The soft heart of Lent. . .

I have pages of quotes from things I have read.  Not all of them are listed with the source or the author and so, while I will leave this unattributed here, others may remind me where I stole the words.

“The nature of water is soft, that of stone is hard. But if water ceaselessly falls drop by drop, the stone is worn away. So it is with the word of God. It is soft and our heart is hard; but the one who hears the word of God often, opens his heart to the fear of God.”

While we might presume that the heart and center of Lent is the unrelenting and unbending weapon of the Law, the reality is that God's Word, even the Law, is more like the soft water described above.  But it would be foolish to presume that because it is soft, it is not powerful.  And yet it would be wise to recall that the human heart is not soft at all but hard and calloused.  It is, however, not quite immune to the power of this seemingly soft Word.  That is what Lent works to teach us every year as we pass through its weeks on our way to Easter.

In order for that soft water of God's Word to have its impact upon us, we must be regularly connected to it.  Regular and faithful church attendance is expanded during Lent and Holy Week as the weekly rhythm is enhanced to mid-week services, added prayers, additional devotions, and acts of charity to accompany for the formal repentance.  The faithful are tuned in even more to the voice of God's Word during the six weeks of Lent along with the part of the ordinary missing from the liturgy and the added hymns to remind us of both our need of redemption and its cost to Jesus.

I have often suggested to folks unsure if they believed to keep attending worship services, keep reading Scripture, and keep praying.  It is not simply that these are effective when we are most confident and faithful.  No, they are effective because it is precisely these regular drips of God's Word that wear down the hardness of our hearts.  We learn from God's mercy to kneel in repentance and we learn from His forgiveness to be forgiving.  That is also part of the rhythm of Lent and reflective of its soft heart in the voice of God's Word that speaks more often and to more effect to us.  The frozen coldness of our hard hearts is softened and melted not by an overwhelming fire but by the constant warmth of the God whose love and mercy truly do endure forever. 

Impossible to imagine. . .

I read not long ago that almost one in three pregnancies in the U.K. now ends in abortion.  Let me say that again.  One third of all pregnancies are ended.  Some 300,000 a year.  What is even more alarming is that the rationale for all of these aborted babies is not strictly economics but the growing numbers of women in the U.K. who cannot imagine themselves to be moms.  In other words, the pressure is not external but internal.  Along with the obvious lack of respect for the sacredness of life and the casual way that women have chosen to kill the child within their bodies before it becomes too big to notice, there is this.  These women cannot imagine themselves to be moms -- there is no longer any aspiration to be or joy in the prospect of motherhood.  It has become something dreary and dreaded.  When did that all happen?

That is, of course, one of the reasons why immigration is important in the U.K. and throughout Europe.  The birth rate of the population is dismally small and certainly not enough to replace those who are there so the immigrants are essential both to the economy and to the health of the society.  The urgency for children has been eased by the more elite ideas of a global village and the exchange of children from the places where the elites presumed them to be overcrowding to the places where they are needed.  In 2023, when there were nearly 300,000 abortions, there were just 591,072 live births were recorded in England and Wales. The birth rate gap has been plugged by immigration. It is a shocking.  Since 1968 there were 10.9 million abortions in the U.K. who were replaced by 10.7 million immigrants to the U.K.  In other words, the U.K. does not need women to become moms and the women seem glad to accommodate this lack of need.  

We all know that marriage has become an unpleasant and increasingly unwelcome responsibility which can easily be ignored by women who do not want to be wives and moms and by men who do not think they are needed to be husbands and dads.  That is the bigger factor behind the U.K. statistics.  In the space of a few generations what was once the social structure that under girded every institution and aspect of ordinary life has become something unnecessary and undesired.  In the same space of time, abortions become routine and normal but something else became exceptional and odd.  That is even larger than the terrible and tragic numbers of abortions in the U.K. and something that cannot be fixed by legislation, tax benefits, or even subsidy.  Think of the homes in which the children who are being born are growing up and what they are learning.  Think of the good lessons and examples lost and the wrong lessons and examples being passed down not simply to the children but to the generations to follow.  Think of how the decline of Christianity in the same period has helped to fuel the fires of destruction that have literally undone all about marriage and family and children which previous generations had passed down -- at least until the 1970s and beyond.

Oddly enough, the largest abortion provider in the U.K. is actually called the British Pregnancy Advisory Service!  Like the American industrial provider of the same, Planned Parenthood, it is clear that pregnancy and parenthood are the last things on the minds of these agencies and the women who use them.  Along with this, the ethical dimensions of both abortion and marriage/family have been pushed to the side of things while other things have taken central place.  What was designed to be exceptional has become normal and what was designed (at least by God) to be normal has become exceptional.  That is how far things have come for our special friends across the sea and the trend is unmistakable both in Canada our neighbor to the north and the more liberal states in the US.  

The cost of accommodation. . .

As I think about the last twenty years of change, it occurs to me that the it was not so much about the progress of the left and those who champion LGBTQ+ rights as much as it is about the accommodation Christianity has afforded this progress by remaining silent or actually appropriating the changes.  I doubt that it was as simple as some think and I may have thought at the time.  It was not merely the fact that this alphabet soup coalition had control of the media and entertainment industry and gradually a political party.  There is something more to all of this.

