And yet,… when it seems like Jesus has forgotten you.

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A friend of mine, a pastor, posted on Facebook the other day that her four-year-old, at the end of what had been for him a very bad day, lamented, “Jesus forgot to help me today.”
Boy did this hit hard for me. I can only imagine how those words felt to her.
But “Jesus forgot to help me today” sounds remarkably biblical. Like something a psalmist would say.

Another friend of mine, pastor and theologian Samuel Wells published an article offering theologically and spiritually healthy ways one might respond to the pandemic. (See link below.)  My favorite sentence – because it is the most Sam-like expression of British understatement – is: “Best-laid plans are having a lean season.”

Indeed they are. I am on sabbatical this spring semester and I had wonderful sabbatical-related travel plans, including a trip to New Orleans that coincided perfectly with my daughter’s break between spring semester and internship, giving me several days to spend with her. Having had to lay aside such plans, it isn’t hard to feel that Jesus forgot to help me – to help all of us – this spring.

And yet,…

I also read a helpful reflection on Psalm 137 – which is a pretty horrible psalm actually. It is a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem, but it ends with the psalmist declaring, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (vs 9). To call this a lament is perhaps a bit understated (maybe something today’s British and ancient Hebrews had in common). It is arguably the angriest of the imprecatory Psalms. It is one I have always found impossible to pray.

And yet,…

What I read today was a reflection on the second verse, “On the willows there we hung up our harps.”

Israel was lamenting their captivity and yet they had not destroyed their harps, they had not forgotten their harps. They hung up their harps. Why? In the hopes that they would one day play their harps again.

And yet,…

Our world has changed. Vacations have been cancelled, weddings postponed, loved ones buried. But what have we hung up? What is hanging, waiting in hope for days that aren’t overshadowed by the darkness of COVID-19? Family dinners? Celebrating the Eucharist with your church family? Sporting events? Entertainment?

We have perhaps hung up many good and holy things, things we love and long to return to, waiting for the “and yet” of God. Because our God is full of “and yets”.- Israel was taken into captivity, and yet God was with them and delivered them.

– Daniel was thrown into a lion’s den, and yet God was with him and delivered him.
– Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish, and yet God delivered him to Ninevah and delivered Ninevah through him.
– Esther was a woman with no power who could have been killed by the king, and yet God saved Israel through her.
– Jesus was hung on a cross to die, and yet he is our resurrected Lord, God the Son, who has delivered us from the power of sin, death, and the devil.

The entirety of the Christian faith is predicated upon “and yet.” Resurrection is not automatic; dead really is dead. And knowing that people are suffering and dying really is horrible. There is no way to make it ok.

And yet my faith tells me there are still, and will still be “and yets” moments.

– People are dying in ICUs, and yet healthcare workers are helping the dying facetime with their families and promising them they will not die alone.
– People are suffering economically – many are hungry, even homeless, and yet people are donating time and goods to homeless shelters, to food banks, to the Cherokee reservation (which has had to close its borders because of the disproportionate incidence of illness it has experienced), and to neighbors.

It may indeed feel like Jesus has forgotten to help us. And our very best plans may indeed have a very lean season.

And yet, we have hung up our harps, in the sure and certain hope that God has not and will not run out of and yets.

 

Link to Wells article: Practices of Resistance

 

We had hoped…

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“We had hoped…” These have long struck me as some of the saddest words in the Bible.  “Now on that same day” – that is on Easter – two folks are heading out of Jerusalem towards Emmaus and they are talking about  “all these things that had happened.”  While they are talking Jesus appears alongside them but is unrecognized by them.  They tell Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  (Luke 24:41)

I hear anguish and sadness and a deep disappointment.  And I hear the unspoken, “but we must have been wrong.”  They had placed all of their hopes and dreams for redemption, for salvation, for life itself, on Jesus having been the one.  And now he was dead.  Never mind that the reader of Luke knows that he is alive and in fact the one talking to them.  I want to sit with the two for a while, to feel what they must have felt.

