Angels, pastors, marriage, and church. . .

It is the mark of children that they confuse wants with needs.  They want candy or a toy or whatever and so they address their parents or grandparents by insisting this is what they need.  Apparently, we have not grown up much.  We are still confusing wants and needs.  It has gotten us into countless troubles not in the least with our finances.  But the Lord is not confused.  He know what WE need and He knows what He wants or wills for us to answer those needs.

God does not need angels.  He is not dependent upon them for anything.  That is clear from Scripture.  When the children of Israel were feeling the clutches of Pharaoh and Egypt’s mighty army, God did not send a legion of angels.  He acted entirely alone to lure the troops into His trap and end the threat against the people of His promise.  God does not need angels.  But He wills to use them.

When some of the heavenly host led in open rebellion against God and His rule, the Lord sent His angels against them, led by the general of the angels, Michael.  The Lord could have acted on His own but willed to work through angels to banish from His heaven those who rebelled against Him.  

God does not need angels.  He does not depend upon them to be the mouthpieces of His Word.  God thunders the heavens or speaks through the still small voice and His Word is revealed to us.  He does not need the ministrations of angels but He wills to use them.  When Abraham and Sarah first heard the promise of a son in their old age, it was through the voice of an angel.  When Blessed Mary found favor in the Lord’s sight, the angel Gabriel spoke the Word into her womb and Christ tabernacled within her.  When the Savior’s first cries filled the silence of the Bethlehem night, angels responded with the song:  Glory to God in the highest and peace to His people on earth.  When Jesus was left weak and weary after fasting 40 days and tempted by the devil, angels ministered to Him.  When St. John the Divine was given the grand revelation of heaven’s glory, angels were sent by God to deliver this picture to him.  God does not need angels but He wills to use them.

God does not need angels.  He does not need their worship.  Though the Scriptures insist that this is the greatest duty and delight of the angels, God does not need this worship.  He is not weak and does not require constant affirmation.  He is not vain and does not expect to have His ego stroked.  But it is God’s will that angels worship Him on earth and in heaven.  And so they do.  And it is His will that we worship Him.  And so we do.

St. John records in Revelation how myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands of angels worshiped the Lord saying with a loud voice:  “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”  Jesus says Himself that on the day when He comes in His glory to bring to completion all things, the angels shall fill the sky giving terror to unbelievers and relief to the saints.  God does not need angels but He wills to use them.

God does not need a pastor.  If you were stuck on the desert island all by yourself, your faith could survive without the benefit of a pastor.  But God wills to work through pastors.  What God could do is not as important as what God has done and promised to do.  He has promised to work through men to address His people with His Word, to wash them in baptismal water, to absolve them of their sins, and to set apart bread and wine to be the flesh and blood of Christ and distribute it to the faithful.  It is stupid and senseless to daydream about what God might do.  You have been given the concrete of what He has done in Christ, what He wills to do, and how He wills to do it.  God does not need a pastor but you do and so He has willed to establish the office of the holy ministry which I have exercised among you for nearly 32 years and for over 44 years since my ordination.

God does not need marriage.  He made all things from nothing and man from the dust of the earth and woman from his rib.  But God has willed to order His creation through a man who leaves His father and mother and cleaves to his wife.  God does not need a wife but I did.  He gave me a wife not to cook or clean or do laundry but to complete me and through our life together to bring children into this world.  The first revelation of adult manhood is that I am alone and that I need who God has willed to complete me in the woman whom He makes my wife.  God does not need marriage but He wills that the family and its center be His merciful love.

God does not need a congregation.  He could have drawn people to Himself directly and individually without the messiness of a church and opinions and conflicts and votes.  God does not need a church but you do.  He willed that you come to Him through the fellowship of the redeemed, through the common life of our baptism, through the preaching that takes place here, through the absolution that is pronounced upon all the penitent, and through the common meal of His uncommon flesh and blood in bread and wine.  God does not need the Church but it is His will to have it and He knows that you need it.
God does not need you.  He does not need what you have whether that be money or talents or skills or wisdom or power.  The Lord does not save you because He wants or needs something from you.  It does not matter how brave or smart or experienced or rich you are, God is the only one who is self-sufficient.  But it is His joy to love you, to save you, to have you join Him in His work, to fight the good fight of faith where you are, and to live in peace and unity by the Spirit.

The Lord’s good and gracious will delivers to us what He does not need but we do:
•    angels to encamp around His people, to guard them in all their ways, and to minister to them so that they may be kept to everlasting life...
•    pastor to serve God’s people with the gifts of God through the means of grace and to shepherd them away from the wolves of false doctrine...
•    congregations where the family of God is bound together in the blood of Christ to forgive each other and bear one another’s burdens...
•    marriage and family where Christ opens the heart of husband and wife and their fruitful love multiplies and fills the earth...

In case you did not get the point, God does not need anything.  He did not have to create but in love sought a people to love.  God does not need us but we need Him and His gracious favor and will.  So from His gracious love He has supplied us with angels and pastors, congregations and families, and with the power of His forgiving love to keep us in His faith and fear to everlasting life.  The angels and all the rest of creation do not need to be told this but you do.  You need to know why the Lord has made you, surrounded you with His love and favor, forgiven you by the blood of His Son, put a pastor before you to serve you with His gifts, brought you into the Church to live out your life of faith, and ordered your life as husband, wife, father, mother, and children in the home.  God does not need these but we do and now it is our grace and privilege to praise Him, angels, archangels, all the company of heaven, the faithful gathered in our midst, all creatures and every created thing.  In the holy Name of Jesus.  Amen.

The nature of the office. . .

In that old Otto Preminger movie The Cardinal, there is a great line in which the bishop says to the priest: "the priesthood is not something you can put on and take off like the cassock you wear..."  The line has hung over me for some time.  Although the movie line is about the turmoil within a priest who struggles to exercise the hard side side of the ministry, it has application for Lutheran pastors as well.  The priest insists it was different when it was theory and not practice, when people and their spiritual lives were not hanging in the balance.  A conflict between what he wanted to do and what he had to do as a priest ended up leaving him wounded and believing.  So, though he had been trained and ordained, the yoke of the priesthood was a burden that was leaving him empty inside.  He begs to be released from his ministry in order to find himself.

Every Lutheran pastor should find some sympathy for this situation.  The ministry is easy to fulfill in theory but in practice it is hard.  To stay in one place for decades, learning the stories of your people, walking with them through days of sorrow and pain and tragedy as well as moments of joy and happiness -- this is hard to do and it is hard to give up.  It is, as they say, a conundrum.  The weekly rhythm of Sunday with its preaching and teaching and Divine Service are not simply clothing you put on but who you are.  The gift of this ministry and its burdens become so deeply ingrained within you and your life that it is hard to contemplate life without them.  I am not speaking here of some kind of indelible character but of the office itself.  Pastors do not stop being pastors when they go home for supper or while they sleep.  How many meals and nights are interrupted by the calls from those within the parish who need and want and rightly expect God's man to be with them in the darkest moments and with them in their worst fears.  And there you go.  It is instinct after a while.  You just go.

To be honest, the pastor's family knows this but does not like it.  How can they?  The interrupted or cancelled vacations and days off and the family events which revolve not around wife and children but the Church Year and the parish schedule may be small gifts and great burdens which they bear because they love the man that the folks in the pews call "pastor."  They know that you cannot take off or put on this ministry like you do the clerical collar or vestments you wear.  They respect you for it but they also resent the part of the man they call husband and father who must be shared with those who call him pastor.  We all know this.  It is no secret.  No matter how long you live beyond the day you retire, you cannot make up for what they have sacrificed.  It is a debt which cannot be repaid and one which allows the pastor to fulfill his vocation -- indeed, without it he could not be who he is or do what he has been called to do.

