The problem of music in the liturgy. . .

It is certainly not true that we were all of one mind when it came to music -- at least until contemporary Christian music came along.  The music in the liturgy has always been rather controversial and subject to debate.  Occasionally we remember this but most of the time we conveniently forget it.  Why this matters is that it is good to know the history as we approach new styles or forms of music that some want to include in what happens on Sunday morning.  This does not mean to say that there is no such distinction between sacred and secular but only that the line between the two has been redrawn over time.

The first issue was voice or instrument.  For the earliest period of Christianity, voice was the only instrument for the music of the Divine Service.  There was no question or doubt here.  Indeed, the witness of the early church fathers here is almost unanimous against the use of instruments in worship and it looks very different than what we typically expect today.  The voice was the only instrument of praise and voices were raised in chant.  

Instrumental music was associated with Judaism.  In the effort to maintain a clear distinction between Judaism and Christianity, instrumental music was omitted from the early liturgy without much discussion.  Indeed, the presence of instrumental music in the Temple was seen less as belonging than concession to the sensuality of the people -- at least according to the Christian view of things.  There was a firm conviction that what the Old Testament (particularly the Psalms) said about the use of instrumental music in worship had no bearing on Christian worship.  Also present in the early church fathers was an attention to unity which was best reflected in unified singing -- monophonic music better expressed this unity in the ancient Christian mind, it would seem.

Whether we like to admit or not, the early fathers were much more puritanical and Amish when it comes to the role of music in worship than Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and even Protestants in general.  I suspect they would be shocked to find polyphonic music, instruments, harmonies, hymns, and organs that have become par for the course for most Christians today.  Part of this was the constant association of instrumental music with sensuality, emotion, and secular (dare I say sinful) arenas.  They sought a higher and spiritual but also primarily word dominated idea of worship.  Augustine himself reflects the conflict within him over both associations with the secular part of his earlier life with its sensuality and the desire to serve God on a higher plane.  That expression finds it ultimate definition in Thomas Aquinas who insists that worship employ only voice for God's sake and for ours.  Obviously, something changed along the way.

What was largely absent in the early Church and tolerated only in limited ways in places later gave way to the embrace of music with any harmony was altogether excluded by the Late Middle Ages.  The mind of the Church began to change with the Edict of Constantine (321 AD) as the Church came out of hiding into a more public presence and into a more public space.  The very possibility of gathering together in large, cavernous spaces had an impact on the singing and the song.  Embellishment of the melody and the skill of the singer made the chant more elaborate and drew more attention to the music and to the text but in a different way.  Choirs or scholas were formed to enhance this musical form but also to keep it distinct from the congregational song.  Gregorian chant became more complicated and there was more movement in the melody and even a hint of harmony.  Along with this, music began to become more mathematical.  After harmony went from two-part, to three-part, and then to four and more parts, it was not a big step to introduce polyphony.  With this was a constant concern against the loss of the text due to the elaboration of the musical form.

There was even a move during the Council of Trent to ban polyphony altogether.  This was surely in sync with the Protestants who were suspicious of Luther and his embrace of music in service to the Word and his own personal advancement of congregational song.   Renaissance polyphony was controversial within Rome and Protestantism together.  By the time you get to the Baroque period and Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Gabrieli, Schubert, Scarlatti, and many others, the connection between math and music is much more obvious. You can see this most of all in the fugue -- the form mastered most of all by Bach but not unique to him.  Both Lutherans and Roman Catholics were not unconcerned about the principle use of music as a handmaiden  to the Word and sought to preserve the intelligibility of the text.  In this they had much in common with some Protestants who insisted that the words of the music must be directly from the Scriptures alone (though some allowed paraphrase).  

Although debate continues and will always continue over the suitability of newer forms of music and whether or not they are they can be employed within the sacred use of the Divine Service, these are not new.  The judgment against forms unsuitable to the sacred setting of the Mass or so tied to their secular identity that such a context cannot be erased in order for it to be rehabilitated for sacred use will also remain.  The key to that judgment will not simply be the sound or cultural popularity of such forms but the intelligibility of the text and whether such forms reverse the role and dominate the Word rather than serve that Word.  The problems with contemporary Christian music and usage within the setting of the Mass or Divine Service cannot be argued simply on the basis of association or origin but must be dealt with on the level of the Word and its proclamation.  That said, it is not being unfair or narrow minded to suggest that some forms have such association with the sensual or with pagan contexts that their usage within the sacred setting of worship cannot and will not overcome to provide for their inclusion the way harmony and polyphony have been incorporated into orthodox Christian worship.  

Obviously, everything I have written is true in the West but may not be reflective of the developments within the East and Orthodoxy there.  I have not even written of the fact that the Tridentine Mass has little place or appreciation for congregational hymns of any kind while the post-Vatican II Mass of Rome seems much more friendly to the form.

Misconceptions. . .

While I am not a fan of the Roman Catholic practice of naming the Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost Ordinary Time, they have certainly gained a bad rap for this by the misconceptions that accompany this nomenclature.  Ordinary has come to mean simple, common, usual, and, inevitably, unimportant.  It seems we are captive to one view of that term and in our poverty of language have forgotten other nuanced meanings of it.  When the word “ordinary” is applied to Sundays in the Church Year, it does not refer to its typical meaning illustrated above but refers to another root of the words that has come to mean simple, common, usual, unremarkable, plain, or unimportant.  It hearkens back to the the English term “ordinal” -- a word that refers to the position of one thing in a series of things.  It is when we call something the first or second among a whole series of things.  It can refer to importance but it can also refer simply to time.  One comes before another and one comes after another.  The term Ordinary Time refers to those Sundays which are distinguished only or primarily by their sequence following one or another major Sundays.  These Sundays have a common color -- green.  It is the color of these ordinal Sundays even though the feast day which they follow has another color (white for Epiphany and red for Pentecost).  Even when we called them after Trinity, we observed the color green instead of the Trinity color of white.  After Trinity or Pentecost is a small change, indeed, for a practice which is the same.

Of course, someone will insist but what about the Sundays of a Season -- the First Sunday of Advent or in Lent or of Easter?  They also follow an ordinal pattern in their naming.  Yes, they do.  But they are Sundays in or of a season and not the ordinal Sundays after an event: The First Sunday after Epiphany or after Pentecost.  So there is no slight meant toward Sundays in Ordinary Time nor is this meant in any way to indicate that they are, well, ordinary.  Indeed, any Sunday is never ordinary and every Sunday, as the day of our Lord's resurrection or a sort of mini-Easter, is special in that regard.  Can any one of us regard our time in the presence of our merciful God to receive His gifts of Word and Sacrament distributed to us quite apart from our merit or worthy regard such a day as ordinary?  No, I did not think so.

There is another aspect to this that perhaps is also worth our attention.  While we regard such time spent together around the Word and Table of the Lord as special, there is also the sense to that gathering that it is ordinary, that is, the common way that God comes to us, through means.  It was common when I was growing up to have the Sacrament only four times a year and there was great counsel from the solemn voices of that day that to have it more often would somehow tarnish its special character and render it common.  Odd how that never applied to hearing God's Word read and preached or praying the Our Father!!  Our Lord never intended for His Supper to become something special in the sense of something reserved for special occasions.  No, indeed, for He commends His testament to the Church with the common to do this often in His remembrance -- as the very means of His remembrance.  So the Sunday of the Church Year may be referred as an ordinal Sunday of a season (after Epiphany or Pentecost) but it is observed in the ordinary way -- gathering together to hear His Word and receive His body and blood and to respond with prayer and praise.  

The weeks of the Sundays outside the Festival half of the Church Year are ordinal and yet they are observed in the same way we observe the Festival Sundays, including feast days.  While there may be attendant changes to the liturgy for some days (such as the omission of the hymn of praise in Advent or Lent), we gather in the same way for the same gifts.  These are never common in one sense and yet it is out common duty and delight in another sense to be there in the Lord's House, on the Lord's Day, around the Lord's Word and the Lord's Table as the people who have been washed by the Lord's water.  Thanks be to God! 

Everyone hopes to be a prophet. . .

