00:00:08.890 - 00:00:32.560

thank you Casey for that very extraordinarily generous introduction. I remember that day well and glad it's behind me , I want to begin this second lecture with two thesis statements that may not be able to prove,

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but which I hope to be, but which I suspect to be true. And would any case be willing to defend? The first thesis Is that the culture in which we swim today is basically gnostic in

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its orientation and impulses. The second thesis is that the temperament or mood of all gnostic imbued cultures is one of deep sadness and boredom. I will say a bit more about the second thesis in my third

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lecture. But for now, let's look at the first thesis, you have a right to ask, what do you mean by agnostic and what is your evidence? My evidence is admittedly impressionistic, but not

00:01:12.780 - 00:01:27.640

that difficult to summon for your examination. There are others, for example, in their different ways. Christopher, lasch, Phillip lee, Harold bloom robert , Bella Stanley. How was who have made this

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case far better than I? And far more comprehensively . However, I will attempt to say what I mean by gnosticism in this context. At first glance , gnosticism seems a strange phenomenon in the ancient world

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. Gnostics were folks, sometimes philosophers more often, very religious folk who professed a radically dualistic view of the world in which God was so utterly transcendent as to exist in a kind of state of perfection and

00:02:01.530 - 00:02:20.870

the world was so distant from that divine serenity as to be thought a kind of benighted place, a third rate hotel to be endured until one soul or spirit could escape to find better quarters elsewhere. Given

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this dualistic view of things, It's not surprising that gnosticism was animated by a preoccupation with one's own salvation . The key to which would allow 1 to transcend the misery of daily life and embodied existence. Knowledge

00:02:39.620 - 00:02:57.910

of this key was, of course, key. Hence the name of those who possessed gnostics. There are other characteristics that could be listed. For example , the solitary nature of one spiritual journey, the

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rejection of ordinary and external forms of faith, including cradle statements and written scriptures approved by ecclesiastical authorities. The privileging of what is called authentic or spiritually elite forms of enlightenment, the hierarchical depth or height of

00:03:17.450 - 00:03:35.010

such knowledge. The disparaging of the goodness of the created order and on and on. Here I would like to note the resonance of this ancient heresy with our own celebrity culture today, happily narcissistic in its

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preoccupation with salvation, deeply suspicious of the established or institutional church and its punitive authority, convinced that religion's primary purpose is to elevate the individual in his or her own quest for redemption. The quest for the

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ecstatic for self affirmation for reassurance that one is in the Know, joined by others in some cases, large numbers of others who are also in the Know is what is desired and this knowledge, it is

00:04:11.750 - 00:04:36.350

thought will certainly lead one upward. There's a mega church in charlotte whose name is simply elevation, A good gnostic notion for all the emphasis gnostics put on the individual's quest for salvation. There is this curious

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longing for mass approval. There is a deep loneliness that is assuaged only by being surrounded by large numbers of people who are like me and who like me are in the know the small congregation, the neighborhood

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church, the life together shared in such a community . These are often considered deficient expressions of authentic religion in this sense, walmart and megachurches play in their respective ways, a similar role in agnostic culture.

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And in both cases, members are understood primarily to be consumers of read obituaries. And recently there was one in the charlotte paper that my friend john Rogers called my attention to listed the many achievements of this

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person and all the clubs that he was a member of. And at the bottom it said he was a member of Sam's club, get them all exacerbating all of this in my judgment. And we had

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a debate about this somewhat in the in the uh time of questioning is the isolating effect. The information has pressed upon us. Where virtual reality reinforces the individual's quest for a relationship that is uncomplicated by the

00:06:16.120 - 00:06:32.970

external ties of family or collegiality or location or context , but which can be accessed without any such entanglements . This is one of the parenthetically, I would note that this is one of the reasons why pornography

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, it seems to me flourishes on the internet, where it constitutes the single greatest commercial enterprise on the web pornography as others have noted, is a deeply gnostic phenomenon, in that its fleshly nous is entirely

00:06:48.620 - 00:07:10.280

spiritualized, rendering the person abstract an object without entanglement or context. Information age appeals diagnostics, especially in holding out the possibility that the manifold nature of life in all its fullness and mystery can be reduced to

00:07:10.280 - 00:07:33.940

a code whether digital or da Vinci into this world , comes the Gospel story, a story that is redolent with history, context with complex family and tribal connections, a story that is located in communities deeply

00:07:33.940 - 00:07:51.670

personal, but just so embedded in a web of relationships and memories, a story that's not about celebrities , a story that takes place at the margin of empires and out of the way places a story that

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is not ashamed of what is small, that is in fact suspicious of what is massive or popular or large story that seems at times curiously indifferent to the quest for one salvation apart from others, and indeed

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dismissive of that enterprise as a form of self justification . A story in which above all, God is not silent or serenely distant, but articulate and uncomfortably close, deeply implicated in the good creation which God

