So many internet oddities. . .

So I read something on social media brought to me by a member where a Lutheran has said he repents of his good works.  Given that a few weeks ago we heard James insist that faith without works is dead and issue the challenge:  you show me your faith and I will show you my works, it is almost comical how we can raise up straw men and then end up saying something foolish and confusing.  No one but a fool would suggest that our good works are perfect in and of themselves or that they contribute anything to our salvation but Lutherans have always been on the side of good works that always accompany a living faith.  In fact, we cooperate with the Spirit in these good works.  So I guess if you help the homeless person or mow your neighbor's law when they are ill you should go right home and repent of those works to the Lord and beg His forgiveness.  But that is not all there is.

There are also those who insist that the love that is the fulfilling of the Law is a different love than the love born of the Gospel.  Hmmm.  I guess we need to add more words or definitions to nuance a difference that does not seem to be there in the text.  Oh, well, it would not be the first time we massaged a different meaning into the Scriptures.  In the end it only confuses and muddies up the waters.  One love is the love the Law expects and demands and the other is the love that Christ gives.  Because it is of the Law, that love is not nearly as good or as wonderful as the love that Christ gives.  It makes love one another as I have loved you into something radically different from the love one another as you love yourself.  Is it that love that is different?  Or, is it the heart that loves which is different?

There are also those who insist that the Gospel love not simply surpasses but negates the love that fulfills the Law -- sort of an end run around the commandments.  In this argument, Jesus is not merely fulfilling the Law but replacing it with a new Law -- the law of love.  This law is perfect freedom not because it changes the desires of the heart but because it releases the heart from having to change.  Jesus is the Savior not from immorality defined by the Law but so that you can indulge in it without guilt or shame.  Whata guy!

Perhaps chief among these is the whole idea "Jesus would not want me to..."   You fill in the blank.  Jesus would not want me to suffer, to deny myself, to give up what I enjoy, to sacrifice my desires, to endure threat for the sake of the faith, etc...  The only problem is that Jesus is recorded as having said that this is exactly what lies before us if we follow Him and this is His call to those who would be His disciples.  Take up the cross (suffer), deny yourself, be concerned with others before yourself, the desires of your heart are evil and must be transformed, you will be persecuted, threatened, and even martyred for His name...  All of these things sound so appealing to us and we are taken in by them because we know what we want better than we know God's Word.

So read Scripture.  Get a good and solid study Bible to help you.  Join a Bible study group at your church (hopefully with a pastor teaching it).  Connect with some of the great podcasts available (from Issues, Etc., to The Word of the Lord Endures Forever).  Do not get your theology from social media.  Caveat emptor.

 

The only growing faith. . .

The shape of Western Europe with its deep history and legacy of faith is eroding away both in practice and in reality.  The once vibrant Christian origins of Europe have been replaced by a society in which Islam is the only growing faith and the rest are in decline.  It is a sobering reality.  We see it everywhere.  In Scandinavia the religious fervor of the past has been replaced by a passion for environment, sexual liberation, and a sustainable lifestyle.  This is what God and redemption have come to mean where Lutherans were once a profound, singing, and practicing and near universal majority.  In Europe, the Luther lands with their sites so important to Reformation history have become tourist ghettos in which the population loves to market the past but has no real or living faith to be nurtured by the Word and Table of the Lord.  Roman Catholics are equally absent from worship and polls tell the same story of a faith at least diluted if not practically absent from daily life.  Indeed, the story of the fire at Notre Dame and its rebuilding treat this as a tragedy to a historical landmark more than one for a community of faith gathered under its roof.  This says it all.  As many have said, there is no room for God in Europe except to be a footnote to its history.

That Islam is the only growing faith is not simply due to immigration but to the decline in the birth rate. Of course, it is also due to the alarming rate that Christians seem to be pushing faith into the realm of feeling over fact and distancing doctrine from spirituality.  The once overflowing worship spaces have become excess real estate or historical monuments or mere community space to house everything from painting classes to yoga.  As we watch the buildings become largely secular spaces, we are also seeing societies and individual lives move much more into the realm of the secular over the religion of their fathers (whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic).  Where prayers were once offered, spaces now function as museums or art displays.  Where people once knelt in solemn joy receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus, people now dance or listen to music.  Where preaching once spoke God's Word into the hearts of the hearers, now poetry is read or a self help class meets.  Of course, the special spaces will be preserved but not for worship.  Worship is the occasional activity of even those buildings deemed culturally significant.  The form remains but the heart is empty.  Christianity is not growing but declining and rapidly.  Islam grows where the fertile soil of society once welcomed the Scriptures and where people once cared enough about doctrine to even fight over it.  No more.

We can content ourselves to think that God is purifying His Church and weeding His garden to get rid of those less than true believers.  If that is what floats your boat, I guess it is consolation enough for now.  But not for me.  I am not content to see the Church merely survive.  I pray you are unwilling to settle for that as well.  We may not control society on the grand scale but we can preserve the faith in our hearts, preserve the faith in the home, preserve the truth by teaching our children and speaking it back and forth to each other.  We may not be able to affect the great society content to see children as burden or ornaments but we can be fruitful and multiply in our own families and train up our children in the way they should go.  We may not be able to influence the taste of culture for art that is not vulgar or music that has no melodic value but we can sing the sturdy hymns of old and teach our children to sing them as well.  In short, Islam is growing because that faith lives in the home as well as in the mosque.  Perhaps we need to learn the lesson.  The Church will not save the Christian religion without the home beating with the same heart of faith.  We can afford to lose the real estate but we cannot afford to lose the home.  That is Europe's problem and it will become ours unless we mark Christ as the center of our homes as well as our churches. 

Where God cannot be, He is

Every now and then you encounter from the pews as well as the world the familiar complaint about God and the presence of suffering.  How can God allow it?  Tolerate it?  Where is God when suffering takes place?  Like the disciples of old, it is our nature to presume that suffering bespeaks and absent God and an absence of God and His grace.  When they asked Jesus "who sinned" at the encounter of the man born blind, it was tacit admission that God could not have been in the mix of things.  If God had been, there would be no blindness and if God was, it was surely to assigned judgment.  This is our default position since the Fall in Eden.  God cannot be where pain lives or suffering exists -- except in judgment as the One who inflicts pain and suffering as punishment for sin.

The cross is the shock of a God who is not merely present in suffering as a spectator but who comes for suffering.  God is in the pain of the whip and the nails and even to the final breath exhaled in surrender to death.  God is not merely there as victim, though surely as victim, but as the One for whom this pain and this suffering were planned before the foundation of the world.  He is the God whose mercy is not revealed in the absence of pain and suffering but there in the midst of it all.  His work is not to condemn and to assign punishment of pain and suffering but to use the pain and suffering to extend His mercy and grace.  This He most surely does in Christ, in His righteous life, in His suffering to end suffering, and in His life-giving death. Where we presume God cannot be, there He is and there He is doing the redemptive work that delivers us from sin and judgment, from pain and suffering, to righteousness and everlasting life.

