An Analgesic Faith: Reflections on Psalm 77

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

Lent has recently become my favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment. 

Lent is bookended by bleak events: it begins with Ash Wednesday, reminding us that we are but dust (Gen 2:7; 3:19) and ends just before Holy Week, which highlights Jesus’ execution and resurrection. 

In the season of Lent, death is everywhere. 

No wonder Psalm 77 found itself into the lectionary’s daily readings. Verses 2-3 capture the spirit of the psalm and of the season: 

In my day of distress I seek Yhwh;

At night, my arms are stretched out without ceasing

my soul refuses comfort

I think of God and I groan

My spirit meditates and becomes feeble. Selah (my translation)

But the spirit and season of Lent are often far removed from the experiences of many American Christians, and most especially those whose traditions are not structured according to traditional church calendars. 

Too often American Christians as asked to numb their pain. Instead of a faith big enough for this whole human life, broken-hearted people are offered shallow platitudes like “God has a plan” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” so stop asking questions. 

This is an analgesic “faith.” But a faith numb to the world is no faith. It’s a delusion.

If all our faith can do is numb pain, then it’s a faith worth rejecting. Lent is there to remind us of what a durable, trustworthy faith should look and feel like. 

If Christian faith has no room for broken hearts, messy human stories, and scarred bodies then it is precisely the kind of religion that Karl Marx described when he said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

We must do better. 

“Things Take the Time They Take”

Unlike American culture, Lent doesn’t ask us to hurry up and get over sorrow or to paper over the shocking violence of this world. Lent doesn’t shuffle us along from sorrow to happiness. 

It’s worth remembering that Jesus’ own 40 days in the wilderness evokes the narrative of Israel’s much longer 40-year period in the desert, known especially from the book of Numbers. Jesus relives those years of wandering, adversity, and delay. The season of Lent allows us to experience these narratives according to ritual time.

Lent creates space for us to sit with life’s pain and to feel it fully and collectively. The author of Psalm 77, for instance, does not end in praise or thanksgiving, like other laments. It turns to the memory of God’s actions in the past (see vv. 11-20), but the God of memory never materializes in the present. At the end of it all, the psalmist’s sharp-edged questions still stand: “Will Yhwh reject forever? . . . Has God forgotten to be gracious?” (vv. 7- 9). 

The fact that Lent is a season for the entire church also tells us that we aren't meant to sit in this heaviness alone. 

We aren’t meant to rush through the darkness to get to the light. We can’t speed the night in order to get to morning. You can’t rush your way to Easter. 

When you try to shortcut the journey you never actually leave the driveway.

As Mary Oliver puts it: “things take the time they take”

The Spirit of Lent, the Spirit of Lament

As a church we often fail tender-hearted people. Instead of offering a faith that is spacious enough for all of human life, we hand them a cheap plastic mask and call it, “faith.” 

Doesn’t the world feel so much better when you wear it? Isn’t the world so much happier and sunnier when you choose the blue pill, rather than the red pill? (The Matrix, 1999). Go ahead. Forget reality and live in a dream.

But poet Cleo Wade is correct when she says, “You can either have a mask or a real life. There isn’t a Third Option.”

Lent is a season to recover a real life. It’s a season of self-reflection and of turning away from the things that leach life away. 

If Lent is the season for recovering honesty, psalms of lament (like Psalm 77) give us the language for doing so. Laments are poems in which human beings complain about this world, one another, and of course God. Laments are the human clapback to God, who is often accused of being distant and unresponsive. 

Lent gives us permission to sit in dust and ashes but also to push back against a culture that is so deeply uncomfortable with pain, disruption, loss, and death. 

A Worthy Rebellion

Just because Lent is a season of sorrow, lament, and self-reflection, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a season of hope. 

But Lent teaches us something important about the shape of hope: True hope always has scars. 

That may be the difference between hope and optimism. True hope comes from tilled soil. It springs up out of broken ground. Like all green and growing things, hope takes time. It’s a seed. Seeds begin their lives in darkness.

But hope doesn’t always arrive on our timeline. We don’t get to control when the light arrives. In that way, it’s less like the sun and more like a lightning strike.

