Love Across the Political Divide

Life is not politics.

That has not been so obvious in these months. Everything is qualified (or disqualified) by whether you want the President to be our president or not. There is less and less tolerance, more and more nullification of any validity of any credibility depending on what you believe is best for our government. People speak of revolution and “saving our country” and fascism — when we are having an election in a month.

Read the rest at

https://mbird.com/2020/09/no-sense-love-across-the-political-divide/

Is Your Church A Racist Monument?

Article written by a personal friend of Pastor Cris and fellow LCMS pastor who has been working in North City St Louis. He is also working in the location of Coli’s First Teaching Job. This is a Large National Magazine. Congrats Chris

Chris Paavola also works with Lutheran Hour. https://thred.org/

—— read here

During the Great Migration, millions of Black Americans fled the violence of the Jim Crow south for a new life in northern cities. In response, thousands of white Americans left their diversifying city to resettle in homogeneous suburbs in a reactionary migration known as white flight. Left behind in the systematically segregated communities of color was something white families couldn’t take with them– their churches.

White Churches………………………….

Read the Rest at

https://relevantmagazine.com/faith/church/is-your-church-a-racist-monument

Deferred Maintenance: Finding God in the Breakdown Lane

by SAM BUSH on Aug 17, 2020 • 8:30 am3 Comments

Earlier this week, right before dinner time, our refrigerator started to sound slightly off. Its normal low purr became something of a soft wheeze. When my wife made a passing remark about it, I shot back, “It’s fine! I think it does that sometimes,” as if I were defending the fridge for having been personally slighted. By some miracle, the matter didn’t escalate into an argument and we then ate dinner with our two boys (not peacefully, mind you, dinner was mayhem).

The next morning, the fridge was squealing. It got to the point where I had to speak up a bit in order for my wife to hear what I was saying. When the stainless steel elephant in the room could no longer be ignored, I conceded: “I think we should probably have someone take a look at it, I guess!” She looked back at me with a knowing, loving, slightly irritated look, reminding me that I was a very lucky man. Six days later and I still have yet to get in touch with a repairman.

Judging from the lines at the dentist, mechanic, and veterinarian, we’ve all been deferring maintenance. Routine checkups are being delayed indefinitely because we now have the ultimate excuse to not do things: You could die! At the very least, the pandemic has made most of these chores inadvisable and, yes, possibly life-threatening. The World Health Organization recently advised putting off visiting the dentist for routine care until Covid-19 rates drop or until researchers know more about the risks involved. Perhaps your teeth whitening is, in fact, a matter of life and death, but I happen to know a certain someone who already has been following this public health protocol for a couple of years now.

Pandemic or no pandemic, there are things that aren’t being fixed that need to be. The roof is leaking, but we’ve put buckets across the floor. Our knee hurts, but we don’t mind limping a little, and people seem to hardly notice anyway. We feel overwhelmed, but virtual therapy feels awkward. We’re in dire need of good news, but the church is closed. In many ways, delayed maintenance is our usual modus operandi, but our capacity to meet the bare minimum is at the lowest it’s ever been. If we had been required to file our taxes on time this past April, it might have led to the collapse of modernity.

Deferring upkeep in our lives during Covid-19 seems to be a microcosm of how we deal with inadequacy and judgment. The reason why I denied that my fridge needed to be fixed in the first place is twofold: 1. I don’t want to be the type of person that needs his fridge fixed (thank you very much); and 2. the necessary steps it would take to fix it are beyond my mental capacity at the moment. Life is hard enough as it is and a broken fridge may be all it takes to send me over the edge.

When modest crises present themselves, we might attempt a quick fix and hope for the best, but Lord knows the piper will always get paid and any delay will only accrue interest. In other words, you can fight the law of life, but the law will always win. Life, ultimately, will not be managed, but endured.

I recently left my job of ten years to pursue graduate school. Clearing out my office felt as if I was having an organ removed. Even voluntary surgery requires a recovery process. While talking about this new transition with a friend, I tried to evade the dramatic undertones of what I was going through. “It’s been a little stressful, but I’m trying to name it. I don’t want it to build into a big blowup,” I told her. To which she responded, “You know, it’s OK if it does.” It didn’t occur to me until then that the loss that I was feeling would, in fact, lead to some sort of a blowup if I ever wanted to allow myself to fully grieve.

