Resurrection Manifesto

Ash Wednesday in a Level One Trauma Center

“We get wet and we corrode and now we’re covered up in rust
We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust” – The Holy Steady, “Stuck Between Stations”

Yesterday I (re)learned two facts about life:

1. The Hold Steady are a true American treasure

2. Ash Wednesday in a level one-trauma center brings a whole new meaning to pondering your mortality.

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As many of you know, my lovely wife and I are no stranger to dead bodies and awful prognosis, she as a med student, and I having lived through a parent with cancer, and three other family deaths over the last decade, and now working as a chaplain resident.

But being 24 (almost 25) brings with it some perks, none more perky than feeling like you have the rest of your life ahead of you. That the promises of the future always beckon. That one day, just right around the corner, I will finally get my proverbial shtick together. I’ll no longer be selfish, or an addict, or have a singing voice that I hate; whatever the heck I want to fix about myself, there is still a chance. As if then, I’ll return to God, and say: “Ok, I’m ready to do the whole ‘Jesus thing.’”

But, as if on cue, God proclaimed that this year, my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years of life in the Kingdom, would be spent as a chaplain resident in a level-one, inner city, trauma center and regional hospital.

Oh yeah, and as if I almost forgot: The emergency department/trauma pager would be one of my assigned (and desired) units.

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830am

Yesterday, we sat around the table at morning report, and my chaplain mentor and I decided we would “split” the trauma pager for the day, myself in the morning and him in the afternoon.

We proceeded down to the chapel at our Catholic hospital, and we received ashes on our forehead. As many of you know, I am a bit of a rebel, so following Jesus’ command in the Gospel text to not “practice your piety in public,”

I washed them off.

God, being God and all, thought that was a brilliant idea, and decided instead of ashes on my forehead, to make the rest of my day ashes in front of my face.

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930am

“Beep, beep, beep, beep,” Adult trauma priority, motor vehicle accident.

I mosey on down to the Emergency Department, and prepare myself for the inevitable unknown. And of course, just then something really does happen. Instead of getting one trauma, we get two, the second one in far worse condition, from the same accident, and: 18 years old.

Then the EMS says this: “His head was, like, sandwiched and contorted between the steering wheel and seatback.”

Shit.

This kid had his whole life in front of him, and now, because another guy, a nice guy too, ran a red light, that all has gone out the window.

And here I am, left to figure out who he is, wait for his family to show up, and wait to be present with her when she learns of this new, awful reality.

And thinking that this kid, this one kid, this one is young, younger than me.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

“Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming near – a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!” – Joel 2:1-2

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1100a

This time, I hear the commotion across the hall in the ED.

A 25-year-old, born six months after me, who has had multiple seizures one after another following a headache and vomiting. If you aren’t up to speed on the medical profession, the simple diagnosis is: that ain’t good.

So I sit with his mother in tears, his baby daughter, and other family members as they cry, as they tremble, and as we pray. Praying for God’s mercy and peace.

I sit with them as they recall the time, three years ago, when he was here after being ejected in a motor vehicle accident and nearly killed.

I sit with them when the doctor comes to talk with them.

This time, me, sitting with my green chaplain badge on, as a constant reminder of their son’s mortality, and of the fragility of any life that meets our emergency room.

This time, it’s me that’s the ashes.

From dust you were created, and to dust you shall return.

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1230p

I’ve now been in the emergency department since 930, without having left, and the nurse coordinator looks at me, and says: “We have a full arrest coming in, it’s not good.”

Then I see her, with the automatic compressions unit, which is lovingly called “the thumper” on her chest, pounding away.

And this time, I look to the heavens, and say: “So…are you trying to tell us something?”

Without much fanfare, she dies, quickly, as an addict who accidentally overdosed while trying to get clean.

But she is not “other” than me, she is a sister, as mortal and broken as I.

And once more, it’s me, on the phone with this family that lives on the East Coast, far away from our Midwest locale, giving them condolences, condolences on their wife and sister whose life, far too young, has ended.

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It doesn’t take much to realize, I suppose, when you do this work, that your mortality is in your face, constantly.

But most days, as a twenty-four year old chaplain, I can ignore it. I can continue to believe that God will wait for me to get my crap together, that God is just dandy with me returning to Him whenever I damn well please, once we’re making money, once we have kids, once I’m done with school.

On this day though, I heard the call of Ash Wednesday far differently before, because there was no suburban bliss to blind me. There was no pretense that being young means that the future is necessarily guaranteed. There was no sense any longer that this God is a leisurely, relaxed, “I’m ok, if your ok” kind of God.

This is the sort of God that is constantly hunting us down, chasing us down, trying to scream in our ears: “CHILD! Remember that from dust you were created and to dust you will return. The day of the Lord approaches. RETURN TO ME.”

