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.

Confession of Sin (Part 10, The Augsburg Confession)

Today, as we continue to look at what it means to be Lutheran Christians, we’re going to talk about confession. This subject is so important that The Augsburg Confession, one of the basic statements of our Lutheran understanding of Biblical faith, devotes two of its 28 articles to them, Articles 11 and 25.

There are several ways in which the word confession can be used, of course. But today, we’re talking about the confession of sin. Confessing our sin is essential to being a Christian. As Christians, we must let go of our sin in order to grab hold of the forgiveness of sin which the crucified and risen Jesus offers to all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

The confession of sin is so important that in His model prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses.” That’s because to continue in sin even after God has clearly shown us that we’re violating His will by doing so is to place ourselves under judgment, to separate ourselves from God, and to refuse God’s grace.

A Lutheran bishop I once knew told me how the guys in his barracks when he was in the Army would say to him and some of the other soldiers there, "You Lutherans and Catholics are all alike. You think that you can do whatever you want on Saturday nights, then say a few words of confession on Sunday mornings, and everything will be OK." The bishop told me that it's true that some Christians, even some Lutheran Christians do take such a lackadaisical attitude about their violations of the Ten Commandments and of the meaning of confession. And it's true: Some who call themselves Christians take forgiveness for granted and see it as license to do whatever they want, when they want.

But to any Christian intent on following Christ, living for Him, and receiving the blessings He reserves for those who trust in Him, such attitudes are unthinkable! To members of the first century church at Rome who wouldn’t acknowledge their sins against others, Paul wrote: “Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:4-5).

God is love, 1 John 4:8 teaches, meaning that everything God does is done from His self-giving love. 
But God’s love does not mean (and cannot) mean that He will force His forgiveness and the gift of life with Him on people who refuse those gifts.

Unless we lay our lives before God in confession of sin, we block the Holy Spirit access to our lives, keeping Him from convicting us of sin or of convincing us of the forgiveness that God wants to give to us through Jesus Christ. (This is what the Jesus calls the sin against the Holy Spirit.)  

If we want life with God, we must confess our sins to God, seeking forgiveness through Jesus, Who died and rose to set sinners free from sin and death. Since God came to earth in the Person of Jesus, belief in Jesus is the only way to life with God. (See John 3:16-18 and John 14:6, for example.)

When the evangelical reformers of the Sixteenth-century, led by Martin Luther, began their work, they did so amid a Church that wasn’t teaching in accordance with Scripture regarding the confession of sin.

You see, starting in 1215, official Church teaching was that believers were required to go to their local priest every year and confess every sin they had committed in the preceding year. If they didn’t or couldn't do so, they couldn’t receive Holy Communion. The priest could then tell the parishioner what "good works" they needed to do to make up for their sins.

The reformers looked at these practices and raised two objections.

First, they said, it’s impossible for human beings to know all their sins. They pointed to Psalm 19:12, which says: “Who can understand his errors? [Then the psalmist offers this prayer:] Cleanse me from secret faults.”

Second, the reformers said, the priest’s job is not to make up good works for a repentant sinner to do in order to be worthy of receiving Christ’s body and blood, but to declare God’s forgiveness to anyone who authentically seeks forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ. Good works are an essential part of Christian living, of course. They're the outgrowth of faith in Jesus. But good works aren’t necessary to gain God’s forgiveness.

Originally speaking to believers in Ephesus (and now to all who believe in Christ, like you and me), Ephesians 2:8-9 say: “...by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not  of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast...”

The Lutheran reformers were saying: You can’t tell a repentant believer in Jesus that their repentance and belief isn’t good enough. To do so is to render Christ’s suffering and death and His promise of forgiveness and new life to all who believe in Him irrelevant. By adding non-Biblical conditions for a repentant believer in Jesus to have forgiveness, you actually poor contempt on the cross on which Christ died and the empty tomb from which He physically arose.

The Lutheran reformers were also saying: You also can’t tell repentant sinners that they have to do good works proscribed by a human being in order to receive God’s forgiveness. To put a human being--be it a priest, a pastor, or some self-appointed holy person--above Christ, denying God’s word of forgiveness to a repentant believer, the Lutheran reformers held and we who are Lutheras today hold, was and is an abuse of the “office of the keys.”

