Pastor Ann's OT Blog

Our Northwestern Ohio Synod Assembly was this past Friday and Saturday. Unlike many pastors, I enjoy going to assembly. Sure, some of it is dull and some of it is frustrating, but mostly I enjoy seeing colleagues, hearing the guest speakers, and worshipping with brothers and sisters from all over northwest Ohio.

I have had the privilege the past four years of chairing the Resolutions Committee of the assembly. Our task is to put the various resolutions in order, ensure that the language is legal and does not contradict the synod constitution, and try to keep the assembly’s focus can be on the content of the resolutions rather than the minutiae. I know, it sounds boring. But it is important work and the committee feels as though we contribute to the smooth progress of the assembly. I also served for six years on the same committee in my former synod, although not as the chair person. That’s how I got on our synod’s committee—bishops talk—and my reputation preceded me.

After more than a decade working with resolutions, I still find myself amazed at what sorts of discussions happen about the resolutions at assembly. Often the discussions are anticipated—opposing views on the sexuality study, for example. But many times I feel utterly surprised at what people read that I missed or interpretations they make that never occurred to me. Sometimes it is as simple and profound as the use of single word that has starkly different implications for different people; sometimes it is grammatical; sometimes people want to add odd or unrelated amendments; sometimes people are just angry.

Such responses remind me not only of the importance of the work of the Resolutions Committee to deal with the minutiae in advance, but it also reminds me of how diverse we are and how much we need to hear the viewpoints of others. A word that seems perfectly appropriate to me can have a totally different meaning for someone else. And I need to hear that brother or sister’s concern so that I can be sensitized to the power of that word and how our various experiences shape our view of the world.

Especially as the people of God, we must be open to the reality that we do not all think alike, believe alike, or share the same life experiences. Yet united by our common faith in Jesus Christ as our savior and in our baptismal covenant to BE the people God together, we can still work together—in spite of our differences—to give witness to the saving power and grace of Jesus.

I presided at three funerals/graveside services over a six day period last week and this week. None of the deceased were Zoar members, but all of them had some connection to Zoar. They knew Pastor Tim, they had attended Zoar as a child, they got married here. None of them or their families knew me. And I had never met any of them. In one case, the daughter of the deceased knew me, but no one else in the family had met me.

So why did I get emotional at each service? It happens to me fairly often in funerals, even when I know no one in the room, but was asked by the funeral home to lead the service. I always meet and speak with family members before funeral services, especially with those who I do not know, so I learn a little bit about the deceased. But that does not mean I “know” them. Therefore, I have no personal grief at this person’s death.

But grief is contagious. I see other human beings in pain, grieving the loss of their loved one, often weeping silently, and it touches me. I remember what it is like to feel such sorrow and I find I am grieving with the family, even though I know not a one of them.

Because this grief happens to me often, funerals are emotionally draining. I find this to be especially true if the family is composed of mostly non-believers or non-practicing Christians. Their faith is weak or non-existent or they have no community of faith to support them (which is why I—a stranger—am doing the service). Their need to hear that their loved one continues to live on God’s heaven is deep and I can feel them yearning for words of hope and comfort from me. Their need for consolation is palpable and it drains me. I try to pour into them my own faith and speak with passion and compassion about the power of God. And when it is over, I am exhausted.

How lonely it must be to be to face such sorrow alone or with little faith in God’s presence! I grieve for that reality as much as for the loss of a loved one. And I hope that God uses me to help these brothers and sisters truly hear the good news of Jesus.

I tend to think and speak with contractions. Y’know—those shortened word forms that your high school English teach penalized you for using instead of spelling out the words fully. Contractions save us a few letters in our speech and on paper but are generally considered to be poor form—at least that’s what Mrs. Greenwald told us. (I mean, THAT IS what Mrs. Greenwald told us.) It’s (I mean, IT IS) laziness, she declared. English is already being mangled enough but not in this class, she said. No contractions, she insisted. And no abbreviations either!

