Given, not chosen. . .

Names, like pronouns, have become agents of our own self-expression.  Though they were once the domain of the society to know how to address you, they have become more the domain of the autonomous self, another avenue of our own identity.  I wish we could forget this. I wish we could go back to the days when family members provided the source for the names we gave to our children instead of some ridiculous penchant to saddle the child with something unique or strange, a name no one else had ever known.  I admit some sympathy for those countries with name police who must give approval before a birth is registered and the name duly given to the child.  I am not resigned to the desire of parents to give novel spellings to old names and new names which defy pronunciation to their offspring.  I suppose I should be happy they are even having children and cut them some slack about the actual name they give the child.  But I won't.

Names are given to us, not chosen by us.  Even nicknames are given to us and not the result of our own invention or choice.  We need to remember that wisdom in an age destined to play with names as if they were Scrabble tiles.  Sometimes our ignorance shows through.  A friend once described to me a girl she encountered while student teaching.  Her mother (was there a father in the picture?) had decided that she liked the name phonetically spelled VaGeenA but in her foolishness saddled the poor kid with the name Vagina.  A year later the girl had it legally changed to just Gina.  Unfortunately, no one fined her mother for her ignorance or foolishness and maybe she never actually got it.  Names are a gift but not necessarily a kind one.

Ever since I was old enough to understand my name was Larry, I complained to my parents (one of German and one of Swedish extraction) that I could have been somebody in life if only they would have given me a better name -- Lawrence even!  Once someone pointed out that Sir Lawrence Olivier chose to be called Larry.  Oops.  Well, at least he had the formal name on his birth certificate.  I thought of all the interesting names in my family's history (on both sides) and of all that I might have been, but I did not choose that name.  It was given to me.  On the list of names and their popularity over the years, you might notice that nobody names their kids Larry anymore and so someday I might just be a rarity -- before I take my last breath and it gets inscribed on my tombstone.

Names are how we know one another.  No matter how lofty or plain, our first names are the start of every acquaintance before it has the promise of friendship.  Husband and wife repeat each other's names with their vows and promises of love and fidelity.  The baby has to get a name before he can head home from the hospital.  You even need a name to get a Social Security number.  When we pray for people at the altar, we generally use their first names instead of some name with a Mr. or Mrs. before it.  When we pray for presidents and monarchs, governors and bishops, we call them by their given name.  Donald.  Charles. William.  Roger.  In baptism we do not ask how this child will be named but how this child IS named.  Don't make the pastor ask "how do I pronounce that?"

God knows our names.  He knows which Susan or Fred we are talking about as we speak their names out loud in the dyptich -- without having to delineate the one with hemorrhoids or the one having gall bladder surgery.  There is something comforting in this.  We ought to treat names with some respect and we ought to respect those whom we name with enough respect to give them a respectable name.  A real name.  Joseph and Mary did that.  They called His name Jesus (well, not really Jesus but the Hebrew form behind it Jeshua).  We ought to follow their example and thank them for not giving Jesus a name they had invented because it sounded nice and they thought nobody else would ever choose it.  Jesus is the name above all names not because the combination of letters is unique but because He is the only who died for us and rose for us so that we might be dead to sin and alive to everlasting life.  The name does not have to be unique.  The person always is -- at least to God.  

The Wellness God. . .

It was while I attended a vicarage supervisor's orientation and preparation class in St. Louis some years ago that I was introduced to the Wellness Wheel.  The Wellness Wheel, it was explained, is a holistic tool to help the pastor/vicar see which the areas in their lives which are going well and those which might need more attention. Identifying these areas was key, I was told, to strengthening the pastor's/vicar's sense of identity and effectiveness. The Wellness Wheel is divided into eight domains: social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, environmental, financial, and occupational. According to the experts, in order to have optimal health and well-being, one must tend to all eight domains.  In the Spring of this year, our own Concordia Plan Services addressed the benefits of the Wellness Wheel in their Better Health  newsletter -- along with a nice little recipe for gluten free and dairy free quinoa pancakes.  It was there called the LCMS Wellness Wheel.  

While I have no doubt of the good intentions and the cost benefits of better health for the pastors and other church workers covered by CPS, it has always bothered me how much attention we give to the idea of wellness.  It seems to me a rather bourgeois concept, the privileged pursuit of those who spend less time than any generation before them on work for the essentials of life and more money on health and happiness than any generation before them.  Perhaps I am wrong.  Without pontificating on something I know only the barest information about, I would rather address the whole idea of the Wellness God, the God of wellness who rewards those who live and work and enjoy their leisure in a salutary way to benefit their wellness.  For the record, I am NOT advocating disregard for common sense healthy habits nor am I suggesting that we live in blatant disregard for the state of our bodies or our lives.  I am simply saying that wellness can become a mighty deity for whom we will cast aside good and right things given to us by God unless we pay attention to this temptation.  

