The Bethlehem Star

For as long as I can remember my parents’ church has owned a large metallic star. This star plays a central role in the annual Christmas pageant as the Bethlehem star. For years it hung from an eight-foot-long stick, which could then be moved to lead the Wise Men to the Baby Jesus. However, after a nervous moment in last year’s Christmas pageant where the star proved too heavy for the kid assigned the part of holding it and came dangerously close to impaling Joseph, this year the decision was made to hang the star from the rafters in the front of the church. There was some discussion as to whether it was theologically appropriate to hang the star above the cross that sits in the front of the sanctuary, but it was decided that the survival of the characters of the Christmas pageant was more important than theological appropriateness.

So on Christmas Eve, there the star hung, twelve feet in the air, centered over the table, just slightly off-center from the cross. As the pastor led us through the familiar Words of Institution, I pondered the location of the star in our sanctuary that evening, and the line its sharp point formed through the cross to the table. That star in our midst served, as its namesake had so many centuries ago, to direct us to the one whom we celebrated that night.

The Bethlehem star reminds us that we celebrate the birth of a child who is God with us. And that in itself, that the virgin should conceive and bear a son, and that son would be God, is a miracle. But had Jesus just been born, it would not have been enough. The Bethlehem star also points to the cross. As we celebrate Christ’s birth, we remember that soon we will also celebrate his death. That the tiny baby whose birth we have awaited, will die on a cross.

But again, had Jesus just died on a cross, that would still not have been enough. Thousands of people died on crosses at the hands of the Romans. Had Jesus just died on the cross, he would still have been a great moral teacher, but great teachings are not what we celebrate. We celebrate a man, who was God, who died without sin and rose again, so that we might have eternal life. We celebrate a God who loved us so much that death could not separate God from us, a God who is still coming to us today. And so our Bethlehem star must also point to the table where we meet Jesus in the bread and the wine. So it is fitting that on Christmas Eve night, the same thing that led the Wise Men to the Christ-child so many centuries ago still leads us to the Christ in our midst. Thanks be to God who came as a child in Bethlehem, who died on a cross at Golgotha, and who still comes in the bread and wine, in the water and the Word, into our lives today. Amen.

Wordle of Sermon on Matthew 14:22-33

I borrowed this idea from a classmate and think it is a pretty neat one. I uploaded my sermon text from the sermon I preached in preaching lab today into Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/, hope this is an appropriate attribution), and this is the image that I got. I like that Jesus, step, and storm received such prominent placing. Kind of a neat idea, I will probably try this again.

The Holy Spirit lives in Andersonville

I met the Holy Spirit Sunday morning. I had twenty minutes between services, was exhausted from traveling all weekend, and my MIC congregation only serves decaf coffee; so I decided to run across the street to the panaderia on the corner and get a cup of coffee and a danish. I walked through the door of the small store, and there she was standing behind the counter, a 5’1” Guatemalan woman in her mid 50s, the Holy Spirit.

“Coffee?” she asked before I could say anything, compassion in her warm, soft voice. Maybe she asked because it was her job to sell me coffee, but something about the tone of her voice told me there was more to it than that. Something in the tone of her voice told me she saw the edge of my clergy collar under my coat and recognized a cold, tired, and overwhelmed seminarian who so desperately wants to be a pastor, but right now just drinks a lot of coffee and dresses like one sometimes. Without waiting for a response, she turned to fill up a cup.

“Yes,” I responded, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “You read my mind!”

“Room for cream?” She turned back towards me, eyes warm and compassionate. “Two or three?”

“Oh, oh, oh,” I stuttered, startled. I only like a very little bit of cream if any, just enough to take the edge off, too much makes my teeth feel thick. She opened the container and before I could stop her, dumped the entire packet in my coffee.

“You take sweet!” she said firmly, pushing the cup towards me and gesturing to the sugar bowl, and then to the stirring sticks and stack of lids. “Stirrer, lid.” I’m not usually a big sugar person, but she was so insistent that I busied myself with putting sugar and a lid on my coffee while she got my danish. Two minutes and $2.35 later, I was out the door with a cup of very hot coffee and a really delicious cream cheese danish that was just the perfect amount of sweet.