On Easter a friend of mine posted on Facebook, “I’m not ready to proclaim ‘He is risen!’ I need to sit in Holy Saturday for a bit.”

That’s where I am on this fourth day of Easter.  Still sitting in Holy Saturday.  Still thinking “but we had hoped.”  We had hoped to be back in church for Easter.  We had hoped to be back in our classrooms.  We had hoped to be in Florida with my brother and sister-in-law.  We had hoped this would all go away.

Holy Saturday has historically been the day Jesus is understood to have “descended into hell” to save those who had died before Christ had come.  When my son was young, maybe five, he asked me – loudly – in the middle of the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, “Mommy, where is hell?”  I whispered back to him, “Hell is wherever God is not.”  He thought about that for a moment and then told me, and a good portion of the congregation, “Well, that doesn’t make sense.  If God is everywhere, why do we say that?!”

I’m not a strong believer in hell.  And, in truth, I’ve never been quite sure what to do with our proclamation that Jesus descended into hell.  My son’s question seemed right to me.  But if hell is wherever God is not – or wherever God appears not to be because all of the things we associate with God, all of our hopes, are a little bit blurry – Holy Saturday and Jesus descending into hell starts to make a little bit more sense to me.

We had hoped COVID-19 would go away.  But it spreads and gets bigger.  And now I know young adults who have had to postpone their weddings and students who are soon to be college graduates whose plans for next year have been cancelled.  I know people who have had and are recovering from COVID-19 and I know people who have lost loved ones to the virus.  I know pastors who are trying to comfort grieving families when they cannot all gather together and where physical distancing highlights our reliance on human touch for comfort.  I had hoped that would not be so.

I have faith that this, too, shall pass and that we will retrospectively be able to see that Christ was here with us all along.  I really do.  But, I also wonder if we do ourselves and those around us a disservice by jumping too quickly to that moment.  Sometimes we need to abide in the now-ness of Holy Saturday.  It is a place of lament, of naming our sadness and disappointment and shattered hopes for what we thought would be.  “We had hoped” is sad, a sort of accusation even.  But it is also honest.  And, I think it is faithful.

Who Will Roll Away the Stone for Us?

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It is an odd Holy Week.

Learning to record worship for YouTube so it can be placed on Facebook.  Learning that there are ways to store and share large video files, too big for my email to handle.  Trying to find ways to bridge the virtual gap that makes watching worship somehow or other feel less like worship.  And yet loving being able to watch friends and former students from across the US and even in other countries as they lead worship online in ways that are beautiful and grace-filled.

In many ways this pandemic has shrunk the world.  My world is circumscribed by a circle around my home of roughly a mile and a half, maybe two mile, radius.  I have walked pretty much every step within that circle, sometimes walking two or three hours a day.  And I am so, so grateful for such a beautiful little circle of the world in which I can walk.

But it is still small.

And the pandemic has shrunk the world in that we are so much more acutely aware than perhaps ever before of our interconnectedness.  What happens across the ocean directly effects us.  What we do directly effects those across the sea from us.  We are, indeed, one family of God.

And though the technology (for which I am grateful) further shrinks the world and allows me to talk with and even see my children and other family and friends, it can never replace their physical presence.  A touch.  A hug.  A kiss.  So while it makes the world smaller, it also reminds me of the vast distances between us.

So this pandemic makes me feel small.  It reminds me – appropriately enough, especially during this Lenten season – of my relative insignificance.  There is nothing I can do to fix this.  I cannot make it go away.  And this sense of smallness, of powerlessness sorta sucks.  ( A valid theological term, I assure you.)

Mark’s Gospel ends with the women (two Marys and Salome) going to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning in order to anoint his body with spices.  I cannot fully appreciate the profoundness of their grief or of their fear.  But I do understand their very pragmatic question: Who will roll away the stone for us?  This is, of course, a literal question.  The stone was big.  Too big, too heavy for them to move it so that they could get to Jesus.  It was big enough to keep them from doing the thing they most wanted and needed to do.

