Don’t flay the sheep.

Hometown Heroes

Luke 4:21-30

Jeremiah 1:4-19

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

San Carlos, CA

Prophetic speaking is hard work. It’s hard to hear the call; it’s hard to carry through and speak the truth; and then there are the consequences when people actually hear what your going to say.

And, it’s also no wonder that, when we hear prophecy, we find a way to clean it up, make it a little less offensive.

Take Rosa Parks, for example. She’ll be appearing in countless school assemblies for Black History month. The seamstress who finally decided she was just too tired to give up her bus seat for a white man and launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. At the school where I taught in Chicago, our school president had been part of the Selma to Montgomery march as a young man so we were pretty serious about Black History month! But even there, the school assembly image of Rosa Parks was a sweet third grader playing Mrs. Parks, her classmates the bus passengers and the driver. And as soon as the confrontation on the bus happened, they all linked arms and sang, “We Shall Overcome.” (It made me cry and giggle at the same time.)

Just in time for Black History month there’s a new book out about Rosa Parks, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. In a column this week in the NYTimes, Charles Blow writes about how this book shatters our simplified, sweetened image of Mrs. Parks .

“Rosa’s family sought to teach her a controlled anger, a survival strategy that balanced compliance with militancy.”

Parks’ grandpa would sometimes sit on the porch with his rifle just in case the Klan showed up. She liked to join him because: “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.” Once, as a child, when a white man threatened her, she picked up a brick and threatened him right back. She was raised in the Marcus Garvey Black Nationalist movement, and unsure that white people and black people really could live together, so while she fought for justice, she didn’t think there could really be peace between races. Her views moderated later in life, about the time of the bus incident. But she was not just an exhausted, beaten down seamstress. She was a dynamo who had been working hard in the prophetic civil rights movement for years. At the same time that this portrait of her deepens my respect, it also reminds me that the people who worked so hard for justice couldn’t be cute and cuddly. They were a force to be reckoned with. And they were a force that was trying to turn the world on it’s head.

We can pretty it up. But seeking justice is…almost scary.

Sometimes we get stuck thinking of Jesus as one who is only meek and mild. (A few years ago, there was a book whose title I loved: Jesus, Mean and Wild.) If you read our gospel lesson this morning very carefully, you’ll notice that Jesus is the one who actually picks the fight here.

When he puts down the scroll, people think well of him. That comment, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” is perhaps misread as a put down. They are impressed. He picked a lovely, poetic piece of Scripture. He read well. A hometown boy, grown up, so well spoken…

But Jesus doesn’t take the compliment. Instead, he gets up, and gets angry.  They haven’t really heard what he is saying.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In other words, the whole world is about to turn upside down. And Jesus, the hometown boy, is the one who’s going to do it.

The people who know him best are not going to be thrilled with the results. They’re going to say: why didn’t you do it this way? Why didn’t you work the wonders here that you did in Capernaum (if you read the next chapter, you’ll learn that Jesus hasn’t even gone to Capernaum yet…he’s picking the fight before all the evidence is in!)

Hearing hard truths from the hometown boy isn’t easy, for the people or Nazareth…or for us.

I wonder sometimes if we have gotten all too familiar with Jesus. We celebrate his birth and watch him grow up. He is at the core of who we are as Christians. Is he our hometown hero? And can we really hear what he is saying? If epiphany has been the season of opening our eyes, really figuring out what Jesus is all about, have we seen, and have we heard, what Jesus is trying to tell us?

If we never feel a bit disturbed by what Jesus has to say, we are probably too comfortable. If it never costs us anything to follow Jesus, we might have misunderstood the directions. Maybe we, too, should be waiting for Jesus to pick a fight with us…

And that’s not even the hardest part of this. It would be one thing if we only had to hear the hard truths that Jesus has for us. But in this world that God is turning upside down, we are called to be disciples…

…and prophets.

It’s hard to hear what a prophet has to say. It’s even harder to be the one to say it. So many of those called to be prophets come up with excuses:  Isaiah says he’s not good enough; Jonah runs in the other direction; and Jeremiah claims he’s too young.

