Waiting for a voice. . .

The world seems intent upon governing by poll.  Business seems to hang upon every survey it can invent both those who are its consumers and those who are not.  Morality tries to find consensus of opinion but ends up tolerating nearly everything.  Even the Church believes that the world will respond if we offer them our ears and listen to their point of view and preference.  What fools we are.  Do we really believe that everything hinges upon listening to those not yet of the Kingdom or are we so desperate that we simply ape what the world around us is doing in the hope that it might make us relevant again?

The world is not waiting for yet another group to promise to listen to its concerns and people are not withholding their faith because they feel they have not been heard by the Church.  There are too many who already hang on their every word or whim.  The world is awaiting a voice.  The world is looking for a Church built with conviction upon what God has said and bold enough to present this truth without apology or embarrassment.  The world is not withholding their attention or their faith because they have not been heard but because the Church has too often failed to speak with courage and confidence the Word of God that endures forever..

The world and people are filled with uncertainty.  They do not know where to turn.  They live in a world which seems devoid of real meaning and purpose.  They put on identities like a change of clothing only to cast them off disappointed because they do not fit.  They cannot trust their bodies or their emotions and yet are told to turn inside themselves for answers, meaning, and purpose.  They are connected digitally but ache with longing for a personal connection and are captive in prisons of loneliness.  They have watched marriage turn from the norm into an exception, children from blessing to burden, and the family broken by divorce, infidelity, and individuality.  They have traded real intimacy for pornography and an idealized sexuality which is both perverted and false.  They have been told the artificial intelligence is smarter then than people and the only hope for the future.  They have trusted technology and been disappointed by the failed promises of newer, better, faster, and more entertaining screens.  They have become consumers of information as well as material things but no longer find satisfaction in what they have.  Death has become normal and yet they fear death and long to know that there is something which lasts beyond the grave.  In the end, life has become fragile and transient and anticlimactic in a world of so many broken promises.  Then the Church comes along to say "we hear you" and expects that to make the difference.

The world is not looking for a God with big ears but one with a strong voice to cut through all the disappointment and overcome all the disillusionment that seems to define our every day.  The world is waiting for a Church which will stand up and sound forth with truth that endures forever and the powerful voice that speaks and something actually happens.  Why else would a liberal world be so attentive to an Islamic voice which conflicts so profoundly with the values the world esteems so highly?  The world is hungry to hear someone who speaks something other than a weak and faint echo of their own words and choices.  This is our opportunity.  We have the voice of God in His Word, not some static voice from the past but the living voice that speaks forgiveness, life, and salvation into the emptiness and noise of our world.  We worry more about being winsome than welcome, friendly than faithful, and offending rather than calling to repentance.  It is no wonder that our pews are empty and our churches passed by in pursuit of other things to give meaning and purpose to life.  But it does not have to be this way.

The world might be happy if someone could make their load lighter or give some direction in time of uncertainty but it would find redemption and rebirth in the promise of the God incarnate who came down from heaven to confront our sin when we would not and to offer Himself in a sacrifice we could neither supply nor afford.  His path of salvation led Him through death to life everlasting and will lead those who hear His voice to walk with Him the path of everlasting life.  But we need to stop acting as if God has called us to make the worst of things in this moment a little better and start manifesting the eternal Kingdom amid the pain and suffering of this life.  This cannot happen by borrowing the voice of the world or proving to be a faint echo of what everyone else is saying.  This can only happen when we rediscover the voice of Him who speaks and the sheep hear, recognize, and follow.  Only then will we have something of substance to offer a world in need, listening for the sound of its Master's voice.

Whether you call this the synodal way or you vote yourself into a position of authority over the Word of God does not matter.  What does matter is that the world is not waiting for us to put on our listening ears or a God who is attentive to the sound of our own opinions, but to speak forth the powerful Word, giving absolution to the guilty, life to the dead, and hope to the hearer.  A listening Church is silent -- silent when the Lord has called us to address the world with His Word of life.

The problem with "churchly" NGOs. . .

 

So, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is in reality simply a non-governmental agency of the US government.  No matter if you think they do good work with the money or not, the false impression given is that they are a religious agency, one which furthers the aims of the Roman Catholic Church in the US.  That is not the case.  The money they administer is done within the parameters of the granting agency and therefore cannot be used for religious purpose but only for a secular one.  It is high time that we cease and desist in calling such organizations churchly and admit that they are but a fancied up name for any other group the US government gets to do its work.  If you are going to do the government's work, then at least be honest and remove the name USCCB from the title of the group and label it appropriately.

Lest any Lutherans here be smug, I could say the same for the the work of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Resettlement Service or even Lutheran World Relief -- both of which might do good  work on the government's dime but are hardly worth labeling as Lutheran.  If it is Lutheran, then it ought to be supported by Lutherans.  At least the LIRRS has rebadged itself to Global Refuge Connect.  Lutheran roots, yup.  Lutheran history, yup.  Lutheran identity, no more.  Lets all have a little more honesty in packaging.  FWIW, this does not apply to the LCMS World Relief and Human Care work done by the LCMS which is done separately and with Lutheran money.  Please send your offerings there with confidence that they are a churchly agency doing churchly work.  But the formerly Lutheran agencies conceived at a time when Lutheran work was cooperative and more Lutheran are but a shell of their former selves.  We all know it.  Let's simply admit it.  Whether or not they do good work on the government's dime, they are not Lutheran agencies doing Lutheran work.  Once you accept the government's money, all religious character to the work ceases and you become, for all intents and purposes, a government employer employing government employees on the government's dime.  So if these NGOs do a better and more efficient job of that work, fine.  Just don't hide behind the Lutheran name and make us forget that it is not Lutherans doing mercy work.

Things are that bad. . .

When things are really bad, small improvements become monumental occasions.  So it is that I read in the diocese of Charlotte that large numbers of men had been ordained this year.  Unpack those statistics and you find that they went from 7 to 6 and then this year to 10.  Percentage increases are more impressive than actual numbers.  Remember if you had 1 and increased your numbers by 100% that is still just 2.  This is not quite a revolution.  It is an increase worth nothing but with a more sobered nuance.  Rome is still in trouble.  Contrast this with the dioceses that are wholesale closing down churches because they have no priests and have less people than ever before.  Not so good.  Which brings me to my point.

Headlines love to herald dramatic numbers -- either positive or negative.  The issue here is not the current numbers but the trend overall and the reality is that things are pretty bad in Rome, along with much of Christianity.  So bad that even slight increases can cause us to celebrate.  We should not be watching the numbers like some sort of stock market ticker but concentrating on what is happening in the pews.  The health of any church is not defined by its leadership or even its clergy but by the numbers and faithfulness of those in the pews.  They are not unrelated, to be sure, but they are not the same.  Rome could have a wonderful pope and still be tanking in the pews.  We Lutherans could have great national leaders and still be closing the doors on too many small congregations.  The investment in the renewal of the Church is made not by buying leaders but by nurturing the parish where people gather around the Word and Table of the Lord.  That is the barometer to which we ought to be paying attention.

There are all sorts of things going against us -- demographics, location of churches, a powerful secular society, the decrease in marriage and birth rates, etc...  All of these are addressed not by national programs but by the work that happens with pastor and people in the parish.  Can you imagine a national campaign for more babies to be born?  How would that look?  Can you imagine a local congregation in which the families there are encouraged and supported and live as role models to those not yet married?  We know what that looks like.  For all the good talk from national leaders -- and there has been much good talk -- the reality is that success in the Church trickles up from the individual parish to the union of many parishes.  The barometer of our success has always been the health of the congregation, the relationship between faithful pastor and faithful people, and the witness to the faith that is given on the local level.