“Who will roll away the stone for us?” feels like a metaphorical question as well, especially this Lent, this Holy Week.  I want to know who is going to roll away this stone for us?  And when?  It feels too big, too heavy, for us to continue to bear.  It is big enough to keep us from doing many of the things we most want and need to do.  It is heavy and scary.  And I want someone to roll it away!

In Mark’s Gospel, when the women arrive at the tomb there is someone who appears to be a young man in white clothing – someone often assumed to be an angel – who tells the women that Jesus has been raised, to go and tell the other disciples.  Now, Mark’s Gospel is a little tricky because it has multiple endings.  But, in what is most likely the original ending of Mark, the women then flee – afraid – and say nothing to a soul.

Though clearly they do tell, because here we are, in the midst of the strangest Holy Week of most of our lives, knowing that Jesus has risen (we aren’t really waiting for Easter), but also stuck in this space where the stone in front of the tomb feels very real, maybe more real than the promise of resurrection.

As we move into and through Holy Week this year, “who will roll away the stone for us?” will be my plea and my prayer.

COVID-19: The Shadow of Death

I’ve heard a number of people speak of this current time of social distancing, of stay-at-home orders, as a collective cultural pause that is good for families and individuals.  A time to slow down and re-evaluate the rush and hurry of our everyday lives.

And at some level I understand this.  The last week in February, just a week or so before COVID-19 appeared in NC, I had told Russell that I really wanted a few days where I didn’t have anywhere to go.  My spring was too busy (my fault), filled with too much travel (all of it good) but I had not maintained an adequate margin.  So, I was looking ahead to June, planning to be more intentional about creating margin in my personal and work life.

So, on the one hand it would be easy to see this spring (and maybe summer and beyond) as a pause, a margin that has been given to me, to us, by the universe.

But that image of a pause does not seem to me to be the most helpful.  Pause suggests we can simply hit “play” again when this passes.  This is, of course, predicated upon the assumption that it is going to just pass.  Pause suggests that when we hit play again, everything will continue moving forward as if not much happened, not much changed.  Like running to the bathroom or getting more popcorn while watching a DVD. Or, like the movie “Click” it suggests we have the universal remote control that will allow us to skip over the unpleasant and inconvenient parts of this story and get on with the life we want.

But our lives, our stories, will not simply continue.  I heard this morning that the current number of COVID-19-related deaths in the US is roughly 2,500 with a projection of 100,000 (or, at least, that is the number the President hopes we will not exceed).  I’m not a numbers person, but that’s a helluva number.  That means our “good” scenario means forty times the number of people who have already died, will die.  I resist the temptation to put this in numbers because each one of those numbers represents a real-life, flesh-and-blood, image-of-God-bearing human being whose value cannot be quantified and who is in relation with an untold number of other image-of-God-bearing human beings.

And in the meantime, increases in economic insecurity, job loss, depression and suicide rates, domestic violence and child abuse, impact an ever-greater circle of people.  Pause is a privilege many simply do not have.

I was talking with a friend about watching the state map and how as it is updated each day it gets darker and darker, with more counties reporting cases and more cases in each county.  We commented that this feels like waiting on a hurricane.  We are all watching the news, doing what we can to prepare, knowing we cannot stop the storm and wondering when Jim Cantore will show up in our neighborhood.

Last night I had an image of the dark shadow in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  On a quest to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father, Calvin, Meg, and Charles Wallace are taken to Uriel and shown the beauty of the world.  They are then turned around and the see a dark shadow that blotted out the stars.  The dark shadow, the reader learns, is evil; it is nothing – a no-thing, a non-tangible nothingness neither created nor sustained by God – that is threatening the world. That evil is not real (in a physical, tangible sense) does nothing to mitigate its effects.