Hope also takes honesty. But honesty is hard and painful, because it requires us to look at ourselves and our world through clear, undistorted lenses. We can’t get to the lands of hope and healing without first crossing the bridges of honesty. There are no detours, no shortcuts, and no alternate routes. 

People often give something up during Lent. Instead, I’ll ask you to pick something up--a worthy rebellion: This Lent, don’t settle for an analgesic faith. Insist on a kind of faith that is spacious enough for this entire life—the mess, the joy, the hurt, the injury, and also the recovery. 

The Story of Abraham and Family Trauma Part 2

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

The older woman was frail; months of cancer treatment had taken their toll. But she was undeterred as she made her way to a microphone, before more than two hundred family members, representing four generations. She began feebly, but her voice grew stronger with the recounting of her story. She spoke of a day –when she was no older than fifteen years of age – on which her father had taken her to a man on a nearby farm. She’d not understood that her father was selling her body for sexual favors to the man – until the man had done his deed and her father was pocketing the money the man had paid as he walked away. Violated, confused and physically hurt, she walked home with her father. But she knew that day that she would leave, and he would not continue to hurt her that way.  

Her story was met with silence and tears. A sister, two years younger, stood at her seat, and with a tear-streamed face told the gathered family members that the same thing had happened to her. A child resulted from her encounters with the man. Her stepmother threw her out of the family home, and another family member took her child and refused to return him. He grew up in another household, without his mother, the man she later married, and his eight siblings. 

So many lives had been affected.  

This family story isn’t just any family story: It is my family’s story – the story of two of my Aunts and potentially others – perhaps even my own mother. It is a story that caused our family to reflect on all of the stories we’d heard from older family members about my grandfather. We’d all heard older relatives describe him as “evil,” “brutal,” “cruel” and “mean”; we’d heard that he’d physically harmed my grandmother, and two of my uncles told their own stories about how he’d beaten them, thrown axes at them. 

What we saw that day was incomprehensible pain and suffering. As a priest and pastor who walks journeys with families who are broken, scarred, grieving, and fractured, I realize that stories of family trauma are as old as time itself – and that our scriptures tell us much about the ways in which we have struggled with one another, in the presence of a faithful God.  

I wonder how the Church can be more supportive – and preach and teach the scriptural texts that have been given to us with more honesty and transparency.  

 7 This is the length of Abraham’s life, one hundred and seventy-five years. 8 Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. 9 His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, 10 the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah. (Genesis 25:7-10, NRSV) 

A short text from the Book of Genesis appears to wrap the story of Abraham and his family in a lovely package with a bow on top: He lived a long life, was gathered to his people, and was buried with his wife, Sarah, by his sons, Ishmael and Isaac. 

If only Genesis didn’t offer painstaking detail about the rest of Abraham’s life, this would seem to be a lovely epitaph. But Genesis does offer painstaking detail about Abraham’s life – from the time that God calls him to leave his father’s house and go to an unknown land that God would show him, until he had become an old man full of years. 

The Book of Genesis reveals much more to us about Abraham’s family. Struggles with infertility plague at least three generations of the family – and Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, is the product of his relationship with a slavewoman named Hagar, who with her child become expendable – and are left to die – after Sarah bears a child of her own. Abraham’s second son, Isaac, is left to bear the scars of nearly being sacrificed by his father. After the attempted sacrifice, Sarah leaves to find a home of her own, away from Abraham. When she dies, Abraham remarries and begins a new family – at well past 100 years of age (Genesis 25). 

So after his wife has died, after his relationships with Ishmael and Isaac have been fractured, after he has started another family, Abraham dies, and Ishmael and Isaac – after more than 70 years apart – come together, in spite of the scars they both bore, to bury their father in the place where Sarah had been buried. 

I want to believe that these sons could, when they are reunited, share their experience of their father, learn from one another how both had suffered, find some bond in their suffering, find some way forward together. That would make for a neater and tidier ending to Abraham’s story. 

Genesis doesn’t tell us that any healing takes place when these two estranged sons meet again to perform the duty of burying their father. 

Indeed, the suffering in Isaac’s family doesn’t end with his near-death experience. Isaac’s own family would be torn apart when the younger of his twin sons, Jacob, would trick his infirm father and cheat his older brother, Esau, of his blessing and birthright. Jacob’s family would be torn apart with the story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50). 