Is there a more satisfying thing to say than I told you so?  If you can find it, please tell me about it.  We all want to be a prophet who can foresee the future than remind people we were right in what we saw.  It saddens me that this is about all we invest in that word "prophet" but sin still lives in us.  The other side of that word is that the speaker is speaking for and forth in the name of another.  The prophet does not own the words of his prophecy as much as he passes it on.  Unfortunately, that seems to be missed among us.

It would seem that there are a lot of prophets who would love to tell us what we have done wrong as a church body and make us wallow in our shame for failing to heed their counsel.  People are telling us all the time about the need to change and get with the times or die.  I fear that some of those folks would love to proven right in their prediction even if it came at the cost of our church body and all our institutions.  There are those on one side who like to be a thorn in the side of those who conserve the faith with all of its institutions and traditions.  Stay in the fight and try to change Missouri, they say.  Of course they do.  They would rather be proven correct in their prophecy than hold fast the unchangeable truth of God.  And there are those on the other side who seem to take delight in a circle of orthodoxy that grows ever smaller and with it a church body!  Purity at all costs is their mantra.  Of course it is.  Unfortunately, the litmus tests of orthodoxy grow as the disdain for error increases.  Love means never having to say you are sorry.  Ouch.

Could it be that we do not want to wait for God's justice or be patient as God unfolds His will and purpose?  Could it be that we would rather take into our own hands what God has kept to Himself?  I wonder.  I am not at all suggesting that truth should be compromised or that error ignored but there seems to be little sadness over the inevitable conflicts and divisions being pressed upon us.  I am saddened by the way we inform upon our brothers and sisters rather than address them directly.  The internet is filled with outrage that is also rather prideful, I fear.  But better for us to be proven right than to try in patience and with discernment speak the truth in love.  At least that is how it seems.

Perhaps we have lost our patience and neither wish to wait nor wish to bring people around.  Or perhaps we just prefer to tell the whole, awful truth than work toward cleaning up the mess.  We have our conferences of like-minded people and we live in the echo chamber of our own minds and meanwhile we are failing at the one duty and responsibility God has given to us -- to speak His truth in love.  I am certainly not suggesting that we end all the conferences or podcasts or blogs (never!) but that we also take time to listen.  Instead, we tend to raise our voices complaining about the closed ears of others while forgetting how hard it is for us to listen.  No, some of these differences will not be resolved and it may require us to become smaller to find a more generous unity.  Still, we ought to at least regret out loud the cost of such fracture and division.  Even when we pray for unity it is generally on our own terms even before it is on the basis of what God has said.

I will confess my own sinful joy to sometimes be proven right -- yet the reality is that living to say I told you so will not benefit the Kingdom or manifest the love that is not optional along with fidelity to the Word that is yesterday, today, and forever the same.  The prophets who took joy at the failings of those to whom they were sent did not fare so well, did they?  If the people heard the Word of the Lord and repented, it would rob us of our joy and delight in saying I told you so.  Maybe Jonah could tell us something of that.  Again, before you think I am advocating for more wiggle room in doctrine and practice, I am not.  I merely want us to speak together without a smug pride that hopes to be proven right more than we hope to see reconciliation and unity.   

Our unrestrained embrace of technology. . .

Only a fool would insist that all technology is bad or that it has had a unhealthy influence upon us and our society.  Like anything and everything, technology must be judged on its merits.  That might even be a universal statement except that the merits are precisely that which is in dispute.  What are the good things and what are the not so good things that technology has provided us?  I suspect that we might have great disagreement over the lists written of that which has been salutary and that which has not. 

Christians have also been divided in their embrace of technology.  Some believe that technology is indifferent, it is what you make it.  Some insist that technology has brought nothing but good and mark the success of their churches over their full use of all that technology affords.  Some are not so sure the good outweighs the bad and others are absolutely sure that the fruits of our digital world, social media, and screen absorbed lives is downright evil.  It depends on the day where I fall in this but I am more suspect than excited over what technology and our unrestrained use of it have wrought on us as individuals and as a people together.  With respect to the Church, I am more than suspect but fear that our unwitting acceptance and embrace have worked against our very purpose and life,

Some would complain that we cannot stand outside modernity and its technological world of invention.  We cannot be Amish, they might say with a snicker.  While it might seem that the Amish simply reject all technology, their relationship with technology is more nuanced.  It would not be fair to say that they have chosen one era and planted their flag there.  The Amish are not governed primarily by their rejection of all the things we routinely take for granted but but their Ordnung, the set of unwritten rules guiding their  daily life and not without its local flavor. That is why you see some variance among the Amish about how much technology to use and how deeply they set their foot into modern life.  When it comes to medicine, for example, the Amish may not subscribe to health insurance but they do not disdain doctors or hospitals or modern therapeutic medicine.  Sometimes they avail themselves of the kind of transportation they refuse to own and operate.  When deciding on new technology and its application to their life, the Amish communities are less concerned with the technology itself than how it affects the life of the family, the shape of their community, individualism, and their lives of faith.  Technology is judged by these criteria and, if it is found wanting, it can have more to do with the effects of technology on their lives than the specific technology or devices themselves. 

Sadly, the overall Christian community does not seem to give much consideration to the effects of technology upon people or churches or the values promoted by the Scriptures.  It would seem that we are too busy scrambling to get ahead of each other in adopting and adapting to the changing landscape technology provides.  Think, for example, how quickly we settled into screens and digital worship as a fitting substitute for in person worship.  Covid may have hastened the embrace or even appeared to have necessitated it but we were clearly headed in that direction long before the first person in the US showed symptoms.  I wish that we spent more time actually evaluating the salutary or not so salutary effects of technology on our lives as people, our faith, and the church and its work.  I wish that we gave more consideration to what our rapidly changing technology is doing to us as people than how we might employ it to serve our mission.  Technology is not neutral and it has ramifications well beyond what we can predict.  If anyone is concerned about the morality of our embrace of technology and the digital world, it ought to be the Church and the Scriptures should say something about the good or bad which is the fruit of it all.

Have screens and our culture of screens helped or hurt us as a community in Christ or as individuals within that community?  More than placing a warning label on something, we need to give our people sound counsel so that they can implement technology in their lives in ways that will not compete with or undercut the faith and the work of the Kingdom.  It is one thing to sit on the sidelights and complain that this is not the way it used to be.  It is a far different thing to weigh through the issues and help people decide how much and how far technology should go -- this is true of the Christian faith but it is no less true of the fellowship and community outside the Church.  A sinful people need to admit that as much as something might be used for good, it will by those sinful people surely be used for bad purposes. Artificial intelligence is without doubt a powerful tool for productivity; its benefit to humanity as a whole may not be helpful at all.  In any case, this benefit to humanity should not be treated as a secondary concern. Do we really think that the internet, social media, the ever present screen, and now AI have had no influence upon the loneliness, isolation, division, burnout, and dopamine addiction suffered by our people in greater numbers than ever before?  I am hearing some churches voice some concerns but not enough of us and not urgently enough to keep up with the rapid change of our digital world.  That is sad and our failure as the Church to address this.  Why is it we can talk about nearly every subject known to man as experts but when it comes to giving a critical look at technology we are largely silent?

Anchors for the soul. . .

In a recent conversation I explored with a few other pastors the heightened attention given to little traditions, especially at the Christmas season.  Some complain about this, about the often rigid expectations of those who show up in church on Christmas after being largely absent throughout the rest of the year.  Others find the whole thing somewhat of a nuisance.  I will admit to being among those who was irritated by the local traditions of a congregation when I, their educated pastor, knew better how to celebrate the Incarnation of our Lord.  Once I moved the candlelight from its coveted position at the end of the Christmas Eve service during the singing of Silent Night (at least one stanza in German) to the proper place during the reading of the Gospel.  People were solemn on their way out the door and one man told me I had ruined Christmas for him.  Of course, I had plenty of arguments why I had not and why his children and grand-children who did not bother to show up at home ruined Christmas and not me.  But I missed what he was saying.  I learned through the years to pay attention.