However L’Engle’s book, like the Christian story, isn’t really a book about evil.  It is a book about hope.  And resurrection.  But resurrection does not – it cannot – deny the horrifying reality of death.

Watching COVID-19 spread throughout our world from the (relative) safety of my home feels to me like watching the shadow spread across the universe from the relative safety of Uriel.  In this week before Holy Week, Easter feels forever from here.

But – and this is a big but – (spoiler alert) it is the power of love that saves the children, their father, and the universe from the power of the shadow.  The power of love is stronger than the power of evil.  Love wins.

As this shadow that is COVID-19 passes, we will not be able to simply un-pause.  But we can – and I pray will – through the power of love (God’s love for us, and our love for one another) continue to find evidence of new life, of resurrection, even in the midst of death.

Love wins.

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Prayer is Not Magic…(but it changes everything)

I have learned more about prayer from my children than from anyone. My daughter, Hannah, was born 25 years ago today.  She came into the world more than six weeks early – beautiful, tiny and nearly translucent.  I was allowed to hold her briefly before she was whisked away to the NICU.  It would be eight hours before I would see her again.  An eternity for an anxious and exhausted new mother.  For a premature baby, Hannah was relatively healthy.  Her stay in NICU was just a week (NICU folks are the most amazing humans anywhere!); we were sent home with a 4 pound 12 ounce perfect little person and lots of instructions from the pediatrician regarding her care.  “She has to eat every 3 hours.  If she’s asleep, wake her up, she cannot go that long without food.  She needs tummy massages several times each day.  She needs to be kept warm.  She needs to be held upright as much as possible.”  And the list went on.  Russell and I brought her home and prayed.  We prayed she would be ok.  We prayed we would be good parents.  We prayed we just wouldn’t screw up this perfect little person.  And we did what the doctors told us to do.

Our son, Jordan, was born two years and two days later.  He came into the world perfectly healthy, a tiny bit chubby, and with a beautiful olive complexion.  Then, at nine months he got sick.  He became gradually sicker over the next six months.  On a May Thursday evening we were in Scottish Rite Hospital, just north of Atlanta, our precious toddler with a temperature of 105.8.  A pediatric infectious disease specialist said, “He will not likely make it through the weekend.  Who would you like me to call?”

No one.  Don’t call anyone, fix my child.  But of course we did.  We called our parents, our siblings, our friends, our pastor.  We moved heaven and earth to surround our child with prayer.

And we agreed to more medical tests and procedures and injections.  When his fever came down (after some serious antibiotics and an ice bath) we took our little boy home with strict instructions from the doctor.  “He will need a daily follow-up at the pediatrician’s office, before the office opens.  Your family will need to quarantine for two months.  No toys or stuffed animals that cannot be sterilized.” We prayed.  We prayed that God would let our little boy live.  We prayed that the doctors were wrong.  And we did what the doctors told us to do.

This morning, on the 25^th anniversary of becoming a mom, I went for a run.  It was overcast and promising rain.  About a half mile from home it started to drizzle.  I kept going.  Another half mile it was a solid, cold rain.  I kept going and thought, “If only this rain would wash away this horrible virus.”  Which made me think of baptism.  Couldn’t the rain be a baptism for the whole earth right now?  For all of human kind?  As I continued to run Jesus and I had a long conversation.  I am angry and I am anxious.  And so I prayed.

And I realized – by this time tears beginning to well up – that prayer is not magic.  COVID-19 will not be washed away by the rain or by my prayers, even if they are tear-filled.  What I began learning twenty-five years ago is that prayer is not the control string on a puppet-god.  Prayer is not enough.  It is that which is necessary (for me) but not sufficient.  God is not likely to override the power of this virus.  Listening to epidemiologist and physicians is on us.

But I do believe that God is with us, in the midst of this.

