Exercises in Empathy

Not counting equality with God as something to be exploited,
he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
Philippians 2:6-7

Over the last year I have mentioned more than once the impact that sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land has had on me.  In her fascinating report of the time she spent among the folks who live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, she tries to unpack the “great paradox” lived by people who acknowledge and endure the pollution of their land by the powerful petrochemical industry and yet who also shun the government regulation that might repair and prevent it. A key aspect of her work is to identify “empathy walls” that thwart understanding and to build “empathy bridges” that promote understanding.  Essentially Hochschild lived among these folks and simply asked the  question: What does it feel like to be you? 

Hochschild’s work especially commends itself in this time of deepening political polarization, because the question “What does it feel like to be you?” directs our attention to a realm that is very different than the question “Why do you think that way?”  It moves our awareness beyond the head to the heart.  It asks us to let go of a demand that the other convince us of the logic of their position and rather demands of us the work of trying to grow in our awareness of their experience.  It sets argument aside and instead invites us to simply pay attention to what is.  Or more accurately, pay attention to who is standing in front of us and what they know simply, and perhaps only, because of who they are or how they feel.    

The lovely thing about these exercises in empathy is that we do not engage them to get at a solution or to convince one another of the right or the wrong way to think about something.  We engage in this work to simply know who the other is.  And if we experience that miracle of feeling even a sliver of what the other feels, we have made a connection that might just lessen the tension between us.  At that moment of empathy, we have entered and experienced the world as the other perceives it.  That experience makes us bigger.  It creates room in us for something we had not previously imagined.  Sure, there are miles to go before we can get to a place of agreement because of this discovery, and to be honest that agreement is likely never going to come about.  But when the personhood of the other is acknowledged and embraced, the seeds of relationship are planted, and relationship is big enough and resilient enough to hold the tension of disagreement. 

In the first chapter of Colossians St. Paul celebrates Jesus Christ as the one in whom all things hold together.  The reason for this is wrapped up in Paul’s other description of Jesus as the one who emptied himself of his divine prerogative, took on human form and humbled himself to the point of entering into our experience of death.  The way of Jesus, the mind of Christ, is the way that lets go of selfish ambition and regards others better than oneself.  The way of Jesus is the way of opening space in oneself for others.  It is a way characterized by empathy.  The space in his heart is big enough to hold all things together.

The great commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples is to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves; yet he also adds the addendum to love our enemies.  That last bit is a tall order.  Yet I think we can take a step toward it through intentional exercises in empathy.  Just as a physical therapist instructs us in how to stretch our muscles, the Holy Spirit works in us to stretch our stunted imaginations.  We cooperate with the Spirit and start the work of loving our enemies when we let ourselves imagine the truth that there is plenty of room for them in the heart of Jesus.  And once we stretch to make space for the possibility of this proximity to them, we extend that stretch to the point of asking them the question: “What does it feel like to be you?”  If we have the patience to stretch a bit farther and actually listen for their answer, we effectively take a step toward relationship.  That little crack in our armor lets some light in.  The light reveals that there is more space in us than we thought.  For the love of Christ is long and high and wide and deep and he can do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.    

David Rohrer
10/09/2020

Opening Up

Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors,
that the King of Glory may come in.
Psalm 24:7

As a lover of words and one for whom working with words occupies a great deal of time, I have been both amused and infuriated by the vocabulary that has emerged to describe our various experiences with and rules surrounding Covid-19. One my “favorite” products of this pandemic is the absurd oxymoron “social distancing.”  Another is the title of this essay: “opening up.”  Whenever I hear this, I get a smirk on my face and the voice of the character Inigo Montoya in the film “The Princess Bride” sounds in the back of my head saying: “I do not think it means what you think it does.” 

The way that “opening-up” is used in the ongoing discussion of what we can and can’t do in the face of this global pandemic suggests that there is someone in charge who has the power to declare the doors open and thus invite and expect everyone to come rushing in to fill the spaces that they vacated in March. Imagine what happens when Disneyland opens for the day or what happens at Walmart on Black Friday and you have the picture that the phrase “opening up” conjures.  Authorities like Mickey Mouse or the man wearing the blue vest swing wide the gate and we all come streaming in.  Just say the word.  Wave us in and we’ll come back inside the sanctuary, or the tavern, or the stadium.   

The problem with this is that merely opening the door, will not open things up.  There is also that dicey little matter of who will decide to come back inside.