Everyone needs anchors for their faith and lives and in this time of nearly constant and fast change, those anchors are even more important. While this is certainly true of individuals and families, the reality is that culture endures when it is anchored to the timeless things that transcend such change.  It does not take all that much to figure this out.  The pace of change and the extent of change have left us not only wearied but vulnerable and even more depressed and set up for disappointment than usual.  It is no wonder that what you do at Christmas takes on greater significance and puts even more pressure on people, families,, and the church this time of year.

As one who never ever celebrated Christmas with my family or my in-laws after ordination, I get it.  My wife and I hoped for the Christmases we knew growing up and neither of us got even a part of it.  Our first Christmas together was spent on Long Island in a cold rain with the worship services of the congregation getting my primary attention and everything else was hard to suffer.  I get it.  It is about the Lord and His incarnation.  Duh.  But it is also about the traditions, ceremonies, and rituals that we learned as children and expected to know our whole lives and pass on to our children.  When we moved upstate New York and then to Tennessee, these things became even more important and added a great deal of stress to us and our families.  Sadly, my wife probably knew this and knows this more than I.  She was always the one who made the best of eve and morning spent at the congregation with time for family and Christmas at home squeezed in as best it could.  God bless her.  If my children have any traditions carried through from our home to theirs, it is because of her.

When your children become adults and move across country and marry, they have their own pulls to distract and disappoint.  It is no wonder then that the congregation and the rituals and traditions of our churches carry such weight and are so fragile.  We are fragile.  Torn up by our roots and moved across the world, a part of us longs for the cultural and familial anchors of yesterday.  I get it.  You should, too.  Instead of rebelling against these anchors or fighting them or even wasting our time trying to change them, we ought to respect them and use them to nurture the lives and families so listlessly bounced around in search of something more permanent.  

It is, after all, a part of the search for Sabbath rest that was hardwired in us when we were first created and it lives in us still with the same urgency and longing.  We desire to be rooted and planted but life continuously uproots us and plants us anew.  To survive we carry with us the traditions, ceremonies, and rituals of our past.  Even in church.  Otherwise, we would have long ago given up the old wording of the Our Father for something new.  We do not because we cannot.  These things are too precious to us.  So, if you are a pastor, cut the people some slack.  If you are people who have been disappointed at home or in church this past Christmas, let it go but not before telling those around you why these roots and anchors are so important.  Sometimes we do not even realize this in the midst of our broken or bruised hearts but until we do, healing cannot begin.  Hold on.  Jesus said that the one who endures shall be saved.  To endure we need to hold on -- to our anchors in God's Word and in our lives together and in the gathering of the people of God.  Hold on, my friends, because the promised rest will come. 

The value of books. . .

I have few books of great worth monetarily but many whose value is beyond the coin invested in paper, ink, and binding.  In fact, it embarrasses me how cheap great books are in paperback reprint or the worn pages of an old volume for sale by a used bookseller.  There are countless times I think I have rescued old books from the dust and dampness of storage in places where they await either interest or destruction.  Sometimes I imagine myself as their savior, shelling out the dollars to make sure that mold or mildew does not take over from our own neglect.  I would have myself to be a valiant soul in pursuit of such wisdom and the vigilant steward to preserve them.  I am wrong.

We collect books in libraries great and small thinking that we are preserving them.  In reality, they are preserving us.  They keep alive in us the wisdom of our fathers and grant to us light to pass own into the darkness of an unknown future.  They rescue our humanity from utilitarian ideals in which less is more, beauty is optional, and a small vocabulary suffices.  They breath wind into our sails and chart our courses to places we will never visit in person but have been there through the windows provided by authors of long ago and yesterday.  They move us along when distraction, disappointment, and disillusionment would leave us frozen in our fears or bitterness.  They coax from us emotions kept lock up deep inside and fill our dry eyes with tears when none have flowed for too long.  They guard us from the tyranny of our feelings by reminding us of godly wisdom and truth built upon fact and truth.  We think we are doing the books a great service by keeping them but they keep us from the worst inside of us and often, though not often enough, urge from us the good we did not know we could.

I write this as one who lives in a faith formed by the Word acting through the Spirit -- an embodied Word which lives on pages because it lived in flesh, died in suffering, and rose never to die again.  I write this as one who lives in a faith in which this Word engages not simply the corners of my mind but the concrete of water that has become my second womb giving me new life and in bread and wine that tastes of heaven and of Christ's flesh and blood unseen but there for faith to discern.  I write this as one whose life has been spent in the vocation of words not for pleasure or enjoyment but as sermon, catechesis, and the care of the soul.  Not every book is worth the time to read and not every read rewards the investment you have made in it but so many times we do not know the value until the words jump off the page and into us.  So it is with the Divine Word.  We embrace the Scriptures not to find hidden knowledge or wisdom but because the Spirit has moved us to open its pages with the promise that in it the Good Shepherd speaks.  The liturgical words of worship are profound not because they are literary but because they connect us to the Divine, to the mystery of Him who is made flesh for us and our salvation and to serve us with gifts we could not earn or merit.

We do not waste our money on libraries but invest in them for our sake, for the sake of those who have gone before, for the sake of those to time, and for the sake of Him who comes to us as the Word made flesh.  Movies are remade with new actors and new scripts over and over again.  The story is often different and the faces are not the only things changed.  Books are reprinted but with the same words, the same stories, and the same power.  AI cannot replicate this.  Like a monkey mimics the things of a man yet is not a man, so AI gives but a small echo of what God has placed in us and is dependent upon us to teach it to be our shadows.  I was so wrong to think that I am the rescuer of books for the truth is they rescue me -- the stacks of those not yet read, the dusty jackets of those consulted but never really consumed, and the familiar whose words have been read so often they live inside of me.  It should be of no surprise that when printing came to the West, the Scriptures would be the book the technology would serve.  It is no secret now that Bibles continue to dominate book sales.  I take some comfort in that.  I also enjoy that there are books waiting for me and that some of them will never get read before I close my eyes in death.  Someone else will pick up where I left off as I meet the Word made flesh, crucified and risen, face to face.

Preserve us from our screens. . .

Living in the digital world of today, the phone has become something more than a mere means of communication.  It is so much more essential than our computers, pens, and paper.  Computer programs are not more and in their place is the vocabulary of apps -- the language of the small screen has won out after all.  In a very short period of time, the small screen has come to dominate our lives in ways that even our desktops and laptops and tablets do not.  Let me illustrate.

Having just survived my first Medicare supplement open enrollment period and played roulette with our lives, I can say this with confidence.  I have even more apps on my phone than ever before.  Each of my physicians and health providers have their portals and their apps and some have already gone through several versions of the ubiquitous apps.  The insurers all have their apps.  The pharmacies and the drug plans have theirs as well.  Bills are texted to me to be paid by link and with it I gain access to my test results and prescriptions as well.  It would seem that my whole life depends upon apps, portals, and, of course, the Apple wallet -- even more than the people themselves.

I am no Luddite.  I know the shape of the world will never return to the past (unless that pulse bomb is employed to render the digital world impotent).  Yesterdays ways are even more than ancient.  Artificial intelligence is the present and the future -- at least that is what everyone says.  I shudder to think how much AI runs commerce, information, and health.  I have every confidence that there is some provision for an AI review of my doctor's diagnosis, orders, and treatment plan.  The entity that has no soul will define whether and how my patient care will proceed and yours also.

While some have every confidence in the tools of our technology, I do not.  I know that my time is surely closer to the end rather than the beginning or even middle of my life so it matters more to those younger than me than to me.  My fear is not that my health care will suffer or cost me more than I want to pay.  Both of these are already happening.  My fear is that for the sake of the screen we are willing to surrender our very humanity, to ignore the pointing of our moral compass to machines, and the choice to let them all do the thinking for us.  In such a world, the soul is not of great value and runs way behind health, healing and the cost of it all.  The reality is that it is in these matters first of all that we either reveal our souls or betray them.  No machine can have sympathy or empathy.  The way we deal with matters of health, life, and death is not an unimportant sign of our humanity,  The way we care for one another will not earn us salvation but it is a pretty good indicator of what and who lives within us and whose works we are about.