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has made and claim for God's own this story refuses to separate flesh from spirit body from soul life from life together. The story has a memory and also hope, both of which are embedded in a community

00:08:56.060 - 00:09:13.320

that is called to embrace the flesh, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as a sacrament to be received. An indwelling by which God draws near to us, bringing us into the Tryon neighborhood

00:09:13.380 - 00:09:30.140

. That is the distinctive life of God. In some ways, I think roman Catholicism has understood this better than we have with its love of ghost statuary , brutal crucifixes, shrouds of touring holy relics,

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even pilgrimages to various places, roman church bears witness in its own way to the utter fleshly nous of the christian message and does so in quite explicit opposition to gnostic attempts to spiritual eyes, the Gospel story

00:09:48.740 - 00:10:07.050

into a journey of self discovery, A piece of the true cross, A ST skeletal remains a particular location for all the their impossible religiosity, if not entrepreneurial mendacity. They attest in their different ways to

00:10:07.050 - 00:10:26.180

the historical nature of the Gospel that happened on earth in real time among real people amidst real circumstances, that the Gospel might be construed directly through such flesh and blood things or that such things might themselves be

00:10:26.280 - 00:10:43.540

spiritualized easily into a story about me and my own salvation journey illustrates the ever present tendency to self worship even here. Still, the impulse toward the fleshly nous of the Gospel story is surely correct flannery.

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O'Connor's famous riposte to mary McCarthy is worth recalling here Because O'Connor understood this gnostic threat so well, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century. Speaking of the Eucharist, which McCarthy had belittle as acceptable.

00:11:01.840 - 00:11:16.570

If only one thought of it as a symbol, O'Connor blurted out. Well, if it's a symbol to hell with it, I think even john Calvin would have agreed with O'Connor on this point, a

00:11:16.570 - 00:11:37.770

fact that might have surprised them both. In contrast , our protestant emphasis on an empty cross, lucid windows image lys principles has made us particularly vulnerable to gnostic tendencies so powerfully at work in our day.

00:11:37.730 - 00:11:56.750

An empty cross for example, may well testify to the risen lord who neither cross nor tomb can contain . He is not here is in truth good news yet it is the risen lord who identifies himself to

00:11:56.750 - 00:12:15.560

his disciples, not by parting to an empty cross , but to his hands inside to his body. That is how they and we recognize him an empty cross. Lets us imagine a much more successful savior

00:12:16.950 - 00:12:31.530

, a crucifix will not let us do that, but shows us what the cost of discipleship looks like . And one of her essays, flannery, O'Connor wrote When Emerson decided in 1832 as a Unitarian minister

00:12:31.660 - 00:12:46.700

that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's supper unless the bread and wine were removed from the Chancel. An important step in the vaporization of religion in America was taken and that's in the spirit of that step

00:12:46.710 - 00:13:01.840

has continued apace. It is that vaporization of the faith that I mean by Narcissism, the images of the church and the new testament are so often organic in nature and describe embodied realities. Indeed the body

00:13:01.840 - 00:13:20.210

of christ as being one of them. That is what christ gives to his disciples. He feeds them his body the way the Gospel is communicated. And so often we would prefer something else, something less

00:13:20.210 - 00:13:39.160

entangling than the vine and the branches and in truth something less embarrassing than the sacrament of the church. A vaporization has that essential vagueness that embarrasses no one , even as it disguises the embarrassment of body of

00:13:39.160 - 00:13:54.780

flesh and blood of time and place of the located nous of the word made flesh. In a brief s side. W. H. Auden captures what is at stake here perfectly. He's thinking of plato

00:13:56.370 - 00:14:11.970

and he writes that he cannot really believe that Plato meant what he says in the symposium about love and particularly about what it might mean to love a person in the symposium, Dia Time a describes the familiar

00:14:11.970 - 00:14:30.340

ladder of being which all duelists must imaginatively construct to connect the lower world to the higher in this schema , lover begins loving at the lowest level that is the earthly level, and then it's drawn by degrees

00:14:30.880 - 00:14:52.040

, elevating upward, ascending the ladder from earthly loves to the form of absolute loveliness until he finally reaches the ultimate principle of all and learns what absolute beauty or love is Auden talks directly to play. It

00:14:52.040 - 00:15:05.860

is quite true as you say, that a fair principle does not get bald and fat or run away with someone else's wife. On the other hand, a fair principle cannot give me a smile of welcome

00:15:05.860 - 00:15:18.710

when I come into the room. Love of a human being. Maybe, as you say, plato , a lower form of love than love for principle . But you must admit it's a damn sight more

00:15:18.710 - 00:15:37.360

interesting. One of the poems that Alden wrote just before he died is entitled No plato No and its opening lines run like this. I can't imagine anything that I would like less to be than a dis