When I was a kid, I was always organizing clubs among the kids in the neighborhood. But what I discovered about these various clubs was that it was hard to get us together beyond the first organizational meeting.  As a remedy I devised a signal that was supposed to produce the effect of calling in the other kids for a meeting; a signal similar to how the bell or whistle at a small town fire station would call in the volunteer fire fighters.  In my case that noise was the sound of a steel rod hitting the 3-inch pipe that held up the clothesline in our back yard.  It was a pretty loud sound; but I can’t remember an occasion where banging on that pipe produced its desired effect.  The gates of the club house were declared open, but no one came streaming in.

There are actually two problems with using the phrase “opening up” to describe the return to worship in our sanctuary.  The first is that people need to be ready to come back.  The second is that the phrase all but ignores the truth of what we have been doing since we stopped meeting in the sanctuary in March.  We have not been closed.  Worship has continued.  Connections between us continue to be made.  In fact, in some surprising ways worship has become more interactive and new connections are being made that would not have been made in the narthex.  Granted there are deficiencies in this new way of worshipping and connecting.  And hands down, I would prefer to be back in that room together.  But we won’t be back there until we are fully back there and the way we will get back there will not simply be when the session votes or the pastor waves in the streaming throngs, but when the entire congregation decides to walk in the doors. And to put a finer edge on it, we will return to that space changed.  We won’t simply come back to what was.

As a member of the Session pointed out at our last meeting, the return to our sanctuary will no doubt be an organic thing.  We will grow into it gradually. This is why the session voted recently to install video equipment in the sanctuary that will allow us to accommodate worshippers who are both in the sanctuary and attending online.  With this new equipment, which should be installed sometime in late October, we will be able to connect the two congregations in one service.  What’s more, this equipment will enable us to continue to welcome our online worshippers into our sanctuary long after Covid-19 ceases to be a live concern.

Covid-19 has robbed us of a number of things, but it has not taken away our power open our hearts to God and one another.  We can still hear and respond to the psalmist’s call to lift up our heads and open the doors of our lives to the God who has chosen to be in our midst.  God’s offer of love and gift of abundant life are not going to be withdrawn.  So, let’s move forward trusting these promises and keep our hearts open to God.     

David Rohrer
10/01/2020

Redemption

Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors?
Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children,
and their children another generation.
Joel 1:2-3

The Prophet Joel’s cry at the beginning of his oracle draws attention to the uniqueness of his time.  A series of locust plagues had overtaken the land.  First came the cutting locusts, then the swarming locust, then the hopping locust, then the destroying locust. What was not eaten by one was finished off by the next.  In short, lots of loss.  Loss on a magnitude that seemed unprecedented.  So the prophet advised the people to draw their children’s attention to it and wake up to how God might still be at work even in the face of all this loss. 

Then later in the oracle Joel invites people to turn their eyes toward the future.  He announces God’s promise of salvation and repair of the damage.  “I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter. . . .  You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you. (2:25-26)”   In short, this loss will not be the last word.

It occurs to me that this is where we human beings have often found ourselves.  Even though Joel speaks of the devastation of this locust plague as if it is unprecedented, it wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last time that people would find themselves living in that liminal space between the wake of destruction and the anticipation of restoration; between the tragedy that has passed and the repair that is yet to come.  There is despair that occupies much of that space but there is also hope that invites us to consider what lies beyond the rubble.  If we are people of faith the source of this hope is found in trusting God to redeem the situation and usher us into that broad and open space where we gladly receive and feast on the fruit of his steadfast love. 

In our day,  fires that are consuming big patches of the Western states, the invisible yet powerful presence of the corona virus, and the disparities and polarities that are at work in our social interactions, have teamed up to cut huge swaths of destruction in our world.  Like the cutting, swarming and destroying locusts in Joel’s world, they have done a pretty good job of consuming a good bit of what has sustained us.  Yet as we sit in this liminal space of wondering when the rains will come, when an effective vaccine will be introduced or when bridges over our divisions might be constructed, there is still a prayer to pray.  It is a prayer based on the hope that the destruction caused by this triumvirate of plagues will not be the last word.  It is a prayer that both springs from hope and also builds hope in us.  It is the prayer that asks God to show us how he is at work right now to redeem the effects of this destruction.

Yet here’s the thing. . . .  This redemption isn’t merely about returning us to the place we occupied before the plague.  Repaying the years that the locusts have eaten doesn’t mean that we will feel like we felt before the locusts did their damage.  Nothing can change the truth that the locusts have eaten those years and the scars caused by their devastation will not go away.  Like the nail marks on the wrists and ankles of the resurrected Christ give witness to the truth of the darkness from which we needed to be delivered, some memory of that from which we have been delivered will always remain.  And it is to our benefit that this is so.  For that memory is a source of gratitude and praise.  It leads us to apprehend just how wide and high and broad and deep the love of God is.  In the relief we know after being delivered from the fowler’s snare we sing a new song.  It’s a song of redemption.  It’s a song about how the sources of our despair did not have the last word.  It’s a song of celebration of the truth that there is no plague that can separate us from the love of God.

