under this one?”

The Christian should be looking at the politicians the way Jesus did, through the eyes of the poor and powerless. We should be demanding that the government and corporations work for the betterment of the whole society, and world, to reduce suffering and poverty and environmental destruction. That should be the question. Not who will best satisfy my selfish desires with the least amount of personal sacrifice.

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As you know, I’ve been leading a small discussion group on the proposed ELCA social statement Civic Life and Faith. Like all ELCA statements, it moves slowly, building a case with scripture and theology, and moving to specifics. It’s far from radical, but sure to irritate some. It has a lot of talk about the need for Christians to advocate for the “common good” – a phrase that some, mistakenly, think is a code for communism and collectivizing all private property. It’s a slippery-slope argument that makes it impossible to talk about our “collective” responsibility to our neighbors in need. An excerpt from the beginning:

Article 2) In the biblical word shalom (Hebrew word) the Scriptures depict God's goal for creation and point to the nature of God’s ongoing active engagement with it. God’s power and love seeks shalom, the fullness of peace, well-being, goodness, truth, beauty, justice, freedom, wholesomeness, and love woven together for all. This statement is undergirded by that biblical term but in the context of civic life employs other terms such as “the well-being of all” or “the common good” because they are earthly measures toward God’s intention. God’s sovereignty brings forth and sustains the universe and grants creatures their power, even though it often is hidden to human view. God intends that humans use and share the gift of power so that human structures and systems serve the intended well-being of all with good order and justice.

So much here one could unpack, but I want to just highlight a couple ideas for consideration as we go into voting.

First, the idea that we are all in this together, the whole creation, and that peace and fullness exist only when we ALL are experiencing it. The good of all is the good for me. This is not a “if they get something I lose something” – a zero-sum philosophy (which is pointed out later in the statement), but a good for all. There is plenty for all, and one person’s winning is not me losing. It’s about wholeness, not transactional gain.

Second, the line about structures and systems. It’s not just about us, as individuals, minding our business and being nice to the clerk at the checkout counter (which you should be), but it’s about the whole system. Laws and policies can be rigged by the rich and powerful to their benefit, at others’ expense. Being ethical, as a Christian, is more than watching my own worst impulses, but about creating systems where some aren’t forced into poverty by laws and systems that give them no choice. We must seek a wholistic justice.

I could unpack this for ages, and I encourage you to take a look at the full statement again. Suffice it to say that we I believe we need to demand of our politicians a focus on the common good, and creating a wholeness with each other and the environment, a concern for the poor and disadvantaged, and not a transactional view of “what’s in it for me?” Transactional relationships are all about leveraging and using, not about loving and giving. They’re the opposite of Jesus.

Pastor Lars

Engaging Public Life as Christians - September pastor's column

This coming month a few big things will be happening in our church. The first is the Community Service and Family Fun Day on September 8th. You could also call it “Rally Day” or “God’s Work Our Hands” Sunday. It’s all those things. We’re trying to market it to people outside the church, who probably don’t know what Rally Day or God’s Work Sunday is. But we have food, community service projects, and some things for kids: the face painter and Willie the balloon maker are back. BUT…..you don’t have to have young children to participate!!!! It’s for the whole church, and intended to be an all-church, all-ages, all-community event.

In olden times it was Rally Day, which was the start of Sunday school. It was a kick-off to get kids back into Sunday school and the church program year. We haven’t had a traditional Sunday school for over 13 years; we do our lessons for kids during the sermon at the 10:30am service. Nonetheless, it’s still a fun time to get everyone back together.

And, unless you have been living under a rock, there’s an election coming up. And it’s big. And we will be asked to vote on candidates and a host of propositions and judges and various positions. We will have the opportunity to make change and participate in government, something a lot of the world does not get to do. As Christians, we have values that inform those decisions, but not uniform agreement on exactly what those values are, or what the role of the government is, or how involved the church should be in these matters. Unlike some pastors, I will not tell you which candidate is “appointed by God” and which propositions are “Biblical”, for many reasons. However, I do believe it’s good for us to do more with politics than just have church about personal problems and prayer, and leave the policies and justice discussions for someone else.

So, where does one begin?

The ELCA (The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), our denomination, puts out social statements from time to time. These are teaching documents, not binding on members (so you don’t have to agree with them to be an ELCA Lutheran). They are not policy documents for congregations. They don’t function with the weight of a Catholic encyclial, say. I’ve done videos on some of the old statements, giving my interpretation of them and introducing them to the people online who might not know that the ELCA exists, or that Christians exist who take social positions that are not reactionary.

Now a new statement is being proposed, and it’s still in the study phase, where people can view it and send back feedback to the committee crafting it. These are not concocted in smoke-filled rooms or in seminary salons. They’re open to the whole church to participate in. It’s called “Civic Life and Faith”. It delves into the issues of engaging issues as a church, faith and public life etc. It has not been ratified, which requires a 2/3 vote of a national assembly.

I decided to do a few study sessions on it to get us started in the conversation, and to be a part of the process. Feedback is open until the end of September. I will host four sessions, in-person, here at church, on September 11, 18, 25, and October 2nd at 6:30pm in the conference room. It’s just a read through and discussion, with no end goal; I’m not aiming to convert to a particular position, just to explore what the social statement committee has come up with.

Peter Muhlenberg. Lutheran Pastor, Revolutionary War hero.

Our history of engagement as Lutherans has been mostly about not-engaging, or selling out. The history is long and sometimes complicated. Lutheran churches in Europe are state churches, paid for by taxes and administered as branches of the government. This has changed in recent years, with the churches becoming moreindependent. It used to be in Sweden, and in England, that a new hymnal needed a vote of parliament. No longer. But with that history, we should not be surprised that bishops were not inclined to bite the hand that feeds them. As much as Martin Luther envisioned a dialectic with the church holding the state accountable, and the state keeping order, and them working back and forth simultaneously as “two kingdoms”, the reality became more one of political union and spiritual separation. Faith was about praying and worshiping and getting to heaven. Politics was the state. So most Lutherans who came to the US stayed out of active politics, with some important exceptions, such as Lutheran pastor Peter Muhlenberg who led troops at Valley Forge under George Washington.

So the history became what theologians now call “quietism” – Christians staying quiet about politics, keeping faith to personal matters and the interior and moral life. When I was in seminary it was a dirty word, and we were admonished constantly to not fall into it, but keep a prophetic witness. Speak the truth to power. Proclaim justice. Name names. It always worked better in principle than parish, where people can choose to leave, or try to run you out if they don’t like your prophecying.

But, and there’s always a but, one can’t forget the German church of the 1930’s. Hitler required an oath from all pastors, his oath, of course, and 98% took it. The Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Niemoller’s were the exception. Yes, they had a prison camp waiting if they didn’t, but most were not doing it with gritting teeth, but with glee. The pastor in Eisleben, at Luther’s family church, where Luther was baptized, had swastikas on his boots under his robes. Because religion was so deeply internalized, it no longer had anything to say to the authorities. It was about making good citizens, with good morals, and not revolutionaries who cause chaos. We look back in such horror at their acquiescence and buy-in, but that’s hindsight. In the moment they were good patriots who loved their country and were proud their leader would make Germany powerful and respected again, the way they believed God wanted it. Their hearts were not initially in antisemitism, at least not openly, but in quietism and a theology that refused to see any contradiction between the Gospel and the desire for the greatness of the nation.

I keep that in the back of my mind, and always hope that we can take a critical view of our own political views, and not fall for the desires of ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism. But it’s hard, because we don’t like to think our views are on the table. It’s “those people” who are out to destroy us. Except Jesus died for them too.

So join me; I think it will be fun. We can model what the rest of the world struggles with: intelligent conversation about religion and public life.

Pastor Lars

Breathe In Breathe Out - August Pastor's Column

Years ago, when I used to do an alternative “Gen X” worship service, I would scour the internet for interesting prayers and meditations to include. Most of them, interestingly, came from England. They had a burst of creativity in the 90’s. One in particular stuck out for me, and I’ve used it for years since.

Breathe in love  - Breathe out hate

Breathe in life  - Breathe out death

Breathe in peace - Breathe out anxiety

Breathe in gentleness - Breathe out tension

Breathe in God’s presence - Breathe out all that distracts you from God

It works best when you sit back and take a bunch of breaths between each section. We tend to have a lot of anxiety, for example, and it can take a bit to get that out.

You know the phrase, “garbage in, garbage out”? This is the reverse of that – it’s choosing to focus on the positive, on the Godly. It’s taking in the good to fill yourself with that, rather than just focusing on the negative. I believe that simply getting rid of the bad by trying to abstain or push away is less effective than replacing the bad with the good. So, rather than just trying to cut back drinking with will power, maybe look at your social calendar and find some social outlets without drinking, and find some hobbies and activities that bring you joy and are sober, and work on identifying and replacing the negativities that you may be trying to not deal with or hide with drinking.

It's the same philosophy I have with kids, that when we simply say, “don’t use drugs” or “don’t sleep around” it can often be counter-productive, making it tempting. But when you have positive things your kids are doing – active in church, serving the poor, connected to family, contributing to the world – then they’re too busy and the destructive behaviors just don’t seem as appealing.

It’s when your life is filled with God and service, the stuff that comes out is positive.

So when life is full of these things that are negative, it can be easy to start becoming negative. When you watch news shows that are full of angry rants and doom-and-gloom prophecies of the end of your way of life and family and apple pie if you don’t stand up and stop XYZ now, you will find that your attitude gets angry and fearful. You become sour and bitter and walk around with a chip on your shoulder. I’ve seen too many people become unhappy with grievances over listening to people who are just that. The process is never instant; we are rarely conscious of it. We’re not good at being self-aware of our emotions as people; they creep up on us. But after a while you meet someone you haven’t seen in a bit, and wonder what happened. Why so mad all the time? He used to be so much fun?

Getting back to kids, this is what we understand when we think of our kids’ peer groups. You know the phrase, “they got involved in the wrong crowd”. And it’s true that to be friends in certain circles you have to conform to things – whether that’s drugs or some other behavior – or face ridicule and ostracizing. We know this with teenagers, but how often do we think of this in our selves? Are the people I hang around with life-giving? Do they build me up? Do they make me more loving, kind, patient, calm, magnanimous? Or something else?

Someone did a study in Colorado a few years ago, where they took liberals from Boulder, and conservatives from Colorado Springs, and put them in a room together to talk politics. When together, and forced to listen to opposing views, they generally took more moderate positions. Nobody converted to the “other side”, but their stances were less strident. When they had them only among like-minded people, their positions became more and more extreme the longer they were together. It was as if just having the echo-chamber to complain to each other made everyone’s views harsher and less tolerant.

So many ways that our thinking is influenced by the voices outside our selves. Time to step back, again, and breath in love, breath out hate…..

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A couple weeks ago I preached on Ephesians 3:16-17, and said I’d come back to it

16I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, 17and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.

The words struck me when I read them, not because they were jarring, but because they were so profound. What’s in our inner being? What do we bring into our selves to dwell with? Is it hate? Anger? Resentment? Fear? Or is it the Holy Spirit, filling our hearts with Christ and his ways of love, slowness to anger, forgiveness, service, and justice? Spirituality is just that, it’s breathing in the Spirit, filling yourself with God, and becoming more Jesus-like. Breath in Jesus, breath out anger, hate, revenge, resentment, fear. Breath in Jesus and breath in patience, calm, forgiveness, and love. Surround yourself with things like Jesus and become more like him, when he dwells in your inner being, and your outer being will be more joyful and full of faith.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Posters and Laws and Beatitudes - July Pastor's Column

It didn’t take long after the State of Louisiana passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom for the predictable social media implosion. On one side were the atheists and secularists freaking out – pulling out (again) Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton quotes about separation of church and state. On the other were the expressions of “finally we’ll get some morals and bring back Christian values to our schools” crowd. I’m sure many hearts and minds were changed immediately by the succinct and stinging truth of the memes 😊. 

As a pastor in a mainline denomination, I find the whole obsession with the Ten Commandments interesting, if a little bit odd. Why that one part of the Bible, out of all 66 books? If you notice, these votes for explicit, public Christianity are always about having those ten rules posted – whether on lawns, state houses, or schools. What’s behind it?

Of course, the meme circulates about why we don’t put up the Beatitudes of Jesus instead. Why not have every kid read:

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

 21 "Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

 22 "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

 24 "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

 25 "Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. "Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

 26 "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

 27 "But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,

 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

 Luke 6:20-28

Well, the second part, in the Gospel of Luke, is avoided even by most Christians. We don’t like the idea that God is going to punish the rich for being rich in the final judgment. But it is what Jesus said.

