Strange but true. . .

If you have the stomach for it, you can watch this snippet of a Roman Catholic Mass from the middle of June.  It is a great deal to digest.  The liturgical looseness is to be expected but the co-opting of a whole liturgy to accommodate an LGBTQIA+ agenda is rather shocking.  One can only hope that the chasuble in the chancel will never be worn.  I was surprised to hear that Rome is the most welcoming to LGBTQIA+ folks and their agenda and perhaps the authors if their Catechism might also be a little surprised.  Or maybe there is no shock or outrage left anymore.  No one should be surprised that their mission is directed to sex workers and trans folks in Kenya.  That said, the strangeness is not simply the liturgical quirks or the obvious LGBTQIA+ friendly atmosphere.  What makes this odd is that this is allowed while those who wish for Latin or ad orientum or reverence or kneeling are castigated, warned, and eventually shut down.  I wish I could say it were only true of Rome.  Sadly, it is not.

The day has come when those who cling to the traditions of the faithful are more and more seen as problem people in every denomination.  It is also true among Lutherans.  Pastors are warned against introducing change too quickly or without regard for the consciences of the people and particularly warned against such things as chanting, incense, and reverence.  At the same time, when pastors come in and put a drum set front and center and replace the organ with guitars, keyboards, and a beat the dominates the music, these pastors are lauded as missional and the people urged to care about those not in the pews enough to give up their sacred cows of liturgy, vestments, and ceremonies.  The vast majority of larger congregations offer at least one contemporary worship option and many of them have assigned the Divine Service to an unpopular time slot and this is still happening in Missouri.  

Why is it that those who take seriously the Confessional call to catholic doctrine and practice are so often singled out for criticism and those who live on the fringes of the church's liturgical life are considered pace setters and mission-minded?  The vast majority of LCMS congregations use the hymnal and at least the minimal ceremonial of that book but the vast majority of people in LCMS congregations worship in congregations that at least offers some form of blended or contemporary service.  Most of us who have a fuller liturgical celebration are less intent upon seeing what we do imposed on those who do less than we are the whole Synod adopting the Divine Service as minimum, the hymns of the hymnal as their song, and reverence as the character of what happens in worship.  We are not about sending a thurible to every address of every congregation in Synod but we are about a clear and unmistakable face to what happens on Sunday morning among us.  It may not be uniformity but it is at least unity.  Rome has the same problem.

Rome has its dioceses of Charlotte or Detroit or other places where bishops are silent as church mice about the extremes of liturgical practice and faith expressed but roar like lions against someone who wants to kneel to receive the Sacrament.  While I do not know of many Latin Mass folks who insist that it has to be Vetus Ordo, I do know that they expect the Novus Ordo to at least acknowledge in some way the kinship between the rites.  They long for unity even if they admit that uniformity may not be possible.  One it tolerated and, perhaps, even celebrated, while the other is constrained and forbidden.  One pope contradicts another on this subject and throws a tantrum over folks who want to be nearer what was the 500 year norm.  Sad but true, strange but true.  Leo has not yet signaled what he will do and Lutherans have no pope to insist upon anything so I suspect the status quo will remain for both Rome and Wittenberg.  It is easier to gang up on the catholics than to curb the excesses of the Protestants in nearly every denomination.

Birth rate does matter. . .

Although most have laughed and dismissed the idea that birth rate is responsible for a significant portion of Christianity's woes, the refusal to entertain this seriously does not mean that it is not true.  Birth rate does matter.  A Pew study from 2010 to 2020 indicates that Christianity is growing (at least in the Southern Hemisphere and Africa in particular) but it is also declining in its proportion to the whole of the world's population.  Conversion is still significant but the decline of births and the loss of the children born due to a lack of catechesis and example is what is more responsible for the state of affairs today. 

In the Pew study demographics were cited most as the explanation for the shift over the decade.  The religious groups with older populations and a falling birthrate are struggling to keep up with those who have younger members and who laud the larger family.  The religions in decline are distinctly those in which marriage is more and more optional and children are not essential.  Europe and North America certainly fill that bill as they have more singles, smaller families, and an aging population so the once dominant religion of that area, Christianity, now has and will have fewer members going forward.  In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa large families and high esteem for marriage along with a significant conversion rate means the number of Christians there is increasing.  

What is true of Christians in these areas is also true of the Islamic nations of the Middle East and Northern Africa.  It is also true at least of the newer immigrant populations in the West who also claim Islam as their faith.  Birth rates matter.  The Lutheran lands of old (Northern Europe and Scandinavia) are showing the worst effects of the loss of marriage as a cultural ideal and the loss of children as a high value of marriage.  As someone once said, as goes Western Europe, soon goes America, and as goes America, so goes Christianity in the West.  I once saw that credited to Adrian Rodgers, the Southern Baptist preacher of a previous generation but it is a case of the obvious.

My point today is to say that the future of Christianity -- in particular in the West but literally everywhere -- depends upon the healthy state of the family, recovery of marriage as the norm, and the rejection of abortion and birth control out of the desire to enjoy larger families.  We cannot evangelize ourselves out of our decline.  There are plenty of people to be evangelized and I am not at all suggesting that we should not make a public proclamation of the Gospel.  Just the opposite.  But the reality is that we could speed up adult conversions in the West and still see our overall Christian population continue to diminish.  The key to the health of the West is the same as the key to the health of Christianity in the West -- the recovery of the value and virtue of marriage and children.  Christianity, however, has to do a better job of retaining our children in the face of a growing secular influence in public education and a culture more and more unfriendly to the faith.  This will mean some hard choices for those parents and families and a change in the values of Christians to be more distinct from the rest of the population.  Surely this is not a bad thing. 

Christianity has suffered as the decision of our ancestors in the early 1930s and 1940s was to embrace birth control and normalize the ideal of a smaller family.  It has also suffered in the large number of Christian denominations who were late to the battle against abortion, no-fault divorce, and the full embrace of the sexual revolution in the plethora of sexual desires and gender identities that has now become normal.  Other Christian denominations chose not to join the fight at all and simply caved into the prevailing direction of secular culture.  Orthodoxy and catechesis are the ongoing causes by which Christians not only retain the faith but keep the faithful in that faith.  This is a profound lesson we should have learned but the reality is that it is hard for us now to stand out and against what has become the norm in the West.  It will be going forward as well. 

Finally, while Christians do better than we assume at evangelizing, for every 18 folks who walk through the front door, 5-6 walk out the back door.  Muslims do a terrible job of converting with barely 2 new folks walking through the front door but they do not lose many and so their trajectory is always pointed higher than Christianity as a whole.  This is where catechesis enters in -- not simply the formal instruction that takes place at the church building but the catechesis of the home in which mom and dad impart the faith, model it, and help it grow in their children.  Many of the folks who left Christianity simply were never there in the first place.  They had not been assimilated as children or as adults and so a faith that remained on the outside of their lives became easy to jettison at the first sign of trouble or disappointment.  We are not doing a bad job of welcoming new people but we are not doing a very good job of modeling, instructing, and helping them in the doctrine and piety of the faith.  If we had, the gains we registered at the front door would not be so diluted by those exiting the back door. 

Better in theory than in practice. . .