While we all know that it is wrongheaded to presume that to serve the Lord in His Church must come with the additional sacrifice of giving up a wife and a family.  Even Rome calls this a discipline and not a doctrine.  At the same time, every pastor with a wife and children knows it might be easier if you could  fulfill your calling without your family having to bear its cost.  Thankfully, celibacy is not a Lutheran discipline.  I have know the love and support of my wife and my kids throughout my service.  My children know only sharing their father with the Church and my wife knows only sharing her husband with the Church.  From time to time that sharing has been less than happy yet they have made this possible for me and I am deeply grateful.  From time to time, it needs to be said.  Thank you.  Thank you to those who have born more than their share of the cost of this vocation and who did it graciously.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

Mega not so much. . .

I grew up in a very small parish in the middle of a cornfield in Northeastern Nebraska. It was never large and had no heyday to look back to.  The most it ever had was probably 100 members and yet in some of those years attendance was 80 or so.  Now, not so much.  The age of the farmers has increased by decades and the numbers of children in that county has dropped significantly.  It is a wood clapboard building that is distinguishable for nothing.  It has a traditional quarter sawn oak tall altar with the carved Lamb of God and a raised pulpit coming out of the wall and the obligatory copy of the Thorvaldsen Christ statue and an ancient pipe organ.  It did not have a fellowship hall until the last twenty or thirty years and prior to that only a basement which doubled for fellowship and Sunday school.  But it did produce a harvest of church workers of which I am one.

Now you might think that the bigger churches supply the bigger number of church workers but you would be wrong.  The large congregations do not do their fair share.  They are failing as incubators of church work vocations.  Even my own parish with some 5 sons in the ministry and a half dozen or so as teachers and DCEs has not kept pace with the little Nebraska church I called home.  We have now about 10 times the number of people in worship weekly but we have not done an equal job in recruiting church workers.  Those who think that the future of our church lives in the mega churches or large congregations is missing something important.  We need smaller churches because they supply the lion's share of the church workers for our Synod.  I suspect that this is how it has always been and how it will always be.

The next time you look down your nose at the country parish which opens its doors to 20 or fewer, ask them how many sons and daughters of that congregation have become church workers.  I'll be you will be surprised.  So before we say that these little congregations need to go away and we need to replace them with larger ones, maybe we ought to deal with the elephant in the room.  Large congregations supply fewer church workers for the work of the Kingdom than small ones.  So do yourself a favor and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving for this thing that smaller congregations do so much better than larger ones.  I do every day.

Strong words. . .

The worst thing we have done to the Scriptures is to make this a book of weak and superficial words, words that require something from us and have no power to address us with something.  The worst thing we have done to preaching is to echo this with respect to the words of the preacher and his task in preaching.  When we removed miracles from the Bible and when we began to distract from the historicity of the great and mighty works of God (creation, parting of the sea, etc...), we made Scripture a book of ideas and we gave ourselves the power over those ideas by either adopting them as our own or rejecting them.  The whole idea that something could be true without being historic or factual is a modern invention and one that has done catastrophic harm over Scripture and in particular the preaching task.

The miracles of Scripture and the mighty acts of God's deliverance are precisely ordinary facts which have extraordinary status even bigger than their context.  When we preach them, we are not trying to distill the fact into a moral of the story or a principle drawn from this fact but applying the facts themselves to God's people because these facts still have consequences and effects.  Nowhere is this more true than in the Sacrament of the Altar.  We do not imagine Christ in the sacrament but actually receive Him in this bread and wine.  We do not make this sacrament but Christ is the sacrament.  As Richard Stuckwisch says, "Baptism puts us in Christ and the Eucharist puts Christ in us."  They are not the same even though both are sacraments.  These are not ideas nor is the language symbolic but real and true and factual.  For this reason we treat the elements of the Sacrament of the Altar as we honor Christ for they are the same and in the funeral rite we begin with the fact of the baptism that says this end is not the end.

For preaching this has meant an emphasis less on the Word of God preached and more on the skill and ability of the preacher.  Technique has become at least as important as content.  While this is true for those teaching preaching and for the preacher preaching, it is even more true of those who hear the sermon.  They evaluate the sermon less upon the objective criteria of what it says than of how well it was communicated.  I am not at all suggesting here that we should be indifferent toward the technique but rather that the technique conveys nothing without the content.  Furthermore, the hearer should regard the words of the faithful preacher as words of God, hearing them and being edified by them not because of how well they were said but because of the Word in the words.  I fear, however, that this is not how most sermons are received.  Instead, they are the inspirational, motivational, and devotional thoughts of the preacher.  However good these might be, it is the Word of God that imparts life and salvation to us.  Those in the pews should expect nothing less than this and receive the words of the preacher as the Word proclaimed into their ears, minds, and hearts.  In short, I fear that preaching has become about weak words instead of Thy Strong Word and so people expect and therefore receive something less than preaching should be.

God's Word is true in every sense of that word.  The Word in elements of water, bread, and wine is true in every sense of the word.  The Word preached is sacramental and true as well.  It preaches the real Word that has the power to do what it says and convey what it promises.  But when we build walls between fact and truth, we diminish the Scriptures and we diminish also the visible Word of the Sacraments and we diminish the preached Word, ending up with less that God means for us to have and we learn to settle for it.

A vestment issue. . .

Over the years I have chronicled some of the vestment ideas gone bad -- from crocheted stoles to every other oddity I have encountered.  There was once a guilty pleasure of a blog called Bad Vestments that has, sadly, now gone dormant.  Maybe I should revive it -- except that after a while it is sad and makes me angry.  While I am tempted to give the failed good intentions of a seamstress or knitter off easy, I am not so inclined to let off those who make vestments into political statements.  I hate that.  It is an affront to God and to the faith.

The image is from eBay and it offers a political statement on the stole of what should point to the Lord or at least the calling to the minister of the Lord who wears it to preach faithfully the Lord's Word.  Instead this is the political statement everyone recognizes for what it is.  It promotes the alphabet agenda of sexual desires and gender identities with its rainbow and its not quite Scriptural statement to side with love.  Apparently this gives new meaning to the passage that says love covers a multitude of sins.  In any case, the point here is not to echo anything from Scripture but to promote a political agenda under the guise of religion.  How sad!  Of all the things that could have been put on a stole from bad artistic design to bad taste, the use of a symbol designed to promote sexual liberation in conflict with the Biblical ethic and order is one of the worst you can do.  Now, to be fair, I am not a fan of camo fabric used for vestments either.  I do not even like those children of the world tapestry orphreys.  I would rather not have any symbols that point to us as people or our views and leave the sacred real estate of vestments to the Lord alone.  I think history is on my side.  So even if you think this is exactly where you stand politically, do us all and the Lord a favor and leave the subject of vestments to art which honors the Lord for His steadfast love revealed most especially upon the cross.  Yes, that is the problem.  A heart is not the cross.  The way the Lord sides with us in love is through the cross.

 

Safely locked away. . .

Thanks to the idea of one of our DCEs some years ago, we give to the baptized a banner to hang on the wall of their room.  It has their name, the date of their baptism, and the words of Isaiah 43:  I have called you by name; you are Mine..."   While this is a nice idea and well done in fabric, it is a practical necessity.  Every parent since Adam and Eve has mistrusted their children with the important stuff of life and so the reality is that they have locked safely away all the important documents of their children's lives.  If their kids end up making it to adulthood safely, maybe by the time they hit 50 or so the parents will relinquish these important papers to their children.  In the meantime, they lie safely locked away. 