By the time Jordan was five, he was still medically fragile, but much stronger than he had been as a toddler.  Russell and I were on a retreat at the Benedictine monastery in Monck’s Corner, SC one summer weekend.  During one of the middle of the night prayers, one of the monks prayed for the parents of young children around the world who were up in the night with sick little ones, that they would be comforted, knowing they were not alone.  We both cried, realizing we had been held in prayer even – perhaps especially – in the most terrifying and lonely moments we had yet faced as parents.  But we were not alone.  This moment remains, for me, the strongest, clearest sense I’ve ever had of the communion of saints.  It changed my world.

Prayer is NOT magic.  But it means we are not alone.  God is with us.  Through prayer the saints before us and among us and yet to come are with us.  Prayer is not magic.  It will not ward off this virus.  We need to heed the warnings of medical professionals to mitigate the spread and treat the occurrence of COVID-19.  But also prayer.  Those who are sick and those who are treating them need our prayers.  The families of the sick and of those who have died need our prayers.  Those who are anxious about their jobs, their homes, and even food need our prayers.  During this time of social distancing the not-aloneness of prayer matters.   Not being alone doesn’t fix anything, but it does change everything.

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On Reformation, Women, and the Holy Spirit

Today is Reformation Day.  502 years of re-formation in the church.  And yet.  Today a student who works in an ELCA congregation shared with me that members of the congregation were upset – some to the point of tears – because the congregation sang the “wrong” version of A Mighty Fortress on Sunday.

This is one of the great ironies of being a Reformation church that exists in a constant state of “that’s not how we’ve always done it.”   I regularly hear pastors, and lay folks, lament that the universities and seminaries aren’t teaching the same texts they “used” to teach.  The program I teach in – in fact the position I hold – has been criticized for focusing less on teaching historical theology (read, dead, white, men) than it did at some imaginary past golden age (when only old white men taught?) and more on contemporary, constructive and liberationist theologies.  As a friend and colleague recently quipped, “I mean, why would you teach students how to think theologically about God when you could instead tell them what the theologians of the past thought about God?”

We Lutherans want our Reformation.  We want the pom-poms and the red paraments. We want the processions and the organ music.  We want to know that we are part of the “right” tradition.

But, we often want our Reformation to stay stuck in the 16^th century.

However, the Holy Spirit – thanks be to God – refuses to be complacent.  She is alive and well and working in the world.  She is alive and well and working in the church.  So, on this Reformation Day it seems absolutely fitting for the ELCA to publicly recognize the continued movement of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

For the past year and a half (has it really only been that long?!) I have been a joy and an honor to work alongside some of the most amazing, brilliant, funny, loving, and faithful women I have ever known.  And for that same year and a half we have been fortunate to work alongside our bishops who have wholeheartedly embraced our dreams for a church that values the gifts of women, have spent time listening and praying with us, and have been willing to use the privilege (all but one of the ELCA’s Region 9 bishops is white and male) and power that they have to make some substantive changes to the way the church does ministry in the world.

May the mischief-making continue.

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Special-E-News–from-the-bishop.html?soid=1101477504383&aid=zy7fVGLpO58&fbclid=IwAR0Ny7WGVupPP0dpb6ZtqlpTGxXB6gMLqo4mx9P4wjzCY5C8AJ9U9F6l7Ug

On Pancake Brains, Going Home, and Holy Mischief

One of the female pastors I interviewed for Holy Mischief told me a story about having begun her sermon the week of Brock Turner’s sentencing with “It’s been a hard week to be a woman.”  Several men walked out of worship during the sermon because, they told her, they did not want to hear about “women’s issues” in church.

Well, it’s been a hard week to be a woman again this week.  John McArthur is a well-known and influential Evangelical preacher and author.  This week, in a public event celebrating McArthur’s 50 years of preaching he suggested that Beth Moore should “Go home” (Moore has been teaching for years, but has recently taught on Sunday mornings in some more high-profile congregations) and he went on to lament that the church was “caving in to women preachers.”