There is no limit to the things which might fit the phrase better in theory than in practice.  I could certainly add a number to that category.  Among them is Missouri's preoccupation with democracy and voting which seems clear in theory (both the rationale and its limits against voting on the Word of God) but in practice it is neither neat nor tidy.  Too often we end up confusing majority with God's will and actually voting on the things God's Word prescribes.  Lutheran moderation seems good in theory but in practice it often makes it difficult for us to actually say that certain things are wrong and you should not do them.  Furthermore, it can end up being a subtle justification for sinning as long as the sins are not too shocking or terrible.

Sola Scriptura sounds great in theory but in practice it has ended up robbing Protestantism of anything remotely near catholic doctrine and truth.  Even if it is not how it is intended, the reality has certainly been that everyone is his own interpreter and his own sancta mater ecclesium and magisterium.  Those who claim to be bound by only the Scriptures have seen their churches waffle on abortion and cave to birth control and embrace every kind of sexual desire and gender identity -- to name but a few of the errors.  Even those who have abandoned the phrase, think that they are operating under the authority of Scripture when they are embracing the times

Even bishops are far better in theory than in practice.  If bishops alone were a guarantee of orthodoxy, Methodists and Episcopalians would not be the rather lost causes they have become and the ELCA would not be on the brink of apostasy.  Yes, I still believe it is better to emulate the ordered structure of Christianity from the beginning than to put things into American democratic terminology but we all know that changing the terminology will not fix the errors.  The same can be said about liturgy and ceremony -- they are profoundly catholic and apostolic but it is not impossible to keep the forms while emptying them of their meaning.  The Church of England seems to have excelled at keeping the shape of things while gutting the doctrine and piety from the ritual and forms of the Mass.

Councils are often great when they confess the truth of Scripture but when they authority of the council becomes the equal to the Word of God or when its power is separated from that Word, the councils become confused conventions of votes and voters who think they are doing one thing while they are often doing something else.  The Reformation was correct in warning us that councils can err and they have and they will continue to do so.  The sole source and norm of catholic doctrine is the Scriptures and the sole reflection of the Scriptures in worship remains the ordo, the liturgical form that belongs to all even when they have chosen to depart from it.  No restoration of faith can happen without a restoration of worship and the other way around.  The search for authority often leads us everywhere when it needs to lead us to the somewhere that is God's unchanging Word. 

There is no silver bullet.  Every age and generation must signal its devotion to orthodox and Scriptural Christianity, make the good confession before the errors and temptations of the day, and stand upon the unchanging foundation of Christ alone.  We cannot afford to become complacent because we call the offices by the right names or keep the ancient form of the Mass or hold to the slogans of another fight.  Ours is never the cause to pause and refresh but to remain ever vigilant against errors that would steal Christ and our salvation and ever urgent in confessing clearly and completely the sacred deposit of the faith and its foundations upon Scripture and its witness in catholic tradition.  There is way that we will lose this and that is when our own voices and the voices of those outside the faith become equal to the voice of Scripture and when our custom becomes the equivalent of apostolic custom.  When that happens it is sure that trouble and decay will soon follow. 

I am . . . a recovering Christian. . .

There is a pastor in Arkansas who purports to be Lutheran (albeit ELCA) and a decade or so ago he had a blog in which he introduced himself in this way:  Hi, my name is Clint, and I'm the least bible-minded pastor in America.  It is a good tag line and sure to arouse some interest in the crowded blog marketplace.  But it is also a terrible indictment against someone and the denomination in which they live.  When faced with the question, Do you believe strongly in the accuracy of the bible?  Schneckloth said he would have answered, No.  If he does not strongly believe in the accuracy of the Scriptures, what is the ground and norm of his faith or of any faith?

He is not alone.  There is no shortage of people who see some things in the Bible as worthy but who discard most of it as either unreliable or inaccurate or hopelessly out of date and out of step with the times.  In fact, there are many Lutherans who do so.  Not all of them are on the lunatic fringe but, indeed, most of them see themselves and believe themselves to be faithful and even exemplary in this regard.  Blindly following the Bible is seen as cultish while taking the Bible with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of reason is seen as enlightened.  Indeed, there are many who think themselves in the mainstream or even conservative but who allow their reason to dictate to the Scriptures.  

Notably, the realm of this is typically morality and the social gospel.  More important than echoing the language of Scripture or calling people to repentance is standing with the oppressed, advocating on behalf those without power, and identifying with them.  It becomes less about sin and redemption and more about freedom and service.  Strange as it seems, I would suggest that it cannot be about freedom and service until it is first about sin and redemption.  You simply cannot get there from here unless the road leads through the cross where the Savior gave His life as a ransom for many.  Again, the problem here is not that this language is necessarily wrong but it is placed above the cross where sin's debt was paid and it transforms the Gospel into a principle (see yesterday's post).  Jesus act of redemption is not to save you from something but for something and, in particular, for this life and for the difference you can make today.

Somewhere along the way I read this man's post quoting another author but in agreement:  don't make the mistake of treating this language too literally, turning metaphor into mechanism, poetry into ledger sheets.  The Bible is a book of symbolic language, of metaphor and myth, and of poetry instead of prose.  We are all tempted to this because symbolic language does not demand anything of us and it certainly does not give us anything of substance.  We are all tempted to this because metaphors are to be appreciated and do not convict us of sin nor direct us to the cross where sin's redemption was made.  We are all tempted to this because poetry is about the language as much as it is about what it says.  We want the Gospel to be this way as well.

Reason and education seem to help us believe that the cross of Christ is about everything but sin and forgiveness, that the Gospel is about how we live as much as about what Christ has done, and the life we need to be concerned about is how to live life now -- not eternal life.  The end result is that we are ever more distant from the cross and from the new life Christ has accomplished and the ball ends up back in our own court.  The guy I am speaking about is nothing if he is not eloquent and logical and even passionate.  The problem is he is simply wrong.  You cannot get there, where he wants to be, without the cross as Christ's surrendered life a ransom paid for sin, a satisfaction offered to the Father to appease God's wrath, and a propiatory sacrifice (as in 1 John 2:2 or Hebrews 2).   If redemption is symbolic, then sin is symbolic.  If the cross is only an example, it is not an altar where Christ gave Himself a sacrifice for our sin.  If the story is poetry (sort of an elaborated version of Abraham sacrificing his son), then our life in the Spirit is poetry and not prose (less about right and wrong than about authenticity).  It is no wonder that in the end it is so easy to go from the cross to causes like gender affirming treatment of pre-adolesents or just about anything else on the trendy wave of the moment.  In the end, you begin to realize that words like these tell you something.  Voices like this are telling you they are recovering Christians, trying to get away from the eternal Gospel proclaimed down through the ages and not looking to get closer. 

 

Concrete or symbolic language. . .

The great challenge in Christianity is to speak in the same concrete terminology that Scripture does and to stay away from symbolic language.  Indeed, the genius of the creeds are that they speak with one voice the one language of Scripture to say who God is and who He is not.  Too often we forego the language of creed and confession and end up with sentimental images or symbolic descriptions of who God is like but without the dynamic power of Scripture, creed, and confession that speak concretely of this God and what He has done.  God is not like anything.  God is who He is -- which goes back to the very name of God in the Old Testament.  I am who I am.  That is why we fail so when we treat God in the language of feeling or image or symbol.  We try to compare God to something and inevitably to us and therefore fall into the trap of the Roman and Greco pantheon of deities.  God is me magnified.  Scripture insists that this is the worst distortion of God and so commands us not to make a graven image of God.  What this means is not simply the carving of a stone deity but the crafting of language about God or likening God to something else but failing to use the terms Scripture uses.  This too is idolatry and blasphemy.

