Thanks to old friends. . .

On the day of my retirement, the parish I have served for 32 years invited two old friends to honor the day with me, my wife, and my family.  One of them is the Rev. Dr. Michael Kumm.  Though he and I are actually distantly related, both having roots in a very small congregation called Golgotha in Northeast Nebraska, I have known and respected this man and his faithful service to the Lord in other ways.  He has been a Navy chief, a seminarian, a parish pastor, and the longest serving chairman of the Board of Directors of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.  His leadership is widely known and highly esteemed.  Many of you might know his voice because he announces for Issues, Etc.  I was so deeply honored by his presence, wit, humor, and encouragement.  Thank you!  

The other individual is the Rev. Stephen Starke.  Though he and I have

known each other many years, you know him best as the writer of wonderful hymns, especially those included in the Lutheran Service Book.  His poetic gift have well served not only the LCMS but the wider Christian community as testament to the living craft of hymnody and its profound character in the life of God's people.  He graciously wrote a text at the invitation of my parish and for the occasion of my retirement.  It was not his first gift.  Twenty years before he wrote another hymn for another anniversary.  More than the hymn text, he offered reflections at the hymn festival that followed the banquet and led us through a meditation of hymns and anthems culminating in an anthem composed in my honor by Benjamin Culli -- one of our church's most gifted and talented musicians.  It all came together around the idea of "O Day Full of Grace" and it concluded with those amazing words of an anonymous Danish hymn writer translated by Gerald Thorson.  

When we on that final journey go
    That Christ is for us preparing,
We’ll gather in song, our hearts aglow,
    All joy of the heavens sharing,
And walk in the light of God’s own place,
    With angels His name adoring.

Though I am deeply grateful by both their present and their words, both men represent a commitment to the Church and to working on behalf of the Kingdom of God -- though in decidedly different venues.  I want to take this opportunity to laud and give thanks for them and those like them who have and continue to offer their service to the Lord of the Church.  I fear we do not esteem as highly as we ought their service and the cause for which they serve.  The internet is too full of complaint and nit picking.  Even those who have served long and well are not immune from the barbs and unkind words of the peanut gallery.  It does not serve us or our church body well to constantly berate and complain about our leaders.  None of them are perfect but they serve at our behest to the best of their ability and because we have, by our votes and acceptance, placed them in the offices and areas when they have labored.  Sometimes we forget the cost of their labor and service which they have borne and presume some other motive.  How will we labor into the future if we diminish those who serve us and the ways in which they have served?

Scripture reminds us that we are to pray for our leaders and honor them and their service.  Of course, we have disagreements from time to time.  My own meager blog admits such disputes and conflicts.  I remain ever so thankful that God has raised up such men and given me and the rest of us the privilege and blessing of their service.  They have so ably and faithfully led us and if we are to enjoy their kind in the years to come, it will require us to honor and esteem them and those who serve after them.  It has been the privilege of my life to know them and so many others and to count them friends and partners in the work God has given us to do.  You should as well.

But we need to make it ours. . .

I will confess that early on in my professional life I was also enamored with the idea of inculturation.  It seemed only logical to me that in order for the liturgy to be effective, we must make it ours.  That old word has given way to a contextual liturgy (and even theology!).  It did not take long for me to decide that this was working the wrong way.  We should be inculturated into the Lord and His kingdom -- not the other way around.  The liturgy is not a toy for us to experiment with but a treasure and blessing through which God distributes to us His gifts.  We are the ones who need to be inculturated into His domain and not the other way around.  We do not need to make God and the things of God ours but we need to be made His.

Anyway, it seems curious that along the way we have stereotyped ourselves into the lie that our liturgy is German or Western and therefore does not translate well into other cultures.  Pope Francis recently approved a Mayan version of the Mass -- hopefully without child sacrifice?!?  The point being that this has become an almost universal idea that the faith and how we worship must become particular.  It is the strangest of things.  

The task of the Church is not to accommodate other cultures but to predominate the culture of Christ and the Kingdom of God.  We do not need to adapt to or adopt from other cultures in order to be relevant but just the other way around.  The Church is not subordinate to culture but the transformer of culture.  It is the job and task of Christianity to forge an identity apart from any particular culture.  Christianity did not adapt or adopt Roman culture or any other in order to be successful in the proclamation of the Gospel but introduced the culture of Christ and His Kingdom to cultures all along the way.  And it worked.  Rome imploded as an empire but Christianity endured.  So it has been through time and with the cultures, civilizations, and empires.  They come and go but Christ endures in the outpost of the Kingdom that is the Church.  We do not need to make God ours or His kingdom but the kingdom and Christ need to make us His or we will only be temporary.  The Church is eternal and we are eternal as the baptized believers whom God has made His own.  Anything else is merely musical chairs.

First time buyers. . .