00:15:37.360 - 00:16:02.270

incarnate spirit, unable to chew or sip or make contact with surfaces or breathe the sense of summer or comprehend speech and music or gaze at what lies beyond a personal story. When I was a student here

00:16:02.830 - 00:16:18.020

, my uncle Stuart curry taught new testament. In addition to his many other gifts, Stewart was an excellent handball player. He loved to play the game . I can remember his stopping other faculty and the

00:16:18.020 - 00:16:32.790

occasional student to invite them to play with him in the afternoon, about four p.m. I never was much of a handball player and rarely ventured down in the basement of Macmillan to play. But there were times

00:16:32.790 - 00:16:45.240

when no one else was available and Stuart was desperately going into the highways and byways, compelling people to come to what he regarded as a banquet. And he would on such occasions invite me to be his

00:16:45.240 - 00:16:56.400

partner in a game of doubles, mainly. I stood around and tried not to get in the way . One day after particularly hard fought contest, we were in the dressing room, drying off after a

00:16:56.400 - 00:17:17.170

shower and Stewart looked at me and said, I'm glad I'm not an angel. Those of you who knew Stuart will recall how dangerous it was to presume anything about what he said. So after an awkward

00:17:17.170 - 00:17:33.300

silence, I bet and asked him why he was glad he was not an angel because he said, angels cannot sweat. There are glories. The thought of being an embodied creature that only the embodied no

00:17:36.090 - 00:17:53.850

to long for the transcendent Bonhoeffer reminds us when you are in your wife's arms is to put it mildly a lack of taste and it is not what God expects of us yet, that is often what we

00:17:53.850 - 00:18:10.250

Protestants especially. We reform type folk have done longing for the hermeneutic A LKE the grand theory that will explain everything. The evangelistic message that will be sufficiently hip to the culture to attract thousands the political strategy

00:18:10.250 - 00:18:23.350

that will organize the culture and demonstrate that we are still players in the world. The theory that will relieve us of the necessity of having to share in something as humbling and ordinary as life together in christ

00:18:25.510 - 00:18:40.470

. Perhaps some of these things do indeed need to be undertaken, but too long for them. While we're in the arms of christ is to forget that we are in the arms of christ whose body is

00:18:40.470 - 00:18:56.720

not made political by doing political things elsewhere, but is inherently political and its provisional embodiment of the Kingdom of God, whose body is not rendered evangelistic by doing evangelistic things outside the body, but whose body

00:18:56.720 - 00:19:15.780

is inherently an evangel, a life together that sings and incorporates others in the praise of God, decide . Another 20th century poet was accused of using too many dead white european males and um those are the

00:19:15.780 - 00:19:30.310

folks that have taught me and I'm gonna dance with them too, because they brought me a long way . Another 20th century poet who saw the gnostic threat and had much to say about it, why should

00:19:30.310 - 00:19:45.080

men love the church? Why should they love her laws? She tells him of life and death and of all that they would forget, she is tender where they would be hard and hard, where they

00:19:45.080 - 00:20:00.400

like to be soft, she tells him of evil and sin and other unpleasant facts and they constantly tried to escape from the darkness outside and within by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to

00:20:00.400 - 00:20:17.820

be good. The longing for such a perfect system that would relieve us of the embarrassment of struggling to be a faithful disciple is indicative of the gnostic impulse and in the 20th century at least has led to

00:20:17.820 - 00:20:37.920

more than one kind of totalitarian ism to contrive a system so perfect that we are relieved of the embarrassment of being even failed disciples is the gnostic dream. It is enough simply to know. Nostra schism has

00:20:37.920 - 00:20:56.380

always despised the irreducible, manifold nous of life. The way a person is a mystery and not a number. The way the good resists neat and clean ideological formulations, the way a place has not only

00:20:56.380 - 00:21:14.540

its own integrity, but also its own history and beauty. Agnostics are always easily embarrassed by the fleshly goodness of life. It's sheer sweetness and are surprised by the places where God in the flesh chooses to

00:21:14.540 - 00:21:30.440

show up a surprise that is not unknown to the inhabitants of scripture story or to those disciples who found their lives entangled with God's purposes. Today. Here too, one can discern the elements of a comedy

00:21:30.440 - 00:21:45.280

that I tried to speak of this morning at the intersection of ministry with time and place and condition for gnostics are saved in the end, In the same way the rest of us are by the banana peel

00:21:45.280 - 00:22:03.410

of grace. The comedy of Redemption, how this comedy plays out in terms of ministry Has been well illustrated in Richard Lectures, Memoirs of his 1st parish in southern Illinois. Um Open secrets is the name

00:22:03.410 - 00:22:18.220

of the book, wonderful book, lectures Lutheran. He had been assigned by his bishop to this parish and he writes about pulling up to the church for the first time when you pull up to your first

00:22:18.220 - 00:22:34.480

church. It's a moment of truth, like the first glimpse of a spouse in an arranged marriage. I felt something flop in my stomach than a crushing sense of disappointment. So this is what's been prepared

