In search of a sacrament. . .

I have often thought that there is no such thing as a non-sacramental Christian church.  The issue is not whether or not to have sacraments but which sacraments.  Either they are the sacraments which warrant the sanction and promise of Christ or they will be something else -- something invented or a designated hitter, so to speak, which fills the current ideology.

Prayer has long been the sacrament of choice for those who disdain the ones the Lord has offered.  It comes with the command of Christ and His promise to hear and answer so it must be good, right?  The problem is that when you turn prayer into a sacrament, it comes with the inherent pledge of Christ to do what the one praying has requested.  If the form is right, others are enlisted to pray for the same thing, and the name of Christ is attached, well, then, there is the sacrament.  Except that prayer has never enjoyed the designation of sacrament, though sacramental it might seem.  Nevermind that the history is not there, the desire is.  It was especially true of the Charismatics and perhaps of the Pentecostals.  In my first parish there was a huge divide when the prayers of the faithful for the healing of a child were supposed to result in the child recovering but the child died of the cancer.  How could God renege on His promise -- especially when it had the support of many united in praying for the same thing?  The prayer of the righteous availeth much but not necessarily the answer sought.  That makes it hard to really offer up prayer as a substitute sacrament.  Meditation may be like prayer but it is somewhat different.  Christians have flirted with this kind of thing for a long time and tried to position such inner contemplation into a sacramental wannabe but it has not yet convinced many -- except the spiritual but not religious who will settle for even a flawed sacrament if it fills their bill.

Prophecy was also a favorite of the Charismatics (and Pentecostals).  Speaking in tongues, sure, but it did not have the cache of a prophet telling us what God was going to do.  There is much talk of it in the NT but also with that conversation comes many warnings, not in the least from St. Paul.  Then there is the problem of prophesies that do not happen.  Ah, what to do with those who attempt to speak in the Lord's name but the Lord seems not to hear them or honor their words?  Hard to make a sacrament out of much disappointment.  Of course, that has never stopped us from venturing beyond the word of Scripture.  Still and all, prophets and prophesies are a disappointing substitute if you cannot be sure what is said is either from the Lord or reliable -- at least until after the fact.  Even Rome has its own flirtation with little girls who hear voices from God or have visions.  Many in Rome are beginning to question some of the age old devotion given to those prophets and their special words from Jesus or Mary.

Some have suggested that worship, specifically contemporary Christian music designed to motivate by emotion, as a sacramental substitute.  It probably is being used to set the mood and even more.  Jesus wants to raise us up but CCM is intent upon raising up Jesus, flowery language about honor and glory replacing the cues of Scripture or the songs that rehearse Christian faith and life amid suffering awaiting the resurrection and eternal life to come.  Mood songs do have powerful effect and that is why the music industry is so successful.  Whether you can translate that into a ballad that effects the means of grace is something entirely different.  Mood music with a beat you can dance to has always had its appeal but what my folks danced to on Saturday night was never thought to have a place on Sunday morning until folks began to assign to worship music the same kinds of duties and responsibilities that everything from Rap to Rock to Ravel's Bolero can do for the imagination.  The only problem here is that God has not asked to imagine Him but provided the actual means for His saving presence among us.  Too bad, though, because mood music is a tempting substitute.

What warms the heart is not always a fit replacement for the Word and Sacraments of Christ.  Try as we might, they do not come with the promise of God to deliver the fruits of His redeeming work through these means.  It is for this reason that Lutherans highly esteem marriage but find it not really sacramental in that definition.  Ordination and penance (absolution) have a pretty decent claim to the designation but not so much confirmation (especially the Western form of it which has no real correspondence in the East).  Unction is a fine practice but lacks the dominical word which gives the means its promise and power.  Good, yes, and salutary but not quite meet or right.  No, the best answer is to stick with the ones God gives and to trust them.  We Lutherans remind Christians all the time that the Word is not simply a written record or history but the living voice of the Good Shepherd.  In that respect, it is the granddaddy of all sacraments. 

A tragedy within another one. . .