This sort of God, an Ash Wednesday sort of God, doesn’t want evolved beings that have transcended their circumstances, their feelings, their tragedies. This God wants the you and me, the you and me that was formed out of the atoms and molecules of this very peculiar universe.

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In the last week, more than a couple staff members in the ED have asked me: “I don’t know how you do your job?”

And I haven’t responded to them yet, at first because I wasn’t sure what to say, but now, because I want to make clear why it is that I can, why my colleagues can, and why we all can.

Hans Kung asks: “Can it not be said that only if there is a God is it possible to look at this infinite suffering of the world at all?”

And the answer, most certainly, is yes.

Furthermore, it is only possible to sit with, and be present in that suffering, if this God is the sort of God who takes on flesh to suffer-with-us.

And it is this long-suffering God, who on Ash Wednesday, reminds us not with crosses on our foreheads, but with the opportunity to be those ashes in the world, to be both the reminder and the reminded.

Dead in sin, alive in Christ.

3 months ago

How far is it to Newtown?

In this season of Advent, we followers of Jesus spend a great deal time talking about distances. From the bright stars far up in the sky to God coming down from on high to low. From wise men coming from east to west to the travels of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem all the way to our rides of the 80/90 turnpike to see family, our hearts are set upon the travel of great distances in this season.

Which is what was so deep and painful yesterday, which was that the grief and anguish of the dead children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, was something that felt just around the corner, in the schools of our own children and loved ones.

It was/is just too damn close.

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Amongst the cacophony of voices yesterday on Facebook, CNN, and in the New York Times, we heard things like “now is not the time for politics,” or “there are no words for this tragedy,” which are true, but also miss the mark.

They miss the mark because one of the things that working as a chaplain has taught me is that 90% of the battle is dealing with the feelings of the present, which are the most important part of keeping us tethered to the seeming awfulness of reality, however tenuous that reality might seem to be to us.

And it is keeping tethered to reality that let’s us feel the fullness of what happened yesterday.

The truth is that there might be some words for what happened yesterday, like meaningless and senseless.

And the further truth is that there are real feelings from yesterday: anger, sadness, overwhelmed, and real honest-to-God grief, even for those of us thousands of miles away.

But I suspect that the greatest of all of these is the feeling that struck me very deeply:

Fear.

Now, this will be hard to hear, and it was hard for me to write, but you need to stick with me here, because when you and I feel fear, we find the easiest path to making it seem far away, as far away as the wise men on their way from Asia.

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In a book I have been reading recently by John Swinton, called Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to Evil, there is this stark quote:

“The myth of pure evil distances us from evil, makes it an aberration that is carried out by distorted individual who bear little if any resemblance to ‘us,’ Evil is not carried out by monsters, but by ordinary citizens who are desensitized to the moral and personal significance of their actions.”

And this is exactly the case that we are, and often, witness in the aftermath of massacres like yesterday, to distance ourselves from the terrifying reality that this could happen in our neighborhood, to our children, or even worse, that someone we know and love could be the gunman, we make these people into the radical “other,” the “aberration,” the “mentally ill” (which I should add, it appears he was), the “monster.” We latch on to whatever we can that makes the pain and grief of this event farther and farther away from us.

Just this last week in Sports Illustrated, there was an article about the sexual abuse of pitcher R.A. Dickey and Judo Gold Medalist Kayla Harrison, in which the thesis of the article is this quote: “How could it possibly ravage that many – one in four girls and one is six boys – with some experts convinced that the true number for all children was one in three? I could offer you a half-dozen fallacies that fed the disease, but ill give you just one: otherness.” Whether it was the Catholic Church, or the Boy Scouts, or the “pedophile,” it was always someone “other,” someone far away from our own lives; but here is the godawful truth, it’s usually a trusted coach, an uncle, or heaven forbid, a parent that commits the abuse.

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The more and more we try to put distance between us and what happened in Newtown, CT, the more desensitized, the more numb, and the more aloof we become from the real, awful anger, sadness, grief and meaningless that was left in the wake of twenty dead children, and from the presence of God in this mess.

And at the crux of all of this is this reality of Advent: that the line between the man who shot those children, and you and I, in God’s eyes and in reality is extremely thin. The difference might be a non-supportive parent, a chemical imbalance in the brain, long-term poverty, or being raised without loving and supportive structures (education, church, culture, etc…).

And, instead of trying to move us farther away from the shooter, the dead, and the grieving, God comes closer.

God moves closer to this awful reality, to both resist the presence of evil that has wracked God’s creation and to inaugurate that this, this awfulness, is not the final grammatical ending to the story.

God comes so close that in Jesus, God actually begins to erase the “otherness” of the shooter, like when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sisterwill be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

See how thin that line is?

God comes so close, that God is eventually crucified to eliminate all of those lines that might make us “other” to each other, and to God.

