Rev. Dr Chad Rimmer, Rector and Dean of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University
Theological Keynote Address to the ELCA 2025 Churchwide Assembly, July 30, 2025
[1] Greetings from the faculty and staff of your Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, of Lenoir-Rhyne University, one of your seven ELCA Seminaries and one of three embedded within our NECU schools that are stewarding the 500-year-old Lutheran tradition of Theological Education in the midst of a tumultuous climate for higher education in our nation today.
[2] Friends, from your global communion of the Lutheran World Federation, which I was called to serve for many years, I invite you to sing this poem from the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore. As a call and response, I invite you to repeat after me until this becomes a prayer…
“Silence my soul…These trees are prayers…I asked the tree…tell me about God…and it blossomed…”
[3] I have been invited to give a theological reflection on our theme, “For the Life of the World.” Speaking theologically about anything implies saying something that is grounded in our knowledge about God or from our experience of knowing God. As Lutherans, our theology of the cross, keeps us honest about what we can claim to know about God through our reason and what we can know by what is revealed to us. Tell me about God…
[4] I only have 30 minutes…probably 25 now. So, I am going to make three quick moves. Firstly, to ground us in our theme. Secondly, to ground us in our context. And thirdly, I am going to try to suggest how that theme might equip you as voting members of this Assembly who are entrusted with responsibility for the life of the Church in a time such as this.
Our Theme: On the Nicene Creed and the Nature of God
[5] I begin with the Nicene creed, because the third article on the Holy Spirit, is the source of our theme, “For the Life of the World.” We remember that the creeds were theological formulations that preceded the canonization of Christian Scripture. They were liturgical confessions of the faith before we had a Bible. For all of the social and historical critique of the council of Nicaea–about the relationship between the structures of church and the state, power and the public role of theology that can guide our reception of the creeds in the current American context of growing Christian nationalism and our new social statement on Civic Life–we remember that our Lutheran confession is grounded in this symbol of our unity with the communion of saints across time and space. (This is one significance of receiving the “Common Statement on the Filioque” at this Assembly.)
This theme is a reminder that the Church, that we are called here to tend, is a creature, a creation of the Word (creatura verbi), a creature that has a nature: we are one, holy, catholic and apostolic. I am going to play with the idea of the apostolicity of the Church.
[6] But I want to remind us that the aim of the creed was to make a theological statement about the nature of God. At its heart, the creed is a fundamental confession about a relationship of Divine Love. I think this doxological claim is the only purely theological statement that we can ever make – God IS love – all else that follows by revelation and reason is constructed on this theological point of Divine simplicity. This is why the Apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13, unfolds the theo-logic of this perennial truth, that love is the only thing that is eternal. Even faith and hope will end when you are in the presence of God, but Love will remain because Love is the stuff, the glory of God.
[7] God is love. And love has two moves. Love creates and love reconciles. The Divine breathes out, and the Divine breathes in. Astrophysicists refer to this as chaos theory, the Bible calls it Wisdom or Ruah. In that breathing out, Love creates all that is seen and unseen. This was the ta panta–all things of Joseph Sittler’s address to the 1961 World Council of Churches Assembly, Called to Unity. Deacon Clare Josef-Maier reminded us that creation was the first communication of God’s love. And any artist or parent knows that creating is a risky prospect that implies freedom of the creature that you loved into being.
[8] The Creator made a good, relational ecology of diverse beings in mutuality, interdependence, and a balanced harmony that we hear in the poetic cadence of Genesis and echoed in the stories and teachings of Indigenous and other wisdom traditions. I am thinking here of the writings of Vine Deloria and other Native American luminaries. But creatures have agency. Genesis says, so, too does the Earth itself to bring forth life. And we humans have the will to disintegrate into conflict and violence. I don’t call Genesis 3 the story of the fall, I call it the Disintegration. The disintegration of unitive consciousness: of humans from the Divine, from each other through our cultures of shame, from our co-creatures resulting in extraction and exploitation, and eventually, our disintegration from the land itself, narrated as our expulsion from the garden, and experienced in colonial narratives and false binaries today. Our history is part of creation, God’s breathing out.
[9] But what is revealed and entrusted to us through the revelation of Jesus is the ministry of reconciliation. God’s breathing in, this is part of God’s Mission, for which the church was created. Rev. Atahualpa, in his Bible study invited us to expand the scope of the church’s role in this ministry of reconciliation. The creed confesses that the spiritual and visible unity of the catholic Church, and our reconciliation with all of creation, seen and unseen, is an evocation of the simple, relational unity of the Trinity that is the “Life of the World”. Willie Korboi reminded us in his Bible study that “the world” here means the entire cosmos.
