WHO THE HELL DOESN'T THIS TRAIN CARRY?

One of my mentors used to say “The Gospel does not teach us how to get to God; it rather teaches us that there is no way to get to God; God comes to us.” Another said, “The message of the Gospel is not that if we’ll go fifty miles then God will come 450 miles; in Jesus Christ God comes the whole 500 miles!”

Much of what is styled as “The Christian religion” is concerned with that fifty miles: If only I will do this, then God will do that. But the Christian life is not “if-then,” it is “because-therefore:”  Because God loves me unconditionally, therefore I seek to live my life in response to such love. And this is not some airy message from the celestial heights. It is as true as any family: A parent, receiving a child in her arms through birth or adoption, does not look into the child’s eyes and say, “As soon as you grow up and become the person I want you to be then I will love you.” (I acknowledge there are families like that – they’re called dysfunctional!) What the parent says, in fact, is, “I love you – because you’re my child.”

A law-based Christianity (and most other religions, come to think of it), cast God as the dysfunctional parent. The religious leader, then, becomes like that torturer-in-chief General during Argentina’s “dirty war” who informed his victims, “Only God can give life and only God can take life, but God is busy elsewhere now, so he left it up to me.” Religion, even if not quite as alarmingly applied, is always used to decide who is in and who is out. (And the one applying the rules is, unsurprisingly, always “in.”)

The old gospel song declares, “This train don’t carry no gamblers, no crap-shooters, no midnight ramblers….” So, apparently, God loves you unless you’re a midnight rambler (!), or (depending on who’s writing the song) gay, or a doubter, or an unwed pregnant teen (a young girl, pregnant, once told me, “My mom says I’m going to hell now, so it doesn’t matter what I do”), or….

This song (and these ideas) came to me as I was listening at full volume to Bruce Springsgteen’s fantastic corrective take on “This Train,” in his “Land of Hope and Dreams,”

This train
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This Train
Carries whores and gamblers
This Train
Carries lost souls
This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'
This Train
Carries broken-hearted
This Train
Thieves and sweet souls departed
This Train
Carries fools and kings
This Train.

(Springsteen includes this song on a number of recordings. The best is “Live in New York City.” Here it is on YouTube. If you’re connected to a good set of speakers, may I suggest you crank it up!)

Thirty years ago, visiting a church in western South Dakota, I read this remarkable welcome in the worship bulletin:

WHO IS WELCOME HERE?

We want it to be of public record that those of different colored skin and heritage are welcome here.

We want it to be known that those who suffer from addiction to drugs and alcohol (whether recovering or not), and their families are welcome here.

We want it to be known that women and children are welcome here and that they will not be harassed or abused here.

We want it to be public record that in this congregation you can bring children to worship and even if they cry during the entire service, they are welcome.

We want it to be known that those who are single by choice, by divorce, or through the death of a spouse, are welcome here.

We want it to be known that if you are promiscuous, have had an abortion, or have fathered children and taken no responsibility for them, you are welcome here.

We want it known that gossip, cheats, liars, and their families are welcome here. We want it to be known that those who are disobedient to their parents and who have family problems are welcome here.

We want it to be of public record that gays and lesbians and members of their families are welcome here.

Let it be public knowledge that we at Custer Lutheran Fellowship take seriously that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The young and old, the rich and poor, all of the broken are welcome here.

We want it to be public knowledge that we are justified by the grace of God, which is a gift through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. We offer welcome here because we believe that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. That’s us. Christ did not die for us after we showed signs of "getting it all together." Christ loved and still shows love to us while we are yet sinners. Sinners are welcome here. Sinners like you and me, and like our neighbors.

Let us not condemn the world, but let us proclaim to a broken and hurting world, God's forgiveness and grace.

We want it to be public record that since we are a sinful people that we will not always be as quick to welcome as we should. Let us be quick to admit our sin and seek forgiveness. May God give us the grace to welcome and forgive one another as Christ has welcomed and forgiven us.

