Surviving the winds of change. . .

When traveling too or from my ancestral home in Northeast Nebraska, I generally drive HWY 36 from Hannibal to St. Jo, Missouri and back again.  Inevitably I pass the home of General John J. Pershing (Laclede) and James Cash Penny (Hamilton, Missouri).  I grew up with JC Penney (and Sears and Montgomery Wards and Woolworths and K-Mart).  You know how many of those big names are gone.  JC Penney is still around but has fallen on hard times.  JC Penney's problems were primarily caused by a failed pricing strategy implemented by former CEO Ron Johnson, who replaced traditional coupon sales with everyday low prices, leading to a loss of customer interest and sales. Additionally, the company struggled with increased competition from online retailers and a lack of clear identity in the market.   Even when they abandoned the changes that proved to be their downfall, they suffered and have been on a downward trajectory ever since.  Sometimes surviving the change back is as difficult as surviving the change that caused the problem.  This is true of business but also of religion.

While Pope Leo may be exercising some caution in his changes in the wake of Francis' death, the whole thing illustrates the problems of changing leaders in any context but especially in the Church.  When the pendulum swings to the other side, it brings with it a host of changes which may be salutary and good but which can also extract a real cost to the vitality of the institution.  The Roman Catholic Church cannot survive a pendulum swing back and forth between leaders who have very different visions of what that church is or should be.  With every swing back and forth it loses the confidence of its people, its stature in the world, and momentum.  That is why having a Francis as pope was so destructive.  Unless and until Leo restores what was, that church will continue to struggle and as long as the possibility remains that another Francis can undo what JPII and BXVI have done, the church will continue to run out of gas.

The same is true of Lutherans.  When we elect leaders who have such different styles and visions for our church body, we consume precious energy and resources just surviving the change.  Every institution struggles with this.  Seminaries and universities know the cost of such change -- even the salutary change which restores what was lost by unfaithful leaders.  Both Concordia Theological Seminary and Concordia Seminary have struggled with leadership changes which cost them momentum and credibility over the years.  It is a struggle even when the right direction is restored.  Everyone knows that there was and remains a distinct difference between the LCMS Presidents Harms and Preus, Kieschnick and Harrison.  No matter which side you were in casting a ballot, the hick up of distinct leadership change is hard on the institution.  That is why elections matter.

It is also true in the parish.  When there is a radical difference between one pastor and his successor, the congregation struggles with the change.  Even when the change is to move to restore what was, the very issue of change is its own problem.  People in the pew struggle to survive the change between liturgical and contemporary worship, between a gregarious and introvert pastoral personality, between a hands on pastor and one who seems attentive only to the things directly in his job description.  It does not matter which side you think is right or wrong, the change is hard on the institution.  Change is manageable and helpful when it is deliberate and incremental, when it is accompanied by a long term pastoral tenure, and when it is explained ad nauseam along the way.  Without these, change is just plain hard on us all.

We live in a world of change, a dizzying array of changes which daily provide us with too much to digest and become accustomed to.  When the Church becomes another venue of such change, it betrays part of its purpose and it also betrays the confidence and trust of the people.  So be careful.  Even when you are heading in the right direction, you must be sensitive to how these changes will be felt within the parish.  Sixteen years ago the Missouri Synod turned itself upside down in governance format and we are still trying to sort it all out.  It is a truism worth pondering for those who would like to make changes.  Sometimes it is not the particular change that is the problem but surviving change at all.  The Church is not the kind of institution which ought to be or can be a constant initiator of change.  We are by nature the preserver of tradition, salutary tradition, in which fidelity to Scripture and this tradition is more valuable than being reactive or proactive to every set of circumstances that might present themselves.  We have habits which are not always good but familiar and when we change our habits, we need to proceed with caution.  Shouting we are not your grandfather's church will not necessarily guarantee that we will become the church of the latest generation.  Oldsmobile once insisted it was not your grandfather's car but look where that landed them.  God has not given us the reins to the Church to do with as we see fit but called us to remain faithful, endure, and pass on faithfully what was passed down to us.  That might be enough despite those who think that unless we reinvent ourselves we shall surely die.

Evolution into darkness. . .

Harvard University is, well, Harvard, after all.  It is a singular institution whose reputation is unsurpassed.  Even though it has boatloads of money, it still charges for its services -- especially to overseas students.  It has a cache which is worth as much as its actual educational services, perhaps even more.  Access to the network of Harvard grads is worth more than the instruction in the classroom.  Nevertheless, it is always good to pay attention to what the school says about itself.