Scott Murray once said that we have done the same thing to our confessional documents.  We have them safely locked away in our constitutions.  Ouch.  How right he is!  They are there when and if we need them and we are very careful to maintain our subscription to them but they are not actively a part of our lives in the same way other things are.  As a Synod we live and die by our bylaws (I know this first hand).  We should be living or dying by our confessions.  As congregations we live and die by our informal rules (invoking the constitution and bylaws when there is conflict but content to live mostly by the way we have always done things before).  As pastors (and other church workers) we make and affirm our subscription to the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church when ordained or commissioned and then when installed.  What about the rest of the time?  For most, as much as we hate to admit it, they are safely locked away in books while the ministry is content with practical stuff.

The Confessions are really practical.  Yes, they are also theological and sometimes reflect a concern with things that seem less urgent to us in the moment but the reality is that they are very practical.  Think for example of the article about the Mass and its insistence that we are falsely accused of having abolished the Mass and then go on to insist that we actually do it better than our opponents -- complete with all the usual ceremonies.  This is not about an idea kept in the head but about the weekly gathering of God's people around His Word and Table (or more than weekly!).  Our Confessions are really practical.  We need to unlock them and drag them out from their hiding places and made them more a part of our daily lives and our lives together as the community of God's people.  Sadly, we probably have more attention for the things of Evangelicalism and pop Christian culture than we do the stuff we say we would rather die than forsake.  Our hearts are elsewhere and so what happens on Sunday morning seems out of step with who we are Monday through Saturday.  There is something inherently wrong with this.

When I ask children when they were baptized, they inevitably say they need to go home and ask their parents who need to unlock the box where they keep important papers and find out.  Is that what we are supposed to think?  Baptism's fact is not important to baptismal life?  Of course not!  No wonder we have our identity somewhere else than our baptism into Christ and the words to a wonderful hymn (God's Own Child I Gladly Say It) while wonderful are often distant from our daily lives.  We surely need to bring the dusty documents of our life out of the boxes into which we have placed them for safekeeping and bring them back out and into our daily lives.  We already do that with part of it (the Small Catechism) but we ought to do it with all of it.

Real food. . .

Having come off the series of John 6 Gospel readings for Series B, I am more and more convinced that it is nearly impossible to meet these texts without understanding them Eucharistically.  Yes, I know.  Luther did not mince words in rejecting the idea that John 6 addressed the Lord’s Supper: “In the first place the sixth chapter of John must be entirely excluded from this discussion [of the Supper], since it does not refer to the sacrament in a single syllable. Not only because the sacrament was not yet instituted, but even more because this passage itself and the sentences following plainly show, as I have already stated, that Christ is speaking of faith in the incarnate Word" -- as 1FC SD VII, 41 quote.  Chemnitz summarized the catholicity of Luther’s interpretation, which Luther claimed was simply Augustine’s -- and, for that matter ecumenical since also Cajetan and Calvin agreed.  Lutherans were rather content on the issue until Wilhelm Loehe advocated a more sacramental interpretation.  Both Warner Elert and Herman Sasse followed suit.  It should be noted that Luther was not above using John 6 in his sacramental piety, especially, for example, in the hymn text Christ Lag in Todesbanden.  

While it is not quite dangerous to conclude that John 6 is Eucharistic, it could dangerous to insist that it could not be.  John 6:63, flesh is of no avail cannot be used against our Lord's own institution of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.  Luther is careful in his debate with Zwingli to avoid this trap but many on the Radical Reformation side are not.  Jesus is not so careful, however, on the other side.  Jesus pushes every button and ends up with an emphatic to intensify His point: “Amen, Amen I say to you,” as if to say:  “Let me be perfectly clear.”  Then He does the unthinkable.  He also switches words from a rather  polite word for “eat,” φαγεῖν (phagein), to τρώγων (trogon), a more graphic word which suggests gnawing on or chewing His flesh.  This is then no symbolic or imaginary eating and drinking but the literal one which, when done in faith, receives what it promises.  Our Lord precisely places the real eating of His flesh and blood in faith in the context of the real eating of the manna in the wilderness -- one of which could sustain life for day but the other feeds the food upon which one eats and never dies.

In the end, it would seem to be a particularly Lutheran thing to do to read John 6 sacramentally,  as David Scaer has noted:  "John 6 is the chessboard on which the traditional hermeneutical rules are either ignored or shown to be inadequate. In making John 6 a discourse on faith, the unus sensus literalis est―which interprets “eating” as really “eating” and not “faith,” and “flesh” as really “flesh”―is replaced by a purely allegorical interpretation in which these words are given a different meaning."  In the end, it might require suspending the mind of all prior knowledge to read John 6 without automatically thinking of the Sacrament but it would also suspend all credibility to read it without also requiring the faith that receives this flesh and blood.  

 

The constant need to explain. . .

Don't get me wrong.  I think explanations are good.  I am all in favor of transparency.  I like it when I understand why something is what it is.  That said, it is something different when we try to explain God as if He were a problem to be solved.  We get into trouble when we do that.   Yet this is precisely what we want to do and what we think we have to do -- explain God and His ways.

This is becoming and increasingly serious problem.  We want to explain why God created as He did and how He did, why He created them male and female, why He worked so slowly and deliberately down through the patriarchs, prophets, and ages, etc.  We want to be the apologist or interpreter for God but in so doing we have removed the mystery of God and turned Him into a rational being like ourselves.  It works because then we can hold Him accountable for what we do not like and for what we do not get.

Why is there the category of clean and unclean animals, food, times, seasons, etc?  Why did God have to do redemption through the death of His only Son?  What does it all mean?  How does it all work?  At some point in time we need to tell ourselves and those around us what God said to Job.  Where were you when all of this was being created and order assigned?  Do we presume to be God's advisors?  There is a certain arrogance in this that we seem unable to resist.  We want an explainable God because we want to know who to blame and to butter up.  God refuses to be that.  He does not woo or win us with neat and tidy explanations but confronts us with His holiness and mercy, His power and compassion, His grace and favor.  These are by their very nature not explainable.

Predestination is the ultimate example whereby we pull God down to our size and make from Him a neat if not somewhat arbitrary explanation of what we want to know -- why are some saved and not others?  Yet the doctrine of election was never meant to explain God -- only to comfort the elect in the knowledge of God's mercy which is not a whim but a promise.  I wish it were only predestination.  We also speculate about what happens to us when we die, about the souls of the unborn who die before birth, of the nature of the resurrection, the Real Presence, and so many other things.  We Lutherans are not alone.  We came out of a church which gloried in theological systems.  God does not give us a system.  He confronts us with who He is and what He has done.  That is our refuge and hope.  Either we take it to the bank or we will find ourselves heading down the garden path of deceit as we try to tie God up into a nice little box with the presumption that He wants us to peer into His mind instead of stand in awe of His displays of shocking mercy. The cross defies explanation but it invites faith and hope and love.  The sooner we remember this, the better off we will all be.  We do not have to know why.  We simply have to know God.  That relates to matters of how all thing came to be right down to sexuality and gender right down to events in our lives that we want to make into signs from God.  There is a little too much explaining going on and too little believing.

Remains. . .

I read where archaeologists uncovered the remains of a long-forgotten medieval Roman Catholic church near Munich, Germany.  The remains are thought to date back to between the 9th and 13th centuries.  Along with the foundations of a church, there were also foundations of several other medieval structures (houses, ovens, pit houses, and cellars) and some human remains in the church.

The archaeologists are excited to have something to research as they seek to understand the history of the region.  Is that all this is?  Something for research and historical perspective?  It seems that this is the fate of the future.  Christianity will become for much of Europe and even parts of the Americas an historical curiosity rather than a living faith.  It was interesting to note that they recorded the find as a foundation and a foundation exists to support something but, increasingly, the Christian foundation of Western Europe supports very little of a living faith in people or a movement within culture.  Christianity has become in these areas like the remains of the people found under the church floor.  They were once alive and so was Christianity but now they are not and neither is Christianity in vast parts of Western Europe.

