Listening Between the Lines

My first congregation was a three-point parish in rural South Dakota.  Three points meant that there were three churches.  Two of them were in tiny towns, and one of them was out in the country.

I lived in one of those tiny towns, in a large parsonage across from the church.  According to the sign on the way into town, the population was 90, but a few of us counted one day (on election day, I think) and we came up with 63.   There was a main street, which held the remains of a bank, the post office and Gizzy's bar.  There were also several open spaces where buildings used to be.  A little farther up there used to be a school.  There was no gas station, and there was no longer a grocery store.  There was still a park and a town hall.  We held Vacation Bible School there.

The town used to be bigger.  I heard stories, and I read some.  I saw old pictures of the glory days.  Four railroads used to intersect in this town.  There were once four churches, too.   The community was settled by Bohemians and by Norwegian farmers.  It was a lively place.

I used to go and visit people who were members of my congregation, but didn't live in town any more.  Some of them lived in nursing homes, or had moved to a slightly larger town nearby.  They often asked me how the town was doing.

"I guess there's not much use for the small towns anymore," they would say.

I heard this sentence, almost exactly the same, so many times, until it finally occurred to me that perhaps they were not just talking about the small towns.

Perhaps what they really feared was that there was not much use for them any more, that the things they valued, that the work they did, that the life they lived would slip away, and mean nothing, in the end.

"I guess there's not much use for the small towns any more."

What do you say?  It seems to be true that there is not much use for the small towns any more.  But I am listening between the lines, now, and I want to tell them that there is still a use for your life, that there is use and a value for your life that goes beyond this life, that lasts forever.  I want to hold that old man's hand and tell him that all is not lost, that what he did and who he was had meaning, that his name is written in the book of life.  I want to tell that old woman that her life has borne fruit, even though the town she loved is mostly gone.

In ministry now, in the midst of change, I am wondering about what it would mean to begin listening between the lines more often.  I wonder what it would mean to listen to what people tell me, and wonder what their real fears and hopes are, what they are really saying.  Perhaps it would mean to listen with less judgment and more grace.  Perhaps it would mean to acknowledge the fear and walk right into the darkness, carrying a light.

The First Day of Advent

It was the first day of Advent today, in my new congregation.  There were shades of blue everywhere, some deep, some aqua, and there were pink and blue candles, and I chanted the liturgy.  In some ways, the sense that it is advent again is comforting for me.  It is advent, and there is a deep resonance of familiarity, like opening the door and seeing an old friend.

So much is different this year.  I am in a different state.  It is raining, not snowing.  I am in a different sanctuary, one with a balcony up to the choir.  The rhythms of the contemporary service are different as well, with some songs I know well and some that are new to me.  We are all learning, including me.

It was the first day of Advent today, in my new congregation.   It still feels new, to me, and perhaps, to them, as well.

For some reason it seemed like a good idea to use the stories of Luke, chapter 1, for the preaching texts this month.  It's not what the lectionary says that I should do, and I know that the lectionary is wise.  But I have always loved the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, and how Zechariah was struck dumb when he didn't believe the Angel Gabriel's message.  All of Luke 1 is about being pregnant -- being pregnant with hope, bearing God into the world.

I want my congregation to be pregnant with hope, to believe that they are bearers of God to a weary world.

I tried something new today:  well, two things, really.  They were not my ideas, actually.  We gave out crocus bulbs to everyone in church today.  I told them to plant them in a pot, or in the ground, and wait, and watch, and hope.  Besides lighting candles, it is something we can do at Advent.

The other thing we did was make a bookmark.  The bookmark had a word on it:  Expecting.  On one side of the bookmark was a definition of the word "Expecting."  On the other side of the bookmark was a short prayer.

Next week's word is "Trusting".  In case you are curious.

It was the first day of Advent today, in my new congregation.  And I am so busy doing things, and I heard the message that it is God who is doing a new thing -- in us, and in me.  I am so busy trying to figure out what the next right thing might be, and I heard that it is God who is bringing new life to us, and in us.

There was a baptism this morning.  A little boy was splashed with water and the word, received the burning candle.  "Let your light shine," we told him.

Light your candle.  Bury the crocus bulbs.  Walk in the rain, or the snow, and pray, and do the next thing, and find out if it is right, or not.

Ask for forgiveness.  Start again.  Open your hands.  Rest.  Play.  Sing.

God is making all things new.

Changing Directions

This morning I opened my door expecting a fresh breeze.  Instead it felt a little muggier than usual.  Still, it was time to walk my dog, so we went for a walk.

It is fall here, so they say.  It is hard for me to notice the signs, because where I am from, the leaves are turning and the evenings have become chilly.  I am used to these signs, even when I grumble that fall arrives too soon and foretells a deep and dark and long snowy winter.

