Africa can teach us something. . .

There are times when we presume that our situation is unique to us today and that because we have such unique circumstances today, there is nothing that we can learn from the past.  This is not simply foolishness but wrong.  The world is not a constant string of new and unique circumstances and situations but often a constant refrain of what was and still is, what was once but has come back again.  We would do well to pay attention to and learn from how the Church dealt with the same challenges and issues we are now facing.

In my reading a while ago, I was pleased to come across this history of the the African Church, only to discover that it fermented into one of the most intellectually formidable areas of the early Church.  Indeed, it is said that had Christians casually walking its streets during the Apostolic age -- even in times of persecution throughout the empire.  Africa provided very fertile soil for early Christianity and gave birth and formation to some of the intellectual giants of our early history -- men like Tertullian and Cyprian.  Yet it did so amid a very cosmopolitan atmosphere which blended conflicting cultural influences that did not exist in other parts of Rome's influence. It was Africa which was home to Augustine, not only a profound figure in Africa but throughout the West.  Although he was bishop of Hippo, his shadow was cast well beyond that domain.  It was here that synods and councils enumerated the Western canon, where formative teaching on original sin, the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates, monasticism (at least in the West), and moral theology.

By the time of Augustine, North Africa had become a vibrant and deeply Christian community.  With  hundreds of bishoprics and the site of many councils and synods, the Church in Africa was catholic and apostolic, rooted in tradition, and practiced a vibrant sacramental theology.  By the time of Augustine's death in 430, the Vandals created a climate that led many Christians to flee to Italy and southern Gaul.  But the history remains and it shines a light upon our current situation.  Although we have some differences in our society and culture, the Church has tended to decline in the midst of diversity and has not held its own in the public square nor has it flourished in the kind of cosmopolitan shape of modern society in the West.  Clearly, one of the keys might a difference among the leaders today.  Are our bishops, pastors, and members as clearly orthodox and vocal in their public witness as were those of Northern Africa in the earliest days of Christianity?  Can we learn something from the way they gave testimony to and demonstrated their Christian witness within a diverse and cosmopolitan setting which is common to nearly every urban area in the world today?

With the arrival of the Vandals and the beginning of the end of the shining moment of the African Church, we find how things can change with the force of power against Christians.  The Church certainly suffered but so did the rest of the culture and civilization when the conditions caused  Christians to flee.  Indeed, it was Tertullian who first raised the question that haunts us today, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  To put it another way, what does culture have to do with the Church?  What is revealed is, of course, the fact that the Church and the culture around it are not insulated from each other and deeply entwined on several levels.  Yet at the same time, it also reveals what happens when the Church becomes captive to that culture and how the culture itself suffers with the absence of a vital Christian presence.

Christianity can never simply be reduced to culture.  We all know that on some level.  But what is the relationship between the Church and the world around the Church?  Christianity does not live in a vacuum but neither is the Church a sponge to absorb all that is around it.  When it did flourish, the African Church lived in a flourishing world and it provided a setting in which Christianity could develop, expand, and build upon its witness and draw people into the life of the Church.  When things fell down due to the invasion of the Vandals, the absence of the Christian voice, and the decline of the institutions of the community, it was not simply the Church that suffered.  In the end, those who remained among the Christian community could not preserve what was severely tested by the threats to the civilization and the Church itself suffered by abandoning its former place within the society.

Within the West, we find ourselves as Christians increasingly isolated and insulated, some by threat and force against us and some by our own surrender, choosing to embrace the values and culture more than to stand forth and stand out in testimony to the Biblical witness and in continuity with the catholic tradition.  What is clearly apparent is how the culture itself is suffering without the vibrant presence of a committed Christian community but what is not always apparent is how the Church suffers when we no longer carry forward the banner of Christ's death and resurrection and the yeast of His Gospel into the world around us with the same urgency and lively proclamation.  That is also something to be learned by the African lesson as well.   

What the revolution won. . .

Having grown up in the time of the sexual revolution and, having already made it through puberty when the freedom was being claimed, I should be one of its champions.  In reality, it is an embarrassment that I was part of the generation that pushed for the liberation of desire from love and commitment.  It has changed not only our vocabulary or the sense of appropriate sexual decorum but also transformed the most vaunted institutions which form the bedrock of society.  And for what?

Freud insisted that sex was at the heart of our identity and personality as people as well as the core and center of our lives together as a society of people and the shape of our culture.  When we began to dismantle them in the cause of freedom and to liberate people from the prison of mores and values deemed ancient and prudish, we did not realize that we would at the same time sanction the dismantling of all those essential human relationships and bonds the defined us as a society and a civilization of people.  That is, after all, what the sexual revolution ended up doing.  It turned overturned the established lifelong union of husband and wife within the primary purpose of procreation and replaced it with a mere recreational activity designed more for self-expression, self-fulfillment, and, in the end, pleasure.  

The shape of the bond between a man and a woman (and any other gender or desire bonded together) was made into a partnership of whose success or failure hinged primarily upon the fulfillment of the members and much of that fulfillment was measured by the sexual needs of those in the "relationship". The end result is that sex today is not about self-giving or any other kind of giving.  It is about taking what you want, what you desire, and what you deem to be right and good and it has turned the partner into merely a another who consents to be a part of it all.  Who has been liberated by rampant divorce, a slower marriage rate among all, the absence of children from love and marriage, the objectification of sex to the point where even scripted pornography takes a second place to artificial intelligence versions of it all?  Is there anyone who has not been touched by this or harmed by it all?  By removing love, commitment, and fertility from the sex act, the act itself was turned into something merely erotic and eventually only prurient.    

In once sense, this had already happened in Germany in the wake of the first great war.  Germany ended up as a nation whose morals had gladly been surrendered to the gods of pleasure and desire.  It did not last and it could not.  The Nazi's rose up to end the reign of terror that had weakened family, home, work, and faith.  In the end their own form of terror replaced both the liberty and what was a hallmark of German virtue prior to the rise of the Kaiser and his socialist replacement.  It has taken longer for the sexual revolution to take hold in America and yet its fruits are little different from that which happened in the pre-Hitler Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.  Now we have come to think it natural to define marriage as a local commitment between any two people who can meet each other's needs and children have become the exception rather than the rule.  Any form of desire is considered legitimate and the traditional domains of family and home have been painted with the brush of patriarchy and submission which no woman can stomach and no man dare expect.  So, instead, the people have made marriage itself into a temporary arrangement subject to the whims of pleasure and happiness defined almost exclusively in terms of the individual.  But are we really happy?  Are we happier than those who went before us?  I am afraid that we all know the answer to that question. 

 

Constant remodeling. . .

I am a fan of DIY projects and remodeling shows.  It amazes me to deconstruct a house that has been improved over the years until it is merely a hodgepodge of failed attempts to make better what was simply the character of the time or the house or its plan.  Sometimes you have to give up and let the house be what it is.  Not every home can be turned into a wall-less wonder of an open plan and not every detail is a character flaw to be replaced by modern simplicity.  Sometimes it just is a Victorian or Craftsman or Foursquare or whatever and either you make your peace with it or not.  And, sadly, sometimes it is a candidate to be simply torn down to be replaced by something better (though the construction methods and materials are not always an advance, to be sure).