While it is true that these remains help those who follow to understand the past, Christianity is not meant to be a past or a legacy or an abandoned foundation.  It is meant to be a living faith, embraced with the hearts, minds, and lives of the faithful born again of water and the Word, cleansed by the Word that absolves them of their sins, guided by the voice of the Good Shepherd speaking through Scripture and sermon, fed and nourished upon the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Eucharist.  Christ knows nothing of nor cares anything for the footprints of the past that lead nowhere.  This is why the role of the family is at least as important as the work of the Church in retaining the faith now and in the future.

Sadly, the largest Lutheran denomination in America is not the ELCA.  Don't be relieved by that.  The largest Lutheran denomination in America is called those who used to be Lutheran.  Just like the largest group from other denominations might also be those who used to belong, attend, and believe but do not anymore.  We have our own remains and foundations to dig out and they do not belong to an ancient past but merely to yesterday.  It is worth thinking about.  What would our churches look like if everyone baptized remained among the faithful, if everyone confirmed was still in the pews, and if everyone who belonged was there to kneel at the rail every Sunday?  The problem we have is not simply appealing to those beyond our walls but keeping those who once believed.  If we fail at this, we will end up looking exactly like Western Europe -- with some old foundations where living communities of faith once stood.  That is a sobering thought.

The challenge of an interfaith home. . .

Vice President Harris’s mixed racial heritage also has an interreligious aspect. The daughter of a Hindu and a Christian, she was raised in the Black church, but was also taught her reverence for Hindu temples. Later, she married Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, creating an interfaith home for her new family and two stepchildren.

JD Vance has an equally diverse religious history.  Having grown up believing in God but not affiliated  with a particular faith group, he attended an evangelical Christian church off and on as a teen and then, by his own admission, entered a period of near-atheism in his twenties. When he graduated from law school in 2013, Vance wasn’t committed to a specific religious community but he was curious about them again. He ultimately chose to the Roman Catholic Church, was baptized and received into the faith as an adult after a long journey. Vance’s wife, is “not Christian.” The two met in Yale Law School and married shortly after graduation. Usha, a native Californian, was raised by Indian immigrants in a Hindu household but has said she was very supportive of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Almost 40 percent of people who have married since 2010 married someone of a different religious tradition bringing with it the joys and challenges of living this out.  It is the story of America in the home, according to some, with the upside being learning tolerance and acceptance while growing up.  This is the practical shape of the coexist ideal.  But is it good for religion?  The essential conflict is that if every religion is true and acceptable, none is true and worth more than either.  Of course, in an individualistic world in which truth is the possession of the individual and the individual is the artibiter of truth and reality, this is not a problem.  But what does it do for the exclusive claims of the faiths themselves?  How does Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- the only way to the Father and the only name under heaven by which any will be saved -- live side by side with other religions, other religious truths, other religious promises, and other religious faiths?

Yes, there is religious diversity and no one is suggesting that we dismantle this freedom of religion but it is worth asking the practical question of how this works out in the home and in the family.  What does it mean to the children when both or any faith is true and equally valid?  What does it do to the religions themselves -- can you be a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran and still honor, respect, and allow for the promises of other religions?  Honestly, it is hard enough when two Christians from diverging Christian traditions marry and try to respect each other's faith.  How is it even possible to acknowledge and be supportive of the competing religious claims of non-Christian with Christian religions in the home?  I look at how hard it is for Protestants raised without sacraments to understand Lutherans (or Roman Catholics) who believe that God acts through means to understand each other and accept the divergent ways in which God is accessible.  How is it even possible to reconcile a faith which is non-Christian with the faith that affirms Christ as the only begotten Son of God through whom salvation alone is to be found?

I was raised in a home where my parents made a choice.  My mother, raised non-Lutheran, was confirmed as an adult and become Lutheran.  She did not do so for the sake of family, although that was an important consideration, but because she had come to know through catechesis that the faith of my father was also her faith.  There was no confusion in my home.  My parents were on the same page from the get go.  How does it work, then, when that is not the case?  How can it do anything but dilute the religious integrity of each faith in the home when there is disagreement?  Sure, by all means, respect the person who is not Christian but to affirm that their faith as a non-Christian is equal to or equally true to the Christian faith tends to gut the essential claims of Christianity.  Is Jesus willing to be merely one choice in the marketplace of religious choices?  It sounds good -- tolerance, respect, etc... -- but on a practical level it is nearly impossible to live out without making both religions somewhat shallow and weak.  If you can tell me how this can be done while allowing each faith to be fully authentic to its claims, please do.  

Again, sometimes we do not have a choice in the matter.  But sometimes we do.  Unity of the heart and mind of the family rooted and planted in one faith would seem to be the best choice even while admitting that the best is not always attainable.  At the least, the Christian would need to preserve the integrity of Christ in an interfaith household.  As American as this whole idea of faith and tolerance is, it is much harder to live out than one might presume.  Unless, as is obvious, you believe that the only good religion is the one whose claims are relative, whose demands are minimal, and whose truth is malleable. 

Excerpts from our history. . .

Excerpts from a description of the Mass attended in Lutheran Wittenberg on May 28, 1536: 

First, the Introit was played on the organ, accompanied by the choir in Latin… Indeed, the minister meanwhile proceeded from the sacristy dressed sacrificially [that means, wearing the traditional vestments including the chasuble] and, kneeling before the altar, made his confession together with the assisting sacristan. After the confession, he ascended to the altar to the book that was located on the right side, according to papist custom… The collect for that day followed in Latin, then he sang the Epistle in Latin… When it was done, the Gospel for that Sunday was sung by the minister in Latin on the left side of the altar, as is the custom of the adherents of the pope… Then he sang the words of the supper, and these in German with his back turned toward the people, first those of the bread, which, when the words had been offered, he then elevated to the sounding of bells; likewise with the chalice, which he also elevated to the sounding of bells. (See Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, pp. 195)

The recorder of this evidence of catholicity fifteen years after the Augustana insisted we Lutherans have preserved nearly all the usual ceremonies was not amused.  I would suspect that many Lutherans today would echo his disdain for seeing and hearing what this man heard a good 16 years into the Reformation.  The path of Lutheranism was not toward retention but renovation, tearing down the old ceremonies and finding ways to cast suspicion on the orthodoxy of those who kept them.  It has not changed today.  Oh, yes, there are more chasubles than before, more chanting, and perhaps even more kneeling but...  But, that is not where many hearts are and the old adiaphora bug still has its teeth in us making us almost instinctive in the suggestion that while some of these things may not be forbidden, best practice is to exclude most all of them.  

We Lutherans are struggling to retain our own identity -- one which is not merely tolerant of but encourages the fuller ceremonial rather than a sparse and bare Divine Service.  We still find it easy to dismiss these with the perjorative Romish instead of finding peace with who we are.  As long as this war continues within the soul of Lutheranism, we will struggle to know who we really are.  We are not merely accepting of the usual ceremonies but by our own confession we insist that this is really who we are.  There is a practice that conforms to the doctrinal stance in our confessions and it is rich and generous toward the ceremonies of old, renewed by those who insist that the words mean what they say and God is really present just as He has promised.  It is not only our enemies who misrepresent us; we often misrepresent ourselves -- confusing preference with confession and still more worried about being thought Roman than Protestant.  Rome is not really our problem but the Evangelicals and mainlines who do not even believe what the Word says or expect that Word to do what it says are a dire threat to our identity and witness.  It is sort of like those who are still fighting with the Masonic Lodge in an era when the Masonic Lodge is in a greater decline than any of us.  

