The problem of happiness. . .

It would seem that many people are not happy.  The world appears not to be enough to provide the happiness that some have sought but failed to find.  I suspect that most of us agree with this.  Happiness has certainly seemed to elude some folks and, it would seem, the number is growing more than diminishing.  In the wake of Covid, the politics of division, the pursuit of a woke world, the struggle to make a green earth, and whatever else you might name, it would seem that less than 4 out of 10 is happy. The numbers betray the reality of our complicated world and the freedom to pursue happiness has become even more of a burden than it was.  So we tend to be more pessimistic than optimistic and that has affected not only our view of the future but our satisfaction with the present.

Some churches have picked up on this and tried to remake Christianity into a religion that fosters such happiness (instead of holiness).  It has take on Protestantism by storm and seems poised to make a big difference in Rome as well.  Perhaps only Orthodoxy is immune from the presumption that God exists to make us happy and to guarantee such happiness -- come what may!  Some would insist that the religious are, on the whole, happier than those not so religious.  We might like to think so but happiness is not always so easy to define or measure.  If we believed that God existed to help us define, find, and sustain happiness, at least we would have someone to blame for our unhappiness.

C. S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote "God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."  Happiness is not a commodity of which God has a storehouse and can dish out when and where He chooses.  God can only give us Himself.  We will have to decide if He is enough to satisfy us or not.  Therein lies the rub.  Faith is not a means to obtaining the hidden treasures God does not advertise but is the means to God Himself.  He is the treasure.  Only faith surmises this truth and only faith accepts it.  God resists being turned into a means Himself.  He is the end as well as the beginning.  

The pursuit of happiness is what America is supposed to be about.  The Declaration of Independence's oft-quoted "unalienable right" of all people is to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  The problem is that we are not satisfied with the pursuit and look for someone to provide the secret and then to guarantee it to us.  We have sought out happiness in material possessions, success, personal achievement, and relationships but even then the result has proven too temporary for us and failed to deliver the lasting fulfillment we have desired.  It may very well be that the framers of the Declaration knew this.  Were they guaranteeing the inalienable right to "chase happiness" — as "in hot pursuit" or were they admitting that it is not in doing what you want or seeking what you desire that you find happiness?  

C. S. Lewis warns us that seeking happiness from God just as seeking it apart from God is a futile endeavor.  God is not the agent of such happiness but its end.  Whether in the superficial trappings of the material world or our attempt to spiritualize such happiness, God is not the director of entertainment nor is He the provider of happiness outside Himself or in addition to Himself. God gives us Himself.  He is the treasure.  Either this is enough for us or it is not.  Clearly, for many Christians it is not.  In their disappointment at not obtaining a happy heart, they have traded in their faith for bitterness and sought to find happiness elsewhere.  For the Christian, the lure of God is not in what God can do but what He has done and this is its own contentment, peace, and joy.

A musical genius and his work...

Two hundred years ago, on April 6, 1824,  the Missa Solemnis in D major for four solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, Op. 123 by Ludwig van Beethoven (†1827) was performed.  The place was St. Petersburg, Russia.  Ludwig Beethoven never heard the work performed in his lifetime.  He had a piano and composition pupil who ended up becoming his illustrious patron: Archduke Rudolf of Austria (†1831), last-born child of Leopold II (brother of Emperor Francis I).  In deference to his support, the composer honor him by dedicating fifteen of his works to him, including this Missa Solemnis. 

The work was begun by Beethoven in 1819, supposedly for the episcopal consecration of the archduke (March 20, 1820), already a cardinal, who had been appointed archbishop of Olmütz in Moravia.  It ended up being a bigger task and was not finished until much later -- four years later. Beethoven, who never heard the complete performance, had labored over this composition at different times for some four years.  He had studied the sacred music of Palestrina (†1594), Händel (†1759), Bach (†1750), and Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (†1788) in preparation for this greatest of works.  He notes such in the score where in the dedication he hoped that “from the heart it can again reach the heart.”

Beethoven struggled to find money to finance his composition much less the time and inspiration to finish it.  In writing for financial aid to the Grand Duke of Hesse after the long ordeal he felt it would become the "most successful of all his productions. It is a “solemn mass” for four solo singers, choirs, and a large full orchestra, which can also be performed as an oratorio. The undersigned therefore expresses the desire to send a copy to Your Royal Highness and respectfully prays Your Royal Highness to deign to grant permission."  Interesting as well is his note justifying the fee for performance: “As for the Mass, which will soon be performed, the fee is 125 louis d’or. It’s pretty big work. But I must ask you to give me an answer on this matter within no more than a few weeks, otherwise I will lose out, since for all that time I will not be able to offer it to other publishers.”

Though some find this not quite a typical solemn mass and it is certainly not meant for sacred usage, it represents a milestone of the composer's art, from a man struggling with deafness and his own fight with God and for God.

 

 

Half a church is better than . . .

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore made known its plans to close and consolidate parishes from 61 down to 30 worship sites.  As is typical, the plans of such closings are always tagged with a seemingly hopeful, confident, and missional title:  "Seek the City to Come."  Of course, the Bishop admits that such decisions are necessary but will enable the diocese to better serve the people of God.  Of course, they were guided by the Holy Spirit in this and not by statistics or mere numbers.  Of course, the decisions were fair and impartial.  And, of course, they are going to accompany the closings with plans to revitalize the diocese.  Don't forget its Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (which preceded the new last that eliminated the statute of limitations in child sexual abuse claims).  The problems, according to the diocese are low attendance, high maintenance costs and, well, n priests.  Archbishop Lori said. "We will form new communities that are well equipped to carry out the urgent mission before us: announcing the Gospel and helping our neighbors here in the city to encounter the saving love of the Father revealed in Jesus Christ."

Maybe you are excited?  I am not.  Not that some of those church buildings did not need to go but what I lament is that all across orthodox Christianity we seem to believe that downsizing is progress.  Even in Missouri.  There voices within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod who think we should be able to close churches, move resources around, and dump the extra names on the rolls and this will fix what is wrong with us.  Will it?  We have a pretty good track record of closing parish schools and colleges and it has not translated into any revitalization.  We have and continue to invent new programs for revitalization and still the numbers are going in the wrong direction.  We have no shortage of books and talking heads telling what we ought to be doing (of course, I do not mean me, LOL).  Typical, huh!

There is plenty of blame to go around.  Pastors are at fault and must shoulder some of the blame.  People in the pews are at fault and must should some of the blame.  Then we have the world and the devil out there working pretty effectively against us.  So, it is understandable why we are failing, right?  Therein may lie some of the real problem.  We trust anything and everything except God's Word.  We accommodate taste and preference to provide a generic worship experience that will fit everyone's desire.  We adjust the morality to fit the prevailing values and mood of the people and their leaders.  We omit parts of God's Word we find outdated or objectionable.  We focus on today's happiness over holiness or service.  We seldom even mention sin.  We celebrate every sexual desire and affirm every invented gender.  What could possibly go wrong?  Oh, wait, we don't do that officially in the Missouri Synod or in Rome -- or we are not supposed to, right?  But if we are not faithful in the full proclamation of God's Word, we are just as much at fault as those who pick and choose their own gospel for the moment.

