Is that really so?

It is common for people to say that the most important thing about a church is not contained simply in statistics.  Of course!  Faithfulness cannot always be distilled down to numbers.  But does that mean numbers don't matter?  Is it possible that the Church can do everything else right in doctrine, witness, outreach, worship, and service and still not grow?  Or, even worse, decline?  Sure it is.  But does that mean that decline is normal or normative for the Church?  I don't think so.

Before going further, let me simply say that hoping, praying, and working for the growth of the Church does not mean you are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it grow.  That is the lie of evangelicalism in which nearly everything is up for grabs in the quest to pack the pews.  Indeed, the mega church side of this seems to suggest that those things that you must hold is smaller than those things you can discard for the sake of growth.  I am not saying this.  I am not at all suggesting that fidelity to the Scriptures, doctrine and creed, worship and piety, and service to others are less important than reaching out.  Indeed, what is the purpose of reaching out (except numbers) if you are not reaching out with the faithful Gospel of Christ crucified and risen?

What I am asking is not what you are willing to give up in order to get more folks in the pews.  What I am asking is whether or not we have become so accustomed to the decline of Christianity (or at least orthodox Christianity) that we suppose that this has become the new normal for us?  Has it?  Have we give into the idea that growth is either not possible or not normal anymore?  Does Jesus not care if His Church grows or declines?  Do we?

I am not at all holding myself up as an example.  The Lord has granted success despite my many failings, to be sure.  But He has granted success.  My first parish was in a local that long ago had seen its better days.  The main drag was pretty empty and in disrepair.  The industry that once fueled the economy was in tatters and there was nothing to replace it.  The congregation was also in rough shape -- afflicted by division over doctrine and practice, accustomed to disappointment, not sure that Lutheran was a positive word or negative one, and suffering from a building in disrepair and an empty checkbook.  I was convinced that the reason so many pastors showed up at my installation was to see the guy who was foolish enough to accept the call (which I did and was though it was my first placement out of seminary).  By the end of nearly 13 years there, doctrine and practice was solidly Lutheran, the congregation was united, the building was in better shape, and the numbers were up (attendance and membership).

In contrast, my second and last call came to a city on the move but a congregation which was not moving at all.  Divided, overcome with disappointment, short of people and funds, with a building debt and in disrepair, and known as a congregation which was for people who were not from here, the congregation was barely keeping the doors open.  Somehow we became one of the most liturgical congregations in Synod, built and paid for an impressive building and a huge pipe organ, and became well known in the community.  Even more surprising, we grew by 250% and continue to see new people walk through the doors each week.  Again, I am not at all lauding my example or gifts.  What I am suggesting is that faithfulness in preaching, teaching, and worship along with a warm welcome bear fruits.  Are we surprised?  We should not be.  Sometimes the dynamics around us leave us with little except decline (like my home congregation in a rural area where the numbers of people and especially those under 65 continues to decline significantly every year!).  But that does not mean that we should become so comfortable with decline that we no longer expect to grow.  I fear that we as a church body have become resigned to the fact that we can do our best but will not seem much happen.  My own experience is that this is not the case and I am confident we are but one of hundreds of examples of congregations and pastors whose faithfulness brings new people into the pews every week.

So what am I saying?  Expect the Lord to grow His Church.  Even when you do not see it and labor faithfully through the years, expect the Lord to grow His Church.  Pray for it.  Do not trade off faithfulness in doctrine or fidelity to God's Word or liturgical worship for the promise of bodies in the pews.  Expect that faithfulness in doctrine, fidelity to God's Word, and faithful catholic worship (like our Confessions expect) will result in growth.  We should not be consoled by the years when our decline is less than in other years or less than we predicted.  We should only be consoled by trusting that He is Lord of the Church when we are doing everything we can in faithfulness to the Lord's Word and will and growth does not come.  But we should not get used to it.  It may be safer to expect less and be surprised by more but that is not the way of the Lord.  Trust does not mean resignation to the things that disappoint us.  Trust means hoping against hope, when nothing gives a sign of that which is to come, that the Lord will grow His Church. 

The first job of liberalism. . .

Some might think that liberalism promotes error.  It could and does, at least in some cases, but it does its worst by promoting uncertainty and trading clarity for ambiguity.  Indeed, that is all liberalism really has to do to set adrift the bark of Christ's holy Church and undermine the foundations of Christian doctrine and faith.  The first job of liberalism is to ask the questions designed to create doubt about the fundamental moorings of Christian faith in Scripture and tradition.  

Nobody has to say that Scripture is wrong.  All the liberal has to ask is if Scripture is fully believable on every point or that there might be another interpretation or another perspective equally valid to the one that has been believed and taught since the beginning of Christianity.  Are all the miracles of Christ factual and historically true or might they simply be stories to make a point?  Nobody is really saying that the miracles are not true -- God forbid -- but that they do not have to be true to do what they were designed to do.  Nobody needs to say that they were fabricated but simply illustrations of the principles that matter and always matter more than truthfulness.  This is the real danger of God's Word in the hands of liberals.  The Bart Ehrmans of this world simply raise questions about whether what has always been believed is the only way to take God's Word or interpret the events of the Biblical narrative.  That is enough.

Nobody has to say that doctrine has been wrong all these years and that the creeds are not reliable.  No, indeed.  All that needs to be said is that what is being preserved and proclaimed are not events or facts or history but principles of love, well illustrated and symbolized by the words of these affirmations.  The creed is not wrong but neither are the words to be taken at face value.  The Virgin Birth is a prime example.  It is proclaimed not because it is literally true but because it preserves the mythology of Christ's appearance out of nowhere and His unique status as the Son of God.  You can say it on Sunday morning without being bound to it as facts or history or truth.  What is being preserved is the idea of it all and not the specific words and their literal meaning.  It would certainly be wrong to dispense with them but there is no need to do so if you simply view them as symbolic words and not as words tied to actual facts or events.

Nobody has to say that it was wrong all these years to affirm that God made them male and female or that marriage and family as traditionally defined are normative in the eyes of God.  No, indeed.  You simply suggest that what we have today was not known in ancient times and therefore could not have been condemned or affirmed.  You blame it on the institutional sin that is the convenient scapegoat of nearly everything bad and refer to the enlightened state of things today in which women, gays, lesbians, trans, and the whole plethora of the alphabet used to define the diversity of sexual desire and gender were repressed by the patriarchal and hypocritical institutions propped up by sin in in the past.  But no more.  No, we have moved beyond these simplistic and tainted positions to see things that were never seen or granted legitimacy in the past.  Jesus would surely not have said anything against what we are affirming today because His Gospel is generally a liberation to feel and be who you feel you are or want to be.  Right?

The liberal Trojan Horse is to let the past stand and simply to move on.  It happens in religion, in history, in sociology, in psychology, and nearly everywhere else.  The danger is not that what was believed will be contradicted but that it will be written off as simply naive or out of date or one of many interpretations.  The liberal will use the same vocabulary but redefine the words.  In the end the damage will have been done without directly disagreeing with anything.  Sure, some liberals have the courage or the integrity to admit that things are changing but most are content to let things evolve gradually as the past and its witness is moved aside and the possibilities of the present and future stand as legitimate and authoritative in their own right.  Ambiguity will end up doing all the work that open contradiction and dispute cannot safely do. 

There is no leverage in loss. . .

For a very long time we have lived with the false idea that in order to raise up someone, another must be torn down.  That surely shows in the bitter political and social divide which is not merely the competition of ideas but the terrible idea that trashing our opponent automatically makes us look better.  It has also shown itself in the battle of the sexes where it is almost universally assumed that we must tear men down in order to lift women up.  That is not the path to respect or appreciation of difference nor is it any road to the equality that so many say they want.  But it will be the path to the destruction of whatever might be good that remains among us.  