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* The welcoming church is Custer Lutheran Fellowship, a congregation of grace and social action and great preaching in Custer, South Dakota. The document was penned by (then) Pastor Chuck Hazlett, but adopted by the whole congregation. (We might edit or state some of it differently today, but this was thirty years ago!) Thanks, Chuck.

LOSING MY RELIGION

Sermon preached on the occasion of my retirement from First English Lutheran Church, Faribault, Minnesota; and from full-time ministry.


I went to four years of college and four years of seminary, and then I came to University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis, and Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Anchorage, and now, for 24 years, to First English Lutheran Church, to learn how to become a pastor.

As with all good education, what I learned most – at Augustana College and the University of Minnesota and Luther Seminary – was how to learn. So my life among you has been a sort of graduate school. You were my teachers (and you paid me!). If I throw into the mix thirty-six years of the siren song of good books new and old, a collection of tremendously smart and supportive and challenging colleagues (within and beyond these walls), and a good dose of life experience, I am happy to report that I have been and continue to be a life-long learner.

Of course the chief textbook in this great life class is the Bible, the chief teacher, the Holy Spirit. The lesson goes on. As Luther said about baptism we can say about our faith: We have enough to study and learn all our lives long. (And my view of heaven is that God will answer all our questions, solve all those perplexities, and then he’ll say, “Now, how about this one…?” And we’ll be off again – questing, learning!)

I add to this philosophy of life-long learning two other philosophies, learned from colleagues, that I have found to be true: The one is from my friend in Anchorage, Pastor JoAnn Post, who once said, as we gathered with others at a preachers’ text study, “I can’t preach on this text until I figure out how it changes me!” (Now, there is a reason for study and pondering and praying and talking with you and with colleagues: “How does this text change me!”) The other is similar, from another colleague: “Every time you open that book, expect to find something new.” Oh, and I do, and I pray you do, too.

Let me talk about a pastor’s adventures in finding something new, again and again.

I remember a time – just a few years ago – that the new thing I found – that dawned on me – when the assigned gospel was Jesus’ charge to remove the log from my own eye before the speck in my brother’s – was that this log-removing is a life-long project!

I have to confess that, as a good religious boy, I had sort of loosely assumed that somehow I could make quick work of getting this log out my eye and then I could turn and work on you. But then, I thought, “When, exactly – would that be? When, exactly, can I say, ‘OK, log gone; now I get to judge you!’” When indeed? Log-removing is a lifetime task. “Judge not lest ye be judged” is another way that someone – Oh, yes, Jesus – put it.

And that’s another thing, another thing that I have learned, another way in which I have been changed. The more I get to know Jesus, the less religious I am. The more I get to know the Bible, the less religious I am. The more my faith is deepened, the less religious I am. This is not as heretical as it sounds; for the truth that came to me – that has been there from the beginning – is that the Bible is not a book of religion, but of life. In fact, in a way, the Bible is a very anti-religious book -- Old Testament and New.  (If you know someone who says, “I don’t go in for this religion stuff,” you might say, “Have I got a book for you!”) What does God say through the prophet Amos? “I take no delight in your solemn assemblies, take away from me the noise of your songs; let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” So much for religion.

And Jesus: “You are sitting in church and there you remember that your brother has something against you? What are you doing sitting in church? Go – be reconciled to your brother!” So much for religion. Jesus’ harshest words were for the most religious people of his day: “You talk about my teachings with your mouth, you honor me with your lips, but you don't do the things I say to do. In vain you worship me, teaching human commandments as the doctrine of God.” So much for religion.

The word religion has an honorable meaning and background, but it is one of the most misunderstood and misused in our vocabulary. Rather than a set of rules, as Pastor Mike reminded us last week, reading in James: “Here is true religion – to take care of the widows and orphans.” James is echoing Jesus in today’s gospel: “Good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free…,” and Amos – true religion is “let justice roll down….”

