Mrs. Jesus

If I were to give a dinner party for the most interesting people of all time, of course, Martin and Katy Luther would be at the head of the table, and on their right hand would be Ezekiel, Genghis Khan, Darwin, Handel, van Gogh and Dostoevsky. On their left would be DaVinci, Moses, Zinzindorf and the Magdalene chatting with Steve Martin and St. John; and to the evangelist’s right, at the other head of the table, he would be in rapt conversation with Catherine of Sienna, next to her husband Jesus.

I would be the water boy, and therefore, Catherine’s favorite.

Why is she at my table?

Born in 1347, the 24^th child of Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa’s 25 children, Catherine was by all accounts an extraordinary child. At seven, she claimed she was engaged to Jesus, and spent the next 15 years spurning attempts by her parents to become married by a) refusing to eat and b) cutting off all her hair, a trick she learned from her sister who died while giving birth.[1] Finally, her father “who loved her tenderly and who also feared God more than the others,” [2] relented and let her become a tertiary of the Dominicans within his own home. At 21, she was mystically married to Christ, and eventually received the stigmata (though it was visible only to her.)[3]

There are lots of saints/mystics/nuns who spurned attempts at marriage and became brides of Christ and while very few received the blessing of the stigmata, that’s not why she’s at my table.

Catherine, along with Francis of Assisi, is one of the patron saints of Italy, and up until two years ago, she was one of only two women that the Catholic Church named as Doctors of the Church. Hardly a cloistered nun, she actively engaged in the politics – church and otherwise – of her day. Based on a four hour vision she received from Christ, she counseled newly-elected Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from Avignon to Rome.[4] In order to do that, she started a popular tour of Italy to make sure it was safe and sound for the pope, whom she called “Babbo” (or “sweet father”).[5]  Gregory eventually did return to Rome, seven years after Catherine’s vision, but she felt he was not showing sufficient leadership to clean up the mess made by the French cardinals, and called him to the carpet for that. After his death, the papacy split into two – one in France, one in Rome.[6]

Not many women can call the pope “Sugar Daddy” and tell him to man-up, [7]  not to mention single-handedly change the course of Christian history through her visions; nevertheless, that is still not why she’s at my table.

Why she is at the table of the Most Interesting People of All Time, next to Jesus, is that she became Jesus’ wife. In her actions, words and deeds, Catherine of Siena transforms the images of mother and wife into a model of female empowerment through those most traditional images, even though she died a virgin and her nuptials were divine.

Along with Julian of Norwich and Frances de Sales, Catherine employs the image of motherhood to great effect when speaking of the union with God. Frances de Sales speaks of the union of God and his creatures as a mother feeds her child:

Consider, then, a beautiful little child to whom the seated mother offers her breast. It throws itself forcibly into her arms and gathers up and entwines all its little body on that beloved bosom and breast….[O]ur Lord shows the most loving breast of his divine love to a devout soul, draws it wholly to himself, gathers it in, and as it were, enfolds all its powers within the bosom of his more than motherly comfort.[8]

Julian pictured Jesus as the Mother of us all, particularly when we partake of the Sacrament:

“The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life…The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his open side, and show us there a part of the Godhead and of the joys of heaven, with inner certainty, of endless bliss.[9]

Catherine takes it one step further than de Sales’ metaphor of nursing mother, and Norwich’s sacramental union by saying that Christ is the sacrament itself. In Catherine’s vision, God is speaking:

Such a soul receives the fruit of spiritual calm, an emotional union with my (God’s) gentle nature in which she tastes milk, just as an infant when quieted rests on its mother’s breast, takes her nipple, and drinks her milk through her flesh. This is how the soul who has reached this final stage rests on the breast of my divine charity and takes into the mouth of her holy desire the flesh of Christ crucified.[10]

Catherine’s relationship with food and the communion wafer actually caused a scandal. At a certain point in her life, she subsisted solely on communion. Her biographer Raymond of Capua, wrote in great detail about Catherine’s refusal to take any food, and that if she did, her body suffered enormously: “[W]hat she had taken in had to come out by the same way as it had gone in, otherwise it caused her acute pains and swellings over most of her body.” [11] To reduce the scandal, she ate with her family once a day, but had to spit out all that chewed; even so, as she drank water, some of the bits of food that she wasn’t able to spit out came out through vomiting.[12] The only food she took in was through Holy Communion, and, apart from Ascension Day, in which she ate bread, oil and vegetables, she continued to abstain from food. Gail Corrington claims that Catherine’s ascetic fasting was a forerunner to anorexia, seeing the connection between “control of one bodily appetite (eating) by fasting, and control of another bodily appetite (sex) through abstinence.”[13]  Were she alive today, Catherine would certainly be diagnosed with an eating disorder, and anyone who feels about marriage the way Catherine did[14] is obviously sexually repressed.

            But I think there’s more to it than that.

            During our Face to Face meeting last month, Prof. Kriz had us place ourselves on a continuum of belief where mystics were concerned: if we rejected mystics as a whole, we were to stand by the West Wall; if we accepted mystics as a whole, we were to stand by the East Wall. It would be very easy to stand by the West Wall and say that a woman who does not want to marry is a closeted lesbian, to say that a woman who kowtows to no pope has delusions of grandeur, to say that a woman who devises elaborate reasons not to eat is anorexic, to say that a woman who sees herself as a bride of Christ is sexually repressed.