I am not at all saying that we should refrain from calling a sin a sin or condemning wrong.  Of course not. But the goal of calling a sin out or even calling out a sin is not as a means to gain leverage over them.  It is, as Matthew 18 reminds us, to gain back our brother or sister.  As good as that sounds, the reality is that too often we will settle for putting someone else down in the hopes that it will lift our boat as a result.  How has that been working?  To demonize our enemies or those with whom we disagree will seem to make us and ours a righteous cause but it cannot mask the selfish desire that is at the root of it all. 

In education as well as in the job market, we have lived for a while with the shaming of men and their characteristic traits of providing, protecting, and working.  Ambition has become a bad word in our vocabulary where everyone shares in everything no matter what they do or do not contribute.  We say we want to float all boats but the reality is that we are simply emptying the stream until there is nothing left to float any boat.  Then we call that progress.  What does winning look like?  Apparently it looks like men abandoning the fight so that women alone are left in it.  Look at the graduation rates and who wears the gold cords of achievement in high school and college graduations.  It is a sea of feminism.  But in that sea, have all the boats been raised to float or have we settled for merely some?  Is it wise or even accurate to frame every male success as a female loss?  Or, the other way around?

Oddly enough, there was a time when women and children were more regularly in worship -- bemoaning the men who were at work, asleep, or on the golf course.  I have a famous Norman Rockwell print of the family heading to church while the husband and dad in pjs is reading the paper while smoking a cigarette.  Now it seems that we are headed the other way around as more young men are heading to worship while their female counterparts are existing.  Of course, it is about faith but there is also a cultural move here.  As young women pull away from institutional authority, traditional marriage and family, historic values, and clear morality, young men seem to draw closer to the same things.  Sadly, it is as if one part of the equation must lose in order for the other to win. 

AI and the promise of machines to replace us not simply from the menial jobs we do not want to do but from the nobility of work in general seems a dream but is it?  Is it good for humanity to be rich in leisure and poor in labor?   Ambition is not a problem to be solved but an energy to be directed.  We have many needs but chief among them is purpose.  Ambition does not need to be replaced by a dream of a mechanized egalitarian society in which machines do our work and we are left with the jobs that AI and technology cannot do?  Ambition within the cause of God and for His purpose is always directed away from self and for the sake of others.

Jesus does not choose sides, elevating one over another but dies for all that all who live should not live for themselves but for Him.  That is both the gift of this Gospel and its call to shape us and our lives by that Gospel.  Our Lord made man for woman and woman for man, having in His creative love His own selfless love as source and example.  The future for us all will not be built by choosing one over another but by the love that loves as Christ has loved us -- at least until that love finishes its work and delivers us unto the Father.  But until then if Christians are to be a leaven in this competitive world in which you succeed at the cost of others, then we need to honor and respect the differences of male and female not as better or worse but as God's own creative will and purpose -- a goodness grace teaches us to sin where sin sees only a race.  There is no leverage to be won by choosing men over women or women over men.  Each is itself a false choice that would deprive us of the essential values of home and family that God meant us to know and enjoy from the beginning.  Diverse roles, to be sure.  Different characteristics, of course.  But together more than apart.  At least when it comes to men and women, boys and girls, neither will gain at the cost of the other. 

Greater sin. . .

While catching up on things, a reader of this blog sent me what Pope Leo, on a flight back from Africa.  In response to a question, he told reporters that “we tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue”.  Some of Leo's greater sins might be described as institutional, societal, and humanity's failings and they have, indeed, been labeled in this way.  But sexual sin is largely personal and individual.  I suppose one might charitably suggest that he was merely drawing the attention of people away from pointing the finger at one or several people and reminding them that nations and societies have been complicit in the ills that afflict us as well.  That is probably not what he was doing, however, and I think he was trying to put out a Francis fire by deflecting attention from the absurdity of blessing proposed by the then pope and now everyone wishes the furor would go away.  It will not go away by doing what Leo proposes.

It was sexual sin that was the first poisoned fruits of Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden and it has been pretty high on the list of wrongs with which we are continually tempted and complicit.  To try and put sexual sin down the list of errors and failings of a sinful humanity is to forget the Biblical record.  Our culture is not enamored with sexual sins as side hustles to bigger wrongs.  It is precisely sexual sin that has taken hold of our hearts and minds and led to the destruction of marriage and family, to the casual way we treat life in general and the child in the womb specifically, and to the use of sex as an entertainment avenue most of all.  The Bible speaks eloquently of this sexual sin and gives any number of examples of sexual sinners whose individual sin brought down a nation (David) and bring Jesus into what is profane (Paul).  For this pope to try to deflect attention away from sexual sin is to miss exactly what Scripture tells us about it and its terrible consequences through the ages (from the sexualization of children to the abuse of women to the infanticide that have remained even as technology makes it more rampant and much easier).

No less that St Augustine, reflecting upon his own wayward life, said that in liberty a man has as many masters as he has vices.  It is not the pursuit of this liberty that we are ennobled but in refusing to succumb to what might be possible but is surely not beneficial that we are sanctified.  To put it bluntly, self-control and God's grace to rescue the fallen and weak are the means to freedom from the entrapment of self-desire and the domination of prurient interest.  We do not find release from this sin by indulging in it nor does the focus on other sins put this demon its its place.  It reminds you of those who would insist that the greater sin is self-denial of this passion and desire rather than self-control.  Be true to yourself no matter what it costs you or how it hurts others is the convenient lie we tell ourselves when we want to justify the feelings we know are wrong.  No, Leo, the sins we need to hear about are not the bigger plagues upon our humanity that are called isms but the secret sins of the heart and the darkness of the mind that leads us into the path of temptation where we willingly surrender to that desire.  I am not saying we Christians should be silent on those other things but we were sent to preach primarily to people and not to the halls of political power or the ballot box.  The cause of Christ is not the redemption of humanity but the saving of one sinner.  It is over this repentance which heaven rejoices.  The Good Shepherd continues to seek the lost one sheep at a time and continues to stand watch over the horizon for the prodigal son and daughter to come home broken and dead inside.  We preach Christ and Him crucified and in that preaching is the call to repentance and faith in the God whose mercy cannot be bought and whose grace is sufficient for our every need. 

 

Too much information. . .

We live in an information world -- a world driven by information.  We have so much information at our fingertips.  As a child I was thrilled when we got a set of Grolliers Encyclopedias.  I never even tapped the wealth of information in those books.  Sure, I used them for curiosity, school, proof, and to win arguments but there were too many words for me to absorb.  Now we have so much more at our beck and call in this thing called the internet.  We hear news from across the world, browse through catalogs of things to buy and choices to make, and learn the names and affectations of people around the planet in social media.  

It is too much information too absorb and it teaches us to be rather passive about the things we learn.  In days gone by people learned what they need to know and used that information for their jobs or families or purchases or the like.  Now we simply accumulate information as if it was what made us wise.  Plus, we live in a time when it is almost impossible to know if what you see or read or hear is actually true or a fabrication or a complete invention of non-human so-called intelligence.  We guess at what we see, hear, and read and hope that what we like is true and what we don't like or what feeds our fears is false.  I wish there was an easy way to figure it all out.

