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.

Friday's Top Five

RevGalBlogPals' Friday Five asked, "What are 5 things you do or things you have bought that have made your life simpler/easier to manage?" and as a bonus, "What's something you wish you could manage better?"

5) After reading earlier comments I'll jump on the bandwagon, and praise Google Calendars. I can access school, church and home (x4) and sync all of them to my phone. Updates on my laptop or on my phone show up in both places instantly. I could live without most smartphone features, but reliable access to our household's calendars preserves my sanity! Similarly online polls like Doodle for setting meeting times has put an end to round robin emails and phone calls trying to find agreement.

4) Facebook Groups, like RevGalBlogPal, but also ELCA Clergy, classmates on internship, classmates not on internship and various ministry cohorts help keep conversations focused on a common theme. Hootsuite helps me manage conversations on Twitter and follow threads and chats when I can.

3) My phone's Volume Button. No joke. Giving myself permission to turn my phone to silent and place it face down so I cannot see the pulsing green light that alerts me to messages and phone calls has helped me disconnect at important times, like family meals, sermon writing and face-to-face visits. My laptop's power button hasn't got as much use, but it's another important feature. Turn it off to play board games with my daughter, for meals, for sleep and at least one day a week, leave it off for the morning. The world is always there when I turn it back on.

2) A treadmill. I ran, I swam, I biked; I practiced yoga and rock-climbed. I like all of them in but I'm not a gym rat and I don't especially want a crowd around for workouts. 3 summers ago, we bought a used treadmill from a neighbor down the road and while I'm not walking across the state on the Mountain to Sea Trail anytime soon, I am walking a lot more often, and further, and faster, than I would if we didn't have it, and that keeps me healthier and more fit.

1) The number-one investment that keeps life manageable ends in a three-way tie between books, my knitting needles and my banjo. But regardless of which one really has my attention in the moment, the value they each hold is that they provide an outlet that isn't academic, theological, pastoral or professional.Whether I'm reading a mystery or a Mary Oliver poem, ripping out stitches (or better yet, adding rows) or picking a very slow Cripple Creek, the time reminds me to get out of my own corner of the world and look up and breathe.

Bonus: Making a really excellent pot of coffee? No, seriously, I can wear a lot of hats really well, juggle and move from one thing to the next and work effectively, a lot of the time. But I don't do a great job at remembering that I'm connected to the people around me, and more than that, I really love them and want the things that make them well and happy, whether that means I unplug and play a game of chess, watch a movie I might not pick, cheerfully talk on the telephone, or empty the dishwasher. So I'd like to get a little bit better at managing life less and living life more.

Just like Letterman, right?
Hope you thought of some of your own top five. Let me know what they are. 

No Syllabus for God-sightings

July 10. Registration day for fall classes. Oh, wait, that’s right. I won’t be taking classes this fall. One of the new experiences gifted to me because I am going on internship is a semester without coursework.  Most of the time, I recognize it as a gift; sometimes, like this morning, I want to throw a two-year old’s tantrum and scream, “But I need that class now...” I think that, besides interrupting the reassuring, steady march of completing degree requirements, what I fear is missing the structure of having a schedule and a syllabus and some predictability. Instead I’m living in a pretty unstructured environment, for a few weeks anyway; trying to listen and watch what God may be trying to teach me in this time and space; and, watching internship draw closer on the horizon.

The learning doesn’t stop, fortunately. I discovered the local library system has a free online language tutor that lets me refresh my Spanish and bridge its Castilian foundation to the Latin American Spanish we hear more often in the Americas. I visited the stacks of the local used book store where it looks like somebody traded in a library of emergence theology and other interesting books. (so, I obligingly brought a few home)

I was finishing up a library copy of Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian and hoped to find a used copy to buy but I didn’t have any luck. I’m not surprised; it is a sticky book − one I expect I’ll reread even though I don’t usually read things more than once. In Almost Christian Dean writes about the 2003-2005 National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) and talks about teenagers, contrasting popular, cultural faith which reflects a moral therapeutic deism and “consequential faith”, which develops in teenagers in congregations who “portray God as living, present and active, place a high value on Scripture; reflect the life and mission of Jesus Christ in its practices and relationships; and emphasize spiritual growth, discipleship and mission.”

As someone who is more comfortable talking with people born in the ‘20s than people living in their 20s (or teens), a while back, I adopted a mantra for ministry: “break stereotypes, learn flexibility, build relationships and communicate well.” Dean challenges stereotypes of teenagers who aren’t interested in talking with adults and who aren’t capable of conversations that take more than 140 characters.  She includes an important reminder in Almost Christian that can get lost in the tussling about that is parenting a teenager:

[Every teenager is] an amazing child of God. Their humanity is embedded in their souls as well as their DNA. Their family is the church, their vocation is a grateful response for the chance to participate in the divine plan of salvation, their hope lies in the fact that Christ has claimed them and secured their future for them.

In Almost Christian, there’s a challenge to be intentional about living this truth out in our relationships with teenagers. There's also a challenge to Christian adults and to parents, particularly in mainline Protestant traditions, to recognize how we influence the faith of children, whether we know it or not, and to not be as afraid of speaking about God and Jesus, of pointing to the ways that God is moving in our lives. We tell our lives in stories and unless we are talking about our God-sightings and God-stories, how can anyone else recognize themselves in the Christian story?

So one hope I have for this unstructured time I have is to participate in more conversations about God’s active presence in our world, and more readily answer where I saw, heard or experienced God in everyday life. I hope you’ll listen in.

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."

Here we go!

I had a professor who would begin his four hour lectures with these words, "Here we go!"  They seem appropriate as I transition from being a full-time student and nonprofit fundraiser to being the full-time vicar, or intern pastor, at a local congregation. For the past four years, I have been in seminary preparing for this move, and now it's here.

