A Long Overdue Collect Study. . .

The Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Advent is similar to two other Advent Collects and yet distinct.  In this and in none other of the Sunday Collects are there three imperatives. On this last Sunday before the feast of the Nativity, the Church raises the stakes of the prayers lest we miss the fullness of the grace of our Lord's incarnation and therefore miss out on the grace of His coming again in power and glory. First, the Collect repeats the call begun on the First Sunday in Advent.  Excita or rouse or stir up Your power, O Lord, and come.  The object of this excita is magnified by the urgency of the prayer.  Hasten to aid us with Your great power and might or it will be too late and we will be lost.

In the purpose clause of the Collect (even without the ut) is the reason for this call.  For it is only by our Lord's first Advent that we can are sustained by His second Advent and prepared for His third Advent.  Indeed, it is by His coming in flesh that He now comes to us through the means of grace and, particularly, by this Eucharist, and it is this Word and Sacrament by which we are sustained and made fit for His coming at the end of the days in power and glory.  Again, it clear that what has the power to prevent us from receiving Him when He comes again is not a spiritual matter of the heart's own preparation or lack there of but our sins.  Our sins can impede the work of God and in particular His coming again in power and glory to receive us unto Himself.  That which causes us to stumble or trip us up are precisely those sins.  Grace is what answers our urgent need (quod nostra peccata praepediunt).  Note here the parallel.  God runs to our aid while in our running we are tripped up and stumble.  This is how much we need His aid and succour (succurre).  We pray the Lord to accelero or accelerate (hasten) to come to our aid. 

Indulgentia means forgiveness.   This is precisely what the long-awaited Savior is coming to save us from: our sins and the damnation they deserve. So, we appeal to His pardon (or “indulgence”) and His mercy (or “propitiation”).

The Gelasian sacramentary (#1121) has this, addressed to the Son, in the first of its propers for Advent. The Gregorian sacramentary (#805) addresses it to the Father and places it for a Sunday after a winter ember vigil. The Gallican Bobbio Missal (#38) has it as a second prayer in the first Mass for Advent. The Sarum Missal has it for Advent 4. The Sarum Missal had four collects beginning with "Excita" (stir up) on Sundays before Christmas (Sunday next before Advent, Advent 1, 2, and 4).  Cranmer kept it for Advent 4, adding "among us" and "through the satisfaccion of thy sonne our Lord":

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni: et magna nobis virtute succurre; ut, per auxilium gratiae tuae, quod nostra peccata praepediunt, indulgentia tuae propitiationis acceleret.

Praepedio means “to entangle the feet or other parts of the body; to shackle, bind, fetter”, and thus “to hinder, obstruct, impede”.   Something that is “before” (prae) the “foot” (pes) causes you to stumble.  In the Lewis & Short Dictionary this prae-pes also means “swift of flight, nimble, fleet, quick, rapid”.  To the Latin ear, prae-ped hears this interesting tension of opposing concepts. During Advent the Collects have all kinds of movement -- rushing swiftly to a goal: venio (“come”), suc-curro from curro, (“run”), accelero.

Although somewhat wooden and not as poetic as Cranmer, we might translate the Collect:

Raise up Thy power, O Lord, we beseech Thee, and come: and hasten to aid us with Thy great might, so that, through the help of Thy grace, what our sins are hindering, the indulgence of Thy merciful favor may make swift [to aid or resolve].

So we prayed on December 22:

Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come and help us by Your might, that the sins which weigh us down may be quickly lifted by Your grace and mercy; for You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

This is the stuff that fills my mind.  Awesome!
 

One dogma but many dogmatics. . .

Missouri has struggled over the years with an official dogmatics text.  Walther had his own standard work, Johann Wilhelm Baier’s Compendium Theologiae Positivae which he used as the basic dogmatics to prepare pastors for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.  In fact, CFW Walther edited Baier’s Compendium and annotated it with excerpts from Luther and orthodox Lutheran theologians.  It did not last, of course.  Eventually Franz Pieper's three volumes (in English, anyway) became the standard and lasted for generations.  As John Stephenson reminds us, nobody in Missouri ever sets out to displace the old works but merely to supplement the text in use.  Eventually, the supplement becomes the standard.  So it was that Missouri decided at some point that Pieper needed a supplement.  After a few starts and stops, two different paths emerged.  One was a couple of volumes of essays with somewhat an official stamp on it that began under Robert Preus and ended up being Ralph Bohlmann's project.  In the end, it has almost been forgotten or rendered somewhat irrelevant.  It may become more used than what it has but it was late in coming and largely unwelcome when it arrived.  Preus took it upon himself to produce his own version of a dogmatics and called it the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Series.  These were not essays but real books -- though somewhat shorter than some might have expected.  In the end, no single series or collection has come to replace Pieper though nearly everyone thinks he could use some help.  Some have found it an affront to Pieper to even think of adding to what he offered while others honor the name without perusing the pages of the actual work all that much (especially in seminary!).  