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The challenge then is not to run, but to actually move into the space of grief, anger, sadness, and chaos.

Indeed, our work of resistance and proclamation is all the more important in these times. We are not called to give glib theodicies and meaningless explanations about the sinfulness of the world, but we are called to physical, emotional, and spiritual resistance to all those powers that wish to make evil something “other” in our world, something we can ignore, something we can easily dismiss and move on from.

For if God is taking up residence in our neighborhoods, embracing the evil and chaos, and coming closer to it, and entering into the broken town of Newtown, CT, then how much more important is it for us to resist the hell that tries to creep into our present reality.

For how much more responsibility and urgency must we have, as Rob Bell would say, to announce the current and accessible reality of heaven on earth, of God’s kingdom now, for all of us. Announcing freedom from the structures and families that have broken us, from the addictions that chain us, and from the awful prisons of meaninglessness that drive some of our brothers and sisters to become perpetrators of hell on earth, and others to becomes their victims.

Our work is urgent, not just for the heavens and hells of eternity, but for the heavens and hells of now.

And that starts with you and I, not moving far away from the awfulness of reality, but confronting it up close, knowing that it is never actually far from us, but nearer and nearer.

AND, that there is One who comes closer and closer to us and this evil, close enough to die from this evil that is always lurking around the corner.

As we come closer by hugging our loved ones, crying and grieving for the dead and their loved ones, asking questions of justice and violence in our world, and reminding ourselves that it is never other and far away, but always near and familiar.

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So yesterday, I lamented, I cried, I grieved, and I was silent, I broke bread with brothers and sisters, and I did this:

I went for a run in our local park, and I stopped when I hit the bridge over the creek, and I walked down to the bank, dipped my hand into the ice cold water, marked myself with the indelible cross that has been a part of me since my baptism, and gave the world around me a benediction; knowing full well that that water that was dashed on my forehead as a baby and the words that accompanied it, and the people that have proclaimed it to me along the way are what has made the difference in my life, and in the lives of so many others.

So I’m back at work, writing this from our inner city hospital, where on Monday I sat with a lady whose husband of nineteen-years was shot and killed in a robbery.

And it’s here, in this inner city level one trauma center, that I am constantly reminded that the distance between the people of Newtown and my life, like the distance between the Messiah and the Criminal on the Cross, is indeterminate.

5 months ago

Apologia de Adventus

I hear you, you the rambunctious Grinch of Advent’s past. I really do.

I know that it has become commonplace amongst “serious” Christians of the liberal and conservative varieties to bemoan the loss of Advent and the “tone” of Advent that is far too close to Christmas already. What, with all of the waiting, and reflecting, and general resistance against Christmas tidings.

It’s a non-stop chorus of sadness over the loss of this and the loss of that around Christmas and Advent in our churches.

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Brothers and Sisters, I want to propose that our “liturgically appropriate colored” Advent eyes are too often fixed in the wrong direction. (Which also happens to seriously affect our Christmas as well).

Hear me out on this.

A big part of Advent is the preparation and the waiting for the Lord. But much like our Western Christmas, we have become focused on the great, the grand, the high and the mighty.

In short, our eyes have become fixed upon the heavens.

Whether waiting on baby Jesus to magically appear in a manger, or for the Lord Jesus to return riding the clouds in full glory. We constantly (notice the “I” statement) have fixed our gaze upon the heavens. And even our Advent tone has taken this up, with the bright morning stars, and the Angels singing, and all of that jazzy stuff.

Let us not forget that the greatest advent tradition of all is the star on top of the tree.

But in our gaze upon the heavens (or for that matters, the beautiful new iPad mini that I really want) all the real miracles weren’t happening up in the stars, or with the Angels, or with the newest Apple creation, but were happening in the dirt, in the muck of the world, in humanity.

With our eyes fixed upon the high heavens, the transcendent, the supernatural, we have completely missed that God has shown up below, in the dirty, nasty, material created world.

God has shown up so far below, that God has taken up residence, not only in the neighborhood, but in the weakest, most helpless creature known to man: the real baby in a real woman’s womb.

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I was recently in the Eerdmans bookstore with my father-in-law, and happened to grab a book off the clearance shelf by a Norwegian Lutheran about a “material faith.” Which I promptly proceeded to thumb through and nod my head in agreement.

So this is my proposal, yes, Advent is about waiting, but maybe what it also is, and maybe just or more importantly is, is about changing the direction of our gaze.

Maybe our practice this advent shouldn’t be fixing our gaze upon the heavens in patient waiting, but instead directing our gaze at the dirt of the world, the material world, that God is preparing to take up residence in, both then and now.

Maybe this Advent we should do our gazing upon those that need a hug.

Gazing upon the rivers and lakes that are polluted, the forests that are dying, and the oceans which are rising.

