the view from your seat.

Recently I read a really powerful and hopeful post from a wonderful friend/colleague/mentor/fellow sushi lover. It's so good that I've just quoted the whole thing below for you.

It's not surprise that the Church is broken (I'm personally feeling this one right now), but yet, incredible things are still coming out of the Church. Young people in age and in spirit are still flocking to the Church because the Gospel has transformed them. 

My seat in the auditorium has seen both highs and lows in the past few years, but I for one am hopeful for the new view I will see in the coming years! 

Rev. Dr. Adam White
Campus Pastor
The Lutheran Center
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:

I wish that you could see what I see.

The past few months I’ve been thinking about perspective. Perspective is such an important thing. It determines how we see everything around us. We might like to think that we can step back and view things from some objective standpoint, but the truth is our vision is always limited by where we’re standing and what we’re expecting – we see things dimly, as Paul put it, because we are finite (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Kenda Creasy Dean once put it this way, “We see Christ differently based upon where we sit in the human auditorium.” She continues, “[S]o no matter what I do to translate Christ to my children, they will always encounter him differently.”

The same could be said of the Church: We see the Church differently based upon where we sit in the human auditorium.

Where we sit in the auditorium matters. This reminds us that the Church is always in the process of translation – of inviting others to see things from different perspectives, and creating language that does the work we need it to do.

And this matters because taking the fact of perspective seriously means being open to the reality that even when we are doing our best to follow Christ, we will, at times, see things quite differently. This means that the Gospel is always particularized and concretized – that we encounter it where we are, not in some privileged position where we can see the whole as it is rather than, as I perceive it. Generalization of one’s (or one congregation’s) perspective to the level of the whole picture is akin to looking at a toe on the Body of Christ and absurdly asserting, “This is the whole body.”

Still this is a game too often played with denominations like ours. When we don’t like things from our perspective, we point to a part of the body we think is ugly or malformed and we suggest that it’s the whole thing, the entire denomination, and that we’d be better off if we weren’t joined with a body that’s just an enormous, fungus infested, crooked toe. In acting in this manner we misperceive in two important ways: first, we fail to see the body in its rich diversity, and second, we fail to see the ubiquity of the Church’s brokenness. (i.e. If we focus on the illness of another part of the body we often forget that we are ill, too.) As Paul reminds us, all have sinned and fall short.

If I’m honest about this issue, I’ve been thinking about this largely because when I was most recently serving in a parish, perception created a powerful frame for seeing the larger church. The way that we talked about the larger church was given a particular shape by the convictions, attitudes and biases of those in leadership (including me). Everything the larger Church (Synod, ELCA, etc.) did was interpreted in light of particular assumptions about the nature of things. It was easy to misrepresent things in this context, and increasingly this perspective became something of a dark, dismal view of the ELCA that shaded virtually everything.

This frame of reference was deeply powerful and, at times, persuasive. It generated its own canon of credible sources (in an internet and cable-news age this is far too easy), and it provided me and other members of the community a way to make sense of things happening around us. It gave us a potent story to make meaning out of our experiences.

I do not wish to indict this particular story now or those who have told it. I even believe that this story—and the way of seeing it encourages—has been told out of a deep desire to be truthful and to have integrity. So I have a more modest aim. I simply want to suggest that where we sit in the auditorium matters.

I want to make this suggestion because I have a fairly new seat in the scheme of things. I just finished my third year on campus and what I see is not dark or dismal. It’s quite the contrary. What I see is hopeful. Good.

And the truth is, my view is much broader than it used to be because I work with students from multiple congregations who are being raised—and raised well—in the Christian faith. I can list youth directors and Christian educators who are doing marvelous things in faith formation, people who get it. I see the very realfruits of their labor every day. I travel to congregations who are proclaiming the grace and love of Jesus Christ with boldness, who have looked outside their own interests to serve those on the margins as Christ calls us to do. I have had the experience of working with a Synod office that is deeply concerned with the life and the vitality of the Lutheran form of Christian witness, a Synod that has inspiring vision for what it means to be the Lutheran Church in the 21st Century.

