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Concordia Journal
Concordia Seminary
801 Seminary Place
St. Louis, MO 63105
COncordia
Journal
Fall 2014
volume 40 | number 4
Fall 2014
Helpers of Joy
Encomia: Robert Weise & Bruce Hartung
Christ Coming To Us:
Luther’s Rhetoric of Location
Engaging Our Culture Faithfully
COncordia
Journal
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assistant editor
Dale A. Meyer
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L UTHERAN B IBLE C OMPANION
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COncordia
J ournal
CONTENTS
EDITORIALs
277
Editor’s Note
278 Helpers of Joy
Dale A. Meyer
280 Encomium for Rev. Dr. Robert Weise
Matthew Behrens
281 Encomium for Rev. Dr. Bruce Hartung
Troy Countryman
ARTICLES
285 Christ Coming To Us:
A. Trevor Sutton
292 Engaging Our Culture Faithfully
Harold Senkbeil
317
HOMILETICAL HELPS
341
BOOK REVIEWS
Fall 2014
editoRIALS
COncordia
Journal
Editor’s Note
The articles of this issue of Concordia Journal could be loosely themed around
questions of culture.
The word “culture” is a word that, if we’re not careful, can quickly get up and
walk around on us. What do we mean when we say “culture”? Is it what we mean when
we juxtapose it to what we mean when we call something “church” (or, if we are quoting H. Richard Niebuhr, “Christ”)? Is it what we loosely define as North American
society? Capitol Hill? Hollywood? Fox News? The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? The NFL?
Or is it whatever we mean when we define ourselves against it, as when we say “counter-cultural”? And what do we make of the fact that the church is its own culture too?
I suspect that, all too often, the word “culture” has become another wax nose,
fashioned into whatever it is we need it to mean in whatever argument we need to
make it. I often find myself drawn to definitions of culture that illuminate the systems
or networks by which human beings and their communities find and make meaning.
Construed this way, cultures are multifaceted, complex, often evolving and devolving
at the same time. And to understand them requires what Clifford Geertz called “thick
description,” the ability to explicate the depth of cultural symbols and significance, to
see what is really at work in our various cultural interactions, both on the surface and
underneath it. The assumption, of course, is that religion, anthropologically speaking, is
one of the primary networks for meaning-making, for how it helps its adherents make
sense of the world. Religion is so much more than that, but we do well to remember
that it is that too.
Religion is a culture.
This means that it is really impossible to be truly separate from culture. It is
ubiquitous. Which makes me wonder if the greatest challenge for the church in culture
today isn’t in how it defines itself for or against “culture” per se, but in how it interacts
within a complex web of particular cultures (emphasis on the s). It strikes me that we
often assume there is still one dominant “culture” within society when in fact, on the
ground, human beings find themselves within any number of dispersed cultural webs
that produce meaning for their lives. We choose some of those cultures; some of them
are chosen for us. In this sense, the church has to grapple with how to express and
live out its own particularity within a muddled web of particularities, where no particular “culture” has a monopoly on how meaning is made. This will inevitably mean
that there will be times and places when we embrace culture and when we resist it.
Sometimes we will be doing both at the same time.
Of course, this also means that I always have to be ready to check my assumptions at the door. I have to remind myself that perhaps everything I just wrote is its
own wax nose. “Never be wise in your own sight” (Rom 12:16b). Therein lies the rub.
Travis J. Scholl
Managing Editor of Theological Publications
Concordia Journal/Fall 2014
277
Helpers of Joy
President Meyer preached the following for the opening of the 2014–2015 academic year.
Not that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy, for by
faith you stand. (2 Cor 1:24 KJV)
It is my privilege and pleasure to welcome you to Concordia Seminary. I invite you
to “Come.” Come with faculty, come with staff, come with other seminarians, come with
alumni, come and have here a life-enriching experience. As I start, let me plant in your mind
the picture of an aircraft carrier. Come, come with us and come onboard the USS Concordia.
Come onboard and experience the depth and height and breadth of following Jesus
Christ in the world the way the world is today. Come with us and learn the depth of sin.
Some of you will meet Steve, a Christian worker in one of the worst parts of the city. Steve
can tell you about a man who gave his daughter to a friend to be prostituted. As she went
off, the father whispered in his daughter’s ear, “This will help daddy pay the rent.” The depth
of sin and the depth of our own sin, yours and mine! As deep and dark as the ocean is, your
sinful heart is deeper and darker. “Who can discern his errors?” (Ps 19:12). That’s why we
want you to come with us and experience the height of the good news of Jesus Christ. As
the Seminary motto puts it, experience “The Light from Above,” anothen to phos. The gospel
comes from out of us, from on high, down into the darkness and depths of the world. This
precious gospel that brings light and immortality to light emanates from the highest ground
on campus, from this chapel. And come with us and experience the breadth of mission; how
wide the mission field is! Your experiences in residential field education, institutional modules,
vicarage, cross-cultural classes in this country and in the world, should lead you to humility, to
realize how precious little we know. But the little we know is precious and we want to share
it with the world. So come, come with us, come onboard the Concordia as we together experience what it means to follow Jesus Christ in this troubled world.
Over the years I have observed many congregational cultures. Every place has its own
culture, its own attitudes, conducts, spoken and unspoken ways of doing things. For example,
the family with an abusive parent has a culture, a harmful culture that perpetuates itself from
generation to generation. Congregations have their own cultures as well. I was invited once to
preach in a church in Illinois. I got there a bit early and walked into the narthex with my alb
on my arm. There were two or three small clusters of people in the narthex, and not one of those
people came up and greeted me! I stood there like a leper holding my white leper’s robe. I started
to sense the culture of that congregation and the rest of the morning confirmed my sense. It
was a culture that I didn’t want to be in, except that I had to be there to preach. Concordia
Seminary has its own culture. It’s not spelled out in the academic catalog, the student handbook or course syllabi. Our culture is not in our mission statement or vision statement or
core values, although they should all reflect the culture. Culture is something you sniff out,
you sense it, you experience it, and in time you start to reflect it. That’s key. The culture you
experience here is a culture that we hope you will engender and grow in the congregations to
which the church will one day send you.
278
How shall we characterize a healthy culture? St. Paul says, “All the promises of God
find their yes in Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 1:20). A healthy seminary and a health church have a
culture of “yes”! Not “yes” to everything you and I want, not “yes” to all A’s, not “yes” to
failing to meet deadlines, not “yes” to a lack of budget discipline. A healthy culture is a a culture of “yes” to the promises of God. All the promises of God are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
The promise from Ezekiel 18:20, “The soul who sins shall die” is fulfilled by Jesus Christ
in his sacrificial death. The promise of Psalm 118:17, “I shall not die but live,” is fulfilled by
Jesus Christ in his resurrection, he the firstfruits of them that sleep. “Commit your way to
the Lord; trust in him, and he will act” (Ps 37:5) is fulfilled in Jesus Christ and by his Spirit.
And so it goes throughout scripture. All the promises of God are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The
things that you will learn—preaching, teaching, leading worship, exegesis, systematics, history—all will be in vain unless you go about it with your head and heart fixed on Jesus Christ.
We want to grow into the devotion the psalmist voiced: “Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but
God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps 73:25–26).
We have to work at this together. That’s why St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, it’s
“not that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers,” coworkers with you for your
faith. “Faith” is a slippery word, easily misunderstood. One of the goals that you must have
at the Seminary is to learn to explain theological jargon in a way that people can understand.
Faith means hanging on to the promises of God, hanging on to his promises for dear life,
because your life literally depends upon the promises of God to you in Jesus Christ. You
have only one soul and it is precious. Your life literally depends upon what we’re talking
about here. As we work together for faith, students, faculty, staff—and I stress again that we
must all work together at this because faith is the most important thing for your soul and for
mine—we will be a community than can be characterized as “Helpers of Joy.” Dr. Martin
Luther beautifully described faith and joy in his Preface to the Romans.
Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the
believer would stake his life on it a thousand times. This knowledge of and confidence in
God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and with all creatures. And this is the work which the Holy Spirit performs in faith.
So let me wrap up by going back to the picture of an aircraft carrier. I’m inviting you
to come with us, come experience a gospel-dominated culture, come contribute to a culture
based on Jesus, the “yes” to all God’s promises, come onboard the USS Concordia. What is
the mission of an aircraft carrier? Don’t come up with military jargon and, please, no theologizing about war and two kingdoms. Just plain layman talk. What is the mission of an aircraft
carrier? Isn’t it to launch airplanes? (Thanks to Rev. Tim Klinkenberg for this illustration.)
It’s not to stand around and talk about the superstructure of the ship. It’s not
to get into endless theological debates about what the hangar below deck looks like or
whether you can trust the radar. The mission of an aircraft carrier is to launch planes.
Welcome to Concordia! You’re here to be launched into a world that desperately needs
Jesus Christ. You are here to be launched as Helpers of Joy! Yes, sir? Yes, sir! Amen.
