Epiphany and Geocaching

For some reason, the journey of the Magi, observed liturgically the Sunday of Epiphany (tomorrow, January 6th), always puts me in mind of geocaching and other forms of high tech recreational travel. I always imagine the wise men traveling from "the East" and arriving at Jerusalem employed some form of celestial navigation--or "astronavigation"--to find the "child who has been born king of Jews" (Matthew 2:1). Celestial navigation would have used "sights," angular measurements between a celestial body (in this case a star) and the visible horizon, to arrive at their destination. Today, with satellites orbiting strategically around the globe, many of us accomplish a similar task with GPS devices. 

In my imagination, the search for the child Messiah was the mother of all geocaching trips. The only thing wrong with my imagination- the wise men used the star to help them know the time of the birth of the child, but not the location. For the location, the wise men had available to them the same prophetic books as the Jews, and even Herod himself. They read the prophecy to Herod, "‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel" (Matthew 2:6).

At this point in the Epiphany story, the star does actually become a guide. Herod sends the wise men to Bethlehem. "When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.  When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy" (Matthew 2:9-10). So my imagination is not totally corrupted. The wise men are wise beyond wise. They use an ancient text (the Hebrew scriptures) together with modern techniques (astronavigation following a moving star) to make their way to Bethlehem. 

It's quite the drama, really. It's inspiring. 

New tech comes with new times. Last week, for part of our Christmas vacation, I skied at Copper Mountain, Colorado. The lift attendants ushering skiers to the chairlift scan your ski pass with little scan guns that sound like futuristic lasers, like from the Jetsons. I think they use the same scanners at the Walton Arts Center. 

In any event, the lift attendant who scanned my ticket asked, with bouncy enthusiasm, "How are you doing today?" Of course I was doing great. I was skiing. I asked back, "How are you?" His reply blew me away with its authenticity and joy. "I'm living the dream, man, living the dream. At least my dream, anyway." 

The thing about Copper Mountain employees, at least most of them really are doing what they love. They want to live in those mountains, near those slopes, among those people. Many it seems would rather ski than eat.

I learned this was true, literally, when I attended worship at the top of the mountain Sunday noon. Copper Mountain Community Church offers Sunday worship at the bottom of the mountain at 8:30 a.m. Sunday mornings. The pastors then spend the morning distributing bags of cookies to employees at all the lifts and restaurants and safety stations around the resort, ending their morning of skiing and cookie love with a mountain top chapel service at 12:30. They take joy at the beginning of worship in describing their ministry, which is new to most of us who are simply there on vacation. 

Their ministry is inspiring. The pastors have found some beautiful ways to do vibrant and faithful ministry with people who work as service staff at the resort. One way they do this is by organizing a free community meal once a month, strategically timed the day before paychecks are issued. By this time, many of the Copper employees are short on cash, even hungry. A few hundred folks show out for the monthly meal.

This ministry puts me in mind of the wise men. The wise men were far from home, out of place. They would have, along the way, had occasion to pay for guest lodging, purchase food from vendors, perhaps employ translators to speak with border guards and politicians. Jesus and Joseph and Mary are themselves soon to be displaced to Egypt fleeing for safety from Herod. Put a bit of realistic flesh on the story, and you start to see all the ways that wealth, and culture, and class, and more are all juxtaposed and vivid in the visit of the wise men to the child King. 

Perhaps in this Epiphany season there are some simple lessons to be learned. For one, be mindful towards and caring of those who serve you as you go about your day. Do not take your waiter, or custodian, or ticket attendant, for granted. They are real people. For another, when you travel, you are both guest and one bearing gifts. You bring something to give--new knowledge, a gentle smile, frankincense. Third, the strangers in our midst often understand us better than we understand ourselves. The great gift of hosting refugees, immigrants, foreigners, is both the opportunity to get to know them on their own terms, and to learn more about ourselves in the encounter.

One last story. We tried to eat at Cherry Berry today in the strip mall near Joyce and College. Sadly, it has closed. In the turn to a new year, one special prayer I have is for all business owners in their struggle to make a good living.

There is, however, a new frozen yogurt shop at the intersection of Crossover and Mission--3 Crazy Berries. Forlorn and sad over the closing of Cherry Berry, our household sought refuge there this afternoon, and were amazed. The owner and proprietor knows his custard. Their product is from Russellville, Arkansas, and he was quite proud to describe how the machinery works, what makes a good custard, and more. Spending a bit of time chatting and eating there reminded me what a joy it is to get to know the people who own and operate our local businesses. It makes me proud to call them neighbors. 