We constantly ponder why a good and powerful God allows suffering, pain, and evil?  Is He impotent to eliminate it for us?  Does He not wish to forego this for us?  Is He complicit in it?  Does He send it?  For us the great temptation is to presume our God is a detached God, an aloof God, who watches us while looking down from heaven but who either cannot or wills to do nothing to help us.  God's surprise is that He comes for suffering, enters into our pain, takes the evil of our sins upon Himself, and bears the full weight of that sin and death for us that we might be redeemed.  He thirsts that our thirst might be quenched.  He fasts in hunger so that our hunger might be satisfied.  He lives to die that by dying in baptismal water we might live.  God enters into suffering not as an experiment to see what it is but to end its reign over us.  Isaiah tells us.  His wounds are our healing and His sacrifice is our gain.  

We are so fixed upon the question of why this suffering comes to us and why we as Christians face such pain that perhaps we miss how God has come to suffer with us and, more importantly for us, and by this suffering redeems us from the condemnation of suffering and pain.  He is present with us not as an antidote to what we endure but that these sufferings might have a redemptive and sanctifying purpose even in us.  We do not suffer aimless pain but in Christ all sufferings have their end, find their meaning, and have purpose.  Where we think God cannot be, there He is. 

Thoughts on a milestone. . .

In 1974 I was a student in my junior year of college worried about what was happening to the church body in which I had hoped to serve.  A convention had exposed deep conflict and division.  The premier seminary of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was a shell of its former self after an exile took students and faculty away.  There was a cloud over everything.  There were enough personality conflicts to fill a stadium and enough bold speeches to fill it with more hot air than anything else.  People were angry, confused, bitter, and suspicious and in the midst of it all I was going to have to choose a seminary.

Underneath the surface were simmering issues that had been kicked like a can down the road and a theological debate that had been hinted at in the past but never fully engaged.  The Synod had grown exponentially during the 1940s-1960s, turning it from a largely Midwestern and rural church body into one increasingly urban and suburban.  The impact of the social movements, racial tumults, a looming presidential crisis, and youth rebellions within the nation had not quite crept into the mainstream of Missouri but they were there.  The slow awakening of a sleepy little church onto a world stage was bringing with it issues and challenges that were only now being realized.  The theological arena across Europe was moving away from an inerrant Scripture and toward a more skeptical view of Bible facts and history.  The Gospel was fast becoming a principle applied to injustice and missions in ways that went beyond the proclamation of the cross and empty tomb.  Some of this was threatening and some was welcome and some was suspect and some was condemned outright.  But not everyone could agree on what was good and what was bad.

Like the Reformation before it, this conflict was over authority and over the authoritative Scripture.  It was the modern challenge of idea that lives outside of fact, the fruit of a Jesus of history largely unknown and the Christ of Scripture somewhat suspect.  It was a battle for the soul of a church body.  Somehow or other I and those like me entering seminary, had to choose sides.  Choose wrongly and it might mean that everything you had prepared for would disappear and even if you chose rightly it would mean the church body in which you served would be deeply affected and somewhat crippled following the outcome.  It did not matter what choice you made, it would cost you friends.  Nobody I knew was outside the fray.  Everyone I knew was stressed to the hilt.  No matter what side you were on, it was a most painful of moments.  

About two hundred of the LCMS’s six thousand congregations left with the 90% of the St. Louis faculty and many of them ended up forming the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.  Others tried for years to live in the never never land between the AELC and the LCMS.  Still others, both parishes and pastors, simply retreated from anything larger than the local needs and concerns of the parish.  Our loss was not simply in those who departed but the climate of the church body that was left.  In the midst of this, the Charismatic Movement was rising up.  The liturgical movement was preparing for new worship forms and hymnals.  Photocopiers were making it possible to depart from anything officially printed.  I wish I could say that we had a happily ever after ending.  We did not.  The battle was won but only that battle.  More battles were to come if we had the stomach for them.

In the end, we did not.  We won the Battle of the Bible and became one of the very few denominations to turn back a liberal tide but we also lost some battles.  Worship became more and more influenced by Evangelicalism and less and less by official hymnals.  Congregations learned how to live under the radar and to practice what they wanted in everything from open communion to catechetical instruction.  We ended up being united in principle over the Scriptures but we continue to be divided over everything from the role of women to liturgical ceremonies to communion practice.  In fact, we are a shell of our former self in size, have closed some of our colleges, struggle to recruit men and women for church work vocations, and struggle to find money to pay for Synod's corporate budget.  Our Synod remains one identity in convention and another in local practice.  Nearly everyone now sees the Synod as a confederation of Districts and congregations rather than the way our life together is codified in our governing documents.  And we act like that as well.  

Of course it was worth it.  No matter the cost, it was worth it to stand for Scripture, for the facts of the faith that inform our doctrine and practice.  But we learned a lesson few of us wanted to learn.  There is no peacetime for the Church Militant.  We are always engaged in one conflict or another.  The gift of our digital age is that the pace of everything moves faster than it did in 1974 and in 1874 and in 474 but you never win the war and must always fight the battle for faithfulness.  The battle lines change but not the cause.  We preserve the faith and must resist the temptation to improve it or adapt it.  We proclaim the Gospel but do not use it as a principle or a core value.  We are always in the crosshairs of a world which has little stomach for a yesterday, today, and forever the same Gospel.  That is why we must have the stomach for it and for the battles that must be fought until Christ comes again in His glory.  Lest we think this is peculiar to us, just look across the landscape of Christianity.  Even Rome finds itself exactly where we were and are.  There is no safe haven or refuge from the constant battles to be faithful.  This much I have learned.

The New Mission Movement. . .

From churches to mission societies there was a profound movement to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the continent of Africa in the last three centuries or so.  It was greatly successful having planted a vibrant Christian mission that became solid indigenous communities of faith.  It was so successful that Africa has now become the largest concentration of practicing Christians.  Lutherans are looking less like their Northern European ancestors and more and more like the churches where the Gospel was planted.  It is not true for Lutherans only.  Roman Catholics, Methodists, and a host of other groups have witnessed the great shift from America and Europe to Africa as the place where conversions continue to grow and church numbers explode.  Now it appears that Americans and Europeans are not quite finished in their mission work but it has little to do with Scripture or the faith and everything to do with the values of modernity.

Unfortunately, what is now being exported is an attempt to undo what African Christians have learned only too well -- the Biblical doctrinal and moral truths that the present age have diverged from in pursuit of  sexual liberation and a gender fluidity.  While you might think that this is only what the most liberal of Western churches are doing, it should not surprise us that even elements within a more conservative tradition are heading down this path.  From Kenya to Cameroon, Ghana to Tanzania, Western aid workers, government officials, tourists, and progressive denominations are advancing understandings of sexuality and the human person that are in conflict with the orthodox and catholic faith and incompatible with African cultural values.  But, hey, what is there to stop them?  The tools of this evangelization of a corrupt and unBiblical sexual ethic and gender identity are money as well as words.  Follow the money trail and you will see how the liberal and progressive Christians are using their bank accounts in an attempt to lure African Christians into following their lead.

