When sin is merely weakness. . .

The Bible is filled with strong words for sin but our modern mind does not hear them.  What passes for sin in private confession and public litany is an apology for our weakness more than it is an admission of our complicity with evil, our complete failure to do good, and our refusal to stop doing what is wrong.  It is tiresome to listen to but it is more of a problem than its sound in our ears.  When sin is merely weakness, our need for God is lessened and God is made smaller in the process.  When sin is merely weakness, we are no longer utterly dependent upon God but He is made a small nicety in a world with other niceties.  When sin is merely weakness, forgiveness is rendered even weaker and grace is made politeness rather than power.  When sin is merely weakness, mercy is impotent and the God of mercy is equally impotent.

In times gone by when I was hearing confession more regularly, a penitent once confessed a litany of things that could have or should have been done better.  These failings rightfully troubled the conscience of the penitent but were they really sins?  I prodded.  What did you do wrong?  The failing was never enlarged beyond what could have or should have been done more or better or differently.  These were sins of weakness and fragility.  They were the small mistakes of someone who knew better and who had succumbed in a moment to what that person now regretted.  It passed as sin in the mind and heart of the penitent but was it really sin in the way the Scriptures speak of sin?

The absolution being sought was more akin to understanding than mercy.  Of course, you could have and should have done better but we are all guilty of these inadequacies (and, therefore, if we are all guilty, none of us are really guilty!).  They were seeking not the powerful absolution that flows from the blood of Christ but the affirmation that they were merely human, like everyone else, and to be sent away with the dutiful expectation to try harder next time.  Is that what sin has become?  If so, it is certainly what absolution has become.  Not the strong Go and sin no more but the more reasonable Go but try harder next time to do better.  

I realized at the time what was happening and how I was also victim to the same minimization of what sin was and therefore the weakening of what grace was but I could have and should have handled it better.  When it did happen again, I stopped the person and turned them to the Ten Commandments to read them aloud and to frame their sin in the context of this Law and not the limited guilt or complicity of what might have been done better.  Perhaps the reader will suggest that this is the familiar path of those on the liberal or progressive side of Christianity but I think it is more likely the temptation of us all.  We want to minimize what sin is because then we do not need God or His grace so desperately but we want to make sin into weakness largely because it puts the ball back in our court instead of His.  It comes right back to us what we could and should do next time as opposed to what we actually did and how only the profound and powerful mercy of a crucified Savior can rescue us from what our sins have done.

Worse, when sin is merely weakness, we are largely victims instead of the perpetrators of evil.  The strong popularity of victimization in politics and culture has eroded the power of confession.  I am a sinner.  I have done the evil God condemns and have not done the good God requires.  I have loved myself above all, lived as if I mattered most, and failed to love God above all or my neighbor as myself.  It is not by weakness or fragility or accident but by will and deed I have sinned in thought, word, and act.  I am fully incapable of finding a way out of this mess of death or atoning for the evils in my mind, on my heart, or by my hand.  When we make a strong confession of real sin, God is not only enlarged in this act of confession but His mercy and grace are made great indeed.  Our appreciation for the cross is magnified.  Sin required a Savior and required a Savior to die.  Forgiveness is not some inconsequential word that understands our human frailty but the powerful blood that cleanses us from all our sin.  When we lose the idea that sin is more than weakness and fragility, we lose the idea that grace is powerful and mercy is a gift bigger than any other.   

Policy based confusion. . .

Policy based governance and, in particular, the version developed by John Carver, has taken hold across the boardrooms of America and, it should be noted, in churches as well.  Designed to address governing boards that err on the side of micromanaging executives while neglecting their particular duties, we see the evidence of this all across congregations, districts, and agencies of the Synod. Its ten core principles include:

1. Ownership: The board is the legitimate voice and agent of the organization’s owners.  All owners are stakeholders but not all stakeholders are owners.  Go figure.

2. Position of the Board: The board is fully accountable to the owners for the success of the organization.

3. Board Holism: The authority of the board is collective with individual members having no independent authority.

4. Ends Policies: The board defines everything in terms of the outcomes expected.  The concern is ends or strategic priorities and secondary to the means.

5. Board Means Policies: Such policies are the way the ends are to be achieved through the governance process and delegation policies.

6. Executive Limitations: The board governs through policies and the means policies are limits on the employees/CEO/staff (they shall not fail to...).  It is negatively stated.

7. Policy Sizes: Policies are framed in the broadest possible terms with specifics defined only as necessary; these are exhaustive in the limitations the board places on the corporate staff.

8. Clarity and Coherence of Delegation: Authority is delegated unambiguously with the broadest possible freedom given to the CEO/corporate staff to accomplish the ends the board has defined.

