Editor Donald H. Harrison has recently returned from a roundtrip cruise between San Diego and the Hawaiian Islands. Following is his second in a series of stories.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — If you want the chance to meet someone and have an interesting conversation, involving hearing another perspective, take a cruise, like the one Nancy and I recently took round trip to Hawaii aboard Holland-America’s MS Zaandam.
Sitting in a lounge with no other place any of us had to be, Rev. David Baker, the Protestant chaplain aboard, and his wife, Gloria, shared with me some highlights of his career as a Lutheran minister and summarized some of their experiences visiting East Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority.
Baker followed in the ministerial footsteps of the Rev. Ehrenfried Hugo (E.H.) Baker, his father, becoming ordained in 1960 in the Swedish Lutheran Church of North America, which subsequently merged into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
His first assignment was in a missionary church in Edmonton, Alberta, where membership had dwindled to six people just one year after the original pastor had left. Baker labored there for five years, and he said that by the time he left between 150 and 200 congregants were attending services every Sunday morning.
Next, he went to Yakima, Washington, to be senior pastor at a large church with 1,300 members. He had served previously in the same church as an intern in conjunction with his theological studies at Augustana College, named for the city in Germany (Augsburg) associated with reformer Martin Luther enunciation of his 95 theses in 1517. After Yakima, Baker went to Corvallis, Oregon, and later to San Jose, California, noting wryly that his career seemed to be ever going south.
In 1994 he was appointed assistant to the bishop for Northern California and Northern Nevada, a position that often involved him in matching ministers and congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
There is a similarity between the procedures of his church and those of Reform Jewish congregations for replacing longtime spiritual leaders following their retirements. Recently, for example, Temple Emanu-El in San Diego chose Rabbi Devorah Marcus to become its new spiritual leader. However, before that happened, Rabbi Richard Shapiro was appointed an interim rabbi in keeping with Reform Judaism’s policy to encourage congregations to wait approximately a year before replacing such long-serving spiritual leaders as Emanu-El’s retired Rabbi Martin S. Lawson.
“We are members of the Peace Lutheran Church in Grass Valley, California,” Baker said. “Our pastor retired the first Sunday in February. He had been there 29 years. I am the ‘supply pastor’ for two months probably, although I arranged for coverage while I am here (aboard the Zaandam). We will probably have an interim placed in March, for about a year, maybe more, because the previous pastor was there so long.”
He said there are two types of “interim pastors” — those that take the temporary job intentionally, and those who were hired as permanent replacements but didn’t work out, so go looking for another assignment. Sometimes a pastor, like a rabbi, is “compared unfavorably to his predecessor, so he is gone. I was assistant to the bishop for a dozen years or so working with many congregations through that process.”
In the world of Christianity, he said, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans follow a traditional liturgy which generally begins “with a confession of sins and an absolution based on the understanding that we are sinful and unclean and that in order to approach God we need to be cleansed, not by what we do but by confessing what we do and receiving God’s grace.” After congregants receive absolution, in the traditional liturgy they then move “into praising God, listening to Him speak to us, and then we respond to that through an offering, for example, and then the communion meal where we receive the bread and the wine, and in receiving that, we receive Christ and the forgiveness of our sins.”
On the other hand, most “Reformed” churches do not necessarily follow that same sequence of worship. “They may have some of the same components, but perhaps not so stylized,” Baker explained. “Also Lutherans, Episcopalians and Catholics tend to have communion every Sunday, most Reformed (such as Presbyterians, Methodist, United Church of Christ, and the Baptists) don’t.”
Within the Lutheran Church, there are wings that are conservative and those, like ELCA, that are “progressive,” according to Baker. ELCA for example voted by a two-thirds margin in 2009 for “the acceptance on the ordained roster gay and lesbian people who are in full, committed lifelong partnership relationships.” In contrast, the more conservative Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church rejected that position.
Baker said when ELCA voted to ordain gays and lesbians, some of its affiliated churches withdrew. In Northern California and Nevada, about 5 percent of the congregations broke away in protest, but in Orange County it was closer to 25 percent, he said.
ELCA supports the Augustus Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, whose patients are primarily Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. After the vote on ordination of gays and lesbians, some members of his congregation in Grass Valley decided that they didn’t want their “benevolence” funds spent through the church at large, voting instead to designate where the funds go. In the case of the Peace Lutheran Church of Grass Valley, he said, the vote was to spend about one-third of the benevolence funds to support the hospital.
Along with visits to the hospital, David and Gloria Baker have been taken on tours of the Palestinian territories, and they were critical of the situation that they observed personally or were told about by their hosts.
Gloria said she observed people in one Israeli Jewish settlement situated high on a hill throwing their garbage “down into the faces of Palestinian children.”
David said there was once a soccer field near the Augustus Victoria Hospital, but the last time he visited the site, the field had “eight dump loads of dirt so the kids can’t play there anymore.”
Gloria said they visited an Arab town (she called it a “refugee camp”) and then went to a settlement on the hill. “We went to a park where only the Jewish children could play.” She asked members of the Jewish settlement why the Arab children couldn’t also play in the park. She quoted the man as telling her, “‘they are not captive, they are free to leave’ and I thought, ‘that is the goal, to have them leave.'”
As if I had turned on a spigot, David told of the daughter of the president of the Lutheran Church of Hope, who “got her degree in the United States and then returned home to Ramallah. But she couldn’t come to the church in Jerusalem because of the hassle of getting through the checkpoints.”
And he told of a conversation with the pastor of a Lutheran Church in Bethlehem who told them at one point during the Israeli-Arab conflict that his church was occupied and severely damaged by the Israeli Army. The pastor decided to leave Israel, he said, but other Christians remain. One man, who owns a jewelry store, near the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer has a home with 8-foot thick walls, and says that his family has been in Jerusalem 800 years. “Those folks aren’t just going to up and leave,” reported Baker.
This coming May, said Baker, the synod of his church will meet in Fresno, California, where it will debate a resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli goods “made in the Palestinian communities and in the Jewish settlements.” He said he hasn’t read the full resolution yet, and hasn’t decided how he’ll vote. But he stressed he believes there are alternatives to confrontation.
He said he visited a town in the Galilee where a school in which Arab and Jewish students are educated together has been growing by leaps and bounds. “So, children can grow playing with each other and not on opposite sides of a barrier somewhere.”
Asked what they, as persons of good will, thought their church should do to improve the situation in the Middle East, David responded: “People should become informed from all sides; this has to be the first step rather than just surmising that because you know a part of the story that you understand. There are different points of view from the same historic events. I think as far as Lutherans are concerned we are committed to that.”
Our conversation was not all politics by any means. David and Gloria have taken about 40 cruises, almost all of them as a guest Protestant minister and spouse. Typically ministers’ families are assigned inside cabins, but occasionally they receive upgrades to more expensive cabins with windows or balconies.
Baker said that the shipboard minister has five responsibilities: He conducts a communion service on Sunday. He leads devotional services on weekdays. He is available for emergencies. He is available for counseling. And he conducts Bible study classes for the English-speaking members of the international crew.
One time, he remembered, a couple came to him and wanted to get married. He pointed out that they didn’t have a license, and that furthermore, from what they told him, they were doing it on the rebound. The would-be bride’s father also was very ill. “I convinced them that they really needed to wait,” Baker remembered.
On another occasion, he struck up a conversation with a passenger, who he found out lived in the same town, in fact along the same golf course. “He lived off the 12th fairway, whereas we live off the 11th green. And we had to go to Tahiti to meet!”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com