The suffering continued through at least three generations. 

But, whatever Ishmael and Isaac believe that they have learned of Abraham, and whatever perceptions they have taken from their own final encounters with their father, they have seen something very powerful about Abraham’s God: They have seen that Abraham’s God is unquestionably faithful. Abraham’s God keeps God’s promises – showing up in the desert to renew the covenant with Ishmael, showing up at the altar to provide a sacrifice in place of Isaac. Abraham’s God is faithful – even if it might appear to his sons that Abraham has not been faithful to them. Ishmael and Isaac would go on, in their own way, to embrace the story of a faithful God and pass that story along to their offspring – a faith story that has lived on, in the faith traditions of Jews, Muslims and Christians. 

More than 50 years after a father who had sold his daughters’ bodies had died, a dying daughter came to a family reunion to tell her heartbreaking story of how she had been violated and harmed. A sister was empowered to speak and tell her truth, as well. They told a story of family trauma that has no neat, tidy wrapping, a story that has affected multiple generations. They came with scars – theirs, ours, those of our ancestors – and unspeakable heartache, pain, and grieving, the reality of our humanity etched into our souls. Our family came together with great need to see those scars, and to hear and bear witness to each other’s stories. 

Our hopes and expectations for neat, tidy epitaphs may be unrealistic. But in the moments that we are brought together, there is opportunity for healing: for engaging in hard dialogue, for respectfully and lovingly hearing one another’s stories, in diligently working to see the image and likeness of God in one another and in those who came before us. For indeed, it seems that it is only in coming together to share the painful truths that we can find our way forward in healing and love.  

The Story of Abraham and Family Trauma Part 1

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Year “A” of the Revised Common Lectionary offers worshippers the chance to re-visit the stories of Abraham and the next three generations of his descendants These texts from the Book of Genesis are shared with our Jewish friends, as well, and some people – Christians and Jews alike, find these texts traumatizing. To some extent, they are. However, the stories, like that of Abraham and his descendants, enable us in our modern times to understand that stories of family dysfunction are not at all new. These stories give us much with which to wrestle with as we learn and ponder them anew. 

When Abraham settled in Canaan, God entered into a covenant with Abraham and promised him more descendants than the stars in the sky and the sands on the shore (Genesis 15). There was just one problem: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, appeared to be barren. They were advancing in years, and Sarah had not conceived and borne a child. 

It was probably good that Sarah didn’t conceive early in their marriage: Twice (Genesis 12 and Genesis 20), Abraham passed Sarah off to foreign kings as his sister, so that Abraham would not be harmed because he was traveling with his beautiful wife. Twice, these foreign kings took the beautiful Sarah, whom they believed to be Abraham’s sister, for themselves – for a time, that is, until their households were punished because of their relationships with Sarah. Genesis reveals quite a bit about Sarah and her opinions (She is far from silent!), but readers are not told how Sarah reacted to having been placed in the hands of Pharaoh and King Abimelech. Maybe she expected to have to commit herself to whatever she needed to do to keep Abraham safe. Maybe she felt betrayed, violated, and ashamed. Maybe she wondered if her inability to conceive might have resulted from her having been taken as the “wife” of other men. 

When Sarah and Abraham continued on their way, and still no children had been born to them despite God’s promise of descendants, Sarah took matters into her own hands, offering up her Egyptian slave woman, Hagar, to Abraham so that he might have children through her. Hagar conceived and bore Abraham a son, named Ishmael (Genesis 16). But as Genesis also teaches us, humankind really hasn’t changed much over the ages, and as we might imagine, conflict quickly arises between Sarah and Hagar. Ultimately, Sarah – at age 90 – does indeed bear a child of her own, who is named Isaac. With Hagar and Ishmael’s “usefulness” having ended, Sarah demands that Abraham remove them from the encampment (Genesis 21). And, so, the last encounter recorded in Genesis between Abraham and his firstborn son, Ishmael, takes place on the fateful day that Abraham takes Ishmael and Hagar and leaves them in the desert, with a single skin of water, ostensibly to die. Ishmael is a young teen by this point – old enough to understand, and certainly to be scarred by, the fate to which his father is leaving him and his mother.  

