Preacher without a pulpit

I finished my seminary internship, completing thirteen months of pastoral ministry at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Asheville in August. Approved for assignment, I am now eligible to receive a letter of call as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) following the completion of my MDiv degree this December.

This in-between time is interesting because I formed my identity as a pastor, a preacher and public Christian leader during this past year, but right now I do not have a congregation or a pulpit. For now, my family and I are waiting for what will unfold. It's interesting in this interim to think more fully about the idea that the Holy Spirit forms faith through preaching, that preaching brings a person to Christ and knits them into the body of Christ, and then to think about what preaching looks like outside of ordained ministry.

Meanwhile, here are my last two sermons from St. Mark's.

July 21, 2013
9th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Amos 8:1-12
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Listen Now



August 25, 2013
14th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

Listen Now

"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)

Summertime in the Preacher's Corner

For my family and me, summertime means barefeet, swimming in the river, campfires and cooking on the grill. For one of my daughters, it isn't summer without the beach, and for another it wouldn't be the same unless she was at Lutheridge for at least one week. Summer means something different for everyone. As we live into the season and all the meanings it carries for people, as a preacher, one of the questions I'm trying to figure out in the midst or Mother's and Father's Day, Memorial Day and the 4th of July, is where, if at all, should my preaching connect the Gospel to these celebrations and traditions?

Here are my three most recent sermons. The first was preached on Trinity Sunday, which fell this year on the last weekend in May, which for most Americans anyway, is Memorial Day Weekend, the official unofficial start of summer when the public swimming pools open, grills are fired up and  the shoes come off.  The second sermon was on June 23, in the midst of the long green season both in the church and in a world where everything is growing and green, and the third was on June 30, the Sunday before America's Independence Day celebration.

I didn't try to make connections to the season's celebrations in this year's sermons and I haven't resolved my questions about the importance of those connections. Part of me wants to stubbornly stick to the text and not be concerned about them, but I also want my hearers to connect the Gospel to their own lives -  to know that they are loved by God and God cares about what happens in their lives - and going forward, I think that may mean making room for the celebrations. Please let me know what you think.

May 26, 2013
Trinity Sunday (Year C)
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15



 Listen Now


June 23, 2013
5th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Isaiah 65:1–9
Psalm 22:19–28 (22)
Galatians 3:23–29
Luke 8:26–39


Listen Now


June 30, 2013
6th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
1 Kings 19:15–16, 19–21
Psalm 16 (8)
Galatians 5:1, 13–25
Luke 9:51–62


Listen Now

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

The Road

RevGalBlogPals are pondering life's journey and the rhythm of our lives this week.

One of my earliest memories is of my dad in a Triumph convertible steering with his knees as we wound our way down some twisty road. I don't know if it was in Salinas, California or Nashville, Tennessee or someplace else. We rode in the car a lot, particularly during moves between one west coast naval station and another east coast base. I especially remember not quite being big enough to see out the windows.
 
For the last five years, I have been on a road through seminary, hitting the occasional pothole or the hazard of an unmarked turn or a sudden obstacle, but also enjoying the long straightaways.  I know without looking at any odometer or official record that I have covered a lot of miles.

It would be easy to take this road and stick to the expressway, but like small towns forgotten in the shadow of the interstate or beltway, there are places I'd have hated to bypass. The most direct route between two points may be a straight line, but there's a whole lot of world to experience in the margins and hidden in backstreets and alleys.

It would be easy to name some of the people with whom I've traveled, but when I stop and think about the number of people who have traveled with me for not only a a period of months or years but even a morning or an afternoon, that list probably cannot be written because I'd never be able to name every person who has prayed for me and my ministry, for my family, or for the congregations where I have served or the seminary and professors who have guided my education.

What's even more challenging is to imagine, like a route yet planned or taken, where this road leads.  I don't believe for a minute that it ends with my degree completion in December. That's just one wayside on an even longer road.

The prayer I keep with me in this unknowing is from the Lutheran Book of Worship:

Lord God,
you have called your servants
to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden,
through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go,
but only that your hand is leading us
and your love supporting us;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Preacher's Corner in Eastertide

Each year in the three-year cycle of the lectionary  (the Revised Common Lectionary), many churches follow lessons chosen primarily from one of the synoptic gospels. In Year A, Matthew; in Year B, Mark; and in Year C, Luke. But in the Easter season,we are given the story of Jesus' ministry that we hear in the Fourth Gospel, or the Gospel of John. Here are sermons from the 2nd and 4th Sundays of Easter this year.

April 7, 2013
2nd Sunday in Easter (Year C)
Psalm 150
Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

Jesus commissions us to bear witness to the identity of God.

Listen Now 


April 21, 2013
4th Sunday in Easter (Year C)
Psalm 23
Acts 9:36-43
Revelation 7:9-17  
John 10:22-30 

God has given us to Jesus as part of the Good Shepherd’s flock; Jesus leads us out of lost-ness.

 Listen Now

Kyrie Eleison... Lord Have Mercy

In a week already marked by anniversaries of past tragedies like the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the shootings at Virginia Tech (2007) and at Columbine High School (1999), as well as the 1993 shootout in Waco, Texas, we witnessed more death and destruction and, while my community is hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the tragedies that struck this week, I felt called to say the following to the people who gathered at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Asheville this morning for Good Shepherd Sunday. The Gospel text was John 10:22-30.