While people routinely track first time home buyers and the like, apparently the Wall Street Journal has a view of first time Bible buyers.  The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has reported on this.  Of course, it is not lost on us that as the nones increase, Bible sales are, well, going up???  Trachtenberg cites local reports book store owners and publishers who say that many of the sales are coming from first-time buyers, college students, and other young adults in Generation Z.  Of course, the interesting thing is that Bibles were once ordinarily available in the home -- multiple copies and various translations.  Could it be that they are purchasing because they have grown up in a home without a printed copy of God's Word?  Furthermore, it is curious that they have turned to a physical book instead of a digital copy of the Scriptures.  What is even more interesting is that there is not a church with a soul that does not give away copies of the Bible to anyone that asks.  I do not know the answers but I have questions.

Before we jump for joy and presume that a generation raised outside the faith is coming to know the Gospel, those purchasing a copy of the Bible will need catechesis.  That is the primary opportunity.  If we know anything about these first time readers, it is that they will peruse the offerings online before actually stepping through the door.  This is where the opportunity lies.  If we can hook them into faithful, orthodox online doors and into faithful, orthodox congregations, the future for the curious could be looking up.  If that is the case, it may mean that there is an entrance into a block that has appeared rather untouchable to many.

Before we jump for joy there is also this sober assessment.  That is the stark reality of children growing up in homes where God is absent, where His voice is not spoken, where His Word is not proclaimed, where His name is not invoked in prayer, and where His gifts are left untouched at the altar rail.  That is a great sadness to those who know His presence, hear His voice, are uplifted by the Gospel, absolved of their sins, encouraged to pray the concerns of their hearts, and eat and drink the body and blood of their Savior.  It is not that the Church is missing them but they are missing the Church.  They are no people but could be God's people if the Word is spoken.  We know the Spirit is faithful in His purpose and work -- we only wish more parents were. 

Those with food insecurities. . .

Listening to a radio ad for a local and very effective charity providing hot meals to anyone in need in the community, I heard for the first time the hungry labeled those with food insecurities.  I suppose it is the proper and politically correct thing to say about the, well, hungry in our community but it is a sterile and impotent description.  It will hardly drive the compassion of those who could help and it turns hunger into a feeling instead of a real bodily need.  For what it is worth, I despise the way we come up with new ways not to offend.  The inoffensive terms have no power to draw us out of ourselves and sacrifice for the sake of others.  Furthermore, they treat a real problem as if it were some sort of administrative inefficiency instead of hunger.  We all know what hunger is.  I do not have a clue what they mean by food insecurity.  Food insecurity will not move my cold heart to offer up an online gift for their work.  Furthermore, they do not offer the food insecure security.  They offer them food.  One meal a day (except on Sundays).  So how is that security?  It is a bandaid.  Now, mind you, it is a valuable one and God bless them for doing it but it is not security for the insecure.  It is a plate of good food, mostly homemade, nutritious, and, most of all, free to all who come (to my knowledge there is no litmus test at the door).  However, if the people who are hungry had to define the term food insecurity no one would ever eat.

Jesus does not diminish those who are hungry or blind or deaf or mute or lame when He uses those terms.  They are meant to be pointed.  God did not intend for us to suffer any need.  Even the barest words of Genesis prior to the Fall tell us this.  It was all good.  Man was fully satisfied (except for the devil who capitalized upon a yearning to be God which Adam and Eve had not even realized until the question came).  We are not urged to care for those differently abled or those with food insecurity or those with vision impairment or those with hearing impairment or whatever, we are called to recognize our own gift in order to assist the need in others.  Imagine if we called it a clothing insecurity or a housing insecurity.  Neither of those terms means anything anymore than the invented ways we come up with to normalize want or need.  That is the point of Jesus' words.  The need is not normal -- it is rampant but not normal so do what you can where you can to help.  Saying the poor you will always have with you does not mean you free to ignore them or ignore their need.  It is the removal of the idea that you can fix society's ills.  What you can do and what you should do is help your neighbor in need.

What these terms have done is to elevate advocacy over real help.  Assisting those with food insecurity could be done with a highly paid lobbyist in state or national legislatures.  But it would not put food in their mouths.  What they need is not an administrative problem but a neighbor with a big heart.  Food insecurity may be a national problem but hunger is always local -- looking into the face of the hungry and God moving your heart to care and act.  Jesus was inviting to see these needs not as an administrative problem but as a local and personal opportunity to love one another as we have been loved by Him.  That is why for the Christian the food is part of the gift and the Gospel is the other.

Duh. . .

While visiting the doctor for the annual check up my wife and I heard the ultimate in common wisdom.  The older you get, the more likely you will die.  Whaaaaat?  News to me.  I beg it is news to you as well.  Of course, the wisdom was justification for being on meds we did not need but are protocol to prescribe to those of, shall we say, a certain age.  It just goes to show you how uncommon common wisdom and common sense have become.  In particular, death has been moving further and further away from our circle of experience and awareness.  Sure, we know the violence of the world and other bad things that happen out there, but our mortality is not on our radar.  If it is, we have long ago dismissed any real sense of accountability or judgment.  God is too nice to hold anything against us and nothing that we desire should be called a sin anyway.