From the lure of tourist dollars to the mountain of money that comes from NGOs and governmental agencies, Africa is being pressured into accepting and adopting what has become normal in the West.  Where this is focused is often upon the youth -- minds ripe for the seeds of an evil missionary impetus designed to change the future if they cannot change the present.  What has happened in Europe and in America only proves that it only takes a generation to effect a sea change in sexual morality.  The Methodists in America got tired of their African counterparts interfering and slowing down the move of their progressive sexual ethic and so they enacted a great divorce globally as well as locally.  Others work through ecumenical endeavors such as the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation to put strings on the flow of money into African churches.  Still others, provide for the distribution of things to promote what is largely still illegal or immoral in Africa -- such as sexual lubricants designed in particular for homosexual behavior.  Perhaps the worst offender, however, is technology.  The internet has become the primary tool by which the West hopes to normalize in Africa what is abnormal there but all the rage in the West -- internet porn is a vehicle of the change of values!  I could say more but I think you get the picture.

For Africa to resist, it will not simply require their own personal fortitude but the help and cooperation of those in the West who have now bowed down to the gods of pleasure without cost or moral judgment.  This is a time for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and for faithful folk in other churches to extend their support so that Africa does not fall.  We ought to be both grateful for and inspired by the resistance currently shown against this onslaught of change by the Western missionaries for evil.  But we dare not leave these courageous brothers and sisters in Christ alone in their witness.

Suffering from sin. . .

It often seems simplistic and naive to say the suffering flows from sin but the reality is that sin is not simply about doing wrong but also suffering for it.  Sin is not simply a theological problem but a life problem.  Our sinful thoughts, words, and deeds come back to haunt us with suffering and pain that is real. Our sinful natures have so screwed up our thinking that we presume if the commandments went away we would happy in the pursuit of what we want unfettered by guilt or shame.  It is not that way at all.  What the commandments forbid is not some theoretical evil out there but the stuff that hurts and harms us in this mortal life as well as eternally.  

How odd it is that we think that God is out to steal away our happiness with our freedom.  How strange it is that we presume that rules against adultery or theft or defamation or jealousy or disrespect are the problem and not the things themselves.  We suffer for our sins not because God is zapping us from on high but because the sins themselves cause earthly problems and have dire consequences for this life and its happiness.  How is happy to worry about the faithfulness of our spouse or to poison our relationships with our parents or to be known as a person of lies and slander or to be consumed with desire for what is not ours?  The suffering is not caused by the denial of these desires but the desires themselves.  They ruin our relationships and steal from us our reputations and make us fearful of others.  Sin is the cause of suffering and not imagined suffering but real pain, sorrow, and trouble.

St. Gregory the Great wrote of the three stages of temptation:  suggestion, delight, and consent. Scripture speaks of this in James 1:  But each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights...  Look at the temptation and fall of Eve.  Lucifer offers a mere suggestion to Eve, that if she ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she would not die but would become like God, knowing right from wrong.  It seems like such a little thing compared to the grand evils of our modern age.  Just a little and rather subtle suggestion becomes the source of so much suffering.  We do the same thing all the time.  We assume God has either lied to us or kept things from us, that we can become gods by ignoring or disobeying the one true God, and that knowing right and wrong will lead us to choosing right from wrong.  In the end, Eve not only ignored what she had known from God but began to despise it and to be dissatisfied with what God had given and told her.  In the end, instead of running away from Adam, she shared her suffering with him and brought him down with her.  That is also what sin does.  Our suffering is not only ours but it belongs to those whom we love.  

Goodness and virtue are not constricting but freeing.  Sin refuses to allow us to see that and so we view everything except our desires with suspicion and doubt and fear.  The path to freedom is not through surrendering to desire but through living self-controlled, upright, and godly lives as those born again of water and the Spirit.  This is St. Paul's appeal to us.  What is good, right, true, godly, and righteous is not the end to our happiness but its beginning.  But, as Luther once observed, the old adam is a good swimmer and even though we are looking away from Satan he is always looking at us.  So we fight the good fight, contending not for a personal righteousness which will minimize our need of Christ but to live as the people of God we are in Christ.  This is our freedom and apart from Christ there is only bondage.

The shape of things to come. . .

By the time I entered my teenage years nearly 85% of all those in America between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were, or had been, married. As I headed out of my teenage years the marriage rate fell by some sixty percent. Fast forward and approximately one-third of Gen Zs today are on track never to marry (that does not quite account for those who cohabit temporarily or even over longer terms).  Not surprisingly, the birthrate also fell to its lowest point -- down to 1.62 births per fertile female or not enough to replace the parents.  So the US, with every other developed nation except Israel, is facing the very real threat of demographic decline.  Clearly this is not simply about abortion or birth control.  It is about the increasingly hostile view of marriage and family by our culture and society.  It is hostile simply by virtue of the fact that it is optional and non-essential to the way we see ourselves and our lives today.

I wonder if all our years fighting against a poorly argued Supreme Court invention in 1973 has left us blind to the onslaught of change that has moved marriage and family from its front and center place to the fringes of our lives.  I wonder if we thought that overturning a SCOTUS decision would be all that needed to be done to make a course correction.  I wonder if we are up to the major task of restoring what has been lost and in particular restoring the need for and blessing of marriage and family.  If all we want are children, IVF and our great reproductive technology can do the deed but if we want to repair what is broken among us we will need boys to become men and girls to become women and both to want and desire a lifelong union in marriage and to have and raise their children within the home as gift and blessing.

Although I wish it were not so, churches are not necessarily aligned in this goal.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality of birth control that makes children the exception and sex mainly for pleasure.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality that marriage is but one of the choices available to people and not even the first or best choice.  Most churches have either formally or tacitly accepted the reality that children are optional to marriage (or to individuals) and that fewer is better than many.  If you do not believe me, look at how they talk about marriage or family or children.  Since the 1930s there has been a sea change among conservative Protestants as well as the mainstream of evangelicals in America and it has not left Rome immune from this influence either.  Rome has official doctrine that insists against birth control and for children but in practice those in the pews have largely overlooked or ignored what Rome has said and prefers to do what they think is right for them.  Even in Missouri we had our own dalliance with birth control as the wise steward approach to the issue of children and we even had our own moment toying with the idea that abortion may not be so bad either.  We have recovered an official stance but it has not necessarily affected or directed how our youth see these things.  Our soft underbelly is that the world has proven at least as influential and probably more than our doctrine upon the views and desires of our youth.

Marriage, traditional marriage of one man and one woman in lifelong union, has become the radical choice and not the normal one.  Children and more than 1 or 2 have become radical choices and not the normal one.  If you want to be a radical in America today, hold to the idea that marriage is one man and one woman in life long fidelity, that love is sacrificial, that birth control is not the norm but children are.  That is the most radical thing in an America in which we are increasingly unfriendly to marriage, family, and children.  If you don't believe me, try going into a restaurant in America with you six children and see the looks people give you.  One look says it all.  By the way, you just might get the same look when you walk into a church in America and plant the same size family in the pew.

Prophetic or foolish?

 

In the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, there is a comment and a sort of warning regarding the election for US President.  While not entirely unprecedented, it represents the kind of intrusion into politics that both voters and candidates resent.  Worse, it comes at a time when Rome itself is in theological and moral disarray so it cannot speak from some high place but as a church in the midst of the same kind of turmoil and conflict as politics in America.  What is truly odd is that it represents a tacit endorsement of Harris (and Biden) even though they hold positions in direct conflict with Roman Catholic teaching.  But since when has that stopped anyone?