            I stand by the East Wall where Catherine is concerned. This woman not only thought of herself as the bride of Christ, she lived her life with the absolute confidence of Mrs. Jesus. You need to get married to continue the family line, her family said. I’m already betrothed, thank you. You need to live in a convent; no, actually I’m fine right here at home. You need to be cloistered; no, I need to work with the poor in the world. The church and the pope are hopelessly corrupt; no, my husband showed me that bringing the holy church back to Rome is his will, and to that end, I will serve as a prophet and diplomat to effect the future of my husband’s church.

            It is not Catherine’s abstinence that inspires me, not her quirks or her visions that inspire me, it is her steadfast devotion to Jesus that blows me away, her utter inability to see anything else – food, men, family, power – as important as her love for Mother Jesus.

            And that’s why she would be at my table.

            That, and because she caught the head of her martyred friend before it hit the ground.[15] Because that’s totally badass.

---

[1] Harvey D. Egan, An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1996, pp. 355.

[2] Mary-Ann Stouck, A Short Reader of Medieval Saints, University of Toronto Press, 2009, p. 164.

[3] Egan, 355.

[4] Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, Harper One, New York, 2010, p. 399.

[5] Gonzalez, 400.

[6] Gonzalez, 402-04

[7] “Alas, alas, sweetest ‘Babbo’ mine, pardon my presumption in what I have said to you and am saying: I am constrained by the sweetest primal truth to say it. His will, father, is this, and thus demands of you. It demands that you execute justice on the abundance of many iniquities committed by those who are fed and pastured in the garden of holy Church….Since he has given you authority and you have assumed it, you should use your virtue and power: and if you are not willing to use it, it would be better for you to resign what you have assumed.”

[8] Egan, 470-71

[9] Egan, 396-97

[10] Egan 362

[11] Stoutz, 169

[12] ibid

[13]  Corrington, Gail, “Anorexia, Asceticism, and Autonomy: Self-Control as Liberation and Transcendence,” in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1986), p.51.

[14] “For a long time you have been talking amongst yourselves and planning to marry me off to some mortal, corruptible man…I have a rich and powerful husband (Christ) who will never let me die of hunger, and I am certain that he will never let me go without any of the things I need.” Stoutz, p. 163-64

[15] “He knelt down very meekly; I placed his neck [on the block] and bent down and reminded him of the blood of the Lamb. His mouth said nothing but ‘Gesu!’ and ‘Caterina!’ and as he said this, I received his head into my hands, saying, “I will!” with my eyes fixed on divine Goodness.” Egan, 365.

A birth and a death of a tradition

Back when I was a kid, I used to refer to traditions as Things you do over and over again that don't ultimately have any meaning.
Man, was I stupid.
In each realm I travel in - whether it's church, or youth or school or travel - traditions seem to become more and more important to me.
Almost three years ago, we started a Traditions service at Our Savior (not even the name could be traditional!), a church that prides itself on being the first church in the Missouri Synod to go all-in on contemporary worship back in the late 1990s. The "new" worship service would be based on the blue hymnals that we had lying around. It rose from a desire to meet the needs of a minority of our church that enjoyed worshiping with acoustic instruments and following the Divine Service (so-called). We also thought it would be a good alternative to the contemporary service, and hoped that it would attract others who had left their old Lutheran churches, but preferred to worship liturgically. As a church that wanted to be a hub for other churches, we also hoped that it would provide practice for deacon leaders who might find themselves leading a Lutheran church elsewhere.
After about a year, as we evolved into a worshiping culture, we decided to buy some of the new Lutheran Service Books, which had five different Liturgical Settings and a host of new hymns and ideas. For a traditional church, it was a pretty contemporary book.
While there were four regularly worshiping families (totaling about 15 people per week), the service never caught on to a wider audience, and so our last service will be Aug. 24, 2014, two weeks shy of our third anniversary.
Over the three years, we have developed a leadership from within our community, so that when I was away, I had two able helpers to lead service with even a gentle rise in quality from when I'm there. We have baptized four kids in our little church and provided an opportunity for many to sing some great hymns in our little room.
The reasons to end: The pressure of preaching three times in three hours is trying for any preacher. The extra time will allow both Pastor Brian and myself to accomplish some important ministry that we otherwise could not.
I called our church this week and told them the sad news. They understood why the church had decided to end the service, but it saddened them nevertheless.  I know how they feel. I like the world better knowing that there are people singing poetry that have withstood the test of time, who have provided a service of Word and Sacrament (in that order).
I know that I will miss choosing hymns that match up with the church calendar (even though our church does not.) I will miss chanting the kyrie, and singing "This is the Feast," and songs like "Beautiful Savior" and "Holy Holy Holy" and "Earth and All Stars." No, not songs, hymns. There's a difference. I can write a song.
It takes tradition to make a hymn.

