What insight!

The Pontifical Biblical Commission of the Vatican has declared, following a “thorough biblical study” commissioned by then-Pope Francis [only now concluded], that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah—for which the two cities were exterminated and struck down—was not due to a acts of homosexual depravity (Sodomia) by their inhabitants, but rather the “rejection of the immigrant.” 

So now we know better after getting it wrong all these years.  This is the level of scholarship in the Pontifical Biblical Commission today and this is good example of the erroneous conclusions a failed higher critical methodology leads to when we treat God's Word as merely another book!  I can only imagine that the lavender mafia in Rome and its champion in Fr. James Martin feel affirmed by this conclusion that it is only a matter of time before Rome makes what was once disorder normal.  And I thought that Rome might be changing after their time in the wilderness under Francis.  Boy was I wrong.

It is as if someone woke up to realize that the Latin Mass was not the big problem but a church body which no longer valued or listened to the voice of God's Word.  This makes the case for the much parodied sola Scriptura of Lutheran and Protestant confession.  It also makes the case for an historical grammatical methodology which does not begin with the presumption that God's book is just like any other book and can be unpacked with benefit of faith in its teaching.  We can only expect the Rome will continue to lead the way into more politically relevant and modern interpretations which defy what the Church has said and faithful teachers have taught and faithful people have heard.  This is the very thing that betrays the claims of catholicity Rome has made and reveals itself to be still living under its own Babylonian captivity to the voice of progressivism.  This is the kind of novelty the Lutheran confessors insisted was typical of Rome and a betrayal of the unanimity of the church fathers which is not a elevating tradition above God's Word but seeing how that Word lives within that tradition. 

In the end this is not really about homosexual behavior at all but about the way -- the easy way -- some work around what God's Word actually says and cast aside the witness of the ages in the form of what the Church has understood and taught.  We are facing a time when the great temptation before us is not simply to ignore the passages of Scripture we do not like or find hard to defend in modern times but simply rewrite or interpret anew what has always been understood and taught. 

The problems before us. . .

While some may suggest that the problem of the moment is doctrinal in nature and specific to the fuzziness we have come to accept as normal in our doctrinal confession, others might insist that it is bad preaching and preachers that are the problem.  Still others might complain that the liturgical chaos that is typical of the either intentional pushing of the limits or the consequence of a casual treatment of the things of God.  Finally, there are those who insist that we are losing people we never had, those who were never really formed in the faith and planted upon the good soil of faithful confession and life within the community of the baptized.  I would suggest that no single problem is the cause for the Church's woes today but that our present crisis is really due to them all -- doctrinal confusion, weak preaching, liturgical disorder, and inadequate formation/catechesis.   Because we are suffering from the combined effect of them all, we need to address all of them and sooner rather than later.

Doctrinal clarity is not the result of more nuanced doctrinal statements.  Words are not the problem although they are certainly part of it all.  Meaning what we say is at the root of it.  It is not a crisis of content but of conviction, a problem of faith.  Let me be clear, the great mysteries of the faith are not puzzles to be solved but doctrines which we accept by faith, trusting in the voice of God's Word to speak to us and for us rather than some sort of game to play in which the goal is to crack the nut.  We cannot do much better than the creeds to say who God is and who He is not (Athanasian Creed) as the Holy Trinity.  It is the same for the mystery of the two natures of Christ.  God has not given us this as some kind of treasure trail to follow to get to the moment of understanding or comprehension but the mystery is the thing, believed and confessed as God has revealed it.  The problem of doctrinal clarity is not crying out for more creeds or newer ones or better expressions of this we believe.  No, doctrinal clarity comes from saying what God has said publicly and confidently over and over and over again until it resides in us and the world hears us making the good confession.