Because the social sciences frequently use this kind of language, we are all tempted to use it of God and to find commonalities where disparities exist.  Everyone worships something has come to mean that worship is not God addressing us but we addressing Him -- even defining Him.  So immediately the self-disclosure of God is forgotten in favor of how all imagined gods are worshiped, how they have been worshiped over time, and what the worship of Old and New Testament has in common with them.  The Achilles heel of this argument is that God is not the accumulation of all our quests for meaning or understanding or reason to allay our fears, worries, or doubts.  God is unique, known not by postulating ideas of Him but by knowing Him through His own revelation of Himself.

Scripture is blunt.  The only God who is God is the crucified and risen Lord.  There is no path to heaven or to God apart from this path and this God who reveals Himself and His love in suffering for sin not His own and rising to bestow upon the mortals immortality.  It is concrete.  Know this Savior and you know the Father for they are one.  The Spirit is not some sort of ethereal reality to transcend the concrete of this life but the power to bring the Word to life in us, to teach us to believe, and to empower us to live holy, upright, and godly lives within the framework of this present mortality.

Theology has devolved into attempts to explain things or render them rational or to impart to the concrete a higher value or plane of existence than the mortal.  In this way theology has become untethered from that which gives it meaning or value.  In this sense, every real theology is Biblical theology and every real Biblical theology is Christology.  We do not put God in this cage but God has revealed Himself to us in this way and refuses to be known by other ways.    Within the spiritual hunger of our times for meaning, purpose, reason, and hope do live those who attempt to offer metaphysical answers to concrete questions.  Some of them sound good and take us in as if we have found a voice which can live within the rickety framework of imagined religion as well as the concrete framework of revealed religion.  Jordan Peterson is one of those figures in this moment but there are many who have come before him and many who will follow him.  The problem is that where the world wants to find ambiguity and type, God is certain and concrete and this is why He is always a stumbling block without the aid of the Spirit to awaken us to faith.

Religion is not love in the abstract or even our love for Him or one another but God's love for us.  Scripture insists upon this.  There is no religion in love welling up from within us but only the first love of God for us.  This is what love means and we see it in the cross and empty tomb.  This love is not words or symbols for suffering endured and blood shed.  It is almost laughable how quickly love in Christianity has come to mean advocacy for the disaffected masses in need.  It is entirely predictable but tragic how noble Christian charity has become an NGO using tax dollars to do what Christ has called us to do.   Love has joined the corrupted words like mission and evangelism which does just about anything but speak Christ so the Spirit can call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify a people to gather around the Word preached and taught, the baptismal water washing clean, and the Eucharistic bread and wine to satisfy all hunger and thirst.  How odd it is that we are more comfortable with love that tells somebody's story but does not cross the road and bind up wounds or water that symbolizes everything but does nothing or the Real Presence which is absent in bread and wine only to live in the heart!

The world keeps asking what God is like and we must tell them who God is.  The congregation gathers to know what life in the Spirit is like and we must tell them it is living within the life of God through the means of grace.  The work of the church keeps asking how to make a big difference and we must tell them love always works one on one.  The guilty seek forgiveness as if it were merely a verdict granted to them that they are okay and we must continue to call them to repentance and absolve them so that they might be the new people God has declared them in baptism.  The people are itching to pray and tell God what they want God to know and do and we must continue to remind them that the mightiest prayer of all is three words: Lord, have mercy.  Nobody is saved by the idea of God but everyone who calls upon the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.

In the spirit of. . .

I wish that phrase had never been invented.  The spirit of something is so often used as the justification for the very things that betray what it is whose spirit you are invoking.  The Roman Catholics do it with respect to Vatican II.  In the spirit of Vatican II, a great number of inventions were made to transform the Mass almost overnight and yet nothing of what was invented was mandated or even discussed at Vatican II.  I find it amusing when this kind of discussion takes place among my Roman friends.  I should not be amused by it.  It happens among Lutherans as well.  It happens among all of us.

We Lutherans talk about the spirit of the Confessions as if they were different from the actual words, the spirit of the liturgy as if it were something distinct from the words or form or ceremonies of the liturgy, the spirit of friendship as if if were different from friendship itself, etc...   We talk about the spirit of Lutheranism as if Lutheranism had a spirit apart from the Holy Spirit.  How goofy is that?!  

The worst way we do this is to speak of the spirit of the Gospel.  The Gospel is not something which has a spirit (again, other than the Holy Spirit).  There is no spirit of the Gospel which is distinct from the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen.  You cannot speak of the Gospel spirit as if it were different from its words.  You should not speak of the Gospel as if it were something that could be reduced to a principle or a spirit.  Every time we invoke the spirit of something, we are in danger of violating what it is that we invoke.

For example, when Christians invoke the spirit of the Gospel to recognize same sex marriage or regularize same sex attraction or justify gender dysphoria, we are violating the very words of that Gospel to do so and betray what it is that we are invoking.  When we invoke the spirit of the Gospel to minimize doctrine and teaching and catechesis in favor of a broad church in which everyone gets to believe what they want, we get that spirit wrong and end up using the Gospel to justify or make normal that which the Gospel has come to forgive.  When we call people to repent for things other than real sins, we are in danger of turning sin into something other than the things which God has forbidden and we are in danger of turning the things God has forbidden into mere suggestions.

Whenever someone talks about doing something in the spirit of..., that should engage your warning radar because without a doubt whatever is being urged in the spirit of will actually be in direct opposition to or at least a distortion of that of which the spirit is invoked.  Plus, the real thing is always better than that which is the spirit of it.  The real food you chew and savor is better than the imagined and the real meat is better than the fake meat in the spirit of beef.  The real Gospel is so much better than the spirit of it.  The real liturgy is so much better than the spirit of it.  The real Christ is so much better than the spirit of Jesus (not meaning Holy Spirit, by the way).  So don't let someone lead you from the real thing because somebody is telling you about the spirit of it.

 

God really loves life. . .

One of the most problematic distinctions between God and man is life.  God really does love life -- in all its forms, shapes, sizes, and value.  He loves the lilies of the fields and the child in the womb, the forest and all its creatures and the aged in a nursing home.  God really does love life.  Surely that is the first lesson of Genesis and its revelation of God's creation -- He loves what He has made even after sin entered the world and we rebelled against our Creator.  That is the most amazing thing about God's love for life -- it is not conditional upon us or some idea of what we can do for Him.  He loved us even to sending forth His Son in our flesh to suffer and die and rise again not for the good or the almost good or even the lovable but for sinners! 

We don't love life -- at least the we of our culture and even perhaps many within the Church.  We love our lives until we don't anymore and wish to end them painlessly as if this were our right.  We love a good life, a well-lived life, a rich and productive life but we are quick to judge the value of the lives of those whom we do not believe live such a life.  We love the young and the beautiful but we are ready to discard the lives of the disabled, the unwanted, and the elderly.  We love the lives of the iconic, the famous, and the powerful but we do not love the weak, the poor, the needy, or the homeless.  Yes, we do advocate for them but is the love of advocacy more than the love of those in need.  We love those who make our lives better but we do not love those who cost us something, those hard to love, or those who different from us.  Yes, we do love the idea of diversity but we would rather people were just like us.  I should not need to go on.  You get the idea.

