Nightshift

I mostly worked nights when I was a hospital nurse - 7pm-7am.  This worked well for me barring the sleep confusion. I liked the quiet. It was just a skeleton crew of staff. I'd get my shift change report and get moving. There was the occasional nurse's report that included something like, "This family is really difficult." These words meant it was going to be a good night. Truly.

When those words were said to me, I added more sentences in my head.  Something to the effect of, "Of course they're difficult, their kid is really sick."  And I knew that at some point in the night, when things were quiet, that the parents and I would end up talking.

I later learned in pastor school about Martin Luther's "dark night of the soul." A middle of the night time filled with despair, anxiety, and fear so thick you taste it. I thought about those parents on my nightshifts. The Germanwings crash seems to have kick-started these memories. As a parent of teenagers, those high school friends who were murdered by plane crash and their parents' grief are haunting. As a Jesus person entering Holy Week, the week before Easter, all that makes sense to me in the face of their deaths is the cross.

For me, the cross isn't so much a way of living as it is a way to describe how I experience life. There are dark nights of the soul and the cross holds the weight of them because it is not falsely optimistic about my own pain or anyone else's. My lack of actual control over much of anything somehow finds space to grieve and to rest. Defiant alleluias will come with Easter. Today I'm letting the cross name the pain.

Weekly vindication for being an "a##*ole"?

I overheard someone make a comment this morning.  It was something about a particularly vocal Christian they know who "spends his week being an a##*ole" and heads to church on Sunday for his "weekly dose of vindication."  My heart sank and is still sinking.  I've spent the morning busily doing other things but this conversation simply won't exit my brain.  So, here I sit, deeply believing in the power of Christ's forgiveness and deeply believing that the cross of Christ helps us tell the truth - the truth about ourselves and our experiences.

Part of the truth is that this guy (I know him too) has hurt some people I know and have come to love.  I've heard him speak about Jesus and faith and I also struggle to see how he connects life and faith together in how he has treated some people.  

While it plays out differently, I also see these things in me.  I hurt people too.  Sometimes I know it and sometimes I don't.  I'm pretty certain that there are people who wonder about the connection between the faith I confess and their experience of me during the week.  But I also place my hope in the promise that whatever happened at that cross also has a part to play in what needs to die in me.  Because God loves my neighbor (you) and by extension God loves your neighbor (me).  Therefore, the forgiveness that comes from the cross is not an empty one.  It is one that also names the pain, the perpetrator, the victim and the consequences as we move through the muddle of our humanity.  I believe that the way I treat you all has true consequences for me on both large and small scales.  I also believe it is true that God forgives wholly and completely.  And I am grateful for it all.

To faith or not to faith...

I recently sat with a new friend who invited me to coffee by first asking, "How do you feel about disagreement?"  Mind you, his question came just a few minutes after I preached a sermon that included John 3:16 so I was utterly intrigued.  The next thing I knew, we were chatting over coffee and disagreeing about preaching.  What he asked, "Why don't Lutheran preachers exhort to faith?"  What I heard, "Why don't Lutheran preachers ask people to agree with an orderly list of theological ideas that equal faith?"  My response to his question is as simple as it is complicated.  "Preaching evokes faith," I said.

What's the difference?  The difference is a distinction about where faith comes from.  If I say that I agree with a list of ideas about God then faith is an intellectual "yes" that I dredge up from inside of myself.  However, faith generated by God, by the shattering of me in the shadow of the cross, comes from outside of myself.  [More about the cross in future posts].  In this light, a preacher points me to the cross and it is from there that faith is evoked, pulled, generated, etc., as a mystery of God's work in me.

Why does it matter?  Because it's about what God is doing, not what I am doing.  I can never do enough, say enough or be enough to make my way to God.  God is then the one who evokes faith.