Such a Good Boy

Once there was a Good little boy.  People often told his mother, “What a Good little boy you have!” and it made her smile.  When the mother took the little boy to the grocery store, he would sit nicely in the cart.  The Good little boy did not try to climb out.  He did not reach for things on the shelves and he did not scream.  The cashier would say, “Your little boy is so Good!”

When he was in church, the little boy sat still in his seat.  He was so quiet that the people in church would say, “That is such a Good little boy!”  His mother and father both smiled. 

Everywhere he went, the little boy was Good.

Sometimes, the mother took the Good little boy to the playground.  The other children were noisy as they climbed and ran and jumped, but the Good little boy sat quietly on his mother’s lap and watched.

The little boy grew and went to school.  He was a Good boy in school, too.  He was so Good that the teacher called the boy’s mother. The teacher said, “I am worried about your boy.  He does not talk.”  The mother was sad then, because she knew the little boy talked very well at home.

Spring came and the little boy joined a soccer team.  He was a Good boy at soccer practice.  He listened carefully to his coach and tried to follow the coach’s directions.  In the soccer games, the Good boy did not kick the ball very much.  The other boys kicked the ball most of the time. 

At the end of the season, the soccer coach brought trophies for the boys.  While the other boys jumped around and shouted and tried to grab the trophies from the coach’s box, the Good boy stood quietly and waited.  When the coach had only one trophy left to hand out, he said, “All the boys are not here.  One boy must be gone today.”  But he was wrong.  The Good little boy had been standing right next to the coach the whole time.

In the summer, the little boy played T-ball.  When their team was up to bat, the other boys ran around in the dugout and tried to climb up the fence.  The coach said, “Sit down and wait for your turn.”  The Good little boy sat quietly and waited, but the other boys did not.  They ran out of the dugout to bat when it was not their turn.  The coach did not notice, so the Good little boy just kept waiting.

What a Good boy he was!

Pastor, Forgive Us

Pastor/Priest  \PA – stuhr/ preest\ n.

A sinner who is so aware of the power of sin in his or her own life that he or she feels called by the Holy Spirit to announce that God loves sinners. 

(From Crazy Talk: A Not So Stuffy Dictionary of Theological Terms, Rolf A. Jacobson, Editor)

As our congregation enters the interview phase of the call process, it is easy for us to fall into a messianic type of thinking.  If we just get the right pastor, all of our problems will be solved.  The choir will always wear robes and fill the choir loft every Sunday.  We will have a permanent organist who plays the liturgy.  We will sing only our most favorite hymns.

The confirmation classes will be large and they will memorize the catechism, reciting it in front of us all.  And no more drive-thru communion; everyone will kneel to receive the sacrament.   Sermons will be short, reminding us frequently of our failure to follow the Ten Commandments.  The pews will be full of familiar faces that come every week and always sit in the same place. 

Maybe that doesn’t match your vision at all and I have gone to one extreme in my portrayal to make a point.  But my point is this: we all have our own individual ideas of what the church should be and what a pastor should be.  And that’s a problem, because it interferes with our receptiveness to God’s vision.  We are blinded by our past because that’s all we know and we are afraid of what we cannot see.

Our romantic ideal of a wonderful new pastor needs to be tempered by the reality that pastors are people, too.  When we forget that, unrealistic expectations are followed by disappointment and discouragement on our part; disillusionment and even despair for the pastors.

So, I want to apologize to pastors for the expectations that we place on you (and your families) that are impossible to meet.  We want you to be something that we ourselves cannot be.

 

We think pastors should really be better than us, but if you think about it, what we need is a sinner, because a sinner can relate to us.  A sinner can relate to the struggles we have.  We need a sinner because we can relate to someone who makes mistakes like we do. 

So maybe we should stop and do a little self-examination before we criticize what our next pastor does or doesn’t do. 

Here are some ideas that may or may not apply:

We confess that we cling to a glorified image of what a pastor should be, setting you up for certain failure because you can never be all those things to all of us.

We confess that instead of being gracious and forgiving, we remember every mistake you have ever made, like the time you called the dearly departed by the wrong name or the time you didn’t wave back when we saw you up town. 

We confess to acting hurt when you don’t come visit us in the hospital, even though we didn’t let the church know we were admitted and we were discharged on the same day.

We confess to making our own wants more important than the needs of our congregation, community and world.

We confess to dropping in on you unannounced just to shoot the breeze when you have a funeral, a baptism and a wedding and regular worship to prepare for all in the same week. 

We confess to scrutinizing your personal appearance and commenting to the people around us on your shoes or your clothes or your hair or your weight. 

We confess to arguing theology with you based on our eighth or ninth grade 

understanding. 

We confess to discussing our concerns about the church and your ministry 

with everyone but you.

For all/any of these things and for those we have not named, we are sorry and ask your forgiveness.  Help us to work with you so that we may together envision and carry out the mission God calls us to.

Lord, deliver us from our self-centeredness and our fear.  Give us the hope, the courage and the faith to look to you in trust.  May your will be done in us and through us, in the coming weeks and always.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

               

               

Where Have All the Acolytes Gone?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ACOLYTES GONE?

adapted from “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” by Pete Seeger

Where have all the acolytes gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the acolytes gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the acolytes gone?

They need to be here when they’re assigned.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the children gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the children gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the children gone?

We have all these Sunday School rooms to fill.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Why don’t their parents just make them go?

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Why don’t they have to memorize more?

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where has all the junior choir gone?

Long time passing

Where has all the junior choir gone?

Long time ago

Where has all the junior choir gone?

We have beautiful robes hanging in the hall.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the people gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the people gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the people gone?

Why don’t they come to church like us?

When will we ever learn?

When will we ever learn?