It is great to be supported by national leaders and national programs but sometimes we confuse those with the place where the real work is to be found.  Rome can have great bishops and lousy congregations.  Missouri Lutherans can have great national leaders and crumby parishes.  Our investment needs to be on the ground and in the local congregation.  That is where the future of the Church lies.  We are filled with voices insisting to know how to merge congregations or close them or decentralize seminaries or put them online or to offer dozens of ideas about everything else.  The talking heads on social media distract us from the real issue.  We need vibrant communities of faith in which the focus is on the Word preached and the Supper distributed to baptized people who understand they have a vocation to live out in home and at work.  The boom of our past did not happen because our leaders knew what to say or what to do but because their was great confidence in our Lutheran confessions, great conviction in the abiding and eternal truth of the Scriptures of which those confessions testify, and great commitment to their local community where this faith was lived out, catechized, nurtured, and accountable.  We have plenty of great print resources and online resources but what we seem to be struggling with today is the focus on the local congregation, on the sense of beauty that is manifest with the people of God gathered around the Table of the Lord and their pastor distributing God's gifts of Word and Sacrament every week.  Where this happens, fruits will abound.  When it does not, no national program or leader can save us. 

The cost of deferring to others. . .

For a very long time now and evolving only slowly over that time the family began to defer more and more to others.  This is especially true of education as the family receded while the role of the state and its institutions of public education took over raising our children.  While there were times in history when this was an easier and symbiotic partnership, it has increasingly become a more challenging relationship.  

For the family side of things, it has not all been sunshine and roses.  The rise of the single parent family has presenting a significant challenge to the publish school teacher and classroom, enrolling children who now come without the requisite background and preparation the home once offered.  The growing dysfunction within nearly all the homes and the loss of a multi-generational context have left the school to try and parent and socialize as well as teach.  The loss of any real moral consensus in America has left the educational endeavor without a direction and without a clear foundation on which to build.  The pressure upon schools to serve as incubators of current societal and educational thinking has left less time for for more core educational pursuits and changed the way schools are evaluated.  The view of the school by the community from treasure to drag or financial burden has moved to the many new homes without children or grandchildren and introduced new stress points to the whole task.  The rise of vocational education in which success is viewed neither as knowledge nor the ability to think but readiness for the job market has also produced cracks in the once impenetrable wall of primary and secondary education.

For that matter, the educational industry in America has grown increasingly distant from those who have the children and those who tax dollars pay the freight.  The rift is more than mere competition but suspicion and distrust of those institutions once proudly among the most revered in America.  This has created resentment and antagonism between the teaching enterprise and those who are taught -- along with their family constituents.  The educational industry has always skewed more left of center everywhere but this is pronounced at the university level and in urban settings.  The rights of the child in the classroom are championed over and against the rights of parents, family, and home.  All of this is  happening amid a growing number of alternatives and choices in the marketplace of options -- including home schooling.  While religious schools are not yet dead, they are no longer as vibrant or secure as the home schooling option increases even though religion is hardly the sole or even more important reason for families to make this choice for their children.  Classical schools hold a promise that is attracting people from all economic classes and from every social background.  For that matter, home schooled kids have shown their stuff and proven to be exceptionally prepared and profoundly successful.  All of this raises the question of whether dollars thrown at the problem will solve anything and might the cheapest option (in real dollars) be better than the expensive one.

Another aspect of this deference of family to school reveals the struggle of the home to present to their children a cohesive worldview, solid moral values which can endure over a lifetime, religious foundation to keep the kids in the faith, and a perspective on the world which, though challenged in teen age years is usually found again as those kids marry and have their own children.  The Church has also been complicit in this.  Sunday school was an American invention for the sake of those children whose parents were not in the Church and yet it has become a population nearly exclusively for those whose parents do.  In the same way, catechetical instruction was done in the home and examination at the Church but now that is largely the domain of the professionals.  How is this working?  Sadly, even worse than the success of the public school over against the home based educational programs.  Yet in the Church we continue to be tempted to mirror in our own schools the modern trends and ideas of the public school and to promote diversity as a sacred truth to accompany the Gospel itself.  We in the Church have learned to be both suspicious and unsure about the value of religious instruction over all and especially that which is done in the congregation by a professional teacher of doctrine.  All of this has accompanied the increased statistics of those lost to the faith in early childhood or immediately post-confirmation.  We say we are not competing with the home and family but it sure sounds like we are saying that professionals know better than parents.  If that is not what we want to say, then it might be time to change our stock speech.  Maybe we need to help the family and home more than compete with them or push them out of the equation.  Home schooling may prove to be the way to do both and versions of home school with co-ops or other partnered endeavors with the Church may be even more important going forward than actual brick and mortar religious schools.

The point is this.  There is a cost to deferring to others what is the rightful domain of the family and the home.  It is high time we recognized this and admitted it.

Tradeoffs in time. . .

Oddly enough, those Lutherans pushing for more ceremony in the liturgy have been joined by those pushing for less in searching out the past to find examples to prove their points.  The problem is that those looking for more have the long view of history behind them and the solid words of confessional integrity to support them.  Those pushing for less have a skewed version of nostalgia on their side.  For my part, I lived through both.  I was a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s when TLH was king and I was a pastor when WS 1969, ILCW, LBW, LW, HS 98, and LSB came along to coax Missouri into a more authentic liturgical identity on Sunday morning.  There were tradeoffs along the way and these are some of them as I see them.

Yes, until talk of a pan-Lutheran hymnal and service book became official, Lutherans looked very much alike on Sunday morning -- no matter their choice of left or right on the doctrinal spectrum.  They followed the same order with slight musical variation and there was little of the now vaunted diversity among Lutherans across the nation.  We simply opened the book and followed it.  For those who openly disdain the book and for the myriad of variations within it now, it can be tempting to long again for the days when we were all Lutheran people of the book (be it TLH or even SBH).  But there were also things not so rosy in that picture of our past.

 LCMS communing statistics first appear in 1930 and report an average communion of 2.10 times a year per member. At that time, most congregations offered Communion four to six times a year. In 1950, 1970 and 1990, LCMS members communed on average 3.22, 5.91 and 8.44 times per year. Through these decades, most congregations increased offering the full Divine Service to at least twice a month.  (From a LW Article in 2021)

For all the uniformity in rite and the general reverence which accompanied the execution of those rites, we were people of the Word but not so much of the Table.  When I grew up, it was common enough to be normal for Lutherans to go without the Sacrament in rite all but 4 Sundays a year and then either to depart the pew prior to the Eucharistic liturgy or to sit in the pew rather than commune.  For those who want to remember this period fondly, it is also worth remembering that we were ceremonially low, the black gown prevailed, sacramental piety was almost non-existent, nobody even talked about private confession, and the most uniform principle of liturgical ideal and practice was whatever was not Catholic.  Coincidentally, that also turned out to be non-catholic and against our own confession.  That is a fact conveniently forgotten.  Even in the hymn section of the book, the people were probably more comfortable with generic hymnody than either the Lutheran chorale or the offerings of the pre-Reformation variety.  It would be hard to even distinguish a Sunday in Lent from one in Easter except for the note in the bulletin or the hymn slide announcing the day on the hymnboard.  But there was uniformity and the person behind the rail and those on the other side did not treat worship as a casual or indifferent thing.