Curiously, Lutheran history is rather replete with dogmatics volumes -- at least from its earlier period.  These were not short volumes or mere essays collected but long and tedious and somber tomes.  Every university had its own dogmatician and every dogmatician worth his salt had his own dogmatics.  We found a way to live with various dogmatics and differing ways of expressing a pretty united faith.  Now, we fear putting any official label on any dogmatics except the old ones that need supplements and are honored in principle if not in actual usage.  So we are back at where we began.  We have all kinds of books used in seminary and by pastors as doctrinal texts and even more essays.  What we are afraid of doing is owning up to this diversity.  Pieper has become the icon of our Synod and we honor the icon even though we look at others a bit more fondly and as somewhat more useful.  How odd we are!  In our early years we produced more dogmatics than most pastors could even find time to read and they were long and heavy works.  Now we seem to do dogmatic theology more by anecdote than by text.

I must admit that Lutherans are seldom at home in systematics and prefer to be Biblical theologians rather than dogmaticians but it is an image not quite supported by fact.  In reality, we are dogmaticians and have  had, at least in the past, a rather great affection for producing dogmatic texts -- until more recent times.  The trend is toward more practical works like Lutheranism 101 and its siblings.  It seems that we do not quite have the same stomach for heavy theological works or by the big names of the past (going all the way back to Gerhard and Chemnitz).  I wonder why?  In the end, we will need to figure this one out.  Walther's old offering is seldom read no matter how well it is esteemed (though translations coming out now may change that a bit).  Pieper is like your grandmother's china -- valued on the shelf but seldom used for a meal.  The enterprise begun in 1983 that took some 34 years to complete was received with not much more than a yawn.  The Confessional series is well esteemed but still incomplete and a little uneven (as might be expected).  Gerhard is being translated but he has a lot yet to go.  Everyone from Chemnitz to Krauth and Schmid have their place.  The end result of this little meandering thought it that we have a lot and still little that stands out and stands up to fill in the places of the mighty efforts of old.

Vocation to worship. . .

Worship is often presumed to be an act of the conscious reason, mostly for the mind and only secondarily for the rest of the body.  How odd it is that we think this way.  All creation worships God not by reasoned conclusion or even by experiencing God's Word but simply doing what they were created to do.  So from the birds of the air to every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth to the creatures of the watery deep to the plants, they worship God not by reason but simply by being who they are as God created them to be.  If we would learn anything from them, what we ought to learn is to be who God has created us to be and redeemed us to be.  It is not simply a matter of words, though words are always a part of who we are, but it is also a matter of vocation.

When we reject the divinely ordered pattern of creation as male and female, husband and wife, mother and father to children, we are refusing to worship God as God has made us to be.  It is one thing when a person longs to be married and the right person or time does not come along or a couple longs for a child who does not come to them.  We cannot fault them for the longing that is left unfulfilled.  In their want, they still can acknowledge that these gifts come from God even though they are not realized in them.  We can also lament that this is what sin has done -- it has robbed us of the opportunity to fulfill God's order and left us subject to the broken nature of things since the Fall in Eden.

As much as we acknowledge that sometimes through no fault of our own, we are left without the opportunity to fulfill the vocation God intended for us in creation, we should not dismiss this vocation as of no importance.  It is precisely by living within the vocation of God's design that we worship Him and not simply by the meditation of the mind or the devotion of the heart or the sound of our voices.  The point of vocation is not to find our place in the world but to live out within the places in which we live the lives God intended.  Sin can certainly affect these lives and our ability to live within them in peace and joy but even in this God has provided forgiveness as the key grace to make love like His own.