00:22:34.480 - 00:22:48.080

for me. I thought as if something surely should be prepared for me. The Parsonage looked to be about 50 years old. It was a story and a half prairie bungalow, white clapboard with triple dormers

00:22:48.080 - 00:23:03.890

and apart porch that shaded the entire front. There was nothing fine about the house, not a hint of character or charm. You couldn't say it was english dutch or french only american vernacular or early depression

00:23:04.240 - 00:23:18.260

. After I completed my study of the house, I turned my attention to the church When I was a younger man. I once saw the cathedral at shark shimmering in the morning across the field of new

00:23:18.260 - 00:23:32.230

mown hay. It was a revelation of sudden disclosure of the heavenly world. Like my church. The cathedral lay in an ordinary field, on ordinary country roads, near ordinary farm houses, but with its

00:23:32.230 - 00:23:45.000

foundation of mist and its towers of stone. It was so supernaturally beautiful that it appeared to descend from heaven. I remember an american tourist exclaiming to no one in particular. Now, that's what I call

00:23:45.000 - 00:24:00.250

a church. My new church did not shimmer. Instead, it's faded red bricks appeared to grow up out of the soil in place of a great tower . The building sported appealing cupola and a steeple with

00:24:00.250 - 00:24:15.880

a copper cross, from which one arm was mysteriously missing. I could not see anything fine about this church. The double doors were painted a sickly salman I suspected the floral arrangements in the cemetery out back

00:24:15.880 - 00:24:30.520

were plastic. How had this happened to me? I wasn't so put off by the physical appearance of the church as I was by its obvious irrelevance, my seminarian friends and I reveled in the social and

00:24:30.520 - 00:24:48.490

religious ferment of the 1960s. We never tired of posing as progressives and announcing like JFK that we wanted quote to make a difference. We had skimmed Augustine's city of God, but we devoured harvey cox's bestseller

00:24:48.490 - 00:25:03.170

. The secular city. His book reminded us there was a secular world out there, yearning to be liberated from religious superstition and theological activists like us would be the agent of its redemptions. The city was

00:25:03.170 - 00:25:12.690

where the action was not in the suburbs, such as the one I grew up in and certainly not in country churches like this one with its broken cross and flourishing graveyard. Looking at all of this,

00:25:12.690 - 00:25:30.470

I couldn't even bear to open my car door because that would have been an admission if only to myself that this assignment was acceptable. The church of the one Arm Cross did not fit my profile. I

00:25:30.470 - 00:25:45.850

knew who I was with a brand new PhD in theology. Already in hand, I had mapped out a distinguished career for myself, a cutting edge pastoral appointment and a socially conscious but not an affluent congregation

00:25:47.450 - 00:26:00.590

followed by a professorship in our denominational flagship seminary capped off by the presidency of the seminary. And why not? Of the whole church body, which to me was the sum of my world. By that

00:26:00.590 - 00:26:14.560

time, my hair would be streaked with silver and contrast stunningly with my black suit and gleaming clerical collar . Of course I knew christendom needed a new strategic little churches like this one, but I bitterly resented

00:26:14.560 - 00:26:26.960

the bureaucrats who had misfiled my gifts, misjudged my promise and we're about to place me in rural confinement . Whoever they were, they hadn't even bothered to get to know me. That's the way I felt

00:26:26.960 - 00:26:42.380

and my resentment came quick and fully formed lecture, spent three years in that church in new kina pastoring the farmers and their families that made up that Lutheran congregation On the night he and his family left to

00:26:42.380 - 00:27:00.940

go to another to be another call to a church after church supper, celebrating 125 years of the congregation's life and the three years of his ministry. Listener writes, there's more to life than ministry. But

00:27:00.940 - 00:27:15.720

I knew as soon as we pulled out of the driveway that I had needed new kina more than new kina ever needed me. I make sense of life from that ministry. I also believe that pastoral ties

00:27:15.720 - 00:27:33.700

cannot be severed even when they are imperfectly remembered or forgotten altogether. If all our relationships participate in a vast network of meaning called kingdom or church, they must have a richness we can't always savor and a

00:27:33.700 - 00:27:48.700

permanency. We can only imagine they are eternal because God remembers everything and has engraved our names into the palms of his hand the moment we hit the oil road, this ministry in the flesh was lost to

00:27:48.700 - 00:28:11.090

me and Lucchino became a story with voices and textures and a mystery all of its own for which I'm grateful. So many congregations are strategically irrelevant. Which of course is their great evangelical gift and exactly why

00:28:11.090 - 00:28:34.060

they're so wonderfully subversive of agnostic culture that complicate things these weak earthen vessels and resist the very powerful forces in our culture that reduce that would reduce all relationships to something more glamorous yet less mysterious, more quantifiable