Weak preaching does not mean preaching error.  It can mean predictable preaching that keeps saying the same things over and over again without actually preaching the text and applying God's Word to who we are and where we are today.  I maintain that preaching only justification is the same problem as not preaching it at all.  So what?  What does this mean for who I am and how then I shall live as a child of God?  Weak preaching is preaching too much until nothing is clear and people struggle to take away from the sermon a handle to hold onto God's Word during the week.  Weak preaching is giving too much time to stories or introductions or jokes or a thousand other little tricks preachers use to mask not knowing or preaching the text faithfully.  Rome is stereotypical of a church body which has forgotten what it means to preach and has turned the whole preaching enterprise into a simple moralistic pep talk.  Protestantism has turned the sermon on its head until what we think of what God has said becomes more important than what He has said.  Perhaps preachers need to read and hear good sermons for a while before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) but it would not hurt to remember to look at the people to whom you are preaching and to speak with conviction and not simply to inform.

Lutherans have their own problems with liturgical chaos on Sunday morning but neither is Rome exempt.  Honestly, for all the problems you might find in an evangelical style Lutheran setting, last time I checked we did not have priests dressed up as chickens or clowns or rappers in chasubles and the like.  Rome seems to think that those who play at worship are a bigger problem than those who want to worship in Latin.   I think we Lutherans might have a few Latin sympathizers but our problem is simply too much latitude and too great a temptation on both sides of the worship wars to admit that we are talking adiaphora here instead of talking about worship words, actions, and forms consistent with what we say we confess.  A spare liturgical style is not as offensive to our Confession as one without any real style but with far too much designed merely to entertain or encourage.  Honestly, if worship is where we encounter the mystery of the faith, we ought to at least approach it with some sense of solemnity, reverence, and awe.

Finally, we must admit that a couple of hours of catechetical instruction as a pre-teen or early teenager OR as an adult is not and is never enough to form a person in the faith.  The liturgy is our primary teacher and through the Divine Service we are nurtured in the faith once taught and once confessed and now owned today.  It is not a matter of finding better catechetical materials or using screens or more modern teaching methodology but of owning the faith, ordering our worldviews by its lens, and understanding who we are and why we are in the midst of it all.  Our journey into the presence of God is not the pursuit of an extravagant moment outside ourselves but of nourishing the life born anew through from the baptismal womb and living in pursuit of its ends while living within the shape of this present moment.  We are not catechized primarily by explaining the faith but of confessing it over and over and over again until it lives within us, being called and living by the voice in the ear of God's Word and guided by that same voice to the place where His flesh once given for the life of the world becomes our spiritual food for the way.  Faith is not a feeling which comes and goes like the clothing we wear and then cast aside but the latitude and longitude of our lives, identified according to God's order and living to fulfill His purpose and calling.

All of these are the urgent pursuits of the day and all of these are the reason why we find ourselves so often in crisis mode.  When we fail at these, we are buffeted by the winds of change and lifted from the mooring lines that hold us fast in the grasp of grace.  All of these ought to be our pursuit whether or not the world finds them interesting or compelling or relevant and even when our own folks begin to wonder why we spend so much time on basics instead of graduating to a higher level of engagement with the mystery of God.  These are not basics meant to get out of the way before we meet the higher and deeper truths of who we are and who God is.  These are, instead, the constant litany or refrain of our Christian lives and calling, the well worn trail we follow over and over again.  We discern the fuller meaning not by growing up or past these but precisely by the constant pursuit of doctrinal clarity, faithful preaching, liturgical integrity, and catechetical formation in the faith.   

Too successful?

This past summer was hard on Europe.  Temperatures were high and the people miserable in an area in which air conditioning was not typical for most homes.  You certainly about it in the news.  It was actually worse than most of us probably imagined.  Of course, climate change was blamed.  It was all man's fault for polluting and disturbing the pristine balance of nature.  Everyone had come to believe that unless we figured out a way to clean up our act, the world was doomed.  Who thought it could have been otherwise?

Now even those who are on the climate change bandwagon are coming to a very interesting conclusion.  