With Trump, this forced polarization would continue, transforming it into the domination of one America over the other. With Harris, there would be attempts to reduce it, as Biden did. The latter’s failure, however, explains the fact that there is not much room to recover a form of unity both at the political level and in the social and cultural self-perception of the country...

It is a unique election because it is quite clear that, if Trump wins, his political project would be an authoritarian remake of the State and the expulsion of the other part of the United States from the federal and state governments, as already done with the Supreme Court. It would be an unprecedented twisting of democracy.

As some of my readers recall, I am not favorably inclined by any of the current candidates but I am much more comfortable with the actual record of Trump as President over his rhetoric than I am the actual record and rhetoric of the Biden/Harris tenure.  Nobody votes for Trump because of his personality and hopefully no one would vote for Harris because of hers.  Neither should people vote by the directive of a Roman Catholic newspaper half a world a way.  The voters have a duty to know first hand what the candidates stand for, promote, intend, and promise.  Sadly, there is nary a mention in the article about the terrible state of abortion politics in America.  Here Trump and Vance seem to have waffled and there is no political party platform that stands strong on the cause of life from beginning to end.

It just goes to show you that politicians make bad theologians and theologians make bad politicians.  I wish that were not the case but it is. 

Reaping the fruits of youth ministry. . .

I grew up in the generation in which youth group at church was pretty tame and pretty lame.  We went roller skating once in a blue moon and had a Bible study every now and then and that was about it.  When my generation had kids, we thought their should be something more.  But what?  So we invented more ways to entertain our youth all in the name of Christ.  The fruits of youth ministry have not been so good.  We entertained them to death -- literally sacrificing their eternity for the sake of the moment.  What we should have been doing was doubling down on catechesis.  The problem is that we did not really know what catechesis was.  Yes, I learned the Catechism -- 1943 edition -- as memory work but was not quite taught the catechism.  When something approaching learning the catechism did happen, it was head centered, meant to impart knowledge but not quite strengthen faith.  There was little to tell me why we worshiped the way we did or that the sacramental life of the Church was the font and source of my own life in Christ (new life and piety).  Now we have congregations with children's church to make church fun and large scale youth events with a heavy dose of fun and so much more.  Has it helped keep our kids in Church or in the faith?

The real youth ministry is not what happens at the church but in the home.  Real youth ministry is kids watching their parents pray, love, forgive, be attentive to and participate in worship, and place a high priority on what happens in worship.  This is the first line of faith strengthening and this is the hill to die on -- not the fun stuff designed to perpetuate the lie that worship is fun, church is fun, and the Christian life is about fun.  Real youth ministry happens when the husband is the spiritual head of the home and when he displays in his own life what it means to love sacrificially.  Real youth ministry happens when the wife reciprocates this love and loves sacrificially.  Real youth ministry happens when parents bring their children to worship and Sunday school and sit with them in the pew and ask them what they learned in Sunday school.  Real youth ministry is when parents do the catechism homework and memory work with their children and who honor God's man in the church as someone worthy of their prayers and their respect.

No, I am not against having fun.  I am not even against the ever present screens.  But the Christian life is not about what makes us happy.  It is about what makes us holy.  And the nature of our life together is not around digital things but the means of grace that bestow what it is they sign.  It is high time that we focus the resources of the churches and of the home on the things that will make a difference.  I recall a meme which says something to the effect that few of our children will make their living as sports superstars or actors or singers but every one of our children will sin and die.  So what should be the most important  thing in our lives?  That which conveys Christ's forgiveness and that which conveys His life -- the Word and the Sacraments. 

Change of address. . .

You know it is bad when they sell their prime real estate in search of smaller and cheaper digs.  So the Lutheran Church in Australia has sold a valuable piece of property owned ostensibly since 1922.  They obviously will reap some wonderful capital gains but what does it say for that church body?  Fifty million AUS and about $33 or so American is no small change but, outside of finding another location, the LCA has announced plans to use proceeds from the sale to support its mission and ministry.  Convenient since the LCA is splitting so I wonder if this is community property in the great divorce -- what do you think?  The Australian Lutheran College doesn't need the space -- it has changed from the full-time model with students living on campus, in the years when it was known as Luther seminary, to a “distributed” education mode.  Apparently only 10 of its 58 students lived on campus so it was not a mass relocation.  

Don't get me wrong.  I am not opposed to selling space no longer needed since Christianity is downsizing everywhere.  Even Rome is doing that.  Still and all, there is something amiss when any church is awash in money but short on people.  It is never a good thing.  The money will not last and it will not solve the people problem.  What it will do is kick the can down the road so that you can delay dealing with the big problems because you have money to fix the small ones.  Some congregations with rich endowment funds have every amenity their facilities might need and they keep them in grand state but there are no people to drag in dirt on Sunday mornings or mess up the rooms throughout the week.  Money problems are easy enough to fix -- especially when you have valuable real estate to dispense of and willing buyers with cash.  The structural problems of Christianity are not so easy to deal with.

The ELCA recently said an amicable goodbye to its largest congregation.  The church with some 10K members in Iowa has left the building over bylaw issues -- at least that is what they claim.  The Synod of the ELCA to which it belonged is relieved though now down 10K members as well and the congregation had not seen itself walking in step with the ELCA for many years.  The split was happy enough and everyone is now free to go their own way without becoming a pain in the side of the other.  But is that a good thing?  Rancor over personality and other superficial issues is one thing but to leave over doctrine and then to smile as you head out the door seems to trivialize the leaving.  Missouri seems not to have that problem.  Our people are noisy complainers even while staying.  But it would be nice if someone leaving a church body over matters of faith would admit that they are leaving because they disagree over fundamental issues.  Except that most folks who left the ELCA would have been happy merely to roll back the clock and accept the ELCA with all of its faults and failings but the ones prior to 2009.  It seems that this might be what Australian Lutherans are shooting for as well.  We will leave but on good terms with all.  Hmmm.  Didn't Jesus suggest that dusting off your shoes at the door was the way you leave rejection of the Biblical and catholic faith?  But that seems so uncivilized.  No, we need to smile our differences away or smile while we part ways but smile all the time.  I am not quite sure what that smile buys us but we just may end up smiling at each other as one side or another walks down the broad boulevard to permanent destruction.  A change of address that is permanent may be the unintended consequences of disagreeing over doctrine, faith, and practice.  Now I know I will accused of being bitter and narrow minded and judgmental but somehow or another I could not imagine Jesus and the Pharisees working it out in this way.  Maybe we should go out with a little noise.  What do you think?

Another good Weedon tidbit. . .

 

 

It is worth your time. . . Thanks, old friend, for your good words!

 

Saving the church, losing religion. . .

Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco was one of the many places of worship I visited in choir tours in college.  It was and is an impressive structure.  Built in 1912, it is a grand space but, like many grand church spaces, it is not so packed with people.  Even as a cathedral it is not overflowing with members or attenders.  Until more recently.

Though fewer people joined the congregation or were showing up for worship, Grace did what other largely urban sites have done.  They began programs to bring people in.  The problem is that hardly any of those programs had much to do with Christianity.  The centerpiece of their programs is Grace Arts, a conglomeration of varies kinds of classes, artsy stuff, and musical events whose formal membership dwarfs that actual number of religious members.  So you can go to Grace and find everything from light shows and trapeze artists to drag queens and carnivals.  The rich and the famous are showing up along with so many others to do yoga in the main sanctuary and to enjoy musical events called sound baths, in which you enjoy candlelit musical events while snuggled into your sleeping bag.  With the other music you can enjoy tribute concerts to Sting, Queen, Taylor Swift, etc.  