Something of this pride, this joy, this care, is evoked each time I read of those wise men who traveled so very far to meet the Christ. The local and the distant, the foreign and the familiar, the secular and the sacred, all are tied together somehow, in an arc of justice, joy, and peace. Epiphany blessings to you and yours.

You can read more about the Copper Mountain ministry at my blog, http://lutheranconfessions.blogspot.com/2012/12/high-altitude-christmas-worship-on-skis.html
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Simultaneously published as the religion column in the Saturday edition of the Northwest Arkansas Times.

An Inquiry into New Year's Resolutions 

• The Rev. Clint Schnekloth

 

[1] The New Year engenders a flurry of soul-searching behavior, earnest plans resolving to change current behaviors, introduce new habits and cease old ones. The practice is so common that the U.S. government even has a web page listing the statistically most popular resolutions, including links to resources that will assist in achieving the new goals.[1] Here's the list for 2012:

Drink Less Alcohol
Eat Healthy Food
Get a Better Education
Get a Better Job
Get Fit
Lose Weight
Manage Debt
Manage Stress
Quit Smoking
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
Save Money
Take a Trip
Volunteer to Help Others

[2] The science of change is increasingly sophisticated. If your goal is to successfully change your habits in the New Year, there's a good chance you can do so, especially if you follow the advice of a researcher such as Charles Duhigg, who has illustrated that changing habits has to do with changing the habit loop.[2] The loop includes an initial "cue," the trigger for the habit, then the routine itself and the body of the habit. Finally there's the reward, which tells our brain whether to store the habit for the future or not.

[3] Breaking a habit, or changing a keystone habit (a deep habit that reinforces and shapes other habits), is more easily accomplished if you can identify the cue, routine, and reward, and then experiment in changes with each, thus shifting a new reward into place behind a cue and routine you prefer.

[4] At this point, I bet your interest is piqued. One of the items in the U.S. Government list above is an attractive resolution to you personally. And I've outlined in a very succinct form a research-tested strategy for achieving the goal you seek. You can even run off and buy Charles Duhigg's book to lock in even more strongly on the power of habit and your power over it.

[5] Am I right?

[6] However, as interesting as change is in and of itself, it is incumbent on an ethicist to ask an even more fundamental question about New Year's resolutions than the rather pragmatic and pedestrian "How?" We are called here to consider the questions "Why?" and "What?" Why should we resolve anything at all? What does a resolution signify within the overall scope of our daily intending and resolving as human beings? And what is a resolution anyway? What does it mean to resolve?

[7] Dig down into a New Year's resolution and you realize that a resolution is a particular focus on human doing of a specific sort, as compared to all the other kinds of human action one might engage in on a daily basis. Drink less alcohol, for example, and you will still drink other things, and still make choices about what to drink, whether it is water or goat's milk. Save money, and you won't spend money in an economy many of us believe needs our regular reinvestment in order to flourish. Volunteer to help others, and you immediately have to start asking yourself which others you will indeed help.

[8] In other words, underneath the popular and annual quest to set New Year's resolutions is a rather bottomless and impossible quest--gaining clarity about why we choose to do this or that at any level, and how to know those are the proper actions. And this deeper question matters, because it is the only way to get at evaluating whether the resolutions we do resolve are worth our resolution.[3] One might wish--foolishly--to be able to resolve to do just one thing... but human life is not lived this way, doing just one thing. Human life in its flourishing involves thousands of daily decisions and actions. This is part of its glory.

[9] Not only that, but there are endless ways to evaluate various decisions from diverse perspectives. Look at the list above from the U.S. government, and notice how personal, and even selfish, some of them are. Most are certainly admirable on one level--on another level, they are somewhat self-serving, even vain.

[10] I'm reminded in these instances of Mrs. Jellyby of Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Mrs. Jellyby is zealously engaged in supporting missions work in Africa--works at it ceaselessly, in fact--but has no time for her own family or household. Dickens writes, "Mrs Jellyby had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it."[4] Many of us would find it admirable to support mission work in Africa. Almost none of us would set as their New Year's resolution to brush their hair. And yet...

[11] On the other side of this equation, we have the famous quote of Augustine, who said, "Love God and do what you will."[5] I confess to loving this quote and using it often. But in the concrete it begins to flag a bit. Try it as a New Year's resolution this year: "This year, I will love God and do what I will." It very well could result in piously thus deciding to go ahead do whatever the hell you were going to do before you established the resolution.[6] It sounds good as a kind of deontological emancipatory mantra, and in a culture that virtually demands that we live thus-and-so-and-not-otherwise it likely bears repeating, but it does not give much guidance for how we should or could actually spend our time and energy from day-to-day.