That cup of coffee was life-giving this morning, and not because it was very good. It was very hot with a bitter edge, and had too much cream for my taste (the danish, on the other hand, was possibly the best I’ve ever eaten, definitely worth the drive to Andersonville if you are ever in the Chicagoland area). But there was something sacramental about that cup of coffee. Something about our very brief interaction, her knowing eyes, her softness in dealing with me, left me feeling that more had gone on than her selling me coffee. For a fleeting moment, I felt something bigger than the two of us look at me from behind her eyes and see past the collar and the confidence I’m trying to grow into, to the cold, overwhelmed, and scared wanna-be pastor who is really me. I felt someone see all the fear and confusion I hold close to my bones, but also all the desire and passion and hope entwined around it, and love that whole mess of emotion and possibility, and feed that with the best she had to offer—hot coffee, a lot of cream, and a few minutes of compassion. And my pneumatology is not that great, but that feels a whole lot like the Holy Spirit. Jesus said after him there would be another advocate, a comforter, a friend who would walk beside us, flow within us, and sustain us in this life. One who will see us for the complicated beings that we are, love us as perfect creatures made in the image of God, and nourish us as we seek to follow in the path of Christ. Thanks be to God who shows up in the most unexpected places, in bread and wine, in water, in the Word, and sometimes even in bad coffee and simple interactions in crowded bakeries on chilly Sunday mornings.

Things Asked While In a Clerical Collar

I think God may be paying forward all the impossible questions I have asked clergy people in my life. I wore a clerical collar for the first time a few weeks ago, and right off the bat had one of those “things heard in a clergy collar” moments.

So there I was, standing awkwardly by the coffee pot after service in a button-down black shirt (which I had accidentally ironed a huge wrinkle into); my new clerical collar fastened tightly around my neck—a little too tightly, I kept fidgeting with it—trying desperately to look older and not as uncomfortable as I felt, when one of the parishioners approached me. I smiled, we exchanged brief pleasantries, and then, she asked me a question.

“Since you have earned a collar,” she started; I felt my heart starting to pound. “I wondered if I could ask you a deep, theological question?”

‘Earned the collar!’ I wanted to laugh. ‘I am a second year seminarian, I have in no way earned this collar.’ Instead I weakly stammered, “um, sure. I don’t know that I will know the answer, but we can talk about it.”

“I was just wondering how you, as a Protestant, interpret James 2?”

At that, I really had to force myself not to take a step backwards. My mind was racing. What even is James 2?!? Oh, this morning’s lectionary text. What were the readings? ‘Faith without works is dead’! How do I address that?! I have no idea! I haven’t taken a James class! I wanted to run or protest or defer to one of the multitude of other seminary-educated people in the room. But in that moment, I was the one in the collar, I was the one who was “pastor,” so instead, I took a deep breath and employed what I later learned is a classic pastoral stall tactic.

“That’s a great question,” I replied calmly. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee, sit down and talk about that.” This bought me a full three minutes to get my thoughts in order and my heart rate back in check.

And you know what, the conversation went great. It was not the most articulate explanation of James, but it did the job. We talked about grace, we talked about faith, we talked about the freedom of being adopted into God’s family. We even talked about Luther and Galatians a little bit. And most importantly, we talked about the good news that is Jesus Christ, coming into the world for us, no matter who we are or what we do or how articulately we can explain theology, or how much we may screw up sometimes. Yay for God who loves us just as we are. I think I kind of like this pastor thing.

Summer Reading List

In honor of completing my first reading assignment of the new school year, I thought it would be interesting to post what I read over the summer. As much as I can remember, these are in order of reading.

1. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling – just as good the fourth (fifth? sixth?) time. Perfect for distracting a person from the reality of CPE. Unfortunately I had a 2-hour commute every day, so I blew through this pretty quickly and had to find something else to read.
2. Forgetting Whose We Are: Alzhemiers Disease and the Love of God by David Keck – this was the book that convinced me that I could not do intense ministry all day and read theology at night and be at all functional. Also, I realized that if you agree with the basic premise a theology book is trying to prove before it even starts, it’s kind of a boring read. The book makes a good and important argument about the ability of God’s love to transcend memory loss, but I wanted more about where to go with that.
3. Bech: A Book by John Updike – I know Updike is a famous author and this is supposed to be one of his classic works, but I’m not sure this book had an actual plot.
4. Dreams from my Father by Barak Obama – I like the idea that we have someone who thinks about things like this running our country.
5. Portuguese Irregular Verbs and The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith – From the series The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom. Similar to Bech, there wasn’t really a discernible plot to either, but they were funny and not offensive (unlike Bech). I rather enjoyed them.
6. The Shack by William P. Young – I read this because I feel it’s important to be up on the current popular Christian literature. That being said, I really enjoyed it. Gave me a lot to think about.
7. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert – Really liked this one too. I see why it’s been making the circles for a while.
8. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld – Painfully awkward. A good representation of what it feels like to be a fourteen-year-old girl, a part of my life I had no desire to revisit. Oddly enough, I found I couldn’t put it down! Like watching an awkward train wreck, I couldn’t look away.
9. Naked by David Sedaris – I read a lot of books this summer that were awkward and had no discernible plot. I found I wasn’t a fan.
10. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – And now for something completely different! Amazing, but wow, painful. Really, really good, but a little intense for CPE.
11. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger – Ah, back to my general level of summer reading preferences. Funny story about this one is I read most of it in one night sitting on the floor in my bathroom because my roommate couldn’t sleep with the light on and I was afraid to go downstairs because of the cat. Yep, I sat on the floor of the bathroom rather than face a 12 pound housecat. It was maybe the most pathetic moment of my summer.
12. Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story about God, Dreams and Talking Vegetables by Phil Vischer – The autobiography of the founder of Veggie Tales. This book was really amazing. A great book about having dreams, doing what you love, and what to do when what you love falls apart. Also just a really good story.
13. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott – I picked up this one sort of on a whim because I like Anne Lamott. It was alright, not much to say really.
14. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – This book lived up to the hype. Really engaging and well written.
15. The Stranger in Big Sur by Lillian Bos Ross – I found it on my shelf in my parents’ house. Definitely not a classic, sort of a regional read.
16. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – The book starts at a funeral, and the rest of the story is about learning how the story got to that point. Amazing how drawn in I was to a book where I knew how it ended. Really good.
17. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver – Always nice to close out the summer with a good Kingsolver novel, and Prodigal Summer delivers. Good characters development, social justice-y plotlines, and a little bit of romance. Perfect.

