Mission: Imaginable

Mission:  Imaginable

NW MN Synod Assembly

May 17, 2015

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

"How do I figure out God's will for my life?" is one of the questions people ask most often.[1]

“How do I figure out God’s will for my life….for my family….for our church?”

Where is God taking us—and how might we best become aligned with God’s direction?

Questions like these point us to the faith practice of discernment….imagining the contours of God’s promised future and how that future affects the ways God is calling us to step forth right now.

When you think about discerning God’s guiding will—where does that best happen for you and your congregation?

·       Discernment sometimes happens in a retreat setting, with balloons bouncing around, post-it notes plastered over a wall, sheets of butcher paper covered with chicken-scratched notes from brainstorming exercises, as leaders of a church try to puzzle out goals and how to pursue them.

·       Discernment sometimes takes place in contemplation—in silence, in darkness pierced only by candlelight, in centering ourselves, in praying--new insights emerge…

·       Discernment sometimes happens in meetings of chosen church leaders who’ve been reading good books, working with consultants, studying demographic trends, interviewing church members, conversing with neighbors, trying to distill the finest honey from all that rich “pollen.”

·       And then discernment sometimes happens in the midst of chaos.  Discernment can bubble up in clutch moments, when a crisis suddenly emerges and action must be taken.   Even in times of chaos –when everyone’s asking “what do we do now, for heaven’s sake?”….discernment happens, albeit by the seat of our pants!

This peculiar narrative in Acts 1 was a discernment moment—the first time members of what would become the first church engaged in communal discernment together. 

And the eleven apostles seem to have employed various pathways to discernment…in the midst of a crisis, with a wing and a prayer, in the confidence that God can and will work through just about any means.

This story--truly a discernment story!--has a shape that starts to sound familiar as we listen to the story with care:

First, there was an elephant in the room--the “elephant” being the absence of one of the Twelve.   One of them had disappeared, not by accident, but by treachery, betrayal and a gruesome death (described here in Acts 1 with more graphic detail than most of us prefer!)

The reason why Judas’s death posed a problem to the remaining eleven disciples is that Jesus had very intentionally chosen Twelve (not eleven nor thirteen) disciples to symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel, the whole people of God, whom Jesus was reconstituting through his self-emptying  life, saving death, and surprising resurrection.

The defection of one of the Twelve, Judas Iscariot, the Betrayer, diminished the potency of that symbol of the Twelve constituting a New Israel, the vanguard of the whole people of God.  So what should be done about that?

 

Discernment of God’s will for people and faith communities often begins with the reality of “elephants in the room”—uncomfortable truths that aren’t being talked about openly, honestly.

        So I ask you, dear friends:   what “elephants” lurk in the     shadows of your church building?   What uncomfortable        truths do you tend to dance around?   What hard realities         tempt you to look away and whistle in the dark, hoping no       one will notice?  Pause.

Back to our text….

Aware of the “elephant in the room” here in Acts 1, the second thing that happens is that someone breaks the silence.  

A pastor-friend of mine says:  “When you realize there’s an elephant in the room, please introduce it to everyone else!”[2]

In this story it’s Peter who names the elephant in the room.   And that’s noteworthy for two reasons:

1.    It’s the first time after Jesus’ Ascension that one of his followers stands up and starts exercising servant-leadership in the emerging church; and

2.   It’s the first time here in Acts that Jesus’ followers start looking forward, not backward!  

Exercising servant-leadership  isn’t for sissies!   When you’re in a discussion at church, it takes gumption to speak up—and even more guts to join a leadership team, not to mention serve its convener. 

But the church of Jesus Christ needs such brave, willing, imaginative servant-leaders….now more than ever!

Peter stepped out and invited the early church to dance with the Risen Lord in his ongoing mission of reclaiming the whole creation, starting with the Cross and the Empty Tomb, moving not backward but forward, into God’s promised future in Christ.

       

        So I ask you, dear friends:  how does your faith community        form and call forth servant leaders?  How do you support    the leaders you have?  What obstacles are sometimes put in     the way of such leadership?   And which direction is your   church facing—backward, or forward?  Pause

Back to our story in Acts 1…

There’s an elephant in this room filled with about 120 followers of Jesus.   Peter gets up the gumption to name this elephant and propose that they do something.   In so doing Peter points the fledgling church forward, not backward.  

