A recurring question. . .

Removing the Mormons from the list of DOD recognized Christian groups is not without its controversy -- except to those who are Christian.  In fact, this is one of the small things in which a wider swatch of Christians actually agree upon -- Mormons are not Christian.  The Latter Day Saints are many things and some of them even decent and good but they are not Christian.  Latter-day Saints claim to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and perhaps even the only path to salvation, but not the unique Son of God. They claim to believe that He is divine and that we should follow all His teachings but He is not, in their estimation, uniquely divine.  In nearly every denomination, a Mormon who becomes Christian is a convert.  Mormons cannot agree to the creedal affirmations of orthodox Christianity or confess the Christology of Chalcedon.  Because they will not confess the orthodox Christian faith, they cannot be called Christian. Period.  DOD does not define this but they did have the guts to admit what some among us cannot or will not.  To state this not only safeguards Christianity but it is good for Mormons -- even if they don't see it.

Only a fool would suggest that Mormons were not good neighbors and good citizens, indeed, good on nearly every level of that judgment.  But the word Christian does not mean good.  It means those who confess a particular faith, informed by the Scriptures, confessed by creed, and held against any detraction or dilution of those words.  The Athanasian Creed captures it well.  Whoever would... and then presents the Trinitarian confession of God which the Scriptures teach along with the confession of Christ, true man and true God and not in the sense of what any other man was or ever will be.  Calling Jesus Lord or Savior is not the same as confessing the creedal affirmation of the Son of God incarnate for us and our salvation.  In 2001 Rome declared baptism conferred by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be invalid.  Lutherans do not accept LDS baptism either.  It is not discriminatory against Mormons but the preservation of the faith against any and all confessions of any less than the one, eternal truth.  It is not being kind or charitable or Christlike to give a benefit of a doubt to such a group that claims to be Christian.  

While we do not know the heart and I presume that the vast majority of those now in the LDS were, if not raised Mormon, then raised some sort of Christian.  That may be a false presumption on my part but I think it is fair.  To act as if Mormon and Christian were the same is to do them a disservice even as it is the faithful and orthodox Christians who do confess the Triune God and Jesus the LORD.  Giving these lapsed Christians or those so poorly catechized into the Christian faith that they cannot see that Mormons are not Christian the benefit of the doubt is to fail to love them as Christ loves them and died and rose for them.  Not for Mormons only but for all who fail to confess the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ the true and unique Son of God in flesh do we maintain this boundary line.  Sadly, the DOD may be more ready than many churches to admit the obvious.

 

Misunderstood words. . .

Sermon for Trinity 4, preached at Faith Lutheran Church, Hopkinsville, KY, on Sunday, June 28, 2026.

There are a host of misunderstood words of Jesus.  The Gospel for today records one of those words which has been manhandled and distorted until Jesus would not recognize what He said.  “Judge not and you will not be judged.”  These are the words so often exaggerated and misconstrued as to make us reticent about even mentioning sin anymore.  Who are we to judge?  That is, after all, the constant litany of those who wear their sins as badges of honor no one can question or assail.  These words of Jesus have come to mean look the other way and they make sin simply an alternative choice.  It almost makes sin normal.

The reality is that the beating heart of Christianity is the forgiveness of sins.  Indeed, God became man not to pat us on the back or cheer us on as we improve or watch us screw things up but to become the sacrifice for sin that is our atonement for all our sins – sins of thought, word, and deed.  He makes the great exchange, laying down His life for ours and paying the price of our redemption with His own suffering and blood shed once for all.  He does this so that we might be restored to the Father as His own children, washed clean in the waters of baptism, led by the voice of His Word to learn to love what is good and right, and fed here at His table in the bread that is His flesh and the wine that is His blood.  Inside Jesus is this – He has come that we might be forgiven.  Inside all of this – the baptismal font, the Scriptures, and the food of this table is one thing – the forgiveness of our sins.  