Along with the ordinary trappings of Christianity, there are all sorts of other things going on under the stained glass windows, beneath the gothic architecture, and within the rich acoustical environment -- things that attract the spiritual but not religious and those who find church normally a turn off.  So you get a sense of community, a focus on joy, some kind of spirituality, and inner peace minus the heavy baggage of religious content of any kind.  They may be saving the building but killing the church -- or, to put it another way, saving the church while losing their religion.  Is that a cost too high to bear or is the price tag of keeping the doors open?

The folks at Grace Cathedral are not the only ones trying to sort the line between killing the religion while saving the church.  You see it everywhere.  Churches have become one stop shopping centers for nearly everything people might want to enrich their lives and they can enjoy it without someone trying to give witness to Jesus.  There are weight rooms and exercise centers, self-help schools and day care, entertainment and motivational centers, the offer of all kinds of new age or old school Eastern forms of meditation and spiritual care without the pesky problem of talking about Jesus.  Is it worth it to save the real estate while killing what that real estate was for?  You tell me.  In our search for income streams and support for maintenance projects, we just might have forgotten why we put in those pews and what it was that was supposed to happen therein.  But will Jesus be happy we kept the building going at the cost of the very integrity of the faith?  Maybe we should secure our money tables to the floor just in case.

Selling off parts of an identity. . .

 

Though it is not alone (Fisk University has tried various ways to sell or lease its own valuable art collection), Valparaiso has now successfully argued in an Indiana court that paintings donated to the university as part of an art museum on campus can be sold.  According to the judgment, the works are not "conservative" (Georgia O'Keeffe is a modernist and Childe Hassam is an impressionist).  Another painting, by Frederic Church, was not constrained by the donor in this way.  

Valpo has done the obligatory public hang wringing all the whole drooling at the idea of getting its hands on $20 million in cash to fund a cash strapped campus in need of maintenance and renovations.  In the end, the legacy will purchase some paint, new bathrooms, and air conditioning for one dorm.  Unanswered in all of this is the question of whether there will be any students to live in that dorm now that the soul of Valpo has also been sold.

Under the terms of the 1953 gift from Percy Sloan, donated in honor of his father, artist Junius R. Sloan, the university was constrained from selling or profiting from the art except to acquire more paintings or conserve the ones it has.  The gift included hundreds of paintings.  The school added to that collection from funds from the museum two landscapes: "Rust Red Hills" painted by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1930, and "The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate" created by Childe Hassam in 1914.  The third painting, 1849's "Mountain Landscape" by Frederic E. Church, was donated by Sloan and not included in the conservative argument.  Sloan's gift included money also and the stipulation that any artwork the school bought with the gifted funds had to be "of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American Art."  All of this hinged upon the meaning of that term.

In any case, Valparaiso placed the paintings in a storage facility last September and temporarily closed the museum in June.  The museum's director, nearly 100 years old, and a pro bono attorney have been fighting this move but have given up.  

So why does this matter?  Well, if you are a donor, pay attention.  The universities are in the market of finding loopholes to donations in order to release the funds to be spent where they desire even if that conflicts with the donor's wishes.  It can be said with some confidence that the Valpo donor had no intention of funding dorm renovations.  Second, the dire state of the university is all around us.  Wittenburg University has shut down all of its music programs while at the same time announcing new construction to house its growing sports program.  Schools are ready to sell anything and everything to fund them through another semester, another year.  But the real issue here is the sale of its core identity.

Valpo is a shell of its former identity.  I suspect that many would say the same thing about some or all of the Concordias operated by Missouri.  The mission that was the impetus for their formation has changed and some wonder if it remains in line with the mission of the Synod.  How much are people willing to sell to save the school?  What if that which is sold is the school's core identity?  What if you sacrifice the school's values in order to preserve the institution?  I fear that the money is a bigger issue than these questions and this may be why the world of church operated or affiliated educational institutions are in such a state.  Even mighty Notre Dame lives with its Roman Catholic identity more as legacy than forming principle for who that school is and what it does.  Is this all there is left?  I hope not.  But at the rate things are going, it may be too late to rescue these institutions from themselves.

Right to be happy. . .

The right to happiness is not merely an American one but has become the universal right acknowledged by all and demanded by all.  Long before it was enshrined in the founding documents of our American republic, we were moving from survival itself as the basic goal to a certain quality of life.  Even though I am not sure that the forming fathers of our democracy were really speaking of the same thing we mean when we say the right to the pursuit of happiness, that is how we all understand it now.  We should be free to do what we want.

That right to happiness has affected many things.  It has certainly formed a leg of support for the situation ethics in which the act is without essential morality except in the moment.  It has also affected how we see a host of other things -- from marriage to divorce to children to retirement.  We believe in the right to happiness and we believe we have a right to exercise it.  While this impacts many things, it has come to be a profound actor on how we judge divorce and remarriage. 

There was a time in which the universal understanding of divorce was that it precluded another marriage -- you go one shot at a happy marriage and if that evaded you, you did not get another.  At some point in time, we began to distinguish between guilty parties and innocent parties in the breakup of a marriage.  It did not take long before we decided that the innocent party deserved another chance at happiness and so could remarry.  Then it did not take long before we decided that even the guilty party deserved another chance at happiness and were okay to remarry -- so long as they admitted their responsibility and promised never to do it again.

Before you get angry with me about the legitimacy of specific instances, lets just take a moment to review how we got to the point today where so many of our folks in the pews have had multiple marriages and even the clergy have had multiple marriages.  We decided that every moral principle is conditioned by the right to happiness.  That right has become the right that trumps every other right.  We tell our children that they have a right to be happy even if that right means they don't want to marry but might cohabit and they don't want to have children.  We tell our children going through rough patches in marriage that they have a right to be happy even if that happiness hurts others -- like their children.  We tell everyone who has another sexual attraction or gender identity that their happiness is more important than anything else and then radically alter the nature of marriage to suit all who might want some kind of it.  Can you see where this is headed?  Do we want our children to be good or happy?  Does God want us to be holy or happy?  Do we want to be holy or happy?  Happiness is a cancer of an idea that changes the landscape of everything.  Do we realize how much making happiness the highest goal affects everything else?  Haven't we enshrined in every aspect of life the very issue that was created in Eden that caused this mess?

Boys to men. . .

No, this is not about boy bands from the past.  It is rather about the way that boys are raised to become men or, as we have found today, not raised to manhood.  I am not being sexist when I say that women struggle to turn boys to men.  They do well enough raising boys but they are missing the central ingredient -- example.  Boys learn best how to be men from men, by example -- that is what women cannot provide.  Obviously, men and women are different and the differences are not framed in good or bad as typically we frame things but as differences inherent to them and for the benefit of both.

I recall a meme showing a mom trying to teach her young boys to stand and use the toilet or urinal.  She holds a water bottle to imitate the way a man goes but it is forced and humorous -- as memes are meant to be.  The absence of fathers in so many homes is noteworthy for the lack of example to teach boys to become men.  This is not about how to use a urinal but rather how to love, lead, suffer, sacrifice, forgive, pray, and serve -- among other things.  These things come from men to boys so that those boys might become men.  Without example, the typical outcome is for boys to grow up in to boys.  But to remain boys is something women neither need nor want.

