A lesson learned too well. . .

The language of healing has always been a part of the Christian faith.  It is there both in the telling of the stories of God's healing grace at work to remedy the human ills of disease but also in the overall description of God's salvific work.  We have always said God is a healing God, taking what is broken and making whole and taking what is diseased and granting health.  They are good and salutary (itself a healing word) terms and descriptions of what God has done.  But at some point, the words stole the message.

Therapeutic deism did not begin recently.  It goes back to the demand of the sick for God to fix what was wrong and to the demand of the hungry to be fed without earthly labor to provide the food.  We have always found a temptation to substitute the present for the eternal.  At some point, however, it become the dominant image of God and the dominant image of salvation.  We are no longer the guilty or shameful who are searching for cleansing or the sinners in search of redemption.  We have become the discontent in search of pleasure, the sad in search of happiness, the bored in search of excitement, the lonely in search of friendship, and, under it all, the spectator in search of entertainment.  The problem with this is that you do not need a Savior, a God incarnate, or a cross and empty tomb to provide these things.  These live not in eternity but in the present, in the moment, if you will.

Though it would be tempting to place this blame at the feet of the liberals, we are all to blame.  We have so eloquently described God as healer that the people no longer look for or need a God who redeems.  They are looking for a therapist to listen, for someone to approve and commend them as they are, and for anyone to show them how they might satisfy their longings rather than reorder them according to God's will and purpose.  Christianity’s dalliance with healing and therapy has become greater than the quest for redemption, for salvation, and for righteousness.  When Jesus sent forth His disciples to heal (therapeuete) the sick, we all took Him at His word and made it into a promise that would be fulfilled now.  All of our expanded analogies using healing to describe salvation have born the wrong fruit.  We want and expect God to do more for us today than for eternity.  We want to flourish in the here and now — body, soul, heart, and mind — and this is what have come to expect and demand from God.  To quote Captain Piccard, "make it so."  

We were encouraged along the way by things outside the faith to look to our thoughts, emotions, and desires to define what happiness looked and how to live well.  We learned from society that our stories were more important than real truth and experience was more reliable than facts.  We have told ourselves this over and over again until we were convinced that this was God speaking to us and so the cultural mythology of the moment overwhelmed the Scriptural expression of need and Savior, sin and redemption, hell and heaven.  The worst evil was that which inhibited or put value judgments on those thoughts, emotions, and desires.  The best good was that which allow those thoughts, emotions, and desires to flourish unhindered by challenge or what others think — much less God.  Authenticity was to the self and the self-authenticating self desired and accepted approval only and nothing less.

When even conservatives stopped speaking of sin or of the evils of sin and began accepting brokenness and pain and disappointment as primary, we became mere puppets of the culture and weak echoes of what everybody already knew and believed.  Who needs heaven when you can expect it or find it on earth and who needs a Savior when the worst sin is not living by your unfettered desires and wants?  We ended up trying to sell the need for God in ways that made sin a sideline and the world loved it.  That is why there are so few churches and preachers speaking about sin and death, forgiveness and life, in the same terms as Scripture and why the substitutionary atonement model of salvation became a pariah to the pulpit as well as to the modern mind.  Lets admit it.  We all joined on the moralistic therapeutic deism model in some way or another and now we have to dig ourselves out of it before nothing of the real Gospel remains.

A few numbers and a thank you. . .