Of course, there are various degrees of “blowup.” There’s the inconsolable crying while watching a survival show (this can be classified as an acceptable blowup). Then there’s the screaming at a guy who you think is driving too fast on your street (less acceptable). The hope is that the blowup is executed in a safe manner, preferably with someone you love and trust. In the areas of our lives where we have deferred maintenance, let us hope that the car doesn’t break down on the highway in front of an eighteen-wheeler. Then again, even then, it may just be OK if it does.

It’s been said before that God’s office is at the end of your rope. When the car breaks down, when the tooth decays, when your mental health deteriorates. The place that feels God-forsaken is sometimes the very heart of grace, or, at the very least, the gateway to true healing. As Kafka once said, “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” Kafka may be right, but I think it’s too much to ask people to try to not avoid suffering. Avoiding suffering is in our very nature. We will inevitably keep the crises of our lives at bay as long as possible, even if that may only delay the wideness of God’s mercy rushing in to meet us there.

The good news is that God works all things together for good. All things means all things. All things also means that one particular thing — whatever it is — that you happen to be putting off right now. He is working that out — as well as the subsequent breakdown — for good. How can we trust this? Because God did not hold back from the sufferings of the world, but instead was lifted up and drew all of it to himself. Jesus’ death was anything but a quick fix. On the Cross, God used his broken body to restore the world once for all.

In truth, I will not call the repairman today. Like most things in my life, I will prolong getting the help I need until it is much too late. In those moments of brokenness, may I trust that the help of God will “come with succor speedy.” There is no queue to wait for God’s mercy. When we pick up the phone to call we find he’s already arrived at our door, wrench in hand.

Groundhog Day Was a Horror Movie All Along

Taken from the Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/groundhog-day-horror-movie-quarantine/610867/

MEGAN GARBER

APRIL 30, 2020

In February, during the Super Bowl, Jeep ran an ad doing what Super Bowl ads so often will: It converted a beloved cultural product into a marketing message. This time around, the alchemy on offer involved the 1993 film Groundhog Day. Cheerfully soundtracked with the film’s most memorable song, Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the spot featured Bill Murray reprising the role of Phil Connors, the misanthropic weatherman who relives the same day (and relives it, and relives it, and relives it). Instead of the existential agony posited in the original film, however, the commercial Murray delighted in the repetition. Because this time around, he faced his monotonous eternity as the owner of a Jeep.

A lot has changed since February. This month, acknowledging the shift, Jeep came out with another edit of its ad. In place of scenes of Murray joyfully navigating Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in a candy-colored four-wheel drive, this version begins with a black screen and sober text: “We understand that every day is starting to seem the same,” it reads, flashing briefly to Murray waking—again—at 6 a.m. The text shifts, abruptly, to the imperative: “Stay home. Stay healthy. When this is all over, the trails will be waiting. Jeep: #StayOffTheRoad.”

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the movies that were most resonant for many people were ones that directly confronted the calamity: Contagion. The Thing. Safe. Outbreak, for a time, was one of the most popular movies on Netflix. But Jeep understood, with the canny intuition of the advertiser, that as the emergency became more permanent, viewers might be seeking a different kind of catharsis. As the days blend and blur—as the weeks become months and the tidy boxes of the calendar melt into formless liquidity—Groundhog Day, now more than 25 years old, has adopted a new kind of urgency. Earlier this month, the Today show featured a video essay explaining “Why Every Day Feels Like Groundhog Day Lately.” Esquire offered tips on “How to Avoid Groundhog Day During Social Distancing.” On Facebook and Twitter, a meme has been proliferating: an image of Murray, as Phil, announcing, “It’s quarantine day … again.”