I am not saying we need to be naysayers to the world and against the world but we do need to be positive and confident of what we believe for the sake of the world.  We also need to remember that Christians are supposed to be joyful.  If we have lost our joy, how does that impact our witness?  What kind of joy is there in downsizing for Christ?  No, we do not need to be against more things -- just faithful to the God whose Word is our anchor and guide.  Yes, we ought to remember that fruit of the Spirit working in us through the means of grace includes:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.  We will not succeed by downsizing either the Gospel or the places where it is proclaimed but what might happen if we actually did show forth in our lives and conduct:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?  We cannot make people believe the Gospel (that is the Spirit's job) but we can certainly give them reasons to not pay attention to it.  It is not the pastor's job or the evangelism committee's job (I wish there were NO more evangelism committees).  It is all our calling to reflect in our life and speech the joy of being the children of God not by works but by grace -- not as an affirmation of our particular predilections but by the rescue of God for a people unworthy of His mercy.

What does this mean?

At the heart of Roman Catholic moral teaching is the affirmation of the dignity of the human self.  That said, I have always had trouble figuring out what this really meant.  That Rome has historically attributed dignity to the human person is abundantly clear but what this actually means has not been quite so clear and is now even more muddled.  The affirmation of human dignity has become intertwined with the somewhat difficult relationship between the Church and the social and political order of the day -- in particular, with the liberal focus on sexual desire and gender identity as the now primary defining markers of that human identity and personhood.

The dignity of the human person sounds great as a phrase but has become increasingly incoherent as a tenet of Roman Catholic faith and life.  This dignity is defined as status within a social and political hierarchy and the respect due those who have such status.  Perhaps it was clearer in the past when the acknowledgement of the dignity possessed by all people and the affirmation of their place within the whole were not skewed by the rampant individualism or distorted by the lack of a common truth and morality.  What does it mean now?

A distinctly Christian anthropology of human nature and personhood cannot simply be defined in terms of what is not.  Indeed, the claim of rights that follows such dignity falsely posits that dignity within the realm of what is owed to the individual person instead of also what is expected of him or her.  It is precisely in the matter of rights that the Christian finds hollow the secular echo of this Christian teaching.  For the Christian, such dignity is not merely a value given by reason or assigned philosophically but inherent in the incarnation, obedience, suffering, and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.  This dignity is not merely a matter of duty or rights owed but what God has done to rescue and redeem humanity and restore us as His own children and what it means to be His children and to live under Him in His kingdom now and forever.  Furthermore, if such dignity finds no conflict with abortion, sexual promiscuity, the devaluation of marriage and family, the right to make and define your own truth, and the right to die painlessly at the time you choose, this dignity is nothing but secular and has abandoned all pretense of Christian faith and roots.

This is what confuses me most about how this terminology has been used in Roman Catholic moral and social teaching.  Either it has a deep and abiding connection to what we stand for as Scripture informs us or else it contradicts that Word of God.  I find it inconceivable that a church body could find a way to support or affirm such things as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights while at the same time keeping silent about the greatest threat to that dignity both in our failure to hold sacred life from its natural beginning to its natural end and the abandonment of the social structure and order clearly intended by God in creation.  It is like speaking with a forked tongue.  That, by the way, seems to be a common complaint I have against Rome of late.  They say the right words about what they hold to be true and then empty those statements of meaning and power by saying other words that contradict what they have affirmed.  In this respect, it is hard to take Rome seriously.  Are you having the same problem?

 

Long conversations. . .

Inevitably when we talk to people about God they are by nature long conversations.  We think we have to deal with every reasoned objection, every curious detail, and every possible confusion.  We work so very hard to explain God to them as if God were, well, explainable.  I think this is because we truly do believe that we can reason them into the Kingdom of God -- no matter what Luther said about not being able to believe without the aid of the Holy Spirit.  It is a well intentioned fallacy.  Faith is not a deduction.  In fact, it is the other way around.  Everything else flows out of, from, and back to faith.  That, too, is the work of the Spirit.

In contrast, Jesus barely gave lip service to the objections or questions of those to whom He preached the Kingdom.  Most of the time His responses were designed to challenge the hearer more than convince him or her.  His conversation with the rich lawyer left the man unsettled and he left rather than pursue another round with Jesus.  On the other hand, it is remarkable how Jesus could simply bid people come and they did.  Without explanation or information, He called to the disciples, Follow Me, and they dropped everything to do just that.

The longest of Jesus' conversations were blunt -- too blunt for our world of bruised feelings and egos.  Take the woman at the well.  Jesus asks for a drink and she responds that He should have asked.  He tells her that if she knew God and His Word, she would have known to ask Him for a drink.  When she seems to come around, He asks about her immoral life.  "Go get your husband, oh, wait, you have had many husbands and the man you are sleeping with now is not your husband."  What pastor or Christian would try to woo and win a disciple for the Lord with such forthright but impolite statements?  Then in a shift to theology (always safer than morality), Jesus insists that she has it wrong there as well.  Oh dear, wrong move.  Or was it?

It occurs to me that we are still trying to be nicer than Jesus, more winsome, and more reasonable but it is not quite working.  We want to make sense of faith, of morality, of abortion, of sexual desire, of gender identity, of poverty, of illness, of death -- and everything else in between.  Jesus doesn't.  Why do we try and do what He did not?  I am at the end of my full-time life as a pastor and I am just not beginning to realize that I have wasted too much time trying to argue or debate or reason people into the Kingdom -- especially about things for which we have no answers except "Believe."  Maybe it is time we cut short our endless conversations and made them more like Jesus.  Follow Me....  Repent.... Believe...  Those do not seem to be the words on our lips today.  We end up talking more about us than Jesus, more about how wonderful our congregation is than even Jesus, and more about how God gives us answers rather than invites us into the mystery of His steadfast and redeeming love by faith.  So how is that working for us? 

Follow the science... except

Follow the science, goes the rant, except when the science refuses to go where you want it to go.  That in a nutshell describes the blatant politicization of the transgender movement especially with regard to children.  For years now the science has been ignored as the crass political motivation has pushed upon us everything from puberty blockers to radical surgery to correct what is not a physiological problem but a psychological one.  While Americans are locked in a political battle about how to deal with gender dysphoria, the rest of the world has paid at least some attention to the science and decided that the radical solutions offered here are the wrong ones.

Now a final report of a major study in Britain has pushed back even harder on what routinely passes for American medical responses to children who appear to be transgender.  You can read it all here.  The report calls into question those life altering decisions that parents and government seem to be pushing on the parents of and the children who question their gender.  At some point in time it will come to light that the radical measures of puberty blockers and early transitioning along with surgical remedies will be seen for what they are -- child abuse!  

For some who identified as transgender, it is too late.  Their sexual organs are gone and their chance to deal with this issue as an adult were taken from them by people who treated a medical issue and a psychological disorder as if it were a political event.  Adolescents are not in a position to give definitive direction to their future and the role of the parents is not to decide for those who cannot.  Good grief, we refuse to let adolescents sign legal contracts, drive, purchase cigarettes or alcohol, vape, marry, or work without restriction but somebody has decided that they are perfectly capable of deciding a life-altering choice and the role of science, religion, family, and friends is solely to cheer them on.  

Why is it we in America have rushed in where fools do not dare to go?  There can only be one explanation.  We do not want to follow the science but have used science to support and further political and cultural values and decisions.  It was true during Covid and it is even more true in the realm of gender identity.  We dance around words that have meaning and prefer to create words that have none in order to foster and encourage what is real only in the realm of feelings, temporary feelings which should not and cannot be trusted.  Science always knew there was no such thing as potential child and knew the baby in the womb was the same person as the one born.  We did not listen then but treated the child as if it were a foreign object or a personal choice and it has created a mountain of death and grief for us and our nation.  Now we refuse to listen to the science in gender identity and are poised to close our ears to reason as well as fact and create another mountain of pain and suffering.

