Seminarians Bound

Say, just before the days take their nightly break I wanted to mention a slight and nudging epiphany which was settled upon me as I read God Pause today. You might know where I'm coming from. Of course it's First Week, and like you I've been thinking about the Luther Seminary community and the church at large who sends their gifted members to institutions like ours each year. 

I cannot help but consider that there are hopes invested in our work of which we are totally unaware. And I cannot help but believe that there is faith invested in us of which we are also totally unaware. And yes, there is of course, faith, hope, and love shared with us of which we are made abundantly aware.

While reading Pastor Alan Baglien's reflections on Matthew 18:15-20 I felt a secret hope and a profound faith burgeoning in my own heart. This passage advocates for a community bound to one another, committed to loving one another the right way, even when it hurts. Pastor Baglien reminds me that from time to time firewood gets stuck in our blind spot and we need a good Christian friend or two to help us get that log unjammed and out of our eye.

What I'm driving at from the long way round is that in a community like Luther Seminary and the ELCA there is hope for goodness and the prosperity of the Gospel. That hope is rooted in honest disagreements and an honest commitment to the Gospel. In my short time at Luther Seminary I have observed and taken part in a fair number of honest disagreements and the Gospel was at the center right along with the disagreements. Having been reminded of this, I'm excited to begin another year of learning here and begin again with fear and trembling to prepare myself to serve the Gospel in the years to come.

I've always been proud of our church and a defendant of it because it is a church in which we allow ourselves to disagree. A disagreement requires 2 or 3 people. And, when it's a disagreement between good Christian friends who are committed to the hope there is in Christ and the truth of the Gospel then we can be assured that Christ is there with us. We've all heard it said that the Lord works in mysterious ways, I think one of those ways is conflict and disagreement.

What a lovely condition; the Lord's got a lot of raw material to work with! We are bound to disagree.