Jeremy Myers: How do we help our young people think about God as moving in our world, working in our world? How do we teach our young people to be in our world, partnering with God in the redeeming work that God's doing in our world? So how do we teach them how to listen, engage, seek out places of brokenness courageously, hopefully be in those places to hear those stories, to be changed by their neighbors stories and then learn how to enter into God's story while they're carrying their neighbor's story with them? And by carrying their neighbor's story with them into God's story, it's going to change the way they hear God's story. Just like God's story will change the way they hear their neighbor's story.

Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University, and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg podcast, one way you can get to know some of the faculty and staff I'm honored to work with every day.

Catherine Day: I'm Catherine Reid Day, host of the Augsburg podcast. We're speaking today with Jeremy Myers, associate professor of religion, and director of the theology and public leadership program, among other roles he plays at Augsburg. Welcome Jeremy.

Jeremy Myers: Thank you, it's good to be here.

Catherine Day: I want to explore several aspects of your work and your passions and I wondered if you'd be willing to start with where you grew up and what you wanted to be.

Jeremy Myers: I grew up in the Chicago area. I was born out in Maryland. We moved to Chicago when I was three. My father was a Lutheran pastor, and my mother stayed home and raised myself and my sister. And it was a great place to grow up and be a kid. There were abandoned railroad tracks behind our house, which offered lots of places to disappear from your parents, and build forts, and explore, and be imaginative.

Catherine Day: So when you say Chicago, you weren't really right in the city?

Jeremy Myers: Not in the city, no. We were about 45 minutes out south of Chicago in a town called Madison, Illinois. And I have vivid memories of loving ... As I said my father was a pastor, and I loved being around the church. I would be given special jobs during certain services. On Good Friday my job was to dial the lights back as the service progressed so the sanctuary got gradually darker, and darker, and darker. And I loved the mystery of that. I remember being a little boy and just loving going to church at nighttime. So there was a mystery about what we did as a religious community that was appealing to me. There was a mystery about that space and the way it smelled, and the way it felt, and the way it looked. And it was a supportive community for me growing up. So the earliest thing I can remember wanting to be was a pastor, and I remember planning little services for my family and setting up an alter, and planning an order of worship, and writing a sermon, and having the family come together and do these little worship services together. And these were not ...

I also spent a lot of time pretending I was Han Solo and that was play. And when I was doing these services with my family it felt quite different. It wasn't play. I wasn't pretending to fly the millennium falcon, I was actually leading worship for them. It felt very different for me. And so early on I think, it wasn't the mechanical rote nature of being at church that appealed to me, but it was sort of the darkness and the smells of candles being extinguished after service, and you could smell that smoke. It was a community of people who were trying to figure out how to care for one another. It was all those things that I think early on when I look back now on my childhood, made me really want to pursue this line of work of being a religious leader. Though I never became ordained, so I'm not a pastor. I don't lead worship services. And I don't fly the millennium falcon either.

Catherine Day: But you still dream about it?

Jeremy Myers: I still dream about that one, yeah.

Catherine Day: So the path wasn't direct?

Jeremy Myers: No.

Catherine Day: What were the twists and turns?

Jeremy Myers: Well I parted ways with my church of origin, the Christian denomination I grew up in. As I got to college I realized I just didn't see the world the way they really wanted people to see the world, and I really found their way of seeing the world limited and not informed by the same way of reading the bible that I grew up ... The way I grew up reading the bible informed my world view differently than the denomination I was a part of so I parted ways and it was painful enough that eventually I really didn't want to have anything to do with the church. I felt like I would probably pop in from ... Because that longing for community and mystery was still there I'd probably pop in from time to time. I knew what I really wanted to do at this point was work with young people. I wanted to be a youth worker. I had had some other significant experiences as a teenager with programming and mentors that helped me feel empowered and have some agency, and I wanted to do that with young people also.

And so I sort of walked away from the church and started pursuing child psychology, child development. And really wanted to go into school counseling or school social work. And I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in child psychology and youth studies, and I did not get admitted to grad school for social work. So I had to figure out something else to do and was devastated because one, I really wanted to do that work, two, not getting into an academic program that you applied for makes you feel kind of stupid. So I had to deal with a lot of those kind of inner demons of not feeling worthwhile. And I ended up finding a congregation that was looking for a one year interim youth director to run the youth ministry. So I applied for that and I figured it's a chance to work with kids, which is what I really want to do. I'm comfortable in the church. I can do this for a year and get myself back on my feet.

