Divine revelation or suggestion. . .

How easy it is for us to consider everything of faith but a request, an invitation, but certainly nothing more.  Certainly not as much as an instruction and by no means as commanding as a law.  That is the danger we are in.  Our creeds, confessions, and liturgies were once words of truth to instruct us in the faith and to keep us on the way.  Modernity has rejected the idea of truths that instruct and has decided that the job of truth is to control and restrain.  The truth of God was liberty and freedom but the truth of man is bondage and captivity.  As churches embrace the values of this world and adopt the truths of man, they surrender their sacred role a beacons of God's truth and become the agents and instruments of the lies and deception of the darkness.

What churches and pastors so often fail to realize is that when we tinker with the sacred things of the faith -- of creed, confession, and liturgy -- we do tinker with the very faith itself.  The people know and experience the things of God not by meditation or by deep thinking.  They meet the Lord through the means He has appointed.  The Church is the custodian of the means and the pastors those who administer them on behalf of the Lord and through the Church.  They are not given the choice to be faithful or not and if they are unfaithful, they have forsaken their offices and identities.an instruction,   But the reality is that the Church has adopted so much of the spirit of the age that an entrepreneurial spirit is valued above faithfulness, innovation more than tradition, and novelty more than fidelity.  This is something that all churches suffer.

Christianity as a whole has come to view the Word of God as divine suggestions and placed reason and preference as the filters to determine what that Word says and means.  It is not exclusive to our age but we have worked very hard to perfect this distance from catholicity.  We honor the legacy of our origins without listening to the voices of the faithful who went before us.  So on Sunday morning we strive for a new sound, sing a new song, bring a new message, and bow before a new god (relevance).  And then we justify it all with numbers, statistics, and customer satisfaction.  If getting the response we desire means sacrificing the Biblical vocabulary of sin and forgiveness, grace and mercy, death and resurrection, then modern Christianity has thrown Jesus under the bus as often as necessary -- seemingly without much thought and without any regret.

Now is the time for radical faithfulness.  We must stop listening to what people outside the Church think and spend more time worrying about what God thinks of what we preach and do.  We must stop apologizing for God and begin hearing and heeding His Word without regard for how people misunderstand or reject it.  Our future is tied to God and His promises and not to the world and its indifference or hostility.  This is not something I say out of regret but in confidence that radical faithfulness cannot possibly produce worse results than our attempts to accommodate the world, strip down the Gospel to a more palatable form, and minimize the need to meet the Lord with faith.  I believe the Holy Spirit is waiting for us to trust in what He will do through the preaching of the Word that endures forever and the administration of the Sacraments that bestow what they sign.  I believe that now is not the time to give into the fears of the times, the whims of a world that does not believe, and the anxiety of churches who would trade faithfulness for popularity.  My brothers and sisters, we have not been given a spirit of timidity but of courage.  But that is what is lacking most on all levels of the Church's life.