Competition and challenge may not be the prime ways that girls learn to become women but that is exactly how boys learn to become men.  Whether of physical or mental or of the will, boys learn from men to become men by competing and by being challenged.  Watching what to do, the boys either compete against each other or against themselves.  I can do that!  It is the cry of success learned from competition and defeat as much as by example and victory.  Through these the boy leaves the comfort of self and the things of self in order to venture into the unknown.  It works for physical feats like climbing trees or zip lining or bungee jumping but it also works for the selfless roles of husband, father, and civic leader.

Where manhood is valued and taught, family and community flourish.  What it also affects is faith.  St. Paul uses largely masculine examples for the growth and maturity in the faith:  fight the good fight of faith, walk worthy, be disciplined, be self-controlled, train for righteousness, suffering produces endurance and endurance hope, etc...  While they have appeal beyond men, St. Paul is directly appealing to men to become men.  This is the need of the marriage, the family, the community, but also the Church.  The sad reality is that when women step up, men step back.  That is not a good thing on any level.  Though some complain about it, different roles and different areas of serving is not sexism at all -- rather it is the acknowledgement of the obvious.  I wish that we had more common sense today but it seem we are willing to dispense with common wisdom in order to embrace extraordinary foolishness.  That is also true for the Church as well as for every other arena.  If we feminize the Church or even do something much less by de-emphasizing godly manhood, we will end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy and the Church will become almost exclusively for women and children.  Where manhood is valued and taught, family, community AND church flourish.

Angels, pastors, marriage, and church. . .

It is the mark of children that they confuse wants with needs.  They want candy or a toy or whatever and so they address their parents or grandparents by insisting this is what they need.  Apparently, we have not grown up much.  We are still confusing wants and needs.  It has gotten us into countless troubles not in the least with our finances.  But the Lord is not confused.  He know what WE need and He knows what He wants or wills for us to answer those needs.

God does not need angels.  He is not dependent upon them for anything.  That is clear from Scripture.  When the children of Israel were feeling the clutches of Pharaoh and Egypt’s mighty army, God did not send a legion of angels.  He acted entirely alone to lure the troops into His trap and end the threat against the people of His promise.  God does not need angels.  But He wills to use them.

When some of the heavenly host led in open rebellion against God and His rule, the Lord sent His angels against them, led by the general of the angels, Michael.  The Lord could have acted on His own but willed to work through angels to banish from His heaven those who rebelled against Him.  

God does not need angels.  He does not depend upon them to be the mouthpieces of His Word.  God thunders the heavens or speaks through the still small voice and His Word is revealed to us.  He does not need the ministrations of angels but He wills to use them.  When Abraham and Sarah first heard the promise of a son in their old age, it was through the voice of an angel.  When Blessed Mary found favor in the Lord’s sight, the angel Gabriel spoke the Word into her womb and Christ tabernacled within her.  When the Savior’s first cries filled the silence of the Bethlehem night, angels responded with the song:  Glory to God in the highest and peace to His people on earth.  When Jesus was left weak and weary after fasting 40 days and tempted by the devil, angels ministered to Him.  When St. John the Divine was given the grand revelation of heaven’s glory, angels were sent by God to deliver this picture to him.  God does not need angels but He wills to use them.

God does not need angels.  He does not need their worship.  Though the Scriptures insist that this is the greatest duty and delight of the angels, God does not need this worship.  He is not weak and does not require constant affirmation.  He is not vain and does not expect to have His ego stroked.  But it is God’s will that angels worship Him on earth and in heaven.  And so they do.  And it is His will that we worship Him.  And so we do.

St. John records in Revelation how myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands of angels worshiped the Lord saying with a loud voice:  “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”  Jesus says Himself that on the day when He comes in His glory to bring to completion all things, the angels shall fill the sky giving terror to unbelievers and relief to the saints.  God does not need angels but He wills to use them.

God does not need a pastor.  If you were stuck on the desert island all by yourself, your faith could survive without the benefit of a pastor.  But God wills to work through pastors.  What God could do is not as important as what God has done and promised to do.  He has promised to work through men to address His people with His Word, to wash them in baptismal water, to absolve them of their sins, and to set apart bread and wine to be the flesh and blood of Christ and distribute it to the faithful.  It is stupid and senseless to daydream about what God might do.  You have been given the concrete of what He has done in Christ, what He wills to do, and how He wills to do it.  God does not need a pastor but you do and so He has willed to establish the office of the holy ministry which I have exercised among you for nearly 32 years and for over 44 years since my ordination.

God does not need marriage.  He made all things from nothing and man from the dust of the earth and woman from his rib.  But God has willed to order His creation through a man who leaves His father and mother and cleaves to his wife.  God does not need a wife but I did.  He gave me a wife not to cook or clean or do laundry but to complete me and through our life together to bring children into this world.  The first revelation of adult manhood is that I am alone and that I need who God has willed to complete me in the woman whom He makes my wife.  God does not need marriage but He wills that the family and its center be His merciful love.

God does not need a congregation.  He could have drawn people to Himself directly and individually without the messiness of a church and opinions and conflicts and votes.  God does not need a church but you do.  He willed that you come to Him through the fellowship of the redeemed, through the common life of our baptism, through the preaching that takes place here, through the absolution that is pronounced upon all the penitent, and through the common meal of His uncommon flesh and blood in bread and wine.  God does not need the Church but it is His will to have it and He knows that you need it.
God does not need you.  He does not need what you have whether that be money or talents or skills or wisdom or power.  The Lord does not save you because He wants or needs something from you.  It does not matter how brave or smart or experienced or rich you are, God is the only one who is self-sufficient.  But it is His joy to love you, to save you, to have you join Him in His work, to fight the good fight of faith where you are, and to live in peace and unity by the Spirit.

The Lord’s good and gracious will delivers to us what He does not need but we do:
•    angels to encamp around His people, to guard them in all their ways, and to minister to them so that they may be kept to everlasting life...
•    pastor to serve God’s people with the gifts of God through the means of grace and to shepherd them away from the wolves of false doctrine...
•    congregations where the family of God is bound together in the blood of Christ to forgive each other and bear one another’s burdens...
•    marriage and family where Christ opens the heart of husband and wife and their fruitful love multiplies and fills the earth...

In case you did not get the point, God does not need anything.  He did not have to create but in love sought a people to love.  God does not need us but we need Him and His gracious favor and will.  So from His gracious love He has supplied us with angels and pastors, congregations and families, and with the power of His forgiving love to keep us in His faith and fear to everlasting life.  The angels and all the rest of creation do not need to be told this but you do.  You need to know why the Lord has made you, surrounded you with His love and favor, forgiven you by the blood of His Son, put a pastor before you to serve you with His gifts, brought you into the Church to live out your life of faith, and ordered your life as husband, wife, father, mother, and children in the home.  God does not need these but we do and now it is our grace and privilege to praise Him, angels, archangels, all the company of heaven, the faithful gathered in our midst, all creatures and every created thing.  In the holy Name of Jesus.  Amen.