We have by and large already surrendered the caring ministries of the church to profit making enterprises or to the non-profits who live as NGOs on the government dime.  The churchly institutions of old are but a memory rather than vibrant institutions of faith.  We are good at names but bad at health care institutions that reflect the soul of the Church.  Oh, we continue rally around good causes to fight against abortion and the cultural whims that have yielded the sacred definitions of sexual desire and gender identity to the whims of culture and feelings.  Some have merely acquiesced to those cultural norms and set aside Biblical teaching.  Though our meager food pantries and such seem powerless to help, their existence is a reminder that these vestiges of caring were born of love and caring that were once a hallmark of our Christian identity and the mark of our service to the Lord of love.  It is, therefore, our place as the Church to raise our voices against that which may work in business but fails in humanity.  Even if only the faithful are listening, we must not fail to be a conscience of faith and a witness to truth in a world which is willing to give up its soul for a reel or a meme or an algorithm to do its work for them.  The screens have no souls but they have the power to steal ours. 

The Rush to Complaint. . .

The sad and terrible situation in our church with a District President standing charged with the production of child pornography and, Lord knows, whatever else not yet revealed has created the occasion for commentators to complain about the failures of ecclesiastical supervision or the processes set up by our bylaws.  I am under no illusions.  Undoubtedly there were things which our leaders and our ordinary procedures for discipline could have done better.  Nobody but a fool would say this was anyone's finest hour.  That said, it does not rise to the level of incompetence alleged by some nor does it mean that rather slow and deliberate procedures for dealing with such situations should be sped up when the will of the people desires it.  

Lets think about this a moment.  Our leadership is given no crystal ball nor do they possess a secret insight into the secrets of men.  In this case a district of lay and clergy elected the man now charged.  He worked with more than 40 others among his peers, the presidium of Synod, and other officers.  He worked with boards, commissions, and service organizations allied with the Synod.  What some claim to have seen in hindsight was not apparent going forward.  If for no other reason than liability, had there been something to see I am confident all the lawyers would have warned us going forward.  I suspect he went through a number of background checks without anything being flagged.  My point is not to come to the aid of this accused man nor to insist that our leaders did everything right.  It is simply a request that those who rush to complain and lay this at the doorstep of those leaders are venting their emotions more than dealing with rational facts.  As understandable as this is, it is not helpful and the public display of this kind of complaint feeds the mouth of the devil and all the other naysayers against the Church.  No one is helping by using social media as a bully pulpit to display their outrage or to vent their complaints.  Whether you like and support our leaders or not, no one was giving cover to this kind of behavior or sin.  

I know a bit about bylaws, perhaps more than most but certainly less than some.  Bylaws are simply the rules we have chosen to live by.  No bylaw can solve a theological problem nor can any bylaw do ecclesiastical supervision.  The bylaws we have are not perfect but they are the rules we have chosen -- for good or for ill.  I have every confidence that they can and should and will be changed or adapted because of what has happened.  We learn more from mistakes than we do successes.  All of that said, one complaint that is particularly vexing to me is the suggestion that the processes we have work too slow and therefore protect the guilty.  Yes, they do work slowly in comparison to those who want to snap their fingers and have something go away.  But if you are the accused in any matter, you will appreciate that we have both rules and a rather deliberate procedure that takes a little time to unfold.  The rush to judgment, like the rush to complain, is not fitting to the work of the Kingdom.  We do not have courts, prosecutors, investigators, and judges.  Maybe we should have but we don't and it is foolish to act like we do when clearly we have a different structure in our bylaws.  We have other pastors doing ecclesiastical supervision (along with all the other things they do) trying to be fair as well as to be just.  As long as they work with integrity, a little slowness should not be an issue.  Remember that when you change the rules to make them work better for you, they will also be used by someone else who may not agree with you.  Rules or bylaws need to be a little out of step with public opinion and the quest for instantaneous judgment.  Matthew 18 has a few steps that mean to be played out over time and not in the blink of an eye. 

Finally, remember that the rules in the Church are designed not simply to dump someone who has become a liability but also to bring them to repentance.  I chafe under that like everyone else who wishes that the wheels of justice worked in the church and worked more quickly.  But that is not how things work.  Every one of us is a sinner and no one can sit in judgment like the righteous man except the One who is righteous, Jesus Christ.  Our call to warn the wicked is not designed to preserve the Church from sinful men but to call every one of them (and us) to daily repentance.  When that call is unheeded, we are not given the option of casting the sinner aside and forgetting about them.  No, instead we are called to preach the Word of God in an effort to bring them to repentance, restore their faith, and secure from them the faithful confession of Christ their Savior.  Nobody has a right to an office in the Church and repentance and restoration does not mean that the sinner returns to their same calling.  We all know that.  Sometimes, however, we seem a great deal like Noah who was motivated to run more by the prospect of the people repenting and then having to deal with them than he was the people hardening their hearts unto eternal condemnation.  As a pastor, I have had the uncomfortable situation of a public sinner who repents and asks forgiveness and restoration when all of us would rather he would go away so that we were not bothered by him anymore.  None of us have that luxury.  Our goal is not to clean up a mess so that nobody sees it anymore but to confront the sinner with God's judgment and His mercy.  This is its own kind of messiness that the world will never understand or appreciate.

So what should we do?  Lets rally around in prayer for all in this situation -- from the victims to the prosecutor to the judge in the court to the perpetrator of such a crime.  Most of all, let us pray for the Church and for the wisdom and discernment to keep things like this from happening as much as can be done and for those whose faith is shaken by the offense and for the Word of the Lord to bear fruit in the lives of all involved, bringing repentance where there is none and forgiveness where there is repentance.  In any case, the cause is hot helped by trying to act as judge and jury in social media anymore than it is helped by the false presumption that you would have acted more wisely in this than all the others in our church body have done.  Everyone of us thinks we are right in our speaking or we would not speak but not every one of us is correct in that thought.  And that is all I am going to say.  

Look where?

A while ago a report was issued on the condition of the LCMS.  It was nothing new but with the opinions were facts born of statistics and comparisons year over year through the last couple of decades.  In the report was the question of whether the LCMS was going to accept the orderly extinction which the facts and figures had charted or whether there was a plan to begin fixing what is wrong.

After some days of thoughts on and off about the report, it occurs to me that we are all looking for a plan and some sort of planner to tell us what to do and then to inspire us to do it.  It would be nice.  It would be good if it all came printed in the mail in full color or downloadable from some website or presented in visual form for all of us visual learners.  It would be nice but it is not going to happen.  Renewal seldom happens from the top down.  This is no different.

What the statistics tell us is that the problem and the solution lies not in some office in a headquarters or from the latest book off the presses or even from the halls of academia.   Both the challenges and whatever response we have to those challenges are squarely on the parish level.  The decline overall is born of a decline in the parishes of our Synod.  Quite bluntly, we have fewer people coming to worship than we have had since our earliest of days.  The number of congregations is declining but at a very slow rate and one that looks bigger because the number of mission starts is also very low.  Though the last two decades have seen the total number of folks in worship on an average Sunday drop to half of what it was, the actual number of altars and pulpits has not dropped as precipitously (2.8%).  In fact, the numbers of active clergy on the roster is a bit higher than a generation ago (2%).  No, the problem is that we are no longer a culture of church going folks as the ratio from those baptized members to attendance is now only 3 out of 10.

The fact that we are not alone or that we are doing better than some should not be consolation to us.  We have to admit that the loss is being felt first of all on the ground level with the congregation and any renewal will begin on the ground level with the congregation.  Furthermore, we will need to face the hard fact that innovation and creativity are not the answers anymore than doing what we have been doing wrong over the past 20 years or so will help us reverse the trend.  Books and programs and experts are not the means to reversing this decline.  We all know that but none of us wants to believe it.  Neither will we reverse the decline by finding convenient suspects to round up and accuse.  It is a fool's errand for Rome to blame all their problems on Vatican II and it is a fool's errand for us to blame all our problems on any one thing or any one group (not even the Boomers so many love to hate).   