Judas Iscariot’s gory death has diminished the apostolic ranks by one.   Somehow that must be addressed, so that when the Holy Spirit falls upon them they are poised, ready to move out into the world at full strength.

The third thing that happens here is that the disciples generate possibilities for a successor to Judas.  They had no succession plan, no governing documents to rely on, no workshop on leadership replacement they could all go attend, no “apostolic head-hunter” they could hire to conduct a nation-wide search. 

Instead, the eleven relied on their sanctified common sense, focusing on just one criterion for replacing the 12^th disciple: “one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us…—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.”

Thus was convened the first nominating committee in the history of the church!   The group soon surfaces two candidates for the open seat in the apostolic circle:  “Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias.”

        So I ask you, dear friends:  how does your congregation      invest imagination in generating possibilities for serving       God’s mission in this time, this place?   How do you give       yourselves the gifts of time and prayer and reflection on the   things that matter most?  Pause

Back to our text…

Fourth and finally, the disciples acted.   There’s no record of them conducting a Minnesota Statute 604.2 background check on Joseph or Matthias.  The eleven didn’t declare 40 days of fasting…didn’t spend time second-guessing themselves. 

Instead they decided, by praying and casting lots.  

St Augustine, a fourth century bishop in northern Africa, said:  “Pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.”[3]   The eleven disciples seemingly anticipated Augustine’s approach—putting themselves in God’s hands through prayer; then doing the “work” of casting lots.

The result was that Matthias was chosen to assume the position of 12^th disciple, restoring the “apostolic strike force” to full strength.

And once Matthias was elected—he was never heard from again, at least in the pages of the holy scriptures!

It’s as if Matthias’s only job was to “be there,” to be chosen, to transform the eleven survivors of Good Friday….into the Twelve missionary-witnesses to the Resurrection.   That was enough!

If that seems a little anticlimactic to you, just remember that the Book of Acts itself concludes its 28 chapters in sort of an inconclusive manner.    As books go, Acts is something of a cliff-hanger…

….and I think that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit intended! Some books aren’t supposed to tie up all the loose ends.

God, you see, is still writing the ending to the Acts of the Apostles through the likes of you and me, latter-day successors to the apostles, whom God is still calling and sending forth as witnesses to the Resurrection, people who point unceasingly toward God’s promised future in Christ.

As God crafts the conclusion to God’s great story, we take our places, play our parts, in ways that may wind up seeming as obscure as the rest of the story of St Matthias, the blessed replacement.

And that’s OK.  It is enough, more than enough, simply to be swept into this Story of how God is making all things new in Jesus Christ.

It is enough that we get to repeat and stake our whole lives on  the greatest “lines” in our episode of God’s Mission Imaginable:   Christ has died.   Christ is risen.   Christ will come again!

Amen.

---

[1] Richard Jensen, Working Preacher (2009), accessed April 5, 2015 at https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=315

[2] Pastor Paul Rohde, campus pastor at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, said this in a sermon I heard several years ago.

[3] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/saint_augustine.html

Welcome to the Heart of God

Trinity Lutheran Church of Moorhead, MN
May 3, 2015; Easter 5
Installation of Pastor Tessa Hansen
Acts 8:26-40

In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  (Acts 1:8)

These are the last recorded words of Jesus before he ascended into heaven, as the author of Acts has it, in chapter 1, verse 8.

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

There is here a trajectory, an “itinerary” that the Risen Jesus sets before his followers.   They will tell his story first of all in the city where Jesus was crucified, Jerusalem, at the heart of it all.  And then they will move out into the world….starting in the regions right around Jerusalem (“Judea and Samaria”)…and eventually they will travel every which-way, “to the ends of the earth.”

This noble vision, this stirring commission with its soaring view of the world and its expansive perspective on a vast future….this lofty vision played out (as it were) in a markedly step-by-step, down-to-earth, often messy fashion.

