The real . . .

It is increasingly difficult, dare I say impossible, for the world to distinguish truth from lies.  We live at a time in which deception is so regularly and effectively practiced that many have some to believe nothing of what they hear and very little of that which they see.  What is truth, as Pilate asked of Jesus, has become What is real?  The world has become to us a grand green screen on which we project what we like and then call that true and real.   We all look at, hear, and experience the same things but we see nothing, hear nothing, and experience nothing beyond our own judgment and preference.  Nothing is until we say it is and so reality has become merely a construct.

Our food is not real but manufactured for us.  We live not by our experience of reality but from the screens tuned to what we want or like.  The world has become a stage on which all of life is acted out as a production.  We are all claiming our moment in the spotlight and we are all imagining what we desire, value, and fear and then calling that our reality.  It was once said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but now there is no reality except that defined by and given existence by the beholder.

In this plastic reality, there is no Jesus except my Jesus.  There is no Bible except the word that I choose to hear and believe.  There is no morality except that which I judge.  There is no God except the one I define into existence.  Far from liberating anyone, this is the cruelest bondage of all.  It is no wonder that our children are filled with depression, despair, and desperation. We have handed them a canvas and told them to paint their own reality and they are at least smart enough to know that it is merely a painting and not real.  Worship has been emptied of its meaning and power because it conveys nothing real and its leaves us with nothing real -- except our feelings.

The end result in this is that Roman Catholics have decided that it is just bread and a ceremony that has no meaning or power or purpose except that which you assign to it.  So much for the real presence.  But lest any Lutherans laugh, we are right there.  When we closed our churches, we manufactured a sacrament of hermetically sealed drips of juice and bits of cracker, handed them out with sanitized hands, and told the people Jesus was in there somewhere.  In their desperation, they took these online sacraments, homemade means of grace, and priority mailed packages and prayed something was in them.  That is why even a sacramental church body is loathe to admit that this was a farce and a sham -- we said it was as real as it could get given the circumstances and now we don't want to admit we were wrong.

We are in a crisis of reality.  We no longer confess our sins but merely that we are sinners.  In this way nothing we think or say or do has to come under the scrutiny of the Law.  Instead we are happy to admit that we are under original sin and we feel no shame in it because nobody else has it any better.  Without real sins, there is no real Savior.  Jesus becomes a life coach and motivational guru helping us make the best of things but we have already sold out the cross by failing to admit sin and sold out the resurrection by making our peace with death.  We honestly cannot come up with any compelling reason why anyone would risk anything to believe or worship outside the safe zone of our feelings and preferences.  That is why we have so many who have not returned to in person worship, why so many drop out the back door of our churches, and simply fade their faith away without noticing.  We are in a crisis of reality.

If you want to be radical, why not confess the reality of water that has become a grave coughing up the dead or a womb delivering the dead to new and everlasting life?  Why not confess that sin is not only a condition we share but what we have thought, said, and done wrong and, owning those sins, mourn the death they have caused enough to repent and seek absolution?  Why not treat the Word of God as God's Word and not the words we put in the mouth of God to suit our own prejudices and preconceived ideas?  Why not bow down before the God who incarnates Himself in bread that is His flesh and wine that is His blood -- cleansing us from sin, imparting to us the medicine of immortality, and feeding us the foretaste of the eternal?  

Sin has turned everything into a fake, a lie, a deception, and a sham -- even our very humanity.  But a real God became real flesh to rescue us with a reality stronger than sin and not subject to the captivity of death.  The only reality the world can know is that reality God speaks, bestows, and delivers.  And the Church is the means of the means of grace -- giving reality to a people who have none.  Once the Church begins to address the world in this way, we might find a few more enemies and a few more friends.  Until this happens, we are irrelevant to a world which has decided the Gospel is fake news not worth bothering.  We are not simply going through the motions.  God is here!  The Church offers the world something more than a green screen on which we might project what we want or desire or fear.  The Church offers the world the only reality that is real.