"Always Being Made New"

As you know, if you are reading this here, I am a church geek. On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, I joined more than 2,000 others watching a LiveStream of my denomination's Churchwide Assembly -  a national gathering of about 952 representatives that happens every 3 years. Thankfully, this year's gathering of the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA) is being held in Pittsburgh which makes it easy for me to indulge in conversations and watch the live feed.

I watched in the morning as four people  - our Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, and three women currently serving as synod bishops - spoke about leading our Church in the next six years, and I watched in the afternoon as a fifth ballot between the two final nominees was held.

For those of you who think this is as interesting as watching grass grow (my frequent analogy for watching golf on television, or live for that matter) what made it wonderful was the color commentary provided by other church geeks, like me. As the people in the room listened and made their decisions about which candidate would receive their vote, I listened on Twitter (#ELCAcwa) and chat to the overwhelming respect and affirmation of our current leader's gifts and ministry. Presiding Bishop Hanson has led the ELCA for twelve years with grace and compassion even as congregations are getting smaller, even as seminaries are struggling, even as controversy erupted over who we ordain as leaders for our congregations.

And in the midst of recognizing the blessing that Bishop Hanson has been to the office of Presiding Bishop, and at the same time listening to the leading of the Holy Spirit for us in the world today, our church elected a new leader - and for the first time, a woman. It was a day to celebrate the Good in the Church even as we look for ways to move forward.

As a seminary student anticipating assignment and my first call in the ELCA, I am grateful for the day and the memory. I am grateful for the women in ministry who have preceded me. I am grateful for the faithfulness of all the leaders - women and men - who have challenged us to "always be made new" and who have shown courage in walking with us into new places and new ways of being church.

If you are a church geek, too, here is the video of Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson introducing Presiding Bishop-Elect Elizabeth Eaton. (This is a formal moderated press conference. Bishop Hanson's remarks begin at about 2:34 mark and Bishop Eaton begins about 5:27)

Conspiracy in the Preacher's Corner

Conspiring to hold Jesus at the center of all of our Christmas preparation and expectation, St. Mark's joined neighborhood churches in participating in the Advent Conspiracy [AC] for Advent. Four churches, four preachers, four worship styles but united as one Body of Christ around the table and the Word - pretty extraordinary.

On Sundays at St. Mark's, we returned to the prophets' words and heard the promise of a Messiah.  I preached the first and last Sundays of Advent.

December 2, 2012
1st Sunday in Advent (Year C)
Jeremiah 33:14-16   
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
 

Listen Now

December 23, 2012
4th Sunday in Advent (Year C)
Micah 5:2-5a
Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)

Listen Now

Sermon Series Starters

Last Friday’s Five laid out kindling to spark our imaginations, asking

• What are two texts or topics you wish you could hear a sermon about?
• What are two texts or topics you wish you could preach a sermon about?
• What's your favorite sermon you've ever heard or preached? What makes it your favorite?

I’m not sure I won’t blur the lines between Sunday learning and sermons in this conversation, and I am wrestling with what kinds of sermons I might wish I could hear. Sure, I’d like to have more conversations about how we are called into the world and I’d like to talk more with people about death and resurrection and heaven, and I like the idea of more pointed teaching about things like the Lord’s Prayer, praying with the Psalms and the Creeds, but, in my understanding, the Word we hear on Sunday isn’t really meant to be about what we want to hear, but how God is speaking to us where we are ─ what we need to hear that day.

It’s easier for me to think what I might preach.  First off, I think I’d like to preach on all those stories in the Bible that seminary professors reference, saying, “Everyone knows this story….”  (The same can be said of hymns.) Every congregation is filled with people who bring their own unique and different story into worship that day. Often, even if you have been raised in a Christian and church-going tradition, your experience of faith formation may look very different from the person sitting beside you. And then there are those of us who didn’t go to church weekly from birth to eighteen, or even fourteen. We can’t talk about sharing a common narrative unless more of us know the family characters and their stories.