God doesn’t put up with the excuses, though. When I was teaching, I gave students an assignment to write an essay about the interaction between God and Moses. Moses holds a special place among the Hebrew prophets: he’s the only one who ever spoke to God face to face. But Moses was also the master of complaining about his call to be a prophet. There was one essay that pretty much summed the whole thing up in it’s title: “God Don’t Want No Lip.” (It was a horrible piece of writing, I’m pretty sure it was scribbled out in a study hall earlier that day…but with a title like that, you have to pad the grade just a little!)

The hardest call is to be a prophet in the places where you are at home.

If you look at the way prophets function in the Bible (and, really, everywhere else), there are internal prophets and external prophets. An external prophet comes in from the outside. God calls Jonah, for example, to go far away from home.

And then there are prophets who function from the inside. In the place they feel most at home. Samuel, for instance, is all but an official member of the court of the King of Israel.

In many ways, it’s easier to be an external prophet, because you don’t have to maintain a relationship with the people you are sent to. You can leave when you’re done upsetting them.

But if you are called to speak hard truths in a place you call home: where you live, where you work, where you go to school, among friends…you have to make sure you are heard without being sugarcoated, and try not to get thrown off the cliff.

Friends, here’s the hard truth about our calling to follow Jesus.

There are no excuses: age or ability, distance or difficulty.

And there’s no putting it in a neat little box that we only take out on Sunday morning.

We are called to bring gospel and grace into the world, into every place we go, no matter how new or how familiar that place is to us.

Sometimes people will speak comfort. Sometimes the broken will feel mended. The prisoners set free. The poor lifted up.

And sometimes we will hear the hard truths, and be called to give voice to them.

But never forget: God’s hand has touched us. There is nothing to fear. And

Through Jesus Christ, God has put his words in our mouths.

Thanks be to God.

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Peep-toes, red nailpolish, and fishnet stockings

Before seminary preaching-lab classes, my classmates and I noticed that each of us had our little “thing” that we had to do before we were on. Adjust your tie; pull up your socks; fingers through the hair; chew on a cough drop.

I redid my lipstick. This would not be particularly notable, except that I was one of fewer than ten women in my graduating M.Div class. (I was trained and ordained in a denomination that had just started ordaining women. Here’s the story of how I later became PC(USA).)

My classmates and I laughed about this. One said, “Yeah, I guess it makes sense. You’d have to do something different than us.”

There’s a temptation, as a woman preacher, to downplay your womanliness. When younger female preachers gather, we often talk about clothes and shoes and makeup and nailpolish. Not because we are inherently vain, but I think because in any career when male has been the default, you have to figure out how to navigate yourself and your lady parts in your role.

And, true confession, I am more than a little bit vain. I would like to care less about how I look.

But I want to look female when I’m pastoring. It’s who I am. I’ve even come to enjoy the little extra bit of latitude being a woman gives me in appearance.

Yesterday morning, I was guest preaching. And just as much as preparing a sermon well, I wanted to look nice. So, after an early morning run, I took over the bathroom and worked at washing away the stay at home mama grunge. I shaved my legs. I painted my toenails a sparkly pinky-red color called (I kid you not) “after sex”. (If you think that’s too racy for a pastor to mention in public, I remind you that I remain proud of my claim to have been the pastor who said “sex” the most from the pulpit during my tenure at Fox Valley Presbyterian Church).

I wore a modest, shorter, flowy black dress, with an empire waist (because not all of us look as good post-partum as Beyonce). But I also wore patterned black hosiery and black patent peep-toe shoes with a white accent to match my stole.

I put on some lipstick and headed to church, where I put on my robe. And I preached. And, sacriligious as it may be, I hope a few of the little girls and boys sitting with me during the children’s sermon noticed the nailpolish.

I didn’t look as fierce as Beyonce did later that afternoon during the half-time show. (Not quite preaching attire.)

But that woman used her body to bring some feminine authority to an event that glorifies the male body, and normally, during airtime and commercial breaks, only shows women as sex symbols or shrews. And all this with an all-woman band and dance troupe. I so hope that the sound and lighting designers were women, too.

