Truth is always stranger than fiction. . .

 Lord knows no one would want Jesus on Wooden Cross if it comes from a smoker's house.

Best interests of children. . .

"I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. I think part of our goal as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents, as much as we rely on parents to raise them."

While catching up on some reading and encountered a discussion of voting which included a rather radical proposal to weight the votes of young people over and against middle age and older people (me).  It was a stupid exchange that flowed normally and naturally out of a culture which values youth over age and experience.  Hidden in this discussion, however, was a statement made to justify shifting the burden away from some for the sake of youth -- a statement which actually had a lot more to do with the value and purpose of the family itself.  That is the statement above.

"Parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interest of their children..."  That is a very reasoned statement probably from someone who has no children and it comes at a time in which I have heard the complaint that old people like me have too much money and too much political power.  While that is probably the premise of this statement above, it is about much more than money and political power.  It is an argument for the individual over and against family, neighborhood, and community.  It is the cause of self-interest over and against the interests of others -- even those of our nearest kin.  It is the purposeful devaluation of the family as an institution and of the parental role as guardian and advocate for the child.  As if this were not enough, the author of the paragraph also suggested that a college graduate age 24 with neither marriage nor children to boast probably has a better idea of what is in the best interest of the child.  That says it all.

"...to make sure children aren't the hostages of their parents..."  There is again the profound animus against the parent and the family.  Because marriage and family are not a democracy in which the votes of the children count as much as the parents, the right course of democracy is to pit the family and the child against each other.  Wow.  That is the state of things.  Of course, we all know that there are bad families and problem children.  Neither of those is typical.  In fact, the normal state of things is just the opposite.  Parents who sacrifice and give their children at a cost to themselves and families who juggle the needs and wants of their children in order to give them all more rather than less.  Neither the child nor young adulthood has much comprehension of either the sacrifices or the juggling of interests that goes on routinely in the home.  Children are not hostages of their parents but run the increasing risk of becoming hostages to an educational, social, and values system that presumes to know better than mom or dad or Scripture or God.

Most of us learn what family and parenting are from our families and our parents.  We are not instructed by books or "professionals" but by the common experience of growing up in a home where mom and dad love us and do what is best for us and we learn to trust that they know what they are doing.  Do they screw up?  Sure, I have made a ton of mistakes raising my children and I expect most of us would be happy to admit the same.  But few of those mistakes have anything to do with holding our kids hostage to our interests and most of them had to do with acquiescing to theirs when my instinct told me to say "no".  

God designed the family and we did not invent it.  He endowed the family with influence far beyond what happened within the home.  Indeed, He made Himself known to us as our heavenly Father and thus gave the dignity of fatherhood and motherhood a higher place than mere biology or ancestry.  Because of sin we surely fail to live up to the promise of His gift but it would be a sad betrayal of that gift and trust to cede the decisions for the children to those outside the family.  Yes, in extreme circumstance the family proves to be unworthy of that trust and sins against the responsibility as well as the child.  But what is being spoken of here is nothing less than institutionalizing the state or others within the state and giving to them the responsibility that belongs to the family alone.  Surely the sad state of affairs today and the increasing rarity of children among us ought to suggest that culture, society, and trendy thinking are even less reliable than plain, old-fashioned sinful moms and dads. 

Given, not chosen. . .

Names, like pronouns, have become agents of our own self-expression.  Though they were once the domain of the society to know how to address you, they have become more the domain of the autonomous self, another avenue of our own identity.  I wish we could forget this. I wish we could go back to the days when family members provided the source for the names we gave to our children instead of some ridiculous penchant to saddle the child with something unique or strange, a name no one else had ever known.  I admit some sympathy for those countries with name police who must give approval before a birth is registered and the name duly given to the child.  I am not resigned to the desire of parents to give novel spellings to old names and new names which defy pronunciation to their offspring.  I suppose I should be happy they are even having children and cut them some slack about the actual name they give the child.  But I won't.

Names are given to us, not chosen by us.  Even nicknames are given to us and not the result of our own invention or choice.  We need to remember that wisdom in an age destined to play with names as if they were Scrabble tiles.  Sometimes our ignorance shows through.  A friend once described to me a girl she encountered while student teaching.  Her mother (was there a father in the picture?) had decided that she liked the name phonetically spelled VaGeenA but in her foolishness saddled the poor kid with the name Vagina.  A year later the girl had it legally changed to just Gina.  Unfortunately, no one fined her mother for her ignorance or foolishness and maybe she never actually got it.  Names are a gift but not necessarily a kind one.