We don't love life especially the lives of those whom we judge to be guilty of the sins I judge to be the worst -- we do not love rapists or murderers or child abusers.  Yet the miracle is that God loves them, loves every sinner, and loves them so much He burns with fire for their repentance and salvation.  This makes God a stranger to us as much as anything else.  If God were like us, He would know better.  Some lives are worth more than others and some are simply not worth anything.  But God's mercy is beyond our human reason.  God really does love all life.  Our struggle in faith is not simply the struggle to believe that God can love us with this powerful and redemptive love but to believe that God actually does love others and especially the others we do not love.

Now to be sure, God does not love our sins.  He loves us enough for His Son to be covered in them and render Him ugly with our unrighteous thoughts, words, and deeds.  He does not love us with the kind of passive love that accepts and tolerates our sins or our own attempts to make up for them but He loves us sinners.  We do not have to love the sins of others in order to love them but we dare not set up their sins as excuses or justifications for loving some but not them.  God loves life and values the lives of sinners even though He hates sin and His Son has bled and died to pay for those sins.  So maybe we need to learn something about His love so that we may love one another as He has loved us.  By the way, I read that last thing somewhere.

NPR and PBS

I am an avid watcher of NPR and NPT.  I do not financially support them.  I love that they provide the BritBox fare of Masterpiece, to the Antiques Roadshow, and so many other programs I enjoy.  I do not pay much attention to their news programs or to their social programming.  I much prefer Lawrence Welk and Hyacinth Bucket to their political point of view.  It saddens me that they are seemingly blind to this slant and presume that everyone from rural America to the hicks in the South are as dependent upon their news and political commentary as are the erudite liberals of the coasts and educational institutions.  I am sad that the loss of governmental money might reduce some of the programming I enjoy but I can always tune into BritBox directly to satisfy me even though it is often easier to turn on my TV and get it from the local national public whatever stations.  The whole idea that without governmental support and without the voice of public television there will be people who will not get the unvarnished truth is laughable.  My local station is running a financial campaign to make up for the loss of the government money and insists that they are the only ones who ask the "hard questions."  As most folks know already, news media hardly ever asks the hard questions of those whom they support and nearly always uses their hard questions to challenge the people they do not support. 

I gave up on NPR when the local station decided that experimental music was better than classical and relegated their small offering to some HD channel I cannot get in my car.  You would have thought they might keep classical music since it is supposed to be high brow but now they are more interested in music programmed by LGBTQIA+ than the masters -- not unlike some symphony orchestra and their programming directors.  I cannot tell you how many times I have tuned into public radio or television only to roll my eyes at their seemingly naivete in displaying a blatant political slant to what is supposed to be neutral news and commentary.  However, since the rest of the media has presumed that their job is to tell us what the news means (commentary) instead of giving us the facts, why would we expect the public versions of that media not to follow suit?  Thus my growing disdain for nearly all media but in particular for one which enjoys governmental support.

That said, there might be a lesson here.  Although the IRS and government seems to be loosening the rules with respect to churches and politics, there is a cost to be borne by becoming political.  Yes, the churches do need to address moral issues without restraint but identifying with a particular political party or cause has the downside of diluting what is our own essential purpose.  We are here to proclaim the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen.  Everything flows from that but, more importantly, is less important than this.  

The reality is the politics have always been connected to churches.  Some wags once suggested that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was the Republican Party at prayer.  While not technically accurate since survey after survey has indicated this is not a true stereotype, the tag has stuck.  Roman Catholics were once universally seen as Democrats.  Again, while it was never quite as true as the image of it, the stereotype stuck.  We are not about parties but issues that flow from our confession, not about candidates but about positions, not about telling people who to vote for but urging them to vote from an informed Christian perspective.  That will always lead to different outcomes and no party mirrors the causes and concerns of the Church.  Public television and radio forgot that along the way and we dare not follow them in this dead end path.  If churches enter the stage with an opinion, it better be clear why this issue is one of confession and creed and not simply another attempt to sell a point of view.  Without this, it won't be long before the IRS changes its mind and without Christ as our proclamation we will become merely another slanted outlet for opinions.  Under it all it better be the Word of the Lord that endures forever.

 

UPDATE:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by Congress as a vehicle to fund public broadcast stations.  On the other hand, Planned Parenthood is a private entity.  Odd, however, that Planned Parenthood, a non-government corporation, got more money, and, even more significant, a greater percentage of its revenue, from taxpayers than CPB was. So Planned Parenthood was also more reliant on federal funding than PBS or NPR ever were. One out of every $8 in NPR OR PBS came from the government while $1 out of every $3 went to Planned Parenthood.  Either public broadcasting was doing something wrong or our values were skewed toward the work Planned Parenthood does (and still does in this when abortion has become a pill).  Why did NPR and PBS not complain about this?  R

As worthless as. . .

From the farm we had the completion of the phrase  this title began and it is not pretty -- even though it is mostly true.  So much of what the Church is and does is exactly that according to the world -- worthless and useless.  It is, as one author entitled her book on worship, A Royal Waste of Time.  I will not dispute this conclusion.  From the point of view of the world, God is mostly worthless and without use except as a convenient target, scapegoat, and blame for the things you do not like or want or have gone wrong.  Other than this, why do you need or want a God or His Church?  

There was a time in which no one said such a thing out loud.  You may have thought it but in public in America, Church was as American as apple pie and Chevrolet.  God was an American, as true blue a patriot in the eyes of our society as anyone.  Those days are long gone.  With gluten intolerance and diabetes and concern for organic and fresh supplies, apple pies are not what they once were.  Chevrolet is not exactly what it once was when the chairman could quip that what was good for General Motors was good for America.  Even those within the Church do not call God an American anymore and it seems that churches and the Church are at best tolerated and at worst despised across the culture of our land today.  Nobody seems to want either around anymore and some are hoping to tax them both out of existence.

If you are outside the Church, I suppose there is no more logical conclusion than to think God useless and the Church worthless.  Even the old charities once so intimately connected with the churches have become largely NGOs who work on the government's dime doing the government's business and not God's or the churches.  But many things seem to have been jettisoned by the times.  We no longer value or share a great moral vision in our land -- not about the sacred character of life from its natural beginning to its natural end, not about what it means to be male or female, not about the centrality of marriage and family, not about the blessing of children, not about a work ethic, not about social interaction, and not even what it means to be spiritual or religious.  Our individualism and our consumer and entertainment culture has isolated us from each other and built invisible barriers that divide us even more than walls.  Ear buds and small screens are more important to us that community or fellowship of any kind -- especially religious.

Lets face it.  Christianity is a hard sell to a people who find most of what is Christian worthless and useless.  But it is not our job to insist that Christianity is worth something or everything or to argue them into seeing how useful it and God and the Church are to have around.  Our calling is to proclaim the Gospel, to call a people to repentance, to baptize and to absolve, to catechize and instruct, to feed and serve.  What God does with our labors is not given for us to define or judge.  We simply do what we have been called to do and as faithfully as we can do it.  Each of us in our stations in life and all of us as the Church doing and serving as faithfully as we are able -- that is our job.  The worth or value of God and the Church are the fruit of faith and not the reason to believe.  The cross is that reason and the Spirit is that power.  Once a person called me as a pastor a blood sucking leech.  Okay.  But thankfully God has defined my worth not by what I do but what He has done for me.  Tell that to the world.  It may not sell but it will probably make for more Christians. 

Is anyone sounding the alarm?