Since beginning this little enterprise some 16+ years ago, the readership has constantly surprised me.  So far, since the blog began, some 17 million folks have tuned in, fewer in the beginning and it has grown.  Every day some 6,000-10,000 people get on the blog for one post or another, some 60,000-100,000 monthly, and a million or so annually.  Obviously, some days more than others and some posts are better than others.  Some tune in and never come back.  Most return with varying degrees of frequency.  I deliberately have not monetized this blog though I have had tempting offers.  It was never mean to bring in the cash.  I like writing the blog posts.  I enjoy reading and my head is filled with useless information and a few decent pastoral and meandering thoughts.  Thank you for reading.  If I offend or upset, I do apologize.  If I get you thinking, I am glad because something got me thinking.  If I repeat myself, well, I am getting old.  LOL.  Cut me some slack.  Do I have familiar themes -- you betcha.  Am I always right?  Well, I think I am at the time I wrote it but I do change my mind and I have no guarantee of infallibility -- think what I could have accomplished if I had!!!  I do not know how long I will keep this up or keep up the pace of posting but it is still going strong.  And so am I.  Thank you all.  When I run into you and you mention the blog, it encourages me -- even when you think I got it wrong!  I am humbled by your kindness -- like the guy I ran into in the Denver airport who said, Are you Pastoral Meanderings as if I were somebody important.  Thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart.  And God bless you all.  

The value of our rites. . .

Recently  I read of a church and the baptismal font in which a saint of some renown who live a very long time ago had been baptized.  It suddenly occurred to me that we know not only where this man was baptized but, through the church's rites, we also know with confidence he was baptized and the liturgy that was used.  We did not have to wonder if he was rightly baptized or what was confessed.  We know.  We have the rite, faithfully preserved, and most of our baptismal rites to this day are a modest evolution of the rite used for this man.  So going back 100 or 1000 years, we know what was said, done, and confessed because we know the rites.

As a pastor dealing with people who did not come from a liturgical tradition with rites, it was often difficult to know if someone had been rightly baptized or not.  I did more than a few conditional baptisms because the person did not have any idea if or how water was applied, if the baptism was in the name of the Triune God, or anything else.  Perhaps it was a river or a tub in the front of a congregation, the rite was ad libbed and where an explanation point should have been was a question mark.  God does not mean us to live in the what ifs but in the because.  That is the gift of our rites.

This is why it is so disconcerting when you watch a worship service and the pastor is making it up as he goes along -- the spiritual euphemism is being led by the Spirit.  He does not even half to say bad things.  Because his words live only in the moment, they struggle to become the eternal Word that Christ has spoken.  When rites are published with the doctrinal imprimatur of the church's official sanction, they live beyond the moment and outside the particular space of one guy before one set of people saying what may be in his heart.  I do not judge the motives but the end result is to deprive the people of the confidence which Christ means for them to have.  That is the gift of our rites.

When the penitent comes for absolution, you can dance around it in a thousand different ways that sound great but end up leaving the person without the comfort the rite itself provides.  I forgive you all your sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Ego te absolvo.  They are not magic but they are a lifeline for the people whose sins trouble their consciences and who hearts are weighed heavy with grief and shame.  There is a place to address the folks with words to console and yet their must be the clear absolution so that the chains of what they have thought, said, and done are cast off and they can go home free.  That is the gift of our rites.

Someone will surely tell me that God knows.  God knows what happened in the ad lib by a stream or at the altar or in the confessional.  He does.  Thanks be to God!  But it is not God who needs to hear it.  It is the child or adult who comes to baptismal water without name or eternity who needs to hear what the rites say.  We are our rites.  Our confidence is not in the rites but in what those rites preserve -- the clear Word and promise of God.  It is not God who needs to hear the magic words at the altar before the miracle bread and cup appear but we do.  We need to know what it is that we are receiving, what is gifted to us in this bread and cup.  We need to know the familiar refrain of the rites which tell us that this is Christ's body given for us and His blood shed for the forgiveness of our sins.  We are our rites.  Our confidence that this is the body and blood of Christ lies not in a perfect performance but in the Word of Christ preserved in the rite as the voice to still our troubled souls with hope and peace.  God knows the sins of the penitent (and impenitent, for that matter) but it is that broken soul who needs to hear the absolution in the clear and plain words that have absolved the penitent for millenia.  We are our rites.  Our confidence is not in the words as a spell to make the magic happen but the words of Christ which tell us His blood cleanses us from all our sin -- including those named just then.  

