Checking Our Sight Lines

sight line - noun

1. 
a hypothetical line from someone's eye to what is seen

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Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. [Hebrews 12:1]

Lent is often a time for individuals to focus on their spiritual life by (re)establishing spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, corporate worship, or generous giving for the poor. Congregational ministries during Lent often support these disciplines through additional worship opportunities, Bible classes, prayer groups, World Hunger coin boxes, and the like. In some ways, such disciplines provide opportunities to check our “sight lines” by asking questions like these:

•  To what have I been giving most of, or the best of, my attention?
• Are the people, things, and situations that I have been looking to helpful or hurtful?
• Does what I look at empower or equip me for serving others or is it just self-serving? Does it move me to give my life away or cause me to hoard it?
• In other words, do my sight lines point me toward Jesus crucified and risen and beckon me further down the way of the cross? Or do they point me away from Jesus toward someone or something else that distracts or harms, disempowers or disappoints myself or others?

Of course, I am referring here to literal sight lines. It is important that we be discerning about what we look at with our physical eyes. What we look at changes us in powerful ways and influences how we interact with the world.

For the moment, however, I am primarily thinking about our spiritual sight lines. These sight lines also form us and influence how we interact with the world.
      What are we looking to in hope that it will provide meaning or excitement or peace or power or whatever else our heart seeks? As it turns out, many of the things we look to cannot deliver on the promises they make. So many of them, even the best looking ones, lure us down endless, dark, distracting rabbit holes of self-absorption and self-justification.

The scripture and liturgies of Lent call us to reassess our spiritual sight lines. They call us to repent, to allow God’s Spirit to turn our sight lines back toward Jesus, the one who actually delivers on God’s promises and who enlists and empowers us to be means by which those promises cross into the sight lines of others.

But this is not just true for individuals; it’s true for the church as a body as well. I wonder what Lent – and the consequent celebration of Easter – would be like if each congregation and its leaders also spent forty days in a sort of communal recalibration of the congregation’s sight lines. Truth be told, nearly every aspect of congregational life – congregational meetings, committee planning, council agendas, youth events, choir rehearsals, staff meetings, fellowship gatherings – can suffer from sight line drift. We start looking primarily at what we don’t have: not enough money or people or young people. Our sights focus on change for the sake of change, or the next great innovation that promises to get people in the door. Our sight lines are directed toward disagreements and power struggles or inward on ourselves.

If we are not careful, over time we drift away from our core mission to simply be the body of Christ in the world, to shine the light of Jesus, to make Christ known. Without even noticing it we “major in minors” and focus our attention and energy on non-central (even if alluringly important) concerns that simply cannot bring life to us or the world if Jesus crucified and risen is not right smack dab in the center of them.

Just as each baptized person is called to turn away from – to repent of – unhealthy, sinful, or otherwise life-snatching sight lines, so is every congregation. Every gathering of the baptized is called to realign its sight lines in order to participate more fully and faithfully in God’s cross-shaped mission of healing and hope in the world.

This Lent, dear sisters and brothers, may God’s Spirit grant that we, the body of Christ, will turn away from distracting and destructive sight lines “and the sin that clings so closely, and run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” [Hebrews 12:1-2]

How Silently the Gift is Given

The sky was clear, crisp and studded with stars as I walked across the campus of St. Olaf College toward my dormitory. It was early December in Minnesota, back in the day when winter was really winter and a walk across campus after midnight could be sheer agony. Breath clung as hoar frost on my free range 1970s collegiate beard. I was sure the water in my eyes was turning to ice.

Something else hovered in the air with the cold. This was the weekend of the annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival. I had worked the late shift in my work-study position as night security supervisor for the student union. I had spent hours on my feet making sure everything was okay for the Norwegian food buffet, pointing alums and visitors toward the beloved concert, helping folks find restrooms and coatracks and wandering family members, making my way each hour through the bustling hoards of excited folk to make sure the right doors were open and the others ones closed. Finally, well after midnight, after the last of the yuletide revelers had left, I made my final rounds, turned off the lights, locked up the big, now silent building, and made my way across the wind-swept campus toward bed.

I caught myself humming “Beautiful Savior” as I walked. Although I had not been at the concert that weekend, I knew this hymn had been sung by candlelight as the closing piece, as it had since, well, since forever. My shivering body begged me to hurry through the cold toward the top berth of our triple-bunked dorm room. My spirit implored me to slow down, look around, and take in the luminous winter world crafted by the beautiful Savior of whom I sang like an echo of the concert ended hours ago.

Neither of my roommates was in our room when I arrived. The glimmering lights of our little desk-borne Christmas tree drew me in. I sat at my desk, thawing hands nestled in my coat pockets, basking in the graceful light shining softly in the dark room.

