Time flies when you're having... fun?

It's been almost two full weeks since my last post. I actually had to count the days to convince myself, because I was sure I had posted just last week. Oops. Sorry, everyone.

My virtual absence was not a sign that I had fallen off the face of the earth; I've just been extremely busy. The academic work here is easier than St. John's was, but there are a lot more demands on my time. From teaching parish (which has taken about eight hours each of the three Sundays we've gone so far) to time in class and doing homework, to attending chapel during the week and (in my case) choir rehearsals, my days are very full. Add on to that the fact that I'm living in an apartment for essentially the first time in my life, which means I have to take the time to do all the cooking and cleaning as well, and... well, let's just say I miss the carefree and youthful days of college. No matter how much we complained about the terrible cafeteria food, it cannot be denied that we were saved the trouble of both cooking and cleaning up. The point of all this is that I feel rather overwhelmed by all the different commitments that seem to have devoured my free time.

So what, exactly, have I been doing with myself the past two weeks? Classes have been going well, although some are certainly going better than others. Hebrew has been difficult but also rewarding; I can read (albeit slowly) the Hebrew text, and am learning the rudiments of Hebrew vocabulary and grammar. Old Testament thus far has been a rehashing of a lot of things I had learned previously, mostly in the EfM (Education for Ministry) class. Church's Worship is going well, although the lectures are much more engaging than the required readings. Early Church at the moment is the St. John's revival class, with its primary source readings and discussions of Greek philosophy. Homiletics is my least favorite class; I'm finding the required reading useful but the lectures unhelpful. Hopefully it will improve with time. As for Integrative Seminar, the field education is going great—I am very excited about working with Pastor Kevin and Pastor Martha, and the congregation is very friendly to us. We certainly have a lot to learn from all of them.

The readings, quizzes, and written assignments are coming thick and fast now. I'm staying ahead of the curve, but most of the time it feels like only barely. As a result, I'm feeling tired and overwhelmed—but not sorry to be here. There's a lot of work to be done, but I'm settling into the routine more and more each week, and I look forward to what I have ahead of me.

I'll do my best to post again more quickly this time around. Stay tuned!

The Age-Old (Illusory) Debate

Before I get to the age-old debate, I promised I would say something about my first Sunday at Grace Lutheran. If I could describe it in two words, those words would be "great" and "exhausting". Steve and I were there for six hours, not counting our 45 minute drive each way. It didn't help that we had stayed up late the night before. Now we really know what we're in for as regular worship leaders... long, long Sundays.

Grace is also exhausting simply because they have so much going on. Four services every weekend (of which we only went to two), education hour (Sunday school and adult ed), feeding the homeless, confirmation, choir and band, a preschool with over a hundred students, and so on and so forth. It's a large church, at least by Lutheran (i.e. not megachurch) standards. The largest worship service is contemporary; the other three are smaller, traditional services. After going to worship and the education hour and then worship again, and having our picture taken by the self-proclaimed "unofficial" church photographer, and getting the tour of the labyrinthine facilities ("And down these stairs are more classrooms! And up here are more offices! Oh, and this is the other worship space! This is where the choir practices!"), we went out to lunch with Pastor Kevin and Pastor Martha to look at the shape of the semester and get oriented. That meeting sums up the two most exciting things about Teaching Parish right now: working with Pastor Kevin and Pastor Martha, and getting free lunch every Sunday. (I'm being facetious about one of these. Guess which one.) All in all, it should be a great experience, although next week we're going to bed early.

Now for that debate I mentioned: science and religion (cue dramatic music). Now, I realize that my perspective on this one is a little screwed, having one grandfather an engineer and the other grandfather a physicist, my parents a physicist and a mathematician, and growing up in the town that built the atomic bomb—while simultaneously being raised in a very active church life with excellent preaching, thoughtful study, and serious consideration of ministry. But really, why does everyone seem to think that science and religion are so opposed? I'm not talking here about arguments over whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa, I'm talking about the fundamental schism everyone seems to identify between the scientific way of viewing the world and the Christian one.