The people who ask the question are coming at the it from a totally different perspective than those who want the Commandments posted. If you believe that the underlying problem with America is a lack of religious discipline, family authority, moral regulation – then the Ten Commandments are perfect. They even include explicit commands to obey parents, to not cheat on your spouse, to not kill and steal. If you believe that the root of crime and drugs is kids not obeying parents, parents not disciplining kids, children not respecting authority, and criminals not fearing punishment, then these commands fit in perfectly. We can turn the country around by teaching religious laws.

But there’s a lot of caveat here that many are quick to point out.

There are two versions of the Ten Commandments, one in Exodus 20:1-17, and one Deuteronomy 5:6-21, and the wording and ordering are somewhat different. Translation issues abound. Christian denominations differ in how they interpret the laws. Martin Luther wrote a whole section of his catechism on these, to make sure you understood that they are not just prohibitions against sin, but commands to actively to good to build up your neighbor.  For example, here is his section in the Small Catechism on the eighth commandment: You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.

What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbour, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way.

But that’s not getting posted.

Then, of course, you have the establishment clause of the Constitution. The Louisiana law is guaranteed to be contested in court.

But if Jesus is the center of your religion, why not one of his quotes on the walls? Why not some blessings on the poor, meek, persecuted, merciful? Won’t Jesus’ words make better citizens – going around blessing the poor and needy?

Well, that’s a different take on what makes for good citizens. The Beatitudes imply a world of powerful and powerless, rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, one that is structural and systemic, where the have nots are victims of the social and economic order, and Jesus is promising them blessings in the Kingdom that the rich and powerful will not get. It’s class struggle and revolution. Of course people of a liberal bent would gravitate towards that.

It's the same chicken-and-egg debate we keep having all the time about human behavior.

Do we do what’s good because we fear punishment for doing bad?

Or do we do good because we have sufficient resources and a good system that doesn’t encourage bad behavior?

For example: do people steal from stores because they are lazy and don’t want to work and just want to indulge in drugs? Or, do they steal from stores because they can’t get rent, jobs, treatment, education to be on their own?

Is it possible that both, to some extent, are true?

Is life complicated, and people complicated? You hear of trust-fund babies committing crimes, when they have all the money in the world. And you hear of people improving their lives through better choices after being tired of consequences. Life is not so simplistic.

My own experience with authoritarian teachers and coaches probably poisoned me on this debate. I saw so many abusive power-trips, and so much creative glee by kids finding ways to break the laws, that the whole system soured me. The more you clamp down, the more fun it is to rebel. On the flip side, I’ve seen classes turn into zoos without enough law and order. But when I worked with teachers who had the authority, but chose instead to put their energy into building up students, listening, guiding, encouraging, there were less behavior problems, fewer incidents. The excitement of rebellion was gone.

So I tend to think that, while law and order are needed, they should be the second approach to social problems, after we’ve tried to make sure that everyone has food, water, shelter, education, health care, equal rights, opportunity, affordable housing, transportation. If these were all provided in the best possible way, and then someone still insisted on robbing the corner store, then you could say with confidence that the person is lazy and doesn’t want to work. But if rent requires a job of $45k for the cheapest place, and a first month, last month, security deposit, background check to get in – and minimum wage doesn’t pay half that, have we done enough?

Our theology, as Lutherans, is one of Law and Gospel. We need the law to show us what our sin is. We need the Gospel to show us the path of salvation. Our hearts should fear sin, but also be so filled with God’s grace that we do good out of gratitude, not fear. Jesus’ love should be the motivator, and if we were perfect at it, we would need no law. But we’re not perfect, so the law has to stay. But it’s the church’s job to show and live love so much that we can put the law out of business.

Luther’s view on Law and Gospel is one of the gems of his theology, and one of the most misunderstood. He was a dialectical thinker, meaning that he held both positions simultaneously in tension, and working off each other. It’s not how we normally think. Most of us think in either-or’s, or fractions. We need either law or Gospel. Either police or social programs. Either rehab or jail. Or we believe we need 30% law and 70% Gospel. We need 50% police and 50% social programs etc. But for Luther, people were both at the same time. We have a sinful nature, that’s a part of us, that needs law and authority to teach us what’s right and wrong, and to punish us for violating that. I think he could go way too far with his thoughts on authority, and sometimes have an overly pessimistic view of human nature, such that he disdained peasant rebellions and democracy. But that said, he did not believe that we could simply rise above social problems with the right cocktail of structural change and government spending and empathy.

On the other hand, he was the person who famously criticized the Pope, and challenged his authority, and undermined it. To Luther, Leo X was corrupt and unworthy of the position, and was not teaching the Gospel. Today, most Catholics would probably agree with that sentiment too. He did see authority as needing limits.

So he felt that while the law should hold us accountable, the Gospel should be there equally to remind us of salvation and call us to a higher and more Christ-like life. With all law we become despondent, hopeless. What’s the point if we’re just going to get punished. On the other if we only had the Gospel, then Jesus would be a quaint and nice teacher of interesting things, who needlessly died a death he could have prevented. He could have accomplished his stuff by writing his manual on love and ethical behavior (and gone on the marry Mary Magdalene or whatever). The Gospel is nothing without the law to teach us what sin is. The law is nothing if there is no way to be redeemed. They need to both exist, fully, simultaneously, until Jesus returns. Only then will we be able to live in a world so perfect that we won’t need the law. Until then, we live in a tension of both-and.

You can imagine how this takes a little bit to wrap your brain around, and why it’s easier to default to a polar position of one or the other.

When I look at countries around the world, you have several examples of law: Saudi Arabia, Brunei, North Korea, China, Cuba. These places have low crime, clean streets, order. But we all know there’s a price, and very few people are moving to these places because of it. On the other hand, we have examples of countries that have invested in preventative measures, programs, social safety nets – Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand – and they have people flocking to get in. Yes, they still have police. In fact, one thing I noticed in Sweden last summer was the increased police presence, and their open carrying of firearms. This used to be something they would brag about not needing. Then I landed in Stockholm and saw the guards with AK-style weapons walking around the airport, and knew that times had changed. Nobody has no police or laws or prisons, but many places have tried to invest in both the “soft” measures as well as the “hard” punitive ones.

We live in this tension, needing both at the same time.

My question for those in Louisiana is: why only the Ten Commandments, and not also the Beatitudes? If the kids need to be reminded of their sins, why not also remind them about God’s abundant love and compassion for those most downtrodden? If it’s about being Christian, why not also have Jesus’ words?

I would argue the theology behind the legislation is missing half the equation: the Gospel. Laws without it rarely change much. Think of a kids who grow up in homes with tons of love and support: do they get in as much trouble as kids who grow up in loveless houses with harsh belt lashings ? We know the answer. You can’t have all love and no law, or you’ll get walked over. But law without love is just being cruel, and will lead to rebellion or self-harm.

It's my position that the Ten Commandments in classrooms thing is a short-cut, a way to try to reform behavior without doing the hard work (and spending the tax money) on the soft preventative measures, fixing unjust systems and providing social supports. In fact, the state of Louisiana is not even paying for the actual posters with the Ten Commandments – they’re soliciting donations!!

And as for their efficacy, I don’t think a whole lot of kids would actually change their behavior if they saw them on a school wall. The fact that the government posted it would make it exciting to rebel against. It would be a fun target to desecrate when the teacher isn’t looking, or a bingo card to brag about violating and not getting caught. It would be like the “don’t use drugs” posters they put up when I was kid. It made drugs more cool and fun. I also don’t think posting them will change any of the fundamental problems behind why kids get in trouble. Broken families, violent neighborhoods, proliferation of weapons - none of that will be changed by the posters. It won’t make kids want to go to church, or believe in Jesus if they don’t already.

The love of Jesus changes lives. I believe this. I have seen it. Hardened criminals have turned their lives around. Enemies have reconciled. People find hope. It’s real and not just in your head. But love does not come disembodied. It has to be experienced through someone. Posters are things. They cannot love. But people can love, and share their faith, and talk about Jesus. This is the church’s job, maybe our biggest job. The state has the power to enforce and teach laws, but it cannot love. It cannot care. It cannot show you your worth and dignity. This must be done by people, and that is our calling.

Pastor Lars

Being in a Denominational Church

Being in a Denominational Church

Pastor’s Column for the June, 2024 newsletter

This month is our annual synod assembly again up in Mesa. I’ll be there June 14-15th to cast votes on resolutions, listen to speakers, and, this year, to vote on who will be the bishop. Our synod, called the Grand Canyon Synod, has been led for the past 6 years by Rev. Deborah Hutterer. Here first term is up and she will be running again.

Holy Communion setup at Love of Christ Lutheran Church, Mesa, AZ

A bishop here can serve two terms, and is elected by “ecclesial ballot”. Basically, everyone at the synod assembly writes a name for who they want to be bishop. It can be any pastor in good standing in the ELCA. They don’t have to live here.  If one person gets 75% or more of the vote they are elected right away. If no one has that much, it goes to a second ballot, or a third, and so on until one person is elected. (I can never remember the exact percentages needed with each round, but the crowd thins each time).

The idea behind it is to reduce the influence of campaigning and leave more room for the Holy Spirit. Some people do, of course, try to get their names out there, and having name recognition in the synod always helps. There has certainly been a tendency to elect bishops from larger urban churches because people know them, but that’s not a hard rule.

All of it will make things more interesting. Synod assemblies, once upon a time, were huge events that went most of a week. People would submit multiple resolutions, followed by loud and contentious debates. Local newspapers would send a press corps. In the 70’s it was the Viet Nam war resolutions, then nuclear war in the 80’s, then in the 90’s and early 2000’s it was same sex marriage and ordination. I remember lines of people cued up to debate pro or con changing the policies, complete with accusations, crying, anger, emotional pleas etc.

Then in 2009 the ELCA approved a social statement on sexuality, along with a policy change for ordination, that allowed same-sex marriage and ordination, and we had more than a few people leave – much as is happening now with the United Methodist Church. Since then, assemblies have been quick, with few resolutions. Part, I’m sure, is the lack of such hot-button issues. But I also suspect people got burned out with the sexuality debates, and after being so stressed with congregational conflicts and then covid battles, nobody wants to debate much.

Bishop Deborah Hutterer of the Grand Canyon Synod of the ELCA

It's all part of being a church in a denomination, which they nickname the “mainline” today. In the 1950’s most people belonged to denominational churches. Now that number has shrunk to a minority. Instead, as you can see in NW Tucson, non-denominational churches have proliferated. They have trendy names that don’t sound particularly religious and are mostly conservative-Baptist in their politics and theology. Lord of Grace is a bit of an outlier in this regard.

There are reasons for the growth-decline trends. Mainline churches have done plenty of resting on past history and getting lazy, but it’s much more than that. I believe one of the biggest drivers towards non-denominationalism is the way people function in community.

Mainline churches are set up like democracies. We have meetings where everyone gets a voice and vote, and we know we won’t always get what we want. Not everyone will like every new initiative or agree with all the items in the budget, but it’s always been assumed that we would stay with our church and  support it even if it didn’t always go our way. And we always understood that democratic process involves meetings, discussions, debates, and time investment. Changes can take time, compromises get made, actions get delayed, but that’s how it works.

Taking a vote at the 2023 Grand Canyon Synod Assembly in Oro Valley, AZ

If you look around our world, participation in organizations is declining across the board. Social groups like Masons or Moose or Elks are shrinking. Non-profits are getting fewer regular volunteers. People are simply less interested in investing the time in process or belonging to groups that require it. Instead, it’s more what we call “vote with your feet”, where if you don’t like it, you just go. You probably don’t lodge a protest or try to talk to anyone before you go; you just leave and look for somewhere else that’s more to your liking.

We do this with restaurants. If I don’t like the food, I’m not going to volunteer to be on a committee to meet weekly for several months with the restaurant owner and chef to develop a new menu, which would then be voted on by the customers. I just leave and try somewhere else. When new ownership comes, I might try it again, see if it’s changed, but I’m not spending my time to fix it.

This attitude carries over to church. Rather than invest in a democratic process to change what you might not like, people are more likely to just move somewhere else.

