Joseph: Be a Man

Whenever I think I have a fix on what we are talking about when we talk about gender, the terrain shifts. If I'm in a group of people and I utter what I think is a truism about gender, the supposed truism is frequently (and immediately) challenged.

For example, just the other day I was on the playground with a bunch of first graders. I was the only adult male outside with the kids for recess (this all by itself gives some indication regarding gender roles in our culture). A large group of children, perhaps thirty, mostly boys, decided to dog pile me. It was really fun, if also a bit dangerous. It was something I tend to think only or mostly a group of boys would do, and only to a dad they perceived open to the idea. My stereotype is that boys roughhouse more than girls, and dads roughhouse more than moms.

But when I told this story to a mixed group, most of my gender assumptions about the scenario were questioned at various levels.

Then this week I've been preparing my sermon for mid-week Advent worship. I'm offering a meditation on Joseph (Matthew 1:18-25). Joseph plays a crucial role in the early chapters of Matthew. He repeatedly receives messages in dreams, and responds faithfully to the angelic messengers. He keeps his family together, first into exile in Egypt, and later in a politically savvy fashion back to safety in Nazareth.

Then he disappears from the rest of the gospel of Matthew, without a trace. We don't know if he dies, or remains alive but unmentioned. All of which (in addition to the fact that Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus) has made it rather difficult for the church over the centuries to engage Joseph as a model of faith or faithfulness in quite the same way as the mother of Christ.

This has me thinking about men. And men's ministries. And the connection between faith and gender. I invite you to ponder with me...

First, I have various gender-based assumptions. We all do. For example:

• I think young males, placed in a cabin for the night in the woods, will after about 30 minutes stop speaking any human language, and will instead transition into animal noises, fake farting noises, and burps.
• If you put a group of girls in a cabin in the same woods, they will stay up late talking about their day and how they felt.

As a former camp counselor and camp director, I have a bit of experiential data to back up these assumptions.

The church also has some gender stereotypes. For example:

• Men tend to join the spit & shine crew and work on building and grounds projects. They are more likely to be council president. 
• Women serve on altar guild and make quilts. Women do more personal care ministries (except that pastors, who do lots of care ministry, are more often men).

And many of those who watch demographic data on the church say these stereotypes contribute, overall, to a situation where there are more women in churches than men.

Which is why people write books like Why Men Hate Going to Church. Conversely, people also write awesome books like this one, Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives, giving indication of the great strides that have been made in terms of justice for women and the voice of women in the church.

Some church leaders try to address this situation by making church more masculine. My most widely read blog post of all time was addressed to Mark Driscoll, a shock jock pastor who encourages strongly stereotyped forms of masculinity in the church to try to correct the over-feminization of the church.

Other church leaders are addressing another set of questions by trying to make the church a safer and more just place for women.

But aside from the quite obvious reality that gender is very amorphous and diverse (we all know women who are masculine and men who are feminine, and seem just fine as they are), there is the identical reality that some of our gender-based assumptions are descriptively accurate and strategically helpful. And some forms of intentionally gender-focused ministry are truly helpful (like our current high school break out groups, where the guys gather with me, the pastor, and the girls gather with some volunteer moms--it's a win-win for discussion, faith development, behavior, and more).

So how are we supposed to think about gender in the church? I think there are four ways to speak faithfully about gender in the church that will prove helpful.

1) Accurate description of realities is helpful, as long as description isn't translated into constricting stereotypes. It is possible to describe without prescribing. The ELCA Social Statement on Human Sexuality is one such attempt. Good ethnographic and sociological research into gender-roles, nature vs. nurture, and more, are also helpful. Awareness is the key, without turning that to which we are aware into a strait-jacket for how everyone should be.

2) Let the Scriptures speak on their own terms, and learn from them. So, for example, in the opening birth narrative of the gospels, we can learn quite a bit about Mary as a mother, Joseph as a father, the disciples as men, the women followers of Jesus as women. We can understand them as being models for faithfulness, and we can even emulate the faithfulness of those of a different gender than our own. Furthermore, we can remember that although everyone is gendered, Paul also says in Galatians that there is longer male or female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:8). If we can maintain the paradox that we are both gendered beings, and that eschatologically speaking the body of Christ is beyond gender somehow, we will do well.