Well during the course of that year I actually really loved it. Fell in love with the young people I was working with, fell in love with the work I was doing, found out that I was actually sort of good at it. Found my way into a church that allowed for some of the doubts and the questions and the push back that I really wanted to be able to wrestle with, and that I thought young people really needed to wrestle with as well. And that's sort of how I found my way back into this line of work in a full-time professional ministry. From there pursued my masters degree in youth leadership at Luther Seminary. And when I was done with that, I found out I actually wasn't stupid, that I actually was sort of smart, and wanted to do more academic work.

Became more curious, which then led me to PhD work. And while I was doing my PhD work at Luther Seminary, Augsburg posted a position looking for someone to come in and oversee their ministry degree program. And I was quite curious about that. And although at the time I thought I would complete my PhD and go back into the congregation and continue to do youth ministry in a congregation, teaching was something that really interested me, so I applied and through the application process found out that I was really excited. I really wanted this job. And fortunately was offered the position and have been here since. So I like to think of myself as youth worker, and I did that youth work in a church. And now I do that youth work as a religion professor at Augsburg.

Catherine Day: Where do the toddlers come in?

Jeremy Myers: I forgot about the toddlers, yeah. My first two years of college were at a Lutheran school in Chicago. And that's where I started to realize I could no longer kind of be a part of that particular denomination. And so I dropped out of school. Dropped out of college for a couple of years and traveled with a band, played base guitar in a band for a year. And that organization I traveled with was based here in Minneapolis, so when that tour was over I relocated here in Minneapolis and had to find work and liked kids and there was a daycare in downtown Minneapolis that was looking for a toddler teacher, and I applied and was hired to be a toddler teacher. So here I was, a 22 year old guy working as a toddler teacher in a field where there aren't many men changing diapers for a living. And that's probably where I really fell in love with the minds of young people.

I had always enjoyed the youth work I had done in my teens and early 20s, but working with those toddlers, the same group of kids day in and day out, and seeing how they had compassion for one another, how they functioned as a little community, how they were thoughtful, how they were problem solvers. The way we often think about toddlers is the way we often think about teenagers, in that they're selfish, they're whiny. Maybe toddlers bite more than teenagers but we tend to think of those young people in those two phases of life in very similar ways. I found them fascinating. And I found them to be exploring their world and trying to shape their world in really neat ways. And that was what drew me back to school to study child psychology, was working with those two year olds and seeing the giftedness and the tension and the cognitive dissonance that a two year old is experiencing. The inner tension and cognitive dissonance that a teenager is experiencing, because of developmental changes, is often seen as something that we should be afraid of or confused by. And I've just come to really see it as just rich fertile soil for imagination, and problem solving, and creating community, and chasing after passions. And I saw that in two year olds and then in my youth work I saw that in middle schoolers and high schoolers as well.

Catherine Day: I'm curious how if there's a connection for you between your own experience in the church with that, I'm picturing you with that dialing down the lights. Almost like I can almost feel your heart beating with anticipation and the drama of it if you will. And how do you think that's informed your own questions about the questions you say were really perplexing you around religion, or your desire to pursue the questions?

Jeremy Myers: Even though it was sort of man-made mystery, me dialing ... It was actually really a big dial that dimmed all the lights. So kind of this man made-

Catherine Day: It's fun to picture.

Jeremy Myers: It is yeah. I could barely reach it, and I had the bulletin and I had the numbers I was supposed to turn it to. The sanctuary became prettier and prettier, and scarier and scarier with each turn of the dial, and for whatever reason ... You know I asked someone who's in psychology, and maybe they could tell me. But that was compelling for me. Not just to turn like ... Being able to help out, I liked. But being able to create this space where other people ... My assumption, whether this was true or not, I don't know. But my assumption was that, turning those lights down made everyone in that space feel like it was becoming more and more sacred. Now that you asked the question, that is very much the way I feel about the work I try to do and the work I try and teach our students to do, is how do you walk into a space, into a community, into a system, and trust that the sacred is already there, and yet also function as a competent leader who can help others become aware of it as well?

And so maybe as a 12 year old I was tapping into that when I was turning that dial. I got to play a role in helping people connect to a mystery that I thought was important and meaningful, and there are actual feelings associated with it. Like embodied feelings of, not always peace, sometimes distress. But there were actual emotions that I felt in spaces and conversations where we were wondering about God, telling stories about God.

Catherine Day: How has that process of telling stories about God been present in your work here?