According to the dictionary, a tragedy is not simply something terrible but a very sad event or situation, especially one involving death or suffering.  Those on every side should agree that when Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children–5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan– and then attempted suicide by jumping out a window– is a tragedy.  The fact that she did not die but lived only to be left paralyzed is perhaps less so.  

We all know about her defense.  She answered the charges against her with the defense of postpartum depression and psychosis. I cannot dismiss such a thing.  If you have been a pastor long, you have undoubtedly ministered to a family in that same boat.  Too many woman have suffered this to one degree or another.  The fact that a great number of women sympathized with her, supported her on social media, and expressed their concern publicly only attests to the fact that postpartum depression is not talked about enough or taken seriously enough.  What remains, however, is that her children suffered because of her diagnosis and her husband and extended family were left with multiplied grief for all that took place.  Of course, in hindsight family and medical personnel might have done things differently.  But her children are still dead while she lives.  Her grief has been compounded by the realization of what she did.  Whether that is enough for her to suffer is not quite the issue in her trial.  In the end, this trial ended with a mistrial–all of the jurors but one wishing to acquit her.  

According to the same dictionary, the word acquit means to decide officially in a law court that someone is not guilty of a particular crime.  It is a curious word.  Everyone admits she is guilty.  The issue is not whether she is guilty but whether or not she is culpable for the crime.  She is clearly at fault but were there circumstances which mitigate against the raw judgment of guilt which should be taken into account. Apparently one juror spoke out in public of the holdout, “He had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”  Here is the second tragedy.  Apparently the other eleven jurors could get over that fact that she had actually and viciously murdered her children.  Some lamented that the law required a unanimous verdict.  It is as if the attention has shifted away from Lindsay Clancy and onto the judicial system and this particular jury.  That is the tragedy.  That we can "get over" the brutal death of these children but cannot get over how many outside the courtroom and all but one of the jurors could is a tragedy of great proportions.  I find it hard to see how the feelings for abortion have not contributed to this state of affairs in which the killing of children is a lesser tragedy than holding the one who killed them to account for her actions.  As if that were not enough, the news has it that another mother has killed her two-year-old son and she particularly tied this to the crime and the trial of Lindsay Clancy, saying she was “inspired” by Clancy.  How is it that we have come to the point where the judicial status of the one responsible for the crimes has become a greater tragedy than the deaths of her children which she caused?  Could it be that this is a tacit admission that some lives are wroth more than others?  Who gets to decide?  Which lives should have value and which should not or should have a lesser value?  But is that not exactly what we have done with abortion?

Yes, the whole situation with Lindsay Clancy is a tragedy but hidden within that tragedy is another one.  We are already at the point of picking and choosing which lives matter and which do not.  Of course, this is not the first time this has happened.  The fact that it continues indicates that we have learned nothing from our errors.  And that is perhaps the tragedy that encompasses all the rest. 

 

Making it all seem normal. . .

If you would have told me fifty years ago that I would have encountered members of my parish or circle of friends who had employed or were considering the use of a surrogate (or becoming a surrogate mother) I would have laughed in your face.  On the surface of it all, it was absurd.  Neither the technology nor the possibility had entered the mainstream.  Well, they have now.  As a pastor I have counseled and consoled families struggling with infertility who think that surrogacy is not only reasonable but moral and a good solution for those longing for a child they cannot conceive without the help of technology and a rented womb.  Now I have not only known but been assured by those carrying a child for a sibling or child unable to conceive that they are not only doing the right thing but the noble thing, the good thing, and the moral and loving thing to borrow out their womb for another family.  While in some cases this is simply the borrowing of the womb, in other cases it is loaning out considerably more -- namely eggs or sperm or both.  This issue will not go away and will become even more normal as technology advances and the Church fails to address it publicly.

Let me say for the record that I am not unsympathetic to the plight of the childless longing to have a child.  It has touched my family and we have suffered the pain not only of the longing but of the choice not to afford the extraordinary and extraordinarily costly and immoral consequences of IVF and surrogacy.  It is a subject close to home.  That is what makes this even more difficult.  The heart yearns to provide hope and a possibility to those whose desire for a child has not been fulfilled.  The reality of the adoption situation has also changed and it is not as simple as deciding to adopt.  The abundance of choices to prevent pregnancy and the availability of the morning after pill have done a remarkable job of reducing the numbers of infants and small children who might be adopted.  Not every family is able to support a child with deep emotional problems or disabilities or physical ills -- though I remain deeply moved by and impressed by those who are able.  The adoption situation today with its open process often means that economic factors prevent others from competing as prospective adoptive parents and the chances offered to the birth parents to change their mind are not without their own impact on the adoption option.  Further, the government has done a good job of taking the Church out of the whole process (unless they play by the government's rules) and this has also changed the lay of the land for adoption and those who might consider it.  So please do not say that I am insensitive or uncaring toward those who find surrogacy and IVF to be their best choice.  I am.  But no matter how compassionate one might be, a wrong is still a wrong and both surrogacy and IVF are wrong.

I think it is pretty clear where Rome stands on this and it is certainly abundantly clear where the LCMS stands on the same matters but I am not at all sure how well or how effectively either communicates these stands or the reasons why.  Protestants as a whole are divide on these issues or simply silent -- leaving the individual consciences to make the determination of what is moral, good, and right.  I think it is true that this may well become our own moment's Roe v. Wade issue and that we are at the beginning of what might become an equally long process of discernment, information, and education on the topics of IVF and surrogacy.  Roughly one in six adults now faces infertility, and congregants are hungry for guidance and the numbers will only increase.  Across the board, studies have found that pastors want and need additional resources to equip them to address these issues and fear they are without the ability to make a difference in the minds of their people on these issues.  It is also clear that the silence of the churches has been interpreted by many within the Church that there is no moral stand on IVF or surrogacy except to proceed with caution and to act with their own judgment.

Surrogacy and IVF are but a few of the major issues facing our people and the Church.  We will need to to equip pastors and church leaders, to offers solid theological resources on a range of topics: beginning and end of life, AI, IVF, surrogacy, egg and sperm donation, embryo adoption, contraception, and genetic testing.  For too long we have acted in the Church as if this was not happening in our own backyards or that such things were not common nor a threat.  We cannot afford such foolishness any longer.  The challenges have caught us unprepared and behind the times to catechize our people within these issues but we dare not bury our heads in the sand and waste more time.  Yesterday was too late but we will have lost tomorrow unless we take advantage of today.  The market driven aspects of surrogacy and IVF are exploding as those who wish to be single parents and same sex parents desire children.  No, we cannot afford to wait to talk about these things openly and from the vantage point of Scripture and the morality informed by God and not by our own feelings or whims.

Mimicking the Mimic

It should come as no surprise that the teachers also learn from the students, the parents from their children.  What might come as a shock is that AI, the great absorber of our intelligence, knowledge, and facts, has reversed the role and become the teacher.  It may not have been by design but it is surely effective nonetheless.  As AI is incorporated more and more into the educational process, it will teach the students just as much as the formal instructors in the classrooms.  Those who depend upon AI both to teach and to learn will begin to think, sound, and judge things the way AI thinks, sounds, and judges.  It is inevitable.  The problem is that AI does not quite discern between the best and what is simply well represented among the thought and opinions of humanity and it has a remarkable tendency to flatter the very things that should not be flattered.  What will that do to us?  Think of the possibilities.

The more we normalize the use of AI in the educational process, the more our students will begin not simply to depend upon the tools of artificial intelligence but will begin to think and sound like what they are using.  We all know that.  Every student mimics the peculiarities of their favorite teacher.  Speech patterns as well as the vocabulary are all part of what the willing student absorbs from the teacher.  It happens in the secular realm and it happens in the Church.  There was a time in our Synod, for example, when pastors wanted to sound like the most popular preachers of radio -- in our case Walter A. Maier or Oswald Hoffmann.  We learn from our teachers.  But when our teacher is not a teacher but an algorithm and a set of memory banks designed to learn from and mimic us, that becomes a serious problem for the world around us and for the Church.  When we depend upon secondary sources instead of our knowledge of primary sources, we become the witting victims of their own flaws and failings.  AI distills facts and reduces things complex into simple and often reasonable conclusions -- the only problem is that they are not always even close to being correct.  Yet without a knowledge of those primary sources, we become captive to the thing designed to learn from us.  It is a circle not of knowledge but of repeated falsehoods, half-truths, and lies.  Worse, we become powerless to challenge the narrative -- without the tools or information to challenge it.