There is some good in this. I have known people who are so miserable in the church they’re in, constantly fighting things, being angry, blocking, complaining, when they could just go down the road and be content. If I weren’t a pastor, and moved into a new town, I would shop around a little before joining a church. If they taught fundamentalism, creationism, or complementarianism (where women submit to husbands but we say that the obedience is “complementary” to the man’s authority and therefore equal – I guess), or anti LGBTQ sermons, I wouldn’t go. If they gave my kids dirty looks in worship when they talked, I’d move on

On the other hand, it’s hard as a church leader to always stay ahead of everyone’s felt needs and opinions. You try to listen, stay in touch, know what’s going on, but you can’t read minds. It makes church members more like customers, less like family members in community. If we really love each other and care for each other, then leaving will be a last resort, not the immediate go-to. In a community, you’ll make the point of getting involved in the process because you have a commitment to the church. If you’re a customer, it’s commitment until something better comes along.

But I wouldn’t change being in a denomination for the alternative. Yes, I’m biased, but I have seen what happens to churches that leave the ELCA and go independent. They usually do fine for the first few years, then, when the pastor retires or leaves, they struggle to find someone new. Then, there’s an exodus of people who don’t like the new pastor, and the place is dead in a generation. They struggle to outlive the founding pastor’s personality. Mainline churches have more resilience this way.

I also like having a bit of a buffer on things with the synod office. You can’t just fire a pastor with a council vote (I like that, of course). You can’t just sell land. You can’t just leave the denomination (without a lengthy process). You can’t just do a lot of things. There’s a process to keep the most extreme actions from being done quickly, and force people to take time to debate and discuss it. Things done in the heat of the moment are rarely done wisely.

So we will see how this synod assembly goes. I am the designated photographer, so I get to get up from the table and walk around to take pictures. (You can see my photos from 2023 here). I will be more excited at some speakers than others. I will enjoy catching up with colleagues, and hearing some news, and know that I’m a part of something bigger than just one church, and that we can do a lot of these things we do better when we live in community. I will enjoy watching the balloting process for a new (returning?) bishop. I will also surely get frustrated at some opinions voiced, some statements made, some things other churches are doing that I disagree with. But I am a part of a community, we are a part of a community, and we don’t walk out on each other without really taking time to turn over stones first.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Of Spirits and Trees and a Richer Life in Nature

Last July, while on sabbatical, I had the fortune of visiting the old Viking burial mounds, and the 1000 year old church, at Old Uppsala in Sweden. In Viking days, it was the seat of kings and a place of religious ceremonies and celebrations. The early missionaries, after the kings had converted to Christianity, built the first church on what they believed was a “pagan temple” or a sort of “pagan cathedral” – a symbolic replacing of the old with the new. You can still see the church, rebuilt a couple times because of fires, which is a working parish church with Sunday services.

The Viking burial mounds at Old Uppsala, Sweden

Of course, as you tour the area you read on the displays that modern archaeology and historical research has not been able to back up the claims of the missionaries that the place was a center of animal sacrifices, nor did it have a sort of “pagan cathedral”. They have found none of the mass collections of bones where they were supposed to be, nor did Viking religion even have cathedrals and temples.

Those medieval bishops can be somewhat forgiven for not understanding the nature of Scandinavian paganism; it was such a different worldview from theirs - an enchanted universe where everything in creation had spirits and powers and meanings. The gods were not particularly caring, just powerful. Thor and Odin would never talk about “abiding in love”, just a lot about bravery and war. It lacked centralization – so people practiced sacrifices all over the country, at different times, without a central organization or priesthood. Yes, some were closer to the gods, or knew more, or had more visions, but nobody got certified. Each chieftain practiced in each place as he saw fit.

Old Uppsala Church, built on the site of a former Viking building, probably a long house.

What was believed to be a “pagan temple” was probably just a “Long House” that would have hosted festivals (read: drinking and gift-giving parties), sheltered people at times, and been a community gathering space. It was where the king would hold court, so putting the church there, surrounded by the mounds of buried long ships and treasures, was symbolic that Christianity was the new central theme in town.

Having studied some of the history of my pagan ancestors, both Irish and Swedish, it intrigues me to see young generations romanticizing the old ways. If you listened to the neo-pagan memes, you would think it was some sort of egalitarian utopia of spirituality and nature connection. In fact, the Vikings could be very violent and practiced slavery. They had kings, rigid social classes, and an economy dependent on plunder. But the part that the neo-pagans do get right is that the universe was not separated from the gods and the spirits, but intimately connected to them.

Inside the church in Old Uppsala.

It's that sense of connection that they’re longing for, more so than Odin and Thor and Loki. That’s why they’re best called “neo-pagans”, because they practice a highly edited and cherry-picked version of the old religion that keeps the nature and skips the slavery, plundering, and hierarchies.

But it wasn’t Christianity that killed the connection with nature or the spirit world. If you went back to medieval Europe, people very much believed spirits, both good and bad, inhabited everything. The rain, the crops, the trees, were all full of them. Angels and demons roamed everywhere, and visions and dreams were still considered messages from God. Where you got in trouble with the church was if you tried to summon those nature spirits for power over others with curses; that was witchcraft (and, yes, a good deal of those accusations were totally bogus and just about property disputes and such). But the world was still very much an enchanted place full of divinity and power.

What broke that connection was the Enlightenment and the advent of modern science. They taught that miracles don’t happen, God doesn’t heal things, angels are fantasy, demons are nonsense, and if God exists, he’s outside the world, never interacting. This forced scientists to explore nature and not fall back on “the gods made it happen” every time they couldn’t answer the question. But it also made nature meaningless, spirit-less, just molecules arranged through natural selection and physics. Just things.

And when nature became just things, we became separated from it, and could now trash it or exploit it without feeling bad. There’s no “essence” or “spirit” in that redwood. It’s just cells – cells that can make me a good profit if I chop it up. There’s no “meaning” to the wetland, so let’s just drain it and build another 5,000 houses, etc. etc.

Seeing the destruction of nature, and feeling the disconnect, a lot of people are asking if something was lost when we took the spirituality out of the world. Are we killing off a part of our selves, and our experience of life, when we see everything as meaningless material objects?

This certainly goes against the experience we all have when we are in nature, and we talk about the effect it has on us, and how we feel refreshed and healed being in it in ways that can’t be explained with just molecules. A lot of modern Americans sense this, and know that there must be more out there than a cold world of particles, but they don’t want to get involved in church, so they call themselves “spiritual but not religious”. It’s a sort of “take the parts of religion you want without the commitment or beliefs or community or practices or expectations”. It’s having the connection with a world of meaning and value and spirits, without doing anything or believing anything. Or you can call it “neo paganism” and have essentially the same thing.

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When I was going through seminary in the 1990’s we would debate how to get the people back in church. The families were led by baby boomers who probably had some church connection and believed in God, but found the organization “boring” and “irrelevant”. In came the “seeker-sensitive” churches to make it “fun” and “relevant” with music and lights and sermons about daily life. There was a lot of excess, and some good corrective. Many places were boring and took people’s attendance for granted and gave sermons about esoteric points of doctrine and a lot of sin and hell. So the seeker-sensitive model was supposed to be the solution to evangelism problems, and so contemporary worships were started and life-groups that focused on specific felt-needs and sermons series’ about things like marriage and finances. And some of it worked, and a lot of good came out of it – including a lot of good music.

But the decline in church attendance and belief in God continued.

Now, I believe, we’re in a new phase where the problem is not that church isn’t relevant; it’s that the church is seen as moving you away from nature and experience, and obsessing with life after death. People are longing for connection with the divine, and to find experiences of transcendence, and are asking questions about meaning and value. It’s just that churches bought into the enlightenment ideas that God was not present in the world, but was outside it, in heaven. God was not filling us with dreams and visions, but telling us what vices to avoid, what words not to say, what clothes not to wear, what substances not to inhale, and promising us a place in the other world after we die.

The churches turned their eyes to the beyond nature, while the culture turned their eyes back in.

So our struggle today is not so much about style or packaging or marketing. Those things matter, but only with people who already believe and are shopping for a new church. It’s about bringing God back into the experience of life and nature today. It’s not about teaching how to prevent sin, but bringing back the enchantment with the world where the divine is seen and felt and heard in the world. It’s about finding a richer, fuller, more meaningful, more spiritual life today. It’s about getting more joy and more healing and more presence now.

So a better question to pose is: how do we structure our church and community life in such a way that we help people experience God, find more richness and meaning, more connection to the divine, more spiritual encounter, more living?

Our role needs to be more as guides to experiencing a fuller life through Jesus, not denying life today for a better one later.

I believe that when we become a place, a community, that disciples and guides people to that experience, we will have a better future as a church.

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The labyrinth from the prayer retreat on April 20th. It’s an ancient spiritual practice that is even built into the floors of some of the medieval cathedrals. The idea is that walking in the pattern focuses the soul on the Holy Spirit, and allows for greater encounter with God. Many of us do, in fact, prayer better moving than sitting still.

What about Lord of Grace?

I got thinking about all this as I reflected on the April 20th prayer retreat that our Prayer Ministry put on. I intentionally stayed out of it, for a couple reasons. First, the leaders are plenty capable and don’t need my input. Secondly, I didn’t want the presence of THE PASTOR to cause people to defer to me, rather than embracing their own experience of the Holy Spirit. Encountering God is not something reserved for professionals, but something for everyone. I want to empower that.

The prayer wall from 2023 Advent services. Meant to imitate the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem where people roll up and squeeze their prayers, here we do the same thing with colored paper and a mesh of plastic chicken wire from Tractor Supply. Either way we make the encounter of God and selves through our actions, bringing our prayers in person, to put our whole selves into the experience.

Then I heard the reports of all the people, the speakers, the prayers, the people giving me testimonials of how it changed them – it just warmed my heart. This is exactly the kind of things that we need as people – time to experience the Spirit today. In fact, people came from outside our congregation just to be a part. The spiritual hunger is real. The marketing trick is letting people know that this is the place you can find it; you don’t need to return to Odin and Thor or the Fairies Of The Trees And Bogs to find it.

In all we do, I hope we can have great experiences that make life richer and fuller and more divine. Whether that’s in just getting some joy out of line dancing or throwing balls at community days, sharing our pains and concerns in small groups, delving into art or creative projects, or just getting lost in the music. It’s what guides so much of what I’m always trying to do.

I have in my head a slogan, or tagline, of “Lord of Grace: finding the richness of the experience of Jesus in the life today” – something like that. It’s unofficial, but helps guide where I believe God is calling us today - to find him in the world and make a fuller life. It is what Jesus said,

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” - John 10:10

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Christ and Culture - April Pastor's Column

In the last four years I’ve done several different online videos to increase the reach of our church – everything from short expositions on the Psalms, to online meditations, to reviews of ELCA social statements and Biblical criticism. It’s been a bit of a hit and miss in terms of getting views and responses. Mostly miss. The algorithms that control YouTube and Facebook are unforgiving, and tend to reward the more controversial or sensational videos, which is clearly not me. That said, one series I did last year on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on secular society and “religionless Christianity” took off. They’re the most viewed (the first one has over 5400) and the source of most of the new subscriptions to the Lord of Grace YouTube channel. I didn’t anticipate this, but it makes sense. Evangelicals have been working hard to appropriate Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran/Reformed pastor from Germany, and revise the narrative so that he becomes the doctrinally conservative evangelical who dared to stand up to Hitler where the wishy-washy liberals did nothing. Of course, that’s not correct, for many reasons, enough to warrant a 12-part series. But their sudden interest drove traffic to the sight, and I got a lot of emails, and even phone calls, from people responding, most thanking me for clarifying and calling out the appropriation.

 So I thought I’d try another series based on the thoughts of another old theologian (the kind I know best) that seemed strangely timely: H. Richard Niebuhr. He wrote more about sociology issues, such as how denominations were more about economic class and ethnicity than theology, but also about culture, as in, “Christ and Culture” from 1951.  It’s a short, accessible, classic that lines most of the shelves of pastors a couple generations back. In it, he details six different ways people have construed the relationship of Christ to culture. They run the gambit from being opposed (Christ Against Culture) to syncretistic (Christ of Culture) to the Christ and Culture in Paradox of St. Paul and Martin Luther. Look for them on the church YouTube and Facebook pages, Thursday mornings at 10am

H. Richard Niebuhr

This series is proving far more difficult to produce than Bonhoeffer, precisely because Niebuhr engages the both-ands and back-and-forths of a relationship that is messy and often ill-defined for most of us. Is Jesus the fulfiller of culture? Does Jesus make culture better? Should we build a Christian Culture? Does the culture have things to teach us? Or is that “caving to culture”?

