Looking for God

I guess this has been circling around the internet and it just caught my attention...

In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

At 6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At 10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent - without exception - forced their children to move on quickly.

At 45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while.
About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities.

This experiment raised several questions:

*In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?
*If so, do we stop to appreciate it?
*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:
If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made . . .
How many other things are we missing as we rush through life?

So here's the question it raises for me... how often do we fail to perceive, like beauty, God's presence in our lives? Why is it that we think we can only find God in specific places, places that we determine to be right, or proper, or logical. If our Christian story teaches us anything, it's that God is found in the improbable, the improper, the illogical.

Open my eyes Lord. I think I need to stop looking for you at church on Sunday morning and start looking for you on my way to work.

I guess it was just my turn...

Worship that was sweet!

My worship class celebrated the entire Three-Day Feast of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and The Easter Vigil all in one day this past Saturday. It was a wonderful exploration of the possibilities embedded within this holy celebration. Creativity reigned as each small group presented their portion of the celebration. My own group had the responsibility for the final portion of the Easter Vigil, including a baptismal remembrance and celebration of the Lord's supper. Check out the photo (taken by Mary Stoneback, one of my classmates). The last supper icon belongs to my friend Ethan Hulme and we hauled it into this building (the oldest Lutheran church in MN). Lit only by candlelight, the gold foil painting absolutely glowed. I have to say, it was pretty cool.

In order to highlight the celebratory nature of this final Eucharist, our group decided to use intentionally sweet bread and wine. Coming from the bitter & sour and into the sweet seemed the perfect movement from death into life.

We served a nicely sticky cinnamon bread baked by local St. Paul bakery "A Toast to Bread." Believe it or not, we found it at Tim & Tom's Speed Market, just across the street from Luther Seminary.

The wine was a locally-grown Chambucier from Falconer Vineyards in Red Wing Minnesota. Here's a photo of me and Ethan meeting the winemakers, John & Anne Falconer.

Perhaps one of the best highlights from the worship service occurred just following the sending when there was a mad dash for the altar as everyone tried to grab another taste of bread and swallow of wine. That's a theological moment I can really sink my teeth into!

Does salvation make a difference?

Full confession: I'm struggling with salvation. Well not all of salvation, just some of it. I believe in Jesus and I believe in Jesus as savior, or as the bookish theologians put it, "the benefit of Christ is salvation." But what does salvation mean. That's where my struggle is.

Let's try defining salvation by examining what it does. As best I can tell, salvation fixes/heals/mends/makes whole the human condition. I can agree that I'm not perfect and I can easily make that claim about you. Fine, I can support a claim about salvation that attempts to address these imperfections or brokenness. But what is so broken about death and why do we fear it so much that the thought of overcoming death is central to our understanding of and need for salvation? Sure, there are plenty of tragic elements wrapped up with death and great is our desire to mitigate tragedy. But that's not always the case. Sometimes death is a blessing. But that's not my problem.

My problem is that salvation has to be about life after death and not so much about life before death. Why do some theologians want to dismiss the trans formative power of taking up all my broken bits and reassembling them now? What if that were to happen over and over again, and not with just me but with everyone around me? And what if someone, now made whole, attempted to create the opportunities for others, people they don't even know, to be made whole too? What would life look like now?

I want to believe that's what the Kingdom of Heaven would look like. Do you?

Imagination

"The church's central task is an imaginative one. By that I do not mean a fanciful or fictional task, but one in which the human capacity to imagine - to form mental pictures of the self, the neighbor, the world, the future, to envision new realities - is both engaged and transformed. Everyone is born with imagination."

"To apprentice oneself to a child is to learn that the world is full of wonders, a world in which nothing is simply what it seems because everything is packed with endless possibilities of usefulness and meaning. To enter that world, all you have to do is surrender your certainty that you already know what everything is and is for; all you have to do is start over again, assuming nothing and learning to approach every created thing with awe."

-Barbara Brown Taylor in The Preaching Life

Have I lost my imagination? When did that happen? When did I decide that I already knew what everything looked like and what it was for? I have a really amazing story to tell and now I get to start at the beginning again. Fun.

A quiet Swede who roared...

"We are not permitted to chose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it—according to the measure of his courage. He who wills sacrifice will be sacrificed—according to the measure of his purity of heart."

"God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjöld was Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 until his death in a plane crash on his way to mediate conflict in the Congo on September 18, 1961.

Just what is "Christian Conversatism" trying to conserve?

"Faith is fearful and defensive when it begins to die inwardly, struggling to maintain itself and reaching out for security and guarantees...this pusillanimous* faith usually occurs in the form of an orthodoxy which feels threatened and is therefore more rigid than ever... such a faith tries to protect its 'most sacred things,' God, Christ, doctrine and morality, because it clearly no longer believes that these are sufficiently powerful to maintain themselves." - Jurgen Moltmann in The Crucified God

*lacking in courage and resolution: marked by a contemptible timidity - Webster

Ouch. Take that conservatives!