[10] Our stories are cosmologies that shape our theological reflection. This is why Feminist Theologian Serene Jones calls, theology a kind of cartography…like a map, stories orient us in time and space, in a way that help us discern our path through our current context.
[11] Fundamentally, origin myths or genesis narratives are wrestling with our confession about the goodness of a Creator, and the obvious presence of brokenness in creation. How can we understand disintegration or the breakdown of ecologies, and our participation in the reconciliation of all that is seen and unseen, to heal and sustain the life of the world?
[12] Friends, I want to remind us that the creedal language is actually, “the Life of the World…to Come”. And those two words, “to come” move us to my second point. In the way of liberative traditions, as a constructive ecotheologian, let’s consider our context.
Our Context: Ecological disintegration
[13] Those two words, “to come” point towards the gap between what is and what will be. This point was apparent in all of our Pre-Assembly Bible studies, that called us to do justice. The realities of climate change, gender based discrimination and violence, and the reality of armed conflict (and here I am thinking particularly of the systematic violence in Gaza and the murdered and missing Indigenous Women), reveal the gap between the gift and promise of the Gospel, the apostolic seed that we proclaim in word, sacrament and service, and what we see in our communities in the US and across the globe in regressive legislative policies and pushback to fundamental work on the rights of protected classes of gender, race, sex, ability, and age.
[14] Our context is one of ecological breakdown. We are witnessing the breakdown of biological ecosystems due to the extraction, economic fetishization and commodification of our co-creatures, what Carolyn Merchant calls, the death of nature. We are also witnessing the breakdown of socio-economic and political ecologies that were established in the wake of 19th and 20th century state sponsored violence. Multilateral democratic treaty bodies like the UN Security Council, Human Rights Council, and UNEP, were entreated to safeguard peace between governments and civil society, and establish human rights mechanisms and frameworks to protect people and planet. And as part of civil society, and never immune from these movements, the Church also experiences tension in our ecclesial ecology as well.
[15] Our commitments to ecumenical bodies, such as the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation are rarely felt at local levels in the US, and the theological reflection that is born out of generations of councils and work on the Faith and Order of our church are at risk of being forgotten in each generation. Even as the ELCA has evolved from predecessor bodies with differing ideas about the nature and structure of the church, we are receiving proposals on changes in candidacy that will affect the nexus between the church, academy and public space (which is a seedbed of the Lutheran tradition); reconsiderations of social statements that require deep discernment; and recommendations from the CRLC and the response of the Church Council that call us to consider new constellations of expressions of the ELCA. We are experiencing the evolution of relationships that make up the Church. In church, society and the Earth itself, we are experiencing ecological shifts, relational shifts in the life of the world…to come.
[16] That gap between what is and the gift and promise of what is “to come” can be a source of anger or anxiety that fuels justice movements in the church and society. And while I am not here to speak to particular structural proposals, I want to speak to the anxiety.
The Gospel and the Apostolic Seed
[17] What I really want to say is that the breakdown of ecologies is a relational problem, not just a structural problem. It is in the wheelhouse of our Lutheran tradition to reform structures, when we deem them unjust. But we should never be confused that restructuring will get us closer to the heart of our relational God. That makes our political structures an idol, as Luther was clear in his catechism on the commandments and Powers and Principalities.
[18] The pressure of this kind of historic materialism is, I believe, part of a justice fatigue among many today, young people included. I hear this from my own children, particularly my son who is about the work of LGBTQIA+ rights, upon which quite literally his wellbeing depends as a gay man. But he struggles to stay engaged because the myths of both progressive and conservative movements are so structurally oriented that many young people are wary to get involved for fear of being criticized for getting it wrong.
[19] Well, have I got good news for you. Are you ready? You’re going to get it wrong.
[20] I think Luther’s whole reformation project began when he realized that the anxiety over getting it wrong is the anxiety that holds us in bondage to the status quo when it comes to unjust power. Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard later talked about this in existential terms of ethics as the sickness unto death. That is, the anxiety or fear that we might not get it right paralyzes us to do nothing, and that is the same as death for people and the planet that are suffering deferred justice. In my work in Climate Justice, I hear time and again that this is the effect of overwhelming climate data that is meant to motivate us, but creates eco-anxiety among our young people, which is now a condition that is so ubiquitous it is being debated whether it belongs it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That is the reality of our collective anxiety around justice and reform movements.
[21] But into that reality comes the good news that we Lutherans call justification by grace through faith. According to the Augsburg Confession, which our ELCA constitution affirms is a witness to the Gospel, the Church is that one, holy and catholic gathering in which the doctrine of the Gospel is proclaimed in Word and sacrament. This, friends, is truly the apostolic nature of the church – not only the missional, sent out action of the church, but the Apostolic seed, the revelation of a Triune, relational creating and reconciling God that we bear to the world, from which follows any piece of what we might call a Lutheran identity.