And justice means that I am called to a life bigger than myself, I’ve been freed from a fearful, selfish concern for my own life, freed in Christ. Justice, righteousness (the rightness of things) means I am called to look out for the life of the widow, the orphan, the poor, the oppressed. As someone said at election time, the question, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” is not a Christian question. (It's just selfishness.) The Christian question is, “Is my neighbor better off…? Are the poor better off?” Let justice roll down.

So if it’s not about religion – in fact if the Bible is an anti-religious book, and faith is something other than “religion” – then what is it about? Life. There is no intricate word play needed here; Jesus says it quite directly: “I have come that you may have life – life in all its abundance.” How dare we turn the richness of this faith into religious rules – especially rules that we can direct at other people? It is the wholeness of life itself that Jesus invites us – and all – into.

It is religious rules that drove the nails into the cross, but the tables are turned, for, as Paul says, the law itself is nailed to the cross with Christ. It is religious rules that drove the nails – the gift of resurrection is the gift of life. And, in Paul’s striking image, we see the law book fluttering in the breeze, nailed to the cross. No intricate wordplay, no twisted interpretation needed. Paul says quite directly, “Christ is the end of the law.”

Martin Luther had a liberating, life-changing experience when – lost in his own despair and sinfulness – he read, in Romans, that we are forgiven and saved as a free gift of God’s grace, and not by rules of repentance. My life and my revelation is not as dramatic as Luther’s, but I felt something similar when I read, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison,” that “Jesus didn’t come to make us religious – he came to give us life!” But it wasn’t new with Bonhoeffer – it’s what Jesus had told us all along.

One part of a “religious” life is a kind of base selfishness: I want to keep these rules so that I, personally, can live forever. But if God’s grace is enough, if my salvation is a free gift, then what becomes of a life of rule-keeping? Well, for one thing, as Mike said last week, “I can’t do it -- I cannot do it!” For another, I am called not to religion, but to life – life that is given away freely for the sake of my Lord Jesus Christ and for the sake of others, in which I discover all that life can be. And more than that, in baptism I am born into the life of Christ. How I live is not a matter of rules, but identity. I’m a child of God! I’m a son of the king! Living this life is who I am!

As another of my mentors, Big Jeff Rohr of blessed memory, once said (in another post-graduate moment that taught me something new), “I trust God to his promises of the life to come, but living the Christian life is reward enough.”

Paul says that “Faith, Hope, and love abide,” and the greatest of these is love. I don’t see religion in that list.

And so, this is not a religious assembly. It is the “body of Christ.” It is an assembly of faith, hope, and love, where “nothing in my hand I bring simply to thy cross I cling.” Where we open-handedly and open-heartedly receive life – life in all its abundance – in the name of Jesus Christ, through whose Spirit we learn something new – are changed – every day.

HOLIER THAN THOU

Jesus promised us the kingdom; what did we get? The Church!

                                                                                                ~Adolph Harnack

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda. (The church, always reformed, always in need of reforming.)  ~an expression of the Protestant Reformation

I am a hopeful ecumenist, encouraged by the apparent waning or blurring of denominationalism, so it always both startles and bothers me when I realize that I am still aggravated by a few issues of the sixteenth century Lutheran reformation—issues such as the nature of the priesthood.

This came to mind a few months ago while watching a 60 Minutes segment on the priest sex scandal in Ireland, and more recently on the occasion of the announced resignation of Pope Benedict, during whose "watch" the Church's response to these scandals came under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

Let me be quick to acknowledge that there have been plenty of sexual boundary violators in my own Lutheran fold, and I agree that the solution to this Roman Catholic catastrophe has to be found within the Roman Catholic Church and not in finger-pointing suggestions from protestant onlookers, even as I, ironically, humbly offer an observation based on Lutheran theology. So, to the possible challenge, “What gives you the gall to say anything at all about this?” I can only reply that what follows is the same thing I offer my Roman Catholic friends in conversation over coffee.

