Forgiveness defined
October 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
One of the primary tasks I have taken up in pastoral ministry is helping people think through and understand a larger picture of the gospel. I think when I left seminary I felt as Karl Barth did in his first pastorate, albeit in a different way. When Barth came to his first pastorate he felt he lacked the tools to preach to the people because he was entrenched in the historical critical method and liberal theology. When I left seminary I don’t think I was entrenched in either of those things as much as I had become wise to know that the the church had very little idea of what the gospel actually is, and the one many people have been familiar with has been very harmful to some and too small for others.
However, the congregants wouldn’t let me off so easy. They were willing to accept that maybe there were other ways to talk about the gospel, but they actually wanted to know what they were. Feeling myself at a lack of words I have set on a path to discover how as an orthodox, postliberal, white middle-class (and aware of that), Anabaptist, (postmodern-ish) seminary-educated, post-evangelical male I might actually talk about the gospel instead of just critiquing others versions of it.
So, I began to reflect upon the words of Anabaptist missiologist Wilbert Shenk. Wilbert told us our last day of class, “What is the Gospel? That is the question you should always be asking.” And then before finishing with this point he stated, “Never write an article about it.” I think I have done my best to keep in mind those thoughts as I attempt to keep asking that question which is in front of me.
But this blog post began as a way to point towards an excellent article in this month’s Christianity Today (link forthcoming, it’s only in print right now) How Far Should Forgiveness Go? by Christine A. Scheller. As I rethink through the gospel one of the words that has been on my mind is forgiveness and how we conceive of it in a better way. This article is stirring, personal, and theological that has written exactly what I hope the church would come to say and struggle with as we talk about forgiveness. Here is the ending for you while I wait for the online edition to link too:
“Forgiveness is not so much a word spoken, an action performed, or a feeling felt as it is an embodied way of life in an ever-deepening friendship with the triune God and with others. As such, a Christian account of forgiveness ought not to simple or even be focused on an absolution of guilt; rather it ought to be focused on the reconciliation of brokenness, the restoration of communion—with God, with one another, and with the whole creation. Indeed, because of the pervasiveness of sin and evil, Christian forgiveness must be at once an expression of commitment to a way of life, the cruciform life of holiness in which we seek to “unlearn” sin and learn the ways of God, and a means of seeking reconciliation in the midst of particular sin, specific instances of brokenness.” (From Embodying Forgiveness by L. Gregory Jones.)
Each of us lives in the midst of particular sins and specific instances of brokenness. And each of us must choose how we will respond. Living a life of holiness and learning the ways of God sometimes means letting go of our need for justice and instead embracing a world that groans in anticipation of the day when it, and we, will be redeemed. It means accepting with humility that God alone is good.
Ordination Update
September 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Being a new minister, and having a blog, means I should be writing about the ordination process, right? Unfortunately, or fortunately, attempting to be ordained in MCUSA will give you very little to write about. For those kind of juicy posts you are going to need to follow the blog of a Presbyterian, Methodist, or Episcopalian. Theologically, Mennonites have a good reason for having a much different process than those folks, but I am not sure our process necessarily reflects those commitments as much as we just need to do something.
For most people becoming a minister with MCUSA will begin with receiving a call from a congregation (or as it is known amongst the low church, “finding a job”). Soon after you start at the church they will formally begin the process of being licensed. In the Pacific Northwest Mennonite Conference (PNMC) this means writing on the Confession of Faith, giving a biographical description of yourself, and updating your MLI (the general resume that helped you receive said job/call). After this paper is completed you will meet with a Ministry Committee for a 2-3 hour interview in which they discern if you are called and fit for the ministry. After the interview they make you wait painfully for 10 minutes and call you back into the room to give you the results of the discernment. When you come back to the room they will also let you know what you will need to do to be ordained. For most people it will involve a 1 year to 2 year discernment process with your congregation, meeting with a mentor, and fulfilling the requirements for the classes your conference requires (as far as I know no conference requires an MDiv). This will vary from conference to conference but the PNMC is pretty standard in requiring Mennonite Polity, History, and Theology. Because our conference is so far from Mennonite seminaries they offer the classes every 1-2 years in Portland. If you did not go to a Mennonite seminary (AMBS or EMS) it will be extremely difficult to not have to take all three. Both myself and a fellow minister in the process who went to Duke Divinity had classes that would fit some, if not most of the requirements, in the history and theology class in Seminary and are still being required to take the classes. If you are considering taking a class to fulfill the requirement check with the conference you most likely want to get ordained in to see if it will count. That won’t help much if you end up in a different conference, but should give you an idea if it would fill the requirement.
