04/16/2014

Trinity's Midweek Blast for April 16, 2014

Stewards of Hope

Holy Week blessings to each and every one of you.

Last Sunday, my wife, Harriet, and I celebrated the Sunday of the Passion at Christ Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton presided at worship, and all eight seminary presidents or provosts participated. The service concluded our time together for the spring gathering of ELCA seminary presidents/provosts. It was a stirring service that began on the front steps with palm branches in hand, and set the stage for "those mighty acts" through which God has redeemed the entire world.

During lunch last week with our student leaders, one of them said, "I am really ready for Easter." I am too. This Season of Lent coincided with global crises (i.e. Ukraine), more senseless school shootings -including one in Columbus last week - and the revelation of astonishing academic fraud in college athletics (i.e. University of North Carolina). This Lent also found my immediate family coming to grips with more loss. I am ready for Easter. Are you?

No matter what we may face, no matter what hurts linger in our hearts, no matter what fear the world may use as weapons against us, what God did on Easter changes everything. It is the reason we exist as the church. It is the reason Trinity Lutheran Seminary thrives and serves in an era of significant economic, ecclesial, and cultural challenges. The very first sermon of the church frames and reframes everything: Jesus is risen!

Let the world throw all of its fear, hate, injustice, prejudice, and cruelty at Jesus. Let the world taunt him, ridicule him, spit on him, beat him, crucify him, and murder him. Let the sin of the world pile on him to the point where his body lies in a cold dark tomb. God will be back. As a 13-year-old boy once wrote in my congregation's Lenten devotional booklet, "He would not stay dead because he loves us." His love is bigger than our hate. His faithfulness is bigger than our defiance. His passion is greater than our apathy.

We exist as a seminary forming leaders for Christ's church alive and at work in the world because God has already overcome everything that would crush us, fragment us, or cheapen us. The refrain of the church is not, Jesus was risen, but Jesus IS risen - right here and right now. The risen Jesus is the first fruits, the sign, and the promise of all of creation. As the late Walter Bouman would teach, we live in the midst of our stories and in the midst of world history already knowing the outcome.

I grew up in the Lutheran church. My parents insisted that my brother and I be formed by the church's worship and life together. It's just what we did. I attended a Christian secondary school with daily chapel, a required Bible course, and a strict honor code. The Westminster Confession was the visual focal point in our huge study hall. Humanity's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. After high school, after college in Raleigh and graduate school in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, with degrees in engineering and management, we settled in a small town in North Carolina where my great uncle insisted that we be at Saint John Lutheran Church the very first Sunday.

It was not long until my job in the construction and manufacturing business took me to the Middle East. My wife and infant children lived through the Iranian revolution. I happened to be in Iran when the Americans were taken hostage. We lived in Egypt, and I spent much time in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. It was in that context that I experienced a call to leave the business world and enter into theological formation for vocational service in the church. Feeling deeply troubled by what I experienced - religious and ethnic hatred, exploitation of the poor and nomadic workers, the humiliation of women, and much more - God spoke to me. I walked onto Trinity's campus as a student in 1985, with a very unpolished but strong belief that the Christian vision for the world could bless it and heal it unlike any other vision.

After a journey that has taken me to countless places and into tragic and difficult situations with gospel-empowered leadership, I am now back at Trinity. It is here where people are formed with the audacious idea that with God all things are possible. It is here that resurrection forges a belief that by the grace of God we really can change the world. Here students are able to stare into the face of dysfunction, despair, and death itself and point to an empty tomb. At Trinity Lutheran Seminary, students are formed by the resurrection and become acutely aware of God's redemptive activity in the world; they are seized by it, re-order their lives in light of it, and are shaped to lead others into it. They are stewards of hope.

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

The Rev. Dr. Rick Barger, '89
President
Trinity Lutheran Seminary