Life is like that.  We live in an improvement era in which everything is being constantly remodeled.  I can barely put my phone down between updates and every time I most need my computer, it is downloading and installing one more idiot updates.  All to give me more emojis and security and bug fixes that do little to help -- at least as far as I can see.  We face the same problem and the same failed solutions with our humanity.  There is a profound utopian impulse common in modern culture which has decided that we can take what is old and make it new, improve upon what we deem to be bad, and fix what is wrong. While with a house it is merely a money pit with dubious results, with humanity there is the innate risk of improving out of us who we are and turning the things that we cannot change into the rabbit holes that distract us from what we can change.  

We have decided that suffering, vulnerability, illness, aging, and the current in vogue human failures are simply problems to be solved.  We have forgotten that sin has placed its mark upon our human condition and that this will not be a defect easily engineered or solved by medical options that kill.  We have lost, at least in our communal mind, the need for and relevance of religion and so we bristle at the idea we need anyone's help.  Of course, God is convenient to blame but not as redeemer or savior.  We will not breed our way out of these things nor will we engineer our DNA to prevent them from staining our image of perfection.  We will not self-improve ourselves out of suffering or frailty or moral dilemma.  Such is the lot of a human condition since the Fall. We must begin by admitting this before anything else can help us.  Repentance is not meant to satisfy a demanding God but to admit that God is our helper and His goodness is not optional for us but key to any hope we might have. 

It amazes me how often in the home improvement shows we are told about smart switches or screens as if these are what will make a house into a home.  It is typical of our penchant for technology to believe that every problem is a technical one and every solution is a technological one.  Even for us.  That is why artificial intelligence is so enticing for us.  If we are having problems with the remodel, maybe we can make a technology which can do for us what we cannot -- an artificial humanity to fix our real one.  How unsurprisingly the solution seems to be more leisure, more entertainment, and more pleasure.  If you cannot live forever, live the time you have well until you decide to check out of Hotel California.  But, if you will recall, you can check in; you just cannot check out, at least in the song.

A just social order is a lofty goal and a life without constraints of pain or disappointment is a common enough one but is that really what we need?  Indeed, the Christian Gospel insists that there is something more that cannot be measured in earthly standards, except perhaps in guilt and shame, not exactly in great quantity today.  Forgiveness and a clear conscience are not perfunctory steps toward a greater goal but the beating heart of Christian faith and life.  Peace with God comes before we have peace within and can make peace with our brother.  Rome keeps talking about human dignity, common good, and justice as a basis for social order.  Protestants keep talking about individual conscience, self-government, and the limits of political authority.  I wonder if both cases have pursued prosperity and, at least in comparison with the past, achieved that dream but at the cost of knowing who we are and why we are here and the divinely given orders of marriage, family, children, and home.  Have we remodeled out of our modern lives the very things that gift us with purpose?  That is what I fear.

Judgment. . .

I read a critique of Protestantism (in which the author would also surely criticize Lutheranism) as a blind alley of judgment which makes it impossible to know who is correct.  

After visiting churches, reading books, talking with pastors, praying, and studying Scripture, I realized that every proposed solution eventually brought me back to the same place. I had to decide which interpretation of Scripture made the most sense, determine which doctrines counted as essential, judge which pastor had interpreted Scripture correctly, and evaluate which scholar presented the strongest case. In the end, every road led back to my own judgment. . . Yet that was the very problem I set out to solve.

I get it.  Protestantism offers a dizzying array of choices and answers and perspectives.  Indeed, how can you know which is right and which is wrong.  It is a judgment.  Now, to be sure, Lutheranism is not exactly the same thing as the myriad of options under the banner of Protestantism.  We have a written confession and claims of catholicity that appeal to Scripture and to the church fathers.  But that is for another post.  In this case, the author is contrasting Rome and Protestantism.  It is presumed that he is saying the choice of Protestantism is left to individual judgment and the choice of Rome is not.  That, however, is a false statement.

The choice of church, Rome or Protestantism or Lutheranism, is always a judgment call.  It is not that any of them offers a way to bypass judgment on the claims made by any of them.  No, the problem is not to find a church which does not require you to come to some conclusion or judgment.  The problem remains by which criteria you judge.  Is it reason or Scripture or catholicity or the implicit authority claimed over years or a teaching magisterium or an office (pope)?  I would suggest that Rome loves to press the issue of authority as if it were a way to bypass judgment when the real issue facing any serious Christian is which church stands with Christ and the Scriptures.  It is not antiquity alone or tradition or office (papacy) but Scripture.  

The person was hoping for some sort of objective judgment to relieve him of the need to judge the claims along side the authority (Scripture).  There is not.  Not in Rome, not in Protestantism, and not in Lutheranism.  You cannot skip over the judgment but you had better judge according to the right criteria.  Rome forgets this.  But Lutheranism here is in a different position than Protestantism.  We have a book, a written confession, that does not equivocate.  Looking for a church?  Dig deep into Scripture and into the claims of all churches.  Lutheranism looks good  It is not that hard to look good in comparison to the many versions of Protestantism but Lutheranism looks good compared to Rome as well.   

 

Death of the family ties. . .

The old joke is that if you have only one child, you are not a real parent.  After all, you always know which kid did it.  It is only when you have to stare into the faces of multiple kids, each of which is denying responsibility, that you earn your parent badge.  Yeah, I know.  It is only a joke.  But there is something to it.  Family ties are not simply parent to child and child to parent but sibling to sibling.  As the number of single child families increases and the number of families with multiple children decreases, the shape of those family ties is inevitably different.  

Europe is already well ahead of us.  Half of all families have only one child.  Here in the US it is still about a fifth of all families with but one child.  By choice.  This is not happening among parents who would like to have more children but cannot but is largely driven by a conscious choice to have one and only one child.  That means no siblings for those children.  The family dynamic is radically different with but one child and the child growing up without a brother or sister knows parent and home life in a very different way than one who lives with siblings.

There was a time when two or three children was considered a small family.  In those days children had no expectation of private bedrooms or bathrooms.  Life was shared in sometimes complicated ways that became normal and even routine.  One bathroom for six or eight people was not exceptional but typical.  Toys were shared.  Chores were shared.  Life was shared.  All that has changed.  We call them improvements.  Bedrooms that are no more only for sleeping but have become refuges for the silent and individual life with the screen.  Homes that have enough spaces to avoid bumping into others.  Meals that are short order or fend for yourself kinds of experiences rather than the whole family around a single table with a single menu.  It is different even for families with more than one child but it is radically different for the single child.  

Churches were filled with families that took up entire pews -- no matter how long the seat.  They filled the churches with the sounds of children and Sunday school rooms with boys and girls and VBS classrooms with hot, sweaty kids waiting for the recreation times.  Photos of the confirmation classes were two or three deep with the washed and earnest faces of youth -- girls in white dresses and boys in their first real man suit jackets.  Part of the reason the churches are less full is the smaller size of the families there.  Even with two children, there is plenty of room in the pews for more than a single family.  We see it in the schools of our communities but it is a pivotal factor in the congregation as well.

