Author: MASadmin

Get Mar[c] and bring him with you!

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Mark. I hope you all threw a party! If you didn’t, that is okay, but I would send St. Mark at least a belated feast day card, just so he knows you were thinking about him.

At GTS, there is a tendency to move feast days around to either Friday or Tuesday. I’m not sure what the reasons are behind these decisions but I think it has to do with the fact that Tuesday and Friday are our big eucharist days (and when seniors preach). So, this week, we switched St. Mark’s feast day from Wednesday to Tuesday. But right before the evening eucharist, the chapel celebrated evening prayer and, lo and behold, yours truly was the reader scheduled for that day. And it just so happened that the epistle reading for evening prayer, designed to set the stage for St. Mark’s feast day [and the Lutheran reading for St. Mark’s feast day!], was 2 Timothy 4:1-11.

Now, how often do I actually read 2 Timothy? Rarely, to be honest. I tend to stick to the genuine Pauline letters (at the moment) and leave 2 Timothy off by the wayside. But, on Tuesday, I got to stand up and read 2 Timothy. And I’ll admit, I got a kick reading to the five people gathered there, 2 Timothy 4:11 “Get Mar[c] and bring him with you, for he is useful in my ministry.”

Hell yeah I am! With just two weeks to go in this semester, with countless essays to finish (or start), this was a good thing to read. Me and you Paul? We’re tight. We’re tight.

The Lutheran Cabal

Wherever two or three Lutherans are gathered in my Name, someone will make a bad joke about them.
– A textual variant of Matthew 18:20.

One of the more “interesting” things about being a known Lutheran at an Episcopalian seminary is that whenever I chat with my fellow Lutheran student or professor, someone feels the need to make a comment. The comment is always in jest and it’s always the same. “You’re like a Lutheran Cabal!” they’ll say and we’ll respond “that’s right! We’re plotting and taking over!” Everyone will give a half-chuckle and we’ll move on with our lives. And this happens all the time. Students, faculty, visitors – everyone says it. If anyone wanted to know what the story of my time at General has been, this joke might sum 95% of it up.

The joke usually doesn’t bother me, and I know that it comes from a loving place, but on some days (like today), my eyes can’t roll hard enough when I hear it. It’s not that I want to be left alone (I don’t) or I’m trying to not stand out (I like the attention). No, none of that bothers me. I think what bothers me the most is that it’s a sign of otherness and distance between me and entire community. Part of that is expected and true: I’m not Episcopalian and I have no desire to become one. But I also sometimes wonder if, beneath the joke, that there is an undercurrent of anguish on behalf of some who say it. For most of my classmates, they are not cradle Episcopalians. The majority of them grew up in other traditions. They came to the Episcopal church, and seminary, because the church they were called to gave them life. They love their church! They love their new traditions! They love being part of it all! They want to propel that love into the world and they really do want everyone to have that same feeling of connection, love, and completeness that the Episcopal church (or at least a congregation in it) gave them. And I totally buy that.

But I don’t think everyone realizes that what they feel about being Episcopalian is the exact same thing that I feel about being Lutheran. I sometimes wonder if they feel sorry for me for not being Episcopalian. I don’t blame them for this; I think the same way about them sometimes (because, come on, Lutheran Christianity is awesome). But I wonder if they see my friend and I chatting, imagine we’re talking in some kind of Lutheran code, and they joke with us because they just really don’t get how we can be who we are.

I don’t imagine, in many ways, that this is that much different from the experience that plagues interfaith and ecumenical dialogues all over the world. For those of us that are really into our particular flavor of faith, we should feel that our flavor is the bee’s knees. But that can actually build walls and barriers unintentionally. I think it’s completely normal for that to happen and that it is fine if it does. But I think we should at least understand that it’s happening. If not, then we’re going to keep making the same old jokes, to the same old people, over and over again, and ignore the fact that their eyes have rolled so far, they’re now on the floor and heading out the door.

Bad Advice Vicar

On Thursday, our confirmation class was covering the book of Acts. In all honesty, it’s rough trying to cover the entire narrative of Acts in forty five minutes. Rather than give an overarching theme and narrow points, I focused the lesson on where Acts started, where it ended, and then we looked at a little at the fun-filled stories, action packed parts of Acts. The kids enjoyed the prison breaks and they got, quickly, the change in tense that occurs chapter 16. They also had no problem seeing Lydia and comparing her to the ordained women leaders at my field site. But what I’m thinking about right now, before I head off to church, is whether any of them will take the last piece of advice that I gave them. For our last story, we read Acts 20:7 where the young man falls asleep, out a window, and dies because Paul is long-winded. A couple of the kids said that they’re going to fall asleep during the sermons now and I said, if they ever get caught by the pastor, to just bring up Acts 20. Now, that got them all a little too excited and they all claim that they’re going to fall asleep during the sermon today. If they do, well, I told them not to rat me out but, in my defense, at least we’ll know they’ve been paying attention in confirmation class.