Jeremy Myers: I think it's the stories about God that are the thing that's compelling. And I think religious communities make God not very compelling when scripture is thought of as a manual or a history book. But when it's thought of as stories about God, stories by a community of people who are trying to figure out their interactions with something they would consider to be divine, they become really compelling stories to read together and they're humorous. And you can see yourself in them, and you can see the foibles and the idiocy, and the naivete of the people who are writing them. When you think of them as stories people told one another to try and grasp who God might be they become really compelling. So when I teach my religion 100 course, trying to invite students into scripture, now we're kind of turning the conversation towards the public theme. But the religion department and my degree program we have this aim, focus towards religion in the public square. If we enter into the stories about God that we have in scripture as public documents of public stories that a public community told to one another, to try and understand their public life together, they become so much more human, rather than divine.

And I think when they become more human they actually have more power. I think if we talk about these stories as divine stories then our students, I would say anyone, has a really hard time connecting with them because they're just odd stories. But if you talk about them as human stories, well humans are odd. So then they become humorous, they function as like a mirror back on us. I remember students getting frustrated because as we were reading through the old testament, they were saying like, well the Israelites seemed to keep doing the same thing, they seem to keep making the same mistakes. Doesn't that sound familiar? And they're like yeah, it kind of sounds familiar. So once these stories can become strangely familiar or mysteriously familiar, they can teach us something about ourselves. And they can then empower us I think, to also tell our own stories about where we think we might be encountering God. We're not judging our own experiences that we might consider to be divine against some sort of assumed universal norm, which is often how scripture is held. Well if we can help folks realize that these stories about God are human stories, then our human stories can matter also.

And it creates opportunity and space for people to encounter God in new ways that don't make sense given that narrative. These stories we have of God and scripture and descriptive of a community of people seeking to understand God. It's not a prescription. They're not prescribing the way you encounter God in the world.

Catherine Day: What I was thinking about is willpower. So if we say that you have to live by these rules, as humans we think of willpower as being really strong, but in fact studies show that it's very weak. We're constantly losing our willpower. And it seems like you're making the connection to the stories that actually it expands our capacity to stay true to what matters to us. I don't know if I'm putting words in your mouth, but that's kind of what was striking me as you were talking about your quest between what you've experienced in the denomination before versus what you've been pursuing now. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Jeremy Myers: Yeah, yeah. I think if we treat it as a prescribed method for encountering God in the world or understanding what God does or doesn't do in the world, it can sometimes be helpful. But what happens when people have similar ... Let me use the sacraments for example. Or what we would call in the Lutheran church, the means of grace. And we would say the means of grace so word and sacrament, preaching of the word, proclaiming of the word, administering the sacraments, holy communion, baptism, these are means of grace. We would say these are ways in which God's grace comes to us in tangible physical ways. And I love that. I love the fact that Lutheran theology talks about bread and water and wine as being things that God sees as worthy enough to put God's self into. I like that. But if what the sacraments do is reconcile our relationship with God, and empower us to reconcile our relationship with others, if that's what the sacraments do, then if someone experiences reconciliation with God, and empowerment to reconcile with others, if they experience that same thing in some other way, then can we call that thing sacramental also or is it only bread, water, wine? Or is it the experience that those things make happen that becomes most important?

And so how do we teach this sacramental theology, bread, water, wine, in a way that doesn't limit it to a pastor with the magic fingers speaking the right words at the right time over these elements, and poof, somehow something miraculous happens? But how do we teach these stories and this theology in a way that our students enter into the world with sacramental lenses on, looking for that same thing happening in other places. You know, you and I talked when we had our conversation earlier about how much we love trees. I love trees. And I couldn't tell you in this conversation why, but for whatever reason I love trees and trees function that way for me. I can't even believe I'm putting this on a recording right now, but trees function that way for me. In some way they're very symbolic of reconciliation between God and humanity. So nowhere in Lutheran theology do we talk about tree as a means of grace. But for me, they function that way.

Going back to your question about the rules, what I'm most interested in my students gaining, whether they're in my degree program, or whether they're in our general religion classes, is a worldview or a lens for moving through the world that thinks that God might actually be possible.

Catherine Day: What you're inviting is a sense of going into a world with both possibility and hope then?

