Ordering the disorder. . .

The chaos that sin introduced into the world was a spiral of destruction and decay that ended in death itself.  The remedy is not a do over but a redemption and it is for this that Christ became incarnate, lived in righteousness, suffered in our place, dying to set us free, and rising to bestow upon us life everlasting.  The shape of the Christian life is order -- not a chaotic freedom in which everyone does what seems right to them (the very definition of sin in the Old Testament) but an ordered freedom in which liberty begins with right relationship.

Since Eden mankind has tried to make its peace with the disorder.  Even when God issued promises, it was tempting to man to hasten those promises by their own actions.  Abraham and Sarah's impatience with God's plan to order not only their lives but humanity is a good example.  But the intervention of man only causes great disorder, hastens the decay, and contributes to the deterioration of the remnants of God's purpose still manifest, though in a distorted way, in creation.

The pace of the disorder has been quick at times and slow at others.  The time prior to the flood was, like our own day, a fast movement to a disorder that threatened even greater harm.  In mercy God slowed down man's arrogant pride and will until His work of salvation could be fulfilled.  God has always acted in the ripe moment, the fullness of time, when His saving purpose fills not only the moment but the future with His redemptive mercy.

Christ is then not an agent of change in the way sin continues to unravel us and the world around us.  Instead He is the ground of our new and eternal being, the solid rock of truth in whom alone a life, identity, and fellowship can be built.  We encounter this certainly through the preaching of His Word but its rhythm beckons us and orders our lives through the liturgy.  The Divine Service is many things, to be sure, but it is mostly a means of ordering what is disordered both for the individual believer and for the community of the faithful.  That is always how God has manifested His life among us.

Israel was not free to worship God as seemed right or pleasing in their own eyes.  No, God ordered worship down to the detail of vestment and building design so that Christ would be manifested in the worship of the Old Covenant -- even before they were able to recognize He was its center and life.  The point of Christ that the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings testify of Him was always accompanied by the fact that the Temple was His house, His father's in which He was at home.  This was no rebuke to Blessed Mary and faithful Joseph but a revelation of the larger scale of His redemptive work.

Neither is the Christian free to worship God as seems right or pleasing in our eyes.  Jesus opened the Scriptures so that His disciples might preach the Gospel and catechize those who heard.  He did not leave them with the Old Testament sacramental signs that pointed to Him but fulfilled them bestowed upon the Church the true sacraments wherein He was Lord of water, Word, bread, and wine -- the mighty Lord who works in these as means to bestow His grace and favor.  Not in the least here is the reordering of what was disordered.

Baptism orders our identity.  We are not our own; bought with the price, we are Christ's.  The old man dies and the new man created in Christ Jesus rises forth to live before the Lord now and in eternity.  The Word that is preached is the Father's Word, mediated through Christ, the Word made flesh, and put into the mouth of the preacher so that it might be powerful and efficacious -- accomplishing His purpose.  The absolution is no mere forgetting of the sin but the confronting of the sin with the only grace strong enough to take it away.  So the apostles become pastors when Christ breathes on them the Holy Spirit and gives them the authority to forgive and retain sin under their new orders as His bishops.  In the Holy Supper is the fulfillment of the Passover and the promise of the future.  The Church is not left to make its own sacraments but Christ pointedly orders the Church with the order of this Eucharist:  Do this in remembrance of Me.  What happens among us is not merely the fulfillment of all that went before as promise but the glimpse of the eternal in the foretaste of the feast to come.  The liturgy is rooted in heaven but revealed here as pattern and shape for our whole life with God.

As the world pulls us from the order of Christ, we are pulled back into that order through the weekly reclamation of the baptized to Christ.  From this our lives of prayer, devotion, good works, acts of mercy, and forgiveness for others flow.  So as the liturgy orders our lives toward God, so it orders our lives in but not of the world, living in relationship to those in our care and our neighbors in need.  In this even our sense of time is ordered -- from the chaos of a time that merely moves to a time that is in God's hand, moving toward His destiny and bringing us with Him to the house of many rooms and the place where sin and evil cannot dwell.  The liturgy orders our lives.  Prayer orders our day.  Good works order our labor.  Tithing orders our things.  Absolution orders our relationships.  It is from the Eucharist and to the Eucharist everything flows until it is only the Eucharist, the marriage feast of the Lamb without end, that remains.