The cost of compromise. . .

Everyone loves compromise.  If you can move something stalled along even an inch you have made progress, right?  Except that the compromises promoted in the cause of solving the abortion conflict are Trojan horses.  One of them is the so-called 15 week ban.  Abortion is banned after 15 weeks (lest you have forgotten that is nearly four months of a typical nine month pregnancy).  There is a problem here.  The compromise sounds tempting until you realize that 96% of abortions happen before 15 weeks!  In other words, you have given up everything to gain almost nothing.

So, adjust the number of weeks, right?  Why not simply ban abortion after 6 weeks (a month and a half of the pregnancy and well after it is obvious that the woman is pregnant).  The problem with this is that  44.8% of all abortions happen before the 6 weeks are up.  In other words, we are still allowing more than half of the babies in the womb to be killed at whim.  The issue is not about moving the line but whether or not we believe that the life in the womb of worthy of our protection?

It would be similar to saying you disapprove of murder if more than four people are killed but you might find your way around tolerating the murder of one or two people.  Either murder is wrong or it is not.  Either abortion is the taking of an innocent life or it is not.  How can you find a moderate position on an extreme issue?  It is like being on a diet that cuts down the number of desserts you have after every meal from 10 to 9 or from 10 to 5.  Are you going to lose weight?  Of course not!  But neither will you have to change your life all that much.  The right to life debate is not about how many children we can afford to kill or how many elderly or how many disabled, it is about the core value of life itself.  At some point we will need to recognize that this value is not won at the ballot box or at the court level but in the essential values that unite us as a nation.  Sadly, in that battle, we have not yet won any significant victory.

 

Only the tolerant are tolerated. . .

For a very long time it has been presumed and taught that only the wise and the strong are able to change their minds and their thinking.  Indeed, in order to be wise and strong you must be able to place what you believe and hold into the background and engage those things that challenge or conflict with what you believe and hold.  Weak people are ideological and foolish people hold to such things as Christian faith.  The goal of life ought to be how to tolerate every opinion and judgment and preference as equal, equally moral, and equally respectable -- except the intolerant ones, of course.

The reality is that this is the fallacy of nihilism.  The absence of conviction is not strength or wisdom but just the opposite.  The insistence that words and acts be freed from morality and conviction does nothing good but creates an unhealthy and unstable world -- just the kind we are living in today.  Our society and world are not in danger from people who believe too much but those who believe nothing except what they feel or desire or experience.  Even these are not the overriding principles that define a person and their character but limited to a moment and without a lasting impact over the life or thought of the person.  This is the reason that politicians seem to shift positions constantly and why the public seems not to care about these flip flops or detours.  This is the reason why religions which are popular are those seemingly divorced from their convictions from their holy books or great teachers.  Moderate religion is all in vogue precisely because it mirrors the same flexibility and detached truth that is in favor with culture, education, and society as a whole.  It is all good.  Except that it isn't.

The elevation of tolerance to the primary virtue over fact, truth, and belief has left us floating on a sea of change with nary a rudder around us to direct where we are headed or how we will get there.  We awaken every morning to discover anew where we are.  In this world, the one thing needful is not what you believe or confess nor is it tied to virtue but ends up being respect for diversity and individuality above all.  The society is at work creating an uninhibited culture of individuality in which the very same individuals are devoid of conviction -- except diversity and tolerance and equal weight to all opinions (except those deemed intolerant).  When Christian duty and submission to accepted morality began to die out, the very fabric of our unity and our responsibility also began to wane.

People have come to desire more than all other things their own choice -- without judgment or challenge.  In such a world, a common life is hard to establish and community difficult to instill.  Even more difficult is responsibility to family or neighbor.  Think how easily we began to believe the lie that it is more important for husband and wife to be happy than to be dad or mom to their children.  This thinking has surely pervaded the educational establishment in America and it has flooded the home and family as well.  We owe no one anything except to be true to ourselves.  It sounds so noble but it is childish and selfish.  The situation is exacerbated by the decay of religious knowledge and education of the people and by the promotion of a most illiberal education in which facts and truth matter little.  Sadly, even science has been hogtied and roped into service to the ideal of a valueless world in which true to self is the greatest freedom.  The old science of test and result that leads to truth has given way to truth that defines how to test and what result to achieve.