Ever since I was old enough to understand my name was Larry, I complained to my parents (one of German and one of Swedish extraction) that I could have been somebody in life if only they would have given me a better name -- Lawrence even!  Once someone pointed out that Sir Lawrence Olivier chose to be called Larry.  Oops.  Well, at least he had the formal name on his birth certificate.  I thought of all the interesting names in my family's history (on both sides) and of all that I might have been, but I did not choose that name.  It was given to me.  On the list of names and their popularity over the years, you might notice that nobody names their kids Larry anymore and so someday I might just be a rarity -- before I take my last breath and it gets inscribed on my tombstone.

Names are how we know one another.  No matter how lofty or plain, our first names are the start of every acquaintance before it has the promise of friendship.  Husband and wife repeat each other's names with their vows and promises of love and fidelity.  The baby has to get a name before he can head home from the hospital.  You even need a name to get a Social Security number.  When we pray for people at the altar, we generally use their first names instead of some name with a Mr. or Mrs. before it.  When we pray for presidents and monarchs, governors and bishops, we call them by their given name.  Donald.  Charles. William.  Roger.  In baptism we do not ask how this child will be named but how this child IS named.  Don't make the pastor ask "how do I pronounce that?"

God knows our names.  He knows which Susan or Fred we are talking about as we speak their names out loud in the dyptich -- without having to delineate the one with hemorrhoids or the one having gall bladder surgery.  There is something comforting in this.  We ought to treat names with some respect and we ought to respect those whom we name with enough respect to give them a respectable name.  A real name.  Joseph and Mary did that.  They called His name Jesus (well, not really Jesus but the Hebrew form behind it Jeshua).  We ought to follow their example and thank them for not giving Jesus a name they had invented because it sounded nice and they thought nobody else would ever choose it.  Jesus is the name above all names not because the combination of letters is unique but because He is the only who died for us and rose for us so that we might be dead to sin and alive to everlasting life.  The name does not have to be unique.  The person always is -- at least to God.  

The Wellness God. . .

It was while I attended a vicarage supervisor's orientation and preparation class in St. Louis some years ago that I was introduced to the Wellness Wheel.  The Wellness Wheel, it was explained, is a holistic tool to help the pastor/vicar see which the areas in their lives which are going well and those which might need more attention. Identifying these areas was key, I was told, to strengthening the pastor's/vicar's sense of identity and effectiveness. The Wellness Wheel is divided into eight domains: social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, environmental, financial, and occupational. According to the experts, in order to have optimal health and well-being, one must tend to all eight domains.  In the Spring of this year, our own Concordia Plan Services addressed the benefits of the Wellness Wheel in their Better Health  newsletter -- along with a nice little recipe for gluten free and dairy free quinoa pancakes.  It was there called the LCMS Wellness Wheel.  

While I have no doubt of the good intentions and the cost benefits of better health for the pastors and other church workers covered by CPS, it has always bothered me how much attention we give to the idea of wellness.  It seems to me a rather bourgeois concept, the privileged pursuit of those who spend less time than any generation before them on work for the essentials of life and more money on health and happiness than any generation before them.  Perhaps I am wrong.  Without pontificating on something I know only the barest information about, I would rather address the whole idea of the Wellness God, the God of wellness who rewards those who live and work and enjoy their leisure in a salutary way to benefit their wellness.  For the record, I am NOT advocating disregard for common sense healthy habits nor am I suggesting that we live in blatant disregard for the state of our bodies or our lives.  I am simply saying that wellness can become a mighty deity for whom we will cast aside good and right things given to us by God unless we pay attention to this temptation.  

The wellness culture is not far from a religion in which God is not the focus but the gods of a pain free, stress free, full, fun, and happy life.  It has a lot in common with the Christian Science of old and its focus on happy thoughts as a means of addressing life's ills.  It has become standard for us to believe that  physical health flows directly out of one’s mental and spiritual state.  This, of course, makes health into the center of everything.  Indeed, I imagine how many Christians are using crystals or yoga or meditation for a thousand different things that they should be addressing to God.  All you need is a mat, a quiet area of your house, and a little time to develop a spirituality without the inconvenience of either God or the Church, and one paying tangible rewards instead of the spiritual ones that seem delayed.

Sitting in silence before God in prayer and simply sitting in silence while you look deep inside yourself are not the same thing.  One begs you to look beyond yourself and the other glorifies whatever your are feeling or wanting in the moment to almost divine status.  One presumes that the greatest sacrifice you make is a little time and dedication to self while the other admits that many things in life come with a cost attached.  We all want to be soothed and consoled and told to pay attention to the little voices inside of us more than to wrestle with our vocations and callings as the people of God, husbands and wives, parents and children, and neighbors.  Suffering is not something to be avoided at all costs but the expectation of those who follow Him who suffered all for us on the cross.  Sacrifice is not something to be overcome but the mirror of the sacrificial love shown to us by Him who loved us more than self -- even to death upon the cross.  We all want balance so that we have time and energy and money for the things we want as much as for the things laid upon us as holy obligations.   Where does Scripture promise such a life without suffering or sacrifice?  Where does Jesus say this is what we deserve, what we ought to be looking for, and what our Christian lives ought to look like?

