The pace of chaos. . . the promise of stability

The gift of technology is a fast paced world in which change itself is accelerated.  News, or what purports to be news, spreads like wildfire and so does the opinion and response formed in response to the news.  Just look at how the instant news of social media platforms contributed to everything from the Capitol protest to the BLM protests to the run up of Game Stop stock.  The pace of change has also benefited the social justice movement in normalizing everything from gender identity to gay marriage.  No one in a previous generation would have presumed that the mind of Americans would change as quickly as it seems to have done.

But the fruit of such rapid change is also chaos.  The protests became riots and all of a sudden a supposedly well trained police force looked like Keystone Cops.  Part of the reason for this is the rapid pace of information and how this can be exploited for the benefit of planned chaos.  Absent the opportunity for a reasoned response, we are left with emotional and provocative replies that tended more to inflame rather than inform.  In addition to the cost of chaos upon the governmental and educational institutions of our society, the pace of change and the chaos resulting from it also has wounded marriage, the family, and the Church.

This is a problem for our society but it is also a problem for the Church.  Chaos is not healthy.  It is a threat not only to the family and home, government and politics, and education and institutional health but to the Church as well.  Instead of trying to mirror or even keep up with social change whose pace borders on chaos, the Church is better served by providing an alternative.  It is not merely eternal rest that we offer to the world but the rest of a life lived in the order and rhythm of God's Word.  We have a perspective which the world lacks and a blessing the world cannot offer.  We have an answer to the great questions of life -- its source, its purpose, and its meaning -- and we have the promise of a greater life to come.  Far from trying to keep up with the world or get in front of the rapid pace of change, we can offer a refuge from it.  The pace of the liturgy and the message of the Gospel all speak to the long view of which today is part but not the determinate part.

Our lives move faster than ever before and the pace of change is dizzying but instead of improving things, it detracts from the quality of life.  We grow weary from the need to keep up and form a thoughtful response to everything that happens.  We do not need to move more quickly but to find an anchor of hope secure enough on which to depend in the face of chaotic and unpredictable change.  This is what you find in the shelter of God's House, in the predictable rhythm of the Church Year, in the familiar words of the Divine Service, and in the gifts of God that bestow heaven so that we might navigate through the earthly jungle.

I am not sure where is the break that some attribute to COVID lockdowns and fears. It has not slowed down anything where I am.  Instead it has created its own pressure cooker of uncertainty, doubt, and fear.  The Church's best response is not to cave into the press of change but instead to slow down our lives and our emotional response to the things of this life.  We do this best not by programs but by the liturgy itself, by the Church Year more than simply a Sunday calendar, and by focusing upon the gifts of God that transcend time and space.

God does not desire things to be done decently and in good order simply because He is OCD.  Instead, God seeks an order and a rhythm which benefits His work and His kingdom and us within the realm of His work and our lives in His kingdom.  Pastors, lay leaders, and people in the pews will weary themselves and cripple the community they are serving by thinking that we must increase the speed of who we are and what we do.  It is just the opposite.  Order and deliberation are not the enemies of our success as the Church of God but the friends of faithfulness and fidelity.

Jesus' spent His life around the rhythm of the week and its focus on the Lord's Day.  He took time off (not for recreation but for prayer and devotion).  He was relentless in the direction of His ministry but deliberate in His pursuit of the goal of that ministry.  While His disciples grew impatient and distracted, Jesus grew more deliberate and intentional in what He did (but He did not simplify His life by diminishing the time spent in worship, prayer, and devotion).  After three years, the disciples themselves grew into the beat and pace of Jesus' deliberate and sometimes plodding ministry and ended up as the conscience of a church that was caught between impatience and persecution.  Maybe we could learn something.  Just maybe we are not helping by multiplying in the Church the kinds of programs that end up stressing out the people of God more than benefiting them.  Could it be that we are scheduling our churches to death and presuming that chaos is the image of success?  If we are, we are not listening to God and not reading His Word.

The Foolishness of God’s Wisdom

Sermon for Lent 3B, preached on Sunday, March 7, 2021, by the Rev. Daniel M. Ulrich.