The comparisons are signs of privilege; they are typically made by and for the people who have the luxury of doing their jobs remotely, of schooling their children from home, of counting boredom as a hardship. But the comparisons are reminders, too, of how easily quarantine, that act of physical separation, can also cause people to feel distanced from time itself. I’d remembered Groundhog Day, hazily, as a comedy above all, its profundities packaged as a love story, its message hopeful about the giddy possibilities of self-improvement. Watching it again, though—watching it now, in the interstitial space between the Before Times and the After—I was struck by how dark the film is before it gets light again. And I was struck most of all by the film’s suggestion that the true source of Phil’s agonies isn’t repetition alone; it’s the fact that Phil endures the endless days not knowing how, or whether, the repetition will end.

Here is the basic premise of Groundhog Day: Phil, a Pittsburgh-based weatherman, is assigned for the fourth year in a row to report on the Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney. He is extremely indignant about the assignment. And so Phil spends his day in Punxsutawney doing a version, the film implies, of what he does pretty much every year: mocking the festivities, belittling the people who partake in them, generally assuming that the celebrations—and their adherents—are beneath him. (Phil refers to himself, at one point, to his cameraman, Larry, and his producer, Rita, as “the talent.”) The pique continues apace, until: A blizzard blows in. Phil, Rita, and Larry have to spend another night in Punxsutawney. And for reasons that Groundhog Day, in a twist of filmmaking genius, leaves unexplained, Phil wakes up the next morning … to realize, slowly, that it is February 2 once more. He is doomed to repeat the day, caught in a loop of unknown origin or duration, until, finally, he is able to live a day of selflessness, of joy, of love—and, therefore, to break through to February 3.

Groundhog Day’s action is structured according to a classic redemptive arc: This is the hero’s journey, set in the small-town wilds of Punxsutawney. But as Phil moves from confusion to resignation to despair, the movie grows darker in tone. Trapped, panicked, desperate, he tries to escape the time loop by alternately jumping from a building, plunging a toaster into his bathwater, and driving himself and the groundhog, Thelma & Louise–style, off a cliff. He uses his compounding knowledge of the people around him to manipulate them. (“I’m a god,” he tells Rita at one point, wearily.) He experiments with consequence-free living: driving on train tracks, mocking a policeman, insulting people so insolently that they slap him. But he never gets any bruises. And so Phil, at once invincible and confined, comes to ask questions such as this one: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

This is comedy that operates, at its edges, as horror. It understands what Phil comes to realize: how easily time itself, when it refuses to move forward, can become monstrous. Groundhog Day has been interpreted as an allegory for ethics, for religion, for psychoanalysis, for self-help, for economic theory; it is also, however, widely recognized as an analogy for the dread of unchanging circumstances. The Oxford Handbook of Military Psychology offers a chapter on the psychic effects of contemporary modes of warfare. It is titled “Boredom: Groundhog Day as Metaphor for Iraq.”

That interpretation does a lot to explain why the film has become a meme in this moment. For those fortunate enough to live a life of easy monotony, time looms. Monday becomes Wednesday becomes Sunday; the activities that differentiated them have largely fallen away. What day is it? has been spiking as a search term on Google. Todd Meany, an anchor at Fox 8 News in Cleveland, has begun hosting a regular “What Day Is It?” reminder during the station’s broadcasts. The segments, which Meany said arose from the very real recognition that “nobody could remember what day it was,” are only partially a joke. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, while providing sober updates about the state’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, often adds reminders such as this one to his slide decks: “Today is Saturday.”

But also: “There’s no such thing as Saturdays anymore,” Tom Hanks, hosting the first quarantine edition of Saturday Night Live, said earlier this month, noting the new irony of the show’s name. “It’s just, every day is today.” In a subsequent episode that aired over the weekend, Pete Davidson performed a song that contained these lyrics: “For like two months I’ve been on my couch / Runnin’ out of things to talk about / It’s quarantine in my house / I’m going crazy, and crazy, and crazy / I’m going crazy, and crazy, and crazy.”

