There aren’t very many Lutherans in Syria. Which helps to explain why it was unusual, to say the least, that sitting the pews of our suburban, white, historically Swedish congregation on a recent Sunday there were six youth and 2 adults who were all either born in Syria or whose parents were born in Syria.

As a result of common work in our community we have a relationship with a mosque from another nearby Chicago suburb. When they were trying to secure building permits for a new mosque, we went to the mat for them in helping to convince county government that all religious institutions – not just Christian religious institutions – are part of the strengthening fabric of our communities.

So when they put out the call offering to have representatives from their mosque come to our congregation to tell their story and to solicit our prayers for peace in Syria, I was quick to accept their offer and invite them to speak.

What I didn’t expect was the powerful testimony that took place. The youth that showed up on Sunday morning were all in high school. They weren’t politicians, they weren’t pundits, and they weren’t ideologues. They were sons, daughters, cousins, and granddaughters. And they told of how the violence in Syria is a story that is impacting their families. Ameer told of how his cousin in Syria was abruptly taken from his family’s apartment in Homs and not heard of for three weeks. Feared dead, he was one of the lucky ones and was dropped at the door of his family’s apartment, his body black and blue and broken from his torture at the hand of government forces. Sarah told of her grandparents who had just barely managed to flee Syria, the land of their birth and the land where they lived their entire lives until one month ago. She told of sitting and watching the reports on TV and seeing her grandparents weep for their friends, their family, their community, and their country.

For months, I have watched with outrage at the way the Syrian government and military are brutally attacking civilian populations and quelling any dissent. I have been frustrated at what seems to me the lukewarm response of the international community. Now my outrage has become personal. This is Ameer’s cousin and Sarah’s grandparents. The global community has shrunk to the point where the violence in Homs is violence against my community and my friends and my brothers and my sisters.

Leave it to a few high school youth whose ancestral homeland, culture, customs, and religion are different from mine to remind me that we are all part of the same family and that somehow, I am my brother’s keeper.

After the early service on Sunday, someone came up to me and said, “Faith is really a good place to die from!”  How’s that for a marketing phrase? Wouldn’t they just be breaking the door down if that word got out?!

She was making reference to a memorial service the day before for one of our beloved, active members who had died earlier in the week after living for a long time with cancer and finally dying from the effects of the disease on his body.

I will blow my (our) own horn a little and say that we really do funerals and memorial services well here. We spend time with the family talking about memories of their beloved who has died, in conversation about scripture that may have been meaningful to them or to the survivors or that would make some special connection with their own life of faith. We talk about favorite hymns, and hymns that the larger church sings, hymns that may open a window of meaning for the service we are planning.

While there is always sadness at a funeral or memorial service, we plan so that the hope of resurrection predominates. What we plan is in direct contrast to what our culture demands that a memorial service should be. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they want the service to be a celebration of the life of the deceased. That has become the cultural norm. And that is defiantly not what we do.

I’m not really that interested in an anthropocentric celebration of a broken life, however virtuous it may appear on the surface. What the church is called to do is celebrate the life that God gives in Christ. So, we hold up the promise of God given in baptism, now fulfilled in death.

The church  – in contrast to the culture – will rightly call attention to how God’s love shone through the life and work of the deceased. In this instance, Bill was not only regular in worship attendance, but was engaged in nearly every Monday evening bible class I’ve taught over the past 10 years. We shared a lot of time together and over the course of years developed a common language for talking about faith, our brokenness, and God’s goodness and promises in Christ. Bill also held a deep concern for the poor and that the faith be transmitted to the next generation. And he was actively involved in a few of our ministries concerned with those very things. So, even though I could rightly give thanks for the pastoral relationship and the ways in which I got to know Bill, my job last Saturday was not to proclaim Bill, but to proclaim resurrection. No virtues of the deceased count a whit in death. And the fact that I as pastor was close to Bill will get him no chits at the pearly gates.

No, what we celebrate is the promises of God, repeated over and over, day after day through life and now made complete in death. That’s why we can have a spirit of joy in the midst of grief and look to resurrection when the signs of death are all around us. It’s why we can sing our Easter alleluias even as we stand at an open grave.

AND it’s my job to remind those who are gathered in their black mourning clothes that we don’t have to wait until we die to live in resurrection. By virtue of our baptism that’s the way we get to live each day.

Brother Bill, whose body we laid to rest knew that. He lived that. Bill lived in the midst of resurrection even as his body was being taken over by disease.

So, because that’s what we celebrate, I suppose it’s true: Faith Church in particular and the Christian church in general – they are pretty good places to die from.

