Lent

A Lenten Message From Sierra Pacific Synod

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The following message from Sierra Pacific Synod Bishop Mark Holmerud originally appeared in the synod’s February 26, 2020 newsletter.

[Recently], as a group of ELCA leaders visited and prayed on both sides of the border with Mexico, the California Assembly issued an apology for the role our state played in rounding up about 120,000 people during WWII – mainly U.S. citizens – and moving them into 10 concentration camps, including two in California. 78 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans. In a unanimous vote, the Assembly passed the following resolution:

“Resolved by the Assembly of the State of California, That the Assembly apologizes to all Americans of Japanese ancestry for its past actions in support of the unjust exclusion, removal, and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and for its failure to support and defend the civil rights and civil liberties of Japanese Americans during this period.”

I remember my mother telling me that one of her best friends, who was Japanese American, was suddenly taken from their Linda Vista neighborhood in San Diego along with her family and never heard from again. My mother’s family, who were of German heritage and who spoke German in the home, faced no such reprisals. They were white.

The history of our country in its treatment of people of color is nothing less than shameful and horrific. In addition to the internment of Japanese American citizens during WWII, there is the decimation and colonization of the Indigenous peoples of America, the enslavement of people who were brought here in chains from Africa and the continuing discrimination people of African heritage deal with every day. Recently, government policies have been enacted that are separating Latinx families at the border who are seeking to immigrate to this country. Having just experienced what is happening at our southern border, I wonder, will it take nearly 80 years before the California Assembly or the United States Congress issues an apology to those who have sought asylum, refuge and justice from the people of a nation whose pledge of allegiance to our flag ends with the words “with liberty and justice for all?”

White Privilege, xenophobic attitudes and government policies foster other forms of race-based discrimination, oppression and violence. There are deep racial divides in our country. What does our church have to say about this and others who have been victimized? The history of violence towards and the repression of women seeking gender equality is a struggle that is far from over, just as the continuing struggle of LGBTQIA+ people seeking equity, access and safety is an ongoing concern in many parts of this country.

In the recent past, our ELCA has adopted statements which are offered as public apologies, teaching tools, and aspirations for how the Gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to see people as Jesus saw everyone – as a beloved child of God. These actions were taken as strong statements of our intention to seek and serve those who continue to cry out for justice, and who look to us as Christ’s representatives on Earth to be agents of peace and reconciliation. I invite you to follow the links below and wonder with others in your congregation / community / ministry how these statements might become conversations, ministries, actions — “God’s work with our Hands” — in and through your ministry for the community you have been called to serve.

Peace,

Bp. Mark Holmerud

Creating Change from … Nothing

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Editor’s Note: The following is from a March 27, 2015 Lenten e-mail message by ELCA Director of Advocacy Stacy Martin. It goes to the heart of why Christ-based advocacy matters.

“They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.”

Mark 6:42-44 (NRSV)

Like Thomas Jefferson, I’ve never seemed to have much patience for the Bible’s miracle stories. They’re difficult to deal with. To my modern mind, it’s hard to imagine that seas can part, food can appear from nowhere and that the dead can be raised.

It’s so tempting for me, in my very modern way, to domesticate miracles – like reducing the feeding of the 5,000 miracle to an idyllic picnic or desert potluck. Not that thousands of human beings sharing isn’t miraculous. It is. In the four Gospels, there are six accounts of this miracle. Six! It must be too important a story for it to be about people sharing their lunches. Miracles are tricky that way.

In the Gospel of John account of the miracle of feeding the crowd, the disciples estimate that the crowd is so large that not even six months’ worth of paychecks would be enough money to feed the mass of people assembled. By expressing the amount in such stark terms, what I think the disciples are really saying is, “We don’t have enough money to feed all these people.” And Jesus is saying, “Exactly. Isn’t that great?”

Isn’t that just like Jesus?

One disciple retorts with what I hear as screaming sarcasm. “There’s a boy with five loaves and two fish,” he says. Imagine! Five thousand hungry people on the side of a mountain, and only five loaves and two fish in sight to feed them with. But it seems that this is exactly what Jesus wanted. The funny thing about God is that we are called to be God’s hands in the world at precisely those times when there’s a whole lot of nothing to work with; which is to say, God calls us all of the time. God even sets God’s communion table so that we come with nothing. It seems that God likes it best that way.

God also likes to turn things on their heads. Jesus’ disciples, who expected to be the ones to provide what was needed, found themselves surprisingly dependent upon the generosity of a small child. The Gospels’ accounts of this miracle indicate that the boy gave over his lunch with the kind of abandon and generosity that we only associate with God. It is just the kind of juxtaposition that God seems to enjoy best. Jesus’ faith is placed in a little child to stave off what might become a riot if the crowd is not fed. This is the same kind of juxtaposition we find ourselves in as church when we advocate in the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

This story about feeding 5,000 with so little is, among other things, a story about perspective. The disciples’ main mistake in this story, I think, is that they have no idea what it is that they have. Namely, they have a God who can feed many on nothing. A God who created the universe out of nothing. A God who put flesh on the nothingness of dry bones. “Nothing” is God’s favorite material to work with. Perhaps God looks upon that which we dismiss as “nothing,” “insignificant,” “worthless,” and says, “HA! Now THAT is something I can work with!”

It is our poverty that we are asked to bring to God, not our treasure, because whether we think we have it all or we think we have nothing, we are all of us beggars fed at the table of God’s mercy. What do we have? Five loaves, a couple of fish? Not much. We believe that even when we want to make a difference in the world, we have to arrive fully prepared, fully equipped and fully funded.

I hear often from church folk and non-church folk alike that Lutherans, any faith community for that matter, can make no real difference in Washington. “Why bother?” I’m asked. Compared to big lobbying firms and corporations, they have a point. By comparison, we don’t have money, or connections, or power, or, often, technical expertise. What do we have? Five loves, a couple of fish? Only a smidge shy of nothing even on our most prosperous days.

It’s on the darkest of days when even bishops suggest that all is hopeless in the halls of power, when I’m dismissed by a member of Congress because I don’t come with deep pockets, when I’m ridiculed by a think tank because I attend to this work from a place of faith and not a place of “real” expertise, when I’ve received the tenth angry letter from a fellow Lutheran who is frustrated with me for even considering advocacy as a legitimate vocation, when I feel that we as the church simply don’t have enough power to change things for the better. It’s on those darkest days that I re-read this miracle story.This tricky little miracle story – the one told six times over in the Bible – says otherwise to the “why bothers” of the world. In this story we glimpse God’s inverted economy of free bread and fish paid for by, you guessed it, nothing. This is part of the juxtaposition I mentioned earlier. It is out of nothing that God will create something, even something as big as justice and peace. It is a tricky little miracle for sure.

In the last days before Easter, as we await the biggest miracle of them all – the bringing forth of life from the vast nothingness of death – may we remember that our nothingness is all that God asks or needs.