Honest Speech - Reading the Psalms

This summer I am studying the Psalms.  Reading Walter Brueggemann, Glenn Pemberton and Eugene Peterson, I quickly realized how unfamiliar the text was to me. I have read bits and pieces of the Psalms and knew they are understood as the songbook of Israel; I knew they are wisdom literature and I knew  they were poetic in the original Hebrew. But like English poetry, their cadence and content was challenging for me.

So, I decided I wanted to try to simply read through the Psalms, just to gain some familiarity with the language, like listening to Spanish radio helps me recognize forgotten vocabulary. I hoped I would notice repeated words and phrases, and begin to understand this new language. If I could get past the decoding stage of reading, I could begin to understand what the writers were saying.

Not surprisingly, Google offers lots of suggestions for reading the Psalms. There are 150 Psalms so reading 5 each day will take a reader through the Psalter in 30 days.One way to do that is to read the psalm for that date, e.g. today is June 22, so begin with Psalm 22, and then read every thirtieth Psalm, e.g. Psalm 52, 82, 112, 142. Repeat the math the next day.

But the Psalms are so varied that a numerical reading felt too random to me, so I chose a reading plan organized around themes.

Reaching the end of the plan, I realized that, there is a nuance between reading the Psalms in 30 days and reading the Psalms for 30 days. I had read just under 2/3 of the Psalter. Of the 61 psalms the themed reading plan did not include, more than half (34) were lament psalms. It struck me then how reluctant we are to use honest speech with God.

While Brueggemann uses the categories of orientation, disorientation and new orientation to identify different Psalms, Pemberton categorizes Psalms into praise, thanksgiving, lament and "other", identifying a full 60 lament Psalms in the Psalter. If we took away a third of our language, I don't think we'd be able to communicate well. Unless we soak ourselves in the Scriptures that are hard - the laments and even the violent and bloodthirsty passages, we risk thinking God only inhabits one part of our lives, and when we are hurting the most, we won't have the language to speak to God, and when we are in the darkest places and passages of our lives, we won't have the imagination to believe God is there with us.

I have built a reading plan that  takes a reader through the Psalter, more or less using the following categories.Some Psalms fit more than one category but for my purposes, they are included only once in the readings. I hope you'll spend some time with the Psalms and tell me whether this is helpful, or share how you approach the Psalter.

Individual Prayers for Help	Individual Songs of Thanksgiving
Communal Prayers for Help	Communal Songs of Thanksgiving
Hymns of Praise	Royal Psalms
Creation Psalms	Trust Psalms
Enthronement Psalms	Acrostic Psalms
Songs of Zion	Festival Psalms
Liturgies	Historical Psalms
Instructional Psalms Day 1 3 4 5 6 7 Day 2 13 17 22 26 28 Day 3 31 35 36 38 39 Day 4 42 43 51 54 55 Day 5 56 58 59 61 64 Day 6 69 70 71 77 86 Day 7 88 94 102 109 120 Day 8 130 140 141 142 143 Day 9 44 60 67 74 79 Day 10 80 83 108 123 126 Day 11 137 33 65 68 98 Day 12 100 103 113 114 117 Day 13 135 146 147 148 149 Day 14 150 8 19 104 139 Day 15 47 93 96 97 99 Day 16 46 48 76 84 87 Day 17 122 2 12 15 24 Day 18 50 81 82 85 91 Day 19 95 107 115 118 121 Day 20 124 129 132 134 136 Day 21 1 14 41 49 53 Day 22 62 73 90 127 128 Day 23 133 30 32 40 57 Day 24 66 92 116 138 66 Day 25 75 18 20 21 45 Day 26 72 89 101 110 144 Day 27 11 16 23 27 52 Day 28 63 125 131 9 10 Day 29 25 34 37 111 112 Day 30 119 145 78 105 106

Week 4 of Lent

Some days, it feels like Lent is flying by and we'll be at Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter in the blink of an eye. (insert banned A word here) Other days, the long hours stretch interminably and it feels like we will remain in the dark woods forever.

