"Whirled Peas"

On the back bumper of Pastor Shulz's old 1991 Buick Regal is a bumper sticker he found that says, "Pray for whirled peas." He doesn't generally put bumper stickers on his car, but this one hit him at several levels. When he first saw it, it was laying on a counter in a little "head shop" in Altoona, sitting among others, mostly with political themes and very pointed. But this one struck him. Peace and peas are, he thought, rather interconnected. There will never be peace until there are peas for all.

Still, he put it in the top drawer of his chest for a few months when he got home. Then, rummaging around for one of his plastic inserts for his clergy collar (he always hated wearing the collars, and so was forever losing the inserts), stumbled across it last January, just in time for Souper Bowl Sunday. It seemed a fitting reminder of the link between world peace and hunger, so he used it in his children's sermon that Sunday, and promptly put it on his bumper.

He thought it a truthful statement, humorously put. Not everyone agreed. One of his more liberal members thought he was trivializing world hunger. A more conservative member took issue with the connection between food and peace. One thought it too political. Another, blasphemous.

Things that other people take for granted can easily get a preacher in hot water. Bumper stickers are just the tip of the ice berg. Having friends in the congregation can lead to accusations of favoritism. Say something in the sermon linking money to stewardship, and people will accuse you of letting the moneychangers back into the temple. If you wear the collar too much, you are too formal; not enough, and you aren't professional. Go to the school basketball and football games and you're a social butterfly; don't go enough and you aren't involved in the community. It's a thin line pastors have to walk. Pastor Shulz used to walk it well, but he's been less concerned about it these last few years.

Strange enough, it really began with that Left Behind series. People were reading those books, and Tom Dulaney asked him to do a series on Revelation. It was something Pastor Shulz wasn't especially excited about doing. He'd read a little of one of the books, and saw they had it all wrong. But it sent him to his Bible, and taught the class, and came away with a new awareness, a new sense that a lot of the things people spend a lot of time on, and so serious about, really aren't worth all the fuss they make over it. He came to the conclusion that, if it is true that Jesus is alive, and if he is in control of history, then we don't have to take it so seriously - maybe we can relax just a bit, and let go of our grip on things - not hold it all so tightly. Perhaps the real story of Revelation isn't that we have to be careful about bar codes, but that all these things people worry about so much, aren't of much concern to God - he knows what he's doing. Our job is to have a bit of faith in him, relax, and let him do his work.

Which led him to thinking that maybe he worried a bit too much about what people thought, or might think, or might do concerning him. His calling was to be a sign of God's grace among them, after all, wasn't it? Maybe it was his job to loosen up the audience a bit - like the first act, preparing them to hear the main act - that of God's overwhelming love and grace, which they could see all around them, if he could just help tune their ears to listen for it, and help them open their eyes to look for it.

That's when he saw the bumper sticker. And he thought it would be a good first try. Since then, he's tried a few other things too - like when he asked the congregation, at the beginning of the service, whether anyone had any good sins to confess that week. If not, he said, maybe they'd just skip the confession, until someone could come up with something they could agree really needed some forgiveness. Finally, Amy Zelquist said that, although her sin might not seem big to someone else, she had said something to her mother that she shouldn't have, and it was really burdening her so, if no one minded, she would like to confess her sin, which she did, and Pastor Shulz asked everyone in the church to pronounce forgiveness on her. It went well, all-in-all, although it did shake up the congregation a bit. And although everyone was secretly hoping for something a little darker - perhaps an illicit love affair, they all agree that it was a great day. They still talk about it.

Another that went well was a little story he told during the funeral of Betsy Schumer - a lovely older woman who passed away on Good Friday, after years spent in a nursing home with dementia. Betsy had once been one of the "pillars," for over fifty years a Sunday School teacher, the first woman elected to the Council and first woman President of the Council. At the funeral, Pastor Shulz told them the story of another older woman, whose grand daughter was living with her, to whom she was trying to teach the Lord's Prayer. The grand daughter, trying very hard to repeat the words of the old woman, began: "Our Father, who art in heaven, how did you know my name?" The audience laughed a great sigh of relief, and Pastor Shulz went on to talk about the God who knows us - everything about us. He never forgets, because he is the Father who knows our name. Afterward, he thought of how the devil must hate humor, because it helps us live so much more easily in God's grace.

The pastor is part prophet and part jester, after all. It is his or her job to proclaim God's grace and to put some flesh to it, because God always meets us in the flesh and, when God does, it surprises us, turning it into an occasion for joy, terror, awe, laughter, tears. So the pastor has to be prepared for everything.

These days, Pastor Shulz is appreciating that a bit more, and punctuating his sermons with a few more jokes, and taking himself - and his congregation - a little more lightly too.

And that's what's happening this week over at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, a little congregation over near Middleton, off Route 22 - a little congregation that doesn't seem like much in the eyes of the world, but which is, oh, so precious in the eyes of God.