 The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. … For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor 1:18, 25).  
    We live in a confusing time.  Life doesn’t make much sense anymore.  Things that we thought we knew for certain are said to be uncertain.  Things that are obvious based on undeniable facts are now called into question.  The knowledge and wisdom and reason of our world, they’re no longer informed simply by the facts.  Now our ever changing feelings inform our wisdom.  It doesn’t matter what’s true; what matters is what we want to be true.  And we’re told that if we just follow the wisdom of the day that we’ll be on the right path...but where does that path lead?  
    Our lives are very much directed by our reason.  And that’s not to say that that’s completely a bad thing.  Everything we know in the medical fields; all the life changing discoveries that have ever been made, all the engineering feats that we’ve accomplished; all the technologies that we use every single day, they all come from using reason.  And that’s good.  That’s why God gave us reason.
    Our reason and ability to think critically is a good gift from God.  We acknowledge this when we confess the Creed, when we say “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  Dr. Luther taught us what this means.  It means that God has made us and all creatures; that He’s given us our bodies and souls, eyes, ears, and all our members, He’s given us our reason and all our senses.  God gave us reason to use in our lives.  He gave it to Adam and Eve in the Garden so they could be faithful stewards, accomplishing the tasks of tending the garden and caring for all the animals.  And this is why He gives it to you, so that you can faithfully use it, doing what God has called you to do in all of our different vocations, in service to one another.  But our reason, our wisdom, it has its limits.  
    We can’t know everything, and it’s foolish to think that we can.  We’re not all knowing.  That’s an attribute that belongs to God alone.  Even before the fall into sin, in the perfection of the Garden, Adam and Eve still didn’t know everything.  They especially didn’t know evil.  But that changed when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  
When our first parents listened to Satan and his lies, when they ate from that tree, they gained the knowledge of evil, and that wasn’t good.  It wasn’t good for them to know evil because now they feared the Lord, now they didn’t see the goodness of creation around them, now they stopped trusting one another, now they knew death.  And because of that, ever since then, our knowledge, our reason, our wisdom, it’s tainted with evil.  
    There was a time in our history, about 100 years or so ago, when we as humanity thought that we could fix all our problems and create a sort of utopia through our knowledge and reason.  We were certain that we could find medicines to heal all diseases, that we could create technologies to make life easier and safer, that we could overcome any and every problem that we encountered.  We expected all good from our reason; but what we got instead was World Wars and weapons of mass destruction that could kill 100,000’s of people at a time.  So now, in response to that failed modern wisdom, we’ve moved on to post-modern wisdom that’s directed by our feelings.  But what has that gotten us: continued racism, social unrest, distrust of almost everybody, a culture that’s sole goal is to cancel people when they do our say something we don’t like, and wide spread abortion that kills 100,000’s of children every year.  I’d say not much has changed.  
    Our wisdom, our reason, our knowledge, it’s tainted with evil.  We’re sinners, and that sin affects not only our deeds and words, but also our thoughts.  Just think about the thoughts that have gone through your head this week.  What terrible things did you think about but didn’t do?  What hurtful thoughts have you pondered but never said out loud?  Our sinful fallen reason, it doesn’t know the good that we think we know.  Our sinful reason only knows wickedness and evil.  The path of this wisdom doesn’t lead to life, but to death.  …  The only wisdom that leads to life is God’s.  It’s knowing Christ.  And this knowing isn’t done by reason, but by faith.
     We know our Lord by faith, through the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen for us.  We know our Lord by faith, our Savior who took our sins upon Himself, who sacrificed His innocent life on the cross to redeem us from sin and death.  We know our Lord by faith, proclaimed in the pages of Scripture, revealed in God’s unchanging Word.  This is the wisdom of God, sending His Son to die and rise, and in that death is your free gift of salvation.  This is the only wisdom that leads life...but it’s a wisdom that is ridiculed and considered foolish today, just as it was in the first century.  
    Not much has changed.  The people of Jesus’ day considered the Gospel to be ridiculous.  After Jesus cleansed the temple of the merchants and money changers, the Jews asked Him for a sign to prove that He had authority to this.  Jesus responded by saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19).  These were nonsensical words.  They didn’t make sense.  The Jews thought Jesus was talking about the great stone temple they were standing in, a building that took 46 years to build.  How was He going to rebuild it in 3 days?  But Christ wasn’t talking about that building.  He was talking about His own body.  He was talking about His resurrection.  And it wasn’t until after the resurrection that the disciples understood and believed this.  
    Christ’s death and resurrection, it’s everything for us.  Our salvation rests on it.  Our life is founded on it, our whole life.  By faith, we understand everything in light of the cross and empty tomb.
The faith we have, the Gospel wisdom of the Lord, it’s not just a church thing.  We don’t just live by God’s wisdom inside this building and then the world’s wisdom when we walk out those doors.  No, we live by faith at all times.  We live by the wisdom of the cross in all that we say and do and think.  
    Jesus' death and resurrection has redeemed us completely: soul, body, and mind.  He’s redeemed our wisdom.  And we use this faithful wisdom to do what the Lord has called us to do, to fulfill the tasks of our vocations, just as He gave Adam and Eve in the Garden.  The wisdom of cross directs our thoughts and actions as we live as husband and wives, parents and children, students and teachers, employers and employees, leaders and citizens, hearers of God’s Word and pastors.  The wisdom of the cross leads us in fulfilling the Table of Duties.  This is good.  This is why God has given us our reason.  
    So use this faithful reason.  Look at all things in light of Christ’s cross and resurrection, because there is your life.  Reason is a good gift from God.  But the wisdom and reason of this world doesn’t lead to the life that so many promise.  True life is lived by God’s grace and by faith.  True life comes from the Gospel wisdom that the world considers foolish.  True life comes from the wisdom of God, the wisdom of Christ Jesus, crucified and risen for you.  In Jesus’ name...Amen.  

Pastor, can you help me find a Bible?

It seemed to be an innocent question.  And common.  Anyone who has surveyed the hundreds of feet of shelving devoted to every kind of Bible known to man might echo the same sentiment.  How do you make sense of all the choices and which is the right choice for me? (Or for the person for whom I am shopping?)

Except this was not a question of finding the right translation or a study Bible vs reading Bible question.  Something more ended up behind hidden in that question.  The person was asking to find a woman's Bible.  Now, mind you, it could have meant a Bible with a rich cover that might be appealing to a certain lady.  But it wasn't.  It wasn't about the translation or the cover.  The woman wanted a Bible that would speak to her  as a woman.  At that point I did not know what to say.

There is no such thing as a woman's Bible or a men's Bible or a teenager's Bible or a children's Bible.  There is only the Bible.  Now, the translation choice might make the text more or less accessible to someone if their level of English or education or reading ability is the concern.  And it is true that a study Bible with all of its addition resources can either help a person read the Scripture or it may actually make it harder to read for someone who just wants to read the text itself.  But there is no Bible that should be tailored toward any person or any stage of life.  Of course, that has not kept the Bible sellers from advertising Bibles as if they were actually written toward a certain age or experience or need or identity.  Marketing skills have taught us to think of the Scriptures in this way but that does not make it right.