And so, Groundhog Day. Groundhog Days. “At first I was like, ‘This is great—I get to chill out, be in my pajamas, do breakfast whenever, slow and easy,’” Lisa Devlin, a stay-at-home mother, told The Washington Post recently. “And then I realized very quickly that just turns the day into an amorphous mess.” That stark shift in mindset, experts suggest, is a common experience. “Some psychologists,” The New York Times notes, “have compared the coronavirus’s effects to the aftermath of a natural disaster, except the disaster is moving in slow motion, taking place everywhere and has no end in sight.” In mid-April, CBS 4, a local news station in Miami, aired a segment that began, “It’s not February 2, but it sure does feel like Groundhog Day lately.” The reporter, Lauren Pastrana (“reporting from my garage, again”), remotely interviewed the psychologist Raquel Bild-Libbin, who noted how easily unstructured days can give rise to anxiety and depression. The doctor also noted the irony of that twist: “We have gained something that we have always wanted, which is time.”

This is another way that Groundhog Day speaks to this moment. Unstructured time, initially, might seem like a gift. “Let me ask you guys a question,” Phil says to two Punxsutawney residents he meets in a bowling-alley bar: “What if there were no tomorrow?” They consider the question. “No tomorrow,” one answers. “That would mean there would be no consequences. There’d be no hangovers. We could do whatever we wanted!”

But one of the lessons of Groundhog Day is that accountability is its own kind of asset. Without it, Phil is rudderless, and doomed to repeat his unending day. And one of the things that makes Phil’s predicament so unnerving, to him and to viewers, is that its dynamics are so deeply unclear. What happened to make time—Phil’s unique experience of time, at any rate—repeat itself? Why February 2? Why this particular February 2? The current moment brings similar questions. “We Still Don’t Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us,” New York magazine announced this week. On Tuesday, Yascha Mounk wrote a piece for The Atlantic that contained the following line: “After weeks in which it made sense to hope that something would happen to end this nightmare, the prospects for deliverance are more remote than ever.” Yesterday, Ed Yong published a sweeping essay headlined “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing.” Its sub-headline: “A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.”

The unknowns, like the disheveled days, loom. The plot trails off. Groundhog Day is a comedy, ultimately, because of its ending: Phil, finally, uses time to become a better person. He learns from the past. He comes to care about people in the present. He breaks his curse. Imagine what Groundhog Day would be if he didn’t. Imagine where we might be, too, if we fail to find a better way forward. There will be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow, and a tomorrow. But will they bring a happy ending? That is one more thing that, in this moment, is profoundly unclear.

The Acquittal of Our Guilty Pleasures

Music is always a near-essential for me when I hit the road. But now, more than ever, having a soundtrack to drive to feels absolutely critical. Typically, I have a playlist cued up to inject some presence into the errand I’m running to offset the Leftovers vibe I pick up everywhere I look around. 

Sometimes, though, someone’s using my Spotify account, and if I haven’t thought ahead and brought CDs (Ron Howard voiceover: He almost never does), my only recourse is the radio which can be a chore. But, when my choice is between listening to the radio or enduring the anxieties and withering self-doubts intruding upon my consciousness in the silence, well, you know what’s going to win out. 

Which is about the only way what I’m about to describe could ever happen. The other day I was surprised to hear the stuttering beat to Dave Matthews Band’s “Ants Marching” stagger out of the radio. Unsettled, I flicked the tuner in no particular direction, fleeing “anywhere but here” in sheer animal panic, reminded uncomfortably of it being my favorite song when I was ten and the subsequent growth in taste I’ve hopefully accumulated since then.

But that hopefulness only continued to be called into question as it went on the duration of my drive: ”Sorry” by Justin Bieber, “Sex Type Thing” by Stone Temple Pilots… Songs that I’m hesitant to admit used to set my heart beating like a defibrillator, and yet—oof, they did. They do.

What was going on? Aren’t I under enough psychic pressure from the cabin fever of sheltering at home already? Do I really need to grapple with why on Earth these songs should pluck some secret lyre in my heart?

I think two things can simultaneously be true: that DMB can be the ideal band for frat guys to get hammered to while assuring themselves they contain multitudes, and “Ants Marching” can excite the nerve endings in the hidden recesses of my soul and set them vibrating with delight in spite of my awareness of the first point. I don’t want that to be true, but it is.