The lost opportunity of the liturgical movement was not the rites that could have been or should have been or should not have been.  No, the lost opportunity of the liturgical movement was the failure to marry a high sacramental practice, manifest uniformity of look and feel throughout the congregations, an appreciation for the ceremonies which could not be commanded to an existing reverence, a commitment to the hymnal, and high view of the Word.  That was the loss I lament.  Not a book or a setting of the Divine Service but the loss of how this might have been real renewal.  Sure, we did increase both the number of times the Sacrament is offered and how often folks commune.  That is good, right, and salutary.  But somehow we managed to do so while devaluing the shape of the rite and its words at the same time.  Sure, we have more pastors in albs and chasubles than I would have ever imagined half a decade ago but at the same time we seem to have lost the idea of what the ordained pastor is and does along with a confusion of what complementary role the laity play in this thing called worship.  Sure, we have more people now in the same book than when the liturgical experimentation began but we have turned from the book to the screen even where liturgy is still king.  Worst of all, we have somehow labeled all the stuff of worship from the rites and music of the absolution to the liturgy of the Word to the the liturgy of the Sacrament adiaphora.  Astonishingly, we have somehow said that Scripture is silent about what ought to happen in worship or how it might happen.  We somehow cannot even find it within ourselves to bind us to the confessional norm of every Lord's Day receiving the flesh and blood of Christ and then conveniently forgot to fight back when the government said liquor stores were essential but the gathering of Glod's people around His Word and Supper was not.  All of this confusion and tom foolery has left us very similar to where we were before the liturgical movement took hold -- arguing the basics again.  This time the basics are the ordo of the Divine Service, reverence, and the value of uniformity.  Really?

We traded one set of problems for another and in so doing admit that we remain more driven by minimums than by fullness, by settling for rather than striving for, and by utility over beauty.  If we had better learned the lessons of Covid, we might just have kept it all but put it on the screen rather than in person.  It is not simply our mess, Rome is suffering as well.  Canterbury also.  It is hard to find a real Calvinist anymore and it is hardly more of a memory the fundamentalism of the past against the evangelical gold standard of worship that seems to prevail where once the tent revival was king.  My point is that we cannot waste our time picking and choosing a moment in time which looks better to our sensibilities than another without failing again in the opportunity to hold to a high understanding of the Word and a similarly high understanding of the Sacrament.  We should never be bound by minimums except to rein in the erring but should all be working for the much more that belongs to our rich theological and liturgical history and heritage. 

 

The TV I watch. . .

There is not much on TV today that I watch.  A few old series from my childhood in reruns is typical fare for the occasional hour of viewing.  That would include, of course, Lawrence Welk on Saturday evenings.  I was forced to watch it with my parents growing up but somehow it has its own attraction and nostalgia.  But the only redeeming moments seem to come from the Brits.  After Welk comes Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet, pronounce it correctly now!) and Dame Judi Dench in As Time Goes By.  But that is nothing compared to most Sundays.  Antiques Roadshow gives way to Call the Midwife and then it is Masterpiece Theatre.

On the air since 1971, Masterpiece PBS has kept us glued to our sets through many different series.  It is one of the last great venues in the vast desert of streaming which has been dedicated to preserving a deep character development, a visual extravaganza for the eye, and compelling story lines.  With all the awards, it is hard to single out our favs.  Endeavor is certainly one, Grantchester another, and then there is All Creatures Great and Small, simply one of the best ever!

The series All Creatures Great and Small is not a modern story but a modern remake of the first adaptation running 1978–1990.  The stories themselves are nearly a hundred years old.  They trace the life of a rural veterinarian working in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1930s and 1940s. The story is drawn from the memoirs of real-life veterinarian James Alfred Wight, writing under the pen name James Herriot.  Each episode unfolds another chapter in his James’s professional and personal journey, through ordinary days and wartime, blending humor, warmth, and a decidedly optimistic view of life as they care for animals large and small within a very close-knit and scenic community.  Now in its sixth season (at least in the United States) it is the best kind of television: genuinely family-friendly, quietly instructive, solidly moral, sometimes starkly real, uniformly hopeful, and rich in kind of life lessons we all need to learn.  Set in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, in the market town of Grassington, we have a positive but not overly sentimental view of life.  The musical scores are an important part of each episode.  Even the visual lead in for each episode is just right. 

It seems that everything else on TV either parrots the prevailing social causes or insists upon showing us the most gritty and dark side of life.  Nothing against the actors, but there is only so many brutal crime dramas I can take and only so many stories of murder, child abuse, drugs, etc., before it is overwhelmingly depressing.  This was once the exception while most TV told a hopeful story, with clear good guys and bad guys, resolution to end each episode, and the assurance of a solid family to make their way through it all.  Now it is hard to find a normal family on TV or to find one in which the current sexual desires or gender identities do not feature larger than life.  Think back to Andy Griffith.  Nobody got wounded or died or got away with murder or robbery.  They all seemed to get along even when tempers got hot or blame was being shoveled around.  Don't forget the lazy Sunday afternoons on the front porch, snoozing or humming along with the guitar a favorite folk song or hymn, after a sumptuous lunch of fried chicken, waiting for the homemade ice cream to be ready.  Okay, maybe it is out of date but does that mean the values, the family structures, and the neighborliness we see there are also out of date?  I hope not.  I hope that one day we will return to a hopeful view of things in TV series with visual appeal, good writing, and solidly rooted hopes and ideals.  I might actually turn on the TV more often. 

Truth is always stranger than fiction. . .

 Lord knows no one would want Jesus on Wooden Cross if it comes from a smoker's house.

Best interests of children. . .

"I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. I think part of our goal as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents, as much as we rely on parents to raise them."

While catching up on some reading and encountered a discussion of voting which included a rather radical proposal to weight the votes of young people over and against middle age and older people (me).  It was a stupid exchange that flowed normally and naturally out of a culture which values youth over age and experience.  Hidden in this discussion, however, was a statement made to justify shifting the burden away from some for the sake of youth -- a statement which actually had a lot more to do with the value and purpose of the family itself.  That is the statement above.

"Parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interest of their children..."  That is a very reasoned statement probably from someone who has no children and it comes at a time in which I have heard the complaint that old people like me have too much money and too much political power.  While that is probably the premise of this statement above, it is about much more than money and political power.  It is an argument for the individual over and against family, neighborhood, and community.  It is the cause of self-interest over and against the interests of others -- even those of our nearest kin.  It is the purposeful devaluation of the family as an institution and of the parental role as guardian and advocate for the child.  As if this were not enough, the author of the paragraph also suggested that a college graduate age 24 with neither marriage nor children to boast probably has a better idea of what is in the best interest of the child.  That says it all.

"...to make sure children aren't the hostages of their parents..."  There is again the profound animus against the parent and the family.  Because marriage and family are not a democracy in which the votes of the children count as much as the parents, the right course of democracy is to pit the family and the child against each other.  Wow.  That is the state of things.  Of course, we all know that there are bad families and problem children.  Neither of those is typical.  In fact, the normal state of things is just the opposite.  Parents who sacrifice and give their children at a cost to themselves and families who juggle the needs and wants of their children in order to give them all more rather than less.  Neither the child nor young adulthood has much comprehension of either the sacrifices or the juggling of interests that goes on routinely in the home.  Children are not hostages of their parents but run the increasing risk of becoming hostages to an educational, social, and values system that presumes to know better than mom or dad or Scripture or God.

Most of us learn what family and parenting are from our families and our parents.  We are not instructed by books or "professionals" but by the common experience of growing up in a home where mom and dad love us and do what is best for us and we learn to trust that they know what they are doing.  Do they screw up?  Sure, I have made a ton of mistakes raising my children and I expect most of us would be happy to admit the same.  But few of those mistakes have anything to do with holding our kids hostage to our interests and most of them had to do with acquiescing to theirs when my instinct told me to say "no".  