This is the current step I am in the process. My mentor has been a great resource for me, my congregation has been very supportive, and the classes are not difficult. In less than a year I hope to ask the congregation to raise me up for ordination (which includes a vote) and another meeting with the ministerial board of our conference. At that point if I have fulfilled all the requirements, seem fit for ministry, and the discernment seems right, I will be ordained in a service at my church.
The loophole in all this (as far as I can tell) is that you don’t need to be ordained to serve long term as a Mennonite pastor. You can renew your license every two years and minister without ordination for as long as you like. I am not sure of the reason for this but it is worth noting that you are not required to be ordained, only credentialed. And that said if your congregating decided it wanted to, you could go without credentials but I don’t think you could officiate recognized marriages, as well as visit prisons and hospitals after hours.
Any questions or additions if you have been through the process?
filling our time
September 10th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Since beginning work in the pastorate I think I am finally beginning notice that days don’t seem long enough. I go to work in the morning, come home and cook a nice dinner with Kelli, sit down and read for a couple of minutes, watch some of whatever TV series we are in, and then it is 10:30 or 11. At this point I know I could stay up and read some more and be slightly tried the next or just go to bed like I should. Normally I go to bed. But I am wondering if any of you few readers have any ideas of how to squeeze some more time out of your days. Would getting up earlier help a ton? Would quitting TV altogether make the day seem longer? I’d be interested in hearing what sort of patterns have helped some of you grasp the constant filling of our time.
Along this long lines writing this reminded me of this great clip of John Cleese talking about creativity.
Non-Conformity
August 31st, 2010 § 3 Comments
Last week a book came in the mail. Not all that rare of an occurrence at the Shedden household but this time I didn’t order a book. Kelli, of course, wondered if I had hidden that I’d ordered a book, but that is another subject.
About 3 years ago when I was living in Seattle and attending Church of the Apostles, Kelli and I were lucky enough to meet two fellow pilgrims in Chris and Jolie Guillebeau. Chris had this crazy idea to travel to every country in the world, not just for the fun, but as a lifestyle choice. If I remember right he looked at how much a nice car would cost compared to traveling the world and decided he would live his life unconventionally. For Chris and Jolie this meant living without a car, living below their means, and doing what they loved even if meant not having the life everybody thought they should be seeking. For Chris this meant traveling and for Jolie it took the form of art.
One day Chris called and asked me to lunch to run an idea by me that he was working on. Not being an expert in anything I gladly agreed to meet him and talk. At this lunch Chris showed a ton of work he had been doing on creating content and thoughts for a webpage that he would use as a platform to tell others about his decision to live what he calls “the art of non-conformity.” I had a hard time wrapping my head around his ideas, but Chris had seemed to have done his homework. I offered some vague comments I thought might help him, walked home in the rain, and wondered exactly what Chris had gotten himself into.
Not soon later Chris started his website and I read it eagerly. He slowly started building a following and before I knew it he was actually getting somewhere. Not long after that he quit his side job and took a leap of faith focusing solely on his webpage. Chris was deciding to do what he loved and help other people find out what living unconventionally might mean for them. Chris and Jolie moved to Portland after he quit his job, but I have kept up with his exploits through his blog and twitter.
This brings us back to the book. The book that arrived in the mail was an early release of Chris’s book, published through Penguin. The book, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World, is coming out in September and contains Chris’s story and more importantly his thoughts to help others to begin to live outside the box. I’d encourage you to check out the tons of great advice Chris gives out on his blog for free and if you feel so inclined grab his book, which is worth it for his story alone.
September Newsletter
August 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Many of you asked for the Bonheoffer quote I used in my last sermon and I thought the best way to get that out would be in the church newsletter. The following is from the Cost of Discipleship and I think it is clear presentation of the difference between what we might call “cultural Christianity” and the call to discipleship. As we have gone through the gospel of Luke this year we have preached on several of the harder passages of Jesus and I think Bonheoffer nails how Christ is calling us to a much deeper faith through those passages. If you are interested I would encourage you to read The Cost of Discipleship, but also released this year was a massive, but readable, biography on Bonheoffer by Eric Metaxas. Through reading about him we can come to understand how this distinction between Cheap and Costly Grace was manifest in his life.
Blog Title
August 25th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Normally the first post on a blog explains the title of the blog and it is normally one of the most boring, but revealing posts. When I was using a different wordpress theme this blog had no title because I couldn’t come up with anything smart enough. But some time ago I filled in “Physical Life” as the title and it showed up when I changed blog themes. Now, it is no secret that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is my favorite book and recently I reread parts of it and came across the passage that inspired my blog title. I would like to think I could write something on why both this book and this passage have become words I often return to in my life, but I don’t think I could write anything as beautiful as the passage itself. However, in the passage itself I think I see that Christianity, Christology, and the sacraments depend on our physicality. Our “physical lives” are not things we can forsake and I hope it is something I learn to love, ponder, and be thankful for. The more I have thought about it, the more I also come to see that prayer is attached to my physical life and how in prayer I come to feel the sacredness and beauty of the physical life I get to live.
