HC SVNT DRACONES

Imagine the scene: middle school youth crowded around a banner, coloring a giant red dragon that hovers over the edge of a castle.  Then keep in mind their assignment is to create the background for the Christmas pageant. The pastor is moving from room to room, assisting the first graders with their Christmas carol, the older children with their costume, then discovers this scene, bringing dragons into the manger.

Here be dragons. It's one of my favorite phrases, written on maps to indicate those areas as yet uncharted, unexplored, and presumed dangerous.  If we're honest, it's the kind of thing that ought to be written on the cover of every Bible.

As far as I know, no dragons appear in the nativity of the Christ directly. But they are not absent from Scripture, making appearances at the very least in Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Sirach, and Revelation. There are dragons in the neighborhood, even if they do not make a direct appearance in the gospels.

But we might say, together with J.R.R. Tolkien, It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

So what is the live dragon in the Christmas story? What do these youth in their artistic wisdom have to teach us?

I am reminded that there is a good deal of myth in the birth narratives of the Christ. There are many levels of complexity. Echoes of ancient Scripture make it into the telling of the birth, with direct quotations from Isaiah and other prophetic books (see Matthew 1:23, 2:6 and 2:15, for example). But these echoes are made more complex by their journey through multiple languages and cultures. As just one example, the word virgin in Matthew 1:23 is an echo of the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) rather than a direct translation of the Hebrew. So Jesus is born of a virgin in Greek, but of a maiden in Hebrew.

This both matters and no longer matters. Mary is either or both, just as the Scripture in Hebrew or Greek is still Scripture. But why, you might ask? Well, for my money, I'll take a Scripture with an historical context over a book fallen from the sky any day of the week. I like my ancient texts flavored with history and complexity. They need to have been somewhere, handled by someone, affected by things.

Only in this way are they Scripture. So if you come to the Christ seeking answers like the wise men, you end up in the same place they did: With an existential invitation to worship, enter into relationship, and remain with the mystery. There's no tract to take home, a short little book length synopsis with all the answers. Instead, the faith, inasmuch as we are to carry it from generation to generation, or country to country, or planet to planet, will develop and get worked out in community.

These are our dragons.

So how is this a Christmas letter? Well, this has been quite a year. There's been enough in the news, in our lives, on the Twitters and the Facebooks, to distract us from truly ancient texts. It's hard to lean into old books when new RSS feeds arrive daily. But we are now in the moment when we recognize that once again this Christ shapes time for us, brings us to the marking of our weeks and our years. Christ forms the very map of how we live, and does so in such a way that we can never explore it all.

Scripture is not to be read once and fully fathomed. It's a text for a lifetime, to be read in a community of trust and hope that embraces its complexity and contradictions, not in order to reject it, but to grow with it.

I think that's the kind of faith community we are, or at least the kind of faith community I hope to cultivate. And then that is who Christ is among us also. Christ is for a lifetime, a Messiah to be met in a community of trust and hope that embraces the complexity of having faith in this Christ.

I don't know what you think of dragons, but let me encourage you to consider that they live rather close to Christ. And every community that lives close to Christ not only fears dragons less but becomes somewhat like the dragons. The powers of this world, encountering real community in Christ, mark the territory near the startling kingdom of God they discover, with the words, "Here be dragons."

The best Christian communities are this polis, this kingdom, this politics and alternative community, with scales hard and tempered enough to take the heat, and a fire that burns in the belly, yet gentle enough to lie down by the infant and rest.

Merry Christmas. If you're in the neighborhood, join us for Christmas Eve worship at 4:30 p.m. or 7 p.m. at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Dragons will be included in the calculations.

Losing faith in my denomination, inch by inch

Back in August, when a beloved long-standing staff-person at the ELCA was let go suddenly and with no notice, a large group of ELCA clergy and members (over 500) put together a petition which we then sent to the presiding bishop of the ELCA. You can read the petition here.

We sent it to the presiding bishop on August 13th. When we did not get a timely response, we expanded the recipient list of the petition to include the whole of the ELCA Church Council. Two days later, on October 13th (!), we received this response.

Dear Pastor Schnekloth,

Thank you for your statement and petition regarding the personnel policies and practices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Regarding the churchwide organization, we are grateful that the ELCA Church Council ensures that our personnel policies are congruent with ELCA Social Statements. As a matter of policy and privacy, we do not publicly discuss personnel decisions regarding individual employees.

God’s peace,

Elizabeth A. Eaton

In other words, "It's none of your business."

