The Canes and Tendrils of the Church

John 15:1-8

“I am the vine, you are the branches.”  John 15:5

The last few weeks, I have been teaching a class on parish administration for lay leaders in our congregations; many who are leading small congregations with no pastor.  This is the fifth of five courses we have done together over the last several years.  I enjoy teaching this group.  They are committed church folks, dedicated to leadership in their small churches and to the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ.  We have good conversations, wrestle with thoughtful questions and struggle together with the challenges facing their small, yet often thriving, congregations.   It has been a great class!

In this week’s class we were discussing the shared governance model that lies at the heart of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s way of doing church together. Shared governance takes work.  It can be messy.  Very messy.  We frequently don’t get it right.  Shared governance requires having a strong stomach for disagreement and difference of opinion, and a commitment to work for reconciliation and creative engagement with one another when conflict inevitably arises.  Shared governance requires listening care-fully to one another, practicing clear, transparent and respectful communication and remembering we are all beloved children of God…  especially when we disagree. 

Most important of all, shared governance in the church only works when we pay close attention to the heart of our faith -- the Gospel way of Jesus Christ – through the study of and reflection on scripture, and by listening for the guidance of the Holy Spirit through prayer and meditation.   The constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America puts it this way,  “All power in the Church belongs to our Lord Jesus Christ, its head.  All actions of this church are to be carried out under his rule and authority.”    (Constitution, Bylaws and Continuing Resolutions of the ELCA, 3.01)  True, as sinful human beings who don’t always see things clearly, and often fall short of the glory of God, we don’t always agree what that means, or how it is given flesh and blood in our daily lives and ministries but, if we don’t start there, we are guaranteed never to get there. 

“I am the vine, you are the branches.”  Jesus tells his disciples on the night before he died. The trunk of the vine provides nurture and sustenance so that the canes (branches) can send out their renewal spurs, stabilizing tendrils and fruit producing flowers.  Grape canes need constant tending and pruning if they are to produce fruit in abundance.  It is only when the vine grower, the vine and the branches work together that the harvest is plentiful.  Jesus paints a wonderful picture of shared governance!   Jesus’ offers us a vivid metaphor for how we all need work together under his hand – whether pastor and council, or synod and congregation, or churchwide and synod – to carry out the mission of love and grace, service and witness, compassion and advocacy that Christ has entrusted to us as his branches.  

Studying parish administration could be boring.  But when we look at the constitutions, and policies and governance structures and practices of the church as the roots and tendrils and spurs and buds that connect us to the vine and help us bear the fruits of the Gospel, studying them can be like drinking fine wine.  Really.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Please pray for those involved in governance of all kinds.  They need it!  Thanks for reading.

Beyond the Fold

John 10:11-18

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold…”   John 10:16

Not long ago, I was standing in line to get a receipt at a gas station near Oklahoma City.  I was wearing my black clerical uniform so it was obvious that I worked for the church.  The woman behind the counter, maybe in her thirties, handed me my receipt, looked me up and down, and asked, “you a priest?”   

“A pastor.”  I responded.

“I believe in God.” She said firmly.  “But I don’t go to church.”

A man behind me had one of those big twenty-four packs of water bottles impatiently perched on his shoulder.  There wasn’t much time for conversation.

“Oh…”  I mumbled.  Not one of my greatest evangelical moments.

“I don’t think you need to go to church to be Christian.”  She continued.  “I think God just wants you to have a good time.”

“Really.”  I said dubiously as the man pushed by me and dropped his water bottles on the counter.  

I pondered that almost-conversation during the two hour drive home.  I wondered why she felt compelled to share that bit of her life with me?  Confession? Affirmation?  Argument?  I’ll never know.   But Jesus’ words about “other sheep” came back to me somewhere toward the end of hour one.

Was this woman one of those “other sheep”?  I know she was.   Beloved by God, she heard God’s voice, even if she didn’t understand it the same way I do. Claimed by a God, who, I am convinced, will be with her even when the good times she seemed to be pursing failed her. I felt guilty about not doing more to “witness” to her, but, in fact, I realized she had witnessed to me.   She bore witness to the Good Shepherd who is always out there beyond the fold working in the lives of people we, who are church folk, might think are the most unlikely candidates for membership in the flock.

God is at work in the world. I am convinced of that too. Sometimes through us.  Sometimes in spite of us.  Sometimes in places where we wouldn’t dream to look.   That is, until the Spirit opens our eyes.

That’s where the Church of Jesus Christ needs to be.  On the margins.  In the cracks in human lives.  In the gaps where so many people live.  In the places where God’s sheep beyond the fold witness to the grace that belongs to all of us,  ALL of us, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Keep your eyes open for God at work in the people you bump into along the way!  Thanks for reading.

Doubts?