One of my ministry mentors, Dana Ferguson, was famous for wearing fabulous hosiery. Fishnets and bright colors and patterns, all the while looking eminently professional. I wore bright tights before I knew her (there are, fortunately, no extant photos of the time I wore banana yellow ones. It was the 90s, I was 13, this is my excuse).

But I kept wearing them as an homage to Dana.

And I now realize that she didn’t wear them just to be quirky. She had really nice legs. God-given ones. And she made sure her congregation was OK with her nice legs. In fact, I think they were rather proud of Dana’s legs.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go touch up my toenails.

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Suburban People Need Jesus, Too

A not-really-so-long time ago, I was trying to figure out what my next ministry step would be. I had spent two years teaching religion at a school in one of Chicago’s not so affluent neighborhoods, and I was finishing up a year working at a big (affluent) urban church. I was considering taking a position that, by church standards, was extremely cushy: associate pastor at a medium to large suburban church in great financial shape. I needed to take that job. My husband was in grad school. I was pregnant. We were up to our ears in student loan debt (still are!).

I felt like a sell-out. I loved living in the city. I grew up living either in cities or semi-rural areas. Mile after mile of uninterrupted suburb was not exactly familiar to me. And I loved city ministry. When the principal at the school interviewed me and asked why I wanted the job, I said, “The Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. God loves cities. I love cities.” (She liked that. I got the job.) (By the way: anyone know where that quote is from? Because I know it’s not original.)

In the middle of that internal debate, a good and wise mentor said to me, “Suburban people need Jesus, too.”

I took the suburban job.

Eight years later, I am a blonde, thirty-something mother of two, who lives in the suburbs and doesn’t work. I don’t have a minivan or an SUV (actually, we only have one car in our family, which I feel ups our hipster quotient a bit). And we don’t own a house. And my husband works in the tech industry so at least we’re a little cutting edge that way. Money is tight for us, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re affluent. I’m mostly your conventional suburban mom at this point.

And I’m never sure how comfortable I should be with that. Urban ministers are the cutting edge people, right? I kind of want to be an urban hipster pastor. But I have a dreadful fear of needles (I pass out when given a shot) and so there are no tattoos in my future. I am too exhausted in my role as a mother of two to tack on even the relatively short commute to one of the urban areas near where I live.  Sometimes this makes me wonder if there’s a future for me in the church. Am I just too conventional for where the (I hope) church is headed?

(And, then, of course, there’s the fact that I am simply unmotivated to get my D.Min. Apparently, this is what all the cool kid ministers are doing. I don’t have the money right now, nor a church position, which is often a pre-req for the program. And everyone around here who’s the least bit Reverend seems to have one. But that’s another issue all together.)

But here’s the thing: suburban people need Jesus, too. Affluent people need Jesus, too. (Just as much as those who are poor need Jesus, right?) And culture in the suburbs, while it might not be as cutting edge as the city, is going to catch up.

A few months ago, I met a pastor in my new town who pointed out: I am exactly the demographic she’s trying to figure out. The young, over worked, exhausted parents of children. Hanging on for dear life in our affluent suburb, sometimes both spiritually and financially.

I hope we see more and more church innovation not just in cities, but in suburbs. I don’t know what that innovation is going to be, or what’s going to work.

But I can’t wait to find out…

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More Stay At Home Reverend Liturgy

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen

St. Augustine, 4th century

Now that, my friends, is a bedtime prayer. I pray it as a way to let go of the things that, as a pastor, I’m holding onto before I go to sleep; family members, church people, neighbors and friends who I am worried about. I need to be reminded that God can take over worrying for the night. And I can get some rest.

But here in stay-at-home-Reverend-land, we are limping our way to the day when everyone goes to bed and stays in bed and there are few, if any, nighttime crises. Erik and I estimate that this will probably happen sometime around 2030, as long as our children have made it out of the house to their own apartments or dorm rooms. We look to that day with expectation.