David Rohrer
09/12/2020

The Idolatry of Ideology

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
Ephesians 4:14-16

Over the years of being in pastoral ministry I have not been able to overcome the sort of autonomic cringe I experience when I get a call from the church receptionist telling me that there is someone on the line or someone at the front desk who has asked to speak to “a pastor.”  In most cases it is someone who either wants to sell me something that would be of “supreme benefit to my people” or someone who needs assistance that I know we usually cannot easily provide.  I suppose the cringe is about having to divert my attention from the things on my to do list in order to give space to someone with whom I am not, and following the phone call or encounter, probably will not be, in a continuing relationship.  But occasionally, I learn from these interactions.  They become God’s gift to me even if I do not build a lasting relationship with the person on the other end of line. 

Not long after I came to University Presbyterian in Seattle I had one such unplanned appointment.  A man had come to our welcome desk and asked to see a pastor.  I happened to be the one who the receptionist called and so I sat down with the man to talk awhile.  The man’s first question to me was: “Are you a Promise Keeper?” I thought it an odd question.  Although I knew what he meant.  He was asking if I had attended the Promise Keeper men’s conference that had been held at the Kingdome in Seattle in the mid 90’s.  He was African American and wanted to be sure I was someone who had made a commitment to racial reconciliation, one of the seven promises that a Promise Keeper was asked to make.  Well I had attended the conference and I had made the promises so we were off to a good start.  But in talking with him it became apparent that he had some needs that could best be addressed with another person on our staff who worked both with the homeless and with mental health support groups and resources.  So I connected him with my colleague and pretty much left it at that.  I handed him off and could get back to my list.

Not so fast.  A few weeks later he came back.  This time he asked for me by name at the reception desk. We connected and he let me know immediately that he was not happy about the referral.  He didn’t want to work with my colleague.  He said, almost spitting the words at me as he uttered them, “That man is an activist.  I don’t trust him or people like him.”  I’m not sure I fully understood what he meant, but whatever activist meant to him, it was in his mind not even close to the meaning of the other label he had previously used with me: Promise Keeper.  Promise Keepers were trustworthy, Activists were not. 

Both were ideological labels. These kinds of labels act as filters or lenses that become the evaluative criteria by which we judge the possibility of viable relationship with another.  They are the means by which we cut to the chase and make early decisions about whether an encounter is worth our time.  Why should I talk to her she voted for Trump?  I can’t read his book, he’s a socialist?   He’s a right wing nut job.  She’s a fuzzy headed leftist radical.  Fascist.  Antifa.  Whatever the category is, the net effect of naming it is to release us from any responsibility of having to engage with this other with whom we cannot agree.

Integrity requires me to admit that this man’s evaluative labels were not that much different than the conclusions I made about those anonymous requests to speak to a pastor.  In the end we were both like dogs in a dog park quickly sniffing out who was and who was not a potential member of our pack.  It’s actually a pretty normal practice.  It’s not always harmful.  But often it is.  History is full of the details of how the assignment of these labels often gets us into trouble.  The Church has been a full participant in this activity of making the label more important than the person.  In the name of purity we have tried to eradicate those who threaten the existence of the “right” way of believing.  Sniffing out the smoke and snuffing out the fires of heresy, we take our eyes off our leader, cut ourselves off from the one who is our head, and focus on and belong to things that do not build up but only tear down.  Ideology becomes our idol and our tenacious grip on what we claim to be the “right” idea often leads us into unrighteous and destructive actions.

Jesus says it well, “It shall not be so among you (Mk 10:43).”  Among those of us who claim to follow Jesus, truth is not a thing; Truth is a Person.  We are not called to an ideology.  We are called into a relationship.  To answer Jesus’ call to follow him does not require us to sign a creedal statement or don a particular ideological label in order to embark on the journey.  Ours is not a faith that primarily describes itself in terms of the tenets of what we think or believe.  At its foundation it is a walk of faithfulness with a Lord whose mind we are called to share.  And the mind of Jesus Christ, the mind of this person we are called to follow, is a mind that is willing to look beyond its own interests and in humility to regard others as better than ourselves (Philippians 2:3-4).  Start here and ideology takes its proper place because we start walking with a living Lord and begin that journey on which we “grow up in every way into him who is our head.”  This is the identity that knits us together into one body.  This is the means by which we are built up in love.      

David Rohrer
09/01/2020

Labels

“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I”
Psalm 61:2

A couple of weeks ago I preached on this text from Psalm 61.  Whenever I read this prayer I am always cowed by its wisdom.  “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”  In other words:   Lord, elevate me to a place where I have something more than merely my own power and perspective. Lift me to the place where I can take in a bigger picture.  Help me to see what I cannot see from the narrow and cramped cell where I have only myself and people like me as a point of reference.  Let me experience the liberty that I can know only when I understand myself to be a part of something bigger than myself and the world that I have created.

