Forcing God to sublet. . .

I will admit up front there was a time when I wondered why churches spent so much on sacred space and why that cost could not have been mitigated with other uses which would not conflict with its holy use.  I was not quite ready to suggest that the worship space was multipurpose but did think that there were things that might be held within the sacred space of chancel and nave without detracting from its primary purpose.  I suppose I still think that sacred music might fill the wonderful acoustical sound of the church's holiest of spaces.  The issue is then where do you draw the line?  What is okay and what is not okay?  Is it a matter of how the decision is made and who makes it.  Obviously, I would be comfortable if everyone thought like me and made the decisions I would make.  But they are not.  So I guess my thinking has evolved.

While this has been brought to the fore by the news of Anglican cathedrals in the UK renting out the sacred space for everything from pop concerts and discos to art shows and craft fairs, the issue is not unique to them.  In this age of budget crunches and declining size of a parish, it is easy to justify the practice of subletting God's house to produce revenue streams, is it salutary?  It is surely about the usage itself but not only that.  Obviously there are some things which cannot be allowed to use the church building and the sanctuary in particular as a venue but what does it say about us when we treat sacred space as potential real estate income? 

Multipurpose space general does nothing well and everything rather mediocre.  That is one inherent issue.  What works for this, does not work for that and so it all means a compromise.  Is that what we want?  Is God merely one tenant subletting a space along with others?  Is the setting for the Divine Service simply what we can make do?  I am not speaking here of emergencies or even the urgencies of a mission setting but the regular and ordinary use of sacred space.  It is not about what we must do in the moment but the customary use of God's House.  More and more I am not sure multipurpose spaces help anything but the harm is more likely done to the sacred use than the other uses.  

Is there a reason we cannot build the great cathedrals of the past and why we find it so hard to maintain the structures we have?  Is it merely about revenue or resources or is it about our values?  Is worship merely one function among many within the Church?  Is it more likely that the churches are spilling over their identities into the other uses or that the other uses are siphoning off the sacredness of the worship space?  I think most of us already know the answer.  We do not value the things of God the way those generations did so long ago?  We build fast and cheap and not slow and grand.  We say it is about the wise use and stewardship of God's resources but we all know that there is something much more to this than that.  We think it wasteful to spend resources over generations to build monumental structures filled with the work of our finest craftsmen and then not wear it all out with invented uses to justify the cost.  We do not believe that the setting for the Word and Sacrament justifies anything.  We are more than minimalists but not by much.  I am not talking about being extravagant but about being wise stewards, counting the cost but committing the value to the cause.  Lets be real.  It is easier for us to make God sublet a common space than to dedicate such space wholly to His holy purpose.  That is why so many of our buildings are warehouses with a stage rather than tabernacles and temples.  

So what is the witness of our multipurpose spaces in which God is simply one user among many?  It certainly tells the world something of what is important to us and how important it is but it also tells the world that there is nothing all that unique or sacred about what happens within the Divine Service.  I would love it if we wore out our buildings for worship services or other appropriate and consistent purposes but it is a shame we are wearing them out by making them a community service venue.  It is no wonder the world seems not to notice the sacredness of the space while rocking around the clock or gawking at strange or almost pornographic things that supposedly pass as art.  They see what we do not.  If worship is not important enough to lay claim to the holy place, then it is not important enough to lay claim to them and their hearts. These things go hand in hand.  Maybe it is high time we all realized this. 

For all the saints. . .

As we observe All Saints and All Souls, now together on the calendar, we tend to look not simply at the names of those who are well remembered but to the many who are anonymous and forgotten.  This is good and salutary -- especially for those who do not canonize the saints with formal process, like Rome.  Over the years as we named in voice and in silence in our hearts the names of those whom we loved who died in the Lord, my own list was largely absent family.  Though fewer and fewer actually remember them the way I do, remembering with thanksgiving the lives of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc., is both a highly emotional moment and a comforting one.  I suspect that as time goes on, this moment will be a different.