Shadow 

No
Jesus' "no" becomes our "no." From Daniel Erlander's "Baptized We Live"

Find
How can we make it easier for people to "find" their way through and follow our liturgy?

Faithful 
What symbols do we use to show how we are "faithful" or tell Christ's story?
 

Ate
What is my daily bread? How much is enough? And whose bowls are empty? How do I share?
 

Happy 
No single image could capture happiness for me, but the folks at Rethink Church included this version of Psalm 32:1-2 The Message on its blog for "happy".
 
Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be—
you get a fresh start,
your slate’s wiped clean.
Count yourself lucky—
God holds nothing against you
and you’re holding nothing back from God. 

Silence
One image that came to mind for silence is from the woods, specifically, from being on the Appalachian Trail in Harpers Ferry for the first time on President's Day in 2001. But even the woods are not silent. We hear the rhythm of our breath, which John Wesley described as prayer.  God breathes into us the divine word and will; we respond in prayer by breathing out our responses in both word and deed.

Water
Martin Luther writes in the Small Catechism, "Baptism is not simply plain water. It is water enclosed in God's command & connected w/ God's Word."

 

Week 3 of Lent

As we move into the second half of Lent, have you discovered practices, prayers or disciplines that have opened your eyes to seeing God in the world around you? Have you changed how you approach God yourself? What have you been learning?

I have discovered that while I use a rich vocabulary of words in much of what I do, sometimes I live in a visual desert, or at least, its distinctiveness is blurred in its familiarity. I wonder how my reflections would change if I lived in  more urban setting, or if I was in more varied spaces every day instead of following my routine of home, desk, sanctuary, highway and home again. And then I find myself convicted: Living in the midst of the familiar (and the comfortable), how much more important is it then that I stop and pay attention to the world around me, to notice where I see God active and vibrant?

Hear

The organ resonates, the trumpets call, the choral voices are raised singing, "Hosanna!"

Earthly
"If God so clothes..." all kinds of "earthly" things, will God not also clothe us? (Mt. 6:30)

Prophet
Who are our "prophets" today? Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly has been named. Mother Theresa probably, too. Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes about prophetic imagination and how we preachers can speak prophetically when we bring the Word to our congregations. I wrestled with an image for this word because I resisted using the image of someone renowned, and kept wondering, "Who are the prophets in my life?" and "What does it mean to be a prophet today?" What are the hard truths we need to hear?

Leave
The story of Jesus delivering a boy from a demon in Luke 9:35-43 is the Scripture the folks at Rethink Church chose for this word. The disciples and Jesus had just left a mountaintop experience, and confronted by the world waiting for them, Jesus drove out the evil. What do we leave when we go out of our sanctuaries? Are we able, on the strength of our witness, to drive out, or expel, evil from our communities? Is that the power of communion, community bound together by Christ?

Thirst
Is our "thirst" for God felt more keenly than our craving for the next cup of dark roast?

Bless
"Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and us to Thy loving service." That was my childhood table grace, and it's one of one hundred graces in this volume, which a seminary friend shared with me several years ago.

Night
Remembering that even in the darkness, God is here with me, with us.

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.

What would you like to be called?

Lauren Hunter at Church Tech Today published a new post this week about 5 Pinterest marketing strategies for churches.  

There’s been a lot of buzz around Pinterest (leave your email in a comment below if you want an invite) because its use, especially by women, is soaring. Recently, when Pinterest policies came under scrutiny for potential copyright issues I began thinking about how we share and promote our interests without infringing on others’ rights, and exploring what kinds of pins people are sharing. (For more on the copyright concerns, here is the February blog post from lawyer and photographer Kirsten Kowalski and a blog post from today’s Wall Street Journal. I follow a lot of people and boards on Pinterest because they pin images that reflect beauty and inspiration in ways that I understand. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Sacred paths by @ChSocm
Places by Yoichi S
Sacred Spaces By Stratton McCrady

As much fun as it is to drink in all the breathtaking images on Pinterest, I wonder how many folks dismiss it as the latest fad and at its worst, vanity and indulgence.