Jeremy Myers: Hopeful realism I would say. Possibility in hope. It's not just putting on our rose colored glasses and assuming that everything's going to be great. Again this sacramental way of thinking about the world is a belief in a God who shows up in the woundedness and the brokenness, because that's where God chooses to be. So the places of woundedness and brokenness, painful places, where maybe we don't want to go are not signs of God's absence. They're not signs of God's curse. Those are the places God prefers to be. It's a hopeful realism. Like how do we move through our world looking for both places of brokenness and death and suffering, but how do we also move through our world looking for places of life and newness and resurrection.

Catherine Day: Well that seems to transition us to this public theology work that you're doing. Can you just talk a little bit about what got you stared down that path, and what your hopes and aspirations are for it?

Jeremy Myers: Well again it starts in youth work for me. And so when I'd served a congregation here in Minnesota, in Fridley, Minnesota and I served a congregation in Valparaiso, Indiana. And when I was both places, and I didn't really think much of this at the time, this is more of an insight gained through hindsight. I was very curious in those places about, what can we be doing as a church out beyond the church? So I was always like intrigued by empty storefronts in the community. Or one of the churches had an afterschool program. And one of our young people wasn't showing up for a while, and I was worried about him. So I went driving through the townhouses where he lives to see if I could find him, just to see if he was okay. And I realized, man there are a ton of kids that live up here in these townhouses. What would it look like if we did our afterschool program up here rather than at the church? So those questions were always there for me. I was always kind of curious about what would it look like if, but never did anything with it.

And then I ended up at Augsburg, and I'm teaching, and I'm trying to teach students how to lead ministry with young people in congregations. The question of, how do we teach the faith if faith is taught? How do we do faith formation or vocational formation with young people? And I just kept thinking well, you can't start in the text. You can't start in the bible, you can't start in the confessions of the church. There has to be some sort of disruptive element. There has to be something that shakes you. That generates questions, that make you want to go the text. The Lutheran church has a long history of having seventh graders show up for confirmation for an hour a week for two years, and we assume that they're walking into that room because they really want to learn what we're going to teach them. And I think we now know that that's not really the case for most of them. And my assumption was, what if we could create for them some sort of encounter or experience, or disruption that would generate questions that would drive them back to the text? So then I stared to think, all right well how do you do that disruption? Fabricating a disruption in someone's life is not good practice. It is borderline manipulation there.

And you don't need to do it, because the neighbor is disruptive. Augsburg's call to be a good neighbor, we believe we are called to serve our neighbor, to be a good neighbor. That neighbor is a disruption always. And so we don't need to create, we don't need to fabricate a disruption, we need to help our young people recognize that the people they encounter on a daily basis place demands on them. They function as a disruption. That's probably a bad way to describe your neighbor, but they do. They place demands on you that might not jive with your own understanding of yourself or the world, or with the time you think you have in that moment. So this is where the public church idea kind of started with. And it doesn't stop with this theological exercise of wondering how these stories interact with one another, but then there is a movement, there is a turn towards discernment and action where you say okay, given what I've heard in God's story, given what we've heard in God's story, given what we've heard in our neighbor's story, who are we being called to be in this place in this moment? What am I being called to do in this place in this moment?

My hunch is that most faith communities want their young people, and not just their young people, but their old people too, to be asking themselves that question on a daily basis. Who is God calling me to be in my family, in my workplace, in my neighborhood? What is God calling me to do in these places? And then not just asking oneself that question, but then turning towards action and actually doing something. So if these are the way we want our young people living out their faith, if this is the way we want people living out their faith on a daily basis, we actually have to go through those motions with them. We have to go through those movements with them. And so the public church work really grew out of me trying to think of an intentional way of doing faith formation and vocational formation with young people.

And as I was exploring that, some of the leaders who were helping me think about this, helped me realize that this isn't just a youth project, you're talking about a new way of functioning as a congregation. A new rhythm of life for a community of faith. And so then I shifted my thinking towards from just a youth ministry approach, to what would it look like for a congregation to be engaged in ... What if these movements out into the community into God's story, into discernment, back into the community with the word or action of good news? What if these movements became the normal rhythms of life for a group of people gathered together as a community of faith?

Catherine Day: Tell us about the public church framework?