On October 14th, we sent the following response to Bishop Eaton and the ELCA Church Council. It seemed clear that some of our questions and concerns had not been heard, and we weren't entirely sure from her response whether the full petition and comments had even been read.

Dear Bishop Eaton, 

Thank you for your response. 

We do not believe the employment policies and practices of the ELCA—across all its expressions—are congruent with the ELCA Social Statements. We are concerned about wage gaps between men and women. We are concerned about the lack of a safety net for ELCA employees due to the ELCA’s decision to not voluntarily pay into unemployment. We are concerned about the length of time pastors who are LGBTQ or people of color go without calls, even in the face of a “clergy shortage.” We are concerned about the future directions of the ELCA, an effort which has, so far, been cast in the language of scarcity and anxiety.

We are hopeful that the ELCA can live up to its 1999 social statement and be a model of just and equitable employment practices in a time when non-anxious, hope-filled employers are hard to find.  We believe that, even when difficult decisions about end of employment are made, they can be carried out in a way that reflects the love of God. We give thanks for the work of the conference of bishops on redesigning the call process. We know that many of our concerns and hopes are your concerns and hopes, too, and that this is not news to you. But your response leaves us with these questions: 

**When will the church council have an opportunity to read the comments made by the 500+ signatories of the petition, and consider the issues they raise?

**What issues related to employment policies and practices is the church council already considering and working on? Is there a way to share that word of that work with the church?

**What do you see as the most important issues facing the ELCA related to the recruiting, training, equipping and supporting of our leaders, both rostered and lay? How can we as a church engage positively in this conversation (and work) together?

**What is the best way for people who have specific concerns related to ELCA employment practices to convey those to leadership, especially when they relate not just to their congregation or synod, but to the system as a whole? Is there a role in the ELCA for an ombudsman? 

Thank you for your attention to these questions! We plan to forward the response you sent us to the signatories of the petition, and encourage them to be in contact with the church council with any further concerns they have. If there is a better route for those concerns, please let us know!

attached: Three documents, the petition, the signatories, and a comments document

Once a month, we sent very brief follow-up e-mails asking, essentially, "When can we anticipate a response to this second letter?" None of the ELCA Church Council responded directly, with one notable exception with whom we were able to have a video chat conference.

Finally, today, December 12th, we received the following response from Bishop Eaton.

Thank you for writing. I pray you are experiencing peace, hope, joy and love this Advent.

In my last response to you, I shared that the personnel policies and practices of the churchwide organization are reviewed and adopted by the ELCA Church Council in accordance with the Constitutions, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  That occurred most recently just two years ago.  Nevertheless, during the Church Council’s meeting in November, a member requested that the council enter into executive session to discuss personnel matters, including those raised by your internet petition, and that discussion proceeded as requested.  Although this should be clear, it is important to remember that in this church, the personnel practices and decisions of congregations, synods, seminaries, schools, and other affiliated institutions and agencies, cannot be dictated or enforced by this office.

You have also expressed concern about the issues facing the ELCA related to the “recruiting, training, equipping and supporting of our leaders, both rostered and lay.”  Of course, this has been, and continues to be, one of the primary areas being addressed by the Church Council during its recent meetings and is the subject of in-depth studies across this church, especially in seminaries and within the Theological Education Advisory Committee of the Church Council.  Milestones during the course of this important work are regularly reported here: http://www.elca.org/News-and-Events/Recent-News-Stories.

Finally, your October 14^th letter raises numerous other issues of concern that are broader questions for the whole church in all of its expressions.  As you are aware, this entire church engaged in a yearlong process to discern what God is calling the ELCA to be and do as we approach the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.  Both the Church Council and Conference of Bishops have embraced the future directions, goals and priorities of this church. We encourage everyone across this church to embrace these directions, goals and priorities. You will soon be able to download the statement, Called Forward Together in Christ Strategic Directions 2025, on the ELCA website: http://www.elca.org/future.  Many of the hopes you identified in your response are named as goals and priorities in the statement. Also, during this season of giving, please remember that this church’s ability to maintain and expand the many ministries you and others care about most deeply depends increasingly on strong mission support.

This church, in faithfulness to the Gospel, seeks to exhibit the inclusive unity that is God’s will for the Church. Thank you for your faithful witness to the Gospel.

God’s peace,

Elizabeth A. Eaton

In other words, "Read the press releases, and none of your business, and maybe you can make a donation."

So now, we're stuck. There's no clear path forward to address the concerns raised by the authors of the petition, and basically no resolution. Notice in particular how none of the asterisks points we raised in our second letter are addressed at all in the bishop's response. I can think of a hundred ways that the bishop's letters to us could have been more engaging and receptive, opening a conversation rather than dismissing our concerns. None of those hundred ways are operative in these letters.