Thinking about how the creation of art and music has become the backseat rider to career driven science and math.

Considering how God is actually, not accidentally, present in the loaves of bread, the bottles of wine, the waters of our world that announce that God is now taking up residence in a new child, a new believer, or a new community.

Catching a backside glimpse of the God who comes down to us in our brothers and sisters who are mourning, hungry, and dying.

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And maybe, just maybe, after all that, we will catch the fact that God has taken up residence as a baby that poops.

That the miracle isn’t the angels heard on high, but the agony of the birth of a little boy.

That God has not only created, but lived on this planet, not waiting for an escape. Eating, drinking, and pooping.

Maybe then we will experience the true wonder of Advent, the really remarkable, miraculous part of salvation, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked:

That God has affirmed that it’s ok to be human.

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Friends, the song isn’t “Joy to the Heavens”, it’s “Joy to the World.”

Really.

5 months ago

finding a call in the ashes

Not all that long ago, I was part of a community that loved to sing this song called “For My Ashes.” I loved this song, it was melodically beautiful, I loved to play it, and when this community of 80 people was belting it out, I nearly wanted to cry.

But here’s the thing…at that point in my life…I don’t think I bought a damn bit of it.

In the midst of struggling with unresolved grief, the angst of the identity change of college, and in the throws of an addiction, a God who could take the bleakest black and turn it into the vibrant colors of resurrection was simply something I could not accept.

So, I went to seminary.

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Being in the ordination process in a traditional church has been a trip to say the least for me, and until lately it seemed to be a pointless endeavor of psycho-theological hoop jumping, with the same three basic questions always being asked of you:

What’s your calling from God, who are you to receive that call, and what do you have to offer to it?

And I have come to suspect that my struggle with it was because I didn’t buy it.

I mean, I did in my head on some level; I could give you a good distinction between law and gospel that sounds like it came straight out of CFW Walther’s mouth.

But, I had no faith in the words, or for that matter any of the promises. When it came to a deep and abiding love of God, the best I could come up with was a faint theological argument.

And how could I do anything else? I had experienced the agony of a mother with cancer for ten years, had lost both of my grandparents, and moved six states away from my family to go to school.

My heart was in a baker’s dozen places, scattered amongst many things. As my enneagram number, nine, likes to remind me, I was “everywhere and nowhere at once.”

The fact that I got as far as I did in the process with my remarkably good looks (!) and a good theological articulation of the Cross has come to scare the crap out of me.

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Lately, I have seen a few people talk about their callings to pastoral ministry, and have heard things like “The love of God shown in community made me want to share that with others,” or, my personal favorite, “a burning desire to preach Law and Gospel” (which by the way, I wrote in my endorsement essay nearly two years ago).

The official position of the church goes something along the lines of, “I feel called to the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments.” With the underlying Lutheran-y assumption being that you feel called to talk about God’s promises.

What I have wanted desperately for years now is to be able to say those words with conviction and authenticity, but I always found myself thinking, “Man, that must be nice to feel called with all those words and feelings and joyous words of heritage…”

And it got me thinking about the grace and healing that started nearly two years ago, and kicked in to gear last February. As I was recovering, and beginning to have some faith again in a higher power, when one of the parents of my high school students committed suicide, and I remember driving home from being in their kitchen all morning, in the midst of the ruins and ashes of their life that had been left behind, thinking to myself: “Is this all meaningless bullshit? Because if it’s not, God, then you and I are about to get into a full UFC cage fight.”

And I slammed my head against the steering wheel and screamed and yelled, screaming out of the depths of my anxiety, grief, and pain at God that has sat in the well of my soul twenty years.

I got home, and my partner in all things crazy, my wife, just sat, told me she loved me.

And a voice, from simultaneously deep within and far outside (that admittedly sounded a bit like Shawn from Psych), said: “Wait for it”

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And waited I did. I finished up seminary, finished up my first job in the parish, and finished up a 90 page masters thesis, and found myself just a couple months later as a chaplain in an inner city hospital, caring for the family of a young man, just a few months younger than me, who had been (eventually) fatally shot a robbery.

I distinctly remember seeing his body in the ICU, during the process of his physical death, with blood on the floor and a nurse holding his intestines, and realizing this:

This is what empty, meaningless, black, chaotic evil looks like. This is what it looks like when all your foundations burn down and all that’s left is ashes.

Then, clear as a day, I could hear my friends, Rachel and Jenny, singing:

For my ashes You give me beauty

For my mourning You give me joy

For my tears, Lord, You give me kisses

Oh, yeah, that’s how good You are

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After the man had died, I was outside the hospital, and I was talking with the brother, an African-American man who was both physically bigger and a few years older than me, who I had been near most of the day. His life had no doubt been scarred by the violence and evil that plagues our Midwestern city; but today, his life had been left in another kind of ruins and ashes.