It isn’t.

I am not a social media savant. I still only know a sliver of how people are communicating today. In his newest book Viral, Len Sweet would call me a Gutenberger because I am about three years older than the oldest digital natives who he names Googlers; I grew up with a different language and vocabulary and my default is still paper and pen.

However, I think Pinterest is giving us new ways to answer an ancient question:

“What do you like to be called?”

When someone asks you,“What is your name?” they are asking what you were called at your birth. But "What do you like to be called?" offers something else. A friend reminded me of how differently those two questions can be heard by people who cannot or will not claim their pasts. Others want to stake their futures with their answers; creatives - graphic designers, artists, photographers - are using Pinterest to visually represent themselves by pinning their resumes. Our answers can reveal how we see ourselves and what parts of ourselves we want to share with others. 

That’s where the opportunity exists for churches on Pinterest. People are asking, “What do you like to be called?” and instead of delivering an answer people may expect, let’s answer by showing people who we are and to whom we belong. Happy pinning!

Speaking Faith

The same year that I began seminary (2008) the ELCA launched its Book of Faith initiative with the publication of Opening the Book of Faith. One of its goals was to teach people in our congregations the language of faith - to understand the Word of God as our "mother-tongue." That definition has stayed somewhere in the back of my thoughts as I learned to decipher Greek and Hebrew, considered the language we use in prayer, liturgy and hymns, and studied the Bible. Now the question of how faith language has emerged again in conversations about the strange silence of the Bible which is the idea that the Word of God is often absent in how we go about living in the world.

The language we use to approach God is important and how we worship can shape how we think about God but that is a different conversation.

The question I have been thinking about is one we ask when we talk about how we make decisions and live as God's people in the world: "What if we lived as though we believed God's promises?"

I think the question needs to be even more basic: "What if we knew God's promises?"

I didn't grow up in the church the way my children or many of my classmates have; I am not a pastor's kid and my grandparents were either dead or agnostic so I didn't have this family tradition of faith. I learned faith as a young adult.

So I know I am not fluent in this language of faith but now when professors or lecturers say, "Well, you all know the story of...", I can usually figure out what they are talking about.  But what I have been thinking about is that when everyone you know, or at least most of the people you stay in conversation with are Christian, it's tough to know what it's like to not know the language.  Have you ever traveled to another country, or even another part of the U.S. and asked for soda, pop or Coke? Discover tea in the South is not Earl Grey? (we have it; it's just not the first thing that comes to mind) What about when you started working in a new job? Do you remember what it's like to be in a group of people who all speak the same language and use the same jargon and you're still figuring out the alphabet soup?

Even though I began learning this language later than some, I had forgotten what it was to not know it. To not know that God loves me. If that is a promise you know and remember, it's easy to forget that everyone doesn't. People do not know God loves them. Not just people outside the church, but people in our congregations.

Why not? It's not because they were texting during the sermon or fell asleep, didn't show up for Sunday Learning or skipped confirmation classes. Too often, I think we speak in a different language and if people don't learn it, we leave them behind to figure it out on their own. Like there is a passcode or hocus pocus. After all, that would be easier than admitting our efforts were worthless and we did nothing but receive God's incomprehensible grace.

So, let's let the secret out and start talking a language that people can understand: one that tells them that God loves them.  Then we can think about how we teach people inside and outside of our churches God's promises. We can help people understand that the waters of baptism are the beginning of new life and coming to the table for Holy Communion is the nurturing on our journey.  We can awaken people to the discovery that the language of faith is not buried or petrified in religious tomes but is a living language that frees us and gives us our voice. When we can begin to speak the language of faith and learn about God's promises to us, then we can ask what life looks life when we both know and believe that God fulfills God's promises.

apokálypsis

I had a parishioner ask this morning, “How do they teach you about prophecy? as in Revelation or Daniel?” I didn’t have a knock-‘em-dead answer. True, we studied Daniel briefly in the core course overview of Prophets, and apocalyptic preaching was part of our preaching discussions. I think Revelation may be offered as a New Testament elective, but apocalyptic texts and their interpretation are not explicitly core curriculum.