Could it be that not having siblings has taught us not to get along or, rather, left us without the memory or tools or skills of how to get along with those we do not like or with whom we do not agree?  Could our lack of tolerance and our desire to insulate ourselves from those who have a different view than we do be attributed to the loss of that memory of growing up and figuring out how to make it work in a home with limited bedrooms and probably a single bathroom and shared toys?  Could it be that our quickness to resort to violence is, in part, our inability to figure out how to deal with conflict or disagreement and our limited tolerance of those who dare to challenge us?  I have no data but I suspect that as the family changes, society changes and many of those are not for the better.  Churches are finding the same short tempers and we are more apt to find folks packing up their things and leaving than investing themselves into communities where there is a chance they might be offended.  It spreads to all our institutions.  Even the old civic groups and youth organizations of old are suffering.  We want our thing and we are much less willing to suffer with those who do not want our thing.  No, the death of family ties brings with us unintended consequences all around.

The Church of England's idea of prayer. . .

The Church of England released an official prayer for the 2026 World Cup with the intention of bringing the nations together and celebrating the game.  The only problem, they forgot what it means to pray and who they were supposed to be praying to.  Among other things.  Even the vicars a curates of the Church of England mocked the prayer mercilessly on social media.  An example of it:  “The Church of England insists on making a mockery of itself and of prayer.”  According to the Church of England’s chair of the liturgical commission: “Prayers shared in Church of England digital communications are prepared by theologically trained staff and are subject to a process of internal review and sign-off."  That is probably enough said but I cannot hold my tongue.

We think that the Church of England is its once vaunted institutions and reverent liturgies but behind it all there seems to be nothing there -- a complete emptiness of depth, faith, and understanding of the Christian faith.  If that is not enough to tell you about the slow but increasingly speedy death of this church body, nothing will convince you. 

 

 

Mary's Day. . .

Thomas Troeger, noted hymnwriter, can turn a phrase.  One of my favorites of his is "borrowed light."  It comes from a hymn published in a collections of hymns also with the title "Borrowed Light."   A professor of Christian communication at Yale Divinity school, he was a well known preacher, poet, and musician.  By ordination, he was Presbyterian Church (1970) and then the Episcopal Church (1999). Troerger wrote some 22 books in the areas of preaching, poetry, hymnody, and worship.  He died in 2022.

Ostensibly written about John, the words might well ascribe to Blessed Mary, Virgin Mother of our Lord.  She shines with His borrowed light and not ashamedly but proudly so.  In art as well as in literature, her figure and face seem always to include the child Jesus.  In some renditions, Jesus is more like a miniature man than a child but the two are usually together.  She is a sign, always pointing to Christ, and from the very first moment of the announcement by the archangel.  "Let it be to me as the Lord has spoken."  Without claim for honor but the honor the Lord Himself has given, she consents to become the Mother of God.  All generations will call her blessed not because of her holiness but for her faith, for her consent, for her humility that asked for nothing but accepting the will of the Father no matter its cost.

Christ's Light reflected in blessed Mary is her glory and the glory of all the saints.  It is in this vein that the Lutheran Confessions commend the saints to us.  Charles Porterfield Krauth notes that the doctrinal sections of the AC begin with God and end with the saints -- a most appropriate perspective.  The Confessions call upon Christians to honor the saints by telling their stories (the history of the saints) so that we may follow the example of their faith and of their good works, as appropriate to our baptismal calling.  the joy of the saints' company is not that they invite us to focus on them. Rather, the very mark of the saints is that they invite us to focus with them upon the Lamb who redeemed them with His own blood, sanctified them in the waters of Baptism, and made them shining witnesses to the glory of His resurrection. They are not dead. They live in Him. Their spirits join us (and we them) in the Divine Liturgy (Hebrews 12!) and we sing a united song with angels, archangels, and with all the company of heaven. "Holy, holy, holy!"   

Today is the falling asleep of Mary, her dormition, and a feast day worthy of some reflection. Mary is for us more than saint but truly our Mother. She is the first of those who pondered in her heart all that the Lord had said to her through the angel and all that God had done. She was there for Jesus' first miracle, at the cross, and in the Upper Room she waited with the disciples for the gift of the Spirit. She received one of the seven last words from the cross. No, we ignore her to our peril for she can teach us much of Jesus, her Son and Savior.

She teaches us humility in her song of praise (The Magnificat). She teaches us absolute trust in the Father's will (Let it be to me according to His Word...). She teaches us to love Jesus and to worship Him who comes to us in flesh and blood as the Son of the Most High God. She teaches us faith, willing to be wounded for His sake and yet never as concerned about her own wounds as His.  She can teach us much if we are willing to read, to listen, to pray, and to learn... But it all begins by speaking her name. If Jesus can honor her as He does and if the Church can call her first of the saints and believers in Jesus, then can we not honor her whom the Lord honored with the gift of His one and only Son?  It is our first step in shining with the borrowed light that comes from Jesus to honor those whom He has honored, who have shone with the brightness of His shining.  A blessed Mary's Day to you all.

Thank God it's Friday. . .

  

The fabulous line from the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey was marvelously funny but for the Americans, at least, it was a legitimate question.  The episode was early on in the series but the weekend had not yet come to the States.  We all know that our weeks have seven days and we all give thanks to God for that seven day gift of time but the whole idea of a weekend -- two days off of work -- was an invention of the 1920s which did not even become routine until 1938.  What is a weekend, indeed!

The workweek ran six days, Monday through Saturday, and almost no employer, even many Jewish-owned factories, gave workers Saturday off. A Jewish immigrant who refused to work on Shabbat was often fired by Monday.  Or so says Yosef Bitton, writing in The Tablet.  While everyone had Sunday off complete with blue laws, nobody -- not even Jews -- had Saturday off.  Even Jews figured out a way to comply with the laws.  In 1885, the Reform rabbinical conference in Pittsburgh declared that observance need not be confined to the Seventh Day, and some congregations began holding services on Sunday morning instead.  Except for the Orthodox.  They saw the Shabbat not as a day off or merely the day of rest or worship but that on which all of Jewish life hinged.  Ditch the Shabbat and what would be left?

Enter Rabbis Abraham Pereira Mendes and Bernard Drachman.  Though they proved unsuccessful at providing Jewish exception for the Shabbat, they did win with the idea that everyone could have two days off.  Labor unions, industrial reformers, and changing theories of productivity all contributed to the invention of a weekend. Indeed, the whole thing worked in part because it was the right time -- for a shorter workweek, for the rise of leisure not simply for the leisure class, and for religious freedom.  We can thank the Jews for the weekend -- among other things.  Henry Ford adopted the 5-day work week, with Saturday and Sunday off, in 1926.  In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act mandated a 40-hour work week, which had the effect of legalizing the weekend and making it all normal.

All that said, how has it worked out?  Any religious usage of the weekend has long ago been cast aside along with the old blue laws in favor of more, well, leisure.  And that has worked against worship attendance, formal religious education, and the family in the home.  Probably has not helped us with the idea of any real rest either.  We seem to work harder at our fun than we do at work where we expect the job to also be, you guessed it, fun.   Having grow up in rural America with its agricultural economy, the whole idea of any formal weekend had to allow for chores and occasional and emergency duties -- especially during the busy seasons of planting and harvest.  But we at least had the expectation of it and the yearning for two days off.

What concerns me most is how we have blurred the distinctions between work and leisure.  Working at home in your pjs has made the distinction between work and play very hard to navigate.  Furthermore, we have pushed the envelope to the point where we do everything at home -- from play to sleep to work to shop to eat to watch movies, etc...  Is there any limit to what we will eventually do at home?  Do we even need the weekend anymore?   Do congregations capitulate to this offering services to fit around people's schedules or do we reorder our days according to God's rhythm?  Is it already too late to lay claim on the weekend for anything more than me?  Lots of questions.  Not too many answers.