I’ve heard those words (or something along those lines) more often than I would like.  And while I can sometimes sympathize with the sadness that is experienced by those who look so fondly upon the church of their memory, I also feel impatient sometimes, wanting to move forward, past the grieving for what used to be and on to the work of being the church of the present.

Since I’m not a cradle Lutheran, most of what I know about the glory days of the church are from the stories I hear, and the education I’ve received reading “Lake Wobegon Days” and “Growing Up Lutheran.” Through these sources, I have gathered that once upon a time, our churches all had:

·         acolytes who took their responsibilities seriously and were properly attired

·         Sunday School classrooms filled every week at every grade level

·         throngs of teenagers coming to Luther League meetings, playing games, electing officers, etc.

·         confirmation classes that memorized the catechism as well as scripture

·         large, beautifully-robed junior choirs that sang arrangements in four parts

·         members who attended worship so reliably that others noticed and worried about their absence

·         pews that were filled every Sunday with people who sat in their regular spots

·         pastors who preached about hell

There’s a kind of a common theme in the song stanzas above.  It reflects a question I have often asked, but haven’t come up with a good answer for yet.  To what extent did all of those things take place in the past because there was, at best, an expectation? Yes, we had posteriors in the pews and kids in the choir, but how many of them were there because they were afraid something bad would happen to them if they weren’t?  Is fear a good way to motivate people?  Sure, it’s effective, but is it really fair to award a prize for perfect attendance if the alternative was something a lot worse? 

“We weren’t given a choice,” is a reason commonly given, and that was true at my house as well.  One Sunday, my brother and I, while dressed in our church clothes, decided to go play in the oats shed.  Oh, that big pile of loose oats was so much fun to roll around in and throw at one another.  When our mother called out the door for us to come get in the car to go to church, she quickly discovered where we had been because the oats clung to our hair and our clothes, inside and out.  The yardstick was swiftly employed (and not to see how much we’d grown), we were cleaned up and brought to church.

I’d be willing to bet that not all of those former acolytes, junior choir members and Luther Leaguers are still active in the church today.  You’ve probably heard the joke about how to get rid of bats in the church. You confirm them, and then you'll never see them again.  Even though we weren’t Lutheran, I went through a similar indoctrination.  The result? My 20’s and 30’s went by with very little church involvement.  At best, I was disinterested and at worst, disdainful. So, how effective was that old system?  I’ll admit to my own stubbornness, but does that account for everyone who chooses to do something else on Sunday?

Even putting aside overt threats of bodily harm or burning for eternity in the fires of hell, do we still want people coming to worship out of nothing more than a sense of obligation?  Do the ends, Christian fellowship and the opportunity to hear the Gospel, outweigh the means by which they have come?  I don’t know, maybe so.  Though Jesus does warn against praying loudly and conspicuously like the hypocrites, he encourages some people who were casting out demons in his name to continue.  If absolute sincerity was a prerequisite for entering the sanctuary, I doubt any of us would get inside.  I know I wouldn’t.

We may be inclined to paint history in a more favorable light, but I do think that trying to compare the present church with the past church is an apple and orange kind of thing.  There are different external forces acting on us today than what we experienced years ago. Those influences once tended to drive people in the direction of the church. Today, they are driven in other directions and we don’t have control over how people respond to those things.  As the last stanza in the song suggests, I question how constructive it is to speculate about others.  What we can do is respond to and share what (Who) does draw us.

The church to come is not going to be the same as the church of the past.  That time is gone. But maybe rather than being so concerned about doing what we think our parents, our neighbors or our pastors expect of us, we can learn to focus our attention on what we see God is doing in, among and through us now. Then we can begin to move ahead together in perhaps even more intimate communion than what we had previously, where the Church can come closer to being Christ’s living body.

Longing for Real

OK, I thought the point of watching soap operas was to escape from reality, but apparently two of my favorite daytime dramas are being cancelled and replaced by “programming that is informative and authentic.”  Isn’t life real enough already?  Why do networks keep adding more reality shows?  Apparently, the genre sells.  But why do we seem to have an increasing need for what is “real”?

I listened recently as a man recounted his experience being hospitalized following a stroke.  His voice broke as he described being awake, but unable to respond to those around him.  As a lifelong Christian, he said that he had always known of the love of God through what he had been taught, but it was in those moments of helplessness that God’s love became “real” to him. 

“Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so” is a familiar song to many.  It was probably one of the first ones learned as a child in Sunday School.  But has the love we have been told about ever moved from being a bit of information stored in our heads to an assurance we carry in our hearts?

Our congregation watched parts of the miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” during our Wednesday evening Lenten services.  This past week’s installment included the crucifixion.  While I knew in my head that these were just actors that I was watching and therefore not “real,” it still moved me to tears to see Mary at the foot of the cross, helpless as her son hung dying.  It was real enough for me.

As we move now into Holy Week, we will again remember Jesus as he gathers his disciples to share a meal together before he is taken to be crucified.  The disciples seem confused and afraid.  They don’t understand what is going on.  What Jesus gives them is something real that they can hold on to.  “This is my body,” he says, and later, “This is my blood.”  

In the meal on Maundy Thursday, we are given a wafer to see and to touch, wine to taste.  Even though we were not present with the disciples in the Upper Room, Jesus is still present each time we receive the sacrament.  In Holy Communion, we have the Real Presence of Christ.

So I invite you to the very best in reality programming this week, at my church or yours.  Come expecting to encounter Jesus.  He’ll be there.  He is real and ultimately more satisfying than anything you can find on TV.

Obviously, St. Augustine didn’t have television to contend with, but I think he still had a sense of the same kind of longing for something that we will never find in this world when he confessed,

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord,

and our hearts are restless

until they find their rest in thee.”