Dale A. Meyer
President
279
Encomium
for Rev. Dr. Robert Weise
Dr. Weise is a white-haired man with a Robin Williams smile who can change
subjects in conversation faster than I can switch gears on an incline. Through biking, I
got to know Dr. Weise before I ever had him as a professor. He and Dr. Kloha were
coaches for Concordia Seminary Cycling. I remember our first race as a team on a cold,
rainy Saturday morning somewhere in western Kentucky. We spent the night before
sleeping on the floors of a nearby LCMS church, got up early, and sat in our cars trying to stay warm prior to the race. Dr. Weise supplied everyone with toe warmers,
gloves, leggings, and anything else that might keep us warm on our bike. I’m certain he
brought out every piece of cold weather cycling clothing he owned. But that’s the kind
of person he was, and is. He’s a man who wants to share. If Dr. Weise has something
that can help, he wants you to benefit. That’s the heart of a teacher. That’s a heart shaped by a relationship with Jesus.
That’s the heart I’ve seen in Bob Weise.
Dr. Weise, thank you. Thank you for sharing openly and honestly, and giving
your students insight into your life so that we could begin to shape a picture for our
own lives as pastors. What you’ve shared is not forgotten. Some things are remembered
because they’re funny. How could phrases like “hot-tub theology” and the “too-tight
collar circuit” be forgotten? Some things are remembered because they’re practical, like
wearing a simple cross when presiding at a wedding so that it can become a gift to the
bride and groom, or buying Happy Meals just for the toys so that you have a stash of
“entertainment” for kids when mom and dad need to meet with the pastor. And, some
things are remembered because they revealed your heart: You told us that before falling asleep you would reach over, grab your wife’s hand, and pray for her. You told us
about counseling with men struggling with same-sex attraction and the need to walk
with people in difficult places. You told us when you were a student you kept Friday
nights free of jobs and homework in order to be with your family, and you encouraged
us to prioritize our families as well. Your students learned from the textbooks, but I
remember best what you shared from your life. Thank you.
Those gathered here might not know that Dr. Weise went to school at Eastern
Illinois University as a scholarship athlete. He was a distance runner and stuck with it
for many years. He started biking—and I for one am selfishly thankful—because it was
easier on his knees. He had a passion for exercise and competition, but there came a
time in life to take a different approach. In a way, that’s what is happening now. It’s
time to take a different approach. Dr. Weise still has a passion for the gospel. He has a
passion to teach. He has a passion to share. He’s got something that can help, and he
wants others to benefit. The approach will be a little different, but Dr. Weise has been,
and will continue to be, a blessing to God’s people as a resource, writer, teacher, pastor,
and friend.
Matthew Behrens
Hot Springs, Arkansas
280
Encomium
for Rev. Dr. Bruce Hartung
Over the last nine years, Dr. Bruce Hartung has been a gift of our heavenly
Father for me personally, my immediate family, and my church family. At various
times, he has been for me a teacher, counselor, pastor, father figure, colleague, and
friend.
I’ve got to tell you, especially because I’m writing a tribute to a man that values
“communities of authentic encounter,” that I hold paradoxical emotions in tension at
Bruce’s retirement from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. On one side rests sadness and
a bit of fear (or in Bruce’s language, anxiety) because I don’t know how his retirement
will affect our “walking together” in an immediate sense. Nonetheless, the other side
bubbles over with joy and appreciation for my beloved brother in the Lord as we celebrate his service at Concordia Seminary and beyond. It is my joy and honor to reflect
on how Bruce has challenged me, walked alongside me, and loved me.
Bruce has challenged me, and all of his students at Concordia Seminary, and I
will use his own words to describe what I believe to be the impetus for this challenge:
“Don’t keep everything inside. Get your emotional reactions from the inside to the outside. In baptism, we are brought into a new relationship with God and into new relationships with each other. God has put us together for mutual support. Use it!”1
My first extended encounter with Bruce occurred while a second-year student
here in the Concordia Seminary community. Our initial conversation was required
as part of the coursework for one of Bruce’s elective classes, Pastoral Care and the
Human Experience. Bruce challenged any overly idealized notions of pastoral ministry
when he assigned books like Trauma and Evil, Healers—Harmed and Harmful, and Clergy
Killers. Uniquely, Bruce also asked students to meet with him for an extended conversation as requirement for the course. Bruce oozed authenticity as we sat across from one
another at the now familiar round table in his office. He challenged me even in that
first meeting. As I remember it, toward the end of our sixty-minute conversation he
confessed that he was surprised that I was not as aloof and disinterested a student as
his initial impression of me. Thank you, Bruce, for your authenticity!
My ensuing journey with Bruce has not only been filled with utility, but also surprising beauty. Bruce encouraged and maybe to some extent, pushed me, a left-brained,
analytical type, to begin to peer into the aspects of my life that would have otherwise
gone unnoticed or uninspected. While formerly I may have predominantly rationalized
the bulk of situations and emotions in my life, Bruce encouraged and equipped me to
wrestle, to consider, and to process. I’m not certain how to say it more eloquently, but
he has ministered to me and affirmed me as a whole human being—head and heart,
body and soul.
In this spirit, Bruce has embodied and personified incarnational ministry as he
has walked alongside me and other professional church workers in the body of Christ.
Again, I’m going to use Bruce’s own words here:
281
It has taken a lot of work to identify what I feel and actually think. It has
taken even more work to share with others some of my experiences. In
the process, I have begun to understand that all human beings have a deep
need for authentic connection. Isn’t this authentic connection the very
nature of the Christian community? We grow as people in the context of
relationship with others. As others engage with me at the deeper levels of
my being, I am touched, moved, and, by God’s grace, grow.2
If Bruce had only walked alongside me during my formative time as a student at
Concordia Seminary I would still hold a debt of gratitude; however, what is more wonderful, remarkable, and valuable for me is that Bruce has continued to walk alongside
me during my first six years as a parish pastor. He has ministered to me during what
feels like waves of personal and professional trial and struggle.
In the reality of journeying together as the church, St. Paul exhorts Christians
in Ephesians 5, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”
(Eph 5:1–2 ESV). Interwoven in the resulting intimacy of consecrated challenge and
walking alongside me is Bruce’s love for me, for the church, and for Christ Jesus.
I am a living testimony to how Bruce has not only educated, or shaped, but also
supported and loved a church worker in both word and deed. In short, I would not be
the parish pastor that I am today without Bruce Hartung. Equally important, no, more
important, I would not be the husband, father, son, and child of God that I am today
without Bruce’s influence on my life.
Although I’ve been asked to share this essay, I know that I am not alone in sharing this sentiment regarding Bruce: Thank you dear brother in Christ for challenging
me, walking alongside me, and loving me!
Troy Countryman
Mattoon, Illinois
Endnotes
1 Bruce Hartung, Holding Up the Prophet’s Hand: Supporting Church Workers (St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 2011), 50.
2 Ibid., 80.
282
ARTICLES
COncordia
Journal
Christ Coming To Us
A. Trevor Sutton

Introduction
Our lives are a mash-up of places: we are born in one community, yet die in
another; we live in one zip code, yet worship elsewhere; we study at one academy, yet
teach in a different setting. Rather than living in a place, we live in places. Many miles
separate our home, work, and communal meeting areas. The first place is home, the
second place is work, and our various social environments constitute third places.1 The
panoply of domains in which we live is not without consequence. We have become
greatly detached from our physical location. We have lost our sense of place.
Fueled by rapid globalization and technological advances, we have become a
transient culture. The digital age has helped to expand our geographic precision in
demarcating physical location. It has, however, diminished our attention to the meaningful details that make a place special or unique; Google Earth has located the whole
world, yet it has done little to help our culture foster authentic human attachment and
belonging to a given place. Technology has enabled us to be both located and placeless.
Many complications arise as we collectively lose our sense of place. The more we
lose our sense of place, the more we become placeless individuals living within a placeless culture. Personal culpability, historical rootedness, and authentic community diminish proportionate to our culture’s growing placelessness. Colonialism has thrived in this
sort of interchangeable culture; monarchical reign was thought to work just as well in
the mundus novus as it did in Europe. Injustice finds fertile breeding ground in this itinerant culture; packing up and moving to the gated suburbs can easily solve even the worst
urban problems. Wanton disregard for neighbors can occur amongst a placeless people;
there is no impetus to love neighbors who will be gone in a month anyway.
Many disciplines—ranging from history2 to higher education3—have seen
increased reflection on the topic of place and placelessness. Location and place, though
often used interchangeably, are not exact synonyms; one is spatial while the other is
social. Location is a geometrically knowable point within physical space whereas place
is a more ambiguous boundary often constituted by human and social attributes. Social
factors such as human discourse, language, history, and shared belief contribute to
A. Trevor Sutton is associate pastor at St. Luke Lutheran Church
in Haslett, Michigan. He is a graduate student in Writing & Rhetoric at
Michigan State University. He has a BA from Concordia University in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, and an MDiv from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis,
Missouri.
285
place identity
and sense of place in a way that geometry cannot. Though often used in
the study of geography, place has a deeply human dimension.