Nice try. . .

Somebody sent me a link to a Roman Catholic talk show listing the top ten WORST songs used at Mass.  It took me a while to get around to give it a listen but I could hardly stand it but they were right on target but...  They blamed the Lutherans!  Really?  Everything gets dumped on the Lutherans from those in Rome complain about.  In this case the usual suspects were rounded up (Haugen, Haas, and Schutte).  While it is true that Marty Haugen grew up Lutheran, no Lutheran would employ him but Rome did.  All his music is published by GIA, a Roman Catholic firm.  And, as if that were not enough, he is a member of the United Church of Christ.  Nice try blaming the Lutherans for bad Roman Catholic folk music!  If anything, we borrowed from Rome -- not the other way around.

Even when the content is not completely terrible, the style is folksy, casual, and so 1970s that it makes youth laugh and those of us with a conscience wince.  I agree.  This kind of music got into the souls of some in the 1970s through the 1990s but don't blame the Lutherans.  Yes, they are rather insipid songs that seem to get inside your head and refuse to let go of you,  They are the musical version of the terrible glued felt banners of the same period. They are saccharine and sweet and appeal to sentiment more than than to the voice of God speaking through His Word.  But don't blame the Lutherans.  Rome did it to themselves and is still doing it in many places.  You know their names.  Companions on a Journey, Gather Us In, Sing a New Song, We Remember, Here I Am, etc...  Thankfully you will not find them in most Lutheran hymnals but in Roman Catholic missalettes and hymnals you will find them regularly.  They do not fit within the solemnity of the Lord's Word speaking and His meal set in our presence.  While I am not in favor of most of these in any context, it is difficult to complain about words drawn almost word for word from Scripture (On Eagle's Wings).  Nevertheless, it is hard to figure out how to take words from Scripture and set them in such a way that the music detracts from them instead of supporting them as a helper (as Luther says).

 

  

Is it comforting. . .

I read somewhere that Cardinal Cupich, one of my favorites as you know 😝, has suggested that all those who have committed suicide have been saved.  Nice of him to intervene with God's judgment well before the day when all is revealed.  And I read where others have also expressed their own sentiments in this regard -- though perhaps not quite as definitively.  For example, Bishop Barron thinks we should not be too quick to give up on those who have taken their own lives.  He has written that "Pope John Paul II insisted that the Church has never made a definitive statement regarding whether any particular person is in hell. And Pope Benedict said that we should suspend judgment in regard to Judas, committing him to the mercy and justice of God.  But again, wouldn't his suicide guarantee that he has gone to eternal perdition?"

As you probably already know, I am all for suspending judgment of the individual and leaving that to God -- not that we have a choice for it is His alone to judge and we bring nothing for or against it to the judgment seat.  In the end, any who will be saved shall be saved by Christ alone and not by their own merits or lack thereof.  Repentance is not the spark of goodness that causes us to love God and opens the door to forgiveness.  While we were yet sinners and enemies of God, the Lord died for us and for all manner of men.  But is it really comfort to venture past the mercy of God and then try to say something about the state of those who have taken their own lives?  If it is not our place to judge, surely it is neither our place to make a statement about what God's mercy has or has not done.

Let me say that I have buried many suicides in my ministry.  Though I might be wrong, I think most of them were running from something else than to death.  That is probably always the case.  It is certainly a different thing for a Christian to lose his way and fall into temptation and, in an irrational act with respect to the rest of his life, to take his life at that moment.  But we live in perilous times when the world is clamoring for an assisted suicide that offers a painless way to go for those who desire and who wish this honored every bit as much as the choice to live under painful circumstance and amid suffering.  Now is not the time to begin pontificating about the suicides being saved.  Commend them, all of them, to the mercy of God in Christ.  If that mercy is enough for our hope and confidence, it will be enough to carry us through the grief and sorrow over the loss of those whom we love who have ended their lives by suicide.  But do not try and overcompensate by suggesting all this fanciful stuff about Judas and every other suicide being saved.  

Perhaps we will be surprised by some of those who are saved (as well as those who are not). I am fairly confident, however, that instead of surprise we will enter into perfect joy, consummation, and bliss where such questions and answers about how this one or that can be saved shall no longer bother us at all.  If we are not bothered in heaven by the lack of certain experiences here on earth or unmet desires for this earthly joy or that, why would we be bothered by the thought that wow, didn't you take your own life and here you are in the company of the saints?  

Judas' end was written into Scripture not as testament to God's mercy but as a warning against despair.  After all, Peter also betrayed Jesus and got not even a penny for it (well, he thought he was saving his own life) but on the day of Jesus' resurrection it was to Peter the first news was directed.  That was an absolution of sorts.  Judas did not get that because there was, at least from our perspective, no moment of regret for his despair or hope in the mercy of God.  That is the warning.  Not that suicides will burn forever but that despairing of God's mercy will certainly lead you to do something bad.  God's forgiveness is bigger than every sin we offer Him.  But let us at least offer Him the sin -- offering Him our doubts, fears, worries, concerns, and struggles.  He will answer them.  That is the lesson of Judas and attempting to speak for God about Judas' eternal outcome will mask that important lesson.  Let us offer real hope and that real hope is in the shape of cross and marked with mercy.  That is all the hope we need.   

Professionalization and pastors. . .

It was said of the seminary graduates of my day that a first call lasted about 22 months.  I do not know if this was statistically correct or merely anecdotal.  It probably does not matter.  In the end I stayed a very long time in comparison to that mark -- nearly 13 years!  Indeed, I probably would still be there if a few things in the community surrounding the congregation had gone differently.  In the end, it was not the people who drove us away and, despite a rocky start, they were the hardest part of leaving to take my second call where I stayed for 32 years.  I always said I had only a couple of moves in me and experience proved that prediction to be fairly accurate. 

I will say, however, that even though pastors seem to be staying longer, very long tenures in the same place are not always seem as healthy by denominational officials and some within the congregations themselves.  Without exact numbers, I would not venture to give an average tenure or an average number of moves in any pastor's household today.  What I will say is that along with the culture, other things have changed which affect how long a pastor stays in one place.  Not all of these are good, right, or salutary for the Church (or for congregations and their pastors).

I read recently where, of the 221 who graduated from Yale College (when it was a divinity school too) between the years of 1745 and 1775 and went into the ministry, 71 percent remained in the church to which they were first called until their deaths. On the other hand, only 4 percent held four or more pastorates.  Without Lutheran seminaries in the US to compare this to, I will have to assume that the numbers would hold for us as well.  But not today.  One pastor's obituary I read in my own denomination's journal included no less than 9 congregations over his nearly 40 years of service.  There are probably those who have been in more.  We seem to be at a point where we affirm longer pastorates as good but are not sure either the pastors or the congregations want this to happen.  Let me suggest one reason.

Though many will dispute me, the problem can be laid in part on the rise of the professional clergyman. It has to do with uniformity in seminary and degree programs (which is not all bad) but it also has to do with the professionalization of the ministry.  The increasing professionalization of the pastor's vocation has directly paralleled his impermanence in the parish.  Could it be that professionalization might shoulder part of the blame for shorter pastoral tenures and for the expectation of them?  By the way, the same thing has happened to the lawyer and doctor in town as well.  They have seen their own vocation professionalized to the point where relationship is less than expertise in their field.  That might touch on some of the pastoral tenure problem (unless you think shorter tenures are a good thing for pastors or for congregations).

It was once thought that any pastor could be the pastor of any congregation.  Now the skill sets of pastors are honed toward more specific circumstances and those skill sets become as much of a driving force about where and how long a pastor is called along with some rather new factors (real estate and the wife's job among them).  Along with this, the tenure of the predecessor has become a powerful factor in the decision of the pastor to accept a call and how long he stays.  I will say without a doubt that many congregations and pastors now view a long pastorate (32 years?!) as problem for their future and for finding another pastor.  Pastoral longevity is now a complaint rather than a blessing -- at least in the minds of some.  After all, when pastors stay too long and become entrenched in the minds and lives of their people, it is hard for some to find room for the new guy and the old ways become so entrenched that they are just as difficult to change.

That is part of the problem.  We are enamored with change.  We think that change or die is a legitimate slogan for the churches today and a pastor who sticks around too long can be an impediment to the kind of change that we think we need.  But this is part of the very problem.  Change has become so rapid and the status quo so brief all around us that churches have bought into the false idea that this love of change is sustainable over the long haul.  We all know that it is not.  People need a break and they need stability -- in people like pastors, doctors, and lawyers just like in other aspects of their lives.  Professionals have a need to make changes to justify who they are and why they are here but such changes can often create their own difficulties for a congregation.  Furthermore, there is a big difference between needed change due to dysfunction or error and change that is less urgently warranted.  

Pastoral searches are not easy on congregations and they are certainly not easy on pastors and their families either.  Having gone through countless interviews over the years and having served as a Circuit Visitor assisting congregations in their calling process, I can vouch for how unsettling this can be in the life of a congregation already struggling.  Corporate headhunting has replaced the calling process and it has created its own problem both for the calling and keeping of a pastor.  It is often seen simply as a job and the process of getting or getting rid of a pastor as just another management change.  If we are honest we know that this is not the case.  Pastors are more like the head of a family than a corporate CEO but as long as we push the professionalization of this vocation and treat it as a corporate office, that is exactly what it will become.  So those are my random thoughts for today.  Chew them up and see what they taste like in your experience.

The end is near. . .

Christians, even conservative Christians, seem intent upon surveying the news for an announcement that the end is immanent more than paying attention to Christ.  I get it.  We worry about everything and so it is not a surprise that in our anxiety over the end times we would look for a voice where God has left mostly silence.  It is a shame, though, that we have left it to governments, international entanglements, and political machinations as the place where the God of His Word will address us to let us know the end has come.  Is that what we really think?

Every end of the Church Year and Advent ought to be a rather solemn reminder that we ought not be looking to the media voices of the world for that which God has already announced in His Son.  Are we in the last days?  Are not those days characterized more by Christ than the evils that have us so upset?  The “end” of all things is Christ.  We are waiting for Him and not for some series of events that overshadow Him.  We are not looking for leaders or governments or nations or even secretive groups to announce what God has already said.  The evil that will certainly be manifest in the "end" is not the primary thing but a secondary effect of the coming of Christ Himself.  We do not hasten nor delay His coming and we are not in charge of God's own calendar.  The events of the world have been part of the end times ever since the coming of Christ began what He is now also bringing to an end.  If we are watching the news to tell us what God has not, we are living in the delusion of our own minds and not by the Word of Christ.  There is no promise to those who predict the end more closely to its actual coming but the promise is given to those who endure without succumbing to the great temptation to take your eyes off Jesus.

I must admit that I hardly think of the end times.  Surely I lament in the evils that have become so commonplace that we no longer are surprised by them, much less shocked.  But I am not looking to the affairs of the Middle East or anywhere else to inform me of that which even Jesus insists He knows not the day nor the hour.  St. Paul reminds us where our focus should be and would urge us to consider with Jesus where our treasure is, our hearts ought to be also.  So in giving us encouragement and even hope, He points us to those things that belong to the Lord and bids us to keep our attention on them:

Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. (Phil 4:8)

There is a great spiritual battle being waged among us and within us.  It is not between the forces of evil under the reins of the devil against the forces of good under the reins of Jesus -- of which we might be tempted to see ourselves as everything from spectators to warriors.  That battle has been done.  It is the once for all of Calvary and the Empty Tomb.  Indeed, the battle we find ourselves in is to decide the focus of our hearts.  It is the battle of the true, the noble, the just, the pure, the lovely, the good report, the virtues, and the praiseworthy, all the things which have God's approval upon them against all that do not.  Fear and curiosity may pique our interest as we try to make heads or tails about the great news of the day but in the end all of which the news speaks will pass away like the wind.  Our battle is not to march like an army of God across the plains of the earth in order to plant His flag.  No, ours is to proclaim Christ the beginning and end of all things and to proclaim Him so that others will know with us His peace and protection among all the displeasing things that unfold around us as well as the glittering temptations of this moment.  Do not despair but do not take your courage from any sign that we are making progress against evils in us and in the world.  No, take your courage from the goodness of the Lord, from His mercy that endures forever, and from His grace sufficient to guard you through this life to everlasting life.  That is enough for me and for you.  The end is always near but Christ is nearer.  Thanks be to God!

The placement of the Our Father. . .

Perhaps there was no set placement of the Our Father within the Canon of the West or a diversity of placements both before and after the Words of Institution.  We do not have a plethora of sacramentary information to detail any assertion one way or another.  But that all changed in the time of Pope Gregory I (c. 540 - 12 March 604), commonly known as Saint Gregory, who left his imprint upon the Church in many pastoral ways.  This is something of a surprise for someone who had been Rome's "mayor" at 30 before entering a Benedictine monastery.  Perhaps it was his monastic background which enabled him to offer what are widely held as great improvements upon the state of the liturgy and church music. Gregorian chant is named in his honor and it is not too much to offer him this praise.   In addition, Gregory is the author of many of the prayers  within the liturgy, including the Christmas Preface and the Preface of Easter and the Ascension.   But he is also receives the credit for a uniform placement of the “Our Father” after the Canon in the Mass.  Indeed, he found it impossible to consider that any words of man would follow or be prayed prior to the reception of the Lord's body and blood.

Pius Parsch, noted liturgical scholar, puts it this way:

According to the great Pope [Gregory the Great], the Our Father is not so much a preparation for the Holy Banquet, as a consecration prayer, in the ancient sense of a prayer for the offering of the sacrifice. For this reason, in the Roman liturgy, it is recited by the celebrant alone, whereas in the Greek liturgy it is considered the table prayer of the congregation, who therefore recite it in common as a family about to approach the sacred banquet. According to Gregory I, therefore, the Our Father should be considered the completion of the Canon, corresponding to the Preface, in such wise that the Preface and the Our Father mark the beginning and the end of the Canon, which is recited in mystical silence. 

