Luther Seminary

And, uh, got your doctorate's degree from where?

Uh, Luther Seminary.

Luther Seminary.

Yeah.

And what was the focus there?

See you next week.

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His vocation was to break through that naivete as much as he could.

And my work had primarily been with Muslim communities in the Twin Cities, where I'd been located at Luther Seminary, working in those communities.

I had only traveled to Palestine and Israel in November of 2002.

So soon, you know, I had only recently fully... entered into the Israeli-Palestinian thing, right? But it captured me immediately once I had, because I've traveled there in the middle of the Second Intifada and volunteered at least part of my time there with the International Solidarity Movement.

that is a hallmark of the Christian community, but it's also a promise that living that life is done with each other and not alone.

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It used to be a Scandinavian name with a slag.

Gerhard Ferdie, he was an Orthodox guy, probably totally alone in being an Orthodox Lutheran at Luther Seminary, St. Paul.

And he said one time, Christianity is not the movement from vice to virtue.

It's the movement from virtue to Christ.

You want to come in as a relational presence.

And I went to Luther Seminary and was taught by you, and all of your classes talked about relationships and authentic relationships and not making utilitarian relationships in order to influence people.

So you go in like that.

Um, but then like you said, life beats you up and it's either for me, I guess it's either personal tragedies where you genuinely just love people and then you have to show up at the hospital when they've tragically died and walk with their family through the funeral and those just add up.

Okay.

Yeah.

So back in 2007, uh, you know, I was a idealistic 22 year old enrolling at Luther seminary.

And I bet you were probably what, in your early thirties at that point, you were young too.

Certainly, it occupies the rest of the book of Genesis.

When I teach this, and I teach this as you guys do every year, right, in our Intro to Old Testament class here at Luther Seminary, I use a scene that probably dates me too much, but at the beginning of The Sound of Music, right, that beautiful musical, You know, you get the overview of the Austrian Alps, you know, mountaintops and so forth.

And then you see this little figure on the mountainside and then the camera zooms in and you see Maria singing The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music.

That's how I kind of view this part of Genesis, right? You've got this cosmic scope.

If I could add one little coda, just that when it comes to preaching this text, I had a woman come up to me after I was teaching in a congregation recently and asked me to consider not using the word barren to talk about the infertility of women in Genesis.

And I do think barren reflects the perspective of the text, right, where it is always, you know, the woman is unable to have children, etc., But I just wanted to add that for preachers to think about as you're preaching on the book of Genesis, what language you use around infertility, because that's an important note of pastoral care that I learned about.

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