So, the Holy Spirit fell down from heaven at Pentecost….the community of Christ grew by 3000 baptized souls just like that….a fresh way of living out faith flowed forth…obstacles emerged and were overcome….all in the context of a brewing threat from the same mad mob that sought Jesus’ death…..until one of the Christ-followers, Stephen, was brutally stoned, triggering the first outbreak of persecution that compelled Jesus’ followers to leave Jerusalem and head out into the surrounding regions.

From Acts 1:8 to Acts 8:1, the spreading of the Christian movement happened--motivated by fear and necessity, the followers of Jesus fanned out in every direction, having all sorts of adventures as they put distance between themselves and the epicenter of it all in Jerusalem.

So one fine day, a follower named Philip met up with a traveler on a desert road…and came face to face with what this new life in Christ-crucified-and-risen would look like.

What Philip encountered that day, what all the followers of Jesus ran into as they moved out, beyond Jerusalem, into Judea and Samaria and finally “to the ends of the earth”—what they met up with was all the messiness of life.

This messiness met Philip in the form of a stranger who had at least three strikes against him:  he was a foreigner, from Ethiopia….he was dark-skinned, a man of another race….and he was a man who wasn’t fully a man, his masculine identity having been marred, likely at an early age.

This unnamed Ethiopian eunuch was someone Philip might otherwise have shunned or simply ignored, pretending not even to notice him….were it not for the insistent demand of the Holy Spirit who told Philip:  “Go over to this chariot and join it.”

Pastor Tessa, this story speaks volumes about what it might mean for you to bear the title:  Pastor of Hospitality….

…Because this story says, first of all, that hospitality in the community of Christ is about so much more than smiling a lot, being nice, always looking for novel ways to welcome folks, and displaying the best of manners and decorum.

Hospitality in the name of Christ is first and foremost about meeting people in the extreme messiness of their lives…..finding ourselves drawn toward perhaps the very last persons we might want to meet.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that three of the markers that created distance between Philip and the Ethiopian still contribute to the messiness of our lives in this time and place: race, ethnicity, and sexual identity.

Hmmmm—is this ancient story really all that ancient?

I wonder, Pastor Tessa, whether this text might be asking you and all the followers of Christ here at Trinity:  how widely are we willing and able to open up the doors of this faith community?   As you engage that kind of messy, complex question you will come close to the heart of what we mean when we speak of Christian hospitality.

If saying this ups the ante a little too high, please remember two other things.

God wants us smack dab in the messiness of peoples’ lives.   The ministry of hospitality involves inviting us to do what God already ardently wants us to do!  God is on your side here, Pastor Tessa, because God is the minister of hospitality par excellence!

Notice, please, how utterly God-guided Philip was here, directed by God to the right road, drawn by God to the Ethiopian’s chariot, prompted by God to ask the right questions and empowered by God to speak the right words at the right time.

The Book of Acts takes pains to show God being utterly in charge as the nascent Christian community stretches its boundaries, crosses ancient barriers, and embraces the heretofore untouchable!   God is no less here, present, effectively guiding you and those you serve, Pastor Tessa.

And second, the one who is welcomed, often shows us the way, if we but have ears to hear and eyes to notice.

There is something about this story in Acts 8 that seems a little too easy, as if the dice were loaded before the game began:   Philip goes to this particular road, finds this particular God-fearing man, reading this particular passage from Isaiah 53, wondering just who it was who was “led like a lamb to the slaughter.”  

Talk about a slow ball pitched right over the plate!!

No wonder Philip can step right up and “proclaim to him the good news about Jesus!”

And then, as if all those coincidences hadn’t piled up a little too neatly, some water appears—water, in the desert, mind you!--just as the Ethiopian wonders about being baptized!

Tessa, things may not always come together that neatly in your ministry of hospitality here and out in the community, on behalf of Trinity...

But please never underestimate the ways those to whom you seek to minister will minister to you.   The ones we would welcome often show us the way—simply by the questions they ask and the ways they ask them.

"About whom,” the Ethiopian asked Philip, “does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?"

Why did the eunuch inquire about the identity of the suffering one in Isaiah, the one who had been cut off, whose life had been taken away from the earth?