Let me create a couple of scenarios, an amalgamation of people struggling with a dry period in their spiritual life. Let’s talk about John and Mary, two different people (fictional) who in different ways are walking through the wilderness, and are finding it hard to go to church.

John has experienced an unexpected and shocking cluster of deaths, in his family, a colleague at work, and a couple of tragic accidents of leaders in the community.  John is in his early 50’s, in good health, a good job, a good family. A good guy all around. Yet he’s finding it hard to go to church. Strangely enough, at his age, until now he hasn’t experienced death within his close circle of family and friends. Death has always been at arms length, something that happens to someone else.  Now with the cluster of death, he’s asking a lot of questions that haven’t been very real before, questions about life, death, who God is, what God is really like, why bad things happen, the often inexplicable and seeming random nature of things that happen. The answers that he’s looking for don’t seem to be coming, and the life and vitality he consistently has found in the church just don’t seem to be there anymore.

Mary recently went through a divorce. For her, the church has also been a place of spiritual life and vitality for a long, long time. But now after her divorce, church has become a place that reminds her of the pain of her present life and grief over what she has lost. She and her family always attended church together. Now her kids are gone from home, and she has to attend alone. She and her husband were active in lots of ministries together. Even though he has left the church, there are constant reminders of what is no longer true. And the caring people of her faith community ask her how she’s doing to the point that she is tired of answering the question and just wants to stay away to avoid having to talk about it one more time.

Now both John and Mary, to their credit, are still coming to church. And I suspect that this time of walking through the wilderness will not last. There will come a time when being a part of their congregations will once again be full of life and vitality.

As a pastor, I haven’t had the option of walking away from regular attendance, but I have known my times of walking through the wilderness. There have been times in my life and ministry when I was going through the motions, when I wasn’t sure where God was or even, if I’m honest, if there was such a thing as a personal God who cared a whit about me.

I don’t think that’s unusual or should be particularly alarming. Life is like that. Most marriages go through dry periods. Most people go through times of vocational uncertainty. We get restless, bored, flat, directionless.

I’m a marathoner – not a good one, just one who hopes to finish the races I start. In every marathon I’ve run there have been times when all I could do was put one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t think about getting to the next mile marker or the next water station, much less the finish line. I cared nothing about whether I was maintaining my pace. It was just put one foot in front of the other and then one more step and one more stop and so on. And in every case, I have finally gotten to the exhilaration of the finish line.

My own spiritual wilderness wanderings have been like that. One foot in front of the other. Get up and go to church. Sing the hymns, say the prayers, listen to the Word as best I can. And I always know that by putting one foot in front of the other, I will get through the wilderness. And when I get through the dry period, I have without exception been able to look back and see that my life of faith was not dead and God was not absent.

Shouldn’t we somehow be telling people that such times are normal and even to be expected.? I almost feel like when people join our church I should give them a guidebook that tells them to expect times of barrenness and offer some counsel for getting through them.

My question today is how many people give up in the middle and never find their way back to spiritual life and vitality.

A few lines from one of the letters of Flannery O’Connor:

Love and understanding are one and the same only in God. Who do you think you understand? If anybody, you delude yourself. I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

I don’t understand most of the people around me. Sometimes they simply annoy me. Sometimes, I am intrigued. I’m working on trying to be more curious and intrigued than annoyed.

This week I was chairing a gathering of about 20 clergy. Part of my job was to report on news of the judicatory. I reported about a series of workshops the judicatory is offering for congregational leaders. About 15 minutes later, when I asked if there were any announcements from the congregations, a big, loud, gregarious pastor announced that the judicatory is offering a series of workshops for congregational leaders, as if this were news to the group. Except it was the same announcement I made 15 minutes earlier. I know he was in the room. I wonder what was so pre-occupying him at the moment when I made the announcement.

In the same gathering were a senior pastor and associate pastor, a ministry team from the same congregation. The associate has accepted a senior position at a congregation about 60 miles away. Their relationship has been strained for some time. In this gathering they were cordial and said all the right things. I wonder what was going on underneath. I wonder what each of them wished they could say. I wonder how they are each feeling about the days and weeks to come.

A colleague showed up at the meeting for the first time since she hosted the monthly meeting at her church nearly a year ago. Part of it was my fault. I send out announcements for the meetings by e-mail; I had her e-mail address wrong and it took me a few fits and starts to finally make the proper correction. So when I saw her, I welcomed her to the meeting and apologized that it took me so many tries to correct what should have been a simple mistake. (I’m admittedly not very good at technology stuff.) Another colleague standing close by overheard my comments and said, “That’s ok. She doesn’t like these meetings much anyway.” While I think it was meant in jest, it felt like it hit a little too close to home to be funny. Did he intend it to be a barb, or was it just an attempt at humor that went way wide of the mark?

