Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Making decisions above my pay grade – Pastor Thought

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In 15 years of serving as a pastor, I have remained a mostly “by the book” person. That is to say, when it comes to worship and liturgy, I tend to stick to the orders, texts and traditions of the church. It is not that I am unwilling to try new or different ideas,  nor is it the case that I feel compelled to follow the rubrics (stage notes in our hymnals) as if they were written in stone. However, I find the structure and careful attention of our established liturgies to be the most compelling means of proclaiming the Gospel in the worshipping assembly. Or to put it another way, you would need to convince and show me how our liturgical worship practices are not the best for saying the important stuff about God for me to change a lot of stuff. 

So this Sunday, as we observe Christ the King Sunday at Sherwood Park, there is a small part of me that is uneasy. The reason for that is that we are technically a week early! … Gasp!

This year, the 4th Sunday in Advent falls on the morning of December 24th. As you all well know, there are evening services that are pretty important to a lot of folks that day as well. 

So rather than packing Christmas full of services from morning to night, we are leaving the Sunday morning of December 24thopen and moving all of Advent forward one week, as well as moving Christ the King Sunday. 

And yes, it was my idea. Even if changing the liturgical calendar feels beyond my pay grade.

In some sense, Christ the King Sunday is a strong reminder that so much of our life of faith is not up to us – beyond our pay grade, so to speak. It can be easy to reduce faithfulness to things like following the rules, being a good person or earning our salvation. 

But as we hear the readings for Christ the King Sunday, which paint a picture of God’s intention to restore and reconcile ALL creation into something new, we can begin to see that, as individuals, we are just small pieces in the great unfolding of God’s divine work.

As creation hurdles towards God’s future, we as the Church bear witness to something that extends far beyond our personal and individual faithfulness. We are witnesses to the work of God taking place all around us, to God’s transformation of all things into the reconciled and recreated beings that we were meant to be. 

So while we move Christ the King Sunday forward by a week, we do so knowing that while we can shift the calendar around here or there, it is God who is moving all creation into a new future that we have yet to see fully. 

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

All Saints according to Coco – Pastor Thoughts

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All Saints Sunday is one of my favourite times of the year, and not because it is the same Sunday as the time change when we ‘fall back’ to daylight savings time. 

Our family has had an All Saints Sunday tradition of watching the movie “Coco” in the afternoon. Coco is a Disney/Pixar animated film that tells the story of a young boy, Miguel, in Mexico who is transported to the Land of the Dead on Dia de los Muertos (the Mexican holiday, Day of the Dead). The Land of the Dead is a colourful fantasy world of skeletons that more or less continue living as they did in fleshly life. As he tries to return home, Miguel encounters his family members and other adventures. 

Spoiler warning: the next paragraph describes the final scene of the movie.  

The final scene of the movie is back in the land of the living, at a Dia de los Muertos feast – an All Saints feast, surrounded by family both living and dead, enfleshed and skeletons. They are visiting and singing, eating and dancing, all as a great gathering of beloved family. The skeletons, with a golden glow, are imperceptible to the living, but there with them all the same. 

There is something in that scene that sparks an image of All Saints Day. The gathering of the great multitudes around the throne of God, singing and dancing, feasting and visiting. But it is not just an image for All Saints Day, but every time we gather at the Lord’s table, every time we gather to sing, pray and praise with beloved family⎯mothers and fathers who have gone before us in faith, siblings who gather at our side at the table, children and descendants yet to follow in our footsteps. 

This image of the whole host of heaven, the cloud of witnesses that holds us in our faith is one that we must encounter and remember on our way to Advent. It is the place to which the whole story of the Church Year has been leading us⎯ from Christmas and Easter to all the parables and stories of the Green Sundays. The vision of the Kingdom of God is as much our anticipated future as Christians as it is our present reality gathered around the table. 

As much as the great multitude is the end of the story, it is also what leads us back to the beginning, because All Saints and our forebearers in faith are also the ones who have handed on to us the story of Advent and the coming of Messiah. Our waiting for God’s promises was first begun by those who have gone before us. 

There is one more image from Coco that resonates with me. There is a cosmic scale to All Saints Sunday⎯the promises given to the whole company of heaven. But in that final scene in Coco, the vision of All Saints is also intimate and personal. It is a gathering in the backyard of the family shoemaking business; it is a family dinner with people who are truly known and loved. It is a vision All Saints where this little Mexican family of Miguel’s represents all families. It is God’s promise given not just to all generally and broadly, but also personally and directly. 

God’s promise that, in the Kingdom, there is a place where we truly belong. 

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Reformation: A Compelling Origin Story – Pastor Thoughts

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Last weekend, one of my colleagues invited me to come to a confirmation class to teach something about Martin Luther. 

Back in seminary, my classmates would often take to teasing me for quoting the Book of Concord or Augsburg Confession. They would roll their eyes when I answered professors’ questions with things like, “According to Luther…”

Lots of my colleagues still tease me for those kinds of things, and I am sure it doesn’t help to have started a Doctor of Ministry program with the intention of researching  Luther and Lutheran Confessions stuff. 

So I guess it made sense that I would get invited to teach a confirmation class about Martin Luther. I have taught many similar confirmation and adult-study classes about Luther and the Reformation before. But something about this particular group of kids struck me. 

It has been almost exclusively the case that no confirmation student has had a clue of who Martin Luther is when they arrived in my confirmation classes over the past 15 years. Thinking back, I doubt that I knew anything about him when I started confirmation either. Once in a while, an excited student will say that Martin Luther was a civil rights activist for African Americans when I ask students if they know anything about him – obviously, they are thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Often, I have used the 2003 film Luther as a means of introducing him to confirmation students. I have always thought it was a good movie, with famous actors! Joseph Finnes, who was also in Shakespeare in Love. Alfred Molina who was in Spiderman.A real star-studded cast for 2003. I do an annotated version of the film where I stop the movie – almost annoyingly often – to explain who the people are, the historical background and setting, the veracity of the plot and so on. 

But it has been close to 6 or 7 years since I have last screened the movie with a group. So this past weekend, I was reminded again just how compelling the story of Martin Luther is. Four teenagers who didn’t know a thing about Reformation history were quickly caught up in the drama of the story where there are no explosions or sword fights or special effects. Just a monk getting upset with the abuses of the medieval church and deciding to do something about it by writing a list of 95 complaints. 

It was a good reminder for Reformation Day. There is a compelling origin story for our denomination (on top of the compelling origin story of our faith) that grounds us in God’s love and grace given for sinners like you and me. There is something to the idea that mercy isn’t for sale and that as people who follow in Martin Luther’s footsteps, we too are called to the work of proclaiming God’s grace. 

We are still called to preach God’s freely given mercy and grace to a world that often believes that such love could only come with a cost. A world that desperately needs to hear that we do not have to earn our way in this life or the next, but that God declares us beloved and forgiven right from the beginning. 

That the work that Martin Luther began in the Reformation, or really that he saw the church called to in scripture, is still the same calling that we share today. 

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Imagining the Worst to Alleviate Stress – Pastor Thoughts

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This week I handed in the first paper for my Doctor of Ministry program. It has been 15 years since I last had to produce papers or complete assignments for school. While it is certainly different and new at the doctoral level, a lot of those memories and feelings from another time in my life have been on my mind. 

When I was in high school, I remember the pressure I felt to do well. I was a busy kid with sports, music and church. Most nights of the week I had one or two practices for either a sports team, orchestra or musical group. I also remember how classes and homework started to take on more importance, as doing well was an important step in getting into university. 

When I would feel particularly stressed or burdened trying to balance school and extracurricular activities, I would workshop with myself worst-case scenarios: What if I failed a test? Failed a class? Couldn’t graduate? Didn’t get into university? 

Somehow imagining the worst of what could happen and then thinking of backup plans allowed me to worry less about the things on my plate and actually get them done. 

At present, worst-case scenarios globally and all the problems that the world is facing these days are not a good place to start. For instance: What would happen if just one of the many people with their hands on the little red button actually pressed it? Or what would happen if COVID suddenly became two or three times as deadly? Or what if the Earth’s temperature keeps rising? 

Those are worst-case scenarios for which only prayer and mutual consolation can help. 

Then there are those of us who are worried about the cost of bananas, losing a job, sharing with a loved one a particularly vulnerable feeling, singing the wrong note in choir, making a mistake on our taxes or any number of things. Sometimes just playing out the worst that could happen is a way to realize that the worst might not be as bad as we feared, or that following through with a plan B might not be so difficult. 

As congregations and faith communities face a lot of change and big questions, it is easy for us to fear bad things happening and do everything we can to avoid worst-case scenarios. 

However, allowing ourselves the time and space to slow down and consider just what might come next after the worst-case scenario could alleviate a lot of our worries and stress. 

In fact, as followers of Jesus, we know that God is not one to run away from a worst-case scenario, but to face it head-on… and then surprise us all on the Third Day with the news that on the other side of the worst-case scenario, there is new life. 

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

I don’t know what to think about Israel and Palestine – Pastor Thoughts

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I am sure many of us have been paying attention to the news this week with heavy hearts and uncertainty about what to think. 

As news of the attacks by Hamas on Israeli citizens⎯rockets, soldiers, kidnappings and murders⎯it felt like yet another setback in an already shaky and unstable world.

Reports of the violence and tragedies have been dominating the news headlines. They were hard to hear and see. Yet, people started taking sides as soon as images, reports and videos of the violence were released. 

The safety and security of Israel, and the horrific acts of Hamas are claimed to be justification for Israel’s response in kind. The occupation and blockade of the Gaza Strip are claimed to be the cause of Hamas’s actions. While there is truth in each claim, neither are those claims the whole story of this complicated situation. 

I cannot help but think of that childhood refrain, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

I also cannot help but think of the story of Noah’s flood. A story baked into the DNA of people of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A story rooted in the decision of God to blot out the wickedness in all the earth. Because of the wickedness of humankind (after God had done the work of creation only four chapters prior in Genesis), God decides to wipe out all of creation. 

God determines to wipe out the wickedness of humankind with an even greater act of violence by drowning all creation in a flood, save a few righteous families and animals. God erases one wickedness with an even greater wickedness. God responds to the corruption and violence of humankind with even greater⎯though righteous⎯violence. 

Significantly, as God gives Noah and his family meat to eat after the flood (Genesis 9), God adds the caveat that the blood must be properly drained from the animals – a reference to Kosher or Halal food preparation. The implication being that a part of humanity’s pre-flood wickedness was the improper worship of God and failure to keep the purity laws. These issues persisted throughout the Old and New Testament, and remained issues at play between Jews, Muslims and Christians throughout history to today.

This cycle of responding to violence with greater and righteous violence has been a part of the human story for 3,500 years. Versions of the flood story are not only told in the Torah, Old Testament and Qu’ran but in many of the mythologies of the Ancient Near East like the Gilgamesh Epic and Atrahasis Epic. It is part of the DNA of humanity and it is part of the cycle of history of that part of the world. 

Violent acts committed by the righteous in the name of blotting out the wicked and unfaithful are condoned by God… at least that is the rationale. 

Of course, the point of the flood story is that God realizes God’s mistake. God realizes that responding to wickedness with greater wickedness, to violence with greater violence, doesn’t solve anything. 

Instead, it takes the remainder of the Old Testament and the beginning of the Gospels to see what that rainbow covenant truly means. God’s promise never to flood the earth again is realized in the Christ who finally answers humanity’s death-dealing ways with Resurrection and New Life. 

In response to news headlines that we are seeing and hearing, let us pray for Peace and Reconciliation. We pray for Resurrection and New Life to take hold among us now.

A Prayer for Peace Among the Nations:
Gracious God, grant peace among nations. Cleanse from our own hearts the seeds of strife: greed and envy, harsh misunderstandings and ill will, fear and desire for revenge. Make us quick to welcome ventures in cooperation among the peoples of the world, so that there may be woven the fabric of a common good too strong to be torn by the evil hands of war. In the time of opportunity, make us be diligent; and in the time of peril, let not our courage fail; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
(ELW Occasional Services for the Assembly)

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