Getting back to the doctor, I reminded him that death is in the crystal ball for all of us.  He is not an idiot.  He knows that.  But he is all caught up in the big pharma and medical establishment which really does presume that we are in charge of scheduling our death.  Sure, we have all been raised to believe that there are healthy habits and unhealthy habits which contribute to our well being but have we now bought into the idea that death is something we control?  Surely, those in favor of some sort of assisted and painless suicide for those who have decided life is too much trouble or pain think so but what about the rest of us?  What about Christians?

Do we believe that we live our lives in God's hands, according to His timing, and by virtue of His grace or do we believe that we are in charge of deciding our living and dying?  Even Christians seem to have embraced the default of our age in presuming that life and death are ours to decide and God is only there to pick up the pieces at the end.  When did that happen?  It surely is the natural fruit of those who have concluded that life begins when we say it begins and that until that time it is nothing but a clump of cells but apparently it also works the other way.  Life can turn into a mere clump of cells no longer valued or needed when we decide it.

We talk about the sacred character of life but as Christians we have generally conceded that its beginning and its ending are within our control.  We want to preserve life at a certain point but we also want to be free to let it go at another point.  In countless conversations I have heard well-meaning Christians insist death is not the worst thing that could happen to you -- living under certain conditions is far worse.  As soon as we conceded that point, we surrender the whole cause for life.

My doctor thinks that medicines are the means to preserving life.  My culture says that being free of pain and free to pursue your own definition of happiness are the means to preserving life.  My Church says that Christ is the medicine of immortality who gives us birth to His new and everlasting life in baptism and feeds us Himself as this medicine of immortality in the Holy Eucharist.  I am not at all suggesting that we forego all the blessings of modern medicine but neither am I willing to cede to big pharma and medibusiness the power to begin, keep, and end life.  And I am certainly not willing to let the culture around me tell me what constitutes life, life full, and life empty.  There is only one Word that we can trust in the tangled way around such issues -- the voice of the God who died and now lives never to die again.  He is the One who imparts this very life to us mortals.  Thanks be to God.

Consent is not the test of morality. . .

All over the place it seems that people are in trouble.  Even President Trump has had his share of women who complained about his unwanted advances.  From politics to religion to education to the military, sexual activity without consent is being identified, exposed, and decried as immoral.  While never wishing to presume that non-consensual sexual activity is okay, neither should we fall into the trap of saying that consent is what makes something moral.  This is certainly true of sex but it is also true of a myriad of things.  Approval, even the mass approval of a whole society, does not constitute morality anymore than permission.  This is the dilemma we are in.  Absent any real and certain boundaries of good or evil, right or wrong, we are left with the flimsy foundation of mere consent.  Even in law the issue can often boil down to consent -- not simply whether the victim gave their consent but also if they were able to give their consent.

On the sex side of things, we are approaching the new terrain of allowing minors to give their sexual consent.  It is as if we are writing pedophilia out of the diagnostic book of disorders and reducing the whole thing to the same playing field we have long used for adult sexual relations.  Consent is everything.  When it comes to children, the last remaining hurdle to removing all legal and moral barriers will be the question of the ability of a minor to give consent.  It will certainly be interesting to see how this one works itself out in the court of public opinion but that is already the direction being pursued in our neighbor to the North as well as in other so-called enlightened nations of the West.  Without the ability to say that certain things are always right or wrong, acceptable or intolerable, consent is the only remaining question to be resolved.

That is the flaw in this premise -- namely, that consent is what makes something moral.  Already we have gotten to that point with premarital sex and that was a longtime in the making.  Now we are seeing extramarital sex being judged by the same standard.  If it is not always wrong, then the standard applying is left up to the participants to judge and that is largely consent.  Believe it or not, that is the base of the issue of transgenderism.  It is not simply that people are saying they have a gender which does not relate to their reproductive organs or chromosomes but also that society has given consent that to this being the only legitimate standard to judge the truth and morality of the thing.  Again, when it comes to minors the issue is largely consent.  It is moral and may even be compelling to use puberty blockers or surgical intervention when the child has decided that their supposed gender is at odds with their body.  The question moves away from the morality of such treatment to whether or not the child is able to consent to such treatment and at what age or by what standard this ability resides in that child.  So no longer are we arguing about the morality of the treatment but simply if the child, freed to judge for themselves, is able to make that judgment.  

We have also used consent to decide if, for example, suicide itself is moral.  We seem perfectly willing to walk back several millennium of prohibitions simply on this basis of consent.  In the same way, my body, my choice is really an appeal to consent as well.  If I decide it is needed or good (for me), then abortion should be allowed without restriction and left to the woman alone to decide (not even in conversation with her physician).  Consent becomes the only thing that matters. 

Even conservatives can appeal to consent.  When some object to the abject inequities of capitalism, billionaires whose wealth increases seemingly endlessly while workers earn proportionately smaller pieces of the success pie, consent is the justification.  It is not, so they say, inequitable if the workers agree to work for their wage and if the system judges it fair.  Consent is then the litmus test of the fairness of employers to employees.  As appealing as this might seem, it applies the same relative standard to morality in his instance as it does to the other instances.

