Perhaps the blogs are going away or are less popular than before but, no matter the reason, I received an email saying that my own little enterprise got a little recognition -- something for which I am most grateful to those who read it now and then or even more regularly.
You can find out more about it all here. Again, I am not promoting it but simply putting the info out there. For Individuals, it does enable you to subscribe to your favorite Blogs in one place on FeedSpot Reader.
Martin E. Marty was the author of some 60 books and a world acclaimed authority on Christian history. He was affable and well spoken. He enjoyed the respect of his peers and those interested in Christian history all across the world. I met him a couple of times and was in awe of him. Paul L. Maier was also the author of many books and endless articles and also had a distinguished career as an educator and historian. I knew Paul well, hosted him four or five times as a speaker and preacher in my parish, and broke bread with him at least as often. I was not in awe of him but I adored him. Let me tell you the difference.
On one occasion, my middle child accompanied us for supper. My son thought it would be boring. He loved and hung on every word Paul said. Paul talked about his yellow Pontiac Solstice (or was it the Saturn version?). He talked about a 50 foot drag line crane he bought and used to dig holes in his property, along with driving his bulldozer, tractor, and such. He had the ability to transcend a difference in age and experience and yet hidden in his words and witness lived large the image of Christ. I cannot help but remember this aspect of the man who was not simply a commentator but a defender of the one and forever truth of Christ crucified and risen. He often said the best thing that could happen for Christianity is people digging up Palestine to build new buildings for everything they unearthed gave testimony to the truth and truthfulness of the Scriptures. Martin Mary could tell us about movements and connections and the development of church bodies and Christian influence but Paul Maier could tell us that we need not be embarrassed about the faith we confess because it's facts have every foundation in archeology and history. I will continue to read and reread the works of Martin Marty but I will long for the conversations with Paul with my son who learned something of the faith while imagining Paul operating the drag line crane making his backyard look like the craters on the moon.
We live in a world and at a time when it seems that children have adult sized choices and decisions thrust upon them, robbing them of their childhood and forcing them to deal with things they are not emotionally or experientially equipped to deal with. It ought to be to our sadness and regret that our children live in an "R" rated world and have had to suffer through words which describe and images that depict some of our worst and most depraved desires. Yet this is the world we have given them and this is the obstacle course they must make their way through to a whole and responsible adulthood. Yes, we do have the power to give them a safer world and environment in which to grow up into adulthood but at some point and for some reason we as a culture decided the hardest edges of life and the most realistic depictions of our chosen reality were the things our children should know from childhood on.
Our world is not safe. It is not safe for them to use the tools of the internet or even the toys we give them for play. We get all excited when some lead paint shows up in a toy from China or a car seat needs to be recalled but we cannot seem to muster the same sort of indignation over the explicit sex acts and violence which is routinely fed to them in those unsupervised screens. We think we are paying attention to the best interests of our children when we violate their bodies because of a momentary whim for a boy to be a girl or a girl a boy but we cannot find it within ourselves to allow them any freedom to be children. Maybe the birth rate ought to be going down if this is all we can manage as a culture and society to protect our children and insulate them from the worst around them.
Hillary Clinton was vilified for saying it takes a village to raise a child. She may have been wrong about everything else but she was not wrong about that. It does take a village and we have been doing a rather poor job as a village taking care of our children. When they act out or display adult size temperaments for sex or violence, we are shocked and appalled. Where did they learn this? I can tell you. Look in the mirror. They learned it from self-indulgent adults who have lost their common sense and forsaken the sense of duty and responsibility our children deserve in order to hand them a weapon which they do not know how to use. How could they not hurt themselves or others!
There was a time when my kids were small and I turned the channel or took the page out of their hand because it was not appropriate to their age or maturity. We need to take more care as adults to protect those most vulnerable more than indulge them with adult sized freedom and choices that will hurt them for the whole of their lives. Before we expect our children to grown up and act their age, we adults need to do exactly that.
One of the saddest fruits of the modern desire to reinvent the architecture of the Church has been how modern buildings struggle to speak with any clear voice of who the Church is and what the Church does. In the place of the old, we do not have the new but instead a cacophony of incoherent voices shouting to be heard instead of speaking of what God has said. There was a time when even the stones cried out of Christ and Him crucified, when the clear message was the body and blood of our Lord, incarnate in the Virgin's womb, living holy for the unholy, dying for the terrible cost of sin, living so that sin would never gain the last word in death, and giving the fruits of His redeeming work without cost to those who deserved nothing of His mercy.