I will confess that what has driven my interest in the topic is two things. The first is the 2009 vote in the ELCA to create a new social statement on human sexuality. We know well how it led to losses and battles, with a common refrain being that we, the ELCA, had “caved to culture” and were letting it dictate our beliefs, not the Bible. The refrain then went out from those wanting to gain members from ELCA churches, “Come to our church. We believe in the Bible”. I thought we believed in Jesus, and the Bible taught us about him? But I get what they’re saying: The ELCA doesn’t take literally the passages we take literally so they are giving in and letting secular, liberal, modern society dictate beliefs.

And it’s a legitimate concern that I don’t brush off lightly. Just because an idea is new, popular, gaining momentum, promoted in universities, doesn’t necessarily mean the church should adapt it. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean we should necessarily reject it - that’s reactionary. And wasn’t one of the complaints about Jesus from the priests that he was teaching people not to obey the traditions and corrupting the youth? Wasn’t reacting to change and trying to shut it down part of why Jesus was killed? Should we not learn that sometimes God calls prophets into our midst to challenge and revise our stances?

Or, better yet, how do we even know that the stances we have really are Gospel, and not themselves culture?

The second concern is the growing talk I hear about America being a “Christian nation” and the need to restore Christianity to the government. This isn’t new. I’ve heard about how removing prayer from public schools was the cause of drugs and debauchery in kids for years. I’ve even heard it said that if we taught Bible in schools we’d prevent school shootings. This desire for a sort of religious nationalism betrays the anxieties of Christians who watch the kids and grandkids quit church, and watch comedians mock the Bible, and worry about the future of the faith in a culture that varies from indifferent to hostile to mocking. It’s understandable, but a little reactionary. Christianity has grown, and does grow, in cultures hostile to it. There are ways. Chinese and Iranian Christians do it with no help from their governments. We don’t need to make a Christian culture to make a Christian church.

 I read a book by a Chinese Australian Evangelical. It was about evangelism. He’s not a liberal, by any means, and proudly wears the evangelical label. One point really sat with me: in Asia and Australia evangelicals support gun control and government health care. Vast majorities. And they read the same Bible. And they play the same praise songs. And they talk about marriage as one-man-one-woman and believe in substitutionary atonement and literal miracles etc. etc. Yet, on these two issues, they take a different stance. Could it be that we are taking things from our culture and mixing them with the Gospel? Since the Asian churches are growing, maybe we should listen to their wisdom.

 But it gets back to the issue of being aware of the ways we incorporate beliefs from our culture into our worldview as Christians without taking the time and effort to critically examine whether or not they are really Gospel and really reflect Jesus. To be a little both-sider-ist, on the leftist extreme there are still Christians who tout Karl Marx’s views as fundamentally Christian and solid in theory, but that were just ruined by bad apples (Stalin, Mao, etc.). They’re few, but the idea of communist Jesus has not died. Most liberal Christians have been more focused on reform efforts like unions, workers rights, opposing racism, and the environment than collectivizing the means of production. But those who went full communist also incorporated into their Christian worldview things that were not the Gospel.

So it gets really complicated, really fast.

 Which is why we need to take a few weeks to go back and forth and examine the different positions, and take a critical look at ourselves and what we believe and practice, and see what parts of our stances are really Gospel, before jumping out and declaring that we are not caving to culture, when what we really mean is “those Christians are caving to culture”. How often does  “Christ is counter-cultural” really mean “Christ is counter their-culture”?

None of us are pure Christians. To be so would imply that we own nothing, give away everything, love all enemies, serve the poor, and get martyred for opposing state oppression. Few of us rise to Jesus’ level of love and sacrifice. Just admitting our mixed-ness with the culture is good, if only to be humbling and less reactionary or judgmental.

Part of what I have seen as my mission here, or mission in ministry in general, is to help us all have a more reflective, self-aware, critical-thinking, experiential, kind of faith. I want us to have the examined faith, the faith that has put itself to the test and still sees the power and hand of God in life. I don’t want us to be unreflective and afraid to look in the mirror and wonder why we believe what we do. I don’t want us to be scared to see the flaws in our own arguments, or the limits of our knowledge. I don’t see my job as purely to reassure certainties and provide the comfort of absolutes.

I know the examined faith life is hard, and not always a pleasant journey. It doesn’t feel good to realize you’ve been following something just because you were taught that, and not because you have tested it and owned it. It’s hard to think that my views are culturally conditioned, even my views on God, and know that I would probably see Jesus differently if I’d grown up elsewhere. But I would not want to go back to the unexamined faith. I want to be like Jesus, who both upheld and reformed the laws of his people. 

I’ve done a few of these studies already on Thursday mornings. They’re still on YouTube and Facebook. I worry that I ramble going back and forth to cover the complexity of the topic. But it’s been fun. I hope you’ll  check them out, and that they’ll help you on your journey of being a Christian in this American/Arizonan culture today.

God Bless,

Pastor Lars

Our Strategic Plan One Year In - Pastor's Column

It’s been about a year since we finished up the structure of our strategic plan, and we’ve been filling it in more and more as we go. The intention was always that it would be a living document, and that we’d update it as needed, and revisit it often. Our goals, just to review, were to create a new mission statement for Lord of Grace, then have ministry groups meet and pray and brainstorm ways they could implement that mission. So our team met and we came up with this statement:

Love God

Open Our Hearts and Minds

Live Graciously Towards All

So far we’ve been moving along with these. Let me share a few of the accomplishments.

Property brought back the semi-annual clean-up days. I’ve always enjoyed the fellowship as much as the brush cutting. Out next one is March 16th, and we’re doing the pews and chairs inside as well as the grass and brush outside.

Worship started work on the narthex. The last time we did much was back in 2012 when we got a special donation and bought the couches and leather arm chairs. In 2013 the carpet was added to the middle, and since then it’s been a somewhat unintentional collection spot. This time a team met and looked at things like function, values, goals. The team wanted to make the room useful, not just as a hallway, but as a welcome center for visitors on Sundays and a fellowship space after service. Yes, we have the big fellowship hall, but experience shows that after the 10:30am service, we don’t make that left turn.

So the first step was to remove all the things we weren’t going to use. This included the couches, the memorial book stand, the fake ficas, the book shelves that were in my office, then the conference room, then the hallway, then the narthex, and now they’re back where they started. As you can see, the room is pretty empty right now, because the new furniture hasn’t been purchased yet.  The plan is to add some new chairs for seating, some side tables for coffee, a new coffee bar, a designated sign-up table, a shelf for books on prayer and health resources, and some things for children’s ministry. These will be purchased as we go, because the funds from the capital campaign are used up. If you’re interested in contributing to a part of the new narthex, just let me know. Here’s the things on our wish list:

L-shaped sign-in table. Kind of like a “welcome desk” you’d see in places, but big enough for clip boards.

Coffee Bar. Small cabinets on wheels for coffee supplies and refreshments. Primarily for after the second service.

Air Pods. Coffee shop grade brewers that will go in the kitchen, used for both services, and have removeable caraffes to go in the narthex after the second service - or any other event.

Area Rug. The current one is from 2013. We’d like to get one of equal or bigger size, with color.

Acoustical panels for the walls. Custom-made in shapes to mimic the rock wall in the sanctuary. Fabric on batting on a wood frame.

The panels are to deal with the sound problem. The original building committee put in $7/foot (in 2002 money) tile in the narthex for durability, I learned from an original member of the church building committee. . This means we don’t have to replace carpet from coffee spills, but the room echoes so you could do Gregorian chant with ease. The couches and center rug mitigated, but with the high ceiling and the rest of the tile, only somewhat. So the team has a plan to put up homemade sound panels on the walls for both color and echo reduction. Eventually, we’d like to get a new center rug with color as well.

Outreach has been super busy going over all the different projects we did as a church and seeing if we wanted to try some new things and retire some old. Just look in the narthex to see the multiplicity of things they’re spearheading.

A big one I’d like to highlight is the partnership with Roadrunner Elementary. The school is often forgotten, being on the west end of the district. It has a good portion of kids with low income, and we’ve stepped up with drives at Christmas and volunteering with their resource center.

Youth and Family has also jump-started some things. As I’ve written about many times, it’s hard for a church our size to field traditional “youth groups”. They require a critical mass of kids the same age, who also get along well, and a lot of staff/volunteer time. On top of that, they are not proven to be the most effective at keeping kids involved in the faith after graduation, in spite of the popularity they have with parents who are church-shopping. Parental faith witness, adults who know kids and care when they show up, the church being there for them in crisis, and getting involved in leadership all make way more difference than age-segregated youth groups.

That said, our focus has shifted back the old “Family Fellowship Sundays”, now called Community Days, we used to do them monthly after the second service, until Covid came. Now they’re back with a bit more organization, including often a theme and specific activities for after eating. It’s taking the little family church potluck and putting some steroids on it. Given that intergenerational witness is the most effective, I love the concept, and they’ve been well attended. We’ll keep these going at least through the school year, and review for fall 2024.

I met with the preschool teachers and our director, America Trujillo, to set goals for their ministry. It’s been a back and forth over the years how we define what it means to be a “church” preschool, as opposed to just a secular one that uses the building. Since there is no one prototype, I decided to have the teachers work on answering this question themselves, and, of course, they came up with far better ideas than I could have. Look for some new art and decorations, some things added to worship, some special drives for the community, and ways for us, as a congregation, to help out.

Of course, all these things are just a sampling, and they happen in addition to the regular work of ministry here at Lord of Grace.

Reflecting on the whole process, I always come back to the slogan about working smarter, not harder. There was a time, mostly in the 80’s and 90’s, when you could grow a church by adding buildings and adding programs. In fact, the more the merrier. People would see either how busy you were, and assume that as an indicator of quality, or would see a program for people “like them” – whatever that means – and find a connection to join. Really big churches still operate this way, because they have finances for large staffs to run things on an ongoing basis. For the rest of us, which is probably 99% of US churches, we run on volunteers and tight budgets. And, as the years go by, we are all finding that the supply of “labor” is not getting any bigger. Fewer people go to church, and those who do are often either busy with kids and family, or wish to retire from regular committee work. So we have to do more with less. It can be disheartening, if you’re trying to keep up with the big place down the road that always seems to have the giant youth group that does whitewater rafting and Christian rock concerts every month. But it’s the relationships, the connections, the spiritual practices, the community being community for each other and the world that has the biggest impact. That we can do by:

Doing what we do better, nor necessarily more.

Making a point to get to know who we’re worshiping with, learning each others’ names and asking each other, honestly, about how life is going 

Pray together and support one another in time of need

Invite people to worship and invite people to join us in our service projects

Get involved in, and support one another, in spiritual practices that help people experience Christ.

Christianity is growing through conversion in large parts of the world, in countries with little money and in churches that are small and meet underground. Programs are not why Chinese churches are getting bigger. We can step back, take a deep breath, and see the gifts we have and the impact we can make by working smarter, and more spirit-led, with what God has given us, and get off the treadmill of trying to compete with laser shows and adventure camps.

The new stations of the cross images

12 posters of stations will be set up around the sanctuary from 11am-1pm and you can soak them in at your own pace. At night the images will be on the screen with the worship liturgy.

On that note, this month is Lent, and Holy Week, and Easter. We get it all. Lots and lots of opportunities to worship, pray, reflect, and come closer to God. Worship is something we do well, and a great way to encounter God and one another. So whatever you volunteer in, I’ll personally invite you to join us at the Lent services on Wednesdays, where we contemplate, reflect, and discuss Bible stories about the disciple Peter. We even get original music by Stuart Oliver, composed just for our services. They’re casual and interactive, and you get wine and cheese after (we’re going full Episcopalian for Lent).

Then comes the agape meal for Maundy Thursday, and a new format for Stations of the Cross. We’re adding an 11am-1pm walk through the stations on your own in the sanctuary. The stations are on posterboard, and you’ll have a chance to go around and write and look and pray over each one at your own pace. At night will be a full worship service, with music and sermon and the pounding of nails.

So many ways to step back, breathe deep, and let the Holy Spirit soak in. What happens next happens next, and God will show the way.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

New Things for the New Year - Pastor's Column February 2024

This last month has been a month of planning for me, and for the church at large. Now that I’m back from the sabbatical and have had some time to catch up on everything, there’s now more energy to look forward. Christmas was wonderful, and the Advent series on “How does a weary world rejoice” was really enjoyable. I enjoyed the art to complement the words of the liturgy, as well as the special night time services, the healing service and the longest night – both of which are still on YouTube. For a long time I’ve felt that we limit ourselves in our connection with God when it’s only words and songs. So many of us, especially in our time, learn as much through visuals as anything. To be able to convey new ideas about the Bible stories, that aren’t only from me, with my limitations, expands everyone’s experience of the season.