And lest one think such ways of continuing to denigrate professional women are limited to religious circles, the day before McArthur’s comments, the Huffington Post ran an article about the advice given during a leadership training event for 30 female executives at Ernst & Young.  In addition to rather inane and arguably gnostic “advice” related to clothing, nail care, and hair styles, the participants were told things like:

“Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus… Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”

And… “If you’re having a conversation with a man, cross your legs and sit at an angle to him. Don’t talk to a man face-to-face. Men see that as threatening.”

Hmm.

Maybe that’s the problem when women preach.  Are we looking at you too directly? Perhaps if we positioned pulpits at an angle…

It is easy to make fun of this sort of non-sense.  Because even my pancake-like brain knows good and well that it absorbs (and more importantly can then use) information every bit as well as any waffle-brained man I know.  Making fun of it is too easy.  As a theologian in the ELCA (a tradition that prides itself on its intellectual rigor) it is too easy to be self-congratulatory over our more sophisticated hermeneutical lens.

And yet.   I’ve had a little bit of push-back on the title of my book.  I chose Holy Mischief because one of the female pastors I interviewed shared having been accused, with another female colleague, of being up to “no good” and to “mischief” for offering retreats for women in which (gasp!) no male pastor would be available to supervise.

Yes.  Sometimes mischief is holy.  Mischief is holy when it is a playful refusal of the status quo.  Mischief is holy when it insists that the way things are is not the way things are meant to be. Mischief is holy when it ignores the demands of a patriarchal, racist, and homophobic world in order to hear the calling of the Holy Spirit.  Mischief is holy when it ignores the concerns about the power of the powerful (one of McArthur’s stated concerns is that women want power, not equality) in order to follow the call of the one who entered into our world as powerless as a baby.  Mischief is holy when it turns the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

I am grateful for the witness of the holy mischief of the amazing and gifted women who continue to answer God’s call in the face of demands that they go home.

 

 

Links to both stories mentioned above:

https://religionnews.com/2019/10/19/accusing-sbc-of-caving-john-macarthur-says-beth-moore-should-go-home/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-ernst-young-how-to-dress-act-around-men_n_5da721eee4b002e33e78606a?fbclid=IwAR377hSoC7-oSSglboLsWPbTQq0FKSR7lKIKrspWvspXP2hgLS2qQAFzgME&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZmFjZWJvb2suY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAG_L3E6UPlg2RnP4SydpcmKsk2RTUSd3cx6qwD7JvYDcQZJZ8u72SNsGsxay-RsUMzK6V-1DbFx19e7sqTNr0Kwkv7MAENrAjZD5Qx9WzeEedM1L-IN-OfJ7jZiY2osYEhE7ofNJECm4E-r1DQlVb6nL8zpW8wvgGRUSYnyBSBP4

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The Wonder of Wonder

I’m a theologian and a professor.   I have a phd.  Three letters which mean people expect me to know things.  And, in fact, the vast majority of a phd program is about amassing data and then demonstrating how much you know.  There is even an academic hazing element of a phd program known as qualifying exams which is all about demonstrating how much stuff you know.

And yet every single academic I know is drawn into – and remains in – the world of academia not because of the stuff we know, but because of the stuff we can’t know.  The stuff we can’t research.  The stuff that no matter how many books we read will still make us wonder.

Wonder means uncertainty.  We do not wonder about the things of which we are absolutely certain.  Or even of the things about which we can hope to find an answer.  Wonder is the space where awe and doubt meet.  It is the space of mystery.

Are you familiar with Richard Rohr?  He is a RC theologian and spiritual writer.  Rohr writes, “People of deep faith develop a high tolerance for ambiguity, and come to recognize that it is only the small self that needs certitude or perfect order all the time. [God] is perfectly at home in the River of Mystery.”