Luke 24:36b-48

Back when I was a campus pastor, I had running discussions with more than one of my students about doubt and faith.  Their general mode of life was “question everything.”  They would sit in my office and pepper me with question after question, and then pick apart my answers in good intellectual fashion:

How do you know Jesus really rose from the dead?

How do you know there is really a God?

How do you know God is loving and compassionate and merciful and forgiving and all that when the world is such a mess?

Why is there suffering in the world?

And on and on.

These students wanted to have faith.  They really did.  And so, they wrestled and wrestled and wrestled with their questions, begging God in their prayers to take away their doubts.

The problem was, they thought that “faith” meant  “certainty.”   They thought faith meant knowing all the answers.   But faith doesn’t mean certainty.  It means trust.  It doesn’t mean knowing all the answers.  It means being willing to live in the questions.  To be open to the mysteries.  To place ourselves in God’s hands.  To hope against hope even when we cannot see clearly what’s coming next. Having faith doesn’t mean living with no doubts.  It means wrestling with those doubts and trusting that our Lord is in there wrestling with us.  Because, on this side of heaven, the doubts will inevitably come.  There will always be those days when uncertainty rules and fears grip us and anxiety drives our actions and reactions to whatever is swirling in the world around us.

Doubt is all over the place in the Resurrection stories in the Gospels.  It is there, front and center, in this week’s Gospel lesson.  Having just dismissed the women’s report of seeing Jesus alive as an “idle tale,”  (24:11) the disciples respond to the reality of the Risen Christ with doubt and disbelieving.    It took a basic human need…  hunger…  to finally break through their grief-clouded and fear-shrouded disbelief.

The Resurrection is no fairy tale; no idle story told to mollify our mortality.  It is the power and promise of God in flesh and blood for flesh and blood.  It bears witness to the truth that God’s love and life are stronger than suffering and death.

In a way, my questioning young friends were some of the most faith-filled people I’ve known.  In the midst of all their questions and doubts…  they didn’t walk away. They didn’t stop being a part of the community of faith.  They didn’t give up on God.  In their own way, they trusted that God wouldn’t give up on them either, even as they raised their questions and doubts.

I think that’s what this thing called, “faith” is all about.

Frederick Buechner, pastor, poet and author of more than thirty books (who is now in his 90s) once wrote that doubts are the “ants in the pants of faith.”   I believe that.  Doubts have a way of pushing us deeper and deeper into the infinite love that is ours through Jesus Christ.  Always pushing us until we discover again that Jesus is already there, way ahead of us, showing us the way from death to life.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading! 

The Tomb is Empty!

John 20:1-20

“I have seen the Lord!”  --John 20:18

As we have journeyed through another Holy Week, we have sat at table with Jesus and his disciples in the upper room and stood beneath the cross of Jesus. We have witnessed our Lord’s sorrow, suffering, and death.  We have heard the cry of the One who was forsaken for the sake of the forsaken; for all of us who have ever been touched by the brokenness, evil and mortality of the human condition.  And then…

And then?

We come to an empty tomb.

What will you see when you look into the empty tomb on Easter morning?

Mary Magdalene looked and saw insult added to injury.  First her Teacher had been crucified unmercifully and now it seemed like someone had stolen the body.  What must she have been feeling?  Shock?  Anger?  Dismay?

Peter goes into the tomb and sees the linen wrappings lying there and he simply sees what his eyes see.  We don’t know what he felt or thought or how he reacted.  But, later that day, he is with the other disciples locked behind closed doors.  Afraid.  Paralyzed. Uncertain.

The Beloved Disciple goes into the tomb, sees the same thing Peter did, but he believes.  But what, exactly, does he believe?  Does he believe Mary’s report that the body has been stolen or does he believe something more is going on?  John tells us none of them fully understand what has happened.  Bewilderment.  Puzzlement.  Curiosity.

The tomb is empty.  What do you see?

Like these disciples, we can see a lot of different things when we look into the empty tomb on Easter.  What we see depends a lot on what we bring with us as we look in and see the folded grave clothes.  Our vision can be shaped…  and clouded… by our own shock, fear, and bewilderment, our life experiences and expectations, what we have been taught and the values we carry.  Some try to explain it away.  Others just take it for what it is and leave it at that.   Still others believe, or at least want to.

But what does it take to look into the empty tomb and see resurrection and new life?  What does it take to behold something which truly transforms and changes our lives and how we live them?   What is it that opens our eyes and moves us to shout with Mary and the other disciples “We have seen the Lord!” to whoever we meet?

Well, with Mary…  it was the sound of her name on her Teacher’s lips.

With Peter and the Beloved disciple it was a word of peace spoken in the upper room.

Like Mary, Peter and the Beloved Disciple, it is ultimately Jesus himself who opens our eyes.  The Word made flesh who still dwells among us through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit breaks through with a word of peace or the sound of our own name.  The Word breaks through in the scriptures or a sermon, or a bible study, or the witness of a disciple or the compassion of a friend or the kindness of a stranger.  Easter happens whenever we are touched with hope in the midst of despair, light in the midst of darkness or life in the midst of death.

