Forde Lives

I sent this message to Paull Spring at CORE  this morning. I am surprised and not surprised by the shortening of the “year of discernment”

Dear Friends in Christ,

Grace to you and peace in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! This was going to be my “you foolish Galatians” letter, but honestly, I just feel profound and helpless disappointment, and a lack of surprise, and fatalism.

Your members said you were going to take a year of discernment. You did not. If three months is a satisfying substitute for a year, what reason should I have to believe you ever meant to take that time? This departure from our denomination feels like a fait accompli, not a measured decision. It is the landing of a fist, one you held cocked at the church over these last years, ever more determined that if the ELCA might be fer it, you were gonna be agin’ it, no matter what “it” was.

I fear also it is too short sighted by far. Your congregations, adherents and members—right now, as you read this helpless missive—your people are out there, making new lives. There are mothers birthing babies, parents raising children, families makin little Lutheran CORE youth. Kids who in just one short generation will grow up to discover they are gay as geese and that nothing, Nothing will change that fact. They will curse themselves and they will curse God for handing them both this terrifying truth about themselves with one hand; and with the other a passion for the Gospel of Jesus and Him crucified. They will be called, as so many have been, and you will not have the faintest idea what to do with them, except stroke your beards, muttering into your hands that you “did the hard, right thing in 2009.”

God can make congregations of stones, a people from dry bones, masses numberless as the stars from aged barren soil. You cannot see his handiwork in the littlest lost last and least of this generation?

Mercy on us all. Mercy.

In Christ,

Jon Olsen

Good morning in Christ’s name!

I am a former student of Gerhard Forde. I ascribe to many—even most—of his theological views. I am passionate about the legacy of his ministry and work. I feel a responsibility to carry forward lessons he taught me, though my updates to this blog have been fitful. I know that this isn’t a very thoroughly maintained and sustained homage to my late friend, teacher and inspiration. So mine is not a very loud or consistent voice. That’s one struggle.

Related to that struggle is that I am participating in a twelve step recovery program. My entry into addiction recovery began in late winter of 2009—coincidentally a little bit after the most recent entry in this blog! (so you can guess part of reasons for the slowdown) One of the things I have learned in that process is that many of us in recovery have “resigned from the debating society.” It’s a little risky to participate in polemical writing of the kind I knew would happen on this blog, because I’m focused on putting my recovery—and the humility required to stay in it—in front of the many reactions I used to have.

The next struggle is that I greatly differ with my friend and mentor on several key subjects. The most high-profile divergences (and those of immediate concern) are on the subjects of church organization/governance and human sexuality, my views of which have branched and sprouted and changed considerably over the last two decades.

I own this domain name, and I made some cool Forde Lives bumper stickers (still available). Plus, I have no doubt that I want to keep the flame of Forde’s legacy alive. I still yearn to interpret not just the church and the corpus of Christian theology, but society and culture, perhaps life itself through the lenses we received from him!

But I also have little doubt that many of the people who are sympathetic to this desire would…to use the kind of salty language my other friend and mentor Jim Nestingen might employ…flip their shit, knowing that I’m a “queer-lovin’ commie.” So, I’m sensitive to this matter: you should know that on the issues of human sexuality most notably addressed in 2009, my stance is more in line with that of the mainline ELCA, than with many of the publicly visible people who likewise carry the Forde legacy. In fact, my personal stances are probably—I’ll be charitable— much less timid and soothing than those voted on in Minneapolis!

Can we continue this? Can you keep (or start) reading? We will see. God’s will shall sort these things out in time. I will stand by my love of Gerhard and his work. I’m committed to a path of service. What will become of this blog? Stick around, decide once things get going. But you should know right now that into which you are getting!

So the churches in Germany have declared a Luther Decade, to celebrate the start of the Reformation. It begins with memorializing Martin’s arrival in Wittenberg in 1508 (including sermon by Mark Hanson!). Is it too much to hope this means that in 2018 we get a celebration of the Heidelberg Disputation?

Yeah, don’t hold your breath.

I encourage you to read On Being a Theologian of the Cross now, instead of waiting.

Presumably it also means we have almost twenty years before the big “Schmalkald Articles” celebration? The 2038 Schmalkald Daze fete is going to be tremendous!