Far from encouraging us not to talk about sin, the commandments are all about sins just as Jesus is.  Keeping the commandments is all about noting what is sin and what is not.  Our lives in Christ are not meant to remove sin from our thoughts or vocabulary but precisely point us to sin and to the keeping of God’s will and purpose.  St. Paul insists that he did not even know what sin was until he knew forgiveness in Christ.  But sin is never theoretical.  It is never neutral.  It is never without victims.  It is never for good.  It is never benign.  It is always corruption and it always corrupts the one doing the sin.  

Jesus does not tell us to ignore sin or to fail to rebuke it.  That flies in the face of everything else Jesus has told us to do, specifically how to deal with sinners according to Matthew 18 with its call to go to the sinner, tell him of his sin so to seek his repentance, bring along a witness to this act of love, and tell it to the Church for the sake of his restoration.  So Jesus is not telling us to ignore sin anymore than He is telling us not to keep the commandments and do what is good and right and salutary.  Jesus is telling us how to do this.  He begins by saying this: “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful to you.”

Now we are onto something.  We are not the self-appointed watchdogs of righteousness nor are we snitches who turn in others in order to make ourselves look better or to advance our cause.  Jesus has not called us to be secret police.  Instead He has sent us forth to be His instruments and the agents of the same mercy, kindness, and love that He came to show us.  

This can only occur because the mercy of God is not in short supply but without limit.  He does not dole out that mercy as a miser who is stingy with something costly but lavish and extravagant even with something that is costly beyond measure.  And that is why we are here.  We are not here to see what God will do about sin but because of what He has done.  Here we are every week coming home again into the arms of the Father to be welcomed as His own even though we sin, to be given a perfect robe of righteousness even though we have soiled the last one, and to feast at His table even though do not deserve a place at the table.  With this same mercy that you know in Christ then judge your brother, sister, husband, wife, parent, child, neighbor, co-worker, or stranger.  Judge them in order for them to be won by the blood that cleanses all our sins.

The servant is not above His master.  Jesus said those words.  Being forgiven, we are to seek out one another not with our agenda but with His.  We call each other to repentance and forgive without limit (not seven times or even seventy times seven but as often as we are asked to forgive).  We all need the same thing.  We need forgiveness.  This is our most compelling need from God.  None of us is without sin and all of us live in constant dependence upon the mercy of God.  We do not judge harshly because we were not.  We do not judge to condemn because we were judged to restore.  We do not judge to curse because we were not cursed but blessed with forgiveness.  We do not manifest this merciful judgment with words alone but with the open heart of love that cares for the other as we would care for ourselves.  That is Christlike and that is the calling of those who would follow Christ.

Jesus goes on to say that the blind cannot lead the blind.  We cannot care for our brother or sister if we are blinded by our own sins, wearing the log in our eye.  This is then the call for us to live constantly within the veil of Christ’s forgiveness and within the home of God’s House.  This is the call not to be blind but to have our eyes opened by His Spirit working through the Word as often as we are gathered around that Word.  We are not in God’s Word because we are curious or even because it is interesting but because we need the Light of Christ, we need to live within the Light of Christ, and we need to be the Light of Christ.  The Light of Christ cannot be darkened by the cover of our sin.  He has called us to set that Light high so that it enlightens the whole world.

When Christians stop judging with mercy, we end up living in the sin that Christ came to take away.  When we fail to call out one another we end up losing the very repentance that His mercy creates.  We distort the Light of Christ and shine darkness where Christ means there to be light.  So for this reason, we are here, week after week, confessing our sins, being absolved, recalling our baptismal identity as His very own children, being renewed in the Spirit of our minds by God’s voice in His Word, and being nourished at His own table.  We are here so that we might be His Light to those still in darkness, a people so profoundly transformed by the forgiveness shown to us that we might forgive one another in His name.