In the end, this is the worst form of intolerance because it masks what is true freedom and tars and feathers this ideal with the most shameful of condemnation only to leave us without cause or means to communicate with integrity or debate what is good or evil or improve what is wrong.  The biggest lie of all is that we need to understand ourselves and the world around us and accept what we find in that world and in that unrestrained self.  Everyone does what is right in their own eyes has as its worst outcome that there is no evil, no boundary to rein in our unfettered desire, and no ability to reflect upon words or actions and their value for the whole as well as the me.

So many internet oddities. . .

So I read something on social media brought to me by a member where a Lutheran has said he repents of his good works.  Given that a few weeks ago we heard James insist that faith without works is dead and issue the challenge:  you show me your faith and I will show you my works, it is almost comical how we can raise up straw men and then end up saying something foolish and confusing.  No one but a fool would suggest that our good works are perfect in and of themselves or that they contribute anything to our salvation but Lutherans have always been on the side of good works that always accompany a living faith.  In fact, we cooperate with the Spirit in these good works.  So I guess if you help the homeless person or mow your neighbor's law when they are ill you should go right home and repent of those works to the Lord and beg His forgiveness.  But that is not all there is.

There are also those who insist that the love that is the fulfilling of the Law is a different love than the love born of the Gospel.  Hmmm.  I guess we need to add more words or definitions to nuance a difference that does not seem to be there in the text.  Oh, well, it would not be the first time we massaged a different meaning into the Scriptures.  In the end it only confuses and muddies up the waters.  One love is the love the Law expects and demands and the other is the love that Christ gives.  Because it is of the Law, that love is not nearly as good or as wonderful as the love that Christ gives.  It makes love one another as I have loved you into something radically different from the love one another as you love yourself.  Is it that love that is different?  Or, is it the heart that loves which is different?

There are also those who insist that the Gospel love not simply surpasses but negates the love that fulfills the Law -- sort of an end run around the commandments.  In this argument, Jesus is not merely fulfilling the Law but replacing it with a new Law -- the law of love.  This law is perfect freedom not because it changes the desires of the heart but because it releases the heart from having to change.  Jesus is the Savior not from immorality defined by the Law but so that you can indulge in it without guilt or shame.  Whata guy!

Perhaps chief among these is the whole idea "Jesus would not want me to..."   You fill in the blank.  Jesus would not want me to suffer, to deny myself, to give up what I enjoy, to sacrifice my desires, to endure threat for the sake of the faith, etc...  The only problem is that Jesus is recorded as having said that this is exactly what lies before us if we follow Him and this is His call to those who would be His disciples.  Take up the cross (suffer), deny yourself, be concerned with others before yourself, the desires of your heart are evil and must be transformed, you will be persecuted, threatened, and even martyred for His name...  All of these things sound so appealing to us and we are taken in by them because we know what we want better than we know God's Word.

So read Scripture.  Get a good and solid study Bible to help you.  Join a Bible study group at your church (hopefully with a pastor teaching it).  Connect with some of the great podcasts available (from Issues, Etc., to The Word of the Lord Endures Forever).  Do not get your theology from social media.  Caveat emptor.

 

The only growing faith. . .

The shape of Western Europe with its deep history and legacy of faith is eroding away both in practice and in reality.  The once vibrant Christian origins of Europe have been replaced by a society in which Islam is the only growing faith and the rest are in decline.  It is a sobering reality.  We see it everywhere.  In Scandinavia the religious fervor of the past has been replaced by a passion for environment, sexual liberation, and a sustainable lifestyle.  This is what God and redemption have come to mean where Lutherans were once a profound, singing, and practicing and near universal majority.  In Europe, the Luther lands with their sites so important to Reformation history have become tourist ghettos in which the population loves to market the past but has no real or living faith to be nurtured by the Word and Table of the Lord.  Roman Catholics are equally absent from worship and polls tell the same story of a faith at least diluted if not practically absent from daily life.  Indeed, the story of the fire at Notre Dame and its rebuilding treat this as a tragedy to a historical landmark more than one for a community of faith gathered under its roof.  This says it all.  As many have said, there is no room for God in Europe except to be a footnote to its history.