I see congregations, denominations and educational institutions working together so that mutual ministry happens even in financially challenging times – risking for one another. And it’s beautiful.

Somehow I have been blessed with a box seat from which to view the stage of the ELCA and, I have to tell you, I love the view. Really. From where I’m sitting, I see a church that is first and foremost interested in proclaiming Jesus Christ and raising up disciples to bear witness to this good news in the world. Yes, anEvangelical Lutheran Church.

For a little perspective, last spring, I sat with the Bishop of the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA and fifteen college students, from across our Synod, denomination, and beyond, who in one form or another are discerning calls to ministry in the church of Jesus Christ. I had the best seat in the house.

The bishop asked them, “What are you here in spite of?” In essence he asked them, “What parts of the body are so ugly that they almost kept you away from this table?” And invariably they had some nasty big toes to name:

“I felt like my church had been lying to me the whole time.”

“My church didn’t teach me how to pray.”

“My church put expectations on me that were not consistent with who I discerned God was calling me to be.”

This is but a sample of the many responses. There were ways, real ways, that the Church had wronged young people. There were ugly big toes to be sure that could have easily been blown out of proportion. These students had not experienced a pure and perfect church – far from it.

But somehow these students had caught sight of something bigger. Right alongside those admissions of the Church’s sin and brokenness the students also told stories of mentors, and Sunday school teachers, and sermons that stirred something in their hearts. In the broken mess of a sinner and saint congregation they heard the Word of God proclaimed and found themselves becoming part of the body of Christ they consumed at the Lord’s Table. Somehow from where they were seated “in the human auditorium,” the story of the Gospel grasped them, the story of God entering into our particularities, meeting us where we are, and dying for us while we were still sinners – a story so BIG that it had to be captured by at least four different writers from four different perspectives who didn’t agree on all the details. Somehow this Gospel story relativized the students’ perspectives and transformed them…

It’s always amazing to me when the gospel takes hold. It’s nothing short of miraculous when the Word causes us to see something beyond the genuine ugliness of our experiences of the Church.

I suppose in this light it’s not at all surprising that in Luke’s gospel when the women return from the empty tomb and tell the other disciples what they had seen that the disciples thought it was nonsense. From those disciples’ perspective, their leader is dead, crucified, and the empty-tomb story that the women told can only be a cruel joke. For many of the disciples, it would have been hard to not write off the whole Jesus experience as something gone wrong, something distorted and ugly.

That’s why in response to the women telling them that the tomb was empty, the other disciples call, “lerios”, a Greek word that Anna Carter Florence has argued is best translated, “’drivel’, ‘trash’, ‘garbage’, ‘crap’, ‘bull’ or in its more vulgar form ‘&^%^*%(@!’.”

To the witness of the women, to their testimony of a better reality, the others call lerios in unison.

That’s the power of perspective. It’s easy for those who see only big toes to call lerios when they hear about something good going on in the church, when they hear that reality of things is more hopeful than they could possibly imagine.

But Peter is the one who moves on despite his horrible experience. He’s the one that has faith in-spite-of. He has to see for himself before he writes off the women’s story for good, and when he changes “his seat in the auditorium,” everything looks very, very different. Peter discovers a God is still at work right in the middle of human brokenness, even amidst suffering and death.

Don’t get me wrong; there are ugly big toes, fingers, armpits, and even open festering sores in any denomination. In the ELCA there are things we do very poorly. There are practices we have that are suspect. Sometimes our priorities seem entirely misguided. Still, more importantly, I also know full well that however good my seat is, it’s still only my seat.

Still, where your seat is in the auditorium matters. I know this is a radical suggestion in a tradition where many like to sit in the same place week after week after week after week. But for those of you out there who have a small frame of reference, I’d encourage you to change your seat. Take a look around. See what things look like from a different angle. Quit thinking that your perspective is right over and against all the others. Get a broader view. Talk to those who are telling a different story about what’s going on. And don’t be so sure that anything good you hear is lerios. It’s really interesting what you might discover.

I wish that you could see what I see. I really do.