Jesus has not called us to be silent about sin but neither has He called us to be the arrogant voices of the self-righteous.  He has called us to be merciful as we have receive His mercy and to show that mercy to those around us, especially to those caught up in sin and being led astray from God’s hope, His promise, and His life.  There is a promise given to us as well.  Forgive and you will be forgiven.  Forgiveness cost Jesus everything upon the cross but it was a price He was willing to pay for you and for me.  Now He asks us to let those unaware of what His love has accomplished to know what His love does for them.  It forgives our sins, quiets our conscience, frees us to know and love His commandments, and comforts us with the mercy that none deserve but comes to us without limit.  May God grant us this heart of mercy as we have know it in Christ Jesus our Savior.  Amen. 

Save the Date. . .

This year's Henkel Conference is scheduled for August 17-18, 2026.

Register through Eventbrite by clicking here.  You can be added to the conference email distribution list by sending a request to: henkel@ascensionmadison.com.

Those scheduled to present include:

•  Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist, Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College, Fox News contributor, and best-selling author
• Scott Yenor, Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage Foundation and Professor of Political Science at Boise State University
• Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media
• Noelle Mering, Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Life and Family Initiative and columnist for the Catholic Herald
• Korey Maas, Chairman and Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College
• plus more TBA! 

 

Glimpses of the transcendent. . .

Over the course of many years and many folks who traded Lutheranism or some other form of conservative Protestantism for either Rome or Constantinople attempted to explain why they left.  In particular, I felt that the Lutherans should have been the least tempted to swim either river -- given that we have both the catholic doctrine and practice married to a strong preaching and teaching emphasis.  It would have seemed to be a no brainer but they left anyway.  It cannot be for the rational side of things or for understanding since both Rome and Constantinople have a sometimes confusing array of answers, even conflicting answers, to the questions raised.  "Holy mother church" is largely the answer to most any query that is raised.  But somehow it works.  Or it seems to....

Those who do respond to my own curiosity, often tell me that their problem with Lutheranism or with Protestantism is often summarized as "is that all there is?"  In other words, they got the words but from their they encountered some form of disconnect.  Where is God?  What is the shape of the baptized life?  Is it simply an appeal to the mind or an encounter with the transcendent?  Is there any room left in modern church life for mystery?  Where do you glimpse the transcendent?  I get this.  I am not ready to abandon the confessional documents of my own tradition but it is painfully obvious that too often on Sunday morning the business of worship is simply transactional instead of mystical.  We have succumbed to the temptation to make information and knowledge the apt substitute for the presence of God.  

A very long time ago I read Brother Lawrence The Practice of the Presence of God.  I still have it in my library.   It was a compelling question for me coming to college from a solid, Midwestern rural LCMS parish.  I had three years of catechism to answer the questions and impart information.  I had 18 years of sermons long on information -- telling me right from wrong, right churches from wrong ones, and right doctrine from false.  The reality is that this still let me with a quest for a sense of wonder that was not being met by what I had experienced growing up.  In junior college with the likes of H. Andrew Harnack and Ed Peters, among others, a new dimension to the Sunday morning experience arose and began to introduce into the same old page 15 Divine Service the glimpses of the transcendent and the experience of the presence of God that had been overwhelmed by the power of words, knowledge, information, and understanding.  It was mind-blowing for this pre-sem guy who had little experience outside his own home church.

I suspect I am not alone.  Although I am now more than fifty years older and with an experience of some 46 years as a pastor behind me, the haunting question remains.  What difference does it all make?  It has long been my suspicion that orthodox Lutheran preaching has lacked this element.  We are so terribly fearful of telling people what to do, how to live, and how to love the things of God that we have told them, we seem to preach about Christ more than Christ, about what to believe than how to live what you believe.  What does it all mean?  Where is God?  Surely not up there somewhere.  If not there, where?  Here in our midst?  We have the information but do we have the appreciation for the glimpses of the transcendent right there in the Divine Service both in the words spoken into the ear, the grace of absolution applied to the guilty conscience, and the taste of God upon our lips in the foretaste of the eternal that is our ordinary food?