Information is just information.  It is too easy to mistake knowing something as important and good in and of itself and forget why knowing that information is important.  We treat life as as a time to accumulate information and it has become the digital equivalent of all the stuff our grandparents collected in their lives and we donated to a thrift store.  It has become a wildly successful industry.  Think of how little Facebook contributes to our world and how valuable it is as a company and how rich you or I might be if we had invested in it early on.  This is not simply true for the world.  Spiritual information has become  something of a cottage industry and it has not escaped notice of the marketers who are leaving the churches in the dust as they speed ahead to become the source of spiritual information for the masses.

Wisdom and experience were once the province of the old.  In our youth culture, it is not exactly a highly valued commodity -- age and experience, I mean.  Where the Biblical landscape had an honored place for the gray haired, now they are largely seen as liabilities or problems the younger folks wish would either shut up or go away.  Was I too harsh?  There are always brilliant young minds in every discipline but they are largely less knowledgeable and smart about life.  That is the premise of how many TV comedies? It is not hard to know what you do not know but it is not so easy to know what you don't.  I do not claim to be gifted in much and my expertise is usually less than my ambition.  If we only spoke about what we really knew, the rooms of our lives would be rather silent.  The passive information we suck up as if it were something real and valuable often leads us to the false conclusion that we know whereof we speak.  That is realm of age and experience and it is what contributes to the wisdom in so much short supply today.

It is probably good advice to tell ourselves and others not to speak as if we knew everything but it is advice seldom taken.  As evidence of that, I point to the increasing intolerance of diverging views on the unsocial social media and the violence that too often becomes the first response rather than the last.  We would do well to learn a little patience.  I am particularly speaking about those who insist that it is their job to inform the stupid masses of all the things they have gotten wrong without at all considering that they might be included among them.

Stick to what you know is good advice.  Stick to what God says is better.  Oddly enough, the plethora of information that surrounds us has led us to listen less to the voice of God and more to the gut feelings we have in the moment.  That is a particular danger we have fallen into in this world today.  We know something about everything but just enough Scripture to make us dangerous.  Lutherans were once prone to advise people to read the catechism.  It sounds like a put down.  It is probably one of those voices of wisdom we no longer pay much attention to anymore.  There is a great temptation to believe that you can know everything but in so doing you end up knowing not much and even less about the very important things of this life.  I fear that this has contributed to our quest to redefine gender, marriage, family, etc, and it has left us with a definite void in our education.  When the most basic things to our lives are largely strangers to us, it is typically the moment when we replace them with unsuitable substitutes.    

Interesting. . .

By now anyone and everyone knows the name Ryan Burge who is the guy with charts, stats, and commentary on religion in America.  It is worth noting when he offers stats that would explain some of the things we see when we watch Christianity in America.  How interesting in this data that shows that over time clergy within the Roman Catholic Church have grow increasingly more conservative while clergy in the mainline (so called seven sisters) have done just the opposite!

In this chart, he tracks the perspective of Roman Catholic priests by year of ordination and notes the dramatic shift since the early 1970s -- almost a complete reversal!  While it might be easy to notice and speak of this anecdotally, Burge has given us real data to show that this is real.  It might explain some of the drama and conflicts within American Roman Catholicism but it is worth noting.  I suspect that it is also true across the world but that is only my opinion.  Rome may be wrestling with a hierarchy that is rooted in another perspective while the future lies in a different direction.  What might that suppose for the next 5-10 years as some of those older folks age out of influence?

On the other hand, the mainline denominations in America have done the complete opposite.  Long ago we noted that their clergy were far ahead of the folks in the pews -- not exactly surprising -- but here it is documented that the conservative voices in pulpits across America in these seven sisters have turned around and headed in a very different direction from those in the pews.  Look at the stats:

Finally, in the following graph is revealed the increasing theological liberalism within those same mainline churches.

It is no wonder that the pews are emptying, that there is no longer instinctive trust between the folks in the pews and those in the pulpits, and that the shape of the future for these churches is more and more defined along ideology that transcends both theological and political views.

The last good war. . .

My father entered the US Army near the end of World War II.  I never served though my draft status for Vietnam was close to being called up.  There was an almost reverence toward the things of war in my small town growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  We played army and had army toys, including legions of little green plastic soldiers we arranged in battles great and small.  We watched the post-WWII movies that continued to esteem and honor the sacrifices of those who fought against tyranny, fascism, and evil.  It almost did not occur to me that I was half-German or that one of my ancestors was the keeper of the Kaiser's horse.  There was no doubt about who was the evil and who was the good in the wake of WWII.  Korea and Vietnam did not have the impact you might have thought.  I would put it that these were tolerated wars but not accepted — wars which began with nobility but whose virtue was tarnished as the years dragged on.  This was especially true of Vietnam.  But when our town honored the dead on Memorial Day, everyone was included.  We lined up as children with our white crosses adorned with poppies to be loaded in cars and head to every local cemetery to pay tribute to the fallen of every conflict.  But the cannon in the public park was from WWII and most of the soldiers who pulled out their old uniforms and managed to button them up for the Memorial Day festivities had on WWII fatigues or dress blues.  It was the last good war.

At some point, we stopped having good wars.  It was not for lack of evil men and empires trying to steal away democracy and freedom.  We have always had those.  Maybe not on the scale of the Kaiser or der Fuhrer but enemies of all America stands for have always existed.  I wish I knew why wars against tyrants and dictators and terrorists stopped being good.  At some point we were worn down from a Cold War in which there was no battle to speak of but still the cost of it all in children huddling beneath desks in case of nuclear war or fall out shelter signs all over schools and community buildings or a thousand other small arenas in which the conflict was fought.  Then it all ended without a bang—more like a ballot box and a collapse from internal pressure and the wall came down and we even had hope for Russia.  The old evil empire seemed to be gone but not evil itself.  In my lifetime I have counted so many different armed conflicts or peacekeeping missions or whatever you want to call them that I have lost track of the number.  Some of them seemed good.  Desert Storm seemed noble enough until it didn't.  Then in Iraq and Afghanistan we seemed to be the good guys but they were not real wars.  We did not win as much as we got tired of it all, the political costs became too great, and an exit strategy was sought to save face.  Now we have had another fight with Iran—a commonly accepted bad player in a region of bad players doing bad things.  But it did not take long for the shine to be tarnished on this as well.

Americans have always honored those in uniform—well, except for those who came home from Vietnam and were treated as if they were the cause of that problem.  We have and should feel nothing but gratitude for men (and women) who sacrificed everything for God, country, apple pie, and our way of life.  But somewhere I think we gave up on the whole idea of a good war.  It seems that none of us can agree on an enemy or a cause anymore.  We are even second guessing the Great War and the last Good War.  We got over Germany, Korea, and Vietnam and they became partners with us in supplying our economic thirst for goods.  We forgot the atrocities of the past—mostly.  But we still cannot swallow the idea that any war for any cause can be good.  Even theologians argue over what wars were or are just and what are or were unjust.  It is not as easy as it once was.  The wartime presidents have been shown to have their own dark sides or they have been blamed for the decisions they made then that some might not make now.  The postwar presidents have thought that a conflict might unite support for them and their policies but it has not worked that way.  Trump said he would get us out of wars but has blood on his hands.  We do not have the stomach for war anymore.  We decry civilian casualties and live in the illusion that wars can be fought in a sanitized way in which there are no grieving mothers or fathers or parents or children—but there always are.  We live in an age of angst about every war and struggle to conceive of any reason why anyone would fight.  Have we lost the fight or simply lost the causes to fight for or to fight against?  In less than a month Memorial Day will happen again.  Has it become simply another day off that is filled with distractions to keep us from thinking about wars, bad wars, great wars, good wars, and those who fought in them and gave up everything for that fight?  I hope it is not true.  Please tell me it is not.   

The ecumenical future. . .