It was because this was the Ethiopian’s own heart-felt life story.   He had been cut off.  His life—his future guaranteed by descendants—had been taken away.   The Ethiopian was fervently fixated on this passage from Isaiah, I dare say, because he was trying to find himself in God’s story!

So also, in all the ways we welcome one another into fullness of life in Jesus Christ, we encounter persons who are already trying to discover their place in God’s story.

Their questions, their longings, set us up to do what Philip did:   to “proclaim…the good news about Jesus” who for our sake was cut off, so that we might never be cut off from the forgiveness, the freedom, the future God has in store for all of God’s children.

So welcome to Trinity, Pastor Tessa!   Welcome to being Trinity’s Pastor of Hospitality!  Welcome to the adventure of  meeting others in the messiness of their lives and welcoming them—not just into this community of care—but into the depths of Jesus’ own story—into Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for us and our salvation.

Which is to say:  Welcome to the delight of welcoming folks into the very heart of God.

In the name of Jesus.   Amen.

God is the Cook!

Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Fergus Falls, MN

April 12, 2015

Second Sunday of Easter

John 20:19-31

If faith was something you could cook up in a kitchen, how would you do it?   What equipment would you use—a microwave oven?  Or a crockpot?

I know that sounds silly, but play with me for just a few moments.  Is faith an instant micro-wave thing or a slow-cooking crockpot thing?

It’s tempting to say that faith is obviously a microwave matter.   It comes as a sheer gift from God, transforms us at our core, makes the lightbulb come on—just like that!  

Here in John 20, Thomas (who was absent when the Risen Jesus first appeared to his disciples Easter evening)…..Thomas, having voiced his doubts about the resurrection, shows up with his fellow disciples one week later…..Thomas is there, he sees Jesus with his own two eyes (doesn’t even have to touch Jesus’ scars as he said he would)….and Thomas just blurts out:  “My Lord and my God.”

Set the microwave on 10 seconds cook-time and out pops the grandest confession of faith in the whole Gospel of John!

And that’s how it happens, or seems to happen, for many folks.  

It’s an especially American thing, this predilection for imagining faith as a micro-wave, all-at once-reality.   

American Evangelicals, long before Billy Graham, championed the revival meeting as the best means for evangelizing and bringing persons to faith. 

Lay down some sawdust, pitch a huge tent, bring in a fiery preacher, round up all the local sinners, sit them down in the front row for a rip-roaring sermon, plead with them to “make their decision,” help them pray the sinners’ prayer, and convert those lost ones!  Usher them from sin to salvation, from death to life, right here, right now—just like that.

We may roll our eyes when we hear stuff like that, but honestly, don’t we Lutherans have our own take on “microwave-faith?”

In fact, we saw it happen just moments ago.  

Sienna and Oliver were brought to the baptismal font, and in the twinkling of an eye they were rescued by the water of their Baptism into Christ, transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, signed, sealed and delivered into the loving arms of God forever.

Set the microwave on 10 seconds—and the deed is done!

And we really and truly do mean that.   Baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus….being buried with Christ and raised with Christ in baptism…..this “baptism now saves [us]” as it says quite clearly in I Peter 3:21.

So there you have it:  whether you’re an American Evangelical or a true-blue Lutheran….faith is clearly a microwave thing.   Faith comes to us from heaven above, faith changes us and makes us new, just like that!

Except that it doesn’t always happen that way….or, more accurately, faith doesn’t happen only in that way.

There is this another way.  Faith and dwelling in faith often seems more like a slow-cooking, long-stewing crockpot.

So here in John 20, it’s not the first time we meet the disciple Thomas.

Although he’s mentioned in all four gospels, Thomas only speaks here in John’s Gospel.  Thomas has four brief “lines” in John’s dramatic script—and when Thomas speaks, it’s always with the voice of cold, hard realism.

In John, chapter 11, when Jesus tells his disciples that his friend Lazarus has died and they must go to him, Thomas--always Mr. Sunshine!--glumly responds: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

In John 14, just after Jesus tells his disciples that they know the way to the place where he is going, Thomas the Realist begs to differ: “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”

And then, here in John chapter 20, we see Thomas in all his skeptical glory.  Demanding certified proof--visual and tactile evidence--that Jesus is really alive again:  “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

You gotta love a guy like Thomas--unvarnished skeptic that he is.  His story didn’t get edited out of the Scriptures! –it didn’t wind up on the editorial cutting-room floor.