The discipline of rhetoric is among the many academic disciplines reconsidering
the important role of both place and location. Location has taken on a new significance
within modern rhetorical theory. While rhetoricians have often discussed location
(mainly rhetorical situation and audience), discussions about location have taken a new
approach in recent decades. Modern rhetoricians have expanded the discussion beyond
audience to consider how location functions as a tool for creating meaning. Recent discussions have arisen around topics such as rhetorical space,4 digital mapping,5 and locus
of enunciation.6 This is a direct departure from classical rhetoric and its attempt to create universal rhetorical precepts.
Though he was not primarily a rhetorician, Martin Luther has recently become
the topic of considerable rhetorical scholarship. According to Neil Leroux, “contemporary scholars of the history of rhetoric have only recently begun to pay the
same kind of attention to the reformer-preacher Luther as they have to Erasmus and
Melanchthon.”7 While Melanchthon is chiefly known as the influential rhetorician of
the Reformation,8 Luther did leave a mark on the rhetorical landscape. He was steeped
in classical rhetoric by way of Aristotle, Quintilian, and Augustine. Luther’s rhetoric,
however, had a strong sense of location that went well beyond audience and rhetorical situation. Luther recognized and utilized physical location in the proclamation of
God’s word. Luther located God’s work in the culture by retelling God’s story of salvation within
the framework of his own world; he actively shifted God’s speaking into the culture of
his day and thereby allowed Christ to come to his people through the proclamation of
God’s word. Luther’s rhetoric was far from a placeless proclamation of God’s word;
it was an endeavor to locate God’s speaking within a specific place and culture. This
emphasis on location of speaking makes him remarkably relevant to modern rhetoric.
Rhetoric and Location
Greek and Roman rhetoric tended toward a placeless rhetoric. These rhetorical traditions are characterized by a strong sense that rhetorical precepts are not only
universal and knowable, but can also be translated into any location. An interchange
between Socrates and Gorgias from Plato’s Gorgias provides an adequate example of the
belief in a placeless rhetoric:
Socrates: And are we to say that you are able to make other men rhetoricians?
Gorgias: Yes, that is exactly what I profess to make them, not only at
Athens, but in all places.9
These rhetorical schools claimed an essential rhetoric that could be used in all
places. Location was far less important than rhetorical precepts. It was believed that
place could not and should not interfere with basic rhetorical principles. Physical location—whether it was Athens, Rhodes, or Rome—was largely inconsequential apart
from properly fitting an oration to its intended audience. Stanley Fish notes that
286
Sophist rhetoric went one step further by dislocating axiology from rhetoric; the orator
no longer had to be good, he just had to be good at what he did.10
Modern scholars of rhetoric have distanced themselves from Greek and Roman
rhetoric by placing a much greater emphasis on location. The role of location within
rhetoric has shifted away from periphery questions about audience and rhetorical situation and into the center of many rhetorical discussions. For instance, recent rhetorical
scholarship has explored, “rooms, lecterns, auditoriums, platforms, confession booths,
MOOs, classrooms” and their “material dimensions that affect what we do there.”11
The relationship between word and space has become a central conversation.
Walter Mignolo, in The Darker Side of the Renaissance, uses location heavily in his
study on Renaissance colonialism. Drawing heavily on Michel Foucault’s concept of
mode d’enonciation, Mignolo explores a concept that he calls locus of enunciation. He
argues that physical location is an important factor in understanding any discursive
practice. Mignolo uses locus of enunciation to mean the location from which one
speaks:
Scholarly discourses (as well as other types of discourse) acquire their
meaning on the grounds of their relation to the subject matter as well as
their relation to an audience, a context of description (the context chosen
to make the past event or object meaningful), and the locus of enunciation
from which one “speaks”, and, by speaking, contributes to changing or
maintaining systems of values and beliefs.12
Mignolo understands location and discursive practice to be inexorably linked with
values and beliefs being changed or maintained through the process. Recognizing the
locus of enunciation from which one speaks helps to reveal its colonizing aim: Is one
speaking from a familiar place or to a foreign place? Is one speaking from the center or
the periphery of the culture? Is this speaking an attempt to change or maintain systems
of values and beliefs? All of these questions are informed by location. And the answers
to these questions are used by Mignolo to reveal the colonizing aim of discourse.
Although he approaches the topic by way of Renaissance colonialism, Mignolo’s
work is helpful to rhetoricians in revealing how place is an important tool for meaning
making. He advises, “We must look for the place (physical as well as theoretical) from
which a given statement (essays or book) is being pronounced.”13 Meaning is added to
a rhetorical utterance by the place of enunciation. Is the locus of enunciation sacred or
profane? Is it any old space or is it a meaningful place? Is one speaking from a place of
power or subjugation? Attending to these details of location offers not only a context
for meaning but also insight into how the act of speaking contributes to changing or
maintaining systems of values and beliefs.
Recent scholarly interest in location has made Luther’s rhetoric of location a
very relevant topic of discussion. Luther had an exceptional awareness for God’s locus
of enunciation. His rhetoric firmly understood the multivalent nature of God’s active
287
through the external word;14 for Luther, God’s speaking shifted into the modspeaking
ern culture through the preaching and hearing of the word.
Luther believed that Scripture was not merely an account of divine work in a
distant time and place. He understood the Bible to be, in the words of Robert Kolb,
“a confrontation with the contemporary sinfulness of hearers and readers and into an
encounter with the love and mercy of their Creator, who has come as their Redeemer,
and who was in the process of sanctifying them through his Word.”15 Luther told the
stories of Scripture in such a way that the parts of the story were relocated in the new
context of the present culture: “Thus as he strove to remain faithful to the story as it
was told, he retold it within the framework of his own world.”16
Proclaiming God’s word in the framework of a new location involved more
than merely fitting the oration to please German ears. While other scholars of rhetoric
have pointed out how Luther crafted his orations to fit a specific rhetorical situation,17
his proclamation of God’s word was also deeply concerned with shifting God’s speaking into a rhetorical space. For Luther, the task of the preacher was not about helping
his hearer’s encounter an echo of God’s speaking in a past location; rather, the task of
the preacher was to actively relocate God’s speaking into the present location. Luther
describes this rhetorical endeavor, though mediated through the very human words of
the sermon, as “Christ’s coming to us.”18 Luther was concerned with shifting God’s
locus of enunciation into the specific location of his hearers:
When you open the book containing the gospels and read or hear how
Christ comes here or there, or how someone is brought to him, you should
therein perceive the sermon or the gospel through which he is coming to
you, or you are being brought to him. For the preaching of the gospel is
nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him.19
The location of God’s speaking is shifted from past to the present; it is shifted
from the narratival accounts of Scripture into the present culture. The public oration
that constituted a sermon was not a moment to idly gaze at the distant work of Christ;
the sermon was a head-on confrontation with God coming to his people in a specific
location by means of the external word.20 Hearers are confronted with a mysterious
presence that is not mathematically quantifiable; however, similar to Luther’s teaching
on Christ’s sacramental presence, the mere inability to quantify physical presence does
not negate physical presence.
The sacrament of the altar, like the public proclamation of God’s word, provided
Luther with a similar opportunity to shift God’s locus of enunciation into the context
of the present culture. The words of Christ, though spoken both miles and centuries
away from Wittenberg were relocated in a new place:
Listen to this: “given for you”; “shed.” I go to the sacrament in order to take
and use Christ’s body and blood, given and shed for me. When the minister
intones, “This cup is the New Testament in my blood,” to whom is it sung?
Not to my dog, but to those who are gathered to take the sacrament . . .
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That’s why I have said that these words are spoken, not to stones or a pillar,
but for Christians. “For you.” Who does “for you” mean? The door or the
window, perhaps? No, these who today hear the words “for you.”21
Luther addresses the rhetorical space within which Christ speaks through the
words of institution. He makes it clear that Christ speaks not to the stones, pillars,
doors, or windows but to the people. According to Luther, this powerful utterance
of Christ is shifted into a new location every time it is spoken to faithful ears.22 His
emphasis on location of speaking explains why Luther considered the ears to be the
primary Christian organ.23 Similar to Mignolo in his recommendation that one looks for
the place from which a given statement is being pronounced, Luther always maintained
an awareness of where God speaks. Celebrating God’s ongoing conversation with his
creation through word and sacrament ministry, Luther’s rhetoric sought Christ’s coming to a specific location.
Since preaching was about Christ coming to a specific location, a sense of place
shaped Luther’s preaching. God’s word is to be proclaimed within a specific location.
Place, including the people and culture of a given place, influenced how Christ’s speaking was shifted into the present culture. For example, in his “Sermon at the Dedication
of the Castle Church in Torgau,” Luther preached:
And here again he [Christ] says the same thing: “Which of you, having an
ass or an ox that has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out
on the sabbath day?” What he really wanted to say to them in our plain
German was: You are just plain oxen and asses yourselves and even more
stupid than those you untie, and it may well be that the ass can read better
than you can, and the ox might lead you to school, for he can well teach
you to untie him when he is thirsty and to water him on the sabbath, or to
pull him out of the well if he has fallen into it, so that he will not perish.