Our problem is that we simply have forgotten how to be the Church.  We have engaged in so many different activities over the years that we have either been distracted from or lost confidence in the one way the Church grows -- the means of grace.  Luther's explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles' Creed has become a shibboleth of orthodoxy but we may just have forgotten to actually believe what we insist upon saying.  Worship has become merely one of many programs within the congregation and the style of worship has become the battleground.  We have made worship into a toy that little children are fighting over in the sandbox instead of the awe filled moment of Christ's epiphany to us and His gift to us of the food of everlasting life.  We argue over sins as if any one of us were righteous and we confess more the vague generalities or systematic sins that do not accuse us instead of praying for mercy before the Lord who is rightfully offended by what we have said, thought, and done.  We entertain people to death and then insist to them than unless they are leading something or taking part of the service, they are not really participating.  We have more Bibles than any one but do not read them and plenty of great religious books that sit unopened.  

The reality is that many of our congregations have forgotten why they are there in the first place and the Lord's visitation has been bumped down the list while relevance and feel good emotions top it.  Covid is hardly to blame but the mere fact that it happened and we acquiesced to the reality that the liquor store is more important than our gathering on the Lord's day in His house only sealed the deal.  We have lost more than people in the pews; we have lost our reason for existence.  Without a renewal that is built upon this positive and powerful affirmation of who we are as the people of God and what we do gathered around His Word, water, and table.  We do not have to draw people to this unless what we are doing is no longer this glimpse of heavenly glory and this taste of the food of immortality.  As long as worship is merely optional, it will become occasional and as long as it is occasional it will become irrelevant.  There is no apology or embarrassment for this statement of fact.  Renewal begins on Sunday morning.  Is this a radical thought?  It should not be and if it is then all the programs and technology on earth will not save us.  We will have condemned ourselves.

Living Lutheran. . .

I had set it aside but then picked it up.  The Living Lutheran is back in print, albeit down to four issues a year, and the Winter issue is telling.  While never actually conceived of nor implemented as a doctrinal journal to teach the faith or even confess it in words, it remains the official periodical of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  So what does that mean exactly and what is it all about?

I took the liberty of surveying the magazine to find 11 authors (3 of them even male) but instead of putting before you the names of the various articles, what you have below are the words in large print drawn out from the prose.  Here is the gist of what the ELCA has become, at least by its own definition and according to its on publication.  The banner on the front cover proclaims that these are stories of God's people living their faith.  Just inside that cover the reader is told of the ELCA we are a church that values and encourages diverse voices and lively dialogue in our faith and life.  Living Lutheran is an opportunity for church members to express individual perspectives, and does not necessarily reflect official positions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Now that is interesting -- an official journal that does not necessarily reflect what the church that publishes it officially holds.

Early on we are told "Our loving Lord laughs often and joyously and invites us to do so as well."  Good to know.  I am not sure if the Lord is laughing at the same things we are or if the Lord is weeping over the things at which we snicker.  But that would involve seriously mining through what the Church believes and confesses and that is not quite what this journal is all about.  So as long as everyone is smiling or laughing it would seem all is well.  Then follows the introduction to the newly elected and installed presiding bishop and secretary.  I presume there is a bit more gravity given to this but perhaps not.  Then a piece about Charlie Brown's Christmas and one on putting the putz (decoration?) into Christmas.

As if on cue, the magazine insists "God did not lead them through familiarity or tradition but through wonder and curiosity."  The Magi, that is.  Outsiders with nothing more than an innate curiosity and a sense of openness to find God where you never expected Him (should I have said her?).  Oddly enough, the next pages describe "The Pig Project has distributed more than 3,500 pounds of meat."  In Iowa, pigs are big business so a food ministry distributing pork is probably to be expected.  In the same story it is proudly announced that the author finds it "counter to the narrative that the church is dying, to see congregations adapting and changing."  But it is dying.  Not because I said it but because the statistics chronicle the decline of a denomination that is close to half of its original size in 1988.  Presumably no one wants to admit that and not on the pages of the denomination's only print journal.

In an article on Ash Wednesday, there is great mention of how we are all broken and a listing of many sins (even systemic and corporate sins) but no sins against the sexual morality of the Bible.  Oh well, God forgives them all and as long as we name our pain, we are good to go, it would seem.  Not sure if it qualifies as corporate or systemic sin but there is an obligatory article on "The impacts of the federal spending law -- along with an ad for their own credit union, I might add.  There is the expected article which speaks of "A reflection on the multicultural young adult event" which should be every event in the ELCA.  Don't forget the National Day of Racial Healing to Center Storytelling."  It may seem a bit odd that a church body nearly 99% white would have so prominent a mention here but that is the shape of the gospel proclaimed in the ELCA -- yes, Jesus did something for us on the cross but what about how bad things are now and what should we be doing to fix what Jesus apparently did not.  Can you hear the snark in my voice?

In the end, we can be comforted by the final words.  "God made you quirky and loves you a whole lot."  That about sums up the New Testament, now doesn't it?  I have no doubt about the sincerity of the writers or even the goodness of some of their causes.  What I simply do not get is how the primary publication of the ELCA can somehow fail to describe what this Gospel is or confess it clearly along with such glowing descriptions of the way some are living out their faith.  My point is simply this.  Without defining the faith that you are living out, the work you fails the definition of Lutheran.  Unless you think the Reformation was about diversity, social ministry, and good works to take the place of Christ's good work on the cross.  I am sorry I am such a downer today but it is very difficult to take the smiles seriously given the doctrinal failings of a church created from a proud past with a hopeful future.  

Time. . . who needs it?

When God ordered creation with the gift of time, it was not like the time we measure today.  Sunrise and sunset defined everything.  It was simply about light and dark and not about seconds and minutes and hours.  Nobody cared about them because no one needed them.  Morning began with sunrise and the day ended when evening saw the sunset. Apart from that, we simply worked.  We defined the hours of daylight by what we did.  Some of it was for self and family in the ordinary chores of house and home and some of it was for others as well in fields and cattle.  Time was largely observed by when work began and when it ended.  There was no time-clock to punch, as it were; when it was light work began and when it became too dark to work, it stopped.  So did we.  The dark was rest.

Now the seconds and minutes and hours dominate us.  We are over scheduled and under rested because the light no longer matters.  We light the dark and dark the light but the ubiquitous screens live on in both and so we find it hard to rest our minds and our fingers.  The busyness continues whether for work or pleasure or aimless distraction.  There are fewer boundaries with the clocks ticking away and the phones reminding us about this or that.  The world has become one great alarm clock with its local version the most important use of that technological marvel, the smart phone.  It is smart but we are not.  We have surrendered nearly everything to clocks that rule our lives and to the time we measure in the smallest of increments.  Gone is the ordinary rhythm of light and dark, work and rest.  In its place is a constant on in which sleep is interrupted with tones that signal notifications of this or that or texts we absolutely must see.  Nothing waits and we wait for nothing.  We simply have to be plugged in.

It is kind of interesting to remember that the church bell that sounded the hours when no one had watches and none had even imagined a cell phone.  The church bell was not interested in making sure you were heading to your appointments but it was sounding out the hours of prayer -- less for the folks in the fields or markets or homes than for the monastics who were drawn together for prayer by those tolls.  The very word for "clock," I am told, has it’s origin is from a word meaning a “bell.” And so the bell sounded into the ordinary noise of the day to announce the times for prayer the monks and nuns would keep. Few needed or wanted to know the hours except those who prayed them.  Then it changed.  The church gave us the clock and we took it from the church until the bells no longer chime and if they do it is not to call us to prayer but to urge us on to the next task.

By my modest search, mechanical clocks powered by weights and gears first began to appear in the 13th and 14th centuries.  In cathedral towers, monasteries, and town squares these clocks were powered bells and some fancy enough to provide dancing mannequins decorated in local color. They were “clocks” because they were powered bells -- not so much telling time as announcing it.  The liturgical year was the accompanying calendar to these bells.  Both are pretty much lost to us and with them any sense of time as God's creation and domain.  It is about us though I wish it could be said that time improved in the bargain.  It did not.  It became more bane than blessing and has held us captive since the sun dial made telling time portable.  Oddly enough, one of the quirks of retirement is that I no longer wear a watch.  Indeed, I am forever forgetting what time it is because my appointments are few, my schedules are more open, and none of it is as urgent as it once was anyway.  In the beginning I thought this a problem.  Now I wonder if it is less problem than a return to a simpler age when everyone was like me.  Morning matters and evening but the day is less cluttered and the night left free for rest.