All won’t go smoothly for Isaac, either: We are told in Genesis 22 that God tested Abraham in asking that Isaac be sacrificed. The last encounter between Abraham and Isaac recorded in Genesis takes place when Abraham bound Isaac on the altar, preparing to sacrifice him to God. For all of the arguments that Abraham had previously given God for sparing the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah when God is preparing to destroy them, Abraham met God’s request to sacrifice Isaac with seemingly little to no resistance.  

Hebrews 11:17-19 extols Abraham for having trusted in God when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps a broken Abraham wonders the price that he must pay for what he has done to Ishmael and Hagar. However Abraham has received this request from God, we fail to ask how Isaac has been scarred and traumatized by this episode. Isaac is old enough to understand that there is to be a sacrifice – and even asks Abraham about the lamb for the sacrifice. Does he truly understand when he is bound and tied that he is the intended sacrifice – until, that is, God steps in and provides a ram? What does Isaac tell Sarah when they return home? How does a mother begin to understand a husband’s need to follow a command from God to sacrifice a child for whom she’d waited 90 years? 

There are no further scenes of Abraham together with his family after the sacrifice. Sarah leaves Abraham’s encampment, and dies in another land, where Abraham purchases land for a burial place. Isaac settles in another land, as well. 

The suffering doesn’t end with Isaac’s near-death experience; it continues through at least three generations. 

Isaac married his kinswoman, Rebekah, who also struggled to conceive. When she finally became pregnant, she gave birth to twins who emerged from her womb embroiled in their own battle. The older twin, Esau, grew up to be an outdoorsy hunter and gatherer. The younger twin, Jacob, received his name because he literally was born holding on to Esau’s heel. Jacob’s envy of his brother as heir would ultimately tear apart their family, when Jacob (at his mother’s urging) tricked a then-infirm Isaac and cheated his older brother, Esau, of his blessing and birthright.  

Jacob made a life for himself apart from Esau, and settled with his mother’s brother, Laban. Believing that he had married his true love, Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, he had been tricked by his uncle, and had married older sister, Leah, instead (“This is not done in our country – giving the younger before the firstborn.” Genesis 29:26). Although Leah bore several sons for Jacob, his favorite son was Rachel’s firstborn, a son named Joseph. Joseph became the target of his older brothers’ jealousy and rage – and while the older brothers plotted to kill Joseph, they ultimately chose to sell him into slavery, pocketing twenty silver coins for him, and representing to their father that he had been killed by wild animals (Genesis 37:22-34). Jacob, too, would know separation from the son he loved. 

All was not peaceful or happy among Abraham and his descendants. All is not happy in many families. If we tend to feel alone in family dysfunction, we remember that even the family of our ancestor most chosen and loved by God, Abraham, struggled. Faith persisted, even amid that struggle.  

Reading the Bible with the Webb Telescope

Photo by James Webb Space Telescope from NASA

A version of this post was shared in a sermon at St. Andrew Lutheran Church and published at Faith+Lead and Enter the Bible from Luther Seminary.

Do you ever get so zeroed in on a project that you completely lose perspective? 

A few weeks ago I was stuck in one of those spirals, looking after draft upon draft upon draft of a proposal that would mean a lot to the start-up organization that I lead. I would spend hours on a single paragraph or a few line-items in a budget. If someone snuck up on me at my desk, I’m certain I looked like this guy. The room smelled like burned coffee. I had books half opened all over the floor around me. I was muttering nonsense about footnotes and line-items. 

And if you asked my friends? Or my spouse? Or my kids? They couldn’t wait for the project to just be finished. 

I’ve been trying to work on getting perspective this year, stepping out of the details to see the bigger picture. I need to make sure that I’m still a present dad for my kids and don’t get too consumed by whatever pressing challenge takes a claim on me first. 

From NASA

I recently stumbled on a set of images that can really put things back into perspective - the images coming back from the James Webb Telescope. 

These stunning photographs have returned from this school-bus sized telescope floating in the middle of space, looking as far into space as human beings have ever seen. 