In what has to be the understatement of the year, Pope Leo said “While much progress has been made on some historically divisive issues, new problems have arisen in recent decades, rendering the pathway to full communion more difficult to discern.”  Ya think?!  While the ecumenical conversations of a certain age could have expected confidence in the ecumenical creeds or a consensus on the morality of divorce, birth control, same sex marriage, etc, this is no longer the case.  In addition to this, the cause of the Gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and risen has been replaced by social justice, climate change, and a host of other causes not even particularly addressed by Scripture.  Finally, the whole certainty of the Scriptural words, events, and message has been undermined until God's Word is merely a suggestion to many Christians today.  Do you think that this might have something to do with the conundrum suggested by the Pope's understatement?

There was a time when I applauded the work of ecumenical conversations.  In particular, the Lutheran and Roman Catholic dialogues produced some solid work engaging each other in what we believe, teach, and confess.  While not every one agreed with the fruits of this long standing theological engagement, it was serious, deliberate, and scholarly.  For the Lutheran side, most of this ended when the ecumenical chairs ended up in the hands of liberal Lutherans who did not take their own history or confession all that seriously much less the positions of their dialogue partners.  Now, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America finds itself in the odd position of being in fellowship with nearly anyone and everyone except any Lutherans who do take their history and confession seriously and who believe these inform and set boundaries for faith and practice.  It is no wonder that the ecumenical conversations have become difficult -- difficult at least for those who want to take theology seriously but easy for those who don't.

Sadly, I confess that today it is probably not worth our time and effort to sit down and engage anyone in official theological dialogues.  For one, the ELCA and Missouri are not speaking.  For another, the conservative Anglicans are still wedded to some of the same liberal positions they had when they were playing well together so I am not sure how far we can expect to get with those who insist that the ordination of women, for example, is not going to change.  Finally, even once rather solid partners (the Lutheran Church of Australia) have set their course away from historic Lutheran confession and identity and it might be that the SELK in Germany is not that far behind.  So who is their left to talk to?

The answer seems to take us to Africa.  There we find churches more willing to sit down with solid and deliberate conversations about faith and life.  There we find some churches whose clergy are being formed within the seminaries of the LCMS.  There we also find a vibrant and and larger presence to the Lutheran identity than seems to be left across the West.  If there is anywhere we need to be going to talk, it is probably Africa.  There are some small and mission provinces offering us hope but by and large the once vaunted Lutheran institutions of the West (i. e. Lutheran World Federation) are probably not worth the conversation and will not offer much hope of any serious debate much less future unity. 

Next week. . .

Next week I will be in St. Louie for my probable last go around on a floor committee weekend.  Hundreds of overtures have come from the various places and entities that comprise the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.  The floor committees have been appointed mostly from District Presidents and delegates who will be in attendance at the Synodical Convention in Phoenix in July of this year.  They will mull over what has been submitted, cull down the working number of resolutions to be presented to the assembly down to a manageable number -- south of a hundred to be sure.  Then, with elections, the assembly will discuss and vote.  If I could have my druthers, there would be more deliberation than is often the case.  Too many times, someone rushes to close debate or call the question before real, substantive debate can be had.  I will admit that it is not easy to manage a real debate with some 1,000 voting delegates (clergy and lay) as well as advisory folks.  But that is part of why we are here.  

We all know that the cost of these things means it is hard to let things simply fly as they will but it would be better rather than worse to have more deliberation by the assembly rather than less.  In part, the floor committees will probably work against resolutions that will prove too provocative and will try to sense the mind and mood of the majority to offer things that pass.  Even bread and butter resolutions will hear from some naysayer who wants his comment recorded.  That means that clock watching will go along with the debate and the voting.  Thankfully, if the electronic voting and queuing for debate tools work, this will give more time to the floor to aid in it in all.  

Some will complain that there are too many clerical collars.  Some will complain that there is too much gray hair.  Some will complain that there are too many woman even as some complain there are too few.  Some will complain that the same voices seem to have something to say on everything.  Some will complain that the resolutions sound a lot like previous year's.  Some will complain that they do not go far enough fast enough.  Some will complain that they go too far and too fast.  Some will confuse us and some will be confused.  A few solid voices will work to sort it all out and then give us a clean record of what we actually said and did.  Short of a papacy to dictate it all to us our a council of bishops to tell us what they deliberated and voted upon, this is what we are stuck with.  

I have been to more conventions than I can remember and sat in the seats where people made the decisions and cast a vote as well as in the seats on the side of the dais where the people who cannot vote sit.  I will come home with a few  tchotchkes from the vendors but not as many as I once did -- times are tough and even cheap stuff from China can be expensive!  I will see a great many faces of folks I know and reconnect with most of them in some way.  It will also be a working week for me and the members of the Commission on Constitutional Matters and Commission on Handbook.  We do not get to make the rules but we have to make sure we follow them -- even the ones some of us don't appreciate.

My only advice is the one that physicians once tried to follow -- do no harm.  We have had a few clinkers in the past with unintended outcomes and consequences.  At least do not make things worse.  We need to clearly affirm who we are, attempt to thoughtfully, Biblically, and confessionally address the challenges before us, select faithful folk to serve us in the many positions of leadership and boards of our Synod, and that is about all we need or should do.  We certainly do not need to reinvent ourselves every three years.  We certainly do not need to forget who we are as we tackle the big problems and issues before us.  We do need to act in such a way that we do not dampen our hopes or darken our view of the next triennium because of our time together in Phoenix.  Like a herd of turtles, moves the Church of God; brothers, we are treading where we've always trod...  Yup, it is a slow process in a fast world and that is probably how it should be.  Do no harm.  That is the best advice.  Don't do something stupid that needs to be fixed down the road because who knows how long it will be before the fix will be found and the error repaired?  And laugh a bit -- if at nothing else, laugh at yourself.  We can be pretty funny even when we intend to be serious.  Oh, well, time to pack up for the soiree in St. Louie.

How unlike his mom. . .

I don't know how I missed this.  In previous years, I had always looked forward to the Queen's greetings at Christmas and other holy days, especially Easter of 2020.  But this year King Charles III of England declined to give Easter greetings to the Christians of the church of which he is supposedly head.  Odd.  Charles has gone to great lengths to assure folks that he is not simply Defensor fidei but defender of faith in general -- no matter what it is called or which God is believed.  That said, he is defender of the Christian faith and, in particular, of the Church of England.  He had at one point shown interest in Orthodoxy, similar to his father.  He also seems to have great interest in Islam, having marked Islamic holidays with greetings from the throne.  So what are we to make of him?

There are many things to complain about in the long tenure of Elizabeth II but she seemed personally not simply spiritual but deeply religious.  She was known to regularly attend worship services and to pray and her messages at Christmas and Easter were written out of an implicit faith -- if not as explicit as some would have liked.  She was an anchor to the religious history of her people and preserved it even when some of those subjects had abandoned it.  Charles seems too at ease with the void of overtly Christian shape to the monarchy and to his particular role as head of the Church of England.  I fear he has passed this on to William who will succeed him.  Though I have read that William has committed to some sort of religious renewal, neither William nor Charles has yet shown the Christian resolve of Elizabeth.  That is sad.  It is a sign of the times, to be sure, but a sad one.

Some would decry state religion and insist that it is not a true faith.  I am not going to suggest that it is all that it should be but I do bemoan the rise of the nones and the norm of secularism that seems to be the wave passing over Europe and Canada and even the US which is not too far behind.  A state religion may not save one before the judgment seat of Christ but that does not mean that it did not contribute to the health and moral certainty of nations and peoples along the way.  Charles seems not even interested in this aspect and I fear too many are willing to let me off the hook for it.

