Pope Francis: No one can rob us of our dignity, not even the devil

I'm a Lutheran Christian.

But that doesn't prevent me from saying enthusiastically that there's much I love about the Roman Christian who heads the Church at Rome, Pope Francis 1.

As part of a series of teachings on mercy, Francis yesterday delivered a homily about Luke 15:11-32. In those verses, Jesus' parable of the prodigal son is recounted.

In the parable, Jesus tells the story of a father and his two sons. The younger son, contrary to the customs in first century Judea where Jesus and His first hearers lived, receives one half of his father's estate, even before his father's death, then proceeds to squander it in often sinful ways.

Destitute and regretful, the younger son decides to return home and ask that his father hire him on as a servant, no longer feeling worthy to be a child of his generous father.

But before the young man is able to speak a word of remorse, his father has run to him with a welcoming embrace and ordered a celebration to begin.

In the last part of the parable though, we learn that the older son is less than happy about his brother's return and his father's forgiveness of the son.

The parable portrays how it is when we turn from God our Father and misuse the life that is the free gift of God. But it also shows how it is when, repentant and struck by the grace and generosity of God, we are able to return to Him through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Some of what Francis said about the passage is recounted in this article:

Our state as sons of God “is a fruit of love from the heart of the father,” the Pope said, adding that “it doesn’t depend on our merits or our actions, and therefore no one can take it away. No one can take this dignity away from us, not even the devil! No one can take this dignity!”...

Jesus, the Pope observed, doesn’t describe a father that is “offended and resentful who says ‘I will make you pay!’” but on the contrary, illustrates that the only thing the father is concerned about is that “this son in front of him is healthy and safe.”

This parable teaches us “to never despair,” he said, and pointed specifically to parents who, like the father, see their children becoming distant and taking “dangerous paths.”

He also noted that the same can be said of pastors and catechists “who at times ask themselves if their work is in vain,” as well as prisoners, “those who have made poor choices and aren’t able to look to the future (and) those who hunger for mercy and forgiveness but believe they aren’t worthy.”

No matter what situation life brings, “I must never forget that I’ll never cease being a child of God, of a father who loves me and waits for my return. Even in the worst situations in life God waits, wanting to embrace me,” he said.

Knowing that God loves us and wants us to have a relationship with Him that frees us to live a life of purpose, love, and hope can imbue every life with dignity.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Francis Fallout

Tonight, on the way back to the church to teach a session of Catechism class, I stopped by a Speedway station to pick up a bottle of water. A clerk not waiting on me spotted me, dressed in my clerical collar, paying up. She made a point of telling me, "You have a very nice evening." Francis fallout.

Later, after class, I stood at the Kroger deli counter, where a man approached me. "I'm not Catholic," he said. "Neither am I," I replied, smiling and touching him on the shoulder, "I'm Lutheran." "Oh," he said, "but I have been delighted to watch everything surrounding the pope this weekend." "I have too. He is a humble man of faith," I said. "Yes, he is," he replied enthusiastically. More Francis fallout.

Francis has negated a lot of the bad press we Christians often get, press usually created by the stupid things that supposedly Christian people say and do in the public square in the name of Jesus.

The pope has managed to do this without compromising the Christian message, sharing it with compassion and love, even the parts of the message that we self-willed human beings are inclined to resist.

There are differences between the theologies of the various Christian traditions. But during this week in Cuba and the United States, Pope Francis has done the whole Christian Church proud. And that is wonderful fallout.

The Time for Cute is Over: The World Needs Jesus!

The time for cute is over.

That's the thought that crossed my mind and came out of my mouth during a recent breakout session with Lutheran colleagues from southern Ohio.

One member of our group shared the impact on him of some polling he'd read about done among people leaving Easter Sunday worship services. A high number of them, people who had presumably just heard the good news of Easter--that God the Son, Who had taken on human flesh and died on a cross, taking humanity's rightful punishment for sin, and then, on Easter, rose from the dead in order to give all who turn from sin and believe in Him everlasting life with God--had been proclaimed, sung about, and shouted, could not articulate what Easter was about.

Truth is, what my colleague shared did not surprise me, not because I think that the average worshiper on Easter Sunday is stupid.

The problem is that we who are called by God through the Church to preach and teach about Jesus routinely make the wrong assumption. We forget that the ground has shifted beneath us.

In North America and Europe, we live in a post-Christian culture. But we assume that most people who pass through the doors of our church buildings know the content of the Gospel--the good news--about Jesus and the new life He offers freely to those who believe in Him. Our job, we assume is to simply remind people of this gospel in compelling, entertaining, painless (cute) ways, being careful not to take up so much time that people are late for the Sunday brunches at local restaurants.

But cute isn't working any more.