00:28:34.070 - 00:28:56.170

yet less complicated, more celebrated yet strangely less joyful . And congregations of course with their one armed crosses and leaky roofs and long memories exist only in particular places. P. D. James once said in

00:28:56.170 - 00:29:11.230

an interview that nearly all of her stories come to her out of a sense of place. You walk into a room and sense that some something has happened there. You see an open stretch of beach and

00:29:11.230 - 00:29:26.270

know someone else has walked there and beneath its sands and waves. The stories trying to get itself told . You walk into a church and find yourself in the midst of memories and hope along with a good

00:29:26.270 - 00:29:44.260

deal of other baggage as well. Just so they become places in the heart and have a way of drawing us into another story, the story they're commissioned to tell John Benjamin, a 20th century English poet

00:29:44.270 - 00:30:03.490

, one that I love very much, writes a lot of poems, I wrote a lot of poems about places. One of the poems he writes is about ST Saviour's Church and High Park in Highbury Aberdeen

00:30:03.490 - 00:30:18.810

Park in London, it's just north of Islington is the 19th century anglican church built at a time when that community was very fluent and today it's a very different community. Um all the house has been chopped

00:30:18.810 - 00:30:37.330

up into apartments. Here's the poem with those such peculiar branching and overreaching of wire. The trolley bus standards pick their threads from the London sky, diminishing up the perspective. Highbury bound retire threads and busses

00:30:37.330 - 00:30:56.670

and standards with plane trees falling by and more peculiar still that ever increasing spire bulges over the house tops , poly chromatic and high stop, the trolley bus stop. And here where the roads unite of weary

00:30:56.670 - 00:31:14.990

ist worn out London, no cigarettes, no beer , no repairs undertaken, nothing in stock. A light for over the waste of willow herb, look at her sailing clear. A great victorian church,

00:31:15.000 - 00:31:30.850

tall, unbroken and bright and a son that's setting in wilson and saturating us. Here these were the streets, my parents knew When they laughed and one the brawn that crunched the gravel, the laurel gert

00:31:30.850 - 00:31:48.980

paths, that wind geranium beds for the long venetian blinds for the sun, a separate trades mons entrance , straw in the mews behind, just in the four mile radius where the Hackney carriages run solid italianate

00:31:48.990 - 00:32:08.530

houses for the solid commercial mind. These were the streets they knew and I, by descent belonged to those tall neglected house is now divided into flats. Only the church remains where carriages used to throng.

00:32:09.080 - 00:32:29.400

My mother stepped out and flounces, my father stepped out in spats, two shadowy stained glass, maintenance or gas lit, even song. Great read Church of my parents cruciform crossing. They knew over these

00:32:29.400 - 00:32:46.830

. Same in cost IX. They and their parents tried bound through a red brick transept for once familiar pew, where the organ set them singing and the sermon, Let them nod and up this colored brick

00:32:46.830 - 00:33:04.210

work. The same long shadows grew as these in the stencil chancel, where I kneel in the presence of God wonder beyond times, wonders that bread so white and small veiled in golden curtains too mighty for

00:33:04.210 - 00:33:22.160

men to see is the power which sends the shadows up. This polychrome wall is God who created the present! The chain smoking millions in me. Beyond the throw beyond the throb of the engines is the

00:33:22.160 - 00:33:45.930

throbbing heart of all christ at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to thee the word that became flesh and not just flesh in general, but jewish flesh lived in Nazareth ministered in galilee dwelled in Cape Ernie

00:33:45.930 - 00:34:02.240

um journey to Jerusalem was crucified at a place called Golgotha was buried in a rich man's tomb who surprised his disciples while they were huddled in an upper room or walking to a maze or fishing in the sea

00:34:02.240 - 00:34:19.950

of galilee. This word that became flesh reveals himself in particular places and cause us to love those places where he's already at work in a strange and small and even in the particular lives whose story he is

00:34:19.950 - 00:34:37.230

weaving into his own. Why else would we have books in the new testament with such names as Corinthians or Thessalonians or Philippians? Such places are not auxiliary to the Gospel, but intrinsic to it. There

00:34:37.230 - 00:34:53.430

really is no salvation apart from the church, not because the church is so wonderful. Most often it's not, but because jesus christ refuses to save anyone without his body, that is the embarrassing reality that

00:34:53.430 - 00:35:12.480

makes particular place is central to the Gospel's message. One comes to love such places. The first congregation to which I was called to serve was in a small county seat town, a few miles east of

00:35:12.480 - 00:35:24.990

here, a town of about 10,000 people. Then it's larger. Now, like lecture, I had recently completed a PhD in theology and thought that I would pastor this congregation for a couple of years and

00:35:24.990 - 00:35:39.260

then move on to teach. That was, as we say these days, my vocational goal and pastoring a congregation I thought would provide me some handy credentialing experience, among other things. So we moved to

00:35:39.260 - 00:35:53.550

Brenham. I was born in Fort Worth, grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston went to college near philadelphia Seminary here in Austin Graduate school in Edinburgh. I had never lived in a small town

00:35:54.350 - 00:36:07.620

ever. I had read Sinclair Lewis of course and from Main Street had gathered all I needed to know about small towns, how narrow minded the people were , how full of bab, it's, and boosters

00:36:07.630 - 00:36:21.310

, how suffocating the cultural climate would be. I was prepared for all of that and in truth, Brennan was not like any place I had ever been . There was for example, an annual celebration,

00:36:21.320 - 00:36:36.300

civic celebration called May fest whose roots went back to Reconstruction days and are best left under a veil of charitable silence where Children in the community were crowned kings and queens, an event full of extravagant pageantry.