The images make for great screen-savers and are shared free for the world from NASA. But I didn’t start gaining perspective until I started to learn a little bit more about these images and the technology that makes them possible.

From NASA

Take these two images, for example. The image on the left was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996. It is perhaps one of the most iconic pieces of space photography and it’s titled “The Pillars of Creation.”

A strangely theological title for an image of deep space, isn’t it?

The image on the right was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope just this year. Images like this one are reframing the ways that scientists understand how stars are born. For the science-types, there is endless reading on these topics and more at NASA’s blog. But the story of how we can receive these images is just as compelling.

On December 25, Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope, roughly the size of a semi-truck, blasted off on the top of an Ariane 5 rocket. A little over a year later it arrived at its final destination, one million miles from Earth. Once there, it took nearly six months for giant mirrors to fold out into space like a giant piece of origami. Eighteen hexagonal mirrors, each roughly height of my six-year old folded out into this massive mirror pointed out into space. If you want to learn more about this feat of engineering, take a listen to its coverage on The Daily. 

It is the size of this mirror and the fact that the Webb Telescope is in the cold of space that allows it to peer into the deepest, darkest corners of the universe. 

The Pillars of creation, for example, in the Eagle Nebula, is roughly 6.5 billion light years away. For perspective, if we imagine the distance between Earth and the Eagle Nebula were shown as the distance between New York and Los Angeles, the Earth would be roughly the size of the point of a pencil. For reference, the James Webb Space Telescope can see more than twice as far as the Eagle Nebula to nearly 14 billion light years away.

It gives us perspective. If we are just one tiny point of a pencil, on this tiny planet called Earth, in all the Webb Telescope can now witness (and beyond!), how might we endeavor to hear God speaking to you and to me?

Well, it happens in a story we call the Bible, this collection of ancient texts passed down from generation to generation. Like Psalm 78 sings, “We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation, the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.”

For many folks raised in Mainline (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) or Roman Catholic traditions, the Bible was something that the professional Christians talked about. Or as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma say in their delightful and Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Biblical Terms, “a book that Christians believe is so holy and inspired that they almost never read it for fear that it might draw them closer to God and neighbor or change their lives in some other inconvenient way.”

The Bible was that family heirloom on the coffee table that grandma told you never to touch. Or it was that book that the priest (or pastor) hauled out into the middle of church with all the reverence and pomp and circumstance that comes with it. I didn’t grow up with this understanding of Scripture.

For me, and perhaps for you if you were raised in a more evangelical world, the Bible was a constant companion. It was the rule by which we were judged. It was a manual for morality. It was a script to be rehearsed and memorized over a lifetime. 

I attended a conservative parochial (church-based) elementary and middle school. I loved this school. The teachers knew me and loved me, prayed for me and my classmates, corrected me gently when I would get disrespectful (sometimes with lines to write, old-school), and taught me the state capitals, the times tables, and the classics of literature. But as I grew up, I realized that some of this upbringing was unique. 

For example, at the beginning of eighth grade I received a full sheet of paper printed on both sides with three columns on each side of all of the scripture verses that I would be expected to memorize by the time the year was finished. We had a verse for each day, a set for each week, a section for each month, and a cumulative test at the end of the year with every single verse on it. My kids will certainly call this my “walking to school uphill both ways in the snow” story.

Not quite that dusty tome on grandma’s coffee table.

At times this long list of Scripture verses has felt like baggage to me, hauling around the bumps and bruises from the constant reminder that “the wages of sin is death” or the strange and disquieting stories from the Old Testament. In eighth grade, it was hard work, and though I frequently rose to the challenge and achieved an “A” in religion or in memory work (what a strange thing to ace!), I just as often resented it. 

As my faith evolved and I began to question many of the traditions I was raised with, the memory verses sometimes stung like fresh cuts or ached like purple bruises. I vividly remember Paul’s edicts against “homosexuality” (a word that a new documentary suggests never occurs in the New Testament, at least in any semblance of our contemporary understanding). I can remember highlighting portions of my leather-bound Bible, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it from you.” While it wasn’t only the words of judgment that were marked with orange highlighter, those are the ones that still seem to sting.