He told me: “So this is it. Huh? I just don’t understand, but thank you. Thank you for being with us, and for talking to me, and being a blessing to us.”

And in my emptiness, bleakness, and tightrope recovery, I heard the vibrant notes of a new song, of the bright colors of resurrection, in my own life, in words that made sense to me:

“Eric, stand here in the ruins and the ashes that are all around you, and point. Point to Me, and the ungraspable song that is just yet out of sight. Just point.“

And that’s my call, like Jonah, that I have run, ignored, and tried to sabotage against:

Just point.

6 months ago

Taking Theology to Youth Ministry, Chapter 2

This is the third part, of a multi-part writing series, walking through Andy Root’s new books on youth ministry.

Introduction

Chapter 1

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“In the last four decades youth ministry has become something. It has become a common operation for many congregations (most local churches have or wish to have youth ministries), it has become a profession (with degrees, certificates, and manuals), it has become a market (with events, products, and outings), and it has become a field of academic study.”

If you don’t have Andy’s new books yet, head over to Amazon and pick them up, now.

It’s been interesting reading these books on the way out of a youth ministry setting. One of the things Taking Theology to Youth Ministry has served to do as serve as a bit of critical reflection over my last three years at my first youth ministry job. In particular, chapter two of Andy’s book asks the question, “what’s it all about?”

As Andy makes clear, often our intentions and purpose are assumed to be the same, which tends to, secretly, have selfish motives beneath the surface. At one time or another, in the last three years, I can attest to the feeling that Andy writes about: “my motivation might be to see the kids I work with showing outward indications that their faith is growing, because that will prove my ministry is a success.”

But, and it’s a big butt, growing faith, keeping kids good, whatever, they all often go unexamined in our lives. This isthe challenge then for us, as youth workers, is to eengage in real theology for youth ministry, theology that threatens our very self and our motives “in light of God’s judgment and grace.”

What I want to focus on here is that too often our theological endeavor in youth ministry is far too shallow, operating not on God’s terms of judgment and grace, but in service to our own needs and motivations, of which, as Andy points out, three major ones seem to exist: keeping kids good, involving kids in service, and passing on the tradition.

Keeping kids good continues to be a major, under the surface motive for many of our ministries. We are told that we “have the best kids” in the community, or that “they are such outstanding teens” by which we mean they succeed in school, athletics, and extracurriculars, by living an upstanding, moral, civic life, that is supported by the conservative (I mean conservative in the “conserving” sense) values of their church. In fact, what this says to kids, is that God’s presence is only found where there is no lying, cheating, stealing, drinking, smoking, or having sex.

This, pardon my french, is complete satanic bullshit.

How can we expect teenagers to confront their crap if they can’t come to engage with and see a real God, who acts in their lives, regardless of their behavior and disposition to that God.

As a Lutheran, we tend to talk about this in terms of law and gospel, which for me, is to say, that our kids don’t need anymore law from a world that is constantly telling them how they fall short. This is the message that our young girls and boys hear from advertising, TV, movies, porn, and most importantly, their peers. These kids need a big friggin’ dose of gospel, that says, while you were yet falling short, God called you a beloved child, as you are, because of Jesus.

And, from my deep relationships with non-Lutherans, to engage in discipleship and theology is not to acknowledge how we always fall short, but to look for God’s activity in real life, precisely in the places that we think most revolt us and God (like the cross and teenagers).

But instead of gospel, often we offer them two other options: service and tradition.

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For most, the reaction to this constant bombardment of inadequacy for teenagers is to show them that “they don’t have it that bad.” We want “them to serve instead of being served.”

Friends, I hate to tell you this, but that’s what National Honor Society is for.

I can’t tell you how many times the teenagers are asked to serve on their own, without any intergenerational partnership, because “it would be good for them.” And, as Andy writes, “Jesus himself was not motivated by service in general, but only be following his father.”

The problem with service as the core of youth ministry is that it doesn’t ground the experience of God for teenagers in their actual humanity. It again tells our kids that they are inadequate, that God cannot be found amongst them, for whatever reason, and that they must go somewhere else to experience God. Instead of God being present wherever two or more are gathered, we must serve to experience God.

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While neither keeping kids good or service are inherently bad, they fall short of grounding theology in the midst of our teenagers, proclaiming law, instead of Gospel.

Unfortunately, many traditions, including my own, have turned to confirmation for a solution, trying to pass on the element of our faith tradition to our seventh, eight, and ninth grade kids, even though most of them have neither the relationship or the basic experience of God to grasp these complex traditions.

What I have found, is that most, though not all, of my teens weren’t able to grasp concepts like grace, a theology of the Cross, or discipleship until one of two things happened: they had a major encounter with God, ala Paul, or, they had some major suffering and began to bear some sort of Cross in their life. The problem is, that for most, there is no articulation of relationship with God in their family life, or for that matter, in their pre-confirmation education in Church. It’s all either fun, games, crafts, or fluffy bible stories.