While dedicating the physical space of a new sanctuary, Luther shifted Christ’s
speaking into the rather coarse “plain German” of his culture. He understands God as
speaking to a specific place. Later in the sermon, Luther explains how God appointed
the congregation to be the location of his work: “God very wisely arranged and appointed things, and instituted the holy sacrament to be administered in the congregation as a
place where we can come together, pray, and give thanks to God.”24 The congregation—
the place where God speaks through word and sacrament—is the locus of Christ’s presence amongst his people. Affirming Luther’s sentiments, both Walther25 and Pieper26
understand the congregation to be word and sacrament ministry within a definite place.
Conclusion
Christ comes to a people and a place through the proclamation of God’s word.
We must, therefore, attend not only to the word but also the place in which it is spoken. Attention ought to be given to the particularities27 of the physical location to
which Christ is mysteriously present. The sermon needs to recognize the reciprocity
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28 that exists within the place of God’s speaking. Who sits in these pews?
of relations
Who sat in these pews in the past? What are their names and vocations? Is their communal deliberation, discourse, or action unique to this place? Where is the pulpit within
the physical space? Is there meaning conveyed by its location in the sanctuary? Who
inhabits the land on which this church is built? Who inhabited this land before us? Is
there an ancestral obligation to, and alliance with, the land? By attending to the specific
details of location, we begin to foster respect and care for the people, place, and culture
to which Christ comes.29
Attending to the details of location is not the same as the narcissistic pride of
individual congregations celebrating the stones, pillars, doors, and windows of their
church structure. Rather, location can provide meaning and context by connecting individual congregations to martyrs and saints, heroes and villains from the history of the
church. Are we located in the midst of oppression like God’s people in Egypt? Are we
situated in a place of societal power like Esther was in the palace of King Ahasuerus?
Is the air we breathe filled with a cosmopolitan milieu like the church in Corinth? Is the
ground beneath our feet parched like the barren land in Ezekiel? In this way, congregations can begin to see their places of worship as a part of a much larger set of saints
triumphant throughout the ages.
By attending to the details of place, we are following in the pattern of God. In
their powerful treatise on the church, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon write:
“Jesus Christ is the supreme act of divine intrusion into the world’s settled arrangements. In the Christ, God refuses to ‘stay in his place.’”30 God did not leave his place
to enter into a nameless and placeless world; he was born to Mary and Joseph in
Bethlehem. He did not engage an abstract people to be his disciples; he called specific
individuals by the names of Peter, James, Thomas, and Judas. He grieved the death of
Lazarus because he knew Lazarus. Christ comes to his people—albeit mysteriously—
today through the proclamation of God’s word. This word is never directed toward
an abstract place or people. Our proclamation is to engage a specific location with the
mercy of Christ.
Endnotes
1
Ray Oldenburg proposed the concept of third places in The Great Good Place (St. Paul: Paragon, 1989).
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 26, 135. Gaddis writes, “Historians have no choice but to engage in these manipulations of time,
space, and scale . . . And what does all this have to do with the landscape of history? It’s simply this: the possibility
that historians may stand, in their relationship to the past, in something like the position states do in their relationship to territory and society. For in “mapping” the past, the historian too is laying down a grid, stifling particularity, privileging legibility, all with a view to making that past accessible for the present and the future.”
3 Johnathon Mauk, “Location, Location, Location: The ‘Real’ (E)states of Being, Writing, and Thinking
in Composition,” College English 65, no. 4 (March 2003): 384. Mauk writes, “A wide range of factors suggests that
college students are increasingly removed from traditional academic space. For example, students are increasingly
less apt to study in, or even visit, university libraries.”
4 Roxanne Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Winter
2001): 42.
5 Jeff Rice, “Urban Mappings: A Rhetoric of the Network,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 no. 2 (Spring
2008): 205. Rice writes, “The rhetoric of digital mapping by which “A given space—such as a city one lives and
works in—may create various networked, rhetorical possibilities.”
2
290
6 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd ed.
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 5.
7 Neil Leroux, “Luther’s Am Neujahrstage: Style as Argument,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of
Rhetoric 12, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 2‒3.
8 Heinrich Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 20‒21.
9 Plato. Gorgias. n.p., n.d., 41.
10 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and
Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 473.
11 Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” 42. “A MOO (MUD, object-oriented) is,” according
to Wikipedia, “a text-based online virtual reality system.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO.
12 Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 5.
13 Ibid., 324.
14 The Apology of the Augsburg Confession Article IV states: God cannot be interacted with, God cannot be grasped, except through the word. So justification happens through the word, just as Paul says in Romans
1:16, “[The gospel] is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
15 Robert Kolb, Luther and the Stories of God: Biblical Narratives as a Foundation for Christian Living
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 27.
16 Ibid., 34.
17 Neil Leroux, “The Rhetor’s Perceived Situation: Luther’s Invocavit Sermons,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly,
28, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 72. Leruoux tries “to shed rhetorical light on Luther’s discourse, not as removed from but as
integral to the “situation,” . . . through an analysis of his perceptions of the issues, the constraints, and the audience.”
18 LW 35:117‒124, Olivier 44.
19 Ibid.
20 Timothy Saleska, “The Uses of Scripture in the Christian Community,” Inviting Community, eds.
Robert Kolb and Theodore J. Hopkins (Saint Louis: Concordia Seminary Press, 2013), 79. Saleska writes,
“Whenever God’s Word is present in any of its forms, we expect to be encountered by God –to be found by him—
and to ready to perform acts of submission to him. Through eyes and ears of faith, we look for him to address us
and influence us in ways that change our lives.”
21 LW 51:190. Emphasis added.
22 John Kleinig, Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2008),
282. “That meal is our theophany, the appearance of the triune God among us for our salvation.”
23 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and
Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 204.
24 LW 51:337.
25 Francis Pieper, Dogmatics 3:420. Pieper states “Walther therefore defines also a Lutheran congregation as ‘a gathering of believing Christians at a definite place among whom the Word of God is preached in its
purity according to the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the holy Sacraments are administered
according to Christ’s institution as recorded in the Gospel.’”
26 Ibid. Pieper, in his explanation De Ecclesiis Particularibus, states “This, then, is the definition of a congregation: A congregation is the assembly of believers who congregate about Word and Sacrament at a particular place.”
27 Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000),
42. Berry warns our modern culture against a “rhetoric of nowhere, which forbids a passionate interest in, let alone
a love of, anything in particular.”
28 Malea Powell, “Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and Geography in
Indigenous Rhetorical Histories,” Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, eds. Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan,.
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 115‒127, esp. 121. Powell writes, “These large Gilded Age
buildings like the Newberry manage the physical place upon which the Imperial society they represent has engaged
in empire into a space of argument for the value of Western culture. The land on which the Newberry Library is
built is land where Miamis hunted, gathered, and celebrated long before any city was built there, so a reciprocity of
relations has long existed between that land and my ancestors.”
29 Charles Arand, “Inviting Community through the Church’s Life Within Creation,” Inviting
Community, 127. Arand writes, “A dynamic interaction occurs between the church and its particular location on
earth. The church brings the proclamation of the gospel to bear upon the needs of that place, a place where human
creatures suffer and struggle, a place that shapes our life.”
30 Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Expanded 25th
Anniversary Edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 51.
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Harold Senkbeil
Death and Resurrection: Disentanglement from the Culture
Seventeen years ago, I delivered a set of Reformation lectures on Luther and the
Fanatics, tracing that theme from the tumultuous years of the Reformation to the era of
Pietism and the influence of American Evangelicalism on twentieth-century Lutherans.
In my first lecture I said that due to the inroads of American Evangelicalism, confessional Lutheranism was looking death in the face. Now whatever you may think about the
validity of that brash statement, I believe you will agree that while the Lutheran Church
is not exactly dead, it is starting to look a little pale around the gills. Yet I am not so sure
I had the right diagnosis of the problem. I am not sure the problems we face today can
be traced to classical theological distinctions. Now it seems that much of what is ailing
us can be traced to cultural accommodation. My thesis is that we are going to have to
first step away from our culture if we are to truly embrace it and connect it to Christ and
his word.
I begin with a prophetic voice from more than sixty years ago. In 1949, Chad
Walsh wrote this about a time in America most of us would consider “the good old
days,” when all those boomers were being born, the economy was on the upswing, and
the church was growing dramatically:
“Modern civilization,” which dates roughly from the Renaissance, is now
on its last legs. This glum conviction is less startling than it would have
been a few decades ago, when the doctrine of inevitable progress still had
many adherents in both low and high places. Today the funeral bell is
being rung by a whole army of philosophers and social scientists.
Perhaps we are headed toward barbarism, and the barbarism will be
permanent . . . Most of the advanced thinkers point out (justly enough)
that the impact of Christianity has been on the decline for the past several
centuries, and from this (with much less logic) they frequently draw the
conclusion that Christianity will shortly fade away completely. An opposite conclusion can be drawn. Perhaps the present sad state of Western
civilization arises largely from the watering-down and outright rejection of
Harold L. Senkbeil is the executive director for spiritual care for
DOXOLOGY: The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and Counsel in Brookfield,
Wisconsin. This essay is based on “The Christian Faces Contemporary
Challenges,” a lecture delivered at the Bjarne Wollan Teigen Reformation
Lectures of Bethany Lutheran College and Seminary, Mankato, Minnesota
October 31 and November 1, 2013.