Churches are losing membership, my denomination (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) more rapidly than any other denomination in the United States. And, according to an article in last week's TIME magazine by Jon Meacham, Americans claiming no religious affiliation at all has risen from 15% to 20% in the past five years.

While mainline churches have sought to present a message indistinguishable from a corrupt and failing culture and while many evangelical churches have watered down the Gospel to be culture-current and both strains of Christian faith in America have often followed the siren song of political engagement rather than Gospel proclamation, Americans have tuned the Church out.

And who can blame them? If we sound like everybody else, just the praying wings of this or that philosophy or political party, who needs us or the message we offer?

After hearing about the polling of Easter worshipers who didn't know what Easter was about, my colleague decided that his preaching had to change, starting on Easter Sunday, 2012. "You know what I preached about last Easter?" he asked us. "Easter!"

That stood in contrast to reports I'd heard about the sermon of another mainline Christian pastor (not Lutheran) on that same Easter. She had shown pictures of Easter bunnies and talked about not how Christ can make the life of those who surrender their lives and wills to Him brand new, but about how Christians needed to be good people and make the world new by their good works. That isn't the Gospel! The Gospel is God-centered, Christ-dependent. 

It turns out my colleague wasn't alone in sensing God's call to get back to the basics and to forget about being entertaining, culture-current, or cute. That became clear as the rest of us began sharing.

"I just finished a sermon series looking at the basics of Christian faith through Luther's Small Catechism," said another one of our group.

"We've been doing a Bible study based on The Augsburg Confession," said another.

Two had done adult Sunday School class on basic Bible teachings.

I offered that our adult Sunday School class was looking at the Biblical underpinnings of The Augsburg Confession, a basic statement of Lutherans' understanding of Christ and the Christian faith, and that I would soon be doing a sermon series on the same theme.

No bishop or church council had told any of us to take this back to basics approach. It seemed to me that this strange convergence in our thinking, born of prayer and study, had the same source: God the Holy Spirit was telling us to forget about cute and simply proclaim the Good News about Jesus, to assume nothing, to take nothing for granted.

To tell you the truth, this moment of desperation and of wrestling with why the Church is needed and how Christ is essential for every human being, is exhilarating and liberating. In the past few years, my preaching has changed. For most of my twenty-eight years as a pastor, my sermon preparation has, to some extent, been weighed down by two questions, the very asking of which, was limiting: How can I get their attention? How can I make it palatable?

Now though, the Holy Spirit seems to be guiding me and others who want to share the Gospel to ask a different question: What do people need to hear?

That very question liberates the pastor from being a marketer to become a preacher and teacher.

It also drives me to God's Word for direction and to God's Spirit for wisdom more than ever before.

And the feedback I get tells me that, on the whole, people hunger for this kind of back to basics approach. People need to hear the truth about God the Father, God the Son Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit. They need to hear the truth about the Bible, the sacraments, repentance, faith, salvation, discipleship, loving God, loving neighbor, the Ten Commandments, sin, evil, the devil, original sin, and being set free from sin and death by God's grace given through faith in Jesus Christ. A back to basics approach fills these needs for God's truth.

According to that article by Meacham, it isn't just we Lutheran Christians in southern Ohio being led by God's Spirit in this way. He says that this back to basics approach is one of the ten big ideas reshaping American life right now:

In a classic attempt to turn adversity to advantage, Christian leaders who once assumed a cultural dominance...are now arguing for a double-down strategy. Rather than softening the Gospel message to make it more marketable to America skeptical of institutions...what draws real energy among the faithful is a renewed commitment to what Christians call the Great Commission, the words the resurrected Jesus spoke to his apostles at the end of Matthew: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.'" [See this translation of the passage, Matthew 28:19-20.]

In His famous conversation with the Jewish teacher Nicodemus, Jesus says:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:16-18) 

The compassion that God has for those who don't yet know Christ or the Good News about Him is undoubtedly behind the back to basics push many of us are feeling as we pray and read God's Word these days.

It appears that Pope Francis I, newly elected head of the Roman Catholic Church, is getting the same message from the Holy Spirit. In his informal homily before the College of Cardinals on the day after his election to the papacy, Francis said:

We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord. When we are not walking, we stop moving. When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to children on the beach when they build sandcastles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity. When we do not profess Jesus Christ, the saying of Léon Bloy comes to mind: "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil." When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.

Amen!

The time for cute is over. 

[UPDATE: As I was writing this piece, thinking of all the people who need Jesus in their lives and how each minute that passes without our plainly proclaiming the Gospel about Jesus puts those people's eternal lives in jeopardy, lines from Bob Dylan's song, All Along the Watchtower kept coming back to me: "...let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late." Jesus is what people need from the Church and from Christians. No one else will give Him to them.]