There may be useful places for AI to integrate into the world around us but I am more and more suspicious of those places simply because I fear we will learn only what our AI teacher offers to us and become stupid in the process.  Every now and then I visit social media only to encounter a meme or a reel which is polished, visually intriguing, and interesting but at the same time blatantly false.  I grew up in the automobile era when fins, wide whitewalls, gas guzzling V-8s, and chrome dominated the marketplace and fueled our ideas.  I cannot tell you how many times a composite image and story about that period pops up with mislabeled visuals or missing facts or false claims.  On top of it I something post angrily about the error and end up commenting on something which has not a thread of human intelligence behind it.  So much for me and mine!  Yet this is not simply an irritant but a destructive force to our world, society as a whole, and the Church in particular.  It will inevitably lower the bar for what constitutes knowledge, understanding, and comprehension.  As long as we are intent upon integrating AI into the classrooms of America, we will contribute to the overall inability to distinguish truth from error, reality from imagination, and fact from fiction.  While this may not seem an urgent problem, the state of affairs in America is already suffering from a lack of consensus on what facts are, what the truth is, and what the moral truths are guide how we use them.  Do we think that somehow AI will help us fix this problem?

I might add that both in the school and in the Church, diversity and the perspectives of others cannot be allowed to overrule the facts (or the truth of God's Word) without both ending up about as solid as the lily pad on a pond that appears to be solid but is merely floating on the surface. 

Things collecty. . .

The collect appointed for us to pray on Trinity 5 (and also on Proper 7C) is one of the good ones with some history, some interesting detail, and well-crafted wording.  I love the collects.  Really, they are compact, rich, deep, and profound within the span of but a few lines of more poetry than real prose.  They are gems.  

Deus, qui diligéntibus te bona invisibília præparásti: infúnde córdibus nostris tui amóris afféctum; ut te in ómnibus et super ómnia diligéntes, promissiónes tuas, quæ omne desidérium súperant, consequámur.

I might put it into English with a fairly free translation:  O God, because You have prepared for those who love You such good things of which the eye cannot see: pour into our hearts such great affections of love, that, loving You in all things and above all things, we may obtain Your promises, which surpass our every desire.

Rome has an official translation:  O God, who have prepared for those who love you good things which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love, so that, loving you in all things and above all things, we may attain your promises, which surpass every human desire.

Divinium Officium has this translation:  O God, You Who have prepared good things as yet unseen for those who love You, pour a burning love into our hearts, so that we, loving You in and above all things, may obtain Your promises which surpass all desire.

Lutheran Service Book has it:  O God, You have prepared for those who love You good things that surpass all understanding. Pour into our hearts such love toward You that we, loving You above all things, may obtain Your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. 

Cranmer is the inspiration for the Lutheran Service Book and Book of Common Prayer versions.  It is hard to imagine that he did not look to inspired by Scripture in his task as translator of the ancient Latin Collects.  Think of 1 Corinthians 2:9

But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

as well as Isaiah 64:4,

From of old no one has heard
or perceived by the ear,
no eye has seen a God besides you,
who acts for those who wait for him.

It comes to us from the 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary, and is found in the 1962 Missale Romanum, now used for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time.   This prayer does not short us on vocabulary but has several different words to express both love and longing: diligo, amor, affectus as well as the related cor, desiderium, promissio.  What a shame that English affords us less in our choice of words to befit us in our translation task!  Looking at a decent Latin dictionary, we find affectus meaning “a state of body, and especially of mind produced in one by some influence, affection, mood: love, desire, fondness, good will, compassion, sympathy.”  The same dictionary renders diligo “to value or esteem highly, to love”.  We capture a hint of it in the English “diligent”.   Love is worth nothing less than all.  Again, the dictionary tells us that desiderium means “a longing, ardent desire or wish, properly for something once possessed; grief, regret for the absence or loss of any thing [or person].”  It does not take a dictionary to remind us that cor is, of course, about the “heart” and promissio “promise”.  Consequor can mean, among other things, to “pursue, go after, attend, to follow” -- even “to copy, obey”. 