Lighten the load

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so the story goes, sent a telegram to 12 prominent men in England. Some were lawyers, bankers, politicians, men of letters and clergymen. The anonymous telegram was the same: “Flee at once. All is discovered!” And the story continues that all 12 men fled the next day and were never seen again.

Would you leave?

I wouldn’t, because I’d know it would come from Gerod. And I don’t think this would work today. With the sheer juggernaut of information we receive through email from Nigerian princes and email scams, I think it would be hard for us to believe something like that was meant especially for us, and not another clever marketing scheme.

One thing is the same then as now, however, and that is there is a place deep inside of us that fears greatly being discovered, that if someone found out what is really inside of us, All would be lost.

I will make you this promise: Today’s sermon could save you money. I will guarantee that if you do everything I tell you to do in this 15 minute sermon, you could save 15 percent on your therapy bill.

We are in a series called The Road to Recovery, and it’s based on a series of messages written by Rick Warren, the creator of Celebrate Recovery, and each of the letters in Recovery stands for something on that road. So we have R for Realize I’m not God. God is God, and you’re not. Say that. E stands for Earnestly believe that God exists, which is harder than it sounds because if God exists, our behavior, thoughts and actions will change. C stands for Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ’s care and control, which has a lot of Cs in it.

Today, we are in the O of Recovery, which I think is the most important concept of all. O stands for Openly examine and confess my faults to God, to myself, and to someone I trust.

This is Rick Warren’s message about guilt and he has three reasons why guilt should be eliminated from your life. He says Guilt destroys your confidence, damages your relationships and keeps us stuck in the past.

I say hogwash.

I love guilt. I am pro-guilt. I think guilt is one of God’s greatest inventions, next to caramel apple pops and fjords. 

Without guilt, we would never know that what we’re doing is wrong, and think about a world like that – a world of billions of people acting like there are no consequences for their actions.

Oh wait.

If you hate guilt, and want to get rid of it, you’re doing it wrong. There’s good guilt and bad guilt, and bad guilt is called shame and SHAME is awful.

The difference between guilt is shame is this:

Guilt is feeling bad about something I’ve done.

Shame is feeling bad about who I am.

Guilt is feeling bad about something that I’ve done. I cut someone off in traffic, I drink too much, I throw an angry beaver at a guy on a scooter, I take God’s name in vain, I’ve done something wrong. I feel bad because of what I did.

Shame is feeling bad about who I am, someone I’ve become.  The best example is Job who said If I am guilty—woe to me! Even if I am innocent, I cannot lift my head, for I am full of shame and drowned in my affliction. The idea of being drowned in your affliction goes along with what a friend of mine at George Fox named John Church said to me. He is a licensed therapist and he sometimes asks his clients to picture themselves as carrying around a giant shame bucket.

Lady came to me – experiencing intense symptoms. night terrors. She would go to bed and have terrors where she was fighting off demons, where there were flames. She videotaped herself, and she was in an all-out battle when she was sleeping. She would never wake up. She was putting herself in hell every night, but at the same time fighting it off. Went to sleep experts, doctors, nobody could help her, so she ended up seeing John. It came down to what was in her shame bucket. She did not ever want to tell John what it was. We have to do this, we have to go there. She had an abortion. She was tricked into it, Later in life, when she learned how a baby grows, she realized that she killed a human life. So shameful for her, permeated every inch of her shame bucket. she deserved to go to hell, penetrated to her core, that she would get the punishment she deserved every night. She was a murderer. As we got that out of her shame bucket, that all went away. She was able to forgive herself, think about it correctly, to live in forgiveness. No more night terrors. Completely different woman, because she was able to relieve herself through her shameful experience.

 Each time you do something wrong, you feel guilty – or at least you should. That’s why God placed the Holy Spirit inside each of us, to give us a conscience to tell us that what we’ve done is wrong. When your conscience grabs you, you confess your sin, receive God’s forgiveness and move on.

Shame is different from guilt, and it wears many different disguises. I’m ugly. I’m a drunk. I’m lazy. I’m disgusting. I’m greedy. How you got to that place of shame is often by unresolved guilt about things you’ve done, or who you think you’re supposed to be.

The best actress Oscar this year went to not only the best actress, but pretty much the most beautiful woman on the planet, Lupita Nyong’o. Can you imagine this person ever thinking she was anything but pretty? 

but when she was a little girl, she used to pray to God to make her skin lighter so that she could become beautiful. When she finally saw a dark-skinned model, she said, “ It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy.” Those are words from the shame bucket there. If we believe we are shameful creatures, inadequate children of God, it makes it so much easier to wallow in our shame bucket, so we keep on doing the things we hate, and hating the person we’ve become.

Because once what you do becomes who you are, you have moved from guilt to shame, and then you have to call my friend John at $110 per hour, because shame is not easily removed.

So how do we avoid carrying around a full shame bucket? Let’s take the five steps to forgiveness. (applause) 

Take a personal moral inventory

The guiding verse here is:

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts; see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24

Earling. 

Earl is kind of a loser, who happens to win the lottery, but then he got hit by a car. While he was in the hospital, his wife divorced him and lay there in despair until he learned about karma:  if you do good things, good things will happen to you, and if you do bad things, bad things happen to you. His life was full of bad things, and so in order to have a good life, he started doing good things. And the first thing he did was make a list of every bad thing he’d ever done.  like. 