Newly installed Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard defined what Harvard has become at her inauguration:  “The ‘Veritas’ in Harvard’s shield was originally intended to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the unassailable verities of Puritan religion.  We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a possession [emphasis added]…We must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand."

In other words, Harvard has not simply abandoned its once formative ties with a particular version of Christianity or any version of the faith, it has abandoned the idea of truth itself.  It is the pursuit more than the end, the question more than the answer, and the doubt more than the certainty which Harvard exists to promote.  That is one heck of an enterprise and price tag to find out that truth itself is an illusion or no more than a stopping point along the way in the journey to knowledge.  But what of the knowledge that has no facts, no truth, no abiding reality?  Is it worth the billions in the endowment fund and the tens upon tens of thousands in tuition/room and board to find out that the only things for sure is that nothing is sure?

It would be unfair to single out Harvard when the same thing can be found in universities and colleges large and small, notorious and anonymous.  That is the state of higher education today.  If university presidents, administrations, and faculties exist only to challenge what they have deemed the transmission of the moral and intellectual patrimony acquired over the centuries by tainted teachers and scholars who were once thought noble, why bother with the cost of such an education?  Doubt, after all, is pretty cheap and easy.  You do not need a university education to tell you to question everything.  The end result of Harvard's educational method and the same from any other institution supposedly of higher learning is not knowledge but the worst kind of privilege and elitism parading as truth.  Though it would never happen in a million years, Harvard would be better served returning to its Puritan roots and risk being labeled foolish by the educated elite than to dole out foolishness in place of facts and overcharge for it in the process.  Yet it would seem that Harvard is not really in the education business.  It is selling not a well-rounded education nor an introduction to truth but a network of contacts who share a common sheepskin more than they share a common set of values, facts, or opinions.  Yet by existing merely to challenge Harvard has joined the most elite of roles -- an expensive court jester who entertains more than he informs.  That is not the kind of university we need nor is it the kind of university we can afford.
 

 

Failures . . .

Feminism has long advocated for the idea that women do not need men and, more lately, that a toxic masculinity makes men even more unnecessary to women.  The news at Cornell must have shaken that idea a bit.  Women do need men.  They need real men and not impulsive children who do not know how to behave.  Even more than this, we all need men, responsible men, stand up men, who have learned how to act in public and in private.   A real man does not take advantage of a woman when she is drunk.  That was the rule long before feminism decided that women did not need men but somewhere along the way we stopped teaching this rule to men.  That is a sad indictment of society as a whole and the state of the family.

It is the failure of the home.  Sadly, too many boys are raised in homes without a positive male role model and either live in a vacuum without a man at all or with a poor example of what it means to be a real man.  Men do not act violently against women.  This is a failing of the home and a consequence of divorce which too often removes a male role model from the boys (or girls) in the home.  It is also a consequence of single parent families without a husband or father in the picture at all.  I am not pointing fingers but I have known of too many women who had children by several men -- none of whom has any active role to play in the lives of her children.  We have institutionalized this problem and made it appear to be normal.  It is not.

The boys so accused are not the dregs of humanity but the super achievers who are attending an exclusive university with so-called privileged backgrounds and checkbooks which brought them there.  It would be easy to condemn those from the wrong part of town or lacking any social standing but these are not the boys who apparently thought it was alright to take advantage of a girl who was vulnerable and whose judgment impaired.  That she was in that position was bad enough but that boys thought it okay to take advantage of her in that position shows how stilted and distorted our values have become.

It is the failure of a society without a common sense of morality and virtue.  When we organize society apart from commonly held values and a sense of what it means to excel, we are left with competing values or, worse, no values at all.  A common religion once taught such common values and a diversity of religions which should share in the ideal of monogamous marriage and fidelity within marriage, of children and the nobility of parenthood, and of the value of discipline and self-discipline should, theoretically at least, support this.  The track record, however, is not as good as the theory.  The sidelining of religion and the diminishing role of religion in life overall have both had their effect in accepting and tolerating a manhood which is simply a large size child with desires and wills that refuse to be ordered.