Funny how we seem more comfortable confessing the things we are not sure about than the things we believe, teach, and confess.  I guess that is the shape of liberalism and progressivism.  We are so very full of steam when we speak of the things government needs to do but not so passionate about what we are called to do.  We love for the government to love the poor but treat charity as if it were a welfare program administered by the state instead of a reflection of the love God has revealed to us and for us.  Charles has his causes -- from animals to climate change among them.  It is as if he thinks that Islam is better suited to loving the neighbor than Christianity or Christians.  Christmas is the more familiar Christian holy day but Easter is the Queen of Feasts and a king who is head of a Christian communion should know that. If that is what he thinks, it is no wonder he smiles quietly without bothering to address his subjects with an Easter greeting.  He is in company with many folks today but I would not call it good company.  Give me some good old-fashioned state religion any day of the week over the kind of impious piety Charles has shown us.  I guess I expected it from him but I had hoped to be surprised.  

Trans is quieter but not going away. . .

As is typical, a heady euphoria of success can often be brought down to the level of managed disappointment.  Those in the LGBTQ+ coalition have seen trans issues as part of their overall purview but the rest of the population seems to have taken a more nuanced and deliberate approach to the trans issues.  It might make some of us think that they have been overcome or suffered a set back.  I only wish that were the case.  The media and the educational establishment are still firmly committed to the normalization of trans status and goals within the overall umbrella of society and government.  They have had to slow down a bit and be a little less front and center but they are still out to make sure that our children accept the trans status as normal even if the parents are more cautious.  That is what makes these social movements so dangerous -- they do not see setbacks as taking all that much away from their overall progress toward their goals.  In fact, I wonder if they do not rather count on those who have expressed caution or warning to its progress to wax and wane in their fervor whenever it appears we may have take some of the wind out of their sails.  If so, we could end up right where we did for abortion -- the law changed but people continued to act as if it was normal and moral to kill the child in the womb with a pill rather than a medical procedure.  The law sent it back to the states but the number of pharmaceutical abortions has increased and the overall number has not declined.  We won at the courts but lost in the court of public opinion.  Could that be exactly where we are now?

Our therapeutic Western culture has many aims to promote -- from endless life to painless death when we desire it from perfect designer babies to babies removed from the messiness of natural conception and birth, from maximum entertainment to limitless pursuits of preference, and from the relative truth defined by the individual to the good of the society overall which constrains our freedoms.  The trans agenda is part of this whole and the rest will be pursued whenever the individual trans issues are put on the back burner.  I am less concerned that any or all of these goals will ever be achieved than I am the whole of our society and the foundation of our liberty will be dismantled and cast aside in the pursuit of these goals.  In the end, it is not these individual issues that we are seeking but the fulfillment of the age old basic human desire to be like God.  From Eden to the present day, our undoing has been our willingness to do anything necessary to achieve that ostentatious ambition. Transgenderism has suffered a setback or two but in its place it is transhumanism that is under the gun as AI, the loss of common truth, and the destruction of common values proceed forth.  That is what I fear most -- not the loss of individual issues but our success going to our heads and our failure to see how the whole movement will usher in the destruction of marriage, family, liberty, life's sacred character, and our communal insistence upon defining what is good and right.  Once these are gone, we are undone.  What encouraged the continued destruction begun in Eden was when man looked around and saw that they did not die -- at least not right at that moment -- and kept on pursuing the goal of being gods instead of serving the God.  When we look around and take a breath and begin to believe that we have answered the existential threat of the transgender movement, we will give them the chance to normalize in the eyes of our children what we as adults think we must oppose for the sake of our children.  We will have preserved our children from those who insist they must claim a gender identity for themselves but we will not have preserved them from the loss of their very humanity without jobs, a purpose, a family, clear values, and a respect for life.

When the unchangeable Word needs to be changed. . .

Yvette Flunder, the Senior Pastor of the City of Refuge UCC over in Oakland and the Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, has said out loud what many others only say privately.  The unchangeable and unchanging Word of God needs changing.  When she talked to the folks at the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, she was telling a liberal, progressive, and militant crowd exactly what they wanted to hear and, surprisingly, many other so called Christians probably agree.

"I’m about to say something a bit naughty, a bit dangerous, actually. I reckon we’re due for a Third Testament. Why? Because the Bible, as it stands, has become a bit of a nightmare, hasn’t it?

You’ve got bits in there like, ‘Slaves, do what your masters tell you like you’re doing it for the Big Man upstairs.’ It’s right there in the ink! Or, ‘Ladies, put a sock in it during church, and if you’ve got a question, wait ’til you get home to ask your husband.’

Now, look at me—I’m a believer! I’m all in! I wake up, I’m chatting with the Divine, the Divine is chatting back, we’re having a lovely time. But I am absolutely fed up to the back teeth with the way these ancient scripts paint God as some sort of vitriolic, narrow-minded headmaster.

People wag their fingers and say, ‘But Yvette, it’s in the Book!’ And I say, fine, let’s rip the page out then! And they gasp, ‘You can’t do that, it’s the Word of God!’ And I say, no, darling. It’s words about God. There’s a massive difference, isn’t there? Is it the literal Word of the Infinite Creator? No. It’s just not.”

The problem is that the old ways of trying to undo what Scripture says are not keeping up with the advance of liberal propaganda and so the only solution left is to do just that -- rip pages out of the old Bible that you object to an write in a new section promoting what you affirm.  This is not simply a rejection of the Scriptures but of the whole idea of Biblical revelation and of the central premise of those Scriptures, namely that it speaks with the unchanging and unchangeable voice of God.

God's Word has become merely a suggestion to us instead of the definitive Word and it has become more and more an unwelcome and rejected suggestion.  While this is surely true of morality and ethics, it is no less true of the story of the Scriptures that is Christ promised, incarnate, suffering, dying, rising, ascending, and coming again.  I wish I could say that this was an isolated opinion from someone on the political as well as religious left.  The truth is that this is the way many Christians of all stripes treat the Scriptures.  God gets a say but it is not the definitive one and when it does not accord with our own values and intentions, then it is His say that ends up changing and not ours.  Christianity overall but especially liberal and progressive Christianity has become a ship without an anchor, adrift upon the seas of change in which the wind in the sails is not God's work for our redemption but our own happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, and self-identity.

There was a time when the optimum question in Bible study is What do you think it says or means?  Now that question has been transformed into the real question that foments doubt and discord -- Do you agree with what it says or means?  There is no truth without our consent and there is no authoritative voice from God except the one whose voice fulfills our purpose and lives in submission to our own wills and desires.  This is no novelty invented by the 21st century but merely the current version of the question raised in Eden:  is that what God really said [meant]? 

Diluting the miracle. . .

So I was catching up on some old news and read where Pope Leo XIV in Cameroon put his own spin on the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves says: “The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing, that is the miracle. There is bread for everyone if it is given to everyone.”  Okay.  So that is the deal.  Jesus was making an object lesson by the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fish.  It was not a miracle so much as a teaching moment meant to inspire us to share what we have with those who have not.  I get it.  It makes it so much easier to deal with miracles in this way and so much less messier.  It does not even need to be a real fact or true to serve as an object lesson in this way and it might even make it better if it was not true -- lest undue attention be given to the work of the divine and take away from our work -- God's but our hands, after all.