The birds of the air or the fish of the sea or the animals of the land along with all the plants have been created by God and worship Him by living out their lives within the order God has made.  We sometimes dismiss this as nothing all that important.  In truth it is at least as important as conscious worship of mind and heart and the worship of mind and heart do not replace the worship of vocation but complement this worship that flows from fulfilling our vocation.  Sin has made this elusive and even caused us to dismiss God's order as something less or less noble than the worship of a mind to comprehend God and His ways or the heart to rejoice in them.  I fear we have forgotten this.  Even Christians succumb to the temptation to believe that there is a more noble way to live out our lives as God's people than to live as husband to wife or wife to husband, father to child or mother to child, or child to our parents.  This seem rather mundane to the imagined loftiness of a contemplative life, for example.  But they are not mundane at all.  In fact, it is to our poverty that our sin conspires to dismiss the shape of God's order and our place within that order as something of little consequence.  We must stop doing this.

A few days ago I wrote of how our children got the idea that parenthood was a terrible burden to be avoided.  When I wrote those words, I was also thinking of the other part of that.  By so labeling marriage as a patriarchal or antiquated shape of our lives together and by so dismissing parenthood as something that constrains who we are instead of fulfilling who we are, we have shown the ultimate hubris.  The rejection of God's order is the refusal to worship Him who made us and who redeemed us by His grace so that we might fulfill our places within His order.  Fulfilling our vocations is part of our worship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

Do we need a John or a Joseph?

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, preached on Thursday, December 19, 2024 (one year series).

John the Baptist is a character necessary to the plot of Christmas but not someone we want or like.  To us and to the Jews of Jerusalem, John was a spoiler who had come to ruin the party.  Things were going fine and nobody asked for John to be there or to open his mouth and upset their happiness with a call to repentance.  No, John the Baptist is like the dad who comes home in a foul mood to spoil our mood with all his talk of sin and death, repentance and faith, morality and truth.

We do not want John either.  We want a happy Christmas in which we open presents filled with things we want and we watch others open gifts we bought that were exactly what they wanted.  Christmas is ruined with all this talk of sin, of preachers who meddle in our business by destroying the carefully crafted myths of the season, and of church that never fits in with our holiday plans.  There is no fun in a father figure who makes you clean up your life by owning up to the wrongs you have said and done or urging us to live lives different from the world around us.  Leave us alone, John.  We have it under control. Or do we?

Look around you.  Are things under control?  John may not be a welcome voice for a people headed to a fairy tale Christmas but he is the voice we need to hear.  He is still warning those who live together outside of marriage that it is wrong – just like he did to Herod.  He is still calling those who want to make a nice memory to own up to their sin and make way for the Lord who comes to save them.  He is still speaking truth to power and calling the dirty to wash in the water of God’s mercy so they might be clean – even if they would rather be a little dirty.

No one wants John to come and ruin our Christmas but we have no Christmas without him.  John opens his mouth to speak not because he is some self-righteous prig but because he is trying to prepare us for the day when there will be no more forgiveness for sin and no more time to repent.  That is why we need to listen to him – as unpleasant and as grating as his voice is.

John is like Joseph.  They must be in this story of Christmas but we do not want them there.  Joseph doubted Mary and was ready to either put her away quietly or publicly announce the sin he accused her of and risk her death – all to preserve the image of his own righteousness.  God sent Joseph because Mary needed him – not to supply some DNA for her baby but to protect her from the threats she would face as the mother of our Lord and to provide a father for His very own Son.

The John the Baptists who preach what we do not want to here and the father figures who protect us from all that we think we can handle are the necessary spoilers for Christmas.  There would be no Christmas without them.  We love the story of a young mother whose Son is the underdog who battles our enemies for us but we do not know what to do with a prophet who warns us to repent and a Joseph who protects Mary to the place where there is no room and who wakes them all out of a sound sleep to sneak away into Egypt rather than spill the blood of the Messiah before its time.

We live amid a broken image of a family in which men do not need women and women do not need men and neither needs children.  We live amid a broken world where the job of religion is to tell us we are all good to do instead of warning us to repent.  We live with the broken dreams of a life negotiated so that we never have to suffer and never have to sacrifice for anyone or any cause.  No wonder people like John the Baptist and Joseph are so unwelcome at Christmas.  They ruin our well cultivated myths and lies that mask our destruction and keep us from hearing the voices of those who want us to be saved.