3) It will not help to reinforce gender stereotypes to try and recover some supposedly lost golden era of Christianity when men were "real" men and women were "real" women. This typically is simply us projecting our own gender biases back onto previous eras that likely didn't even hold the same assumptions about gender we now hold.

4) We can probably learn something from all sides of the conversation. I tend to think the people who are concerned about the lack of male participation in the church have a point. There's something missing in current North American church culture that leaves many men uninspired and marginalized. There is also something about current North American church culture that continues to be oppressive to and dismissive of the very real experience of women.

This last and final point is probably a liberationist perspective (argument from experience) with a catholic bias (taking a wider entirety of experience than typical). I hope all of it is helpful.

And if nothing else, this blog post has helped me prepare that sermon on Joseph for tomorrow.

A sermon after the Newtown tragedy

The assigned biblical texts for the Third Sunday of Advent provided helpful resources for preaching this weekend, inasmuch as any texts or preaching can speak to such a horrible situation. If it is helpful, you are welcome to listen to the audio of the sermon here. 

God our hope, you are in the midst of all who suffer. Be with the people of Newtown, Connecticut, who, with your servant Rachel, weep and wail for the loss of innocent children. Hear their cries; embrace their pain, and bring peace to all victims of tragic violence. Amen.

Get your books for free

Books (at least some of them), can be got for free. Here's how.

I assume you care about books and are passionate about them. Even if you get some of them for free, you spend quite a bit of money on the rest.

You also spend time with books. Lots of time. For example, right now I'm reading a considerable amount of phenomenology, especially the work of Jean-luc Marion. Pushing through to comprehending perhaps the most important philosophical school of the 20th century--and its implications for things like theology and preaching--will hopefully result in a breakthrough in my own preaching and pastoral ministry. It is worth the time, both in terms of professional development and pastoral ministry.

This illustrates that, underneath any techniques, the best way to get books for free is to be passionate in your engagement with them.

But I digress. You want to learn how to get your books for free. Here are three books I have received for free for the new year, and plan to review for various publications. The story of how each one was gotten illustrates how you might get free books.

Write for an on-line journal

In this instance, because I've written content for the Journal of Lutheran Ethics in the past, they looked through their stack of books, and asked if I might review this one. Since I write the preaching column for JLE, this makes sense. Find your niche, then work it. Keep your name in front of the editor, and be in regular dialogue with them. That's the angle here.

Write for a print journal

Most journals can request review copies for you if they haven't already assigned the book to somebody else. In this case, I requested the book from the Book Review Editor, who wrote to the publisher. The publisher is doing a special printing of the book and sending it my way (apparently the print run is so small they are printing it on demand). Again, direct contact with the editors, and an established relationship with them, is essential.

Write to the author

This book is published at an institutional-buyer-only price-point. I doubt anyone other than libraries will purchase it, unless and until it sells enough copies for them to consider publishing it in soft cover. In cloth, it is jaw-droppingly expensive. You can actually read it on the publisher's web site as an e-book, but the subscription for that service is even more jaw-droppingly expensive.

Or you can just write to the author and see if they have a copy lying around to send. Which Professor Dorrien did, so is sending one my way for review here on the blog. Since the topic is of interest as philosophical/theological genealogy leading up to phenomenology (the topic I mentioned at the beginning of this post), the book was available because of a) my interest, b) my connection to the topic, and c) because I was willing to review it.

Almost any author you can think of has a web site, a faculty page at their institution, or is on Facebook. Make the connection. Write to them. The world is flat. These folks don't live on Laputa. 

Christmas Eve Explained

Why Evening Services?

The church has for centuries celebrated services on the eve of holy days because the traditional Christian liturgical day starts at sunset. Examples include the Eve of Epiphany, the Easter Vigil, and All Hallow's Eve (Halloween or Eve of All Saints). Since Christian tradition has held that Jesus was born at night (Luke 2:6-8), it is especially appropriate, and poignant, to gather for Christmas worship on the eve of Christmas Day. Many churches around the world still hold midnight Mass, or at least one service close to midnight, to commemorate both the lateness of Christ's birth as well as the birth of the new day at midnight.