“Genesis Quote at memorial site,” George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art , accessed March 14, 2023, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/1720.

But as I have walked a little further down the road that many are calling “deconstruction” these days, I am starting to understand how generous this inheritance can be. Some of those edicts of judgment call me out of apathy toward the ache of justice: “What does the Lord require of you, O mortal? But to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Or from the words from the Genesis story of Cain killing his brother, Abel, painted on Chicago Ave in Minneapolis, the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered.

Scripture still has something to teach and is still speaking to me, even if I have tried to outrun it at various times in my life. 

I’ve come up with my own definition of scripture so that I can be clear with people I teach how I understand its role in my life and the world: “Scripture is our witness to the living voice of God.” Not quite as witty as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma, but it helps me stay focused on listening for God amidst these ancient verses that indict, dream, haunt, surprise, and prod me.

When I bump into things in my life, seemingly out of nowhere a passage will smile at me, mid-conversation, mid-thought, mid-dish-washing. 

(Ask my spouse, it can be annoying!) Here’s an example.

We bought this hibiscus tree at Costco this summer, watered it diligently, rotated it for sun exposure, and eventually brought it inside for our cold, Minnesota-winter. At that point, I completely forgot about it for more than a month. It’s a miracle anything can live close to my gardening incompetence. After all the leaves fell and the tree looked all but dead, I decided to try watering it for once. With a little attention and love, the leaves started to sprout, and the first bloom came out, just like the prophet Isaiah, dreaming of the lineage that was all but chopped down, “A shoot shall come up from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

How many places in our lives do we leave behind, lifeless, devoid of meaning, just a chopped off stump? But with a little warmth, a little love and attention, and perhaps the call of a gardener present at the first whispers of creation, blooms might just come forth. God gardens in the lifeless places in our lives and in the world, bringing forth possibility where there was no hope for tomorrow.

And for another example.

My mother-in-law is obsessive about the condition of the roads in the upper-midwest where we live. Dissatisfied with the Department of Transportation’s classifications of pink, blue, and green, she is wont to say, “They say blue, but these roads are definitely pink!” Every Friday, my mother-in-law sends a family text message with a little encouragement, some thoughts on the weather, and often, a verse or two from Scripture. Just before Christmastime, she sent this one:

“It's almost Friday. This weather drove Grandpa Jim absolutely bonkers. He'd be yelling, ‘Just stay home.’ And he loved his whole family together more than any gift. I have no advice for this kind of winter driving because I'm in the passenger seat with my eyes closed. But I'm praying for your wisdom and safety and your travel ahead whenever, wherever you go. If grandpa were here, he'd do the same. He might also share with you how as a child they'd hook up the horse and sleigh, wrap up in blankets and ride the maybe four miles to Emanuel Lutheran Church. It was here that the live trees were decorated with lit candles. Sounds dangerous. Anyway, amidst all the planning, changing and unpacking and stressing, let's not lose sight of the amazingness, of the birth of Jesus and all that has brought to us all hope, love, peace. You are loved. You are blessed.”

That text message isn’t a dusty family heirloom sitting untouched on a coffee table. It isn’t a list of to-do’s or a manual for morality. It isn’t the pomp and circumstance of a beautiful volume floating out into the assembly. 

It’s alive. It’s a living, breathing, active word. 

Active in the absolute mundane moments of deciding whether or not to drive in a snowstorm; alive in the haunted hallways of a new diagnosis; moving in the daring dreams of a child who wants more for this world; singing in the final breaths of a matriarch who looks back on a life well-lived and greets death with the smile of an old friend.

These passages knit my stories together as much as they stitch my sinews. They’ve rattled around in my bones long enough that they seem to spring out when I least expect them and perhaps when I need them the most. But they only crawl out of my body because I’ve dusted off that volume, spent time wrestling, and walked away, like Jacob did in Genesis, with a bit of a limp.

Contending with Scripture is a bit countercultural these days. But, in my estimation, it’s worth it.

From NASA

It’s worth it to have hope on the tip of my tongue.

It’s worth it to see a story that stretches long before I’m here and will be around long after I’m gone.

It’s worth it to dance with the generations of witnesses who have written, wrestled, dreamed, and dared to speak of God.

