Sarcastic Lutheran

sin

At theology pub this week we talked about sin.  And it was good.
I have a problem with sin being only equated with behavior.  Yes there are some sinful behaviors, but I think that what makes them sinful is the injury that results from the behavior, injury to the one who committed the sin and injury to others as well.  For instance, and I know a lot of people have a different opinion on this, but I do not believe sex outside of marriage is sinful on its own.  I don't know that God really cares about sex, I think God cares about hurting ourselves and others and when this happens as a result of sexual behavior then it draws us further from being in harmony with our source, God, and thus is sinful.  This can happen in or outside of marriage and by trying to eqate its sinfulness with behavior and not with harm, then we miss the mark.  Is it possible to live in a manner so that no harm or injury come to yourself or others as a result of your actions?  no. Even if I withdrew from society all together and lived as a hermitess (and there are days when this sounds absolutely delicious), I am still removing myself from community (in which I believe Christ is revealed), and thus am causing myself harm. 
Props to Martin Luther for the whole "we are all simultaneously sinner and saint" thing.  Brilliant.  Holding these two in tension is the stuff of faith to me.  Yes I sin and am oriented to self and not God (more often than not), however, I am made imago dei, in the image of God and am beloved of God.  Both are true.  To live as though I am all of one and not the other is simply fraudulent.  The beauty in this is how the two natures are in relationship and not seperate from  each other.  Yes, I sin.   My thoughts and behaviors cause harm to myself and others, but as one made in the image of God (as one who still is connected to the source from whence I came and to where I will go), I have available to me the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation.  To not be a slave to sin is to admit when I am wrong, which then allows me to receive forgiveness from God (although this idea is shaky for me), myself and others.  I don't believe in the cosmic gumball machine of forgiveness as it were, where IF I put a quarter in (confess my sin), THEN God releases the gumball of forgiveness.  I just don't see myself as that powerful really, to cause God to forgive me.  Instead, I think maybe that the flowing spring of forgiveness and reconciliation is ever flowing.  We do not cause it to flow.  It is always and already.  But we cannot drink from it standing up.  We have to do two things in order to maintain a posture to be able to recieve this healing water. 1. admit I fucking NEED it. 2. get down on my knees.  By doing this I do not cause the spring to flow, I only allow it to feed me. 
We do this for each other as well.  Forgiveness and reconciliation is the stuff of the gospel.  It's hard too.  But the water of Life flows deep and strong and we all need a drink.

AAR highlights

I just returned from the American Academy of Religion's annual conference which was held this year in Washington DC. Here are some highlights:
* eating dinner Friday night with about 30 Lutheran women theologians and scholars
* presiding at a session on religion and spirituality among the Deaf
* going for an hour long morning run in which I passed the Washington memorial phallus, I mean obelisk, the Lincoln memorial and the Vietnam memorial (I cried as I walked past those names thinking of all the families (on both sides) whose loved ones are dying right now in Iraq.
* Spending time with my friend Sara who's so smart and funny I can hardly stand it, and Ryan Torma who is my Partner in Lutheran emerging church crime.
* going salsa dancing until 2am with Sara, Ryan and this random Swiss guy we met (Christoph, who's absolutley lovely) who I referred to as "Zwingli" all night ...
* Hearing Brian McLaren, Peter Rollins and Phyllis Tickle's panel on emerging church. They were all brilliant.
* Theology Pub with the above, and about 40 others - scholars, Baptists, Nazarenes, Anglicans...it was a good conversation with lots of cross-pollination.
* Hearing papers on Men's studies in Religion; Men's studies is a perspective I've not experienced and hearing about men struggling with the nature of masculinity was really interesting ("Zwingli" was on this panel)
* Experiencing a Smithsonian exhibit on Bibles before the year 1000. It was thrilling to see these ancient codexes and illuminated manuscripts. (the guy at the convention book exhibit noticed how enthralled I was with the enormous, full-color coffee table book on the "Bibles before the Year 1000" exhibit and he asked if I was a starving grad student, I replied that indeed I was and that I could never afford such a book, but that I appreciated how totally beautiful it is...he then proceeded to slip it into a nice shoulder bag and say "then this is something that would probably mean a great deal to you, right?" and handed it to me with a smile.)
* Coming home and being with my kids this morning.

Brian McLaren and Pete Rollins

I will be hostessing a Theology Pub in Washington DC featuring Rollins and McLaren on November 19th at 7pm: Capital City Brewing Company across from the DC convention center, on the corner of 11th & H Streets NW in downtown DC. This is following a panel they are participating on at the AAR conference.

Show up. It won't suck.

If anyone reading this is going to be at the AAR/SBL (if you don't know what this is, trust me, you wouldn't care anyway...it's the American Academy of Reigion/ Society for Biblical Literature's annual meeting with like 10,000 academic study of religion geeks...a true nerdfest if ever there was one...see told you you wouldn't care) I am presiding at a session on Saturday morning on religion and spirituality among the Deaf, come say hi.

Theology Pub

Tonight is the first monthly Theology Pub at the Mercury in Denver. This event is my idea and I am the hostess, therefore a prayer is in order:
"Dear God,
Bless this weird little thing where strangers gather over beer to talk about our experiences of you. May those who participate be brought closer to you. Above all God, please help me to not get in the way because you and I are both aware of my ability to fuck things up, and without you I am sunk."
In Jesus name,
AMEN.

Bonhoeffer is a total Rock Star

It would be difficult for me to be less of a poetry person, but I picked up Voices in the Night: The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (edited and translated by Edwin Robertson) this morning and read this:

Christians and Others ("others" can also be translated as "Pagans")

1. All go to God in their distress,
seek help and pray for bread and happiness,
deliverance from pain, guilt and death.
ALL do, Christians and others.

2. ALL go to God in His distress,
find him poor, reviled without shelter or bread,
watch him tormented by sin, weakness, and death.
Christians stand by God in His agony.

3. God goes to ALL in their distress,
satisfies body and soul with His bread,
dies, crucified for all, Christians and others
and both alike forgiving.

I may have to rethink my distaste for poetry. Holy shit this is good stuff. Bonhoeffer is such a rock star to me. If you don't know who he is, it is worth finding out - he wrote this and volumes of theology while imprisoned by the Nazis (who later executed him) for his involvement in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. He was a powerful voice of resistance to not only the Nazi Party, but the church in which he was a pastor - a church that was silently complicit in the death of millions.

In the commentary on the next page, Robertson says that soon after writing this poem Bonhoeffer said in a letter that: "It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but the participation in the suffering of God in the world."

Robertson goes on to say:

By now Bonhoeffer had observed Christians and others, finding, as he said, that it was easier to talk about God with unbelievers than with Christians. One is reminded of the answer given by Jurgen Moltmann to the question, "are you, then, a Universalist?" to which as a good Calvinist he had to say "No!", but he added, "I sometimes suspect that God is."

I'm thinking this will be what we discuss at Theology Pub this Thursday.