So, along those lines we will be doing something similar for Lent. It’s starting early this year; February 14th is Ash Wednesday. Our ashes will have to compete with Italian dinners. But, to make it easier to do both, I’ve added a shorter noon service this year.

Still, we have a great program for Lent called “Wandering Heart” by sanctifiedart. It’s the same outfit that gave us “Weary World”. It all revolves around Peter the disciple and his struggles with Jesus and his teachings. The visuals are striking, and I love the concept of making Lent about exploring the harder parts of Jesus. Peter certainly did. Mid-week services will still go on Wednesdays, much like last year, with visuals, meditatation and open-mic discussion (followed by fellowship in the narthex).

Speaking of that, changes are coming there. One of the goals of the worship committee in the strategic plan is to redesign the narthex. Over the years it’s become a bit of a collection space, with more things than we really need there. It’s ground zero for first-time visitors to encounter our church, and needs to be as welcoming as possible. So, we formed a small team to look into how to make it both more welcoming and more useful. Lots of ideas to be unrolled in stages. The first step was to clean it out, remove old stuff, and start refilling it from there. We have plans to put in a coffee bar, permanent sign-up table, a re-vamped welcome center, and acoustic tiling on the walls to dampen sound. Some other things might come too, money allowing.

Other things are coming as well. The mural on the back wall of the sanctuary is going to get started as soon as we get all the paint. A general design was approved by the council for Michael Schultz, who has painted numerous Lutheran church murals (see Reformation Las Vegas, Holy Spirit Las Vegas, San Juan Bautista and San Juan Bautista). It’s going to cover the entire back wall, and will depict, in a creative and modern way, the following three Bible stories:

Mark 9:14-27 - Jesus heals a young boy who is possessed by an evil spirit and who cannot speak

Mark 5:25-24 - Jesus heals a woman who for 12 years is suffering from a hemorrhage.

John 20:11-18 - Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene as she weeps outside the empty tomb

Other things in the sanctuary are getting finished up – such as getting a second step built, new banner stands, a conductor stand, kneelers, and more. Give a big thanks to my dad, Rev. Paul Hammar, for building all this stuff for us out of the wood from the pews we took out. The audio system is also going to get some reworking so we don’t have problems with buzzing or interference anymore.

So much is going on in the church, the list could go on. At a time when many churches are struggling with decline, we have held steady. Worship attendance is down from before Covid, like almost every church, but has moved up in the last few months. 2023 was better than 2022. And the generosity of this church continues to amaze me. Our general offerings for 2023 came in at $17,211.85 above what we budgeted. I can’t thank you all enough. This puts us in a strong position going into the new year, with resources to keep moving forward instead of having to make cuts. All we do depends on your contributions.

The Honor Guard ceremony this month in the fellowship hall.

In more good news, we welcomed back Boy Scout Troop 219 to Lord of Grace. We’ve sponsored Pack 219 cub scouts for years, and did the troop as well when the church was younger (some time before I came). They’ve been at another church and are now re-chartered at Lord of Grace and will be meeting and having events here. I’m excited to open the doors to the community more. You may see their trailer by the electrical box in the parking lot. We have several Eagle scout projects here as well, so scouting has been a tradition of ours for a while.

Making the Advent lanterns for the Advent tree

And, of course, I have to give a plug for the return of our monthly family fellowship lunches after the 10:30am service. We did these pot luck, once a month, for a while before Covid. Now we’re back with intergenerational activities, food, and things for youth. These will keep going the first Sunday of the month until summer, and you’re all invited. It’s a great chance for us to be a big family, meet or catch up with people, and build connections between adults and kids.

So much is going on at our church, new people and new life and deep spiritual growth opportunities. Things are humming because of your time and support.

Pastor Lars

Let Jesus Be Jesus - Pastor's Column Jan 2024

From there Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Probably fewer passages put Jesus in a bad light than this one. Calling a woman a dog, more or less, seems so out of character. Was he just having a bad day? Was he tired or worn out from people incessantly pestering him for healing? That would make sense. If it was your daughter, you’d pester the guy with a cure, even if it meant he didn’t get a day off.

Christian theology, however, is full of explanations to make Jesus not look so mean. He was really just testing her faith – like the state denying your disability claim the first 5 times to make sure you’re serious about it. Or he wanted to make a point to everyone there, and knew she had faith, but just wanted them to see. Or something like that.

I like the Jesus who has a bad day better. The thought of him toying with the poor woman to use her as a “teachable moment” seems more cruel than just snapping. The explanations involve so many layers of 3D chess: I’ll say this, knowing she’ll say that, so I can give this response, so she’ll give this response, and the crowd will get this message. Wow! Jesus could just tell, what’s that called, a parable, instead.

It's one of my pet-peaves with what I’ll nickname “pious apologetics”. It’s that strain of thought that wants Jesus to always be perfect, never have a bad day, never lose his temper (except the tables, I guess) and always have a good moral lesson behind everything. This Jesus is so milquetoast that he's not really much of a person. We assert in the creeds that Jesus is fully and human and fully divine at the same time. But, to the pious apologists, he’s fully divine in a human shell. His humanity is only physical. His mind is pure-God. That smacks almost of possession – or one of those Stargate movies where the alien takes over the human body.

The Bible is full of passages that are, in some way or another, troubling to our modern sensibilities. A lot of them. It runs the gamut from Lot’s daughters seducing him to have kids, to David wiping out whole cities, to the commands for slaves to be obedient even when mistreated (yes, check out 1 Peter 18-19, Titus 2:9, Colossians 3:22). The outsider reads these and gets offended. “How could a good divinity command this stuff?”. Then the pious apologist responds with a lot of theological and hermeneutical (interpretive) gymnastics. David had to do it. Lot’s daughters thought they had no choice. Slavery in Rome was different, and not so bad (different from the US, yes, but definitely bad. Slave owners, by Roman law, could do anything they wanted to people they owned – including raping and killing). All this preserves the sense of perfection of the scriptures, of our heroes, of our Messiah. But pious perfection has never been the point. It’s about God continuing to work in the world when people aren’t perfect. And it makes Christians look ridiculous trying to explain away things that are indefensible, rather than just say, “look, we don’t take every passage literally, we know it was written by people, and some passages are just wrong – like the slavery ones”. Is that so hard? Even to say that Jesus had bad days and spit out some nasty words to get a woman out of his face.

Maybe Jesus was seeing some bigger picture, but the dog reference is so offensive, I can’t help but think he just really wanted her to go away, and thought if he made it sting she’d get the hint.

I can relate to Jesus here, being exhausted is something we all know. Just ask most moms, or rural doctors. Everyone wants something from you, and they’re demanding, because to them it’s urgent, but you only have so much in you. You want to help, but you don’t have any energy left to give. So when you need most to be calm, patient, understanding, you’re just irritated.

There’s a reason why, I believe, so many of the wisest teachers have light schedules. They have to protect their own inner peace so they have peace to give others. They have to have their hearts filled with the Spirit to lead others to it. It’s why I wish our public school teachers had lighter schedules. And social workers. And counselors. And………

It’s why I don’t have services on Christmas Day. It’s why the office stays closed most of the week after Christmas. It’s why I have more healing services in Advent, and fewer programs and events. We need to recharge, so the faith becomes something that builds you up, instead of another to-do on your long list. As if any of us really want more committees to sit on to manage business and ensure compliance with policy directives. We need committees and policies, but less is more in a world where everyone is over-scheduled to begin with. More things does not mean your church is necessarily better. The experience of the Holy Spirit is more important than filling the calendar with programs. And it will have a bigger impact on our faith and evangelism.

So we begin a new year, 2024. Keep time to find your time with God, your space to breathe deep, the spiritual gifts that make serving a delight, and not a chore, and have the patience to be loving towards those who pester and annoy us.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Christmas Justice and Bike Loops - Pastor's Column December 2023

One of the gems of the city of Tucson is The Loop bicycle path. I hit it fairly regularly for exercise and relaxation. Yes, I know one can relax by sitting, but I find it easier, with the way my mind works, a lot of the times, to be physically active. It’s fun to be in motion, to see things, to know that you’re moving by your own power – it gives a sense of freedom and accomplishment. It also helps get rid of Thanksgiving dinner.

I remember riding The Loop when it was more like The Line, when it went along the Rillito River from Craycroft Road to the train tracks by I-10. That was it.

Now it’s expanded, so you can do over 100 miles if you want. It goes up into Marana and Oro Valley, and all the way down to Valencia along the Santa Cruz River.

One thing you can’t escape on The Loop nowadays is the massive increase in homeless people. In 2006 I don’t remember any. Now it’s inescapable. People are living in the river, along the path, in lots adjacent. They have carts, and often bikes with kid-trailers full of stuff – and often dogs. You can also see a profuse amount of trash in the rivers and, especially, along the west side of the Santa Cruz near downtown. One day when riding along the Rillito River, by the Tucson Mall, I had to actually stop and walk through the homeless because the path was blocked with people lighting their bongs in broad daylight and tripping out. Another day I smelled marijuana four different times. There’s clearly a lot of drug use.

Before I came to Lord of Grace I used to preach once a month at the Gospel Rescue Mission – men’s center. It’s a good test of whether your preaching is relevant in a room with 80-100 homeless guys. They’ve seen it all and been there, and heard a lot of preachers give a lot of testimonials. They have a B.S. meter that’s really, really attuned. Over time I got to know a lot of the guys, hear their stories. It made me a better pastor.

There were as many ways people ended up there as there were people. In general, you had different tracks. Some really just fell on hard times – like the vet who came back from Afghanistan to find his wife had divorced him and cleaned him out because he wasn’t there to go to court and contest it (I believe the laws have changed this somewhat). You had those who got into addiction and lost everything. Then you had those who lost everything and got into addiction. Plenty had been in and out of jail. And, of course, we know employers are all tripping over themselves to hire people with rap sheets. I never understood how making it harder for people to get a job was supposed to solve anything.

But I digress.

The Mission does amazing work, and they can give you stories of people who have actually turned their lives around and gotten better. They can show results. Of course, a lot of the people I see by the river won’t go there because you can’t use drugs on site, have dogs, and you have to follow rules. So they decide that a tent in the wash is better.

-----------------------

One thing I try to cultivate in our church is generosity. We should be, as people of God, giving regularly, not just to the congregation but to those who are doing the work of helping people out of hard times. And we do a lot of these things – from the food we collect to our Christmas present campaign for families. In fact, I don’t have to work very hard for these to be so successful (I must credit the outreach team for their work, for sure), because the value is already there.

However, I am always struck by how random charity is. For example, we collect presents for kids at Roadrunner elementary. We’re going to help some families have a lot more joy at Christmas than they would have otherwise. But we are only scratching the surface. We could serve many times more families before getting all the kids who live in low incomes the same Christmas. It’s more than we can handle.

And then, of course, you have the other factors. Some parents are probably more bold with asking. Some are better at finding where the charity campaigns are.

Others, I’m sure, are not so bold, or confident, or maybe feel ashamed by their finances. Some are just not very sympathetic. They might have a bad attitude, or bad habits, or make choices that seem wasteful. Their kids often get less because they were born with parents who nobody likes. But should likeability be a criteria for kids getting what they need? Shouldn’t resources just be given based on need, and not your ability to work a system or make an ask or appear sympathetic and just likeable enough, and just sad enough, and just humble enough, but just hard-working and responsible enough, and just apologetic enough, but not too pushy or brash………

I’m glad we do what we can for those who need it, with the resources we have. I don’t think we’d be very faithful to Jesus if we didn’t. On the flip side, I don’t see how we can address poverty and drugs and homelessness without talking about money and power and politics. I don’t see any way out of it without using some taxes and government regulation – always controversial in our highly capitalistic society.

For example, part of what’s driving so much poverty and homelessness now is the skyrocketing price of rent. Did you know that banks and private equity firms are some of the biggest purchasers of houses? They are gobbling up real estate. They use the property as equity to get loans, then use those loans to purchase other financial instruments. Aren’t houses supposed to be for people to live in? But since it’s very lucrative, what’s going to stop them, if not the government making some limits? And why are we afraid, as Christians, to talk about the financial system that pushes up rents, pushes people out of houses, pushes families into poverty as rent gobbles up more and more of their money, and we keep spending more and more to try to save the people pushed out? Why not pass some laws that will bring down demand and make housing more affordable? Seems fairly common sense, and just.