Sigh.  It is as if that is what liberals do -- they turn miracles into object lessons far removed from fact and truth and turn it into a great big picnic lunch in which they a good time was had by all and everyone contributed something.   While that may be the rationale for a potluck, it hardly befits the narrative in Scripture.  That is great modern and humanistic thought but it is not quite what the Bible tells us nor does it fairly befit the miracle of Jesus.  It was not that Jesus or the disciples shared anything but that the mighty and everlasting God in flesh has power to multiply the little into more than enough -- complete with one basket of leftovers for every doubting Thomas among them.  If only Jesus had put more emphasis upon the work of the disciples in sharing this bread and fish!  That would have made it clear that the miracle is not in what was made present and distributed but in the distribution and how the folks were inspired to do likewise.

Which is a perfect segue into another miracle made more about the sharing than the gift.  That is the Holy Eucharist.  The emphasis upon the sharing instead of what is received makes the meal less Jesus' own and more ours -- which is exactly what we want.  It also makes it convenient to share with anyone and everyone despite what they believe, teach, and confess (or even if they are baptized!).  This is exactly the modern emphasis.  It is not in what is given, shed, broken, and distributed but the act of sharing that makes this eating special.  In this way it does not matter all that much what is received.  Instead, the real miracle is in the sharing.  This is exactly the pathetic and limp Eucharistic theology of indiscriminate fellowship built upon our want to minimize differences and doctrine and emphasize the act of personal interaction -- fellowship -- as if this was the primary gift of the meal and not the forgiveness of sins Jesus talked about in the Words of Institution.

While it saddens me to hear a pope go down that road, it does not surprise me.  Rome has been thoroughly in bed with modernism for a very long time and this is especially true of its hermeneutics.  The details that encourage us to see things as fact and truth are minimized in favor of sentiment and a synergistic call to do likewise -- as if the goal of our Savior was to awaken within us our own divine spark to be godly instead of save us from our sins and from the power of death.  How disappointing and yet utterly predictable!  Leo is showing his colors and he is more on the side of Francis and his Biblical liberalism than Benedict and his warnings about historical criticism and the separation of fact and truth from the narrative of Scripture.  As someone once told me so long ago, if you cannot contribute something of substance, keep silent.  Pope Leo, are you listening? 

Say the black and do the red. . .

One of the most troubling aspects of contemporary Christian worship that is too abundant even within liturgical churches is that you cannot make a distinction between announcements and the ordo.  It all flows into one because there is commentary on everything.  Liturgical directions that tell people what they are going to do before they do it are not exclusive to contemporary Christian formats but they are intrinsic to the kind of free flowing liturgy which is basically a conversation of leader and people (whether that is the pastor or the music leader and people).  I detest it.  I do not even like it when we tell people to sit or stand or kneel.  Unless they have no direction in hymnal or worship folder and it is absolutely required, the presiders do best when they shut up and let the people do their part without prompting.  Nearly all of the time they already know what they are to do.  Let them.

Those who practice contemporary Christian music and worship delight in the lack of clear markers to define liturgy and announcements (which vary between information and inspiration).  Indeed, so often in these congregations the announcements work like the opening act of an entertainment venue to warm up the crowd before the main act shows up.  I might be relieved if that main act was Jesus but too often it is simply the worship leader du jour who enters like the mighty sage with all the answers to tell the people what they should do.  Preaching is less preaching in this context than it is a longer version of the kind of informational and inspirational announcements which begin the worship time and are hardly distinguished from the rest of it that follows the first words and songs.

I was talking with members of a group which spent a goodly amount of time opening for the big names on the concert tours.  Interestingly, they said they had to walk a fine line between overshadowing the main attraction so that the crowd was disappointed when they took the stage and disappointing the crowd so that they lost interest in the whole thing.  It would be helpful if worship leaders heeded the same advice.  Do not make yourself so big that Jesus is no wanted or welcomed and don't make yourself so boring that people are not watching or waiting for the main event.  If they did at least this, it might be helpful.  Instead it seems that too many of these leaders know how to keep the attention on themselves and on the things the people do without allowing any of the attention to be given to Jesus and His gifts.  

One more disappointment is how they keep making everything in worship special -- from the music that entertains the people to the events that they are promoting to the latest kitschy trinket they are promoting.  Everything is special at these churches but the one thing that is supposed to be the most special becomes ordinary -- so ordinary that no special order, vestments, or devotion is attached to the Christ who gives us His flesh in bread and His blood in wine.  Okay, there you have my rant for the week.  I am not sure where you attended or what you experienced this Sunday morning but I hope and pray the markers that signaled the beginning of the Divine Service were clear as well as the gifts of God in Word and Sacrament the center of it all. 

If you bothered with the video, the liturgy as such began about 17 minutes in and the sermon at about 32 minutes in.  For what it is worth, the sermon seemed to be more about goats (greatest of all time) in various categories than about Jesus and what He has done.   

The Lavender Cardinals. . .

There was a time when I watched 60 Minutes -- if only to listen to Andy Rooney and his take on things.  But it became increasingly hart to watch a show that was so predictably left of center and a mouthpiece of the Demoractic Party.  So it was out of curiosity I tuned into to the Sunday when the program gave voice to the liberal voices of those wearing red, indeed the only actively serving Roman Catholic cardinals in the US.  Cardinals Cupich, Tobin and McElroy appeared as the voice of Rome and the spokesmen for Pope Leo XIV but on a platform which has been a reliable adversary of Trump and the right (not necessarily the same) on 60 Minutes.  In reality these have been reliable supporters of Pope Francis and of the political left appearing on a reliable and leftward leaning program.  Indeed, it has been said by some that these three represent not the future of Rome but its past and the lavender shade of that past.

You could say much about these three lavender cardinals and their words on 60 Minutes but one of the things you must say is that they have been particularly vulnerable to the temptation to confuse and confound political and social positions and movements with the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen.  On immigration in particular but also on the normalization of the role of divorced and LGBTQ within the Roman Catholic Church and uniformly support increasing the role of women if not the ordination of women to the diaconate and priesthood.  They were certainly in sync with Francis but there is not yet enough proof to show that they are in sync with Leo.  What they are, however, is a group fighting to keep control of the microphone and camera in the publicity war that is raging within Rome over what this communion will believe, teach, and confess.

There was a time, not that long ago, when Rome was a reliable voice in the cause of pro-life issues and for the sanctity of marriage.  It was the same Rome that catechetically referred to homosexual behavior as disordered.  I am not at all sure that this Rome continues to exist or have preeminence among the myriad of theologies that comprise this communion over time and certainly today.  If we think that there are fights going on within Protestantism and Lutheranism and Anglicanism over the soul of these churches, there is a fight going on within Rome over which church Rome will be -- one that is within the dogmatic, moral, and liturgical continuity with its own past and one that seeks to break with that past (and with the claim of tradition that Rome has historically made).  Which Rome is the real Rome is given visual imagery as you look at these aging faces trying to hold onto control of the agenda and its content even as this distances Rome from its earlier doctrinal, moral, and liturgical identity.  But before any of us attempts at any smug reply, let us remember that we face the same problem -- a church in love with the moment but increasingly suspicious and intolerant of its own identity and confession.  Who will win?  Don't count the lavender cardinals out yet. 

 

Must our leaders be Christian. . .

I will admit something that I am not proud to say.  When someone who I am employing or obtaining services from announces to me that they are Christian, the hair on the back of my neck goes up.  When we were building the last addition on to the church I served for 32 years, several subs assured our building committee that because they were Christians and we were a church, they would do us a great job.  Every one of those either never showed up to complete their work or were fired for cause.  A very long time ago I got a pep talk on tithing from a Christian trying to sell me a washer and dryer.  He insisted that it was good business to tithe since God multiplied what you gave and sent it back to you.  He said he had the pay stubs to prove it.  Yeah.  So when a politician announces that they are Christian and will hold to Biblical values and bring the integrity of faith to their office, I generally take it with a grain of salt.  Perhaps I have become too jaded.  Indeed, the quiet Christians tend to surprise me and the loud ones tend to disappoint me.  That is exactly the problem when some Christians look for a Christian on the ballot --  as if that were the sole criterion we were to use to choose who would lead our nation, state, city, etc...