The cross assures us that God is with us even in the depths of suffering, sorrow and death.  The empty tomb guarantees that suffering and sorrow and death will never have the last word.

And that Good News truly changes everything!

Blessed Easter,

Bishop Mike.

Thanks for reading!

Gates of the Forsaken

Mark 11-15

 “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”  --Mark 15:34

On Sunday, the Christian world once again begins our journey down the Via Dolorosa, Latin for “The Way of Sorrows” or the “Way of Suffering.”  For eight days, we accompany Jesus of Nazareth from the gates of Jerusalem, through the gates of hell and on through the broken gates of death to resurrection.   The journey begins and ends in celebration and rejoicing, but in between, Jesus endures challenges from without and within, evades the cunning traps of religious leaders, experiences the betrayal of friends, the cruelty of power, the disdain of the masses, the agony of torture and a slow and horribly painful death.   In the end, after all that he has faced, he cries out the haunting first lines of Psalm 22, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabchthani?” which means, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”    He cries out the words of every human being who has ever experienced challenges from without and from within, traps, betrayals, cruelty, disdain, agony, torture or painful death.  He cries out the words of humankind held in bondage by the brokenness, evil and mortality of the human condition.

In that moment, in that moment, I believe God, the great Creator of the vastness of the universe, identified most fully and completely with all God’s human children.  With you.  With me.  With your neighbor next door and on the other side of the world.  And that saves us.  Makes us whole.  Frees us for eternity and for right now.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 8,  “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  (vs. 38-39)

It is a promise and a guarantee that God stands with us, steadfast, unshaking, unwavering, in the darkest and most awful moments of our lives…  even and especially when we feel totally and completely forsaken by everyone and everything -- even God.  Oh, and also in all those hard or even sort-of irritating times short of that. 

That’s the wonderful, mysterious paradox of the cross.  That’s the wonderful, mysterious power that allows us to transcend all the crap the world throws at us and gives us the capacity to love and the will to act with compassion, mercy and forgiveness.

If we simply skip from the gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the broken gates of the empty tomb on Easter Sunday, I am afraid it’s easy to miss the point and the passion and the power of the whole week.  To understand, we need to go through the gates of hell with Jesus…  or more accurately, we need to hear, once again, that he willingly goes through the gates of hell with us. 

I encourage you not to skip the observance of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday this Holy Week.  Walk the Way of the Cross.  Feel the cry of the One who was forsaken for the sake of the world in the depths of your soul…  and then…

Well, we’ll talk about that next week.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thank-you for reading.   Blessed Holy Week.

Daylight Savings Time (And other bright ideas)

John 3:14-21

[Jesus said,] “…those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”  John 3:21

Being a “night person” I’ve always liked the idea of daylight savings time.  Shifting the lengthening sunlight from the morning hours (when I’d rather be sleeping) to the evening (when I am much more awake) works for me.  Though “daylight savings time” as we know it didn’t officially start until Germany enacted it in 1916, the idea of shifting the clocks to correspond more closely to the solar day has been around at least since Roman times.  The idea was to save energy and reduce the need for artificial light.  Because humans are mostly diurnal, we tend to get more done with the lights on. 

Light and darkness have been used as metaphors for good and evil probably since the dawn of time.  The Gospel of John is no exception.  In this week’s text, John’s Jesus uses darkness and light to refer to how people respond to the love of God reflected in and through the Son.  Like light and darkness divide the day and night, so belief and unbelief separate those who live in the light of God’s love and those who do not.   The light of God’s love is a constant, it’s what we do with it and how we experience it that varies.  Our belief does not save us, God does, but if we chose to stay in the dark God’s healing light won’t have much of an impact on our lives.  It’s not our decision that saves us, God does, but to live in the light of that gracious Gift is what God intends for us.  As Ephesians says, “For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”  (2:10) Luther’s Small Catechism puts it this way, “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith…”  (Apostles’ Creed, Article 3).

The cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is like God’s “daylight savings plan.”   The life, death and resurrection of the Christ adjusts the light so that we can do what God created us to do and to be in a world so often shrouded by the darkness of sin, evil and death.  The question each of us must answer is not “what must I do to be saved?” but “what do I do now that I am?”   Or…  “How do I live now that the lights are on?”

Jesus answers that question too.  In the light of God’s great love for us and for the whole world, he teaches us to reflect that love for one another, for our neighbors and for the whole world.  In service and witness, in lives of gratitude and praise, in acts of forgiveness, mercy and compassion, we radiate with the light that shines in the darkness.  In us, and in our deeds, as Jesus says, God’s light is seen more clearly, and God’s love is known more fully.  Because, after all, we get more work done with the lights on!

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks, as always, for reading!  (Don’t forget to “spring forward” on Saturday night…)