I know there are children's Bibles but many of them are not really Bibles at all -- they are collections of Bible stories abridged from the Scriptures.  I suppose this is not a bad thing as long this is not the only Bible the child ever reads but one ought to take care to make sure that the collection of stories is not slanted to a particular viewpoint or the details are not abridged in such a way that the story itself is betrayed.  The best children's story Bibles make the actual text more accessible to the child and do not replace it with somebody else's words.

I fear that marketing has confused us even more about what to look for in a Bible and how to purchase one that will encourage us to read.  There are reader's Bibles with less attention to the chapters, verses, and headings so common to all Bibles but not necessarily helpful for reading.  There are good study Bibles that do not replace God's Word with the words of a commentator but provide helps to understand and apply the text that is read.  There are devotional Bibles designed to support the daily office or the daily devotional life that forms and feeds the piety of the reader.  But there are no Bibles written for men or women or certain age groups or for any other specific cause or agenda.  

Change best comes slowly. . .

There are texts that remain static and stable over time, both in the public square and in the Church.  We do not lightly amend or change such things as our national anthem or the pledge of allegiance.  Rules do not change at whim for the sports events that capture the national attention.  In the Church this has meant that texts like the Our Father, Creed, and Confession are not updated except where necessary.  We saw how the modern wording of the Lord's Prayer has fallen flat over time and how important it is to retain the text that has come down to us through the ages.  In the same way, in the solemn moments of national scope benefit from tradition, ritual, and ceremony that have served us through the ages.  Even in the age of political division and pandemic, the inauguration of a president is one of those occasions in which tradition benefits the hand off of power from one administration to the next.  So in the Church do we pass off from one generation to the next the sacred texts that we received.  This happens at home and in the Church.  I cannot think of anyone who has ever asked me for a modern version of the 23rd Psalm at a funeral.  I have witnessed the snickers when the traditional vows that were spoken were replaced with words that proved less then worthy and even downright foolish when viewed a generation later.  No, change like this best comes slowly and deliberately.

I have advocated often for the deliberate and incremental change of the liturgy, that no one benefits from radical revisions (except in cases of heresy) except the devil.  We know from the personal experience of the liturgical change of the 1960s and 1970s that it did not encourage people to attend but may have been a significant factor in the decline of the worship attendance of many of God's people.  Liturgical change is best handled slowly and incrementally for the benefit of youth and for the comfort of age.  Since one of the primary areas in which we as the Church confess our faith is what we say and do on Sunday morning, the Divine Service in the role of such confession will not benefit from constant amendment or change and will be damaged by radical change.  In this the hermeneutic of continuity is a key concept, forgotten only to our detriment and recalled for the benefit of all.  But the liturgy is not the only thing that benefits from slow evolution.

When the catechism is subject to constant amendment, the very purpose of having a catechism is contradicted.  The catechism serves the Church and the faithful by providing a solid reference for the faith and a stable teaching tool to pass on the faith.  When we tinker with the text of the catechism too often, we make the catechism less that a sturdy summary of the faith that will serve as an anchor for God's people.  Minor edits may not seem like all that much until you get a room full of people and we all try to repeat from memory a part of the catechism -- only to find that we learned different words!  While it is not a bad thing to add to the catechism when things must be addressed that did not even exist in previous generations but it is not helpful to the cause of the catechism to change the content of what we believe, teach, and confess.  When this happens, the evolution is really a devolution of the ready tool of catechesis and the cause of teaching the faith to the faithful.

The same is true when multiple versions of Scripture are employed in the lectionary.  It is best that we find a version which best serves the pericopes and is faithful over time rather than constantly changing the text.  I have found myself stymied with passages long ago committed to memory only to have that memory corrupted as different translations have rendered the same words differently enough to make it hard for me to recall any one of them accurately.  No, the best course is slow and deliberate change that respects the benefit of continuity and aids the cause of the faithful at home and in the Church by treating these things with care and respect.

Speaking truth to power. . .

I cannot tell you how often I hear or read the expression A Church that will not speak truth to power is not a Church that proclaims Jesus Christ.  It is constantly invoked by those who advocate for social change.  But when that change is the darling of the media and the political cause of the day, it is hard to say that such a church is being prophetic or faithful.  Speaking truth to power has become the byword of those who wish to address everything from injustices of the past to social change.  I have to admit I am tired of this expression.

Jesus did little to challenge the authority of or the state of the government in Israel.  Though He was accused of insurrection and rebellion, He was hardly a radical.  His concern was not the reform of a nation but the rescue of the sinner captive to sin and death.  The truth He spoke to power was not a call for radical redirection but the recovery of what had been lost by the faithless stewardship of those who were charged with maintaining the voice of the law and the prophets before Him who came to fulfill them.  I am leery of churches that presume to inform the government and our leaders at every turn and of groups that presume to inform the Church of the pulse of the people.  Neither is really being prophetic at all and this is not what speaking truth to power ought to mean.

Our calling, the exclusive calling of the Church, is to confess Jesus Christ faithfully before the world.  Indeed, no one else has this charge and no one else will do what the Church is given to do.  It is not that we should forget the poor or the victims of oppression.  We should not.  But this mission flows from the primary calling of the Church to confess Jesus Christ faithfully before the world and does not replace or substitute for this proclamation of the Gospel.  When we speak truth to power, we are addressing Satan and his minions -- the powers that rule this world.  We are confronting those whom Christ confronted with His own suffering and death and we are confessing the redemptive power of His sacrifice for any and all who believe.  