[12] So what is the resolution to all of this? How then shall we live? Fastidious and unflagging attention to our daily decisions may get tiresome, but it certainly isn't a bad idea to at least spend a few days reviewing and examining our lives to observe not how we intend to live, but how we actually live. This is what it would mean to gain "resolution" on our resolves.

[13] But we may not want--or need--to spend all our waking hours in such attentive examination of our actions. This could be--likely would be--completely exhausting. In this sense, the Augustinian dictum is worth our attention. Love God, and then be free in your daily actions. If your love towards God is rightly ordered, all the daily details and decisions will fall in line.

[14] It might seem facile, but I believe is nevertheless true, that this is what it means to resolve the issue of New Year's resolutions. In the very moment when all the focus is on the pragmatic and utilitarian, hammering out the details of how we will, for real and this time really truly do what we have resolved to do, world be damned! a step back away from the specific resolutions to gain some resolution on the nature of our resolving is a good way to start the year.

[15] So now what are you going to do having read this essay to its conclusion?

Clint Schneckloth is pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Fayetteville, AR.

---

[1] http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/New-Years-Resolutions.shtml

[2] http://www.npr.org/2012/02/27/147296743/how-you-can-harness-the-power-of-habit

[3] It is worth noting the other definitions of "resolve" and "resolution." In addition to the traditional New Year's definition, which might simply be "determination," resolution also refers to "clearing up," like getting better resolution on a computer screen or camera, or resolving a conflict by bringing greater clarity, even a solution. This essay is an attempt at widening the scope of what a New Year's resolution entails, connotatively.

[4] http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/bleakhouse/5/ 

[5] http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/01/love-god-and-do-what-you-will-avoiding-over-devotion-to-our-lady-of-perpetual-discernment

[6] Of course, on another level this is true of any resolution, because a resolution is only a resolution. It is lived out not in repeatedly saying it, but in the doing.

--

Simultaneously published at www.elca.org/jle, The Journal of Lutheran Ethics

Lutherans Are Lazy

There is a salutary aspect to Lutheran laziness I condone and celebrate. It can be summarized in the simple bon mot:

The Lutheran form of sanctification is a nap.

This is most certainly true. Emphasized here is a) sanctification is something done to us, not something we accomplish, and b) holiness, at least in part, is marked by rest, peace, stillness, quiet.

But this is not what I mean when I say that Lutherans are lazy.

Being Busy is a Form of Laziness

What I mean, to be precise, is that when Lutherans hit an impasse, begin to struggle, find themselves in decline, for the most part they simply expend more and greater energy on the very things that weren't working in the first place.

In this sense, being busy is a form of laziness. Churches not reaching new people in a city just start a church in that same city, and in a form pretty much similar to, and reaching the same kind of people as, the churches that already exist, perhaps with a hipster twist.

By and large, Lutherans invest their energy (if they invest any energy at all) in reaching people groups within our own cultural orbit. It requires people to come to us, and to be pretty much in the same economic, cultural, and language class as ourselves. We reach people who already self-identify as Lutheran, or at least liberal Protestant or liturgical or denominational, etc. And we expect people to come to us.

And we invest lots and lots and lots and lots of energy trying to reach this increasingly diminishing and shrinking group, and we wonder why we are not growing as a church (and yes, I know someone is going to post a comment on this thread that we are shrinking because we are liberal or apostate or whatever--so just in advance, I think you're wrong. We're shrinking because we are lazy).

It's too hard

What we don't do (because it is hard, and remember, we are lazy) is reach people at considerable cultural distance from ourselves (I've linked here to a 19 minute lecture by Alan Hirsch that is worth watching, unless you are too lazy. He points out that 90% of church ministries are designed to reach at best about 35% of the U.S. population. 65% of people in our country are simply not even a "target"for our church's ministries. Hirsch says this is a strategic problem. I say it is proof of our laziness).

We rarely cross language barriers or deep cultural barriers. We seldom try to reach the very rich, or the very poor. We are concerned that sharing the gospel with those of another religious tradition might be colonialist or something.

Heck, we won't even move to places where there are very few Lutherans.

Want proof? Just drive south from my home (Fayetteville, Arkansas) to Texarkana. Once you are south of Fort Smith, try to find an ELCA congregation. Try to find an ELCA congregation in Texarkana, a rather large city. Or, drive West across Oklahoma, then west across Kansas. Try to find Lutheran communities in those places.