Here, the signs are subtler.  I can still wear my shorts, if I want to, even though it is fall.

I am not sure I want to, some days.

So, this morning, I took my dog out for a walk.  It was warm and still and the dog (who is a good sport, even at 10 years old) bounced around and sniffed everything.

And then, we turned around.

It was not my idea, actually, this 'turning around' thing, but I went along with it, and when I did, I felt it right away.

It was a breeze:  a lovely cool breeze that I never noticed until we turned, until we changed directions.  It was always there, but we needed to change directions to find it, to feel it.

The breeze was a small thing, but that is the way it is sometimes.  There are big changes, like turning around, and there are small things, like feeling the breeze, the wind of the Holy Spirit, who has always been with us, although we don't often notice.

I was at a conference most of last week.  The geography was so much different than here, and so much different than my home state as well.  We were up in the mountains, where the air is thin and you have to take deep gulps and slow down, where you can feel your heart beat and see the beauty all around.

We were talking about worship and faith formation, about the children in our churches, but not just the children.  We were talking about how to faithfully minister to all ages in a way that only the church can do:  by being together, by using the gifts of all the generations.   This does not sound like a big thing, but it represents a change in direction for us.  The church has gotten into the habit of segregating people by age much of the time.  Even in worship.  So we are thinking about how we might really honor the gifts and needs of all generations in worship, use our imaginations and our dreams, our bodies and our souls.

Today, I felt a breeze, a small reminder that the seasons change, that the Holy Spirit is among, and within us, to keep me on my course, changing my direction.

I Have Loved Sunday School

I grew up in Sunday School.  From the time I was three years old and we were going to church at Augustana Lutheran, the church where my father grew up, I went to Sunday school every Sunday.  Even when we visited my grandparents in southwestern Minnesota, I went to Sunday School.  I didn't especially enjoy going to Sunday School when we visited a strange church, but I went.  They sent a postcard back to my Sunday School letting them know that I had attended.

I loved Sunday School, mostly.  I loved my teachers, who were not my parents, and who taught me that other adults in the church cared about me.  I loved learning the stories and playing the games with the other students, some of whom were my friends.  I liked when we drew pictures of churches, but then our teacher told us that the church wasn't the Building, it was the People inside who were the church.  I remember learning about the Old Testament and the New Testament, and about the parts of the liturgy, too:  Collect, Kyrie, Agnus Dei.

One week we had a Bible story about forgiveness, about how Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive.  Seven times?  When Jesus told him, "70 X 7", our teacher told us to try to figure the problem out.  But since we hadn't learned long division yet, all we could come up with was that it must be A Very Large Number.

Another time I was in 6th grade Sunday School and we were giving our teacher a bad time.  I think we were already thinking that this was boring and we didn't want to study the lesson.  Our teacher was a new member of the church, a young dad with three little girls.  We were giving him a tough time, so he decided that he would just share a little of his faith story with us.  He told us that they had had one other daughter, who had died of leukemia, and how that affected his faith.  I still remember that.

So, I grew up in Sunday School, and I learned some things.  I learned some things about relationships.  I learned some things about the church.  I learned some things about the Bible, although there were some gaps. For example,  I did not have a very good idea about how the stories went together, for one thing.  This was true even though I went both to church and to Sunday School every single week.

So I have to admit that Sunday School was not perfect, and it is even less perfect now.  Perfect attendance is rare now, for one thing.  It is hard to find enough teachers, and even if you find enough teachers, it is hard to find enough students who really want to go.  There are plenty of other options on Sunday morning.  Every parent can teach their child about Jesus, but not every parent can be a good Sunday School teacher.

I have loved Sunday School, but I have to admit that, for a lot of churches, and a lot of children, it isn't working.  They are not learning the stories of the Bible, but most of all, they aren't learning that other adults in the church care about them.

But one of the gifts of the church is still relationships.  It is a place where we can meet each other and know each other across generations, where we will realize that Forgiveness Is a Really Big Number, and where we can share stories and songs and pray and catch faith from one another.

If only we will only make the space.

What To Take Along When You Don't Know Where You Are Going

I remember a particular Sunday during our pastoral transition.  It was a Sunday designed to be a pivotal event in our congregation's life.  We were gathered to celebrate our past while we looked to the future.  Our congregational profile had been completed; the "transition team" was about to morph into the call committee.   Every choir and music group had a part in the worship service.

The sermon revolved around a particular event from Israel's history:  just as they were about to cross the Jordan and enter the promised land, a representative of each of the twelve tribes took a stone from one side of the river, and brought it along with them to the other side.  The idea was that although our congregation was embarking on a new chapter in our life, we honor our past and take a part of it along with us on our journey.  I think that there were even some stones on the floor by the baptismal font, and a paper cut-out of the river Jordan, so that the children could move the stones from one side of the river to the other side.

I have to admit that, though I have more than a passing acquaintance with the Old Testament, this particular story had escaped me up until then.  I know that I read almost the entire Old Testament during seminary, but I must have skimmed a few parts, a feeling that came back to me a couple of years ago when I decided to read the whole Bible over a summer.  (Wait a minute.  When did David do THAT?)

But, I digress.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought that the story about the stones was a little more nuanced than I had at first suspected.  I remember re-thinking the story a few months later, and coming to the sudden realization that the stones were not simple reminders of the past.  They were specific reminders of 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.  As the people of Israel was about to cross over into the promised land, they were to take stones from the wilderness, to remember when they were settled the experience of wandering.

The stones were reminders for people coming into the promised land, but they weren't reminders of the 'good old days.'  They were reminders of God's goodness when they grumbled, of God's anger and forgiveness, of dancing around a golden calf, of manna and quails, of manna hoarded that went bad.

I can't help asking myself now:  What does this mean for us?  What stones should we take with us where we are heading, and what do they mean?

The pastoral transition has ended, but in some ways we are still in the wilderness.  Getting a new pastor is not the same as entering the promised land.  In fact, I am not even sure where we are, or where we are going.  Are we in Egypt, living in a culture foreign to us?  Is God leading us into the wilderness?  Or are we in the wilderness now,  wandering without a home, learning to be God's people without the benefit of accustomed markers?

Sometimes I think we need to go back all the way almost to the beginning, all the way to Abraham, to know where we are.  We need to go all the way back to Abraham, who was on the road, on the way to somewhere or another when he heard God say, "Go.  Go to a place where I will show you.  You will be blessed, and you will be a blessing."

What do you take along when you don't know where you are going?  I am not sure, but I suspect you take your family, some stories, a little bread and wine.   You forget about crossing the river Jordan and entering the promised land, and feeling like you have arrived.  You just live here, on the road, sharing stories and bread and wine with the strangers who cross your path, and somehow where you are now becomes the promised land, because it you have come to realize that the promised land is not a place, but the promised land is in the face of the strangers, and in the eyes that look into yours, and in One who called you and accompanies you and will not abandon you.  Somehow you come to see the fleeting vision, where the kingdom of God is in everything you gave away, and somehow (who knows how?) you have finally become a blessing.

Congregational Redevelopment and "Leaving Room"

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came shortly after one of the first worship services I led as a pastor.  One of the parish members came up to me after worship one week and said, "You didn't leave enough room."

"What do you mean?' I asked.  I had no idea what she was talking about.

"During the prayers," she answered.  "You always include a prayer for 'those we now name in our hearts', but you don't leave enough room for me to pray for all the people I want to name."

It was true.  I did always include a time of silent prayer, but I never thought about how much silence people would need if they really took me seriously, if they were really praying for people during that time of silent prayer.  I didn't leave enough room.

More recently, someone at the congregation where I serve now mentioned that they always have a prayer list in their purse or wallet.  They take the list out and pray during the petitions at church.  But the list is getting pretty long.  It is possible that I am not leaving enough room.  

I have been thinking about the term 'redevelopment' for awhile now.  I can think of a lot of words to use to describe what congregational redevelopment means.  Here are a few:  transformation.  overcoming fear.  listening.  creativity.  being and becoming.

And here are a few words to describe what redevelopment is NOT:  getting rid of everything from the past.  cookie-cutter contemporary liturgy.  ignoring your tradition.

I like Matthew's version of the passage about the new wine and new wineskins.  Notice how it reads:  "Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins bursts, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.  "Particularly I like how Jesus seems concerned about making room both for the new and the old wine, how Jesus wants to make sure that new wine is put into new wineskins where it can grow and expand, where it won't ruin those old wineskins with the precious old wine.

"Making Room."

The more I think about it, this is one good way to think about redevelopment.  It is not unlike leaving enough room during the petitions for people to say their prayers, leaving room during worship for silence as well as song, leaving room in our lives for God to do a new thing, or an old thing in a new way.  To redevelop is to trust that God is at work in us, in our congregation, in the world, that if we will just leave some room:  some room to fail, some room to try new things, some room to listen, God will lead us.  To make room is to trust that this is God's church, that we are still called to be bearers of hope and grace and faith in the world.  To make room is to listen -- to God, to one another, to strangers.  To make room is to fail sometimes, and trust that God will use everything we do for God's purposes, to bring good news.

To redevelop a congregation -- is to leave room -- for silence, for the Word, for God to work in ways we did not expect, and would not have predicted.

I am not claiming to know very much yet about 'redevelopment', at least not yet.  I am on this journey along with everyone else, this journey of which I cannot see the ending.  I am on this journey, and I love the old wine, but I yearn for the new wine too, even though I don't know what it will taste like yet.    All I know is that I am going to try to make room, to make room for God to work in my heart, in the silence, in the noisiness of our children, in the tears of strangers, in this congregation.

Lord, Have Mercy

The summer has brought some changes, big and small, to the congregation where I am a pastor.  Of course, the big one is a new senior pastor.  But there have been a few little ones, including some ways that our worship services have changed.  We're trying a few things in worship, without doing anything major yet:  we want the congregation to be the ones who figure out what our worship identity is, and what our worship should look like.

In the meantime, we have been doing a couple of things differently:  1)  we have moved the announcements to near the end of the service.  We decided to do this right after our "Rally Day" worship, when the beginning of the service was delayed several minutes because people were still coming in the front door.  2)  we begun worship with the "Kyrie."

I have a couple of observations regarding these changes.  One is this:  I should not criticize anyone for finding change difficult, because I'm sort of finding it difficult myself.  Doing the announcements at the end of the service does not come naturally for me, much as I like the idea.  And I'm used to beginning worship either with a song, or with confession and forgiveness, so the flow of worship seems a little odd to me, still.

But I do find myself dwelling on those three word, that most ancient prayer, "Kyrie Eleison."  "Lord, have mercy."  It is a confession and it is an intercession.  It is the cry of a disciple, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."  It reminds me that prayer is not a transaction, but a gift.

This morning I had one of those bad headaches I get every once in awhile.  I haven't had one for a long time, and I forget how they feel until one of them comes along again.  I caught myself praying a sort-of prayer, "God, if you will take away this headache, I promise I will do more of the things you want me to do.  I promise I'll write, I'll use my time wisely, I won't procrastinate...."  I was in the middle of this kind of prayer when I remembered the Kyrie, "Lord, have mercy....."

There's no bargaining, no reminding God that I'm an essentially Good Person, no promising that I will be better.  The only chip I have is the mercy of God.   That's it.  And that is enough.

One of my high school friends, one of a different denominational persuasion, visited a Lutheran worship service one time and reported on her experience.  "First you ask God to forgive you," she reported.  "Then all of a sudden, you are saying, 'Lord, have mercy' again.  What's up with that?  Why don't you just believe you are forgiven and be done with it?"

At the time, I didn't know exactly how to answer her.  Maybe it was true; maybe we did wallow a bit too much in our sinfulness.  But now I am beginning to see a little more clearly:  "Lord Have mercy," is the constant refrain of our lives, of our prayers.  It's not that we are wallowing in our sinfulness, but that the foundation of our life is mercy.

The foundation of our life is mercy.

God is merciful.  That alone is enough to transform our lives.

"Hope and Change"

"What do you hope for?"

That's the question that has been going through my mind lately.  I'm not sure why:  perhaps it has something to do with the congregational transition here, the hopes regarding a new senior pastor, the changes we see in our community, and what it means for our faith community.  Perhaps it has something to do with our society itself:  disasters both natural and man-made, people occupying Wall Street, warnings about environmental and economic catastrophes.  There is a lot of uncertainty.  In the midst of this, what do you hope for?  I mean, really.  What do you hope for?

I googled the word "hope" recently, looking for quotes, and discovered lots and lots of quotes.  "Hope" is a word that can carry a lot of meanings, both deep and mundane, as in "I hope it doesn't rain!" or "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope."  Whoa.  Hope is a powerful thing, to bring hope is power. 

So, what do you hope for, really?  Be honest now. 

One of the issues in the church today is all of the churches that used to be big, that used to be full of worshippers every Sunday, and now are not so full.  And the temptation is to hope for things to be like they were in the past:  to say, I hope for a day when the churches are full again, like they were before, we hope for a time when we had 1,000 children in Sunday School.  We hope things can be like they were in a decade that we liked better than the one we are in now. 

But is this really hope?  A good hope will point toward something in the future, not to the past.  Christian hope is God's promise for a new world, not a wish for an old one.

I remember once sitting in a shelter, talked to a woman who worked with women trying to escape domestic abuse.  In a way, the woman said, hope is a great enemy, at least if it is a false hope that their partner will change.  This false hope keeps them from making changes that will really set them free for a better future.

So, what do you hope for?  really

For the church, our hopes are based on God's promises to us:  a promise for a new world where the Lamb rules, where death is no more, where tears are dried, where there is enough for all, enough healing, enough love, enough food, enough dignity.  Our hopes are based on a vision of the throng worshipping at the throne of the Lamb.  And these hopes sustain us even when there is not such a great throng worshiping in the sanctuary. 

So, what do you hope for, really?

That's the first question.