Also, I understand the Lutheran Church to be a reform movement within the Church Catholic (Martin Luther never intended to start a new “church”), and it is in that spirit that I have the temerity to comment.

Although the cause of each case of sexual abuse has to do with the mental or sexual health of each individual priest involved (and leads critics within the Roman system to wonder about an approach to priest-formation that perhaps engages young men at a too-early stage in their psycho-sexual development), and although the strictures of celibacy are an easy target for speculation (an issue beyond the scope of this essay), the thing that makes sexual abuse by priests a grave spiritual crisis for Roman Catholics is the ontological holiness of the priesthood.

Some will hear this as an understatement of the obvious, others will say, “Huh?” Let me explain.   I know that “ontological” is a big old sophomore philosophy term, but it’s at the heart of this sad situation. It is a word that has to do with the very essence of being – of one’s nature. In Roman Catholic doctrine, the priest, at his ordination, becomes a holier person in his essential self, in his “being.” Compared to the laity, he is, quite literally, “holier than thou.” He is, in fact, holy in the same way that Christ is divine while still being human. In the words of John Cardinal O’Connor:

We become priests at ordination. There is an "ontological change" in our spiritual nature. Such is a profound mystery. Is it too bold an analogy to compare the change to Christ the Son of God's retaining His Divinity while becoming a man? At ordination an ontological change takes place. (Emphasis the cardinal’s.)[1]

This perceived holiness not only makes a trusting person vulnerable, it also elevates the criminal act to a crisis of faith for Roman Catholic laity and a crisis of integrity (not to mention public relations) for the hierarchy. As a laywoman in the 60 Minutes piece puts it, “They covered it up because the priest is supposed to be perfect.” (In Ireland, these ontologically superior beings are now allowed to be in the presence of children only under the supervision of another adult!) Although refreshingly open, the archbishop in the 60 Minutes interview doesn't address the issue of elevated priestly holiness. To my observation, it is never mentioned in churchly or journalistic discussions of this matter. But it is central.

By contrast, the reformation view is that all Christians are priests (needing no intermediary to approach the Divine), and that a member of the clergy is one of these priests who is ordained to a certain function (the care and ministry of word and sacrament), not to a different level of holiness. If the pastor plays a spiritually important role, it is because the word and sacraments, not the person, are important. What happens at ordination is a call to do a job for the community, not a transformation of one’s being.

  

For good biblical and practical reasons, a pastor is – and ought to be – expected to live an “exemplary” life. But even though a kind of folk-theology causes many a protestant layperson to think of the pastor as especially “holy,” Roman Catholic doctrine assures everyone – the layperson, the hierarchy, and the priest himself that he, in fact, is, and bases the priest-people relationship on this holiness.

When a protestant pastor commits an abuse, great damage ensues (worthy—because it’s in my own clan—of a much hotter essay than this), and each individual case is every bit as devastating as that perpetrated by a Roman Catholic priest. But, I suggest, it seems not to have the effect of a church-wide (or world-wide) spiritual crisis because of the ultimate leveling of function (vs. ontology); the Lutheran pastor is not, in the final analysis, understood to be holier than the parishioners he serves.

What is beginning to sound like a lecture is actually an expression of frustration. And to the charge, “You’re just rehashing a centuries-old debate,” I plead guilty. I continue to hope and pray for the healing of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic breach. I worship lovingly with my Roman Catholic friends. But ecumenism means speaking honestly to one another from the strengths of our traditions, and in this case Martin Luther got it right. Roman Catholic priests need to come down an ontological peg (while the Church itself comes to honest terms with the causes of this epidemic). Of course only a new reformation will allow this. It happened before; it will happen again. Semper reformanda.

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[1] Vatican article.

A POLITICS BORN OF FAITH? OR A FAITH BORN OF POLITICS?