The nature of the office. . .

In that old Otto Preminger movie The Cardinal, there is a great line in which the bishop says to the priest: "the priesthood is not something you can put on and take off like the cassock you wear..."  The line has hung over me for some time.  Although the movie line is about the turmoil within a priest who struggles to exercise the hard side side of the ministry, it has application for Lutheran pastors as well.  The priest insists it was different when it was theory and not practice, when people and their spiritual lives were not hanging in the balance.  A conflict between what he wanted to do and what he had to do as a priest ended up leaving him wounded and believing.  So, though he had been trained and ordained, the yoke of the priesthood was a burden that was leaving him empty inside.  He begs to be released from his ministry in order to find himself.

Every Lutheran pastor should find some sympathy for this situation.  The ministry is easy to fulfill in theory but in practice it is hard.  To stay in one place for decades, learning the stories of your people, walking with them through days of sorrow and pain and tragedy as well as moments of joy and happiness -- this is hard to do and it is hard to give up.  It is, as they say, a conundrum.  The weekly rhythm of Sunday with its preaching and teaching and Divine Service are not simply clothing you put on but who you are.  The gift of this ministry and its burdens become so deeply ingrained within you and your life that it is hard to contemplate life without them.  I am not speaking here of some kind of indelible character but of the office itself.  Pastors do not stop being pastors when they go home for supper or while they sleep.  How many meals and nights are interrupted by the calls from those within the parish who need and want and rightly expect God's man to be with them in the darkest moments and with them in their worst fears.  And there you go.  It is instinct after a while.  You just go.

To be honest, the pastor's family knows this but does not like it.  How can they?  The interrupted or cancelled vacations and days off and the family events which revolve not around wife and children but the Church Year and the parish schedule may be small gifts and great burdens which they bear because they love the man that the folks in the pews call "pastor."  They know that you cannot take off or put on this ministry like you do the clerical collar or vestments you wear.  They respect you for it but they also resent the part of the man they call husband and father who must be shared with those who call him pastor.  We all know this.  It is no secret.  No matter how long you live beyond the day you retire, you cannot make up for what they have sacrificed.  It is a debt which cannot be repaid and one which allows the pastor to fulfill his vocation -- indeed, without it he could not be who he is or do what he has been called to do.

While we all know that it is wrongheaded to presume that to serve the Lord in His Church must come with the additional sacrifice of giving up a wife and a family.  Even Rome calls this a discipline and not a doctrine.  At the same time, every pastor with a wife and children knows it might be easier if you could  fulfill your calling without your family having to bear its cost.  Thankfully, celibacy is not a Lutheran discipline.  I have know the love and support of my wife and my kids throughout my service.  My children know only sharing their father with the Church and my wife knows only sharing her husband with the Church.  From time to time that sharing has been less than happy yet they have made this possible for me and I am deeply grateful.  From time to time, it needs to be said.  Thank you.  Thank you to those who have born more than their share of the cost of this vocation and who did it graciously.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

Mega not so much. . .

I grew up in a very small parish in the middle of a cornfield in Northeastern Nebraska. It was never large and had no heyday to look back to.  The most it ever had was probably 100 members and yet in some of those years attendance was 80 or so.  Now, not so much.  The age of the farmers has increased by decades and the numbers of children in that county has dropped significantly.  It is a wood clapboard building that is distinguishable for nothing.  It has a traditional quarter sawn oak tall altar with the carved Lamb of God and a raised pulpit coming out of the wall and the obligatory copy of the Thorvaldsen Christ statue and an ancient pipe organ.  It did not have a fellowship hall until the last twenty or thirty years and prior to that only a basement which doubled for fellowship and Sunday school.  But it did produce a harvest of church workers of which I am one.

Now you might think that the bigger churches supply the bigger number of church workers but you would be wrong.  The large congregations do not do their fair share.  They are failing as incubators of church work vocations.  Even my own parish with some 5 sons in the ministry and a half dozen or so as teachers and DCEs has not kept pace with the little Nebraska church I called home.  We have now about 10 times the number of people in worship weekly but we have not done an equal job in recruiting church workers.  Those who think that the future of our church lives in the mega churches or large congregations is missing something important.  We need smaller churches because they supply the lion's share of the church workers for our Synod.  I suspect that this is how it has always been and how it will always be.

The next time you look down your nose at the country parish which opens its doors to 20 or fewer, ask them how many sons and daughters of that congregation have become church workers.  I'll be you will be surprised.  So before we say that these little congregations need to go away and we need to replace them with larger ones, maybe we ought to deal with the elephant in the room.  Large congregations supply fewer church workers for the work of the Kingdom than small ones.  So do yourself a favor and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving for this thing that smaller congregations do so much better than larger ones.  I do every day.

Strong words. . .

The worst thing we have done to the Scriptures is to make this a book of weak and superficial words, words that require something from us and have no power to address us with something.  The worst thing we have done to preaching is to echo this with respect to the words of the preacher and his task in preaching.  When we removed miracles from the Bible and when we began to distract from the historicity of the great and mighty works of God (creation, parting of the sea, etc...), we made Scripture a book of ideas and we gave ourselves the power over those ideas by either adopting them as our own or rejecting them.  The whole idea that something could be true without being historic or factual is a modern invention and one that has done catastrophic harm over Scripture and in particular the preaching task.

The miracles of Scripture and the mighty acts of God's deliverance are precisely ordinary facts which have extraordinary status even bigger than their context.  When we preach them, we are not trying to distill the fact into a moral of the story or a principle drawn from this fact but applying the facts themselves to God's people because these facts still have consequences and effects.  Nowhere is this more true than in the Sacrament of the Altar.  We do not imagine Christ in the sacrament but actually receive Him in this bread and wine.  We do not make this sacrament but Christ is the sacrament.  As Richard Stuckwisch says, "Baptism puts us in Christ and the Eucharist puts Christ in us."  They are not the same even though both are sacraments.  These are not ideas nor is the language symbolic but real and true and factual.  For this reason we treat the elements of the Sacrament of the Altar as we honor Christ for they are the same and in the funeral rite we begin with the fact of the baptism that says this end is not the end.

For preaching this has meant an emphasis less on the Word of God preached and more on the skill and ability of the preacher.  Technique has become at least as important as content.  While this is true for those teaching preaching and for the preacher preaching, it is even more true of those who hear the sermon.  They evaluate the sermon less upon the objective criteria of what it says than of how well it was communicated.  I am not at all suggesting here that we should be indifferent toward the technique but rather that the technique conveys nothing without the content.  Furthermore, the hearer should regard the words of the faithful preacher as words of God, hearing them and being edified by them not because of how well they were said but because of the Word in the words.  I fear, however, that this is not how most sermons are received.  Instead, they are the inspirational, motivational, and devotional thoughts of the preacher.  However good these might be, it is the Word of God that imparts life and salvation to us.  Those in the pews should expect nothing less than this and receive the words of the preacher as the Word proclaimed into their ears, minds, and hearts.  In short, I fear that preaching has become about weak words instead of Thy Strong Word and so people expect and therefore receive something less than preaching should be.