73 Always took a penny, never left a penny

261 Ruined Joy's Wedding

 5 Picked my nose in public

27 Made fun of people with accents.

35 Stole an organ from a church.

84 Faked death to break up with girl

116 Rolled John Fenster down a hill in a porta-potty

Earl made a great start, because he honestly looked at himself and came up with a list of things he’d done wrong. And he took the next important step – he accepted responsibility for what he did. And then he did an even harder thing – he made up for what he did the best he could. Some things were impossible to directly make up for – you can’t unpick your nose in public, for example – that would be even grosser. But he returned the organ to the church, and he gave Joy a fabulous new wedding. He taught English as a second language.

This actually makes sense to society. Karma is kind of a divine justice for people of the world – it’s so simple, it makes sense. The idea of crossing things off a list and finally being good is very attractive. 

But Christians have a better way, because we don’t cross things off the list – we put the list on the cross.

Hear the gospel – every wrong thing you’ve ever done, every wrong thing you’ll ever do is laid at the foot of the cross and was buried with Christ. He wiped your sheet clean. You are forgiven of all your sins. **Earl’s motto was “The Secret to Life is Fixing all the Bad Things You’ve Done.” You can never do that, no matter how long you live, and no matter how short your list, but Christ did it for you. Christ has fixed all the bad things you’ve done.

We can learn from Earl for a couple of reasons though, and one is the idea of restitution. When it is within your power and it causes no harm to the other, please make up for what you’ve done. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Earl did the first two steps, which is to take a moral inventory and then he accepts responsibility for his faults, and that’s our next fill-in the blank: Accept responsibility for my faults.

This can be even harder than the first step. You can make a list of all your sins, but accepting responsibility for them is the difference between being God’s superstar and hell’s worst sinner.

What is the worst sin of all time?

a) committing adultery, murdering the husband and then covering it up

b) betraying the messiah to death

c) denying you know the messiah to save your own skin?

d) b and c

How is it that the sin of Judas and the sin of Peter are almost identical, but one person was led to despair and suicide while the other was led to despair, confession, restoration and ultimately, whose confession of Christ as lord is the rock upon which all Christian churches are built? Judas ultimately could not accept responsibility for his faults, could not believe in a God who could forgive him for betraying his only begotten son. Peter did take responsibility for his denial of the Messiah, and Jesus took special care in restoring him, welcoming him back to the fold.

How could a very similar sin lead to two completely different outcomes?

The answer might actually be in letter A. When David committed adultery, plotted Uriah’s murder and cover-up, he was confronted by a prophet of the Lord. When Nathan told David that he was the man, David immediately responded, with

I have sinned against the Lord.

When you accept responsibility for your sin, you are proclaiming your faith in a loving and forgiving God. We know the consequence for our sin is death, but not eternal death, because we were buried with Christ and raised with Christ through the waters of baptism, which now saves us. Ultimately, accepting responsibility for your sin is an act of faith, and leads directly to the next step on the path to forgiveness:

 Ask God for forgiveness

This has to do with our key bible passage for today, but I’d like to expand it a little more. I don’t think John could be say this any stronger : ** if you think you don’t sin, you’re not only fooling yourself, you’re calling God a liar, because God knows what’s in each one of us, and it is sin. But if that sweeping, true conviction drives us to despair, the next sentence is sweet relief: If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness/

That’s God’s part – to forgive. Our part is to admit our sin and ask for forgiveness. Both sides should be happy with the equation.

That’s the end of it, really. This could be called “The Three Steps of Forgiveness,” because most of the sins I commit are between God and me. The normal guilt cycle we talked of earlier, of committing the sin, admitting the sin, confessing the sin, receiving forgiveness – most of that can all happen between you and God.

But there are those sins, the ones that truly bother us, whether or not anyone has been directly harmed or not, and for this stage, I Admit my fault to another person.

The guiding verse here is James 5:16 -  Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

In Luther’s small catechism, on the section about confession, we read,  “Before God, we should plead guilty of all sins, even those we are not aware of, as we do in the Lord’s Prayer; but before the pastor we should confess only those sins which we know and feel in our hearts.”

To which you might respond, “wait, what now?”

We are supposed to confess our sins to our pastor. Out loud. To his face. On a regular basis.

This could be the scene in front of Pastor Brian’s house every Saturday night.

Very brief Lutheran history lesson. In the 16th century, when Martin Luther broke off from the Catholic church, one dispute was over whether private personal confession should be kept as a sacrament in the new Lutheran Church. Catholics and Protestants agreed that baptism and communion should be retained, but Luther said the other five – last rites, marriage, ordination, confirmation and confession – did not rise to the level of Sacrament, which should only be kept for the ones that give the forgiveness of sins and have an earthly element attached to it. But the man who wrote the Augsburg Confession says that the Lutheran church should have three sacraments. Philip Melanchton argued that the Lutheran church should keep confession as a sacrament, Luther said no, and so we only have the two.

BUT

Luther never intended for Lutherans to stop going to private confession. He is famously quoted as saying, “When I urge you to go to Confession, I am doing nothing else than urging you to be a Christian.” So there are some Lutherans, such as myself, who want to offer private confession as one of the options in a 21st Century Lutheran church.