The wellness culture is not far from a religion in which God is not the focus but the gods of a pain free, stress free, full, fun, and happy life.  It has a lot in common with the Christian Science of old and its focus on happy thoughts as a means of addressing life's ills.  It has become standard for us to believe that  physical health flows directly out of one’s mental and spiritual state.  This, of course, makes health into the center of everything.  Indeed, I imagine how many Christians are using crystals or yoga or meditation for a thousand different things that they should be addressing to God.  All you need is a mat, a quiet area of your house, and a little time to develop a spirituality without the inconvenience of either God or the Church, and one paying tangible rewards instead of the spiritual ones that seem delayed.

Sitting in silence before God in prayer and simply sitting in silence while you look deep inside yourself are not the same thing.  One begs you to look beyond yourself and the other glorifies whatever your are feeling or wanting in the moment to almost divine status.  One presumes that the greatest sacrifice you make is a little time and dedication to self while the other admits that many things in life come with a cost attached.  We all want to be soothed and consoled and told to pay attention to the little voices inside of us more than to wrestle with our vocations and callings as the people of God, husbands and wives, parents and children, and neighbors.  Suffering is not something to be avoided at all costs but the expectation of those who follow Him who suffered all for us on the cross.  Sacrifice is not something to be overcome but the mirror of the sacrificial love shown to us by Him who loved us more than self -- even to death upon the cross.  We all want balance so that we have time and energy and money for the things we want as much as for the things laid upon us as holy obligations.   Where does Scripture promise such a life without suffering or sacrifice?  Where does Jesus say this is what we deserve, what we ought to be looking for, and what our Christian lives ought to look like?

It is dangerous to borrow something like this from the world, complete with all its expectations, and to promote it to, of all people, church workers.  When “more you” is code for less God or the lie that this means also "more God," the real discipline of Christian life and morality is turned on end.  When every goal and reference point is internal, without tradition, moral demand, submission to God, service to neighbor, the wellness goal points away from God and not to Him. What may have started as a well-intentioned call to order your life more faithfully has ended up being a gussied up form of narcissism.  When you can no longer see the difference between doing Pilates, crafts, quiet time, or hiking for the sake of pleasure and well-being and those things are done as spiritual experiences contributing to your own sense of well-being, something is wrong.  The gym is not the Church.

Wellness can be a real and honest pursuit, the shedding of bad habits rooted in sin for better habits rooted in the understanding of life and your body as gift and temple of God.  These activities can certainly lower your heart rate, improve your posture, help with aches and pains, aid your focus on the things that matter, and give you an hour of quiet you badly needed. What none of this can do is turn life in to something safe and easy, without cost or demand, without sacrifice and suffering.  That is the lie.  You cannot light candles in the gym or Pilates studio and make that into the House of God, replacing the Church where real life is to be found and received.   The church of wellness softens us and our lives into the lie of something that may be comfortable in the moment but cannot deliver the peace the world cannot give.  Indeed, Jesus warns that those who save their lives will lose them for eternity,  Could it be that this is what He had in mind with those words of caution?

Happy Labor Day. . .

This is my second Labor Day as a retired man whose income is no longer the fruit of his labors -- well, current labors, anyhow.  I will admit a certain unease at that statement.  Apparently I am not alone in my status.  I real in the Wall Street Journal  “According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April.”  Work was once what defined us, at least as men.  Now that does not seem to be true.  People are not only not working but not really looking for work.  They seem to no longer need labor to define them or understand their place within the whole of the society and the world around them.  I suspect this is more universally true and not simply true of males but the point remains.  

Labor has become an enemy of our identity and not the domain in which we define ourselves.  It is not a matter of working for money, which is always important enough, but working as an expression of our humanity that is at stake.  We work not merely to earn more money for our favored pursuits but we work to become better people -- at least that is how it was once believed.  Work or labor is what we were created for and not simply the consequence of the Fall in Eden.  Work is the way we participate in God's own labor of creation once and continued creation to sustain what was once created.  Indeed, the Church has its own sacred labor in extending to those not yet of the Kingdom the fruits of Christ's own redeeming work.  So men without work, indeed mankind without labor, is the stuff of a spiritual crisis and not simply a mechanized or technology heavy world.  Refusing work or disdaining labor is itself the problem of disowning our place within God's order and our purpose which continues to be to exert dominion without domination and to do it for God's purpose and not our own whims.

AI represents a challenge to us because it threatens to rob us of our identity within God's order and to create the environment in which our leisure will become our final undoing, pursuing pleasure at the cost of morality and the institutions of marriage and family which are the bedrock of our society and God's gifts to us still -- though more and more unappreciated.  AI is a Trojan horse which hides within its promise the means to institutionalize our corruption of self, God's creation, and our place within it.  It is not because AI can do things for us but because we have so gladly surrendered ourselves to the idea that labor is a problem and not a gift and that work is something more than utilitarian but noble in stature.  On this Labor Day, we seem poised to enter into a new age in which we are celebrating more our freedom from work than our calling or vocation to it.  What will that mean for our future?  I fear to attempt to answer that question.