God designed the family and we did not invent it.  He endowed the family with influence far beyond what happened within the home.  Indeed, He made Himself known to us as our heavenly Father and thus gave the dignity of fatherhood and motherhood a higher place than mere biology or ancestry.  Because of sin we surely fail to live up to the promise of His gift but it would be a sad betrayal of that gift and trust to cede the decisions for the children to those outside the family.  Yes, in extreme circumstance the family proves to be unworthy of that trust and sins against the responsibility as well as the child.  But what is being spoken of here is nothing less than institutionalizing the state or others within the state and giving to them the responsibility that belongs to the family alone.  Surely the sad state of affairs today and the increasing rarity of children among us ought to suggest that culture, society, and trendy thinking are even less reliable than plain, old-fashioned sinful moms and dads. 

Given, not chosen. . .

Names, like pronouns, have become agents of our own self-expression.  Though they were once the domain of the society to know how to address you, they have become more the domain of the autonomous self, another avenue of our own identity.  I wish we could forget this. I wish we could go back to the days when family members provided the source for the names we gave to our children instead of some ridiculous penchant to saddle the child with something unique or strange, a name no one else had ever known.  I admit some sympathy for those countries with name police who must give approval before a birth is registered and the name duly given to the child.  I am not resigned to the desire of parents to give novel spellings to old names and new names which defy pronunciation to their offspring.  I suppose I should be happy they are even having children and cut them some slack about the actual name they give the child.  But I won't.

Names are given to us, not chosen by us.  Even nicknames are given to us and not the result of our own invention or choice.  We need to remember that wisdom in an age destined to play with names as if they were Scrabble tiles.  Sometimes our ignorance shows through.  A friend once described to me a girl she encountered while student teaching.  Her mother (was there a father in the picture?) had decided that she liked the name phonetically spelled VaGeenA but in her foolishness saddled the poor kid with the name Vagina.  A year later the girl had it legally changed to just Gina.  Unfortunately, no one fined her mother for her ignorance or foolishness and maybe she never actually got it.  Names are a gift but not necessarily a kind one.

Ever since I was old enough to understand my name was Larry, I complained to my parents (one of German and one of Swedish extraction) that I could have been somebody in life if only they would have given me a better name -- Lawrence even!  Once someone pointed out that Sir Lawrence Olivier chose to be called Larry.  Oops.  Well, at least he had the formal name on his birth certificate.  I thought of all the interesting names in my family's history (on both sides) and of all that I might have been, but I did not choose that name.  It was given to me.  On the list of names and their popularity over the years, you might notice that nobody names their kids Larry anymore and so someday I might just be a rarity -- before I take my last breath and it gets inscribed on my tombstone.

Names are how we know one another.  No matter how lofty or plain, our first names are the start of every acquaintance before it has the promise of friendship.  Husband and wife repeat each other's names with their vows and promises of love and fidelity.  The baby has to get a name before he can head home from the hospital.  You even need a name to get a Social Security number.  When we pray for people at the altar, we generally use their first names instead of some name with a Mr. or Mrs. before it.  When we pray for presidents and monarchs, governors and bishops, we call them by their given name.  Donald.  Charles. William.  Roger.  In baptism we do not ask how this child will be named but how this child IS named.  Don't make the pastor ask "how do I pronounce that?"

God knows our names.  He knows which Susan or Fred we are talking about as we speak their names out loud in the dyptich -- without having to delineate the one with hemorrhoids or the one having gall bladder surgery.  There is something comforting in this.  We ought to treat names with some respect and we ought to respect those whom we name with enough respect to give them a respectable name.  A real name.  Joseph and Mary did that.  They called His name Jesus (well, not really Jesus but the Hebrew form behind it Jeshua).  We ought to follow their example and thank them for not giving Jesus a name they had invented because it sounded nice and they thought nobody else would ever choose it.  Jesus is the name above all names not because the combination of letters is unique but because He is the only who died for us and rose for us so that we might be dead to sin and alive to everlasting life.  The name does not have to be unique.  The person always is -- at least to God.  

The Wellness God. . .

It was while I attended a vicarage supervisor's orientation and preparation class in St. Louis some years ago that I was introduced to the Wellness Wheel.  The Wellness Wheel, it was explained, is a holistic tool to help the pastor/vicar see which the areas in their lives which are going well and those which might need more attention. Identifying these areas was key, I was told, to strengthening the pastor's/vicar's sense of identity and effectiveness. The Wellness Wheel is divided into eight domains: social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, environmental, financial, and occupational. According to the experts, in order to have optimal health and well-being, one must tend to all eight domains.  In the Spring of this year, our own Concordia Plan Services addressed the benefits of the Wellness Wheel in their Better Health  newsletter -- along with a nice little recipe for gluten free and dairy free quinoa pancakes.  It was there called the LCMS Wellness Wheel.  

While I have no doubt of the good intentions and the cost benefits of better health for the pastors and other church workers covered by CPS, it has always bothered me how much attention we give to the idea of wellness.  It seems to me a rather bourgeois concept, the privileged pursuit of those who spend less time than any generation before them on work for the essentials of life and more money on health and happiness than any generation before them.  Perhaps I am wrong.  Without pontificating on something I know only the barest information about, I would rather address the whole idea of the Wellness God, the God of wellness who rewards those who live and work and enjoy their leisure in a salutary way to benefit their wellness.  For the record, I am NOT advocating disregard for common sense healthy habits nor am I suggesting that we live in blatant disregard for the state of our bodies or our lives.  I am simply saying that wellness can become a mighty deity for whom we will cast aside good and right things given to us by God unless we pay attention to this temptation.  

The wellness culture is not far from a religion in which God is not the focus but the gods of a pain free, stress free, full, fun, and happy life.  It has a lot in common with the Christian Science of old and its focus on happy thoughts as a means of addressing life's ills.  It has become standard for us to believe that  physical health flows directly out of one’s mental and spiritual state.  This, of course, makes health into the center of everything.  Indeed, I imagine how many Christians are using crystals or yoga or meditation for a thousand different things that they should be addressing to God.  All you need is a mat, a quiet area of your house, and a little time to develop a spirituality without the inconvenience of either God or the Church, and one paying tangible rewards instead of the spiritual ones that seem delayed.

Sitting in silence before God in prayer and simply sitting in silence while you look deep inside yourself are not the same thing.  One begs you to look beyond yourself and the other glorifies whatever your are feeling or wanting in the moment to almost divine status.  One presumes that the greatest sacrifice you make is a little time and dedication to self while the other admits that many things in life come with a cost attached.  We all want to be soothed and consoled and told to pay attention to the little voices inside of us more than to wrestle with our vocations and callings as the people of God, husbands and wives, parents and children, and neighbors.  Suffering is not something to be avoided at all costs but the expectation of those who follow Him who suffered all for us on the cross.  Sacrifice is not something to be overcome but the mirror of the sacrificial love shown to us by Him who loved us more than self -- even to death upon the cross.  We all want balance so that we have time and energy and money for the things we want as much as for the things laid upon us as holy obligations.   Where does Scripture promise such a life without suffering or sacrifice?  Where does Jesus say this is what we deserve, what we ought to be looking for, and what our Christian lives ought to look like?

It is dangerous to borrow something like this from the world, complete with all its expectations, and to promote it to, of all people, church workers.  When “more you” is code for less God or the lie that this means also "more God," the real discipline of Christian life and morality is turned on end.  When every goal and reference point is internal, without tradition, moral demand, submission to God, service to neighbor, the wellness goal points away from God and not to Him. What may have started as a well-intentioned call to order your life more faithfully has ended up being a gussied up form of narcissism.  When you can no longer see the difference between doing Pilates, crafts, quiet time, or hiking for the sake of pleasure and well-being and those things are done as spiritual experiences contributing to your own sense of well-being, something is wrong.  The gym is not the Church.