Let me be blunt.  The good memories of those who suffer in hell will do nothing to comfort them and will only increase their misery and the best memories of those who delight in heaven will be left behind for that which is even better.  But we need to hear the preaching Johns of this world and we need the fathers willing to protect, provide, sacrifice, and suffer for the sake of their families.  They say the truth hurts and maybe it does but it does not inflict the pain of a life forever captive to death’s prison or alone in your misery.  If we knew what we think we did, we would wish for more like John and more like Joseph who are strong enough to be faithful in a world of temptation and lies.

John is dead and he will be raised again but on the last day and that is too late for us.  So we need preachers who will speak the inconvenient truth in love even at Christmas.  We need those who will be voices of John in their homes, for the sake of their children and families.  We need spoilers who will ruin the myth of Christmas with its most profound reality– God IS come to be your Savior.  We need those who will protect the little lives carried in their mother’s wombs even at the cost of their own hopes and dreams and happiness.  We need those who will not only speak of God’s will but demonstrate that will with the forgiveness that is full, free, and for those who deserve not a bit of it.  We need John and Joseph.  We need YOU to be John and YOU to be Joseph in your homes and neighborhoods.  In the end these do not ruin Christmas or spoil a memory but make it possible for us to welcome Him who comes in the Name of the Lord.

Christmas is not ruined by honest preaching that calls us to repent or by strong fathers who love their families enough to bring them to that place where this preaching takes place.  Christmas is ruined by people who think today is more important than eternity, that you have to get your own way in order to be happy, that you have to hide behind a mask in order to get along, or that you have to act like you are good to go in yourself and do not need anyone’s help.  Jesus has not come to give prizes to the perfect family.  Every family is dysfunctional.  Every family is a mess.  Every one of us is weak in the face of temptation.  Everything that is not of God in this world is evil.  But the Baby born in the manger has come for just that – for people who need help, for sinners who love evil more than good, for families which are a mess, and for those who wear a mask in public to cry at home alone.

Make your way straight to the Lord, without delay or detour.  The Christ was born for you and He has been pleased to live and die for your sins.  For every call to repentance, there is the promise of forgiveness.  For everyone who admits they are vulnerable and need each other, there is comfort.  Jesus is under no illusions about who we are or what we need.  Christmas is not about memories or presents but about the Savior who came to us as one of us that He might take away our sins and the sins of the whole world.  Amen.

The drumbeat of death. . .

I listened to Elon Musk (not my favorite person) but one thing he said is spot on.  He indicated that from his view the educational system and even the family has done a great job beating it into our children, particularly girls, that if you get pregnant your life is over.  It is surely true that with respect to premarital sex the uniform witness of nearly everyone has been to do whatever is possible to prevent pregnancy and to expand the difficulties of such a pregnancy for everyone.  Could it be that we learned too well?  The birth control that was for particular situations has become universal and normal to make conception exceptional and rare.  But what was perhaps reasoned advice to the teenager has become the normal way a generation or more has come to see pregnancy in every case.  It is not simply life changing but steals your life away from you.  You do not get a career, you do not get advancement in your profession, you do not get happiness -- instead you get chained to a prison cell called parenthood.  No wonder we see pregnancy as a disease to be prevented and abortion as the sacrament of this religion of unwanted children.

I was a pastor during the time when much of youth ministry seemed focused upon this.  We had countless "Bible studies" and pep talks in an attempt to prevent our teens from becoming sexually active or taking drugs.  Kids got so tired of the predictable message they stopped listening.  But what they did hear and what has stuck with them is the Christian version of the idea that if you get pregnant, your life is over.  Girls especially heard this and took this to heart but boys did as well.  Parenthood was a trap and not a joy.  I wonder what they thought this said about them and how their parents viewed them.  Did they also begin to think that their own moms and dads had dreaded the announcement that it was a boy or it was a girl?  Even if they did not apply this to their own conception and birth, they certainly applied it to their own want or desire to be a parent.  We are now reaping the poisoned fruits of our own failure to speak clearly and authentically.  No, motherhood is not a prison and, no, parenthood is not an unspeakable burden, and, no, children are not a curse upon your hopes and dreams and happiness.  Children are a blessing from the Lord.