I am much more familiar with the stats in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and these are by no means encouraging.  Yet the reality is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is in even worse shape.  Now no one in their right might takes comfort in the fact that as bad as we are doing, others are doing worse.  If you do, I am sad for you.  I don't.  Remembering the days when we were both growing by a new congregation every week or less and TIME was wondering if everyone in America would be Lutheran in the year 2000, I grieve not over the loss of power or prestige but of vibrancy in our life around the Word and Sacrament, seriousness for the task given us, confidence in the Word to guide and answer our questions and the worlds, and hope for the future.  In both denominations, doom and gloom and a mind for expediency or ignorance seems to be our temptation.  That said, a bishop of the ELCA has given a sober assessment of the state of that church body.

• Over the last 10 years, the percentage of the smallest congregations with fewer than 50 people has doubled.
• 58% of ELCA congregations have fewer than 50 people.
• Congregations that worship with over 250 people in attendance decreased from 9% to 2% over the last eight years.
• From 2015 to 2023, The ELCA lost 834 congregations. Of these, 520 closed, 131 merged into another congregation, 142 left, and 41 were removed.
• The ELCA ordains about 200 pastors a year, while 400 pastors retire each year. Currently, there are over 600 ELCA churches seeking a pastor.
• 45% of ELCA congregations cannot afford a full-time pastor.  

The ELCA ordains 200 pastors a year, sees about 400 pastors retire each year, and has over 600 parishes calling a pastor (not counting permanent vacancies).  In the LCMS we are smaller by the numbers but have about 115 or more new pastors every year and has 500+ calling (with many of those calls for part-time pastors).  These stats cast a long shadow over us.  We seem not to lack money as much as people, not congregations but growing congregations, not pastors but young pastors who can be expected to serve 35-40+ years.  That is what we share in common with a denomination that also calls itself Lutheran though looks very different from us.

This is one of the poisonous fruits born of distraction.  Missouri continues to be distracted by worship wars, evangelicalism, congregationalism, and the lingering skirmishes of the last Battle for the Bible.  The ELCA seems to find it hard to reject a cultural cause that has anything to do with sex or gender.  When the dust settles, both church bodies find it easier to fixate on the distractions than take up the cause of the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen.  Both find it hard to give full attention to the mission of calling sinners to repentance, absolving them of their sins, and raising them up to new and everlasting lives in baptism.  Both have been lax in their catechesis and now it shows in the generations lost by failing to teach this Gospel in the home and at the Church.  Both have been lazy about youth, preferring to entertain more than challenge them with the faith of the Scriptures and Confessions.  Both are reaping the fruits of a culture of divorce and of a devaluation of marriage and children.  We all owe it to the Lord of the Church and to the future to admit our past, lay it before the Cross, and rise up renewed to do better.

If I had to predict the future, I would find more hope for Missouri than the ELCA.  Already their ecumenical partnerships have weakened the Lutheran identity at their seminaries, blurred in the minds of the people what difference there is between Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterian, etc..., and muddied what it is that Lutherans actually believe and confess.  This provides them with short term pulpit supply from whoever is available but long term problems coming up for a rationale for the ELCA.  Missouri, for all its problems, it is much more homogeneous in belief and practice even though our disputes dominate the headlines and, as long as we keep the two seminary route, we will also have a much more theologically and pastorally united ministerium.  The numbers are not the issue and we should not fixate on them.  But they are a warning shot to remind us that distraction from or abandonment of the Scriptures and our Confessions will hurt us even more deeply and steal the vitality from our mission.  The demise of either body is certainly possible but the faith we confess is not for the benefit of how we feel about ourselves.  It is about the lost and the Good Shepherd who has called us to labor for Him in finding them and making them part of His flock so that He may shepherd them to the rich green pastures and the cool quiet waters of everlasting life. 

Is there a right to die?

I have written before on the right to die.  Our neighbors to the North have taken the lead in both the availability of this option as well as its exercise.  It is not an example we ought to follow.  I read a month ago or so in the New York Times Magazine a very long article giving particular focus to this issue.  In the title is the challenge:  Do patients without a terminal illness have a right to die?  It would take far more space than I have here or time to give fair treatment to the many cases of nonterminally ill people being helped to death by physicians in Canada.  You may call it doctors killing their patients intentionally.  That said, it is something we need to keep in our conversation because there are voices here who think that we should make it all uniformly legal (as some states have moved toward).

The stories cry out for an answer -- chronic depression, chronic pain, histories of abuse, failed attempts at suicide in the past, loneliness, poverty, the loss of family and friends.  Why, it would seem that individuals whose lives are already spiraling toward death are owed a painless, easy, and cost free way to end their suffering!  Do they?  Is there a threshold of pain, suffering, and hardship in which death is not only the end of what hurts but a positive step toward peace?  The world cries out for moral leadership in an age unwilling to spend the time necessary to give such hard questions their due.  The churches who proclaim the resurrection without fear should also without fear proclaim that death is not our choice.

Quoting from the NY Times Magazine:

Fundamentally, he [the death doctor] didn’t think the best way to protect poor and marginalized patients was to force them to stay alive, because in some counterfactual version of events, in which the world was a better and more just place, they might have chosen differently. That wasn’t how anything in medicine worked; a doctor always treated the patient as she was. How could it be otherwise? If only those who were rich or well connected were recognized to have autonomy and allowed to choose? . . .

He had read the report from Paula’s neurologist, which said that Paula did not have permanent brain damage and was not eligible for MAID. But he thought the specialist, who was not a MAID provider herself, misunderstood the eligibility criteria. There was nothing in the law that said that Paula’s neurological condition had to be tied to actual, physical damage to the brain. Paula’s pain was real either way. She felt it the same either way.

Doctors, who once were bound by the pledge to do no harm, have repeatedly pushed euthanasia upon those without terminal illness in Canada for years.  Teams of physicians routinely counsel those with such pain or illness to positively consider assisted suicide or, to put it more accurately, euthanasia.  Death is, according to them, a more compassionate choice than life.  It has become the mark of our compassion not to serve the suffering but to end their suffering with euthanasia or assisted suicide and to become the advocate of such death even for those without terminal illness.  This is not medicine.  Finding a doctor willing to kill you is not finding a friend.

Ill and disabled Canadians with non-life-threatening but serious conditions often do not receive nor are they promised prompt medical treatment with some waiting months or even years for such help.  At the same time, however, some of Canada's disabled and non-terminally-ill patients are found not only eligible for euthanasia but fast-tracked toward such a death.  In an amazing statement of efficiency, such a death  can happen within 90 days of the patient being found qualified.  Those patients who can find a doctor to certify that their deaths are “reasonably foreseeable,” face no waiting time once that eligibility has been established.  Is this what we want to learn from looking to our neighbor to the North -- how to be more efficient in killing the patient than in treating them?

Delaware is close to enacting such laws to allow this.  So is the UK.  Sadly, churches find opposition to their anti-death stance even from folks in their pews.  We are so conditioned to think that suffering is the worst thing of all and anything which can end suffering is good that we no longer think through the consequences of allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia.  How odd it is that we seem to face hurdle after hurdle to end the lives of those who have been given a death sentence for the horrid nature of their crimes but we can throw together a death cocktail at a moment's notice!  Is this truly the mark of an enlightened civilization or is it the mark of its decline?  

