Pastor's Notes

Pastors are one of the last breed of generalists. That is we are the proverbial “Jack of all trades, masters of none”. While we may have our own individual forte’s, pastoral job descriptions for parish pastors are all very similar. Preach, teach, baptize, lead worship, bury the dead, visit the sick and wounded, and drink a lot of coffee.

One thing we all do is write. We write newsletter articles, columns, letters, thank you notes, teaching outlines and sermons. We all seem to have our own style in doing these writings, but we all seem to do them.

I couldn’t begin to tell you if I have a “style.” When call committees have asked about my preaching style, I just respond that I actually have several styles. Perhaps that is my style.

One thing I have experienced over the years in sitting down before a paper with pen in hand, or later at a typewriter, and, more recently, sitting down at a computer, is that I so often begin with a sentence or two of introduction, but have absolutely no idea where I am going with whatever I am writing. (Perhaps you agree that far too often such lack of direction shows).

After that sentence or two, somehow a third sentence flows out…then a fourth, then a fifth…soon I have a paragraph or two and away I go. Sometimes it seems words appear on the computer’s monitor before I even think them. I’m not talking about that annoying autocorrect, I mean the words appear seemingly before I consciously think them.

Before long I am struggling with some kind of summary….what did I say? What point(s) were made? What is the writing about? Generally I never write something, then send it to the printer or email to the intended recipient. Usually there are rewrites. Sometimes interminable rewrites. Sometimes what I wrote a few days ago is torn up or deleted and off I go again with other words appearing from nowhere it seems. Eventually I am satisfied enough or a deadline occurs and I must be satisfied as there is no longer time to be otherwise. It is not unheard of that as folks are settling into their chairs for worship, I am typing the final Amen on yet one more rewrite.

What a great parable for life! We all start somewhere and often end up in a place not at all like our plans, hopes, or dreams. Life comes at us and drags us along. Experiences appear and we have no idea how they got there. More importantly, we often have little idea how we got there. A small town Pennsylvania boy living most of his adult life 2,000 miles from home in and around cities and major metropolitan areas. Students who are often the first in their family to attend college, Many who have a college degree no longer working in any field close to their area of study….so many unpredictable things that happen to us in life. Good things, difficult things. Unforeseen things and unforeseen people crossing our life’s path often changing its very direction.

Coincidence? Happenstance? Subliminal choices? Overt choices and decisions? Could be. Maybe even a mixture of some of these. Yet through it all there sometimes seems to be a force at work greater than these and greater than ourselves.

Maybe ours is not to figure this out, but to run and go with it. Let those words appear before we think or type them. Let events and people speak to us. Let us be both ourselves and changed. Let us trust in all we belong to God.

“Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”

Rabbi Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) wrote the above words many decades ago. Yet still they seem to hit home much too closely today. To sum up Rabbi Heschel’s quote from my perspective, it would seem we too often see being a person of faith as primarily a state of identity. We are Christians (or Jews or Muslims, or whomever). We are. Christian is a form of identity. It is a noun.

Certainly Christianity is a form of identity as is Judaism, Islam, and other faiths. Christian can be either a noun or adjective. I am a Christian. I try to live a Christian lifestyle. Noun and adjective.

Yet being a Christian seems to also require that Christian faith be turned into a verb; that is, into doing, into action. While many might agree and see Christian as primarily a verb, an action, that too is insufficient. From where, from whom does our action spring?

These are important questions. It matters greatly in what kind of God we believe and what kind of God motivates our deeds. There is a reason Christians have different thoughts about the hot topics of today and the hot topics of days past. Christians have differing views of who God is. Too often the God we see reflects too much of ourselves and too little of God. Most Christians, for example, agree God can be angry. However we disagree over what and over whom God is angry.

This is where creeds, worship, and the discipline of the faith are useful. This is where the past can at times be instructive both in a good and not good way. This is where a faith community is helpful, in fact necessary, if the God who continues to be revealed to us is to be more than a God who is like ourselves in our current state of life. People of faith need to rub shoulders with others in the faith. People of faith need to rub shoulders with those outside the faith. Notice how you may have found agreement in the quote above, yet that quote comes from someone outside the Christian faith.

