Theology

Now this is some serious preaching. Don’t read the transcript, go straight for the MP3. And hold on to your seats, girls and boys.

Pr. Cwirla has an absolutely bang-up post on the fruits of the Spirit and Lutheran trepidation:

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.

Michael Spencer linked to this good read from Michael Horton on the ascension of Christ, and the work left to the church. I nodded along with Horton for his sharp analysis of American Christianity and its revivalist tendency:

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.

This evening, in a Bible study with some friends, we read:

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

John is not explicit about it, but an image of Christ’s coming sacrifice for sin is hidden in the Upper Room foot washing. As he goes round the table, washing each of the disciples, he wipes the dust and grime from each of them onto the towel tied around him as a garment. When he has finished, he stands before them. On his garment he wears their filth, and thus foreshadows the cross. By contrast the disciples, though uncomfortable with the action of Christ, are reclined leisurely, freshly washed and prepared to partake of the Passover Feast.

Note: I’d been working on this post for a few days when this helpful discussion sprung up on John H’s blog. Though I’m echoing many of the remarks from that conversation in the words below, I figured I ought to post this if for no other purpose than to get it off of my chest.

In my four short years as a member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, I have been perplexed by the way the church addresses questions of Christian practice, the day to day, living and breathing parts of Christianity. Though written on a completely different subject (postmodern philosophy), the following quote from Albert Borgmann’s book Crossing the Postmodern Divide, struck me as a appropriate to the subject:

The dominant discourse about the future of our society is composed of the vocables of prognoses, projections, extrapolations, scenarios, models, programs, stimulations, and incentives. It is as though we had taken ourselves out of reality and had left only objectified and disavowed versions of ourselves in the universe we are trying to understand and shape.

For many confessional Lutherans here in the US, something like this contemporary gnosticism dominates our thinking about Christian practice. When it comes to all the things that the scriptures say about living, we have a way of addressing ourselves at arms-length, reflecting on our behaviors, desires, passions and afflictions as if they weren’t our own. We read Christ’s words about loving our neighbors, but we clam up when someone wants to talk about actually cultivating love in our daily lives. We pray “create in us a clean heart, O God,” but discussions on holiness or discipline are received uncomfortably. I’m not going to go out of my way to provide evidence on this point, I’ve spent enough time reading Lutheran blogs and talking to Lutherans across the US to know that what I’m identifying is not unusual, and perhaps has even become the norm for some conservative churches (see the comments on the post I referenced in the note above if you’d like to read more on this).

This fracturing of faith from tangible practice (other than the Divine Service) appears to be the consequence of the habit to decontextualize and mechanically divide Law from Gospel, then use the Law only as a sort of pre-game commentary before the Gospel.

When practicing these habits, we read scripture and listen to sermons with scalpels in hand. One friend of mine, a lifelong LCMS member studying to serve in the church, explained how a particular pastor was his favorite because every phrase from that pastor’s mouth could be divided into equal portions Law and Gospel. Pastors who diverged from this formula, in my friends view, were out of line with the Confessions. I couldn’t help but wonder of Christ would pass my friend’s test.

This Law/Gospel slice-and-dice–and the way use of its associated language has become a litmus test for Lutheran orthodoxy–can be absolutely debilitating to a vibrant congregational life. The consequence is unintended, to be sure: Our desire to properly distinguish Law from Gospel is appropriate. We are cautious , lest we upend justification. Throughout mainline and modern evangelical churches, we’ve seen a misapplication of the Law kill vulnerable spirits and turn Christ into an afterthought. But rather than helpfully correct the missteps of other churches with a more nuanced and truthful articulation, we’ve tended to dodge the conversation entirely.

What we need to recover is a proper conception of Christian identity. A discourse on spiritual formation with its starting point in our identity in Christ has an entirely opposite trajectory to the failed project plans and task lists of the withering megachurch. Our identity cannot be documented in a Gantt chart: Though identity is wholly who I am, I cannot create it, build it, trade it, or buy it. It has been given to me.

The approach I want to illuminate is found again and again in Paul’s letters. Paul’s response in Romans 6 to the antinomian question “Since we’re saved, can’t we just keep in sinning,” isn’t to drag out the a set of rules or collection of self-improvement handbooks. No, Paul starts talking about baptism:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

That last paragraph is no attempt to sneak the Law in through the Gospel’s back door, but a pronouncement of absolute freedom–freedom founded in our new selves in Christ. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Christ’s work in baptism has fundamentally altered us. We have been struck down and raised up in Christ. This is not just new life someday, this is new life now. Some days, it doesn’t feel much different. But Jesus says it is, and he doesn’t lie.

There is no warning here, no curse, no hidden agenda. Paul does not follow his “Let not…” with an “Or else…”, the only concern he has is implied by the letter’s existence: He wants to make sure the readers believe it.

