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Artwork for Geek and Greek Podcast: Episode 44 GEEK AND GREEK PODCASTGeek and Greek Podcast: Episode 44 30 00:00:00 / 00:46:03 30 Subscribe to This ShowDownload This EpisodeEmbed This PlayerShare This Episode
Ep. 44 - Dave remembers old friends and Justin finds new hope in the concept of justification. How a Pharisee and a tax collector open whole new windows into God's voice.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!
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 At the beginning of most services, we have a time of confession. It’s different than the cultural image would lead you to believe. We don’t have wooden booths where people list out their specific sins to a priest. Together, we all admit simply that we didn’t live up to everything we were supposed to be in the week past. We speak this truth before God and each other, then we hear words that create hope for the week to come: God still loves you, God delights in mercy, you are forgiven. The traditional, cultural image of confession puts the focus in ineffective places. First, people are expected to remember and enumerate all their sins. This not only assumes that they can recall correctly, but that they can identify correctly! Some of the things we think are fine actually end up hurting other people or bring harm into the world in subtle ways. Sometimes we’re slow to realize these things. Confessing every sin we admit and remember is not the same as confessing all our sin. This manner of confession also gives power to the sin itself, making wrongdoing central. We come together because of the sin. We speak about the sin. We almost take a weird kind of pride in it. That power then translates to the priest or pastor, who hears our confession, then doles out penance. If we spend time in the cosmic penalty box, doing good things, our sin gets erased.  The entire process focuses on us. The people we harmed are largely left out of the process. God becomes the great vending machine of forgiveness, dispensing it in response to our penance coins. Since the entire root of sin is placing ourselves in the center of the universe, devaluing God, this seems an odd way to go about erasing sin.
In our confession together during worship, we do not name the personal sins we remember. We are always free to do that with a pastor individually if we wish, but that’s not the central point of the worship confession. Sin doesn’t get to hold center stage. Instead we admit we have neglected and hurt others in ways we know about and ways we don’t. We confess that we don’t know how to do things right, that we always fall short in some way, that we cannot save ourselves. Then we speak the great truth: God, if this is going to come out right, it depends on you. After we say these things, we hear the pastor speak absolution. We hear that sin, though real, will not be the most powerful element of our relationship with God or our neighbors. We hear God assuring us that even though we are imperfect, we are beloved bearers of God’s Spirit. Nobody’s shortcomings are big enough to overturn the work and power of God. God chooses to love us, to inspire us, and to send us into the world to do good, no matter what. The action here is not on us. The power does not lie with the things we do wrong. Instead the power and action are God’s. In response to God’s action, we go out into the world sharing the same hope: we are more than our shortcomings, more than our mistakes. Sin will not reign; love is more powerful. --Pastor Dave
Artwork for Geek and Greek Podcast: Episode 43 GEEK AND GREEK PODCASTGeek and Greek Podcast: Episode 43 30 00:00:00 / 00:46:56 30 Subscribe to This ShowDownload This EpisodeEmbed This PlayerShare This Episode
Ep. 43 - Who will you change for? Who will the church change for? Who does God change for? Maybe the answers should be bigger than we think. Justin and Dave talk over widows and judges in Luke 18.
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com! Also Includes Lutheran Confirmation Ceremony
 Last time we talked about how people’s ethics (“Halloween spirits could be evil! No candy for you!”) get in the way of joy and community. This harms not only the people who espouse those views, but the people around them. Fortunately, this kind of thinking is fairly easy to detect. I employ a two-step process:
Let’s flash back to the beginning of all things. The Book of Genesis tells us that God created the world good. There were no exceptions. God didn’t make bad things. Not even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (the one Adam and Eve ate of) was bad. It served a good and proper purpose. Evil found definition when people misused God’s good creation for selfish gain. The tree wasn’t evil, Adam and Eve saying, “We’re going to use this to become like God, taking power over everything, defining good and evil for ourselves!” was evil. The same is true of the things in our lives. The same hands, elements, and actions that heal can also harm. Radiation can be used to treat cancer or cause it. Categorizing an object or action as inherently good denies its inherent potential for misuse. Categorizing an object as inherently evil does the inverse. Churches used to do this all the time. Ask around 100 years ago and you would have likely heard some version of, “Church is good, but dancing is evil!” In the last century we’ve learned we can’t automatically assume that churches or church leaders are good. We’ve left a trail of broken lives behind learning that lesson. Meanwhile you, and maybe your parents, might well exist because of relationships that started with a dance.  People want to read scripture in ways that take the guesswork out, defining good and evil simply. We like it when we hear that X is good and Y is evil, particularly if we lean more towards X than Y. Trying to justify ourselves, we end up telling a lie. We objectify the world around us and its people, causing great harm.