00:36:37.340 - 00:36:52.980

There were 14 Lutheran churches in a three mile radius of town, one large roman catholic church and a growing number of adherence to the church of christ mormons and other non denominational bible churches. The Presbyterian Church

00:36:52.980 - 00:37:07.420

had almost closed its doors several times since its founding in 1877, but it kept the faith despite many discouragement and in the late 60s and early 70s had begin to show signs of growth with some young families

00:37:07.420 - 00:37:23.590

who had moved to Brenham from Houston Numbering 94 members in 1976, the church called a new pastor, completely inexperienced seminary graduate to be their first full time pastor in 50 years. My wife and I and

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our 18 month old son Chris moved into a small frame house across the street from the church, one of two rental properties available in the town. My first day on the job George wearing a saint if

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there ever was one came by our house at seven a.m. In his pickup to show me around. He took me out in the country to visit every farm and rural home where the church had members. He

00:37:52.080 - 00:38:06.860

figured I could find my way around the town but I might get lost out in the country and he was right. He wanted me to know Washington County to learn about the place to know as a salesman

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says and the music man to know the territory. And as we drove he told me stories about what happened here, the families that lived there, the troubles that afflicted these folks, the joys that had

00:38:22.710 - 00:38:37.060

come into their lives. At the end of the day. I knew the territory a little bit, but also knew how much there was yet to learn and how thick were the memories and the context in

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the history of that little congregation. One day after I'd been in Brenham for about six months, a member of the session told me every time I drove by your every time I drive by your house after

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work. I see you in your living room reading the paper. I knew that I wasn't in a big city anymore. I came to love the guy who told me that he's dead now. But he

00:39:02.270 - 00:39:14.980

was a good man. He was a farmer and a fertilizer salesman. He worked with other farmers to improve the soil and conserve the water on their land , served on the school board. He was a

00:39:14.980 - 00:39:28.910

staunch democrat and when republicans took over Washington County, he fought a losing battle to serve on the county commission. He was not a liberal. He never graduated from college. He helped a good number of

00:39:28.910 - 00:39:44.500

illegal aliens to find work and employed more than a few himself. I came to learn from him things about the county, its people and the church's ministry . Places like that become places in the heart where

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all sorts of people and contradictions are bound up together in the mystery of being human and nothing is as ideologically clean as we would like it to be. Two of our Children were born in that town.

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All of our Children grew up in a church where they learned bible stories, participated in numerous vacation bible schools in wonderful christmas pageants and musicals and church picnics like any other place I suppose. But they were

00:40:16.890 - 00:40:31.060

also part of a congregation that during the Iranian hostage crisis welcomed Iranian exchange students for Halloween parties at the church and helped them get paid for work they had done when others would take advantage of them. It

00:40:31.070 - 00:40:44.490

was a church that refused to participate in a billy graham crusade on the grounds that the town didn't need saving so much as it needed to live out the salvation that was already theirs in jesus christ. It

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was a church in which a presbyterian elder transformed the annual spring celebration of may fest from a segregated, all white affair to a communal celebration that involved all the Children in that community, black and white and

00:40:58.390 - 00:41:12.760

brown. It was a church that suffered together as a mother and her son were abducted from worship one Sunday morning and murdered the church that learned to live and worship and hope in the face of such violence

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. It was a church that welcomed the severely retarded to its worship, one of whom ministered to the whole congregation with his life and later with his death it was a church that loved music and knew how

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to celebrate with musical programs, christmas, pageants and choirs. It was a church that loved the town of Brenham but also could smile and even poke fun at its more self important moments. A church that

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pastored our family when our youngest child was in heart failure at two months and had heart surgery at age five have I idealized this community of faith perhaps it was to be sure, a church full of sinners

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as well and there was and still is a great deal of pain and egotism and self deceit there, just as there is in all congregations in retrospect, it seems to me that our witness was pitifully small

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and holy in commensurate to the radical claims of the gospel, but it's not mere nostalgia or sentimentality to record that. Here was a community that gathered to hear the word and was shaped by the word.