Our membership in Christ is not a depersonalized principle but a fundamental, tangible truth. Just as I am a member of my earthly family–proved all the way down to my DNA, tangible in every cell and follicle–so I also am a member of Christ. This is intensely personal and present.

In Ephesians, Paul’s language is even richer:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

and:

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The Gospel, for Paul, is a fantastic expanse: A new world bursting forth from Christ and consuming us absolutely. By grace, through faith, we are swallowed up into God’s holy plan. What we so often sum up in the word “saved” is rich new humanity coming into full bloom in our own frail and afflicted bodies, in our own meager lives. Again, his concentration is on identity. This is not only a message about Christ, but membership in Christ.

The building/growing metaphors strike heads and set off sparks. Christ is cornerstone, and we the structure grow up in Him. And here God dwells. Church in Ephesus, he says, this is who you are.

Breathing deep of this new humanity in the bowels of a Roman prison, Paul then urges:

… walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.

Notice something: Paul’s exhortation does not tiptoe, waffle, or skate. A poor use of the Law/Gospel hermeneutic may convince you that after all that glorious Gospel news, Paul has just brought out the Law, both barrels blazing (I can almost see a certain contingent of Lutheran seminarians ticking points off of his sermon score card). But for everyone hearing this letter as a whole, Paul decimated the Law miles ago. Taken in context, this is no interruption to the Gospel celebration. The soaring melody has not turned sour. And he has certainly not turned to religious moralizing. He has said, “You are alive in Christ,” and now he says again: “You are alive in Christ.”

There is no warning, no threat, no curse. No matter how much we want to read it this way, Paul is not saying “Welcome to Club Jesus, here is your list of responsibilities.” The passages that follow (”be imitators of God, as beloved children”,”husbands love your wives”,”put on the full armor of God”) are not a rehashing of the rules that Paul so strongly declared abolished at the beginning of the letter. They are reflection on lives hidden in Christ, and Christ hidden in every nook and cranny of those lives, in every sorrow and joy, in every time and place. Lives drenched and drowned in Christ.

It’s worth saying here: These passages could certainly be misused to pound out another Christless religious project, devoid of Gospel entirely. But that is not Paul’s use, and that is never a right use. Paul’s words here are a working out of Christian identity.

The Law and Gospel labels may have their place here, but they cannot be used poorly. Scripture doesn’t exist so we can sit around labeling it, Paul wants us to live inside it.

We can’t retreat to a basement-level reading and trade earth-shattering magnificence for comfortable familiarity. I say basement-level in order to propose an improved model, perhaps only for bettering my own scripture reading, perhaps for something more. I suggest we add another layer to the classic Lutheran movement from Law to Gospel: The movement from death to life.

Law and Gospel are grounding truths, foundational to a right understanding of scripture. But unpacked, they are too familiar and abstract. Death and life are immensely personal, intimate, and tangible. Both pairs of terms are Biblical. The movement of the former pair is called justification, the movement of the latter is called resurrection. Neither movement is ours, both are Christ’s. This two-dimensional model I propose provides firm doctrinal ground in its Law/Gospel component, firm footing when faced with the tides of a withering American consumer-Christianity. Yet Death/Life component gives us room to feed on scripture, breathe God’s truth, and be active in our new humanity. Without some sense of this resurrection life, some pockets have American Lutheranism have created a new brand new command of Law/Gospel score keeping.

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.

These things. These theological questions that Olivia comes up with. I’ll tell you, if this isn’t the most humbling task, the instruction of Little Ones concerning God’s Truth, then I don’t know what else is.

While driving home from a LONG outing to try and find a fabric store that carries Anna Marie Horner’s “chocolate lollipops” fabric Olivia asked me, “Where is God, I want to be with Him but I can’t see Him.”

Criminey! So I said, “well God lives in Heaven, which is in the sky behind the clouds and the stars and the sun.” It feels good to talk to her about something that I love so much, but I’m worried about being confusing, worried about giving too much information, or too little. The best advice I’ve been given is to let their questions guide you. Well, Olivia is a girl of many questions, so these conversations go on for a long time.

“How can we fly up into the sky so that we can get behind the sun and see God?” she asks.

“Well, we can’t. But God comes down to us, too. So we can see Him down here. When we read our Bible, that is God’s Words talking to us. And when a little baby is Baptized God puts himself in the water and pours himself all over the baby, so we can see Him there. And when we take Communion at Church we are eating Jesus’ Body and Blood, so we can see Him there.” I said, hoping that she wasn’t confused.

“That means that there are two Jesuses.”

“No, there’s only one Jesus. It’s just like there is only one Olivia even when you get a cut and your blood comes out.” At this point I was pretty sure that I was being confusing. Now I’m talking about biology and theology. Yikes. Where are all the smart people? How in the world am I going to help Liv know God in truth?