“From 1980, Europe warmed around 1C more than the average of extratropical areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and around 1.5C more than the global average. . . . Most of this excess warming over Europe can be linked to the reduction of particle emissions,” Pedro Roldán‐Gómez, an associate researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, told The Telegraph.

The reduction in air pollution has caused an increase in temperatures that is particularly pronounced at the poles. When the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks, the jet stream grows stagnant, which results in weather systems, like the recent hot spells in Europe, persisting for longer periods.

Europe has warmed at twice the rate of the rest of the world since the 1980s, resulting in deadly heat waves that environmental activists and politicians have attributed to carbon emissions. But according to the study, the opposite is true: Much of the increase in temperature can be attributed to Europe’s recent success in reducing the amount of airborne particulate matter, since such pollution acts as a sunshade. 

In other words, the problems evident in Europe's heat wave were also of man's doing but not because he was being irresponsible and raping the good earth of God's creation but because they were trying to repair the wrongs done by those before.  Cleaning up the problem results in its own set of circumstances that become a new problem for us to deal with.  My point here is not to argue for or against climate change but to point out how deeply the problems of our world are established by sin and how it is impossible for us to fix our own problems.  We cannot save but need a Savior who can.  Only the God who created all things can come to our aid and repair what we have ruined.

While it might seem the responsible thing to pick up after our own mess and it is surely the right thing for us to do, that does not mean that we can repair the wrong and restore what we have broken.  It is a good and helpful thing for a parent to call a child to account for making a mess and for calling that child to pick up the mess and make right what he has made wrong even when the parent knows the child cannot possibly do it all on his or her own.  God watches us even when we are trying to do what is right and yet He understands what we do not.  We cannot fix it or make the mess go away.  That is how deeply sin is embedded into the fabric of creation and why it groans not for us as responsible adult people to take notice of and responsibility for what we  have screwed up but for the One to come who alone can answer this longing with real new birth and an everlasting creation.  Right here in climate change and the ecological work of those intending to repair the wrong is evidence that we need a God to do for us what we cannot do -- a God to fix the Fall and repair what sin has done not simply to the soul of man but to the whole of the world God made.

We want a king. . .

Much has been said about how George Washington could have become King George I of the United States but turned back both the honor and the responsibility.  Perhaps the evolution of the office in the years since the could have been King George might be explained in the desire to make a king out of whoever in habits that office.  The imperial presidency is really just a catchall term for the election of a monarch -- albeit one with limited terms of office since FDR.   Perhaps we are simply a people in search of a monarch to rule us the way we want to be ruled.  I get it.  Democracy is a messy business and, even if you cannot necessarily find a better alternative, that does not mean it is any less messy.  Congress says they want to be a power and force to be reckoned with but the people's house is a group of folks concentrating on the next election right after they have won the previous one and the Senate is a series of little fiefdoms with potentates who only reluctantly agree on anything.  A king would be nice.  Somebody to demand what we want from and somebody to blame when it all goes South.

Israel wanted a king and was not happy that God had saddled them with something less than what they thought they deserved and everyone else had.  We all know how that turned out.  Can anyone really recite the list of those kings no one wants to remember?  In Scripture it ends up being something like so and so went and did what was evil in God's sight and then slept with the fishes ancestors who had done the same.  Boring and disappointing all at once.  It surely did not keep them from claiming the Roman imposed version of a monarch as their own even though they hated the thought of it all.  There is something about a king, after all.  I guess that it is in our blood to want someone whom we think has the power to change everything and someone to blame for not changing it the way we want it.  Give them cake became give them a king and make them regret it.  The king or president ceased to be merely the highest authority within the structure of the social order to become instead the very embodiment of the sovereign State.