When we think of confession, we think of the sweaty sinner in the confession booth opening up the screen, father forgive me, it’s been 30 years since my last confession… But it doesn’t have to be that, and to show you how it’s done, I’m going to ask Elder Dan Pielak to come up and do a quick run through.

Do it. 

In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of my favorite parts of regular church is when Pastor Brian creates a unique confession each week. I don’t know if you appreciate what he goes through to try to convict you of your sins each week, but it’s not for the amateur. He and I and many of you were raised with the Lutheran confession of sins “I have sinned against you in thought word and deed by what we have done and what we have left undone..” etc. And there is value in that confession as well, as that time can be taken to consider our unworthiness before God. But as for impact. This is it. Dan just spoke to me something from his list and I looked him in the eye and proclaimed his forgiveness before God. And God has given you that right to forgive sins when a brother or sister has confessed to you. Jesus said to his disciples, ** “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone their sin, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” In the Lutheran hymnal they have a form of private personal confession and it contains a key line in it. After forgiving the sinners sins, you say to him or her, “Do you believe that my forgiveness is God’s forgiveness?” And the answer must always be, “Yes.”

Do you believe that? Good. Because that leads to our last step, **Accept God’s forgiveness and forgive myself.

This too, requires faith, and for some people who love to live in their shame bucket, this is the hardest part. You mean God loves and has forgiven me? How can God love such a terrible person?

Paul writes in Romans: For all – how many? all! – have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,  and all – how many? all! – are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 

Let’s read the first part of our key bible passage: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.  If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

Everything we’ve been talking about this morning has been about light and dark – the darkness of guilt leads to the lightness of forgiveness; the darkness of sin was blown away by the light of Easter. If we claim to be a follower of Christ, we are followers of the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

My challenge for you is to take the lid off that shame bucket and let the light of Jesus Christ burst it wide open. I want you to take a moral inventory, to honestly sit down and take stock of who you are, and what you’ve done. And once you’ve done that accept responsibility for what you’ve done wrong – don’t blame anyone else for what you’ve done, but take responsibility for the sins you’ve committed. If this sin is still bothering you, if you can’t shake it, confess your sin to another person. You don’t have to tell everybody, but tell somebody, so that you can hear the word of forgiveness. And finally, receive God’s forgiveness and above all, forgive yourself, or else it’s all for nothing.

And that’s how you can save 15 percent on your therapy bill.

Let’s Pray.

God in heaven, Satan would like nothing better than to have us live in our shame bucket. We know that we will sin, we know that we will stray, we know that we are estranged from you when we do not follow your path. Help get us back on the right path by facing the facts about our life, confessing our sin and receiving your forgiveness.

And Father, we thank you for sending your son as Redeemer and your Holy Spirit as our sanctifier. But today we are bold to pray for someone to come into our lives who can serve as our confessor, a trusted Christian friend from whom we can hear the words, “You are forgiven.” In your son’s holy name we pray,

Amen.

Musicals

You're walking down a rainy street and all of a sudden, you use your umbrella as a prop and begin singin' in the rain.
You're crucified; your family and friends are singing what a superstar you are.
You're on a march for segregation in Baltimore. Queen Latifah leads the way and you're perfectly choreographed in your song and dance.
You're a nun. You dance on the hills in Austria singing sounds that make music.
You're in a gang in New York. You meet your rival gang and have a dancin' and singin' battle.
And these are some of my favorite musicals.
So when I saw Distant Voices, Still Lives this week, I had to redefine what I mean by favorite musical, because this was a realistic musical.
One of the few times I had this same feeling was watching Truly, Madly Deeply when Alan Rickman and Juliette Stephenson started singing in their joyous reunion around their apartment, playing whatever instrument they could find.
But this film featured dozens of songs sung in pub or at home or at a wedding, naturally. These are not trained Broadway musicians, they're just Brits who love to sing a cappella when the spirit moves, whether drunk with joy or drunk with sorrow.
Angela Walsh's version of "I Wanna Be Around" sung by a wife who realized that her husband was not so far from her abusive father, is heart-wrenching. That was a weeper, but most of the songs are pub friendly and raucous, like Beer Barrel Polka.
I have begun to appreciate the classic musical, realizing that camp and un-realistic staging is just part of the genre. But this film tops them all for its realistic take on growing up in post-war Britain. Outstanding.