God does reveal a bit of God’s self in creeds and worship, the rituals and routines of faith. God does reveal a bit of God’s self through those around us, inside and outside the church. God also reveals God’s self as we turn our Christian identity into a verb and serve and do. How often have we jumped in to help in some instance only to discover we got more out of the service than we put into it?

Faith identity, ritual, belief, present, past, and future all have their place. But that is the point, isn’t it? They have their place. They are not alone definitive of what it means to be a Christian, to be a follower (follower is a word implying following, doing). The Christian faith is not merely to be believed. It is to be lived. It is to be a part of all our life. In living that faith belief and faith itself often are strengthened. Yet God doesn’t save our spirit or our faith. God saves us.

We have a particular ministry here that I am not sure we always recognize. Each year we receive students new to our ministry. They come from Lutheran congregations near and far. Currently one of our Lutheran students is from India.

Students from other church backgrounds, no church backgrounds, and students nominally “churched” find their way here in various ways. Last year we had three students who grew up LDS.

What will this year bring? Most likely more of the same. Yet the one group we sometimes miss are those I call refugees from less open faiths. I don’t think I coined that phrase, but if I head it somewhere, I can’t recall where. Often those refugees seek us out on their own or are invited by our students after expressing to one of our students the hostility ….yes, hostility…they experienced in another campus ministry. Often, but not always, these are LGBTQ+ students. Sometimes they are those who have rebelled at another ministry or church’s position on LGBTQ+ folks and or how they view women or race.

Yes, we have a ministry to refugees. Not always those who arrive with all their possessions packed into one small suitcase nor those whose primary language is other than English. We have served some of these kind of refugees in the past and no doubt will again in the future. The refugee ministry which we have most years reaches out and welcomes those who felt constrained or even verbally abused in some cases in some other church or campus ministry.

One that stands out to me over the years is a student from some years back. This student was invited to have coffee with other students in their ministry. The student soon discovered coffee was instead a brutal and harsh “intervention” to change this student who had let it out to the ministry that they were bi-sexual. The student was traumatized by the “coffee.”

After being invited into our ministry by one of our students who lived in the same dorm, the student gradually began to discover when we say we welcome all we mean all. After getting to know this person, I sent them to ASU counseling as they continued to experience quite a bit of anxiety from the “coffee” experience. ASU counseling, after a few sessions, sent them to PTSD counseling. That’s right, the same counseling those traumatized by war receive.

There is a happy note to this story. The offending campus ministry no longer is part of ASU’s partnered campus ministries and lots its privileges at ASU. Other campus ministries had bad experiences to report to ASU about that ministry. The even happier note is the student became active here and the counseling helped them move past their experience to embrace both college life and a life of faith.

Refugees from less open faiths. Thank you for providing welcome and a church home to those seeking a more embracing God who sees them fully as one of God’s children. It’s part of what we all do here.

“Whatever Happened to Sin?” is the title of a long ago written book by Karl Menninger, an American psychiatrist. It does seem to be a word on the endangered species of vocabulary list. Most times I hear the word outside of worship or Bible study it has to do with eating high caloric foods that clog one’s arteries. You know, “That dessert is absolutely sinful”…meaning it is really bad for you but tastes, O so good!

Sin is a useful word. It supersedes the words mistake or error. Sin is a word that connects a wrongful act with God. If I make a mistake in measuring a space for a new refrigerator, it is simply a mistake between me and the person selling new refrigerators. God isn’t really into tape measures and refrigeration.

If, on the other hand I am constructing something and cut corners simply to make something cheaper or easier with no care for safety, that can be more than a mistake. God cares greatly about people being unnecessarily put at risk.

There is actually a mistake you and I make about sin. We think sin harms another. Indeed it can and often does. That is why sometimes the best confession made is not to God but to those against whom we have sinned. Ask any 12 Step group about this.

The mistake we make regarding sin is we get the part of what sin does to others while at the same time miss the effect and the affect sin can have on us. The truth is we do sin, but sin also does us. Yes, of course others have and will sin against us and we suffer its consequences. We are well aware of that. However our own sin has consequences to ourselves. I am not talking about punishment for our sin when it causes a valued relationship to break or has some ripple effect on others. Instead I mean that our own sin even when not noticed by others has a way of striking us. Guilt builds up over time and produces nothing very healthy.