You remember the office of the keys, right?

Just to refresh your memory, turn to Matthew 16:19. To set the stage, Peter has just confessed his belief that Jesus is both the Messiah (or the Christ), the anointed king for whom God’s people had been waiting, AND “the Son of the living God,” a phrase meaning that the Holy Spirit had led Peter to believe that Jesus was (and is) God in the flesh. Then Jesus explains a power and a responsibility that He will give His whole Church:

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

What this means is that it’s the job of the Church to tell the whole truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Lutheran confessions insist that there are two elements in the Word of God about Jesus that the Church must faithfully proclaim:

• First, we must proclaim the Law, God’s moral commandments embodied in the Ten Commandments, and explained elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments, and 
• Second, we must proclaim the Promise, the truth that in spite of our sin, all who repent for sin and believe in Jesus Christ, are saved from sin and death, given forgiveness of sin, and life everlasting with God. 

That means that the Gospel truth every unrepentant sinner needs to hear in order to have life and peace with God is that their sins are not forgiven, that they’re still dead in their trespasses, yet that can have life and forgiveness through Christ alone. It’s the Church’s responsibility to bind the unrepentant in their sin with the hope that they will confess their sins and trust in Christ.

The Gospel truth every repentant sinner needs to hear is that their sins are forgiven for the sake of Jesus Christ, Who died and rose for sinners, and that they do have life with God.

But the Reformers said, the power of the Keys, this responsibility to speak the truth in love to both repentant and unrepentant sinners is not an authorization for priests, pastors, or anyone else to impose a regimen of required good works on a repentant sinner.

Every Christian is authorized by Christ to exercise the office of keys, but they dare not add to or take away a letter or a syllable from God’s Word. As Proverbs 30:5-6 say: “Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you and you be found a liar.”

The Roman Catholic theologians of the 16th-century read what the Lutheran theologians were saying about confessing sin and were horrified!

They even accused the Lutheran Reformers of doing away with private confession of sin, which is something they never did. Nor, by the way, have we who call ourselves Lutherans in 2013 done away with private confession either. As a Lutheran Christian in 2013, we are bound by our confessions and by the teachings of the Bible to believe in private confession too!

Take a look at the first article about the confession of sin in The Augsburg Confession, one of the basic statements of we Lutherans’ understanding of Biblical Christianity. It’s Article 11:

Our churches teach that private absolution [that is, the private proclamation that sins are forgiven] should be retained in our churches, although listing all sins is not necessary for Confession....

While the Lutheran reformers certainly wanted everything to be done “in good order"(they were Germans, after all), they also wanted to set all Christians, clergy and laypeople, free to do their ministries, including the exercise of the office of the keys.

There’s good reason for allowing laypeople to exercise the power of the keys. You see, not everyone feels comfortable going to talk with their pastor about their sins. This is why the Lutheran confessions retain private confession, but don’t say that pastors are the only people to whom Christians can confess their sins.

Of course, we all can confess our sins to God in the Name of Jesus in personal prayers that don’t involve other human beings. In fact, we should confess our sins in that way every day, often.

But it’s good sometimes to have people who are devoted Christians to whom we can confide our sins and receive from them the Word about Christ’s forgiveness. It’s too easy for us to go solo as Christians, telling ourselves either that our sin is too big for God to forgive or that our sin is too insignificant to matter. But private confession and absolution can help us to see the truth and know God’s guidance in our lives.

I remember once when I had unintentionally fallen into a bad habit that I only realized after a time was a sin. One day over breakfast, I confided my sin to a friend. He heard me out, pointed out what I had done wrong. I was sad about my sin. There was a long silence as I sat there, running my fork around the surface of an empty plate, feeling sorrow for sin and wanting to be reconciled to Jesus. And then, seeing my repentance and my belief in Jesus, my friend told me, “Your sin is forgiven, Mark. Be at peace with that.”  My friend hadn't just tapped me in the should and said, "Oh, that's OK." But, like the father in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, he let me experience the full depth of my sorrow for my sin and let me express that sorrow in confession that also included regret that I had hurt the feelings of the God Who made me and gone to a cross for me. When he saw authentic confession of sin coming from me, he knew that as a Christian, it was time to loose a sinner from the straitjacket of sin and set me free to be Christ's child once more.