Same Setting...

Different pope.

The Power of Weakness, the Wisdom of Foolishness

In his letter to the first century church in the city of Corinth, the apostle Paul constantly comes back to four words (and their cognates):

• weakness
• power
• foolishness
• wisdom

Worldly people, with shrewdness and cynicism, have their ideas about where wisdom and strength lie.

The worldly believe in themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what's best for them, looking out for their own interests above all, and being comfortable.

The worldly place their highest hopes in the things they can see, acquire, touch, or use. If they ever consider the God Who made them, their accountability to Him, or the needs of others, it's only in fits and spurts.

Such considerations leave them uncomfortable and they move to push them out of their minds.

From a worldly perspective, it's total foolishness to believe that a Savior Who died on a cross, a condemned man, could do anything to change my life, my perspective, my eternity. When you die, you die, the worldly say. Crosses bring an end to the human "pursuit of happiness." Until death comes, they strive to "build large barns" (think: self-storage units, pole barns, and junk rooms and rooms junked up with stuff) and say to themselves, "Soul,...relax, eat, drink, be merry," never dreaming that, at any moment, God could say to them, "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (See Luke 12:13-21)

The worldly extol what Jesus calls "making provision for the flesh," by which He means, I think, pursuing more than what we and our families need--Jesus calls it "our daily bread"--to pursue what we want.

When the worldly pursue what they want, whatever it is, they foolishly crowd out the only God, revealed in Jesus Christ, Who can give meaning to our lives here on earth and life with God beyond death.

Jesus' crucifixion proves how horrific and destructive the worldly life--sin--is. On the cross, Jesus experienced the death and condemnation that awaits anyone who insists on living this life on the basis of their own supposed wisdom and strength, by their own wits. Jesus died bearing our sinful worldliness. The Bible says that, "For our sake [God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus paid the price for human worldliness. "For the wages of sin is death," the Bible says, "but the free gift is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Through what the world consider His foolish submission to the cross, Jesus, sinless human and perfect God, paid the debt each of us owes for our worldliness and opens the way to eternity to all who will renounce their worldliness (repent for their sin) and believe in (or surrender their lives in trust to) Jesus.

When we come to faith in Christ, there begins an ongoing process that the worldly consider foolish, that those who rely on their own strength deem weak: Ongoing submission to Christ. It can be a painful process, bringing our sinful self to God to be crucified by God as we confess and trust in Christ for forgiving grace. But it's the only way to life!

Of course, we are all born worldly. We're all born looking out for number 1. Our human inclinations will always be to do what we want to do. We will even argue that a behavior that God has called sinful must be OK because we were, we claim, "born that way." It seems foolish to us to turn from behaviors that we were born inclined to pursue.

But Jesus Christ came to justify sinners, transforming those who surrender to Him from enemies of God to God's friends. Jesus did not come to justify our sins.

The God we meet in Jesus Christ is not an indulgent uncle who covers our selfish pursuits with a veneer of heavenly approval.

The only way we sinners will be justified, counted innocent and set free from the slavery of worldliness, is to submit daily to the crucifixion of our old sinful selves, so that the new self--foolish and weak in the eyes of the world, but redeemed, eternally alive through God's power and wisdom--can rise to live with God.

Through Christ and His cross and the daily crucifixion and repentance we undergo as we submit to Him as Lord, we live and see God "through a glass darkly" in this world, but perfectly on that day when, with all the risen in Christ, will see Jesus face to face.

In eternity, the difference between wisdom and foolishness will be on full display. And we will see that the lifestyle of daily repentance and renewal that the Lord Who set His Church to "turn the world upside down" commands of and commends to us, is the way of the only life worth living. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," Jesus says, "no one comes to the Father except through Me."

And He says, "If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose it for My sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" (Matthew 6:24-26a)

That's why in 1 Corinthians, part of God's inspired Word in the Bible, Paul spends a lot of time setting us straight on the difference between our wisdom and God's wisdom, between our strength and God's strength.

God's wisdom and strength, he insists, is seen in Christ, the man of tears well-acquainted with grief, and in His cross, where He bought back from sin, death, and the devil all who believe in Him.

Paul says, for example: "...the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18).

In the next verse he remembers God's promise from Isaiah in the Old Testament, "For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart'" (1 Corinthians 1:19).

And then, "...since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks [by which Paul here means Gentiles, all non-Jewish people] desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jesus and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:21-25).

My experience is that wisdom and power are more likely to be seen at the deathbed of a person who trusts Christ than they are in the halls of economic or political power, or displays of military conquest, or the ringing words of idealists touting the so-called rights of human beings.

God's power and wisdom are seen in those who are humble enough to own that they are imperfect, worldly sinners whose only hope for this life and the next is Jesus Christ.