It’s worth it because it’s how we can hear this living voice of God, still speaking to us today.

You might be thinking what all this has to do with the James Webb Space Telescope? 

Well, a bit of something.

When they were looking to give a title to this, one of the most famous photos of deep-space, astronomers looked nowhere else than someone I can’t believe I’m quoting: Charles Spurgeon. A lion of fundamentalism, full of all sorts of problems that I could list, but preached a sermon featuring this image in 1859. My late grandmother, Phyllis Fleming, who knit Psalm 1 into the first stole I was given, would be proud of me for quoting Spurgeon! The astronomers knew they needed a bigger story than the precise science of how stars are formed. 

The Pillars of Creation sparkle with the love of God that shimmers in every moment of our existence. It swings around every corner of creation from the microscopic speck of a point of a pencil all the way to the edges of the universe that we can't even imagine. These Pillars of Creation sing of a God who is breathing in the Eagle Nebula and singing at my corner bus stop. 

The New York Times commented that this image looks like the very fingers of God, reaching out of the heavens. I think I see it too, God daring to breathe creation into being, to spark change in our pencil-point-of-a-world, and to trust the frailty of human language to speak to us still today. 

Rev. Matthew Ian Fleming

Matthew Ian Fleming is a recovering evangelical who opens up his Bible bruises with curiosity, wonder, and a fair amount of irreverence. He is the founding director of Church Anew, an international platform equipping church leaders to ignite faithful imagination and sustain inspired innovation. With four colleagues, Matthew launched Alter Guild, a podcasting network with over 350,000 downloads that now features four shows including Cafeteria Christian with Nora McInerny and New Time Religion with Andy Root. Matthew is ordained in the ELCA and serves as teaching pastor to St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. At home, Matthew sings unrequested car-duets with his spouse, Hannah, jams on banjo with their two daughters, and religiously bakes sourdough bread.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.

A Digital Space for Spiritual Formation

Photo by Hannah Wei on Unsplash

This post originally appeared on Rev. Angela Denker’s new Substack newsletter, I’m Listening. We share this here because we appreciate Angela’s work and because we want to continue to provide you with new ways to think about and put spiritual practices into action. Rev. Denker’s newsletter is one such example. May the contents and the concept nourish you as you seek to lead thriving faith communities!

As you’ve doubtlessly read over the past few decades now, church membership and attendance continue to atrophy faster than your old DVDs. One of my first-ever spiritual blogs, written early in my ministry career in Chicago, was a response to a viral piece titled: “Why doesn’t anyone want to go to church anymore?”

A young-ish parent at the time, I took exception to the piece’s assumptions. I think for a lot of people, reluctance about regular church attendance has less to do with outright antipathy or anger and more to do with disillusionment and distrust that what happens in American church buildings on Sunday mornings has any connection to the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Most people I talk to, in between rushing from work and parenting and caregiving responsibilities — scrambling to pay one bill and then the next — are still longing for a deep spiritual connection in their lives. They’re just tired: tired of searching for genuine connection with God and getting met with a kitschy coffee shop and a signup sheet for small groups, with a promise of free church “merch.” Or worse, getting sucked into a church only to realize that the real goal of the leadership is not the world’s salvation but instead Christian political takeover. That was so Middle Ages.

Anyway, it’s true that while working as a Pastor, I will indeed be in church most Sunday mornings (and I hope you find a local faith community, too - whether it’s a Christian community or not) - I wanted to use this space to offer up something for you on Sunday mornings as well, either as a supplement to your local community and ministry leaders, or as a place for you to find respite and renewal while you sort out your faith walk at home.

So each Sunday morning, I’m going to promise to send you a newsletter with a few items: (1) a quick take on three pieces of Scripture, with some questions to send you searching for more; (2) a prayer; and (3) an invitation: to send me your prayer requests, with a promise that I will be praying for you.

As our community grows, I hope that you’ll indicate when you’d like your requests to be public, so that we can be a community who prays for each other. Even on days when I struggle with doubt, when I wonder what I believe anymore, I believe in prayer and its power to act and change and transform me, you, and even the world.