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Christianity. In that case, a return to Christianity may be the price a reluctant world will have to pay if it wants any civilization at all.1
What I am proposing as the best way for Christians to face contemporary challenges builds on Professor Walsh’s thesis: our problem is not so much the secularization of society as it is the secularization of the church. If that is true then the way forward is the way of the cross: first death, then resurrection. Perhaps the collapse of all
things familiar and comfortable to us is not that disastrous. Perhaps it is the inevitable
consequence of a church grown complacent and dependent on its addiction to the culture.
As my friend Robert Kolb has said, “The Eisenhower administration isn’t coming back again anytime soon.” Ward and June Cleaver and “the Beav” no longer define
the American family—if they ever did. What many of my generation consider “the
good old days” are gone for good, and maybe that is not so bad. The marriage between
the culture and the church was ill advised in the first place and it is no longer tenable.
Not so long ago community standards were largely reflective of Christian morality,
but that day is long past. No longer can you look up and down the street to determine
what is right and wrong. What passes for acceptable behavior among our neighbors is
increasingly incompatible with the Christian life as outlined in the New Testament.
What to do? There is more than enough handwringing and fear mongering in
our churches. Conservative biblical Christians find themselves increasingly out of step
in a world that seems to have passed them by. Most agree that we cannot go on with
business as usual. Statistics do not lie, and once you begin tracking the decline, panic
sets in.
In 2012, the Pew Research Center published the results of a poll demonstrating
that the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans had increased in the previous five
years by 5 percent—from just over 15 percent to just fewer than 20 percent. One-fifth
of the population—and one-third of adults under thirty—claimed no religious affiliation at all.2 This decline is despite concerted and innovative evangelistic efforts in the
last three decades to grow the church. It is enough to put the fear of God into you.
You know what happens; perhaps you have seen it in your own congregations. People
look around and see the greying heads in the pews and they panic. “This is a disaster!
We’ve got to do something!” is the cry. There is no lack of eager would-be saviors
of the church. They frequently prescribe radical surgeries or complete makeovers.
“Change or Die” is their motto. Sadly, the outcome is all too predictable: the patient
emerges from surgery or makeover looking remarkably like the surrounding culture.
I think we can agree that the challenges require our concerted and deliberate
attention. I think we can also agree that the solution to those challenges is not to deconstruct and rebuild the church in the image of the world. The word of God, not the
world, determines the mission. The missionary task of the church is to bring an eternal
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biblical gospel to bear, tailored for the challenges unique to each generation.
A hasty cure based on an inaccurate diagnosis is always dangerous to the patient.
A proper cure hinges on an accurate diagnosis. True in medical care, it is especially true
when it comes to spiritual care. So first, let us assess the symptoms, and then I will propose a diagnosis. It may be that certain things need to die if there is to be a resurrection. In the second part of this essay, I will outline a treatment plan for an intentional
and deliberate cure of what is ailing the church.
Diagnosis and Cure: Exploring the Symptoms
Students of the culture agree that there has been a tectonic shift in the foundations of civilization in the West. Not all agree on what to call this shift; it is no longer
fashionable to speak of “the postmodern era.” Whatever you call it, something has
changed dramatically. Anyone who has lived more than a few decades knows that
assumptions held in common for generations have been shaken radically. To cite one
example; I grew up in a world in which everyone held that there was such a thing as
truth. They fought loud and long over what that truth was, but most everyone believed
truth was out there, waiting to be discovered, and given enough data, human reason
would be able to uncover that truth. Hardly anyone holds to that notion anymore.
Objective truth is now viewed much like a daguerreotype in a world of flashy full-color
digital imagery, a quaint vestige of bygone times.
The Loss of Virtue
What is left when you take truth out of the picture? What happens when human
reason is banished from the marketplace of ideas? I don’t need to tell you; after all, we
all live in a world that has lost its virtue, as David Wells reminded us fifteen years ago.3
When there are no commonly defined objective virtues, all that is left are subjective values. No wonder our culture is in moral free fall. Who can argue principles when all you
have are values? Values, by definition, vary from one person to another, and one person’s values are as valid as another’s.
When reason is abandoned, all you have is emotion and volition. Our vocabulary reveals just how far we have come. Listen to your friends and neighbors; listen
to yourself. Very few speak of opinions or thoughts; when asked for our perspective
on important issues, what do we say? Not “I think,” but “I feel.” And who can argue
with feelings? Everyone is entitled to feelings, after all. In our subjective age, feelings
are largely all that is left. We live in a time in which almost everyone lives a life with no
foundation other than one’s own values. We live as bundles of feelings, cast adrift to
float on an endless sea of subjectivism.
The Flight from Reason
The price of moving our common understanding of reality from truth to perception and away from reason toward feeling is social fragmentation and moral decay. In
his recent book Conscience and Its Enemies, Robert P. George identifies three essential pillars of human society; the removal of any one of them spells cultural chaos and social
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Firstly, “respect for the human person—the individual human being and his
disaster.
dignity.”4 When life is not respected, be that life in the womb, the elderly, or those
unable to contribute significantly to the collective community, that life is easily discarded, as we have seen not just in Nazi Germany, but also in the supposedly enlightened
West with the acceptance first of abortion, then assisted suicide and euthanasia, and
now infanticide.
George’s second pillar of decent society is the institution of the family.
The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the
original and best ministry of health, education, and welfare. Although no
family is perfect, no institution matches the healthy family in its capacity
to transmit to each new generation the understandings and traits of character—the values and virtues—on which the success of every other institution of society, from law and government to educational institutions and
business firms, vitally depends.5
Notice here that George is not raising any of the vital biblical arguments in favor
of sexual chastity and marital faithfulness; his is a natural law argument. He points out
that as this second pillar collapses, the social consequences are immense. We are beginning to see the rise of a complex and astronomically expensive network of social welfare constructed to salvage the wreckage from the denigration and demise of the family.
The third pillar and hallmark of a healthy society is, according to George, “a fair
and effective system of law and government.”6 When law and government are built on
a foundation of personal feelings and self-interest instead of reason and objective fairness, the results are evident, not only in the halls of congress, but through all of our
society, right down to the meetings of our county commissioners and township boards.
The subjectivism we deplore in governmental policy is nothing other than
the social and political consequence of our collective worldview, which George calls
“expressive individualism.” Classically, the liberal arts were designed to constrain and
master basic impulses and desires of individual human passion for the cause of the common good. This educational ideal was designed to free—to liberate—the individual to
contribute to society as a genuinely free person. When, on the other hand, human passion gains the upper hand, that person is a slave to impulses.7
The Debacle of Individualism
Ask anyone who has given his or her baser inclinations free reign, and you will
see for yourself. Whether it’s a cocaine addict looking for another hit or a porn junkie
locked in a private hell of remorse, self-loathing, and sexual self-destruction—expressive
individualism initially promises freedom, but ultimately delivers bondage.
It’s exciting to declare independence from the expectations of others and cultural
norms, but the result isn’t pretty. When your companions are comprised of me, myself,
and I, you live in a very small world.
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Individualistic thinking is not a novelty. It’s as old as the garden of Eden and
is a temptation to every generation. Yet what arose in 1960s America has tainted each
succeeding generation, from the Boomers to the Gen-Xers to the Millennials, and now
Generation Z. Individualism, and specifically, to use George’s term, expressive individualism, is very much with us and, in my way of thinking, has had a devastating influence on
the life and mission of the contemporary church. This living for self and fixation on personal feelings and well being that characterizes the secular culture may have blossomed
in Sinatra’s “I did it my way” sentiments, yet it has not only come to full flower, but has
gone to seed in the American church.
The Movement from Christ to Christian
You can find examples of this movement in much of the preaching in pop
Christianity today. The mission of the Christian takes over for the mission of Christ.
The sacrificial death and substitutionary atonement of Jesus is eclipsed by the gospel
of progress, happiness, and self-improvement. Whether it is sermons on how to have
good sex or how to live a life of fulfillment and service, the cumulative effect is devastatingly clear: the self has been substituted for God. The improved Christian has taken
over the spotlight from Jesus Christ crucified. The work of the Christian has taken over
for the work of Christ; sanctification—more precisely, a false view of sanctification—
has taken over for justification. Works have been substituted for faith, and the law—a
pale and anemic version of the law—has been substituted for the gospel. “How to” has
taken over for “repent and believe.” “What would Jesus do?” has taken over for “what
has Jesus done?”—or more precisely, in terms of the efficacious word and sacrament:
“what is Jesus doing?” We do not serve a dead hero, after all, but a living Lord, who
comes among us daily to nourish us by his word.
The important thing to note as we look at challenges to contemporary Christians
is that we have imported far too many of the assumptions of our secular culture into
the church. We have abandoned teaching in favor of coaching. We have abandoned
teaching truth and focused on self-improvement programs. We seem to be driven more
by polls and approval ratings than we are by the word of God. We have embraced the
expectations and norms of our culture and begun to remodel the church in the image
and likeness of the world—and in that world, expressive individualism takes precedence
over everything else.
