Just in case you have forgotten him. . .

While every Christian squirms as Pope Francis tries to play friends with the world and ends up making everyone alternately angry or relieved, there was a time when a serious theologian was Bishop of Rome.  While Lutherans may not have liked everything about Benedict XVI, we learned to appreciate his gravitas and his love of Scripture.  In one of the more prescient things Joseph Ratzinger ever said, he looked around at the present and toward the future and left us this:

′′Soon we will have priests reduced to the role of social worker and message of faith reduced to political vision.  Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, at the most dramatic stage of crisis, the Church will be reborn.  It will be smaller, poorer, almost catacumbal, but also more holy. For it will no longer be the Church of those who seek to please the world, but the Church of the faithful to God and His eternal law.  The rebirth will be the work of a small, seemingly insignificant yet indomitable break, past a purification process.  Because this is how God works. Against evil, a small pack resists."

It is always the remnant that brings the faith to bear against the masses.  It always was that way in Israel of old and it has been that way through the ages and it will continue to be that way.  The Church has constantly been tempted as Jesus was -- to bow down to the devil of the day in order to achieve their dreams of relevance and popularity.  The cheap and easy path to glory was not the way of Jesus and it cannot be the way of those who follow Him.

I am sad to see the grand church buildings of old closed or sold or left to ruin.  They represented the sacrifices of generations who believed it was worth it.  But if they are merely empty monuments to the past and without the people who gather in the presence of the Most High God, they are of little use to us now.  What is of greater consequence are those who once gathered but no more.  Perhaps Covid has done us all a favor by allowing those who were not of Christ an excuse to depart the pretense.  In any case, I remain tearfully sad at those who once graced the pews and lifted their voices and knelt in prayer and reception of the Sacrament but do so no more.  I live with the deep regret of those who have become occasional Christians, together in the Lord's House when it is convenient or when it costs them nothing of their vaunted safety, security, comfort, and pleasures.  Quite literally, it is the greatest of my own personal failings as a pastor that many departed under my watch.  I continue to think of and pray for them.  But the reality is most are gone, never to return again.  Yet without the company of voices confessing together and the gifts of God bestowed in Word and Sacrament, their faith will be hard to sustain.  The world and the devil will see to it.

So maybe we are, as BXVI wrote, a small pack.  But for twelve the world might not have heard the Gospel or the lands around the Mediterranean converted within a century or the hoards of pagans washed in baptismal water or the world cast against the bright light of Christ.  We may not be as many as we were once or as we wished we were now but we are enough -- enough for the Lord to do His bidding.  Rather than shed our tears for the earthly power and influence that now lives only in our past, we should struggle and strive to make sure we remain of the household of faith, that our earthly homes are places where Christ lives in faith and devotion, and our earthly lives continue the good works that purchase none of the cost of our salvation but serve the neighbor and are noticed and rewarded by God.  That will be enough.  

Curiously, bishops all over the Roman Catholic Church are rushing to close church buildings -- not only because some of them are empty but because they are stretching priestly resources so very thin.  They say that the majority of all churches in America have less than 70 folks in them.  Before we would lament their smallness, remember that nearly every one of the congregations of Christendom were even smaller while Roman emperors were persecuting the illegal faith and the Word of the Lord grew (to borrow Franzmann's wonderful phrase).  It will grow still.  Not because we will it or because we have programs to make it happen but solely because of His promise that His Word shall not return to Him empty handed but will accomplish its purpose for being sent.  If that was true, it still is.  Because this is how God works.

In the golden age of our glory, we set up colleges and universities and parachurch organizations to accomplish all kinds of wonderful things.  Now our institutions of higher education are pale imitations of the secular schools with which they compete and our parachurch organizations are shopping for a market bigger than our dwindling numbers.  Some of these may well outlive the church bodies that established them as they morph into agencies for anyone who needs their products and away from their exclusive role as servants of the servants of the Church.  That is how it will be.  But the Church will go on.  In the ruins of our once mighty operating empires, the cross is still raised and Christ still lives and the Kingdom casts off every blow of the devil trying to kill it.  If that is what it takes to survive, then we will do it and survive as God wills.  How we wish it were not so, but that is how it is.  Rome has a joke of a pope in place of a real theologian and that is the sad state of affairs for many church bodies.  Do you miss him yet?  I do.  We need confident voices to tell us that the shadows of our past may well be the temptations of the present and the undoing of the future.  Put not your trust in earthly rulers or kingdoms or churches that borrow from them.  Take up your cross and follow Jesus.