In this era when the fruits born of our various political, racial, gender, and economic disparities are on full display, it seems to me that this prayer is one that all sides can and ought to pray.   In fact, I might even assert that it is the prayer that is actually the foundation of all our prayers.  Like a stem cell, it is the prayer that gives birth to every other prayer we pray.  For to be lifted to the rock that is higher than ourselves requires us to not only acknowledge a power greater than ourselves who does the lifting, but also the relinquishment of our own power to don and assign the various labels that keep us in those cells of polarity and disparity. 

Assigning labels seems like an appropriate thing to us when we do it.  It helps us to order life.  It suggests a framework of understanding and an organization of society.  We have categories for friend and foe, right and wrong, safe and unsafe.  Labels help us embrace those who will return our embrace and keep away from those who seek our harm.  Labels help us to identify goals and provide a framework for defining priorities.  We land on a worldview, a way of knowing, and a framework for understanding that gives shape to our lives and so creates a space that seems safe.  As a good diagnosis defines the course of treatment for a disease, labels help us to know how we are going to engage life and make decisions.

But here’s the thing, those labels we don for ourselves or assign to others can never tell the whole story.  The full story is always bigger. Always more complex.  Always defying the limits of the label.  While labels have a short term asset of helping us to root out and excoriate the sinners and create and elevate the saints, they ultimately wear thin as we realize that the line between these two groups is not as dark and definitive as we might have thought.  Better societal definitions of the oppressor and the victim, sinners and saints, heroes and villains are not the primary catalyst for real change.  Those labels indeed tell the truth, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

Why do we think that defining polarities and waging wars based on these polarities can lead us to that higher place where all will be well?  I suppose, history testifies to the wisdom of Hegel’s dialectic.  It’s not hard to make the argument that a succession of battles between various theses and antitheses will gradually produce the synthesis of a new order.  There is some truth in the theory that we will evolve as the factions who have donned conflicting labels battle it out and go through those pendulum swings of gaining or losing power. But history also shows that an endless succession of winners and losers produces an endless succession of attempts by either the defeated to reclaim what they’ve lost or hegemonistic despots to ruthlessly hold onto what they’ve gained.   

It’s only the truth that is bigger than the label that can set us free. That’s why Jesus’ words about attending to the matter of the log in our own eye before we attempt to remove the speck in our neighbor’s eye gets us a step closer to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Giving attention to that log requires us to use our power to address a thing that we have the power to change.  God has pledged to come alongside us in this work.  The winds of the Spirit can elevate us to the rock that is higher than ourselves.  And what liberty there is when we take in the view of that broad and open space of a life where we belong to One who has delivered all of us out of the tiny world of self.     

David Rohrer
06/26/2020

In Plenty and In Want

“I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:12-13

I have officiated at hundreds of weddings in my 38 years of pastoral ministry.  It is one of the privileges of playing the role my calling invites me to play.  People invite me into their lives and ask me to sit awhile in their world in order to give witness to God’s presence and pray for God’s blessing.  So for that time, I sit with them and talk with them and pray for them.  Yet when the four weeks of pastoral counselling and the weekend of celebration have passed, my notes from the ceremony and the couple’s results from the Prepare Inventory go into a file; I bless this bride and groom on their way, and for the most part they pass out of my readily accessible memory. 
 
Yet some have found a place closer to the front of my mind.  Their stories and my experience with them make a memorable impression; they become God’s gift to me, the Spirit’s tools in my own spiritual formation.  One such couple came across my path in the early years of my work.  This rather affluent, ok let’s just say it, REALLY WEALTHY, couple asked me to perform their wedding.  Their union was no doubt as much merger as marriage.  They were not a part of the church where I was serving but asked me to perform a ceremony that was to be held at the yacht club.  In the fourth week of our pre-wedding meetings when it came time to plan the ceremony, I went over various examples of wedding vows from which they could choose.  They settled on the traditional vows in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship.  But one phrase caught the groom’s eyes and pointing to it he said, “I don’t think we need to promise this.”  The phrase was in the list of conditions in which a bride and groom both promise to remain faithful to each other. He was pointing at the line “in plenty and in want.” 
 
This young man could not conceive of the contingency that would necessitate making this promise.  He had plenty, he had never not had plenty, and the thought that he might one day not have plenty was not accessible to him.  It was a dumbfounding experience for me.  I knew in my heart he needed to be challenged on this but I also knew that this was not an arguable point with him.  So in the inexperience of my early years of pastoral ministry, I had neither the confidence nor the categories by which to express my dismay.  I silently acquiesced to his wishes and we left this line out of the ceremony. 
 
