What in the world is seminary and why would you want to go?

When I tell people that I am in seminary they tend to give me a blank look.  If people happen to know what it is (which happens VERY infrequently), they just are not sure what to say.  So here are my thoughts on what seminary is and why I am enrolled in it.

This article from the Huffington Post Religion blog is a great place to start.

Serene Jones Why Attend Seminary?

But here are my collected thoughts on what seminary is:

I. A place of learning:
This should be obvious, but this goes well beyond an ordinary institution of graduate education.  Yes, we read more books in a 10-week quarter than should be humanly possible, we write papers, I even survived 20 weeks of learning Koine Greek that enables me to read the New Testament or Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible).  However, seminary is also about reexamining assumptions held about religious truth, some that have been held for a lifetime.  It is about bringing your personal baggage to light now, because undoubtedly, it will come up later in your ministry.  It is helping others to examine, grow, and strengthen their own beliefs and look at their own baggage and how it hinders them from growing closer to God.  We learn how various religious beliefs interact with, hinder, and enhance one another.  


II. A place of professional development:
Granted, I am enrolled in seminary as I prepare to become an ordained pastor, some of my peers are studying theology from a purely academic standpoint.  My education involves not just didactic sessions, but real, practical applications of what I am learning.  Right now I am about six weeks into CPE to learn more, read this article from the ELCA, which is an absolutely indispensable part of my preparation.  I am moving to St. Paul, MN next January to continue my classes at Luther Seminary (known as a Lutheran residency) and I am very eager to start my contextual learning at Humble Walk Lutheran Church.  I also have a full-time, yearlong internship in some sort of setting that is yet to be identified.  


III. But why would anyone want to go to seminary?

All I can say here is that I am in seminary because I am preparing for ministry in the ELCA, and ministry is my vocation.  Vocation, in my understanding, is the one thing that you can't not do.  This calling of ministry in and through the church has chased me through most of my life.  This is really not an easy journey.  It is pretty expensive both in terms of money and of time.  I am really thankful for the education that I am receiving because I am preparing deeply for ministry.  Denominations who have "preachers" make me nervous.  Preachers are often self-identified, charismatic leaders who may or may not even have a college education.  In fact, there are even child "pastors" who allegedly feel the calling of God to preach, and go on to spew hellfire and brimstone from pint size pulpits.  I think a preacher with a self-appointed call is one of the most damaging things for Christendom.  So as tiresome as my myriad of requirements can be, I am really, really thankful.  I have people holding me accountable, I have the opportunity to discern and clarify my sense of call, and I have a wide support system.  Seminary gives me the opportunity to examine how my belief system interacts with the world around me.  It is teaching me how to think critically, articulate my theology, and put all that into practice.  

Pray for rain

Credit Christian Science Monitor

Pray for rain for Colorado.  We have had almost a month of devastating fires.  This is a funny internet meme that I pulled from Facebook, but the real truth is not one bit funny.

We are so in need of rain.  Our state is burning up and people are going crazy.

Credit Denver Post

Look where I get to live

This is right by my house in Denver's City Park

Sermon: Welcome to the World

Grace, Peace, and Mercy are yours from the triune God.  Amen

I am humbled and honored to preach my very first sermon at House today.  I am so thankful for the witness of love and grace that this community is to me and to each other and for your support as I prepare for ministry.

When I saw that today’s gospel reading included John 3:16, I have to admit that I was more than a little apprehensive.  John 3:16 is probably one of the most often quoted verses of the Bible and we hear it so frequently that we think we know exactly what it means. I was afraid to even touch this part of John’s gospel because it has so many heavy connotations that can be painful, but since here at House we are committed to faithfully wrestling with the texts, I am going to suggest that it might not mean what we think it means.

         I hesitate to even say the words “born again” here because I know how painful this particular expression of Christianity has been for some of my friends in this room. I would like to suggest that we look at being born again not as a decision that we make as individuals but as something that God does for us.  We are born again not because we are such great people, but precisely because we need to be saved from ourselves.  We are trying to be our own God, instead of letting God be God. 

I absolutely think that “born again Christians” have it right when they say that we must undergo a massive transformation.  But we find ourselves getting into trouble when we try to domesticate and dictate that transformation for ourselves and others. This is just as easily seen in evangelical Christian communities as it is in progressive Christian communities.

 In the text, BECAUSE God so loved the world, God gave his only Son.  God’s gift of love and grace in Jesus Christ came not because we deserved it, but precisely because we needed it so badly. In our desire to keep God on our side, we ignore the first part of the verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” in order to get to the part that we think makes us special, “…so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Because we can be so intent on being saved and comfortable once we have faith, we miss the first half of the verse, God so loved the world. Not just the clean-cut evangelicals or the progressive church.  All of it.  The entire world.  Where we also fall short is thinking that when we are born again in Christ our lives will be safe and will make sense.  But the fact of the matter is that being born again can break our hearts.  It means that God has gotten ahold of us and is going to use us in spite of us.  That has been my experience this week.

As some of you may know, this past Tuesday I started CPE or Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Anthony hospital.  For the next ten weeks I will be serving full time as a hospital chaplain, assigned to the Neuro ICU and Trauma ICU floors, as well as rotating shifts in the Emergency Room.  As I finished a particularly emotional shift yesterday, I realized there was no way that I could discuss being born again today without the idea of dying.  But this is not the physical kind of dying that you might associate with a trauma center.  This is about me dying to myself and my ideas of perfection and letting God be in charge.  This is about me letting go of any control that I think that I might have and instead just being who God created me to be and being born again in Grace. 

Earlier this week I sent an email to the House prayer list asking for prayers as I began this internship.  I wrote that I was terrified that I had no idea what I was doing and that I would not be able to be of service.  God proved me wrong on my second day. Wednesday afternoon I was awaiting the arrival of a Flight For Life helicopter.  As my heart was pounding, I realized that there was nothing in my life up to this point that could have prepared me for what I was about to see.  There are some things that you wish that you could un-see, but at that moment, the gruesome trauma was not what I saw.  That came later.  At that moment, I saw the face of God.  I saw Jesus in the bloodied and bruised man on the stretcher and in the people who were working in perfect harmony to save his life.  This leaves no doubt in my mind that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved in emergency medicine.  Before I was even aware of what I was doing, I was praying that God be present in that trauma room, and let that unidentified man on the table know that he was loved and cared for.

This sort of instinctual letting go and letting God move through me happened a couple more times this week.  Yesterday I was holding the hand of an exhausted mother when she learned that she would out-live her middle-aged daughter.  There are no words to say in that situation, but as a dozen people frantically tried to save this woman’s life, her mother asked me to pray.  I said a silent prayer to God that my words would be what God would have them be, and before I knew it, words were coming out of my mouth and there is no way that they were my own.  My prayer book was six floors below me in the office, so I needed to fully trust that God would help me find the words to pray for this family. 

My prayers this week were not perfect, and neither am I, but I learned something: I am born again each day in Grace.  I have only myself to offer and that is enough if I am open to trusting God and seeing what can be born through me.  My ideas of perfection in ministry died this week, and were replaced with the transformative understanding that being fully present requires complete trust that God will do for me that which I cannot do for myself.  I have been born again.

Which makes me wonder, what if being “born again” has nothing whatsoever to do with a decision that WE make…has nothing to do with having words, or prayers, or the right answers, or even self-confidence?  What if rather, it is the result of the wild, all encompassing love of God?  God so loved the world that he sent his only son to dwell among us in order that we may be saved.  God knows just how foolish we can be when we try to orchestrate our own transformation and has given us the incredible gift of life in Christ, but first we must die to ourselves in order to be reborn. 

What if instead of trying to transform ourselves and others, we fall in to the arms of a God who wants nothing more than to love the entire world back into wholeness? As I collapsed into my car after my shift yesterday I collapsed into the arms of a loving God who says you are mine, brokenness and all.  You are enough and I love you. Isn’t John 3:16 nothing more than God falling madly in love with us? At our physical birth we come into the world through no actions of our own.  We do not get to choose to be born. We spend the rest of our lives trying to gain control over ourselves or others or our surroundings. But these things we grasp at were never ours to hold, much less control. We also have no control over being born again in Christ.  Christ says I love you and you are mine.  Welcome to the world.

What if we look at being born again as something that happens each day through the boundless grace of God, just as surely as the sun rises?  That being born again is not something that we decide to enact for ourselves, rather it is something that happens to us every single day.  What if being born again meant acknowledging the brokenness of our humanity and living out God’s own passion for putting what is broken back together again?   Is it possible that being born again by the power of the spirit has less to do with our own actions, beliefs, and judgment of others and EVERYTHING to do with falling into the promise of God’s love? 

Daily we die to ourselves and are born again in the baptismal promise of Christ. We do a pretty great job of screwing things up that we try to control and thinking that we are running the show, but thanks be to God that we are claimed by Christ and loved anyway.  And that we are born again tomorrow in love.  WELCOME TO THE WORLD…Amen.  

What I've learned in my first week of CPE

In no particular order.  Of course this is not an exhaustive list.

1. Flight for Life pilots wear night vision goggles.  Awesome.

2. Everyone who goes into the ER has to go through a metal detector and have their belongings searched. Like the airport.

3. Watching Flight for Life helicopters land on the helipad and offloading patients is one of the most intense adrenaline fueled experiences you can experience.

4. Observing life or death procedures in the T-10 room, and the number of people who work in perfectly orchestrated harmony to save a life, leaves no doubt in my mind that God is involved intimately with emergency medicine.

5. There does not appear to be a climate nor a time zone in the hospital.  And apparently the gas fireplaces in the lobby burn all year. Random.

6. Trauma rooms are nothing like what Grey's Anatomy would have you believe.  I was shocked at how quiet serious trauma situations actually are.

7. There is no upper age limit for donating tissues to Colorado Donor Alliance.  I am now a certified Designated Requestor and this will become an important part of my job.

8. The biggest thing that I can offer to patients and their family in crisis is myself.

9. Comfortable shoes can make or break an entire day.

10. Seeing death from this side of things (instead of from the side of the grieving family) is really fascinating.  In an instant, a family's entire world is changed and gone.  A person is lost, along with an entire lifetime of experience.  Meanwhile, we sometimes see 4 or 5 deaths in a day. It is not that death is treated in a cavalier way, but that it is merely a part of life.  A chaplain "attends" a death, does the paperwork, and then proceeds to go to lunch or get a latte.