As I reflected on his question, I was reminded that too often, our understanding of apocalypse is defined by popular fiction such as The Left Behind series, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness or movies like “2012” or “Independence Day”. In fact, several of the films I chose for this weekend are set in “post-apocalyptic" worlds, after civilization as we know it in 2011 has destroyed itself.

Contrary to our popular assumptions though, apokálypsis means "lifting of the veil" or revelation, giving us a definition of apocalypse that reorients us to paying attention to what Scripture has to say. Understanding that apocalyptic literature was written to people experiencing crises of faith frames the text much differently than imagining that the text is saying something about “the Last Days”. Understanding that the text may reflect messages of perseverance or hope, a call for endurance or a claim to God’s sovereignty presents different possibilities than using the text as a roadmap to survive the Second Coming.

Another point made by Anathea Porter-Young in her article about preaching apocalyptic texts is that “apocalyptic preaching also reveals the true nature of visible things, using symbols to characterize what it reveals.” Apocalyptic images and symbols have meaning, but their meanings may have been skewed or changed in popular media. As preachers and teachers, how then do we reclaim or interpret the meaning of symbolism and images in ways that are consistent with Scripture, and encourage our hearers to do the same?

Here's a related article on WorkingPreacher.org: Greg Carey, “Preaching Apocalyptic Texts”

Note: portions of this post were first written and published in a short essay in Middler Preaching in Spring 2011.

Mother-Tongue

I am learning my 'mother-tongue'.(Mark Allan Powell, Opening the Book of Faith)

Like a child who hears her mother and father speaking it and then learns the words, I am being immersed in a language I don't know and learning how to listen to it, what the cadence is and what the words mean. I am also listening to stories and learning who the characters and authors are. Like a child growing up on AA Milne, Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss, I'm discovering the authors who write about theology. I am also experiencing some wonderful but startling moments where it all overlaps.

New concepts, ideas, practices:

Tenebrae Service - The Service of Tenebrae follows a tradition of the church dating back to the 8th century. From the Latin, the word Tenebrae, means "darkness" and commemorates the final hours of our Lord's life on earth, as he suffered death upon the cross. In the early church, the service of Tenebrae was celebrated on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Holy Week.

Mission Developers - this is work happening in different forms in different places, but one place is Netzer Co-op http://www.netzercoop.org/ near Austin, TX

Shema - from Encyclopedia Brittanica: (Hebrew: “Hear”), the Jewish confession of faith made up of three scriptural texts (Deuteronomy 6:4–9, 11:13–21; Numbers 15:37–41), which, together with appropriate prayers, forms an integral part of the evening and morning services in the Jewish faith.

Random vocabulary:
phylacteries held the Shema and were literally bound to one's hand or forehead as a reminder of God's Word

a prolegomenon is an essay

aggiornamento is a 'bringing up-to-date'

abrogate means to 'nullify or abolish'

expiation means to make atonement

exigencies are state of affairs that make urgent demands

People I've learned more about:
Rudolf Bultman
Paul Tillich
David Tracy
James Cone
Sallie McFague
Rosemary Radford Reuther

Things I Learned Recently

Often, I forget more than I learn, so I thought I'd write a few notes to remember new lessons.

Playing scrabble across three generations, I was taught
peavy or peavey : a lumberman's lever that has a pivoting hooked arm and metal spike at one end —called also cant dog

What a squeeze chute is and how it operates


How to make pear jam:



Peel and grate 4 cups of pears
Measure 7 1/2 cups sugar
Mix 1 Sure Jell Pectin with fruit using high heat to bring to a boil
Add the sugar all at one time.
Bring to a full boil, and boil hard for one minute.
Remove from heat and skim foam for five minutes.
Ladle into jars leaving 1/4-inch space.
Water bath in boiling water for ten minutes for pints.
Set 24 hours.