As I periodically ponder this exchange I always feel sad and Jesus’ words about rich men and the camel passing through the eye of the needle come to mind.  For what I know now beyond any doubt is that the state of wanting, the experience of poverty, is essential if we are ever going to follow Jesus and walk on the way of faith.  The gnawing emptiness of want is the gateway to abundant life.  We need only go to the first words in Matthew’s rendering of Jesus’ stump speech, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.  Blessed are the poor. . . , blessed are those who mourn. . . , blessed are the meek. . . , blessed are those who hunger and thirst. . . .  In short: Happy are those in touch with their emptiness because they are ready to be filled.
 
Poverty and the discomfort of want are not the normative experience for most middle and upper class North Americans.  We might at times compare ourselves with those who are more “well-heeled” than we are and feel a bit disadvantaged; but for the most part our relative degree of affluence in comparison with the rest of the world keeps us in a sort of steady state of not thinking that much about wealth or poverty.  I know I didn’t ever feel economically privileged until I spent two weeks at a theological seminary in Pune, India in 1985.  On that trip I spent one night in the Centaur Hotel near the airport in Mumbai (Bombay) before I flew out to Pune the next day.  The cost of the room was 700 rupees, about $55 at the time.  In talking with other pastors at the seminary a week later, I discovered that for a one night stay I had spent the equivalent of the average monthly salary of a pastor.
 
Hunger, poverty, grief and meekness, are not our norm.  So when they encounter us we find ourselves ill-prepared for the work of mining them for the blessing hidden in this ore.  Covid-19 and the racial unrest of these days are presenting us with the invitation to engage in this work of excavation.  The poverty of isolation from one another, the weight of a deeply rooted and seemingly insoluble problem,  the threat to our peace that we feel, the loss of freedoms that we had taken for granted, or the fear that comes with facing into the truth of an uncertain future all have embedded within the them the severe mercy of facing into our hunger.  They give us a vehicle by which to identify with the deer longing for flowing streams (Ps. 42), the prisoner sitting in darkness and gloom (Ps. 107) and the famished longing of a soul wandering aimlessly in dry and weary land (Ps. 63).
 
When we know we are in want, when we feel hunger, when we are consumed by the truth that we have nothing to consume, we are ready to be filled.  We are invited beyond that vague sense of restlessness that otherwise occupies the waking hours of most of our days.  That restlessness is not hunger so much as it is a fear of hunger.  It is this fear that fuels our consumer economy and sends us on that futile quest for the thing that will bring us peace because it holds out the false promise of ending our waiting for the unknown thing we are wanting.   
 
There is no better feeling than eating when one is deeply hungry and drinking when one is truly thirsty.  Awareness of deprivation is the gateway to joyous fulfillment.  Thank God for the opportunity of these days to recognize just how hungry our world is.  And more importantly, thank God that God is ready and waiting to feed us.                      

David Rohrer
06/12/2020

Paradox and Praise

“There seems to be ample evidence to suggest that singing creates a quantity of fine aerosols
that can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, move with air currents,
and stay infectious for many hours, exposing virtually everyone in a building.
Our sources strongly recommend against singing indoors in public until a vaccine is widely available and widely used. For similar reasons, the use of wind instruments should also be avoided.”
(from “Church Music in the Age of Covid-19”, Wisconsin Council of Churches)

Reading this caution issued by the Wisconsin Council of Churches was one of the more memorable low points for me in the journey through the Covid-19 crisis.  It has been matched only by a list of alternatives to singing that I also saw printed in a similar piece of ecclesiastical policy.  But that said, I also cannot deny the truth behind this admonition.  We need only recall the cautionary tale of the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal earlier this year.  60 people gathered for a 90 minute choir rehearsal and within days, 45 people in the choir were sick with Covid-19 and I believe four of those people died as a result of the disease. 

The notion of singing being a vehicle for the spread of a potentially lethal contagion was never something I thought about before now.  While I have thought about it as a way of spreading something contagious, those contagions were always life giving rather than death dealing.  It has always been a vehicle to disseminate truth and beauty.  It has the power to help us express our joy and our pain.  It invites us to join the groan that is too deep for words and the shout that resounds above the heavens.  Singing fosters hope in us when we are down in the pit of despair and leads us to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Singing together helps us to transcend the limits of our mortal condition and at least approach, if not pierce, the veil between heaven and earth.   

To be very frank, I don’t know what corporate public worship is if it does not include congregational singing. 