Oddly enough, The Lutheran Hymnal violated the order (along with other Lutheran Church Orders based upon 16th century Lutheran practice) but kept the other part of Gregory's preference:  that the people did not say or sing the Our Father but that it was solely the priest.  When the priest says these words, he is supposed to be staring at the Host (Roman historic practice).  It is a profound moment to have the priest address the prayer to the Father while looking literally at the Son and it is an awesome expression of the mystery of the faith for that priest say who art in heaven while Christ is there present in the Eucharist!   Josef Jungmann sees “the people say[ing] the Our Father along with the celebrant. It is the people’s Communion prayer.”   It is certainly their pre-communion prayer.  However, when the people "take over" the praying of the Our Father, it does affect the way it is seen as a consecration prayer, along with the Words of Institution, which is a connection long held long before Lutherans made their liturgical adjustments to the order.

In a sermon St. Augustine says:

If perchance, in consequence of human frailty, our thought seized on something indecent, if our tongue spoke something unjust, if our eye was turned to something unseemly, if our ear listened complacently to something unnecessary, it is blotted out by the Lord’s Prayer in the passage: “Forgive us our trespasses,” so that we may approach in peace and so we may not eat or drink what we receive unto judgment.

Lutheran efforts to recover the Eucharistic Prayer over the years have dealt with the placement of the Our Father and left us with two orders as well as two canons.  I must admit that I find it hard to reconcile the two.  It is for me one of the difficulties of constantly switching liturgical settings in LSB -- the canons being so very different and the placement of the Lord's Prayer itself almost opposite.  I wish we had been more careful to make sure that the canons were consistent and the only consistency I think appropriate is to follow the Gregorian convention of the last 1400 plus years which is consistent with the East as well. 

The cleansed life of media and AI. . .

Everyone knows that life is messy.  You love the wrong people and the wrong people love you.  Love is not idyllic but hard, a struggle even at is best.  Children are mixed blessings and bring a lot of baggage into your lives.  Friends ignore, deceive, and betray you.  The good do not prosper and the evil seem to do just fine.  Moral people don't always make great leaders and immoral people sometimes lead better.  Wars are terrible but seemingly inescapable.  The weather always rains on your plans and your parades.  I could go on but I think you get my drift.  Life is messy and disappointing and hard.  That is the way it is.

We look for an easier life.  We insulate ourselves from people in an effort to prevent them from hurting or betraying us.  We hedge our bets even with the love of our lives.  We like the idea of freedom but find its practice is a dirty business.  So it is no wonder that social media has an appeal for us.  We can make friends who will never show up at an awkward moment or betray us (we can always unfriend them).  We can make sure that our friends are pure and without any nasty strain of conflict or disagreement with the views we hold.  We can be romantic through means and hit the off button when the feeling passes.  We can make sure a whole world knows our story and our slant on things but we can prevent theirs from interrupting us while we are on our soapbox.  I get it.  Media makes it safer to have friends and even live with your families.

AI is part of that deal.  Have you ever noticed how complimentary AI is when their bot reviews our work or helps us find what we want?  It is so nice how deferential they are to us -- the hidden wisdom of those data centers and the chatbots who are almost human.  We wish that the folks at work were that nice or the folks at home.  AI is appealing in part because they are nicer than people in their dealings with us.  You never have to say you are sorry and you never have to muster up the words to forgive the hidden humanoid who is there at your beck and call.  The bots can do all things well enough to be better than the real thing -- even relationships and sex!  Who is not impressed with the appeal of a make your own friend, companion, or lover?

Our virtual AI “companions” seem to be willing to trust our secrets, be sympathetic to our quirks, nice, and, even more importantly, attentive.  Lord knows, we live in a world of distracted, indifferent, duplicitous, and disappointing people.  Perhaps the promise of AI is that it will someday offer a real enough alternative to simply check out of the mess of relationships, friendships, etc... Even our own bodies can be transcended and we do not have to be bound by our looks or size or shape or, even, gender.  At some point, we will be able to travel without leaving home, just as eat food we do not cook or even leave the house to obtain.   The surprise here is not that these things are offered to us but that we are so attracted to them and tempted by them to surrender our very humanity to what can never be human.

If for these reasons alone, the Church should be wary about tying our fortunes to AI and media in general.  We do not have the luxury or having a virtual relationship with a real God.  It is about time that we said this out loud in public.   

Who are the real thought police?

The real thought police are not conservatives but those on the leading edge of progressive politics and thought, so-called liberals but really illiberal.  It is dangerous in liberalism to allow people to disagree with the status quo of progressive political and social thought.  The mechanisms are already being put in place to monitor, for now, and eventually control even the private messages of individual people -- messages which dare to express their independence from the woke ideals and their promoters in the world.

An example of this is the fact that the European Parliament voted early in July on the urgency of Chat Control—the scanning of the private messages of citizens charged with no crime and threatening no one except the powers that be.   Of course, this will be heralded as necessary access to prevent violence, to protect children, to end hate speech, and to make for a more civil society.  Who is naive enough to believe that it will end with scanning or monitoring of such messages?  As Rod Dreher as suggested, this is not for building an infrastructure to deal with today but the establishment of an infrastructure for tomorrow.  It is always good to remember that we never surrender our freedom all at once but in small steps over time.  We surrender it line by line of rhetoric and computer code and it is never to control but to protect -- a reason no reasonable person would dare to argue with but it never stops there.

You must hearken back to the case of Päivi Räsänen, the Lutheran member of parliament from Finland now convicted by a Finnish court of hate speech — for quoting the Bible, and for criticizing LGBT ideology  —  after being exonerated several times before. Though she was twice acquitted by the courts, the Finnish state was not satisfied and tried her a third time in order to gain the conviction they wanted. The consequences of this conviction are not limited to Finland.  In fact, Päivi was prevented from flying through London’s Heathrow airport on a flight back because she’s a convicted hate criminal and that made her either dangerous or a persona non grata in the UK even for a temporary moment in an airport awaiting a connecting flight!  The UK insists she is unwelcome there.  This is Päivi Räsänen, an elected European lawmaker, denied travel through Heathrow Airport on  orders of His Majesty’s government for daring to quote the Bible in public.  The irony here is that this is done in the name of the King who is charged with defending the (Christian) faith of the Church of England.

Now who is the thought police you should rightly fear?   

Update:   Räsänen has filed an application to appeal her conviction to the European Court of Human Rights in July, commencing the final legal juncture of a landmark case for freedom of speech in Europe.  Stay tuned.  

A strange paradox. . .

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.  Or something like that was said by Barry Goldwater.  It did not matter since LBJ showed a mushroom cloud with the express intention of saying it was either him or nuclear holocaust.  In the end it was enough to push the Texan to a mighty big victory and to tarnish the reputation of an otherwise honorable opponent.  I wonder if they were really as far apart as the commercial suggested.  In the end, the party that nominated Johnson went on to see Chicago riots and the landslide shift to the other side four years down the road.  It is a strange paradox when you set it up so that your friends are not friendly enough and your enemies are not who you think them to be.  Such is the case in religious politics as well.