Too often the ripple effects of divorce is literally to eliminate one whole side of the family from the lives of the children.  As if that were not significant enough, relationships with the other side of the family is too often strained -- especially when they become aging parents no longer able to give but in need of help.  It seems the bonds of family are strained and some stretched beyond repair as we wake up to an age in which perhaps 1 out of 4 children have either no relationship or a strained relationship which is distant and lacks any regular or meaningful contact.  The drumbeat both of academia and social media seems to support those who have chosen to have no contact with their parents or siblings.  The victimhood which dominates therapy today further sanctions this distance as a essential function of needed self-support for those who hold their families responsible for the wounds they think they bear.

Of course, there are always exceptions which would justify such distance between parents and children.  No one is disputing that.  But when the exception becomes normal in the eyes of the world, we know that we live in difficult times.  How do you resolve this distance?  How do you even restore the desire for contact and relationship?  There was a time when the ties that bind lived through trouble and ease, pain and happiness, want and plenty.  Now it seems that the maintenance of family ties is dependent upon their quality   Relationship is the reward for high quality experiences not the normal pattern for these connections.  Family forever is breaking under the stress of divorce and remarriage, children who have deemed their parents abusive or unworthy of their affection, and a therapeutic culture in which individual and personal health and well-being is a higher priority than familial ties.

You see it in obituaries.  No longer do these death announcements describe much of anything of the life of those who have died.  Cost of publishing and fear of disclosing too much information leaves such death notices stark and cold.  As one who tends to read every obituary, especially, for example, those within my church body, it is as if these lives mattered little to anyone.  Even funerals are becoming the exception rather than the rule, cremains are scattered to the dust of the air without a stone or plot to mark the resting place of the deceased, and family mementos are consigned to the flea markets and thrift stores without even a cursory review of their contents by the surviving family members.  Not long ago at a flea market I saw a medal of honor for sale among other things considered insignificant by their family and even the marketers hawking these goods.  It is a sad testament to the nature of our lives and our deaths.

Part of All Souls is the solemn acknowledgement that all our lives matter to God.  He has redeemed us not because of who we are, what we did, or what we might become but solely out of love for those who saw Him as enemy and stranger.  His love was not easy but sacrificed in death so that the guilty might be forgiven, the lost returned home, the estranged reconciled, and the dead raised to everlasting life.  He did this not by divine fiat but by offering up His only begotten Son for us.  All Saints and All Souls is the celebration not of the sterling lives of the few but the common need of us all met in Christ our Savior and of the pledge and promise that this life is not all there is.  We belong to Him, citizens of a heavenly kingdom not even death can overcome.  In an age when families are estranged by anger and divorce, children and parents separated by old hurts and wounds, and people increasingly isolated and alone, the forgiveness that not only redeems us individually but marks us as members of the family of God is even more important.  In the Divine Service the family is gathered, those seen and those who presence is known but unseen, the foretaste of the eternal feast, for good and bad, the saints forgiven and bound in the blood of the Lamb.

 

 

 

The Lutheran Reformation was bad. . .

There was a time when enemies of the Lutheran Reformation would attack specific positions or doctrines or the solas.  That was enough to get people upset.  Nowadays, the easiest way to discredit the Lutheran Reformation is to blame it for every bad thing happening in our society today.  That is what one Notre Dame professor did.  According to Brad Gregory, when, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, he unleashed criticisms that not only resulted in a rejection of the pope’s authority and fractured Christianity as he knew it, he did worse.  Perhaps unintentionally, Luther is sort of single-handedly responsible for a world of greedy modern capitalism, polarizing politics and social instability. 

A centuries-long move toward secularization, the inability of citizens to agree on even the most basic norms important for shared political and social life, and unrestrained consumerism focusing on radical individuality and self-indulgence is Luther's legacy.  Not the bring light of the Gospel in a world accustomed to darkness and not a reform movement to address the rampant corruption everyone agrees was typical of both church and state, no, Luther was a mad capitalist who encouraged polarized politics, delighted in social instability, and a greedy and self-centered capitalism without a conscience.  My, he must have been a busy fellow.