I get a little uneasy when churches establish government offices to speak truth to power.  More often than not, the truth that is spoken is not Jesus Christ but the progressive social agenda adopted by those churches -- and one that bears little resemblance to the cause of Christ and the witness of Scripture.  There are some church leaders who have an opinion on everything but whose voice ends up standing for nothing.  It becomes merely an echo chamber of their own hubris.  This is not the concern of Christ whose kingdom is in but not of the world or reflective of St. Paul who counseled the slave not to leave his master but to relate to that master differently because of their common faith.  Again, I am not at all suggesting that we should ignore or abandon the plight of the poor and the oppressed but I am saying that advocacy is not what Jesus commends in Matthew 25 but actual works of mercy and love.  We are and should be doing what Christ did and not presuming to think for Christ or speak for Him where He has not spoken.

In our age speaking truth to power is calling out a nation entranced by gender shaped by feelings instead biology, challenging the redefinition of marriage that weakens the family and does not add anything to God's design, and an antagonism to personal liberty which threatens to shut down the voice of the Church except behind the closed doors of Sunday morning.  Speaking truth to power in our age means challenging social media platforms, the media, and big business -- all of whom have conspired against the morality of Scripture when it comes to marriage, family, sex, gender, and the protection of life.  This is the speaking truth to power that our age needs.  Instead, we have found church leaders and even a pope who presumes to meddle in politics while remaining silent in the face of such affront to God's revealed will and purpose.  In our age, our church leaders across the denominations have succumbed to the power and influence of political leaders in suggesting that the Church is not essential and that government can decide who can worship, when they can worship, and what goes on in worship.  Speaking truth to power means telling the government that they have no such authority.  But you will not hear much of this from those who claim to speak on behalf of Christ.  Instead, the more vocal voices of the churches have toed the party line with respect to sex, morality, life, abortion, and gender and they have deluded themselves into thinking that this is what Jesus called us to do in proclaiming Him to be the Way, the Truth, and the Light (John 14:6).

The domestic church. . .

Church buildings and congregations do not live in isolation from the domestic Church.  Quite the contrary, they are intimately and profoundly connected.  The Church in the home points to the congregation and beyond to the Church through the ages and eternal.  In return, these point to the Church in the home.  The family is not some extraneous aspect of the Church but an essential part of the Church.  What happens in the home, from parent to child, points to what happens in the Church and is fulfilled in the gathering of the family within the family the Church before God and in God's house.

Just as the greater Church needs to renewed by the Word of God and focused in prayer, so does the domestic Church need the same renewal.  Without this renewal both are destined to fail in the face of temptation, to succumb to the powers of fear and doubt, and to be lost in the maze of error that will befall us all without the blessing of God's Word and grace.  It is for both the domestic or little Church and the greater Church, a constant and abiding need to be trained up in righteousness and re-evangelized that compels both to the piety of devotion in God's Word and prayer as the fitting response of the faith that Word has brought to life and nurtured.

While this normally happens in the little Church from parent to child, the child can also teach the parent.  The simple and abiding trust of the child is often the longing of the jealous adult who finds is harder to trust and whose temptation is to act willfully instead of waiting prayerfully upon the Lord.  Yet it is not only for the family but for all estates.  The dwelling places of the single need even more the blessed instruction in God's Word and the fruitful response of obedience and prayer.  It is the Word of God that both reveals and fulfills the wise and loving plan of God for all estates and gives to those within those estates the comfort, consolation, guidance, and peace of His grace and mercy.  By securing our own lives and wills within the gracious will and purpose of God in Christ, our estates become less burden and more opportunity as the aim of both is to share in the love with which God has loved the entire world and find in this love hope and peace.  Constancy is not simply the call of the married any more than living a chaste life is only the domain of the single.  Yet both will soon become impossible burdens to bear without the riches of God's grace to guide and the depth of His mercy to forgive.

God loves humanity and has provided the gift of relationship no matter how that community is known and enjoyed.  Yet He has not left us to our own devices to do what seems right in our eyes.  He has instead bequeathed to us His Word to inform and shape us, the desires of our hearts and the aspirations of our minds. While it might be easier to presume how this works in the assembly of the redeemed within God's House, it is no less true for the domestic Church, for the homes in which God's people dwell and for the various estates that reflect those homes.  It is not only the gathered Church that needs the direction of the Lord's Word and the heart of prayer, but also this domestic Church and the strength of one directly impacts upon the other.  They should not and need not compete.  Each has a different focus but is formed from and by the same Word of the Lord and directed back to the Lord in the voice of prayer and praise.  They complement each other in the way that God has designed and when each are strong, both are strong but when either is weak, both suffer.

The devil builds a chapel. . .

Martin Luther is always good for a quote, though some of them might be a bit embarrassing to us today.  When he said that where God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel, Luther hit the nail on the head.  We think the domain of the devil's warfare is in the world but he already owns the world.  His fight is in the Church, with the Church, and in particular, with the pastors of the Church.  The wake of the pandemic has only proven this to be true.  

The devil has used the pandemic, the fear it created, the distance it has encouraged, and the despair that it has caused especially against the Church and the pastors of the Church.  If the Church has suffered because of this virus, it is the devil who delights.  If pastors of the Church have been worn out or despair because of this virus, it is the devil who delights.  And if we presume that we must battle against the devil, all his works and all his ways alone, then the devil also delights.  We are contending against the demonic powers but not alone.  He fights for us (as Luther also wrote).  