It is the failure of freedom.  We have made the goal of individual freedom so sacred that we justify and allow the worst abuse of that freedom.  Pornography is not wrong because it exposes nudity or portrays the sexual act between men and women but because it places both within the context of abuse, violence, exploitation, and every perverted idea of what sexual pleasure is or how to achieve it.  Porn is a mirror into the corrupt soul and we have insisted upon freedom in the extreme to make available even to children learning the rudiments of sex and their roles as men and women.  Little children cannot escape pornographic images or video and their understanding of themselves and others is framed less by any conversation with parents or religious figures or physicians than it is the secret images of the screen.

Our unsocial social media and the often crude and violent lyrics of contemporary music only aids in the reduction of men and women to their most base and crude selves.  Without positive role models in the home and without a religion promoting the roles of male/female and husband/wife built upon mutual respect for each other and those roles, our sons and daughters are left to exploit and be exploited without a counterbalance to the unrestrained pursuit of self.  What is there in our media that would insist that gang rape of a drunk woman is wrong in every circumstance and in every context?  If there is even a hint of doubt about the uniform condemnation of this in our media, then that media is corrupt and is corrupting us and making us more children than adults. 

As Christians we should know this better than most.  The elevation of human life and virtue is not in the pursuit of self but in self-control, living upright and decent lives with respect for others and a refusal to exploit another for personal pleasure.  There is a false sense of Christianity in which God is setting us free to pursue ourselves and our wants and desires but this fake version of the real faith is not being condemned as it should.  We are not simply our desires.  We are much more than this.  It is what distinguishes us from animals whose instincts define their behavior.  We are not them.  We are or ought to be governed by principle, by a sense of right and wrong, and by a willingness to pursue what is good and right and true and for the common good even when that conflicts with our wants or desires as individuals.  Christianity cannot guarantee that any will act in accordance with those morals and virtues but it at least provides a solid counterbalance to the desires that do what is right in their own eyes and in the moment.  It is not that this kind of thing never happened before or in the past when a sense of Christian virtue and responsibility was more universally held.  It is that without Christian virtue and responsibility there is even less to restrain us from our basest desires and the pursuit of want over goodness.  That none of these boys stopped this travesty from happening is another element of the weakness of our backbones in the face of what is tempting.  Indeed, this is one more example that what failings we have will not be improved by feminism or more competition between the sexes but by the triumph of constraint over desire and the life governed by conscience which has the power to make us do what is right even when it is not what we want. 

My greatest spiritual work. . .

In the constant and seemingly endless debate over the role of our works and their contribution to our salvation, one quote seems to stand out to me.  It was probably an off the cuff kind of remark that ended up being remembered.  It was by an Orthodox author, although I do not recall who he was or is, but it is one of those things that drives a conversation.  It does not deny our works but frames them within the only context that they can fill.  So read it and give it some consideration.  I cannot remember the exact wording of the full quote although I am pretty sure that set within it was this pithy observation;

My spiritual works accomplish nothing except to bring me to that place where I realize I can do nothing to please God and am naked before Him.

The age of self-improvement in which we live seems to insist that if we want to, we can fix ourselves.  If we don't, we can accept ourselves as we are and live with it.  Both are lies.  How many podcasts and memes presume to tell us how to make a moral improvement on ourselves or at least to make a positive change in our appearance?  Whether we are intent upon fixing global warming and repairing the climate crisis or casting off the combustion engine and fossil fuels or making robots and smart machines replace the laborer on the production line, we are filled with the illusion that we can do this if we just try.  It is no wonder that this has translated into the realm of personal identity.  If we want to be a woman but find ourselves in a man's body, we can be the woman we want to be and no one can stop us.  If we want to discard a child in the womb we do not want, we can do so with a pill.  If we want to have a child but have trouble conceiving, reproductive technology can make it happen for us.  If we want to live in isolation and work, shop, eat, and entertain ourselves within the boundaries of our homes, we can.  If we want to believe in a truth that is only as deep and wide as our perception or has a time span limited to the moment, we can and no one can do anything about it.  So why don't we presume that we can invent the God of our choice or define ourselves in such a way that conflicts with nature and the work of the Creator? 