But there are times when we must be willing to use the office of the keys to announce that God has not forgiven a person. Several years after the incident I recounted, a woman of a former congregation came to me in tears and confessed a sinful relationship with a married man in which she had been involved for decades. “I know it’s wrong,” she told me. “But I also know that if he phones me tonight, I’ll go to him and sin again. I’m not forgiven, am I?” It would have been an abuse of the office of the keys for me to have lied to her. But I tried to put a positive spin on things. I told her, “You can be forgiven. Jesus died and rose so that you can be forgiven. But no, at present, you’re not forgiven because you don’t believe in Jesus enough to lay this sin at God’s feet and ask for forgiveness in Jesus’ Name.” I had to bound that sinner in hopes that, like the prodigal son in Jesus' parable, she would come to herself, confess her sin, and receive the assurance of God's forgiveness!  

But why, we may wonder, is it necessary for Christians to keep confessing their sins? "If we tell God once that we're sinners," we may reason, "what more can he expect of us?"

The answer is simple. None of us is perfect. I keep a written prayer journal. I now type it out on my computer, according to the ACTS formulation: A for Adoration; C for Confession; T for Thanksgiving; and S for Supplication or prayer requests. Personally, when I look back on my confessions of sin that I offered one year ago or two years ago, I find myself confessing the same stupid sins to God now. I may be bring those same sins and same sinful inclinations before God for forgiveness for as long as I live. The only time I should get worried is if I stop confessing that sin, even if that sin is still something I turn to. I'll need God's forgiveness and help in seeking to live a life pleasing to Him as long as I'm on this earth.

When we confess our sins to God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We confess, “God, this sin is bigger than me. But You are bigger than my sin. Cover my sin in the forgiveness Jesus bears for those who repent and believe in Him.” The God Who took on flesh, died on a cross, and rose from the dead in the Person of Jesus Christ is always glad to answer that prayer!


But when we confess our sins in the presence of other Christians, whether in private confession with one trusted Christian or during public worship, God helps those of us who walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:6-7), to hear Christ’s words of forgiveness that we can’t hear when we're just praying to God personally on our knees.

Words like: “In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Christ was given to die for you, and for His sake God forgives you all your sins. To those who believe in Jesus Christ He gives the power to become the children of God and bestows on them the Holy Spirit.” They’re good words to hear!

In Psalm 32, David says that before he confessed his sins, his “body wasted away...for day and night [God’s] hand was heavy upon him..” But then, he tells God, “I acknowledged my sin to you...I did not hide my iniquity...and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”

Whenever we confess our violations of God’s will--in our personal prayer time, in confidence to a trusted Christian friend, or in public worship--confession is the road to the healing of relationship with God that God wants all of us to know.

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, and our friends and guests on Sunday.]

"I came to Harvard seeking Veritas. Instead, he found me."

A one-time atheist describes her journey in faith in Christ.

I don't want to gain the whole world...

...and lose my soul.


Here's the original recording, featuring Kirk Franklin:

Open Our Eyes, Lord

How God's Grace Frees Us to Love God's Law

Lutheran Christians, as you may know, love to say that we are saved by God's grace through our faith in Jesus Christ and not by good works. It's a truth that is freeing!

But some take this Biblical truth to mean that God's law, the ten commandments and all the places that amplify and explain them in the Bible, is a bad thing.

But not according to Martin Luther, whose teaching and preaching started the Lutheran movement and the Reformation.

In his newest book, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse, Robert W. Jenson points out Luther began both The Small Catechism and The Large Catechism (the first for laypersons, the second for clergy, with a discussion of the law.

And Luther talked about the commandments in his Large Catechism explanation of the Apostles' Creed, where this statement appears:

The faith...makes us pious and pleasing to God; for through this confession we acquire a desire and affection for all God's commandments.