Rios

Monday Movie night!
Bless me, for I have seen much in the past week. The trip to Portland was a successful one, not only in terms of the education I received, but for the uninterrupted viewing opportunities afforded one who had a hotel room above a bar that did not close until 12:30 am. What better way to spend my time than to finish Battlestar Gallactica, Season 2, 2.5 and Razor? Well, several of you could argue that there were a lot better ways to spend my time, but that water has gone under the bridge.
I earlier wrote about BG, Season 1, and especially its reliance on a lot of God/gods talk. I must say that the picture did not become incredibly clearer by the end of Season 2. Remember, in the artifice of the show, the majority of people - the state religion - is essentially Greek gods, or, what our world might have been without that pesky Jesus fellow. There is a religion planet, there are priestesses who tell of prophesies that are coming true. There is a come to Zeus moment when they finally find what could be earth and there are rocks with the "old gods" names, like Aries, Capricorn, Virgo etc. And so it looks like the Greeks/Romans win. But for the Cylons, who still maintain there is one true God.
These are the robots. Would I be right in being slightly offended? Robots believe in one true God, while the Greeks are right!? Okay, it is science fiction, he wrote nastilly...
But the movies I really want to review are Rio movies, two John Wayne flicks: Rio Bravo and Rio Grande; one is infinitely better than the other. Rio Bravo is a tight Western of the kind later popularized by Clint Eastwood - bad guys besiege a town, good guys rally and outwit bad guys with the help of a few good guns. The surprise in this one are the folks around the stately Wayne (boy, did he exude testosterone): Dean Martin playing a former alcoholic (there is a certain irony there in realizing that your reformed alcoholic character later became a byword for alcoholism. Surprisingly, Dino was awesome in this dramatic role); Ricky Nelson (young, hot gunslinger who can also carry a tune - he and Martin do a nifty duet); Walter Brennan (playing a high-pitched, pre-Red Neck red neck, with his famous limp that he would reprise for the rest of his career); and an incredibly fetching Angie Dickinson (she was already attractive in "Police Woman," when I saw her growing up in the 70s.
Rio Grande was less wonderful, with Wayne opposite Maureen O'Hara and lots of "injuns." That pretty much says it right there. This was more like the classic Wayne Horse Opera, with the highlights being fancy horse riding and crooning by the Sons of the Pioneers.
Pancaked in the middle was Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, which couldn't have been more different. This line was delivered straight:
Hortibeuse: Your wife is dead.
Orpheus: Are you jokng?
Hortibeuse: That would be a very strange joke.
Completely deadpan, but it made me laugh out loud!

Youth Group 2014-15

Following our Youth Ministry Team retreat May 30-31, we are proposing several exciting changes that match up with the church’s vision of discipling young people. We will have an opportunity to discuss these proposals Sunday, June 22 following the late service. Ahead of that, here are some anticipated questions:

What is a Splash Group?

A Splash Group is an adult-led small group at either home or church that meets on a weekly basis. Most Splash Groups will be comprised of 1-2 caring adult leaders/hosts and a member of the Vanguard (see below). Each Splash Group has its own flavor: some are by gender, some are by high school (MRLH) some are by interest (activity-based, deeper spirituality, musical). Each group’s leaders and members decide what the flavor of each group will be.

What’s the Vanguard?

The Vanguard is Tim’s Splash Group, the young leaders he has targeted for mentoring and discipling. They are also expected to go “above and beyond” regular youth/splash group membership, and become the face of OSLC youth ministry by their thoughts, words and deeds. Along with Tim’s group, they are required to be a leader in another adult-led Splash Group, and sometimes step into a leadership role within that group. Their qualifications are that they be FAT (Faithful, Available and Teachable).

What’s the difference between Splash Groups and Youth Group?

Youth Group is Tim as the leader who prepares a spiritually-fulfilling lesson or fun activity or service event at 7 – 8:30 pm each Wednesday night for all of the 9^th-12^th graders.

Splash Groups are led by caring adults, who prepare a spiritually-fulfilling lesson or fun activity or service event at a variety of times during the week (last year, we had Saturday am, Sunday pm, Sunday evening, Monday evening and Thursday evening).

The difference is that while a single leader can effectively pour their time and energy into at most 12 people, with six Splash groups, the number of youth who are effectively disciple and cared for raises by a multiple of six. This means that each Splash Group leader and Vanguard will be praying for each other, sending each other Bible verses and devotions, and planning any special events for the group.

The end product of our youth groups has been good Christian kids.

The end product of our Splash Groups is disciples of Jesus.

I have a high school teenager.

God bless you.

What are the opportunities for their participation in Youth/Splash Group next year?

1) Sunday morning. We are re-energizing our Sunday morning focus next year. Peter, Mark and Adrian from PLU were amazing for the past two years; to top them would be impossible. We are doing the next best thing and having JulieAnn Detweiler lead a team of teachers on Sunday morning. One of the best things a church can do is to provide consistent Christian leadership for their students, and I believe JAD will be able to provide that this next year.

2) Splash Groups. As mentioned, we are emphasizing the small group model, led by caring adults at different times each week. The one problem our Splash Groups suffered from last year – 100 percent of the trouble – was logistics. What is the magic day/time/season that your particular group of teenagers can attend on a consistent basis? I will not bore you with the details, but finding the right day and time was pretty tough last year, which leads to another innovation (see below.)

3) Third Saturdays.  In the past, we have had 8-10 special events – putt putt, bowling, kickball, field game, caroling at the Alzheimer’s facility – that required a little more time and energy. Many times, we were constrained by the Wednesday evening time and place (bowling could only be at Narrows). This year, following each Faith in Action (3^rd Saturdays 8 am – noon, lunch to follow), we will be offering 8-10 special events. This will emphasize the service aspect of being in a youth group as well as the ability to have the family come along and participate in some fun and helpful activities. Some of the Saturday activities we’ve planned include Putt Putt, ParenTeen Jeopardy, Sing Along Sound of Music, Exodus: Gods and Kings (movie), Bowling, Paint ball, Ultimate tourney and Footgolf.