"Today was the Lord’s Supper, and I preached on Mark 14:22,"And as they were eating, he took bread, and when he had blessed, he brake it, and gave it to them, and said, Take ye: this is my body." Normally I would not preach on the Words of Institution themselves when the Sacrament is the most beautiful illumination of them there could be. But I have been thinking a great deal about the body these last weeks. Blessed and broken. I used Genesis 32:23-32 as the Old Testament text, Jacob wrestling with the Angel. I wanted to talk about the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it. I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life. In any case, and you may remember this, when almost everyone had left and the elements were still on the table and the candles still burning, your mother brought you up the aisle to me and said, "You ought to give him some of that." You’re too young, of course, but she was completely right. Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Your solemn and beautiful child face lifted up to receive these mysteries at my hands. They are the most wonderful mystery, body and blood. It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it."
On a good day
August 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
I hope occasionally when asked for a report of your day in the ministry you will be able to say, “I think I wrote one good sentence in the sermon for Sunday.” The sermon is at the heart of our ability to speak as well as sustain speaking Christian. The sermon is not your reflections on how to negotiate life. The sermon rather is our fundamental speech act as Christians through which we learn the grammar of the faith. As my colleague Richard Lischer puts it in his book, The End of Words, “the preacher’s job . . . is to do nothing less than shape the language of the sermon to a living reality among the people of God—to make it conform to Jesus. The sermon, in fact, is Jesus trying to speak once again in his own community.”
If you haven’t had time yet to read through Hauerwas’ great commencement address he gave at Eastern Mennonite I encourage you do so now. The reason this line stuck out to me is that when I read the address for a second time I had just spend about 4 hours fiddling with a sermon looking for something to crack into proclamation. I had done all my research, had practically written the whole thing, but couldn’t really find anything that I really wanted to say in the sermon. Sermon writing for me often functions like a puzzle with one really odd piece. It’s not hard to find all the pieces, look up sources, even really write it, but I will spend hours thinking about the one sentence that I really want to bring to the congregation on Sunday and for some reason it took longer than usual to find it this past week. So reading this reading right after I finished I felt like I could say to Kelli when she asked what I did all that time at the kitchen table was that, “I think I wrote one good sentence in the sermon for Sunday.”
Hipster Christianity
August 13th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Today Kelli and I had fun figuring out which of the portraits of Hipster Christianity we are and we couldn’t decide between the two posted below. Brett McCracken has been working for what seems like a couple of years on his book Hipster Christianity and this month it has gotten a giant ramp-up with the release of the book. The characterizations are funny, but I often wonder what purpose they serve. I know he thinks he is breaking down what is “cool” versus “real” (according to his Wall Street Journal article) but I have a hard time seeing this kind of project as productive towards that because it bleeds cool. Read his blog, the webpage for the book, and even the marketing format they have chosen and you can see this book is meant to be another tack-on for the person who can now say “yeah that church is cool, but it isn’t real.” I haven’t read the book and to be honest, I am not sure I will (I’ll stick with the original hipster Karl Barth) but I would be more interested in hearing him talk about how someone might hear the Word of God proclaimed and respond in our churches today than see caricatures, nice webpage’s, and the call for something “real”. It’s all fun and games to come with these portraits, but I think if he really wants to tackle where the church is today he will find, like many of us have, that it won’t involve a book contract, a highly trafficked webpage, and manufactured images, but will rather involve the long silent unnoticed laboring of seeking to proclaim and live the gospel in the world. When he gets around to that I’ll buy that book.
Coming Back
August 10th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I told myself that after my vacations and the church mission trip I would begin to blog again. My life seems to have been sorely lacking writing/blogging energy and I fear that might mean I am running low on creative energy as well. I might be in a period where I am learning more than saying more, but I figure it would help to try and discipline myself to write more both here and on the Barth blog. Discipline has never been a word I liked very much in my life, but I am aware that it also helps make up the word disciple. So for the first time in my life I am trying to embrace some discipline. It started about 8 months ago with the Barth project of 5 pages a day (which I have kept up on, just not blogged about), and then moved to running every other day in February as well as eating a healthier diet, and now I think it might mean doing something for my creative life as well as spiritual life. On the spiritual side, I am adding in some new disciplines but creatively I would like to start by trying to write on the blog at least twice a week for this year. For a couple of months two years ago I managed to blog almost every day so that seems manageable, but it also means you the reader (if there are still any) will have to put up with attempting to regain my writing legs. So here’s to disciplines and for putting up with half-baked often incoherent ramblings and #1 out of 104 entries.