But that seemed to be enough for a while. Until later that night we were reading a book about St. Patrick. I asked who God’s Son was and she said, “Jesus.” So I reminded her that Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Then I said that the Holy Spirit is inside her. “I don’t want Him in there. Can you take Him out?” she complains, pulling at her shirt.
Great. This is the spiritual instruction that I have to give her now when Rob and I are her only influence. What kind of questions is she going to come up with when other people are telling her things? Will I ever be ready for this?

These things that Olivia comes up with! I really had no idea what to say to this one, so I just answered it as best as I could and hoped that I wasn’t confusing. I ended up being funny, apparently. Olivia was cracking up.

So what was my answer?

“We are. All the People of God are His wife. Me, you, Elise, Daddy…”

Liv laughed, “Daddy is a girl?!”

I then said, giggling and afraid that I’ve reached the point of confusing, “Well, with God and people He is the boy and we are all girls.”

It was hilarious, I tell you, for Olivia to imagine that Daddy is a girl. I have absolutely no idea if that was a good answer or not. Remind me again why I am in the business of Catechizing this little spit-fire?

Ah, Christmas dramas. I’d almost forgotten they existed, until I heard about Willow Creek’s 2007 production: Imagine Christmas.

From a quick search on the internet, I can tell you one thing: You’ve never seen anything like this. And somehow you’ve seen everything like this. It’s a smorgasborg of modern Christmas grandiosity, chock full of American Christmas touchstones familiar to anyone who has ever watched television between Thanksgiving and December 25. Cute kids in snow hats quote Linus’ best lines of scripture from the Charlie Brown special. The stage is bathed in a wintry blue and covered in swirling snowflakes. Attempts to hint at the current market for C.S. Lewis fantasy material are thrown in: Shots of a Big Ben-ish clock tower tolling Christmas morning, and scriptures projected on-screen in a typeface that matches the one used in the recent film version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Dancers descend from the ceiling on ropes of billowing cloth a la Cirque de Soleil, angels trade pithy remarks, and dance teams backflip across the stage. Those looking for something more traditionally small-church American get a Gospel number of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” And then there’s that guy playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra-style violin backed by squealing electric guitars. This is not your local church’s Christmas drama, but it probably takes a stab at representing it.

Actually, maybe it is your local church’s Christmas drama. The Willow Creek Association’s website–which sells Willow’s ministry materials to other churches–lists Imagine Christmas and its associated promotion DVD as the third and fourth top-selling items in their store ( see here). And a quick search on Youtube shows a bunch of our brothers and sisters in Christ are spending a lot of time trying to pull this thing off.

Church leaders are encouraged to purchase and produce Willow’s production, though the advice on method varies from “complete rip-off” to “do your own thing.” On this page, Willow declares that “Your Biggest Programming Decision of the Year Just Got Easier.” The package contains “everything your church needs to create an imaginative and highly-visual program or outreach event for the upcoming Christmas season,” and the site suggests that you may just want to “show it entirely on video.” On the same page, however, they encourage church leaders to “make a Christmas program that’s uniquely yours.” Willow leaders interviewed for the promotional trailer admonish purchasers to do something that fits the particulars of their community (and the size of their stage).

(As an aside, I have to chuckle at the thought of my own church performing Imagine: The altar guild ladies being lowered from the ceiling amid carol swells played by the hand-bell choir, the elderly couple with the hearing aids cringing to the wail of the guitar…)

The psychology behind the entire production is a plain example of consumer-driven church thinking. Bill Kinnon’s excellent post on Imagine quotes from the Chicago Tribune, which interviewed Willow’s PR rep, Susan Delay:

“In today’s world, the church must compete with movies and even restaurants for audiences. Everybody wants to be entertained. People who might not go to church might come to see a Christmas pageant, and if we can share Christ through this, then yeah!”

(I’ll leave any comments on church PR reps who end sentences in “then yeah!” for another time.)

I sound like a broken record for saying so, but the real shame here is that Willow Creek has assumed that the decline of American Christianity is a problem of attention span; that the solution is upping the ante with spectacles comparable or even larger than those the secular world offers. But this approach accepts without criticism the entire framework of marketing and American consumerism; that what we desire should be our foremost concern, that what we do with our time should satisfy our desires, and that we ought not feel guilty for any of it. Of course in all of this Willow is making an effort to communicate Gospel of Christ, but more now than ever before the medium is the message. What are the implications of communicating the Gospel in a way that is so much like the world’s anti-Gospel?

Please understand that my goal here is not to point out how so-and-so has done it better, or somehow say that Willow Creek is something other than part of the church. Certainly, the Holy Spirit uses even Imagine Christmas to give life. In the post I linked to above, Kinnon helpfully responded to a reader offended by his post, and it’s worth echoing the following:

I’m not sure who has said Willow is “bad for everyone.” The critique is primarily of the Consumer Church and how Willow is very much a part of that “style.”

It is pure pragmatism to suggest that because you became a Christian at Willow’s Imagine, and three family members prayed the prayer, that the spectacle of Imagine is beyond sincere criticism.