This is a neat way to judge everything and particularly sin.  It leaves most of us off the hook if we have obtained consent from others (and therefore their approval) and it allows us the freedom to decide what is sin and what it not.  This is, in effect, what most liberal Christian churches have done.  Sin is not about God's will and purpose or even about commandments and prohibitions in Scripture.  It is only about harming others (unless they consent to it).  That does a very fine job of removing most of what used to pass for sin from any test of morality beyond consent -- yours or the consent of those affected by your words or actions.  In such a situation, the confessor can skip over sins that were done consensually and the father confessor need not jump to conclusions about something being wrong but merely inquires about whether or not it was done by agreement and with permission.  In this way, it not only narrows sin but also narrows the Gospel.  Forgiveness becomes something small and occasional instead of being something profound and essential to everyday life.  Worse, it puts the person giving consent in the driver's seat of God, deciding by that consent if something was wrong or not.

What is the big deal?

There is quite a stir still in Rome about whether or not kneeling to receive the Sacrament is permitted or forbidden.  It has a history, to be sure, but it is mostly recent.  In fact, it does not have that much to do with Vatican II since the Council never addressed the subject and the permission to stand was inaugurated prior to the Council.  It came at the the insistence of bishops and priests, based on practical reasons and appeals to Church history rather than theology, and was the subject of as much mythology as fact in the anecdotal sources of the modern practice.  At one point, however, surveys said it was the most disliked liturgical change - even among Roman Catholics who approved of other liturgical changes taking place in the Mass at the time.  Prominent members of the Liturgical Movement, a theological and pastoral initiative which promoted liturgical reform and active participation in the liturgy, argued for standing for the reception of the Sacrament and insisted it was the most desirable method.  They claimed it was the ancient practice and, perhaps more importantly, it was modern and more efficient (shorter Mass times!).  Not to mention that the removal of the altar rail made for a more egalitarian feel to it all absent the fenced in holy space at the altar.

What began as an accommodation when the crowds were large became the rigidly enforced norm for all people (at least that is how it is in most Roman Catholic dioceses).  What is amazing is that some Roman Catholic bishops have issued strident orders against receiving the Sacrament kneeling even though prior to the mid-1960s that was the universal and long standing practice of the Roman Catholic Church.  So why are those bishops all fired up about this?  What does it matter?  Why would somebody like Cardinal Timothy Nolan, of St. Patricks NYC fame, tell the priests to stop asking for altar rails?  Really, I wish I knew.  While sometimes I would long for a GIRM (General Instruction on the Roman Missal) for sloppy Lutheran practices, I cannot for the life of me figure out why this would be such a big issue in Rome.

The norm for reception of Holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States is standing. Communicants should not be denied Holy Communion because they kneel. Rather, such instances should be addressed pastorally, by providing the faithful with proper catechesis on the reasons for this norm.

So in roughly a generation and a half, the universal practice of kneeling for the Sacrament had become something you need to teach people NOT to do.  Honestly, it defines understanding and no amount of explanation makes reasonable what is arbitrary and capricious.  How strange that this could created such a fuss when other abuses in the Mass are ignored!   Is it because those bishops are so jealous for their control of things they do not like that they cannot even tolerate what was once normal?   If I had the pope's ear I would gently catechize him on the things that Rome ought to be reforming and to leave the matter of the posture for the reception of the Sacrament up to the people and their priest.  What worries me is that we Lutherans have the same tendency to take what was once ordinary and make it exceptional and to take what was once exceptional and make it ordinary.  Except with us it is not a rail but the very Liturgy itself.  But do not worry, I am sure Rome is not that far behind us. . .

Notre Dame. . .

You can watch a very informative and enjoyable documentary of Notre Dame and especially the fire.  You can also find any number of videos online about the interior -- especially the changes that were done following the devastating fire.

What I found most interesting were the comments of one French woman who said that it was beautiful inside but it was not the Notre Dame she had come to know and love and the sanctuary in which she had prayed.  Her complaint were the interior finishes, especially the altar, font, pulpit, and other furnishings.  In the context of her thoughts, she said something telling.  The cathedral was not, in her opinion, a luxury hotel which required modernization in order to keep up its clientele.  It was a telling comment.

Indeed, Notre Dame represents what has gone wrong in churches today.  The exterior remains its old Gothic self but the interior has been modernized.  That is the problem.  It is one thing to modernize the exterior of the faith and to a certain amount that is unavoidable.  But to change the heart of the faith is to depart from it.  The woman was not denying that the building was still "pretty" but she was admitting that the changes inside detracted from the cathedral it had been.  Perhaps it was not easy for her to put her finger on but what she was saying is that when the church changes the interior of the faith, the faith is changed -- no matter how much the external remains.  Think of it this way, you can put new clothes on the body but the body underneath remains the same.  