When you think of all the psychological baggage that each of us carries, the difficulty of communicating with any precision, our ubiquitous fears and anxieties, and all that we’ve experience in the one hour or 6 hours prior to an encounter with another human being, no wonder it’s hard to understand each other.

And yet we are remarkable. We are resilient. We are unique and complex. We so often rise above our anxieties and fears to accomplish astounding things. Though we are cracked and broken, still we are created in God’s image and that mystery comes through almost in spite of ourselves.

I’m working on trying to be more curious and intrigued than annoyed.

This past week I was in a gathering of five seasoned pastors and five seminarians, each serving a full-time internship in a congregation. We spent nearly two hours of engaging conversation about important and meaningful things. Such conversations are life-giving for me.

At one point we turned to the matter of how we handle diverse, even contradictory positions among the members of our congregations. We agreed there are several issues currently raising controversy in the larger culture that also generate conversation, controversy, and tension in our churches – homosexuality and the place of gay and lesbian persons in the church, gay marriage, abortion, the growing anti-labor sentiment, even the place of ethics within the realm of economics. The members of our congregations represent a wide spectrum of opinion on these and many other issues. Then someone asked this question, “Do you talk about these things? I mean have real, meaningful dialogue? Or do you just peacefully co-exist, sort of tolerating each other without ever engaging each other?”

The question comes at a time when, in the larger culture, we have few if any role models for having reasoned, respectful conversation about things about which we disagree. In the presidential primary debates, and lest one party be unduly targeted, even in the larger political context, our so-called leaders engage in personal attack, hyperbole, and outright lying. It doesn’t seem to be necessary anymore to speak factually about the opponent’s position or record. The hoped-for kernel of truth lies buried somewhere in a concrete vault of demagoguery.

So, that makes it all the more important that we cultivate the church as a place of true community where we can have meaningful and respectful conversations about things about which we disagree.

I recall a particular conversation in our own congregation that became an iconic pattern for subsequent conversations. In the days after the second invasion of Iraq, there was not only anxiety in the larger community, but it was palpable in our building. All week long, the building was buzzing, people talking with concern in their voices about this new war. In our congregation, we have conservative hawks, avowed pacifists, and everything in between. So, one Sunday, we invited people to gather in our fellowship hall in the hour between our services just to talk and listen. I set some ground rules for our conversation and then the associate pastor and I each spent about 5 minutes talking about what we were thinking and feeling. Then we opened the floor. What happened was a remarkably open and respectful conversation. People talked, and more importantly, genuinely listened. Before long, speakers were acknowledging opposing viewpoints as they spoke their own opinions. There didn’t seem to be a drive to convince the other about the rightness of “my” opinion, nor any need to belittle “your” opinion as wrong. It was genuine dialogue.

This is the kind of thing we have to cultivate in the church. We have to give people the sense of the wonder and gift of true dialogue. And we have to give people the space and the opportunity to practice this skill so they can take it into the larger community where, at least as I observe, it rarely if ever happens.

Civil conversation has to begin with acknowledging that there are things we disagree about, and that disagreement doesn’t make the other person bad or necessarily wrong. We have to learn how to disagree well.

On the matter of disagreeing well, I recently ran across these guidelines from a short speech by John Roth, now bishop of the Central/Southern Illinois Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

1) Fairness.  I am disagreeing well when I can state the position of the person I am disputing with accurately enough that that other person recognizes that position as genuinely his/her position.

2) Intellectual integrity. I am disagreeing well when I can state the strongest, most compelling argument against my position.  In other words, I am disagreeing well when I can recognize and acknowledge where my own position is most vulnerable and where a contrasting position makes valid points.

3) Honest humility.  I am disagreeing well when, after thinking through my position and expressing it with true conviction, I acknowledge that as a fallen, flawed human being I myself may be wrong.

Not a bad place to start.

In our upper middle class, suburban, mainline congregation, we’re working on hospitality. When I came as senior pastor 10 years ago, the congregation had identified hospitality as an area where they needed growth.

Hospitality to those who are not like us or are not part of our tribe is particularly important in our denomination that historically has descended from the various ethnicities of Europe: Gemany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. (Have I left anyone out?) These days most unchurched folk have no idea what it means to be a Lutheran, but they know if they feel welcome when they step in our doors.

We’ve had additional opportunity to practice hospitality because refugees from around the world – a large number of them from Burundi in Western Africa – have been resettled almost literally in our back yard.

So, today as I was reading Matthew 3, I was caught up short when the gospel writer reports that Pharisees and Sadducees were coming out to the wilderness to be baptized by John. His response was anything but welcoming, calling them a brood of vipers and castigating them for merely putting on the show of repentance. How’s that for hospitality?