Rome has certainly evolved the papacy into a kingly sort of office.  Papolatry had its roots far earlier than Vatican I but it has not been abandoned even as the mythology of democracy has also evolved.   We may find the worship of the pope to be a thing baffling, strange and contradictory, but it is perfectly reasonable why Rome wants to turn the pope into a king.  "Whatever the pope says because the pope says it.”  It does not seem to matter who the pope is.  It does not even matter when he contradicts other popes or even himself -- walking back one day what he say the day before. The papacy has become the ultra institution of Rome and nothing else seems to matter -- unless you are on the opposite side of the pope when suddenly you agree with all the critics.  Rome does not want a pope but a ruling monarch both to blame and to sit in the place of God with wisdom and an all knowing soul -- eve without a guarantee he will always be right.

Lutherans are not far behind.  Missouri is perhaps the most democratic of the governance forms of American Lutheranism yet we want a benevolent monarch as much as the next guy.   Whether in clericals or a shirt and tie,  expect our Synod President to move on a dime in pursuit of what we want and to be slow as molasses to stop what we wish continued.  We blame him for everything that is wrong in Synod without acknowledging his role in making things right.  We get a little testy when we think he has gone too far as well as when we believe he has not gone far enough.  In short, we also want a king.  We want a benevolent monarch who is nearly always right when we agree and willing to take back what we do not like or agree with.  We expect him to honor the good institutions and correct the ones not so good, to know who to appoint where and who to can when they have done wrong but to do it in a proper pastoral way -- a humble monarch at least.  We want a king whom we can predict and control and who looks good on camera as he benignly goes about our business.  Like the Garden of Eden, we say we want freedom but blame King God I when things happen as He said they would but we were not listening.  It is probably no different in any church which cares about things like doctrine and practice.  We do not want a president or even a bishop but would like a king who acts decisively when we think it necessary and patiently when the spy glass is on us.  Ride on King Jesus and those who minister in His name -- at least so far as He is riding where we want Him to go.  It seldom seems that we are ready for any kind of cross bearing or suffering but we are perfectly willing to be the cause os some of that. 

A choice between synagogue and temple?

Often Roman Catholics insist that Protestants do not really know what worship is.  They complain that the Temple is missing from Protestant worship, that there is no sacrifice, and that there is no sacrament.  I suppose there is truth in all of this.  Protestants have chosen the synagogue as their model - not the Temple.   Indeed, Protestant worship seems to be thoroughly indebted to the model of Jewish synagogues: “To this day Protestant worship is indebted to [synagogues’] emphasis on prayer, Scripture reading, teaching, lay involvement, and elder rule” (as one Baptist put it).  Honestly, there are plenty similarities between what is typically found in most Protestant churches on Sunday morning and what would ordinarily be found in a first-century synagogue (example Luke 4:16-21; Acts 13:15,27). 

Jesus was found in the synagogue regularly.  You cannot accuse Him of ignoring what happened in the synagogue and He accepted the scroll to read from Isaiah and then to preach the text in one of those synagogues.  It would be a false presumption that Jesus did not consider what happened in the synagogue important or well connected to the piety and worship lives of Jews and those who would come after Him.  Catechesis, the likes of which you would have found in the synagogue, continued in the early church and down to the present day.  The synagogue was clearly that place where religious instruction took place and the ordinary place for what we would call preaching.  We have this on record; Jesus gave the Bread of Life discourse “in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum” (John 6:59).  Undoubtedly, it was also a place where people prayed but the House of Prayer which Jesus cleansed was not the synagogue but the Temple.  Only an idiot would suggest no one prayed in the synagogue but what happens today in the synagogue has been altered by the fact that there is no Temple to be a House of Prayer anymore - at least since its destruction in 70AD.  Indeed, Jesus not only visited the synagogue but commanded His disciples to do the same, following His own example: “[going] about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity” (Matt. 9:35).  Indeed, the criticism Jesus has of public prayer in the warning given in the Sermon on the Mount was not directed to the prayers of the Temple particularly but in the public places of the synagogue and street corner - where people were watching but God was not paying attention since it was clear it was not directed to Him.   No, Jesus was clearly in the habit of attending synagogue weekly (Luke 4:16)

