Myers observes–with particular poignancy to our current election–that in the early years of this country, the Americans thinking deeply about the nature of governance and legislation were also the ones governing and legislating. In the last hundred years, the particular tasks of politics (and really, the particular tasks that make up all our lives) have been atomized into distinct specializations performed by experts, so that many politicians spend careers focused on the specializations of campaigning and legislating without dealing with  communities as a whole.

The philosophy of specialization and the metaphor of the machine have brought a similar fragmentation to every corner of our lives; our daily jobs, families, and our selves.

I cringed when McCain said he wanted to “defeat” evil, but its worth noting he immediately talked about hunting down bin Laden and winning the War on Terror. I think both formulations are wrong in their own way (I don’t much care about bin Laden, and I think the phrase “War on Terror” is stupid), but he wasn’t literally talking about the removal of evil from the world in a metaphysical sense. In fact, he was responding to Rick Warren’s formulation of picking between “ignoring, negotiating with, containing, or defeating” evil — I would have chosen “contain,” but isn’t nuance lost in most multiple choice settings?

If you’re going to compare cringe-worthy quotes from the debate, though, Obama’s “above my pay grade” comment regarding giving human rights to babies made me wince far more. Gene Veith discusses that one here.

We Lutherans live under a terrible burden of having to be right all the time.  We value purity above all things - purity of doctrine, of practice, of hymnody, of programs, of purpose.  Yet purity is never held out to the sinner-saint as an attainable goal.  It’s a forensic-given in Christ, and utterly impossible in ourselves.  If we claim to be “pure” in what we do, we will ever be on the defensive justifying ourselves against those who claim otherwise and constantly measuring ourselves against the next guy.  Defensiveness tends to bring out the worst of our sinful selves.  Defensiveness and fear open the door to the anger, strife, party spirit, and dissension that war against the fruit of the Spirit.

I believe that much of our Lutheran anxiety has to do with defensiveness and fear.  We want to present our denarius back to the Master pure and undefiled.  And so we don’t take risks, we play it safe, we hedge our bets, we hide behind the skirts of our institutions, we circle our wagons to ward off the challengers.  We wrap our shiny denarius in a sock and tuck it safely in the back of a drawer.  But the Master said, “Do business,” not “keep it pure.”  We are fearful and defensive, not trusting the Word to do His work, not trusting that God justifies the unjustifiable and ungodly, acting as though Jesus needed us to defend Him.  Poor Jesus.  And in our fear and unbelief, we stunt the fruit the Spirit wants to produce in us for the benefit of others.

My thoughts have run along the same lines as Cwirla’s critique lately, especially where he points out our common tendency to use treasured doctrines to defend ourselves from the work of the Spirit, rather than being worked on by the Spirit through them:

I worry about my fellow Lutheran pilgrims who have become so wrapped up in defending their “being Lutheran” that they have lost the sense of wonder and joy at being justified for Jesus’ sake.  I wonder whether we haven’t become the Ephesian church of the Revelation, doctrinally pure yet loveless, able to spot a heretical Nicolaitan from a mile away, yet flagging in the love that once characterized life together.

I wrote about about this in this post (shameless plug!), where I argued that:

The proper distinction of Law and Gospel is not a method for keeping God out of our lives, but for seeing how He has already gotten in. Even the finest doctrine, hermeneutic, or slogan can be misused to avoid vulnerability to the Word. The moment we’ve done so, we’ve turned a blessing to a curse.

In many ways, I see this misuse of God’s promises is one of the central struggles the people of God face. Look at Israel’s history in scripture: If they weren’t wrestling with absolute debauchery, they had become completely consumed with ticking a doctrinal checklist in order to save themselves. Sure, theirs may have consisted of a set of ritualistic rules, but how much does that really differ from our own list of requirements for right-standing with God? Scripture (and Jesus!) makes it clear that it wasn’t the Law that was Israel’s problem, but its misuse. I think the same goes for our catechisms, confessions, and liturgies. Properly used, they are blessings. Wrongly used, they are our own distinctly Lutheran brand of works-righteousness, and a litmus test for admission into our club. But if Israel was entrusted with the very oracles of God, as St. Paul says, how much more richly have we been gifted with the body and blood of Jesus in Word and Sacrament? That’s not something to be frightened over, it’s pleasure and joy, joy, joy.

