Where God cannot be, He is

Every now and then you encounter from the pews as well as the world the familiar complaint about God and the presence of suffering.  How can God allow it?  Tolerate it?  Where is God when suffering takes place?  Like the disciples of old, it is our nature to presume that suffering bespeaks and absent God and an absence of God and His grace.  When they asked Jesus "who sinned" at the encounter of the man born blind, it was tacit admission that God could not have been in the mix of things.  If God had been, there would be no blindness and if God was, it was surely to assigned judgment.  This is our default position since the Fall in Eden.  God cannot be where pain lives or suffering exists -- except in judgment as the One who inflicts pain and suffering as punishment for sin.

The cross is the shock of a God who is not merely present in suffering as a spectator but who comes for suffering.  God is in the pain of the whip and the nails and even to the final breath exhaled in surrender to death.  God is not merely there as victim, though surely as victim, but as the One for whom this pain and this suffering were planned before the foundation of the world.  He is the God whose mercy is not revealed in the absence of pain and suffering but there in the midst of it all.  His work is not to condemn and to assign punishment of pain and suffering but to use the pain and suffering to extend His mercy and grace.  This He most surely does in Christ, in His righteous life, in His suffering to end suffering, and in His life-giving death. Where we presume God cannot be, there He is and there He is doing the redemptive work that delivers us from sin and judgment, from pain and suffering, to righteousness and everlasting life.

We constantly ponder why a good and powerful God allows suffering, pain, and evil?  Is He impotent to eliminate it for us?  Does He not wish to forego this for us?  Is He complicit in it?  Does He send it?  For us the great temptation is to presume our God is a detached God, an aloof God, who watches us while looking down from heaven but who either cannot or wills to do nothing to help us.  God's surprise is that He comes for suffering, enters into our pain, takes the evil of our sins upon Himself, and bears the full weight of that sin and death for us that we might be redeemed.  He thirsts that our thirst might be quenched.  He fasts in hunger so that our hunger might be satisfied.  He lives to die that by dying in baptismal water we might live.  God enters into suffering not as an experiment to see what it is but to end its reign over us.  Isaiah tells us.  His wounds are our healing and His sacrifice is our gain.  

We are so fixed upon the question of why this suffering comes to us and why we as Christians face such pain that perhaps we miss how God has come to suffer with us and, more importantly for us, and by this suffering redeems us from the condemnation of suffering and pain.  He is present with us not as an antidote to what we endure but that these sufferings might have a redemptive and sanctifying purpose even in us.  We do not suffer aimless pain but in Christ all sufferings have their end, find their meaning, and have purpose.  Where we think God cannot be, there He is. 

Thoughts on a milestone. . .

In 1974 I was a student in my junior year of college worried about what was happening to the church body in which I had hoped to serve.  A convention had exposed deep conflict and division.  The premier seminary of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was a shell of its former self after an exile took students and faculty away.  There was a cloud over everything.  There were enough personality conflicts to fill a stadium and enough bold speeches to fill it with more hot air than anything else.  People were angry, confused, bitter, and suspicious and in the midst of it all I was going to have to choose a seminary.

Underneath the surface were simmering issues that had been kicked like a can down the road and a theological debate that had been hinted at in the past but never fully engaged.  The Synod had grown exponentially during the 1940s-1960s, turning it from a largely Midwestern and rural church body into one increasingly urban and suburban.  The impact of the social movements, racial tumults, a looming presidential crisis, and youth rebellions within the nation had not quite crept into the mainstream of Missouri but they were there.  The slow awakening of a sleepy little church onto a world stage was bringing with it issues and challenges that were only now being realized.  The theological arena across Europe was moving away from an inerrant Scripture and toward a more skeptical view of Bible facts and history.  The Gospel was fast becoming a principle applied to injustice and missions in ways that went beyond the proclamation of the cross and empty tomb.  Some of this was threatening and some was welcome and some was suspect and some was condemned outright.  But not everyone could agree on what was good and what was bad.