One of the gifts that internship gives me as a seminarian is a time of discovering more about living life in public Christian leadership and who I am as a pastor. Gathering up wisdom from the people who have gone before me, I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, where we discover our lives together are rooted in some basic, simple truths.

One of the basic truths I learned from that same professor was, "Take regular breaks." He could be mid-sentence, but at ten minutes to the hour, we stopped and took ten minutes to walk outside, breathe or re-caffeinate. It didn't really matter what we did as long as we got up from our desks and did something else. He didn't want to talk more than fifty minutes in one sitting and I doubt any of us wanted to listen for more than that. Another professor makes the same suggestion when she hits a wall in the process of sermon writing: take a break and do something else for 15 or 30 minutes. Don't just keep staring at the empty screen or tablet of paper. Whether it's preparing a sermon or teaching others, taking regular breaks will benefit everyone involved.

From my grandaddy, I am reminded, "Take care of the patient, not the illness." A doctor at a teaching hospital,  he saw too many new residents who never really saw the patients as real people; instead they attended to the disease and diagnosis, and overlooked the living, hurting human being who stood there. Our congregations and communities aren't numbers on offering envelopes, or statistics for the annual report - numbers on a page - they are living, breathing and hurting human beings.


Getting to know real people means having real conversations, but what those conversations look like has changed a lot in the thirty plus years since I was in kindergarten. When it comes to our conversations here and on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, a United Methodist pastor in Indiana shared these guidelines which advocate, "Avoid harm, do good, be connected and help others connect to God." Pastor Keith Anderson, formerly of Woburn, Mass. and now in Ambler, Penn. writes about weaving social media and ministry, too, and a group of folks who regularly chat about church and social media using the Twitter hashtag #chsocm dove into questions of boundaries and authenticity on June 26 (here's the transcript).


I will be sharing what I am learning throughout the year in future posts and look forward to our conversations.

We, who are many

"so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another."  ~ Romans 12:5


Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing explores ways to pray - contemplative prayer, bodily prayer, the prayers of saints like Teresa of Avila and more. Redmont, who is Catholic, approaches prayer from a fresh perspective for me (a Protestant). One of the questions from this week's Friday Five  added another layer to this conversation, asking:

"What religion/faith besides yours captures your curiosity and why?"

My answer is that I have discovered prayers and practices from Buddhism that make sense and enrich my own Christian perspective. Thich Nhat Hahn is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who writes about the intersection in some of his books. He speaks well to how we are all related and connected, and responsible for, each other.  Judaism, too, reminds me that of the spiritual ancestry that Christians and Jews share.

But Redmont and others remind me that even within Christianity, there is a richness from sharing practices. of prayer and worshiping together.

"Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household." ~ Ephesians 2:19 

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to talk with others about what it means for our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), to be in full communion with other denominations. The ELCA is in full communion with six other denominations: the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Moravian Church, and the United Methodist Church.

While debate in our culture and society is divisive and polarizing, these relationships illustrate that it is possible to unite, recognizing common characteristics between us:
• a common confessing of the Christian faith;
• a mutual recognition of Baptism and a sharing of the Lord's Supper, allowing for joint worship and an exchangeability of members;
• a mutual recognition and availability of ordained ministers to the service of all members of churches in full communion, subject to the disciplinary regulations of other churches;
• a common commitment to evangelism, witness, and service;
• a means of common decision making on critical common issues of faith and life;
• a mutual lifting of any condemnations that exist between churches.

One participant in the ecumenical dialogue suggested that rather than mourning the differences in our denominations and traditions, perhaps God celebrates the diversity of the Church and the many and varied expressions of worship and proclamation that it brings to God's people in the world. What do you think?

Friday Five Reflection

This week's Friday Five:


1. What has encouraged you? 
Over the weekend, I began reading Jane Redmont's When In Doubt, Sing where chapter-by-chapter she talks about different forms of prayer. The short readable text and the way it engages me with Scripture and prayer has been a real gift to my mornings.

2. What has inspired you?
Watching my youngest daughter work throughout this week to try out for middle school cheerleading. She has gone into something completely unknown to her (and me!) and is having fun while she is learning and practicing. Her excitement about what she is doing is contagious. It all wraps up this afternoon with the tryouts.

3. What has challenged you?
Nothing extraordinary this week. There was the ever-present challenge of balancing work, school, family and self and the give-and-take it requires. Both time and money feel scarce sometimes but at the very same time, I hear from others stories of loss and grief and realize how much I have to be grateful for.

4. What has made you smile? 
On Sunday,two friends told me I looked relaxed. That doesn't happen often! It was my last day of a four-day sabbatical that I gave myself and my family after finishing spring exams. I have two more courses this summer and then I begin a full-time internship at St. Mark's Lutheran in downtown Asheville in August. While I still have a lot of unknowns awaiting, it is wonderful to begin to make this transition into public Christian leadership and full-time ministry.

 5. What has brought a lump to your throat or a tear to you eye in a good way? 
 On Sunday, the boarding school where I live and work celebrated graduation and the boys who arrived with us in 2008 graduated and left for college. This is one of the places along the way where I have discovered how much you can learn from the young(er) people around you and I am grateful for them even when they make lug-headed decisions as teenage boys sometimes do. They also have insatiable curiosity, compassion for one another and fire for the things they hold dear.

What about you?

p.s. I could have written a much shorter answer. One event this week generated all five of these responses: On Sunday, many members of the first cohort of Distributed Learning MDiv candidates  at Luther Seminary graduated with their MDiv degrees at Central Lutheran Church in St. Paul. Congratulations to all the graduates but especially to the men and women who began this pilot program in 2007!