Similarly, I’d like to preach on the women of the Bible like Ruth and Sarah and Esther, and invite other women to preach on them also. I wouldn’t be in seminary and preparing for ordained ministry if I hadn’t stumbled into the paths of women vicars, pastors and preachers during the past fifteen years. It’s kind of like being in elementary school or even high school, and being asked, “What career do you want?” How can you imagine, even with Google, that you might want to be involved in a ministry for refuge settlement, or a food bank, or be involved in micro loans unless you meet people and hear stories about people who are doing those things? How can we lives as disciples without learning the stories of the people before us?

And when those knowledge gaps yawn in front of me, I'm grateful for the reminder from a recent sermon that regardless of whether we remember the meat of the weekly preaching we hear, we are fed, nourished and nurtured by it. One especially memorable sermon was preached in Advent by a school chaplain where he told the story of the Christmas truce in 1914 during World War I. The chaplain's storytelling had a way of transporting us back to that night, helping us imagine the loneliness or isolation of the soldiers and the poignant gratitude we feel for being together and safe. My memory of our hymn selections isn't a lot better, but I believe we closed the service singing, “In Christ, there is no East or West.” Thanks be to God for meeting us where we are.

Like a Milkpod Bursting

"Like a milkpod bursting" was how Phyllis Tickle described the communities that grew out of a year-long gathering in Kudzu's, a local bar in Memphis. From her description, I would guess a lot of the participants in "Beer and Bible" might have refuted that it was church. Certainly, it didn't look like church if you imagine church as a building with pews and hymnals and offering plates, but, undoubtedly, it was church, the ekklesia: it was local people gathered around the Word of God. 

(Read a little bit more in this 2008 article on Sojourner's website)

What mattered was the people who came and went on those Tuesday nights had questions they wanted to ask about faith, about truth, about the Bible and about God, and they had a space where they could come and ask them. When they ran out of questions, they stopped meeting. A year later they reunited to mark the anniversary of what they had been doing and sometime after that, the milkpod burst and they began meeting in smaller groups.  

Tickle gave the illustration of this emergence community to give us a picture of how church is happening today outside our mainline congregations.

Explaining a cascade of sociological and historical events that have set the stage for “The Great Emergence”, Tickle was challenging those of us “in the business of religion” to listen for and address the hard questions that people ask. The questions aren't meant to tear down the Church we have known; they are to get at which traditions carry something worthwhile – Living Water (John 4:10) – and which ones are like cracked cisterns that need to be thrown out. 

Encouraging leaders to designate a pastoral allowance that lets pastors go where people are – whether that is a neighborhood bar or a coffee shop – Tickle argued that we need to be reminded that our congregations and churches are not the kingdom of God, but we are called to serve the kingdom of God and that means talking to whoever is looking at us, wherever they find us. 

"Take the kingdom out to the people around us."

Friday Five (and it's still Friday!)

So this week's FridayFive asks:

1. What does the Lord's supper/ Eucharist mean to you?
2. How important is preparation for this, and what form does it take?
3. What does baptism mean to you?
4. How important is preparation for baptism and what form does it take?

When I began the conversation with my church about being called to rostered ministry, the question of how central to my call was being able to administer the Sacraments was *the* question that made all the other questions fade into the background. The presence of Christ in the bread and the wine and the living-ness of God’s promise of forgiveness and new life sustain me.

One of my favorite descriptions of the sacraments comes from Dirk Lange and Christian Scharen, two of my worship professors at Luther Seminary:

Baptism brings you into the family of God and coming to the Table teaches you how to live in that family.

(Hopefully I haven't butchered the paraphrase)

It's a question others may debate, but for me, infant baptism is one of the ways we witness the depth of God's grace and understand that it a gift freely given by God to each of us. An unearned gift. We are forgiven and it does not come from any merit or worthiness of our own at all.

What I want for adults and for families though is for the catechumenate process of learning what God promises and how we are called into life, to renew our lives daily and live into the fullness of life in Christ, to be transformational.