I became a Christian twenty-five years ago after watching a two person, one-act play based on Revelation 3:20. Someone I know became a Christian listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. On Christmas Eve, whilst we attended service in an Anglican Cathedral, my eldest son told me of a friend of his who became a Christian simply visiting such a place. In each situation, our Father drew us to himself. There are millions of stories of Christians coming to Christ in the oddest of ways. Because He worked in those situations does not mean that they are somehow anointed. (I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar hundreds of times as a teenager with little or no impact on my spiritual life.)

And as one commenter followed up:

Can we discuss the methods without invalidating the genuine things that God has done?

After all, this side of the resurrection, the church should be absolutely concerned about message and medium. God has promised to rescue his people, and I have no doubt he will do so even if Willow Creek merges with Starbucks, Joel Osteen becomes the next pope, and McDonald’s starts including N.T. Wright action figures in their Happy Meals. But the church is called to be a foretaste of a soon-coming kingdom, not of this world. Let’s spend some serious time talking, thinking, and praying about what recipe gives His people the truest flavor; all the fragrance, nuance and intensity of the supper of the marriage feast of the Lamb.

N.T. Wright gives this simple explanation of Christ as the foundation of the priesthood of all believers in a sermon on Hebrews:

God chose the human race to be the priests of all creation, offering up creation’s worship to him and bringing his wise order to it. When humans sinned, God chose the nation of Israel to be the priests of the human race, offering up human praise and putting into operation God’s solution to the problem of sin. Israel herself, however, was sinful; God chose a family of priests (the sons of Aaron) to be priests to the nation of priests. The priests themselves failed in their task; God sent his own Son to be both priest and sacrifice. The inverted pyramid of priesthood gets narrower and narrower until it reaches one point, and the point is Jesus on the cross. The sacrifice of Jesus is the moment when the human race, in the person of a single man, offers itself fully to the creator.

- From his book, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship

Travis Prinzi gets it right. This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my last post.

Michael at the BHT recently linked to this post, which discusses John Piper’s critique of N.T. Wright’s definition of righteousness. Wright has long held that righteousness is best understood as God’s covenant faithfulness; the covenant being God’s promise to deal with sin finally and set the world right. Piper, on the other hand, calls Wright’s approach reductionistic, and has this to say in response (from his book, The Future of Justification):

“The essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name. And human righteousness is the same: the unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of God. (64)”

Piper’s statement is typical for his brand of thoroughly reformed theology, which sees God’s glory and sovereignty as the fundamental principal from which all time and history springs. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking often leaves Christ in the role of gatekeeper to God’s glory. In this model, the person and work of Christ is important because He allows us to get in line with God’s glory. God’s glory has become this disembodied thing, an other-worldly standard which must be maintained.

A better reading of scripture, in my mind, is to start with Christ first, then re-imagine ideas like glory and righteousness through Him. Re-read Piper’s statement on righteousness through the fulcrum point of the cross, he ends up a lot closer to Wright. It goes something like this:

• The essence of God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of His name.
• He accomplishes this only through the cross and resurrection.
• Throughout the New Testament, the cross and resurrection are explicitly for the life of the world.
• Therefore, God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold (and resurrect!) the life of the world.
• … and in Wright’s book, that’s pretty much the covenant.

Piper’s approach goes awry when it begins considering God’s glory as an object somehow separate from the communion of the Trinity. We’re headed for trouble any time we try to divorce an attribute of God from the person of Christ.

Jesus is speaking with the Pharisees. He has just healed a man on the Sabbath, and when questioned, identified Himself as God’s Son, completely justified in his work. It’s blasphemy to their ears. After an explanation of the source of his authority, Jesus tells them they can search the Scriptures all they like, but He is the one who gives life. He closes His response with this:

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? - (John 5)

This passage is foundational to a right understanding of Scripture, and particularly to a right understanding of the Law: A failure to believe in Christ is a failure to believe in the Law. And likewise, failure to believe in the Law is a failure to believe in Christ.

John the Baptist reviles the Pharisees with a similar remark:

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. - (Matthew 3)

I sat up straight in the pew this past Sunday when, after reading this scripture aloud, our pastor closed the reading with the standard declaration, “This is the Gospel of the Lord.” Somehow I’d fallen into a stupor. I’d forgot that the Gospel has edges this jagged. There’s an identifiable line of thought which says something along the lines of “We have Luther as our father…” Fruit in keeping with repentance? Winnowing fork? Baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire?

Christ-centered theology cannot be weak on the Law; to weaken the Law is to weaken Christ. If we are to put the cross and resurrection at the fulcrum point of our theological framework, we cannot forget why it had to be the cross, why it had to be blood, why it had to be the Son of God Himself.

I’ve continued to kick around the ideas I put down in this post about the use of the phrase “spiritual journey,” and the journey metaphor as a way of understanding our lives as people of faith: It seems to me that the idea of a journey isn’t really a bad one–there’s enough mention in scripture of similar terms–but it’s the idea of my spiritual journey that really messes things up. God is certainly taking us somewhere–as he took the Israelites out of bondage, etc.–but it’s us, not me.