9. Any Reasonable Interpretation: The CEO/corporate staff are allowed any reasonable interpretation of board policy.

10. Monitoring: The board monitors and evaluates performance, comparing actual results (success or failure) against the Ends and Executive Limitations stated by the board. 

Policy Governance is a precision governing system that conditions success with following the model without variation.  In Policy Governance, all the above pieces are required for Policy Governance to be effective. Only when all are brought to bear on the organization can there be owner accountability. 

In typical adaptation for church usage, the senior pastor functions as the CEO or the pastor who is elected or appointed for other levels of church governance.  Elders/board members in the congregation are policy makers and monitors of compliance.  Congregations hold their leaders accountable through policies rather than the direct exercise of authority. 

Such is the entrepreneurial model of both governance and the pastoral office at work.  Sometimes it seems to work okay, perhaps even well.  There are, however, things that tend to happen as a result of policy based governance.  One thing is that it confuses spiritual responsibility and authority with physical responsibility and authority for property.  When this happens, it is not unusual for the spiritual to become second to the physical ends or indicators of success.  

The other big problem is that it tends to make lay leadership weak (on the congregational side) and to make for limited input to the governance of the organization except to set ends and make policies.  Even worse, it tends to elevate weak leaders and infuriate strong lay leaders.  

Finally, it tends to turn even the corporate leaders (in this case, the pastor acting as CEO) to comparing statistical results with ends envisioned without really leading at all.  The focus is on doing what the Board has directed and the evaluation is based on fulfilling the ends directed by the board through the policies it has established.   What happens if they are not the real ends or the policies are simply bad policies?  In this way, the governance tends to muddy things up and encourage mediocre leaders.  What happens when a pastor’s primary accountability is measured by whether or not he follows the policies the board has established and achieves the organization outcomes the board has defined but that comes at the cost of the values, doctrine, and confessional integrity of that organization?  What about the faithful proclamation of the Word and the faithful administration of the Sacraments?  

There was a time when we probably had too many boards acting independently of each other and too many committees with overlapping responsibilities.  Maybe there was a time when we functioned rather disjointedly and probably somewhat inefficiently.  But have we over corrected --  effectively throwing the baby out with the bath water all in the name of shorter meetings, transparency, clear expectations, and defined objectives?  Fewer people in governance in an church organization and those few people with less responsibility except to define outcomes and establish policies can be a recipe for disaster.  Furthermore, when everyone is concerned with the physical side of things and no one is paying attention to the spiritual, the Church is definitely in trouble.  And, I am afraid, we are already there.  It is less a problem of pastors wanting to take over what rightfully belongs to the laity than it is nobody wanting do what they are supposed to do.  It also has the problem of judging everything in the church by the wrong set of values and defining success in every way except that which God would judge faithful.

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. . .

The danger of secularism is the idea that life is independent and solitary, that the only real association is choice and that it only has the meaning we attach to it all.  Stuff.  It is all just stuff and accident and nothing organized or ordered.  The world has for a long time embraced the idea that there is a way to secularize everything in such a way that it has nothing to do with the notion of God. But things are not just things. “Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory,” is the revelation of Scripture, the song of the Church, and the affirmation of the faithful.  Not just heaven but earth.  All the earth is filled with beauty and all things declare the wonder of Him who made all things.  The earth is also the revelation of God's glory.

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

The eternal song of the angels who surround the throne of God in Isaiah's vision of heaven (Is. 6:1-4) is given also to earth to sing. The splendor of that song was lost to us in the Fall but not the splendor God has woven into the fabric of all things.  It had to be revealed to us and so it was and is.  It might seem that the glory of the earth was nothing compared to the miracle of God in flesh, the death that paid for every sin, the resurrection for all who live under death's shadow, and the ascension to the right hand of the Father.  Is it nothing?  In the Holy Eucharist, the God who made all things and entered into our world prepares for us a table to give us the gift of life. 

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory.  Heaven breaks into the world until both heaven and earth must display what cannot be hidden. Oddly enough, Luther proposed moving the Sanctus after the Words of Institution precisely because the reality of these words and their fulfillment in the bread now His body and the cup now His blood.  Here we confess in the blessed song that the earth is full of God's glory and that this is part of the proclamation every bit as much as the heavenly redemption.  It is the end of any neat distinction between sacred and secular, of the lie that it is all just stuff.  It is the end of everything the world wants to believe about religion, about the ability of mankind to deny the spiritual character of our identity and of the image of God placed in us though distorted by sin yet not obliterated.

We sing it in the Te Deum and in the Sanctus and we read it in the Scriptures.  It is our statement that the earth cannot deny the reality of this everlasting truth.  The world battles emptiness and depression with all the wrong remedies.  Stuff is just stuff.  Things are just things.  People are just people.  As much as I hate to speak of it this way, the affirmation that heaven and earth are full of God's glory is therapeutic -- not in the sense of some patient listening to feelings but real therapy that gives honest consolation, comfort, and peace.  The answer to our longing is not a conversation about feelings but the affirmation of the truth.  Heaven and earth ARE full of God's glory.  His glory is His saving love, His merciful countenance, His sin-forgiving heart, and His gracious disposition.