Living some 500 years after Luther in a world facing AI concerns, our unsocial social media has become normal but the conversations Luther had are not.  So in this time of tech, Twitter, TikTok, and such, is Martin Luther worth talking about anymore?  If he is, does he merit any honest credit or simply blame?  Was the Reformation a tragic mistake or a tragic necessity?  We Lutherans will certainly beat our chests on October 31 but I am not sure we even want to talk seriously about the Reformation -- good and bad.

It might be easy to characterize the Reformation as a single event set into motion by one individual with a vendetta against the Pope.  It is another thing to actually understand this man and those who fought with him on behalf of real catholicity, honest doctrine, an efficacious and normative Word of God, and a church which had become a nightmare of abuses.  If you take the opportunity to look closer. Now is the time to get to know Luther, you would find not a freedom fighter or institutional rebel but a real man searching for a gracious God and a pastor who cared more for his people and the Church than himself and his own safety.  He took up the cause of the Gospel at a time when the Gospel was more presumed than preached or taught and when popes had institutionalized corruption within the central offices of Rome to a point never seen before.  

It is not simply Rome trying to demonize Luther but those whom Luther himself would condemn but who rode on his coattails to advocate for positions at odds with the catholic doctrine and practice Luther and the confessors of the Augsburg Confession formalized.  While some might say that Rome has been reformed and Luther would have stayed within a Roman Church now with a vernacular liturgy, bishops advocating for married priests, popes who talk to Lutherans and sign a common justification accord, and such.  Others think that the modern day rebels against creed, confessions, liturgy, and such would have a vigorous spokesman if Luther had lived today.  It might be fun to jump in and play the game but it will hardly help us understand the real Reformation.  

Luther lived on the edge with his words and criticisms but his practice and his legacy is largely a conservative one.  He was not the edgy sort of guy and the movement that bears his name was not the avant guarde kind of society of rebels that we think.  In fact, Luther would probably feel right at home in the small congregations people seem intent upon closing, making sure that the faithful heard the Word of God proclaimed in its truth and fullness and were richly served with the sacramental grace of Christ's institution.  He would not be willing to water down the confession to make it palatable for the modern ear and He would not sanction jettisoning the liturgy, hymn, and chant to make worship sound like their song playlist. 

If Luther matters today it is not because of a people who hold their breath at his every word but because of a people who hold their breath over the Word of God preached, taught, and lived out among them.  It is the honest reverence of a people who believe God's Word does what it says and delivers that of which it speaks where we find the true heirs of the Reformation.  Creativity, spontaneity, novelty, and invention in the name of saving the Church for Jesus would not appeal to Luther but saving the Church by remaining faithful to the Word of God and Sacraments of Christ would find him cheering us one wherever we might find ourselves.  The "one little Word" of his mighty hymn "A Mighty Fortress" is alive and well and this is both our legacy and our proclamation still.

 

When miracles become ordinary. . .

The truth is that we have unrealistic expectations of nearly everything in life.  Among them is the idea of certain things being special -- so special, in fact, that every time we experience them we tingle with excitement and are awestruck before them.  And then it all becomes ordinary.  We spend a goodly portion of our lives trying to rekindle the moment and the make uncommon what has become routine.  It is an endless but fruitless pursuit.  Everything special ages into the ordinary.  That is not bad.  It just is.  Life is not lived in the spectacular but in the routine, not on the occasional mountain tops but in the regular valleys.  In some way we all know this but reject it in favor of the pursuit of the raw and edgy feel of the first experience.

This is true of nature.  I grew up in a farming community in a distinctly rural atmosphere.  There is little that is more miraculous than the tilling of the soil, dropping in a seed, and then feeding the world.  When an uncle of mine passed away, the Lutheran pastor who did not know him at all suggested that my uncle had regularly dipped his hand into the soil, lifted his eyes to the heavens and praised God for the miracle.  He did not.  He regularly complained to God about too much rain or too little, costs too high and the price of corn too low, etc...  He had lived too long with the miracle a child sees when he puts a bean seed into a jar of soil and watches it split open and send forth a stalk to the sky and it was all rather, well, boring.  He was not a bad guy but it happens to all of us.  The miracle becomes ordinary.

