The Great Quest for Spirituality

Nearly everywhere you go you find folks writing about the seemingly insatiable quest for things spiritual among the population, and, in particular, younger members of our population.  There is a deep spiritual hunger -- no question about that -- but this is not necessarily something easy to capitalize upon for Christians.  The hunger for things spiritual comes at the very same time there is a rejection for doctrine, objective truth, and the Church.  It is as if we want the husk of the ear of corn but not the corn on the cob and the cob is rejected because it provides the corn.  The spirituality that folks are left with is an empty shell, a pursuit without a goal, a means without an end, a process without a conclusion.

We need to be very careful how we proceed.  For us as Lutherans truth is not some floating reality but an embodied reality.  Ours is not a general truth but the specific truth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God in human flesh and blood.  We must be careful about the great temptation to divorce truth from Jesus Christ or to give the impression that faith is something other than our encounter with the God who came to us by the incarnation of His one and only Son.  Everything we confess about God we know through Jesus Christ.  Apart from Him, we have no God at all, no means of connection with the Creator and His intention of creation, and no answer for the great questions of life -- where did I come from, why am I here, what happens after death...  The spiritual hunger and quest among the American people may be an open door but we need to be careful how we open that door.  For too many, the idea of Christianity, like the idea of God Himself, has become the infatuation, rather than Christianity itself and the one and only God whose face is Jesus Christ.

This quest for things spiritual and this hunger to go deeper is often accompanied by a disdain for Scripture and the Sacraments.  These are the old means of the old face of Christianity and people are searching for that which goes beyond them.  The Word and the Sacraments, however, are not some surface area of Christianity, of which there is stuff deeper to be mined and brought out as the true treasure.  The true treasure is Jesus Christ.  The Word does not speak of Christ but is Christ speaking.  The Sacraments are not sacred rituals and symbols but the very means by which Christ comes to us with the fullness of His grace and gifts.  They are Christ just as Scripture is Christ.

Lutherans are, if anything, very incarnational.  Our understanding of the Sacraments and worship is incarnational.  Our theology is incarnational.  We know only one God and that God is the God who is Jesus Christ and all that is known about God is known through Him and His revelation.  The Sacraments are like Christmas all over again -- the marriage of the heavenly and divine with the ordinary earthly element and the result is the unique mystery of God and His presence, grace and gifts, forgiveness and life, rebirth and new identity.

It seems to me that we have not done such a good job of making this known.  The way we treat Scripture often results in the false impression that it is a guide book to the spiritual quest or a rule book to tell you how to live your life or a rule book to get what you want from life or, at worst, one path of truth for which there are many paths and many truths.  We act as if Bible study were about attaching our meaning to its truisms instead of encountering the Christ who is the Word.  We act as if the Sacraments are merely a sacred ritual of the gathered community instead of the source and foundation of each individual Christian life as well as our life together as the people of God.

Lutherans are vulnerable to the kind of semi-Christian literature that has flooded the marketplace.  Our people read devotional books that have disembodied Christ from His Word and the Sacraments from spiritual life.  Our people have given into the idea that Bible study is about finding hidden meanings in the text instead of meeting Christ there.  Our people live in the great temptation and confusion of a mind shaped by Lutheran catechesis but a heart which years to hear what Joel Osteen and others like him preach (a good news religion, more about here than heaven, about happiness than sin, about pleasure than death, and about getting what you want than meeting the God who answers your need...

We have some books and some authors... we need more.  We need those who can bring to bear the timeless truth of this creedal and catholic faith to bear in the present moment, with winsome and inviting applications of the yesterday, today, and forever faith.  We need Pastors to raise up expectations about and an understanding of what happens on Sunday morning.  We need musicians who can equip our people so that, as one author put it, the soundtrack of our lives is consistent with the confession of our lips.  It is not what Lutheranism lacks that is killing us, but our failure to fully exploit this wonderfully incarnational, Biblical, and catholic faith so that people see Scripture as the living voice of Christ and the Sacraments as the wells that spring forth with the living water of life...

This is what I hope for in a renewed Lutheranism, ready to exploit the opportunity of a people thinking about things spiritual but without a clue as to what that really means...