Saturday, July 26, 2025

In the spirit of. . .

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

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

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

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

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

 

Friday, July 25, 2025

God really loves life. . .

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

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

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

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

Thursday, July 24, 2025

NPR and NPT

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

As worthless as. . .

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Is anyone sounding the alarm?

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

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

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

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

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