I wonder what Mrs. Greenwald and other language purists would make of the “new” contractions that have popped up as the result of Twitter and texting and email. Gone even are the apostrophes that marked where letters had been left out or periods that let you know this was an abbreviation. Instead we have “yr” (your) and “gr8” (great) and “thx” (thanks) and “LOL” (laughing out loud) and “BRB” (be right back) and “bc” (because) and “IDK” (I don’t know)—a contraction IN an abbreviation that last one!

Is the English language (and probably other world languages) deteriorating because of this new shorthand (as some claim) or is this just another evolution in language? After all, we don’t speak like the Quakers did or like the translators of the King James Bible did or like the early Britons. Language has evolved and continues to do so. That’s why Webster’s keeps adding new words to the dictionary every year. Language is a living thing, always changing, always evolving, never static.

Lamenting change is understandable, but ultimately not useful. To live, to breath, to speak is to change and be changed. HTH. (hope that helps or happy to help) And HND (have a nice day—I made that one up.)

Pastor Tim does it with puns. Don Lieder does it with old jokes. My husband does it with teasing. My nephews do it by quoting lines from movies. I tend to do it with sarcasm. Humor. We all like it—to give it and to receive it. But we do not all express our humor in the same way and therefore, we do not always understand each other’s humor. This can be troublesome.

With the explosion of media and social networking, there are even more opportunities for expressing our humor—which also allows more opportunities to be misunderstood or misinterpreted. I have discovered that even adding a little smiley to a text or post or email does not mean that my supposedly-humorous remark will be interpreted the way that I wish. Unfortunately, such discoveries usually come too late—when the recipient has been hurt or offended or just confused. Then I have to backtrack and explain and even apologize, hoping to mend fences.

Humor is a tricky thing. When I insert it into my sermons, I am never certain how it will be received. Sometimes I get a laugh…sometimes a smile…sometimes nothing. And sometimes people laugh at what they think is my humor when I did not intend it that way at all.

The thing about humor is—it requires a relationship. If we have no relationship with the one delivering the humor, the possibilities for misunderstanding increase exponentially. If do have a relationship, then we often laugh at humor that we may not find very funny just to please the humorist. The relationship may be an intimate one or a work-related one or simply two people who think similarly and who “connect” quickly. Without some sort of mutual ground, humor is a risky endeavor.

Still, how boring would the world be without humor? Even Jesus used humor in his teaching…Say, did you hear the one about the shepherd who left 99 perfectly good sheep to go find one stray?

Some things defy explanation. They simply make no sense and we can question and speculate to our heart’s content and never come to an acceptable conclusion.

Such is the case at the death of a child. Yesterday, Zoar hosted a funeral for a 17 year old member of Lutheran Church of the Master. Kerry had fought his rare form of cancer for almost a year but in the end, succumbed to its insidious lethality. It was a sad and inexplicable tragedy for which we have little understanding.

Pr. Chuck Campbell reminded us in Kerry’s funeral sermon that although cancer took Kerry away from those who loved him, there were things that cancer did not and cannot take away from Kerry or his loved ones. Peace, courage, faith, tenacity, humor, hope, and love were all present in Kerry throughout his illness. And because cancer did not take these things away Kerry, it cannot take them away from Kerry’s family and friends. For when they saw that the one who was dying still possessed these qualities, they found that they, too, could possess them.

And while none of this can ever explain or make the tragic death of a 17 year old child acceptable, these qualities remind us that our God has an astonishing way of bringing joy from sorrow, hope from despair, and life from death.

We all grieve with the Keller/Huffman family and trust that the abiding presence of the Savior and their powerful memories of Kerry will grant them comfort and eventually, peace. As for Kerry…well, let us just say that Kerry is better right now than he has ever been and will remain so for eternity. And thanks be to God for that.