Of course, that is the problem.  All of our works bring unintended harm even when they do some good and all our efforts in the moment cannot prevent the direction of time toward its own destruction.  But our greatest spiritual work is to look into the mirror of our soul and find ourselves wanting, without the power to please God or repair our sinfulness or atone for our sins or hide them from His gaze.  Yet this is enough.  It might end in despair, regret without hope, but the Spirit swoops in to turn this into repentance and faith which trusts in God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  God delights in our acknowledgement of our weakness not because He gloats over our plight but because He knows that this is where the Gospel begins in us.  It fills the emptiness of our own failing and inability with the fullness of Christ and His work.  It leads us beyond ourselves and our despair, disappointment, and destruction to bring us from darkness into His saving light.  Although we fear that the light will only expose, it does something we never expected.  It heals and redeems, shining upon Christ even as it exposes our failing and impotence.  And in that moment, the grand gift of grace does its work and the fruits of mercy formed on a cross make alive what was dead, giving hope to those who can hope for nothing, and raising us from the death of sin to the life death cannot touch.  If this is all our works can do, they have not done nothing but the something that in emptiness allows God to fill us.  Thanks be to God! 

Now that it is over and done. . .

Politics is a game I rather abhor.  As I have said many times, I would prefer a benevolent monarchy to the mess that we call democracy.  However, that is what we have.  I am very conservative socially and politically, not a libertarian at all but neither am I militant about using the government or law to do what some would do on either side.  Laws do not make morality or even enforce it but reflect the sense of the time and that requires the Church to address the question of morality on issues less than on candidates.  

Ours is a strange system of two political parties which people seem to dislike with equal fervor and which parties seem powerless to stand for anything uniform or cohesive or coherent.  They are different more by degree than principle, more by pace of change than direction.  I have very little confidence in either of them.  Neither am I looking for a righteous person to get my vote.  I will admit to sometimes holding my nose while voting for people I do not like and would never count as friend but whose positions on the issues more closely conform to my own.  I suspect people on both sides do this and I also suspect that this is a much larger group than either party would care to admit.  I am writing this before the election so as I write I have no idea how it all turned out.  I will say this.  The civility of the political discourse in America was long gone before Trump although he has contributed to its coarseness.  Who can forget how Johnson tarred and feathered Goldwater with a mushroom cloud TV ad that lied about the man and his positions.  But America fell for it and Johnson got a landslide.  

Another thing that is missing is any sense of humor.  It is obvious that some candidates and office holders delight in casting out a joke which most folk seem to get except the media and their political opponents.  When a Texas governor said of a Bush that the poor guy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth we all laughed.  It was funny.  There is no laughter in politics anymore and most folks take themselves way too seriously (Trump is often a shining example of that).   Provocative statements are meant to provoke and this seems to be the way of things today.  In the end, how many of s trust anything a candidate says and how many of us actually expect campaign promises to be kept?  This is perhaps the most egregious result of our cynicism.  We vote without expecting all that much from those we vote for and they seem intent to give us all of that.  How sad it has become!

Yet before we rush to blame the candidates, we need to look into a mirror.  The politics of the day are mirrors into the problems of America, amplified every couple of years in the ballot box.  If the candidates can say nothing to inspire us, it just might be that we do not want to be inspired but prefer to be enraged.  If the people running for office are not sterling folks, it might be that we have rigged the system to produce exactly the folks we love to complain about.  If the politics have become nasty, well, then, follow an argument on Facebook or any other social media platform to see the nastiness multiplied even among friends and family.  If the negative ads are all we see, could it be that we no longer wish to be educated about the issues or have the attention to give to a nuanced political debate of them and prefer to get testosterone packed sound bites texted to our phones or parading across that social media?  We tend to get the kind of candidates we are as a people and probably therefore deserve.

Israel once complained that they had no king and needed one only to have a laundry list of kings they did not want or like and are remembered by no one.  It happened then and it happens now.  I have personally aided and supported good men whose political campaign made them swear off politics forever.  Sadly, that is the fruit of our poisoned atmosphere.  Good people do not offer themselves to the process or as candidates to govern.  Is that what we want?  And pastors and congregations who become the kind of naysayers of doom who add fuel to the fire are also to blame -- on both sides.  I do not want Cardinal Cupich to pick my candidate but neither do I want Paula White to.  If you do not know those names, Google them.  But it does not help to have churches and their leaders try to enter the fray with the idea that they can throw mud without getting dirty.  We all get dirty in this process.  That is the problem.  So we need to spend less time on the people and more on the issues but not as oracles of wisdom as much as voices of conscience.  Some of the worst things on the ballot are not people but issues -- constitutional amendments and other things that transgress on the sacredness of life and the solemn duties of parents and children to each other.  We surely need to equip our people to see through the fog to know what it is that is at stake there.  So I guess I have had my fun.  You are free to disagree with me but frankly I am glad it is over for at least six weeks or so before the next election season seems to start again.  It is less seasonal anymore than it is continuous.  Sigh.