Nearly a generation ago I was shocked one Sunday morning to have a member
of our congregation come up to me after church and say: “Pastor, we’ve heard all about
Jesus and his cross; we already know the gospel; give us something we can use.” I had
to do a quick internal analysis of that particular sermon: had I given the law short shrift,
perhaps? Had I fallen into minimalizing the gospel by perhaps falling into trite mantralike expressions? But no, that was not the case. Here was a woman, well-catechized
and well-placed in terms of influence in our church, who genuinely believed that the
transforming gospel of Christ crucified and risen had no discernible application to her
daily life. She believed that helpful hints for daily living were more important than the
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forgiveness
of sins, life, and salvation daily and richly dispensed in Christ’s name and
stead in his church. Clearly, I had some teaching to do.
What Goes Around Comes Around
Ironically, the pulse of the contemporary church resonates to the beat of the
world. Rather than having something transformational to bring to the world, today’s
church seems fixated on remodeling itself to look more and more like the world, albeit
with a spiritual veneer. From its mission approach to its preaching to its worship and
teaching, the American church seems to have adopted the culture’s focus on expressive individualism, which threatens—tsunami-like—to engulf and submerge it in a sea
of subjective self-interest. Twenty years ago, David Wells highlighted the irony of how
conservative Christianity had begun to resemble the creed of the classic Christian liberals of the early twentieth century:
It is not difficult to see how the marketers of Evangelicalism might begin
to resemble the old liberalism, the gospel that H. Richard Niebuhr once
described as ‘consisting in a god without wrath bringing people without
sin into the kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross.8
More recently, the Australian Broadcasting Company documented the nearly identical statistical decline of active churchgoers in Christendom worldwide not only in liberal church bodies, but also among conservative and evangelical churches. Citing recent
demographic studies among Christians in America, Australia, and the UK, Christopher
Brittain documents a downward trajectory in habits of church attendance across the
theological spectrum.9 The sole statistical exception to the decline is in the Global South,
where the growth of Christianity is apparently led primarily by pentecostal churches of
the neo-pentecostal persuasion, which emphasize a single charismatic leader, the witnessing of miraculous signs, and the “prosperity gospel” that teaches that financial reward is
a sign of God’s blessing.
Despite the broad theological divide between liberals and conservatives, they
have a remarkable affinity. While classic liberalism capitulated to the intelligentsia of its
day, modifying biblical teaching to accommodate scientific and philosophical reasoning, conservative evangelicalism has adjusted its compass to the trends of pop culture,
packaging its teaching and church life to appeal to a customer base informed by marketing, advertising, and entertainment. Meanwhile, the neo-Pentecostals are adjusting
their message to appeal to the individual as well, promising wealth and self-promotion
to converts. Brittain advises churches across the theological divide to quit focusing on
cultural trends and the fashionable dictates of expressive individualism:
For conservatives, the task is to stop interpreting the demise of liberal
congregations as a victory for evangelical Christianity, and to explore what
might be learned from the fact that liberal Christianity’s roots lie in the
attempt to adapt and respond to cultural diversity and modern individualism.10
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On the other hand, liberals need to ask themselves what they have to hand on
to succeeding generations. Brittain writes, “. . . liberals need to give greater attention to
why the doctrines and traditions of Christianity should matter to someone not already
familiar with them.”11
The lesson of the ages remains true today for Christians on either side of the
theological divide: the church is always one generation away from extinction. You could
say the church is engaged in a perpetual relay race, passing on what we have received to
those who come after us. Liberals are in danger of dropping the baton altogether, abandoning the faith once delivered to the saints. But conservative churches face a formidable challenge as well: accommodation and modification of the faith to reflect the cultural
individualism of our time. Our culture presents a notoriously fluid target, shifting with
every passing fashion. The maxim holds true: “If you marry the culture, you are destined
to become an early widower.”
The New Babylonian Captivity of the Church
Confessional Lutherans are keenly aware of what happened in October of 1517.
Not many of us easily recall what happened three years later, however. Having been
threatened with excommunication by Pope Leo X earlier that year, in October of 1520
Luther published the second of his major treatises delineating the cause for his break
with the church of Rome. In “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Luther outlines
scriptural objections to the sacramental theology of the Roman church, which had carried the church of Christ into captivity just as surely as the Babylonian Empire had carted off the Jews into captivity. Enslaving the church in a hierarchical scheme of priestly
ordination, the papacy imposed aberrations into the Mass: first, by withholding the cup
from the laity, second, by the doctrine of transubstantiation, and third, by making the
Mass a perpetual sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead rather than a sacrament
for the remission of sins in Christ’s body once given and blood once shed at Calvary.12
The formidable challenges to the contemporary church could well be viewed as
comprising a new kind of Babylonian captivity. The strange thing about this captivity is that it is not enforced or imposed on the church from without, but chosen and
embraced from within. We are in many ways our own worst enemies. The culture we
live in presents challenges to the Christian unprecedented in living memory, but the
challenge lies not outside the church, but inside the church. What I describe as the new
Babylonian captivity is what we have done to ourselves, namely, the strange fascination
with our contemporary culture evident across denominational and confessional lines.
I have shown how expressive individualism has prevailed in our world and now is
the governing principle that defines reality across political and geographic borders, ethnic and language divisions, and social and economic status. People everywhere take it as
axiomatic that there is no overarching truth, and that every person has the inherent right
to exercise freedom of choice in any ethical decisions, since truth is in the eye of the
beholder. Further, all of these truths, some of which may be diametrically opposed and
mutually exclusive, are equally valid. In the end, therefore, reason devolves into feeling
and each person is his or her own authority.
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The ensuing chaos is of course both predictable and tragic. Yet we as Christians
have come to the kingdom for precisely such a time as this. We are not going back to
the Eisenhower administration any time soon. Sadly, too many confessional Lutherans
sound as if they come straight from the 1950s and the neat and tidy world of Father
Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. It is time that we address not that world of sixty years
ago, but the world we live in now. For too long we have been content to reminisce
about days gone by and shake our heads sadly at the developments around us. No wonder that to a watching world we often come across sounding like nostalgia freaks.
I suggested earlier that the way out of the mess involves diagnosis and then prescription. We have labelled our problem a kind of “Babylonian captivity,” but we have
not yet defined the disease. Let us take a careful look at some of the symptoms of this
bondage to the culture that has the contemporary church so paralyzed and depleted.
Symptom 1: How the Church Lost Its Story
Over the last four or five decades, there has been a loss of the importance of
the biblical narrative. This loss is perhaps nowhere better delineated than in an essay by
Robert Jenson in 1993, just as the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment and the age
of reason was starting to crumble. In his essay, Jenson dramatically posed the church’s
mission challenge as a contemporary version of what the church faced in a parallel time,
the cultural tumult and collapse of late antiquity.
As the church once lived and conducted her mission in the precisely postHellenistic and post-Roman-imperial world, remembering what had vanished
but not knowing what if anything could come next, so the church must
now live and conduct her mission in the precisely “post”-modern world.13
The consequence of living in a postmodern world, Jenson contends, is that the
church now faces a missionary task in a world that has lost its story. The Christian
West no longer has a living memory of the story of the Bible, namely, a Creator who is
the author of creation and therefore the narrator of all history, who provides continuity
and meaning to the purpose of humanity. The age of reason tore man from his creator
and called into question the authenticity and importance of the Bible. Jenson writes,
“The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring
disallegiance from the God who was that faith’s object . . . Modernity was defined by
the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.”14
Now, twenty years past the collapse of modernism, the church is still scrambling
to find footing in a world without a story. Because the church’s members were raised in
a culture that collectively had lost its connection with the God who gives meaning and
purpose to the world, the church herself has a hard time recovering the content and
meaning of the biblical narrative, to say nothing of unpacking that meaning for the ethical and moral challenges that surround us. It appears that not only has the world lost its
story, but also the church has lost her grip on that story as well—or at least is suffering
from chronic amnesia. This loss of the Christian story and biblical narrative is the first of
the symptoms of our collective disease.
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Symptom
2: From Eternal Verities to Personal Fulfillment
There has been a shift within the church, almost a conscious decision, to turn
away from the eternal truths of the word of God and focus on human fulfillment. It is
tragic, it is inexplicable, and it is suicidal. It has all the appearances of a death wish considered from the perspective of Scripture and the history of the church catholic. Yet it
is palpable and demonstrable.
Last year Tullian Tchvidjian, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and
grandson of evangelist Billy Graham, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post
deploring the capitulation of evangelical churches to expressive individualism in the culture. He pointed out that the frantic activism that has been imported into the life of the
church has not only failed to stem the tide of defections from the pews, but has gutted
the central tenet of the faith once delivered to the saints, namely God’s “one-way love”
in his Son Jesus Christ.