In the shadows under the tree I noticed a small wrapped package bearing my name. It had not been there when I left earlier in the day. I picked it up and noticed an electrical cord running from it like a long, slithery tail to the wall outlet. What gadget did my roomies give me for Christmas? I tore off the paper to discover that it was…my alarm clock, the one that roused me from sleep every day. They wrapped my alarm clock?!

Now I saw another wrapped gift pulling low a branch of the tree by a duct-taped hook. Round and heavy…unhooked and unwrapped it was a prized baseball from my high school career. Then, on my pillow a long, thin, carefully wrapped pretzel stick from the big plastic jar of them I brought and shared from home.

My eyes thawed and I wept at the goofy love of my roommates. I took a deep breath of the room’s warm air and whispered a prayer of wonder and thanks, blinking at the soft light glistening in the prism of my tears.

Isn’t this what the manger-borne Jesus reveals for us, the giftedness of our every day? Doesn’t God in Christ carefully wrap with goodness and love the very things and people we take for granted day by day and give them back to us glistening with grace? Isn’t it so that this Jesus, this Emmanuel, makes holy what we think is merely mundane?

Yes. Yes. Yes. It is so. How silently the wondrous gift is given!

Peacemakers in a Violent World

We live in a violent world.

Some violence occurs so far away that it’s hard to comprehend, even when the images of it flash across our consciousness night after night on the evening news. Some is as close as the air we breath, making it difficult to even acknowledge and overcome. Near and far, day after day, violence inflicted by human beings on other human beings steals life, scars spirits, and inflicts fear.

I must admit that sometimes when I think about all the shooting and bullying and beating and bombing in our world – and the often rancorous and so far ineffectual debate over what to do about it – the psalmist’s words express my own thoughts:

I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind and tempest…for I see violence and strife in the city…and iniquity and trouble are within it; ruin is in its midst. [Psalm 55]

Yet those of us who are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with his Spirit are not called to lock ourselves in some underground bunker. We are called to do something about the violence around us and within us. We are called to own up to and address our own violent tendencies and to wage peace in the world around us.

The sixty-five synodical bishops of the ELCA crafted a pastoral letter about violence when we were together in Chicago at the beginning of March. This letter calls us to active participation in the cross-formed reign of the Prince of Peace. It also provides a list of resources to assist you, your congregation, your circle of friends, and your family to discuss violence and to do something about it. 

Kathryn Lohre, ELCA Director for Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations and President of the National Council of Churches (NCC) also suggests these helpful resources:

•  2010 NCC Resolution, “Ending Gun Violence: A Resolution and Call to Action by the National Council of Churches of Christ, USA” 

• World Council of Churches Decade to Overcome Violence 

Through the prophet Jeremiah God once said, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” [Jeremiah 29:7]. As we seek our world’s peaceful welfare together through repentance, prayer, and action, we walk in the promise sung by that old prophet, Zechariah, ages ago and echoed every time we sing the Gospel Canticle of Morning Prayer [Evangelical Lutheran Worship, p. 303]:

In the tender compassion of our God

     the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

To shine on those who dwell in darkness

     and the shadow of death,

And to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Think Creatively

[The mission territory that I serve as bishop is about to embark on a re-visioning process called "New Vision for a New Day: Listen deeply. Think creatively. Act boldly." This piece is a brief reflection on the second aspect of that process.]

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen

[Ephesians 3:14-21, NRSV]

From the very beginning of scripture to its ending, God engages in the sometimes irritating habit of calling people to think creatively. Over and over again, God’s people seem to limit their vision and, consequently, their creative energies, to the borderline where their own limitations, frailties and failings meet the threats, challenges, and impositions of life.

To weary people on the edge of a promised land fraught with well-armed giants, God says, “Go ahead; take it.”

      To people languishing in exile, God entreats, “Do not remember the things of old…I am about to do a new thing!”

      God in Christ, no longer bound by doors locked tight by fear, appears to dispirited disciples whispering peace and proclaiming, “Fling wide the doors! I am sending you just like the Father sent me.”

      In a multitude of languages, God’s Spirit permeates the people on Pentecost, calling them to dream new dreams.

      God calls to Peter, bound as he is by careful adherence to tradition, to stretch beyond the boundaries and borders at the very outer edge of his vision.

      The truth is, fear binds and faith frees. Or, more accurately, when all we see are the immense challenges in the light of our own frailties and failings we often become fearful, paralyzed, and held captive to our own imagination and to what we already know. On the other hand, trust in God’s redeeming activity in the world, combined with trust in God’s unfailing love and care for us and for the world, offers freedom to let go of what we already know and to reach beyond our own limited vision, well-worn pathways, and daunting challenges to receive with open hands God’s creative, life-giving future.

       Next time you are in a planning session at church, or trying to imagine your way through a difficult time at home, or working with a community committee on some new project, take a moment to consider the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s amazing grace and then let your imagination run wild and free into God’s imaginative future.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen