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Bearing Each Other’s Burdens: A Call to Love

November 13, 2024

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A pastoral letter in response to the election.

Bold as Love

Like everyone I know and across the nation, I continue to have a lot of things on my mind in the wake of last week’s election. Some are rejoicing, and may those who rejoice be blessed.

I write today because many people I know are worried. I’ve spoken to many who feel alone and endangered; who feel in their bones that the incoming administration will cause harm, and for good reasons. I write for those who need to know that when the world seems cruel and backwards, the Church is a place of shelter.

Even so, the question I’m asking is for all of us: what does it mean for us as the Church to respond to this moment?

Bearing Witness to Love

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

– Matthew 11:28-30

Despite the comfort of the words, this isn’t Sweet Tea Jesus offering us easy love — nothing is easy about love. When Matthew 11 begins we find John in prison and asking just who Jesus is. Later, Jesus looked at the people and lamented their lack of faith, asking them pointedly,

“What did you expect when you went into the wilderness to see John, a reed shaken by the wind? A man in fine clothes? People in fancy clothes whose hearts are easily conquered live in palaces and among the powerful.

“Did you expect a prophet? Well you found one, and not only that, you found the one who bears the promise of Elijah if you’ll just let yourself consider it. Listen to me if you’re able to set yourself aside.” (Interpretation of Matthew 11:7-15)

Jesus never promises faith will always make us happy. Jesus never claims that following him will make life safe or easy, because what Jesus offers is grace. Grace is the truth of God’s love in a peace that the world cannot give. And truly, grace isn’t always easy to receive because it requires us to set ourselves aside and embrace challenging truths about who we are. Grace is God’s presence in the broken places we try to hide. Grace is God’s compassion in moments of our deepest sorrow.

Jesus’ yoke is easy because his teaching is love. Jesus’ burden is light because love compels us to bear our burdens together.

When their brother died, Mary and Martha don’t need Jesus to fly in and save the day by immediately calling Lazarus out of the tomb to make their sad go away. Grief, no matter how good news might be, always takes time to resolve. And so what they need is for Jesus to bear witness to their grief in the middle of the road, even as they tell him their brother wouldn’t have died if he’d gotten there sooner. They need what we all need in times of deep hurt, God with us.

With Mary and Martha and all the saints, we carry our own anger at God; doubts in our faith. We come bearing our sadness and grief that somehow God may have stopped bad things from coming. Not only does our faith not forbid any of those feelings, we learn from Paul that it’s in these moments we experience the greatest miracle of all — the love and grace we find in sharing each other’s burdens.

Christ joins us in bearing each other’s burdens as he did Mary’s and Martha’s, as he did those gathered trying to make sense of John’s imprisonment and imminent execution.

This is what it means to be the Church. We bear witness together in times of trouble by loving each other, knowing that the greatest gift we have is our willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who hurt. We bear witness by not flinching in the face of each other’s pain, and instead offering a shoulder or a hand or whatever’s needed to lighten each other’s burdens.

Joy in Sorrow

The reason I’m a Christian is that following Jesus compels me to do the hard things. Loving my enemy is hard. Praying for those who persecute me is hard. And in moments when I’m profoundly disappointed and struggling, the world offers a cheap comfort that falls so flat. What God through Christ offers isn’t happiness, but joy.

Lutheran-style Christians embrace a Theology of the Cross. This lens of faith affirms God is with us especially in our moments of fear and vulnerability.

In these times, and within the very space where that fear and vulnerability gather, we seek God; yearn for God. We encounter Christ and each other at the foot of the cross. Together we find joy because beloved community brings joy even when we don’t feel happiness. And this is joy, knowing God loves us — every part — especially those parts we hide in our pain. And we know this by those who stand with us and who we stand by.

God is with us, especially when it’s hard.

One Last Thought

I leave with a final thought.

We all experience the impact of this election in different ways and with different severity, but many of us feel the grief of this in our bones. Our ability to stand together is the stamp of God on our lives. Empathy is a sign of faith, and standing with the vulnerable is the action of our faith. And for now, we must feel all of this. Even so, we remember we have work to do that’s never done, joining Mary on the morning of the third day. We too carry the funeral spices to the tomb only to find the stone rolled away. Jesus joins her there and carries her heart into hope.

We know people who need us to carry them. Our communities need congregations to be a safe haven for the vulnerable, a site of power for the weak. The world needs us to bring joy and light to dark places because God’s kingdom isn’t only coming, but the good news is that life, air to breathe, and hope are all already starting to break through. Christ is calling us to remember that God is still bigger than fear and hate.

God is with us. God calls us, all of us, to stand together especially when it feels impossible.

I invite you to stand with me at the foot of the Cross. I invite you to join in this work of carrying spices to the tomb, and together, find that the stone has been rolled away as God is accomplishing what feels impossible. Our road isn’t easy, but our path to mercy is clear in Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Grace & Peace,

Eric the Lutheran

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More Than Words

May 23, 2024

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Part 3 of the Without Sin series. See Part 1 here. | Home

Hitting God’s Jackpot.

Over the course of the next two days, I wrote.

I ate little.

I slept little.

I wrote so much.

I spent the better part of those two days in my booth. I left occasionally to do something or other but returned as soon as I could. That booth was my sanctuary and my office. I could study there because there was enough caffeine and distraction to keep my chronically understimulated mind stimulated enough to think clearly. Also, we could smoke inside, a bonus at the time.

I wrestled with the questions, “If God is love, and love is what motivates God’s relationship to creation, why does our understanding of salvation not look like love?”

“If salvation is the beginning of our relationship with God, why do we name God’s ultimate plan for salvation the ‘end times’?”

Less literally than Paul in Acts 9, I felt like scales fell from my eyes when I realized my biggest problem with the whole idea of salvation is the fact that Americanized Christianity spins a false narrative that it’s really still up to me, captive or not.

“It’s like God gave us all a winning lottery ticket,” folks would say. “All you have to do is cash it to hit God’s jackpot.”

Growing up in the South, I heard people tell me all the time that I need to decide for Jesus or I’m not saved. I have to accept God’s grace and Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, and I go to hell if I don’t. The question is so obvious now, but it opened my eyes then — if it’s really my decision that brings my salvation, is it really God saving me?

How is this not still just reformulation of salvation through works righteousness since it seems like I’m really still saving myself?”

As I look back, I realize what I was writing at the Waffle House was the result of deep reflection that really began when I was sixteen years old.

Help Me Jesus.

I stood with my friend Spence in his back yard, and he said from what felt like kind of out of nowhere, “Do you know if you’re saved?”

Spence was uncharacteristically guileless, which unnerved me. He always had an angle, but this time his angle was sincerity because he was recently baptized as a Southern Baptist.

Good Lutheran that I was even then, I responded, “saved from what?”

“Hell.”

“Oh.”

“You have to be baptized.”

“I got baptized when I was a baby, so I’m good.”

“No, that doesn’t count. You have to choose it. You have to want it. You have to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior or else it doesn’t count.”

I was starting to get a little frustrated, “I go to church like every Sunday. I got confirmed. I go to youth group and church camp. I pray every night” — a small exaggeration. “How am I not accepting Jesus?”

I told you I’m a good Lutheran.

“You have to know where you’re going to go.”

“When?”

“When you die.”

I didn’t even know where I was going the rest of that day, so I deflected. “Well do you know the seven last words of Jesus on the cross?”

“Noooo … ?”

“Into your hands, I commend my spirit.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It means I know the Bible better than you.”

So there.

“Well knowing what Jesus said on the cross doesn’t stop hell. Nothing stops hell but Jesus.”

Whoever said “hell is other people” must’ve had this conversation too because it didn’t stop there.

In fact, I swear it’s still going on in some alternate reality where we’re both rail thin with three foot beards and mothers who went hoarse long ago calling us for dinner.

I got what he was saying, that there has to be something intentional about our faith, or else all those prayers are just empty words. Faith is more than words, more than actions, more than consenting to believe something.

Faith is living out this mystery that is life, remaining open every day to the possibilities of God. Openness isn’t passive. It’s active — and despite that I don’t believe that my will is salvific in the slightest, there is a sense of choosing to remain open to the possibilities of God that whatever it is exists beyond us has any interest in us whatsoever.

What I lacked back then was the next thirty-odd years of my life, but even now, I feel the same keen edge of conviction that there’s something to this need for response, even if it was coming from the most Southern of Baptist denominations.

When that conversation finally ended, I was left wondering how we could both worship the same Jesus and God, yet my belief would land me in hell.

As I wrote, I started remembering that this isn’t even where and when that internal upheaval began.

I remembered Mom-Mom.

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The Divine Double Negative

May 2, 2024

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Home | Posts | Without Sin – Part 1

When it first occurred to me sometime around 2001 that nearly all the language about God’s creative acts is written in the past tense, I was stunned. It was around that time that I began taking classes with the late Dr. James Cutsinger, then the undergraduate director of Religious Studies at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina.

To this day, I carry one of the earliest and most profound lessons I learned from him, which he called the Divine Double Negative. I can’t say for certain that he coined this term, and in fact wouldn’t be surprised if he picked it up from the French philosopher and theologian Frithjof Schuon, but since I can’t find the term with Google, I’ll attribute it to him.

I can still hear him today saying something along the lines of, “the character of God is so constant that when God speaks, existence exists where it was not. There is nothing God cannot do, but the constancy of God’s nature means that there are things God cannot not do if they’re in God’s nature. If God is Love, God is never not loving. If God is Creator, God is never not creating.”

The Divine Double Negative changed my entire theological outlook because, if God cannot not create because it’s God’s nature to create, then creation isn’t ever finished as long as there is God. Cutsinger shared that some thinker, probably some Orthodox Desert Father, theorized that creation sprang into existence in whatever instant God began. If God is eternal, then in some fundamental tangible way, so is creation. This is puzzling because what we see, feel, sense, and measure in creation is so utterly finite. With this in mind, it’s rather seductive to follow this thought to the conclusion that if creation coexists eternally with God, then creation is God, kind of like the cells, flora, fauna, and various organs and ecosystems of our body is what makes each of us each of us.

This may work better in a tradition in which creation is a necessary consequence of God’s existence. In Hinduism, existence flows from the heart of Brahman like water from a fountain. In this sense, calling it creation feels somewhat misleading. It’s less an active process that requires intentionality than it is the sweat dripping from Brahman’s brow. Calling something a creation seems to imply effort, thought, planning, execution. Creation seems to require a vision of what will be, or at the very least what could be. This is a difference in working within a Christian paradigm, but I believe this idea of intentionality is a fundamental difference akin to water falling or being poured into a cup. They have essentially the same outcome, but the difference is vast.

While existence itself may indeed be a consequence of God’s existence, creation is something of God.

God is not creation and creation is not God. Creation is the work of God, and God cannot not be about this work because whatever God intends becomes. This is an interesting idea to me because there are a lot of different ways thoughts come to me. Some I try to think, but can’t. Some I want to think, but don’t. Many come unbidden from someplace adjacent to my willful reflection, but not from my own intention. Words like this have formed in my head many times, I’ve spoken them many times, but I’ve never written them down with this intentionality before now. At least in the context of the Divine Double Negative, this reveals something else fundamental to God’s nature.

God is intentional.

It sounds a little silly to say because I think it’s kind of assumed in our talk about God in most circumstances. It’s important though, because it’s different than saying things like “God doesn’t make mistakes” or other cliches people say without much thought behind them when put into the context of the Divine Double Negative. God cannot not be intentional is so much different, because it allows for one other constant in the nature of God.

God is constant, yet dynamism is the definition of God’s constancy. God is always creating, and creation never stands still. Creation is always moving, evolving, exploding and compacting, heating and cooling. Lungs breathe, earth orbits, stars collapse, and in the midst of all this constant dynamic existence, God cannot not do new things.

God’s dynamic constant is what actually undergirds my own expressed and considered faith at this point in my life. The abusive construct of that old white-bearded dude in the sky stalking our sins like an angry abusive father is abhorrent to me. I can’t stomach the idea that God’s love can be defined by anger unresolved by anything other than the murder of his son must be heresy. If God cannot not love, the God cannot be so possessed by such covetous behavior as holding, feeding, carrying, and nursing a grudge. A grudge brings nothing new. A grudge is a millstone dropped in tides long gone.

Love itself is dynamic. Love isn’t a one-sided affair, but always a dance between people in relationship in which we give and receive, share hurts and hopes. Love is messy, organic, and always changing. Love is always something that exists in multiple locations because it cannot be centered only in one person without becoming something less than love. Love is dynamic because there is no love that doesn’t affect the lover and the beloved. Love makes us vulnerable because it opens us to our beloved, beckons our heart to come out, and calls us to stand nakedly before them without the armor of our words or egos, but just as we are.

God is love, God cannot not be loving.

Love is vulnerable. God cannot not be vulnerable.

The cross is God’s incarnate vulnerability expressed by Word made flesh.

If God loves what God is creating then God is affected by creation. Golgotha is where sacred and secular eternally meet, mixing the bloody, shitty, wounded Land of the Crucified with the hope of love’s recovery even as love hangs crucified. Love is always life and death, taking and holding a breath, hoping against rejection and fearing its possibility. Love is risk and reward, and because love cannot exist in one party alone, love is messy.

God is Creator. Creation is a mess.

God is love. So it turns out that God loves a mess.

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Unfair Linen | Where Secular & Sacred Meet

May 2, 2024

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Home Page | Posts | Without Sin – Part 1

Fair Linen is the name of the long white cloth that covers the top of an altar. It’s traditionally made of the highest quality linen available (and affordable) at the time of its purchase, and it’s not hard at all for this single liturgical item to cost upwards of $500 each.

I grew up in the Lutheran church. I’m a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and have served congregations, on synod staff, as a hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, as well as the chaplain at a senior scaled living facility. Most of my career has included youth ministry as a significant focus, and I’m frequently heard saying, “adults are nothing but trouble.” The variety of ministry contexts has afforded me a wide view of what it means to be part of the Church, what it means to be Christian, what it means to be Lutheran — and a whole lot of what it means to be human as I’ve walked with so many people over the years.

In every expression of my ministry, in every setting in which I’ve served, there have been items that reflect what folks gathered consider sacred. In my early hospice ministry, it was my now-tattered LBW Occasional Services book that I carried with me like a life preserver until I felt comfortable enough that I could just carry me into the room. In my congregations, there are paraments, candles, pulpits, stained glass windows, beloved banners, and other items that remind us of the contributions of the saints who came before. In youth ministry, it’s decks of cards, craft supplies, curriculum guides, thrift store communion ware, dance music, and standing in circles while swaying to songs like Light the Fire.

Now here’s me being honest — I literally came up with the name and idea for this site at 10:17am EST this morning. I know this because I messaged my friend Sanchez and got the laugh. I put it to the back of my mind, but I kept thinking about it.

The more I thought about it, the more I love this image of unfair linen.

As much as congregations, youth ministry, hospice and other ministry contexts are filled with what’s sacred, wherever there are people we also get messy humanity. We get what’s traditionally known as the profane, which is really just a fancy way of saying secular. In hospice, it’s waiting to pray with someone whose bedding the CNA is currently changing because a

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Category: Uncategorized

Bearing Each Other’s Burdens: A Call to Love

Bold as Love

Bearing Witness to Love

Joy in Sorrow

One Last Thought

More Than Words

The Divine Double Negative

Unfair Linen | Where Secular & Sacred Meet