And so this is our version of Augustine’s prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who whine or wail or wee-wee this night, and give my angels help going back to sleep. Tend the sick; give rest to weary parents; bless the bladders; shield the sheets…

(For extra fun with bedtime, you need to watch Jim Gaffigan. A few minutes in, there’s a description of bedtime in his house. The man gets it.)

Jim Gaffigan on Parenting

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Membership or Mishpaha

A few years ago, I invited Bob and Laura Keeley to my church to speak to parents about their book, Helping Our Children Grow in Faith. (What? You’ve not read this book? Get a copy and read it!)

That night, they mentioned the word “mishpaha.” It’s Hebrew for “family.” Kind of. Because it doesn’t mean the two parents and their kids sort of family. Or even just the addition of aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and cousins. It’s a term that comes from a time and a place when the whole village was your family. (And, yes, they were probably all related to you, but…)

A few months after Bob and Laura visited us, one of our recent high school graduates stood up in front of the whole church on a Sunday morning, and told everyone that he had learned this word mishpaha from Bob and Laura. And then, tears streaming down his face, he said, “You are all my mishpaha.”

I get a little nervous about family language in the church. If we’re talking family, as in the romanticized Victorian notion of it, that’s not exactly what church is all about.

But if we’re talking mishpaha, that’s another matter.

When we no longer live in villages where we are all related to each other, we might need some mishpaha.

One of my guilty TV pleasures is the show Parenthood. It’s about 4 adult children and their kids and the grandparents. I watch it for the mishpaha scenes. The scenes where the whole family gets together for dinner in Grandma and Grandpa’s big backyard; or around the kitchen counter island; or in the park to play tag-football. Those are pictures of the New Creation to me.

On this week’s episode, the mishpaha scene was in a judge’s chambers, where an adoption was finalized. And instead of the promises being made simply between the boy and his parents, everyone chimed in with a promise. (Cue the waterworks.)

And I found myself thinking: I wish, instead of talking about church membership, we talked about church mishpaha. And I wish what we did in worship when we welcome new church folks into the mishpaha looked like this. The liturgical wheels are churning…

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The Stay at Home Reverend

No, really, my Master of Divinity degree is still quite useful at those times when I’m fully a stay at home parent.

For instance, I can use my knowledge of liturgy to write collects appropriate to various occasions.

Like this one:

Creator God, who tamed the chaos of water, and brought about all that is; who made human beings in your image, and graced us with creativity and curiosity: in your great mercy, grant that my home’s plumbing may be protected from any harm, that whatever my toddler chose to flush down the toilet when I wasn’t looking would make its way safely to the sewer, so that we may live in peace in our house, and work to glorify you in all that we do and say, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

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Taking the Boobies to Church

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

–Christina Rosetti

Last Christmas, in the middle of an eight month hiatus from church pastoring, my family attended “The Big Church” where I’d had the privilege to work for awhile years before. It was a good safe place for us just to go to church for awhile. We already knew and  loved people there and the pastors, many of them dear friends, let us just be a family at church.

On Christmas Eve, Zora was an angel in the children’s pageant. (The pastor who organizes this pageant should have half an eternity of spa services lined up in the hereafter.) While the rest of us were waiting, crushed into a crowded pew, ten month old Abram decided it was time for  snack. It was way too crowded and noisy for nursing.

The Big Church was in the middle of a monumental, desperately needed construction project last year. Sunday School classes were squeezed into tiny corners of the historic building; the nursery was in a sitting room; hallways were crowded and chaotic. The place was busting at the seams.

In other words, there was really no convenient place to nurse a baby.

So, I found the quietest hallway corner I could, sat on an old pew, wrapped my winter coat around me and the boy, and settled in to nurse.

It was a great hallway, mostly. Mostly, because it was out of the traffic pattern of the thousand or so people cramming themselves into the pews for church.

But not perfectly private. It turns out that with the construction re-routing, this hallway was the most convenient little back way for the pastors to get to their studies.

Which is how two of the male pastors wound up leaning in for their customary cheek-kisses, without noticing until they were pretty close that I was feeding the boy.