When you first taste of a perfectly grilled steak or a lobster tail drawn in butter or bread fresh from the oven, it is a magical experience.  But if you eat these regularly, they become routine and ordinary.  It is not bad.  It is life.  Some of us spend our whole lives trying to escape the ordinary and live in the specialness of a moment forever new.  Marriages fall apart because love becomes routine and its not the first kiss or touch.  We reject the ordinary in favor of the constant pursuit of life on the edge.   Thrill seeking seems romantic at first but it is a heavy burden to place upon life and soon the pursuit overtakes the end result.  It is that way with addiction in general but it is also a specific addition to the pursuit of what was or what never was.  It is, like nearly every addiction, a destructive one.  It does not add but constantly subtracts from life.  Like the life lived behind the constant scrolling of the screen, the thing no longer matters as much as the pursuit of what might be or what is behind the next change.

This is also true with the things of God.  We want things to be constantly special.  We have prayerbooks because prayer becomes routine and without the prompting of a form set before us, we lose interest and grow bored with it all.  We have a liturgy because the routine grounds us against the constant church shopping for an experience we have not had before.  It is a necessary anchor for a people constantly shifted by wind and wave, chance and change.  We have the Word near us but a lectionary prompts us to live in it when we put it down as a boring novel or history text and appoints us with a cycle of texts in which to live, to know, and to guide us into the rest.  We have the baptismal font front and center as we enter the sanctuary so that we remember we are baptized when our infant or childhood baptism is not recalled or its significance acknowledged amid all the other things in life that claim our identity.  We have the Eucharist not as something very special but as the regular table and regular food of the people of God.  We come not because it gives us chills every time we approach the Sacrament but because we need its food whether we are hungry for it or need to be called to the feast.  God lives in the ordinary and not simply in the special, in the routine and regular of Word and Sacrament as well as in the moment when their miracle becomes impossible to ignore.

I grew up with a Lutheran Church which had forgotten itself and consigned the Eucharist to four times a year and then not all commune.  While some are shocked by this in an age of more regular Holy Communion, Roman Catholics had the Mass every Sunday but more as a spectator event than a participant by weekly Communion.  They even removed the chalice from the lay as something too special and meant only for those in orders.  But we were fools.  The special character of the Sacrament does not proceed from its occasional encounter but from its life among us as the routine and regular place where we eat the flesh once for all broken for us on the cross and drink the blood that cleanses us from all sin.  It is the foretaste of the eternal feast not because it is so special but to point us to what is coming when every thing around us would point us to other things not so routine.  The Lord never meant it to be special but routine and ordinary, as oft as you eat and drink...  

Oftentimes converts become worn down and disappointed because the enthusiasm of the first experiences in their churches do not last.  Disillusioned by the special become ordinary, they sometimes switch churches in search of the spectacular only to wear themselves out into disbelief.  But God lives in the ordinary and routine, in the boring and common.  In six days of labor and the day set apart for the Lord.  Work becomes routine and so does the Sabbath.  God's work is not to keep propping up the ego for the excitement we seek but to make it plain and obvious that God lives where we live.  When the miracle becomes ordinary, God is still there.  Amid valleys and shadows, disappointment and despair, defeat and loss, pain and suffering -- God is there with grace sufficient and life stronger than death and forgiveness greater than the sin.  Once we begin to recognize this, we relieve ourselves and our faith and our life from the impossible burden of maintaining the chills and tingles of the first even while we are experiencing the last. 

Great lines from an old classic. . .

Often what sticks with me even longer than a plot or a complete work are the great lines that seem to be bigger than the book itself.  This is true of many works but especially of the great works.  Dante is responsible for a couple of them I have written on paper and keep on my desk.