Similarly, I want people to grasp the joy of being welcomed to the Table and of being loved despite our brokenness. For my congregation, part of preparing to come to the Table is participating in the order of confession and forgiveness where we hear our sins are forgiven. Even on my ugliest, most bitter day; my most despairing or exhausting day; my grief or anger. Even then.

How about you?

p.s. Sally also asked whether we had a quote, poem or song that helps us come before God in a sacramental way...will you share yours?

Missing

What don’t I do if I have to ride the bus from here to the train and catch another bus on the other end? Do I skip the early worship or sacrifice a good night’s sleep? Do I go places that mean another transfer, another route, another line or another walk? What do I miss when I’ve already spent fifteen hours on buses and trains and just want to sit and be still for a day. Maybe the groceries wait until tomorrow or we never get to the library. If I make it to the market, it’ll be the one closest to me, even if that means I can’t buy as much. But even if the prices are okay, what don’t I buy when I have to carry my bags? When the backs of my legs ache and my fingers cramp from trekking through the cold?

And what do I miss when I adopt the vacant look and stare out the window or bury my nose in my book instead of smiling and saying hello or talking to the person behind me in line? Smiles break open our masks of anonymity and of otherness. “Hello.” “Good morning.” “Thank you.” What does it cost me? If you were going to rob me, it would have happened already. Instead you pull the line for the stop ahead and help me find my way. You laugh with me as we begin a new day. At night, on the way home, we’re quieter, more weary and maybe more wary because the darkness envelops us as night falls and we’re still not home. 

And even when I get home, when I am a mama or a daddy, what do I miss? Excited stories about the school day or playground, anguished teenage narratives and dinner table conversations because we’re sapped from bobbing and weaving through the city streets. 

Part of my reflections of a two-week experience living in Chicago's Hyde Park, studying urban pastoral education and riding Chicago Transit everywhere.

Where am I now

    Just as we begin each educational leadership class by looking at our knowledge competencies, we conclude each class by reassessing our skills, knowledge and attitudes, measuring what we have learned and how our classroom experience has informed our understanding of education.  Early on in Media and Technology in Parish Education I identified two goals that were still growing edges for me.  The first one is supporting intergenerational learning, and the second one is supporting theological and biblical reflection in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of people involved.
    Often when we talk about intergenerational learning, we talk about forging relationships between older adults and youth, but I am in the middle and personally, I am much more comfortable reaching out to older adults than children, teenagers and even college-age young adults.  However, technology and media create openings for conversations in ways that might not happen otherwise across multiple generations.   Three of us in my family shared this video with each other – my retired Navy officer father, my eleven year old flute-playing daughter and me.

    Similarly, my almost sixteen year old daughter commented recently on the way that we watch people grow up through the photographs they share on Facebook.  I have classmates who have posted scanned photographs from our high school years and for my daughter, cameras have always been digital so pictures from kindergarten through high school are easily shared online.  Comfortable with using social media and technology to tell our families' stories, now we are beginning to discover how we can use them to tell our faith stories as well. 
    Blogging our theological and biblical reflections for this class has let me invest time in Blogger, adding elements to my blog like a cloud of the tags, labels or subjects in my posts and a blog roll or listing of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.  The reader itself has a search engine to find blogs based on keywords so I can search for a title or a topic and add it quickly.  And for a twist, in Blogger, when I list my favorite musicians, I can click on a name and find other bloggers who share an interest in that musician. (So look out for more bluegrass theologians.)
    These tools and resources have connected me with other people who are blogging particularly about faith, leadership, education and social media.  But just making the connections isn’t the same as having conversations.  For conversations, I will always hope to find and make opportunities to sit down across a table with other people in a concrete, physical space, but as a distributed learner, I am also very comfortable with asynchronous conversations. 
    Using Hootsuite I can read feeds from Facebook and Linked In, and even RSS feeds from blogs, but I primarily use it to follow conversations on Twitter where I tweet @christinaauch.  In Hootsuite, I set up streams or feeds – lists of Tweets by other people - in Twitter using hashtags.  Hashtags are words preceded with a pound or number sign (#).  Right now I have my main Twitter feed where I can read anything posted by someone I am following, but I also have a half-dozen or more streams that I read that are based on the hashtags or subjects:

#chsocm (people interested in how churches are using/can use social media; tweetchat begins July 11)
#isedchat (independent school education chat)
#edsocialmedia (education and social media)
#finalsite (a web communications conference in June near Hartford, CT)
#gather2011 (Bread for the World’s conference in June in Washington, D.C.)
#WGF11 (the Greenbelt-esque Wild Goose Festival held in June in NC)
#NN11 (Netroots Nation 2011 conference in June in the Twin Cities)

Here I see tweets from many more voices, anyone who uses the hashtag in fact. For tweetchats we are actually engaging in synchronous chats, at a given time and date, but you can also stumble onto them and go back to them if you can’t be online at the proposed time. 
    It is in these conversations that I hear a number of voices, including Lutheran, Episcopal, United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist, and other Protestant voices, and now the Pope as well.  Different nonprofits and denominational offices and ministries (Bread for the World, Vibrant Faith Ministries and David Creech at ELCA World Hunger, for example) are on Twitter, too.  Tweets are conversation starters, and the conversation grows as comments are retweeted or people reply to earlier tweets. 
    For people who don’t think real conversations happen in 140 characters or less, in the past few days, I have had a conversation about how to talk to our children about Jesus, our gathered community and worshiping together without answering “Why do we go to have to go church?” with “Because that’s what we do on Sunday.” and connected with someone who has written his thesis on themes similar to Clay Shirky’s. Earlier this year, I spoke to David Creech about a course he had taught on Christian responses to poverty and hunger.
    These are real conversations happening without the benefit of a landline phone, knowing someone’s full name or having a peer introduction. They are respectful, engaged and thoughtful conversations about God, wealth and poverty, justice, faith, fear and pain as well as places where joys and sorrows are shared. The participants often are more diverse in racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds than I would find at a roadside diner or coffee shop in my corner of the world, and probably in my congregation, although I’m less convinced that we are any more successful at bridging class divides.  Nor do I think our digital spaces should replace our physical spaces and face-to-face conversations, but they afford unique opportunities that complement and even enrich those conversations.

SPOILER ALERT - How the film fest wrapped up

Tonight I finished the sixth of the movies I chose for a weekend (and a day) film festival that looked at how faith, culture and media mix and what messages about humanity, God and faith may be implicit in these films and what messages may be explicit. (Here's the original blog with the movie list.)

My interest stems from an acknowledgment that pop culture is a place where these conversations are happening, just as in social media today, and I haven’t been present, let alone participating. 

Where was I? Well, for one thing, 4 of the 6 films were rated R. I pretty much stopped watching anything stronger than PG-13 in 1995 when my oldest daughter was born.  4 of the 6 films were set in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial intelligence had overrun human beings.  I am more likely to read Agatha Christie than George Orwell and was perhaps even more telling, I was convinced upon finishing college I could find a job that didn’t require a computer.  (Clearly, I don’t have a future in telling the future)  Finally, 2 of the 6 films were set on death row, and 1 of the 6 was released when I was 12 (1982) so I definitely missed those. 

What were the common themes?

• All of the films looked at the criteria we use to value life and create identity. Do humans have greater intrinsic value than other created beings? Why or why not?  Does it matter who one’s parents are, where someone came from, how they experienced childhood?  Are we malleable? Can we change our identity?

• There were questions about sin, judgment, and grace. What is sin? Or some sins worse than others? What does judgment look like? What does hatred and division spawn? What does fear do? What is redemption? What is integrity? How do we preserve hope?  Can hope be restored?  What does grace look like?

• There were questions about love.  What is unconditional love? Can love exist among difference? Can relationship exist apart from physical intimacy?  How do children love differently than adults? Are love and faith related?