Yet here we are, encountering yet another Covid-19 oxymoron borne of the paradox that it daily invites us to engage.  We can now add worship without singing to the list which includes phrases like social distancing and sheltering in place. As a congregation we are confronted by the paradox of working to preserve and build community when it is dangerous to gather in close proximity to one another.  We can neither deny the validity of the warning to keep our distance nor turn away from the truth that isolation itself is a danger to us.  So as I wrote last week, it’s time to get creative.  The severe mercy of engaging this paradox is that it invites us to pursue and rest in the bigger Truth who is allowing those two competing realities to exist in the same world.

The severe mercy of this paradox is that it invites us to pray, “Lord, how are you at work here, and how can I be a part of that work?” It invites us to look for and then strive to be a part of what God is up to.  It is to seek to live in awareness, as two great catechisms in our tradition remind us, that our only comfort in life is that we belong to God and our chief end in life is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.  In short, it is to dedicate our lives to the praise of God.

Often when we think about praising God we think first about the actions associated with praise.  We confuse the big reality of praise with the ways we express it.  Praise is more than thanksgiving and adoration.  Praise is about more than singing or spoken acclamations.  Praise is not merely the attitude of falling to our knees or lifting our hands to the heavens.  Praise is a way of being.  It is the awareness that every moment has everything to do with the living God.  It is a heart that beats because of God.  It is the awareness of God’s presence and the longing for that awareness when we are experiencing what feels like God’s absence.  Praise or the act of glorifying God is what we are and what we do when we sense the heaviness that elevates us.  The Hebrew word for this glorious presence is kabod¸ which also means heavy.  Praise is being overwhelmed by the weight of God’s glory. 

There are infinite ways we can express our awareness of the presence of this infinite God.  Singing is certainly among them.  But it by no means exhausts them.  During his triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus reminded the Pharisees of this fact.  When they complained about the song the adoring crowd was singing and told Jesus to silence them, he replied: “If these were silenced even the rocks would cry out.”

So even if we are silenced with respect to indoor singing, how can we listen for the song the rocks are singing?  How can we participate in those songs that are more than songs, those songs that never stop singing? A line from the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to me as I was thinking about singing and the potential temporary loss of it in our indoor worship.  As I was complaining to God, and whoever else would listen, about the sheer stupidity and incomprehensibility of this ban on indoor singing I heard this prayer:

Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.

How ironic! A song reminded me that there are infinite means of expressing praise.  Hearts do not necessarily need a diaphragm, lungs and a larynx to sing the songs that issue forth from their depths.  When my feet are planted firmly on the rock of the Mount of God’s redeeming love, I have unlimited means of reveling in that gift.  For that love is broad and long and high and deep and we will never arrive at the place where we completely comprehend it.  We will always be growing in our awareness of it and thus always learning ways to express our sheer joy in the gift of being surrounded by it.

David Rohrer
05/29/2020

Crisis and Creativity

These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng and led them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.
Psalm 42:4

I have heard it said that crisis is often the best soil for creativity.  The crisis that delivers us into places of isolation, dislocation, deprivation and desolation can foster a resourcefulness that helps us to find new ways to fulfill the desires of our hearts.  What initially is nothing more than a source for our lament over loss, can actually teach us to sing a new song of hope.  This was certainly the case for Israel during its exile in Babylon.  In this time when their last memories of Jerusalem were a broken down wall and the burned out rubble of the temple, they sat at first by the waters in Babylon weeping and refusing to sing the songs of Zion (Ps. 137).  They were furious; and paralyzed by rage all they could think about was the injustice done to them and how long it would be before they could go back to Jerusalem and reclaim what was rightfully theirs.

Yet 70 years of lamentation was not a sustainable means of managing their grief and rage.  Nor was simply waiting to go back to what was.  So for whatever reason, they began to allow the light of God into the cracks in their hard shell of bitterness.  That light warmed the seeds of hope and creativity lying dormant within them, and the plants that grew from these seeds changed them forever.  What was born during this era where they were deprived of their normal ways of worship and fellowship were new ways to gather and new songs to sing.  They built “highways to Zion in their hearts” (Ps. 84) and the dry, lifeless world of exile (Ps 42:1-3) became a well-watered and verdant field giving witness to their ongoing covenant relationship with God (Isaiah35:1).  Most of the Psalms were written and the institution of the synagogue was born during the exile.  In a time where they could not worship as they had, when they were grieving the loss of “leading the throng” into the temple, the Holy Spirit was working overtime, blowing the creative breath of life into the lungs of people who thought they would never sing again.