So, what’s going on? Was there something in their behavior that is not reported but was offensive to John? Did these unfortunate few become representative of what John saw as a whose system of corrupt religious leadership? Was that the kind of thing he said to everyone?

I don’t know. But I know it sounds harsh and unfair to my ears so distant from the scene.

And it makes me a little uncomfortable. Jesus certainly showed a preference for the poor and the rejected, the ones who had no claim to Jesus’ time, his ear, or his mercy on the basis of who they were, what they had accomplished, or what status they had. At the same time, he reserved his harshest criticism for the religious leaders and the whole institutional and structural system.

And then I reflect that I am a religious leader who gets a paycheck twice a month from the institutional church and live and move and have my being within the structural system of the church.

I wonder what John would have to say to me?

While running errands this week, I ran into a member of our church who I haven’t seen for a while. He and his wife are new empty nesters and have gradually dropped out of participation at church. What’s surprising about this couple is that they were heavily involved for several years as their children progressed through elementary school, middle school, and high school. Mrs. Member served on our church council and was active on one of our worship teams. Mr. Member served on a couple of short-term task forces. Their children were not active in our youth ministry, but attended consistently with their parents, at least through confirmation age.

What I see in this couple is a pattern that is not unusual. In the church, we lament the trend of our youth dropping out of church after they graduate from high school and go off to college, and then upon college graduation, begin to find their own place in the world. But what about their parents? Over and over again I see parents who were regular in worship attendance, even participating in church leadership, drift away when their children graduate from high school and go off to college.

What gives? Was it always only about the kids and providing them with some background in religion and spirituality? Was there nothing in their church participation that fed them and which they found meaningful? Is there something missing in our congregation’s ministry, or was this inevitable?

I often ask myself the question, “Would I be actively involved in the life of a congregation if I was not a pastor?” I try to get beyond my professional investment in this congregation to consider my personal connection to the faith and to congregational life. Do I find meaning beyond my vocation as pastor?

For me, the answer is unequivocally “yes.” My connection to congregational life is far deeper than the fact that I have been called to this life as my vocation. Especially in worship, I find something deeply meaningful in allowing ancient texts and ancient liturgy and hymns both new and old help me to interpret my life and experiences and thrust me forward in this mystery we call life. I think I would be one of those every Sunday attenders, and I would find a way to use the gifts that I have as a volunteer. Church life is meaningful to me beyond my vocation. I have never been involved in the church for the sake of my kids. I have instead wanted to invite them into a life that I have found very meaningful.

So, that’s me. But my experience is obviously not universal. And so the question remains: what’s the difference?

Several weeks ago I read an article that continues to haunt me. In the article, Walter Brueggemann reflects on the interactions between the Egyptian pharaoh and the Israelites at the time just before the exodus. He took note of the fact that one of the ways the pharaoh oppressed the Israelites was over time to make them do more and more with less and less. At first the straw was provided to make bricks. Then in what sounds like a 21st century cost-cutting measure, the Israelite slaves were required to make the same number of bricks, but now also get their own straw. In the story, the demands continued to grow until they simply could not be met. Moses intervened with the call to action, “Let me people go.”

Over the past several years, I’ve shared many meaningful pastoral moments with people listening as they tell me what they do for their work and how their work is going. Work is somehow very basic to what it means to be human. Quite a few of those pastoral moments have uncovered frustration with the corporate downsizing movement that sounds eerily like what the pharaoh imposed on the Israelite slaves – to do more and more with less and less.

Like a conversation a couple of weeks ago when 30-something guy, working in the corporate world, father of an elementary and a preschool child, told me that he heads off to work in the morning just as his kids are climing out of bed and generally works until past 7 at night and rarely gets home in time to have dinner with his wife and kids. Over the past several years, his unit has laid off people and simply transferred the work to those who still have jobs. He doesn’t like it, but has simply accepted it as the way it is.

The story is replayed over and over; only the company-specific details change. And while few like it, the prevailing refrain is that it’s just the way it is and in this economy, they’re just happy to have jobs.

But I wonder a couple of things. Having a job is a good thing, even a necessary thing. Having meaningful work brings satisfaction, not to mention keeping a roof over the head and food on the table. But is having a job the highest good? When do we step back and reflect on whether a particular job is robbing us of the more basic intangible things that bring meaning and satisfaction. What happens when putting food on the table is in direct conflict with the even more basic calling to be in relationship with spouse and children? What will it take for those who work in the American corporate culture to collectively rise up and say, “You are exacting too high a price on things that are most basic to my humanity. I will not give you anymore.” And whose job is it to go to the nameless and faceless pharaohs of our culture and say, “Let my people go?”