The hub of Christianity is not “do something for Jesus.” The hub of
Christianity is “Jesus has done everything for you.” And my fear is that
too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our “do
more, try harder” sermons and pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of the Christian faith is the work that we do instead
of the work God has done for us in the person of Jesus.15
This performancism, as Tchvidjian calls it, has spread throughout evangelicalism, and continues to make inroads in ostensibly Lutheran churches. It’s as though the
Reformation didn’t happen; the justification of the ungodly has been set aside in favor
of the perfection and growth of the saints. The sad truth is that the message of personal
happiness and success heard in the pulpits of America today is the practical equivalent
of the worst kinds of moralism promulgated in the Roman church of Luther’s day, albeit
cloaked in secular wrappings and shorn of much of its spiritual veneer.
Symptom 3: From Chastity to Decadence
Just a few minutes in front of any TV, computer, or movie screen will tell you
that we’ve come a long way since the days of Mae West and Sophie Tucker (as if
anyone can still recall those femme fatales). Sex sells, and it is used to sell everything:
from overpriced clothing for hormonally driven teenagers to overpriced sports cars
for old men trying to recapture their lusty youth. Increasingly our culture seems to be
stumbling in a mad rush to out-sensualize the sensual and to deconstruct and redefine
human sexuality in every conceivable decadent way. We can trace the devolution from
Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl some years ago to
Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke’s “twerking” at the Video Music Awards, and eclipsed
by Beyonce’s sixteen-minute medley of sexually graphic lyrics with choreography to
match. Apparently, there are no limits to how low you can go in degrading the human
body and its sexual function.
We cannot blame the advertising or entertainment industries; they would not
be doing these things if they did not meet with eager customers. We could talk about
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the multibillion-dollar
pornography industry and its devastating impact in the church
and among clergy. We could talk about the millions of child sex-trafficking victims. As
alarming and tragic as these developments are in themselves, they are above all symptomatic. We need to pay attention to these developments not merely as examples of
moral decay, but as underlying spiritual decay and emptiness. The impact of the sexual
revolution on social structure and basic humanity should tell us something about the
world we live in. As I have written elsewhere, before we can ever clean up the world,
we must weep for it.16 What can be sadder than that the most intimate aspect of our
bodily existence, designed by our Creator to imitate and reflect the union of Christ and
his beloved bride, the church, should become an expression of personal indulgence and
self-gratification rather than union and self-disclosure between husband and wife? What
could be more heart-rending than ripping sex from its marital context in a permanent
one-flesh relationship and making it a solo performance as in pornography, or loveless
and anonymous, as in “friends with benefits”?
If we trace sexual practices from the sexual revolution until now it should not
shock Christians that large numbers of faithful churchgoers see no problem in redefining
marriage to include same-sex relationships. After all, if sex is divorced from its context in
human procreation and generations of married heterosexuals have come to define their
marital relationship principally as an emotional bond and view their sexual union primarily in terms of orgasm and their own personal pleasure, what possible reason might we
have to forbid same sex couples the same privilege?
The sexual disaster unfolding in our society and increasingly among those who
bear the name of Christ is but another symptom of what has happened as the church
has capitulated to expressive individualism and built its corporate life around the gratifications of the individual. We have sown to the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
Such is the inevitable result of the secularization of the world, some will say.
Remember, my contention is that the challenges we encounter as Christians are not
so much the consequence of the secularization of the world as they are the result of
the secularization of the church. Mary Eberstadt, journalist and research fellow at the
Hoover Institute, argues that the decline of the church in the West is paralleled by the
decline of the family. Like a double helix, the two are intimately related, she contends.
As the church regains its teaching regarding marriage and the family, the church will
have an impact on the culture around it. Ours is not the first era when Christian sexual
mores conflicted with the prevailing culture, Eberstadt reminds us:
In the largely pagan world where Christianity first took root, as Roman
writers themselves reported, infanticide was common; abortion was hardly
unknown; births to unmarried couples abounded; divorce was a rather
obvious solution to marital unhappiness, at least for men; and in certain
classes, homosexuality was a familiar fact of life. All of these were behaviors and customs that Christianity then pronounced to be sins.17
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Despite opposing accepted values of the day, in the apostolic era and the generations following the church grew dramatically. The church captured the hearts, minds,
and imaginations of the pagan world with the transforming story of God’s intervention
in this world in the person of Jesus Christ, who demolished death and brought life and
immortality, transforming sexuality along with every other dimension of human existence.
There is hope, in other words. All is not lost in our time of decay and decadence.
Corporately, we in the church have been in this position before. If we can rise above
our addiction to cultural individualism, we can address this challenge effectively. Above all,
if we remain faithful to our Lord, he will remain faithful to us, for he cannot deny himself.
Symptom 4: From Soul to Self
Our survey of the impact of expressive individualism on the life of the church
would not be complete without the fourth and final symptom: the shift from the
divinely created soul to the self-constructed ego, or as it’s more popularly called, the “self.”
You likely won’t hear the word “soul” used much these days. It’s another of
those words that has gone out of fashion. Even in the church we seem to find the
word awkward and a bit embarrassing. Yet it’s a big word in the Bible. The psalmist
writes, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Ps
103:1). The mother of our Lord, upon being greeted by her cousin Elizabeth, calls out
in thanksgiving, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”
(Lk 1:46-47).
Biblical anthropology is a complex topic and exploring the meaning of the word
“soul” in the Bible is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will provide my own
working definition of the term. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that
biblically a “soul” is not something you have, but something you are. In other words, the
soul is not a substance that resides somewhere above the hypothalamus, but rather is
the person in relation to God. At the creation of Adam, the Lord God took the dust of
the earth and formed it into the shape of a man, then breathed into his nostrils his own
divine ruach, or Spirit, and Adam became a nephesh hayah, a “living soul.” That is, he was
of the stuff of the earth with a fleshly body, but being made in the image and likeness of
God he partook of the life-giving Spirit of God in his totality. Thus, when the psalmist
or the Virgin Mary speaks of “my soul,” they mean themselves, body, soul, and spirit, in
relation to God.
Since the Enlightenment, the biblical view of man has shrunk considerably. To
paraphrase Jenson, the whole project of the Enlightenment was the attempt to live in a
narratable world without a narrator, that is, without a relationship with God the Father,
maker of heaven and earth. When the world shrinks to exclude everything spiritual,
all that is left is the material. Accordingly, the view of humanity shrinks along with the
view of the world. A human becomes a biological organism without origin, purpose, or
direction—a bundle of impulses and desires, motivated by internal goals.
Seventy years ago, C. S. Lewis showed what happens to human society when
humans fend for themselves without a creator. Lewis showed, in other words, what
happens when humankind loses its soul: “We make men without chests and expect of
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them virtue
and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our
midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”18 In other words, when we deliberately strip humans of their spiritual dimension,
they can no longer be fully human. This is where individualism has left us as a culture.
Humanity has been debased, and has little or no capacity for the classic virtues. In the
name of personal freedom, we have created a world in which human beings are captives to their own desires. “Well, there you have it,” you might say. “That’s the price of
secularization.” Maybe so, but how tragic it is when that same individualism rides rampant in the conscious life of the church. How catastrophic it is when the church herself
becomes secularized and expressive individualism sits in the driver’s seat in the church’s
life and mission. When the church has lost connection with Christ her living head, she
loses her soul.
There are more than enough examples of churches trying to reinvent themselves
in the image and likeness of the world in an effort to gain attention and favor in the
eyes of a populace less and less attracted to the gospel. Here is an example of what can
happen when the church loses sight of who she is and caters to expressive individualism.
A YouTube video recorded several years ago at an Anglican church in Ontario
continues to make the rounds on the internet. Titled “A Cat, a Hat, and a Eucharist,”
the video presents highlights of a service designed around Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the
Hat. The presiding priest, decked out as—you guessed it—the cat in the hat—saunters
down the aisle for the procession mimicking the mischievous cat, then proceeds to
serve up the liturgy in the doggerel rhyme of Dr. Seuss. For example, this is the eucharistic prayer:
This bread we share is my body you see
Take it and eat it in memory of me.
And after they ate, he picked up a drink
And said, “There’s more in here than you think.
This is my blood that I give for you.”
And for those who think their life is through
Because they sin, they should be living.
And remember our God is always forgiving.19
The audacity of those who dreamt up this travesty is beyond comprehension.
One responder at the YouTube website wrote, “Isn’t blasphemy against the Holy
Spirit an unforgiveable sin? This is sickening, worldly, and blasphemous . . . Makes Joel
Osteen look like John Calvin.”
We may laugh, but we also weep. These are perilous times for the church, and
the forces that gave rise to this travesty are also at work among us. We need to watch
and pray that we enter not into this temptation. More than that, like good spiritual physicians, we must be alert to the symptoms to accurately diagnose the ailment. Only then
can we faithfully and effectively treat the deep spiritual disease that has infected the
church’s lifeblood and so bring the light and life of Christ to a world enslaved by darkness and death.
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Diagnosis:
Acedia
Having explored the symptoms of our contemporary sickness, I propose a diagnosis so we can intentionally treat it. It seems to me that what we have here is a classic
case of acedia one of the seven deadly, or cardinal, sins; often translated as “sloth.”