Losing our yesterday. . .

Quotes about from those who laud the study of history to those who abhor it.  We seem to have gone past Henry Ford's rebuke (history is bunk) and learned to despise our past.  We are not only more and more ignorant of that past but more and more uncomfortable with it.  That says a great deal about us -- more about us than our yesterdays.

Part of the gift of victory is the ability of the victorious to write history.  Of course, those who lost are rightfully suspicious of and antagonist toward the privilege of victory.  Remarkably, the victors are not all self-congratulatory.  We have written some honest and fair surveys of our history over the years -- even before we had a woke culture to tell us how bad it was.  At least we knew our history.  We may have struggled to come to terms with the darker parts of that history but we knew its study was valuable and its familiarity was key to any hope of improvement.

I wish I could say that feeling remained.  The fruits of many methodologies are born in both our suspicion of how history has been told and our delight in painting with a broad brush the offenders and their offenses according to modern standards.  In studying Scripture we learned to be skeptical that we could ever really know the Jesus of history but it was enough for us to know that the Jesus of history was certainly very different than the Christ of the Bible.  Everything became a conspiracy theory and the center of the story was always different than what the text said.  This discomfort with history has moved well past religion and made us strangers to our own stories.  Either we have rewritten those stories or we have stopped telling them.  In either case, we have become strangers to our past.

Losing our yesterday will do little to improve our tomorrow.  What it will do is divide us even more and leave us conflicted, isolated, and ignorant.  The perfect example of this is how liberals and progressives snuggle up to the Palestinian cause, Islam, and terrorism against the Jews and Israel.  Do we really think that our American ideals have more in common with the terrorist and theocratic rule of Middle Eastern Islamic nations than they do with Israel?  It is a catalyst of ignorance and idealism that have made friends from those who should be enemies -- unless these same progressives and liberals are okay with the oppression of women and the death penalty for homosexuals.

I wish this were simply a crisis of conflicting values but it is more.  As we lose touch with our own history and lose confidence with the accuracy of its story, we are left with nothing to guide us but feelings and a distorted sense of what is right and what is wrong.  How else can we reconcile a culture which insists upon the fundamental right of one child to decide his or her gender while refusing to affirm that same child's fundamental right to life.  As yesterday becomes a stereotype or caricature of itself we find ourselves more broken, divided, suspicious, intolerant, and violent today.  What this breeds is not only today's ills but a dark future.

Christianity once had a powerful role in sustaining the story of our past.  In the university as well as in practice, Christianity honored our forefathers as well as God's work in time to deliver us from the tyranny of the moment.  The more Christianity loses its anchor in Scripture and its awareness of God at work in time, the less our culture has to guide us in the present or the future.  The great danger today is not simply the evils that we call good but our inability to understand what is happening to us because we have learning nothing from our past.  From the Psalms to the Gospels, Christianity is the retelling of the old, old story of Jesus and His love.  We don't just need that in Church.  We need to tell our old, old story in our schools and universities.  The loss of hope in our tomorrow is fed by the loss of our yesterday -- in religion and in life.

No closed questions. . .

In a discussion on a forum of ideas, the point was made that it is not helpful when certain things are treated as closed questions and therefore not open to discussion -- at least in the sense that they can be changed.  Though this was initially framed with respect to the sex and gender issues, it is not exclusively so.  The issue seems to be this.  Unless you are willing to talk about any doctrine and the conversation is open to an end that might be different than what the Church has always said, it is not a conversation worth having.  So if you cannot talk about same sex marriage or the gender alphabet as something that could end up at a different place other than the rejection of homosexual behavior, same sex marriage, or the idea that gender is an individual construct, it is not worth talking about.  Every end must be suspended for the sake of the conversation.  I get this.  Those who want to talk are looking to change minds and change positions and change doctrines.  They have no interest in defending themselves over and against those who believe the Church has long ago decided these things but they also find it narrow minded, judgmental, and a failure to be open to the Spirit if those who believe the Church has long ago decided such things do not want to treat them as open questions.

As much as some want to rush into such hot button issues as sex and gender, what about the bread and butter of Christian dogma?  Is the Trinity also a subject for conversation in which the Trinitarian statements of the Creeds are not allowed to be the end?  Can we talk about God as if the Trinity were not settled doctrine?  Should we?  Is original sin also a subject for conversation in which what the Church has said and believed is not necessarily where we might end up?  Should it be?  You could add in any number of things Scripture says and the Church confesses and has confessed through the ages that now some want to talk about because they no longer like where the conversation went.  My question is more basic.  If that is the definition of the conversation, then we cannot talk about anything unless we are willing to forego the conclusion the Church has made and turn a closed question into an open one.  Who does that benefit -- apart from those who do not want to end up where the Church has?

Accordingly, the only purpose of the conversation is NOT to end up where the Church has and to introduce a different conclusion.  While this is the modern penchant, it is alien and destructive of the Church's faith and confession.  What good does it do to make cultural-specific or relative what the Church has confessed, without any real change, for a couple of thousand years?  There can be only one justification for such a conversation and that is to make a change, to depart from what has been taught and confessed through the ages, to ignore what Scripture clearly says, and to invent another conclusion.  

There is also something else.  Failure to allow the conversation to end at a point other than what the Church has always believed and confessed is itself judged negatively as intolerance or unfriendliness or arrogance.  There are those who believe if you could make a case for a different end, you must make that case and you must allow that conclusion to stand at least along side what the Church has always believed and confessed OR you must replace the sacred deposit with the new invention.  Now you get what is the problem in the modern theological conversation.  While it is hard to made the case for change strictly from Scripture, it is possible to make the case on "theological" grounds.  Herein lies the problem.  Theological and Biblical are allowed not simply to compete but to conflict and the weight lies on the theological over the Biblical.  This is the fallacy of the modern era and one that makes what Scripture says and the Church has confessed as a mere starting place and not an ending point.  This is also the modus operandi of liberal and progressive churches -- put a question mark where the Church has put a period and put doubt where Scripture has put confidence.  The end result is that love becomes the only thing and love is so weak that it can only affirm and must approve whatever the individual has deemed right and true in his own eyes. 

What does prayer look like?

Sadly, the visual image of prayer has become decidedly feminine and aged.  I wonder if we presumed too much from the story of Simeon and Anna in the Temple.  In any case, prayer increasingly looks like the solitary domain of an elderly woman.  Whether clinging to a rosary or hands folded and eyes closed, the visual that accompanies prayer seems to have no room for others or for children or, especially, for men.  This has become a distinct problem for us.

Those inside and outside of churches see prayer as women’s work and the only women with the time to devote to prayer end up being the faithful but gray and white haired ladies of Christianity while the young, the youth, the younger women, and especially the men are too busy living to pray.  It is a profoundly more feminine snapshot than even those who attend worship.  Women, especially older women, pray but men work.  In the end, even faithful men have come to the view that God wants more from their hands in labor than in prayer and that is their challenge.  How odd!

The praying man has become an increasingly rare icon -- even among pastors.  The men not only fail to lead the family at prayer but their children find it hard to imagine dads and women husbands actually praying.  Now I am not saying that men never pray but that the image of a man at prayer has become absent from the albums that contain the ordinary images of life and worship.  Statistics have always said that the witness of the father bringing his family to church and leading the home has a profound and significant impact upon the likelihood of a child in the home keeping the faith.  Important but a much lower statistic is the woman and mother who brings her children to church and acts as the spiritual head of the home.