Confession.  I’m not a fan of ambiguity.  I like knowing things.  I like certainty.  I like order and structure.  I alphabetize the books on the shelves in my office and I hang shirts by color.  Though I am not a chemist, the logic of the periodic table appeals to me.  I like being able to make sense out of things that seem senseless.

And yet none of the good stuff of life is knowable.  It cannot be quantified, ordered, or fabricated.  Have you ever thought about that?  The really good stuff – the beauty of a sunset, the music of children laughing, the silence of fresh snow.  The experience of the presence of God.  In the Eucharist.  In the community gathered.  In the quiet recesses of our greatest fears and pains and joys.  None of that can be explained.  It defies definition or classification.  It cannot be collected like trading cards. It can only be experienced.

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel it is the women at the tomb who first saw the resurrected Lord Jesus.  When they see him, the take hold of his feet and worship him.  Can you imagine the wonder, the awe, the uncertainty they must have felt.  And even the fear.  After all, Jesus’ first words to them are “Do not be afraid.”  He then tells them to tell his brothers to meet him in Galilee.   And so the Gospel of Matthew ends with the eleven remaining disciples (in Matthew’s Gospel Judas committed suicide one chapter earlier) going to Galilee and seeing Jesus.  And “When they saw him, the worshipped him and doubted.”  The translators of the NRSV tell us “But some” doubted, but that simply isn’t in the Greek.  In the Greek the disciples “worshipped and doubted.”

This is, I think, exactly what wonder is.  Wonder draws us into the mystery of the Triune God.  It does not try to explain the inexplicable.  Wonder is our faithful response to the ineffable God.  It is perhaps the only way we know the unknowable.  Because wonder invites us to be.  To dwell.  To abide.  And being, dwelling, abiding in the Triune God evokes awe and faith and doubt and uncertainty.  And even fear.  But wonder also invites us to a life of discipleship, a life of going and telling and remembering.  And wonder opens the door to a faith that trusts.  Just two verses after the disciples worship and doubt, Jesus promises them – and commands them to remember – that he is with us to the end of the age.

Why Theology Matters – why I wrote a book about suffering

Several years ago a friend of mine was on the scene of a freak accident in which a young child was killed by a car backing out of a parking space. A (well-meaning?) pastor who happened to be in the parking lot at the time of the accident told the mother that he hoped one day she would find out what she had done that had caused this tragedy.

I am not a pastor or a therapist. I am not a counselor or a spiritual director.

I am a theologian and an ethicist and an academic. And I teach and work and worship and live with real people, many of whom have experienced very real suffering and trauma. And too many times in the aftermath – or even in the midst – of horrendous pain very real people have heard (and even said) things like that pastor. Often from, or even as, someone who claims to be speaking on behalf of God.

I am not a pastor or a therapist. And like most folks, I imagine, I often feel at a loss for what to say to someone who is suffering. But I do believe that sometimes – probably always – the best pastoral care is good theology. Only, even as I write that I hear Stanley Hauerwas saying that “Good is not a theological category.” So, it would be better to say that the best pastoral care is faithful theology – theology that is true to the story of God in Jesus.

And sometimes the truest thing we can say in the face of suffering is this: it sucks.

It sucks.

But that is not the only truthful thing we can say.

Fifty Shades – You Deserve a Better Story

One of the few conversations I ever had with Christian theologian and ethicist Allen Verhey was about consent. He had come to sit on one of the benches just behind Duke Chapel and smoke his pipe and I was on a nearby bench sitting in the sun, waiting for class, and reading his book, Remembering Jesus. I had been thrown off balance a bit by his chapter on sexual ethics and so when he asked what I thought of his book I said as much. In that chapter he suggests that consent is hardly an adequate ethic. I told him that consent seemed like a great ethic to me. Dr. Verhey’s response – “Consent simply keeps it from being assault. That is not a good; and it is certainly not the good to which we are called.” Consent, in other words, is a minimalist ethic – it is the bottom beyond which we should not go, but it is hardly a worthy goal.