Wellness can be a real and honest pursuit, the shedding of bad habits rooted in sin for better habits rooted in the understanding of life and your body as gift and temple of God.  These activities can certainly lower your heart rate, improve your posture, help with aches and pains, aid your focus on the things that matter, and give you an hour of quiet you badly needed. What none of this can do is turn life in to something safe and easy, without cost or demand, without sacrifice and suffering.  That is the lie.  You cannot light candles in the gym or Pilates studio and make that into the House of God, replacing the Church where real life is to be found and received.   The church of wellness softens us and our lives into the lie of something that may be comfortable in the moment but cannot deliver the peace the world cannot give.  Indeed, Jesus warns that those who save their lives will lose them for eternity,  Could it be that this is what He had in mind with those words of caution?

Happy Labor Day. . .

This is my second Labor Day as a retired man whose income is no longer the fruit of his labors -- well, current labors, anyhow.  I will admit a certain unease at that statement.  Apparently I am not alone in my status.  I real in the Wall Street Journal  “According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April.”  Work was once what defined us, at least as men.  Now that does not seem to be true.  People are not only not working but not really looking for work.  They seem to no longer need labor to define them or understand their place within the whole of the society and the world around them.  I suspect this is more universally true and not simply true of males but the point remains.  

Labor has become an enemy of our identity and not the domain in which we define ourselves.  It is not a matter of working for money, which is always important enough, but working as an expression of our humanity that is at stake.  We work not merely to earn more money for our favored pursuits but we work to become better people -- at least that is how it was once believed.  Work or labor is what we were created for and not simply the consequence of the Fall in Eden.  Work is the way we participate in God's own labor of creation once and continued creation to sustain what was once created.  Indeed, the Church has its own sacred labor in extending to those not yet of the Kingdom the fruits of Christ's own redeeming work.  So men without work, indeed mankind without labor, is the stuff of a spiritual crisis and not simply a mechanized or technology heavy world.  Refusing work or disdaining labor is itself the problem of disowning our place within God's order and our purpose which continues to be to exert dominion without domination and to do it for God's purpose and not our own whims.

AI represents a challenge to us because it threatens to rob us of our identity within God's order and to create the environment in which our leisure will become our final undoing, pursuing pleasure at the cost of morality and the institutions of marriage and family which are the bedrock of our society and God's gifts to us still -- though more and more unappreciated.  AI is a Trojan horse which hides within its promise the means to institutionalize our corruption of self, God's creation, and our place within it.  It is not because AI can do things for us but because we have so gladly surrendered ourselves to the idea that labor is a problem and not a gift and that work is something more than utilitarian but noble in stature.  On this Labor Day, we seem poised to enter into a new age in which we are celebrating more our freedom from work than our calling or vocation to it.  What will that mean for our future?  I fear to attempt to answer that question.

As Lutherans we were once part of those who embodied Protestant work ethic so much maligned and disparaged by some today.  Our emphasis upon vocation was one of the means by which we lifted what was seen as utility into the realm of the holy.  We labor not simply for money or the things we value in life but as part of our life within the fabric of God's own order and His work.  As Lutherans increasingly surrender to the idea that work is bad and labor is indignity, we will find it harder and harder to justify or defend such institutions of marriage and family.  They are our most essential work and the labor of love given for spouse and child are among the the holiest of our earthly vocations, second only to the labor that is our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for all His goodness to us.

So along with your hamburgers and hotdogs, yard sales and outings, you might pause to think about that statistic I mentioned at the beginning.  Happy Labor Day!

Improvement?

Here are some photos I have seen of remodeling jobs in Roman Catholic churches and it is time to look again at the beauty of the Lord's House and how architecture and art contribute to that beauty even though it comes essentially from what the Lord gives and bestows in that House through Word and Sacrament.  You tell me what you think.

or this:

  

or this:

 or this:

 or this:

or this:

Beauty is a noble work especially in service to the Liturgy.

The realm of the holy. . .

Those things which cannot be challenged but must be affirmed are no longer simple truths or opinions.  They have moved past the secular and into the realm of religion.  They become the holy truths which must be affirmed.  They are belief, to be sure, but the unchallenged belief that form the fabric of the sacred or holy which is also the realm of God.  This is no longer the God of His own disclosing, the God of the wholly other who makes Himself known to us.  No, this is the God of our choosing, the God whom we have was born of our opinion and then created as the holy when those opinion changed into the sacred truths which could not be challenged or disputed anymore.  This is exactly like the God created by Israel from a golden calf but no one who holds these truths to be self-evident would admit it.  It is why our culture refuses to honor the ancient faith but remains religious.  It is a religion whose sacraments are not means of grace but the sacred rituals of the ballot box or the social media where truth is now affirmed.  It also explains why we remain so divided as a people and why uniting us is such a monumental task.  It is like trying to reconcile the actual beliefs of Islam and Christianity instead of simply trying to find commonalities within those faiths.  Sure, you can find things in common between the two religions with sacred text and holy histories but there is, in reality, nothing that could possibly unite the two.  They are fundamentally at odds with each other.  Their truths do not intersect in any fundamental way.

So it is for those who hold to the sacred tenets of feminism or homosexuality or gender invention.  There may be things we find in common but these are fundamentally at odds with the essential truths of both religions.  Yes, the deities of sexual desire and gender identity are a religion, a religion of belief that transcends logic, DNA, and even the body itself.  They are not incidental to those who hold to them but the grounding truths that organize and construct their self-identity and their worldview.  It is also the same for those on the opposite side who view President Trump as savior of their world order and the only means to any future they want to have.  We have entered the day when it seems impossible to hold to one view or another on the issues before us and still remain friendly with those who hold the opposite views.  Politeness may be about all we can expect but accommodation is harder than ever to find.  That is because what is held has become religious truth with its own doctrinal test of orthodoxy and its test of fellowship and unity.

There was once the possibility that Republicans and Democrats could espouse very different political views and still worship in the same pew.  Now the political views have transcended into religious truths and with that has come the inability to fellowship with those who have the nerve to disagree or to see things differently.  It is the reason why Washington has become such a polarized place, why there are fewer and fewer who can venture across the aisle to form constructive partnerships, and why it is essential to destroy your enemies.  I wish I could say that it was one sided and that it all was the fault of the political left.  It is not.  At some point I think we all know this.  Neither extreme wants to admit this and so the left is characterized as godless when they do have a god and sacred truth but the right is attracted to a Christian nationalism that has little in common with orthodox and catholic Christianity.  It may also be the reason why global religions are increasingly fractured and why it is so hard to repair these fractures.  Rome finds the Latin Mass and existential problem and so the left insists it has to go and the right insists it has to stay.  Anglicans fight over the name but the current Canterbury and GAFCAN (among others) represent very different versions of Christian truth and doctrine and not simply a sexual issue divide.  ELCA Lutherans and Missouri Lutherans are not simply different versions of the same essential confession but radically different takes on that confession and mutually exclusive takes at that.  In the midst of it all there are those who speak a common language and have a common worldview even though they have differences of opinion.  I fear that group is growing smaller.  Christianity will become even more fractured -- not because of the dispute over classically Christian dogma but over how much of the sacred order from the Kingdom of the left can be included within the body of belief without destroying the Christian.  It is not that nothing is sacred anymore but what is sacred is no longer bounded by Scripture and sacred tradition.  Religion has not ceased to before a force but it is a new religion whose creeds and confessions are informed less by sacred revelation than by unassailable truth which dare not be challenged and whose preeminence must be accepted in order to belong.  That means it has become its own religion in a society increasingly hostile to orthodox Christianity but not yet secular.