False mercy. . .

We have some pretty odd ideas about what constitutes mercy.  Many of them are present in the culture and religions that reflect that culture today.  One such idea is that there is no judgment or accountability.  Where is the mercy in that?  That is the worst of all injustices for it means that neither virtue nor evil matter at all.  Every fool knows this is wrong and simply ends up in chaos.  Or some think that if there is a judgment or accountability, mercy would mean that there is no hell or punishment.  That would be the ultimate mercy.  Where is there mercy in that?  In this mercy, again, evil and virtue are the same.  It matters not if the individual acknowledges his sin or not, requests absolution or not.

Mercy does not mean there is no judgment; we need mercy precisely because there is a day of judgment, a moment of accountability in which all that is hidden is revealed along with all that is known.  Mercy does not shrug its shoulders with evil but answers it with something stronger that covers all our sin.  In the same way, mercy does not mean there is no hell; we need mercy precisely because hell does exist and it is real.  Mercy begins with the acknowledgement that there is judgment and there is hell and asks the Almighty for something even bigger than this judgment and its consequence in hell.

There is no mercy in saying there is no test or even that the score does not matter.  Who wants such a pale imitation of mercy?  No one does well if no one is allowed to fail.  We end up with a mercy which gives everyone as many chances as they need, never keeps score, and everyone gets a trophy at the end of it all.  While that might work for T-ball, it does not work in life.  There is no mercy here.  There is not even any God.  Yet this is what passes for mercy among some of the liberals and progressives who can find sin or evil only in those opposed to them and their fanciful ideas of mercy.  This is exactly a gospel without a cross, without sin, and, therefore, with a need for a Savior.

It is no accident that when Jesus appeared to His disciples after the Resurrection, He bestowed upon them the office and the power of the keys.  Mercy is exactly forgiveness and nothing else.  Mercy is not looking aside from our indiscretions or accepting us and leaving just the way we are.  Mercy is the absolution that cost God everything and then He freely bestows it upon us.  This is what God has done -- the unthinkable!  Not minimizing either our sin or our guilt but taking it away with something much more powerful -- the blood of His Son that cleanses us from all our sin.  With this He has also displayed the power of His great love for us -- that the burden and consequence of our wrong was borne upon the shoulders of the innocent Son whom He has sent to be our Savior.

Tolerated but not commended. . .

Over time it becomes tedious to keep repeating it but apparently it must be said again.  Adiaphora does not imply that every choice is equal or equally valid or commendable.  It merely means that no law can be made about it to bind the conscience of people.  It does not mean that every possible choice or preference is equally licit or valid or worthy.

Lutherans have bound themselves to catholic doctrine and practice.  We do refuse to legislate this in such a way that it becomes new rules or commands to be followed but we make it crystal clear in our Confessions that the side you ought to come down on is not how little but how much we retain in church usage, ceremony, ritual, and piety.  We are inclined to keep and permit those who would not keep what we do only because we refuse to legislate such -- not because we really believe less is more.

After Easter and Holy Week with its rich and full devotional life, there are always those who complain about too much and how they prefer a simpler service.  It is their American right both to complain and to have a different preference.  But to presume that preference is all that drives adiaphora or that the Lutheran liturgical principle is actually less is more should dictate what we do or do not do, well, that is simply false.  While less is permitted and no command laid upon to demand more, the Lutheran liturgical perspective is that we keep not cut.  You may not like that or appreciate it but it is embodied in our first and basic Confession.  We are not simply free to cut what we do not like or value or appreciate lest preference become the new pope that determines everything.  Remember that practice and belief are not far from each other and it does not take much of a stretch to make preference into a pick and choose mentality that governs doctrine as well as practice.  In fact, some practices become significantly more because of the denial of doctrine!

So when someone tries to say that adiaphora means it does not matter, they are wrong.  It does.  Not all choices are equal or equally salutary for the life of the faithful.  Remember that the first Lutheran church order produced by the great Reformer was less an order than a set of rubrics on how to use the existing missal (Roman).  That ought to tell you something.  It was not merely a matter of conserving resources but a conservative liturgical principle that said the more is better than the less but no law must demand it -- especially where the more is difficult to sustain.  Lutherans claim to be the Evangelical Catholics Rome ought to be -- not only in matters of doctrine but also in practice.  Strange how it is then that some become more concerned with what is restored to the Divine Service than with what is omitted (until nothing of the Ordo actually is left!).  

By the way, the Pastor is called to model not his own preference but to model the fullest of the ceremonial of the Divine Service so that the people know what belongs to their tradition even when they themselves do not practice it and so that the Pastor does not get to have the dictatorship of his own preference over the preferences of others.  It is not about preference at all no matter whose it is.  We ought to be striving for fullness and never ought to be satisfied with simply the least (costly, effort, or ceremony).  So when a pastor says he does not do this or that because that is just not me, he is teaching the people it is all about the person and nothing else.  That is also a false idea of adiaphora!

Taking down the family. . .

The recent outrage over the address by Harrison Butker is revealing on many levels.  The critics are revolted by the very idea that the family is the center of our lives and the foundation of our culture and society.  They were offended by the idea that husband and wife would sacrifice for the sake of marriage and children.  This ought to be alarming to Christians and to those concerned for the well-being of our nation.  This family has been the most basic social unit and the very foundation of all human civilization.  It is written into our DNA.  But now it is the family that is under attack and the cultural and political left in America are working very hard to destroy the identity of the family and replace it with a confused ideal of self-authentification which references everything in feelings and mostly sexual feelings at that.  

When we found ourselves filling out marriage certificates without reference to husband or wife and birth certificates without reference to mother and father, we began the formal and governmental sanctioned program of eliminating the family as we know it. There have always been liberals and progressives who believed that government knew better than any mom or dad and who have raised up education and child care as the better substitute for the family of old.  They were on the fringes.  Now the work of sexual liberation and the triumph of sexual desire and the eruption of brand new genders has moved this work into the mainstream.  It is not in the saltwater regions of our nation or in the liberal enclaves of the urban dwellings but has become normative for every educational institution, library board, book list, and law governing our social order and affecting it.  This is not about the release of desire or the triumph of the feeling over the body but about the destruction of the family.  While you might expect such a judgment from the folks at "The View," “Today with Hoda & Jenna” co-hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager also ripped Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker for his faith-based commencement speech at Benedictine College.  Even the NFL had to distance themselves from Butker -- as if this group has any moral authority left for its choice of the dollar over the abusive and indulgent lives of its star players.

Whether you are J. K. Rowling or Harrison Butker, you dare not offend against the prevailing mores of a culture designed almost exclusively to destroy the family.  Target is but one major business and industry which is seeking to capitalize on this modern notion as businesses become also instruments of the new values and new shapes of society.  The only diversity that matters to these groups is the one that is about sexual attraction and gender identity.  If you get in their way, they will work to take you down and this works only because the overwhelming number of Christians are either silent on this matter or complicit in it.  Where is the compassion and love that would chemically abort the child in the womb and then laud this as the noble thing to do?  Where is the respect for life that would insist more than a dollar sign defines the value of life -- from its natural beginning to its natural end?  Children are essential to God's order but optional and probably not even all that welcome in the evolving order of society today.