Jeremy Myers: The public church framework is a cycle of four movements or four art forms that enable a congregation to move into its context intentionally. That's at the core of what I teach my students in the theology and public leadership degree program. It's also the method we're using in the Riverside Innovation Hub, which is a new five year lily funded project, where we're working with 16 local congregations to help them re-imagine their work with young adults. So I'll describe it in the context of the Riverside Innovation Hub, because I think that'll be easier. The Riverside Innovation Hub is functioning off of the assumption that young adults, 22 to 29 year olds, are not really interested in being targeted by a congregation. They do not want to be a target market. Rather they would like to be invited into some meaningful work that is place based, that is contextualized. And so the public church framework becomes a really helpful way for a congregation to begin imagining place based work in their context that young adults can participate in. So that starts with a movement, what we call ... The term we use is accompaniment. It starts with a movement out into the neighborhood. The congregation moves out into the community that it's located in. Its actual context.

What does it mean for this faith community, this institution, this system, this group of people, to be planted here in this geographical location? The first movement is an intentional movement out into the community to listen. Who are our neighbors? What are their dreams for our community? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are they afraid of? What do they hope for? What makes them laugh? What do they live for? And just doing the hard work of getting to know those people. That's the first art form, the first movement. The second movement then is the movement back into interpretation. Where we now start to weave God's story into these stories we've heard out in the community. How do the things we say we believe about God impact what we've heard in our neighborhood? How do the promises we say God makes impact the way we hear our neighbor's story? And vice versa. How does our neighbor's story impact the assumptions we make about God? Maybe the things we've always thought about God have been too limited and we encounter stories in our neighbor's lives that change that and expand that. So that's the interpretive move.

The third movement then is the movement into discernment. Where the community wonders together, who's God calling us to be in this place, in this time? What is it that God's calling us to do? And then the fourth movement is a re-engagement with the community in what we call proclamation. And proclamation is often thought of as one person speaking to a group of people. The way we use it is the proclamation of good news. Douglas John Hall is a theologian who says "Good news is always good because it's always displacing someone's actual bad news." So if you want to proclaim good news into someone's life, you need to know what their bad news is. And so the first three steps are really about hearing and understanding that bad news in context, and the four step proclamation is reengaging with a word or an action that's actually liberating for that community of people in that context. That might be an outdoor worship service on Easter morning, and that's what churches love to hear.

That might be participating in a black lives matter protest. That might be working on water runoff issues to make the watershed healthier. It might be installing solar panels on the roof. It might be working some kind of micro loan program for entrepreneurial type young people in the community who want to start small businesses. But it grows out of a deep listening to the community and a congregation thinking, what's going on here? How might God be working reconciliation in this community? And how might we get involved in it? We have different levels of involvement, so we probably have about 25 congregations in the metro area involved with us. We're in the second stage now. The first stage was a year of listening where we did some research and we studied local congregations who are known as doing good work with young adults already. So we spent a lot of time listening to the leaders of those churches, listening to the young adults at those congregations, to learn from them. And we're in the second phase now, where we have hired eight young adults who are working as Augsburg employees for the next nine months as innovation coaches.

So each of these innovation coaches are assigned two congregations. So they spend 20 hours a week in each of those two congregations, 20 in one, 20 in the other, helping those congregations work through these art forms of the public church framework. They've spent these last couple of months getting the congregation to practice accompaniment in their community. Now they'll be moving into the interpretation work and the discernment work. And they'll spend nine months doing those three movements with the congregation. And at the end of that time these congregations will submit grant proposals to us. Essentially what they're doing is they're saying, we've done the accompaniment, we've done the interpretation, we've done the discernment, and here's the proclamation we'd like to try for the next couple years, will you fund it? And so they submit us those grant proposals, we fund it, and then the next couple years will be those ... The coaches will no longer be in those congregations after the grants get submitted. They're just there to help them write the grant. At the end of that time, those congregations will have grant money in two years to really try, experiment with some new things.

So we're in the second year. And then those two years will be year three and year four. And then the final year would just be a year of cleaning up and evaluating the work we did.

Catherine Day: You describe this as kind of a circle. That it's feeding things both directions, is the way I kind of interpret it. I almost see the piscean fish, or the church fish swimming back and forth if you will. Was that an intentional design?

Jeremy Myers: Yeah. My colleague in the Riverside Innovation Hub, Kristina Fruge will talk about the mutual transformation that happens through this in accompaniment. So the goal if you will, is to really proclaim good news or become good news, or speak good news, that's the goal. And sometimes we often think that that means the institution will do the speaking, or the institution will do the proclaiming. But sometimes what might happen if you're truly listening, the good news that you proclaim to your neighbor might actually be you confessing your institution's racism. Or confessing that your community has been hurtful towards LGBT community. That's what we mean by mutual transformation. If you engage with your neighbor in a way that truly honors your neighbor as a person, in a way that's not dehumanizing them, this is not market research. This is accompaniment. Then if you're truly listening and discerning, then the good news might be you saying, I'm a screw up and I'm sorry. I just read an article, another interview that one of our partners congregations did. And they talked about the porous walls of the church or the porous membrane around the church. That if God frees us to be human then our neighbor can help God do that work of making us become human too.