Think about this.  Merely 20 years ago, then President Bill Clinton was trying to make good on a campaign pledge to allow homosexual soldiers to serve openly in the military.  Then there was no thought to actually achieving something approaching legalized gay marriage.  Then came the revolution that made all of these things not only possible but settled.  It was achieved not by some grand game plan on the part of the promoters of all of this but by the fact that Christianity had long ago given up a real worldview for a compartmentalized view of faith, sex, life, and a host of other things that may or may not relate.   

While a person's attitudes on moral issues have proven to be strong predictors of religious engagement and affiliation, it turns out that religious engagement and affiliation have turned out not to be such strong predictors of their stand on moral issues.  That is at least as much the reason for the fast lane to normalization that the whole LGBTQ+ has enjoyed as the strategy and effective follow through of the advocates for the change.

Although I have long advocated for a complete Christian worldview instead of the kind of fragmented issues that may or may not relate to each other, this has clearly been the soft underbelly of Christianity.  The problem is that for too many Christians, there is no real relationship between who Jesus Christ is to them and what that translates into with respect to the burning issues of sexual desire, gender identity, marriage, and family issues.  There may be some correlation but not enough to influence or dictate how faith defines a stand on moral issues.

While mainline Protestant churches have been far more accepting of homosexuality and sexual liberation in general, they are not the only ones.  Evangelicals have also been remarkably silent or overtly tolerant of the the gay position on thing.  Even Roman Catholics have their problems with the lavender mafia and the Fr. Martin's who have been vocal advocates for making some sort of accommodation or acceptance of the direction of culture.  Oddly enough, no one seems to have noticed that these have not alleviated the stark membership decline so many of these churches have suffered and may well have encouraged that decline.  The odd thing is that people do not simply find a church which promotes their more liberal views when they disagree with Scripture and tradition on these moral issues, they simply drop out of church altogether.

What I am saying is that a Christian worldview in which all of these issues were coordinated and connected is not some luxury for us but key to our survival as the Church and to our ability to influence and give witness to the world around us.   Sex was a problem in Eden and sex was one area of influence early Christianity had on the world around them.  Now it turns out that sex is an issue today as well -- indeed, it might be a fairly big issue when faith and values seem to conflict with Scripture because Christians have found a way to box things off away from each other in order to find some sort of reconciliation with the world.  The real challenge Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity 's profound doctrine of salvation over their willingness to disagree with the Bible on moral issues.  The death of Christianity may well be predicted in the way we become more comfortable with the world's position on moral issues and the way we distance ourselves from what the Bible actually says.

In a world of noise. . .

It is no secret that we live in a world of noise, constant noise that prevents silence or a single voice from intruding.  Some of it is beyond our control.  The sirens in the day and night, the sounds of engines roaring or brakes squealing, the ordinary background of work and pleasure that fills the neighborhood and the city happen without our consent or our desire.  Some of it is within our control.  The TV or radio or sound tracks that we turn on to prevent us from being alone or being forced to endure silence have become automatic.  Even Church is not without its noise.  Again, some is forced upon us with screaming babies and footsteps on the floor and conversations hushed or loud and phones that seem intent upon being noticed in the very place where they should not be.  

Sometimes it might seem downright rude to intrude upon the silence even further with so many words spoken, notes played, and words sung.  Why can't we simply live in silence at least, as Jesus said to Peter, for an hour or so?  But I would suggest that the songs of faith that we lift in liturgy, hymn, chant, and choral works are not noise at all.  They are, I would posit, the most glorious sound of all.  There is nothing that fills the ear and the spaces of our lives like the sound of voices in chant and song, hymn and choral voice.  Not everyone of us is into music like I am but even those who do not consider themselves singers can hardly label the sounds of sacred music in worship as noise.

As Lutherans, sacred music is not a competitor with the liturgy but an essential part of it all.  It is a formal component of liturgy and there is not much I can say about a completely spoken liturgy without benefit of hymn or chant or instrumental music.  In a world too filled with noise, sacred song has the power to lift our hearts and souls to heaven. The ministers of music are true stewards of the holy art of music and song in sacred form and they help all the people of God to “sing and make melody to the Lord with all of the heart” (Eph 5:19)  One of the really sad things that has taken place is the ‘downgrading’ of sacred music and the replacement of the sacred music with contemporary songs that form a playlist of preferences instead of the wonderful song that joined all voices into one before the Lord.

Microphones and canned music may be considered necessary to us today but they can be simply sources of noise in worship rather than enhancers of the sacred songs of liturgy and hymnody.  The architecture of the churches once worked to make such electronic agents unnecessary but I fear today they only make these artificial noisemakers more necessary.  I well remember moments in which the sounds of sacred song filled the spaces.  Miserere is a setting of Psalm 51 by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri. It was composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, probably in the 1630s.  It was supposed to be used exclusively in the Sistine Chapel during the Tenebrae services of Holy Week.  Perhaps it would still be obscure would it not be for Mozart, who, as the story goes, committed its sound to memory and wrote it out so the rest of the world could enjoy.  The whole mystique was enhanced by this unwritten performance tradition. Written for three choirs, two of five and four voices respectively, with a third choir singing plainsong responses, it is probably the most recognized and enduring examples of polyphony.  I heard this sound rising up literally from the choir and compelling our souls to look with them to the heights of God';s mercy and grandeur.  That is not noise.  It is, along with the songs of the ordinary and hymns, the sounds that live in the presence of God.  Thanks be to God!  