Clearly certain forms were clearer in this than others, so much more clear than the confusion of circular shapes that test the boundaries of usefulness for the Church they are supposed to hold. The cruciform shape of the building made it clear that we preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Easter does not leave behind the cross but frames its meaning and power. And in that cruciform shape there is the altar. The altar is Christ on that cross shaped foundation. From that altar the blood and water flow in the Eucharistic and baptismal means of grace. The Gospel is words but not only words. The pulpit is the mouth that speaks but not in place of the body and blood and water. No, it is with these that together Christ is made known, known, and made known more.
It occurs to me (though undoubtedly I have borrowed this from someone along the way) that the only ones who really see this are the members of the altar guild. They have the best job in the Church or at least the best vantage point of it all. They are like the men who brought the body to the tomb and the women who came to complete the burial. They are near while the rest are far removed from the center of it all. The altar is marked on the top with five crosses to mark the five wounds of Jesus. The altar cloth is like the burial linen, the shroud if you will, that wraps the body and touches its flesh. On this altar cloth are transferred the burial marks, the five wounds. They absorb the blood that flows from the body not as a back up in case of accident but because that is the reason for their existence, why they were made. With the altar cloth is the corporal on which the sacred vessels sit and the purficator which cleanses the chalice as the blood is distributed. These are like the face cloth of Jesus which He folded up and placed on the side of where His body lay. And the paraments are like the outer garments, the seamless robe too precious to tear which adorns Him who is alone worthy of wearing it. The sacred vessels are lifted up not in offering of sacrifice to the Father but so that the Father might countenance their filling -- the blood that flows into the cup turning sacrifice into sacrament.
Everything in the building and at the altar speaks. It speaks of body and blood. From the pulpit body and blood. The stones do cry out and with them the ministers who carry these gifts in their hands and lend to Christ their voices and every aspect of the chancel and nave. The stained glass are visual words of God's work of our salvation in His Son. The organ is the massed choir of voices of God's people who have been set free to sing the unending song of what God has done. It is and, according to Revelation, will always be about the body and blood, the Lamb who sits upon His throne and the saints gathered around Him. But of all people, the altar guild folk get it best. They who handle the things of God along with the ministers of Christ see what too often the people in the pews do not see. Christ is here. He is literally here. The same body in Mary's belly comes to yours that the Lord of life might be incarnate in you too. The same body hung upon the cross that you might bear yours in Him as He bore for you. The same body laid in the tomb but the tomb could not hold Him. As He was stripped and laid bare, the Church will soon strip the chancel and lay it bare -- so bare that it cannot be anymore missed or ignored. Christ crucified for me.
The palms wave with joy for the day -- not because they know not what awaits the Lord of glory as He comes but precisely because they do. He is come for this. My hour is now. My glory is here. And the busy altar guild leads us through the unfolding of the days from palms to lilies, from death to life, not as a play but as the true and real divine drama is done before us in remembrance of the once for all and forever is told. Curiously enough, the body and blood of Christ are never spoken of as signs or symbols ever. One of the reasons why John 6 cannot be symbolic. Real food, real drink, real flesh, and real blood. No, Jesus does not and no Scriptures speaks of His body and blood as symbol of another else or sign of something not there. Sure, other things may symbolize that which is the most real of all reality but not the other way around. And the altar guild knows it all, sees it all, hears it all, and works that we all might know and see and hear it so that we might give witness to it in word and deed. Thanks be to God for the altar guild. Join up. It is the closest seat to the mystery of the ages which unfolds before us every week.
Sometimes Lutherans get so caught up in the invisible character of the Church's fullness that it is easy to presume that the Church is not local, a specific assembly in which the Word speaks, sins are forgiven, sinners washed clean, and the hungry fed upon the Bread of Life. As Norman Nagel often said, a God who is everywhere is nowhere when you need Him. This is reflective of the incarnational theology of St. John. Jesus is the God who is precisely that -- somewhere. He is here. In the flesh of His mother as like any child and yet without sin. In the bread of His flesh and yet gloriously so. In the bread that is the Word that proceeds from the mouth of God and yet not simply words.
It is a wonderful thing to have a written confession -- Lutherans are blessed to have such in the Concordia. But the Confession does not live in some theoretical or artificial idea. The Confessions live in the assembly of the saints and they live where and through the Word of the Gospel purely proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered according to our Lord's bidding. In some respects, we have lost this dynamic and think of the Confessions as a book of words to which one subscribes. Confessional subscription, while affirmed in words, is something lived out as the people of God gather around the Word of God and the Table of God. You cannot build a wall between what is believed and how it is lived out, between what we say and what we do. Sadly, that is exactly what some have tried to do and in so doing have rendered academic and weak what is practical and strong.
Doctrinal integrity means nothing if those who kneel at the rail have different confessions and those with one confession have no unity unless they kneel together. There is no church fellowship that does not meet also at the rail and there is no rail that welcomes those who have no fellowship. The independent congregation without a formal fellowship of confession and liturgical life is an oddity that cannot live long and begs to the rescued. The congregation in which the fellowship is so wide that it does not expect or manifest a unity of confession is also odd and empty, begging to be fulfilled with the riches of a confession that is lived out in liturgical life.
In the same way, though this liturgical life does not demand an exact uniformity of rite or ritual, it certainly desires such -- as close as can be. Just as this liturgical life does not demand appointments or architecture, it certainly does not disdain the riches of more over less. What must not be demanded is nonetheless the desire -- oneness of confession and Table, of liturgy and church usages, of beauty and ceremony. Such unity and uniformity is not some theoretical ideal but that to which we work not because we must but because we desire it. There is something lost when we become so comfortable with a diversity of beliefs and practices that we find unity an alien thing instead of a familiar. Maybe it is true that the Church will never realize this goal on earth but that should not prevent us from striving for just that -- a unity not of less but of more, not of minimums but of fullness. If this is not that to which we are committed, for which we work, and the desire of our hearts, we are not worthy of being called the Church.
Finally, the standard we apply is not personal nor individual but catholic and of the whole. For this reason, we value tradition over novelty, what has been received over what has been invented, what marks us in continuity with those who have gone before over that which marks us as new and different. In the end this is the arena in which the old adage lives, lex orandi, lex credendi. And this ancient principle is reflected in our Confessions even as it is reflective of who we are as a church and what are the marks of this church. Our unity and life is liturgical just as our confession is. It is worth remembering in an age in which diversity seems to value the freedom to be different over the freedom to look like our fathers in the faith.
The danger is also that we remove faith from the concrete of the means of grace and the work of the Spirit from those means of grace so that even God becomes an idea to inhabit the imagination rather than the God who fills the present so that He might fill eternity with us. The more we distance God from the means of grace the more we distance Him from anything we would call real and unchangeable. God is not an idea. He is a personal being who is known to us in a personal way through the concrete of the Word and Sacraments. Faith is not an idea or even an idea of this God. Faith is the trust in the God who has revealed Himself to us and made Himself known to us precisely because without His aid and Spirit, we would be left to a mere idea of Him and not the reality of Him and what He has accomplished for us.
Of all the things that are dangerous to Christianity, one of them is surely the idea that we turn God on and off like a feeling, that we decide for Him or against Him at will and whim, and that He lives in us as an idea in our imagination. No God like this has any power to save us eternally nor has He the power to change us in the present moment. Such a God does not need to be worshiped, is hardly with the time to pray, and will countenance our surrender to whatever desire we have -- including the one to disown Him when He no longer is needed or fulfills any purpose in our eyes. This God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the prophets, and not the God who was made flesh in Jesus Christ. While I can only hope that evangelicals will tire of this view of God, I can warn the Lutherans who want to be like the evangelicals that this is not the God of our confession, not the God of our liturgy, and not the God of our prayers.
If you listen to Pastor Paul Smith, Bishop, Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand, answering the usual questions, you do not hear the voice of someone who seems strange or odd or scary. He is perfectly calm in his explanation of what was being done, why it was being done, and how the church was going to live and thrive because of what was done. It is the kind of calm that suggests that there is no reasonable person who could possibly disagree with him on this matter and no one of good heart and sound mind who would object. Anyway, according to Smith, we are all going to get along and this is all going to be wonderful -- diversity is the byword of a vibrant and alive Christianity, you know.
You can listen to the series of videos here. They are generally short, a couple of minutes, and nicely done. The problem is not that he is not nice or that the decisions made are not reasonable in the light of social understanding in the 21st century. No, the problem is that this is wrong. It does not accord with Scripture. It does not accord with the Lutheran Confessions. It does not accord with history. It does not accord with catholic doctrine or practice. More than making things better, it has already spun off one more Lutheran group of those who object to this departure from all things Biblical and catholic.
My point is simply this. If you wish a reasoned Christianity which might be inspired by Scripture but which actually accords with social and cultural thought across religious and secular realms, this is your path. Diversity over truth, flexibility over orthodoxy, mind over Scripture, and a smile to fix every problem. We can all get along and look good in the eyes of a culture which does not care a whit what Jesus says, what the Church has said and done, and how it will affect the unity of a particular communion. Pastor Smith is nice. Those who disagree with him are not so nice. Well, then, perhaps God is not so nice either -- at least as we would reason it all in the same brains that exchanged a perfect Eden for an earthly fight for daily life until death wins. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. By the way, you might just want to pray for the LCANZ and also for those good folk who have decided it is better to be on the side of Jesus than the world -- Lutheran Mission Austraila. They, by their own words, committed to continuing 'to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints' (Jude 3).