As Lutherans we were once part of those who embodied Protestant work ethic so much maligned and disparaged by some today.  Our emphasis upon vocation was one of the means by which we lifted what was seen as utility into the realm of the holy.  We labor not simply for money or the things we value in life but as part of our life within the fabric of God's own order and His work.  As Lutherans increasingly surrender to the idea that work is bad and labor is indignity, we will find it harder and harder to justify or defend such institutions of marriage and family.  They are our most essential work and the labor of love given for spouse and child are among the the holiest of our earthly vocations, second only to the labor that is our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for all His goodness to us.

So along with your hamburgers and hotdogs, yard sales and outings, you might pause to think about that statistic I mentioned at the beginning.  Happy Labor Day!

Improvement?

Here are some photos I have seen of remodeling jobs in Roman Catholic churches and it is time to look again at the beauty of the Lord's House and how architecture and art contribute to that beauty even though it comes essentially from what the Lord gives and bestows in that House through Word and Sacrament.  You tell me what you think.

or this:

  

or this:

 or this:

 or this:

or this:

Beauty is a noble work especially in service to the Liturgy.

The realm of the holy. . .

Those things which cannot be challenged but must be affirmed are no longer simple truths or opinions.  They have moved past the secular and into the realm of religion.  They become the holy truths which must be affirmed.  They are belief, to be sure, but the unchallenged belief that form the fabric of the sacred or holy which is also the realm of God.  This is no longer the God of His own disclosing, the God of the wholly other who makes Himself known to us.  No, this is the God of our choosing, the God whom we have was born of our opinion and then created as the holy when those opinion changed into the sacred truths which could not be challenged or disputed anymore.  This is exactly like the God created by Israel from a golden calf but no one who holds these truths to be self-evident would admit it.  It is why our culture refuses to honor the ancient faith but remains religious.  It is a religion whose sacraments are not means of grace but the sacred rituals of the ballot box or the social media where truth is now affirmed.  It also explains why we remain so divided as a people and why uniting us is such a monumental task.  It is like trying to reconcile the actual beliefs of Islam and Christianity instead of simply trying to find commonalities within those faiths.  Sure, you can find things in common between the two religions with sacred text and holy histories but there is, in reality, nothing that could possibly unite the two.  They are fundamentally at odds with each other.  Their truths do not intersect in any fundamental way.

So it is for those who hold to the sacred tenets of feminism or homosexuality or gender invention.  There may be things we find in common but these are fundamentally at odds with the essential truths of both religions.  Yes, the deities of sexual desire and gender identity are a religion, a religion of belief that transcends logic, DNA, and even the body itself.  They are not incidental to those who hold to them but the grounding truths that organize and construct their self-identity and their worldview.  It is also the same for those on the opposite side who view President Trump as savior of their world order and the only means to any future they want to have.  We have entered the day when it seems impossible to hold to one view or another on the issues before us and still remain friendly with those who hold the opposite views.  Politeness may be about all we can expect but accommodation is harder than ever to find.  That is because what is held has become religious truth with its own doctrinal test of orthodoxy and its test of fellowship and unity.

There was once the possibility that Republicans and Democrats could espouse very different political views and still worship in the same pew.  Now the political views have transcended into religious truths and with that has come the inability to fellowship with those who have the nerve to disagree or to see things differently.  It is the reason why Washington has become such a polarized place, why there are fewer and fewer who can venture across the aisle to form constructive partnerships, and why it is essential to destroy your enemies.  I wish I could say that it was one sided and that it all was the fault of the political left.  It is not.  At some point I think we all know this.  Neither extreme wants to admit this and so the left is characterized as godless when they do have a god and sacred truth but the right is attracted to a Christian nationalism that has little in common with orthodox and catholic Christianity.  It may also be the reason why global religions are increasingly fractured and why it is so hard to repair these fractures.  Rome finds the Latin Mass and existential problem and so the left insists it has to go and the right insists it has to stay.  Anglicans fight over the name but the current Canterbury and GAFCAN (among others) represent very different versions of Christian truth and doctrine and not simply a sexual issue divide.  ELCA Lutherans and Missouri Lutherans are not simply different versions of the same essential confession but radically different takes on that confession and mutually exclusive takes at that.  In the midst of it all there are those who speak a common language and have a common worldview even though they have differences of opinion.  I fear that group is growing smaller.  Christianity will become even more fractured -- not because of the dispute over classically Christian dogma but over how much of the sacred order from the Kingdom of the left can be included within the body of belief without destroying the Christian.  It is not that nothing is sacred anymore but what is sacred is no longer bounded by Scripture and sacred tradition.  Religion has not ceased to before a force but it is a new religion whose creeds and confessions are informed less by sacred revelation than by unassailable truth which dare not be challenged and whose preeminence must be accepted in order to belong.  That means it has become its own religion in a society increasingly hostile to orthodox Christianity but not yet secular.