While I am concerned about the Church that will be left after this pandemic is over, I am more concerned for the state of the pastors of the Church.  I know for myself I am tired, irritable, thin-skinned, and cranky.  Like so many of my fellow pastors of the Church, I have not had many days off and no vacations and missed the pastor's conferences that helped to refresh me and reinvigorate me for the pastoral task.  It has been a long year and some of us pastors of the Church have lived through it only with some scars and wounds that still need to heal.

Some congregations have suffered financial problems that come to roost on the pastor and his compensation.  Some congregations will register statistics that show a decline and the pastor will be held responsible or blamed.  Some congregations will remain divided among those who wore masks all the time and those who did not, those who hunkered down at home and those who tried to live as normally as possible, and those who thought everything should have shut down and those who thought the whole thing was an invention of some deep state conspiracy.  In the midst of this pastors have tried to do their best and they will get caught in the cross hairs of the fight.  In the homes where the pastors live, they have wives and children who bore a great measure of the cost of this pandemic and the time and energy stolen from the pastor was also stolen from them.  The pastors will think of those who died in the faith without benefit of pastoral care in their last hours and of their own family members who died and they were not able to be there for the funeral and to grieve as a family.  In my own case, I lost an uncle, a cousin, and a very close friend who were buried a thousand miles away and was unable to be there.  My wife lost an aunt and grieved alone.  It is a recipe for despair and the devil is there to exploit every opportunity to bring down those who serve the Lord's people and His Church.

Suicides and despair have increased and the devil has been at work to increase our awareness of our misery and to minimize the comfort of God's Word and promise.  These afflict Christians and pastors as well as people without faith.  In fact, the devil's target is not the world but precisely the Church and the servants of the Church.  Yet his power works best when we are isolated, when we alone and lonely, and when we are without the benefit and blessing of the Word preached to us and the Sacrament received by us.  For the pastor this means not simply preaching but being nourished by the Word preached.  It means not simply bringing God's gifts to His people but receiving those gifts himself as the penitent absolved and the communicant fed and nourished.  Pastors need pastors, too.  And friends.  Those who give must be refreshed or they can give no more.  This is true of the people in the parish and that is why they come to have God's Word preached into their ears and taught into their minds and built into their hearts and His absolution release them from the prison of their sins and His Supper feed their hunger and quench their thirst.  But it is also true of the pastor.  We ignore this to our peril.  We are targets for the devil's taunts, temptations, trials, and troubles.  Alone we will be victims of his wiles but in Christ and within the fellowship of God's people, we will be given strength and power to endure, grace to rescue and restore when we fall, and instruction for our hearts so that we will learn from it how to resist and be strong.

Cancel Culture Strikes Again. . .

The fallacy and hypocrisy of the cancel culture movement are obvious to everyone except to them.  It has bordered on the ridiculous for sometime but now it has gone over the edge.  From the short-lived plan to cancel Mr. from Mr. Potato Head to the removal of Aunt Jemima to the elimination of the Native face from Land O'Lakes, it was an irritating but mildly humorous look at things that were supposed to matter but were really rather trivial.  Okay.  So what.  Then the Muppets were under the ban for their violations of the standards of diversity.  Then Amazon decides that certain books should not be sold that disagree with the cancel culture agenda.  Then came the attack on Dr. Seuss and the withdrawal from publication and licensing six of his books deemed worse than inappropriate.  Now they have my anger with attacking Dr. Seuss (sort of like the right attacking the icon of the left in Mr. Rogers).   It is getting too much.  But I doubt that it we have seem the limits of how far it will go.

What is so ludicrous about the whole thing is that it lives under the backdrop of the daily killing of the unborn -- sanctioned and heralded by the very cancel culture people who insist that no offense is too small to go unnoticed.  We are under orders to respect diversity, to apply the appropriate pronouns to those who decide from day to day and year to year what kind of gender fits their mood, and to cleanse not only our classrooms and our marketplaces and even our history from anything that hints at offending this diversity.  The politics of this all are still being played out.  

The great division in America had less to do with Trump than it did the steamroller of political correctness that is rewriting our past as well as policing our thoughts, words, and deeds in the present and intent upon reshaping our future into a tomorrow in which the only people allowed to be offended are those who do not toe the line.  This is what the election was about in 2020.  Trump was an imperfect standard bearer not for the skinheads and white supremacy folks but for ordinary Americans who see their faith, their past, their life now, and their future taken from them.  Our freedom no longer counts for no one will be allowed the liberty to diverge from the sanctioned path of diversity chosen for them.  It affects freedom of speech and the freedom to work and the freedom to live but it also affects the freedom of religion.

If it takes a different name on syrup or a toy or butter to placate those who are so easily offended, I guess that is not too much to pay.  But when the marketplace has items removed from purchase and books removed from circulation because they are offensive, that impingement of freedom comes at a greater cost.  For if ideas that offend anyone can no longer be tolerated, Christianity itself is in danger.  Christianity that is inoffensive is not Christianity.  All throughout the New Testament is the admission that this faith is offensive, a scandal, a challenge, and a threat to the world.  Orthodox Christianity with its refusal to sanction salvation by works or personal identity and value defined by peers or self will not last long under the heavy hand of censorship.  Soon the very subjects of sin and forgiveness, depravity and redemption, death and resurrection will not be tolerated.  

