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.

Specifically, though, the conference gave me the chance to recollect some of my most formative experiences growing up heavily involved in a modern evangelical church: Summer camps and conferences were a huge part of my Christian identity when I was young. I have fierce memories of crowding together into a darkened, sweaty gymnasium with hundreds of other teenagers, a stage washed in concert lights, the roar of electric guitars, raised hands, tearful repentance, the ultimate conviction that this was where we belonged.

It’s hard to shake off moments like that, and years of them piled up to convince me that I was called to be a minister–after all, that fire in my heart had to be a calling from God, right? Night after night, with the echo of those drums ringing in my ears, I’d lay awake with my certain future in ministry spreading out in front of me.

When it came time to pick a college, I was sure I needed to attend one of our loose denomination’s Bible colleges (later shot down by my parents). I wanted to join up with a good worship band. Maybe become a missionary. I hardly gave a future in the secular world a thought–I was certain I would be doing something in the church.

But then real life woke me up. As I finished high school and began college, leading worship services, mentoring newer Christians, and guiding Bible studies, I began to have real questions. Struggles with sin. Doubts. It just wasn’t always easy to stay on the mountaintop. I began to loathe the fire in my heart. I was angry about it, ashamed. How could someone called by God feel so conflicted?

it only got worse, and my wife (at that time, my fiance) and I came to a spiritual crisis. We were burnt out. We needed the Gospel, and we needed it desperately. And though it was being preached in some form all around us, we were deaf to it. The message was too mixed. Grace didn’t seem free, and we felt like we were in chains.

By the time we ended up in the small LCMS church we still attend, I’d walled off my heart from any hope of becoming a pastor. I was bitter with my Christian experience, certain that I’d fallen prey to my own emotions at a vulnerable age. I convinced myself that work in the church was something I could never do, someone else’s job, someone else’s problem. The ache to serve, though, never left. And over the last five years I continued to struggle with anger and sorrow at its persistence. Time and again, the desire would well up inside me. And in all that bitterness I had only one answer: “No.” Considering a life in ministry, after the emotional wringing I’d felt I’d been through, was impossible. But why couldn’t I get rid of this burden? Get on with clocking in and out of my nine-to-six job, living in my vocation as father to my kids, husband to my wife, and hard-working employee at my job?

At some point during the conference last week, though, something changed. There were no sweaty gymnasiums, no flood-lighted stages, no roaring electric guitars. No calls for tearful emotional repentance, and no emotional revelations. I laid awake in my bunk in the University of Scranton dorms, listening to the sound of teenagers talking outside–teenagers so much like I must have been years ago–and laying my spiritual past alongside these similar, but so tremendously different experiences at Higher Things. Day after day I heard the preaching of Christ, Christ, and Christ again. I received Christ, again, again, and again. I went to confession and absolution, I laid down my pride and heard that I was forgiven. And somehow, all that anger started to disipate. The six-foot thick concrete walls I’d built between myself and the possibility of a life serving the church started to crumble.

It’s so hard to put into words, but I guess I just started feeling alive again. And when I asked myself why I felt so alive, the obvious answer was because I’d just stopped saying “No. Not that. Anything but that.” Somehow, I found myself open again. Open to possibilities. And no longer afraid that caring about the truth of the Gospel would lead me over a cliff. Not certain of anything, to be sure, but I find myself with a heart that is more tender, rather than bitter. And a temperament that is more patient, not angry.

And the burden is gone. The weight I felt every morning when I woke up, and every night when I came home weary from the office has lifted. And for now, that’s good enough. I don’t know if I’ll ever pursue the ministry, but wondering, thinking, talking, and most of all praying about it does not seem so hard any longer. And if that means I can be a little more at peace, then that’s good enough for me.

While genuine zeal in the discharge of one’s office is necessary and important, this cannot be said regarding any kind of zeal. There is a false, ungodly, carnal zeal that does not come from God and is not produced by the Holy Spirit, but is rooted either in animosity against those who teach a different doctrine or in the selfish thought that a display of zeal will bring the minister honor, at least in certain congregations, or in fanaticism.

- CFW Walther, Law and Gospel

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.

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.