Which, by the way, is a theme of Christmas and Advent. It’s the Virgin Mary herself who swore her baby would “cast the mighty down from their thrones and send the rich away empty”. It’s the prophet Isaiah who proclaims that justice is the key to peace – and he predicted the Messiah. It’s part of our time in the church year, and part of who we are. I’m glad to be in a denomination that’s willing to have conversations about justice, even at the holiday season, and systems and how the coming of the Messiah is not just good news for personal salvation, but good news to make a more just world. And I’m glad to be a part of a church that tries to make this world more a more just place to live in.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Pastor's Column - November 2023

It’s good to be back. And I really do mean that. I enjoyed the sabbatical immensely, and I will say another “thank you” to everyone who got it set up – the sabbatical team – as well as everyone who stepped up to cover for me while I was gone. I know you were in good hands with Pastor Dew.

It was, of course, a wonderfully relaxing time. I feel detoxed, now, from the stresses of the last few years, and am ready to look at new things. While some people would do one thing on sabbatical – say, meditate at a Scottish monastery for three months – I couldn’t do that. I was busy, but none of it was church work. Moving is enjoyable to me, and reduces stress.

In case you’re wondering what all I did, here’s the recap again:

Took the boys to Show Low for a week. Saw the Renaissance Faire there, Meteor Crater, Petrified Forest, and some of the lakes and woods around.

Flew to Michigan for a Hammar family reunion. Caught up with my sister and all sorts of Hammars I hadn’t seen in a while (or ever).

My old apartment in Sweden - the first floor to the right of the door.

Flew to Sweden for two week, just me and Kristie. We landed in Stockholm, went north to Uppsala and Gävle, where Kristie was an exchange student. Saw her old high school and her host family. Then went to Dalarna for a day (where they make the orange horses), and down to Kalmar where I lived for two years. I got to see the old apartment building, the old church, and the castle I used to bike to as a kid. Went back to Stockholm and home. Did everything by train, bus, and foot.

Got the boys (the two youngest) on the bus for the first day of school.

Kristie and me on Grand Mesa

Jumped in the 4Runner and went to Colorado. Originally, we were going to camp Colorado and Utah, but when we saw the temperatures in Utah, decided to stay in the elevation. Our first stop was to Colorado Springs to visit Kristie’s mom in a nursing home. We then camped in state parks for three weeks (with a few hotel nights to cleanup), and came back home in time to bring Karl up to NAU.

I stayed home for a few days, then, watching the boys while Kristie had to go back to Colorado Springs when her mom was dying. She passed on September 1st.

Then I took off to Mesa Verde National Park for four days, before driving back to Colorado Springs to meet up with the family for Kristie’s mom’s funeral on September 15th. From there I took the 4Runner and my two bikes and headed to the family cabin in northern Minnesota.

Got to try out some kayaking this fall. The lakes were mostly quiet, as it was after Labor Day and all the weekend warriors and jet skiers had gone home.

All in all I got to spend a lot of time outdoors, in woods and parks, places I find a lot of peace. Minus taking care of Kristie’s mom, most things went as planned.

I took a ton of pictures, of course, and am busy uploading them to my account on flickr.com. When that’s done, I’ll give you links to the particular albums with sabbatical pictures, and do a couple forums on a Sunday with a super-abbreviated slide show.

Of course, it was a huge joy to see the sanctuary renovations finished. I really had planned to have them almost done before I left. Things came up, of course, that weren’t predicted, delaying everything. A big thank you to everyone who managed that – especially Sam Lyth who was the project manager – and to everyone for their patience in worshiping in the fellowship hall and moving chairs, and to everyone for your generosity in the capital campaign that made it all happen.

We still have some finishing work to do. The mural on the back wall is undone. I’m working on lining up the artist. We have some things to build – kneelers, banner poles, music stand etc. – that should get made in the next few months. The big dragon to slay at this point is the audio system.

The sanctuary is 21 years old now, and changes have been made in several waves over the years. Most of the time, the solution was to keep adding more cables to more mics and more boards and more speakers. This has left us with a jungle of cables under the front altar area, many of which are unused. In addition, the mass is picking up electrical interference from lights and power cables, and a lot of National Public Radio. The solution, in the short run, was to re-route the speakers and cut out the line from the band to the computer. This stopped the awful buzzing sound, but it means no sound from any instruments goes directly to the computer to go online. The podium and pastor’s mics, however, go straight to the back, so they’re unaffected. What we’ve been doing is putting portable mics in front of the instruments to pick up the sound through the air. Not a great fix, but it at least allows people online to hear. This is why we had a couple weeks of really weak musical audio.

The solution is probably going to involve a laborious cleansing and inventorying of cables and wires, followed by some re-stringing. Our techies have been hard at work, but it could take a bit to fix 20 years of accumulated cable. Thanks for your patience.

But these are just the fine tunings of a big project. The carpet looks wonderful. The lights are bright. The band and choir sit up and can be heard so much better. The shortened pews give us more reasonable seating capacity and flexibility. It all turned out about as well as planned.

Now I move on to things in the future. I’ll be catching up with people, making visits, and planning Advent and Christmas (we have to be early in the office with these things). We have a new strategic plan to start implementing, and a new member class coming up this month. Things keep moving, our church keeps moving, and the Spirit keeps moving.

Pastor Lars

Reconnecting - Pastor's Column July 2023

This is the last column I’ll write for the next few months, as after Sunday (July 2nd), I’ll be gone on sabbatical until Sunday October 15th.

It’s hard to think that I’ve been at Lord of Grace for 13 years now. The ELCA recommends sabbaticals every 5-7 years, but at that time I had 5 kids in the house, ranging from preschool to high school. There was simply no way to swing being away from family for that long. Now that three are out of high school, things are more manageable, and I can get the time off.

There was a time when Lutheran bishops could be a bit like task masters. They had very high expectations of hours worked, and when conflict would arise, or people would complain to the bishop, the question was often sent back to the pastor with a “how many hours are you working?”, as if laziness must be the reason everyone’s not happy. Couldn’t be anything else.

But then this attitude, and workaholism in general, started catching up with us as a church. Clergy burnout hit hard, and many quit. Then you had a huge wave of misconducts and affairs in the 70’s-90’s. All those people working long hours found unhealthy ways to release. Now we’ve just come to understand that the job is not what it used to be. Before, you pretty much knew what was expected: preach, teach, visit, repeat. If you preached more, taught more, visited more, then you could expect some success, or at least people would be more happy.

Now, we don’t even know what we’re doing in church half the time. You have fewer volunteers, people coming less often, more secular culture, fewer visitors on Sundays – all adding to the pressure to get new people in new ways. Then let’s throw in technology management, livestreaming, social media, and all the organizational work you have to pick up because you don’t have the people to delegate it out to, and the job suddenly is less about working harder, and more about figuring out what works - all while you still preach, teach, visit.

All this has led to a wave of retirements, and an attrition rate of around 30% of pastors in the first 5 years. All of it combined to make the higher ups think that maybe they should pull back on workaholic expectations and try to figure out how to have healthier clergy who stay longer, and thus are more effective at constantly adapting and leading change. Hence the support for pastors taking sabbaticals.

You know how I’ve preached against the “industrial” way of thinking about ministry for years. Humans are not machines that can just crank out better things by putting in more effort. We need time to rest in order to think, feel, imagine, and recharge. To be effective at coming up with new things, and constantly problem-solve new situations, you have to be rested and in a clear frame of mind. If you’re tired from running ragged, you get rote and uninspired.

And the last thing we all need is to be rote and uninspired. That’s not much of a life. So we need to value time off, rest, recreation, family, hobbies, community engagement, outdoors just as much as work – in order to be good at work.

I won’t say I’ve become rote these last three years, but I will admit that the endless adaptation to changing circumstances has come with stress. I will say that it’s hard to think of how to grow the church, and make disciples, and do new ministries, when you can’t even figure out where everyone is, or how to operate all the machines. I miss that, because, to me, that’s the funnest part of ministry – the opportunities to change new lives and make a difference. I plan to do a lot more of that when I come back from a few months away.

For the sabbatical I’m going to mostly go back to doing things I’ve done, or places I’ve seen. There will be some adventure; I’m going to check out some parks and monuments I’ve never been to. But camping and hiking are things I love. Most of my faith journey leading to seminary was out in the woods, at camp, when it wasn’t at the local church. Endless days in the trees debating God’s call for me, my place in the world. Getting back to that will bring peace (I hope) and some renewed connection with God. Going to see Sweden again, where I remember being the only one in my class who went to church on Sundays, will be exciting. It was through our connections to Sweden that Kristie and I met in the Scandinavian Studies Department at college. It’s why the sabbatical proposal was filled with talk of “reconnecting”. It’s a little like being the musician who had big hits early on, and tons of new stuff, and then gets so busy running tours that things can get repetitive, and needs to go back to Greenwich Village coffee shops (if you took a Bob Dylan-style journey) and the life before the work to get re-inspired for new ideas and new energy. The Beatles made their best album at the end of their career (Let It Be), although some would argue orange pills and Yoko Ono had a hand in it 😊.

But that’s the idea: to get back to the basic things that formed faith originally, spend time with family, and not do any work. There will be a lot of picture-taking, and I plan to get some printed out for a display when I get back. But there will be no theological investigations, or touring “successful” churches to look for practices to poach. Just lots of decompressing and soaking in God’s beauty and grace.

While I’m out, you will be in the good hands of Pastor Jim Dew and the many members who are stepping up to cover ministries and even some lay-led services on Sundays. The Lay Visitation Team, led by Cindy Stein, will be in charge of member care. If you have prayers or concerns, sicknesses, surgeries, or just someone to talk to, call her. The team is excited to be there for the congregation, to build up and support one another.

I also won’t get to see the sanctuary finished (though I might sneak in under cover of darkness to check it out later), as it will still be under construction when I leave. Sam Lyth is managing the project, so you can bring your questions to him. Reminder again that the pews will not be bolted to the floor anymore. This will give us flexibility with the space, but you will have to be careful if using them to stand up.

Sue Justis is leading a study on spiritual gifts. Check out the display for that. You have the chance to not just read the book on gifts, but study with Rev. Josh Acton himself, the author. If you want to see some of his previous talks, check them out here.

Fourth of July and Rally Day are still on – our two big events in the heat. Prayerfully consider if you can do some grilling or helping out with those, since I won’t be around to call and recruit. See our council president Linda Merritt if you can help with Rally Day.

When I look at all the work of the last couple years, we’ve really come a long way as a church. We transformed to livestreaming and beefed up our internet presence. We upgraded our building, and continue through your generosity. We started a strategic planning process and got a new mission statement. Now we’re rebuilding our sanctuary and looking at revising our ministries for growth. We got challenged, and rose to the occasion. Thank you all for everything you did to support our congregation and get us through so we can not just survive, but plan ahead and lean into the future.

Having done that, I will be leaning back on a folding chair in the woods somewhere for a while with my wife and good pot of coffee brewed over a kerosene stove. I’ll think of you. But not too much 😊. God bless.

Pastor Lars

Sanctuary Changes Coming!!! - Pastor's column June, 2023

Our sanctuary renovations have started, and I hope you’ve had a chance to look at the sanctuary, if you can’t make it in person. As of writing this, we got the first phase completed: the painting of the walls. The two tones have warmed up and brought the sanctuary in a lot. I’ve been very pleased with how it’s come out. Sometimes things don’t look like you think when the color goes on, but this time worked. The peak in front, with the darker brown, really pulls your eye to the front, and pulls it up, so the room feels more high and less wide – less cavernous. The darker brown on the upper sides and back corners also does this. The lighter brown, on the lower sides and big, front walls contrasts well.

I’ve said for many years that we have to face the reality that average worship attendance is not likely to reach the highs of the early 2000’s. I said this before Covid, as trends have shown that most church members consider themselves active if they come even once a month, sometimes less. So you can have the same number of people, but the room gets emptier. Throw in Covid, and then people staying home and following online, and it’s even less. To grow the weekly average would require a massive jump in total numbers, so we could keep adding new members for years and still not see much difference on Sunday morning.

Then there’s the seasonal fluctuation. The snowbirds return to the north, and the families start vacations and camps. The first service drops to the low 20’s, and the second service in the 60-80 range (it varies a lot). We don’t need 220 spaces for either one.