Like the Reformation before it, this conflict was over authority and over the authoritative Scripture.  It was the modern challenge of idea that lives outside of fact, the fruit of a Jesus of history largely unknown and the Christ of Scripture somewhat suspect.  It was a battle for the soul of a church body.  Somehow or other I and those like me entering seminary, had to choose sides.  Choose wrongly and it might mean that everything you had prepared for would disappear and even if you chose rightly it would mean the church body in which you served would be deeply affected and somewhat crippled following the outcome.  It did not matter what choice you made, it would cost you friends.  Nobody I knew was outside the fray.  Everyone I knew was stressed to the hilt.  No matter what side you were on, it was a most painful of moments.  

About two hundred of the LCMS’s six thousand congregations left with the 90% of the St. Louis faculty and many of them ended up forming the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.  Others tried for years to live in the never never land between the AELC and the LCMS.  Still others, both parishes and pastors, simply retreated from anything larger than the local needs and concerns of the parish.  Our loss was not simply in those who departed but the climate of the church body that was left.  In the midst of this, the Charismatic Movement was rising up.  The liturgical movement was preparing for new worship forms and hymnals.  Photocopiers were making it possible to depart from anything officially printed.  I wish I could say that we had a happily ever after ending.  We did not.  The battle was won but only that battle.  More battles were to come if we had the stomach for them.

In the end, we did not.  We won the Battle of the Bible and became one of the very few denominations to turn back a liberal tide but we also lost some battles.  Worship became more and more influenced by Evangelicalism and less and less by official hymnals.  Congregations learned how to live under the radar and to practice what they wanted in everything from open communion to catechetical instruction.  We ended up being united in principle over the Scriptures but we continue to be divided over everything from the role of women to liturgical ceremonies to communion practice.  In fact, we are a shell of our former self in size, have closed some of our colleges, struggle to recruit men and women for church work vocations, and struggle to find money to pay for Synod's corporate budget.  Our Synod remains one identity in convention and another in local practice.  Nearly everyone now sees the Synod as a confederation of Districts and congregations rather than the way our life together is codified in our governing documents.  And we act like that as well.  

Of course it was worth it.  No matter the cost, it was worth it to stand for Scripture, for the facts of the faith that inform our doctrine and practice.  But we learned a lesson few of us wanted to learn.  There is no peacetime for the Church Militant.  We are always engaged in one conflict or another.  The gift of our digital age is that the pace of everything moves faster than it did in 1974 and in 1874 and in 474 but you never win the war and must always fight the battle for faithfulness.  The battle lines change but not the cause.  We preserve the faith and must resist the temptation to improve it or adapt it.  We proclaim the Gospel but do not use it as a principle or a core value.  We are always in the crosshairs of a world which has little stomach for a yesterday, today, and forever the same Gospel.  That is why we must have the stomach for it and for the battles that must be fought until Christ comes again in His glory.  Lest we think this is peculiar to us, just look across the landscape of Christianity.  Even Rome finds itself exactly where we were and are.  There is no safe haven or refuge from the constant battles to be faithful.  This much I have learned.

The New Mission Movement. . .

From churches to mission societies there was a profound movement to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the continent of Africa in the last three centuries or so.  It was greatly successful having planted a vibrant Christian mission that became solid indigenous communities of faith.  It was so successful that Africa has now become the largest concentration of practicing Christians.  Lutherans are looking less like their Northern European ancestors and more and more like the churches where the Gospel was planted.  It is not true for Lutherans only.  Roman Catholics, Methodists, and a host of other groups have witnessed the great shift from America and Europe to Africa as the place where conversions continue to grow and church numbers explode.  Now it appears that Americans and Europeans are not quite finished in their mission work but it has little to do with Scripture or the faith and everything to do with the values of modernity.

