Monday, May 26, 2008

5/22/2008 – Thursday

I just receive a notice that a thought piece that I shared with the faculty at LTSP was just shared with them via email. The piece was originally written on Easter Monday. It reflects conversations at LTSP on Worship and life here at LTI on just eating. It is focused on the food for the soul and how one partakes in that food. Please comment if so moved.

From: "Richard Stewart"
Date: March 26, 2008 10:01:14 AM EDT
To: "Robert Robinson"
Subject: Re: Some reflections from afar that may be shared on Friday.

Bob, Sorry the attachment didn't make it. While my reflections may not directly go in the direction of the faculty conversation, I am sending them to you as a thought piece based upon a geographically removed view of the emails and conversation that I have had since my departure. I would suspect that these reflections may also be influenced by my perspective of religious life at LTSP over a longer period of time. Some know that I have been a gentle critic. Now if that helps with the vision, feel free to share this document.
Friends, I'm at a school where the students can worship together in 4-5 languages, but they do not eat together, because of [as they describe it] cultural differences. At LTSP we enjoy the table fellowship of the Refectory, but we have difficulty experiencing ourselves as a unified worshipping community. At the LTI, I really struggled with this for the first month. For regular worship [7:20 am and 7:00 pm] students tend to lead the service from the Suffrages. They add hymns to the mix of morning and evening prayers and they are assigned to preach, at least that is what they make of their time to reflect on the assigned scriptures for the day. Remember that we use the Moravian texts for daily worship that is prescribed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa. They produce this worship manual each year in the eleven official languages of South Africa. Each book is also a directory of the pastors in each diocese and in the White – Settler’s Church.
The primary hymnal is the Lutheran Book of Worship, copies donated by congregations who had moved on. There are copied sheets of songs in Zulu, Tswana, Xhosa, and Afrikaans. But these do not limit the students or the worship leaders, as there are songs that come out of memory banks that seem to have resonance with all of the students, whether they are from South Africa or they are graduate students from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Zambia, Botswana, or elsewhere. The singing is spirited though not always in direct correlation with the printed music on the page. Somehow everyone gets along and in the process God gets praised.
I must admit, that the ‘sermons’ get a little tedious. You can almost tell which year the student is in by the way they go about interpreting scripture. They don’t want to disappoint their professors, who may or may not be in attendance by what they say or their reflected knowledge of the history and the lineage of the book of the Bible to which they have been assigned. I have heard an enormous amount of direct quotes from Commentaries, but there is a piece of enlightenment when the older students gently comment to their colleagues, that they may be interested in what a professor will teach them in the next year.
The worship is sensitive to the traditions that we all carry, but they may be overly sensitive to the order. As one of the visiting colleagues noted when we went to a township church and a service led by students, that the service was very conservative. Cheryl Anderson, a United Methodist, on the faculty of Garrett Evangelical and a Fulbright Scholar had never been to a Lutheran worship before. She seriously wondered whether Black American worship would be as conservative and high church. My response was that there was greater freedom expressed in many American Lutheran churches of African descent, but that the ordo was to be respected along with the cultural traditions. What I had found in Southern Africa was that the traditions had been set by the missionaries and they continue to be replicated by the indigenous leaders who are now in charge of the worship life of the congregations
without much critical thought to what comes from the cultural context other than hymns. The musical setting of the liturgy is unaffected by the cultural context.
This is in contrast to the eating practices exercised on this same campus. The food service cooks food that is common in many of the tribal contexts of southern Africa. BhapI a corn meal wet bread is served at almost all meals, along with rice. Chicken is a staple, but it can be served fried, roasted or in a gravy where the meat begins to fall off the bone. We also have beef, sometimes as small steaks, or as a stew with gravy and potatoes. Pork is usually a chop that is well cooked. Fish is generally fried. Vegetables can be sweet potatoes, beets, carrots or cabbage, generally in cold slaw. There are a few students who do not eat red meat, but I haven’t yet met a campus vegan.
Now it does not matter what tribe or country you are from. All line up to be served the same meals from the same servers, but they do not carry their meals to the same tables. The Pedi speakers go in one direction, the Zimbabweans go to a table near their living quarters, the Venda speakers go to their room areas, the Afrikaans speakers go to their quarters, and the Zulus eat at table in the cafeteria.
When they are asked about the anomaly, they usually respond that they are eating separately because of their cultural differences. There is something about being able to eat and talk in the same language and to make jokes and to kid one another in the context of eating a meal.
The meal is a time for light hearted banter and when one is challenged to make cultural adjustments in the midst of eating, they are no longer at ease. The meal becomes work. Thus it is easier to eat separately as this is a part of relaxation. It is a part of our re-creation. We nourish our bodies and our souls. In this context we are free.