Says Jenson:

...according to Luther, the reason faith makes us pleasing to God is that it lets us love the law. Faith does not excuse us from the commandments, it makes obeying them a joy, such as is expressed in so many psalms and such as God likes to see in his creatures.

I doubt very much that Luther would be on board with the contempt for God's commands that is in vogue in many contemporary mainline denominations in North America and western Europe.

The denigration of God's moral law, seeing it as irrelevant, inoperative, or even bad, is, so far as I can see, an old false teaching that seems to always be cropping up in Christian circles. The name of this heresy is antinomianism. It argues that because of Christ, Christians are exempt from keeping God's law, even though many of the letters of Paul, the apostle of grace, argues against it.

God's Law, the moral commandments of God, are not the vestiges of a primitive religion, as some smarty pants argue today, but the statement of God's will for all human beings who live on earth until the day of the risen and ascended Jesus' return.

Happily for us, Jesus, perfect God and perfect human, obeyed God's Law perfectly and by His death and resurrection, has erased the Law's power to condemn those who repent and receive the gift of faith in Him.

And when we have faith in Christ, the law, which once only served to hem in our sinful inclinations or to show us, by our inability to obey its commands, how desperately we needed the grace that comes from Christ alone, is transformed for us.

Through Christ, the Law becomes a delight to us, freeing us to spend each day in repentance and renewal through Jesus Christ, as we seek to live according to the Law by which human beings were made by God to truly and fully live!

So, think about that: We are justified by grace through faith in Jesus Christ...because faith in Christ plants a love for God's Law that makes us acceptable to God.

Through faith in Christ, God sets out to sync our hearts, wills, and minds with the heart, will, and mind of God and like the psalmist, we can say: "Happy are those...[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law they meditate day and night" (Psalm 1:1-2).

"Hotter Than All the Fifty Shades of the World"

A "holy tension": The wonder and the meaning of God's gift of sexual intimacy to husbands and wives.

Megan Hill writes:

When our marriage bed sinks low, barely visible under crumpled laundry and half-read books, the Evil One [the devil] scores a victory. So we meet the challenge. We persist in writing tender notes, and giving gifts, and making love: strategic maneuvers against the Devil's drift. We hold the marriage bed high, honoring our pleasurable commitments there, to buttress ourselves against marital malady and nothing less serious than its death.

And:

For non-Christians, the ultimate meaning of these symbols is love itself. Love: part emotion, part fantasy, part pleasure. A passionate equivalent to the iTunes Cloud, to which all human love songs and poetry and feelings are collectively entrusted.

For Christians, the symbols mean so much more. This mystery is profound.

In the tenderness, the holy jealousy, the delight, we mean to show Christ and his church. In the oneness, the sacrifice, the nourishing and cherishing, our weak symbols become something greater.

Read the whole thing.

"Keep Calm and Carry On"

Eric Swensson links to a short, beautiful video about the simple image and words from a World War Two-vintage poster that was never used then, but is having such an impact on people today.

Confused by Seth Godin

Internet guru Seth Godin is a smart guy, I'm told. And I've got no reason to doubt it.

But this post by Godin, The worst feedback is indifference, struck me as funny.

In it, he says that those who generate social media content, like blog posts, shouldn't dread "the cutting remark, the ad hominem attack." "No," he says, "the worst sort of feedback is no feedback at all. That means we've created nothing but banality."

But if feedback is so good, why doesn't Godin's blog allow for comments?

I'm confused.

The Future

Remember The Population Bomb? It was published in 1968 and was not only popular, but accepted as irrefutable truth by many thoughtful people during my college years, 1971-1975. The book's thesis was, as a Wikpedia article on the subject says, that there would be "mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals." Because of this impending crisis, the book "advocated immediate action to limit population growth."

But, guess what? The "population explosion" didn't happen. Wednesday's Harvard Business Review Daily Stat delves into why the dire predictions of shortages resulting from overpopulation didn't come about.

