The Gospel is not a philosophy

This must be absolutely clear: The Gospel is not abstract, it is not a method, it is not a timeless principal. The Gospel is not a philosophy.

The Gospel happens. Sins are committed and forgiven, the Word announced and heard, at specific times and in specific places. This is appropriate for a message announced and delivered by Christ. Like all of us, He was born of a woman, lived, worked, and died in a specific time and place. The work that Christ accomplishes in us, and the work that He will for all time accomplish–forgiving of sins, raising of the dead, new heavens, new earth–is and will be accomplished here, over the course of and at the end of our own timeline.

So now for a curveball: What impact does this incarnational perspective of life have on the way we understand our Lutheran Law/Gospel distinction? I’d like to say none, but I’m compelled to prod a bit. Don’t we sometimes tend to put all the “stuff of earth” in the Law category, and only the “stuff of heaven” in the Gospel bit?

With the exception of the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacrament, many Lutherans start to cringe when anyone mentions a correlation between the Gospel and the content of their daily lives. It sounds too nebulous, too subjective. Like they might start telling you they heard Jesus while folding their laundry, or saw Mary’s face in their egg salad.

And if it’s not creepy-weird, we worry that they’re just going to start lining up a list of accomplishments that reveal their piety and devotion. It’s just hard to say anything about the here and now that doesn’t come off sounding like what we’ve labeled “Law.” Certainly we encourage people to take comfort, find hope, and have faith in the Gospel–unarguably good and vital things that the Scriptures themselves encourage. But we forget that we make those more abstract exhortations precisely because the message of the Gospel is that Christ is doing something. It’s all about God’s action… God’s action in time. That action is here, now, “in all times and all places.”

What I’m trying to get at is this idea–firmly embedded in the New Testament–that the Gospel has legs. And talking about those legs and their direction doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped talking about the Gospel and started talking about Law.

What we Lutherans are justifiably cautious of is the romanticizing of the moment. We shudder at the charismatic drumming up of the falsely divine. If we start talking about the Gospel in the here and now, people might start speaking in tongues or jumping off the choir balcony. Either that, or they’ll look at their complete wreck of a life and abandon all faith entirely.

Maybe. Maybe not.

This is where the theology of the Cross blows our doors off. Again and again and again we are told that the Kingdom is hidden, hidden, hidden. But it’s not hidden in disembodied souls or abstract statements of faith. It’s hidden in the longing-for-resurrection members of our bodies. It’s hidden in the groanings of creation all around us. It’s hidden in the dawning of each new day, the billions of stars scattered in the night sky, the created-in-the-image neighbors next door. It’s hidden in the lowly, meek, poor, and suffering. It’s hidden. But it’s here.

So the next time someone starts talking about their mundane life and Jesus and the intersection of the two, don’t cringe so much. It may truly be Christ, carrying through to completion all that he has promised.