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They heard a community that heard that word gladly and bore witness to it with its body and its life . Michael Lindvall tells the story of an associate pastor at the brick church in new york whose job it

00:42:49.230 - 00:43:02.620

was to teach a new members class and part of his teaching was to describe the life and mission of that congregation Lindvall. One sunday sat in on the class and the associate pastor's description seemed to him a

00:43:02.620 - 00:43:16.160

bit overblown, perhaps even a bit too rosy after the class, Lindvall spoke to his colleague and asked him if he didn't think he had laid it on a bit thick that morning and depicting the more positive

00:43:16.160 - 00:43:37.220

aspect of the church's life. And the associate admitted that perhaps he had but that he preferred to view the congregation as scatological e as if it were already part of the kingdom of heaven. Embodying that promise

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, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift. Another person who has written eloquently about loving the place of ministry and learning from his parishioners is walter wanger in Lutheran pastor and writer, he pastored an inner city

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congregation in Evansville indiana was predominantly black congregation. He tells the story I've always found very moving about. His church organist, Jocelyn Fields, who was dying of cancer in his first year as pastor wanger and

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decided to visit this woman spring, summer autumn every day. He vowed to visit Jocelyn. I didn't know what to say, nor did I understand what I had the right to say. I wore out

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the psalms. The psalms I thought were safe. I prayed often that the Lord's will be done, but I was scared to tell either him or Jocelyn what the Lord's will ought to be and scared of

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God's will anyway, not bumbled One day when she awoke from surgery I determined to be cheerful to enliven her and to avoid the specter that unsettled me. The death I chattered. I spoke brightly in the

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sunlight outside and vigorously of the tennis. I played that morning and sweetly of the flowers, hopefully of the day when she would sit again at the organ and play reading music during my sermon. But Jocelyn

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rolled a black eye my way raised a bony finger to my face and she said, shut up, God help me! I learned so slowly, but God and Jocelyn taught me with unutterable patients. I

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had thought to give her the world. She did not have was in fact taking away the only world she did have. I've been canceling her serious, noble, faithful, dignified dance with death. So

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I shut up! And I learned! And I visited her and the autumn she whitened, and as the autumn whitened into winter, and Jocelyn became no more than bones. Her rich skin turned ashy.

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Her breath filled the room with close odor, whichever thereafter is meant dying to me. The day came when I had nothing, absolutely nothing to say to my Jocelyn. I entered her room at noon,

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saying nothing. I sat beside her through the afternoon until the sun had slanted into darkness, saying nothing . She lay awake, her eyelids paper thin and drooping, watchful eyes. Neither of us saying anything

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. The evening took us, and no artificial light went on when the sun went out, but with the evening came the Holy Spirit, for the words I finally said were not my own. I turned

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to my Jocelyn. I opened my mouth and spoke as her pastor and I said, I love you ! And Jocelyn widened her ebony I, and she put out her arms and hugged me and I hugged

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those dying bones and she whispered, I love you too. And that was always sad, but that was power from on high cloaking both of us in astonished simplicity, even as jesus said that it would

00:47:24.650 - 00:47:42.740

, for in a word that I did not know , I knew a need had found not only expression , but its solution to, and she died. And I did not grieve. So do we learn

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to become pastors. So does the Holy Spirit give us words to describe what we're seeing when we see the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst and do not know what to say or how to name it.

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Learning to love a place, learning to Minister is in this sense of vocabulary lesson, this is so much of theology, we do not know how to describe what we are seeing until the Gospel articulates it

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for us and gives us the word to name this strange new world. I wonder if that is not the way the Gospel in fact works most of the time Eucharistic, li so to speak, taking our

00:48:30.210 - 00:48:45.550

words and breaking them apart, transforming them and giving us by the power of the Holy Spirit. The words to say that describe now. The Kingdom's reality is that not how and why the early church could

00:48:45.550 - 00:49:01.500

dare to embrace so much of classical culture has not the Gospel sometimes quite literally taken our words and given us back a language did not something like that happened with Luther's german translation of the bible or Tyndale new

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testament. The Gospel, we complain is often threatened by the culture, but in truth, the Gospel is powerful and regularly subverts the surrounding culture and what in which it becomes incarnate and forms its own culture

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. Of course, if one is called to a church in our culture translating the scripture may not be a Minister's first priority, but rest assured each sunday in a variety of ways, the Minister will be

00:49:37.520 - 00:49:52.710

doing just that, praying for the Holy Spirit to give her him the words and the time to study and prepare the Holy Spirit works that way too. Indeed, that way, most of the time that

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will translate the Gospel into the language of the people and not as a work of some ecological virtuoso, but as one who has received from the Lord that which also is to be handed on to others.