This issue is on my mind because of the book I'm reading for Church's Worship at the moment, titled Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission. Let me just say to begin with that I like the book a lot; it has a very interesting perspective about how worship and mission are connected. But in both of the essays I've read so far, the authors take pot shots (it seems to me) at science. In the first essay, Thomas Schattauer says of the thanksgiving (eucharistic) nature of worship, "It orients us to the source of all things, to the almighty and everlasting God, who has created and continually sustains the world and everything in it. [So far, so good, right?] Such a recognition is diminished, if not altogether eliminated, in the scientific rationality that permeates the daily existence of most people." To which I eloquently responded in the margin, "Nuh uh!" Again, in the second essay, Jann Fullenwieder says, "Do we really expect to see God? Because we are versed in scientific and psychological explanations for many of life's questions, many North Americans do not think God is acting in the world."

Now, I don't pretend to understand what these writers meant by "science" in this context. And I certainly appreciate the problem in the attitude held by some (though perhaps we only assume that it is held by some) that science has all the answers, and that having science removes the need for Christianity. Still, I think the language these authors are using goes beyond that radical "scientific" attitude—which, again, I don't think is really a mark of good science at all—to say that any kind of rationality or understanding of science is detrimental to religion. I have found that studying science is almost a kind of worship, that the more I learn about the world (or at least our theories about the world) the more amazed I am. Why should I not say, "Praise God that we could discover from tiny drops of oil that electrical charge has a discrete unit" instead of "Praise God for bunnies"? Why shouldn't our growing knowledge of God's creation make us ever more aware of his role as creator and sustainer of the world? What is the conflict between science and religion that everyone is so worried about? I posit that science and Christianity, when both are understood not as blind following of a principle but as eager and vital exploration, are highly complimentary; they are not opposed at all.

Liturgy, etc.

In Church's Worship this week, we talked about liturgy. Usually, when we use the word liturgy, or say that a church is liturgical, we mean that it has a well-defined order for the service, a template that every worship service follows. Because of that, liturgy can have a pejorative sense of being strict and boring.

However, as many of you may already know, the origin of the word "liturgy" actually means "the work of the people". So in fact, what makes a service liturgical is not how formulaic it is, but rather how participatory it is. As Dr. Oldenburg pointed out, in the original sense of the word, the most liturgical churches in early American history were actually the black churches and the Quakers.

Obviously, Lutheran churches today are liturgical in both senses, but in Church's Worship we're emphasizing the original meaning. As a leader of worship, I could follow the order of the service to the smallest detail, but if the people are not participating, I'm not doing my job. That makes the order of worship a little less intimidating. As Pastor Steve told me about the worship service at ITS, "The Word of God needs to be proclaimed and the Meal shared. Everything else is just details."

In other news, I've received my Teaching Parish assignment. Steve and I are going to be at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church of Westminster, MD. We're being placed together, which is unusual, because we are a couple, and Grace has a clergy couple, Kevin and Martha, serving as co-senior pastors. We start Teaching Parish tomorrow, and I'll give my impressions of Grace in my next post.

And Thus School Begins Again...

That's right. Another autumn, another academic year. Aside from the first few, there haven't been any years that weren't academic in my life. It's a bit disheartening (or maybe it's just the rainy weather today) to think that I have another four years of school ahead of me, although one of those years will not be strictly academic.

Still, I'm here, I registered for classes, I've been billed for tuition, so I might as well dive in. So far, I've had five of the six classes I'm taking this semester. The last one will begin on Tuesday, but I think I have enough impressions to make my report. As I mentioned in my last post, there was some last-minute shuffling of my schedule, so disregard the course list I posted earlier in the summer. I'm taking Introduction to the Old Testament (this is the one I haven't had yet), Biblical Hebrew, Church's Worship, Integrative Seminar, Early Church and Its Creeds, and Foundations of Homiletical Theory. I'll talk about each one briefly.