Christians need to realize that there is no desire to enter what we have known and defined as marriage and the family by those with disordered attractions and confused identities.  They do not want what we have but want to destroy it and they use not only our silence but our shopping dollars to support their cause.  How odd it is that we live in a world in which you can make a football star a hero and all he has to do is to repeat what everyone knew and believed only a couple of generations ago!  But the enemies of marriage and the family have been effective and productive.  They have changed the minds of the youngest generations and it is routine now to find youth who reject marriage and have no desire for children.  You can call them selfish but the reality is that the subliminal message of the past and its now painfully obvious cause have been skewing the hearts and minds of the next generation to reject what they themselves knew growing up.  It is not the loss of an institution but the destruction of the very foundation of our life together. 

Observant. . .

Although I grew up without the term in my vocabulary, observant was very much a part of nearly every church in my small Nebraska town.  On Sunday mornings, the Methodists made their way to the Methodist Church, the Evangelical Covenant folk to theirs (we called them Mission Covenant back then), the Swedish Lutherans to theirs, and headed out of town were the German Lutherans and the Roman Catholics (their congregations not having a facility in town).  It was expected.  In fact, I hardly knew anyone who did not go somewhere to church.  If you believed, you observed this belief with attendance; if you did not believe you just might be seen in church as well since it was a good thing to do.   

Serving on Long Island I encountered the distinction between observant and unobservant religious affiliation primarily in terms of the Jews very well represented there.  In addition to discovering that Jews also had denominations (Reformed, Conservative, etc.), I discovered that Jews routinely distinguished their Judaism in terms of those observant Jews who attended synagogue somewhere and those who did not (or only at the high holy days).  It also revealed the depth of the religious practices of the home (from kosher diets and kitchen appointments to none).  For a long time it was the only thing I thought about.  Now it seems so common I hardly ever think about it at all.

Our culture is in love with those who break the mold and are distinctive -- at least in so far as they are out of step with the generations before and traditional anything -- including religion!  We are a culture of unobservant people with respect to the social mores, morals, values, virtues, institutions, and beliefs of those who came before us.  At one point this was reflected in those who insisted that whatever it was, it was not your grandfathers!  How cool.  In reality, of course, it is not cool to be unobservant or non-practicing.  It is thoroughly pedestrian and group think to refuse not simply to believe but to find any value to the values and piety of the religion of your ancestors.  Biden is a good Roman Catholic precisely because he is not all that Roman Catholic -- in doctrine anyway.  It is the same for most people who have a practice but distance themselves from the kernel of what is believed.  Nobody should blindly follow anything or anyone, right?  Except that this is exactly what is being done.  When out of fear of what others might think or judge we distance ourselves from the body of doctrine and from its practice, we are being very traditional (in a different way).  Being observant is the new and real radical thing to be and to do.

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had little time or use for traditional religion and did not waste their time showing up.  On the other hand, George Washington (who could have been King) was known for his faithful presence in worship (Anglican usually).  Unlike the loudmouths of Franklin and Jefferson who routinely shouted out their contempt, no one really knew what Washington did believe but they did see how he worshiped.  Now some might call Washington a hypocrite.  That would be a false and harsh judgment unless someone actually knows what was in his heart.  Let God be the judge.  What Washington refused to be was a loud mouth bore.  We have too many of them today.  Some of them are the religious who find fault with everyone and everything as if God had made them judge and jury.  Most of them, however, are media folk and the educated elite in America who use their power to disrupt the religious beliefs and practices of others (mostly orthodox Christians!).  Curiously enough, even those who claim adherence seem to enjoy some distance -- after all, less then 40% at best and 20% at worst of those who belong even shop up on Sunday morning.  Biden the Roman Catholic who celebrates Trans Day instead of Easter is an example but he is hardly different from those who insist they are, say, Lutheran, but seldom show up.  Observance is the companion to belief and if a few more of us practiced what we say we believed the world might find it harder to use their loud mouths to condemn us.  We have enough peer pressure against faith and practice.  Let us use a little peer pressure for it.

"Private" Masses

One of the objections of the Lutheran Reformation was to the practice of so-called private masses.  By the time of Luther and the reformers, this had come to mean a mass without servers or congregation, the private mass of the priest as part of his individual piety and within the scope of his priestly duty or responsibility.  Now you might presume that this practice was old and well established by this time.  Old is a relative term and the individual priestly celebration of the mass was old but no older than one or two hundred years by the time of Luther.

We must distinguish the private mass of the priest from the small masses that did in fact include servers and a congregation, albeit a very small community.  Apparently, once Christianity was legal and had begun to construct church buildings, these small masses become problematic.  At the beginning of the 6th century, a ban was introduced on such celebrations of the mass in private homes on feast days and therefore outside official places of worship (extra parochias, in villa.  Again, there is scant evidence that this ever included what had become typical in the sixteenth century of a priest saying mass without server or congregation of any size.  While this does prove that these private and small celebrations of the mass were persistent and did not seem to give way to the parochial celebration of the church, the discipline of this ban was not toward “private” private masses.  In fact, this could be explained as the episcopal leadership calling the local church to the public mass of the church building which he saw being neglected by some.

What are truly “private” masses can be found clearly in the 13th century.  In fact, the Franciscan missal Regula which was published around 1230 and which preserved almost word for word the now extinct missal of Honorius III (1216-1227), gives us the most clear notice of a private mass.  “Sed si sunt plures sacerdotes in loco, secrete possunt cantare missam quam volunt”.   In 1243, an ordo missæ was for the first time published solely for the “private” mass, the Ordo “Indutus planeta.”  This seems to indicate the time when the norm for the Eucharistic liturgy became the private mass -- somewhat to the detriment of the solemn public liturgy.  This was a direct ancestor of the Ritus servandus in celebratione Missæ of the 1570 missal.  Only a few years before this, in 1226, Saint Francis of Assisi emphatically recommended to his brothers that, if several priests were in the same place, only one Mass should be celebrated per day, and that all should attend.  It would seem to be a significant discouragement for each priest celebrating the mass alone and individually. 

Such a private mass, according to Jungmann, is "a Mass celebrated for its own sake, with no thought of anyone participating, a Mass where only the prescribed server is in attendance..."  Though it ended up defending the practice, the first draft of the Council of Trent’s decree on the Mass urged that private masses not be celebrated without at least two persons present.  While there is a tradition for it, the private or solitary mass represents a eucharistic practice which has almost no justification in the church’s tradition and in that respect cannot be called traditional. The priestly discipline that became normative has no real stature or standing in the theology or doctrine of the Eucharist of the Church that went before this time.  My point in this is not really to say anything except that what had become normal by the time of Luther was technically an aberration or oddity only a hundred or more years before.  Luther's objections were therefore directed to something that was not an old and cherished tradition of Christianity through the ages but a more medieval invention that over a hundred years or more become normative and, at least in the eyes of the Reformers, an objectionable practice.  It is good to remember that maybe it was because it was an evolution or invention the private mass was rejected by the Reformers and remains suspect among their heirs today.

Keeping Sabbath. . .

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 4B, preached on Sunday, June 2, 2024.