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That's hard work. It would be so much easier if the Gospel Gospel could be taught as a lecture or offered as a therapeutic technique recommended as a successful strategy, if it were that and folks still did

00:50:24.150 - 00:50:39.720

not get it as agnostic might say, then such folk could be held in contempt and simply dismissed. But what if such folks, stupid, silly, frightened wayward as a flock of sheep? What if

00:50:39.720 - 00:50:58.390

such folk are the embarrassing crowd, jesus is called his stupid, silly, frightened wayward shepherds to pastor , then it seems to me the one sin, So to speak, the one sin that is the

00:50:58.390 - 00:51:17.240

pastoral sin against the Holy Spirit is to hold those people and their place in contempt. Richard john Neuhaus who died this past year unlamented by many protestant liberals , but nevertheless, remarkable intellect, pastors and priests

00:51:17.250 - 00:51:32.280

wrote a marvelous little book called Freedom for ministry. I'd like to close this lecture with a couple of quotations from that book. Both of these have to do with the task of love for the theological virtue

00:51:32.280 - 00:51:50.300

of love. It's probably fair to say that as often as not, the communal life of christians has obscured rather than signal the love of God, not infrequently, life together is mainly strife together. This

00:51:50.300 - 00:52:01.880

comes this commonly comes as a shock to young men and women entering the ministry. Among those who later leave to go into professional counseling or take holy orders in the Church of Health and human services. A

00:52:01.880 - 00:52:16.500

frequent reason given is disillusionment with sheep who turn out to be wolves. It is easy to say that such ministers should have known better that their idealized view of the church was naive and immature and what did

00:52:16.500 - 00:52:29.760

they expect from a church that is, after all , made up of sinful people. But it must be admitted that there is no adequate preparation for the viral, for the violence of sheer nastiness that so

00:52:29.760 - 00:52:46.350

often erupts in the life of a christian community. It is a special sort of nastiness perhaps because proximity to the sacred multiplies the force of the demonic envy , resentment, and unalloyed hatred can make their appearance

00:52:46.350 - 00:53:05.760

in any human association, but they seem so ghastly in the church because they so flagrantly contradict the stated purposes of the association earlier in the book Newhouse, who converted to roman Catholicism reflected on his work as

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pastor of ST john's Lutheran church in Brooklyn. He liked telling people that he was pastor of ST john's in new york. And they would ask, do you mean ST john the Divine? And he replied

00:53:17.680 - 00:53:34.400

, no, I'm pastor of ST john the mundane . In 1960s, he was very much a part of the civil rights movement. He writes, I counted among the great graces of my life that I

00:53:34.400 - 00:53:47.330

was for a time until his death on April 4 , 1968, permitted to work with Martin Luther King jr, as a kind of liaison between himself and the peace movement. Among the truths that he so

00:53:47.330 - 00:54:06.130

powerfully declared and embodied, was this whom you would change. You must first love. That means we must see more in other people than they see in themselves. If we are to help them in becoming

00:54:06.130 - 00:54:21.290

who they are. Wise parents, know the truth of that, as does any good teacher and as should every pastor so often and so tragically, we forget this truth. Many of the radical ISMs of

00:54:21.290 - 00:54:40.760

recent history for God too often protest, assumed a superior and sneering air. Too often. The voice of conscientious resistance was escalated into a screed of contempt . Never mind that there was sneering and violent contempt

00:54:40.760 - 00:54:59.120

on the other side, when we stop loving, we stop winning. No matter how many points we think are ours too often. Movement for change fails , not for lack of analysis, not for lack

00:54:59.120 - 00:55:19.410

of commitment, but for lack of love. And when movements that are without love do succeed. Their success is often a greater wrong than the wrong. They set out to correct whom you would change lastingly

00:55:19.410 - 00:55:37.940

, and for the good you must first love. True prophecy is the opposite of contempt. It is an office of Love. It takes little effort to depict congregational life is dull, vapid and devoid of

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anything meriting our devotion. The church as the beloved community is always easy prey. One recalls the legend of john the evangelist and Apostle when he was a very old man, carried into the church for his

00:55:55.980 - 00:56:09.770

final sermon, he said, Little Children love one another, and he said it again and again and again. In fact, that was all he said , and some of the people thought it a shame

00:56:09.770 - 00:56:28.600

that the silliness of a senile old man should be exhibited in such a fashion. But others understood that john sermon summed up a long life's reflection on the meaning of gospel and the meaning of ministry. Like

00:56:28.600 - 00:56:46.230

john, we must never weary of the simple exhortation to love. Such inexhaustible perseverance is derived not from the response of the people, but from the inexhaustible love of God and christ with respect to the ministry

00:56:46.230 - 00:57:04.970

of love. The proof of the pudding is not in the people, but in the promise that is the embarrassing, quite unknown Mastic way. The one who brought us teaches us to dance the steps or

00:57:04.970 - 00:57:22.880

steps of love, and are always embodied movements that leave no room for contempt or resentment. To want change without love is to want something other than the Kingdom of God. That is why it always takes

00:57:22.880 - 00:57:32.760

a miracle to learn these damps. Dance steps, Love and ministry and christian discipleship are like that.