We’re in a very different kind of crisis these days.  Our oppressor does not manifest itself with the concreteness of a conquering army or a voracious, narcissistic emperor.  Our captor is silent and unseen.  So it is harder to oppose and, at this moment at least, impervious to any rebellion we might mount to overthrow it.  So perhaps our despair is even greater than that of the exiles, because it is so unclear as to where we should focus our rage.  Yet even so, the songs the exiles wrote and the means of gathering they developed have something to teach us about how we can manage our anger and sorrow.  They call us to summon the same spirit of creativity and explore how God might be inviting us to a new thing (Is. 43:18-19).

My biggest frustration these days is that the very act of meeting together indoors, in close proximity to one another for an hour or more is apparently one of the best ways to spread Covid-19.  Get us all singing in that space and you create an even more fertile environment for the disease.  I’d call that a crisis.  And I spend many of my waking hours longing to go back to a time when we did not have to worry about this or spend our waking hours trying to devise ways of maintaining our current means of worship in our sanctuary while avoiding this threat.  It will surprise no one to learn that in spite of all my fretting I have yet to come up with the time machine that would take us back to the way we used to be or the work-around that would neutralize the threat of this contagion. 

So what can we do?  We can focus on what we know we need and work to develop new ways of meeting that need.  One of the most important items of business we need to attend to in these days of restriction and isolation is the work of “not neglecting to meet together” in order to “encourage one another”(Heb. 10:25).  I believe there are some creative ways we can heed this admonition to meet together while also respecting the limits placed upon us by Covid-19.

We have already settled into one example of this creative adjustment by gathering for our weekly worship service on Zoom.  And we will continue to offer this into the foreseeable future, and so accommodate those who will not initially be able to come back into the sanctuary even when we open that up.  But there are other ways to use this tool that we have not yet fully explored.  Bible studies, prayer groups, lectio divina groups, and fellowship events (aka- happy hours) are all things we can do using a video conference platform.  In this time when we cannot just drive to the church and all attend the same service and then chat with one another in the narthex after the service, we can still be talking with one another about our faith.  We can be encouraging one another to persevere.  If you need some help with making use of the tool that facilitates these discussions, there are folks in the congregation who are making it their mission to help people get set up.  Don’t just defer this necessity of meeting together until the time when the church building opens up again.  Do it now. 

Another thing we can do to attend to this admonition to meet together is to explore outdoor options for gathering in smaller groups.  We might not be able to gather 120 people in the sanctuary to sing and celebrate the Lord’s Supper, but we can gather groups of ten to do those things outside.  Granted this significantly diminishes the number that we would normally think of when we think of a “throng”, but a circle of 10 spaced at a safe distance from one another more than meets Jesus’ suggested quorum of two or three who come together in his name. 

In short, we need to think beyond merely restoring our indoor once a week gathering for all.  The initial work of opening things up will not be about getting everybody back into the sanctuary and getting back to the way things were.  Instead it might mean multiplying the number of gatherings we have and spreading these out over the week.  Will you please join me in praying and dreaming about this?  God’s steadfast love has not ceased, Jesus is still Lord and we are his disciples.  As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians “now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.”  So let us both accept the unhappy circumstances of the now that we cannot change, and cling to the truth about God in this now that will not change.  Let us act in the assurance and confidence that nothing will separate us from God’s love.  

Why are you cast down O my soul and why are you disquieted within me,
hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my King and my God.
(Ps. 42:11)

Dave Rohrer
5/22/20202

Return to Normalcy?

One of my best friends during this time of crisis in our world has been the study of history.  When I look back and see that there have been other times in history when we have walked a similar path, I tend to turn down the volume on what I am feeling in the present.  I step back from the tendency to catastrophize and stop using words like unprecedented.  I have heard it said that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.  Frankly, I think the better way to state this maxim is that those who study history know when we are repeating it.

With all the talk these days about “opening things up” and “getting back to normal” I’ve been thinking about an obscure detail concerning the 1920 presidential campaign. 100 years ago Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox were running against each other for president.  Their running mates were two future presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt.  In 1920 the nation had just emerged from two major crises, World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, and Harding’s campaign slogan was “Return to Normalcy.”

Sound familiar?

Return to normalcy.  It certainly expresses our heart’s desire these days.  We’re tired of being cooped up in our homes.  We’re oppressed by the loneliness of it all.  We’re fearful about the economy.  We desperately want to get back to the way things were before we shut ourselves in as a result of this worldwide outbreak of Covid-19.  Our souls are sated with the bad tasting food of crisis and we want the sustenance of something more savory.  So let’s get back to the way things were.  Let’s return to normalcy.

Of course the problem with this desire is that we can’t fulfill it.  It’s as difficult to go back to what was as it is to predict what is ahead.  We can only be where we are.  We can only live faithful lives in the present that are  fueled by gratitude for and wisdom born of past experience and hopeful anticipation and educated guesses of what might be best for the future. Nostalgia about the past and fear about the future have not proven to be the best foundations for decisions we have to make in the present.   