What this string of brief Thomas-sayings in John’s Gospel suggests is that Thomas had been stewing on matters of faith, believing in Jesus THROUGHOUT his whole time of following Jesus-in-the-flesh.

Thomas’s last and greatest word here “My Lord and my God!”—DIDN’T just pop into his mind like a bag of microwave popcorn!    It was, rather, the product of a long, twisting, turning pilgrimage with Jesus, a conclusion formed and shaped by the Holy Spirit who had been brooding over Thomas for years!….

…..and Thomas’s bold confession here wasn’t the end of his story, either!

Although the Bible doesn’t tell us how Thomas’s life later unfolded, historians of the earliest church tell us that all of Jesus’ closest followers proclaimed the Good News, started Christian communities, were persecuted for their faith, and were scattered across the whole world.

A pious legend, believed to be true by many, holds that Thomas traveled all the way to India, where he bore witness to the Crucified and Risen Christ and was martyred on a hillside near the city of Chennai, close to our companion synod alongside the Bay of Bengal.

Six years ago my wife Joy and I visited the purported site of Thomas’s death and paid homage to his memory in the Santhome Cathedral where a part of Thomas’s body is enshrined.   When we were there we learned that there are still Christians in the Mar Thoma Church who claim St Thomas as their founder and spiritual father in faith.

So, in this telling of the story, Thomas’ faith wasn’t just a one-shot microwave experience.   Rather, it was a long, low, steady “cooking” process.   Thomas was marinated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the rest of his life.  His was more of a crockpot faith than a microwave faith!

So too, with precious little Oliver and Sienna this morning….and so too with our own lives of faith.

We pray, and we have promised to help shape for Sienna and for Oliver a long, slow, steady unfolding of the faith in Jesus Christ into whom they have been baptized.    We have publicly declared that, in both the peaks and the valleys of their faith journey, we and other Christians will always, always remind one another of our Baptism in Christ, as together we follow Jesus toward the open future he has brought into our midst when he stepped out of the Grave on Easter morning.

Oliver and Sienna were baptized here this morning—just like that!

But it is equally true to say that Oliver and Sienna BEGAN their baptism this morning….inaugurated their baptismal life, right before our eyes.   

And this baptismal life will continue for them….until their days on earth come to an end and they begin the next chapter in the story of all that God has in store for all the baptized:  the life of the world to come!

The point isn’t whether faith is a microwave thing or a crockpot thing.

The point is that, thank goodness, God is the Cook!    And God calls us to help out in his “kitchen”….so that Christ might be formed in everyone whom God calls, however God calls, into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus our Lord and Savior.

Amen.

Recognizing and Responding to New Opportunities

Synod Theological Day

“From the Field, For the Field”

April 9, 2015--Fargo, ND

RECOGNIZING AND RESPONDING TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES

As I prepared these remarks I took seriously the fact that the first word in the assigned topic is "recognizing”….because “new opportunities” may, at first glance, look like anything BUT new opportunities.   They may—rather—strike us as really steep mountains, scary obstacles or huge piles of manure.

So the question is:  out of what sort of orientation toward reality do we approach this world and life as we know it?   It’s easy as pie to operate out of a default “problem orientation,” a way of looking at things that comes naturally for upper Midwestern Lutherans. Such realism-run-amok can shoot down any fresh idea, any new way of thinking—in an instant!

What happens, though, when we look at things from the vantage point of the Empty Tomb on Easter morning?   What happens when God opens us up to embrace a “promise orientation” that steps out of the gloomy house of death into the sunshine of Christ’s resurrection, cracking open God’s promised future in Christ?

“Recognizing new opportunities” involves willingness to reframe just about everything that comes our way—especially the “awful awfuls”—in the light of Christ the crucified and living one.   Such reframing involves looking again at the problems that seem so self-evident, and perceiving within them the possibilities God has tucked inside them.