• There were questions about human finitude, grief, compassion and death.  Why does our world have disease? What happens to us at death? What happens to the people who are still alive? What distinguishes life from death? How are freedom and life related; what about slavery and death?

Eventually, I want to write up the extensive notes I have on each film, and dig more deeply, particularly into intersections with Scripture, but for now this experiment in mixing theological reflection and popular culture has taught me to listen more carefully to the world around me and to look at how we ask questions about ourselves, others and about God in our everyday lives and experiences, whether that’s in a Friday night movie, a Saturday morning cartoon, church on Sunday morning or a lazy afternoon in a hammock reading a best-selling novel.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 3 of 3)

**Spoiler Alert: This post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

When David, Teddy and Joe arrive in Manhattan and find the place “where the lions weep”, they find a young boy who looks identical to David.  David asks, “Is this the place where they make your real?” Then David asks the second boy his name and discovers he is also named David and he erupts in an uncontrollable rage bashing in the head of the second mecha boy, screaming, “I am David! I am special! I am unique!” Dr. Hobby comes in and tries to calm him, reassuring him that he is special, that he is “the first of a kind” and that he is real because, in his quest for the Blue Fairy, he has succumbed to “the great human flaw – [wishing] for things that don’t exist.” 

Questions: Where do find our identity? How do we experience the difference between who the world says we are and our identity as God’s children?  What makes us or our lives real? What icons or idols do we chase?

When Dr. Hobby leaves David to assemble the other team members, David wanders around the offices and discovers a production line of Davids and Darlenes, child mechas in various stages of assembly and packaging.  The scene changes and David is sitting on the edge of a windowsill overlooking the sea and he jumps, tumbling into the depths.  Joe watches from the helicopter they were using and then fishes David out of the sea, depositing him inside the cockpit.  Inside, David tells Joe he saw the Blue Fairy at the bottom of the sea.  In a final confrontation between orga and mecha, the police arrive and drag Joe off; as he gets pulled into the sky, Joe yells, “I am. I was.” and pushes the button to submerge David and Teddy into the water so that they can go to David’s Blue Fairy. 

Questions:  Are there times in our lives when we have tumbled down in despair and been rescued? How do we respond? Where do we find hope?

David maneuvers the capsule toward the Blue Fairy, the remnant of a Coney Island Pinocchio attraction, and parks himself there, praying “until the sea anemones died… the ice encased [him].”  With open eyes, David stared “through the darkness of the night and the next day and the next day….” 

Questions:  How is our faith childlike? How do we pray? Do we pray expectantly?

The scene shifts and we see a snowscape and the Blue Fairy, no longer under water but part of the frozen landscape.   A subtitle indicates two thousand years have passed.  David is awakened by a new being and climbs out of the capsule but when he reaches out to touch the Blue Fairy, she shatters and disintegrates.

It doesn’t matter though because here in this world, the new beings tell him that because he knew living people, he is “unique in all the world.” They create for him, from his memories, the house where he lived with his mother and Martin, but when he asks , “Will Mommy be coming home?” they explain she cannot because she is no longer living.  When they tell him that they are able to regenerate people from pieces of DNA, we discover that Teddy is still carrying a lock of hair from David’s mother.   They agree to bring her back but they explain to David that the experiment is not perfect; after the first day, the recreated humans die again when they fall asleep at the end of the day.  David insists and he has his “perfect day” with his mother, finally closing his eyes when she does, after she says, “I love you, I have always loved you.”

Questions: What are the stories we have in Scripture about being raised to new life? What does a new life in Christ look like? Read Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33. How can we talk about grief and compassion in light of God’s mercy?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 2 of 3)

**Spoiler Alert: This post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

Hidden in the woods, David first encounters other mechas.  Near his hiding place, a dump truck deposits its refuse, a collection of mangled mecha body parts and scavengers swarm the site to find new eyes and limbs. He wanders into a mecha shantytown where damaged and discarded mechas roam. 

Questions:  What is disposable in our society? How do we define wholeness? What about community? Many of the mechas are created for one job - nannies, lovers - which they do extraordinarily well; are people disposable when they are no longer useful or productive?

