A Practicing Lutheran, notes

Email 7/11/16

Just figured out why I have become so much dumber as I have moved into Trinity leadership.The only experience I have as an adult Lutheran is what we have shared the last few years.  I seem to be pretty Lutheran, but as a young man visiting the future.  My Lutheran experience did not grow since the sixties.  I missed everything.  So much is not obvious to me. I have trouble with the sequence of the service.  I can do all the parts, but I do not know how they follow each other until I completely diagram it out  I came close to discovering the equivalence of stewardship with generosity, but it never kicked into place.  Now I see why you (PM) wonder who I am addressing and why I write these long flowing bizarre essays revealing the depth to which I do not understand the adult Lutheran mind.

I write these long pieces for myself as a way of understanding "Lutheran"   I perceive that if I think things through very carefully, and writing is how I do that, some kind person will read all this stuff that makes no sense to them and explain the part I am missing.

My adult mind went down different paths and does not know what adult faith feels like.  If my parents had not done such a peachy job of socializing me it would have been much harder to be accepted at Trinity.  I have the look, the voice, know hymns, the creed, the Luther story, lots of theology I treat sort of like serious myth.  I stopped thinking about the disconnect in my mind and floated on autopilot to get this far. 

The adult Lutheran part of me is just missing except from what I have learned recently.  The feeling part of me is like a visitor from the past, whipped 50 years into the future. It is so confusing because I turn out to enjoy theology in retirement.  I will probably become able to describe every heresy that ever was.  For me, the path Latin Christianity followed, the segment we belong to,  was only one out of thousands of other paths that were also traveled by groups of people since Christ.  I see no evidence God ever set anyone straight if they had the wrong idea.  There are no nudges that I can find.  All just people with the usual competency and behavior.

Of course, I feel the creed is absolutely how things are.  God is so much larger we cannot grasp him at all.

You will have to burn only half of me.  :) :)

David

If I had seen "Extravagant Generosity" six months ago we might have been spared my dissection of stewardship from an outsider's perspective.  Thank God for Robert.  Harry G. is one of my faith heroes.

I may be useful at some point ministering to the fallen away, the worn out, those who no longer see any point in church.  I would advise young Christians to take a much longer view of faith through their lives, which is impossible for them, The sacrament has great power. A young member asked me point blank if I believed the Christian story a couple of years ago and I replied in the affirmative,  If people can hold on to some glimmer of faith and keep showing up Sundays, the horrible ways one can be abandoned by life might be tolerable.  Poor, weak faith is some kind of norm for people who write about it.  Faith cannot be so weak that we must believe ourselves accursed hypocrites, that we must stay away forever because we are not genuine enough, because we are impostors,  It is survivable to simultaneously believe and not believe.  Faith is sneaky and can become real while you are not paying close attention,  Practice is the operative concept.  Faith practice.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 9:48 PM, David Sheriff <dvdshf@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank God for both of you.  I could never have stayed with church without the two of you.  I am truly where I belong as long as I do  not insult someone's beliefs too aggressively and drive them away.  I now know to stay quiet and bottle up my reforming, problem-solving self on matters of faith, particularly not being able to understand the faith of others.

I have been concerned with the stewardship posting because I do not know how to recreate other's faith.  Empathy requires us to feel what the other feels,to literally re-create their point of view internally, to walk in their shoes.  I have limits there.  I will help as you wish, but I can never steer.  I have faith, even strong faith, but it is not the faith my parents had.  They tried so hard to get me to see as an adult.  I had to exhaust every other possible source of meaning before giving up and returning home spiritually.  I may be big-time internally conflicted for the rest of my life.  I understand love, though, and that may be enough.  I can compartmentalize pretty well and ride herd on my disbelief by doing so.