Some would insist that right-to-lifers are trying to make choices for the people but the reality is that we are trying to slow things down lest those who believe someone's life is not worth living are given a short cut to ending that life.  I have great respect for physicians but I do not believe that this belongs to any doctor to make the judgment call to bring an end to a life.  Surely there are circumstances when nothing more can be done except palliative care and awaiting the will of God but these are not justifications to put a figurative gun in the hands of those whose job is to help and not to hurt, to preserve life and not to end it.  If we cannot get it right on basic issues of life and death, we are in a sorry state and it just might be that the churches have failed in their role as teachers and advocates for the cause of life -- the life given and redeemed by our merciful Lord.

 

 

Law and Gospel

I grew up with the admonition that politeness and courtesy were never optional.  Whether you faced people you despised or were looking across the table at your enemies, the uncommon common virtues of politeness were not to be forgotten.  Maybe it is the perennial niceness of the Swedish culture or the stoic face of the German ancestry, but the truth is I find it hard to preach the Law in full accusatory manner.  Never mind that I am a wimp at heart, would rather have my folks love me, and grew up in an age in which the Law was preached always to us and not to you, the truth is I find it hard to speak the Law with the full weight of its power in personal address to the hearer.  I suspect I am not alone.

On one hand, the Law is silent because people think anything said about sin or any call to repentance or any encouragement to holiness of life and conduct is an attempt to elevate yourself above others.  In particular, the preacher finds out how quickly someone replies to the Law rightly proclaimed by saying "Your not perfect, either."  Well, that goes without saying now doesn't it?  If preachers had to pass a sin test before mounting the pulpit, there would be no preaching.  Even saintly St. Paul lamented loud and often his own sin and unworthiness -- all the while preaching loud and often the Law and calling the people of God to walk worthy.

On the other hand, the Law is unwelcome because people misunderstand the Gospel.  Those who presume that Jesus died so that we would no longer talk about sin or there would no longer be anything called sin have a false idea of the Gospel.  The cross only makes sense if sin is deep enough and powerful enough to keep us from cleaning up our own house and setting ourselves right before the Father.  Otherwise, it is a cruel joke to have Jesus suffer and die only to prove He loves us.  Jesus did not die to silence the Law but to fulfill it.  No longer can anyone claim a righteousness before the Law nor should they.  Christ is our righteousness.  That said, this Gospel does not erase the call to be holy as God is holy.  The call to Christian living has been muted by those who insist God wants us to be happy even if what makes us happy is contrary to His Word.  With this, the Gospel has become less about Jesus than a principle of love, acceptance, and toleration in which we judge no one and nothing wrong (except the things that would keep us from doing what we want).

I will say this.  We tend to preach as preachers and hear as hearers through the lens of our own weakness, pain, and shame.  This is the problem for those who mount the pulpit and this is the problem for those who sit in the pews.  We have selective hearing and we speak selectively.  This is a problem for the Law but it is also a Gospel issue.  Pastors find it hard to preach on sensitive topics that some will take wrongly and people are glad for pastors who shy away from those subjects.  In so doing, however, we blunt the Law AND the Gospel.  Jesus' blood has taken on every sin but if we are not ready to address sin with the blood of Christ, people will still live in bondage to sin.  Pastors need to be set free from their fears of what people might think but the people need to be set free from their sin through the Gospel.  All of this requires and expects that both will be preached honestly and fairly -- not as a recipe for a good sermon but as the text itself addresses and expects.  That is the value of the lectionary.  It forces preachers to take on topics they might rather ignore and to address them honestly.  I would be lying if I did not admit that sometimes I winced after proclaiming the text and then saying "The Gospel of the Lord."  Some of them did not quite sound like happy words.  But the Gospel is not about happiness.  It is always about holiness.  The goal of the preacher matches the goal of Scripture -- not to make us happy but to make us holy through the blood of Christ and to transform our hearts to desire such holiness.  The Spirit's work makes this hit home and turns the sermon from lecture into real preaching.

Segregated Sundays . . .

In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.”   In the wake of the BLM and protests that once figured large in headlines, and, according to polls, that assertion remains pretty much as true today as it was when King spoke it.  Something like 80% of American Christians congregate in weekly worship services where a single racial or ethnic group comprises the overwhelming majority of the congregation.  I have no reason to dispute that.  What I do dispute is whether this is, in and of itself, a sign or symptom of racism, specifically the institutional racism that is charged against so many institutions in America, including the Church.

I should note that I belong to a denomination which, despite its historical outreach toward Black Americans and its very diverse face including its overseas missions, is overwhelmingly white.  You might even say painfully white -- given the efforts to increase the presence of a people of color in our congregations, colleges, and seminaries.  Though we are not the most white Lutheran group in America, we are more white than we wish we were or thought we would be at this point.  My own congregation is probably more diverse than the Missouri Synod but not as racially mixed as we might like.  Therein lies the issue.

Diversity is not a bad thing but it is not always a good thing either.  Before you get ready to attack me, hear me out.  When I first came to Clarksville, Tennessee, more than 30 years ago, a highly respected Black pastor told me this:  Brother Larry, if any Black people come to your church, send them to me and if any white people come to my church, I will send them to you.  He said this without apology, not as a joke, but earnestly as a Black preacher who believed that the culture of the Black church in America was worth preserving even it it meant that the churches were segregated on Sunday mornings.  I understand what he was saying and believe that many prominent voices in the local Black community know what he meant and still believe there is truth in it.  I also felt it keenly since I belonged to a church body in which the German culture and language was preserved until it could no longer be -- especially in the wake of the Nazis and WWII.

No one is saying that diversity cannot exist or should not exist.  In fact, my own parish was on the cutting edge of the issue when, in its first constitution in 1959, it insisted that this congregation would not discriminate on the basis of race.  Given the complexion of race relations at that time and in the coming years, it was a bold statement to make and I believe it was sincere.  Yet despite being open, we have not attracted many from the Black community.  Sadly, we have even lost Black Lutherans to churches of other denominations in Clarksville that were predominantly Black.  Some of them told us they felt the pressure from their peers to leave a predominantly white congregation and join one in the Black community.

Jesus intended that the Gospel would extend to every race and place when they departed Jerusalem for the corners of the earth.  The Church IS an example of this diversity and the various complexions in the Church are testament to this.  But do the pews have to reflect this international diversity in a particular congregation in a particular place?  Segregation may take place for a variety of reasons that are not all as evil and vile as racism -- including the preservation of culture.  I know of Greeks who lament the loss of their culture once so profoundly identified with their Greek Orthodox congregations.  The same is true of many immigrant groups in America.  Preservation of culture and language has been as roundly condemned as the racism whose policy of hatred left its long dark shadow on American history.

I grew up in a different kind of segregated community.  Swedes and Germans lived side by side but worshiped in different congregations and in a different language for much of that history.  They would be seen by others as two sides of the same coin but they did not see themselves that way.  Their ethnic differences and linguistic divisions were preserved not out of exclusion but out of affection for their identity.  Perhaps there were jokes about which group was better but they shopped at the same stores and worked in the same occupations without rancor.  They just wanted to preserve some of their history and identity.  Is that a terrible thing?  

I think the same is true of many Blacks in my own community.  We have no segregated schools or businesses and it is boringly common here to see mixed race families and children and all are accepted pretty much at face value without complaint.  But on Sunday mornings the Christians part their ways and show forth distinct choices that are not necessarily divisive or racist -- even though to an outsider that is exactly how it appears.  Of course, I am not saying that prejudice has been overcome or that there are not divisions born of animosity and racism but it is certainly not the sanctioned prejudice of three or four generations ago.

