The value of books. . .

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

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

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

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

Preserve us from our screens. . .

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

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

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

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

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

The Rush to Complaint. . .

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

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

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

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

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

Look where?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living Lutheran. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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