So when a conservative Southern Baptist like Rick Warren embraces “new measures” in church growth by advocating a vision of the church as an army of reformers who can end the plagues of disease, war, and poverty as well as promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and alcoholism, he stands in a long line leading from Finney to Strong to Sunday to Graham. “Deeds, not Creeds!” used to be the mantra of the social gospel of mainline churches, but Warren has revived it today as if it were newly minted. After a brief dispensationalist interlude, American evangelicals returned to their more positive and triumphant (postmillennial) message of transforming American culture into “a shining city upon a hill.”

… Ironically, in the land that prizes the legal separation of church and state, the identification of church and sub-culture, each with its political agenda, is nearly total: white suburban evangelicals, the Black church, mainline social gospels, and the more recent “new urbanism” of the emergent movement. Yet in spite of their different agendas, each of these ecclesiastical demographics is largely dependent on the heritage of American revivalism.

But by the end, I wanted him to say something more clearly. He writes on the word “incarnational” here:

… “Incarnational” is becoming a dominant adjective in evangelical circles, often depriving Christ’s person and work of its specificity and uniqueness.[9] Christ’s person and work easily becomes a “model” or “vision” for ecclesial action (imitatio Christi), rather than a completed event to which the church offers its witness.[10] We increasingly hear about “incarnational ministry,” as if Christ’s unique personal history could be repeated or imitated. The church, whether conceived in “high church” or “low church” terms, rushes in to fill the void, as the substitute for its ascended Lord. In its train, the sacramental cosmos returns. As Christ and his work is assimilated to the church and its work, similar conflations emerge between the gospel and culture; between the word of God and the experience of our particular group; and between the church’s commission and the transformation of the kingdoms of this age into the kingdom of Christ.

Horton is on the money when he points out that the church must be careful not to replace Christ. But what I’m longing for him to describe is how the church is in Christ, never replacing Him, but fully and presently partaking in His life death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and even his future return, through the mystery of Word and Sacrament. What Horton needs to point out is that all of the effort the American church throws into transforming culture could never properly be called incarnational action anyway. While Christ was present in the flesh, He could hardly have been called an activist of any sort. Jesus’ exposition of the power of God was something completely different: St. Paul makes clear that the ultimate earthly realization of God’s glory was, paradoxically, Christ’s brutal suffering and death on the cross. The contemporary fad of hybrid-driving evangelical political activism is in a category altogether separate from the bloody sacrifice of the Son of God. In short, it’s not being incarnational that’s the problem, it’s that the church has no idea what that word even means.

Incarnational living is not our life (with the emphasis on our). It is Christ’s life in us (with the emphasis on life and Christ). It is to struggle to find our identities completely in Him–in His Word and in His Sacraments. That is not to be misinterpreted as a way of making Christianity a private existential struggle. This is a public declaration of our present death and resurrection in the Spirit and soon-coming death and resurrection in the flesh. It is, essentially, to end ourselves and be begun in our new-in-Christ selves day after day after day. It’s tone is, by definition, humble. And it happens wherever we are: Our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods. I would use the word local if it hadn’t started showing up on so many t-shirts lately, but maybe I’m too cautious.

Incarnational living is not our project. Our engagement with culture is not informed by a vision or formula, but flows out of our baptism–a baptism that we do not always consent with, but to which we must learn to say “Amen.” St. Paul’s discourse in Romans 8 tells us that this already/not-yet tension is shot through the entire created order. The entire cosmos waits in eager longing for freedom from its bondage to corruption and decau, just as we groan for our relief from struggles with sinful flesh. And that freedom is something no political platform or activist movement can deliver.

Incarnational living is not whatever we’re most comfortable with. The Corinthian church, much like the American, was puffed up in its arrogance. Certain of its importance and focused on its achievement, it wasted time on theological bickering and personality cults (I follow Paul! I follow Apollos!) and turned a blind eye to the Corinthian culture’s grip on its life. And St. Paul’s sharply sarcastic rebuke leaves me stinging every time:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

The way the world looks at things, it’s pretty tough to build a city on a hill out of scum of the earth. Horton puts it well here:

Where we might hope for triumphant calls to “redeem culture,” the New Testament epistles offer comparatively boring yet crucial exhortations to respect and pray for those in authority, to treat employers and employees well, and to be faithful parents and children. We are called “to increase more and more” in godliness through the ordinary means of grace in the church. And in our secular vocations we are called to “aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk properly toward those who are outside and that you may lack nothing” (1 Thes 4:10-12).