Caught in an orga police raid of the camp, David and other mechas are hauled away in a trawling net and taken to a “Flesh Fair.”  The fair combines the most exploitative elements of a circus and a demolition derby, taking aim at imprisoned mechas and destroying them in public and humiliating displays.  It bears an ugly resemblance to the slave trade markets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with mechas corralled in cages. 

Questions:  Whom do we call neighbor? How do we treat our neighbor? When do we avert our eyes to oppression or bigotry? When do we even participate in oppression? What effect do hatred, division and fear (sin and brokenness) have on our world?

Led into the center ring, David surprises everyone when he pleads for his life.  People are confused and shout, “Mechas don’t plead for their lives.”  Dismissing their arguments, the despicable master of ceremonies taunts, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, recalling the verse from John 8:7 when Jesus challenges the crowd who would stone the woman,“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  The crowd turns on him and pelts him, creating a riotous melee during which David, Teddy and another mecha named Joe escape. 

Questions: What do we learn about sin, judgment and grace here?

When David explains to Joe that he is looking for a woman called “the Blue Fairy” Joe thinks he knows how to help and the trio travel to Rouge City in a journey and meeting reminiscent of Dorothy seeking out the Wizard of Oz.    After they arrive in Rouge City, David sees a status of an angel at a curbside chapel, “Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart”, prompting Joe’s observation that “the ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.”  Then they go to visit “Dr. Know”, asking how to find the Blue Fairy. 

Questions:  To whom do we turn for knowledge and revelation? What language do we use to describe our Creator God? What assumptions do we have about God?  How do we respond when we cannot find answers? What do we do with our unanswered questions?

With an improvised verse from W.B. Yeats for an answer, David urges Joe to help him get to the “end of the world” which Joe knows as “the lost city in the sea at the end of the world” or Manhattan.  

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 1 of 3)

The story of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is the story of David, a child mecha created as a prototype by Professor Hobby, a human scientist and inventor who steers Cybertronics, a giant in the artificial intelligence industry.  Living in a society that has survived extreme climate change and the loss of seaboard cities like New York and Amsterdam, humans have thrived by limiting human population growth, licensing human pregnancies, and relying on mechanized beings (mechas or robots) because they use a finite number of resources.    Now Dr. Hobby has proposed creating child mechas for whom “love will be the key by which they acquire a subconscious.” 

**Spoiler Alert: The remainder of this post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

One of the earliest theological questions in the film is creation.  Someone asks if a robot can love, what is the responsibility of the human to that robot? And Dr. Hobby parries, “Didn’t God create Adam to love Him?” 

A second question exists around end-of-life questions.  The family into which David is “adopted” had a young son who was in a coma-like state for five years; the parents continue to visit him in a sterile, clinical setting waiting for his condition to change, and then, resigning themselves to his condition, agree to adopt David.

Shortly after his arrival, the mother gives David “Teddy” a supertoy teddy bear who accompanies David everywhere he goes.  Teddy had been their son’s constant companion.  Perhaps, he appears here as a paraclete? 

Miraculously, the biological son Martin recovers and returns home, and tragically but not surprisingly, a sibling rivalry begins.  In this context, a fourth set of questions about difference, biological vs. adopted, and race, organic (human) or mecha (robot) are raised.  The mother reads Pinocchio to the boys and David becomes convinced that if he were “a real boy” his mother would love him more.

His dilemma raises several more questions, including “What does authentic relationship look like?”, “What does unconditional love look like?” 

After an accident involving the boys endangers Martin, the parents decide to return David to Cybertronics, where they know he will be destroyed.  Destruction is inevitable because when the parents adopted David, they implemented a protocol that “triggered” his love; it was irreversible, unconditional and unalterable.  In this iteration, he could only love the person who implemented that protocol; that person was the mother. 

So now we encounter questions about covenant and the cost of breaking covenant.  The covenant is first broken when the parents decide to give up David.  However, the mother fails to return David to Cybertronics; instead she leaves him in the woods theoretically to protect him from destruction.  With her actions, she breaks the covenant she had with the company also. 