Man things are also increasingly hard to define.  There was once a common definition of the work of men as providers and protectors of the home but these have long ago given way to the shared duties of husband and wife with little real distinction between them.  Longer ago the man's role was to do the hard things of keeping order, maintaining discipline, fixing things, and the outdoor tasks of the house and yard.  But the primary work of the husband and father is within the life of the family.  They have increasingly become spectators in this and even distant spectators.  Yet surely our Lord presumes that this is not the case!  As the Scripture says “Would one of you hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf or a poisonous snake when he asks for a fish?” (Matthew 7:9-10).  Our Lord is not talking to moms here but dads.  Is this reflective of the state of family life today -- even among Christians?  Could the Lord be reminding us that when men leave these domains and especially prayer to others, they are doing exactly that -- giving their loved ones and families stones instead of the Bread of God's Word and the Body of Christ to eat and allowing the dangerous play with serpents instead of the nurture of godly things?

Presence is everything.  You need to be present in the home and in the church to take up the cause of prayer.  Your wife is not for your pleasure but for your keeping safe and providing for and for whom you sacrifice even your life.  Your children are not playthings nor do they raise themselves but they are arrows in your quiver because of how you lead and care for them.  You cannot be a stranger to the House of God and fulfill your godly role assigned to you as man of the house, husband of your wife, and father to your children.  Faith conversations do not happen when you plan them but as you are with your family, less in the ordered conversations of devotion than in the practice of how you life, work, pray, sacrifice, and serve.  Children learn forgiveness not in Sunday school but as they witness their father grow in stature as a man who confesses to his wife and seeks her forgiveness and who hears his wife's confession and forgives her over and over again.  Children learn prayer they see their father pray at home and in worship, without shame or embarrassment and as the mark of the true strength of character and virtue.  Wives will gladly submit to a man they see demonstrating such conscience and resolve for love always invites love.

I am not at all suggesting that women or elderly women should stop praying.  What I am suggesting is that the minds of our children and youth should as readily conjure up the image of a vigorous man deep in prayer as the gray and white haired ladies we have become accustomed as the icons of prayer.  If men seek their families to follow, they must lead and they must lead them to church and in prayer.  This is how our children trust their fathers, listen to them, and follow their example.  Yes, men will fail but the restoration of the fallen is as profound as any example can be to children who need to know that God rescues the fallen.  So, men, don't be afraid of failure.  Maybe you did not have a good role model at home or maybe you did not learn from your own father.  That should not condemn you to their error or lack.  The strengthening of the family and the home begins on bended knee with the voice of husband and father leading the family in prayer.  

Expressive individualism. . ..

Our cultural move to a hyper-individualism focused upon the pragmatism with respect to the wants and needs of the individual in the moment has been well documented -- even celebrated.  It should not need to be defended here.  How deeply this expressive individual with its preoccupation on the felt needs or wants of the individual has affected Christianity and movements within Christianity is still being worked out.  It is not difficult, however, to see how many of the churches in America, and not only those who have a progressive or liberal bias, have capitulated to this expressive individualism both in the form and content of the worship and the doctrine or teaching of the faith.

Everywhere you look, the images of our society include those who live on the fringes merely by virtue of their numbers.  Yet those who are transitioning from one gender to another or adopting a non-binary view of gender and those who flaunt their divergence from the norm, such as drag queens, for example, have become the cultural icons of the moment.  It is pretty hard to argue that expressive individualism has not triumphed in the thinking and living of the West -- even among those who personally are not identified with these extremes.  How deeply this has infected the church depends upon which churches you are looking at.  The mainline Protestants (mostly liberal Christians) and even many “progressive” evangelicals appear to have conformed to the radical subjectivity of sexual desire and gender identity. They have adopted the view that Scripture and the teaching of the church must adapt to where people are at and follow the movement where people are going both in what is believed and how it is practiced.  The statistics tell us that such progressive and liberal mainline churches have not prospered in this move but have actually dwindled and, surprisingly, the more traditional churches in doctrine and practice and the adoption of the positions of culture are actually more demographically robust than those who have mirrored the world around them.

What is remarkable is that even these churches are not quite immune from all the pressures to adopt and be adept at maneuvering within the landscape of our modern world.  These churches have attempted to remain faithful to biblical orthodoxy but have they also allowed the spirit of pragmatism, consumerism, and individualism to prevail at the same time.  To what extent has their preaching and teaching focused more on the path to successful living rather than holiness of life and faithfulness amid challenge?  To what extent has their worship life reflected practices and music that emphasize the same over doctrine and faithfulness to the Biblical witness?  Look at these churches and what is both the soundtrack of their formal and informal devotional lives in the contemporary Christian music that sounds much like a secular playlist for the day.  Look at what their youth have understood to be the cardinal truths of their faith as they come of age in the world.  You will find more folks participating in the fitness centers and self-help groups of these churches than those willing to be taught what God says and how that truth neither depends upon nor changes by the faith of the individual.  Look at how easily they move from church to church in pursuit of something other than doctrinal orthodoxy.  What is all of this saying?

The indictment of modern liberal and Progressive Christianity does not depend upon nuance but is fairly and accurately defined by the shallowness of what passes for modern day preaching and teaching and the worship services which entertain more than they do anything else.  It was never about your children or grandchildren at least attending some church but always about which church and what that church believed or taught and how that church worshiped the Lord.  It might be that the church they are attending is doing a pretty good job of helping them depart from orthodox Christianity, from the solid truth of the Biblical witness, and from the categories of sin and forgiveness in which the Gospel lives.

 

Death is the end. . .

Progressive Christianity is not simply an error or a divergence from what was and has always been believed, it is suicide.  Progressive Christianity will always result in a move away from the Scriptures, from truth and fact, and from a normative faith to one normed by the individual.  Progressive Christianity seems to find nothing sacred or immune from change or alteration.  It invites no standard more than the individual and no time more than the moment.  Because of this, it can offer nothing of substance and certainly nothing of permanence.  From the house built upon the rock that is Christ, progressive Christianity has constructed a house that sits on sand, for now, and soon will sit on nothing at all.  Because of this, it is a suicidal movement that, in the end, will always result in the repudiation of what God has said for all and for all time in favor of what someone thinks or feels or thinks or feels he has experienced in the moment.  In fact, the ease at which Protestantism has chosen to live upon the moving foundation of the moment and the autonomous individual is another signal that it is not a serious theological movement at all but whimsical and nonsensical. 

Underneath progressive Christianity is a rejection of nearly everything Scripture says.  Progressive Christianity insists that Scripture speaks with symbolic language of creation.  While that might not seem so bad to some, what it does is undercut the whole purpose of the creation account.  God made all things as they are.  Evolution steals the fearfully and wonderfully made and leaves us with an accident of nature or mutation without design or purpose but random and without any intrinsic value or worth.  Progressive  Christianity guts the miracles and leaves them as mere fables with morals designed to tell you what you must do and nothing about what God has done.  In so doing, God cannot be made more than the myth or legend that produced these stories and, if He exists at all, has a sole purpose of making you better or making the world a better place.  Progressive Christianity defines life without sin and declares death to be natural -- an essential part of the circle of life.  Then death has the victory and the life that continues either lives in the memory of those who recall the dead or in some vague, spiritual existence in which real means imagined.  Progressive Christianity finds its purpose in ridding the sins of old from bothering the freedom of people to do what they want (so long as it is currently sanctioned) and consensual.  In this view, sex is for pleasure and life is for pleasure.  Progressive Christianity finds man alien to creation and therefore pursues the reduction of man's footprint on the earth through everything from birth control to abortion to ecology.  It is suicide with a religious veneer.