I want to share two examples from our life in the NW MN Synod over the last five years—realities that seemed at first like anything but “new opportunities”

1.   First, a nagging sense that we’re an aging, declining church with an uncertain future.

2.   Second, the loss of over 10% of our congregations due to disaffiliation—effectively redrawing the very map of our synod.

We could not perceive “new opportunities” in these realities without first staring right at them, taking them in, and wrestling with them—the way Jacob wrestled with God (or was it a demon?) by the River Jabbok--wrestling until Jacob extracted a blessing from his opponent.

So if all we look at is “who shows up on Sunday mornings,” the narrative of aging and declining seems readily apparent.   But when we actually delved into the demographics of our region, another story emerged:  in 17 of the 21 counties of our synod, children and youth age 18 and younger outnumber senior adults age 65 and over.   And between 2008 and 2012 three-quarters of the counties in our synod showed population increases, not population decreases.

Shored up by this “second look” at our mission field; proud of our heritage as a child-friendly, youth-loving synod; aware of our people’s hunger for an alternative narrative to define us—late in 2010 we responded by surfacing and claiming a vision for our life together that would fly right in the face of the story we’d been telling ourselves about ourselves.

Lift up the Next Generation Vision—handout.

We have found that this Next Generation vision “has legs.”   

·       When our synod downsized its staff in 2010, we sought out a way to sustain our long-standing commitment to bringing together middle school youth and high school youth for faith-nurturing mass gatherings that are integral to the youth ministries in many of our congregations.  

      

   We retained our synod LYO board as one of the ways we not only sustain these gatherings as youth-led faith experiences, but also as one of the ways we train up younger leaders.

·       We set forth the Next Generation vision in a series of bishop’s Bible studies in 2011.

·       Our spring 2013 EEEvents, a.k.a. church council training events, featured breakout sessions on topics related to the theme:  “Living into the Next Generation Vision.”

·       And at last year’s synod assembly we agreed to partner with Vibrant Faith.org to offer training and coaching for congregations hungering to help homes and families reclaim their role as primary arenas in which faith is formed.   Share brochure.

Regarding the other problem we had—the loss of over 10% of our congregations since 2009 due to disaffiliation—a generative discussion began at a retreat for our ten conference deans held in February of 2013.  

We talked first about the pain and disruption caused by losing 33 congregations to disaffiliation--leaving one of our conferences a shadow of its former self, and significantly altering the landscape in two other conferences.     Clearly, we didn’t need to maintain our 25 year old ten-conference structure.   Isn’t it time to “redraw the lines” to come up with a smaller set of larger conferences, giving each conference a critical mass of congregations to live and work together as near neighbors?

But then the deans shifted to a more basic question:   why have conferences at all?   What are they good for?   What is the purpose of the conference in our way of being church?   As we pondered that deeper question, mindful of all the ways neighbors help neighbors, one of the participants dared to recast the whole issue by asking—what if we had 20 smaller conferences rather than 7 or 8 larger conferences?  

In that moment, when we took a second look at what at first seemed like a little map-redrawing exercise, we knew we were looking at something bigger.  We recognized that we actually had, not a math problem or a geography conundrum, but a “new opportunity.”

So our synod council invited a group of about 20 folks from across the synod and its varied constituencies to gather and do more than redraw a map.   We named this group our synod “Rethinking Conferences” Task Force.

The group met regularly throughout 2014 and did several things.

We learned some of the history of how our old 10-conference structure came to be.   An older member of the group recalled a time long ago when every pastor and congregational president went to conference gatherings because that’s how you got the “stuff” for the coming year—the paper resources and “hard copy” curricula—that fed congregational programming.

We learned that if you go all the way back to 1988, the synod had actually diminished in size by 67 congregations—from 300 in 1988 down to 233 in 2014.

We pondered all the realities that fed our earlier pattern—where county lines were drawn, where school district boundaries were set, where local phone service was a factor.  Revisiting this history, all the changes that have happened since 1988 came into sharper focus—especially the overwhelming influence of the Internet, cellular phone technology, and “virtual reality”—a phrase not even in our vocabularies in 1988.