To their credit, they didn’t freak out. One of them offered to let me use his office (because the hallway was a little drafty).The head pastor laughed a little when I mentioned that I found it funny that I had a hard time finding a spot to nurse a baby in a church on Christmas Eve.

I was never a very public nurser in churches with my babies. With the first one, I had my own office to nurse in. My second baby (who is now an almost two year old, painting his head with my lipstick, and trying to dance on the dining room table as I write this) was an active eater. He liked to throw things and “re-adjust” any sort of blanket while eating.

I also get that it might be a little uncomfortable to see your pastor nursing. It shouldn’t be, but I get it.

That said, I’m convinced nursing should be easy to do in churches. There should be comfy places for moms to sit (and, perhaps not the bathroom…a corner of the kitchen would be more appropriate!). There should be private space. But there should also be public space. No one should tisk tisk at a mom who has to feed a baby during church, whether that baby takes a bottle filled with formula or a breast-full of milk. I remember one church I went to that had an unofficial nursing pew in the back: it wasn’t uncommon to see a line up of mothers and babies back there.

And there should never be shame. (Good for my friends and colleagues who didn’t freak out last Christmas Eve when they greeted more of me that they were expecting.)

But maybe there should even be more than that.

Maybe we should be celebrating this reminder of the incarnation.

This article by Rachel Marie Stone, points it out brilliantly. So does a chapter in my friend Katherine’s marvelous book (which you should read, of course).

The image of Mary feeding Christ is a reminder of human Jesus was. It’s something we all do some version of as infants. And right there, Jesus, God incarnate, had enough to be nourished.

Besides that, it’s an image of God and us. (Julian of Norwich is famous for using this imagery.)

So, this is not to ignite debates about breast milk or formula. But shouldn’t we be encouraging glimpses of this reminder of God’s love for us in church?

Here’s to hoping you can hear an infant or two slurping their way through a meal in the back of church on Christmas Eve!

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Radical Compassion

I have a six year old who is in the first grade a school that is demographically similar to Sandy Hook. Her class is filled with children with the same names as those of the babies who died at that school.

It is incredibly easy for me to have compassion for those children, for their mamas, for their daddies, for the teachers and classmates who survived.

20 children. 6 teachers. So many friends and family. I cry and pray for them as easily as I cry and pray for myself.

I saw a photo of a Sunday worship prayer station an acquaintance planned. There were 28 candles.

20 children. 6 teachers. And the shooter and his mother.

28 candles is not easy. It’s radical compassion.

And this is what’s hard about the Jesus thing. It is so easy to have compassion for the babies. And for the mother.

But what about the shooter?

When I was figuring out how to tell my daughter about the shootings, I got stuck on how to talk about the shooter. I knew she would ask why someone would do something like this.

Every once in a while, she calls her brother “bad” and I remind “People aren’t bad. They do bad things.” (I’m sure this will be an annoying parent phrase she reminds me of later.)

Do I really think that goes for everyone, not just my dear, sweet baby boy, but someone who would shoot children?

Zora was shocked when I told her, “Why would he DO that?”

So I told her, “This man who did it, he must have been so sad and his brain had gotten so sick for him to be able to do something that horrible. It was a really bad thing.”

And then I thought about it: I really do believe this, that God created us good, but that we do bad things because of sin and brokenness.

And in order for a human being, wonderfully and fearfully made by God, to do something this horrible, the only way I can understand that is that they have spiraled so far into some deep, dark place that they cannot get out of.

Our bodies and brains and the chemicals that course through them are part and parcel of how we are created, good. But they are also affected by the soul sickness that we all carry.

And so I think of mental illness and neurological disorders not as something that an individual is somehow responsible for, but as part of the great infection of sin in this world. Much like cancer, that horrible, horrible thing that takes over bodies and destroys them.

And I can only begin to imagine how this mother and father and brother struggled as they tried to figure out what was going on with their boy.

And how this boy must have been tormented and betrayed by his own biology.

I know and love people who struggle mightily with mental illness and with neurological disorders. And, yes, most of them are perfectly safe.