Traditional and orthodox Christianity is not battling for its own survival but for the survival of man and so far we do not seem to be doing all that well in this war.  Our children have come to agree with Progressive Christianity and culture that marriage of confining, family is not worth the trouble, children (if you want them) are toys, our marriages seem to fail at a rate similar to the unchurched, and our choices seem to mirror the values and choices of those who claim no faith.  We are not vying for turf here but for the most important and noble truths Scripture can convey.  Are we the crown of God's creation as people and did the Lord actually move time and eternity to send forth His Son in the womb of the Virgin to suffer and die to redeem us from sin and death?  If this is not true, what is?  Progressive Christianity is willing to kill the faith to save it -- literally.  It is time for us to admit and warn about the stakes of life today.  We are not looking toward a better tomorrow defined by the unfettered pursuit of pleasure and a life insulated from sacrifice but a life of service in the service of the One who served us even to death on a cross.  We are not looking for a better heaven and earth but a new one in which sin and death have no place anymore.  We are not looking for freedom from responsibility or duty or work but for the freedom which will help us accept responsibility, pursue the godly vocations for which we were created, and for work that puts others and their needs (spouse, family, neighbor) above our own as Christ has already done for us.

You will find in Progressive Christianity a narrower vocabulary in which sin has become injustice and death rescued by pharma and technology and life defined by our passion less any constraint or limit.  The end result of this is death.  Progressive Christianity does not need saving because it has no sins, does not need redemption because it has made its peace with death, and does not need a heaven because they are determined to find a way to have your best life now.  Progressive Christianity is self-destructive as a movement and even more as a reason for the hope you have.  Do not listen politely or meet in dialog or speak in the same terms as Progressive Christianity.  This movement is not looking for something you need but for a hit on the dopamine and a rush of good feelings that will turn your eyes from is what really wrong.  Death is the self-appointed end for Progressive Christianity.

Does God want religious harmony?

God must feel real good when we sit down at a table to play nice about religious diversity.  I may be a fool but I find it hard to identify any positive fruit if interreligious dialog.  Sure, our conversations with others who claim to be Christian, to esteem Scripture, and to confess the Gospel might be worthwhile -- not to promote understanding but primarily to call each other to account.  When you sit down with others, you probably better begin by having a realistic and historical view of who you are and what you believe.  But when you sit down with other religions without a common Word of God or history or values or identity, what is to be gained?

For example, do we really need to understand Islam better?  Will mutual understanding really calm down the tinderbox of Palestine?  Will Lutherans or Roman Catholics actually find some sort of common ground with Muslim faith and practice?  Maybe we could agree on climate change but will we ever agree on who God is and is not?  Do you think there is any way to such a common answer to the burning question of who God is?  Yeah, I thought so.  Neither do I.

Is God glorified knowing that people are trying to play nice in the sandbox of this mortal life but who do not bat an eye to defame and desecrate the Word of the Lord that endures forever in order to do so.  What have we gotten wrong about Islam, for example?  Is this somehow a deep and dark religion that has been falsely characterized over the years and its informative texts and leaders secret to us?  Does Islam really misunderstand Christianity because there are hidden things of the orthodox and catholic faith which are not in Scripture or creed or confession?  Is there the expectation that Christianity and Islam can coexist and respect each other's own exclusive paths to salvation as just as much true as their own?

I have volumes in my library that address Islam as well as its primary text.  I also have volumes in my library which tell me how to respond to Islam.  There are also copies in the parish library.  Perhaps Islam has their own similar books.  So what do we talk about in dialog which we cannot know from such written treatments of each other's faiths?  After such a dialog will Christianity disown the exclusive statements of Christ that no one comes to the Father except through Him?  Will Islam reject its own exclusive statements.  

Although I have focused on Islam,  you could substitute any other religion and ask the same sort of questions of those who believe a Christian/Buddhist dialog could be fruitful or a Christian/Sikh conversation or, well, you name a religion and fill in the blank.  The sad reality is that it is more likely that such dialogs will result in misunderstanding of their own faiths as well as the faith's of their dialog partners precisely because they are seeking common ground where none can possibly exist.  I am not saying that we should be open and hostile enemies toward one another but neither do I believe that our cause or the cause of humanity is furthered by presuming that the world will be better if we all just dilute our convictions enough to make a joke of what we say we will believe.  I shudder every time a Pope meets with the leader or leaders of another world religion.  Inevitably he will end up misrepresenting Christianity or misunderstanding the religion he hopes to accommodate.  But we are all at fault here.  No table is big enough for us to come let us reason together if such reasoning requires us to abandon what we believe.  Christianity invites such scrutiny from skeptics and opponents because we believe the Word of the Lord will bring faith from the hearer much to our own surprise and even chagrin.  But if we are apologizing for Jesus or His Word, we have no business sitting down with anyone and saying we would like to talk about how we are able to promote respect and toleration.  As I write this we have just celebrated the Exaltation or Triumph of the Holy Cross -- or did we not mean it?

Lutherans are not Protestants. . .

Lutherans have always found themselves the odd man out at the table of religious traditions.  We seem to be Protestants but we are not.  We claim to be Catholics but we aren't Roman.  Nowhere it this more true than when it comes to our approach to authority.  It sounds like Lutherans are right there with every other Protestant in putting authority in reason.  Unless we can be shown by Scripture, we will not believe it.  It almost sounds like Luther but it is not Luther.  Luther was bound by the Word that had authority over his conscience and not because of it.  Luther did not place Scripture into the realm of personal interpretation (though, to be sure, sometimes he sounded that way).  Luther believed in authority -- an authority bigger than him and bigger than the moment.  I sometimes wonder if we as Lutherans have forgotten that.  Luther was not a Protestant -- at least not in the way that term has been used since the first days of the Great Reformation.  Luther was a creedal theologian and one whose whole purpose was not to vitiate the authority of the Church but to correct that authority by placing it upon the firm foundation of Scripture.  The Reformation was and remains about authority and where it resides.

Even some Lutherans have come to sound pretty Protestant.  They submit to no man or institution, to no creed or confession, and only to a Scripture through the lens of their own reason.  They insist that they are happily free from these constraints as long as they stay true to the Word of God.  In the end, creed and confession, man and institution must submit to their understanding of Scripture and to their interpretation of it.  In this construct, nothing can be accepted from the past without being re-proved by the Word of God.  It is an exhausting proposition.  Every time you open the Bible you have to prove or disprove something and at the top of the mountain is reason.  It is not the end of the papacy but the making of every Christian a pope.  It ends up being a religious version of the autonomous self.  But is that Lutheran?  Or, is it even Christian?

Rome makes an attractive alternative to those who have tired of proving or disproving everything every time they open the Bible.  Rome has chosen which authority is above Scripture so that there is only one authority to interpret the Bible.  They say it is the Church but it is those with agency within the Church to do that (teaching magisterium or papacy).  If the church has the authority to infallibly interpret Scripture, then individual authority is not what is operative.  The problem is that this authority does not mean the same to all those who claim to be Catholic -- Rome puts it in one place, Constantinople puts it in another, and Lutherans put it somewhere else.  For Rome this problem lies with the fact that the teaching magisterium and popes have disagreed and erred and been inconsistent and even contradictory.  For Constantinople this problem lies with the fact that councils have contracted and erred and disagreed.  For Lutherans is that we sometimes are not even ready to admit that there is a church larger than a congregation and so we default to some sort of individual reason that is top of the heap.  