Still the fire still burns.  “If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you’d likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot of an average white Christian church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic—than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop.”   At least that is how Robert B. Jones in his book, White Too Long, sees it. According to him, practicing Christians (of any kind) are more racist than non-Christians or non-practicing Christians.  Maybe you agree.  I do not.  I do think that the segregation we see on Sunday morning may not be racist although it can be in places and among some people.  It can also be a benign effort to preserve distinctly culture elements of an identity.  That may be easier said of Black congregations than of white but it should not be.  I long for the day when race no longer divides us but I hope and pray that we can figure out a way to preserve language and culture without becoming as intolerant of this as we ought to be for racism.

Now the harder question is surely this -- what constitutes culture and what is pan-cultural or above culture?  In other words, it is an easier discussion to watch who walks in and out of any congregation and make judgments like racist or inclusive but it is a much more difficult and touchy thing to actually evaluate what happens therein.  In other words, besides language, what elements are legitimately cultural without affecting the truthfulness or orthodoxy of that church and what violates that truth or orthodoxy?  It seems to me that here is the harder struggle.  Especially if that culture provides cover for things that are not catholic and apostolic.  For the Gospel transcends culture.  Indeed, it creates its own culture.  And that is a question I do not have room to expand upon here and now but it is a question at least as important as the one about the segregation of Sunday mornings.

Pope-u-larity. . .

Since I was not alive in the 1900 years past, I cannot say whether or not the pope was as pivotal to Rome then as it certainly is today.  In fact, for a Lutheran the problem of the papacy is magnified by the almost godlike character applied to those who sit upon the throne in the Vatican.  As a Lutheran, I am certainly happy to grant the authority of this man as Bishop of Rome and, as we have repeatedly said, accept him as a spokesman for Christianity and leader of all in that sense, the petrocentrism of Rome is all or nothing.  Yes, there were some grumbles about the legitimacy of Francis when the man they wanted was in retirement.  I could have joined them since at least Benedict was orthodox and knew something of Lutheranism.  Even then the centrality of the papal office was apparent with an occupant most serious minded Christians did not like or respect.  They held their noses and prayed for him and paid attention to him because in the Roman Church he was and this new pope is the only game in town.

The modern papacy changed when, one hundred fifty-five years ago, the newly formed nation of Italy proclaimed victory and Pope Pius IX stayed behind the walls of the Vatican.  People thought then that the papacy was finished.  Little did they know.  From Vatican I on, the papacy became larger than life.  In the wake of Vatican II, then Pope Paul VI was able to flaunt what was written by the Council and effect his  (or those of his advisors)  radical changes in just about everything starting with the Mass.  The previous Leo was the main beneficiary of Vatican I and the current Leo seems to have learned a thing or two from his mentor.  Good popes and bad ones have come along and most folks might think of him as Americans think of those in Washington -- those who do less are better than those who try to do more.  The problem of the papacy is magnified as he and his office are expanded until they have sucked all the air out of nearly every room.

All politics is local.  That is what Rome seems to have forgotten.  Take, for example, the uproar by Bishop Martin of Charlotte.  He is the personification of what is wrong with Rome on a global scale.  He thinks everything is about him -- from his liturgical preferences to nearly everything else.  That is certainly what Francis thought.  As an upswing, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were too busy with theology to mandate that everyone had to be them but Paul VI and Francis let it go to their heads.  Whatever affection outside of Rome for the likes of JPII or BXVI withered in the face of Francis confusing confession and false humility that hid his domineering side.  If the Pope is all there is to Rome, then Rome is in bigger trouble than ever.  For all the talk of 1.45 Billion people, count the noses of those at Mass on a given Sunday and you have a better gauge of who and what Rome is.  You can have the best Pope in the world but if the local congregations are in rough shape, what does it matter?  Lutherans need to pay attention to this lest we invest savior into the job description of those who lead us as well.

I truly do hope that Leo will undo what damage Francis did but I also hope he will stay off the hot mic on the airplane, give less interviews to reporters, and spend less time trying to be me than Francis did.  The more that Rome becomes synonymous with the Pope and the Pope with Rome, the greater the problems within Rome and for ecumenism in general.  I suspect that most folks outside of Rome are like me.  We long for an orthodox, pious, well-spoken, patient, and faithful leader of the Vatican.  It helps us who contend for the faith in our own neck of the woods.  But none of us needs a pope-u-larity contest winner or a petrocentristic church in Rome.  Not even Lutherans.  

Catechisms in glass, wood, and stone. . .

As most of you know, I have a fascination with church architecture.  I have more books on the subject than I care to admit and did not let go of them when I downsized my library.  It is in part simply an affection for good church architecture that serves well its liturgical purpose and, on the other hand, a morbid curiosity for the egregious examples of those that work against its liturgical purpose and are just plain ugly.  Recently I put together a title for a blog post that would touch upon this interest.  Catechisms in glass, wood, and stone.  That is how we ought to regard architecture in the Church.

I wish that this thought were universal.  Sadly, the banal is less sinister to the need and function of the Church than those things which are plainly novel.  I think of churches trying to look like ships (either internally or externally) or those designed to be like living rooms or family rooms without the necessary height or focus suitable for the liturgy.  Even the warehouses of metal have the potential to be finished for their purpose and rendered more suitable for the liturgical gathering of God's people around His Word and Table.  As Lifeway's endless polling has demonstrated, even those outside the faith expect and want churches to look like churches and not to have deceptive architecture which masks their purpose or identity or trendy looks that trade in their soul for what is avant garde.

Those planning churches (fewer than in other ages) would do well to carefully select an architect or a firm which specializes in liturgical church design.  Yes, there are such even though they might not be local.  Those working to repair what they have inherited should be concerned more with how they serve their purpose than how well they fit the modern vibe.  We do not need buildings that fit the whim of the moment but cannot serve their essential purpose.  Above all, it is good to remember that buildings also teach -- even when that teaching is at odds with what goes on inside.  What you are building or what you are remodeling is literally a catechism in glass, wood, and stone.  Don't forget this and you will not likely go terribly wrong.

What happens on Sunday morning seldom can demand our every attention for the entire time.  Everyone knows our minds wander and we have distractions which we carried in with us as well as those we observe while there.  I once had to instruct nearly 200 people to stop looking at a bird who had infiltrated God's house and was swooping around the sanctuary and to keep their attention focused upon the eternal Gospel which God had placed in their midst in His Word and Sacraments.  Distractions are all around us and deep inside of us and the building either will aid the task of restoring our attention to what God is doing or they will assist the flight of our imagination exiting from God's sacramental presence.  Before the stained glass had been installed, one person lamented to me how sad they would be when they could no longer watch cloud formations or the flight of birds or the branches of trees bending to the wind.  I said that was exactly why we were installing stained glass -- to keep their vision where it needs to be and to recall they eyes from the distractions that our inevitable.

Good arrangement and good furniture all support this task.  When the building cannot be torn down and we begin anew, we can at least look around us and make sure that what is in the building does not inhibit what takes place there or distract us from what is happening by God's work and design.  This is why it is often better to shop for used church furniture from the past which can be refurbished and used again than it is to experiment with new designs which do not help the liturgical assembly by directing us clearly and without distraction what God is doing in our midst.  Furthermore, beauty is not an enemy of the liturgy but, rightly understood, a tool and aid to the liturgy and to the people there assembled.  Not everything must be ornate or elaborate but the principles of good design point us always to the faith and to the liturgical function.  That is surely the purpose of stations of the cross or a well appointed baptismal font that is not hidden away in the corner or paraments whose witness in fabric is both clear and faithful.