It was with interest, therefore, that I read the introduction to Christopher Chen’s recent Evil Empire?   He insists that the New Testament weighs in on the hidden Christians who appear in the New Testament as soldiers and Roman officials.  Chen reports that throughout the patristic period Christians held major and minor posts in the Roman government -- well before Constantine!  His point is that the government is not necessarily the evil empire that some Christians insist.  In fact, Christians have long been hidden in the most surprising places -- from communist or secular China back to perhaps the eighth century.  Not exactly the beast marked with the sign of the anti-Christ.  It is not simple but complicated.  That is true surely for the secular democracies of the West, the socialist economies of the same, the communist nations which have become institutional dictatorships, and so many others -- but it is also true for our American democracy.

We have people who gut Christianity's doctrinal center to proclaim a gospel of love and acceptance that fits better with liberal social mores and then parade that faith before the nation on the left.  We have people who proof text their campaigns with great slogans betrayed by moral lapses on the right.  There is no one single word to look for to find the great combination of faith and virtue in our politicians.  That is certainly true of President Trump.  While his words often embarrass or disappoint me, his actions are easier for me to support overall.  It is the problem not simply of the flaws or failings of our leaders but also the alternatives.  I wish I had a simple answer for this dilemma.  I don't.  Hidden in our government on every level are good people.  Plastered on the front pages of our media are the sins of our enemies.  Somewhere in the middle stands an American and a Lutheran Christian like me who struggles to sort my way through the maze of options and alternatives on the ballots from local to national.  Too often they are not the people I would have nominated.  But the government, though accountable to God and all its leaders also, is not quite a tool through which God is doing the work the Church does.  At best it preserves enough distance so that the Church and Christians are free to do what is good and right and salutary.  At worst, it conspires with the enemies of the faith to promote what contradicts Scripture, creed, and confession.  Sometimes, the best we can hope for is for those who lead us and our laws to simply leave us alone.  Well, and one more thing, to hope that those hidden Christians working in the halls of government on every level will help to prevent what we fear and promote what is our hope and confidence -- all while drawing as little attention to themselves as possible.

Where do you find one?

I was reading an older article on the First Things website raising the poignant question, Looking for the Real Catholic Church in New York City.  The whole premise is even larger than the Roman Catholic Church.  Indeed, it is common among those looking at Lutheranism but also Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Protestants.  The problem is that various different representations of Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and so many others exist side by side with little to clue the outsider in on which is authentic.  They cannot all be bona fide representations of the same churches when they look so different and sound so different and often believe so different.  Can they?

Although this might seem like a rather picky point to make and even a rather narrow minded perspective, it is not.  No one joins a church which has a split personality or more than one doctrinal and liturgical face.  Do they?  Maybe it was once possible to limit your sense of the Church to one congregation but not today.  After all, we live in  mobile world in which our people pack up and move many times throughout their lives.  Furthermore, the differences between the various congregations of the seemingly same confession are not just window dressing differences but real and substantial.  In a world in which people seem more and more interested in authenticity, which one is authentic?

Indeed, that is the problem.  Which one is the real one?  Lutherans have tried for a very long time to presume that there is no real face to Lutheranism -- they are all real and we even have a term for it.  It is called adiaphora.  We have adopted that term to mean that anything can go on Sunday morning -- within certain limited boundaries -- so long as the kernel of faith is preserved in theory.  I do not buy it but it is the party line, so to speak.  What this means is that Lutheranism presents itself in a variety of ways to those within the tradition and to those either interested or merely curious.  The range is rather mind boggling.  Some of us have bishops and some do not.  Some have female clergy and some do not.  Some confess the whole Book of Concord and some merely the Augsburg Confession.  Some have adopted the Western version of sexual desire and gender identity and some have not.  Some have praise bands and some have pipe organs.  Some have pop gospel choruses and some have hymns.  Some have an open table and some practice close(d) communion.  Some have vestments and some have torn jeans and tees.  I could go on.  You get the point.  So would the real Lutheran Church stand up?  Que.  They all stand.  Ah.  Duh.

Rome has an equally confusing face on Sundays.  Some have Novus Ordo and some have Vetus Ordo.  Some have reverence and tradition and some have casual informality all over the place.  Some have pep talks on spirituality as sermons and some have, well, sermons.  Some like Rome and the Pope and some want to keep both as far away from them as possible.  Some kneel and some stand.  Some hold out their hands and some wait for the Sacrament to be placed on their tongues.  Some have altar rails and some are tearing them out.  Some want a dictator pope and some want to introduce democracy into Rome.  Some want married and female priests and some could leave it if ever showed signs of happening.  Would the real Roman Catholic parish please stand up?  

No matter where you stand on these issues, the truth is obvious.  They all cannot be right or can they?  Is Christianity more a state of mind than a liturgical identity or a creedal confession?  I fear that those who may be interested in a Christianity neither lite nor paranoid will have to admit that not all the incarnations which display the name Lutheran are right or can have the same claim to fame.  Eventually, we will have to resolve this (and so will Rome!).  Even if we cannot muster the strength to resolve the untenable disparities for the sake of God and the people of God, then at least we need to resolve it for the sake of those who might be interested in trading the vacuous version of Christianity of the liberal left or no version at all from those who refused to teach it to their children into something authentic.  At least I hope so... 

Rights vs Freedoms. . .

K.G.M. v. Meta is a landmark legal case where a young woman, known only as K.G.M., sued Meta and other social media companies, effectively accusing them of designing their platforms to be addictive -- especially for children.  Her standing was her own personal claim that her mental health was harmed by these social media. The jury found in favor of K.G.M. and awarded her $6 million in damages.  This al;l happened in Los Angeles and in Superior Court and, even though it went on for three years, is surely not over yet.  Last month’s ruling in K.G.M. v. Meta et al., found Meta and YouTube liable for harms to an individual plaintiff not by virtue simply of content but by design, by the algorithms inherent to those platforms.  Of course, the naysayers insisted that this verdict threatened free speech; and that it interfered with and undermined parental rights and responsibility.  These are the same concerns raised against state efforts to impose age restrictions or parental consent requirements for minors on social media.  Is this really a contest between our children's mental health and wellbeing and rights of both kids and parents?

Note that the plaintiff alleged ythat she was harmed not by the content she was exposed to on social media (which may be bad enough) but by the design of the platforms themselves, such as aggressive algorithms, infinite scroll, autoplay, “likes,” and filters which both change the appearance of the person on display as well as the setting or background.  I would simply add that the progress in AI only makes these more dangerous as they become more effective.  What so many fail to note is the distinction between content (which is protected by the First Amendment) and product design (which is subject to liability).  In other words, this is not a simply balance between rights and freedoms protected by law but a challenge to the structure of those social media platforms and how they work.  Addiction scientists testified at this trial that social media effectively acts like a drug, triggering pathways in the brain that build upon rewards, triggering dopamine release, and generating a hunger or need for what is being offered.  This is much the way video games and pornography operates.  It is not simply the image on the screen but the craving for what is next, what is behind the next screen or click of the mouse.