But this is not just about guns. It’s about how we care for each other. How we care not just for our own families, and just for the people who it’s easy to care about. How we are as a society (which, to my mind, means how we care with our tax dollars).

26 candles is easy. 27 isn’t too hard, either.

But there were 28 victims. Hard as that is to say.

My spiritual discipline this week is radical compassion. Prayer not just for the families that grieve sweet children.

But also prayer for families that grieve the tragedy of the sweet child who grew into a young man who fell into such a dark place that he could do something so horrible.

May God cradle us, sinners all, in strong loving arms, and carry us to a place where there is no darkness.

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Baby, it’s cold inside

OK, I’m going to admit it. We do need heat here in California. This family of Northerners has been schooled.

It turns out that houses of a certain vintage here (late 1940s) seem to not have insulation. Or storm windows. And, while our pipes aren’t going to freeze, it gets chilly at night. 37 degrees is nothing to sniff at if your house is essentially uninsulated.

Our house has a heater. That’s right. A heater. One heater, a floor to ceiling unit, about 2 feet wide, that sits in the wall of our living room, and then back through the wall to the little hallway between our bedrooms and the bathroom. It’s brand name? “Cozy.”

I knew it looked familiar…it’s the same as the heater in the house my Dad grew up in. When he visited, he told us it was not really good for much other than standing in front of while you changed your clothes so you don’t freeze in the brief moments when you’re naked.

We caved and turned it on this morning when Erik discovered he could see his breath in the kids’ room. And it got warmer. And there was much less shivering.

I caught Erik standing, luxuriating in front of it. The cat is getting cozy with the Cozy, too.

Thank goodness we kept our wool sweaters, though!

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On Sandy Hook and Luther’s Second Use of the Law

(When I posted on Calvin’s third use of the Law and Santa Claus, I really had no intention of another “use of the law post”; and certainly not for this reason…but, here we go)

As I watch the Christian social media reactions to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I’m seeing some posts along these lines:

“If we just had God in the schools, this wouldn’t happen.”

“There is no solution but the return of Christ.”

The first sentiment is simply a theological error. God is in the schools, whether we have separation of Church and State or not. God is there because God is omnipresent. God is there because there are God-following children and teachers and administrators there. And when horrible things happen, God is especially there, because God is present with the brokenhearted. (And, yes, I know, too, that there is the question, “How could God be there an let this happen?” That’s an issue for another post. And it is a serious question.)

The second one I agree with…to a point.

I agree: sin and suffering in our world will not end without the full presence of Jesus. This is the point of Advent. We recall the waiting for the birth of Jesus. We celebrate that coming of Christ. But in the meantime, we also are waiting for the second coming of Christ.

Some Christians disagree with me on this one, but I don’t think humans are capable of fixing everything before that return.

However, this does not mean we just give up and let the world go down the path to utter destruction. God calls to be make the world better. God works through us to make the world better.

So, here’s where I get to Martin Luther. My friend Elizabeth (Lutheran pastor extraordinaire) pointed out, a better simple version of Luther’s second use would be this:

“The Law helps us create an ordered, civil society.”

Luther felt that it was actually part of the government’s God-given responsibility to help with this. (Even if we wouldn’t be able to get it perfect in time for the return of Christ.)

There’s obviously nothing in the Bible about guns. But, there’s plenty about how to live together as a society. And that includes taking care of each other, and taking measures to curb violence.

As Christians, we are not called to vote for a specific political party or platform. But we are called to look for ways to help and support our society and our government use the Law to curb our tendency toward sin, as individuals and as a group.

As far as I can tell, that means that we need to do some work, as Christians, to look at the myriad of things we could do make it harder for people to obtain weapons that are clearly designed for killing human beings, quickly and efficiently. How we can make sure that those who do own guns are prepared to be safe and wise about how they use them. And how we can take care of people who have spiralled so deep into mental illness that they would be able to contemplate doing something like this. How we function as a communities that look out for each other. There are so many sides of this, and the actions we need to take involve our government, our schools, our community organizations, our churches.

And, yes, as imperfect human beings, we won’t get the whole thing sorted out perfectly. But we can do better.

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