MARCH 6, 2013

Whew! How We Dodged the Bullet on Global Starvation

How did the world survive the 20th-century population explosion, which many had expected to lead to mass starvation? Agricultural innovation contributed to a 10% rise in per-capita food production from 1961 to 1980, and greater global trade and a population shift to cities helped the world absorb billions more people, David Lam of the University of Michigan writes in Demography. The population boom was triggered by rapidly falling death rates, but the subsequent global decline in birth rates means that the world's population, now at 7 billion, may soon stabilize and may never reach as high as 12 billion, Lam says.

Source: How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons From 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History

Casey Stengel was right: It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Does that mean that scientists--social as well as physical--should refrain from speculating about the implications about ongoing trends? Or that we should stop paying attention to them?

Of course not!

But I think that we shouldn't ascribe infallibility to pronouncements about the future made by any human being, no matter how well trained, thoughtful, and credible they may be.

As a Christian, I want to make responsible decisions about my life, my actions, and my votes.

So, when I hear what knowledgeable people tell me about the federal debt and its implications for the future or what climatologists say about global warming, to name two examples, I don't stick my head in the sand or go into panic mode. I consider, do what I can, and move on with my life.

This is possible because as a believer in Jesus Christ, I'm assured that I belong to the God Who is in the process of making a new future for His creation. And, because of the grace of God received by all who believe in Jesus, I get to be part of it!

Even with all my sin, faults, and imperfections, God is teaching me to pray with King David:

...I trust in You, O Lord;
I say, "You are my God."
My times are in Your hand...

[Psalm 31:14-15] 

Baseball's Greatness Captured

Lots of people tell me they don't like baseball because it's "too slow," "not enough action," "boring."

To me, that's all hooey!

I know that it's just a TV commercial, but this new ad from Dick's Sporting Goods, well captures the greatness of baseball. To those who have fallen in love with the game, every single pitch of every game packs all the drama and tension, each pitch calling for the sudden, thunderous action of a basketball overtime or football sudden death.

That's true even when there are no runners on the base paths. It's even true when teams are way behind their opponents in the late innings. You can never tell what might happen in a game in which the defense has possession of the ball!

Baseball is, in my book, the greatest game ever invented. THE. MOST. EXCITING. GAME. And I am so excited that spring training games are already being played!

Strange

I'm not sure what to make of this research at all. Does it add up to you?

MARCH 5, 2013

To Improve Your Math-Test Score, Write About Your Emotions First

Female research participants who were instructed to write about their current emotions for five minutes subsequently got an average of 15% more math problems right than other women, say Kathleen C. Burns of the University of Wisconsin and Stacy L. Friedman of the University of Massachusetts. The finding is in accord with past research showing that emotional expression has broad positive effects. It's unclear whether simply talking about feelings—as opposed to writing about them—before taking a test could also improve performance, the researchers say.

Source: The benefits of emotional expression for math performance

"Come Acropper"

Writer Gay Ingram blogs about the derivations of everyday expressions. Here, she tells us where the phrase, come acropper, comes from. You'll fall for it head over heels.

Holy Communion (Part 9, The Augsburg Confession)

[This was shared during both worship services with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

This morning, we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Our topic today is what we Lutherans believe about Holy Communion. To understand what Lutherans confess about Communion, it helps to consider how we have historically read the Bible.

The entire Lutheran movement is rooted in taking the Bible’s witness about God, including both the Old and New Testaments, seriously. Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic priest and scholar whose work with the Bible led him to discover anew the truth that human beings are saved from inevitable sin and death by God's grace through their faith in Jesus Christ alone and to the Reformation and the Lutheran movement wrote:

No violence is to be done to the words of God, whether by man or angel; but [the Scriptures] are to be retained in their simplest meaning wherever possible, and to be understood in their grammatical and literal sense unless the context plainly forbids it. 

More than one Lutheran pastor and theologian through the centuries has said that Lutheran Christians take the Bible as it comes, seeking to avoid imposing the preferences, prejudices, and prevailing philosophies of their own times on God’s eternal word.

So, for example, when a Lutheran views passages that say, “The mountains skipped like rams,” or “Let the hills sing for joy,” Lutherans don’t believe that mountains skipped or hills sang. Clearly, the Biblical writers in these instances were speaking metaphorically.

And the Bible “comes at us” with many forms of literary expression: history, poetry, song, wise adages, prophecy, and strange apocalyptic literature, to name a few.