The problem with "satis est"

Everyone is agreed upon what the Latin satis est means.  There is no confusion there.  It is enough.  But from there on out we seem not to know what to do with that statement.  "And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments" (Et ad venam unitatem ecclesiae satis est consentire de doctrina evangelica et administratione sacramentorum). So reads one of the most important sentences in the Augsburg Confession. Coming between a definition of the "one holy Church" and the rejection of the Romanist teaching that human traditions, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, must everywhere be alike, this is a key statement of the Augustana on the nature of the Church's unity.  We all know and are pretty much agreed on what satis est means even though we cannot seem to come to any unanimity on what "the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments" means.  But the latter is for another post.  This one is about the simple phrase it is enough.

AC VII confesses that the church is located or found where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered (Est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium
recte docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta).  We all know the simple and yet profound truth of this assertion.  Of course, there is a dispute about what rightly preached and rightly administered means.  We are still trying to figure that out in a way that everyone can affirm.  Even within Missouri there seems to be division over what these words mean as they are unpacked in practice.  But we dare not get to far ahead of the words "it is enough" or, it is sufficient.  For the point here is not to discourage a higher level of unity and uniformity in words and practices (church usages) but to admit that it need not be required to go beyond the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments, the twin markers that locate the true Church.  I would suggest that we have misstated these words in such a way that it is too often seen as interfering or domineering to suggest that more unity and uniformity could or should be the goal.  That is what we find in the original constitution of the Missouri Synod at least until 1979 when it was changed (and as to what that means might be answered down the road).

It is wearisome to have people insist that less is more, that the minimal satisfaction of what must be required for the unity of the Church is all that anyone needs to strive for or be satisfied with.  That is simply not the case.  The original constitution of the Missouri Synod called for a higher standard, namely, to strive for the highest possible uniformity and unity of doctrine and church practice (a word that has evolved in meaning but at least means rites and ceremonies).  This took concrete shape in the requirement that members of the Synod exclusively use doctrinally pure agendas and hymnbooks and catechisms and was further expounded by the early intention of the Synod to form a publishing house to produce exactly those doctrinally pure agendas, hymnbooks, and catechisms.  The aim for a higher degree of unity and uniformity does not mitigate against Augustana VII but accurately understands the difference between what must be required for basic unity and what should be fostered for the well-being of the Church.  It is high time that we admit that satis est does not mean the most that can or should be the aim of the churches in their walk together.  There is nothing wrong or unseemly or against Augustana VII to strive for more, to expect more, and to call each other to account for the more that is a profound benefit to the Church.

It is frustrating that we as a Synod seem hesitant to say this and felt the need to try to incorporate responsible variety as an equivalent aim or goal in 1979.  Of course, the context of 1979 was not evangelical, seeker style, casual, non-liturgical worship services but the conflict just begun with a cooperative hymnal effort rejected and the Synod pursuing its own book.  Responsible variety then meant more the LBW/TLH/WS 1969, etc., mix of books and rites than it ever foresaw or expected the kind of thing typical among some folks today.  So, while the Synod modified the constitution to include responsible variety, it did not retract the goal of a higher level of unity and uniformity which was for the good of the Church, for the benefit of the congregations and their ministers, and for the benefit of the people in those congregations.  It may be enough to have a minimal standard for the sake of unity but that does not and has never meant no more needed to be the aim or the striving for of those within and those seeking to be in fellowship with the LCMS.  Satis est was never a mere matter of how little you can get by with but where you begin -- with where you end up being far and away nearer unity and uniformity in the fullest sense of those terms.

What insight!

The Pontifical Biblical Commission of the Vatican has declared, following a “thorough biblical study” commissioned by then-Pope Francis [only now concluded], that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah—for which the two cities were exterminated and struck down—was not due to a acts of homosexual depravity (Sodomia) by their inhabitants, but rather the “rejection of the immigrant.” 

So now we know better after getting it wrong all these years.  This is the level of scholarship in the Pontifical Biblical Commission today and this is good example of the erroneous conclusions a failed higher critical methodology leads to when we treat God's Word as merely another book!  I can only imagine that the lavender mafia in Rome and its champion in Fr. James Martin feel affirmed by this conclusion that it is only a matter of time before Rome makes what was once disorder normal.  And I thought that Rome might be changing after their time in the wilderness under Francis.  Boy was I wrong.

It is as if someone woke up to realize that the Latin Mass was not the big problem but a church body which no longer valued or listened to the voice of God's Word.  This makes the case for the much parodied sola Scriptura of Lutheran and Protestant confession.  It also makes the case for an historical grammatical methodology which does not begin with the presumption that God's book is just like any other book and can be unpacked with benefit of faith in its teaching.  We can only expect the Rome will continue to lead the way into more politically relevant and modern interpretations which defy what the Church has said and faithful teachers have taught and faithful people have heard.  This is the very thing that betrays the claims of catholicity Rome has made and reveals itself to be still living under its own Babylonian captivity to the voice of progressivism.  This is the kind of novelty the Lutheran confessors insisted was typical of Rome and a betrayal of the unanimity of the church fathers which is not a elevating tradition above God's Word but seeing how that Word lives within that tradition. 

In the end this is not really about homosexual behavior at all but about the way -- the easy way -- some work around what God's Word actually says and cast aside the witness of the ages in the form of what the Church has understood and taught.  We are facing a time when the great temptation before us is not simply to ignore the passages of Scripture we do not like or find hard to defend in modern times but simply rewrite or interpret anew what has always been understood and taught. 

The problems before us. . .

While some may suggest that the problem of the moment is doctrinal in nature and specific to the fuzziness we have come to accept as normal in our doctrinal confession, others might insist that it is bad preaching and preachers that are the problem.  Still others might complain that the liturgical chaos that is typical of the either intentional pushing of the limits or the consequence of a casual treatment of the things of God.  Finally, there are those who insist that we are losing people we never had, those who were never really formed in the faith and planted upon the good soil of faithful confession and life within the community of the baptized.  I would suggest that no single problem is the cause for the Church's woes today but that our present crisis is really due to them all -- doctrinal confusion, weak preaching, liturgical disorder, and inadequate formation/catechesis.   Because we are suffering from the combined effect of them all, we need to address all of them and sooner rather than later.

Doctrinal clarity is not the result of more nuanced doctrinal statements.  Words are not the problem although they are certainly part of it all.  Meaning what we say is at the root of it.  It is not a crisis of content but of conviction, a problem of faith.  Let me be clear, the great mysteries of the faith are not puzzles to be solved but doctrines which we accept by faith, trusting in the voice of God's Word to speak to us and for us rather than some sort of game to play in which the goal is to crack the nut.  We cannot do much better than the creeds to say who God is and who He is not (Athanasian Creed) as the Holy Trinity.  It is the same for the mystery of the two natures of Christ.  God has not given us this as some kind of treasure trail to follow to get to the moment of understanding or comprehension but the mystery is the thing, believed and confessed as God has revealed it.  The problem of doctrinal clarity is not crying out for more creeds or newer ones or better expressions of this we believe.  No, doctrinal clarity comes from saying what God has said publicly and confidently over and over and over again until it resides in us and the world hears us making the good confession.