Our guilty pleasures rupture the husk of our confirmation biases. They testify, “You are those things you let on to the world, but you are also these things.” They are acknowledgements that there’s more to us than our carefully curated public images would suggest. They extract and exclude the evidence of a concealed self we don’t want to let on. We suppress those things that make us feel guilty and ashamed, those things that will not let us forget how we fail to measure up to the standards we set in place for ourselves. The guilty pleasure is Exhibit A in our masochistic self-trials whereby we carve out selves we would prefer to be.

Even the label “guilty pleasure” is a way to cloak our attachment to these songs in the shade of a term implying distance. The phrase inoculates the song’s side effects by dismissing its significance and the resonant frequency with which it rings in sympathy with our being. It reassures us that we know better and regularly choose better, but much like catching a cold, can any of us ever be vigilant enough?

It’s an attempt to distance the self we project to the world and, most importantly, the ideal self we imagine and wish we could become from the irrational dilettante we routinely are in our unguarded moments of simply being. This distance is deceptive, however, because in the act of dissociation we end up burying the pleasure deeper within the self we don’t dare allow to see the light of day. 

The problem here is that that excluded self is still us. Georg Simmel emphasizes the uncomfortable point that

[t]he individual does not attain the unity of his personality exclusively by an exhaustive harmonization… of the contents of his personality. On the contrary, contradiction and conflict not only precede this unity but are operative in it at every moment of its existence.

(Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. D. N. Levine [University of Chicago Press], pp. 71-72)

To be an I, in other words, is always to be a contradictory I. There’s no way around it.

“Do I want to be loved in spite of?” Tim Kreider via Donald Barthelme asks us, and the answer surely is, “No!” That sounds too horrifying for words. I want the love others pour into my prim, manufactured self to be imputed to the actual, unedited me silently behind the scenes. If I can’t earn that love, then by God, I want to smuggle in approval for a bogus self and worry about the divide later. Or never. 

Guilty pleasures essentially say, “Others might enjoy such drivel, but not I,” which is only slightly less obnoxious than the classic, “I thank you Lord that I am not like other men” (Luke 18:11). They serve as boundary markers for who we think we need to be, and who we will fight the outside world’s disciplining scrutinies to become. They’re bowling alley bumpers for our actual selves to ricochet within to safely arrive at the destination we assure ourselves is best. Guilty pleasures can be readily surrendered, we think, when the Thought Police break down our door and read us our charges under the Categorical Imperative of Cool. 

But they never actually arrive, do they? Sure, some of us have been embarrassed when we’ve been asked our favorite album and we’ve said, “Kiss’ Dynasty.” It happens. But the music magisterium we fear is really the oppressive voice of our own inner moralist, spoiling the fun by applying real aesthetic criteria beyond their legitimate bounds with no breaks. That’s no way to live, but that doesn’t stop that voice. 

The deepest, most fundamentally good news usually comes cloaked in the form of its opposite. So hear the good news: only phonies need Christ; positively put, inauthenticity is the price of admission. Maybe most of these songs really, truly aren’t good in any critical sense. But if I could be honest with myself for half a moment, I know the deeper issue my guilty pleasures refract back to me is that I’m not all that good, either. But Jesus wants me anyway. And he doesn’t agonize under any scruples that would try to indict him: “You are woefully inconsistent! Are you taking seriously the implications of the moral heart of your being and the objects of your affection? You can’t love Ian—what would that say about you? How can you be the true, the good, and the beautiful, and bring him into the sphere of reconciliation?”

In a way that evades our attempts at comprehensive understanding, God is both just and the justifier of nincompoops like us (Romans 3:26). Our clumsy likes and ill advised favorites won’t count against us at the eschatological tribunal. We’re just not all that good at consistently liking the best stuff. We might as well just own it. But God isn’t ashamed of you for the Bread records you inherited from your parents or your Big Daddy Weave CDs, or because Weird Al was your first concert. You, delighted by questionable tunes, are vastly preferable to him than dour-but-refined-and-checking-your-Top 5-list-“correctly” you. 

So crank that Starship song; get so severely down to Carlie Rae Jepson. Now is a time when we really don’t need yet another Law choking out our attempts to cope. Your guilty pleasures and mine have been acquitted, their questionability annulled by the superabundant righteousness of Christ. Add your favorites—your actual favorites—to his open-sourced mix. For his triumphal procession blasts all manner of music as we are led in the captivity of freedom (2 Corinthians 2:14). 