As we rediscovered our history, we examined again, with great care the one small paragraph in the ELCA Constitution for Synods that describes conferences.  Two things captured our attention on the Rethinking Conferences Task Force:   the varieties of configurations mentioned and the missional purpose for such ways of connecting with one another.

So, having recognized we had a new opportunity on our hands, we responded by doing some cooking and stewing.   We shifted from thinking of this as a microwave oven project, to realizing we had a crockpot project on our hands. 

We took our time, talked and listened to one another, dreamed together as people among whom the Holy Spirit was moving--and out of all that,  a proposal emerged (described on the handout) that is now before our synod, to move in three directions simultaneously—involving clusters, conferences and networks.

      

   To invite congregations to be parts of 26 clusters  of churches and ministry agencies in close geographic proximity to one another.

·       To form these clusters into eight conferences to choose leaders, gather at least annually (perhaps on the same Sunday afternoon, perhaps with some shared programing developed in collaboration with the synod), and to tend legislative functions such as supporting conference shared ministries, nominating persons for synod council and CWA voting members, and surfacing resolutions for consideration at synod assembly.

·       To open the door to non-geographic networks, using social media platforms like Facebook…networks of folks coming together around shared affinities and ministry priorities, e.g. networks of Vibrant Faith congregations, multi-point parish leaders, a congregations developing relationships with congregations in our companion synod in southern India.

Postscript:  My remarks, obviously, are retrospective in nature.   In truth, we did a lot of “wandering around” before noticing the possibilities tucked inside these two problems.   That’s what the church is always doing, which is why the most honest way to describe God’s guidance is to say: I’m not sure right now--but I’ll get back to you, after enough time has passed that God’s fingerprints have become visible!

Beyond Survival

Grove Lake Lutheran Church, Pelican Rapids

March 1, 2014/Lent 2

Mark 8:31-38

In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

It’s good to be with you this morning.  Over the years I’ve gotten to know some of you, and this morning I hope to become acquainted with even more of you.

Without even knowing all of you, though, I’m going to make a guess about you folks here at Grove Lake Lutheran Church.

I’m guessing that some, perhaps many of you, are survivors.

You have been up against something—raising challenging kids, losing a job, dealing with addiction, being abused, facing cancer, weathering divorce, farming the land, you name it…

You’ve been up against something that could have done you in—but it didn’t.  You survived!

And for that, I say:  “Hats off to you!”   Surviving is good, because life is good!

If you’re a survivor—I thank God for you.

Surviving is good.  But as good as surviving is, it’s not the greatest good in the universe.

That’s because tucked inside every survival story there is a seam of danger we dare not ignore.

The danger in hunkering down, getting focused and doing whatever it takes to survive….the thread of danger in that is that we become so focused on ourselves or our little circle, our “tribe,” that we can easily lose sight of others.

It’s just in the nature of the beast.   To survive is to pull in, focus on ourselves or our group, and for at least a while to shut out everyone else….so that we allow nothing and no one to distract us from the challenge of surviving.

We may all have survival moments or “episodes” in our lives—I think we do—but we’ll be smart  to avoid making “survival” the main theme, the entire story of our lives….because, truth be told, if all we’re about is surviving we could get pretty lonely.

I think this is where  Jesus is pointing us in this morning’s gospel lesson when he says:   "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (vv. 34-35)

Jesus’ wisdom flies in the face of human wisdom, the wisdom that says:  sometimes you have to buckle down and do whatever it takes to survive, to make it through the day.

Jesus doesn’t specifically use the word “survival” here, but he comes close when he talks about denying ourselves and losing our lives rather than trying to save our lives.

What’s that all about, anyway?

It’s about the thing that’s even bigger and better than surviving.  It’s about staying connected with, related to others….being open to God and the whole human family in ways that are simply at odds with focusing all our effort on surviving.

This is the kind of life God has always intended for us and for all people.

We see signs of that in our Old Testament lesson, where Abram and Sarai are promised descendants without number and new names to boot.   Abram and Sarai had pretty good lives, just the two of them, but God had much more in store for them—God had the whole world in mind when he called Abram and Sarai to be blessed so that they could be a blessing to all nations of the earth.