Remember that all of this is happening when our toddlers are being encouraged to experiment with their gender identity, eight year olds are being given hormone shots to change that gender identity, birth certificates reflect cultural norms instead of biological parentage, and babies are killed in the womb.  Remember that pornography is allowed.  Rap and music lyrics that sing of the subjugation of women, rape, and abuse are allowed.  Choice that decides to keep or kill life from conception to birth to old age, fragility, and frailty are all allowed.  But not the Church speaking of morality, of right and wrong, that the majority of religions and non-religious people held until a few generations ago -- this is not allowed.  People wonder why curmudgeons like me get so excited.  Read the news.  I fear not for myself but for the kind of world my children will grow old in and my grandchildren will grow up in -- especially because the faith will no longer be tolerated in a cancel culture world.

Prescient words. . .

Though written almost 30 years ago, the words of Robert Jenson are truly prescient.  He began his essay in First Things by saying that the world has lost its story: 

What if these presumptions are losing hold? I will in this essay follow the fashion of referring to the present historical moment as the advent of a “post modern” world, because, as I am increasingly persuaded, the slogan does point to something real, a world that has no story and so cannot entertain promises.

You can read the essay here.  I will not add to his words but I encourage you to read them and to see if they do not accurately describe the world in which we live and work. 

 

A great day. . .

I say from time to time that the good life is good not because our life is good but because God is good.  In other words, the good times are not defined by the circumstances around you but the God who has addressed you with His greatest treasure -  His only Son.  We sometimes forget this.  God is always good and we do not have to see it with our eyes or experience it in an easy and comfortable life to rejoice in the goodness of this life because we have a good God.

Looking around us at a world crumbling under the weight of its own unbelief, we Christians and especially pastors often appear angry, frustrated, and ready to despair.  And sometimes we are.  But the reality is that we have not the burden of God laid upon us to Christianize the culture or rescue and redeem the society.  Thanks be to God!  Ours is the call to speak the Word of Life to people walking in the shadow of death.  And in one respect, this is a great day to be the Church.  For all around us are the ruins of our culture, the tattered remains of hope, and the shadow of death.  Yes, it is a challenging world and one that tries our souls as servants of the Servant of God who has redeemed us.  Yes, it is a frustrating dilemma that we find ourselves in as parents and children, employers and employees, neighbors and friends.  But we cannot afford to forget that the cause of our joy lies not in how things are going but in the God whose mercy has loved the unlovable and redeemed those unworthy of the cost of His redemption.

This is surely what it means when St. Paul tells us that he has learned contentment in all things.  He is not saying that poverty is good or want is pleasant.  There is no contentment in our money or our things -- no matter how much or how little.  Our contentment lies always in Christ.  I find this sometimes hard to forget as I lament the way of the things around us as a community, culture, and nation.  I want the world to get better -- who doesn't?  But I want it to get better largely because I want my life to be easier.  Perhaps you are in the same boat.  We wish for a more godly culture and life because we expect it will be easier and better.  It may be.  But St. Paul also acknowledged that his knowledge of sin increased because of the faith.  It could be that we see the problems of the world around us more acutely because we are in Christ.  I suspect that I expect more from the folks in the pews and myself precisely because we claim to be in Christ by baptism and faith.  So at the same time I look for a reason for hope and contentment, I see ever more clearly the disappointing picture of what sin has done to me and to those around me and the world in which we all live.  Yet our hope never lay in an improving world but in the God who loves us with a redeeming love we neither deserve nor expect.  This is the surprise of  joy.

I do not believe that it is God's purpose or promise to make us happy.  Happiness is a fickle thing and fleeting.  Some of the things that I thought made me happy now I think infuriate me.  If God's plan and promise are to make us happy, He has a bigger job carved out for Him than our redemption.  But that does not mean we are without joy.  The joy of the Lord is our strength.  I read that somewhere.  It is not a meme or a trivial statement to be written on canvas and hung on the wall.  It is God's Word.  Jesus is our joy and treasure.  He is our strength.  He is our hope.  I love that hymn and believe it should be sung far more than it is.

1    Jesus has come and brings pleasure eternal,
    Alpha, Omega, Beginning and End;
Godhead, humanity, union supernal,
    O great Redeemer, You come as our friend!
Heaven and earth, now proclaim this great wonder:
Jesus has come and brings pleasure eternal!

2    Jesus has come! Now see bonds rent asunder!
    Fetters of death now dissolve, disappear.
See Him burst through with a voice as of thunder!
    He sets us free from our guilt and our fear,
Lifts us from shame to the place of His honor.
Jesus has come! Hear the roll of God’s thunder!

3    Jesus has come as the mighty Redeemer.
    See now the threatening strong one disarmed!
Jesus breaks down all the walls of death’s fortress,
    Brings forth the pris’ners triumphant, unharmed.
Satan, you wicked one, own now your master!
Jesus has come! He, the mighty Redeemer!

4    Jesus has come as the King of all glory!
    Heaven and earth, O declare His great pow’r,
Capturing hearts with the heavenly story;
    Welcome Him now in this fast-fleeting hour!
Ponder His love! Take the crown He has for you!
Jesus has come! He, the King of all glory!

This is a hymn for our times and it points us to that which is true joy and pleasure in a world filled with fake joys and false treasures.  

 

Deny or Confess. . .

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (B), preached on Sunday, February 28, 2021.

    It must have been hard for Peter.  He had given up everything to follow Jesus. He had risked irritating and alienating His own people.  But Jesus did not seem to care about all he had given up and Jesus seemed intent upon riling up the very people who were threatening Jesus.  Then as they wound their way through Caesarea Philippi Jesus asks them “Who do people say I am?”  It was an innocent question and it cost the disciples nothing to report on what others thought.  But Jesus made it more pointed.  Who do YOU say I am?  This was a different matter.  There was risk involved to answer this question.  Nobody spoke up but Peter.  And Peter spoke well. You are the Christ!