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When I was growing up, my parents’ generation could remember where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed.

For me, the first event that I remember in that way is the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

A litany of unthinkable events have happened in the years since then.

Like it or not, these incidents become waymarkers in each of our lives, like blazes on a footpath or buoys in a channel.

When new news of death and destruction hits us, like it has this past week with the bombing at the Boston marathon,
the explosion of the fertilizer plant in Texas,
the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province,
we freshly mourn the loss of lives
and try to find our true north, to regain our equilibrium,
wishing our cries of “Enough” and “Never Again” were sufficient.
But somehow, they aren’t,
and now, here we stand together again,
lost and disoriented,
deeply grieving for the hurting world around us.

We all react differently to these experiences.
Some of you may be able to neatly categorize these events as the stuff of history
while others have heard or seen so much in your lifetimes that you numbly accept yet another tragedy,
while for others, each new tragedy is a sharp jab to your gut
as the memory of “where you were when you heard” rushes back and knocks the wind out of you, all over again.

Poet Mary Oliver suggests yet another reaction, writing,
“Read one newspaper daily …
And let the disasters, the unbelievable yet approved decisions, soak in…
What keeps us from falling down to the ground…?”(1)



Indeed in today’s Gospel, I think we are called to fall down –
called to admit that in this broken and hurting place, we can do nothing apart from God,

called to kneel before God and confess Jesus as Messiah – the Risen and Living Christ who died to restore us in relationship with God – 

and called to stand and follow him,
as our Good Shepherd, confident in God’s love and care for each of us.



Speaking to a Jewish audience, Jesus takes the image of the Good Shepherd,
a familiar image known to them through the prophets Ezekiel (34; 22:27), 
Zephaniah (3:3) and Zechariah (10:2-3, 11:4-17),
an image that compared the unfaithful leaders of Israel to bad shepherds who consigned their flocks to the wolves,
and tells them, "Look again!"

Recalling the promise of a future shepherd,
a good shepherd, who will gather God’s people as one flock,
Jesus says,
“Look around you! I am the Good Shepherd. My sheep hear my voice, I know them and they follow me.” God has fulfilled God’s promise to Moses, to David, to Israel!

God has given God’s people – us – a good shepherd who gathers us into one flock,
one community of followers who know Jesus.

We don’t just know his genealogy or where he was born; in John’s Gospel “knowing” is not just a “head” matter, but a “heart” matter. Knowing is not just an intellectual task; “knowing” is “believing” – God’s people believe Jesus is the Messiah and follow him.

And not only has God given us a good shepherd;God has given us to Jesus.
Just as a shepherd knows the flock in his care, Jesus knows each one of us –
the good, the bad and the ugly. 

Jesus knows us in our anger, our hurt, and our tears.
And Jesus knows us in our generosity, our mercy, and our joy.

We know his voice – his Word comes to us through Scripture. Psalm 23 tells us

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
   I fear no evil;
for you are with me;”

His Word gives us assurance of his presence and reminds us of his promise:

that we will have eternal life – that death will not have the last word;
that we are held in God’s loving hands – no one and nothing can snatch us from God;
that God is greater than the evil we see perpetrated;
that God is greater than the powers and principalities that try to separate us from one another and from God.

And so, we follow him. United as one flock, our waymarkers are not the tragedies that we experience in our lives, whether they make the news cycle or not.

Our waymarkers are God’s commands to love God and our neighbor. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, leads us in God’s ways and keeps us on right paths.



Reassured by God’s steadfast promises in a world violently shaken by the brokenness of human sin and by death, we walk “on the rough ground of uncertainties”(2) ; we claim God’s love, grace and forgiveness and confess Jesus as Messiah.

In a message shared Friday night, Bishop Mark Hanson told us, “There are no God-forsaken places and there are no God-forgotten people….”(3)  We may be “washed in life’s river”(4), but we are baptized as God’s children; our Shepherding God knows each one of us by name and loves us and cares for us.



Let us pray. (4)

O Lord, our Shepherding God, come close to us now
Come near us in our time of need.

Guide us with your voice,
Help us to listen and follow no matter where you lead.
Help us to trust you.

Shepherding God,
thank you for your son who laid down his life for those who follow him and for those who are not yet in the fold …

We pray for those who don’t know the shepherd. We pray that by our actions and our reaching out into the community, they may come to know you.

Shepherding God,
Guide us with your love and renew us with your peace. Amen.

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Notes:
(1) excerpt from Mary Oliver, “The Morning Paper” in A Thousand Mornings
(2) excerpt from Mary Oliver, “A Thousand Mornings” in A Thousand Mornings
(3) ELCA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2q4IuPQcow&list=PLC4E2E3CA2B79AA24&index=1
(4) excerpt from William Blake, “Night”
(5) excerpt from Abigail Carlisle-Wilke, "Sunday Prayer for Easter 4C", RevGalBlogPals, http://revgalblogpals.blogspot.com/2013/04/sunday-prayer-for-easter-4c.html