Spiritual growth (sanctification) is never an independent project. All of scripture’s sanctification language is inclusive, rather than exclusive: People of God, the church as body of Christ, the vine/branches metaphor, the list goes on.

Scripture’s sanctification language is also relational. This is fitting for a religion that worships a God-in-three-Persons; God-in-Communion. The Church is called the bride of Christ, we are called sons and daughters of God. Indeed, we cannot come to know Christ apart from the work of the Church, and knowing Christ means union with Christ.

Lutherans talk about the church as the “priesthood of all believers”. As Dr. Wollenburg has written:

Individual members of the priesthood receive their identity when the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is put upon them. The nature and character of the royal priesthood is that of a community or society. The identity of each member of the priesthood is determined by his or her relationship to the community in which God lives with his Spirit (Eph. 2:22). In contrast to idolatrous baalism, paganism, animistic religions, and gnosticism, both ancient and modern, no one can know or belong to God as an isolated individual. The worship of the community of the priesthood is not a crowd of individuals coming together, each to have his own religious experience.

In this light, the language of “personal spiritual growth plans” to help on “your spiritual journey,” is really counter-Christian, regardless of the appeal to a culture defined by its icons of segmentation. If I want my family to participate in music together, I give them all instruments, not iPods.

Our sanctification is in communion with Christ and His Church. This doesn’t mean that individuals can’t each be at different places in a life of sanctification. Quite the opposite–the diversity-within-unity of the church is what makes it a community, and the blood of Christ for all is what makes it His bride and body.

In the comments to this recent post, Mike made some great remarks (emphasis mine):

For American Evangelicals, it seems that the journey metaphor is dominant, though not in as much in the sense of an ascent. I don’t know how to articulate this entirely, but it seems as if there is a sense in which people expect “growth” and “sanctification” to include, perhaps not secret knowledge, but maybe, secret feelings or secret insight. People expect change in their spiritual lives. Granted that change is inevitable, but I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the willingness of people to follow fads and change church bodies so readily.

I know exactly what Mike means about “secret feelings or secret insight.” In a lot of ways, throughout my teen years in nondenominational megachurches, this is what it meant for me to be faithful. It was very important that I always be learning something new–without those flashes of light, I felt like I was losing all vitality as a Christian.

I’m glad I don’t see things this way any longer. Learning new stuff is certainly not a bad thing. But keeping a list of our theological insights as a barometer for the work of the Holy Spirit just doesn’t work. In fact, scripture emphasizes time and again that we ought to be fools for Christ. I don’t know all that phrase entails, but I can bet it’s not code for “becoming more insightful.”

While writing my last post, one phrase used over and over by Hybels and Hawkins has been sticking in my brain: “spiritual journey.” There’s nothing uniquely Willow Creek about this term, it’s pretty much everywhere you look when it comes to American spirituality. Christian or otherwise, everyone’s talking about their spiritual journey; it’s as much a New Age term as anything else.

So, some rambling thoughts on the phrase: Is this a term Christians should be using? Does “spiritual journey” really capture the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body, the restoration of earth and heaven, the union with the Christ and all saints? The journey underscored by Christ and the disciples isn’t some sort of traversal of higher planes of Christian understanding, but a move from life to death to new life. And I mean physically, too.

To my ears, these words have lost a lot of their saltiness. In the context of the video clips Willow Creek leadership summit, they somehow sounded more gnostic and narcissistic than Christian.

Eugene Peterson has done a lot of work in his writing to recover this phrase, and really to recover the word “spirituality” in general. I highly recommend his books “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places,” “Eat This Book,” and “The Jesus Way” on the subject.

Peterson’s primary thrust is that you can’t go talking about spirituality without talking about a Christianity that’s lived. Not lived in the sense of a life that follows some sort of principles for success, but a Christianity that’s lived in places, conversations, meals, lived while driving the minivan, walking the dog, tending to your sick children, getting up and going to work and coming back and lying down again. That’s not to say the Christian spiritual journey is the “same old” life. No, but it’s life where the journey happens, life shaped by the cross.

Maybe it’s worth saying that the Christian spiritual journey has more to do with waiting than escaping. The Apostle Paul’s image of the long and painful footrace of perseverance is also a good one, if you can put yourself in the mind of the runner trudging along mile after mile, and not the spectator tuning in only to catch him crossing the finish line.

I’m still digesting what I’ve read and watched about Willow Creek’s latest project: Reveal. To really understand what this is about, you really have to go watch this video presented by Greg Hawkins, the executive pastor at the church.