It is dangerous to borrow something like this from the world, complete with all its expectations, and to promote it to, of all people, church workers.  When “more you” is code for less God or the lie that this means also "more God," the real discipline of Christian life and morality is turned on end.  When every goal and reference point is internal, without tradition, moral demand, submission to God, service to neighbor, the wellness goal points away from God and not to Him. What may have started as a well-intentioned call to order your life more faithfully has ended up being a gussied up form of narcissism.  When you can no longer see the difference between doing Pilates, crafts, quiet time, or hiking for the sake of pleasure and well-being and those things are done as spiritual experiences contributing to your own sense of well-being, something is wrong.  The gym is not the Church.

Wellness can be a real and honest pursuit, the shedding of bad habits rooted in sin for better habits rooted in the understanding of life and your body as gift and temple of God.  These activities can certainly lower your heart rate, improve your posture, help with aches and pains, aid your focus on the things that matter, and give you an hour of quiet you badly needed. What none of this can do is turn life in to something safe and easy, without cost or demand, without sacrifice and suffering.  That is the lie.  You cannot light candles in the gym or Pilates studio and make that into the House of God, replacing the Church where real life is to be found and received.   The church of wellness softens us and our lives into the lie of something that may be comfortable in the moment but cannot deliver the peace the world cannot give.  Indeed, Jesus warns that those who save their lives will lose them for eternity,  Could it be that this is what He had in mind with those words of caution?

Happy Labor Day. . .

This is my second Labor Day as a retired man whose income is no longer the fruit of his labors -- well, current labors, anyhow.  I will admit a certain unease at that statement.  Apparently I am not alone in my status.  I real in the Wall Street Journal  “According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April.”  Work was once what defined us, at least as men.  Now that does not seem to be true.  People are not only not working but not really looking for work.  They seem to no longer need labor to define them or understand their place within the whole of the society and the world around them.  I suspect this is more universally true and not simply true of males but the point remains.  

Labor has become an enemy of our identity and not the domain in which we define ourselves.  It is not a matter of working for money, which is always important enough, but working as an expression of our humanity that is at stake.  We work not merely to earn more money for our favored pursuits but we work to become better people -- at least that is how it was once believed.  Work or labor is what we were created for and not simply the consequence of the Fall in Eden.  Work is the way we participate in God's own labor of creation once and continued creation to sustain what was once created.  Indeed, the Church has its own sacred labor in extending to those not yet of the Kingdom the fruits of Christ's own redeeming work.  So men without work, indeed mankind without labor, is the stuff of a spiritual crisis and not simply a mechanized or technology heavy world.  Refusing work or disdaining labor is itself the problem of disowning our place within God's order and our purpose which continues to be to exert dominion without domination and to do it for God's purpose and not our own whims.

AI represents a challenge to us because it threatens to rob us of our identity within God's order and to create the environment in which our leisure will become our final undoing, pursuing pleasure at the cost of morality and the institutions of marriage and family which are the bedrock of our society and God's gifts to us still -- though more and more unappreciated.  AI is a Trojan horse which hides within its promise the means to institutionalize our corruption of self, God's creation, and our place within it.  It is not because AI can do things for us but because we have so gladly surrendered ourselves to the idea that labor is a problem and not a gift and that work is something more than utilitarian but noble in stature.  On this Labor Day, we seem poised to enter into a new age in which we are celebrating more our freedom from work than our calling or vocation to it.  What will that mean for our future?  I fear to attempt to answer that question.

As Lutherans we were once part of those who embodied Protestant work ethic so much maligned and disparaged by some today.  Our emphasis upon vocation was one of the means by which we lifted what was seen as utility into the realm of the holy.  We labor not simply for money or the things we value in life but as part of our life within the fabric of God's own order and His work.  As Lutherans increasingly surrender to the idea that work is bad and labor is indignity, we will find it harder and harder to justify or defend such institutions of marriage and family.  They are our most essential work and the labor of love given for spouse and child are among the the holiest of our earthly vocations, second only to the labor that is our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for all His goodness to us.

So along with your hamburgers and hotdogs, yard sales and outings, you might pause to think about that statistic I mentioned at the beginning.  Happy Labor Day!