Jesus had much to say about Sabbath keeping because there were so many rules about keeping the Sabbath.  These rules went far beyond the requirements of Exodus 31.  There the Lord insists that keeping the Sabbath is a sign between God and His people throughout the generations and a means by which and the acknowledgment of God’s sanctifying work among us.  It had become a rigid and overbearing duty placed upon the people of God that became also its own focus and not a means to resting in the Lord.

I wish sometimes that we were in that position today.  We are not.  There are few Sabbath keepers today and the rules once rigid have become as flexible as we want them to be.  The reality is that on the Sabbath, we do what we want.  If we want to go to Church, we do.  If we don’t, we don’t.  If we want to get groceries, we do.  If we don’t, we don’t.  If we want to go out to eat, we do.  If we don’t, we don’t.  If we want to work on the yard, we do.  If we don’t, we don’t.  If we want to catch up on our occupational work, we do.  If we don’t, we don’t.  Do you get the pattern?  The Sabbath is not much about the Lord for us but for different reasons than it was not much about the Lord in Jesus’ day.  In both cases, we have missed the point.

The first reminder here is that the Sabbath is not optional anymore than it is optional to us to if we want to murder or lie or fornicate or commit adultery.  The Sabbath is not a suggestion to us anymore than it is mere suggestion that you should not covet or deceive or defame.  These are commands.  The Sabbath is a command.  You shall remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.  The Pharisees got it wrong because they messed up what it means to keep it holy.  We mess up because we have no Sabbath at all.  Both are the problem.

Jesus insists that the Sabbath, like every other commandment, is given to us not to punish us or steal our joy but to bless us and fill our joy.  This is as true for a life in which marriage is honored and children and life and reputation and possessions as it is for a life in which God is honored as the Lord of creation and the God of our salvation.  We are as guilty as the Pharisees in missing this as we are guilty of refusing to let God be the focus of the Sabbath.  The commandments were given for our good whether we can keep them or not.  Even the Sabbath Day!  Yes, the holy obligation of hearing the Word preached and receiving from the Lord’s altar the body and blood of Jesus are command that come with blessing attached.

When our Lord’s disciples were chastened by the Pharisees for harvesting grain for food on the Sabbath, they presumed that the Lord of the Sabbath disregarded the earthly needs of His people and instead commanded them to go without in order to serve the commandments.  It was the same when Jesus healed on the Sabbath.  When our Lord refuses to bend to the Pharisees’ view of the Sabbath, He was not suggesting that the rules do not matter.  Rather, Jesus was defining the rules by God’s gracious and merciful intent – to provide for the bodily and spiritual needs of His people.  God strengthens us body and soul.  We do not get to choose between body and soul because He did not choose between them.

The Pharisees would have insisted that it is a choice and your own needs are secondary to the command of God to observe the Sabbath.  Jesus insists that it is not a choice and that the Sabbath is gift for the soul as much as food and shelter are gifts for the body.  But that is clearly not our problem today.  We do not have religious leaders insisting that we must not cook or travel or conduct business on the Lord’s day.  We have a world in which none of the days are the Lord’s and all of them belong to us to do as we choose and see fit.

The Sabbath is fulfilled in Christ, by His death and resurrection.  This fulfillment was never meant to release us from any duty or delight to the Word and Sacraments of the Lord but rather so that God might fill all our days and not just one.  Luther’s catechism clearly hits this by focusing not on the day or the lack of work but the direction of the worship day and our lives upon the preaching of God’s Word.  Our problem today is not restrictions laid upon us that prevent us from seeing Christ in the Sabbath as it was with the Pharisees but just the opposite. We have abused our freedom to do anything and everything on the Lord’s Day except value and make central the preaching of His Word and the reception of His Holy Sacraments.

While we can blame the world for scheduling school and sports events on Sundays and stores for doing business and the like, they are not the problem.  They are the symptom.  The problem lies in our hearts.  Do we love the Lord’s Word and value His gifts so that these means of grace command the full attention of our hearts, minds, and lives OR do we find worship to be an intrusion upon our day and resist the whole idea that our time and our lives are in God’s hands?  Today no one would complain that the disciples harvested or Jesus healed on the Sabbath but we all find plenty of reasons why we don’t feel like or want to be in Church.

The rules of the Sabbath have not changed.  Jesus did not release us from those rules.  He opened up the Sabbath so that it could be what it was always supposed to be – the reflection of God’s people upon God’s mercy as they hear the Word of the Lord and joyfully respond with faith.  The end of the Sabbath does not come at the end of Sunday any more than it came at the end of Saturday in the Old Testament.  The end of the Sabbath comes when everything is about Jesus and we are gathered around Him on high, around the Lamb upon His throne, joined with the saints who went before, praising His goodness, and being filled with His mercies in the Marriage Feast of the Lamb without end.

If we do not connect what happens here with what will happen at the end of all things, then the Sabbath will always be about rules we do not want to keep and time we reserve for ourselves instead of for God.  But once we connect this Word preached today and this altar where today we receive the foretaste of the eternal, then the Sabbath is revealed for what God had always intended.  Then it has its focus not on rules or on us but on Christ.  That is what it means for Him to be Lord of the Sabbath.  He is where He has promised to be, in Word and Sacrament, bestowing what He has promised to give, in forgiveness, life, and salvation – and we are where we need to be, joyfully hearing, eating, and drinking that Christ may live in us and we in Him – now and to everlasting life.  Amen.

The problem of pain. . .

In his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis argues that presence of pain is an insufficient reason to reject belief in a good and powerful God.  Lewis writes that he is "not primarily arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origin - a task ... necessary if we are to put the problem of pain in its right setting."  Of course, he addresses the common complaint:  "If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both."  What God cannot or will not do for us, we will do for ourselves.  We will answer the problem of pain with pain relievers, shifting the problem from death to pain and the solution away from the resurrection to relief of the pain.  The gods of big pharma are certainly attuned to the want of our culture and society to find a life free of pain and a death without pain when you are over it all.  I wonder what C. S. Lewis would think of the world we have created with all of its expectations.

We find it hard to understand a God or anyone who would not or cannot relieve suffering and pain if it is possible to do so.  The morality of it all has shifted from the reason for suffering to the immorality of those who will not do everything in their power to prevent or relieve it.  On top of it all, we have equated all suffering to be equal -- whether imagined, real, mental, emotional, or physical.  There is no distinction.  Even if it is self-imposed.  Suffering and pain are bad.  The gods of our age relieve suffering and pain and do not worry about the morality of how they do it.  The worst suffering and pain of all is the word "no."  Self-denial is not exactly in our vocabulary today and so orthodox Christianity grows less attractive by the day and a new version of Christianity which accords with our presuppositions about pain daily increases in attractiveness to us.  Added to that, at least in the eyes of the unchurched, the Christian faith is in competition with big pharma and our health care conglomerates intent upon answering every new pain with a new medication or treatment regimen.  

Oddly enough, the whole idea that faith is to insulate us from pain and suffering goes smack dab against the words of Jesus.  He promises rejection, persecution, imprisonment, and even death to those who would take up the cross to follow Him.  Even worse, He calls upon us to deny ourselves.  Let us not forget that He invites us to make sacrifice the hallmarks of our marriages, families, and witness.  On top of that, St. Paul insists that to join Christ in suffering is not a punishment to be avoided but the most precious privilege of identity and belonging.  The problem of pain is not what Christ came for.  Pain is a byproduct of faithfulness -- it was in the beginning of Christianity and it remains so.  Somehow or other we have forgotten this and harbored the secret hope that if we are faithful enough we will be kept from the sufferings and struggles of this mortal life and delivered pain free into the perfect life of our imagination in heaven.  How deeply have we misunderstood our Lord and raised a false expectation of what it is like to walk with Jesus!  The more we can do to distance ourselves from this imagined Christianity, the better it will be for us and for those who hear the Word through us.  But it may prove hard for us to let go of such an enticing expectation even if it is not authentic or true.