We don't know how to move forward at this point. I confess that personally, I find this whole dialogue disheartening and disillusioning in the extreme. I have a feeling that if we are going to make real change in our denomination, we're all going to need to get a lot more noisy rather than less noisy, and we're going to have to try and push through very entrenched power systems and structures that can basically wait us out only to then say, "Get off our lawn."

Why I Love Jesus (Weird Mix Edit)

Sometimes all I really want to do as a pastor is tell people how much I love Jesus. But because people have heard folks exclaim their love for Jesus quite often, it may be less than clear what I mean.

So, this Sunday in worship, I plan to use the sermon to simply share why I unabashedly love Jesus. We're going to be working from Matthew 11, one of the more enigmatic passages in the gospels. So allow me, if you would, to offer some examples of what I love about Jesus, as a kind of foretaste, and hopefully an invitation to love Jesus the way I love Jesus.

1. So, first there's the whole thing where Jesus never simply answers a question with, "Yes." Whether this is a survival tactic under a violent empire, or a discipleship strategy to force all hearers to think more deeply, it remains true, Jesus seems to avoid simple answers like "yes" or "no." Pilate: "Are you the Messiah?" Jesus: "You say that I am." Jesus is especially avoidant of answering questions regarding his Messiah-ship. So in Matthew 11, when John sends messengers to ask if Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus replies: "Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, etc."

2. Related to this, Jesus is as political as heck, but not in the way anyone anticipated. It's like everyone nominated him to run for governor of Arkansas for a major party, and then instead of getting out stumping and winning votes, he spends a day volunteering at the children's hospital, another day sleeping with the homeless on the street, and a third day up on Petit Jean preaching to a rag tag crowd of farmers. He's an epic failure at traditional political strategizing, all the while conducting the most powerful movement building the world has ever seen.

3. He's fully human and fully God, which also means he comes across as not-quite-human and not-quite-God. Matthew 11:18: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”" John was on many levels more holy than Jesus. In fact quite a few people in history have seemed better Christians than Jesus: St. Francis, Mother Teresa, Ghandi. So Jesus really wasn't as great a man as some others. On the other hand, he's the Son of God. But he doesn't "do God" like you'd expect. He completely frustrates almost all the ways we tend to think about God by antithesis: he's not impassible, almighty, immortal, omniscient, and so on.

4. He's got the best mom. His mom is like social justice warrior extraordinaire. From the time he was born, she'd been singing these amazing politically subversive songs (what we sometimes call the Magnificat). During his public ministry, she was always organizing, always present, bringing the movement forward.

The Almighty has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty. 

5. He said the oddest things. Sometimes they were straight up paradoxes, or at the very least dialectical. Like the Sermon on the Mount. He told parables, which are pretty much the best short-short story collection ever assembled. And if you start to list the things he said that Christians tend to overlook, things get pretty wacky. As just one example, Jesus taught that John the Baptist was Elijah come again (and who was going to come "again again"; 11:14). 

6. Did I mention he had the best friends? We might mention Moses and Elijah, with whom he was tight. But then also Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, the disciples (some better than others, as it were, but my favorite is Peter). And then he seemed to simply get out with people in social settings pretty much all the time. It's like everywhere Jesus went was either to attend a party, or to assemble one. Hence, the water to wine in John 2. And again Matthew 11: the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’

7. He regularly stuck it to the powerful... like pretty much all the time. But he could at the same time be really close friends with those in power who had themselves aligned with his movement. Think of Zachaeus. But he was always sensitive to the weak and lowly ones. Think children. Or the widow who gave all she had. Or the woman who washed his feet. And so on. 

8. We have four stories about him, which is way better than just having one. Some other religions portray Jesus in alternative ways... for example, at least a couple of world religions claim Jesus didn't die on the cross. But we have on good record from four witnesses that he did, and this his death, even more than his resurrection, is central to the good news. Jesus died. On a cross. In complete faithfulness to his mission.

9. He rose from the dead and was both recognizable and unrecognizable. He ate fish but also passed through doors. At his death, bodies came out of tombs and walked around Jerusalem. Ever since, people have tried to make sense of this moment, his death and resurrection, and they've come up with all kinds of fascinating perspectives, from the idea that the resurrection is just a collective unconscious insight of the apostolic community, all the way over to cosmic notions of a world transfigured and ontologically changed by the events around him in that moment... signified by the fact that the curtain on the temple with a painting of creation was torn in two when he died. All I know is, that was a big enough moment that people decided to go back and figure out roughly when Jesus was born and then date history from that moment. 