Search on the ELCA web site for churches in Mississippi or Louisiana.

Better yet, try to find a Lutheran pastor or missionary with intentions to go to these places, either as a tent-maker or with mission support. Or, come ask my congregation how hard it was to find a Lutheran pastor willing to move to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Then go ask the synod staff in Minneapolis, Minnesota whether they have any problems finding Lutheran pastors or missionaries willing to re-locate to the Twin Cities to work in a church.

Better still, try to find a Lutheran circuit rider who is going to go out and visit many different communities like these and try to establish new worshipping communities. Find people willing to immerse themselves in other cultures, learn other languages, move their families into significantly different economic neighborhoods and cultures.

So what to do?

Yes, we do have many ethnic ministry tables, and we are finding some small ways to reach new peoples and cultures. And we have some shining stars in our church who have, often at significant personal cost, moved to the margins and the fringes and immersed themselves in new cultures and places.

But mostly we don't, and we have a glut of clergy living in culturally Lutheran centers while my synod (Arkansas-Oklahoma, not Lutheran central), for example, currently has 15 of 53 congregations without a pastor.

Mostly we are engaging in organizational insanity, "trying to achieve significantly different results by doing exactly the same thing better." It's not even clear that most of us, or most of our communities, are doing exactly the same thing better. Perhaps we are, in some places. But what we are not doing is trying to achieve significantly different results by doing different, radically different, things.

And when people read this, even when I read what I have just written, when I start imaging "radically different," I'm still too lazy to imagine truly radically different things. Mostly I'll just tweak it in order to accommodate my own culture, with a little zest thrown in.

We try to resolve the problems of the church with the same kinds of thinking that caused the problems in the first place. Often we get very, very good at this. And certainly there is always need to bring the gospel even to those who are culturally close to us.

But this is still laziness. And it lacks true courage.

So what then should we do? (Acts 2:37)

1. Move. More of us, more leaders, such as pastors and missionaries, need to move. For some, this will mean moving geographically, to new places with unreached people groups. Texarkana would be a good start. For others, this will mean getting out of the office, and out of the culture in which you currently reside, to be with people right in your own town (perhaps even right across the street) that are culturally distant from you.

2. Do less. This is counter-intuitive, if your goal is to be less lazy, but actually in order to go and do more mission, you're going to need to do less of the crazy stuff, trying to achieve significantly different results by doing exactly the same thing better. So stop it. Open up some space to actually do different things.

3. Take a vow of poverty. More of us are going to need to figure out how to sacrifice our comfort and safety, life in the geographical places and cultures where we currently live, and among the economic waters we currently swim in, to actually be where those at cultural distance from us actually live. Perhaps you will need to divest yourself of your own language in order to speak the language of someone else. That's a radical kind of poverty, and we need more of it.

4. Which brings me back to--move. We aren't going to have a movement without moving. And we can no longer say, "Somebody else can do this. I'm quite happy here in Lutheran heartland." This is a big country, with increasing numbers of people who are honestly not hearing the gospel. This is a call. And it is going to require legitimate, hard, and sustained work. From me. From you.

Make Your New Year's Resolutions S.M.A.R.T.

2013 Goal Setting Worksheet

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. (Jeremiah 29:11-12)

Make Each Goal S.M.A.R.T.: Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Relevant-Timely (on a time table). To learn more about how to write S.M.A.R.T. goals, read the Wikipedia entry, which is excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

2013 Personal/Family Goals

Goal	Anticipated Outcome	Expected Date of Completion	Completed?

2013 Professional Goals 

Goal	Anticipated Outcome	Expected Date of Completion	Completed?

2013 Discipleship/Spirituality Goals

Goal	Anticipated Outcome	Expected Date of Completion	Completed?

  

Notes:

Make Each Goal S.M.A.R.T.: Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Relevant-Timely (on a time table). To learn more about how to write S.M.A.R.T. goals, read the Wikipedia entry, which is excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

-Three Categories are presented, but you can choose your own categories or Goal areas.

-Only four spaces are given, more than four goals will probably be hard to realistically achieve. Focus.

-This is an opportunity for you to prayerfully vision for the coming year, take it as an opportunity.

-Revisit it at least quarterly if not monthly. Post it somewhere you can see it regularly.

-Thanks to Erik Gronberg, pastor of Trinity Lutheran in Fort Worth, Texas, for this simple and helpful template: http://www.tlcfw.org/pastors.html