Public Leadership in a Public Church:
The Call and the Courage

Blandy Lecture Two
Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
Austin, TX
September 29, 2004
The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA Presiding Bishop
and LWF President

"Bishop Hanson, by what right do you speak on Iraq . . . the Middle East . . . immigration? You do not speak for me."

Such is a typical e-mail response whenever I issue a statement on a particular public policy issue or place of conflict in the world. It is a valid question regarding what it means to be a public leader in a public church.

In my response, I always begin at the same place: the baptismal font. "I speak by virtue of my baptismal calling. I hope you are speaking on the basis of yours."

Immediately following a baptism, a representative of the congregation announces, "Through Baptism God has made these new sisters and brothers members of the priesthood we all share in Christ Jesus, that we may proclaim the praise of God and bear God's creative and redeeming Word to all the world."

By the time those baptized are ready to affirm their baptism in the rite of confirmation, we are even clearer about our baptismal vocation. The presiding minister asks, "You have made public profession of your faith. Do you intend to continue in the covenant God made with you in Holy Baptism?" But the question is not left quite so open-ended. It goes on to describe the baptismal life in God's grace:

To live among God's faithful people,
to hear his Word and share in his supper,
to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ through word and deed,
to serve all people, following the example of our Lord Jesus,
and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth" (LBW, p. 201).

It is true we may not agree on what kind of justice is called for in a particular situation. You may argue for retributive justice. Another may contend it is restorative justice. Still another may plead the case for distributive justice. Such lively public discourse is most appropriate for the community of the baptized. What is not open to debate, it seems to me, is whether or not we who have been bathed in God's grace and marked with the cross of Christ forever should be involved in the struggle for justice and peace. It belongs to our baptismal calling.

Public church does not belong solely to the civil realm of advocacy. It begins in public worship when the assembly gathers around the means of grace. The proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments, the intercessions, and the hymns of praise are public acts, not the secret rituals of a private association. In worship we stand in Christ before the throne of God's grace on behalf of the whole creation. Public worship is worship that is open to all and on behalf of all. From worship we are sent into various publics to serve the Lord.

Professor Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, in her excellent book Public Church: For the Life of the World, draws upon Martin Luther for the connection between worship and our public life. She writes:

Where the Eucharist is "properly" practiced, Luther teaches, it creates a community of people engaged in public life on behalf of the common good, especially the good of the vulnerable. The communing community is "changed" into a people who attend to human needs. [Luther writes,] they "help the poor, put up with sinners, care for the sorrowing, suffer with the suffering, intercede for others, defend the truth" (pp. 16-17).

I also respond to the question "By what right do you speak, Bishop Hanson?" by referring to what the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's constitution states: "Consistent with the faith and practice of the ELCA, every ordained minister shall . . . conduct public worship . . . [and] speak publicly to the world in solidarity with the poor and oppressed, calling for justice and proclaiming God's love for the world."

The point is made again in the ELCA document Vision and Expectations, describing standards for ordained and rostered lay ministers:

This church expects its ordained ministers to be witnesses to and instruments of God's peace and reconciliation for the world. . . . This church expects its ordained ministers to be committed to justice in the life of the church, in society, and in the world. . . . This church expects that its ordained ministers will be exemplary stewards of the earth's resources, and that they will lead this church in the stewardship of God's creation (p. 15).

I also turn to Scripture when questioned about the basis for my public leadership. A frequent text is the risen Christ's appearance to his terrified disciples on Easter evening (John 20). Behind locked doors, they were afraid. Is there a more apt description of our contemporary context than this?

We are fearful people: terrified of being victims of another violent attack such as 9/11, afraid of the stranger in our midst, worried about the future. In the midst of these fearful disciples stands the risen Christ extending three times an ordinary greeting that became a most extraordinary gift: "Peace be with you."

Joseph Sittler describes this peace as rest and as movement:

When the world is regarded as a succulent resource to be squeezed for its juice of joy, it turns out to be a thief, a liar, and a cheat. When the world is received as a gift, a grace, an ever astounding wonder it can be rightly enjoyed and justly used.

The peace of God as rest, whose gift is to have no anxiety about anything, fulfils itself in a peace of God as movement which goes out with holy concern about everything.