10. I could go on and on, because I love this guy so much. But in the end, one of the things I love most about him is that he coalesced a movement, a community of people who tries to be an outpost of the kingdom he cast a vision of, a continuing body of his presence in the world. The church is a lot of things, sometimes not that great of things, but in its best moments, it gives the world the continuing presence of this man, Jesus. That's no small thing.

The kind of Lutheran we are

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that conversations about our church or denomination often have to begin with simply explaining what Lutheranism "is." Because Lutherans have come to the United States from many countries of origin, and since arriving here have periodically split into smaller groups (or merged into larger ones), there are a LOT of Lutheran flavors.

There's really only one Lutheran group in the United States that comes close to my denomination, the ELCA, in size, and that's the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). In Arkansas, if people have encountered Lutherans, more than likely it has been LCMS.

But the truth is, our local congregation, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, not only isn't like most of the Lutheran churches in those other denominations, it isn't even like many of the Lutheran churches in our own denomination. Although we're a denomination, we're also very congregational as a polity, which means the local church is free to be itself without having to imprint too strongly the denomination to which it is affiliated.

Some of the outward markers of the kind of Christian we are as a church and denomination are obvious, and are representative across our church. We ordain women as pastors. This aligns us with mainline Protestants more than the LCMS. We practice open communion, and host it weekly, which aligns us more with the Episcopalians. We have a liturgy, which makes us "Catholic Lite." We preach from the Bible and are Jesus-centric, which aligns us more with Christianity than with other progressive religious movements which, on another level, we share common cause (like Unitarian Universalists).

But then there are the things that make us quite distinct, and make me wonder whether it's right to call us Lutheran at all. For one, we practice full inclusion of the LGBTQ community in the life of the church. This distinguishes us even from many ELCA congregations.

But it's more than just welcome. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our life together as a Christian community is our commitment to offering open space for doubts and exploration. That is to say, an atheist or an agnostic would not feel out of place in our congregation, and in fact many such folks belong here. Belief and doctrine are not gates for entry, but furniture to try out.

Which is not at all to say that belief and doctrine are unimportant. Far from it. A good rug really ties the room together. Everyone loves a comfy couch. But the system of belief that we host among us is subject to inquiry and challenge. It's okay not to believe everything. And it certainly isn't an expectation to conform to specific behavioral patterns or types of "decency." We're quite busy trying to be less and less bourgeoise, even if our denomination and urban context tips that direction.

And then there's one more thing, and maybe this is the central thing.

The center for us as a community of faith is reminding each other that Jesus is the subaltern.

That's a fancy (Spivak) word, but it's helpful. The subaltern is the marginal one, the one on the edges. You know, like the beatitudes--blessed are the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, which then gets expanded in Scripture to include the Gentiles, the eunuch, refugees, and so on.

Then we remind ourselves that we are the body of Christ in the world. So we are the subaltern. Living as a Christian community means living as the subaltern, with a deep sensitivity to Christ's solidarity with subaltern communities of all types.

This is why we're committed, sometimes at a cost, to speaking up and with specific communities--#blacklivesmatter, the Transgender network, Latinx, refugees, immigrants.

Of course as a community of faith, we still carry all the markers of our historical origins also. Our worship still looks on some levels like a Lutheran worship formed in the crucible of the 1950s. We host potlucks, play handbells, sing hymns. Every Christian community is always an amalgam of its history and culture.

But we are also free to indigenize, perhaps more than other rigid types of Lutheran. Our worship has Ozark elements. Our leadership includes folks formally excluded from other Christian communions. We are free to join other movements and share common cause with them.

And increasingly, we catalyze ministries that we ourselves do not own or possess. We're free enough in Christ to trust that we can initiate things without possessing them, encourage others even when we don't earn credit. In fact, that's precisely one of the most profound ways Jesus Christ was both God and human.

As Son of God, he didn't consider that sonship as something to be grasped, but released himself fully in the world to be the subaltern.

This has been a very long explanation, but I post it as response to those with questions. It's my way of saying, if you're an atheist, or gay, or exhausted by culture Christianity that equates faith with nationalism, or just a plain old person in the world curious about an alternative form of life together with others that is making an attempt to live as the embodiment of Jesus the subaltern in the world... maybe give us a shot.

There's so much good in the world to be done that happens when those of common cause come together. You don't have to do it alone, and we may very well be better together.