Unfortunately, what is now being exported is an attempt to undo what African Christians have learned only too well -- the Biblical doctrinal and moral truths that the present age have diverged from in pursuit of  sexual liberation and a gender fluidity.  While you might think that this is only what the most liberal of Western churches are doing, it should not surprise us that even elements within a more conservative tradition are heading down this path.  From Kenya to Cameroon, Ghana to Tanzania, Western aid workers, government officials, tourists, and progressive denominations are advancing understandings of sexuality and the human person that are in conflict with the orthodox and catholic faith and incompatible with African cultural values.  But, hey, what is there to stop them?  The tools of this evangelization of a corrupt and unBiblical sexual ethic and gender identity are money as well as words.  Follow the money trail and you will see how the liberal and progressive Christians are using their bank accounts in an attempt to lure African Christians into following their lead.

From the lure of tourist dollars to the mountain of money that comes from NGOs and governmental agencies, Africa is being pressured into accepting and adopting what has become normal in the West.  Where this is focused is often upon the youth -- minds ripe for the seeds of an evil missionary impetus designed to change the future if they cannot change the present.  What has happened in Europe and in America only proves that it only takes a generation to effect a sea change in sexual morality.  The Methodists in America got tired of their African counterparts interfering and slowing down the move of their progressive sexual ethic and so they enacted a great divorce globally as well as locally.  Others work through ecumenical endeavors such as the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation to put strings on the flow of money into African churches.  Still others, provide for the distribution of things to promote what is largely still illegal or immoral in Africa -- such as sexual lubricants designed in particular for homosexual behavior.  Perhaps the worst offender, however, is technology.  The internet has become the primary tool by which the West hopes to normalize in Africa what is abnormal there but all the rage in the West -- internet porn is a vehicle of the change of values!  I could say more but I think you get the picture.

For Africa to resist, it will not simply require their own personal fortitude but the help and cooperation of those in the West who have now bowed down to the gods of pleasure without cost or moral judgment.  This is a time for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and for faithful folk in other churches to extend their support so that Africa does not fall.  We ought to be both grateful for and inspired by the resistance currently shown against this onslaught of change by the Western missionaries for evil.  But we dare not leave these courageous brothers and sisters in Christ alone in their witness.

Suffering from sin. . .

It often seems simplistic and naive to say the suffering flows from sin but the reality is that sin is not simply about doing wrong but also suffering for it.  Sin is not simply a theological problem but a life problem.  Our sinful thoughts, words, and deeds come back to haunt us with suffering and pain that is real. Our sinful natures have so screwed up our thinking that we presume if the commandments went away we would happy in the pursuit of what we want unfettered by guilt or shame.  It is not that way at all.  What the commandments forbid is not some theoretical evil out there but the stuff that hurts and harms us in this mortal life as well as eternally.  

How odd it is that we think that God is out to steal away our happiness with our freedom.  How strange it is that we presume that rules against adultery or theft or defamation or jealousy or disrespect are the problem and not the things themselves.  We suffer for our sins not because God is zapping us from on high but because the sins themselves cause earthly problems and have dire consequences for this life and its happiness.  How is happy to worry about the faithfulness of our spouse or to poison our relationships with our parents or to be known as a person of lies and slander or to be consumed with desire for what is not ours?  The suffering is not caused by the denial of these desires but the desires themselves.  They ruin our relationships and steal from us our reputations and make us fearful of others.  Sin is the cause of suffering and not imagined suffering but real pain, sorrow, and trouble.

St. Gregory the Great wrote of the three stages of temptation:  suggestion, delight, and consent. Scripture speaks of this in James 1:  But each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights...  Look at the temptation and fall of Eve.  Lucifer offers a mere suggestion to Eve, that if she ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she would not die but would become like God, knowing right from wrong.  It seems like such a little thing compared to the grand evils of our modern age.  Just a little and rather subtle suggestion becomes the source of so much suffering.  We do the same thing all the time.  We assume God has either lied to us or kept things from us, that we can become gods by ignoring or disobeying the one true God, and that knowing right and wrong will lead us to choosing right from wrong.  In the end, Eve not only ignored what she had known from God but began to despise it and to be dissatisfied with what God had given and told her.  In the end, instead of running away from Adam, she shared her suffering with him and brought him down with her.  That is also what sin does.  Our suffering is not only ours but it belongs to those whom we love.  