In the last few days I have had conversations along the following lines:

• A multiple e-mail exchange with a man who disagreed strongly with a point I had made in a sermon, contending that I had inappropriately crossed a line from religion to politics.*
• A phone call from a young woman who thanked me for addressing “these difficult issues.” (She was referring, in part, to the same sermon.)
• A question from a parishioner wondering if our church was going to tell people how to vote (in favor of an amendment to ban gay marriages) like the Catholic Church was doing in a DVD from the bishop which had been mailed out to all Catholics.
• A conversation with a man who was grateful to hear that our church wasn’t going to “kick anybody out” for being homosexual. (He is a straight man.)

These conversations bring to mind three conundrums (conundri?) I have pondered over the years, and increasingly these days:

1. CAN YOU AND SHOULD YOU AVOID POLITICS IN PREACHING?

The only way to avoid upsetting somebody in the pew is to stick to sweet Jesus stories and general religious pabulum. The problem with that is that you cannot, then, be a biblical preacher. Although I have never set out to preach a “political” sermon, honest biblical preaching will intersect with the world of politics – that is, the real world. (The alternative, perhaps, is to be the preacher who is “so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly use.”) So although I am not as courageous as an old friend who sometimes claims, tongue-in cheek, that he is disappointed that no one has walked out in the middle of a sermon lately, I do try to “preach the text” and let the political chips fall where they may. (The “text” being that assigned in the Common Lectionary – an objective approach to surveying the scriptures over a three year period – and not a passage selected by me.) Ironically, I also agree with Martin Luther, who said, “After every sermon, the preacher should fall on his knees and ask God to forgive him for what he’s just done.”

2. HOW DO WE BECOME WHO AND WHAT WE ARE?

Many (not all) disagreements with a preacher’s message have to do with one’s place (preacher and hearer alike) on a liberal-conservative spectrum. Often (not always) one who is conservative theologically will also be conservative in politics (and vice-versa). But how, really, does one become liberal or conservative? To say, “It’s the way you were brought up” is too simple. My parents were moderate Republicans, my grandfather was a Republican state legislator, I am a liberal Democrat in my politics and, I suppose, open-minded and “progressive” in theology. I had a loving relationship with my parents and never consciously rebelled against them for the sake of rebelling. My confirmation pastor – a significant and positive influence in my life – was orthodox Lutheran in his theology (although he did teach us, in 1959, that “there is no conflict between Genesis and evolution,” which is about as much as he said on the subject). I don’t recall a sermon that addressed any political issues of the day. He was no firebrand.

Was I liberalized by Vietnam? By the general milieu of a college campus? (But my most influential political science professor had served in the Republican Eisenhower administration.) By a religion class that introduced me to the wide possibilities inherent in biblical criticism and theology? (If so, what made me open to such ideas?) It is not my intention to go on about “me,” but I do so with the assumption that I may be a somewhat representative example of this kind of complicated development and these kinds of spiritual-psychological-physiological questions.

I am intrigued by the current hypothesis that there may be a genetic component to all this. I emphasize “component,” because as I read the theory the idea is that, if involved at all, genetics is only a part of the mix. In any event, my understanding of myself as a liberal seems to me to be even more deep-seated (or inborn?) than my self-understanding as a Christian. Is it genetic?

3. …THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?

Which leads to the third conundrum. I have sometimes maintained that I am a liberal because I am a Christian. I know only too well that there are millions of people who would aver that they are conservative because they are Christian. But which is it? Does my Christianity lead me into a certain understanding of politics? Or have my politics influenced me to be a certain kind of Christian?

And you?
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*The specific point my friend took issue with was this statement in my sermon: “There are over 450 passages in the Bible that have to do with economic justice and care for the poor. Some-times people ask me, 'Pastor, how does the Bible apply to my daily life?' Well, here’s one way. One way that all those passages about hunger and justice can apply to your life: When you enter the voting booth, whether you are Republican, Democratic, or Independent, you can ask yourself, 'Is this vote I’m about to cast going to benefit the poor?'” 

(Since writing this post, I have read "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion," by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt's research-based analysis offers a very convincing thesis regarding the issue of his title.)