It is this that I fear is causing people who get the words but are missing the mystery to search for something else.  Tragically, they often end up trading off one for the other when they should be expecting and even demanding it all.  The mystery of God is not inconsistent with the voice of Scripture and the truth of doctrine.  The glimpses of the transcendent are not escapes from ordinary reality but that which helps us live as those who are in but not of the world, followers not merely of Christ's voice but those who walk in His ways.  If there is a failing of Lutheranism, it is often that we do a very fine job of imparting information but forget why we are imparting it.  Living as the new people born of the baptismal womb is exactly what we were born to do.  Beloved, we are God's children now.  The mystery of what will be we accept by faith but the mystery of who we are is not lost to us in the practice of our faith day after day after day.  When worship ends up being only words, even for the God who is the Word made flesh, we miss the significance of what it means to behold the glory of God face to face.  When it becomes transactional or propositional, we are no longer the sinners transformed by the mercy of God and become like Eden's children trying to get God even if we cannot be Him.

Real girls need not apply. . .

So I read this in a media post reporting on a news story across the pond:

One in five boys aged 12 to 16 is in or knows someone in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot, according to a Male Allies UK study of over 1,000 boys across 37 UK schools. 85% have talked to chatbots and 26% prefer the attention to human connections. The top companion apps have tens of millions of users and let children design an AI "girlfriend" in under five minutes, then charge for virtual gifts and explicit content. The apps advertise on YouTube and online games. There is no minimum age law for AI companions. Age verification is a checkbox. 

Imagine that.  Some folks thought AI was the technology to save us from ourselves!  It is sad that 1 in 5 teen boys have this within their experience and that 1 in 4 prefer the AI girl to the real thing.  Well, it is really more than sad.  It is an unmistakable sign of a serious problem that is not merely a stage or even a positive choice but an acceptance of how broken the world is.  The fact that eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed is just as concerning.  This alone says that they trust a chatbot over a real person with a real voice. In less than five minutes for a young boy to create his “dream girlfriend” -- someone they can customize and design according to their own preferences without the need to compromise or sacrifice.  In this way, the boy gets it all except that it is not real.  While no kid begins with the false assumption that this chatbot is a creation the fruit of technology for money, the same kid can quickly “forgot” that the creative persona is not real.  Part of the problem lies in the constant positive feedback provided by these created identities and what such a stilted relationship does to the child becoming an adult and the ability of that child to become a healthy and integrated part of society.

While this is reported in the UK by The Telegraph, we would be foolish to presume that such is limited to the confines of the UK.  It is an ever spreading reality as children use AI in pursuit of school work or information but do not stop there.  Because this is a new phenomenon which the parents of these youth did not know or experience for themselves, it also leaves families ill-equipped to recognize or respond to these situations when they discover them.  Furthermore, the way that AI is incorporated into education and modern day life is on the increase and will certainly continue to increase this phenomenon before it is abated in any deliberate or accidental way.  What is even more a problem is that this has become socially acceptable within the peer groups of these young teens and the promise of AI lauded by the media and political and media leaders.  In fact, it is sometimes even encouraged by churches.

Where are the guardrails to prevent harm to these young teens or to provide for them direction into healthy and real relationships?  That is what we struggle with today.  Pope Leo certainly hit a nerve here but his warnings are as yet without any means or mechanism within the churches or social organizations to protect our children from the lies that seek to exploit them in the guise of someone better than life.  I do not have the answers but it is high time that we spent some capital of time and money developing some answers before it is too late.  It does not take long to lose a generation to the very things which were supposed to improve and make better their lives.  At least this we know from history already. 