Not sure how to close off this rambling post, I think I’ll just post a bit of the hymn “I Bind Unto Myself This Day,” a Lutheran take on St. Patrick’s Breastplate. It doesn’t get much more incarnational than this:

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me forever,
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation,
His baptism in the Jordan River,
His cross of death for my salvation,
His bursting from the spiced tomb,
His riding up the heavenly way,
His coming at the day of doom,
I bind unto myself today.

The Close of Day service is simple: A benediction, a responsory reading drawn from Psalm 92:1, a scripture reading, the Creed, a common reading of the Song of Simeon, the Lord’s Prayer, prayer for others and ourselves, and finally Luther’s close of day prayer from the Small Catechism. Ordinary as it is, we were doing far less beforehand, and going through an entire prayer service felt like a stretch at first. Now, a few months later, I daily look forward to this family worship time.

Though I didn’t realize it at first, adopting a prayer service was a complete turn around from the meager way we spent our time before. Our prayers basically consisted of a few words before bedtime with our daughters, occasionally including the Lord’s Prayer, or a confession of the Creed. On a given night, we might have used some of the same elements the Close of Day service includes, but the structure was always spontaneous.

The prayer service, on the other hand, is always the same. Once tedious, I now find this a great comfort. Regardless of my mood, the leftover stress from a long day at work, or the unpredictable tempers of my children, the structure remains the same. This creates a rhythm that steadies us. Especially as we continue to pray many of the words time and time again, associations with the syllables and phrases build in and between us, so that we come to know the service as we know one another.

Some of you may wonder if praying in this way is doomed to become empty ritual. I’m certain that we’re capable of sucking all the life out of this good gift if we approach it mindlessly. But night after night, I’m refreshed because the form of the service is declarative. Evening worship not our activity, but God’s event. Nightly, I hear myself say “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and I and my family echo back “Amen.” In our little house in Akron, we have again heard God put His name upon us, and in that one “Amen,” we have answered back “Yes, yes. It is so.”

Understanding family worship as an event–God’s event, not our own–blows my mind. Where prayer for me used to consist of running down a well-worn list of requests out of some sense of responsibility, I now find myself coming to hear again what God has to say. We open up His Word, and what it has to say is good. And when we bow our heads to voice our petitions, we pray in Christ. In the mystery of our baptism, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is our mediator, petitioning the Father for us. The drama in worship goes far beyond our own words on our lips; but in Christ, God’s words are upon our tongues! As we ask in the first words of the service:

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praise to your name, O Most High;

To herald Your love in the morning,
Your truth at the close of the day.

What is it that’s good about this? Not that we all happened to read some scripture together, but that we hear God’s great love again, our ears are filled with his truth. The heralds are not giving this simple evening prayer service its oomph, the action of God is! And this is obvious when we speak together Simeon’s beautiful response to laying eyes on God-in-the-flesh, Christ:

Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace;
Your word has been fulfilled.
My own eyes have seen the salvation
which You have prepared in the sight of every people:
A light to reveal You to the nations
and the glory of Your people Israel.

Of course you’d want to say the Gloria Patri after that!

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

God’s event don’t work like human events. They don’t go hand-in-hand with some kind of emotional rush. In fact, it’s common that we say the final “Thanks be to God,” without feeling a thing. And the Word of God that we hear doesn’t sound like we think it should–a booming thunderclap from the heavens, or even a still, small voice in the bossom. Instead, the Word of God sounds like our own weak and humble words, occasionally faltering and stammering over the Lord’s Prayer, a Psalm, or the words of Simeon I quoted above. It sounds like my daughter’s tiny voice announcing to those of us gathered in the bedroom “…for Thine is the Kingdom! and the Power! and the GLORY!” This may not be what we expect, but yet we say “Amen,”–this is most certainly true.

For the first time in my life, I find myself genuinely loving prayer. I pack my little prayer card in my laptop bag and take it to work, then sneak out and sit and my car and say the noon prayer service aloud to myself. We’ve even begun going through the morning prayer service together before or after breakfast. This excitement may not last forever, but it is a good gift, and I thank God for it.

Whenever the Lord’s Supper has been permitted to decay, the boundary lines between church and world have universally disappeared and the church has been absorbed into the world.

Amen.