Is there something wrong with taking it slow?

As everyone knows, the Church is generally a decade or three behind culture and society as a whole and this is certainly true when it comes to technology.  This is evidenced by the fact that most congregations presume that social media equates to Facebook and the relatively poor state of affairs with most online presences.  Normally this is simply a minor thing.  Lags are not always as bad as we are made to think.  But in one particular area of things, it might seem that the Church is trying to jump the distance and forge ahead of where others are not so sure we should go.  At the very point people are beginning to question the value of online education and its effectiveness as the primary tool of learning, there are so many voices insisting that online is the only way for the Church to go.

I wonder if there is something wrong with taking it slow in this avenue of technology.  According to many across Lutheranism, this is just plain foolish.  I would suggest that it is the path of wisdom.  There are ample reasons for the shift to online education for clergy.  Cost is the big factor, of course.  It is a whole lot cheaper to provide and to participate in online classes.  Both the providers and the students are understandably attracted to anything that would reduce the cost of training to become a pastor.  But money is not the only reason and it should not in and of itself rule the day.  Yet money is the drumbeat of nearly everything in this conversation.  We should not require people to endure the financial burden of residential seminary education and we should not require the people to cover the cost for them when there are less expensive alternatives.

The other thing has to do with the cost of time.  While similar to the cost in dollars, the cost in time is a little different.  There are the factors of moving and uprooting family for he time spent in seminary, the problem of an educational cycle still rooted in an agrarian time frame when summer was off to work in the fields (yes, even for a seminary this applies), and finally the whole idea that you have to wait for four years to do what you are being prepared to do.  The cost to the family is one thing but some suggest there is a cost to the Church to wait so long for those who are being formed for the pastoral ministry to begin practicing that ministry.  Indeed, the SMP option as currently ordered provides for just that -- on the job training as people doing the work from the beginning of their training to do that work.

Finally is the issue of context.  The world is all about context today.  It is as if no one is or should be trained for the pastoral ministry and instead is being trained for a specific pastoral office in a specific place.  It seems that a good segment of the Church does not want the training to be general at all but very specific, as if the congregationally raised up and trained pastor is the best of the best.  An online path to pastoral formation allows the context to continue while the training is being accomplished.  There is no doubt that many think that this is optimal and that too much time is being wasted in preparing people for generic places that do not actually exist.  Context is everything, remember.  Along with this is the whole idea that pastors squander too much time in getting to know the places where they serve and that it would be better if they were already familiar with that context, indeed, the products of those contexts.

It would be foolish for anyone to immediately dismiss these arguments for online pastoral training.  But it would be even more foolish to presume that these are the primary and pivotal factors that should define how we form men to be pastors.  In fact, if what was being conveyed is merely information, online training would be the obvious choice.  There are other things involved here.  Along with the information that is being given to the student, there is also something being conveyed to the Church by the student during the process of pastoral formation.  The students must be judged not simply on their academic prowess but on their suitability to be pastors.  This is a judgment made not by a few but by many -- both the academic concerns and the pastoral suitability.  The whole faculty is given the charge to know the candidate and to as a whole discuss the man's suitability before commending that same man to the Church.  How this happens on a primarily online setting seems to be given little conversation.

One of the things I am most concerned about is the localization of pastoral training and how it leads to a localized judgment regarding the pastor's suitability.  The more we reduce the numbers of those involved in this and the more local those who render this judgment, the less the ministerium belongs to the whole Church and the more it belongs exclusively to the congregation.  While some in Missouri might laud this congregational focus, it makes me entirely uncomfortable.  I am not all that Waltherian and am pretty sure that the more we lean in this direction, the less need or requirement there is for the Synod at all.  Training of pastors and the custody of the roster was and remains one of the most important reasons for the Synod to have been formed and to continue to exist.

Lastly, the obvious thing is that we have not had a deal of time nor concentrated study of how well online education is doing.  The SMP program was purposefully designed not for the man in the early twenties but for those with life experience and congregational experience.  The concerns of the larger educational world about the effectiveness of the screen replacing the classroom remains an issue that needs to be addressed.  I am no expert in this area but I am sure we have such individuals who can help us figure it out.  Along with this, we also need to look at the loss of collegiality that a common experience with common teachers has long provided the Synod.  Again, I am no expert but we already lament the loss of the junior college/senior college and seminary experience has had upon the ministerium so we ought to smart enough to consider that such a change would have untold consequences in a shift to online training.

So what is the rush?  Take it slow.  We once sang in mocking the Church, Like a herd of turtles, moves the Church of God; brothers we are treading, where we've always trod....  Is that so bad?  More and more I am learning the wisdom of taking things slow.  I hope and pray the Church is listening to these concerns.