Acts and even thoughts of racism have a way of embittering us. Disbelief in science and climate change while effecting us, effects those too with power to do something about it who fail to lift a non-pollutant finger. Racism can shape us in a way few sins can do. As we live it, act it, and deny it, these forces work together on us to make us into a person whom we would acknowledge God does not want us to be.

In sin we have a force, a power, from which we cannot escape. Sin-sick we hope for an escape as we often are aware we are becoming not only one whom God does not want us to become, but also we are aware we are becoming someone whom we don’t want ourselves to become.

This is why confession and repentance are so important. We need to acknowledge our sin for the sake of neighbor and for the sake of ourselves. We need to strive to turn from this sin for the sake of neighbor and oneself. This is loving our neighbor as oneself at its best. Love of self can often be stating we are too often not all that loveable. To acknowledge this can be to love oneself and one’s neighbor more deeply.

God wants confession and forgiveness not out of a hardness of God’s heart with hopes of convicting and punishing us. God wants confession and forgiveness for a better you and me, a better neighbor, and a better world.

Sin will always do the neighbor. Sin will always do ourselves. Sin always needs as response our acknowledgement and efforts to combat sin. Let’s provide an answer to Menninger. What ever happened to sin? It did not go away. Neither did it go underground. Instead sin has lost some of its grip on us. God’s forgiveness will help with that.

Water, especially in the form of ocean waves, can be a very powerful force. Its might can be witnessed along many seacoasts. In some nations the power of the waves is harnessed to create electricity. Along all coast lines there are visible signs of water’s force.

Not all that is struck by wave action have the same reaction. Some swimmers find themselves knocked around by the waves at the beach yet on the very same waves many figure out how to float on top to body surf or catch a wave with a surfboard and use its power to their advantage.

Entire coastlines are formed in part by the force and direction of the waves. Some seem to withstand it and remain rather straight and stalwart, perhaps receding over time, but retaining their straight formation. Other coastlines are sculpted with curves, jagged edges, points and small coves teeming with lifeforms in their tide pools.

Standing on some beaches one can see many of water’s art forms. On the beach are rounded, smooth pebbles, worn and polished by time and water. However out in the water and, perhaps, on the sides of the beach can be huge rocks enjoyed by sea birds and people who feel the need to scale them. These rocks are rough and can scrape both hands and feet on attempted climbs. The same waves that made small, smooth forms also created rough-hewn, giant monoliths standing guard over the coastline. The very sand on the beaches is often a result of constant pounding until all that is left are granular flakes that were once large rock.

Life is similar to ocean waves. Life has a way of coming at us, one wave at a time. Life, like ocean waves, is relentless. It never stops coming. Some waves are larger than others. Some are caused by storms even far away. Some can come simultaneously from different directions. Life again is similar. A war in a country many could not previously have found on a blank map has affected us. Of course, not nearly as much as those living in and around the war zone, but the ripples of military strikes have reached our shores.

Sometimes we can stand strong like those majestic seaside cliffs. Sometimes we stand strong, but visibly scarred like those jagged coastline rocks. Many times what life tosses our way smooths us. We become calm, accepting, understanding and patience. Many of us have or will have physical evidence of life’s force upon us. Bent over, lines, wrinkles, gray hair, muscles and joints that no longer work as they once did, and eyesight that isn’t quite what it used to be. Some of life’s pressure creates mental issues of depression, anxiety, or fear.

We as followers of Jesus follow one of whom it is said commanded the waves and walked on water. That is, faith has a power. As life does its best at shaping and forming us, followers of Jesus have another force that molds us. Regular attention to worship, prayer, scripture and efforts to live as disciples cannot prevent the forces of life from having impact. They can, however, help us withstand those life forces, and, at times, help us become stronger, even using those forces directed against us to grow and deepen our faith and our person.

Life’s challenges are not all that has power and strength. Physics tells us to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Faith that allows us to pick ourselves up and follow again can be quite a strong opposite reaction. That is the force we disciples have given to us to encounter the actions of life and the world.