If you are sitting in church on Sunday morning, look around and think about this.  The building is a catechism in glass, wood, and stone.  Make it a good one.

What is mirrored. . .

The problem of the mirror is which image is original and which is the reflected one.  Every now and then I will be watching something or see a photo and notice that things are not quite correct.  Somebody is filming themselves or has made a copy of what they are watching and everything is backwards.  It started out when I noticed that it appeared they were driving a right hand drive car or when writing appeared backwards.  I would have never known that I was looking at the mirror image rather than the original.

AI makes it hard to sort things out easily between something that is not real and something that is fake.  Long before AI, we could easily be deceived by the promotion of something as real which was merely an an image of that reality.  It remains a problem.  Too much of what we see, read, and know has it confused. Are we seeing the mirror image or the reality?  What is the difference?

So often we forget that there is a difference.  Think, for example, of the father in the home.  Is the earthly father a mirror of the heavenly or is the heavenly father a mirror of the earthly.  Sometimes we get it wrong.  Some folks say they have a hard time relating to God as Father because they had a terrible or absent earthly father.  The problem with this is that the God whom we call Father is not a magnified version of our earthly father.  No, our earthly fathers, if we are so blessed, bear in some way, the image of the heavenly Father down to us.  It is the problem of the mirror.  Is the image in our mirror the earthly father extrapolated to the size of God or God who in some small yet significant way is mirrored in our earthly dads?  We don't call God Father because He is like our earthly fathers.  We call our earthly dads father because, even imperfectly, they can and, if we are so blessed, do reflect the Heavenly Father to us.  This does not take anything away from our earthly dads.  In fact, it does just the opposite.  This does not diminish his fatherly love and service to us but elevates it.  God shines Himself through a sinful and flawed man whom we call dad without magnifying his failings and pinning them on God.

You need not have enjoyed a virtuous and blessed earthly dad to enjoy calling God Father.  It is great when it happens that we have good and wise and loving earthly dads and this helps us understand and appreciate the Heavenly Father but it is not essential.  God does not do what our earthly dads do only a little better or more so.  Our earthly dads do in a very small yet profound way some of what our Heavenly Father does all the time.  We all know only too well the limitations of the flesh.  We know the faults and failings of our earthly dads.  We learn over time to forgive them and to look past all of the things in which they have missed the mark and to be grateful for the things they did on our behalf -- all be it imperfectly.  It is in the kinds of things an earthly dad does that he is a reflection of our Heavenly Father and not in how well he does them.

My own father is now gone ten years.  He was a good and decent man but not perfect.  As time goes on I am able to see more clearly his goodness than his faults but I am never confused and neither would he want me to be.  He was not a smaller version of God to me but a reflection of all God's goodness within the boundaries of human frailty and his own experience and life.  I hope and pray that my kids understand this with respect to me.  God does all things well.  I do a few, so very few things passably in comparison.  I hope all dads feel the same.  It does not diminish our fatherhood but honors God's.  If in some small way, we are reflections of God's goodness, we must not forget that earthly dads are not mirrors of what God has done wrong.  He has done and continues to do all things well.  If an earthly dad teaches you this one thing, he has done okay.

 

Pride or flaunting. . .

Since now the month of June has ended and its Pride parades and events completed, it might be a good time to reflect on what pride is and what it is not.  Yes, the times have changed and things were more, shall we say, muted than in the past.  That said, those who sponsor and support Pride are less proud than they are defiant and less proud than they are flaunting what they know will provoke and offend.  It is less about pride than it is about self-aggrandizement, the promotion of vice and virtue as one without any reflection, judgment, or shame.  The dictionary gives as the primary definition of pride as a sense of one's own proper dignity or value; self-respect.  That is the point.  Proper dignity, value, and self-respect are what seems to be absent from most of the Pride celebrations.  Instead, these tend to focus on the last of the possible definitions:  arrogant or disdainful conduct or treatment; haughtiness.  It is clear that the arrogance, defiance, disdainful conduct, and sheer haughtiness of most of what passes for Pride is the chief aim of those celebrations.

Of course, it is not quite fair to blame only the rainbow array of desires and genders for this.  Open any social media page and you see self-promotion, the display of vice as well as virtue, and the unashamed taught that to love someone is to support their every thought, word, and deed.  That is also the point.  The rainbow folks are taking to extreme what the rest of the world seems intent upon -- being me, flaunting me, and doing it defiantly so.  I have Facebook "friends" whose posts I tend to ignore because they are so "me" oriented.  You probably have the same.  They are anything but modest in both their display of themselves visually and the way they speak about things.  If anything, such modesty ought to be what Lutherans mean when we speak of moderation.  It is not that one is free to indulge in things as long as you do not indulge too often or too deeply into the forbidden fruit of desire and selfishness but rather than you are modest in such things.  Surely this is also what St. Paul means when he speaks of self-control.  Modesty is nothing if it is not self-control.

Ill-tempered rants and raves are the complaint porn of our age.  As a culture indulge this at least as much as the sexual porn.  These too are perversions.  There is a shameful pride in the failures of others more than there is a real lament in their errors or mistakes.  This is one of the reasons I moderate comments here.  Some folks seem to delight in flaunting their own pride and judgment as much as the June parades and events flaunt the rainbow causes.  In every case, we need to look at the cost of our excesses.  Limitation of what you say or concern for how you say it seems absent -- so absent that the virtue of restraint is completely missing around us and in us.  If we think it, we feel like we need to say it and if we say it we think we need to act on it.  Proper dignity and value as well as self-respect call us to a higher standard.  As we look at the Pride month in the rearview mirror, it would be good for us to look through the windshield of the future and scale some things back.  Scripture is pretty clear in its warning that pride goes before a fall.

Schools are also a problem elsewhere. . .

According to news reports, one out of every three elementary age school children in Bavaria are unable to speak German well enough to attend classes.  It is worst in in the city of Augsburg, where two-thirds of first-graders lack competence in German language skills even to understand the teacher to understand what is being taught and they cannot read German.  Children who lack appropriate competence in German language skills must take remedial classes.  In the case of Germany, the problem is laid at immigration and the lack of integration of immigrants into German language and culture.

The blame cannot be laid upon the children but upon the adults.  On the one hand, there is the false ideal of a nation in which people speak their own language and have their own culture side by side with the language and culture of the nation itself.  On the other hand is the problem of immigration which is necessary for nations with low birth rates and the need for younger workers but if this is at the cost of  parallel cultures and languages which keeps them separate but equal, it is in the end the worst form of discrimination.

 

This also illustrates the universal problem of requiring schools to do other things than the educational agenda which is their primary purpose.  How can a school succeed in its primary purpose if it is saddled with the impossible task of respecting those who have another primary language and the language of the classroom is but secondary?  For years German schools were lauded as examples of success in both teaching and requiring higher educational accomplishment from their student population than American but now it appears that their success has become the price they must pay to preserve the ideal of immigrants who can live on the fringes of the language and culture of their new home country.

 

It is not only America which has required a common commitment to morals, ideals, language, culture, and work and family values of their past for those new to their borders.  No matter how much it is derided by the left, a commonality of culture and life is part of the fabric of every fruitful nation.  Soon, the Germans will awaken to this as Americans have.  The problem is that the homeschooling movement is not an option there nor is there in place a strong option in the religious schools -- as these options exist here.