The basic premise Hawkins lays out is as follows: Megachurches like Willow have defined themselves with the following method:

• Churches exist to make disciples of Christ. Hawkins describes a disciple of Christ as someone who has “increasing love for Christ, and increasing love for others.” (Jesus used a similar formula when asked to sum up the Law…)
• Churches make these disciples by creating stuff for people to get involved in: Service projects, small groups, worship services, bible studies, etc. After the initial step of belief, involvement in these programs turns people from new believers into disciples.
• Taking these first two points, you can then make the case that a church’s success is going to be determined by the congregation’s head-count. The more people are involved in more programs, the more disciples are produced.

But Willow’s recent research indicates that things don’t actually work out this way. Instead, those who consider themselves most devoted to Christ are those also getting the least out of the programs and activities provided by the church. In fact, in Willow’s own surveys, they found that people self-described as “fully devoted followers of Christ” were the most likely to be thinking about leaving the church. Individuals who had gotten past the initial rush of exploring and diving into faith were progressively less and less interested in all the “stuff” that had brought them into Willow Creek in the first place.

In this video, Willow founder Bill Hybels talks about the new direction the church is going as a result of these findings. He offers the opportunity for other churches to run the same survey, gather the same data, and join along on Willow’s course. Maybe I’m missing something, but the new direction Hybels lays out doesn’t look that different from the old.

Hybels talks about how his team is going to begin providing “customized personal spiritual growth plans,” explaining “You go to a health club, and you get a personal trainer who tells you how can do physical conditioning in the way you need it. Well, we need to provide customized personal spiritual growth plans to people at Willow to get them to become self-feeders.” Hybels goes on to say, “We’re gonna up the level of responsibility we put on the people themselves so that they can grown, even if the church doesn’t meet all their needs.”

To be blunt, this whole thing is pretty gut wrenching. All the standard megachurch criticisms can be made–that the whole thing is boardroom-slick and marketing-savvy–but what particularly gets me is how it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to just do His work. Would C.S. Lewis’ growth plan have read “marry a divorced woman with a terminal illness”? Bonhoeffer’s, something like “join a secret organization dedicated to rescuing Jews and speak out against Nazi power.” Lazurus’ would be short and sweet: “Die. Trust us.”

Even while watching the videos, I was holding out hope. I kept expecting a record-scratch sound effect to interrupt. An old woman to start pounding out “The Church’s One Foundation” on a creaky upright. Someone to open up a Bible. Anything that might snap the whole thing back to something close to orthodoxy. I guess I was just expecting to see the cross.

This exchange between Jesus and Nathanael at the end of John 1 sticks out to me:

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

Nathaneal’s response to Christ reveals a way of thinking completely unlike our own. He goes along with his brother to meet Jesus, skeptical, expecting to be disappointed. Jesus catches him off guard with a sarcastic comment–he could probably see Nathaneal’s furrowed brown a mile off. Nathanael asks (maybe defensively?) “How do you know me?” and Jesus fires back a bit of Nathaneal’s personal info, revealing that he knows more than Nathanael ever expected.

Here’s where Nathaneal responds as only a monotheist could: He immediately calls Jesus the Son of God, the King of Israel. He’s ready to worship Him on the spot. He has no doubt that a man with this kind of power must be from God. He doesn’t call Jesus a psychic, and he doesn’t double-check Jesus’ Jewishness. He believes, then and there, that this man is God.

For Nathanael, it seems, real power must come from God. There’s just no other source.

I try not to meddle in the parenting of others. It’s their business, but I obviously have my opinions. I mostly have oppositions to the “Christian Parenting” giants who like to write books making generalizations about how to parent my child unto godliness, all the while knowing nothing about me. I don’t just disagree with their methods, I disagree with their theology and their lack of discretion. How do they know to whom they are teaching? How do they know their methods are being properly prescribed? And mostly, how can they not see that this method of “discipline” obscures the person and work of Christ when a parent cannot forgive their child until there has been punishment for their sins? Are not our Christian children under the Fount of Grace as much as we are?

Here is a wonderful take on the topic over at Lutherama. Don’t just read my post on it. I have only skimmed the subject since she has done such excellent work, I would only be repeating, so make sure you click the link.

Rob’s Grandmother passed away a few weeks ago, and thus began Olivia’s questions about death. “Why did Daddy’s Grandmother have to die, Mama?” (she always calls me Mama when she’s feeling small). Not what I was expecting to hear from my not yet 3 year old.

“Because she was very old and sick, and Jesus said it was time for her to die and go home to be with Him.”

“I don’t want to go be with Jesus.”

“It will be a long time before you have to go be with Jesus.”

I can’t remember exactly what she asked next (this was weeks ago, really) but it was something about if we would see Grandmother with Jesus. I think she still confuses Pastor with Jesus, so perhaps she was asking if Grandmother would be at church. I’m not sure. But anyways, I answered her, “We all love Jesus, and all the people who love Jesus will be together with Him after they die.”

That seemed to satisfy her. Though the topic has come up regularly since then.

At bedtime tonight Olivia told me that her ponies went to be with Jesus because they died. Then she said, “But we will see them when we die.”

“Yes, we will all go be with Jesus.”

“Will we be people?”