Rome recently saw the SSPX, a traditionalist group loosely on the fringes of Rome, defy the papal threat and ordain their own bishops.  I get it.  They spat in the face of the pope, for Pete's sake.  That is how it appears, anyway.  But is it exactly that?  Watch the videos posted of the ordination of their bishops in Switzerland and the ordination of a bishop in Laredo, Texas, and it is not so clear.  The trad group is pious and reverent and churchly while the Roman group sounds almost Protestant casual doing the same thing -- a more liturgical version to be sure but not exactly high church either.  The dispute with the SSPX seems to fall around the Council nobody seems to agree on what it said or means -- Vatican II.  Some, like Benedict XVI and John Paul II, insist that Vatican II did nothing but a new coat of paint on the old church and nothing of substance in doctrine or practice really changed.  But that is certainly at odds with the liturgical reforms of Paul VI which were not quite Vatican II but have claimed the label.  The SSPX does not like some of what the Council said and little of what Paul VI promulgated.  On this, a host of folks uneasily within Rome seem to agree.

Rome has also seen others who seem to fit within the fold turn the Mass into a circus, resist every attempt at reverence, and make the little visit with God into a homey little sit down.  On top of that there are official voices clamoring for the ordination of women, for a voice and vote on the things of importance, and for a friendlier view to the LGBTQ+ community.  It is not quite important that they do not seem to be going anywhere to change Rome but the fact is that they get to flaunt their outrageous views seemingly without recrimination while Pope Francis tried to evict a conservative cardinal from his Roman apartments for daring to question him through official channels.  It certainly does seem that to err on the conservative side is more cause for Vatican complaint or discipline than to go the other direction. Does that mean that the liberal edge is more friendly with Rome than the more conservative, traditional side?  What a paradox?  Your friends are more those who stretch the limits of faith and practice within the boundaries than those who try to rein in the extremes?  Really?  Not to mention the fact that the previous Pope ceded control over who is ordained to the Chinese communists and the new one seems comfortable with that.  So four bishops from the conservative side are a bigger outrage than how many from the Chinese government?

Before you shrug your shoulders and suggest this is a Roman problem, the same thing exists in Lutheranism and in Missouri.  There seems to be plenty of latitude given to those who stretch the borders of faith and practice one way but not so much the other way.  If the people like a pastor who is not living within the boundaries of confessional Lutheran faith and practice, it seems okay to let him be.  But a conservative pastor who tries to bring the folk back into the fold is claimed to be rigid or overbearing and handed a resignation letter to sign.  Yes, I know, there are many nuances to these cases but it is no wonder sometimes it is hard to figure out who your friend and who is not anymore.  All of this attests to the fact that the most dangerous thing in any church body is someone who is pious and faithful on the conservative side of things.  Across Lutheranism it is the same.  Liberals get away with denying just about everything and ignoring our very Confession while conservatives who hold the line are seen as loving rules more than people and more like a law-giving Moses than a grace-giving Jesus.  But is it always that simple?  Are the folks more dangerous to the health and life of the Church more those who conserve or those who innovate?  We are still a church body intimidated by large parishes that seem more evangelical than Lutheran while fearful of the small parish that keeps the tradition without apology.

We all seem to love the muddy moderate middle more than anything else.  Liturgical but not too liturgical, conservative but not too conservative, and confessional but not too confessional.   We Lutherans know this only too well but apparently we are not alone.  Rome and the Episcopals would rather sell a building once used for Christian worship to a Muslim group than to a conservative one.  That statement can be shown truthful with myriad examples.  Even the ELCA was guilty of that.  Who are the friends of orthodox Christianity?  Those who hold to the creeds, councils, confessions and liturgy of the Church or those who like to live on the wild side?  The answer seems obvious but, depending upon who you talk to, it is not.  Leo will excommunicate the SSPX principals for their action but warn those who flaunt Roman teaching and practice on the other side.  Even a certain Tucho seems to exemplify this desire to live on the edge while talking tough with the rad trads.  It is not always different even among those who claim to abhor popes (like Missouri).  It is a strange paradox, indeed, that we treat those who skirt the left boundary different than those who do the same to the right. 

Political humor. . .

A wise person’s heart directs him toward the right, but the foolish person’s heart directs him toward the left.  Ecclesiastes 10:2 NASB

Is that a small thing?

It has been said that an appeal to church councils is not as much as some think.  In fact, Luther himself says as much in his work On the Councils of the Church (first section) and again in his Treatise to the German Nobility (written some 18 years apart).  He is defraying the position of Rome and the Pope as well as conciliarism in general by seeming to demean them for merely explaining and asserting what is already there in Scripture.  I get it.  He is right, of course.  Faithful councils did not make up answers to the vexing questions of the day but concerned themselves with what Scripture says and then applied that to those vexing questions of the day.  But doing that is not a small thing.  It is the same problem I have who insist that ordination is merely apostolic custom -- well, yes, but, is apostolic custom something small or something important?

We tend as Lutherans to sound like we are demeaning both the testimony of the fathers and the edicts of the great councils as if they were not doing anything much at all but simply repeating Scripture and applying Scripture to the problems of the moment.  We are certainly NOT saying that this is a small thing.  They could have invented positions for the Church without Scriptural substance or support.  There were plenty who did (some of those deemed heretics and some who have a rather orthodox reputation).  We as Lutherans labored against all sorts of things not explicitly or even implicitly found in Scripture -- from the treasury of merits to purgatory to papal infallibility to a host of things down through the ages.  Inventive theology is fun and interesting but it lacks the warrant of God's voice and the blessing of His Spirit.  We need to stick with Scripture and then to apply Scripture even to those things not explicitly addressed in Scripture and then to shut up instead of venturing far from God's Word.  We are counseled by God's Word neither to add to it nor to detract from it even as we are called to heed its voice and hold fast to what it says.  But, of course, sometimes folks are of no mind to listen to what God says.  So when the Church can muster the courage to speak what God has said, it is never a small thing.

When a body like the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod comes together to commend what Scripture says and what our Confessions affirm and even what the fathers have said and councils have judged, it is not a small thing.  We live, after all, in a world in which inventive theology (and liturgy) is the regular practice of some, even many.  If that were not true we would not have seen the ordination of women, the embrace of same sex marriage, the promotion of birth control as normative and good, the acceptance of abortion as a women's health issue, the support for the myriad of genders, and so many other things.  These can only occur when we skip over what Scripture says and appeal to another authority or listen to another voice over what God has said.  So when we come together and say again what the Bible says, councils have confessed, fathers have testified, and confessions have adopted, it is never a small thing at all.  For the reality is that everywhere around us churches are ignoring what God has said in favor of all kinds of authorities in competition with God's Word.  So don't demean that as something unimportant or small when it happens that the Church marshals the courage to say this is what God has said and this we believe, teach, and confess.

At the same time, however, we must admit that there are many who disagree over what Scripture is even saying and who spend their days in creative exegesis in order to make God's Word say something different than what it does.  So when we promote the faithful exegesis and confess the truth of God's Word and, in so doing, appeal to council and the testimony of the fathers, that is a good thing.  It does not give councils or the fathers an authority greater than God's Word but it does show that we are not promoting novelty nor are we falling into the creative exegesis temptation so prevalent today but that we stand with those who have stood before us on the truth of God's Word.  That is not a small thing either.  Appealing to the witness of councils and the fathers in support  of what Scripture says is doing exactly what we ought to be doing as assert and give support to the fact that we are building upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, living in faithfulness to the traditions handed down to us, and giving care to holding to the sacred deposit once given to us and which we commend to those who follow us.  None of this is a small thing but a very important way that we testify to the catholicity and apostolicity of the faith we confess and which we live out around this Word and Sacrament. 

Hubris. . .