Curiously, we seem to have lost the battle to prevent premarital (or extramarital sex).  Christian teens and Christian adults seem to be as tempted by and succumb to temptation nearly as often as those outside the faith.  But we have all rallied around the holy grail of contraception and abortion so well that even Christians are not sure that abortion is wrong or always wrong.  What we are sure of is this.  Don't get pregnant or, if you do, wait until you have everything else out of your life that you desired.  Surely this is part of the issue with IVF -- the age at which women are having their first pregnancy keeps advancing and is nearly at that point when most women in the past were having their last pregnancy.  That is the most profound lesson of all our talk against premarital sex and are warning to our girls and boys that a pregnancy would ruin their lives and we learned that lesson too well.  We have turned sex into pleasure without the bother of a child and the laboratory into the place where we get a child when we finally decide we might want one.  Gone is the joyful affirmation that children are a blessing from the Lord.

The threat against premarital sex is not that it might result in a child.  No, the threat against premarital sex is that it is wrong, it works again a good and positive marital relationship down the road, and it delivers on all that is corrupt about sex and pleasure without any of the blessing.  Stop telling your daughters that if they get pregnant they will ruin their lives.  Start telling them that children are a blessing from the Lord to a husband and wife who promised their lives to each other till death parts them.  We are not asking youth to wait for sex because a child could ruin their lives but to wait as a child waits in anticipation of something that is good and for a time when that good is appropriate.  Pregnancy is not a disease nor is being a mother (or a father) a terrible fate.  These are the most wonderful things in their own time.  It is not our job to manage sex the way we would manage a disorder or diagnosis.  It is our job to rejoice in the Lord who has gifted us with marriage and gifted marriage with the heritage and promise of children.

Living and learning. . .

I heard it said by someone not impressed with the plethora of theological conferences and the few liturgical and musical conferences hosted around the Missouri Synod that it was preaching to the choir.  I suppose it is possible to get that idea.  Each conference has its own confederates who have rallied around a cause.  To some extent these conferences are designed for those already in the know- the professionals.  That said, there are a host of them not simply accepting the ordinary folk from the pew but creating themes and seeking speakers who will appeal not simply to the professional class but to those in the pew.

The criticism seemed to be laid especially at the feet of those who promote confessional Lutheran theology as opposed to missional (whatever that term has come to mean) and those who promote liturgical worship as opposed to evangelical style (again, not a precise term).  Perhaps that is true on some level but all conferences are organized around a central principle with an appeal to a certain audience.  I guess the question here is whether these conferences have practical appeal or whether they are not simply a reunion for folks with the time, money, and interest to get together.  Perhaps there is a little truth to the old friends character of these but that has always been the culture of the Missouri Synod.

My point is that what once constituted an academic or professional topic has become decidedly practice because we live in a world of wars.  We have morality wars that are not simply about whether things are good or beneficial but right or wrong.  We have sexuality wars that are not simply condemnations of those things that conflict with Scripture but provide a way for Christians to respond to what is going on out there and to find a way through the challenges laid at their feet and the feet of their children and grandchildren.  We have truth wars not simply about which truth is true but whether there is anything that can be labeled truth beyond the individual or the moment.  We have education wars that are not about how best to educate but what will be taught and where that education takes place (public school, home school, private school).  We have life wars not simply about abortion or reproductive technology but about existential questions of life, its origin, its beginning, its end, and its value.  We have worship wars not simply about style but about whether there is a liturgical identity that reflects our confession or not and how uniform or diverse this practical application should be on Sunday morning.  I could go on but I think you get the point.

Many if not all the conferences in our church body, official and unofficial, are about how we find our way through these wars, about providing not simply information but fellowship for a people increasingly embattled  and weary of the many struggles.  Perhaps the most important thing that happens in these conferences is that relationships too often defined simply by digital connections become personal.  I know that is the case for me.  The time I spend at circuit winkel or conferences is time well spent as we engage, challenge, and support each other as pastors and in our parishes.  The time we spend in church is much the same.  We reconnect, engage, challenge, and support each other in the Christian life of living and learning.  Even when we cannot be there in person, there is a benefit to the many videos made available.  If you are like me, you are not only listening to the speaking but scanning the room for the faces of those you know.  All in all, I think this is justification itself for the 2-4 days spent at a conference.  There are some pricey ones but most are rather reasonable.  The cost is worth it and the benefits accrue for the wider church as well as those who actually attend.