Happy Anniversary!

This is a big anniversary year for Lutherans -- in 1524 in Germany the first Lutheran hymnal was published.  Down through the centuries, more and more have followed with each generation and each gift added to the preservation of what came before.  The book today is not merely a hymnal but a prayer book and devotional tool for home and for the individual.  But first a brief survey of the years...

The hymns of Martin Luther became the songs of the moment, first published on broadsheets like a newsletter and circulated among the populace.  Their virtue was the ability to be memorized and not depend upon the printed form.  In 1524, some enterprising printers put together the first Lutheran collection of hymns.  They were followed by counterparts in Nürnberg, Augsburg, and Erfurt and, yes,  Wittenberg.  There the Geystliche gesangk Buchleyn appeared with Luther’s own preface the same year.  Luther himself promoted and continued to work with evangelical musicians and composers such as Johann Gottfried Walter until five years later the first Wittenberg hymnal had been expanded, revised, and augmented.  New editions appeared in 1533, 1535, and 1543, the Begräbnisgesänge (burial hymns) of 1542, and the 1545 Geystliche Lieder (published in Leipzig by Valentin Babst with 129 hymns including forty-five by Luther himself).

After Luther died, Lutheran hymnals continued to be written and published with Luther's own name on the title page to remind the readers of Luther's approval of the hymn and chorale.  By 1569, the Nürnberg hymnal published by Valentin Fuhrman had swelled to 213 hymns and in thirty years it increased by another 125 hymns.  These were largely entrepreneurial ventures instead of authorized productions just as with other kinds of Lutheran literature.  During the sixteenth century alone, these printers published some 192 editions of the complete German Bible printed, 252 of the New Testament alone, 330 printings of the Small Catechism, and  Lutheran prayer books together appeared in 373 editions and some 1,500 Lutheran hymn editions. 

The first Wittenberg hymnal of 1524 had four-part settings of Luther’s hymns and was intended for school use, in order to “give the young . . . something to wean them away from love ballads and carnal songs and to teach them something of value in their place.”  In addition to the role of the choirs in leading the liturgy in general, the weekday offices of Matins and Vespers were the particular province of the schoolboys, who were supplied with the ancient Latin hymns as well as new Lutheran ones by Philip Melanchthon and his students.  The classes were in Latin but the boys sang in both Latin and in German.  From 1529 onward, Lutheran hymnals contained a section of  “catechism hymns.” Beginning with his hymns on the Ten Commandments and the Creed, Luther composed hymns corresponding to each part of the Small Catechism.  These were expanded in the next generations with Nicolaus Herman’s hymn on absolution (“ ‘As Surely as I Live,’ God Said,” LSB 614) and Ludwig Helmbold’s summary of the entire catechism (“Lord, Help Us Ever to Retain,” LSB 865).  These hymns were the means by which students memorized and understood the Catechism and they were sung in the Sunday afternoon catechism preaching services.

Today we tend to use the Lutheran hymnals as less devotional tool and resource for the home than as instrument for corporate worship.  This is to our poverty, to be sure.  Furthermore, the practice of printing out hymns (and omitting stanzas) as well as putting the music on screens only distances the people from the ordinary uses of the Lutheran hymnals in the home and within the devotional life of the individual.  But the Lutheran hymnal is not a relic of the past; it is still very much a profound and effective tool for learning, expressing, and finding comfort in the faith.  Our own Lutheran Service Book is not old but is will soon turn 20 years of age and, as it takes nearly a decade to produce a new or revised book, it will continue to service us for another decade or more.  That said, the hymnals of today need to find a medium between change for change's sake and failing to change until it makes change nearly impossible.  Lutherans should not be afraid of a new hymnal just as Lutherans should make sure that, as Norman Nagel once wrote, we preserve the best of the past while adding our own best, thus renewing what is old and discerning the value of what is new.

The starting point. . .

Having heard a month or so ago the words of Jesus gently chiding St. Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," it might be good to flesh that out a bit.  Thomas, like the rest of the apostles, thought seeing was believing.  It did not work so well for Thomas, as we all know, but we also forget that it did not work out so well for the other apostles, either.  They had seen the Lord, seen His hands and side, and heard His voice on Easter evening but the following week they were still behind locked doors.  In other words, they saw but the believing part of it all did not come quickly or easily.

How easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that if you see, you will believe.  The reality is always the other way around.  Surely this is what Luther was keen on conveying in his explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles' Creed.  I cannot by my own reason or strength [eyes, ears, and all my senses] believe...  Seeing is not believing but just the opposite.  Believing is seeing.  Faith opens the eyes and not the eyes open the mind and heart to faith.  

That also translates about believing and understanding.  We have come to think that the path to faith is explanation, comprehension, and understanding.  So the goal of the preaching and teaching is to take what is complicated and explain it -- dare I say make it simple?   At some point we turned the worship and awe and reverence of the mystery of God into a didactic and reasoned explanation.  So, as Walther once complained, the lecture hall has replaced the temple and the sermon has made the preacher into the debater or orator.  We turn faith into an acceptance of and comprehension of a series of theological statements instead of the trust in God's mystery engendered by the power of the Spirit.  To make this into a pithy phrase, we don't understand to believe, we believe to understand.  

It is not that reason is bad or that faith is blind but where you begin.  Faith is borne of the hearing of God's Word and the Spirit's work in that speaking and hearing.  Faith is not the aha moment or reasoned conclusion of a consideration of the evidence.  Faith is the Holy Spirit inhabiting the mind and heart through the spoken Word and imparting trust where there was none.  Faith is the not the fruit of truths rendered reasonable but the unreasoned truths of God's Word [truth] that produce the fruit of trust and confession.  

As important as this is, the reality of our current age is that we no longer see to believe or believe to see -- all of this lies upon the holy altar of our feeling and preference.  Understanding is not believing nor is believing the means to understanding but rather both surrender to the higher value of feeling and, to some extent, experience.  This faith relies upon and arises from the revelation made to the prophets and apostles who wrote the canonical books but not to learning in general or to the revelation that has arisen from learned men.  Oddly enough, in our current age learning itself and learned men are suspect and must defer to the experience or feeling of the individual who becomes not only the arbiter of truth but also its definer.  It is no surprise, therefore, that the Reformation period and Luther are as uncomfortable in our modern era as is Aquinas. 

Are the nones athiests?

The Pew Research Center survey of last summer has focused some attention on the beliefs of the nones and whether, indeed, they are of no faith or consider themselves to be “atheists.”  It was a prior Pew study that indicated the surge in the number of those who were self-declared “nones” -- those who do not identify with any particular religion.  In fine-tuning some of that data with a new survey, it appears  that not as many of those nones would also fall into the category of “atheist.”