Weak preaching does not mean preaching error.  It can mean predictable preaching that keeps saying the same things over and over again without actually preaching the text and applying God's Word to who we are and where we are today.  I maintain that preaching only justification is the same problem as not preaching it at all.  So what?  What does this mean for who I am and how then I shall live as a child of God?  Weak preaching is preaching too much until nothing is clear and people struggle to take away from the sermon a handle to hold onto God's Word during the week.  Weak preaching is giving too much time to stories or introductions or jokes or a thousand other little tricks preachers use to mask not knowing or preaching the text faithfully.  Rome is stereotypical of a church body which has forgotten what it means to preach and has turned the whole preaching enterprise into a simple moralistic pep talk.  Protestantism has turned the sermon on its head until what we think of what God has said becomes more important than what He has said.  Perhaps preachers need to read and hear good sermons for a while before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) but it would not hurt to remember to look at the people to whom you are preaching and to speak with conviction and not simply to inform.

Lutherans have their own problems with liturgical chaos on Sunday morning but neither is Rome exempt.  Honestly, for all the problems you might find in an evangelical style Lutheran setting, last time I checked we did not have priests dressed up as chickens or clowns or rappers in chasubles and the like.  Rome seems to think that those who play at worship are a bigger problem than those who want to worship in Latin.   I think we Lutherans might have a few Latin sympathizers but our problem is simply too much latitude and too great a temptation on both sides of the worship wars to admit that we are talking adiaphora here instead of talking about worship words, actions, and forms consistent with what we say we confess.  A spare liturgical style is not as offensive to our Confession as one without any real style but with far too much designed merely to entertain or encourage.  Honestly, if worship is where we encounter the mystery of the faith, we ought to at least approach it with some sense of solemnity, reverence, and awe.

Finally, we must admit that a couple of hours of catechetical instruction as a pre-teen or early teenager OR as an adult is not and is never enough to form a person in the faith.  The liturgy is our primary teacher and through the Divine Service we are nurtured in the faith once taught and once confessed and now owned today.  It is not a matter of finding better catechetical materials or using screens or more modern teaching methodology but of owning the faith, ordering our worldviews by its lens, and understanding who we are and why we are in the midst of it all.  Our journey into the presence of God is not the pursuit of an extravagant moment outside ourselves but of nourishing the life born anew through from the baptismal womb and living in pursuit of its ends while living within the shape of this present moment.  We are not catechized primarily by explaining the faith but of confessing it over and over and over again until it lives within us, being called and living by the voice in the ear of God's Word and guided by that same voice to the place where His flesh once given for the life of the world becomes our spiritual food for the way.  Faith is not a feeling which comes and goes like the clothing we wear and then cast aside but the latitude and longitude of our lives, identified according to God's order and living to fulfill His purpose and calling.

All of these are the urgent pursuits of the day and all of these are the reason why we find ourselves so often in crisis mode.  When we fail at these, we are buffeted by the winds of change and lifted from the mooring lines that hold us fast in the grasp of grace.  All of these ought to be our pursuit whether or not the world finds them interesting or compelling or relevant and even when our own folks begin to wonder why we spend so much time on basics instead of graduating to a higher level of engagement with the mystery of God.  These are not basics meant to get out of the way before we meet the higher and deeper truths of who we are and who God is.  These are, instead, the constant litany or refrain of our Christian lives and calling, the well worn trail we follow over and over again.  We discern the fuller meaning not by growing up or past these but precisely by the constant pursuit of doctrinal clarity, faithful preaching, liturgical integrity, and catechetical formation in the faith.   

Too successful?

This past summer was hard on Europe.  Temperatures were high and the people miserable in an area in which air conditioning was not typical for most homes.  You certainly about it in the news.  It was actually worse than most of us probably imagined.  Of course, climate change was blamed.  It was all man's fault for polluting and disturbing the pristine balance of nature.  Everyone had come to believe that unless we figured out a way to clean up our act, the world was doomed.  Who thought it could have been otherwise?

Now even those who are on the climate change bandwagon are coming to a very interesting conclusion.  

“From 1980, Europe warmed around 1C more than the average of extratropical areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and around 1.5C more than the global average. . . . Most of this excess warming over Europe can be linked to the reduction of particle emissions,” Pedro Roldán‐Gómez, an associate researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, told The Telegraph.

The reduction in air pollution has caused an increase in temperatures that is particularly pronounced at the poles. When the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks, the jet stream grows stagnant, which results in weather systems, like the recent hot spells in Europe, persisting for longer periods.

Europe has warmed at twice the rate of the rest of the world since the 1980s, resulting in deadly heat waves that environmental activists and politicians have attributed to carbon emissions. But according to the study, the opposite is true: Much of the increase in temperature can be attributed to Europe’s recent success in reducing the amount of airborne particulate matter, since such pollution acts as a sunshade. 

In other words, the problems evident in Europe's heat wave were also of man's doing but not because he was being irresponsible and raping the good earth of God's creation but because they were trying to repair the wrongs done by those before.  Cleaning up the problem results in its own set of circumstances that become a new problem for us to deal with.  My point here is not to argue for or against climate change but to point out how deeply the problems of our world are established by sin and how it is impossible for us to fix our own problems.  We cannot save but need a Savior who can.  Only the God who created all things can come to our aid and repair what we have ruined.

While it might seem the responsible thing to pick up after our own mess and it is surely the right thing for us to do, that does not mean that we can repair the wrong and restore what we have broken.  It is a good and helpful thing for a parent to call a child to account for making a mess and for calling that child to pick up the mess and make right what he has made wrong even when the parent knows the child cannot possibly do it all on his or her own.  God watches us even when we are trying to do what is right and yet He understands what we do not.  We cannot fix it or make the mess go away.  That is how deeply sin is embedded into the fabric of creation and why it groans not for us as responsible adult people to take notice of and responsibility for what we  have screwed up but for the One to come who alone can answer this longing with real new birth and an everlasting creation.  Right here in climate change and the ecological work of those intending to repair the wrong is evidence that we need a God to do for us what we cannot do -- a God to fix the Fall and repair what sin has done not simply to the soul of man but to the whole of the world God made.

We want a king. . .

Much has been said about how George Washington could have become King George I of the United States but turned back both the honor and the responsibility.  Perhaps the evolution of the office in the years since the could have been King George might be explained in the desire to make a king out of whoever in habits that office.  The imperial presidency is really just a catchall term for the election of a monarch -- albeit one with limited terms of office since FDR.   Perhaps we are simply a people in search of a monarch to rule us the way we want to be ruled.  I get it.  Democracy is a messy business and, even if you cannot necessarily find a better alternative, that does not mean it is any less messy.  Congress says they want to be a power and force to be reckoned with but the people's house is a group of folks concentrating on the next election right after they have won the previous one and the Senate is a series of little fiefdoms with potentates who only reluctantly agree on anything.  A king would be nice.  Somebody to demand what we want from and somebody to blame when it all goes South.

Israel wanted a king and was not happy that God had saddled them with something less than what they thought they deserved and everyone else had.  We all know how that turned out.  Can anyone really recite the list of those kings no one wants to remember?  In Scripture it ends up being something like so and so went and did what was evil in God's sight and then slept with the fishes ancestors who had done the same.  Boring and disappointing all at once.  It surely did not keep them from claiming the Roman imposed version of a monarch as their own even though they hated the thought of it all.  There is something about a king, after all.  I guess that it is in our blood to want someone whom we think has the power to change everything and someone to blame for not changing it the way we want it.  Give them cake became give them a king and make them regret it.  The king or president ceased to be merely the highest authority within the structure of the social order to become instead the very embodiment of the sovereign State.