We would expect that Dante's Inferno would speak of dramatic sins but the reality is that dramatic sins are salacious but not always profound.  Adultery is a dramatic sin as is murder but it is ordinary in the way that both have been going on since the Fall and seem to be favorites of mankind.  The more profound sins are those of the lukewarm whom God will chew up and spit out, those neither hot nor cold who seem perfectly comfortable in and outside the Church.  They live in lives of moral ambiguity certain that there is no black and white but shades of grey that call the wise to be silent more than to cry out.  They tend to recede into the background of wherever they find themselves and offend no one -- not even God. 

These are those who are sheep no longer desiring the Shepherd, hearing His voice but not following, and living on the edges of the flock.  The Kingdom of God lives not simply in the dramatic moments but in the sphere of every small choice in which the Christian either manifests that he belongs to God or not.  There is, of course, the presumption that a sort of neutrality in which the soul yearns for and seeks another way without the messiness of witness might exist and this is what blinds the soul to the consequence of being comfortable neither of God nor against Him.  It is a quiet withdrawal which chokes off faith but does not quite make the sinner a dramatic force of evil.

Dante understood this and it is manifest throughout his work.  There, at the threshold of Hell, before he encounters the usual suspects of tyrants, murderers, traitors, and violent sinners who everyone knows and expects to populate the deeper realms of hell, he sees sees the souls of those who never truly chose God nor reject Him.  They simply live in ambiguity.  Their lives are, according to Dante, sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo—“without infamy and without praise” (Inferno III, 36).  They are not alone on earth for Dante also connects them with the angels who were “neither rebellious nor faithful to God” (Inferno III, 38–39).  Perhaps they had conscience and moral strength enough to refuse great evils and yet they could not bring themselves to stand forth for good.  They live in silence rather than conviction, choosing safety and security here over truth, comfort and ease over martyrdom, personal pleasure over sacrifice, and self-preservation over faithfulness.

Why this scene is chilling in Dante is because he does not begin his sojourn through Hell with monsters and notorious evil whom everyone expects to be there but with those who insist upon belief but lack conviction, who insist upon good but live in the realm of the morally evasive. Their sin is not dramatic and would merit no mention in the tabloids that chronicle our evils but they are even more profound. They have refused the dignity and danger of choice, teaching us that neutrality is not innocence. It is as if they say, “I belong to Christ, but I will not stand with Him publicly.”  It is the realm of fear.

The Church and Christians have lived with this fear for too long and it has become usual and familiar.  The Church has become daring only insofar as this is the same edge on which lives public opinion and the direction of society.  The Church has become reluctant to call a sin a sin and lives too easily within the realm of silence for the things that the Word of God condemns.  It is not all nor everyone but it is the many who claim to be authentic and who insist that they love Jesus.  They love the idea of Jesus more than His reality and the false image of the Savior over the One who insists upon dying for sins because they cannot be forgiven any other way.  It is the quiet Christianity in which the witness is more to a conceptual love than the love revealed in suffering on the cross.  It is the silent Christianity which speaks of this idea of love while refusing to upset things by addressing the sins for which Love was born.  But Dante's witness is clear as is Revelation.  The lukewarm who live in vagaries and uncertainties and fear find the gnashing of teeth and not comfort at the day of judgment.  They have refused the cover of Christ's love in life and so it abandons them in death to reveal that their sins, not dramatic but profound, lack the cleansing of the blood because they refused to see them as sin.  

This is the affliction of modernism that brings rot to the institution of the Church.  Some are confused by righteousness to presume moral authority to judge in the place of Christ but this is no answer.  The refuge of the soul lies always in the Love that suffered and died, in the sin admitted and confessed, in the body laid in the tomb for the dead.  When this is no longer our message and we live in the convenient realm of simple do gooders who seek to improve today rather than proclaim God's tomorrow, we betray our calling as Christians and our identity as the Church.  At some point, the emptiness of what passes for Christianity will no longer be able to live in the shadows and must either stand close enough to Christ to be splattered with His blood or live in the clean clothing of the world that offers nothing of real hope.  Perhaps that day is coming soon.