This changes the dynamic in the room, of course. A full room has lots of energy, and feels more alive, even if it has fewer people, if the people are closer together. We have more people than a lot of the storefront churches around, but they’re jammed in small spaces so they *feel* more alive because they’re more crowded. On the flip side, when you come into a giant space that has 50-90% empty seating spaces, it *feels* empty– even if the actual, raw, number of attendees is the same as the storefront. In other words, if you reduce the seating and make the room feel smaller, people *feel* the space to be more warm and comfortable, and the congregation more alive. Empty pews telegraph how many used to be here but now aren’t. Full seats telegraph growth and success.

The sanctuary with the new paint colors.

All this undergirds the reasoning behind a lot of our sanctuary changes. The paint makes it feel more warm and cozy. Taking out half the pews allows us to size seating closer to capacity. Moving the band and choir up will make them more visible, which will make them feel closer. Extending the front platform across the room will make the seating area feel smaller still.

There are many other reasons for why we’re doing what we’re doing: to allow greater flexibility and creativity, to see better (the lights) and to have better angles for livestreaming (the platform). All this, together, will give us an adaptive space for future uses – even ones we can’t anticipate.

One note: when the shorter pews come back in they will not be bolted to the floor, so pulling on them to stand up will make them tip. We’re going to increase their stability by bracing the backs, but it won’t be 100% tip proof. On the flip side, we can space them out a little more, and move them around for special occasions or future needs.

Speaking of lights, while I write this the electricians are busy replacing those in the sanctuary. This includes the wall lights and 16 new track lights behind the front wood beam: 4 for choir, 4 for the band, and 8 new track lights for the altar area. All are LED and all are dimable. We will have more light for Sundays morning, and less for special services.

Once this is done we wait until vacation Bible school (June 5-9) is over. Then, on June 12 and 13 we’ll need lots of volunteers to come in and unbolt the pews and take them apart so the carpenter can haul them off for repair. June 11, then, will be the last Sunday in the sanctuary until the renovations are complete – a planned total of five weeks. During this time worship will be in the fellowship hall. It will still be the same two services, just in a different location. It should remind us of the good old days of being at Coyote Trail Elementary and meeting in the cafeteria – except that we’ll have less moving of chairs and equipment.

I thank everyone up front for all your flexibility and patience. We’ll have a lot of schlepping pews and tables and chairs around, lots of moving things and problem-solving space issues. It is only temporary. Most will be done before I leave on July 3rd, but not all. It will be fun to come back and see everything new.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Loving not Hating - Pastor's Column May 2023

I was giving a tour of the sanctuary to a lighting consultant, who was asking me about what we wanted for the sanctuary. I told him my concerns were fairly practical: I wanted to have things more adjustable, and brighter up the front and on the sides, new sconces etc. He suggested all sorts of new lighting ideas, that the churches he worked with wanted fancy lights to “bring the young people back.”

That stuck with me, that churches had told him that they thought fancy light production at worship would make young people more interested in church. This shouldn’t surprise me. But it still seems like such 1990’s thinking. Back then, a lot of people (Baby Boomers – largely) grew up in traditional churches, but thought they were boring. So adding bands and light shows and production elements would tilt the scales when picking between churches. If you’re going anyways, why not the one with lasers, fog machines, jumbotron etc.?

But times have changed. I honestly have never met a person under 40 (heck, under 50 now) who says they don’t go to church because it’s too boring or traditional. Their issues are deeper. They don’t believe in God at all. Or they don’t like “organized religion,” and they will give a list of grievances with “church”. And none of them have anything to do with lights. Instead, the view is that Christians are hateful, transphobic, intolerant.

Ouch.

This bites much deeper than production value.

But where do they get these ideas?

The internet, of course.

And the newspaper.

And stories from friends.

And the stories they hear are disturbing.

I’m sure you all heard about the pastor at Faith Christian Church, based out of the University, using church funds to buy mansions on Mount Lemmon without paying taxes. He claims it’s for “spiritual retreats”. But, interestingly, only he and his close friends ever go on them.

So the internet lights up with “tax the churches. They’re all a scam….”

Then there’s the episode at Bookman’s where they had one of those drag queen story hours. A local church sent a crowd of angry people to shout and scream them down, scare them into stopping. They said they were “protecting the children from grooming”. What utter nonsense. There is no data to support drag queens leading to child molestation. Most offenders are straight and married. None of them started with drag queens.

Of course, to the young people watching from the sides, this is glaring hypocrisy, and intolerance. They see priests molesting kids and bishops covering it up, then Christians are worried about drag queens?

Of course, you and I will point out a distinction between some non-denominational personality cult and the Roman Catholic Church. They don’t. It’s all just “Christians are hypocrites”.

You want to know why kids don’t want to come to church? They think we’re hateful, homophobic, reactionary, sexist etc. They can’t figure out why they’d want that guy with his shiny red corvette and frosted tips to tell them every Sunday why LGBTQ people were going to hell. No thanks. I’ll be a good person, live love, and do it without “organized religion”.

I’ve had people ask my kids, when they say I’m a pastor, “so, your dad hates gays?” Gentle ribbing? Or do they really believe it?

The two biggest questions I get asked by confirmation students are “what is hell all about?” and “why do Christians hate gays?”

That’s the world we live in. Like it or not. The kids who go to church have to answer to their friends for the sins of those Christians who are screaming loudly to block what most young people see as self-evident human rights. They don’t see atheists shouting down drag queens and screaming at school board meetings. Ergo: atheists are more tolerant and loving.

I know that we as a church, as the ELCA, have struggled over the years with what course we will plot over LGBTQ issues. We know all too well at Lord of Grace that many of our former members left to go to conservative churches that would affirm their belief that all same-sex activity was sinful and against the Bible. We also know that our social statement on human sexuality both affirms same-sex marriage and ordination, but does not condemn those who choose not to support that. You don’t have to agree with the change, but we do expect you to live in a loving and supportive way in community with those who do.

Which brings me back to thinking about our place as a church, our future, our strategy for proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ in these times. Most of our society seems to be splitting apart along hard, partisan lines. Some churches stake out a traditionalist view, and they keep planting churches that affirm those beliefs, and do so with really good light shows. On the other hand, more and more of the population is just dropping out of church entirely. They don’t see a place for them. They may not deny God’s existence, but don’t want to participate in what they see as hateful politics.

In order to do evangelism these days it’s not enough to talk about Jesus. You have to overcome all these negative views, all these preconceptions first. You have to BE loving and supportive of people ostracized by other churches. And you have to keep clarifying, “but we’re not like that church, we don’t believe that, we don’t practice that……”

It's gets exhausting. I used to be more circumspect about doing the whole “We’re not them” bit. It felt arrogant. But after watching the screaming at Bookman’s and credible threats against the Catalina Foothills school board, I don’t feel we have a choice. Honestly, I would rather go to no church at all than that one.

And I used to be more circumspect about talking about ELCA social statements. I was worried it would offend people and cause controversy, and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. But, the more I see in the news, the more I feel the opposite. We’ve already lost people because of our positions. Maybe it’s time to use them to gain new ones.

It's why I feel we need to be more bold in identifying ourselves as different, and highlighting our social positions, and letting people know we’re an alternative. We also have the burden of living that out in practice, and demonstrating that we can be loving, open-minded, tolerant, inclusive, accepting, non-judgmental, listening to diverse views, and not automatically against all social change. We have a lot of obstacles to overcome to reach new generations for Christ. And none of them have to do with flashy lighting.

That said, we will be upgrading our lighting. We’ll go with the simpler plan: nothing flashy, but more bright and adjustable. We’ll be able to set a mood for a meditative service, and raise it for Sunday morning. And I hope that under those lights, whether dark and contemplative or bright and celebrating, that we act and live love and acceptance of Jesus, so we can melt hardened hearts with deeds and actions that give a different voice to Jesus and the church.  

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Painting San Juan Bautista - pastor's column April, 2023

Seventy years ago some Swedish Lutherans on the south side of Tucson formed a congregation, in the old Augustana Synod (which has since merged in to the LCA and then to the ELCA), on Bilby Road and almost Park Avenue. They called this church Bethany Lutheran.

By the mid-1970’s, most of the Swedes had moved away, and the neighborhood had become mostly Mexican-American. So they sold the property to the Lutheran Church in America (the LCA) and with the proceeds moved west to Cardinal and Valencia and formed Santa Cruz Lutheran Church.

San Juan Bautista, as it looks today.

Meanwhile, at the old Bethany building, a new pastor named Rich Miller came in, who spoke Spanish and had served congregations in the Caribbean. He had a counseling practice on the side and, through that, met a bunch of people of Afro-Cuban descent who had just come to the US. He restarted the church as San Juan Bautista Lutheran Church, or Eglesia Luterana de San Juan Bautista.

The church remained this way until the early 1980’s, when most of the Cuban immigrants moved to other parts of the US, and Pastor Miller started and outreach to the Mexican-America community that now is the majority of the area. He stayed there until the late 1980’s.

He was then followed by a retired missionary from Guatemala, Pastor Gary McClure. He served the congregation part-time for the next 18 years. He was followed by three more pastors who all had short terms, followed then by Pastor Mateo Chavez, a retired teacher from Yuma and member of the congregation. Pastor Chavez has now been at San Juan for several years fully ordained.

This April 30th San Juan will be celebrating its 70th anniversary as a ministry site (as two different congregations). They’ve weathered a lot, particularly the struggle with finding pastors who can speak Spanish, and know the culture. As a small congregation of people on hour wages. San Juan has not been self-sustaining for years, and relies heavily on the generosity of the ELCA, Grand Canyon Synod, and our fellow Tucson congregations.

Pastor Rich Miller (second from left) helping the musicians from San Juan at the super-youth event in 2017. Pastor Mateo Chavez is speaking, and his wife Anette is with the guitar second from the right.

Lord of Grace has had an off-again, on-again partnership with San Juan. I saw in an old directory that we rebuilt the underlayment on their roof in the early 2000’s. We also had a combined youth group event in 2018 down there, which was a lot of fun. Then there was the “super-youth” event here in 2018 that featured a musical group from San Juan.

When I was doing Open Space Church, we had a good partnership with San Juan. As a mission start, we relied on ELCA money to support us. But what we didn’t have in finances, we had in talent.

Michael Schultz painting Jesus and John the Baptism where the old windows used to be at San Juan Bautista

In 2015 we held our second live graffiti art show at San Juan: WET PAINT 2. Open Space’s own Michael Schultz painted a big mural on their education building with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jesus, and the Luther Rose. We also brought in other local artists to make an event out of it. The mural is still there, though it could use a touch-up because of the fading. It faces due west.

The Holy Spirit by Tucson artist SES ONE

Then again in 2019 Open Space came back to host a graffiti contest, and paint the outside front of the sanctuary. The windows that once showed light into the front were covered up with plywood decades ago, and were painted like the rest of the building. Instead, Michael Schultz painted this Jesus with John the Baptist (above) in stained-glass-style, but with all spray paint. Numerous other artists competed, and the winner, SES ONE, with this Holy Spirit Dove, still sits in the San Juan sanctuary.

One thing that has been a frustration of many of us in the Grand Canyon Synod is how Tucson, which is 40% Mexican-American, has only one Spanish-speaking church, and . We need to do better at our evangelism, and break out of being a denomination of primarily Midwestern transplants (says Midwestern Transplant). There aren’t easy solutions, but one thing we can do is help support the congregation we do have.

The Lord of Grace and San Juan youth groups in 2016 in front of the main mural on the education building.

Which brings me to my shameless plug for volunteers to help me repaint the San Juan fellowship hall. The room has been rebuilt and repainted several times, and has some marks of wear, as any heavily-trafficked space does. I’ll be going down April 10th to prep the walls and tape, and then paint on April 12 and 13. I could use help to make it all go faster. It’s not a huge room, but it does take time and effort to get things done with detail. Sign-up sheets are in the narthex, and you can pick the day you can come. I hope to see you there.

Pastor Lars

Experiencing God in Wilderness -pastor's column March 2023

These past few weeks I’ve been doing an online study of selected passages from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison. It’s been a fun experience to go back and look at one of my favorite writers and theologians, as well as someone I feel pretty comfortable recommending as a model of Christian faith. In case you aren’t familiar with him, he was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He taught for a while at Union Seminary in New York City, and decided to go back to Germany with the rise of Hitler. He could have stayed out the war, but he felt his Christian calling was not to avoid the cross of discipleship, but embrace it. I’m not sure I would have been as bold.

When he got to Germany he joined the Abwehr – German military intelligence. It gave him clearance to travel to gain secrets about the Allies, while also working as a sort of double-agent. He ended up joining a plot to kill Hitler, and when he was found out, was sent to the Tegel prison in Berlin. He stayed there 18 months before being quietly transferred to an SS camp, where he was interrogated, tortured, and, eventually, hung naked with piano wire a couple months before the war ended.