What happens to Wednesdays next year?

Wednesday is no longer Youth Night…but it can be Splash Group night. If your pattern for the past few years has been to take your kid to youth group on Wednesday night, there will be at least one Splash Group meeting at church at that time. Likewise, if Monday nights, Thursday nights, or Sunday nights or Saturday mornings fit your schedule better, those or other times will probably be available as well.

What’s the difference between Wednesday Night Youth Group and Wednesday Night Splash Group?

Apart from a different adult leader, not much, except that the curriculum will probably be more consistent! I (Tim) am not wired to follow a weekly curriculum. I chose a topic by what I felt was most needful for my kids that week. While that is a theory, it’s probably not the best theory. Each Splash Group runs their own study – last year’s ran the gamut from Ruth/Esther, to David, to Screwtape Letters to  Case for Christ.

A Wednesday Night Splash Group may not have the numbers of the whole group meeting together – which is available Sunday mornings – but it offers an opportunity for adults to provide Christian care and compassion to future followers of Jesus. If Wednesday night is an ideal time for a lot of people, we may have two Splash Groups on Wednesday night. Pastor Brian has been espousing a model of both large (Sunday morning with JulieAnn/3^rd Saturday) and small groups (Splash Group).

So what will Tim be doing?

My job with the youth next year will be spending as much face to face time  discipling time with as many youth and adults as possible. Each Sunday morning, I will be meeting weekly with either the Splash Group adult leaders, or else the Vanguard. We are both going to go through Real Life Discipleship book, or a Lutheran variation of those if I can get it written in time. I will be making my way around to each of the Splash Groups during the week (including occasionally the Wed night Splash Group(s)). I will also be going to lunches in the area high schools with your teens – as well as your teens’ friends. My intentional outreach for the coming year will be the under-served Franklin Pierce High School.

I liked large group Wednesday nights – why can’t we still have them?

We are hoping that your large-group desire will be fed by the 3^rd Saturday events, retreats (Winter Retreat), special events (New Year’s Eve All-Nighter), as well as the weekly Sunday morning gatherings. Also, if Splash Group A is doing an event, Splash Groups B, C and D are also welcome to join them.

This is all brand new to us. We are also open to discussion of other ideas.

I’m on board! How do I get signed up to a Splash Group?

Several Splash Group leaders and the Vanguard have already begun the process of inviting 8^th graders into their existing groups. Nothing is official until the End of Summer Potluck, Aug. 27. I will be meeting with Splash Group leaders – new and old – in the coming months to solidify schedules. Again, Satan’s favorite weapon is “logistics,” so be prepared to be flexible!

Justified

Boyd Crowder: I asked him to shut down his poison factory and merely made an observation about its combustibility.

Boyd Crowder: Truth always sounds like lies to a sinner.

Raylan Givens: I hope I didn't take you away from anything.
Boyd Crowder: Well I was this close to bringing a sinner to Jesus and now he is consigned to eternal damnation. I hope that you're happy.

[giving the prayer at Boyd's camp]
Raylan Givens: Dear Lord, before we eat this meal we ask forgiveness for our sins, especially Boyd- who blew up a black church with a rocket launcher, and afterwards he shot his associate Jared Hale in the back of the head out on Tate's Creek bridge. Let the image of Jared's brain matter on that windshield not dampen our appetites, but may the knowledge of Boyd's past sins help guide these men. May this food provide them with all the nourishment they need. But, if it does not, may they find comfort in knowing that the United States Marshal Service is offering fifty-thousand dollars to any individual providing information that will put Boyd back in prison. Cash or check, we can make it out to them. Or to Jesus. Whoever they want. In your name, we pray. Amen.

Raylan Givens: The answer is: me and dead owls don't give a hoot.

In the competition between Amazing Lines on the amazing show Justified, I'd call it a dead heat between Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). On the one hand, Boyd has my vote because a) he played Sammy in one of the best movies of all time (The Apostle) (another character named Devil was also in the Apostle, but, come on, I can't seriously root for Devil) and b) he started this series as a born again Christian (following a little dust up with his nemesis, Raylan.) His church in the woods drew all manner of lowlife, and he was a bona fide preacher of the gospel to them. For a time, before his father's death, Boyd attempted to actually clean up the hollers around Harlan, Kentucky of the meth and oxy addictions, and did so using the name of Jesus. That didn't last long, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the temporarily saved.

On the other hand, we have Raylan, whose delivery is sweet as honey, most especially when it's followed by the heel of his boot. It is his prayer to the lowlifes of Harlan above, though, that gives him the edge. Talk about a prayer that preaches law and gospel; that's especially helpful to a crowd that is outside of the law on a regular basis. They need to hear the gospel, in this case, 50,000 Almighty Dollars. His prayer also convicted (or should have) Boyd of his past sins involving the black church and the dead friend, and also to the rest of the "congregation" that their spiritual leaders is a) likely to kill them as spit on the ground and b) if they decide to "do the right, thing," they might be rewarded for it handsomely.