We see that in Jesus, the greatest descendant of Abram and Sarai, as well—we see it in Jesus’s life and ministry, his awful death and his awesome resurrection.    Jesus lived in a way that showed he knew that personal survival is not the greatest good—not even close!

Karoline Lewis, who teaches at our seminary in St Paul, puts it this way:  “To ‘deny yourself and take up your cross’ invites us into what the cross can also mean -- not just death and suffering, but God choosing human relationships. The cross represents God’s commitment to humanity. The cross represents what we do when we are not in relationship with the other and think only for ourselves. Because to be ourselves is to be certain of our connectedness.”[1]

We also see this openness to the whole human family, this refusal to focus on personal or tribal survival, in the lives and witness of Jesus’ followers down through the ages. 

In January my wife Joy and I were privileged to be part of the ELCA Bishops Academy in Germany, as we got in touch with our roots in the life of the German monk Martin Luther and the Reformation he started….and as we traced the development of the Lutheran church over the last five hundred years.

One of the sites we visited was the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald.   A quarter of a million persons deemed “undesirables” by the Nazis were imprisoned here, and over 50,000 of them died in this stark, barbed-wired concentration camp.   Two of the persons who were imprisoned at Buchenwald were German Lutheran pastors and martyrs--Paul Schneider and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906, into a highly-educated, well-to-do German family.  A brilliant child, he was groomed for the life of a university professor of theology.

But then along came Adolf Hitler, his insane pursuit of power, and his maniacal hatred of the Jews and others he deemed “undesirable.”   Quickly grasping the danger posed by Hitler’s Nazis, young professor Bonhoeffer knew he could not stare at his shoes and hope the whole situation would go away.  

In the 1930s, Dietrich studied in the United States and made friends in England.  He considered “sitting out” World War II in a safe place—doing whatever he needed to do to survive.

But instead Bonhoeffer decided that he belonged in his native Germany.  He had to bear witness to his Lord Jesus Christ—in bold word and costly deed.

So Bonhoeffer returned home, served as a pastor while participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was arrested and three weeks before the liberation of Germany—was hanged  by the Nazis in 1945.

For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at the tender age of 39, the question came down to this:  “Who is Jesus for us?—in this time, in this place?”   And the answer that kept haunting Bonhoeffer was this:  “He—Jesus—is the man for others.”   

It was only a short hop from that answer to what Bonhoeffer knew he needed to do—NOT to survive at all costs….but to be part of a true church for others, in obedience to the Man for others.

My dear friends, this “being for others,” this way of life that gives itself away for others, isn’t just for biblical characters or historical heroes.  It’s for all of us who have been baptized into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is the mode of living that our Lord Jesus  immerses us in when we go down under the water of baptism and when we confess that Jesus is indeed the only way worth following, the only truth worth confessing, the only life worth living.

This way of life is for us as individuals, and it is for communities of faith like Grove Lake.

In my ministry as synod bishop I interact on a daily basis with all kinds of congregations--233 of them across the 21 counties of our synod.

And many of these congregations are focused, over-focused (!) on their survival.

Which means those congregations are likely NOT to survive!

Here’s where the out of this world “logic” of Jesus words in our text comes to light, right among us.   What’s true for us as human beings is just as true for congregations as living members of the Body of Christ.   Hang on to life, cling to life, focus all your attention on surviving….and you will die.

Give yourselves away, focus on your neighbors and your world and all the ways God frees you to be connected to them, care for them, share your best with them….that, that is life!

Let me share an impression of Grove Lake Lutheran Church:  you may have plenty of survivors in your midst, but as a community of faith you don’t seem overly focused on survival.   I think, instead, that Jesus’ gospel logic lives here.  

One of the marks of that is your eagerness to engage our synod’s Fostering Vibrant Faith project.  I take that to mean that you “get it”—you “get” the fact that faith is the only thing that multiplies as it is divided, shared, passed on….starting with the youngest among us and the young ones who are in each of our own circles of care. 

God bless you with sturdy faith in Jesus Christ, the Man for others….whose cross represents God’s fierce commitment to the whole human family….that all might live in Christ’s forgiveness, move forward in Christ’s freedom, and live every day in Christ’s overflowing love.

In the name of Jesus.   Amen.

---

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3542