We have here so many little tracks to follow in this collect.  They seem to circle and then return (the things the eye cannot see or invisible things) is picked up at the end with the promises which we know not by sight but by faith.  Everything which God has prepared for us is already and not possessed or even fully comprehended or experienced now and therefore is known as only it can be known -- by faith.  Faith, hope, and love abide, not as competing or even different essences but connected well.  Love is the greatest but this great love we both receive and respond with is born of faith, faith that lives in hopefulness of the God who has kept and will always keep His promises.  

A convenient construct. . .

Those who delight in muddying the waters of gender put distance between the person and their reproductive organs, between the feelings of the person and their DNA, and between the emotions and the body.  The real person cannot be explained or confined to the sexual organ or their DNA or even the body as a whole.  It is bigger.  It must define everything.  So it must redefine the body to match what the self has decided in conflict with the body, the DNA, and their reproductive organs.  The surgeon's scalpel is used to reshape the flesh to meet the expectation of the feelings and create an identity the body has failed to manifest.  It is creative -- I'll grant you that.  But it is a foolish pursuit without anything real at the end of it all.  

While reading the NALC (ELCA split off over 2008 sexuality decisions of that denomination) 10 page study document on the ordination of women, I noted this quote.  "As William G. Witt argues in Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination, ordination is not an icon of Christ’s male body but of His humanity. Ministers represent Christ not by biological similarity but by sharing in the human nature the Word assumed."  In other words, they are doing the same but to Jesus.  His maleness is less important than his humanity.  That He was incarnate in a male body is almost irrelevant to the whole thing.  He was born human -- except that human without male or female pretty hard to identity!  This quote is used to justify again the practice of ordaining women which the NALC may study but not change.  Yet in distancing Jesus maleness from His humanity, they are doing exactly the same thing the gender fluid crowd is doing.  In the end, they also destroy their own raison d'etre.   For if the maleness of Christ is of no consequence to those whom the Church ordains over and against women, it cannot be applied to any of the LGBTQ+ folks the NALC wishes to exclude.  

There are many convenient constructs invented to bypass both the word and practice of Scripture and the Church (a surprisingly consistent norm right down to the modern era!) and to make optional what the Church understood through the ages to be unchanging and binding.  In the case of the NALC, it reveals what those who left the ELCA are loathe to admit.  The only thing they did not like about the ELCA was its embrace of same sex relationships, marriage, and opening the ministry to all of them.  It was a departure by degree rather than conviction.  It is like those who went they have a flat tire complain about how nicely the trip was going until they weren't so nice.  You do not want a new car but simply the way things were before the tire went flat.  I get that.  We all wish that we could preserve a moment but that is hardly a reason to begin a new church body -- especially when that new body is in fellowship with the one you just let and retains everything except the 2008 pronouncements on same sex marriage and clergy.  

That is the problem with the NALC and other conservative groups which have left their original building in pursuit of a better one.  The sacred tenets of women's ordination are lines drawn in the sand.  It is not about ordination but a dot in time from which they will ground their identity and confession but not without shutting down debate any further.  In short, they have a gay problem -- even more so than Missouri because they are willing to embrace everything but homosexual marriage and clergy (along with their subsequent gender rainbow).  Missouri has no gay problem because it does not speak of those who are prevented from being ordained but those who are permitted.  They adhere not to post 2008 criteria but to the same criteria which the Church has observed since the beginning -- the Scriptural one of men only, husband of one wife, able to manage well his household, of good repute, having the requisite gifts/skills necessary, and being theologically orthodox.  It is also because they define the Gospel in part as the exclusion of older barriers which they have not transcended and not simply in terms of Christ's death and resurrection once for all for the forgiveness of sins and the bestowal of life everlasting.  Sometimes, it would seem, the Gospel demands you to deviate from the previously held understanding of Scripture and the witness of the catholic tradition flowing from the Scriptures.  But, of course, if you do that for one group and not for another, it is pretty clear that this all started not with the intent to reclaim what Scripture has taught and the Church affirmed but from an artificial line drawn in the sand.  It was and remains a gay issue.