There are passages of Scripture that are clear works of fiction, as in Jesus’ parables, stories Jesus made up to make important points. That’s why a Lutheran traveling in the Holy Land would never fall for the advertising of a hotel between Jerusalem and Jericho claiming to the be the inn at which the good Samaritan deposited the wounded man from Jesus’ parable about what it means to love one’s neighbor.

But Lutheran Christians have also historically believed that when the Bible witnesses to events with seriousness and consistency in places that don’t purport to be metaphor or parable, the plain sense of a passage is always to be preferred. This is why Lutheran Christians have historically never shied away from confessing that Jesus was born, miraculously, of a virgin’s womb; that He performed miracles as signs of His being God, with dominion over life and death; that He died on a cross for our sins; that He actually physically rose from the dead; and that faith in this Lord of heaven and earth is, as Jesus insisted repeatedly during His earthly ministry, the only way to forgiveness of sin and eternal life with God.

The documents we Lutherans have always said express our understanding of what it means to be Christians--from the Apostles’ Creed to The Augsburg Confession, from the Small Catechism to the Smalcald Articles--have always insisted that those facts about God and salvation that Scripture insists to be absolutely true are facts and truths we absolutely believe. While today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has never repudiated this Lutheran understanding of Biblical truth, you will find that many of our pastors, theologians, bishops, and others do repudiate things like things like the virgin birth, the physical resurrection from the dead, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, expressed in conferences, assemblies, official papers, and publications by our own publishing house and no one in the hierarchy of our denomination steps in to say, “No, actually, this is what Lutheran Christians confess.”

All of which leads us to Holy Communion and a simple verb, is.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 14:22. Three of the gospel writers and Paul write about Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion. And while John doesn't mention the institution of either Baptism or Communion, the two sacraments of the Church, He starts His account of Jesus’ ministry with the miracle of turning water into wine, symbolic of Baptism and and Communion, and describes how, within moments of Jesus’ death, a sword was driven through His side and out came water and blood. So, we can conclude that both sacraments are important. Look at what we’re told by Mark about the night when Jesus instituted Holy Communion: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.” Then, look at verse 24, where Jesus says, “This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shared for many.”

Our Roman Catholic friends read this passage and, employing the Aristotelian philosophy favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas who was influenced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, say that in Communion, bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood and remain so beyond a congregation’s time of worship. This is why the bread is stored in a box called a tabernacle next to the altars of Roman Catholic sanctuaries.

Our Protestant friends say that the bread and the wine represent Christ’s body and blood and that Communion is a time, not to be re-membered to Christ and His Church of every time and place, as we believe, but only to recall what Jesus has done for us, a ceremonial memorial.

Lutherans have historically said, in effect, “It all depends on what your definition of is is.”

We believe that the bread is Christ’s body because Jesus says it is His body.

We believe that the wine is Christ’s blood because Jesus says it is His blood.

We believe that Christ’s body and blood are in, with, and under the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.

We have no way of understanding or explaining it. If we could explain it, we ourselves would be God...and we're not!

We only have Christ’s promise that when His words of promise, what we call the Words of Institution, are said again over the bread and the wine as His people worship, He comes to us again.

Holy Communion is a way that the risen Jesus, now ascended into heaven, can come to us and assure us of the truth of His promise that He is with us always, that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

It’s though Jesus is telling us, “I know that it’s hard to believe in Me or My promises when you can’t see me. But here’s My body. Here’s My blood. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. See my wounds, touch my body. I am with you.”

Someone has said that Holy Communion is like “the hat on the invisible man.” If a man were invisible, you might not know he was around unless he put on a hat. We can’t see Jesus. But when we invoke His words of promise over bread and wine, He really is with us.

But Holy Communion is more than just an assurance of Christ’s presence with us, wonderful though that is. For those who trust in Christ when He says that He is in the bread and is in the wine, there is also assurance that His forgiveness of our sins--sins which would otherwise send us to eternal separation from God in hell--is ours.