Faith, Culture and Media Film Fest

Here and in comments to others, I’ve mentioned that while I am participating in social media, I often miss the ways in which technology, theology and popular culture intersect.  Popular film and music just aren’t spheres I spend a lot of time in. 

So while, I tweet and watch trends on Twitter on things like #edsocialmedia or conferences like this weekend’s “Wild Goose Festival” (#WGF11), connect with friends, classmates and professors on Facebook, and network with colleagues in fundraising and communications on LinkedIn, if you ask me to list the top three movies in the last year, I bomb.

Somewhere in reading Drescher or Hess, I decided it would be interesting to watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and The Matrix (1999) both of which came up in conversations about how digital technology, questions about God and culture mix. 

As long as I was going to watch those two, I wondered what else I might be missing, and discovered a list of 100 movie titles with “spiritual significance.”  Reviewing the list, I picked out another four films I haven’t seen :

Bladerunner (1982)
Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Dead Man Walking (1995)
Signs (2002)

So with the weekend ahead of me, I’m going to spend some time looking at what these filmmakers and actors are saying, or not saying, about who God is and who we are as human beings.

Ending Ten Months of Silence

Wow. My last post is February 2009 and now it's January 2010. Happy New Year!

It isn't that I didn't learn anything interesting in that time. But it must have been more like drinking from a firehose than I realized because I didn't share any of that learning here.

In the spring semester I encountered systematic theology and was fortunate to be study with Dr. Paul Sponheim at Luther Seminary. We explored what statements we will make about God and volumes of what others have said including Carl Braaten, Robert Jensen, Elizabeth Johnson, and Ted Peters. I found my voice and the words to express what I understand about God, and a far-deeper appreciation for the mystery of God and all I do not, cannot, and may not ever, understand.

Alongside that coursework, I studied the Pentateuch. I confess: I spend more time in the Scripture when I have a class that digs into it. Beyond the commitment to the Shema that I posted about, I was also inspired by a new understanding that the Law was given as a gift to God's people, not as oppressive rules and regs. Reading the detail with which the Levites undertook their worship, I realized I had not appreciated the richness or intricacies of the traditions in Judaism.

The summer brought new studies that revealed a wholly new understanding of catholicity and mission in the church, and a long, slow swim through centuries of church history and the Reformation. I discovered the basis for many of the Episcopal traditions I experienced as a child, and then got to see their origins first-hand, visiting Oxford and Westminster in England in the late summer.

Before the fall semester intensified, I had the chance to meet and listen to Marcus Borg who was speaking at a local congregation. Heart of Christianity was one of the first books that helped me find expression for the encompassing love of God and I really enjoyed hearing him in person.

The months since then have been consumed with completing four months of clinical pastoral education (CPE). It was a transformative experience but one that I began very much feeling like a child playing dressup in a white labcoat. I was surprised at the void I felt from the absence of Lutheran traditions, enriched by sharing the experiences with colleagues, grateful for the blessing of being with families who celebrated their loved ones' lives, and yet heartbroken by some of the losses we experienced together.

As intense as CPE was, it was balanced against the foil of continuing coursework that dove deeply into the New Testament, exploring Matthew and Jesus' parables. It made me wish for more classes on the individual books of the Bible because the focused study creates an understanding of the book as a whole work, instead of the piecemeal glances we get in Sunday services, and the discussions allow more reflection and more opportunities to really soak in the texts.

With the new year dawning, I am headed into a new intensive at the seminary, new coursework and new discoveries. One of the classes - the Church and Music - has already put into words something I could only feel: "...the faith of a community comes to life in its music-making. In music, the faith and life of a people take flesh.”(Westermeyer, Te Deum, 5)

With each step, my awe and adoration for God deepens, as does my gratitude for his love for all his creation.

I'll close with a G.K. Chesterton quote that was shared with me in the New Year:
"The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul."