Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Discipleship as Power?

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We are in the final weeks of hearing from Mark’s Gospel. Way back in Advent through Easter, we heard all the dramatic stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. Since June, we have been wrestling with the middle chapters of the gospel book, working out with the disciples what Discipleship means. What it means to follow Jesus as he goes about bringing the Kingdom of God near. It sounds relatively simple if we don’t think about it much and stick to a Sunday-school-surface reading. 

Of course, Mark, Jesus and the Disciples don’t give us much of a chance to make that choice. This week, James and John ask Jesus to sit at his right and at his left. (It almost sounds like my children, who are often very keen to manage whom they sit next to at mealtime.) Yet, this is not just about children trying to get seated next to the teacher, or popular kid, or favourite grandparents at dinnertime. 

James and John are opening up a complicated and layered issue that Christians continue to deal with today. What does it mean to be associated with Jesus and what do we get out of it? We don’t have to look much further than the various elections going on around us to see the ways in which politicians use proximity or distance from Jesus, Christianity, the Church and Faith to gain votes and power. We also don’t have to think very far back to the ways that the Church has used Jesus as a means to wield power over other Christians, over our neighbours, and over Creation. 

On Sunday morning, we will discover that James and John don’t really understand what they are asking. They don’t yet see that Discipleship, as Power, is not what Jesus is offering. Discipleship as Service or Sacrifice might be more like it. Jesus also has some harsh words about the problems of trying to gain individual power on offer. 

Before we get to unpack what reversal and work of transformation Jesus is up to with us, we might have to sit and stew over these hard questions. What does it mean to belong to a religion that has had such a complicated relationship with power? How do we each fit within the relationship and experience of power?

By now you might be able to guess that some of these questions are part of what I am currently working on in my doctoral courses. As we try to understand just where we sit as people of faith in 2024, there is work to be done to understand how Christianity arrived here. 

However, I won’t dig too deep into issues of power, colonialism, white-euro-centric Christian supremacy and more right now. 

Instead, as we go back to Jesus and the disciples in the Gospel of Mark, we are reminded that even in the mess of power that they and we find ourselves in, Jesus has come to flip and overturn the established orders. Christ’s power is to serve, sacrifice and give. Christ gives Godself fully and completely to power-seeking people like James, John and the rest of us. And in that giving of Godself, somehow Jesus shows us the way to new life. 

Photo: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s House… and we know his ideas on the cost of discipleship.

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Giving thanks over the years – Pastor Thoughts

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I don’t think I could have ever imagined feeling this way, but I could have used a little more September this year. Between the program year ramping up, my foolishness in agreeing to a few too many things, the kid’s school year and activities starting and my coursework ramping up, it has felt like a busy few weeks. Thanksgiving should not be here this soon; I thought there was more time! 

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving felt like it was deep into the school year. Summer was already a distant memory, while Halloween was still three weeks away! Now, all that feels like it passes in the blink of an eye. 

Thanksgiving, like all holidays or holy days, comes at us differently at different times in our lives. When I was young, Thanksgiving weekend often felt like a great long break to eat lots of turkey and have an extra glorious day off from school before the snow arrived. For those with grandkids and large extended families, these important holiday events feel like touchstones yet provide fleeting opportunities to spend time with loved ones, chances to make memories, and opportunities to invest in what matters. For those of us in middle age, millennials are now middle-aged! – these holidays feel frantic managing kids, work schedules, social calendars, volunteer responsibilities and extended family obligations. Of course, there are those for whom Thanksgiving may be lonely or difficult and might be grief-filled with a notable spot at the table now empty. 

Ever since seminary, when in the course of learning theology, biblical studies, biblical Greek, and liturgy, we were taught that the word Eucharist means ‘thanksgiving,’ my brain always conflates the Great Thanksgiving that is a part of each worship service with communion and the holiday of Thanksgiving. I have started to see Thanksgiving weekend in Eucharistic terms – imagining this weekend around the second Monday in October as a time when Canadians practice Eucharist in our homes with family, friends and community. Thanksgiving tables aren’t necessarily the same as the Lord’s table that we gather around in worship. They are not public tables of welcome where we encounter the true presence of Christ as the Lord’s table is. But they are gatherings with a Eucharistic quality where often a motley collection of people gather together to share a meal and wind up somehow bound together into a new community in the process. The yearly gatherings are small reminders of the kind of community that we joined each Sunday around the Lord’s supper. 

So pay attention to who you eat with this weekend, know that you are joined to a new community of Eucharist and Thanksgiving. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Redefining ministry in 2024 – Pastor Thoughts

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This week (for Sunday October 6th), the gospel of Mark covers an uncomfortable passage about divorce, where Jesus gives no reason that makes divorce palatable. The passage certainly feels like divine judgment hurled on something pretty common in our world (if you want to know why Jesus’ comments on divorce meant something very different than we may think, see this sermon from 2021). Whatever Jesus might actually be saying about divorce, the bigger question might be about the place of faith and religion in our world. There is the general question about the secularity of our North American culture but also the place and input that our faith has in our lives. 

It is a question that I have been circling for the past month or so. Topics that have to do with faith in society and the church in the world include colonialism, Christian identity, how we talk among ourselves and others about the Church and so on. The question at the heart of my doctoral research is grounded in how we understand the role of Christian ministry in our lives.

On the surface, my research is asking about how people understand the work of clergy and the expectations out there that are placed on clergy. Deeper down, this is about exploring the place of Christian ministry in the world, as the work of clergy is done, along with, and equipping lay folks to be the hands and feet of the Church in the world. This, in turn, means digging into how contemporary Christians understand ministry and our collective work of ministry as the Church. 

Perhaps more simply put, asking people what they think the job of a pastor is has to do with how we understand all of our roles in the work of ministry. 

Answering this question is interconnected with another question facing many churches, including Sherwood Park, these days: What is our place and purpose in the world around us?

Like my research question, discerning our place and purpose in the world is a multifaceted question. There are lots of ways to begin answering it and lots of pieces that impact how we answer. What are we called to do and be as a community of faith in this time and place? Do we have the resources we need to carry out this ministry? Are there possible ministry partners around us with whom we can do more together than alone? What would happen if we didn’t carry out this ministry here? What would be lost? How can we change to faithfully entrust the legacy of our ministry to the next generation and into the future?

These questions take time to sort out. To answer them well as congregations requires us to put on the hats of researchers exploring all avenues of wondering, not knowing what answers might be out there. It isn’t easy to ask these questions because we aren’t used to the circumstances that we are in. Even if the Church has taken a few decades to slide into this situation, it feels new and uncertain and nothing like the version of being church that we know. All the things that we are talking about these days are not the things that pastors and church folks talked about in the past… at least that is not what I remember. 

But on the longer time scale of the history of Christianity, questions about our place and purpose in the world are not new. The Apostle Paul addresses these questions frequently in his letters. The early Church had to deal with similar questions as it navigated living in the Roman Empire. The Reformers had to reinterpret the Church’s place in the world during the Reformation. Today, we are being called into another moment to ask this question – What is our place and purpose in the world?

Photo: The modern chancel set into St. Mary Cathedral in Erfurt, Germany founded in 724 CE.

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Canadian Lutherans and Colonialism – Pastor Thoughts

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Monday, September 30th was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, where we remember those Indigenous children and families who were victims of and affected by Canada’s Indian Residential School system. This year, there were orange shirts around that weekend, as September 30th is also called “Orange Shirt Day.” 

As Lutherans, we are a church body whose origins are European; we carry with us a connection to the history of colonialism. Yet, as ELCIC Lutherans in Canada, we also carry with us a history distinct from that of other White-European churches, such as the Anglican, Roman Catholics and United Churches. While Lutherans have had a presence in parts of North America since the 16th Century, they were mostly in the US’s original thirteen colonies. Martin Luther came onto the scene decades after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, meaning there weren’t enough Lutherans to start spreading around until the 1600s. 

In the case of most churches and congregations that belong to the ELCIC, our oldest congregations are relatively young, started by our grandparents or great-grandparents in the last one hundred to one hundred fifty years. In the case of Canada’s residential school period, most Lutherans were considered immigrants and outsiders by the church bodies (Anglican, Roman Catholic, United) that were running the schools. 

So what is our connection to colonialism? We were not necessarily part of the institutions that were the core of the colonial project in Canada (the British and French empires), but we are part of the White European ethos by proxy. In the height of the colonial era (the late 1700s through 1800s), Europeans were colonizing all over the world, bringing their ways of life, culture and beliefs to nearly every corner of the globe. Europeans engaged in colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North and South America during this time. This was the time when that saying, “the sun never sets on the British Empire” came into being.

At the core, colonialism was based on the idea that White European ways of life, culture and spirituality were the right and best ways for humans to live. This idea continues to propagate itself even as we now try to reconcile our colonial history. 

Colonialism is why Canada had “Indian Residential Schools” to ostensibly “remove the savage from the child.” It is why we forced our religious practices and culture on indigenous peoples and often declared that other ways of living, other cultures, and other ways of believing in God were inferior and wrong. 

As Lutherans in Canada, we have kind of sneaked into the back door of colonialism, going from being seen as immigrants considered outsiders for a lot of the last century and a half to trying to lump ourselves in with other White European descent church bodies at precisely at the wrong time. We didn’t have an institutional stake in colonialism, yet we are somewhat a part of the group that colonialism declared to be the right way – as long as we seemed, in Canada’s case, European, White and Christian enough. 

In this week’s gospel, the disciples are worried about others who are healing in Jesus’ name. They are worried that these “others” are not doing things the right way. Jesus reminds them that the work of the Kingdom of God happens in so many more ways than they can imagine. 

Unfortunately, that message didn’t get through to colonial empires. But, as we seek to dismantle and reconcile the structures and worldviews of colonialism that still exist in our world today, we can remember this message: God might be at work in places and ways we have not conceived of yet. We are called as people of faith to the important work of truth and reconciliation, even from our unusual position as Lutherans in Canada. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

The weird and surprising history of 10 Commandments Monuments

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On Thursday last week, I got a call from a CBC staff reporter asking for my opinion on a news story that I hadn’t heard of until that very moment. She asked what my thoughts were on removing the 10 Commandments Monument from Assiniboine Park – 5 years ago. The monument had been removed and placed in storage in order for The Leaf to be built in the same location. 

I stammered out some thoughts about religious freedom in Canada, meaning that public spaces shouldn’t play host to objects that promote one religion over another. The removal of the monument didn’t seem like a big deal, so if the city wanted to put it in storage or return it to whoever donated it to the city in the first place seemed like a good idea to me. I mentioned that history is much better studied in books and museums, as evidenced by my doctoral work. Whatever thoughts I cobbled together seemed of enough interest to CBC that they asked if I would be willing to be interviewed on the afternoon radio show, which I agreed to. 

But something was twigging me about this story. A lot of religious symbols and images on buildings and public spaces in Canada come from an earlier colonial era. As we know, there was a long period when the church and government were working together on various projects. Many Anglican and Roman Catholic Church buildings, in particular stone ones in the middle of cities and towns, were built with government funding because churches at the time were believed to be central to the public good of communities – that is, if you were Anglican in English Canada or French in French Canada. The other thing the church and government collaborated on at that time was Indian Residential Schools. Something which we are still learning and unpacking the traumatic effects of today. 

My initial thought about this monument of the 10 Commandments was that it likely came from that colonial era, but I wasn’t sure. One fact that bothered me was that in Germany, I hadn’t seen a single Ten Commandments monument, and nor could I remember one in any church I have ever been to anywhere. I needed to know more. 

So, in the time between that first phone call and the later afternoon interview, I did some real research rather than hypothesizing. I guess doing doctoral work is training me to do the research and uncover the real story. 

I jumped into the rabbit hole that is the history of 10 Commandments monuments in North America and discovered some interesting facts. Beginning in 1951, a member of the Fraternal Order of the Eagles (essentially a social club that did some charity like the Lions or Kiwanis), a Judge in Minnesota sentenced a youth convicted of stealing a car to learn the commandments with a pastor, rather than jail time. He believed that learning morals might turn wayward youths around. He expanded this vision to posting copies of the 10 Commandments in Juvenile Courthouses across North America. A few years after this, a certain Hollywood movie director heard of this campaign by the Order of the Eagles and saw an opportunity – a marketing opportunity. This director had a movie coming out in 1956, also called The Ten Commandments. The director was none other than Cecil B. DeMille. So DeMille got in touch with the Judge and helped the Order of the Eagles to place stone monuments in parks, courthouses and city halls across North America. The campaign kept on going for ten years, which is the time when Assiniboine Park got its 10 Commandments monument. In 1965, no one objected to the idea. But as early as the 1970s, objections began to arise on the grounds of the separation of church and state. 

CBC interview:
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-111-up-to-speed/clip/16095755-reverend-says-ten-commandments-monument-put-back

Follow up: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-29-information-radio-mb/clip/16096976-a-religious-monument-removed-assiniboine-park-hopefully-displayed

Certainly, the monument here in Winnipeg is not the first to have a debate around its appropriateness in a public space. Debates around these monuments have been in the news for years. As you will recall, last week, my eNews article spoke to the idea of being surrounded by the symbols and images of a given religion and not being a vehicle for knowing the faith, even when those things have a deep historical connection to a place. 

In fact, during the Reformation, the topic of statues, paintings and art was a hot topic. Many thought they were graven images. While Martin Luther admitted that people did not have to venerate crucifixes or statues of Mary, he did say that these art and symbols could be helpful for people in their faith journey by communicating the gospel. 

However, Luther was clear that the gospel was not about telling people what to do, and nor was faith a matter of living morally. In fact, he didn’t see the 10 Commandments as primarily about morals at all. While they did have this basic function of drawing the line between right and wrong, their real function was to show us – human beings – our sinfulness. The commandments reveal to us the ways in which we do not put God first but rather try to be God in God’s place. They also reveal the myriad of ways in which we harm our neighbour by failing to care for those around us. The Commandments show us our sinfulness and need for salvation – but they are not in and of themselves the gospel. Rather, the gospel is Christ. Christ given for the sake of sinners. God’s love, mercy, forgiveness and life given through Christ for sinful humanity. 

So, to me, our 10 Commandments monument doesn’t speak to our history in Manitoba, even if it is a weird quirk of Hollywood marketing history. Nor do they represent the essential proclamation of our faith, the good news. In fact, they tell us the bad news. Bad news alone. But as I wrote about last week, learning our faith and learning the good news happens in conversation. The gospel is proclaimed in the things we communicate to the world, and Luther would add in how we love and care for our neighbour. 

Sources:

https://religionsmn.carleton.edu/exhibits/show/tencommand/tencommandhistory

https://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200109/10_schmitzr_laxten-m/

An iPhone Pastor for a Typewriter Church