[22] This includes our commitment to Law and Gospel as the grammar of grace that refuses to get bogged down in analogy or legalism, but points to the promise of the incarnation to affirm that all life is a gift. This includes our commitment to a concept of freedom that refuses to accept nationalistic notions of liberty, but proclaims a paradox of liberation that says you are only freed to do the loving thing for your co-creatures no matter what the law says. This includes our theology of the cross that refuses to spiritualize the suffering of our neighbor, but calls a thing what it is, not settling for shallow justice, but advocating for restorative justice, which Cornel West reminds us is what love looks like in public.
[23] Friends, this is the link between justification and justice; God’s grace and your gifts that is always personal but never private. This is the true apostolic nature of the church that we are called to tend “for the life of the world”. And rightly proclaimed, that grace and justification transforms our anxieties into action for engaging our gifts in the work of transformative justice for the life of the world…to come.
[24] Luther knew justification as a process of becoming. Writing about the parable of the yeast in Matthew 13, in the Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521), Luther writes, “This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming…we are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it; the process is not yet finished, but it is going on; this is not the end, but it is the road; all does not yet gleam with glory, but all is being purified.” (PE 3:30-31)
[25] Justification is only the beginning. The good news of reconciliation breathes us back into community, and connects new lines of kinship so that we can participate in what is becoming. It is an invitation to become the new thing, to participate in the life of the world to come. So as we discern questions about our becoming, such as reconsiderations of our social statements on sexuality or civic life or realignments in our ecclesial expressions, realize that in leading adaptive change processes, we are engaged in remaking the life of the world to come.
From Cosmos to Cosmogenesis
[26] Once the mystic Meister Eckhart was asked, “What does God do all day?” And he answered, “God lies on the maternity bed and gives birth”. I asked the tree…tell me about God…and it blossomed…Deacon Clare reminded us of the continual creation of Divine Wisdom, the Word that Colossians reminds us was before creation is God’s Poetic work of continuing to speak and create and transgress and re-create for the sake of life. And that Word revealed in Christ is not just a cosmology, but our baptism is an invitation to participate in cosmogenesis. It is our mystical participation in co-creating the life of the world to come. As Luther wrote in the catechism, when we pray “your Kingdom come”, we are really praying, let it come through us, ELCA. That gap that we see between what is and what is not yet compels us to seek racial justice, repudiate the colonial Doctrine of Discovery, adapt and affirm the presence of queer, colored and differently abled bodies and minds, and center our young people.
[27] And so, for my final move, I want to briefly reflect on how that call to cosmogenesis, that continual creation happens. Yes, the ministry of reconciliation was revealed in Christ. But our constitution, affirms that this good news begins “with the Word in creation.” As Psalm 19 sings, “Day after day [creation] pours forth speech; night after night [creatures] reveal knowledge.” Creation teaches us in its being. Luther viewed creation as masks of God, and Joseph Sittler called creatures, evocations of grace. It should be no surprise that the wisdom of a relational Creator is woven into the fabric of creation. And so, when we think about becoming, emergence, or continual creation, in the natural sciences, we call this “evolution”. And while I have much to say about adaptive change, evolution and theology post-Darwin, I only have time to make one quick statement.
[28] Amongst the beautiful diversity that results from evolution, evolution conserves forms that serve the function of life. Yes, there are punctuated and cataclysmic events, but evolution proceeds by geological time that conserves what works. The bones in your hand are the same bones as those in the fins of a blue whale. In other words, forms change, but they do so only to better fulfill the function of life. And there is a seed of life that is constant throughout creation. In spiritual ecology we call this, the soul of the Earth, and while climate change calls us to adapt in order to care for the Earth, our human vocation to Care for the Soul of the Earth persists.
[29] From the liberation theologies of our friends in West Africa[1], womanist theologians among the Circle of Concerned African Women such as Professor Musa Dube teach us about the tradition of the Sankofa. Sankofa is a Ghanaian Tree word that means, “go back and get it.” This wisdom is symbolized by a bird that, even while she is flying forward into the future of the life of the world to come, she reaches back and carries the seed, the egg of the tradition. The wisdom of the ancestors remains true, no matter what form and future it flies into. I want to suggest that this is like the apostolic nature of the church. The Lutheran tradition is certainly suited to be always reforming structures where they are unjust. But, the report of the CRLC lifts up several principles that speak to the persistent nature of the church that guide our discernment in this moment of moral imagination. First among them is “interdependence.”