My Roman friends tell me that in order to disprove Roman Catholicism, you do not start with the Bible. Roman Catholics understand this as mere private interpretation and point to their historical claims.  The authority lies in the church -- whatever that means.  The problem for a Lutheran is that Rome has been all over the place and there is no clear and consistent teaching -- especially in the more modern times.  The teaching of Rome does not need Biblical authority nor does it invite it.  The other problem is exactly that history.  Who in their right mind believes that the early Church is the same as medieval Roman Catholicism or the same as Rome after Trent or the same as Rome after Vatican I or II.  In fact, Rome is debating this very point.  Is the Mass of Trent the same as the Mass of Vatican II?  This is evidence of the fact that the problem cannot be solved by shifting the authority from one autonomous individual to an autonomous institution.  What we call Roman Catholicism is defined most clearly by the Council of Trent and yet it is that very Council of Trent that Romans are insisting has been replaced by another Council that, on both sides of the divide, represents a different doctrine or teaching.

Lutherans often sound and act like Protestants but we are not.  We are Catholics not of the Roman kind.  We esteem our institutions highly but we do not endow them with autonomy or authority any more than we place one individual over truth.  We believe that there is an identifiable Catholic and Apostolic confession that has not wavered from the ages, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets by the voice of God's Word, and is not alterable by voice or vote.  Are there challenges to this by some, sure.  There will always be.  We will always seek to find an authority in our conscience or reason or in an individual or group of teachers because that is controllable.  If we defer to the sacred deposit once delivered to the saints, the faith will be confessed without being controlled or altered and this is what we say to the world.  It is the mark of true catholicity and we would welcome popes and teachers and individuals of any kind to join us in this faithful confession once and always the same.

What does anything mean?

For the Christian, words matter.  God spoke and all things came to be -- the Word is creative.  Christ is that Word through which anything that exists was called into being.  Christ is the Word made flesh in a moment in time.  He speaks through the voice of His Word.  The Bible is the written Word of God.  It does not take much to get it.  Words matter because God works through His Word.  Without that Word, faith is not possible since faith comes by hearing the Word of God.  The Spirit works through means -- the means of the Word, Scripture.  I could go on but it is pretty basic stuff.  So when we confront a world in which words do not matter, when truth is subjective, and when nothing is more than one person wide or deep and even then subject more to feeling or experience over truth, we are bound to have problems.

How we judge truth and how we see words is affected not simply by the Scriptures or religion but by the world in which we live.  You do not have to be a conservative to note how we treat words.  From the newspeak in which words take on a different meaning and context than they originally and universally meant to the doublespeak in which words are intentionally freighted with a different meaning than they would literally convey, we find ourselves at a great disadvantage politically, socially, morally, and religiously.  Yes, the Church is sometimes to blame for this confusion but even more has been the incorporation of the way the world around us communicates into the framework of religion and faith.

Add to this is the way those who control the message have the ability to change the historical record. To the victor belong the spoils and so important to that is the ability to write the history in such way that it favors them.  We have all known this but there have always been those whose recollection has challenged a false historical narrative.  The difference is that some have invented history and written it back into the past as if it really did take place.  The invention of history is not simply the altered facts but the slant on those facts.  For example, CBS recorded the announcement that Candidate Harris wanted to remove the tax on tips with glee and to the accolades of those in the hospitality industry.  However, a few months ago the same media was suspect of the cost to the treasury when Candidate Trump said he would do the same.  So we alter things by the spin we place on them as much as by the change of the actual record or fact itself.  The isolated incidence of same sex relationships in ancient cultures has become normative and justification for the radical shift that such same sex marriage was and is for our time.  All of this rewrites history or changes the slant on it to favor a presupposition instead of merely reporting the fact.

The unknown today is the new reality of artificial intelligence and what it could do to the established historical record and to the slant placed upon that history by those looking back.  What could AI do in service to those who wish to cleanse the past from the things that the present deems as its sins or alter our perception of that record?  I do not have a clue how this might further erode any idea of or appreciate for the constant of fact and truth.

Back where I began, let us think for a moment on how this suspicion of history or denial of the objectivity of truth bears on those who hear God's Word.  The Spirit is not simply working against the heart hardened by sin to disbelieve God over preference and experience and reason but is battling the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or that if there is that objective truth does not matter.  For this reason we speak the Gospel not simply to an unbelieving world but to a world that does not believe in truth any longer.  So how do you think that affects the people who hear Jesus say "I am the way, the truth, and the life?"

Close to power. . .

Apparently I had missed that Lutherans were across the hall from power once.  VP Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a Lutheran.  And then he was not.  He became Methodist.  So we have had Lutheran Supreme Court justices and Attorneys General but now we could have a Lutheran VP who has not left for another church - Tim Walz.  The only problem is that his version of Lutheran is somewhat less than, well, Lutheran.  What do I mean by that?  If Lutheran means holding to the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God, then Walz belongs to a body that hedges its bets on that point.  If Lutheran means holding to the Evangelical Lutheran Confessions as normative over reason and culture, then Walz belongs to a body that believes that the Confessions are more historical document than confessional standard which informs and norms the present.  If Lutheran means being the catholics that our Augsburg Confession claims we are, then Walz belongs to a body that is more at home in liberal Protestantism than with what had been believed, taught, and confessed through the ages.

Walz, born in West Point, NE, and raised Roman Catholic, began teaching in Nebraska where he also met his Lutheran wife, Gwen. From Minnesota, she attended a slightly less prominent legacy Lutheran school, Gustavus Adolphus, than St. Olaf.  After Nebraska, they ended up in Mankato, MN, at the Mankato HS where was a coach and faculty advisor for the school’s first gay-straight alliance. From that time on, Walz did not merely follow the ELCA in its pursuit of the alphabet of sexual attractions and genders, he embraced and led the way to expanding upon it as Governor of Minnesota.

Now Lutherans are no different than other faiths.  We like to parade our politicians out in front just like Roman Catholics and everyone else does.  The problem is that too often we are more comfortable with the politicians than we are with the profundities of our own faith.  Look at Biden.  He claims to be a good Roman Catholic.  Some think he is but only if being a good Roman Catholic means refuting and working against the historic and set doctrinal positions of the Roman Catholic Church.  Who knows what Biden believes in his heart of hearts or Walz for that matter.  In fact, we are not to know what is in the heart -- that is the domain of the Lord.  But it is surely reasonable and, I might add, Scriptural, to believe that the thoughts and words and deeds are not opposed to each other but reflect a certain uniformity within the boundaries of our own human inconsistency.

So my long lingering journey to a point is this.  Be wary of trumpeting the politicians who might belong to your church.  They could be good and faithful folk who believe and confess exactly what their churches do.  They could also be good and faithful folk who believe and confess exactly what their churches do but who believe that they should not impose their personal convictions on others.  They could also be good and well intentioned folk who believe and confess along the lines of what their churches do but who believe governing and believing are two different realms with few bridges between them.  They could also believe that they are good and faithful folk whose duty it is to conform the faith of Scripture and the ages to their own preference and that this is the mark of faithfulness to disagree and diverge from the confession of the church where they think the church is wrong.  In any case, while it is nice to claim a politician as close to the halls of power as one can get, it does little for that church in pursuit of the mission anointed by God and can, in fact, do some harm.

Tim Walz may be a great guy but he probably is not the kind of Lutheran he ought to be or he would not belong to a church which is content living on the cutting edge of Lutheranism and going beyond that edge for the sake of culture, society, modern values, individuality, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and access.  So whether we think he is a good guy or not, let us not list his Lutheranism as one of the reasons why he is.  In fact, I would be happiest of we judged our politicians on the basis of their public stands and records and not on anything else.  If you have read my blog you know that I am not a diehard Republican or a Trumper but I do appreciate that some of his governing was much better than his words and the Republicans have generally stood more solidly on the issues of life, culture, gender, and such.  I would happily support Walz or Biden or Harris if that were also the case.  My conundrum is that while the left has gone lefter the right has also headed left.  Because of that, there is a bigger issue than if they are Lutheran or Roman Catholic.