A big part of the Biblical narrative grows out of the theme of what happens when we human beings emerge from a crisis.  The expulsion from the Garden, the release from slavery in Egypt, 40 years of wilderness wandering and the entry into the new land, the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, the end of 70 years spent in exile in Babylon and a return to the rubble that was once a great city, the crucifixion and the resurrection of the one who turned out to be a very different Messiah than the one who was anticipated, all give witness to this theme.  At each of these moments of transition the story tells both of the longings and sadness the people have as they look back to what was, as well as the fear and the hope they experience as they anticipate something new.  And at each of these moments the Bible acknowledges our feelings and gives us songs to sing that put words to them: Wailing laments that long for the restoration of what was and hopeful hymns as we search the horizon for the signs of God’s presence.

Yet there is another song that we are given as well.  It is the song that sings of the one constant that endures even in the face of uncertainty and change.  There are many versions of it in the Bible but one of my favorites is Jeremiah’s song in Lamentations 3.  It faces into the loss and embraces hope.  It does not deny the pain and yet sings of something that transcends it.  It offers no rosy promise of a return to what was, only a celebration of what remains true.  In the wake of destruction and the throes of exile Jeremiah gives us a word for today:

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
    is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
    and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
    and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
    his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
    “therefore I will hope in him.”
(Lamentations 3:19-24)

David Rohrer
05/06/2020

Shameless Nakedness

“And the man and his wife were both naked,
and were not ashamed.”
Genesis 2:25

Sometime in either my freshman or sophomore year of college I took a class called Human Ecology.  It fulfilled one of the two biological science general education course requirements for a bachelor’s degree and was essentially a course that explored the inter-relatedness of human society and the natural world.  Early in the class to make the point that human beings share things in common with the other animals in this world, the professor identified what he considered to be the two major biological traits that distinguish us from other animals. Pointing to his head with one hand and repeatedly demonstrating the grasping function of his thumb and his other four fingers he said: “These are the only two things that make us different: our brains and an opposable thumb.”

I suppose if you look at this question from the perspective of evolutionary biology it is not far from the truth.  At the very least, it is a helpful perspective in that it mitigates some of the arrogance brought on by that big brain and maybe helps us to think twice about how to live in a state of respectful humility with the rest of the natural world.  And this was certainly part of my professor’s point.  But it is not the whole story.  And it is not the only perspective from which one can look at this question of how we are different from the animals. For what that big brain also does is give us the ability to admit what we do not know and therefore also postulate the existence of a being other than ourselves who might know what we don’t.

If we see ourselves as creatures made by the thoughtful and intentional actions of a Creator, then there is another short list of similarities and differences we can compile when we compare ourselves with the other animals God has created.  The story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 is a helpful source in constructing this list.  What makes us similar can be summarized in words like dust and death, and what distinguishes us is identified in the words like image and dominion. 

The Psalms are a helpful commentary on Genesis.  For on the one hand these poets lead us into the stark awareness that we return to the dust from which we come (Ps 90) and that we cannot “abide in our pomp” because like the beasts we perish (Ps 49).  On the other hand they celebrate our special status in creation as ones who are on God’s mind in a different way: That God made us “a little lower than God” and has given us “dominion over the works of [his] hands” (Ps. 8).

But irrespective of which of these two sets of lenses we use to explore this question of our similarities to and our dissimilarities from the other animals, we are delivered into a place where we must face the same question. We have to decide what we will do with this information.  We have to ask: “So what?”  How will we make use of our privilege and what will we do with the truth that we have limits?  We are brought to a place where we must consider our moral choices in how we will relate to this world. 

And when I come to this point I am glad for my theological lens.  For it gives me direction in how to deploy my big brain and it gives me compassion for a world that comes from the loving thoughts of a benevolent creator who looked at it all when it was finished and said: “This is very good.”

There is a strange little detail at the end of Genesis 2 that brings this together for me.  We’re told that the man and the woman were “naked and not ashamed.”  Another way to say this is: They knew who they were, they saw themselves clearly and they were ok with that.  Naked and not ashamed: vulnerable and undefended, yet confident and empowered. 

When we know who we are, people created in the image of God, made by God for relationship with God, one another and the rest of creation, we are not anxious about what we are not.  We shrug our shoulders at the fact of our nakedness because we know that our vulnerability is not the only truth that defines us.  We can humbly make use of those big, yet limited, brains because we receive them as a gift from God and use them in gratitude to him and for his glory.

The way Eugene Peterson renders the third Beatitude concerning the blessedness of the meek provides us with a good summary and an apt conclusion:

You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—
no more, no less.
That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
Matthew 5:5

David Rohrer
April 27, 2020