In the study, only 4% of US adults call themselves “atheist.”   While this is more than the study 16 years ago, it is still very small.  Men are slightly more likely to call themselves atheist than women and the younger (those under 49) also more likely to define themselves as "atheist."  Of these, some three out of four self-identified atheists said they had no belief in God or a higher power -- the traditional definition of an atheist.  But among the other quarter of respondents, there was some belief in a higher power.  Regardless, the vast majority of US atheists (98%) agreed that religion is “not too” or “not at all” important to their daily lives.  Curiously, nearly 80% of US atheists admitted a “deep sense of wonder about the universe” that causes them to wonder.  Of these, however, only 36% reported that this led them to ha greater sense of peace.

Within the 4%, there was nearly universal agreement that “religion causes division and intolerance” and encourages “superstition and illogical thinking.”  Nearly three-quarters thought religion did more harm than good to society but 40% or so thought religion helped society give life meaning and value, particularly in the encouragement to treat others better.  What is also significant is that many atheists were well-informed about religion and answered better than most people in questions about religion. They knew constitutional limits to religion and they also knew what Easter was about.  There are fewer atheists in America than in Europe and this accords well with the general more religious character of American society.

4% is not a huge number but it is not insignificant.  Lutherans number somewhere between 12-15 in America (though less if you count the numbers of members Lutheran congregations report).  So there are about the same number of atheists in America as their are Lutherans.  That should be a wake up call.  If you listed only confessional Lutherans, the atheists would outnumber us perhaps 3 to 1.  This means you would more likely encounter an American who did not believe in God than you would one who confesses the faith embodied in the Lutheran Confessions.  Ouch!  Happy Doubting Thomas Day!

The ingredients define the soup. . .

We live at a time when the line between love and hate has grown very thin, indeed.  To some, it is the very same emotion -- only directed differently at different times toward different people.  You can only hate those whom you first loved.  We see that in Judas who must have loved the Lord at some point.  He certainly followed our Lord's call and rose to the esteemed position of treasurer of the band of brothers.  We all know that the one who handles the money is pretty high up on the totem pole.  But at some point that love faded and was replaced with distance, resentment, bitterness, anger, and betrayal.  It may seem like something odd or strange for Judas but it is more normal than anyone cares to admit.

Lovers and husbands and wives burn with passion for the other until they don't.  Something usually intervenes to raise questions where there were answers and doubts where there was confidence.  It is not that love fades like a deep color left out in the sun but it becomes its opposite across the fine line that once kept them apart.  We are disappointed.  Things did not turn out like we wanted or had hoped or thought was going to happen.  Disappointment gave way to some distance and the longing that once led us to be familiar becomes contempt that finds no room for forgiveness or love anymore.  Then it becomes resentment and that resentment embitters until nothing is good and everything is bad -- like those who tell you everything is gone wrong when everyone knows it is not everything but certain things.  The anger burns where love once burned and then betrayal kills what brought them together.

It happens to Christians and their God as well.  We think everything is grand in the beginning until we find that God did not do what we wanted or say what we think He should have said or give us what we desired or, worse, He forgave those we judged unworthy.  Then we cannot stand the Church or God anymore.  Love crosses the line and hate is born.  We resent the whole idea of Church and God until the things that once comforted us not offend us.  We stop going as if by somehow punishing God with our absence He will have to change and become like the God we want.  In the end, we are left with the bitter stew that poisons our lives with anger.  That anger shows by how easy and how we relish judging others, how smugly we point out their hypocrisy, and how easily we see the speck in the eyes of another but cannot see the log in ours.  

This is the recipe for a bitter soup that makes us sick with its poison and kills us by keeping from us anything good and salutary to life.  What we should eat to live and nourish us ends up killing us.  We cannot find joy so we cannot share it.  We cannot stomach disappointment so we disappoint.  We cannot outright offend God but we can resent Him until we no longer care about offending Him anymore.  Then  it is our sport to see how many we can taint with our judgment and how many we can deem unworthy or unrighteous or unredeemable.  Then we have come full circle and moved Jesus away from the judgment seat in order to occupy the throne for ourselves.  Its power we manifest by betraying all that we once know and counted upon and stood for -- then Satan has done for us and to us exactly what he did in Eden.

There is an ingredient that redeems the bitter soup so poisonous to us.  That ingredient is forgiveness.  We have it not in our larder but Christ has it and gives it our freely only to those who do not deserve it and those unworthy of its mercy.  But where mercy reigns, disappointment, bitterness, resentment, anger, and betrayal surrenders.  His blood is the higher power that is greater even than our smug and safe little circles of judgment and justified evil.  Of course, the problem is that we have grown accustomed to the bitter taste of the soup of life we make and the taste of mercy, while sweet, it must be learned by the eating.

Multiculture is no culture. . .

In the grand egalitarian scheme of things, multiculturalism honors every deity held in esteem by every people -- the more the merrier!  Even in some Christian schools (even some Lutheran ones!), the presence of a diverse student body and the attention to various calendars creates a no-win situation.  On the one hand, if you are a Christian (Lutheran) school, should you not honor the one and only culture of Scripture and the God who is the author and actor in its story?  Of course, you risk offending those who do not share in that Christian culture of identity, belief, and practice.  Or do you suggest that every religion is equal and every god has a place at the table and presume that not only the Christians but every other religious adherent is likewise watered down and religious lite?  Unless it is merely the honoring of a legacy or history, what god wants to be merely one of many gods and what god wants to share the glory with every other deity that passes for a religion?

It would seem to me that the best choice is not to honor the student but to honor the character and identity of the institution.  If it is a religious school, honor the religion that claims it and orders its life.  Those on campus who are not of the religion of the school are not there to take down that religion.  I suspect that all of them are there because somehow they got the money and grades to get in and they want to leave with an impressive piece of paper on their wall (sometimes useful for gainful employment and sometimes not).  I would further suspect that these diverse religious populations tend to be significantly smaller than the group that owns the property and runs the institution and perhaps the greatest percentage of the study body is not all that into any religion.  What good does it do to play with the faiths of others as if you were ordering food at an ethnic restaurant?  For everyone who is acting the part of being religious, there are those who truly believe their faith.  Does it make anybody happy to turn any religion into a watered down imitation or parody of itself?  

If the students on campus are so moved and want to practice their faith, hey, its a free country.  But to try and sponsor such events as if multiculturalism were a really good thing ends up only diminishing every faith and makes all of them seem rather petty and insignificant.  While his might not be recognized by a culture determined to make gender a decision, the people running these institutions should know the difference.  In the end, multiculturalism treats every religion and ethnicity as if it were the soup du jour or the daily special at the diner.  Who wants their faith and culture treated in this way?  Who would allow outsiders to parody and stereotype their faith and call it virtue?  As a Christian I am offended and I would expect that anyone serious about their religion would be likewise offended.

It sounds so good and noble and all but in the end it makes a joke out of that which ought to be the most serious thing in our lives -- this we believe, teach, and confess.  While this is most certainly true of Christianity (and Lutheranism), it should be no less true of other faiths. 

The curse of being normal. . .

There was a time when Christianity was exceptional, when it was filled with mystery and awe, and when it drew the notice of the curious and bored.  There was a time when Christianity stood out and did not fit in, like a square peg, it did not fit in the round hole of predictable and ordinary life and thought.  There was a time when Christian worship was about that which could not be held or seen -- known by faith but judged an even greater reality than the rest of life.  At some point in time, most of this disappeared both from within the household of Christian churches and people and in the view of those on the outside.  Christianity became normal.  I long for the time before this happened.