I suspect that encountering God at the foot of the cross, and wrestling with that experience, is necessary before being able to grasp onto any particular sort of articulation of that experience. Not the other way around.

So if it’s not keeping kids good, giving them service hours, or confirming them into a particular tradition, then what is youth ministry for? The answer, as Andy titles chapter three, is most certainly, participation, reflection, and wrestling in God’s action.

8 months ago

Taking Theology to Youth Ministry, Chapter 1

“The sweat fell from her forehead as Nadia heaved the last box from the cart into her new office. Sitting down to catch her breath, she wiped her brow and sighed deeply. [As] she looked up at the empty walls, she felt both anticipation and fear. “Can I really do this?” she audibly asked herself”

I must admit that reading theology-as-narrative is a bit different than the normal reader-response dance with a text, but in this format it works. In this first part, I am going to be looking at chapters one through three, since they serve as sort of an introduction to Andy’s thinking on youth ministry.

Chapter 1

In Andy’s narrative, we are guided by the narrator, Nadia, a new twenty-something (like me) youth pastor who has been called to a typical suburban mainline Church (i.e. a little conservative, lack of theological heritage/identity). She, like the rest of us, has to deal with the expectations of fellow staff, weird relationships with pastoral colleagues, and the expectations of the centers of power within a congregation. As I was reading, I found myself sympathetic with her situation, mainly because I have shared many of her frustrations over the last few years. While I love the church I am at, it is no different than many places, where youth ministry can be both a place for fertile experimentation, and a place for people to attempt to express their antagonism and power within the church.

While she has, in this narrative, some strain in her relationship with colleagues (due to various reasons), I want to focus instead on the groups that Andy identifies within the life of the congregation, which I suspect are present for many of us: One camp who are nostalgic about their own youth ministry experience and desire a church that “is fun and appealing to our kids,” the other is focused on evangelism and outreach, a place where kids from the community will want to come (sort of like YoungLife).

I suspect that both camps, while Andy doesn’t say this explicitly, have something deeper, and far more flawed, as a motivation: nostalgia and envy.

For the first camp, they desire to see the youth group “big, like it was in my day.” This is driven by wanting to see the Church full, like it was in the 50’s. Here’s the problem, despite the size of the Church in the fifties, the fruits of that ministry have been borne, and what do they show? A lot of the same, mainly: muddy theological identity, church as primarily a social institution, and moralistic therapeutic deism. Yes, the Church was full, but it was filled with many people who are no longer in Church, or are in Church “because it’s the right thing to do.” Nostalgia is a nasty thing for the church, and particularly in youth ministry, because it lacks any awareness that youth ministry is one of the most critical places to evaluate where, and search for, God’s activity in the current cultural setting of adolescents.

I suspect that this is also the camp that sees the purpose of youth ministry to see their kids, their grandkids, and the kids of the church, to be “good.” By this, we mean no drugs, no sex, no curse words, and modestly dressed at all times. This too is driven by a nostalgia for the morality of a bygone era. Not only does this gloss over the moral failings of any generation, but it also conveys the impression that the Church is there for “good kids,” despite the narrative of God’s activity in Scripture with people who are nearly always the kids that don’t make it into the group.

I myself, as someone who curses with his adolescents, am most frustrated by this camp. Mainly because my experience as part of a messed up youth group with a messed up youth pastor (whom would admit this, and I love dearly and is my current spiritual director) who swore, with people who came from broken homes, used drugs, smoked liked chimneys, and yet kept hearing about God’s grace and activities in their lives was critical to my faith.

Whereas that camp is driven by nostalgia, the other camp, the one I have dealt with most in my current setting, is driven by envy. And before I write anything else, just let me acknowledge, that I understand the envy and in no way think of them any less for it. They look down the street at the Willow Creek-types and the Young Life types, and see their outreach and evangelism to the community, which leads to more numbers, as indicating success, relevance, and significance.

Unfortunately, this type of envy is modeled so often within our beloved churches that our adolescents learn it well and also react to it just as strongly. This is because envy is the prime driver behind consumerism and advertising, which this current generation is saturated with and skeptical of more than any other. Whenever we try to use a new model, start a new worship, or try a new style, it is usually driven by some base level of envy. Instead of looking for God’s presence and activity within our own midst, and in the midst of whatever ministry setting, we go search for it in the places that we envy and want to be like most.

This envy is incredibly destructive, because it fails to acknowledge the capacity of God to already be at work in the midst of our struggles, our dwindling numbers, and the impending deaths of many of our churches. It is also the prime driver behind families that church shop and adolescents that look for the ministries with the most shiny things.