I AM THE 1.4 PERCENT

While digging around the ELCA website for financial statistics, I finally came to terms that in at least one category, I am part of the world-famous 1%. I am a hispanic worshipping in the ELCA and there were only 41,000 of us in 2010. That’s fantastic. FINALLY – a claim to the big time! ONE POINT FOUR PERCENTER RIGHT HERE! Aren’t you glad you know me?

Now, of course, I don’t fit the typical “hispanic/mexican” mold. My family has been on this side of the border for quite awhile so I’m part of the first generation to not learn Spanish (though I keep telling people that I’ll pick it up some day). In other ways, I probably fit the stereotype. I’m stocky, I like mexican food, I enjoy the World Cup, etc. Actually, it’s silly to label myself as a stereotype but when it comes to statistics, I’m an oddity. I’m hispanic but not spanish-language oriented. I’m in a strange place where I’m a minority but I’m not at the same time. I’m part privileged, part not. And I would think, based on the Lutheran Church’s history with the assimilation of immigrant groups in the US, that people in my category would be an easy draw for the ELCA. Built into the very history of the ELCA is the struggle with assimilation and entire generations were born into the place I am at now. You’d think that the atmosphere and flavor of the church should reflect that struggle of assimilation. But I rarely see it and I wonder if the church makes a mistake is misidentifying the wrong characteristics that define the Hispanics as “the other”. The Lutheran church has a long history of dealing with the problem of language and it seems that dealing with language is the first step in reaching out to our current society’s others. However, that doesn’t solve it. Hispanics aren’t a cultural bloc even though their Spanish (in their various dialects) unite them. Mexicans are not Dominicans and Argentineans are not El Salvadorans. A century ago, the differences between the Norwegians and the Swedes were not solved by the Norwegians starting a Swedish language ministry.

The question, I think, is not language based but culture based. Opening the communication doors is a good first step but I wonder if the ELCA – the whole ELCA culture rather than just its leadership – is willing to allow Hispanics into their churches with the expectation that they wouldn’t just become Lutherans but that they will also engage, like the Finns, Germans, and Swedes before them, in the cultural development of what it means to be a Lutheran in the United States. And I’m not sure if that’s really the case – though whether that’s a conscience choice of the ELCA or just a part of the reality that our polity focuses on individual congregations that will mostly be risk-adverse. One of the main power bases of the ELCA is its 95.6% Caucasian population. The question is if they want folks like me at the table. The fact that I’m on the ordination track makes me think they do – but whether they want me to be the exception rather than a norm is something that I sometimes wonder about.

Work It

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work‚Äîdifficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do‚Äîteenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks‚Äîchanging diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath‚Äîare not only not work; they are idleness itself.

…

So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it.

Katha Pollitt writing in The Nation is exactly spot on. The simple fact is that WHO does the work is just as important as WHAT the work is. Even New York, where nannies can make a lot of money, it depends on WHO the nanny is – their background, race, skin color, class – that depends on how much money they can make. Domestic work isn’t a virtue in itself; the virtue of the individual defines that profession. A lower-class, illegal immigrant, single woman is not the view the same as Ann Romney. They just aren’t and there’s no single way to compare the two without noting the differences. And there are way more lower class women doing domestic work than there are Ann Romneys. The fact that she’s become the face of this reality is insulting, not only to those who are left in her shadow, but to the countless women, and men, who don’t have the opportunity to be stay-at-home moms.

What’s funny about this, to me at least, is how this issue has been around for millennium. You can see it within the Book of Acts. For Luke, the women work best as patrons. In the story of Lydia, Paul, and the slave girl with the spirit of divination, Lydia is valued because she is rich and has the opportunity to take care of Paul. The slave girl, the one who goes around announcing that Paul is a servant of God, has her spirit removed from her. She’s silenced and vanishes from the text while Paul returns back into Lydia’s household later. Although there are many ways to read this text, one way to read it is simply that the slave girl who vanishes is worth less than Lydia for Luke. Paul had an opportunity to baptize the slave girl, to bring her into the fold, but doesn’t. Instead, he silences her. Lydia was given the opportunity for entrance into the body of Christ but the slave girl was not.

The parallel to the Ann Romney/Hillary Rosen story isn’t exact. But it does show that, even in my Christian tradition, the reality is that individuals becomes types that overshadow and hide reality behind them. “It depends” is just as important component of the church as it is with US society. On this side of the eschaton, that’s where we live – in a place where “it depends” matters more than it should. As long as we, as a society, self-define our own elites and look to them as our models of our reality, at the expense of the vast multitudes that will never fit those templates, we’re going to make the mistake of talking about the WHAT but always missing who the WHO really are.