Blame or reason cannot be laid at those outside the Church -- either critics or admirers.  They did not do it to us.  We did it to ourselves.  We became enamored of the idea that God could be explained and so faith could be explained.  We ended up with a faith that was not an encounter with the mystery of God but a rational conclusion to a series of logical proofs.  We turned faith into something ordinary and God became just as ordinary -- a convenient refuge in an emergency and a pursuit when the material was found wanting but not an end to and not even the definer of life.  Church became more and more about us and less and less about God and so Christianity became a rather pedestrian religion, a normal faith in normal things.

We decided that even though Jesus insisted His kingdom was not of this world, ours would be.  We would build a kingdom for God by taking over governments and governing.  We would build a better world by force, if necessary, so that God would be impressed with our efforts and we could be judged an earthly success as well as a heavenly one.  Then, when we were in charge, we manifested a decidedly earthly wisdom and spirit in how we administered the power we had been given or simply grabbed.  It was the exchange of one set of ordinary things and people for another and the world hardly noticed.  Though I am sure that God has noticed.

Gone are the days when we actually believed that standing in the House of God was standing on the holy ground of God's presence.  Now we sit back in cushioned seats, sipping our designer coffee from our special mugs, waiting to be entertained or for self-improvement tips for our lives -- if we come at all.  We sit back in our neighborhoods and workplaces doing the same thing -- without any real sense of vocation or purpose larger than the next moment, the next thing on our screens, and clock out time to pursue our leisure without constraint.  We seem proud of the fact that Christians are just as sinful as those outside the Church, divorce at the same rate, cohabit as frequently, and have kids with the same problems as those without Christian faith.  Perhaps we forgot or maybe we just did not want to be the Church -- the called out to stand out.  In any case, the world looks at Christianity and, at best, sighs with boredom.  At worst it blames Christianity for all the problems inside us all.

I think about the worst thing that happened to Christianity, to Christians, and to worship is that we became normal, average, ordinary, and nothing special or different from the landscape around us.  I fear that this was the point where the children raised in the Church began to ditch her and the world began to ignore her and we started yawning in the face of God.  Maybe at some point, Christians and their churches will begin to be not normal, not average, not ordinary, but something as special as the places where God is at work bestowing the miracle of His gifts in the mystery of the means of grace.  Until that happens on a large scale, make sure it is happening in your congregation.

 

 

The mystery is the unity. . .

Sermon for the Holy Trinity (B), preached on Sunday, May 26, 2024.

In our world today the byword for everything is diversity.  This diversity is not simply a celebration of difference but the promotion of such difference.  In fact, it is the presumption that diversity by itself is a cardinal tenet of human rights and authenticity in people and in our institutions.  We have all become blank canvases in which we paint the picture of ourselves and repaint it as often as we want.  The job of the world around us is to celebrate every incarnation of ourselves and our truth and our identity and cheer us on.  I do not need to tell you this.  You already know it well.  Diversity is good and uniformity is bad.  That is the shape of things in our world today.

In contrast to this, the confession of the Holy Trinity is not about diversity at all.  We are not confessing three Gods or three persons who share part of the Godhead or persons with competing wills and purposes.  The great mystery of God is not the Three Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  No, the great mystery of God is that the Trinity is unity.  The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit – as the Athanasian Creed takes pains to point out.  But the confession of the Trinity would be a lie about God unless we accompanied this with the Unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This Unity is revealed in the love of the Triune God for us sinners.  This is not a celebration of diversity or even distinctions as much as it is the joyful confession of love in the shape of a family.  When God sent Adam out to name creation it was so that Adam would realize he was not a family but alone.  From that realization, God reflected on earth the familial shape within the Trinity.  It was not good for man to be alone because God was not alone.  Because God created man with a will, the man that God made had to realize this before understanding and appreciating the blessing of family.

The Trinity is Unity.  That is the mystery revealed in Christ.  The Father is the source of love.  From His love, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father.  In love the Spirit proceeds to reveal this love to creation.  All manifest this love for us sinners, for you and me.  In this saving work, we see the Unity of the Trinity displayed.  The Son comes with the words of the Father.  The Spirit makes known the words of the Son.  There is no competition in love.  There is no pride of place or jealousy or envy.  Love perfectly unites the Son and the Spirit in the fulfillment of the saving will and purpose of the Father.  That is the mystery of the Trinity.

When the Church confesses the doctrine of the Trinity we are not looking for distinctions between the persons but celebrating the unity of the Trinity.  It is not then about a law laid down but love manifest from the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Sure, in the words of the creed there are teeth.  Any who will be saved must so think of God.  This is not about putting God into a box.  Rather it is about the marvel and joy of sinners who by the power of the Spirit see the love of God at work in Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

When the Church confesses the doctrine of the Trinity, we are not trying to explain God or to cut God down to a size that fits our reason or understanding.  The Trinity certainly defies understanding.  But who wants a God who can be understood?  Such a God is not a God at all but only an extension of our own reason and selves.  If you want a God you can understand, go to the Pantheon or Olympus.  There are explainable deities.  But if you want a God who loves with the perfect love that saves you, then the Trinity is exactly that God.  Trinity Sunday is not about explaining the mystery of God anymore than it is about understanding it.  On this day we join with the Church that has gone before us to confess the God of love – the Father who is love’s source, the Son who is eternally begotten in love, and the Spirit who reveals this love that we might believe.

When the Church confesses the Trinity, we are confessing what Scripture says.  Instead of bending God to our wills and making Him a creature of our imagination, we confess what God has said about Himself in His Word.  It may make your head spin but it warms your heart to speak of the Father from whom all things come, the Son who rescues and redeems those captive to sin and death, and the Spirit who fills our minds and hearts with this glorious knowledge by faith.  This is not a mathematical formula.  This is not some philosophical proof.  This is the Church, hearing the Word of God and then speaking that Word back to God and in witness to the world.  This is God manifesting the love within the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to you and me – sinners and enemies who have been saved by grace.

To think rightly of the Trinity is to believe, to submit both mind and heart to the Scriptures and the Spirit.  To think rightly of the Trinity is to worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  To think rightly of the Trinity is to preach this pure Gospel of love to a world which has lost hope of ever knowing such love and lives in the darkness as the blind feeling their way through life until death.  To think rightly of the Trinity is to rejoice in the love of God that has saved you.

Let me say one more thing.  If you are not sure the Trinity is correct or whether it even matters at all how we define God, think about this.  What kind of God allows His Church to get His very identity wrong?  If God is all powerful, then He has had every opportunity to correct the error of the Trinity and rewrite the creeds to reflect this correction.  But He has not done so.  The Holy Trinity has been confessed in preaching and teaching, in creed and confession, in worship and in catechesis down through the ages to the present day.  The authority of the Church hinges upon this doctrine of one God in the Three Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  If we have gotten this wrong, we have gotten nothing else right.

In the end it is this simple.  To think rightly of the Trinity is to believe the Gospel. To think wrongly of the Trinity is to reject the Gospel.  You cannot pick and choose between the Trinity and the Gospel.  They go together.  No where is this more profoundly revealed than in the Gospel reading for today.  Its shape is distinctly Trinitarian.  The Father sent His one and only-begotten Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him.  The Spirit begets us into the family of God, born not of flesh and blood but of water and the Spirit.  We do not enter the Kingdom of God as individuals but as the members of the body, the family of God, to be joined to God and call Him Father, to know Jesus Christ as our brother, and to live in the blessed unity of the family of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.