There are things that form a unity within the externals of the Church.  This is certainly true of doctrine and practice.  The age old axiom lex orandi, lex credendi gives this aphorism a concise and clear statement of the relationship between how a thing looks and what it means.  When this unity fails, the Church becomes a mere mask and not something yesterday, today, and forever the same.  This was obvious to someone who looked at a building she had known as familiar place of faith and prayer only to see that the building had changed.  Its new interior furnishings represented a disconnect between the past and the future.  The altar was no longer a holy place representing the entrance of the eternal into the temporal but was merely a piece of furniture or art for the designer to use as canvas for his or her self-expression.  The focus was not upon the God of our fathers but the deity of human invention and imagination.  This is what is wrong with the Church today.  Overall, it is less reflective of Scripture and the voice of the eternal God and much more the expression of its people and a particular moment of time.  It is therefore a creature of the moment instead of a glimpse of the eternal.  This is not only Notre Dame's interior problem.  It is the problem of modern Christianity.

It does make a difference. . .

I was reading a discussion of a wonderful Advent hymn as it made its way from Latin into English and how preciseness matters when translating and speaking.  Here is a bit of it.   It is amusing -- lifting our minds to the merciful Pickler instead of the merciful Creator.

There are two verbs in Latin that can give us the word spelled Conditor: condo, condere results in cónditor while condio, condire produces condítor. The verb condo, condere, condidi, cónditum, “to bring, lay or put together” in the sense of “establish, build, construct, compose, describe” and, strangely, “hide” is never to be confused with condio, condire, condivi, condí­tum: “to put fruit in vinegar, wine, spices, etc., to preserve, pickle”. Our English word “condiment” comes from condio. BEWARE! This gets confusing because since “to lay up”, as in to pickle or preserve, can also be expressed by condo! There is a connection between the words.

Incautious people might sing the Vespers hymn in such a way that we lift our hearts and minds to the merciful Pickler, rather than the merciful Creator. The inattentive singer of vespers sings us an image of a cosmic cook sealing stars into Ball jars or sprinkling fresh herbs through the heavens.

Lutherans know well this hymn (though not perhaps this translation which I like):

Creator of the stars of night,
Thy people’s everlasting Light;
Jesu, Redeemer, save us all,
And hear thy servants when they call.

Thou, grieving that the ancient curse
Should doom to death an universe,
Hast found the med’cine, full of grace,
To save and heal a ruin’d race.

Thou cam’st, the Bridegroom of the Bride,
As drew the world to evening-tide;
Proceeding from a Virgin shrine,
The spotless Victim all divine.

At whose dread Name, majestic now,
All knees must bend, all hearts must bow
And things celestial thee shall own,
And things terrestrial, Lord alone.

O thou, whose coming is with dread
To judge and doom the quick and dead,
Preserve us, while we dwell below,
From ev’ry insult of the foe.

To God the Father, God the Son,
And God the Spirit, Three in One,
Laud, honour, might, and glory be
From age to age eternally. Amen.

My point today is not really about this hymn.  It is about how imprecise we have become in our use of language.  The increasing use of unprecedented is unprecedented.  We have become victims of our own laziness.  This is especially true of the media.  My wife and I routinely correct the pronunciations of the news media talking heads (who were once chosen for their ability to speak with precision and without the color of accent ).  We are tired of meteorologists who do not know how to pronounce temperature.  There is no humor left in the way we talk and instead it is evidence of an education in which spelling and grammar do not count anymore.  It is sort of like those who do not follow directions because they have never been taught cursive.  

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the faith.  We do not even notice how many heretical or at best, questionable, statements are made in sermons and Bible study.  We do not speak of God with the precision God speaks to us of Himself.  We are supposed to honor everyone's pronouns but we refuse to honor God's.  Who we think God is carries more weight than what God says about Himself in His Word.  So undoubtedly people complain that I am too picky and laugh at the suggestion that words matter.  For want of a comma along there is a radically different meaning in what we say or write.  It is all coming home to roost especially in a faith which esteems words so very highly.  This is really rather sad but it is even worse.  It is destructive to our ability to communicate and God's ability to communicate to us.  Words matter.  No where is this more telling than when it comes to a collect.  So often the way the collect is prayed destroys any semblance of what it is saying so that it is hard for anyone to say "Amen" at the end and mean it.  That is why we must be clear.  The "Amen" is not perfunctory (the way it was misunderstood in the hymns of the old The Lutheran Hymnal) but the voice of faith indicating that what was said was heard, is believed, and has been prayed.  For that, language matters.

 

 

 

Losing ground. . .

Abortion is for our time the same kind of moral test as civil rights were to many generations before.  It is not simply about abortion and when it is or is not legal but about the value we assign to life.  Given that criteria, the results of the election have not seen us advance but rather lose ground.  It is clear from the actions of states that the populace has decided abortion must be preserved in some form -- something on which both conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat seem to agree.  For now, there are still states in which abortion is illegal: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.  Missouri, joined Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Kansas in passing pro-abortion ballot initiatives.  Voters seemed to believe that Trump was not the threat Harris claimed to their “fundamental right” to abort their children.  According to the exit polls, 47% of those who believe abortion should be legal “in most cases” still voted for Trump.  Again, this is not simply about abortion but about the esteem in which we hold life from its natural beginning to its natural end.