“Yes,  Jesus will give us all new bodies that won’t ever get sick, or hurt, or sad.”

“Mine will be pink,” she said matter-of-factly.

I’ve been through a kind of inspirational winter. Where I once saw greenery and new life and felt light breaking open inside of me, there was for a long while an expanse of ice and snow. Things die in the winter. They curl up and decay and molder and traces of themselves and traces of other things all coalesce until there is only dark earth.

That happens with the imagination, too. Passion, hope, fierceness of belief grow brown-edged, curl inward and crumble.

But “there lives the dearest fresness deep down things.” * The dying and dead things are a humus of memory. And somewhere there is life. Breathing silent, pushing slowly upward.

One more reason to loof forward to the resurrection of the dead, the life of the world to come: The complete renewal and redefinition of work. Man’s curse becomes pure pleasure, great glory to God.

Olivia is on the cusp between the age where she cannot control her impulses, and the age where she can. She has known right from wrong in some sense for a long time. I know this because she is very verbal and enjoys telling her aunts and uncles, “We don’t go outside by ourselves!” or, “Stop fighting!” Knowing right and wrong does not equal being able to master her own desires and comply and so we have a lot of correcting, reminding, redirecting etc.

Well, where she once took the correction, reminding, and redirecting as an annoying interruption to her active play, she now reacts very humbly. When I have said, “Olivia, we don’t use our hands for hitting. Use gentle hands with our sister,” these past few weeks a new response has come from my little girl. She covers her eyes with her hands and sometimes she even apologizes spontaneously. It’s simultaneously adorable and encouraging.

I try to meet every, “I’m sorry, Elise!” with a: “She forgives you. Now we all feel better.” And after something has made Olivia feel particularly guilty I remind her of how Christ has died on the cross for her sins and she doesn’t need to feel bad anymore.

I think this is probably the perfect time to introduce the Ten Commandments. And hopefully I can start helping her to understand how pushing her sister is breaking the fourth and fifth commandments. That’s probably a little ambitious. But it pays to aim high.

The more Peter Leithart writes, the more he sounds like a Lutheran. And then he doesn’t. Either way, I can’t get enough of it. The vigor of us confessional Lutherans occasionally has the unfortunate side effect of making everything we tell you about doctrine sound like we’re holding a rod above your heads of all our fellow Christians. Or an axe.

But Leithart. He has the tone of someone who’s diving into scripture feet first. And acknowledging that it’s really, really messy. Scripture’s darker passages, winding stories, and odd comments just don’t wrap up nicely–it’s encouraging to hear someone admit that. And admit that without immediately claiming to have figured it out.

And this isn’t to say that Leithart’s opponents and critics aren’t diving into the pool just as deeply. Plenty of them are, and that’s why they’ve been so impassioned in their critique. As painful as this can be, it is the way of the church. What else do we mean when each Sunday we confess “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church?”

One church from Peter and Paul all the way up until the 34th PCA General Assembly 2007. One church that has trouble building consensus, trouble talking, trouble being polite, trouble even getting an informal show of hands. There’s a reason Jesus didn’t run for election. Jesus is not a member of your congregation. You are a member of His. And although it might surprise some to hear an LCMS Lutheran say it, when we each come to eat and drink, we’re not served with our own personal Jesus, a la (depeche) mod. “Given and shed for you” was not the precedent for “Have it your way.”

Scripture has this way of knocking the wind out of you, kicking your doors clean off their hinges, and sticking around in your craw long after you’ve asked it to take a hike. And just wait until it starts rifling through your desk drawers. Leithart sounds like a guy who’s watching Scripture rearrange his furniture. And knock a hole in the living room wall with the sofa. For the sake of the church. I like that.

Since the PCA has recently knocked them around a bit, maybe Leithart and the rest of the Federal Vision crowd can just become Lutherans. They like baptism well enough.

I’m not encouraging anyone to ditch their confession. I just find myself nodding along with much of what Leithart and others have to say. Far more than many of the products of my own denomination, the Federal Vision discussion constantly reminds me what is so refreshing about being (in John H’s terms) an Augsburg Evangelical.

and Olivia is proud to tell us (as of last night), “God made me.”

God Parents, you’ve done well.

even though I am not a Looper myself. They’re Lutheran Homeschoolers for those who don’t know.

This week, The Rebellious Pastor’s Wife wrote an excellent post about the Parable of the Good Samaritan. She’s taking a class and these were based on a lecture, I think.

Let me just say that I’m JEALOUS that she is taking a class like this. Look at this quote:

But Jesus is the Good Samaritan. He comes and bandages our wounds, gives us a safe place, and revives us. He is God, so He cannot be unclean, but He takes our uncleanness upon Him. He gives the innkeeper two denarii (two days pay) to watch after us and says He will repay him when He comes back….when? He took care of two days…so He’s returning on the 3rd Day…when He rises again.