All this sacrifice has put a credibility behind his writings that most theologians don’t have. But there’s one part of him that is getting renewed attention these days, from an unlikely source: American fundamentalists.

When Bonhoeffer was in New York, there was a theological movement at the time in mainline churches called “liberalism”. Nowadays we call it “classical liberalism” because it isn’t the same as today. The word means different things. But back then it was about how we could build the kingdom of God here on earth through social programs and science, and that doctrine and beliefs were largely unimportant. What mattered was the social outcomes. This was a reaction to the “quietism” of so much of American Christianity then that taught, basically, forget about the world and prepare yourself for heaven. Actions have reactions.

What Bonhoeffer found disillusioned him on classical liberalism, as he felt it didn’t address the issues of discipleship and personal responsibility for one’s faith. But this is not to say he was a quietist, or against churches taking social stands. Here’s just one quote

“Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.”

He was not a social conservative, he just had issues with this particular brand of liberal Christianity.

Fast-forward to the early 2000’s, and suddenly you see his name being trumpeted by American Christian fundamentalists as one of their own. He’s now the doctrinal evangelical who died resisting the weak-kneed liberals who wouldn’t stand up to Hitler. So many things are wrong here, but most people wouldn’t catch them. In Germany, the Protestant “Lutheran” church actually calls itself the Evangelische Kirche. They don’t use the word “Lutheran”. In fact, our own doctrinal book, the Book of Concord, says “These are the writings of the Evangelical churches”. Lutheran was a nickname.

To conflate Dietrich Bonhoeffer with the modern evangelical movement, and all its literalism and politics, is simply wrong. He was anything but. Today he would go to a mainline Lutheran church, talk about “social justice” and “systemic injustice” along with the individual’s call to discipleship. He would in no way support the evolution-denying or science-denying politics of today’s evangelicals. But you have to dig a little to find that.

His earlier books, the Cost of Discipleship and Ethics have a heavy focus on the individual and the personal cost of being a follower of Jesus. They don’t delve as much into systemic and social things. It’s in his later writings, where he’s sitting in prison, with lots of time on his hands, that he starts to really rethink a lot of the Christian faith. It isn’t that he loses faith, even seeing WW2, it’s just that he gets disillusioned with how faith did not lead to action where it mattered. And so he begins to wonder if maybe the “religion” of his time – the practices, theology, unwritten belief systems, need to get jettisoned to get back to following Jesus. This is what he calls “religionless Christianity”, and this is what I’ve been exploring in the video series.

And yet, even here, his words got spun. You have fundamentalists talking about how they’re getting rid of “religion” to get “back to the heart”. And when pressed what that means, it’s something along the lines of: traditions, denominations, liturgy, robes, communion, written prayers – anything that might resemble Catholicism. They’re going to just sing and pray and listen to a sermon, and that’s “getting rid of religion”. The problem was, Bonhoeffer’s exploration of religionless Christianity has nothing to do with liturgy or bishops or robes, and everything to do with questions like:

• How can you talk about the cross if people are not believing in sin?

• Why is so much of “religion” just focused on life after death, instead of this world?

• What do we have to say that adds Christ to the world of experience and science, instead of saying that God is either not working in the world, or only is there to answer the questions we can’t (the God of the gaps)?

• Is it ethical to encourage people  to have an existential crisis so that you can solve it?

• What does it mean to talk about redemption if the world doesn’t think they need to be saved?

These are questions driven by the rise of secularism, science, atheism, philosophy. Nothing about robes or hymns or weekly communion. Nothing about Jesus “in your heart”. Much more deep.

Where I find the questions the most convicting and engaging for me center around the idea of finding God in the world, and not in what’s after or beyond. If God is only the answer to questions we can’t answer, the more science answers the less room there is for God. And in a world that could care less about hell and heaven, do we have something to say about life now?

There’s this common phrase I hear among my fellow wilderness-hiking-types that they don’t need to go to church because “nature is my church” and “I find God in nature/mountain/stream/rainbow/sunset”. I have spent a lot of time in nature, and while I feel that I can better connect with God there, because there is more beauty and less distractions, I have not found God. I missed the community, the Word, the communion, the songs. Just me and nature eventually got kind of lonely.

Ragged Top Mountain, in Ironwood Forest National Monument.

But I see where they’re coming from, and because of Bonhoeffer I understand it better. They’re not denying that God exists, or that there is more to life than the physical world, or that there is transcendent experience. They’re just placing it IN THE WORLD. Church, they believe, is all about after death and outside of experience. They want a richer experience of God IN NATURE, not a God who tells you to destroy it because it’s all going to hell in the rapture anyways. They want to find God now, not just after death. And they want more life now, not a deprived life now in order to prepare for the good one later.

With that, I can’t disagree.

But our music, our hymns, so much of what we do is not geared towards finding God IN the pleasure and beauty today. If anything, pious Christianity has viewed pleasure as the first step on a slippery slope to debauchery and hell. Better to hold it all in. And if you listen to the songs about after I die, they go on and on about the “far side of Jordan”, but nothing about the near side of my life.

It's made me rethink how we can talk about God with no reference to heaven and hell, afterlife, punishment. It’s made me rethink how to talk about Jesus as someone to find IN the experience of the world, not as an escape from it.

Jesus being tempted to rule the world by The Tester

And how do we do that, and keep Jesus distinctly Jesus, and not fall into “God is in everything, so everything is God” sort of mushy-ness? Bonhoeffer suggests going back to the Old Testament, where no one believed in hell or an afterlife, and where Jesus, he believes, considers that of minor importance (though he does believe in resurrection). The message is there, the way is there, but it will involve some re-experiencing the world around you.

My thoughts meander, but let me bring it all back. This Lent our theme is “wilderness”. You can take that a couple ways. One is that it’s a place of emptiness, disorientation, deprivation. In those places, like Jesus, we can hear the Spirit more clearly because of our lack of distractions. The other way is to look at the wilderness as a place of rich experience, peace, harmony, and presence of mind – a place where God is MORE present, and deprivation is less. In both cases, we can go on our journeys away from the endless to-do lists that kill any experience of holiness and transcendence, that separate us from daily experience of God.

We’ll explore this theme in our mid-week services through the use of meditation, conversation, and contemplation of visual art. God will be present in both the non-seeing, and in the rich visuals. The sermons on Sunday will emphacize this two-sided journey, and, I hope, we will all have a new perspective on faith as followers of Jesus in this world.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Blue Ocean Evangelism - Pastor's Column Feb 2023

It’s been a couple months since everyone got an update on the strategic planning process, with Christmas and all, but we’re back and continuing our work. The committee met in January to start talking about implementation of the new mission statement. In case you can’t remember it:

Love God

Open our hearts and minds

Live Graciously toward all

The focus of our community is always first on the Lord, deepening our relationships with him, and being disciples. Then we open our minds and hearts to exploring and experiencing God’s truths and God’s will for our lives. Finally, there’s grace, God’s free gift, which we live with each other and which we want others to experience. In other words (my personal paraphrase)

·       Relationship/Spirituality

·       Exploration and Experience

·       Acceptance and gracious living

Now comes the next step: to go to our ministry teams and have everyone do brainstorming, and develop plans for how to implement these things in their areas. Some groups will focus more on one part than another, of course, but we’ll be most successful with the most ideas, ownership, involvement. Look for members of the Strategic Planning Committee to set up sessions with your ministry, and go through the process with you.

These are the nuts and bolts of process, of working things out, getting decisions made. But I also want to step back and share a few reflections on how to go about mission today.

I shared this little spiel with the committee, and thought I’d share it with you. It’s based on a book from the business world called “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The basic premise is that businesses operate in one of two markets. In the “red ocean” lots of different companies compete for a finite market. The competition is intense, so prices have to go down. You also have to spend lots of energy trying to beat the competition at quality, often investing hugely in small differences that only the most savvy consumers notice. Think of wines: if you want the connoisseurs,  you have to make really good wines, with very specific tastes, to people who are very picky. It’s called the “red ocean” because the competition is bloody. Lots of failed businesses and “cut throat” competition.  

In the “blue ocean” you don’t have competition, and you’re not even really competing with the other businesses. You’re creating a new market. Think of those wines with the kangaroos on them. They’re not super expensive, don’t have fancy French names, the bottles are easy to read, and they’re just sweet enough that ordinary people who have never swished a goblet under their noses can appreciate. The company is raking in millions selling wines to people who identify as “not wine people”. It’s a blue ocean success.

Where this matters to us is how closely this resembles the religious landscape of our NW corner of Tucson. When Lord of Grace was new, growth was fast and churches were few. We were one of the only ones. We were an island in a blue ocean. Now there’s one in every strip mall and school. We got huge. Now it’s bloody red, with a church on every corner. In addition, interest in religion is dropping, so a smaller percentage of people are looking for a church. This means more churches competing for fewer people – even factoring in recent development and housing growth. So, they all have to get better bands, more exciting youth groups, better signage, more savvy marketing, more programs….to grow in the market of church-shoppers.

Looking out over the Continental Ranch area, they all look pretty similar, to me at least. Little or no liturgy: just songs-sermon-go home. Praise bands playing the same songs. Pastor with jeans and untucked shirt with carefully sculpted hair to look “hip”. And a theology that’s solidly old-school and not up for debate. The differences between them are subtle – one pastor’s preaching style may be more animated, another more didactic, another does better jokes. The bands will be subtly different and try to get better singers and one might have a more charismatic “worship pastor”, but 90% is the same thing cloned over and over. It’s religious red ocean.

One effect of red-ocean church world is that size becomes a key asset in market positioning. To offer the best band, best programs, best parking, best media, best youth group etc. it helps in every way to have more people and money. Don’t have a volunteer for VBS? Just hire someone. Your kids don’t have a lot of friends at the small church? Go to the big one where they know everyone from school, and have cool mission trips and white-water rafting. As a smaller congregation, you simply can’t compete with the big players in a red ocean market. They can out-perform you in every category – except if you want to not be anonymous or want to get really involved. The whole scene gets disheartening, frustrating, and demoralizing.

Then you throw in those churches and pastors who decide that the quickest and most cost-effective way to build a church is to poach active members from somewhere else. Maybe you can out-visit the local pastor, or invite his members to ball games, or have your members invite people from other churches to your small groups. If a person is already a good giver and volunteer, when they switch you get a lot of money/volunteer time quickly.

And then you ask if this is really what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about – trying to compete for the business of religious customers.

Of course, there are many very good reasons for switching churches. Many of us here have done that. Maybe the theology or social positions here better align. Maybe you were hurt at the last place. Maybe you just moved across town. So it’s not all just cynical “sheep stealing” as we call it in the business. But I’ve seen enough to know that it isn’t that uncommon, unfortunately.

But what if we decided that we weren’t going to play the game, that we weren’t going to spend our energy trying to provide better religious services to Christian customers, and instead did what Jesus said to “make disciples of all nations?” When you hear pastors talk about evangelism, we always talk about “those who have not heard” and “those who do not know God”. Nobody says, “those who are good members somewhere else”. What if we decided to abandon the red ocean, and focused our mission on the blue ocean – the 80% of the population that doesn’t go to church, or that isn’t fundamentalist? What if we decided that instead of trying to out-do these big places with fancy programs and big staffs, we did unique things that they don’t, so that we’re not interchangeable products? What if we went our own path, and deliberately positioned ourselves as an alternative to everyone else?

That’s what I’ve been thinking about for years. And I believe it’s a far better strategy for Lord of Grace.

Within greater Continental Ranch area, we stand out for a few things. We have a building; liturgy; an open-minded theology, that’s both rich and conducive for questions and doubts, a denominational history and accountability. We also have a welcoming community, energetic worship, etc. etc. We should highlight our differences, lean into them, and find ways to use what we have to connect with the huge blue ocean mission field.

When we meet as ministry teams, to do our dreaming and planning, I’ll be asking questions like: how can we build relationships with people outside our church? How can we connect people with God who don’t know, or who have fallen away? How can we impact lives of those around us? How is what we do and are different, and how can we use that as an asset?

It's a fun process, I think, to open yourself to the Spirit to see new opportunities. It’s also a lot of fun to do some dreaming again, after spending so much energy the last two years on survival and adaptation.

God has a place for different churches in the kingdom of God. It isn’t one size that will connect with everyone, no matter how much I may disagree with the stances of some others. They are bringing people to Christ who may not come here. But, still, God has a special calling for us, in this time and place.

God Bless,

Pastor Lars