Table Talks: Historical Faith

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther would sit around his dinner table at home with friends and students and talk about life and theology. Over the past year, we've started to emulate these famous talks with our friends and family, and today we're excited to share the first one with you. This third episode, hosted by Kelsi Klembara Adam Francisco, Malte Detje, Bob Hiller, and Dan van Voorhis as they explore the topic of Historical Faith.

St. Patrick and COVID 19 From FLGA District

St. Patrick and COVID 19

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations this year will be very different. While many will still enjoy a green (or amber) beer, there will be no parades, no rowdy gatherings at a neighborhood bar, restaurants will serve far fewer corned beef and cabbage meals to celebrating patrons.

The COVID 19 pandemic has changed everything.

Whether you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day or not, St. Patrick does have something to teach us as we learn to keep our social distance. St. Patrick’s evangelistic methodology may serve our time and context well.

I’ll let you google St. Patrick’s history – the story of his kidnapping, conversion and subsequent return to Ireland to share the Gospel message with the Irish barbarians who had enslaved him. It’s quite a story. What really interests me, however is how he created a Christian movement within local communities. These days especially, I wonder if God has prepared His church – us – for such a time as this.

Patrick understood that the spiritual life and ministry call were not to be lived alone. There were no large (or small) churches to which he could invite the barbarians. He did not work to convert individuals, but through his missional vocation, his way of life, he invited others to observe, live, and practice a life of discipleship with him. Through this lifestyle evangelism, the Holy Spirit converted many to Christianity.

The lesson for us today – as churches are closed for worship, children are sent home for on-line schooling, meetings are cancelled and travel is curtailed – is simple. While we may not gather in large groups, how could our church leaders resource members to have “house churches,” to gather very small groups in their homes or yards, where neighbors could observe the Christian faith in action and hear the Christian Gospel? Could it be that some or even many of these neighbors will become participants, rather than observers? How many will the Holy Spirit bring to faith and Christian confession in the context of these micro-communities or “house churches?”

This was Patrick’s method. But it wasn’t new with Patrick. The believers in the early Christian Church practiced the same (see Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4). These believers were called “Christians” (Acts 11) because they lived a Christ-life and because they talked about Christ all the time. Something was different as they practiced hospitality and lived godly lives and as they invited their neighbors to live this life with them. Their neighbors took notice. In fact, these “Christians” were especially noticed in the darkest of times. Plague, persecution and famine gave Christians opportunity to demonstrate Jesus’ love as they served their neighbors in His name.

COVID 19 and the suggested – or enforced – precautions to “flatten the curve” offer us, as the church, the opportunity to be the church in fearful and challenging times. We have the opportunity to live life (even in quarantine) on mission, and to share Good News at a time when the news on TV isn’t so good.

I appreciated James Emery White’s statement in his March 16 post, Why We Cancelled Our Weekend Service…And Why You Should Too. He says, “Just because a church takes a break from physically gathering together doesn’t mean it ceases to be the church! We all know that a church is more than bricks and mortar, and while called to gather for worship it is vastly more than the weekend services… At this moment, our culture needs something it doesn’t have. Not simply more test kits, but the peace that surpasses understanding.” How can you share that peace with your neighbors? White says, “By closing a physical door, we may just be opening a spiritual one.”

St. Patrick gave us so much more than green beer – although you might consider having one with your neighbors and sharing the real story of Patrick with them as a starting point for spiritual conversation.

I think he would appreciate that.

Rev. Dr. Peter Meier, FLGA District
Executive Director of Missions and Outreach

For Consideration and Sharing:

As you prepare pastoral letters and communications to the people of your congregation and school, consider how you might use them to highlight the missional opportunities God is giving.
• How could you gather and share faith stories that take place in the midst of the pandemic?
• What scriptures are you sharing to give courage and hope, pointing people to God’s promises?
• What “best practices” are you promoting to involve God’s people in caring for their neighbors?
• Consider sharing any of the above with us as a means of helping and encouraging others!