Parents are complicit when they fail to exercise their parental duties to supervise and decide on behalf of their children what is appropriate and what is not.  In this, they are hindered by social media companies which insist that they are child-friendly and that they can be safely used by children.  Indeed, social media has become ubiquitous in our society.  We are addicted to those screens, reels, ads, and content and not simply because we are weak or mindless but also because those social media platforms are designed to exploit us, especially children.  Ten minutes in any public place and you can see how everpresent these screens are while we shop, walk, enjoy leisure, eat, talk with friends, etc., but especially when we have nothing else to do and even when we have everything else to do.  It cannot be merely that we are more weak-willed than ever before.  It has to be that social media companies have our number, literally.

It bothers me, then, when the Church jumps on the bandwagon and adopts social media as the means to do its work of evangelism, fellowship, education, formation, and even worship.  We are contributing to the problem.  We may not half to abandon all social media, nobody is saying that, but we do need to be much more careful about whether we are simply using a platform or feeding the hunger that is corrupting youth and adults.  Indeed, some churches today are more a .com presence than a presence in brick, mortar, and people.  The screen is justified because it is cheaper and easy but are we paying attention to the cost of this wholesale abdication to the social media frenzy that has become the world today?  Some people may choose to live on Facebook.  If they are adults, I suppose I have little to say.  But the Church does not need to live on Facebook (or any other media platform).  And, I would suggest, we betray our very claim to be the Church when we become nothing more than one more client of those platforms, preying upon the users of any age, with theology, fellowship, prayer, and communion disguised as an algorithm.  

Was it wrong?

The history of the requirement of priests to be celibate is not exactly easy to chart.  The practice of the East indicates that it was not exactly uniform Western practice -- at least prior to the Great Schism.  In the East priests are still allowed to marry (before ordination) though bishops are drawn from monastic orders or the unmarried who lived under the rule of celibacy.  Even in Rome there are exceptions.  Some Eastern Rite Churches, part of the Orthodox Church following the Great Schism, were reunited with Rome even as the Reformation was unfolding but with the proviso that they would be allowed to retain their liturgical, theological, spiritual, and disciplinary heritage, including a married clergy.  Clergy of Protestant denominations who convert to Roman Catholicism and seek the priesthood are allowed to keep their wives and children -- as expected in a communion that does not look favorably upon divorce!  Pope Benedict XVI created a special dispensation for the Anglican Ordinariate to do the same.  

The history of moral failure is not exactly rare.  It is said that even homosexual and heterosexual popes themselves did not lead celibate lives.  It is claimed that Pope Paul II (1464-1471) died while being sodomized by a page; Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) was known to be a “lover of boys and sodomites;” Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) notoriously had illegitimate children with two women; Pope Julius II (1503-1513) had three illegitimate daughters; Pope Leo X (1513-1521), who excommunicated Martin Luther, was reported to have suffered from an anal fistula as the result of too much anal sex; Pope Paul III (1534-49) fathered four illegitimate children; Pope Julius III (1540-1555) shared his bed with 15-year-old Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte whom he incardinated at the age of 17; and Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) had a son while studying for the priesthood.  We all know the stories of Augustine and other earlier church fathers and their, well, indiscretions.

Celibacy did not suddenly appear but evolved, first under Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) and Pope Calixtus II (1119-1124), but more profoundly under Pope Innocent II (1130-1143), a monk of Cluny who convened the Second Lateran Council in 1139 with its requirement of celibacy for all diocesan priests and for its singular invalidation of the marriages of priests who were married. It applied to the orders of subdeacon and above with wives or concubines and it threatened to deprive them of their position and its income if they failed to obey.  Most of this is not whispered charge but well founded in record, including the failures of those to whom the vows of celibacy were to be made!

What is Rome to do?  Does it admit that a thousand year practice was wrong or misapplied?  Does it suddenly shift gears and restructure what is built around a celibate priesthood to be something else?  Exceptions are one thing but repudiating such a long past is quite another.  What about all those faithful men who gave up the desire for a wife and a family for the sake of this higher calling?  Were they duped or simply fools or did they have much higher motives?  Unlike the East, Rome does not exclusively create bishops from monastic clergy.  What would this do to the episcopate?  Then there is the vexing question of the Lavender Mafia and the claim of some that homosexuality is firmly entrenched not only among the priesthood but among those in the monastic life.  It could be ended with a simple notice from Leo XIV that it is no longer required but it won't be and it probably will never be ended.  Those who look to Rome awaiting this shift will not live to see it and probably no one will.  It has become part of that long train of doctrines and practices within Rome that cannot be jettisoned any more than they can be argued from history or Scripture as catholic.  So what will Rome do?  They will continue doing what they have done for a thousand years.  It will become harder but the cost of changing is too great to the culture of Rome.  And which pope wants to make such a change only to have it end up with the same division that has plagued Rome since Vatican II in the worship wars of the Latin Mass vs the vernacular?  I cannot imagine that anyone will go there anytime soon.  Can you?

Bonds of affection or ties to truth. . .

There was a time when the ecumenical endeavor seemed to have the attention of many, if not most, of Christian leaders and seemed poised to muster the energy to do what years of division have undone.  That, of course, has come and gone.  The ecumenical endeavor is no longer on the front burner of anyone and many presume that its aims have all been achieved -- if not by a common structure and single jurisdiction then by communion and fellowship long ago declared.  The only problem is that the ecumenical consensus was achieved not by struggling to find unity amid the doctrinal divisions that had existed or continue to exist.  Instead of truth, the focus shifted to mere affection.  We like you.  Let's work together.  Let's eat together.  Bonds of affection are as fickle as affection.  What was needed then and now is something more study -- a unity deep in the truth of God's Word, the creeds confessed, and the doctrines held.  That is not where the ecumenical movement is today.  Not by a long shot.

An example of this has already occurred in Anglicanism.  The once formidable Anglican Communion has been fractured to the point where those representing some 75% of Anglicans worldwide chose to boycott the enthronement of Sarah Mullally as it titular head, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Who would have thought that the supreme example of a unity forged less with common creed and confession but in the area of affection, tradition, and "gentlemanly" discretion would be left with the tattered rags of church bodies and bishops who still hold to the idea that fellowship does not have to mean agreement on doctrine?  But that is where things have ended up.  The seeds of this division were always there but they have grown, matured, and borne the poison fruit of an Anglican Communion which is no longer a communion at all.  Yet what we have seen in Anglicanism is largely what has happened across the ecumenical landscape.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has struggled to find some group with whom they are not in communion -- except, of course, the Missouri Synod which actually holds to Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.  Bonds of affection have led to seats at the table for Methodists, Reformed of various stripes, and a host of others who could not quite agree on what is believed, taught, and confessed but who do agree that affection means you are willing to overlook such thinks for the sake of the ecumenical endeavor.  They are certainly not alone.  Indeed, nearly all the old seven sisters of the American Mainline Protestant Churches have pursued this kind of ecumenical unity which is but merely the agreement to act civilly toward each other, not to address the other's sins, and make nice for the public image.  There is, for this reason, little need for the ecumenical conversations of old in which theologians actually looked at what they believed and what that meant.  It is probably for this reason you have need seen any such provisional texts of the progress of those conversations for some time.  Don't count on any in the future either.

Ecumenical endeavors have become the stuff of media friendships proclaimed with a click and with all the meaning and significance of those social media relationships.  Bonds of affection may sound nice but they lack little teeth or power to hold groups accountable or together.  And that is the real purpose of ecumenical conversations -- to hold each other accountable to what we said and say we still mean about who is God and what His Word speaks.  Indeed, the premise of the old ecumenical conversation was that if we really held each other accountable to be the best we could be through the norm of Scripture, it actually might mean that we had a confession in common.  Alas, that seems to be lost.  In its place is something that is as fragile as a house of cards and with even less meaning.  What a shame!