Goodness and virtue are not constricting but freeing.  Sin refuses to allow us to see that and so we view everything except our desires with suspicion and doubt and fear.  The path to freedom is not through surrendering to desire but through living self-controlled, upright, and godly lives as those born again of water and the Spirit.  This is St. Paul's appeal to us.  What is good, right, true, godly, and righteous is not the end to our happiness but its beginning.  But, as Luther once observed, the old adam is a good swimmer and even though we are looking away from Satan he is always looking at us.  So we fight the good fight, contending not for a personal righteousness which will minimize our need of Christ but to live as the people of God we are in Christ.  This is our freedom and apart from Christ there is only bondage.

The shape of things to come. . .

By the time I entered my teenage years nearly 85% of all those in America between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were, or had been, married. As I headed out of my teenage years the marriage rate fell by some sixty percent. Fast forward and approximately one-third of Gen Zs today are on track never to marry (that does not quite account for those who cohabit temporarily or even over longer terms).  Not surprisingly, the birthrate also fell to its lowest point -- down to 1.62 births per fertile female or not enough to replace the parents.  So the US, with every other developed nation except Israel, is facing the very real threat of demographic decline.  Clearly this is not simply about abortion or birth control.  It is about the increasingly hostile view of marriage and family by our culture and society.  It is hostile simply by virtue of the fact that it is optional and non-essential to the way we see ourselves and our lives today.

I wonder if all our years fighting against a poorly argued Supreme Court invention in 1973 has left us blind to the onslaught of change that has moved marriage and family from its front and center place to the fringes of our lives.  I wonder if we thought that overturning a SCOTUS decision would be all that needed to be done to make a course correction.  I wonder if we are up to the major task of restoring what has been lost and in particular restoring the need for and blessing of marriage and family.  If all we want are children, IVF and our great reproductive technology can do the deed but if we want to repair what is broken among us we will need boys to become men and girls to become women and both to want and desire a lifelong union in marriage and to have and raise their children within the home as gift and blessing.

Although I wish it were not so, churches are not necessarily aligned in this goal.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality of birth control that makes children the exception and sex mainly for pleasure.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality that marriage is but one of the choices available to people and not even the first or best choice.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality that children are optional to marriage (or to individuals) and that fewer is better than many.  If you do not believe me, look at how they talk about marriage or family or children.  Since the 1930s there has been a sea change among conservative Protestants as well as the mainstream of evangelicals in America and it has not left Rome immune from this influence either.  Rome has official doctrine that insists against birth control and for children but in practice those in the pews have largely overlooked or ignored what Rome has said and prefers to do what they think is right for them.  Even in Missouri we had our own dalliance with birth control as the wise steward approach to the issue of children and we even had our own moment toying with the idea that abortion may not be so bad either.  We have recovered an official stance but it has not necessarily affected or directed how our youth see these things.  Our soft underbelly is that the world has proven at least as influential and probably more than our doctrine upon the views and desires of our youth.

Marriage, traditional marriage of one man and one woman in lifelong union, has become the radical choice and not the normal one.  Children and more than 1 or 2 have become radical choices and not the normal one.  If you want to be a radical in America today, hold to the idea that marriage is one man and one woman in life long fidelity, that love is sacrificial, that birth control is not the norm but children are.  That is the most radical thing in an America in which we are increasingly unfriendly to marriage, family, and children.  If you don't believe me, try going into a restaurant in America with you six children and see the looks people give you.  One look says it all.  By the way, you just might get the same look when you walk into a church in America and plant the same size family in the pew.