Yet the risen Christ offers not only the gift of peace, but also himself showing the wounds of his crucifixion. Then follows the surprising command, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you" (John 20:21). Right back into the world that crucified him, Christ sends his followers.

We are not sent into the world on our own. "When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'" (John 20:22). We are sent in the power of the Holy Spirit with the promise of the gospel. "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (John 20:23). Whether in John 20 or Acts 1:8 or other Great Commission texts, the command to go is joined with the promise of the power of the Holy Spirit.

To be public leaders in a public church means we will be engaged constantly in discernment. A critical part of that discernment is deciding when do I as one called into leadership speak out, and when do I help the community find its voice. I have found those trained in church-based community organizing especially helpful here.

The discernment is not just about who should speak and when, but perhaps most importantly, "What is the content of our public speech?" The answer comes as the community engages the tradition (Scripture, the Confessions, the social statements of the church), the contemporary context, and our experiences.

My experience as a parish pastor was that it is not a small undertaking to invite a congregation into an ongoing process of communal, moral deliberation. In one parish, we asked 10 people representing the diversity of the congregation to spend a year learning the art of moral deliberation and then begin teaching it to the congregation.

The obstacles to such an undertaking are many and great. Prof. Moe-Lobeda reminds us there are moral anthropological obstacles -- "selves curved in on self." According to Luther, she reminds us, it is not possible for us to do the moral good as fully as we try to do it. Moe-Lobeda also cites social and theological obstacles, including our resistance to conflict, today's despair and hopelessness, and the tendency to separate neighbor-love from justice (chap. 3).

I am afraid that too often we tend to equate healthy congregations with those that have no tension. So we disregard the New Testament church realities and ignore differences among us and avoid engaging in public moral deliberation. How tragic that in the months leading up to the war with Iraq, more congregations were not engaged in lively conversation about what is the just response for the United States. Churches in the historic just-war tradition have a particular challenge in this complex world of warfare to articulate what makes for just peace and just war.

The argumentative culture in which we live makes communal moral discernment extremely difficult. We prefer to observe two people in debate usually representing the most polar-opposite positions. Then we will decide the one with whom we agree, rarely having to personally articulate the reasons or engage another in conversation. Many of the ways we as churches make our decisions about response to public policy issues do not encourage communal moral deliberation, either.

Perhaps moral deliberation is too narrow. Is not the question we are asking actually "What is God doing in and for the sake of the world?" How are we as the Body of Christ part of God's mission? (What is the relationship of missio ecclesia to mission Dei?)" Even to begin to answer that question, we must study Scripture. The answers to how we as people of faith relate to the world are not always clear-in fact, seem contradictory.

Scripture declares the world is God's creation, the object of God's love and reconciling activity in Christ Jesus. If that is true, then as followers of Jesus we will be ENGAGED in the world. We will be engaged as evangelists ("proclaim[ing] the Good News of God in Christ through word and deed"), as servants ("serv[ing] all people, following the example of our Lord Jesus"), and as those who "strive for justice and peace in all the earth."

Yet we also read in Scripture that the devil prowls around like a lion, seeking whom it may devour. In the baptismal liturgy we ask, "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and the devil's empty promises?" (LBW, p. 123). If this is true, then we will also need to discern when to intervene in acts of faith-based RESISTANCE. The late Rev. Will Herzfeld challenged us to engage in acts of evangelical defiance.

Scripture also reminds us that the world is not our home. We are sojourners here, just passing through. We are in the world, but not of the world. So there will be a certain DETACHMENT from the world for us as people of faith. Detachment yet not complete withdrawal from the world.

If I were back in the parish, I would lead the Sunday adult class every week. I would invite the members to reflect upon their week. When and how were they engaged in the world? Where did they encounter evil? Were they able to resist? How did they stay detached from the snares of a competitive, consumptive culture? Then we would study Scripture, look to the forthcoming week, and pray for one another and our world.

Perhaps in all of this I have placed too much attention on ourselves. For the primary task of discernment is to ask what God is doing in the world. Prof. Moe-Lobeda writes:

The church is called to ongoing discernment. Amidst the complexity and moral ambiguity of life, how are we to discern what God is doing in any given situation, and how might we most faithfully give social form to God's work?

[She contends that] Lutheran theology offers invaluable clues. It assures us that human beings cannot know with certainty what God is doing in the world; yet, paradoxically and in the face of uncertainty, we are to act in accord with God's mission and activity as we understand it through faithful discernment. . .