CS Lewis warned us of this in That Hideous Strength.  The problem of AI lies not in its limitations but in its lack of limitations.  It can literally ruin everything and renders sterile to the point where nothing is good, nothing is desirable, and nothing is worth the reality. The threat of AI is not its incompetence so often revealed by memes on the internet but that it is too efficient and soulless.  It works well to supply pleasing words and images and even music but it also cuts us off from our own past by rendering fiction as truth until we do not know the difference.   A world where you can make anything at any time to fit any desire is a world in which nothing is necessary or worth any risk.  Surely this is exactly what Lewis was hinting at -- the more perfectly we manufacture a false human expression the more we risk being emptied by the very thing that is life.  Maybe we cannot kill AI but at least we should be able to prevent it from becoming the next stage of human evolution 

  

Very different perspectives. . .

One of the confounding things of God is that His mercy is so remarkably different from the way we approach mercy.  For us mercy is about compassion and kindness shown to the deserving but for God it is compassion and kindness shown to those who deserve none of it.  It is the same with how we approach forgiveness.  For us on earth, forgiveness requires something from the forgiven.  Implicit in this is not only a promise not to do it again but the right of the one doing the forgiving to judge progress on that goal.  This implies that the forgiveness is not a real done deal unless and until such progress is made by the forgiven to ending that which needs forgiving.

Genuine repentance in our eyes is almost always related to behavior.  What we do proves the intention of the heart or proves the hypocrisy of our words and promises.  We forgive those who have then done something to engender that forgiveness.  They have shown a requisite sorrow over their sin and have made promise not to sin again and are making positive steps to do just that.  Repeat offenders are by their very nature suspect in our view of those who deserve to be forgiven.  It always amazes me that we expect and demand so much more than God does.

St. Paul puts it bluntly.  While we were yet sinners and enemies of God, Christ came.  He did not come for the deserving or for those, who given the gift of forgiveness would make atonement and live in obedience to the commandment, but for sinners who could not help or redeem themselves and before they could even know or request such mercy from God.  But there we are, gumming up the works of forgiveness, by walking back what God has done for us in Christ and then applying more rigorous standards to those who ask forgiveness.

St. Peter rightfully and honestly asked the Lord what the limits of forgiveness were -- now many times, how earnest the request, and how willing to make amendment of life.  But our Lord dismisses all such talk and simply says as often as they request, forgive.  And then St. Matthew records the only qualifier -- as often as you have been forgiven by God.  This is forever enshrined within the words of the Church's primary prayer, the Our Father.  Forgive us as we have been forgiven by YOU.  But how hard that is.  How difficult it is to find the line marking the divisions among us and discerning to whom and when to step back.  For us, the witness of Matthew 18 is more as another accusatory voice than it is a witness to the seeking of restoration from the one offended.  For us, telling it to the Church is announcing triumphantly the sin of the other -- at least in part if not in whole to justify ourselves and tidy up our own righteousness.  Both of these are foreign to the words and will of Christ.

We seek to insulate ourselves from hurt or from being rendered foolish but God gladly plays the fool for the sake of those whom He redeems.  He is willing to stand at the horizon every morning and every evening and search the sky for the prodigal to come home, already hearing their lame excuses and well-rehearsed scripts, but then He silences their voice with His own embrace, restoring the garment of our belonging and sitting us in the place of honor which most of us think should belong to those who have earned it and worked for it.  Such is the majesty of forgiveness -- far from the weakness of a passive heart it is the profound act of strength from a heart which acts even before the sin to rescue the sinner.

In our eyes such limitless grace is almost laughable and greatly offensive.  Justice is what we request more than mercy but the mercy of forgiveness if better than justice.  If only we could convince ourselves that this was true!  Alas, the Holy Spirit's job is daily to do just that -- convince us of the truth of His mercy and convince us to practice such mercy one to another.  How profound the moment when heaven rejoices and the sinner confesses the sin only to have that sin cast as far as the East is from the West by the mercy of God that has no end.  Thanks be to God!