[30] I began with the theological claim that the Creed confesses… the comos is created and sustained by an interdependent unity of a Triune God, a dance of Divine love. And as a result, the church, both the seed of the gospel itself and the forms of Ministry that proclaim that seed in word, sacrament and service, are the apostolic nature that we are called to tend into the future, for the life of the world. And so I close by naming aspects of the interdependent ecology of the church, our communion, to keep in mind as we discern.
[31] Firstly, I hope we will consider the expressions of our communion beyond congregation, synod and churchwide, to include in real ways that our global communion of the Lutheran World Federation will impact the daily life of the ELCA. With over 77 million Lutherans among 150 member churches in 99 countries around the world, the median demographic of a Lutheran today is an East African Woman. And in our study process on Lutheran identities entitled “Now There Are Varieties”, the asymmetry of gifts and forms of ecclesial and liturgical expressions around the communion is inspiring. And as the ELCA looks for pathways to authentic diversity and dismantling systemic racism, we can look beyond ourselves to our ecclesial altar and pulpit fellowship with the diversity of our global Lutheran siblings, invite them to the table and receive the gift that they offer us.
[32] Secondly, we must attend to our ecumenical commitments, because what happens to one member of the body affects all members. Recent formal ecumenical dialogues and full communion agreements have nurtured the visible unity of the church that are part of the reconciling Word we proclaim. The faith and order established with ecumenical partners will be affected by structural or constitutional changes within the ELCA. And receptive ecumenism means that we might learn new and just methods and modes of being church from them. Particularly, our document, Faithful Teaching, that emerged from the 12th Roman Catholic/Lutheran dialogue focuses on the nature of synodality, which is another way of talking about interdependence. It highlights a possible path for the church to engage in discernment and moral imagination that is faithful to the apostolic seed and shape of the ecumenical church. Part of that vision points to the final point that I want to propose.
[33] Thirdly, the concept of the mutual magisterium that can exist between congregational synods, the episcopal ministry of our bishops as spiritual leaders, and the teaching theologians of our church. I may be claiming an ecclesiology that the ELCA never has, but your theologians are here to do the hard theological work of becoming while we recreate our relationships in communion.
[34] Because here is the catch – we never do structural reform for structure’s sake. What we do is the result of the love received in communion. The Eucharist is our gift and way to re-member what has been disintegrated. As Conjunto theologians remind us, Eucharistic feasting is resistance. In the face of narratives of economic scarcity and the colonial violence that would deny and disappear bodies eucharist is the way to re-member the bodies that are excluded or disappeared from democratic spaces. Who is not present at our table as we discern? And as womanist theologians like Emily Townes remind us, it is a way to re-story our narrative and motivate us to our creative work of cosmogenesis through the act of communion.
[35] What we do is re-member the body. We host the meal. We keep coming back to the table and drawing the circle wider, not only mapping as consultants do, who are our assets here at the table, but rather constantly and faithfully asking who is not here at the table…and needs to be…Ecumenical and global partners, young people and the historically marginalized. Come, eat, drink, and dream the life of the world to come into being.
[36] The Word is still making the world, friends, that is why it is hard. So, let me speak to the young people, those in the CRLC report who call for deeper engagement in this poetic work. In an age of epidemic social and eco-anxiety, here is hope. You will not, church, solve relational problems with structural solutions alone. But rather than anxiety, this is our Eucharistic hope.
[37] As an ecologist, I hear the gift and the promise clearly – we are becoming a new ecology of grace. As a theologian, I hear the gift and promise clearly – we are part of that becoming, our baptisms redeem our human call to till and keep so that the world can heal, can continue to grow. For all of us in a Reformation tradition, we can hear structural re-formation not as a problem to be solved but a natural becoming of the creature that is the church, precisely because, as Orthodox theologian Schmemann reminds us, we are a living sacrament, for the life of the world…to come.
[38] View this work of reformation not as a necessity because of our fall, but rather, as the Easter Exultat sings, the result of the Felix Culpa, the Happy Fall into God’s work of continual creation.
[39] So, finally, let me close in a homiletic of hope for this Assembly. Even though you are a governance body, please resist the approach of the law: that if you get this right, then we will constitute a body that is just. That only heightens the anxiety in the room.
[40] Rather lead our discernment with the grammar of the Gospel: Because Wisdom delights in making all things new, therefore, it is by grace that we are freed to become. We are becoming, and this is a holy moment of moral imagination.
[41] I don’t know what it will look like, but I know that we are freed to recreate a loving ecology that reflects what it means to be Lutheran around the globe today. So to keep ourselves open to the ways in which the Spirit is nurturing us for the life of the World to come, people and planet, we might pray something like this:
[42] Silence my soul…these trees are prayers…I asked the tree…tell me about God…and it blossomed.
Rev. Dr Chad Rimmer serves as Rector and Dean of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University.