A friend of mine, Chris Wissmann, has written her autobiography, My Life: A Testimony of His Love. There, she recounts something I've shared before about visits I paid to her husband, Sig, as he lay dying at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati. She recalls that many of us, friends of Sig and Chris, "did not want to leave because it was so peaceful. The atmosphere was God's atmosphere..." She remembers me telling her, "I don't want to leave; it is so holy in here."

Holiness is the opposite of worldliness. That person is holy who has believed in Jesus Christ. They entrust their sins, their desires, their pretensions to perfection, their arrogance to Christ, trusting that not only will He no longer hold those things against us and allow us to be eternally condemned for them, He will set us free from all the compulsions of this sinful world.

Those compulsions place demands on us. They tell us to perform, to be, as I've said in a phrase I stole from somebody, human doings, rather than human beings.

They even (always) come disguised as good things, like good works done for the applause of others instead of the glory of God; like sex to placate a pressuring partner rather than the expression marital fidelity between a husband and wife it was intended to be; like working hard to make a comfortable mark in the world instead of providing for the needs of our families and ourselves while dedicating some of the income to the work of God in the world.

True power and true wisdom is seen in Jesus and His cross. True power and true wisdom is experienced by those who follow the Christ of the cross and surrender their sins and their whole beings to Him and to the crucifixion of our inborn worldly passions and desires.

It was so that none of the people in Corinth with whom he first shared the good news, the Gospel, of Jesus, would be confused about what's truly important in the message about Jesus that Paul made a firm resolution:

"...I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified...I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of [God's] power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:2-5).

Yesterday, in a homily delivered during Mass with the College of Cardinals, the new pope, Francis 1, said,

"When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly." 

"In the cross of Christ I glory, tow'ring o'er the wrecks of time!" a Christian hymn proclaims. Follow the crucified and risen God of all creation, Jesus. Learn the power in admitting your weakness, the wisdom in acknowledging your foolishness. See how God gives the foolish and the weak His wisdom and His strength.

Thrilled by Francis' Call to Mission

Words spoken by the new Roman Catholic leader, Pope Francis 1, in an informal homily delivered to the College of Cardinals today, thrilled me. (Thrilled is not one of my usual verbs. But that's exactly how I felt.) From The Los Angeles Times account of the Mass at which Francis preached:

Stressing the power of prayer, Francis told the cardinals, "He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil. When we don't proclaim Jesus Christ, we proclaim the worldliness of the devil, the worldliness of the demon."

"When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly."

He added, "We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, all of this, but we are not disciples of the Lord."

Francis issued a strong warning to the cardinals, telling them the Catholic Church risks becoming a compassionate nongovernment organization unless it sticks to its spiritual path.

Building a solid Church, he added, was vital to stop it from crumbling like a "sand castle" built by children.

Wow! This is exactly the message that not only Roman Catholic Christians need to hear, but we Lutheran and other Christians need as well.

There is no point to the Church's existence if we don't keep on the mission given to us by Christ Himself:

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)

We Christians, as part of the larger Church (the Body of Christ, in Biblical terms), each have our missions. In fact, Peter, the man Roman Catholics say was the first pope, that Christ has saved us from sin and death not only as a gift for us to enjoy, but as a gift to share with others:

...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

Peter also tells Christians this:

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. (1 Peter 3:15-16)

It displays a profound lack of faith in Christ when church bodies or congregations give up on fulfilling the mission Christ commands and the Holy Spirit empowers us to do to, instead pursue political or social agendas. In these pursuits, they impatiently attempt to coerce others into living under their versions of the kingdom of God, rather than sharing the Gospel as Christ commands and letting Him reign, do His will, and build His Church.

Christ has said that new life comes only to those who turn from sin and believe in Him and the Good News, the Gospel, that His death and resurrection have unleashed in the world. Sharing this Good News is our mission and it is not of Christ for us to get sidetracked for human agendas. Whenever the Church forgets to keep the main thing the main thing--sharing the Gospel through Word and Sacrament--you can be sure that the devil cackles with delight. There's nothing he likes more than the Church going off-target!
 
Many of his fellow Christians won't agree with Francis on everything. For example, I have profound disagreements with the Roman Church on relying on the intervention of dead saints, such as Mary, when we are privileged to approach God directly through Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.

But I am excited that leading the largest Christian body in the world is a person who is challenging His flock to focus on the mission Christ commands all His people to pursue and trust that, as we do so, the lives of those who receive Christ by faith will be so transformed that they spend their doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God (Malachi 6:8).

My prayer is that God will help me to live such a life: a life of repentance for my sin, of gratitude that Christ died and rose for a sinner like me, of the purpose that belongs to those live life in the company of Christ, and of hope for eternity with God.