People are incredibly adaptable to change -- look at how we complain but then figure out how to live with the foolishness of daylight savings time!  There is a limit, however.  When time is not simply a day ordered by light and dark, it often becomes a prison of deadlines and demands.  Our bodies and our minds were created for a rhythm and the church once announced it with the call to prayer.  Now we can stay up late and rob ourselves of rest and confuse the pressing need for work with the ability to explore the internet and its games and useless knowledge without boundaries.  It is no wonder that vices exploit time and our ordering of time apart from God exposes us to their influence and temptation.  If there is a thing we ought to do it is to recover the sense of time ordered by light and darkness, day and night.  While that might mean giving up some of our precious screen time, it will surely reward us with more than rest and some real peace.  News was once a scheduled event but not it breaks in to unsettle us with what is local and what is too far away to imagine.  Has it helped us?  Has it contributed to the lesser evils of crime and violence?  I think you know the answer.  I also think you know why I long again for a time when the clock was the church's and the bell was our reminder of those who prayed as we should.  Here are some older words to a very familiar hymn:

1. Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home:

2. Under the shadow of your throne
Your saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is your arm alone,
And our defense is sure.

3. Before the hills in order stood
Or Earth received her frame,
From everlasting you are God,
To endless years the same.

4. A thousand ages in your sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

5. Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op’ning day.

6. Like flow’ry fields the nations stand,
Pleased with the morning light;
The flow’rs beneath the mower’s hand
Lie with’ring ere ’tis night.

7. Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be thou our guard while troubles last
And our eternal home.

 

Cultus vs ethical path vs cerebral belief. . .

The fact that we do not have definitive records from early Christianity does not seem to prevent those who want to draw conclusions from drawing the conclusions they favor.  I am thinking here of the myth of the simple faith of Jesus.  How many have been tempted to minimize both doctrinal truth and institutional worship as a late and unwelcome invention?  You do not need to be Roman or even among the seven sisters of Evangelical Christianity to hold to your sacred truth over fact.  Lutherans do it as well.  Most are drawn to the mythology of an early and pristine Christianity uncluttered by doctrine, liturgical form and test, and a sacramental understanding of things.  Instead they combine to preserve the falsehood that early Christians would be scandalized by what institutional Christianity has become and fear the devil won after all.  They would insist that the recovery of a simple, easy, non-cultic form of Christianity is the cause which will save us and that anything else is an imposition upon the first Christians and a distortion of any kind of church they would have known.

They have sold to us the lie that early Christians worshiped in their living rooms in a first century version of a Barcalounger while being engaged either by a cerebral version of the faith or exhorted to a certain moral shape of everyday life.  They have come to the conclusion that there were no altars in early Christianity but only tables -- the same ones that held lunch and afternoon tea -- and that any development of a religion of doctrinal tenets, liturgical worship, vestments, chant, and altars was a deformation rather than a formative maturation.  So their goal has been as much as possible to disdain the present in favor of such a pristine Christianity of potlucks, universalism, and love for everyone.  Their vision has exchanged the vertical for the horizontal and encouraged us to a noble simplicity over the excesses of later eras.

Are they correct?  It would seem that some on both sides of the theological spectrum want to agree with their history of it all.  The evangelicals were sure all along that nothing mattered except people being happy though they differed on how to make them happy (rigorous moral living or consent to the right set of doctrinal propositions.  Bronze age Lutherans somewhat embarrassed by their own liturgy and vestments seem as likely to concede that what God wants is right believing and that nothing else matters all that much (from sacraments to good works!).  Preaching, believing, and right acting are all that really matter and the rest is, well, adiaphora (falsely meaning nothing all that important).  They marvel at how the Church devolved into a cultic religion.  I do just the opposite.  I am amazed at how quickly Christians were able to leave behind their forced gatherings in homes for proper church buildings and all the accoutrements of worship.  Constantine must have been a very powerful man to be blamed for everything from invoking what is Scripture and what is not to the corruption of a simple faith into a complex one of creeds and truth statements.

The problem we have today is that some insist upon framing their lives as Christians and their association with the Church in the realm of volunteers who share a set of words on paper and who live the Amish paradise of a most unceremonial pattern of worship.  However, worship is not some little sideline for some in the faith but the place where we are nearest to God and actually receive His grace through means and glimpse the promise of the eternal to come.  Doctrine does not live in the realm of reasoned proposition or theoretical faith held mostly by the mind but is how we live out our faith together. Doctrine touches every aspect of Christian life.  That is the genius of lex orandi lex credendi.  The phrase gets this correlation between doctrinal integrity and liturgical unity, between conceptualizing God and meeting Him where He is to be found (means of grace).

Luther, the modern Roman Liturgical Movement, moralistic and therapeutic deism, and the goal of a noble simplicity all got it wrong if they insisted that heart and mind were where it happened over Word and Sacrament.  BoGiertz got it correct.  Mission and worship do not compete but are different sizes of the same coin.  Let's just be radical here.  If you think Jesus would be shocked and offended by vestments, pipe organs, choirs, chant, altar parments, crucifixes, bowing, kneeling, and the like, then you know a different Jesus than does the Scripture and the blessed who hear and believe.  You cannot read the passages on worship in the Old Testament and then jump to St. John the Divine's vision of Revelation and presume that in between God just wants us to gather around the kitchen table and much upon some symbolic food along with supper, think about Jesus and how we can follow Him, and keep the doctrine stupidly simple.  I am tired of those who have made Mid-Century Modern into a religious architectural style and entertainment into worship but I am also weary of having to defend to those who want it all but less of it that Christianity is cultus and not simply ethical path, that this faith is about a real taste and vision of eternity and not simply how to have your best life now.  We have surely screwed up a few things over time but recognizing the liturgical shape of worship and the Christian life is not one of them.  St. Matthew's Gospel begins and ends with Immanuel -- from the name given to the Child born of a Virgin to the promise of the Risen Savior.  This Immanuel takes shape, form, and flavor in the Holy Eucharist and within it unfolds the liturgical and ceremonial shape of how then we live.  Faith comes by hearing the Word but it does not live solely in the mind.  We behold Him not merely with the ear but with all the senses.

Not the gold standard. . .

When I was a teenager my father would sometimes complain of me that "I had a champagne taste on a beer budget..."  Surely I am not the only one who recalls that little phrase.  Its meaning is quite obvious.  You cannot afford what you want so you adjust your taste to what you can afford or need (vs want).  When you think about it, it is not bad advice.  In the purchase of cars, I routinely defer to what I need and can afford over what I desire.  In the purchase of clothing, I tend to the clearance rack.  If you cannot afford the best, you accept the best you can afford.  It works in so many things but it is a terrible way to look at the Church.

Of late, the discussion over residential seminary and the liturgy has used another phrase the gold standard.  While some may be old enough to recall when our nation was actually on the gold standard, its meaning as a shorthand phrase to describe that past is largely lost.  Instead, the gold standard has become, at least in common parlance, the champagne taste and it is countered by what is urgent or affordable in the present moment.  In both phrases, the idea is that no one disputes that the residential seminary is better or even best OR that the liturgy is better or even best.  The problem is that we cannot afford either one right now.  We are running a deficit of clergy, time is of the essence, pastors have families that need not be uprooted to go to seminary, online training has become normal, and local control and connection is preferred over a centralize control manifest in a seminary setting.  Yes, the complainers all agree that residential seminary is better but right now we need to adjust to a new norm.

In the same way, the liturgy is spoken of as the same kind of gold standard.  It would be great if we all had pipe organs and choirs and people who know the words and music of the liturgy and sang with gusto and it attracted those outside the Church but that is not the case now.  Even small parishes using the liturgy and hymnal insist they cannot afford the gold standard of organ (I should say organist) so they have to use something else - something that is affordable.  Large parishes insist that they cannot pack them in without a praise band and entertainment style worship and though they wish it were different it is not.  As per a previous column, the gold standard gets in the way of reaching people for Jesus.  I could go on and on but you get the point.