So here’s Sunday Stretch: Vol. 1:

Bible Stories

Here are some weekly readings (from the Revised Common Lectionary), and some reflection thoughts/questions:

Amos 8:4-7

Amos 8:4 Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

5 saying, “When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

and practice deceit with false balances,

6 buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals,

and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

Amos 8:7 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

You can always count on the Prophet Amos for some plain-spoken, grassroots truth on justice and everyday life. This is the Prophet who first gave us the idea for No Justice, No Peace - and called out the futility of religious ritual without grounding it in care and justice for the poor and marginalized.

I’m struck in this passage by the phrase: “you that trample on the needy.”

I encourage you to pause here for a moment. Maybe you know what it feels like to be trampled on. To feel dismissed, ignored, and dehumanized. To be told that you really don’t matter as much as somebody else, especially somebody else with more access to wealth and power than you have.

The Prophet condemns those who trample on the needy. And though many of us may know in our bones how it feels to be trampled on - we can also recognize the times and places that we have trampled on the needy: have lamented our own struggles and relative position while ignoring the cries of our siblings in need.

Questions to Ponder

How can I lift up the needs of those who are trampled upon? How can I tell their stories?

What do I pray when I am trampled?

When do I confess to being the one who is trampling upon the needy?

1 Timothy 2:1-7

1Tim. 2:1    First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone,  2 for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.  3 This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,  4 who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  5 For

there is one God;

there is also one mediator between God and humankind,

Christ Jesus, himself human,

6 who gave himself a ransom for all

—this was attested at the right time.  7 For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

Let’s keep this one simple. Paul is prescribing for Timothy that our highest calling is to lead a “quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”

I often don’t feel contended with a quiet and peaceable life. In moments of calm, too often I am disquieted by the notion that I should be doing more: working harder, achieving more, being better. Paul urges against this notion. In line with the Theology of the Cross, he reminds me that what brings godliness and dignity is a quiet and peaceable life. For today, that is enough.

What are the marks of a quiet and peaceable life?

Who do I know who is living a quiet and peaceable life?

What is keeping me from a quiet and peaceable life?

Luke 16:1-13

Luke 16:1   Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property.  2 So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’  3 Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.  4 I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’  5 So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’  6 He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’  7 Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’  8 And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.  9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

Luke 16:10   “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.  11 If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?  12 And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?  13 No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

Many a sermon has been preached on this one, but probably still not enough - because Christians just can’t seem to learn it. You cannot serve God and wealth.

In an age of ballooning church budgets and celebrity pastors, and a nationalist American Christianity hungry for power, money, and influence - we have strayed far from Jesus’ words. But let’s take it deeper than that final line. Notice what Jesus admires. He admires the manager who prioritizes his relationships over his money. The work of faith runs through our relationships. We are called to care for people, not money.

What does it mean to serve God over wealth?

When is a time when you’ve served wealth over God, and vice versa?

Have you been faced with a choice like that of the manager?

What does this story tell us about mercy?

PRAYER

Dear God,

This week I pray intently for each person who is reading these words. You promise that if we seek we will find, and if we knock the door will be opened unto us. I pray for each reader this week, that they will find answers and solutions for the desires and wanderings of their hearts.

I pray that you will bring healing for pain: physical and mental and spiritual,

I pray that you will place loved ones in their lives to hear them, and know them, and love them.

I pray, God, that you will nurture our souls in Sabbath rest, that you will help us to see clearly our own sins and shortcomings, that we will feel free to confess and be forgiven, and that you will draw us together in trust.

I pray, for each person reading today, that you will bring days of a quiet and peaceable life.

In Jesus’ name,

AMEN

An Invitation

A Community that prays for one another is transformed by the power of the Spirit. Here are my prayer requests for this week:

1. For my recovery from COVID and time outdoors

2. For refugees around the world, especially from the war in Ukraine

3. For victims of famine, especially in the Horn of Africa

4. For those facing climate-related disasters, and upheaval from their home

5. For farmers preparing for harvest

What are your requests? Feel free to add them below or send them to me via email. Make sure to mark those that you’re OK with being public requests, and I’ll add them our weekly prayer next week.

Keep the faith,

Angela

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Angela Denker

Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.

Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | https://angeladenker.substack.com/
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com

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