Rome knows this and has cultured the Mass into the worship of the Temple.  Yes, it is spoken of as sacrament but it is primarily sacrifice.  The sacrifice of the Mass was, after all, a key point in the Reformation.  But Rome seems to have forgotten the synagogue.  Preaching has not quite been a strong point in Rome and, if you check modern Roman Catholic blogs and such, preaching is still a touchy subject.  Nearly everyone admits that preaching is weak and often moralistic in a typical Roman Catholic Mass.  Sure, there are exceptions, but just as Protestants have chosen to model the synagogue, Rome has chosen the altar and the sacrifice they insist is the most important thing happening in the Lord's House -- even more important than actually receiving communion!  If Protestants have gotten it wrong, I would suggest Rome has as well.  By their singular focus on the holy sacrifice of the Mass, they have attempted to rebuild the Temple in the sanctuaries of Roman churches and continued the sacrifice at the altar - though unbloody - with the people praying during the Mass as if they had no real part in it except to pray.  So instead of receiving the sacrament during the Mass, communion happened outside the Mass or while the Mass was going on and the people were there to pray the Rosary.  Praying and being near where the sacrifice of the Mass was offered is enough.  Though that opinion is not universal, it is probably typical in Rome.

But there need not be a choice.  In Lutheranism, the Divine Service preserves both the synagogue and the Temple.  It is the place of preaching and instruction and catechesis in a high understanding of the reading of Scripture and its explanation and application in a sermon which has an equally high place.  But the prayers are not peripheral nor even individual.  Prayer is the language of worship that permeates the Divine Service and culminates in the prayerful proclamation of the Verba Christi and the Our Father.  The Temple is there not to recreate the sacrifices of old or the one, all-sufficient sacrifice of Calvary but to distribute its fruits in the flesh and blood of Christ given to us to eat and drink in faith in remembrance of Him for the forgiveness of our sins.  It is the Temple fulfilled and transformed so that in His name and by His own Word we worship in Spirit and in truth, eating the drinking the foretaste of the eternal feast right here and right now.  In response to God's goodness, grace, and mercy, we offer Him the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving not simply in a few ritual words but in lives offered as living sacrifices.  It is all there in the Divine Service and in the high place given to preaching AND the sacrament that is the hallmark of Lutheran worship theology and practice.

Walther saw this when he got to America and complained about lecture halls that had replaced the sanctuaries in which Word and Meal were the center piece of the gathering of God's people and the marks of the Church which identified God's House to the world.  When Lutherans forget this and their own Confessions and end up sounding like Protestants, we betray our identity and our claim to be the catholic and apostolic church, keeping the faith in pure doctrine and right practice against those who would divide it up or choose sides (like Protestants and Rome).  When Walther insisted that we chant, wear vestments, use candles, have altars, etc..., he was marrying together what God had always meant to be together and which Protestants had forsaken along with Rome for merely half of the whole.  Worship is not a choice between them but the embrace of the fullness of both.  I will admit that Lutherans themselves forgot this for a time when they kept the Eucharist in theory but reduced it to a rare practice (growing up for me that meant four times a year!).  This is the bronze age error which the liturgical movement among Lutherans has challenged and the Eucharistic revival is evidence of recalling who we were and are.  At the same time, it should not come at the cost of faithful preaching.  We own both -- the tradition of the synagogue in the liturgy of the Word and the tradition of the Temple fulfilled in the Upper Room in the liturgy of the Meal.  To have one without the other is to misunderstand what worship is and what God not simply calls it to be but has provided it to be.  The Word will not return to Him empty but will accomplish His purpose and Christ will never fail to be there given and shed for us in the Holy Supper - a presence not limited to those who believe it but to all who commune and hence the centrality of faithful discipline of the Table (close(d) communion).