Our own congregation accommodates this pattern by offering three different services on Christmas Eve. We offer a 6 p.m. Children's Worship that is early in the evening, near dusk, and so at the end (beginning) of the day. This service is a service of word, carols, poems, special music, a time for meditation on the central text for Christmas, Luke 2. It is especially designed to be developmentally appropriate for children and their families.

Then, because our sanctuary cannot actually hold the number of people who would attend one Christmas Eve Mass, we offer two, one at 7:30 p.m. and one at 9:30 p.m. These two services are mostly identical, a traditional liturgy of Word & Communion, that then include some additional aspects appropriate for a high festival eve service. We read the proclamation of the birth of Christ at the beginning of the liturgy. We sing as many Christmas carols as possible during the service. We conclude  the service with a candlelight vigil and night prayer. As we sing Silent Night, all those gathered light vigil candles that have been distributed during the service. As the sanctuary is darkened, the candles are lit, and soon the light of the hundreds of candles fills the space, invoking the light of Christ coming into the world.

This year, we will at the conclusion of these services pray the traditional night prayer: 

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

It will be my goal as a preacher to help us meditate especially on the news the angels share, and what it means to be messengers of this good news. It is the goal of all our worship leaders to evoke both the solemnity and joy that accompanies the celebration of the incarnation of Christ.

Different Lessons/The Whole Christmas Story

I offer separate lessons and sermon for the 7:30 and 9:30 services. There are actually three lectionary texts on offer for the series of Christmas Eve/Day services. These differ somewhat between denominational traditions. For examples, see Textweek.

Essentially, this will mean the sermon for the first service will focus on the early verses of Luke 2, and the second service will focus on the latter verses of the chapter. In anticipate this year especially meditating on the psalms selected for these services (Psalm 96 and Psalm 97) both of which have deep resonances with the gospel lessons for Christmas Eve.

Sunday morning, we invite families to read John 1:1-14 and pray Psalm 98 as part of their morning Christmas day household prayers. 

The Mood

The overriding memory I have each time I hear Luke 2:1-20 read—and this is one of those memories that is so evocative and strong that I can smell it, taste it, touch it, feel it, and hear it—is the memory of reading this text out loud each year at my grandparents house on our farm in eastern Iowa. Their sitting room had been converted into the Christmas room. My grandmother beautifully decorated a real tree each year that sat in the front window, visible and bright for all those who drove past on the snow-encrusted highway. Inside, the room was warm and carpeted. Grandma played piano, and accompanied us in song as we sang carols. Finally, after too long of a wait to open all of those temptingly wrapped gifts, it was the tradition in our family for one cousin each year to read the gospel. I trembled with anticipation the years in which I read it out loud, and proudly listened on when my younger cousins were able to read it for the first time.

I tell this story not because it is particularly unique, or because you need to know that much about one family story in order to understand the Christmas narrative, but because this is how so many of those in worship will contextualize readings from the gospel during the season of Christmas. They are not simply lectionary texts read in worship. They are warm, relational, almost edible texts that evoke memories and feelings beyond anything we can say or do in our worship leadership or preaching. Christmas, like weddings and funerals, is one of those services of Christian worship where what we already bring to the service can in many ways over-ride what we hear or sing there. So much more is being evoked in these days by the texts that are read than can be encompassed in what we preach, but mindfulness of that fact shapes our pacing and approach. The wisest thing we try to do is go slowly, deliberately, prayerfully, letting hearers and worshippers have as much space for their feelings and memories as for our words or ritual actions.

And overall, we try to let the service evoke what we sing every Sunday in Christian worship, the Gloria:

         Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.

         Lord, God heavenly King, Almighty God and Father,

         We worship you, we give you thanks,

         We praise you for your glory.

         Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world,

         Have mercy on us.

         You are seated at the right hand of the Father—receive our prayer!

         For you alone are the holy One, you alone are the Lord,

         You alone are the most high, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit,

         In the Glory of God the Father, Amen.

Ideas for Christmas morning

Many families are on the road visiting family Christmas Day. Others cozy in at home and observe long-standing traditions. Still others attend Eucharist. Still others engage in service, visiting those who would otherwise be alone, lacking shelter, or hungry on Christmas day.

I'd love, as conclusion for this meditation, to hear from readers how they observe Christmas Day. Perhaps we can learn from each other.