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.