Furthermore, the IVF talk, be it political banter or not, has added to the idea that life is not sacred but the technology we use to control it is.  I fear that the cause for life has not been advanced by this election or by the ballot choices so far but rather we have lost ground.  It seems that both sides of the political spectrum have decided that life is a commodity rather than a treasure to be preserved and protected.  While most pundits agree that a Trump administration is far more Christian friendly than a Harris administration would be, the reality is that this does not necessarily apply over all to the important issues relating to the cause of life.  The differences are degrees and not in substance.  Perhaps that reflects the fact that the populace is still wary of any kind of bans on the freedom to make reproductive choice (at least one outside the decision to have sexual intercourse) and even more fearful of limitations of the rights of the parents to do what they think they need to do in order to conceive when they do want a child.  In addition, they seem instinctively libertarian when it comes to putting down hard and fast rules about the preservation of life for the physically and mentally fragile, the aged, and those who decide for themselves that the time has come to die.

For all the hype, Trump seems to manifest no deep or profound religious convictions outside the mainstream of American experience.  Neither in his nor Harris' campaigns were there any explicitly religious themes used to rally a particular segment of the religious landscape and, indeed, a conscious decision made to advocate for some leeway for abortion and out and out support for IVF despite the public warnings of Roman Catholics, to name just one group.  Unlike in other campaigns, religiously prominent figures played no significant role in this campaign on either side.  This election witnessed the the fewest overt references to religion in American history and those which were noted were innuendo from the shrill voices of the liberal left more than from the candidates themselves.  This is a warning sign that religious causes such as the sacredness of life no longer warrant the deference of the candidate in pursuing that religious clientele.  In other words, those voters belonging to churches with strong pro-life stands are not necessarily mirroring the position of their church bodies as they enter the polling booth.  While some might chalk this up to pragmatism, I fear that the afterglow of Dobbs has left us blind to the fact that we have not done a good job of reasoning and persuading the people that life is sacred and that assaults on all sides of the cause, as well as abortion, are the beachheads on which the future wars will be fought and not within the hallowed halls of the courts.

More than the loss of a word. . .

Every now and then the world wide web is a buzz with arguments over whether or not Lutherans are Protestant.  It should be a no brainer.  No.  That is the answer.  Not a qualified one or a hesitant one.  No.  Lutherans are not Protestants.  Yes, we did protest but we are not Protestants.  We were not Protestants when we protested and we are certainly not Protestants now.  Look around you, Lutherans.  With whom do you wish to be identified?  With Protestants like the imploding mainline churches of America?  With Protestants like Joel Osteen and the evangelical wannabes who build shrines to themselves?  With Protestants like the disunited Methodists who get more upset over sex than Scripture?  With Protestants like the Baptists who insist they believe every word of the inerrant Bible except baptism now saves you or This is My body?  I could go on.  You should go on.  We do not claim to be nor do we wish to be lumped in with the Protestants (though some liberal Lutherans certainly do belong there!).

We are catholic or Catholic (frankly, I have never understood the problem with the capital letter).  We insist this in our first confession and have not recanted.  So confessionally, we do claim an identity but not the Protestant one.  As loathe as some Lutherans are to admit it, this is unequivocally true.  To be at war with your catholic identity is to be at war not with Rome but with yourself.  This is the problem with Lutherans.  We have become so comfortable in the contrived identity we have wrapped ourselves in that we no longer feel at home in our own confessional identity.  So yes, we better get over our difficulty saying that we catholic and we better learn to say that word with conviction or we will risk becoming who we imagine ourselves to be and thus be lumped upon the rather inconsequential mound of other Protestants mostly dying or already dead.

This is NOT about a word but about an identity.  Some years ago I asked a Bible study why people were Lutheran.  They spoke about being raised Lutheran or marrying into the Lutheran Church or finding a compromise between a Roman Catholic and Protestant home after their wedding.  Then someone actually said that unless you were baptized and confirmed and raised a Lutheran, that person did not know why anyone would become Lutheran or we would try to make them Lutheran.  Yup.  There you have it.  We did not simply lose a word from our vocabulary but an identity.  When I said that there was only one reason to be Lutheran and that was because Lutherans hold the true catholic and apostolic faith, there was an uproar.  But what about my kids who were confirmed Lutheran and ended up at some cool named non-denom down the street?  Or the Methodist Church my in-laws attend?  And so on....  In their minds, the only tenable position was to believe that no church had the truth and every church had enough bits and pieces for one to be saved and everyone should stay who they are.  