In our classes, Gerhard often talked about his approach to preaching a text. I think it’s an intriguing one. It wasn’t any kind of hard and fast “method” or anything, but it provided a good starting point, for when you were stuck. So I’d like to take that approach. Again, strictly as a student of his. He often talked about finding the hardest thing about a text, the most difficult moment in a given scripture. The preacher, he said, needed to preach right at the heart of that difficulty. It was part and parcel of Gerhard’s radical presumption for preachers to stare the fearful moment in the face. He and Nestingen both liked to refer to the text working you—for some texts I thought of a boxer in a meat locker (I was the meat)—and that it had to work on you if it was going to work through you to proclaim God’s victory in Christ to the people.

So what I’m going to do is pull out something from the lectionary, and find what I think is the hardest part of the text. We’ll try to look at it the way Gerhard taught us to, and if you like, you can use this in your prayerful preparations for next Sunday. We’ll try to get something posted every Tuesday, starting now.

Here’s the ELCA lectionary. In each of these posts we’ll run through some or all of the verses with a “Fordean eye” open for the hard parts. Normally we’ll put the whole thing behind a “read more” cut link, because it’s going to be long some weeks. This week, as the first one, we’ll include it here.

Series A: Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 21, 2008 (Lectionary 25)
“Complementary Series” Jonah 3:10-4:11, Psalm 145:1-8 (8), Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

Jonah 3:10 “God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
This starts things off right away doesn’t it? God changed his mind? What kind of God changes God’s mind? Aggh! The kind who can do whatever God wants to, that’s who! The God who works all in all! It’s rough enough God toys with Jonah with the whole bush and worm scenario. But that’s par for the course, that’s miracles and wonders. God does wonders like that all the time, and especially in Jonah—ol’ Jonah’s being thrown all over the countryside and God’s whipping up storms and casting him in the sea, tossing him into the maw of a fish. (Dr. Throntveit liked to joke that this was the text to use whenever former students asked teachers to come to their ordinations because it used to read “God ordained a worm“) But God doing miracles is one thing, out in the open. God changing God’s mind, even if it’s to the benefit of the people, should set your teeth chattering and your spine tingling. There is one of those lacunae in the text (lacunae is my favorite word this week) wherein you see through the gap a vast and terrible gulf, you see the footprints, the long-cast shadow of the unseen God, all in the implications. A God who can change God’s mind is a word that kills.

Psalm 145:1-8 “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable.” and “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
There’s some law and gospel, quite present. The unsearchable greatness and slow anger hints at a much wilder world of God’s power. The abundant steadfast love is how we might come to praise God, to look on that face and not despair.

Philippians 1:21-30 “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.”
But but but…? What? Wait, what are we supposed to do Paul? And then you start talking about “living in a manner worthy”? We’re just trying to figure out so dang hard what that means, Paul! You just throw out these phrases and it drives us crazy! Would you turn dying into a task? You don’t mean we have to die do you? This Jesus program you’re going on about? Die?

Matthew 20:1-16 “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”
Well, this is right in Dr. Forde’s wheelhouse—my memory is that a sermon on this topic appears in Captivation of the Will (we’ll check that and get back to you). But it’s hard to get more obvious than that. Am I not allowed to do what I choose? Oh. Oh my. This is hard. This is a granite spike jutting out of the earth. Here Jesus points a finger directly at the unimpeachable majesty of a God who elects. Argh! Madness! Death and madness! There’s your opening, preachers. May you have the temerity to mine the grace in it and do it to your congregants.

(Hint: you get to say “And this God who does what God chooses with that which is God’s own chooses to raise Jesus from the dead for you. God who does what God chooses with that which is God’s own chooses right now to grab you and hold you in the very heart of love from now on. Really! You, you hearing me speak you are now claimed by this audacious Jesus who is the very lifeblood of the living God. You are God’s own and no power in the kosmos will take that away from you now.”)

Now you try it: Here’s the “Semicontinuous Series” Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 (1, 45), Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

Thoughts for church leaders:
Do you use a confession of sins in your worship?
Do you use terminology like “we are in bondage to sin” “what we have done and what we have left undone” ?
Is confession corporate?
Do you feel like we lost something in not naming particular sins?

This writer agrees with the reformers’ sentiments “who can enumerate all his errors?” because that is a cry of confession against the whole of sin, the many powers that devastate us. But I wonder if also we (from the reformation tradition) have misplaced our ability to confession actual sins when we have begun to confess Sin.

There’s something in Forde’s language around the specificity of love and proclamation, the reality of it, that I think we can also acknowledge in sin. In their preparations for worship, perhaps leaders can take time to address a particular sin, or ask the community to speak a particular sin in the act of confessing.