God's Word is true in every sense of that word.  The Word in elements of water, bread, and wine is true in every sense of the word.  The Word preached is sacramental and true as well.  It preaches the real Word that has the power to do what it says and convey what it promises.  But when we build walls between fact and truth, we diminish the Scriptures and we diminish also the visible Word of the Sacraments and we diminish the preached Word, ending up with less that God means for us to have and we learn to settle for it.

A vestment issue. . .

Over the years I have chronicled some of the vestment ideas gone bad -- from crocheted stoles to every other oddity I have encountered.  There was once a guilty pleasure of a blog called Bad Vestments that has, sadly, now gone dormant.  Maybe I should revive it -- except that after a while it is sad and makes me angry.  While I am tempted to give the failed good intentions of a seamstress or knitter off easy, I am not so inclined to let off those who make vestments into political statements.  I hate that.  It is an affront to God and to the faith.

The image is from eBay and it offers a political statement on the stole of what should point to the Lord or at least the calling to the minister of the Lord who wears it to preach faithfully the Lord's Word.  Instead this is the political statement everyone recognizes for what it is.  It promotes the alphabet agenda of sexual desires and gender identities with its rainbow and its not quite Scriptural statement to side with love.  Apparently this gives new meaning to the passage that says love covers a multitude of sins.  In any case, the point here is not to echo anything from Scripture but to promote a political agenda under the guise of religion.  How sad!  Of all the things that could have been put on a stole from bad artistic design to bad taste, the use of a symbol designed to promote sexual liberation in conflict with the Biblical ethic and order is one of the worst you can do.  Now, to be fair, I am not a fan of camo fabric used for vestments either.  I do not even like those children of the world tapestry orphreys.  I would rather not have any symbols that point to us as people or our views and leave the sacred real estate of vestments to the Lord alone.  I think history is on my side.  So even if you think this is exactly where you stand politically, do us all and the Lord a favor and leave the subject of vestments to art which honors the Lord for His steadfast love revealed most especially upon the cross.  Yes, that is the problem.  A heart is not the cross.  The way the Lord sides with us in love is through the cross.

 

Safely locked away. . .

Thanks to the idea of one of our DCEs some years ago, we give to the baptized a banner to hang on the wall of their room.  It has their name, the date of their baptism, and the words of Isaiah 43:  I have called you by name; you are Mine..."   While this is a nice idea and well done in fabric, it is a practical necessity.  Every parent since Adam and Eve has mistrusted their children with the important stuff of life and so the reality is that they have locked safely away all the important documents of their children's lives.  If their kids end up making it to adulthood safely, maybe by the time they hit 50 or so the parents will relinquish these important papers to their children.  In the meantime, they lie safely locked away. 

Scott Murray once said that we have done the same thing to our confessional documents.  We have them safely locked away in our constitutions.  Ouch.  How right he is!  They are there when and if we need them and we are very careful to maintain our subscription to them but they are not actively a part of our lives in the same way other things are.  As a Synod we live and die by our bylaws (I know this first hand).  We should be living or dying by our confessions.  As congregations we live and die by our informal rules (invoking the constitution and bylaws when there is conflict but content to live mostly by the way we have always done things before).  As pastors (and other church workers) we make and affirm our subscription to the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church when ordained or commissioned and then when installed.  What about the rest of the time?  For most, as much as we hate to admit it, they are safely locked away in books while the ministry is content with practical stuff.

The Confessions are really practical.  Yes, they are also theological and sometimes reflect a concern with things that seem less urgent to us in the moment but the reality is that they are very practical.  Think for example of the article about the Mass and its insistence that we are falsely accused of having abolished the Mass and then go on to insist that we actually do it better than our opponents -- complete with all the usual ceremonies.  This is not about an idea kept in the head but about the weekly gathering of God's people around His Word and Table (or more than weekly!).  Our Confessions are really practical.  We need to unlock them and drag them out from their hiding places and made them more a part of our daily lives and our lives together as the community of God's people.  Sadly, we probably have more attention for the things of Evangelicalism and pop Christian culture than we do the stuff we say we would rather die than forsake.  Our hearts are elsewhere and so what happens on Sunday morning seems out of step with who we are Monday through Saturday.  There is something inherently wrong with this.

When I ask children when they were baptized, they inevitably say they need to go home and ask their parents who need to unlock the box where they keep important papers and find out.  Is that what we are supposed to think?  Baptism's fact is not important to baptismal life?  Of course not!  No wonder we have our identity somewhere else than our baptism into Christ and the words to a wonderful hymn (God's Own Child I Gladly Say It) while wonderful are often distant from our daily lives.  We surely need to bring the dusty documents of our life out of the boxes into which we have placed them for safekeeping and bring them back out and into our daily lives.  We already do that with part of it (the Small Catechism) but we ought to do it with all of it.

Real food. . .

Having come off the series of John 6 Gospel readings for Series B, I am more and more convinced that it is nearly impossible to meet these texts without understanding them Eucharistically.  Yes, I know.  Luther did not mince words in rejecting the idea that John 6 addressed the Lord’s Supper: “In the first place the sixth chapter of John must be entirely excluded from this discussion [of the Supper], since it does not refer to the sacrament in a single syllable. Not only because the sacrament was not yet instituted, but even more because this passage itself and the sentences following plainly show, as I have already stated, that Christ is speaking of faith in the incarnate Word" -- as 1FC SD VII, 41 quote.  Chemnitz summarized the catholicity of Luther’s interpretation, which Luther claimed was simply Augustine’s -- and, for that matter ecumenical since also Cajetan and Calvin agreed.  Lutherans were rather content on the issue until Wilhelm Loehe advocated a more sacramental interpretation.  Both Warner Elert and Herman Sasse followed suit.  It should be noted that Luther was not above using John 6 in his sacramental piety, especially, for example, in the hymn text Christ Lag in Todesbanden.  

While it is not quite dangerous to conclude that John 6 is Eucharistic, it could dangerous to insist that it could not be.  John 6:63, flesh is of no avail cannot be used against our Lord's own institution of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.  Luther is careful in his debate with Zwingli to avoid this trap but many on the Radical Reformation side are not.  Jesus is not so careful, however, on the other side.  Jesus pushes every button and ends up with an emphatic to intensify His point: “Amen, Amen I say to you,” as if to say:  “Let me be perfectly clear.”  Then He does the unthinkable.  He also switches words from a rather  polite word for “eat,” φαγεῖν (phagein), to τρώγων (trogon), a more graphic word which suggests gnawing on or chewing His flesh.  This is then no symbolic or imaginary eating and drinking but the literal one which, when done in faith, receives what it promises.  Our Lord precisely places the real eating of His flesh and blood in faith in the context of the real eating of the manna in the wilderness -- one of which could sustain life for day but the other feeds the food upon which one eats and never dies.

In the end, it would seem to be a particularly Lutheran thing to do to read John 6 sacramentally,  as David Scaer has noted:  "John 6 is the chessboard on which the traditional hermeneutical rules are either ignored or shown to be inadequate. In making John 6 a discourse on faith, the unus sensus literalis est―which interprets “eating” as really “eating” and not “faith,” and “flesh” as really “flesh”―is replaced by a purely allegorical interpretation in which these words are given a different meaning."  In the end, it might require suspending the mind of all prior knowledge to read John 6 without automatically thinking of the Sacrament but it would also suspend all credibility to read it without also requiring the faith that receives this flesh and blood.