God does not judge the form or the heart but both, not as the unmerciful looking for cause but as the God who seeks to assure us that what He has promised is, indeed, ours in this water, bread, wine, and absolution.  This is what the rites preserve.  Only a fool would attach this to some unchanging incantation secretly passed down through the ages as if ordination is the passing of the secret handshake.  No, ordination is the same thing as I have spoken before.  In the words and the rite the Church says to those whom this man serves that you do not have to imagine or wonder or decide if his ministrations deliver what they promise and bestow what they sign.  The rites and this man's serve as a man under orders tell the people in the pew that this is the case.  The rites can change but incrementally, not some mighty shift that upsets everything and makes strange what was familiar but as the careful update of the timeless.  I am not bound to one of the rites only but when the rites have the imprimatur of the church's seal upon them, any one of the rites approved, it gives to those in the pew the assurance that there is more to it than feelings.  The value of our rites is too often treated as something casual and irrelevant when those rites are very important to the faith of those who come and to those who come looking for faith.  We are our rites.  We can be more but we should not be less. 

Mortal or sinful or both. . .

Although there is much in Orthodoxy which attracts me, I remain confounded by the refusal of Orthodoxy to speak of original sin except in terms in mortality.  Sometimes modern Orthodox tend to characterize the Western definition of original sin in almost comedic terms -- criminals living out their sentence here on earth before they suffer it eternally.  It does little to help with the understanding but it does make it clear to me that for the East original sin amounts to nothing more than the presence of death as a shadow over life.  It is that, of course, but is that all it is?  Our mortality is certainly one continuing consequence of the Fall but it is not the only one.  All the talk of sin in Scripture cannot be summarized as a problem of will on the part of the mortals or else Jesus is come merely to open the door to the grave and leave the stone of sin unturned.  I do not get it.

In Western theology, it is common to all theological traditions that human beings are born with “original sin,” which, in includes the curse of death and the inability to free ourselves from either death or the sin that caused it.  But that is not all.  This also means that we suffer from the continuing consequences of what our first parents did in Eden.  We share a communal guilt in addition to a personal one and this is not something we choose or suffer because of our sins we have thought, said, or done.  It is guilt inherited from Adam and Eve and the common malady of those born of woman.  Furthermore, we are born sinful and unclean, that is, we are born as sinners.  We are neither innocent nor are we good from the moment of our existence.  Every man born of woman needs to be redeemed and this is not simply the release from death.  The East does not speak in these terms.  I would suggest that it does not speak fully the language of Scripture which does speak in these terms as well as in others.  I would suggest that the original sin which speaks of our bondage to sin of which we cannot free ourselves includes death but is not merely that we are mortal and that this is not some novel invention of the West but the witness of the Scriptures and the testimony of the early Church as well.

Indeed, it seems to imply that Jesus came to liberate us from our bondage to death but our bondage to sin is something we can handle -- at least by the choice of virtue and asceticism.  That would place everyone of us back in Eden in the place of our first parents except for the shadow of mortality which is cast over us until Jesus lifts it from us and brings us into His own immortality.  How curious it is that we can handle the problem of sin but not death!  Indeed, modernity seems intent upon testing this notion.  We as people seem to be working very hard to be masters of death, making it also a choice.  Since we have already worked to eliminate sin as a category of our fallen lives, we moderns seem poised to neither to need saving nor to need a Savior at all.  While I would agree that we in the West can sound rather dismal in the way we speak of this mortal life lived in bondage to sin, the East seems too hopeful that a good choice can fix what sin has done to us.  I wish that were true but we all know it is not.   Original sin seems to be the one truth that requires no revelation.  Every newspaper account of our wrongs and every obituary speaks volumes of what sin is and what it has done to us.  