    Strangely enough there was no patting Peter on the back for his bold confession. Instead, Jesus charged them to keep silent.  If Peter had done well and confessed rightly who Jesus was and is, why must Peter remain silent about it?  As if that were not enough, Jesus began to teach them what it meant to be the Christ.  And the picture was not what Peter or any of the disciples wanted to hear.  The Son of Man must suffer, must be rejected, and must be killed.  I suspect neither Peter nor the rest of the disciples heard much from that point on.  What they did hear was how openly Jesus spoke of the cross and His death. And they wondered what it meant since Peter and all the rest had pinned their lives and hopes and dreams on this Jesus.

    It is no wonder that Peter found this betrayal, suffering, and death a hard pill to swallow.  Mark records that Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke Jesus for speaking in this way about suffering and death.  All the disciples were watching and listening when Jesus rebuked Peter publicly with the worst condemnation that could be said:  Get behind me, Satan!  Who would not be stung by such a rebuke!  But the reality is that there is nothing more satanic that interfering with or trying to prevent God from completing His redeeming work.  Jesus is plain about this.  There cannot be anything which would get in the way of God’s redemptive work by the cross, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ.

    As if this were not shocking enough, Jesus cross shaped life is the cross shaped life of those who would follow Jesus.  Deny yourself, take up cross, follow Jesus, lose your life, and gain it for eternity.  All around Peter and the disciples the world was dying and men were being consumed by evil.  In the best of people and the best of lives lived the secret sins of thought, word, and deed.  Those sins reigned down death and destruction upon every sinner.  And there was is no way out.  Jesus is blunt, alright.  The only hope is the cross. If Peter is not ready for this, he knows where the door is.

    It is just as shocking to you and me.  We want a Savior who will fix our problems and clean up our messes and help us when we need help and know when to make Himself scarce.  We want a Savior who will insulate us from the costs of discipleship, not call us to follow Him in a life of cross bearing.  We want a Savior who will make sense out of a senseless world of COVID 19 and uncertainties and fears.  But the Savior whom we need is the Savior who will take on our biggest need, who will suffer in our place for our sin, die in our place the death that was ours to die, and rise up so that we might have a new life to live.  This new life we live is not a new or improved version of the old life of sin we once lived. It is a radical new life, the shape of the life we see in Christ – where cross is center, forgiveness reigns, and we gladly suffer for His name.

    The Gospel is not safe or easy.  It is dangerous.  The enemies of Christ and His kingdom are clever.  Like Caiaphas they see the wisdom of one life sacrificed for many.  But they refuse to endow this life with the power to redeem.  On the other hand, there are many Christians who are sincere but completely confused about what the Gospel really is.  They presume that sincerity and good intentions  and the desire to fix the world will count for something.  Only faith matters and in faith only a life in which the people of God are unafraid of this dangerous Gospel.  When Jesus began to speak of why it was necessary for Him to suffer, die, and rise again, the disciples were shocked. When what Jesus said played out before their eyes, they were afraid.  Even the resurrection did not silence all their fears.  They met Jesus behind locked doors.  It would take the Holy Spirit to open their mouths to speak this Gospel before the world.

    St. Peter did not forget this rebuke.  On Pentecost he spoke boldly.  When he wavered, St. Paul would rebuke him.  You cannot make the Gospel inoffensive or palatable. It is always dangerous and radical and shocking.  You and I will suffer the same rebuke when we would try to make the Gospel harmless, make it all sound reasonable, and take the cross from Jesus or the cross from discipleship.  You win nothing if you gain the world and lose your soul.  Though we have nothing here, if we have Christ we have everything.  If we are ashamed of these words and draw back from the cross-shaped life of those who follow Jesus, we have nothing left.  But if confess Christ openly and live without fear the cross shaped life of self-denial, trusting in the Lord, we have everything worth having.

    The generations have not changed.  We live in an adulterous and sinful generation. Things are not improving.  Virtue is called evil and evil is called good.  An example is the so-called Equality Act now before the Senate.  When we no longer know male from female and are willing to sacrifice religious freedom on the altar of gender confusion, we face a grave threat to the very Gospel itself.   Of all our proud attempts to improve upon God’s work, nothing here will endure.  It is shocking to us but it is not news.  The prophets proclaimed it long before Jesus came to suffer for it.  The Gospel is still scandalous and the cross is still a stumbling block.  The answer does not lie in trying to repair what is ruined but to repent and rejoice in the answer that is Jesus, in the power of His cross to redeem our sinful world and release us from the curse of sin, and to proclaim and live this Gospel without fear before the nations.  Only what is in Christ shall endure.

We do not need religious wolves in sheep’s clothing to tell us how to wind our way through this sinful world and find as much happiness as we can here.  We do not need religious charlatans to tell us that evil is good and good is evil.  We do not need spiritual distractions which give us the impression of new life without the cross that makes that new life possible.  We need truth and truth tellers.  We need people willing to suffer the rebuke of truth when they are in error and people to repent of their sinful words and ways.  We need pastors with backbones willing to tell us that falsehoods are not truth and the truth is not negotiable.  

We need nothing less than the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man betrayed into the hands of sinners, suffering and dying upon a cross that was made by us and for us, and rising to deliver to us grace and mercy none of us deserve.  We need parents who will teach and pray this Gospel into the hearts of their children and teachers who will impart this Gospel to Sunday school and catechism classes.  We need a Church in which this Gospel is the center of our life and worship and not a sideline to programs that appeal to our wants and desires.  