Rome has certainly evolved the papacy into a kingly sort of office.  Papolatry had its roots far earlier than Vatican I but it has not been abandoned even as the mythology of democracy has also evolved.   We may find the worship of the pope to be a thing baffling, strange and contradictory, but it is perfectly reasonable why Rome wants to turn the pope into a king.  "Whatever the pope says because the pope says it.”  It does not seem to matter who the pope is.  It does not even matter when he contradicts other popes or even himself -- walking back one day what he say the day before. The papacy has become the ultra institution of Rome and nothing else seems to matter -- unless you are on the opposite side of the pope when suddenly you agree with all the critics.  Rome does not want a pope but a ruling monarch both to blame and to sit in the place of God with wisdom and an all knowing soul -- eve without a guarantee he will always be right.

Lutherans are not far behind.  Missouri is perhaps the most democratic of the governance forms of American Lutheranism yet we want a benevolent monarch as much as the next guy.   Whether in clericals or a shirt and tie,  expect our Synod President to move on a dime in pursuit of what we want and to be slow as molasses to stop what we wish continued.  We blame him for everything that is wrong in Synod without acknowledging his role in making things right.  We get a little testy when we think he has gone too far as well as when we believe he has not gone far enough.  In short, we also want a king.  We want a benevolent monarch who is nearly always right when we agree and willing to take back what we do not like or agree with.  We expect him to honor the good institutions and correct the ones not so good, to know who to appoint where and who to can when they have done wrong but to do it in a proper pastoral way -- a humble monarch at least.  We want a king whom we can predict and control and who looks good on camera as he benignly goes about our business.  Like the Garden of Eden, we say we want freedom but blame King God I when things happen as He said they would but we were not listening.  It is probably no different in any church which cares about things like doctrine and practice.  We do not want a president or even a bishop but would like a king who acts decisively when we think it necessary and patiently when the spy glass is on us.  Ride on King Jesus and those who minister in His name -- at least so far as He is riding where we want Him to go.  It seldom seems that we are ready for any kind of cross bearing or suffering but we are perfectly willing to be the cause os some of that. 

A choice between synagogue and temple?

Often Roman Catholics insist that Protestants do not really know what worship is.  They complain that the Temple is missing from Protestant worship, that there is no sacrifice, and that there is no sacrament.  I suppose there is truth in all of this.  Protestants have chosen the synagogue as their model - not the Temple.   Indeed, Protestant worship seems to be thoroughly indebted to the model of Jewish synagogues: “To this day Protestant worship is indebted to [synagogues’] emphasis on prayer, Scripture reading, teaching, lay involvement, and elder rule” (as one Baptist put it).  Honestly, there are plenty similarities between what is typically found in most Protestant churches on Sunday morning and what would ordinarily be found in a first-century synagogue (example Luke 4:16-21; Acts 13:15,27). 

Jesus was found in the synagogue regularly.  You cannot accuse Him of ignoring what happened in the synagogue and He accepted the scroll to read from Isaiah and then to preach the text in one of those synagogues.  It would be a false presumption that Jesus did not consider what happened in the synagogue important or well connected to the piety and worship lives of Jews and those who would come after Him.  Catechesis, the likes of which you would have found in the synagogue, continued in the early church and down to the present day.  The synagogue was clearly that place where religious instruction took place and the ordinary place for what we would call preaching.  We have this on record; Jesus gave the Bread of Life discourse “in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum” (John 6:59).  Undoubtedly, it was also a place where people prayed but the House of Prayer which Jesus cleansed was not the synagogue but the Temple.  Only an idiot would suggest no one prayed in the synagogue but what happens today in the synagogue has been altered by the fact that there is no Temple to be a House of Prayer anymore - at least since its destruction in 70AD.  Indeed, Jesus not only visited the synagogue but commanded His disciples to do the same, following His own example: “[going] about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity” (Matt. 9:35).  Indeed, the criticism Jesus has of public prayer in the warning given in the Sermon on the Mount was not directed to the prayers of the Temple particularly but in the public places of the synagogue and street corner - where people were watching but God was not paying attention since it was clear it was not directed to Him.   No, Jesus was clearly in the habit of attending synagogue weekly (Luke 4:16)

Rome knows this and has cultured the Mass into the worship of the Temple.  Yes, it is spoken of as sacrament but it is primarily sacrifice.  The sacrifice of the Mass was, after all, a key point in the Reformation.  But Rome seems to have forgotten the synagogue.  Preaching has not quite been a strong point in Rome and, if you check modern Roman Catholic blogs and such, preaching is still a touchy subject.  Nearly everyone admits that preaching is weak and often moralistic in a typical Roman Catholic Mass.  Sure, there are exceptions, but just as Protestants have chosen to model the synagogue, Rome has chosen the altar and the sacrifice they insist is the most important thing happening in the Lord's House -- even more important than actually receiving communion!  If Protestants have gotten it wrong, I would suggest Rome has as well.  By their singular focus on the holy sacrifice of the Mass, they have attempted to rebuild the Temple in the sanctuaries of Roman churches and continued the sacrifice at the altar - though unbloody - with the people praying during the Mass as if they had no real part in it except to pray.  So instead of receiving the sacrament during the Mass, communion happened outside the Mass or while the Mass was going on and the people were there to pray the Rosary.  Praying and being near where the sacrifice of the Mass was offered is enough.  Though that opinion is not universal, it is probably typical in Rome.

But there need not be a choice.  In Lutheranism, the Divine Service preserves both the synagogue and the Temple.  It is the place of preaching and instruction and catechesis in a high understanding of the reading of Scripture and its explanation and application in a sermon which has an equally high place.  But the prayers are not peripheral nor even individual.  Prayer is the language of worship that permeates the Divine Service and culminates in the prayerful proclamation of the Verba Christi and the Our Father.  The Temple is there not to recreate the sacrifices of old or the one, all-sufficient sacrifice of Calvary but to distribute its fruits in the flesh and blood of Christ given to us to eat and drink in faith in remembrance of Him for the forgiveness of our sins.  It is the Temple fulfilled and transformed so that in His name and by His own Word we worship in Spirit and in truth, eating the drinking the foretaste of the eternal feast right here and right now.  In response to God's goodness, grace, and mercy, we offer Him the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving not simply in a few ritual words but in lives offered as living sacrifices.  It is all there in the Divine Service and in the high place given to preaching AND the sacrament that is the hallmark of Lutheran worship theology and practice.

Walther saw this when he got to America and complained about lecture halls that had replaced the sanctuaries in which Word and Meal were the center piece of the gathering of God's people and the marks of the Church which identified God's House to the world.  When Lutherans forget this and their own Confessions and end up sounding like Protestants, we betray our identity and our claim to be the catholic and apostolic church, keeping the faith in pure doctrine and right practice against those who would divide it up or choose sides (like Protestants and Rome).  When Walther insisted that we chant, wear vestments, use candles, have altars, etc..., he was marrying together what God had always meant to be together and which Protestants had forsaken along with Rome for merely half of the whole.  Worship is not a choice between them but the embrace of the fullness of both.  I will admit that Lutherans themselves forgot this for a time when they kept the Eucharist in theory but reduced it to a rare practice (growing up for me that meant four times a year!).  This is the bronze age error which the liturgical movement among Lutherans has challenged and the Eucharistic revival is evidence of recalling who we were and are.  At the same time, it should not come at the cost of faithful preaching.  We own both -- the tradition of the synagogue in the liturgy of the Word and the tradition of the Temple fulfilled in the Upper Room in the liturgy of the Meal.  To have one without the other is to misunderstand what worship is and what God not simply calls it to be but has provided it to be.  The Word will not return to Him empty but will accomplish His purpose and Christ will never fail to be there given and shed for us in the Holy Supper - a presence not limited to those who believe it but to all who commune and hence the centrality of faithful discipline of the Table (close(d) communion).