What I Learned on my Summer Vacation

The big question I’m getting a lot these days is “what did you learn at CPE?” I’m never really sure how to answer that question. What did I learn? I learned a lot of things. Some meaningless (all the verses of Alexander’s Ragtime Band), and some profound (how liturgy continues to give meaning to people with Alzheimer's Disease long after their other memories fail). I learned I am uncomfortable in group processing, I learned meeting new people never gets easy, no matter how many times a day I do it. I learned a lot about myself. But I think the biggest thing I learned in CPE is it does not really matter what I learned about myself, because in the end I am not the one that matters. In the end, God breaks through in spite of me, not because of me. My job is simply to be present.

One of the most powerful moments of my summer happened standing outside of the ICU unit at Alexandria Hospital. As I stood there staring at the menacing grey metal doors, I felt completely and totally unprepared for what was on the other side. I stood leaning against the wall for a few moments, my mind racing. What was I, I wondered to myself, twenty-five years old, first year seminarian, going to do that was at all helpful. I didn’t even really know the woman I was visiting. She had been my welcome wagon person, and when I ran into her in the halls she would ask about my upcoming sermon. Other than that, we had no interaction. Why was I even here? What was I supposed to do? Who did I think I was? And then there was a voice, not one of those deep, God voices but my own voice, coming from within my chest. The voice, my voice, rang out, “I don’t know what you're supposed to be doing here either, but whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing here, you’re not going to do from this side of the door.” And with that, I walked in.

What I realized that day was what I brought through the door had nothing to do with my abilities. It did not matter who I was, what I knew, or how good my game plan was. My presence as “chaplain” served as a reminder that God was already present in the midst of crisis. As long as I was willing to walk through the door and be used, God was already in the room wanting to use me as a reminder of God’s presence. Thanks be to God, who uses such simple and broken tools as humanity to accomplish God’s work in the world.

Blogs: Because everybody else is doing it…

I have decided to jump on the bandwagon and start a blog. I mean, everybody’s doing it, right? This being my introductory blog post, I thought I’d lay out what my goals are for this blog. Future postings will not be this boring, I promise!

First, why have I started a blog?
1) Community – I have developed over the past eight years, a propensity to upend my life and move it across the country. The problem with this habit, above and beyond the fact that it means I cannot own more than fits in a mid-sized Subaru, is that I keep making really good friends in these places and then find myself leaving them behind. This is an attempt to maybe let those people keep up with what I’m doing.
2) Practice – One of the facts they have drilled into us in seminary is if you want to have a habit as a pastor, you had better start developing that habit while you’re in seminary. Blogging seems like a worthwhile habit for a pastor to pick up. Many of the best pastors I know blog. It seems like a good way to keep in touch with people outside of the confines of Sunday morning.
3) Arrogance – I am a Lejonhud at heart, and we do love to hear the sound of our own voices…

Second, some questions answered.
1) What do I plan to write about? – Whatever I find interesting, really. Maybe some theology. Probably a fair amount of things I find funny. If and where the ELCA decides to ship me. Stuff like that.
2) Will I ever update this blog? – Probably not, in all honesty. I mentioned earlier that many of the best pastors I know are bloggers. A fair number of those great blogger pastors never actually update their blogs. I figure at least I’m in good company.
3) Why did I call the blog Small Stale Crackers? – It’s a line from an essay I wrote about communion. I thought it was a clever line and a well-written essay, and I also think it makes a witty and intriguing blog title.

Anyway, that’s about it, I suppose. Hope you enjoy. With that, I will begin the actual blogging.