Times have changed.  We have made significant progress in debunking the myth of the high road and low road that all lead to heaven -- at least in my own congregation.  But what stands out to many who visit or some who come as vagabonds from the broken remnants of their tradition is that we really do mean it.  Lutheranism preserves the one true catholic and apostolic faith.  We are the catholics who hold to Scripture, who live within the lively tradition of the faith once delivered and passed down to us, and who take seriously the confession once made and still held.  Rome's catholicity is compromised by the very existence of an inerrant papal office and by the doctrines of which Scripture knows nothing but they insist must be believed.  The Eastern Churches are largely ethnic and their doctrinal and confessional identity is stunted to 787 AD.  Lutheran church structures are a mess, to be sure, but the faith confessed is solid, Biblical, catholic, and apostolic.  Sadly, Lutherans themselves are still overall more at home under the banner of Protestant than they are as Catholic.  Who in their right mind wants to belong to a communion which has it wrong?  Or partially wrong?  Or mostly wrong?  Let the Scriptures be the judge and arbiter of truth.  The Roman claim to an inerrant church that invents the Scriptures is really nothing less than a claim for the papacy and a man who gets to say yay or nay.  Can anyone reasonably believe that this is what the apostles thought?  The East rests its claims on ecumenical councils and consensus that anyone and everyone knows err, disagree, and are in conflict with each other.  We Lutherans have it all except in our minds we think too little of it.  Content to be Protestant, we just may die as an institution while our faith lives on.

An ending and a beginning. . .

Sermon preached for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany of our Lord (C), preached on the occasion of my retirement as the Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Clarksville, TN.

The wedding at Cana in Galilee is both an end and a beginning.  It is the end of the individual lives of a man and woman and the beginning of their new life together as one, husband and wife.  It is also the end of the age of the prophets and their signs of what is to come and the beginning of our Lord’s epiphany of words and works that fulfill all the promises.  It is the end of the old covenant with its ceremonial rites of purification and the beginning of the New Covenant of Christ’s blood, as the old jars of water for ritual fulfillment of the law are permanently stained with the wine that will be Christ’s blood shed for the sake of the world.

St. John uses precise language here.  This is the first of the signs that Jesus did but certainly not His first miracle.  From of old all the signs and wonders God did were done through the Word that was now made flesh.  This is not quite the start of Jesus’ public ministry – the miracles of His annunciation, incarnation, baptism, and temptation all happened before this.  He had already called His disciples.  But it was the first of HIS signs that mark the character of all that Jesus came to do.

With the end comes a beginning and with the beginning there is an end.  The mother of the bride sheds tears at Cana because her daughter is not hers anymore.  She is her husbands.  There is always sadness with an end and a beginning.  John the Baptist is the end of the prophets.  The long line of patriarchs and prophets, judges and kings is complete in Christ.  The priestly line is also ended in Him who is both priest and victim, Jesus Christ.  The temple which had stood as the sacrament of God’s presence with His people is replaced by Him who will be raised up on the third day and deliver the people’s sacrifice of praise to the Father and the Father’s gifts of grace to the people.

With the end comes a beginning and with the beginning there is an end.  I am living testament to the truth of those words.  This is not without tears in me nor in some of you.  There is always sadness with an end and a beginning.  John the Baptist knew the truth of this from his prison cell as he sent his followers to Jesus.  I know it now as I must relinquish to others the role I have known for thirty two years.  I take no comfort in this and my heart aches.  My consolation is not in the worthiness of those who succeed me.  There is something more here than the transfer from one generation to another of the stewardship of the work that is always the Lord’s.  No, if we are to be comforted it must be from the Lord alone.
 
Neither the bride or groom or their families or the guests or the steward of the feast knew what was happening.  They focused on the wine – the lack of it or the best  given at the end.  The Lord always saves the best until last.  This does not mean that the best is yet to come.  This is foolish; Christians are not optimists.  We do not think nor dare we hope that things are actually getting better.  You had no idea what the future would hold when you called me to be your pastor 32 yes ago.  I had no idea what the future would hold when I packed up my family to head to Tennessee from New York 32 years ago.  Neither of us knew the hardships, trials, joys, and blessings would be down the road.  But we did know Christ.  In that we are like the disciples of Jesus and the servants seeing the miracle hidden from eyes.

I will not say to you that things will be fine under Pastors Smith and Martin.  If I should, dismiss such sentiment.  None of us knows the future and our enemy is powerful.  But our trust is not in flesh and blood.  We have only one confidence,  one hope, and that is in Christ alone.  The promise of God is not resident in people but in the means of grace.  His covenant is the covenant in His blood, shed upon the cross, risen never to die again, and present here among us in a miracle much like the wedding feast in Galilee and the Manna in the wilderness.  It turns out this text is especially fitting for this day, for an ending and a beginning.  Though the wedding guests, the wedding family, the bride and the groom, and nearly everyone else that day was in the dark, you are not in the dark.  You know that any past we celebrate was God’s work and that the only real future also belongs to Christ.  He knows what that future is and He is with you as we all stumble our way into it.  Trust not in princes or rulers or pastors.  Trust in the Lord.  He is the only One who fulfills the end and opens the beginning.  He will not disappoint you.

Where is the Lord?  He is in those unglazed clay jars ruined for their old purpose of holding water and destined for a new beginning of wine that is Christ’s blood.  Christ takes the past and fulfills it perfectly and then ushers in the new beginning of His redeeming work.  He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.  Hebrews tells us that the New Mediator who is Christ is greater than all the old patriarchs and prophets who came before Him, greater than Moses and greater than John the Baptist.  Their enduring work was to point to Jesus; if my work is to endure, it is because it pointed you to Jesus.  Christ ends a past so that He may open a future which cannot be imagined or known except by faith.  None of us can see it clearly now but we do know this: it will be better than every yesterday and bigger than every dream.  Now we see through a mirror dimly – it is called faith.