Meanwhile we read in Galatians 5:22: …the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. This provides its own ethic, less concerned with things than the effect those things have on the community. Is it possible to dance with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, and etc.? I think so. Is it possible to do church without those things? Absolutely. Which determines what’s right or wrong, better or worse. Is it the thing itself, or what that thing brings into the world by how it’s used? If an object, word, or action brings forth fruits of the Spirit, there is no law against that thing (at least the way it’s being used at that point). If an object, word, or action does the opposite, no law can justify it. This ethic is more complex. It forces us to ask questions like who, where, when, why, how, and to what effect. It forces us to listen to each other instead of judging each other. It’s also a truer, more powerful representation of the way we’re meant to be together. --Pastor Dave  Our annual Trunk or Treat event is October 30th from 6:00-8:00 pm. During Trunk or Treat, members of our community bring cars, candy, and chili to share with kids and families all around our neighborhood. It’s a great time every year. Once upon a time, folks asked whether people of faith should participate in Halloween. The holiday evokes images of ghosts, goblins, witches, and the like. Aren’t these opposed to church? As a faith leader, I have pangs of guilt about excess saturated fat and dental damage caused by overconsumption of sweets this time of year. It’s not just Halloween either! Thanksgiving pie…Christmas fudge…you can’t escape it! Then again, modern nutritionists tell us that there are no bad foods, just harmful ways to eat them. A little chocolate, even overindulged occasionally, is good for your health. It’s much better than being constantly frightened of “bad” foods, then developing an unhealthy relationship with them: craving or denying. Those nutritional lessons apply to faith too. Candy, chili, ghosts, and goblins aren’t good or bad unto themselves. Used in the right way, they can bring joy and togetherness to God’s people. I’ve seen hundreds of families go home smiling and holding hands after Trunk or Treat. I’ve seen zero plotting to take over the world with black magic.  Could these things be used wrongly? I suppose so. But developing an unhealthy relationship with them because we’re afraid they could be used wrongly is no better. Fear and faith don’t mix well. A community that takes a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup out of a child’s hand because it’s potentially evil is, itself, broken. It’s also doing something pretty close to evil: assuming its own standards as universal, making others suffer for those standards, and sending the message that God is a God of anger, isolation, and denial.
Personally I think chili, games, candy, and costumes are far more reflective of God’s Kingdom than a community based on fear. Teaching people not to operate on fear-rather to live life by joy and trust--is one of the most valuable things a community of faith can do. So welcome to Trunk or Treat! I hope you can participate and share goodness together with those around you. That’s not just the meaning of a holiday, but of every day. --Pastor Dave  The annual Lefse Making Weekend at Shepherd of the Valley is coming up on October 25th and 26th. For those who don’t know, Lefse is a potato tortilla pancake thing. Some kind of Norwegian voodoo transforms spuds into a delicious vehicle for sugar and butter that melts in your mouth. I have no idea how this magic is accomplished, but plenty of people in our church do.
This is a great example of the value of community. We have a corporate knowledge of doing something valuable and/or interesting…in this case, making Lefse. We share that knowledge freely because we love the community that forms around it, and it’s just plain fun! Those who have the wisdom to guide us get to step forward and instruct, while people who are new to the subject can join right in without feeling like they have to fulfill a hundred requirements first. We don’t center around a single person, but around the creative process. As we do so, the community transforms. We now share something in common that we can pass on to others. This is the way communities of faith should be! We gather, we share, we learn and inspire, and we come out the other side with something more than we had. We don’t run home hording our knowledge, or the fruits of it! Instead we share it with everyone around us. If you want to learn how to make delicious, old-world Lefse, you can come at noon on Friday the 25th or 8 a.m. on Saturday the 26th to find out!
Ep. 42 - [RE-UPLOAD TO FIX AUDIO] How God closes the space between us through compassion. Turns out the cleansing of the lepers in Luke 17 is about way more than just thankfulness!
The Geek and Greek podcast is a show where two reverends talk honestly and clearly about faith, Christianity, scripture, and life. Follow us at GeekAndGreek.com!  One of the main questions people have when they visit churches is, “Will I belong here?” This is true when entering any group, but especially true when exploring a religious community. Churches have a long history of setting up parameters for faith, then defining membership by people’s ability to meet those parameters. Churches have prided themselves on exclusivity, being different than “normal” people. Walking into a community of faith nowadays, one expects to be judged as much as welcomed. The word “welcome” carries a hidden implication: as long as you’re just like us. This is foolishness. Any serious reading of scripture is going to yield the conclusion that we all fall short of the people we were meant to be. If perfection, or even goodness, is the metric for inclusion, none of us qualify. When we enshrine our own standards as the litmus test for faith, we also enshrine our blind spots and faults. When this happens, we set our sins in stone as much as our faith. That we build pretty buildings out of those stones does not make the flaws any less evident.  The only corrective to this idolatry is to find truth, faith, and God’s Spirit in people who are not “us”. These people bring different strengths and faults. When we compare together, we each see the flaws in our own stones and the beauty in each other’s…more knowledge than either of us had alone.
Without that radical, inclusive welcome, we become our own gods, making faith out of our instinctive human predispositions instead of things beyond us. If our litmus test for inclusion is, “Thinks just like we do”, we have failed before we even started. If we fail to welcome all, we end up welcoming nobody but ourselves. In this scenario, God resides among the excluded. Not only does God pity those who have been cast out in his name, he probably has a better chance of being listened to and cared about when people aren’t already convinced that he looks, sounds, and thinks just like them. Shepherd of the Valley welcomes all, not just as members, but as leaders and teachers and bearers of God’s Spirit. To do otherwise would be idolatrous, a denial of the faith that we say guides us. --Pastor Dave |