Here’s the problem, and which Andy points out, is that Nadia is far more moved and interested by the young people themselves then the infrastructure and programs, which begs the question, “what’s the purpose of youth ministry?”

And here’s the kicker, I don’t think that youth workers are alone in searching for an answer for this question (an answer which we will address soon and is just as relevant to the Church-writ-big), because I think that in Churches, and in my current church, there is a small remnant that constitues a third group, that is on the search for God’s activity in our midst that we have been ignoring and dismissing for far too long.

9 months ago

Taking Theology to Youth Ministry, Introduction

Early on in my current (and now outgoing) calling as a youth and family director at an ELCA church in Southeast Michigan, I was turned on to an obscure youth ministry book from IVP called “Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry,” by a guy named Andy Root. Andy is professor of CYF at Luther Sem, and as I have come to discover, one of the most articulate voices for a *needed* rethinking of youth ministry.

When I read his book three years ago, it placed into writing the many thoughts already circulating in my head about youth ministry, as a new youth pastor, and coming out of a vibrant faith community, Jacob’s Porch. I was so engaged by what he was articulating, that I made the three hour journey to Mars Hill (Rob Bell’s old church) in Grand Rapids, Michigan to meet him and to hear him speak more about youth ministry.

And for those of you who know me, also know that my journey through ELCA candidacy has been nothing short of an adventure. I recently made the switch in my affiliation from Trinity Lutheran Sem (in Columbus, OH) to Luther Sem and pursue an M.Th in addition to my Lutheran year of righteousness, in large part, for the opportunity to take classes from Andy and others.

His thinking and that book have been a manifesto for my vocational existence for the last three years. And, If you haven’t read it yet, pick up a copy here.

Andy recently released two new books on youth ministry called Taking Theology to Youth Ministry and Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry. And in a new writing project for me, I’ve decided to blog my way through them.

So, stay tuned later today for part one.

9 months ago

To be in apostolic community, church, is not necessarily to be with whom we are emotionally, ideologically, and otherwise compatible. Rather it is to stand, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, precisely with people who are very different from ourselves and, with them, hear a common word, say a common creed, share a common bread, and offer a mutual forgiveness so as, in that way, to bridge our differences and become a common heart. Church is not about a few like-minded persons getting together for mutual support; it is about millions and millions of different kinds of persons transcending their differences so as to become a community beyond temperament, race, ideology, gender, language, and background.

Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, 115.

9 months ago

To believe is to believe you have been torn

from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.

I come back to the world. I come back

to the world and would speak of it plainly,

with only so much artifice of words

themselves require, only so much distance

as my own eyes impose

on the slickrock whorls of the real…

Christian Wiman, “One Time - 1. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona”

10 months ago

Nine years later.

“But will you recognize my face

When God’s awful grace

Strips me of my jacket and my vest,

And reveals all the treasure in my chest?” - Joe Pug, “Hymn 101”

__________

How can I ever forget it? It was the phone call. It was that ringing phone that threatened our family for almost a decade. Usually when that phone rang, test results were relayed; while in the meantime, fear and dread would find a crack to slither it’s way into our lives. That’s the thing about cancer; it takes a relatively benign object, and turns it into something horrible. And on this day, this early July day, cancer finally fulfilled its threat.

___________

Being an awkward fifteen year-old kid who had just finished my freshman year of high school, it had been a long summer. In late May of 2003, my mother, after a high school orchestra concert, had taken severely ill. By this point in our lives, after a decade of cancer, this turn of events seemed to be nothing new.

But, this time, it was different.

Things never really got better. They seemed to just keep getting worse, and despite the best attempts of everyone around me, I could sense what was happening. You see, the thing is, that sort of like the Spirit, it’s difficult to describe death in the abstract, but when you finally see it, you instinctively know just what it is.

It wasn’t just physically or emotionally different this time around, it was existentially different. My mom was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 1993, and had gone into a coma. As the story goes, I had a dream where God had promised me that everything would be fine, and I relayed this to my terrified father on the steps of our front porch one afternoon, when he was asking me if I understood what was going on.

And miraculously, she was.

But this time, there was to be no such promise. From the outset, on that May evening, I knew that the cancer had finally taken its toll. Somewhere in the depth of my messy and confused teenage angst, I knew that this was the end for my mom. And instinctively, I also knew that it was going to strip me of whatever pretenses, emotional mountaintops, and adolescence that I had left.

And when that phone rang, 11 o’clock on July 9th, 2003, the only words that my devastated father could utter, in tears, were: “Eric, she’s gone.”

And I, ever the emotionally engaged and empathetic teenager, got off the phone with my dad, promptly resumed my game of SSX on the GameCube, and numbed myself to reality.

Not realizing, that in the span of that phone call, the plates of my reality had shifted beyond any recognition.