You are those clay jars, the work of God the potter, fashioning you for Himself in the waters of baptism, keeping you pure by holy absolution, and filling you with the new withe new wine of His blood in the Holy Communion.  This is Jesus, the new wine.  He weeps with Mary and Martha at Lazarus’ death.  He aches for the pain of the nursing mothers of Jerusalem.  He claims the uncleanness of the leper, the evil of the demon possessed, the disability of the lame, the blind, the deaf, and the mute.  He even owns the death of those who die.  It seems wasteful and shamefully extravagant.  Those who have already drunk too much should not drink more.  But Christ has more to give to those willing to drink from His cup.

Your future is not tomorrow but eternity.  For one day Jesus will do for this baptismal font and altar and pulpit what He did to those water jars for purification.  He will ruin them because they are needed no more.  This is the future you await.  Not simply another generation of leaders or another pastor to stand where I stood but the eternal tomorrow.  God is among us not to get us through another day but to bring us to the eternal day.  On that day, the end of the world will cause us no sorrow because the beginning of forever will fill us completely.  This needs to be your focus.  Not another day or week or year or generation but remaining in Christ to receive the fullness of the new and everlasting day He has come to give you.

That is why we are here now.  We are kept in Christ not by our wills or our desires but by the Word of God preached and taught, by the water of baptism that washes us clean, by the voice of absolution that claims our sins for His blood, and by the holy food of His flesh and blood in this Eucharist.  We are not waiting for a better tomorrow but a new and eternal one, not for the realization of our dreams but for  Christ’s promises to be fulfilled, not to make it through a life but to eternal life.  In that journey there will always be endings and tears.  Our comfort lies in the beginning and the joy that is without end with Christ, our Lord.

Did you notice that St. John posits this miracle on the THIRD day.  He is invoking the resurrection, pointing us to Christ, and to our own joyful resurrection.  You do not make it to the end by getting through another day.  You make it through another day because you have a vision of the end.  You are not looking for the next of anything, much less pastors.  You are looking for the end, the consummation of all things, when Christ shall come.  You are waiting for trumpets to sound, for the dead to be raised, and for your place at the great marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom without end, today in Clarksville, tomorrow in Jerusalem on high.   Amen

The seeds of violence. . .

The seeds of the violent shape of our culture begin in the womb -- not simply with the original sin into which every life is conceived but with our callous and shameful indifference toward the value of the life within the womb.  If we cannot afford to give the life in the womb protection, honor, respect, and value, how can we be expected to accord such esteem to life outside the womb.  While this is certainly true of life in general, it is particularly true of the lives of those least able to care for or defend themselves.  Here I am thinking of those whose lives are severely impaired by dementia, mental or emotional disability, and those with physical fragility.  The point is this.  Gun violence and the overall violent shape of life here and across the world was caused by something more than the availability of guns or the intolerance that breeds the kind of contempt that feeds such violence.  It starts with the esteem, value, protection, honor, and respect given to life at is first beginning -- the conception and fetal development within the womb.  It is not because we are violent that we abort babies or want to euthanize the disabled and frail, it is because we abort babies that we think violence can be the way we express ourselves and those who cost us money and time can be given a painless death to what most now consider a life not worth living anyway.  This legitimacy has and will lead to legal enshrinement of the right to kill those whose lives we do not value as a society.

The root of the problem of violence does not lie with the individuals (which does not at all minimize their responsibility) nor does it lie with the problem of guns (which is a conversation which we still need to have) but with the way we view life itself.  It starts in the womb.  If what is in the womb has no ultimate value, nothing else will have value.  If our society has attached no value to the child in the womb, it will not value the life outside the womb.  What is incredible is that as a society we attach more value to our pets than we do to any other life.  A nation got upset a few years ago when some idiot on the freeway threw a dog into traffic -- which I do not condone!  However, what is wrong with the picture of a people whose outrage and contempt lies with an abuse of a pet while they march for the right to end the life in the womb on a whim?  It is not that we need to devalue our pets.  We need to learn the value of life and hold life precious and sacred (whether you are religious or not).  This is the bedrock that upholds our society and our way of life and without it we are vulnerable and life takes on a relative value instead of an absolute one.

Everyone who is shocked by school shootings and other kinds of violence should also be shocked at the callous disregard our culture views the life in the womb or in the nursing home.  The prolife position is not about abortion but about the value we attach to life -- from its natural beginning to its natural end.  In the same way, we cannot acquiesce to whatever works with reproductive technology (IVF especially) if the success of one pregnancy comes at the cost of many embryos discarded or thrown into the freezer like a pound of hamburger for when you feel like it.  It all stems from the same problem.  We do not value life.  Until this is fixed, all the things we do to answer the violence all around us will be bandaids that cannot heal the wound.  Absent a common value to life, the culture of death everywhere increases.