Best part?

He made it a Christian prayer, but asking it all in Jesus' name.

We are currently on a Justified torrent, sometime watching as many as two per night! (I'm being held back by my lightweight wife!) It is usually violent, occasionally creepy and features one of the best characters in television, Margo Martindale's Mags Bennett. Her on again, off again compassion/tyrannical mother from hell would be a case study in psychosis.

Of course Luther would love Justified, because, well, that's what the Reformation headline was: We're all Justified (by Grace through Faith).

Great idea, terrible title.

Wax

This week, I was introduced to the 18th century mystic, Jean-Pierre de Caussade. Several of my classmates had a hard time with a statement that he wrote: "The events of every moment are stamped with the will of God." What with there being evil and all, it begs the question, "Every moment? Really? Hiroshima was stamped with the will of God? Dachau? Phnom Penh? Santa Barbara?"
Yes. The events of every moment are stamped with the will of God. (he continues) How holy is His name! How right it is to bless it and to treat it as something which sanctifies all it touches....O Lord, may You rule my heart, nourish it, purify it, make it holy, and let it triumph over all its enemies. Most precious moment! How small it is to my bodily eyes, but how great to the eyes of my faith! How can I think of it as nothing when it is thought of so highly by my heavenly Father? All that comes from Him is most excellent and bears the imprint of its origin.
I couldn't help it - I thought of a wax seal. Here is a metaphor for baptism, that God came down in the holy waters of our baptism and sealed us as his own. The wax does nothing but receive the imprint of the king. We do not even create the softness - that's the heat of the Holy Spirit who does that. And the signet? It's a cross, of course, a simple cross that we are marked with, which will not be broken until the last day.
I am wax; God is the imprint.
The metaphor does not last, but in answer to those who doubt every moment are stamped with God's will, we can say, "The seal doesn't know the contents of the envelopes. It could be good news for king and country, or news of a defeat." Our job is not to determine the course of events; our job is to proclaim the image of our maker, no matter what news lies inside.

The hardest thing to do is to refrain from saying, "How could a loving God..." because then we are attempting to make God in our image. "How could a loving God..." do something that we don't consider nice or fair or just? "How could a loving God..." watch as an animal or race or field become extinct? "If God is good..." how could God disappoint me so?
Our purpose is not to skip to the loo over every one of the moments God gives us on this earth; that's lunacy, to rejoice when there are mass killings. Our purpose is to find in every moment the imprint of God, to choose the course of action God wills for each of us, and to live that out with purpose, to bear the imprint of our origin.

The Greatest Sport

This is a post on the Greatest Sport.
Not another plug for Ultimate, you might be thinking. Will the guy never give it a rest? What Would Jesus Play? The Holy Spirit of the Game. Yeah, we get it, Ultimate frisbee is a great sport.

True, but it's not the greatest sport.

What I love about Ultimate is many things, but many of those things are going away. I loved the idea of Spirit of the Game, that you play hard, but you play fair and you don't play dirty to win. I loved that it was self-refereed. I loved that I was good at it, and could keep up with my competitors.

Brodie Smith declares the Spirit of the Game doesn't work. We have "observers." And I can't keep up anymore. It is still a great sport, but what made it personally great for me is not so deep.

No, the greatest sport is one of the oldest, and that is wrestling.

The list, please:

1) It is man v man or woman v woman or woman v man. There is no ball, puck, shuttlecock, bow, arrow, sword, bat, frisbee, club, racket. sleigh, stick, weights, goal, water, gloves, paddle, bike, skates, horse, car, beam, vault, rings, hurdle, ski, board, javelin, pole, discus, bar, gun or stone. The only other non-equipment sports that I can think of are some of the martial arts, running and sumo wrestling. There's no actual contact with other humans in track - it's a race against the clock, mostly. If I had to say what the necessary equipment for sumo, it would be a Whopper. 

Wrestling pits you and the other guy/gal. There's no team mates to help/hide behind. There's no judges to bribe or blame or impress.

2) It is absolutely the brown shoes on the tuxedo of sport. The only people who like wrestling are wrestlers. And sometimes their families. Do you want to know how disrespected it is? It almost got bumped from the Olympics. Three levels of equestrian, ping pong and synchronized swimming are Olympic sports, but not wrestling? I don't mean to put horses down (!), but come on.

3) It builds confidence. Do you want to know how much confidence it builds? It builds so much confidence that wrestlers have resisted the urge to punch the millions who call their sport gay. That's confident. My coach, Ed LeBeau, was one of the most important men in my life because he taught me that trying your hardest, playing fair, preparing weeks and months for a six minute match is worth it on a spiritual level.

4) No greed. No wrestler is in it for the fat contract at the end. They wrestle because they love the sport, not because it is the path to a multi-million dollar payoff. It is a pure sport.

This fall, I hope to carry on where my father began 50 years ago, when he started the wrestling program at Concordia Lutheran High School in Fort Wayne, IN. I am not starting a program, but I'm hoping to join the group at Franklin Pierce High School. I look forward to working with the coaches and athletes, to rekindle my love for this sport and to make some friends along the way.

Stay tuned.