My perspective is quite different.  I do not think that residential seminary or the liturgy is the gold standard or the champagne we can no longer afford.  I think it is simply who we are as Lutherans.  We long ago and from the start lived within the realm of a residential seminary (Wittenberg), of academic curriculum and standards, and of an educated clergy.  We did so not to change what had been but as people adopting the status quo.  We did not invent the residential seminary but accepted what had been and used it ever since with a few minor variations.  This is neither something new or unique to us.  It is who we are and who the Church had been before us.  In the same way, the liturgy is not something we invented nor did we perfect it.  We adopted it and simply added a set is rubrics or directions for use with the existing missal (that is called the Formula Missae).  For that matter, we did not, at least in the beginning, even deviate from the Latin norm!  It was who we were and are (well, are to some of us).  The problem here is not looking at things beyond our reach or price range now.  No, indeed, the problem is that some of us are no longer want to be who we were.  

This has been framed wrongly.  I blame adiaphora and Lutheran refusal to make rules about such things (except bylaws which we love to use to try to solve doctrinal problems).  It is time to get over it.  We are not a group of autonomous and independent congregations who can do what they please with impunity.  We have agreed to be who we are.  The confessional standard is not simply for cerebral appreciation or theoretical unity.  It is how we live.  We hold these things not as ideals but as the norm and how we form pastors and do worship flows from this norm -- not from cultural situations or preferences but from what we believe, teach, and confess.  When we apply this gold standard or champagne idea to such things, we are in essence watering down our confession and admitting that we can operate outside that confession when the need demands.  

It is as if we are making what might be necessary in the emergency condition of the folks lost on a desert island to be the norm which establishes everything we do.  Of course we have and will always have emergencies but these do not define who we are or establish what faithful practice is.  They are always exceptions.  Sure, we can call anything and everything an emergency (like we did during Covid) and hasten the dilution of what we believe, teach, and confess into mere theory to be set aside whenever we think it has become a problem or we can admit that emergencies are rare and refuse to define the rule by these exceptions.  I would add beauty to the list along with residential seminary, the liturgy, hymn, chant, and song.  Beauty in the house of the Lord is not decoration but words, including the Divine Word, expressed in art, glass, carving, metalwork, and stone.  Warehouses suffice as an emergency substitute but once they become the norm, everything else becomes optional as well.  What is merely optional almost always becomes exceptional and not the norm at all.

Bottom line:  Residential seminaries and the liturgy are not gold standards or champagne tastes but merely the living out of who we say we are.  They are not set in stone but they change incrementally and not radically over time.  There is a hermeneutic of continuity going on here.  It is not fruit basket upset because the times are changing but the steady course of a ship which is aimed not at getting through this storm but arriving safely and faithfully at the home port.   

The start of it all. . .

Let me state for the record that I have no objection to scholars debating the authorship of Biblical books in which the author is not named within or attributed to someone in another Biblical book.  I suppose it is a n impossibility for the same to resist asking a similar question when the authorship is named or attributed.  It is, for my part, the least interesting of questions but, well, for those who live and breathe a mystery, have at it.  What I do object to is when the starting point of it the inquiry is to disregard or belittle what Scripture does say about authorship. 

If Scripture includes a reference to authorship or if the authorship has been attributed to someone in another Biblical book or if tradition has assigned authorship for good reason to someone, why must the debate begin by picking apart what Scripture says or using so-called science or archeology to insist why the Scriptures or tradition must be wrong.  What is there gained by immediately calling into question the veracity of Scripture or the primacy of tradition well established?  I can only presume that the whole enterprise is designed to raise questions about all of Scripture and not simply authorship.  Frankly, I have seldom been proven wrong in this assertion.

It is certainly one thing to begin with what Scripture clearly says about authorship or other things and to expound upon that using the clear passages of Scripture to illuminate the unclear.  It is quite another to use as your starting point that what Scripture clearly says must be wrong.  Yet that is how we got into trouble until now Scripture no longer has the confidence of many if not most commentators.  Indeed, I fear that the majority of those who encounter the Word of God begin with the presumption that it cannot be the Word of God but just might contain words of God.  Filled with the self-importance of that presumption, it goes one step further and insists that the job of the sophisticated scholar is to tell us which words belong to God and which do not. In this way, they save us poor foolish, superstitious, naive folks from being deluded by what the words actually say and mean.

Instead of paying attention to the remarkable consistency of teaching within the history of Christianity from the earliest days to the present, the scholar today uses every minor difference or fringe figure's dispute to say that there is no such thing as the catholic and apostolic faith at all -- at least nothing we can know for sure so far removed from the Biblical era.  Yet, the same scholars do not hesitate to presume upon Scripture what seems tenable, reasonable, logical, or acceptable in the present moment.  While this is not about same sex relationships, I will use this as an example.  The scholar begins by insisting that what is today (regularized same sex relationships in a nominally monogamous and legal setting) was never known in the Biblical era so therefore what the Scriptures say does not apply to such relationships.  In this way, it is impossible to argue against this.  It is implicit in the mind of the liberal or progressive that once you take what is condemned in Scripture (homosexual activity) and place it within the context of a relationship sanctioned by law and approved by the majority within a given culture, then Scripture has nothing to say about such homosexual behavior.  We could follow the same sort of logic about a thousand different things and end up the same place.  You cannot trust the Bible.

I once had a family interested in membership who insisted that they only believed the Bible and that creed or confession were not important.  So when I asked them if baptism saved or Christ's flesh and blood were really present in the Eucharist or that the pastor had the authority to forgive sins in Christ's name, they insisted the answer was "no."  If it says that, it cannot mean that and what it means must be different than what it says.  In response, I suggested to them that they had the marks of becoming a proud liberal.  They were deeply offended.  Why would I say that?  Because anytime you can begin to set aside what Scripture says because it offends your sensibilities or logic or conception of things, it is the start of questioning everything until little stands except the golden rule and a nice but irrelevant deity.

Over the years I have never met someone who took seriously what Scripture said until he began to believe nothing but I have met plenty of people who no longer took Scripture seriously and ended up believing nothing at all.  In other words, people who believed what Scripture said were less likely to abandon the Word of God but those who began to open the Bible with a question were highly likely to end up abandoning the Word of God.  The Bible cannot say that and if it does it cannot mean that -- this is a sure way to insist that Scripture must prove itself before they will believe any of it.  Sadly, this conversation too often starts with an assertion that we really do not know much at all about what Scripture says of itself and what we do know must be taken with a grain of salt.  

While we love to lump everyone into the fundamentalist camp if they pay attention to what Scripture says as the voice of God, the reality is that Lutherans do not fit the bill of a fundamentalist.  Indeed, the renewal of patrology or the commentary on Scripture as God's Word is a characteristically Lutheran contribution.  The idea that Scripture has some mystery to crack to behold some greater deeper truth (can anyone say Gnostic) seems to be a more Roman and progressive idea.  Rome says leave it to the pope or the bishops while the progressives insist we leave it to the experts.  In this way, despite what Benedict XVI warned of higher criticism, Rome seems captive to those who begin with skepticism while Lutherans begin with confidence.

The self-interpreting or transparent text . . .

Anyone who is Lutheran knows the word perspicuity.  Indeed, Lutherans have held to the clarity of Scripture, insisting that Scripture is clear, ever since Luther in On the Bondage of the Will.   It is one of those ideas that we know but are not at all sure what it means.  The contention of the Reformers’ Scripture is clear and its meaning self-evident or transparent is best seen as a claim against Rome's insistence that no one can read Scripture without the interpretive authority of the Church and its teaching magisterium to define what Scripture says.  For goodness' sake, this idea of the clarity of Scripture does not mean that Scripture is a simple or easy book to read.  In fact, everyone knows and believes that many things in Scripture are difficult to understand or else everyone would agree on what it says and means.  Our Lord Himself said that it is not given to everyone to understand the things of God, that the will of God is to reveal the truth to the small while hiding it from the great. While everyone knows that a knowledge of the original languages of Scripture is a help, the key does not come from knowing how to use the tools.  Scripture interprets Scripture works because the student of the Scriptures knows the book and approaches it by faith, knowing the Holy Spirit as guide.  But what this does not mean is that there is no need for the teaching authority of the Church.