For Orthodoxy, original sin is ancestral sin, but while we suffer the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin, such as death and a tendency to sin, we do not inherit guilt for that sin.  It is no wonder that Augustine is no favorite of the East.  For the Orthodox “original sin” refers to the “first” sin of Adam and Eve.  While those born since bear the “consequences” of sin, the chief of which is death, there is also a weakness before sin.  In the West, humanity likewise bears the full “consequences” of the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, and this includes both the “guilt” of the sin of Adam and Eve and a condition which makes us more than merely weak to sin but captive to sin of which death is the universal sign of this.  In the East man is guilty only of his or her own sin but does suffer from the mantle of death which is passed to all humanity from Adam and Eve.  As Lutherans we insist that we are both mortal and sinful, wearing the guilt passed down to us from Adam and Eve and caught in sin so that we cannot free ourselves.  While this does something to the notion of man's nobility and dignity which some might find offensive, it also reflects a higher view of Christ and the accomplishment of His work on our behalf.  

What makes us a people. . .

Nations is the word that is usually used for something that hardly corresponds to what the word means in Scripture.  The nations are clans mostly, peoples linked by ancestry, culture, language, and religion.  By that we mean something very different from the thing that has borders and territory and a place on a map defined by somebody but probably not so much the folks within those borders.  Modern nations are a construct, an invention of some minds who thought this would end some of the conflicts and violence.  Boy, that has not exactly gone as planned.  The Middle East is but one example of borders gone wild with disparate peoples who have been forged into a country but the threads of that union are being constantly unraveled by the inherent divisions within.  How does anyone decide what is in the national interest of people who cannot agree on what that interest is?

Religion is not the simple thing in this equation either.  See how Muslims of different denominations within Islam war against their kin.  Christianity is no different with the history of Europe being also a history of religious wars, or at least wars fought in the name of religion if not religious in themselves.  We often forget how fragile the ties that bind us as nations and peoples and countries today.  It is to our peril.  The grant illusions of a global existence in which such minor inconveniences such as conflicting cultures, languages, religions, and values do not matter was always the weak link in the idea.  Now with America First and its counterparts throughout the world, the whole thing is being rethought.  Economics aside, there are few proponents of such idealism as the coexist crowd wants it except those who do not believe much of anything.  So what do we do?

One of the more obvious things it to recall how important a common faith is to define a nation of people.  While there are always disparities in class, wealth, race, and ethnicity, a common faith can overcome all of them to bind the people as one even with all that differentiates them within that common faith.  However, without a common faith, the unity is not simply more fragile but, in the majority of cases, it is impossible.  There are no nations that endure over the long haul without a common faith to unite the people and contribute to overcoming all that would divide them.  Without a common faith, the answer lies in some sort of oppressive regime -- whether totalitarian such as Germany was under Nazism or is in China OR authoritarian as now exists in many of the oil rich Middle East states.  Even then, Germany found a form of religion to be helpful and fostered it and even China has brought the Roman Catholics and Christians in house churches under the umbrella of the state.  This is also true of the authoritarian regimes where religion is fostered to assist in the overall state of governmental affairs even if there is some degree of religious pluralism within the society -- the so-called civil religion.  Rome knew this and even the Soviet Union knew this but somehow we have forgotten it.

The increasing problems of Scandinavia, Great Britain, France, and so many other parts of Europe exist in large measure not simply because of immigration and refugee resettlement but because this comes at a time when the religious fabric of these nations are in decline.  Without a common faith, a nation is hard to establish and hard to sustain.  With it, the dynamic changes radically.  Even in America we are facing the problem of who we are as a nation apart from the common Christian backgrounds, beliefs, and values that once were implicit in our identity.  How can a nation long exist without the structure of a common faith to encourage and support a common value system and identity as a people?  It appears to me that this is behind some of the struggles we are having today.  Diversity looks good on paper but does not translate into a workable political system without something strong and clear to unite the diverse.  Nations are made not by borders or laws but a common language, culture, and, most of all, a common faith.