Both Intro to the Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew are taught by Dr. Stevens. Hebrew, I can already tell, is going to be my hardest class this semester. Actually, the first three weeks are probably going to be the worst part, as we learn the Hebrew alphabet and learn to read the text aloud. At the moment, my brain is on a constant loop saying, "Aleph... bet... gimel... dalet... he..." and so on. As for Intro to the Old Testament, I haven't had that class yet, so I'll give my impressions sometime in the next week.

Church's Worship is taught jointly by Dr. Oldenburg and Dr. Christianson. It looks like a very interesting and enjoyable class. I'll have it next semester as well. The purpose of the class is to cover all aspects of worship, from music to prayer to the Eucharist to the church building itself. Dr. Oldenburg is truly passionate about worship and also serves as the Dean of the Chapel. It's easy to be infected by his enthusiasm. As for Dr. Christianson, he's also teaching Early Church and Its Creeds, so I'll mention him in a moment.

Integrative Seminar is the class which ties in our field education work with our academic work. This year, we'll be doing Teaching Parish, for which each student is sent to a local church to learn about the congregation and to spend time with its pastor. Dr. Erling and Dr. Avery teach this class together. Dr. Erling indicated to Steve and I that we are actually going to be assigned to a church together, which is somewhat unusual, but they want to assign us to a church which has a clergy couple. I'm excited about that opportunity, although it means Steve and I are literally going to be doing everything together this semester—both classes and Teaching Parish.

Early Church and Its Creeds is a history course primarily. It's taught by Dr. Christianson, who has been teaching at the seminary for over 40 years, so he's obviously a very knowledgable and able professor. The idea of the class is to cover the history of the creeds and the development of the early church, but also to talk about why creeds are important now and how they fit into the worship of the modern church. In that way, it dovetails with Church's Worship.

Last but not least is Foundations of Homiletical Theory—the preaching course. We'll be studying the theory of preaching and applying that knowledge by writing three sermons this semester. Dr. Hedahl is the professor for this course (and, interestingly, she's also the author of one of our required textbooks).

So that's the course load. As I mentioned above, Steve and I are taking all the same classes, and it looks like we'll be at the same Teaching Parish church, so we're seeing a lot of each other these days. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but it's a new experience for us after St. John's, where we never had class together. As the semester progresses, hopefully I'll learn a few interesting pieces of information I can share with you all.

Convocation

Another hurdle down: I've officially been oriented and convocated. Tuesday was a long and overwhelming Presession, and the Convocation ceremony was Wednesday. I've discovered that one of the interesting perks of going to a Lutheran seminary with a long history is that you get a seminary hymn: (for those of you extremely familiar with hymn music, the tune to this is AURELIA)

Serene upon her hill-top,
She reigns these many years,
A mother of God's prophets,
Preceptor of God's seers.
Afar her couriers journey,
Her watchword on each tongue:
"Ecclesia Plantanda,"
From sea to sea is sung.

About her walls the thunders
Of warfare filled the world,
Among her circling treetops,
The smoke of battle curled,
But at her pitying threshold
She bade all strife to cease
Within her walls ruled mercy,
Within her gates dwelt peace.

In love her children gather,
Upon her wooded hills,
And with the oil of wisdom,,
Their lamps again they fill,
O, may they ever find her,
When seeking her they come,
A fount of life and blessing,
Their mother and their home.

-Elsie Singmaster Lewars, 1926

(As an aside, the phrase "Ecclesia Plantanda" means "The church is always being planted," the motto of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, patriarch of American Lutheranism. This information was provided to me along with the hymn in the good Lutheran tradition of leaving no Latin untranslated.)

Classes have now begun at the seminary, although I'm not taking exactly the schedule I signed up for. I'll give a rundown of the classes and professors in my next post.