. . . A Lutheran theology of the cross counsels that the work and ways of God are revealed most fully in Jesus Christ, and-in some way beyond full human comprehension-that this one is known most deeply in brokenness and suffering. Thus, we will glimpse what God is doing, to the extent that we allow ourselves to be present in profound solidarity and compassion where people and creation suffer most (p. 64).

In other words, there will be both humility and boldness in our public witness. The humility is a mark of our being called to be servants. The boldness comes with claiming the promise of the power of the Holy Spirit.

If we are going to be public leaders in a public church, I believe we will need to do more work on how we understand power. When is power neutral, simply the ability to make things happen? How do we claim and exercise power? For what ends? Again, the insights of church-based community organizing are helpful here. Not only to understand and exercise power, but also to develop the arts of public leadership that contribute to sustainable communities and healthy mission-oriented congregations.

Being public leaders in a public church means we will also engage in communal lament. Prof. Moe-Lobeda quotes Christian ethicist Emilie Townes. In a sermon on the Book of Joel, Townes "claims that, for people living in covenant relationship with God, social healing begins with communal lament." Listen to Townes:

If we learn anything from Joel
it is to know that the healing of brokenness and injustice
the healing of social sin and degradation
the healing of spiritual doubts and fears
begins with an unrestrained lament . . . .
It's a lament of faith
to the God of faith
that we need help
that we cannot do this ministry alone
we can't witness to the world in isolation
we can't fight off the hordes of wickedness and hatred with a big
stick
we can't do this by ourselves anymore, God
we need . . . divine help.

Moe-Lobeda continues, "Communal lament, as Townes explains it, is the assembly crying out in distress to the God in whom it trusts. . . . Deep and sincere 'communal lament . . . names problems, seeks justice, and hopes for God's deliverance. Lament . . . forms people; it requires them to give name and words to suffering.'" "[D]rawing on the work of Walter Brueggemann, [Townes notes that] a loss of lament meant [for the Hebrew people] 'a loss of genuine covenant interaction with God.' Where the assembly praises God but does not lament, 'covenant is a practice of denial and pretence.'"

"Could it be that communal lament is a key to the social healing in the publics in which this church is called to minister?" asks Moe-Lobeda. "Who is more suited to lament and call forth public lament than a people of the cross, a people called to be present where life is broken, where people suffer, where the earth groans? Who is more equipped to face and lament social agony -- rather than deny it -- than a people who knows that ultimately the power of God's love will reign? . . . When and how might worship be the public processing of grief and pain regarding societal, ecological, and individual brokenness? When and how might this public church open doors to public lament?" (pp. 68-69).

If Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it knew not the things that make for peace, why are we not standing in the public square weeping over Jerusalem today? Why are we not lamenting the incursion of Israeli Defense Forces, the building of the separation wall, the acts of violence from Palestinian terrorists?

In recent months, I have been part of an Interfaith Initiative for Peace in the Middle East. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders, through our own consensus-building process, developed a 12-point proposal for peace: four points addressed to the United States government, four to the Israeli government, and four to the Palestinian Authority. In our deliberations, we also take time to lament. Then we confront elected leaders, seeking to hold them accountable for commitments made in the Road Map.

To be public leaders of a public church is to hold elected leaders accountable for their commitments. It is also to call for repentance when it is clear we must stop and go another direction: repentance that might lead to reconciliation, rather than revenge and the perpetuation of cycles of violence.

A public church will join with others in turning this society away from patterns of consumptive living that are destroying species of life every day and turning toward a pattern of earth-sustaining life. Ethicist Larry Rasmussen argues, "We are now for the first time in all of history on the verge of ecocide."

What kinds of leaders will we need? In an exceptional lecture called "Pontiff, Prophet, Poet: What Kind of Leaders Will We Require?" John Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, asks: is the pressing question today "what kinds of churches need pastors?" or is it "what kind of mission needs leaders?" (p. 1). He argues it is the latter when we think of mission as "missio Dei" -- God's work in and for the sake of the world. He goes on to describe the kinds of leaders we need.