Turn, please, to John 1:29. Early in Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist catches sight of Jesus and says: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

Before Jesus came into the world, God’s people would annually sacrifice unblemished lambs on the altar in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for themselves. The lambs died to take the punishment for sin that every human being deserves. The ancient Hebrews understood that blood had power. It contained the very power for life. Loss of too much blood brings loss of life. Blood is life.

That’s why, after Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, killed his brother Abel, God said that Abel’s blood was crying out to Him.

Many millenia later, when God’s people were slaves in Egypt, God delivered them from slavery through an action that, to this day, Jews celebrate at Passover. They smeared the blood of lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings and while the angel of death brought the deaths of firstborns all across Egypt, the angel passed over the homes of the Jews.

In a sense, as we receive Christ’s blood in Holy Communion, we are covered by the sacrifice of Himself that Christ made when He willingly went to the cross for us. The blood of Jesus cries out for us to say to God the Father, “This man belongs to Me. This woman is one of My own. This child is My child.”

This is why we should never receive the Sacrament flippantly or with anything other than the joy and reverence it deserves. I’m not saying here that you must affect a particular emotion in order to receive the bread and the wine. Fortunately, the power of Holy Communion doesn’t depend on how we’re feeling on any given day. Whether you’re sad or happy has no bearing on Christ’s promises, “This is my body”; “This is my blood.” But the Sacrament must be received with faith, even if that faith is only the size of a mustard seed. We must be willing to trust Christ when He promises that He is with us and that He brings us forgiveness of sin when He comes to us in the Sacrament.

This is what Paul is talking about when he says in 1 Corinthians: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

Please open the buff and brown edition of The Augsburg Confession and turn to Article 10, "The Lord’s Supper":

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat the Lord’s Supper...They reject those who teach otherwise. 

Holy Communion is one of the greatest gifts a Christian can receive, which is why the people in the early Church received it every single time they worshiped.

It’s why Martin Luther and the early Lutherans received Holy Communion every single Sunday they worshiped. Luther also offered it every single Wednesday of every week and on other occasions as well.

It was only in America, where there was a shortage of pastors, that every Sunday celebration of Holy Communion fell into disuse.

If a church has a regularly called minister of a Word and Sacrament and Holy Communion isn’t being celebrated every single week, that church is a bit like a motorcycle with one wheel, trying to move along with only one of the blessings God intends to give His people every time they gather to worship Him.

But no matter how often the Sacrament is shared, if those who receive Holy Communion don’t believe in Jesus, believe in the Word of God in the Bible, or believe in Christ’s promises regarding Holy Communion, the elements are only bread and wine.

As Luther says in the Small Catechism, we must believe in Christ’s promise, “Given and shed for you.”

When we do, we are blessed beyond all telling!

5 Things to Do When You Get Bad News

Whether it's learning that someone at work has betrayed you, that you're being downsized out of a job, or that strange symptom you've been suffering has yielded a frightening diagnosis from the doctor, we all get bad news. What should you do when you get bad news? Here are five suggestions, gleaned from the Bible.

1. Talk it over with God. As a Christian, I believe that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ in order to take the punishment we deserve for our sins--death--and to rise again in order to open up eternity with God to all who turn from sin and turn to Jesus as their only hope. Jesus says: "Come to Me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

Whenever we receive bad news, we can churn with frenzy, a sure recipe for making bad decisions. Instead, go to the God we know through Jesus. Tell Him what you're going through. Spend time with Him. The bad news won't go away. But God will give you the peace and power you need to face it.

Talking things over with God when we get bad news isn't just about dumping our woes on Him. Prayer isn't a monologue. To pray also means spending time reading God's Word, letting Him speak to us. In the New Testament we're told: "All scripture [which we now know as the Old and New Testaments] is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God [that happens through faith in Christ] may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

2. Seek the advice of faithful Christian friends. Proverbs 15:22 says: "Without counsel, plans go wrong, but with many advisers they succeed."

God has especially granted to every member of the local church particular spiritual gifts. He does this, we're taught, "To each [Christian believer] is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7). So, if you're a Christian, remember that in your local congregation, whatever its size, there's likely to be someone gifted by God to help your or advise you on how best to address your bad news.