So our neighbor can liberate us as well. We're not just there to liberate the neighbor, but it's that relationality, that authentic human encounter, where we really see one another, where we really know one another. That that's liberation and the church doesn't own that. The church can partake in that. So we're just trying to find methods to help congregational leaders be open to partaking in that work in their communities.

Catherine Day: I was struck by the poll that just released. The fastest growing religion in Minnesota and maybe beyond that is none. Do you have any idea of what might be happening 10 years from now because of the work you're doing?

Jeremy Myers: I like that young people are leaving the church. I like that they're not willing to put up with bad church anymore. And I think a lot of what we have out there is just bad church that people have tolerated because the culture has expected them to tolerate it. And now the culture no longer props that up. So young adults are saying, I'm not anti-church, I'm not anti-religion, I'm not anti-God. What you're doing there doesn't work for me. There was an article in the Star Trib this Sunday about that. And when I read the comments, I read comments of people who are still very inclined to think that God's doing something in the world. For them God is still a possibility. And ironically, faith communities, churches, make God feel less like a possibility. And so they want to be engaged in ways and in places. They want to engage life in way that keeps God as a possibility. And a lot of our congregations have flattened that mystery that I was talking about from my childhood. We flattened that. It's not there, and so God isn't a possibility. This institution seems to be the only possibility.

We show up and we talk about God, maybe. We talk about the things we think God does. But you never help me actually encounter those things. You never help me actually become a participant in those things. So I am happy that young people are leaving the church. It also breaks my heart. Because I think the church could be more, and I think they could make it more. So my hope is that we will give congregations permission to set some things aside, that we will teach congregations how to listen, how to draw people into a theological process of wondering who God is in this place and what God is doing, so that God becomes a possibility again for people. And I hope that these congregations will then start to allow young adults to lead. To bring their unique questions, to bring their unique ways of encountering what they think is sacramental into the church. I think that would make the church a richer place. It would make the church a public place. It would make the church a place that compels people to live public lives of faith, where they believe God is at work in the world and they believe they can participate in that work.

Catherine Day: I do wonder if in fact part of what you're talking about is a reconnection to wonder and mystery, as the path to save not only our religion, but to also save the world from our own destruction.

Jeremy Myers: Absolutely.

Catherine Day: And is there a connection with that for you?

Jeremy Myers: Yeah. Absolutely. The text we've been using to guide our work in the Riverside Innovation Hub, that's a text that's been really important to me too in my teaching in theology and public leaderships is this vision in Ezekiel 47 where this divine tour guide is showing Ezekiel the river as it flows out of the temple, away from the temple. And this river grows deeper and wider as it flows away from the temple. And at one point this divine tour guide, this angelic figure, whoever it is, turns to Ezekiel, the first words that he says to Ezekiel are "Mortal do you see this?" And in some ways that question, mortal do you see this, is a question I want the leaders that come out of our program to have emblazoned on their hearts, so that they're looking. If you know someone's going to ask you the question do you see this, you're going to pay attention and look. And so it's engaging the world with an expectation of wonder, of mystery. It's that hopeful realism that there's pain and suffering and brokenness and scabs and wounds, and those are beautiful. And that doesn't mean they're not painful, and that doesn't mean sometimes they were inflicted in ways that were deeply unjust. But there's beauty there, there's healing there, so learning how to see again in the world.

I think as I read the new testament, I feel like that's what Jesus was really trying to do. I mean like sometimes literally healing a blind person, but figuratively too, saying you can see, you can do this. You can see this again. Mortal you can see this again. So it's having leaders that expect to encounter that wonder, and go out looking for it, and then help other people look for it as well. In trees, in people, in brokenness, in healing, that they believe that there's something that cares about this universe, that's at work in those things.

Catherine Day: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jeremy Myers: Thank you.

Catherine Day: That was Jeremy Myers, associate professor of religion and public theology. I'm Catherine Reid Day, and this has been the Augsburg podcast.

Paul Pribbenow: Thanks for listening to the Augsburg podcast. I'm president Paul Pribbenow. For more information please visit augsburg.edu.