Thankful...

If you are on Facebook (and really…who isn’t on Facebook these days), you’ve probably been reading the status updates of your friends and acquaintances as they post each day during November that one thing, event or person for which they are thankful. Perhaps you’ve been participating in this ritual yourself. Good for you.

I am not making these daily posts. For some reason, I just can’t bring myself to be all that reflective alongside the latest Farmville updates, rude comics, and music videos. But I am a thankful person. Really I am.

Mostly.

Okay…mostly not thankful enough.

Just one example: The good folks here at Grace have been updating the 1970’s-era kitchen in the parsonage. Everything was torn back to the bare walls and rebuilt…new wiring and lighting, mostly new appliances, new cupboards and counters and floors…everything. The very skilled folks of this place have been doing the work themselves on nights and weekends, and they’ve been very particular about doing it well. It’s going to be wonderful. But it has been going on for more than 14 weeks, which is long enough to make one weary of not having a kitchen. Consequently, my attitude toward the project hasn’t been the most thankful or charitable…especially for the last month or so.

On the other hand: I just found out that our friend Val gets to move back home tomorrow. She was flooded out of her North Dakota parsonage back on May 23, and has been “making do” ever since. Needless to say, she’s pretty excited and thankful to be back in her own place.

The difference between these two scenarios helps me understand why thanksgiving…real thanksgiving…is so darned hard: in my sinfulness, I find it difficult to get out of my own way long enough to understand how truly blessed I am. Luther (after Augustine) identifies this as living in se curvatus, i.e. turned in on oneself, and it’s the headline symptom for the sinful life. I seem to be infected.

The cure for this infection, of course, has already been delivered. It is a gracious Savior whose redeeming work among us begins by unfolding our self-centered lives so that we might grasp both our own deep need and the emergent beauty of a cosmos being set right by unmerited and unrelenting grace. This wider and more genuine perspective on life cannot help but yield awe and thanksgiving.

Truth is: most of the time I don’t realize how good I have it. (I’m convinced, by the way, that I’m not alone in this flaw.) So thanks be to God for a glimpse of reality. And thanks be to God for Val’s homecoming. And thanks be to God for a new kitchen, and committed craftsmen, and the willingness to take the time to do things well. And thanks be to God for the opportunity to be shaped not by some anxiety about what’s missing in our lives, but by the wonder of what we have already been given.

You read it here; I won’t be posting it on Facebook.

We are one...

This past weekend, Ebenezer Lutheran Church…a sister ELCA congregation in San Francisco…held their 5^th annual Faith and Feminism conference. Certainly, the church catholic has not always heard or valued the voices of women. So opening the church to the witness and experience of women seems like a reasonable, indeed necessary, move.

Where things get dicey, however, is when the local high priestess for the pagan goddess Isis is invited to conduct a workshop, or when the treasured prayers of the church, e.g. the Lord’s Prayer, gets re-written, or when the liturgy no longer leads worshipers before the Holy Trinity but invites them into relationship with the divine feminine or Christ-Sophia. 

Hmmm.

I know. These folks are 2000 miles away from me. What should I care? But I do care. For one thing, we ostensibly share the same theological commitments as congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We are partners in the mission work of this denomination…not simply isolated local congregations. I take seriously that partnership. But I wonder how or if that partnership can continue where syncretism (not just bad local theology) seems to be the order of the day.

One of the great temptations that has come out of the ELCA’s recent actions concerning sexuality and ministry has been for local congregations to withdraw into themselves…not leaving the denomination, but ignoring the changes in policy, reducing or eliminating their financial support, and satisfying themselves with the notion that “they can’t tell us what to do” or “it won’t happen here.” I think I understand how this idea becomes plausible.

But it is, ultimately, misguided. The church is not a stand-alone operation. Like it or not, we are connected to one another in the sharing of Christ’s mission in the world. Our communities likely do not need just another idiosyncratic local service club. They need the grand story of the Gospel lived out by the whole Church for the sake of the world God loves so deeply.

Which means…rather than retreating into ourselves as though we can ignore the issues which challenge us, this is a time for the Church to get serious about the Good News which is Christ’s gift and challenge to us. We must ask hard questions about rival theologies and dubious spiritual practices. We must take loving responsibility for one another so that we might speak the one Word, even though it be through many voices.