But even when there are no ready strategies, God gives the fellowship of the Church to lighten our burdens. Referring to the second portion of Jesus' great command that we love others as we love ourselves, Paul tells Christians: "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

When we share and bear each other's burdens, those burdens get easier to bear and we draw strength from one another. "Two are better than one...For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help...A threefold cord is not easily broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

3. Make plans, but don't let your planning turn into worry about tomorrow. The Bible tells us that it's wise to make plans (Luke 14:31), but we should be ready for the curve balls that come at us in this imperfect world. We also need to be ready for God's vetoes of our plans.

James writes in the New Testament: "...you do not even know what tomorrow will bring...Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:14-15).

Jesus says, "...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today" (Matthew 6:34).

Make plans, but take each day as it comes.

4. In the midst of troubles, let God love you. Jesus' death and resurrection were for you. The good news that Jesus wants to give you life with God, not just after you die and leave this world, but right now, trumps all bad news. You may feel powerless; but when you let God love you, bad news is powerless to destroy your hope, peace, or joy.

When you surrender your life, including all your troubles and your sins, to Jesus and let them be covered by His grace and goodness, you'll live each day in the assurance that nothing can separate you from the love God gives through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:31-39).

5. Remember that God won't let go of you; so, don't you let go of God! Millions of believers in Jesus Christ have endured all sorts of troubles, experiencing what the Bible calls "the peace that passes all understanding" (Philippians 4:7).

You can know that peace too. In Deuteronomy 31:6, God promised His people, and in Hebrews 13:5, He promised again to all people who believe in Him through Jesus Christ, that He will never leave or forsake us.

That promise is like a blank check from God written to be used you whenever you get hit by bad news. Cash it!

I Think You'd Call This Abusing the System

My guess is that researchers would find a lot of "grocery story miracles" if they conducted similar research at a Kroger or Walmart.

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

Many Airport Wheelchair Requesters Are Just Sick of Standing in Line

15% of wheelchair requests at Los Angeles International Airport—about 300 requests per day—are bogus, according to officials quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Able-bodied travelers like to use wheelchairs to get to the front of security lines or because they want a wheelchair assistant to help them with their bags. Travelers who stand up and walk away after the wheelchair has served its purpose are known as "miracles" to the staff of helpers, the newspaper says.

Source: Long Lines Lead to Rise of Wheelchair 'Miracles'

Proofreading Lessons

I do a fair amount of writing. In addition to sermons, there are occasional articles for local newspapers, emails and notes to parishioners and others, those 140-character epistles on Twitter (known as Tweets), and the posts that appear here.

But, true confession: I don't think that I've ever been satisfied with anything I've ever written. Ever.

In fact, if, for whatever reason, I run across old blog posts, after I cringe at finding grammatical errors or unclear writing in the pieces, I will edit them. I do it even if they're more than a decade old and unlikely to ever be read again.

This piece from PBS' Mediashift, gives ten lessons aimed at people who self-publish e-books. But they're good rules for anyone who writes things they hope others will be able to understand.

To me, #10 is the most sensible lesson of all.

'Lifeboat'

This great bit of satire was written and performed by Steve Taylor, a guy I wish would do more records, back in 1985.

It does a great job of sending up and boiling down "lifeboat ethics" of the kind we see in the proposal to euthanize those with dementia John Schroeder mentions in the post just below this one.


 Do more records, Steve!

One Voice Opposed to Euthanizing Dementia-Sufferers

John Schroeder, whose father died in car crash five years ago, talks about his mother's dementia and the proposals of one movement to bring euthanasia to the victims of dementia:

There are two ways to look at my mother - a mindless eating and pooping machine requiring constant attention - or - a living human of diminished capacity. Why is it we lavish love on babies who are also eating and pooping machines, why is it we work hard to care for those of diminished capacity not old, but when the diminished capacity is the road to certain death, we throw them in the warehouse and pray for a quick death.

You either value life or you do not. Even within the range of "normal" some lives are more worthy than others. As soon as we start making decisions based on whose life is better, or more worthy we place ourselves in God's place - we blaspheme in a very real fashion. It is a sin, pure and simple.

Amen!

Read the whole thing.