These words should remind us that our institutional forms and ritual habits are neither holdovers from the ceremonial order of the old covenant nor are they empty gestures no longer needed or godly in the new covenant. Indeed, they have been fulfilled. What were once merely forms and habits are now filled with Christ. This is a vibrant liturgy not because the people are with it or into it or it has all the bells and whistles but because Christ is there, the One who fulfilled all that went before and who gives to the present the taste of the eternal which is coming. Listen to his words:
Once upon a time, Israel offered sacrificial worship at a sanctuary through the ministrations of priests, but Jesus opened the door to a post-religious world sans sacrifice, sans sanctuary, sans priest, sans everything. That’s a misreading. Augustine captures the actual thrust of the letter when he characterizes the transition as one from shadow to reality, symbol to truth. Christian liturgical practice is still sacrificial and priestly, but through Jesus we have access to the real, original, heavenly things. What Israel did in twilight, the church does in the full light of day. The new doesn’t inaugurate an a-liturgical form of life and worship, but radically rearranges liturgy itself.That is the point we so often either take for granted and thus relegate to the realm of the theoretical or we miss entirely. Through Christ we do have access to the eternal and that access does not come to us by escaping or eschewing the earthly forms of the means of grace but directly through them. It is as if we have become the woman caught in her sin who distracts the conversation to the idea of which mountain. Jesus does not denigrate the mountains that where they worshiped but insisted that it was not a choice between those hills in the past but the revelation of what was here now in Christ -- the heavenly brought to earth to bring us to our home on high and fulfill all the promises of yesterday.
It is clear that most of what passes for worship is an almost gleeful abandonment of anything that would resemble the past in favor of an individualist and emotional piety in which worship is almost irrelevant and the earthly replaced entirely. This surely ends up being either an other worldly spirituality in which nothing of today has meaning or it ends up with a present day spirituality in which today is the only things that has meaning. God must be shedding tears. He has fulfilled all that was promised and filled the present with Christ so that we may glimpse the future and be kept unto the consummation of all things and here we are clapping our hands, stomping our feet, and propelling ourselves into an emotional high or arguing ourselves into heaven as if all the work of Christ depended upon a yea or a nay from us. Lutherans have, as I have often said, the fullness of it all in the efficacious Word AND Sacraments, catholic doctrine, liturgy, and practice, and the vibrant fruit of God's work in the present through the doctrine of vocation. What a shame we do not value and live out what we have. In this, we are not unlike that woman arguing with Jesus at the well while He is giving us what is beyond our wildest hopes and dreams in the mystery of His grace that saves us now for eternity.
In this respect, liberal or progressive theology is myopic. It sees only what it wants to see and it can only see through the lens of what sounds reasonable and right now. It does not intend to be the way, the truth, and the life forever but what is good now and what works now. Indeed, this is the greatest failing of liberal and progressive Christianity. It is tied to the moment and not to the past or the future. It is wedded to the worldview now and cannot escape this temporal prison. On the other hand, catholic Christianity is by nature conservative. It does value what was received from the past and it is concerned about what is passed on to the future and the criterion for this is always outside the self of reason and understanding but in the Word and works of God.
It is unreasonable to think of sin as arbitrary wrongs that are not adjusted or minimized by circumstances or the changing mood or judgments of the times. It is unreasonable to think of sin as sin without mitigating circumstances to make some of those sins less egregious than the same sin in other contexts. It is unreasonable to think that anyone might have to deny themselves and their desires and become new and different people in the process. It is unreasonable to think that worship should reflect the values of God and not appeal to the sense of the times or the desires of those in the pews. It is unreasonable to think that all life has the same intrinsic value and no life should be ended for the sake of the person or another. It is unreasonable to meet God in the splash of water, the voice of His Word, the taste of bread and wine. In all of these, it is completely unreasonable except for the fact that God has reasoned it all this way in His heart and out of love for us. If we are to endure, we need an anchor more secure than what seems reasonable or right in the moment. We need nothing less than the Word of God that endures forever and for a Church built upon this solid foundation. We do not need to make the Church relevant for the promise of life to a people marked with death has its own relevance in every age and generation.
Why would we dwell upon what we think God would want when we have the record of His voice still speaking through His Word? Why would we make the test of truth reason or popularity or acceptance by the judgment of the present moment? There is so much more and it beckons us to get past what seems reasonable or comfortable to meet God where He has planted His promise in time to bring us to eternity. Why would we dwell upon what works for us now if it has no power to work for us the blessing of everlasting life? Indeed. A good thing to hear on a day dedicated to deception.