That Islam is the only growing faith is not simply due to immigration but to the decline in the birth rate. Of course, it is also due to the alarming rate that Christians seem to be pushing faith into the realm of feeling over fact and distancing doctrine from spirituality.  The once overflowing worship spaces have become excess real estate or historical monuments or mere community space to house everything from painting classes to yoga.  As we watch the buildings become largely secular spaces, we are also seeing societies and individual lives move much more into the realm of the secular over the religion of their fathers (whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic).  Where prayers were once offered, spaces now function as museums or art displays.  Where people once knelt in solemn joy receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus, people now dance or listen to music.  Where preaching once spoke God's Word into the hearts of the hearers, now poetry is read or a self help class meets.  Of course, the special spaces will be preserved but not for worship.  Worship is the occasional activity of even those buildings deemed culturally significant.  The form remains but the heart is empty.  Christianity is not growing but declining and rapidly.  Islam grows where the fertile soil of society once welcomed the Scriptures and where people once cared enough about doctrine to even fight over it.  No more.

We can content ourselves to think that God is purifying His Church and weeding His garden to get rid of those less than true believers.  If that is what floats your boat, I guess it is consolation enough for now.  But not for me.  I am not content to see the Church merely survive.  I pray you are unwilling to settle for that as well.  We may not control society on the grand scale but we can preserve the faith in our hearts, preserve the faith in the home, preserve the truth by teaching our children and speaking it back and forth to each other.  We may not be able to affect the great society content to see children as burden or ornaments but we can be fruitful and multiply in our own families and train up our children in the way they should go.  We may not be able to influence the taste of culture for art that is not vulgar or music that has no melodic value but we can sing the sturdy hymns of old and teach our children to sing them as well.  In short, Islam is growing because that faith lives in the home as well as in the mosque.  Perhaps we need to learn the lesson.  The Church will not save the Christian religion without the home beating with the same heart of faith.  We can afford to lose the real estate but we cannot afford to lose the home.  That is Europe's problem and it will become ours unless we mark Christ as the center of our homes as well as our churches. 

Where God cannot be, He is

Every now and then you encounter from the pews as well as the world the familiar complaint about God and the presence of suffering.  How can God allow it?  Tolerate it?  Where is God when suffering takes place?  Like the disciples of old, it is our nature to presume that suffering bespeaks and absent God and an absence of God and His grace.  When they asked Jesus "who sinned" at the encounter of the man born blind, it was tacit admission that God could not have been in the mix of things.  If God had been, there would be no blindness and if God was, it was surely to assigned judgment.  This is our default position since the Fall in Eden.  God cannot be where pain lives or suffering exists -- except in judgment as the One who inflicts pain and suffering as punishment for sin.

The cross is the shock of a God who is not merely present in suffering as a spectator but who comes for suffering.  God is in the pain of the whip and the nails and even to the final breath exhaled in surrender to death.  God is not merely there as victim, though surely as victim, but as the One for whom this pain and this suffering were planned before the foundation of the world.  He is the God whose mercy is not revealed in the absence of pain and suffering but there in the midst of it all.  His work is not to condemn and to assign punishment of pain and suffering but to use the pain and suffering to extend His mercy and grace.  This He most surely does in Christ, in His righteous life, in His suffering to end suffering, and in His life-giving death. Where we presume God cannot be, there He is and there He is doing the redemptive work that delivers us from sin and judgment, from pain and suffering, to righteousness and everlasting life.

We constantly ponder why a good and powerful God allows suffering, pain, and evil?  Is He impotent to eliminate it for us?  Does He not wish to forego this for us?  Is He complicit in it?  Does He send it?  For us the great temptation is to presume our God is a detached God, an aloof God, who watches us while looking down from heaven but who either cannot or wills to do nothing to help us.  God's surprise is that He comes for suffering, enters into our pain, takes the evil of our sins upon Himself, and bears the full weight of that sin and death for us that we might be redeemed.  He thirsts that our thirst might be quenched.  He fasts in hunger so that our hunger might be satisfied.  He lives to die that by dying in baptismal water we might live.  God enters into suffering not as an experiment to see what it is but to end its reign over us.  Isaiah tells us.  His wounds are our healing and His sacrifice is our gain.  

We are so fixed upon the question of why this suffering comes to us and why we as Christians face such pain that perhaps we miss how God has come to suffer with us and, more importantly for us, and by this suffering redeems us from the condemnation of suffering and pain.  He is present with us not as an antidote to what we endure but that these sufferings might have a redemptive and sanctifying purpose even in us.  We do not suffer aimless pain but in Christ all sufferings have their end, find their meaning, and have purpose.  Where we think God cannot be, there He is.