Augustine famously said he would not have believed were it not for the authority of the Church.  He does not minimize the role of Scripture against the Church but understands the role of the Church to teach the Scriptures.  Protestantism has left us with a tyranny of individual interpreters who cannot be challenged, too many popes, if you will.  Sometimes Lutherans are tempted in that direction.  Just the Bible.  Even our own Confessions seem awkward to us.  What kind of authority do such creeds and confessions have?  Are we not Bible alone people?  It is as if this has influenced the idea that an educated clergy, especially one schooled in the Biblical languages and well taught in history and theology, is almost a problem rather than a blessing.  It just gets in the way, so to speak.  At least that is how some speak.  Online courses and a minimal sufficiency are not only all that is essential but all that needs be for the Church today.  In their push to let Scripture be alone, they have mistaken the idea that Lutherans do not believe that a churchly education is all that important against an urgent timeline and localization of belief and practice.  Is that who we are?  Does perspicuity or clarity mean that that the only skills or preparation the pastor brings to the table is administrative in nature or moral in shape?  Does this mean that all that talk of doctrine and faithful practice get in the way of a faithful clergy?  That is how it would seem if you listen to the current debate over online courses and non-synodical seminaries.  Give them the Bible and that is all that they need to serve the people today and the people in the pews know best what kind of pastor they want and need and how he should be trained. 

History says otherwise.  Henry Melchior Muhlenberg found doctrinal and liturgical chaos on the American frontier.  Not even a century later, CFW Walther complained that Lutherans in America did not know who they were, what they believed, or how they worshiped.  Even after the work of building seminaries and producing the Common Service, Graebner lamented the liturgical chaos in Lutheranism and suggested it was not simply about worship but also about what is believed.  The Church is not extraneous here but essential.  The teaching of the authority does not compete with Scripture but flows from Scripture as the Word is confessed and taught not as the opinion of one but as the catholic and apostolic faith, always and everyone believed and confessed.  Is our age now different?  Have we outgrown the need for the authority of the Church or a well trained clergy?  Our chaos today is in many respects the same as before.  We need the teaching authority of the Church not to replace Scripture but to unfold its truth against that which has been faithfully confessed and taught through the ages and we need an educated clergy who know the Word and who know both the challenges and the orthodox rudder that has maintained this truth through the stormy waters.

Luther was led to attack the Roman hermeneutic because it assumed an obscurity in Scripture which had to be penetrated by an allegorical or analogical interpretation by the magisterium of the external church.  At the same time Luther harshly attacked Rome for arrogating to itself alone the office of interpreting an obscure Scripture, he turns right about and attacks the radical reformers for indulging in private interpretation which ignores the general consensus of the church, the rules of good grammar, reason under the guidance of the Spirit, and the internal testimony of Scripture itself.  Either Scripture is clear or it is a dark book meant for the hallowed halls of the scholar but not for the ordinary Christian.  The clarity of Scripture must never be confused with simplicity or comprehensibility.  Luther would be most impatient with modern Lutherans who are preoccupied with a "simple" Gospel and who contend for a minimally trained clergy as a misuse of his words. For Luther the Gospel is the highest and most profound majesty. It is not simple. But it is clear and can be understood as to its meaning especially in matters of salvation.  What Scripture says is clear enough but what it means is the ministry of the Church and the clergy.  It means doctrine.  To fail to make the jump between what it says and what it means is the failure of Protestantism at the time of the Reformation and now in our world of vagaries and uncertainty.  We have the Word not to do with as we please but so that it might reveal to us the saving truth or doctrine by which we are saved and how we then live.  All dogmatics must be exegesis; and all exegesis must be systematic and dogmatic. In this way, our work, our confession, is exegesis. This is our confession of the clear Word of God."  What it means to be Lutheran is this disciplined approach to Scripture - both homiletically and
dogmatically.  This is why we have such high standards for an educated clergy and why we refuse to surrender the authority of the Church to the whim of the individual.

Second thoughts. . .

The media has not been kind to us in the LCMS.  I am not here speaking of its treatment of us as much as our treatment of it.  We have used the media in so many less than helpful ways and it has created a number of ill effects that do not bode well for the future.  Perhaps it is an appropriate moment to talk about it.

The media usage of the LCMS about the LCMS has been either to enlarge expectations and the reach of what Lutheranism can be and should be by extolling our good Confession OR it has been to diminish the reality of what Lutheranism is by exposing what is bad and making it known.  Some might see any difference.  I think there is a difference.

It is easy, after all, to expose what is bad or shameful among us.  We have no shortage of errors, scandals, and wrongs which rightfully shame us.  We are a church of sinners, after all.  One does not have to look very far to find good examples of such sin within the churches and clergy.  We are also well equipped to publish the record of our disappointments and embarrassments.  The subject of our outrage at those among us who live on the fringes of orthodoxy or morality or simple appropriateness is a fond one to take up and put pen to paper (or, in this case, words to a screen).  Some of it not only does not belong in public outrage but belongs in the more nuanced places where reason and due process live.  These things are not efficient but are slow and deliberate and prodding.  None of us is happy about this but it is probably better for all that the mechanisms of dealing formally with our discontent are not quick.  Part of that is because we seem to want to fix everything with bylaws and bylaws simply cannot fix much of what is wrong among us.  We crave decisive actors and actions except when someone is complaining about us.  I get it.

We are not so well equipped to utilize the resources of the internet for reasoned conversation or civil debate but even less so in praising what is good or convincing each other what is right and salutary.  There are some who do just that.  They are positive and build up more than they tear down.  From podcast to blog to talk show they lay before us in humble expectation the cause of Scripture, creed, confession, and truth.  I laud them for what they do and know that this is to good effect.  I cannot count how many have given my own congregation a try because they heard the Word proclaimed and of a church body in which this proclamation was normal and normative.  I only wish there were more who were intent upon using the various platforms available to convince rather then ratting out in public what they find wrong.  I may seem to do the same but it is not truly my intent to be a tell all site but rather to prod us even by our wrongs to do what is right.  I apologize when I do something else.

There is one thing the internet seems ill-quipped to do.  It is a terrible place for a real conversation, for the expression of nuance, for respect for process, and for the discipline that ought to be common but is about as uncommon as common sense.  The internet is good at putting us against each other and into camps of those who disagree and who refuse to be moved from where they stand.  There was a time when I regularly participated in a couple of such online forums but they ended up in stalemates over predictable arguments and it grew tiresome and tragic even to participate.  I am genuinely surprise when comments made on social media are not designed either to throw red meat to the hungry wolves or inflame the dragons among us.  It ought to be the other way around.  Moral outrage with its implicit self-righteousness should not be the norm but the exception.  Or at least I wish it were.

We are accountable to each other in this Synod and we are duty bound to observe the covenants of love that define our relationship but I am not at all sure it is good or helpful to turn us into spies who take to the web to tell all about the sins and failings of others.  I would not be ELCA if it were the final remnant of Lutheranism left but I really am saddened by what it has become.  It is a real tragedy and I cannot but grieve the loss of better predecessor bodies than what their merger became.  Likewise, I am saddened by what Anglicanism has become and what even the seven sisters of Protestantism became in view of what they were once.  I do not want a small but purer Missouri.  I want a growing Missouri which is growing because it is more and more faithful to Scripture, creed, and confession.  I do not want those whose potshots at our church body have sullied our reputation even more to shame us from being truthful and orthodox. Neither do I want us to become a caricature of our pompous selves as those outside us view the Synod and prove correct the stereotype of us as a people who love cutting down more than we can tolerate building up.  I hope the new year bring a little regret for how quick we are to shame each other in public as the first step we take when something is not as it should be.  I pray that in the New Year we will learn how to talk together in pursuit of the fuller orthodoxy and catholicity that is our prayer and not simply to boil things down to the minimum we can all agree upon.

Indeed, the whole point of moderated comments on this blog was to derail the side conversations that became nothing more than rude shouting matches.  This does not glorify God or extend the cause of Christ.  Yes, we must be blunt when wrongs are left without correction from those so charged with these duties yet we should not delight in being the first to publish how bad some of us are.  That is why I am hoping some of those who do that will take a pause from hitting the publish button.  We need have a higher purpose in all of this than delighting in the sins of others or we are Pharisees and Publicans all.