The Zoar Council has graciously agreed to give me a two-month sabbatical in the fall. I’ve been in the ministry for 15 years and the ELCA recommends that pastors take periodic sabbaticals for rest, refreshment, and renewal. Many sabbaticals include a learning component and mine is no exception. I am going to study stretching.

Specifically, I am going to study yoga and meditation—stretching both body and mind. While I have practiced both disciplines in the past, I have fallen out of doing so, and would like to renew these practices in my life.

In preparation for some more intense study this fall, I have already begun some simple stretching exercises to begin the process of limbering up my tightly-wound body. Something as basic as lying on the floor and stretching my arms up over my head and holding that position for five minutes makes my sides, chest and arms ache for hours afterwards. It’s a good ache, but an ache nonetheless. It is proof to me of how tight and inflexible I have become, that such a simple pose hurts so much. And one of the interesting phenomena that I’ve experienced when I was practicing yoga regularly is that I felt taller, could breathe more easily and seemed to have clearer sight (probably from the increased oxygen that came as the result of breathing more deeply).

Stretching is painful. People who stretch regularly make it look easy, but if you do not stretch regularly, it hurts when you do. This is true not only for bodies, but also for minds. Minds that refuse to stretch—to be challenged, to seek out new information, to consider other possibilities, to look in new directions—are minds that become tight and inflexible. Such folks become smaller and often refuse to open their eyes to see more clearly. The breath of the Holy Spirit has a harder time entering their being and nourishing their souls.

The problem is that being open-minded, stretching our boundaries is not comfortable. It can hurt, and even if the initial results are positive, it is easy to fall back into our closed, tight, smaller selves.

Jesus calls us to stretch, to risk, to reach, to be open. It is difficult and it can hurt and we may not like it, but it necessary if we are to grow into the people Jesus has called us to be. We can all so much more than we already are. We just need to start stretching.

Zoar’s Evangelism Committee, at the request of the Council, is exploring ways to promote our church’s ministry in the community. Lutherans are not so good at tooting our own horns, but we can’t share the gospel of Jesus with new folks if they don’t know that we exist. But we are quickly discovering how complicated mass communication is.

Should we rent a billboards or pay for an ad in the local theatre? How about bumper stickers or mass mailings? Should we pay for ads in the newspaper or at an on line news site? What about yard signs or t-shirts for members? Of course there’s always television commercials and radio ads and perhaps we might update our website to make it more jazzy. And let’s not forget Google and Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Who are we trying to reach? What’s the message we want to convey? Do we have “brand” we can promote or a niche market we want to target? How much money will all this cost and where do we get the most bang for the buck and how will we measure ‘success’ anyhow? Communication is complicated.

And to think the a handful of 1^st century peasants had only their feet and their mouths to share the gospel of Christ. And perhaps in the end, based on that group’s astonishing success, that’s the best way to communicate the gospel after all. To simply tell the story of Jesus in our lives to another live human being, without any billboards and bumper stickers and banners.

While at Scrambler Maries a few weeks back, I noticed that scattered around the restaurant were several poinsettia plants leftover from Christmas. They looked a bit shabby, but were nevertheless an unexpected bit of leftover Christmas cheer. I don’t know why the plants are still there. Perhaps it is because someone at Marie’s loves Christmas so much that they are reluctant to let it go. Or more likely, it is was simply that the plants just kept hanging on and on and on and no one could see the good in throwing out perfectly decent living plants just because they were out of season. Still it made me smile to see them. I saw a woman looking at me smiling foolishly at the plant and I’m sure she thought I was a bit batty.

Poinsettias come from Mexico where their use as a Christmas symbol grew out of a folk story. The story goes that young children in Mexico would fill the mangers of their communities’ life-sized nativity scenes with flowers. In a certain village, there was a young boy (or a young brother and sister, depending on which version you read), who was too poor to put any flowers in the manger. An angel appeared and told the boy to pick some weeds from the roadside and put them in the manger. When he did so, the flowers transformed into poinsettias, called Flor de la Noche Buena, the Flower of Christmas Eve.