While at the same time the school I've left behind has a different set of issues. I cherish the time we gather together for meals in the Refectory. We can have light hearted banter, we can eat together as faculty, students, and staff. There is no hierarchical forum or form that takes precedence in the Refectory. We speak the same language, and even when we gather at language tables for Spanish, or German it is done in the context that all are welcome. We gather around tables to discuss the issues that have arisen on campus. What are the values of a green campus, what mission activities can we all be partners in addressing. What skills have some of us acquired that we would like to share and communicate with to others in our community, those are the elements for which we gather around the table to eat and have fellowship.
It is in the environment of the refectory that we do not find that our cultural differences emerge, but those which can easily be addressed in open and candid conversation. In one very critical sense the table in the refectory is where we can break bread, give thanks and share the cup of fellowship in our multicultural environment. It may not have been considered, but the fact that the bulk of our worship services precede the walk to the refectory means that we have only changed location for the final act of worship together. Though it may sound sacrilegious, the table of the ordo may exist at the opposite end of the parking lot. That then raises a critical question about our worship practices. If we can continue to eat together, why is it that we have difficulty worshiping together? As I'm beginning to discern it may have some direct relationship to the differences in the taste for spiritual food in a multicultural environment and society.
On this Easter weekend there were several television shows that tried to address some of the issues that have arisen in South African society in the last couple of weeks, about “how does this Rainbow society work, now fourteen years after liberation.” Though the Settler’s church has made specific reference for me in planning some workshops that they are no longer just a white church, their practice of integration is not unlike the integration we have in United States churches. Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in South Africa and America.
My experience in South Africa is limited. Yet the Presbyterian Church around the corner from the LTI and across the street from the UKZN campus has been the most diversified that I have seen in a long time anywhere. With Blacks, Whites, and Asians [limited]; the pastor acknowledges that his congregation is highly unusual in Presbyterian circles. The service is lively, spirited, contemporary musically, and focused on teaching the scriptures and liturgical form. They celebrate communion every Sunday. The pastor has been in the one congregation for 27 years. So he has seen the congregation through the change in the neighborhood around the university and through the change in the apartheid system of governing. This congregation has devised a way to find a spiritual food that nurtures a multi-cultural congregation.
The seminary campus church is a reflection of the Lutheran Church and its mission life. It serves Lutherans, and those who understand themselves as a liturgical church. There is an expected formality and order that is reflected in every geographical church
represented on the campus. This common ordo is the central gathering point for all of these Lutheran Christians no matter what language by which they started their journey in being a disciple who is justified by faith alone.
The LTSP campus finds its rooted-ness in that same ordo, but we have also said that we are to be open to a wider population of sisters and brothers in the faith who come to us with a wider variety of traditions. That openness carries with it an expectation that there will be a wider variety of the spiritual food which nourishes those who gather at the altar of the Lord. This wider variety of spiritual food can be considered a feast that passes any single person’s understanding. To prepare this larger offering of spiritual food may mean that there will be a need for greater flexibility in the manner in which the ordo is accomplished on a campus like that offered at Philadelphia.
While the center of the ordo is the word, the pinnacle of a worship service with the living word present in the table of the Lord may not be the spiritual main course for those who find fulfillment and nourishment in the feast of the proclaimed word at the end of the service. What place does the commissioning, the blessing, of those who are about to return to a work-a-day world have in the context of worship? What importance is there for those who call for a spiritual passage that will be part of a week long memory of what is important in life? How do we fee those who are asking for spiritual food that will carry them through till they are able to gather in community once again to be nourished?
This is not to say that there is not nourishment in the patterns of our past, but with each class that enters the seminary, are we taking them back to where we, that is Lutherans, were nourished, or are we prepared to find different nourishing points to meet the needs of a broadened student body, and thus a broadened populace who is in need of hearing, feeling, and tasting God’s spiritual word in ways that they can lead a truly diverse assemblage of congregations that look to us for trained theological leaders?
Perhaps it is ironic that communities that are called through the gospel to reflect God's compassion in worship and at table have such a difficult time. Is it an issue that we can sometimes become overly immersed in our own cultural issues and that bars us from seeing the problem as anything other than that of the other. Are we faced with a contemporary way of wondering, why were the Pharisees and Sadducees so upset about the company Jesus kept at table? What is the current consensus among ecumenical scholars concerning the eating and drinking Paul speaks about with the Corinthians? How do we understand the eating and drinking that cause scandal to arise because the body of Christ was not being discerned in the Eucharistic elements of the bread and wine but in the person and presence of the community? But you my colleagues know all this. What makes this so difficult to communicate in a place where the leaders of the Christian community are being educated?
May these words be of assistance in your visioning.

Richard Stewart on Easter Monday 2008.

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