Hubris, a noun, meaning overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance or excessive pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods), or overbearing pride or presumption.  It originated in ancient Greece, where it was considered a dangerous character flaw that threatened to provoke divine punishment.  Though it has its roots in Greek and not in Christianity, it has a textbook example in the fall of Adam and Eve.  This took place not primarily because of the enticement of the serpent (devil) but the desire of Adam and Eve to be like, if not to actually be, God.  That presumption happened because Adam and Eve had distanced themselves from the Word of God.  It remains the singular problem of sin today.  We do not hear God's voice nor do we heed it.

That hubris led all of humanity to be cast under the shadow of death and for the perfect pleasure of Eden to be interrupted and their lives ordered by a harsh labor to fall upon both husband and wife and all those who proceed from their union.  The hubris of those who refuse to hear and heed God's Word is still not without consequences today.  Look at the empty shell of Christianity left when liberal and progressive church bodies have set aside God's Word and listened to another voice over God's.  Words, especially liturgical and creedal words, become mere words without meaning or influence.  They become part of the noise of the world instead of being the heralds of the Kingdom who bring God's order to the chaos, His life to death, and His restoration to what has gone astray and lies lost in the maze of error.   

Scan across the the ruins of Protestantism and the uncertainties and diversity of Evangelicalism and you find the same hubris in the willingness to either ignore or set aside what God says in favor of the internal voice of feelings or the prevailing views of society or culture.  It is even voiced in religious terms when, for example, the trans person speaks of being "born again" by their affirmation of a gender different from their body or DNA.  In place of God and His Word, the glorification of desire has eroded not only the definition of marriage but its purpose, replacing procreation with pleasure.  The embrace of climate change in the extreme in which man is viewed as an intruder and interloper in creation is but another example in which the voice of God is silenced and the views of society replace God's Word.

Distance from God's Word is the first step to departing from that Word.  As soon as we become embarrassed or even ashamed of what God says, we are ripe for casting aside His voice and replacing it with the myriad of voices from within and across the landscape of culture and society.  It is as if Eden's conversation with the temptation of self and the world dominated by the devil is being replicated over and over again as moderns become uncomfortable with God's Word.  We do not need to rewrite the Scriptures if we can succeed in ignoring it and setting it aside in favor of the voices of others.  The crisis of Christianity is not that orthodox Christianity has lost its soul but that too many Christians seem to be comfortable living outside the sphere of orthodox Christianity, with a truth that appeals to them but is unknown to God.  The Church will not be undone by the likes of Satan and his power but the Church can be diminished in the world as those who claim to be God's no longer hear or follow the voice of their Good Shepherd.

You do not need to sit on a mountain top or dress oddly or demand sacrifice to play God.  Indeed, all you need to do is to honor the Lord in public piety but ignore what He has said.  This is surely what the Lord was talking about when He says they honor Him with their lips but their hearts are far from Him.  I wonder if this is the shape of the future for those who once claimed not only to love the Word of God but to heed it and now do neither.  

This day in history. . .

Unless I am mistaken, and I often am, it was on this day in 70 AD that a Roman assault during a revolt of the Jews burned the Second Temple burned to the ground.  It is no small day.  When we attempt to date the books of the New Testament, we look for signs that would either address the Temple's destruction or give, by silence, the testimony to its continued existence.  Furthermore, it was the sign that Jesus Himself pointed out as the end of one era and the beginning of another.  Jesus did not equivocate. The Temple would be destroyed “with not one stone left standing upon another” making this an unmistakable sign of a profound moment in history.  Billy Joel said he didn't start the fight but somebody did and it was always burning until it was no more.

The Temple was simply a piece of real estate esteemed by the Jews.  It was the House of God, symbol and instrument and locus of God’s presence on earth. Jesus Himself called this “my Father’s house” on two occasions recorded by the disciples and perhaps more often (Luke 2:49; John 2:16).  He jealously cleansed the Temple when it had deviated from its purpose for the Divine Service and become merely a place of commerce, even holy commerce.  This place figured large on the day of Jesus' death, with the record of “the curtain of the temple,” which veiled the innermost place of God's dwelling literally “torn in two” to expose there the mercy seat which had been revealed upon the cross.  This is, at least, how the writer to the Hebrews describes Christ's opening of the sanctuary “through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.”  A new Temple not made with hands rose up on Easter and made us living stones of its continued construction.   Yet that structure in Rome did not fall down all at once but seemed to continue on for nigh onto forty years, even refreshed in its appearance along the way.  Then, following Christ’s Ascension to the right hand of the Father, the place that had been the meeting place of Jews and Jewish Christians literally had to give way to the prophecy of Christ.  The Temple burned and fell.  (See Luke 24:53; Acts 2:46; 3:1; 5:21; 21:26–30)

The priestly ministry of the Old Testament is described in Hebrews 6 -- including the lampstand (menorah), table, and altar of incense.  With the destruction of the Temple, the building was stripped of all its adornments and the Temple’s menorah was carried by its conquerors processing into Rome.  These adornments had become the spoils of victory in the conquest of Judaea by Titus.  The celebration was not about a building brought down by fire but an end to the pesky people who had been a thorn in the side of Rome more irritating than their size or importance belies.  The history of the Jews was not over but the Old Testament people of God whose identity included a priestly caste to sacrifice (the Passover lamb, for example) was done and would never be the same.  The Sadducees also came to the end of a line and the Pharisees gave birth to rabbinic Judaism as a replacement for their own dominance.  And the Christians also were sent forth from the Temple along with everyone else.  It was not only an end to the Jews as we had known them but the first step of Christians beyond shadow of their spiritual forebears.  The next mention of the lampstand and the altar would be in the book that proclaims the future to come when everything is brought to its ultimate consummation.   The Revelation to St. John picks up the story not in Israel or anywhere on earth but in the heavenly gates, with the heavenly liturgy, where the saints and all who have loved His appearing are gathered unto Himself eternally.

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We're just about two weeks away from our fifth annual Henkel Conference, which aims to provide a forum of the best Christian speakers on theology and culture for the encouragement of God's church on earth. And we're elated to announce the additions of Carol Swain, Korey Maas, and Nathaniel Pullmann to an already spectacular lineup, which now includes  ·    Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist, Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College, Fox News contributor, and best-selling author ·    Scott Yenor, Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage Foundation and Professor of Political Science at Boise State University ·    Carol Swain, Former Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University and Co-chair of the 1776 Commission ·    Alex Newman, President of Liberty Sentinel Media ·    Noelle Mering, Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Life and Family Initiative and columnist for the Catholic Herald ·    Korey Maas, Chairman and Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College ·    Nathaniel Pullmann, Headmaster of Redeemer Classical School (Fort Wayne, IN) With a slight change to prior years, we're excited to conclude the conference with a discussion on free speech with panelists Mollie Hemingway, Scott Yenor, and Carol Swain and moderator Alex Newman.  We wish not only to host great speakers for the church's edification, but also to offer a merry gathering; hence, we’ve once again booked the best pizza joint in Nashville for dinner after the opening day. A local Christian bookstore will be selling the works of the speakers and other items during the conference. Scholarships remain for high school and college students (inquire for the promo code via the email link below), and feel free to forward this email to anyone who might be interested in attending.  Rev. Gregory Bauch Ascension Lutheran Church, Madison TN   Register Now   Email Us   More Information