Dr. Joel Robert Poinsett, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, brought the plant to his Charleston, South Carolina home in the 1820’s. The plant was later named in his honor for his “discovery” of it. Dr. Poinsett went on to found an organization that was the predecessor of the Smithsonian Institute.

So not only were the poinsettias out of season…they were out of place, that is, not in the place from which they originated.

Sounds likes Jesus to me. Out of season, out of place, appearing in unexpected places and making us smile at the foolishness of it.

OK, so let’s think about the term scareware. The name describes it perfectly. The purpose of this software is to scare people so that they let down their guard and do something foolish like give their credit card number to someone who will steal it. The whole idea is to undermine your confidence and sense of security so that you do something foolish or dangerous or that you will regret.

There are, unfortunately, lots of scareware tactics used in the world. From drug companies who try to scare you into asking for their products to former President Bush’s terrorist alert levels to ‘scared straight’ programs, our world abounds in scareware. Sometimes such scare tactics can be meant for good, but for the most part, they are not. Besides, fear is not an effective long-term motivator. People get tired of being afraid, so much so that sometimes we let our guards down completely and are not afraid enough.

Even the church gets in on the deal. Many churches try to scare people into believing. Horrible church sign sayings like “You can’t enter heaven unless Jesus enters you;” or “To be almost saved is to be totally lost;” or “Many who seek God at the 11^th hour die at 10:30.” Or a favorite: “Where will you spend eternity: smoking or non-smoking?” Really? Do I want to belong to a church that thinks such cute sayings represent any sort of meaningful theology or function as effective evangelism tools?

Here’s the thing: can you really scare someone into faith? And if someone is actually scared into faith, how can they imagine themselves beloved of God? How can they love a God whom they believe stands ready to punish or condemn them if their faith wavers? I just cannot imagine that sort of faith being durable or helpful or life-affirming. More importantly, faith based on fear surely does not please God.

In fact, faith and fear are opposites. Those who fear cannot believe; and those who believe have no reason to fear. Most of us fall somewhere between those two poles, I suspect. In any event, as a conversion or faith-creating ploy, fear does not work. I would even go so far as to say that fear destroys faith. Besides, if God is not gracious, we should all be very, very afraid. For unless God is very, very gracious, heaven will be an empty place.

This is similar to the scary window I got.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a virus on my computer. I have viral software and firewalls and all that and I’m very careful about opening weird looking emails or downloading files. But this one got by me.

Vince Krolak, our IT guru, got rid of it for me. He called it scareware. Scareware is often attached to an image, he said. And in fact, I was trying to download an image of a cross for this blog when the I got the virus—and don’t you know, the image disappeared from the image list after I tried to download it! Anyhow, up popped a window that looked nearly exactly like my viral software telling me that I had downloaded a virus and asking if I wanted to run a scan of the computer. I clicked “run scan” and the virus was loosed.

Now mind you, the virus didn’t destroy anything on my hard drive or mess up my files. But it kept popping up with a list of supposed viruses it had found on my computer and then urged me to go to a website to purchase an updated viral package so I could rid myself of these highly dangerous infections on my computer. That was my first clue this was bogus. I had the good sense NOT to go the website and certainly did NOT provide my credit card number. Vince tells me if I’d given my credit card number, it would likely have been sold immediately and huge charges made to it within hours.

Instead all I had was an annoying “scary” window that kept popping up every few minutes. I know some stuff about computers and so tried to delete it myself. But after several attempts from several directions, it was obvious that it was beyond my feeble capacity. I emailed Vince who said I should shut down the computer until he could come by in a couple of days to clean it.

So I’m up and running again. I wonder, though, what sort of people spend their lives trying to mess up other people’s lives. All the cleverness it took to create such a virus could have been used in so many other, positive, life-affirming ways. Instead, these mucky-mucks choose to use their God-given smarts to do harm to others. I just don’t understand such thinking. More on this in the next blog.