_____________

As I write this, I recognize that this is the first time I have really put down on paper what happened and what it felt like. It’s taken nine long years, and encountering more death than any twenty-four year old should have to, to get to this point.

I put those lyrics by Joe Pug at the top of the page, because listening to them in the car the other day is what prompted me to write this little essay, the idea of that God’s grace can be awful.

For the first, say, twenty years of my life, my faith in Jesus was nearly purely intellectual. By eight-grade confirmation, I was reading Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, attempting to get a grasp on the idea of grace. This, of course, led me to write in my confirmation sermon, that one “didn’t have to go to Church to have faith and to be loved by God, because that would be works, not grace.”

Let me tell you, the glares of the older folks in the crowd could have killed.

But here’s the thing, when my mom died in 2003, no idea of God’s grace, no faith in God’s omnipotence, no faith in modern medicine could have made me feel better.

In fact, my mom’s death was an awful grace of God. Not so much that God was responsible for it, so much as that God made something awful, and didn’t make me feel better. Instead, it began the long project of stripping me of myself, and my ability to have faith in something that I could comprehend.

In many ways, I think that Joe Pug’s question articulates something that I have yearned to speak of: “will you recognize my face, when God’s awful grace has stripped me of my jacket and my vest?” When I returned to high school that next fall, I was different, in a mysterious and awkward way. I think many didn’t recognize me after being stripped of the ground of my being, and those who did, I was either too numb or too self involved to acknowledge.

Though they tried, the entire awfulness of the situation turned me into a narcissistic addict who didn’t like the feeling of being existentially naked in front of my peers and God, so I lied and manipulated. Instead of accepting that grace can be awful sometimes, I pushed back, further bunkering myself into the rational, into the emotional, into the controllable. I wanted my grace to be nice, to feel good, to make me stronger, and more of a leader. While God wanted grace to show me reality, and that neither the jacket of Lutheran theology, nor any vest of the explainable could save me from death; I just wanted to find new clothing.

Your mileage might vary on this, but don’t let it be said that I think that Adam and Eve clothing their nakedness from God was a nice story. It clearly is something lived out everyday.

I suspect that most people, myself included, don’t particularly like the things that are what make up God’s grace, those awful things which strip us of ourselves; the death, the chaos, the brokenness all around us that God makes into grace, showing us a different promise.

I think that’s one of the main reasons that we become addicts, why I became an addict, was to clothe myself from being exposed, exposed in my doubt, in my weakness, in my fragility, to God and to the world around me.

Because I couldn’t deal with this reality: God’s grace is not an escape from death, but new life through actual death.

__________

Lest God misses an opportunity to show this awful grace: my grandpa died in 2004, and my grandma and my wife’s grandfather within days of each other in December of 2009.

Which brings us to this, the ninth year of this journey into the awfulness of death. And it is this year that has finally laid bare whatever addictions and intellectual fortresses I had attempted to clothe myself with.

This year, two remarkable events stripped me in an unrecognizably new way: CPE and the suicide of one of my student’s parents.

In October, I began my first unit of CPE, a thorough psycho-theological ringer, in which the seminarian serves as a functioning chaplain, usually in a hospital. Here’s the kicker, on my second day at the hospital, I found myself alone (which wasn’t supposed to happen), praying over the dead body of an African-American man and his family. In that moment, I began to realize that whatever intellectual doubts, whatever emotional doubts, whatever clothing I had to keep myself from being recognized by God were being replaced, not by more faith, not by more intellectual assent, but by Christ. A shift began, that was fully recognized in January of this year.

On that January morning, I found myself, like nearly nine years before, on the end of a phone call, with nearly the exact same words being spoken to me: “Oh my god, he’s gone!” This time, it was a high school student from the youth group I help lead on the other end. Driving over to her house and arriving on the scene, I found that her dad had committed suicide.

That afternoon, driving home from their house, I found myself remarkably angry with God, probably for the first time in my life. I remember punching the steering wheel, and just yelling: “What the hell, God? Was there no other way? Why does she have to experience this awfulness? Why did I have to be there for another death?”

And I found myself, sad, full of doubt and intellectual anger, stripped bare and feeling fully recognized before God for the first time in my life. And it was there that something deep within my being changed, recognizing that God’s awful grace is this: that we are stripped bare, so we can be clothed with Christ, and Christ’s calling in the world.

We are not called to escape plans, and utopian dreams, but like Jesus, we are called to be broken and poured out, even unto death, for the sake of others.

And that’s my faith now, as opposed to nine years ago, it’s not intellectual or emotional, it doesn’t ride on spiritual highs and lows. My faith has become existential.

And that calling and faith of Jesus that makes up the depths of my being, did the same for my mom. Who had to experience that awful grace of death, and through it, be clothed by God, and give me new life from whence it must always come: death.

10 months ago -