I love it! It seems like the kind of text-dissection that went on in my best literature classes in college, but it’s about Christ. I would LOVE that. Suddenly I’m very jealous of seminarians. I bet they get to read this stuff all the time.

Olivia is very determined to play “Pastor.”

Yesterday it was warm enough to go outside, so when Olivia found mud puddle I was so elated to be in the sun I didn’t care if it meant an extra bath. Liv found many uses for the puddle. She painted the trashcan, she painted my car. She painted her shoes and herself.

Then she filled up a little bowl from her toy kitchen with watery mud and offered it to Sherman saying, “Take, Sherman. This is the true blood of Christ!”

How do you break the news that girls can’t be giving communion to dogs? It’s just not theologically sound.

Over this weekend Olivia and I read this book to Elise. Since we were reading it to Elise I asked Olivia a lot of questions about the book. So, this is Olivia’s version of the Easter story as told by her and me:

Me: (pointing to a picture of the cross with a figure on it) Who’s this?

Liv: Jesus

Me: What is he doing?

Liv: He’s dying.

Me: Is he dying for you?

Liv: Yes. And Elise, and Sherman.

Me: (pointing to a picture of Mary) Who’s this?

Liv: Mary. She’s blue.

Me: Yes, Mary is usually wearing blue. (pointing to a picture of the Tomb) What’s this?

Liv: A rock.

Me: Yes this is the tomb where Jesus was buried after He died. (pointing to a picture of the empty tomb) What’s this.

Liv: (very excited) The rock is open! This is the happy part!!!!!

Me: Yes! It is so happy that Jesus rose again! He is alive!

Liv: He rose again!

from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Who died and rose again, for your sins and mine.

Blessed Easter to you all!

Before you worry about our theology, note that this is Olivia’s imaginary game. It reminds me of the story that Jaqcue is always telling about Andy when he was a kid. How he’d pretend to be a pastor, or talk to God out loud in the bath tub.

Well, Olivia is at the stage where she loves to pretend to be everyone but herself. She is always playing that she is Papa, Tintin, Woody, a hunter or anything else from one of her stories. And she also plays “Pastor.” This game involves Olivia running around the house announcing, “I’m a Pastor. I baptize my pony.” It’s follows the same basic plot line as the hunter game, “I’m a hunter. I shoot the fearsome animal.” Both games require that she run around and yell this over and over again triumphantly like a superhero.

Olivia is also beginning to tell us this story:

“When I was born with Pastor Kozak he put some water on my head and I cried.”

or this story:

“Elise was born at church and Pastor Kozak poured water on her head.”

This was obviously very important to her. It’s fun to hear her perspective. She’s remarkable theologically accurate for a two and a half year old.

And I ask this, not in a “what can YOU do” sort of way, though that is a good question. But I ask in a more defeated, “ah, I’m feeling the weight of sin” sort of way.

My Dad just went to India on a business trip. While he was there a bunch of beggars came and started pounding on the windows of the car asking for money. Some of the children didn’t have hands. Apparently their parents cut their hands off so that people would feel more compassion on them and they would bring home more money.

Also while there, he and his associates were taken out to dinner. The waiter brought out the Indian version of Diet Coke instead of the American version and so his boss fired him. My dad said that he felt terrible because it didn’t matter to him which kind of Diet Coke they served.

How is it that I can be sitting here in my warm comfortable house, with my children still connected to all of their limbs? I am feeling the weight of sin Read the rest of this entry »

Mortal Sin.

Being the theological misfit that I am– raised Roman Catholic, coming of age in a Modern Evangelical church, and converting to Lutheranism as a young adult– I am so often surprised at the things on which people are in disagreement.

For example, I can’t understand why all of Christendom doesn’t understand the Parable of the Seeds the way Lutherans do, it just seems so straightforward. I guess I’d have to admit never believing “once saved, always saved,” even though that’s what most of my friends have always believed is true and were shocked to discover Lutherans don’t. I was just as shocked (or better yet, confused) by their position.

Back to Mortal Sin. I read this post by the Rebellious Pastor’s Wife Read the rest of this entry »

The first half hour of this episode of Issue Etc. is excellent. I’m looking forward to reading Wright’s book.

It’s especially good to hear Todd Wilken engaging with Wright’s material. Up until this point, I’d found few in the LCMS who were actually willing to give any consideration to Wright’s work.

Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I devote my rare and free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must propose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of “recapitulation” of the inviolable mystery of the person.

- John Paul the Great, 1968

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This last month, fond readers had to say goodbye to one of the finest sites the web has seen, The New Pantagruel. The parting lines of editors Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall have been ringing in my ears ever since I read them:

Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.

What the Pantagruelists really got–and so many others miss–is vocation. Too often we use the word in only its most narrow sense, usually referring to our specific professions, our “day jobs.” But that hardly captures the depth of the idea that God has called each of us to our varied and particular times and places. Our surroundings, with all their mundane tribulations and seemingly meaningless tasks, are no accident.

Read the rest of this entry »