Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The danger of forgetting the saints. . .

The natural way of influence is for those who come before to pass on and pass down to those who come after.  This has been the way of things since time began.  The memory of our fathers and mothers was preserved through oral and written history.  In the lives of our forebearers we find the wisdom accumulated of many generations.  This is not always wisdom worthy of passing on but it deserves to be heard and to be taken seriously.  Nowhere is this more true than in Christian history.

We began with the God of Adam and Eve, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, the God of David and Solomon, the God of the prophets...  We identified God by His works in and with our spiritual and physical heirs.  What we inherited from Judaism was affirmed in Christian theology and practice.  St. Paul referred to himself as a spiritual father and counseled the members of the congregations to whom he wrote and Timothy, the young pastor, to emulate him, follow him, and "guard the deposit" entrusted to him.  The very liturgical framework of the Eucharist is preserved in solemn form when St. Paul passes on what was entrusted to him in the very Words of Institution.

The pattern of influence is from the past to the present and then to the future.  In the introduction to the Lutheran Worship hymnal of 1982, the timeless words of Norman Nagel put this into liturgical focus:

How best to do this we may learn from his Word and from the way his Word has prompted his worship through the centuries. We are heirs of an astonishingly rich tradition. Each generation receives from those who went before and, in making that tradition of the Divine Service its own, adds what best may serve in its own day – the living heritage and something new.

A generation adds but does not replace, contributes but does not discard, offers but does not disdain the accumulated heritage and legacy of our fathers in the faith.  The tradition is slow to add but this deliberateness is not because someone is choosy.  No, it is because the new must be sifted as was the old so that the best is retained, commended, and passed on and that which is not worthy fades into the background. This is the natural definition and practice of catholicity.

We live, however, at a time when just the opposite is happening.  In society, youth is coveted and age is disdained.  Our culture is infatuated with what is new and the youth culture drives not only the marketplace but the values of people and society as a whole.  If this were merely a matter of infatuation with technology it would be one thing.  But it is not simply this.  Maturity has been replaced by an adolescent culture, with immature values and with a childish self-centeredness that threatens the very fabric of culture and of the Church.

What was born of community has been replaced by an individualism in which personal desire, fulfillment, happiness, and pleasure are the ultimate values to be protected and pursued.  Like strangers going through the closets of the dead, the things of yesterday are being cast off without restraint as if the past offered us little but the curious to be glanced upon and heaped upon the garbage heap.  It has consumed a large measure of Christianity to the point where entertainment has displaced worship as the activity of Sunday morning, feelings have replaced objective truth of Law and Gospel as the foundation of our identity and lives, and the full embrace of desire has become the object of the freedom we have in Christ.  Every Pastor and every parish is under this pressure.  It does not matter how hard they would resist or how insistent they are to reject the infatuation with the adolescent self, every church and church worker deals with it and every person in the pew is affected by it.

We mouth the words of the past (like when we confess the communion of the saint in the creed) but these have become mere words and not the nature of the Church.  We are a communion of a saint, of one person, and each the definer and shaper of the truth that we would call Christian.  Matters of liturgy are no longer matters of faith but of personal preference.  Matters of doctrine are no longer matters of truth but personal interpretations.  Matters of morality are no longer matters of right and wrong but of expedience.  Matters of discipline are no longer the boundaries of love but the unwelcome intrusion of the judgmental and legalistic.

I was reminded of Eugene Peterson's prescient words about the "unwell" nature of a society in which the impetus flows from youth to maturity instead of the other way around.

“There was a time when idea and living styles were initiated in the adult world and filtered down to youth.  Now the movement goes the other way: lifestyles are generated at the youth level and pushed upward.  Dress fashions, hair styles, music, and moral that are adopted by youth are evangelically pushed on an adult world, which seems eager to be converted.”  The Contemplative Pastor, p. 121-122

In practical terms this mean we have laid aside our corporate memory as a community, culture, and church.  We treat every issue or problem or challenge as if it had never been faced before and we begin with a clean slate in our determination of what we shall say and do in response.  We are far poorer for this on every level of society and in the Church.  The saints have become mere anecdotes, stories we may be forced to listen to but nothing we must take seriously.  The wisdom of the Church passed down through the ages expressed in creed and confession, normed by Scripture, has become the object either of our scorn or our laughter and therefore treated with an even greater skepticism than we treat the Bible.

This is part of the fracture within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod as well as the greater fault line within Christendom.  Part of the Koinonia process within the LCMS and the true ecumenism of the greater Christian world is to help us listen again to the living tradition passed down to us by the saints, to acknowledge this as the voice of the Spirit at work in time and history, and to rediscovery that the mark of Christian identity is faithfulness, guarding, keeping, and faithfully preserving to the next generation the sacred deposit entrusted to us.  Before we ever get to the what of the things we must discuss, we ought to begin with a renewed sense of holy history.  Without this, the radical reformers disdained by Luther and his heirs will have won.  They will have proven that the Church became so corrupt it had to be reinvented and they will have replaced every agenda and purpose of Christianity with the task of reinventing the faith for every generation.  The people of God will have exchanged the false immortality of preserved adolescence with the true eternity of the maturity of faith and life transcended to heaven where ever limitation and temptation is finally and forever gone.
How best to do this we may learn from his Word and from the way his Word has prompted his worship through the centuries. We are heirs of an astonishingly rich tradition. Each generation receives from those who went before and, in making that tradition of the Divine Service its own, adds what best may serve in its own day – the living heritage and something new. - See more at: http://www.messiahlacrescent.org/2012/06/dr-nagel-on-worship/#sthash.PO8Cu4j1.dpuf
How best to do this we may learn from his Word and from the way his Word has prompted his worship through the centuries. We are heirs of an astonishingly rich tradition. Each generation receives from those who went before and, in making that tradition of the Divine Service its own, adds what best may serve in its own day – the living heritage and something new. - See more at: http://www.messiahlacrescent.org/2012/06/dr-nagel-on-worship/#sthash.PO8Cu4j1.dpuf
How best to do this we may learn from his Word and from the way his Word has prompted his worship through the centuries. We are heirs of an astonishingly rich tradition. Each generation receives from those who went before and, in making that tradition of the Divine Service its own, adds what best may serve in its own day – the living heritage and something new. - See more at: http://www.messiahlacrescent.org/2012/06/dr-nagel-on-worship/#sthash.PO8Cu4j1.dpuf

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