Whoever is ashamed of Me, says Jesus, or of My words, the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His glory at the last day.  There is no sugar coating this word of warning but neither can we afford to miss the promise.  If we confess Him, He will confess us.  Jesus will know us and commend us to the Father and open the door to the place He has prepared where all the struggles, sorrows, sin and death of this life will not even be a memory.  Amen.

Sin is God's problem. . .

One of the biggest differences between our times and other times, even Biblical times, is that sin is no longer our problem but has become God's.  I do not mean that it is God's in the sense that He must redeem us because we cannot save ourselves but in the sense that we no longer feel guilt and shame over sin the way we once did.  We may not feel as guilty or feel as much shame as we did a long time ago but we are angry over sin.  Mostly we are angry because we see ourselves as victims -- victims of the sins of others, victims of the sins of our society, victims of the sin of our government and leaders, and even victims of God. 

Some weeks ago I was waiting to check out and a conversation was going on around me.  A man was pouring out his soul at the loss of two of his children and his own health difficulties.  At one point he said that when he died and went to heaven, he and God were going to have to have a conversation.  In other words, God is responsible for the bad things that have happened to me and He will have to explain Himself to me.  It was certainly understandable that this man would feel angry, wounded, and hurt by the circumstances he had endured in life but he had turned this around so that neither he nor his sons were responsible for these circumstances.  But God was.

I suspect that he spoke for many today who wonder about God.  The old movie, O God, John Denver faces God, played by George Burns, and asks why God would allow terrible things to happen to people.  God, in the voice of comedian George Burns, responds, Why do you?  I do not think that answer would suffice for many folks today.  We give ourselves credit for the good that comes our way but we blame others and God for all that is not good.  The man I mentioned above was angry with God and the people listening to him understood his anger and sympathized.  He had a right to be angry with God because life was not fair to him.  Such is the typical frame of confession and absolution today.

Absolution has become the default position.  Of course, God will forgive you whatever measly sin you might have (not that you should have many) but that is His job.  God's job is to forgive and make things right and our job is to give Him something to forgive and present Him with the things that need to be made right.  We don't feel personally responsible or accountable to God or to anyone.  But we do expect others and God to be accountable to us.  Our shame is that we feel no shame, no guilt, and that God has more to be responsible for than we do.

There can be no good absolution without the binding.  We forgive the sins of the guilty, those who know their shame, and who are penitent believers, but we bind the sins of those who feel no guilt, who know no shame, and who are impenitent.  Except that this seldom happens anymore.  The old absolutions that accompanied exhortations to communicants in early Lutheran history included this binding along with the loosing.  Today we have only the loosing and therefore, without the binding, we have no loosing either.  Because we are so adept at excusing and justifying our wrongs and so good at seeing, remembering, and holding the wrongs of others against them, we are not so good at confession and therefore not so happy over absolution.  

This is a problem for a Christianity where the central problem is sin and the central gift of God is forgiveness of those sins.  Without guilt, shame, repentance, and confession, there is no gift to be believed and no blessing to be enjoyed.  So it is not a small problem for us.  Without personal responsibility and repentance, then it is truly God's problem and not ours.  And to this hardness of heart, there can be no absolution. 

The promise of technology. . .

I remember thinking to myself while typing a stencil and readying the mighty Gestetner mimeograph, "i f only St. Paul had a set up like this we might have had a dozen letters from St. Paul to the folks at Corinth."  Looking back, the technology was old, difficult, and messy.  But it did work -- most of the time.  Yet these were the days before technology meant cell phones, email, social media, copiers, and the like.  When I began as a pastor, we were using improved forms of ancient technology -- like the IBM Selectric we purchased (to my delight and at my urging!).  The revolution in technology could surely have meant even more to blessed St. Paul and his cohort of New Testament authors.  But for all its promise, it has not come without problems.

Perhaps none of the cost has been as high as censorship.  The pipeline of information and communication may be wonderful until it is shut down to those who vary from the party line.  And that is the point.  Once we might have thought that media and technology were rather neutral vehicles that might allow ideas to be debated, philosophies discussed, politics argued, and faith witnessed.  But I am not so sure that this will happen.  We have witnessed a thought police arise to review what is posted, to oversee what is discussed, and to decide what is tolerated and what is not.  

The day will come at some point when orthodox Christianity will find itself a silenced minority.  It is already surveyed with a stricter eye than is applied to others and the tolerance for diversity apparently no longer applies to a faith that contradicts the ideas of the day.  Even more, we will have to decide whether we are content to be one of the cacophony of voices arguing and shouting or if it may be better of us to leave some of those convenient social media platforms and their supervision.  I do not know if that day will come sooner or later but I suspect many of us in the Church already see the handwriting on the wall.  When that day comes, I hope we have the courage of our convictions and actually follow through with our resolve.

For now I have a fairly free hand at blogging.  Yes, there are folks who threaten me and report me to the thought police (especially for comments made on this blog).  I would be more than happy to give up moderating comments if a few folks would try advocating their ideas rather than smearing someone with a label.  But the hand that gives can take away -- as we have we have all seen on Facebook and Twitter.  I still think that St. Paul and the Biblical authors might have well used the opportunities our everyday technology affords us but I am confident they would not have compromised or surrendered the faith in order to have access.  In this we should all follow the lead of integrity and faithfulness over cooperation and acceptance.