We will need leaders, said Thomas, who are pontiffs. By that he means bridge-builders. "Bridge-builders don't impose uniformity; they seek to enable different communities to become a diverse community." We will need leaders who are prophets, truth-tellers who "discern truth for and within the community of faith. . . . We will require leaders schooled in the theological disciplines and practiced in the spiritual disciplines lest the truth that is proclaimed be merely warmed-over political agenda or social ideology with a pious veneer. . . . [And] we will need [leaders who are] poets. . . . Poets and liturgists are today's evangelists who enable us to sense the improvisational God revealed in Jesus Christ, and lure us into the company of those who are no longer satisfied with consuming or with living as competitive strangers to one another" (pp. 6-7).

Public leaders for a public church will have to be people of courage. In his book Credo, William Sloan Coffin writes, "So what the Christian community needs to do above all else is to raise up men and women of thought and of conscience, adventuresome, imaginative people capable of both joy and suffering. And most of all they must be people of courage . . . . Our faith should quell our fears, never our courage" (pp. 70-71).

Public leaders for a public church will also need to be wise: "other-wise." My colleague Dr. Jonathan Strandjord gave a most insightful address at the opening convocation of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in 2002. It was titled "Theological Education for Public Witness: Becoming Other-wise in the World." Dr. Strandjord argues that wisdom usually aims at one of two things: either wisdom serving our desires, or wisdom reducing our cravings. Both are pretty essential to human life, yet both extract a heavy toll. Listen to Jonathan:

First of all, there is the wisdom which serves desire. I want something, so I learn how to make or otherwise get hold of it. I fear something, so I try to learn how to destroy or avoid it. In both cases, an increase in my wisdom is an increase in my power. Such wisdom is not inherently evil-it is essential to human life. But it is also ambiguous. Because our hearts are ever restless, our desires limitless. And so we aim to know and understand more and more so we can control more and more. . . .

A world in which we crave more and more knowledge for ourselves and fear it in others is not a happy place. And so, this sort of wisdom is followed everywhere and always by its contrary-a wisdom which seeks to reduce craving, which aims to replace hot desire with cool detachment . . . . The wisdom of detachment aims at the freedom of being above it all, self-possessed. Instead of rushing to grasp, in detachment you step back to critically evaluate. Such wisdom is not inherently evil: it is essential to human life. But it too is ambiguous. For the only complete safety is in stepping all the way back in absolute detachment, in a criticism that won't quit, that is never willing to commit and say -- "There, there is something worth pursuing, worth risking your freedom for or staking your life on."

Strandjord argues that wisdom and faith held in lively interactive conversation and tension lead us to become "other-wise":

What is truly distinctive about being other-wise is not the mastery of a specialized subject matter. Rather, being other-wise is a fundamental orientation, a basic posture, an over-arching purpose -- it is intellect in the service of an extra-ordinary project.

. . . [B]eing other-wise is not driven by the itch for power and possession or by the quest to be free, above the fray.

It is, instead, essentially born of wonder . . . .

This wonder is an ecstasy in the literal sense, making us stand outside ourselves, expelling us from the captivity of self-concern. An ecstasy which takes us out of ourselves-but not out of the world. Quite the contrary, it places us before the neighbor. . . . [To be other-wise] is deep thought for the sake of the other. It is mindful generosity. It is wisdom as a feast for whoever could use the nourishment.

Strandjord concludes that this is the fundamental purpose of theological education:

. . . to occasion, deepen, and sustain this sort of mindful generosity, to lead us to become other-wise. Which means that the goal, the telos, of theological education is the widest possible public witness. Theological education which does not drive to public witness [or public engagement] is a contradiction in terms, plain and simple. And this public witness is something far more profoundly ecstatic than public relations (which is how wisdom-as-desire goes public, aiming to connect with and shape the opinions of those who can make a difference for oneself) or public critique (the public character of wisdom-as-detachment, which aims to express the absolute freedom of the knower). The public witness of the other-wise is a feast for all who hunger and thirst.

But we will not be public leaders in a public church without the gifts and presence of the Holy Spirit. When confirmands have affirmed their baptism, we do not send them immediately into the world. Rather we invite them to kneel, and with the laying on of hands we pray:

Father in heaven, for Jesus' sake, stir up in these men and women the gift of your Holy Spirit; confirm their faith, guide their life, empower them in their serving, give them patience in suffering, and bring them to everlasting life" (LBW, p. 201).

Each confirmand responds, as do we this day, "Amen -- may it be so."