Reason says. . .

A few months ago many of us were gathered in a church somewhere while a finger dusted with ash traced a cross on the foreheads of those who came forward.  The words were shocking enough for an adult to hear, Remember, O man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.  But there will be moms and dads bringing small children with curious faces and infants so seemingly innocent to get the same odd anointing.   In the cold reality of reason, this all seems to be an empty gesture for the children and babies carried up in loving arms.  Reason says these are innocents who have no guilt to carry, no shame to hide, and no sins to confess.  But that is the problem.  We were born into this sin that does not seem to be apparent on the smiling and joyful faces of children and babies.  They belong there because of what choice was made not by them but for them when, in Eden, we were all one in Adam.  If they do not belong there, then none of us do.

The same unthinkable reason that brought infants and small children to the rail for ashes is what brings them to baptismal water.  Need.  Whether that need is expressed in formal words and sentences or whether it is attested to by faithful parents who know what is on the faces of their children as well as what it means to be born into sin, need compels us.  No one can reason themselves into a baby being brought to water meant for sinners who have some guilt to confess, some shame to admit, and some sin to own.  Reason says the child is innocent until they reach some age of accountability, some awareness of right and wrong, some culpability of will and desire.  But infants and children are also born into a world of death, with a will compromised by the inclination to evil, and in their own helpless state to deliver themselves from all of this or even part of it.  

Reason tells us that the resurrection is the hope of those near death and not the baby in the arms of mom or the children carried by their dads.  After all, they have their own lives ahead, full lives with chapters waiting to be written.  That is the illusion.  Reason usually deals with black and white, the clear and the concrete.  In this case reason is wrong.  It clings to a dream while the reality is marked in death upon the flesh even of a child.  We all need what the promise of Easter offers.  We cannot predict when death will come and we dare not presume that the seemingly innocent faces of children are immune from it.  If we come to the empty tomb both out of need and of desire, the infants and children have the same need even as we wait to hear from their lips the words of desire and faith.   

I don't get it. . .

So it would seem that Christianity poses an existential threat to the world.  There is a growing backlash against the Church as if somehow the Church was vibrant and powerful enough to compel unwilling unbelievers to either abide by the tenets of Christianity or to convert.  At least that is how it reads.  Our society is replete with warnings about Christian nationalism, about a Christianity enforced by government and aided by law, or about the imposition of a willing faith upon unwilling people.  Except where is that happening?  Where is Christianity rising up to become the kind of social or political force that would cause liberals and progressives to issue warnings?  At least in the West?

It would seem that the Church is actually at its weakest today than ever before.  Christians do not seem to have played a pivotal role in the ruling which made abortion no longer a constitutionally protected right.  Christians seem to have lost the war against the diversity of sexual desires and gender identities which we perceive as normal.  Christians have watched as marriage has dropped in popularity and children virtually disappeared in the homes of most of us yet some are warning against the Church somehow taking away the freedoms so jealously afforded by the liberal and progressive forces in our land.  Indeed, the whole of the West seems to be on the same page in this.

But somehow those same liberal and progressive folk seem content with Islam.  According to the evidence and the state of affairs in the Middle East (though not alone), Islam appears to be the greater threat to the great American way of life but you would not know it.  Muslims have done a profound job of compelling or forcing the hand of those on the forefront of culture war yet liberal and progressive Christians have little to say in protest to this.  On the other hand, Christians are positively demonic in the eyes of the liberal West.  Who represents a greater threat to the status quo of the world?  Is it Islam with its militant repudiation of all the liberal and progressive values OR is it Christianity, which, by and large, has seemed to accommodate the secular values that it is supposed to reject?  The world has decided that Islam is a victim that needs to be protected from the big, bad Christian demon -- just like all the liberal and progressive values that Western culture holds dear.

Honestly, I wish that Christianity acted like the institutional threat it is generally seen to be by liberal and progressive Western culture.  Of course, there are pockets of threat but Christianity has hardly provided a uniform and solid front against the liberal and progressive secular culture.  Yes, I do believe that Christianity is an existential threat to the values and ideals held by secular progressivism and even the shallow and tepid Christian form of the same thing.  I just don't see how the world around us can judge us to be such a threat since so much of Christianity has capitulated to those values and positions.  That is my sadness.  I wish we were something to threaten the world with a real difference and not just a lukewarm version of ourselves.  Oddly enough, I guess, the stereotype of Christianity feared by the liberal and progressive West is actually worse than the reality.....