The ancients saw much more in acedia than mere laziness. They saw beneath
sloth to its underlying cause: disappointment with and spiritual disaffection from God’s
divinely ordained gifts, be they in the realm of creation or redemption. Acedia’s deadening and deadly effect can be easily inferred; when numb to Christ’s saving work and
the Father’s gracious gifts by which he makes us and preserves us, Christians sink into
boredom, apathy, and then, despair. More than sixty years ago, British playwright and
Christian humanist Dorothy Sayers powerfully evoked the spiritual emptiness of acedia
and its often tragic end:
The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the
world it calls itself Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair. It is the
accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin
which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds
purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there
is nothing it would die for.20
More recently, Christian writer Kathleen Norris has opened the semantic domain
of this ancient term for modern scrutiny. In her journal, Acedia & Me: A Marriage,
Monks, and a Writer’s Life, she tells of her lifelong struggle with clinical depression, that
she has come to recognize as something far more pernicious: the persistent and chronic
temptation of acedia.
I believe that such standard dictionary definitions of acedia as “apathy,”
“boredom,” or “torpor” do not begin to cover it, and while we may find
it convenient to regard it as a more primitive word for what we now term
depression, the truth is much more complex. Having experienced both
conditions, I think it likely that much of the restless boredom, frantic
escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us
today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress. The boundaries
between depression and acedia are notoriously fluid; at the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest that while depression is an illness treatable by
counselling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer.21
The prevailing boredom with holy things that we see in the contemporary church
is the telltale sign of acedia. The first petition teaches that what God has made holy cannot be sanctified by us; our duty is to keep God’s sacred things holy among us. God’s
word must not only be taught faithfully in all its truth and purity, but those who receive
that word are to live holy lives in conformity to it. Anyone who teaches or lives contrary
to God’s word profanes and defiles God’s holy name.
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Now, consider again the symptoms regarding the challenges of our age:
1. How the church lost its story, despising and rejecting its identity as curator
of God’s sacred mysteries.
2. The move away from eternal verities toward personal fulfilment; exchanging
the truth of the gospel for the dictates of expressive individualism.
3. The move from chastity toward decadence as the church increasingly apes
the sexual promiscuity of her pagan neighbors.
4. The move from soul to self as the church endorses the faulty view that each
person must construct reality out of his or her own impulses.
Singly and collectively, these signal an abiding disaffection of all that God has
declared sacred, boredom with all things holy. This boredom betrays the machinations
of the evil one, who with his allies, the fallen world and our own sinful nature, does not
want us to hallow God’s name or let his kingdom come—a turning of our backs on all
that God has declared to be good and holy and true. That is exactly what acedia is: not
caring about those things that that demand our utmost care. Listen again to Norris as
she unpacks the tragedy of this predicament:
At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person
afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life
becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding,
acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet
can’t rouse yourself to give a damn.22
There is another side to acedia; the narcotic effect that covers the pain and struggle of life. The standard definition of acedia—sloth—doesn’t describe the hectic pace of
contemporary life. We live in a whirlwind of electronic stimuli that demand our attention. We are constantly busy; we can’t possibly be accused of being slothful or lazy!
Yet precisely these phenomena are indications that we suffer from acedia. The
busyness of our lives is a dead giveaway that the solid and lasting things of the kingdom
of God have lost their luster among us. Dare I say it? The frenzy with which much of
the church busies herself with things peripheral to the kingdom in a frantic attempt by
her own ingenuity and effort to make God’s name holy or make his kingdom come is a
sign that something is radically wrong. The church has lost connection with Christ, her
living head; she has listened to the siren calls of this world; she has succumbed to the
prevailing culture instead of what Christ Jesus created her to be.
Our hectic lives are examples of the narcotic effect of acedia among us, the
“spiritual morphine” that Norris wrote about. All this activity is a way of coping
with pain. It masks a deep and abiding psychosis that infects our culture on all levels.
Richard Leahy, a psychologist specializing in anxiety and its treatment, has written,
“The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.”23 That should tell you something; we are not designed
to live the way most of us live. Something has gone profoundly wrong in our world,
but we need to step back a bit to see it clearly.
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Beneath the beehive of activity we find an empty core, the “spiritual morphine”
of acedia at work. The late Russian author and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in his Harvard commencement address of 1978 characterized the formerly Christian
West as a “world without a center,” that is, its pursuit of individualism and personal
pleasure betrayed that it had lost its first love. Toward the end of his life, he described
the frantic pace of life as a symptom of deep psychosis. He wrote, “the psychological
illness of (our age) is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness—fitfulness
and superficiality.”24 We would expect this frenzied superficiality in a secularized culture, but that we find the same frenzy and superficiality in the church indicates that
the church has become increasingly secularized; acedia is alive and well among us.
Treatment: Recovering the Corporate Life
So where do we go from here? If the problem we face is not the secularization
of society but the secularization of the church brought about by importing expressive
individualism into the church, then we simply cannot face contemporary challenges
individually.
It is time revive and recover the third article of the Creed; to live corporately
and communally in a world of expressive individualism. Rather than contributing to
the fracturing of human community we Christians need to concretely demonstrate how
God sets the solitary in families. We need to show how the Holy Spirit calls, gathers,
enlightens, and sanctifies people one by one through the gospel, and then draws them
into communion in his holy church. Luther put it this way:
Just as the Son obtains dominion by purchasing us through his birth,
death, and resurrection, etc. so the Holy Spirit effects our being made holy
through the following: the community of saints or Christian church, the
forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
That is, he first leads us into his holy community, placing us in the church’s
lap, where he preaches to us and brings us to Christ.25
The frantic busyness of our world is a symptom of the pain and isolation everywhere; a loneliness epidemic that also threatens the fellowship of the church. We are
so busy we can’t connect through genuine conversation. Technology provides, at best,
a parody of that community of the holy Christian church in which sorrows are diminished and people uphold and encourage one another in the bond of Christian love and
compassion. According to St. Paul, the church is not an organization, but an organism:
the very body of Christ. And the church’s members are linked together in a “communion”—an intimate organic unity that transcends external institutional associations:
But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that
lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members
may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer
together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the
body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Cor 12:24–27)
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We are not created to live solitary lives; we are not redeemed to live solitary lives.
And we are not sanctified all by ourselves either, thank God. That is what we learn in
the third article. As the Holy Spirit sanctifies me by the gospel, so he sanctifies the whole
Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. And in
that communion—that fellowship, or organic union—I experience not merely the forgiveness of my sins, but balm for my burdens and strength in times of temptation.
In his devotional for the gravely ill Frederick, Luther wrote:
The faith of the church comes to the aid of my fearfulness; the chastity of
others endures the temptation of my flesh; the fastings of others are my
gain; the prayer of another pleads for me.
Therefore, when we feel pain, when we suffer, when we die, let us
turn to this, firmly believing and certain that it is not we alone, but Christ
and the church who are in pain and are suffering and dying with us. Christ
does not want us to be alone on the road of death, from which all men
shrink. Indeed, we set out upon the road of suffering and death accompanied by the entire church. Actually, the church bears it more bravely than
we do . . . All that remains for us now is to pray that our eyes, that is, the
eyes of our faith, may be opened that we may see the church around us.
Then there will nothing for us to fear, as is also said in Psalm 125: “As
mountains are round about it, so the Lord is round about his people, from
this time forth and forever.” Amen.26
Prescription: Treatment Plan for Evangelization
I offer some specific suggestions to face contemporary challenges, all of which
flow from the corporate life of the church. If the problem is the pernicious growth of
expressive individualism in both society and church, if boredom with holy things and
frenzy that we find in the church are symptoms of the disease acedia, then we need a
treatment plan.
Make no mistake about it; every aspect of this plan is in fact a plan for evangelization. For too long we have seen the ministry of the church and the mission of the
church as distinct compartments, outreach and inreach, making disciples and keeping
disciples. Yet the life of the church revolves around the central article: the justification
of the ungodly by grace through faith in the Son of God, who is the atoning sacrifice for
the sins of the whole world. Like the hub of a wheel, the church’s corporate life is an
extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.
In America we have embraced an idea from Arminianism and frontier revivalism,
that bringing people to Christ is a one-time event that centers on getting them to decide
for Jesus. Thus, evangelism belongs at the front of the Christian mission, but discipleship is Christians living their lives in God’s kingdom. The rise of secularization and
individualism in society and church means that we need to return to the early Christian
model of being and doing church. Every aspect of the church’s corporate life is evangelization, an extension and expression of the living Christ present at work in his church.
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cross, and resurrection are at the center of mission and ministry. The apostolic
Jesus, his
mandate to Timothy is one pointed example:
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge
the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the
word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort,
with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people
will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away
from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always
be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill
your ministry. (2 Tm 4:1–5)
Proclamation and Ministry
Preaching has fallen on hard times. Many see this as a failure of technique and
style. Preachers today know how hard it is to get people accustomed to visual communication to sit still and listen. Preachers need to learn all they can about effective
rhetoric and communication techniques. However, as important as it is that preachers
know how to speak, it’s more important that they know what to say. That is, they need
to proclaim the gospel, not merely explain it.
John Kleinig tells of a pastoral conference in Australia in which the presenter
was exhorting the pastors to be more Christ-centered in their preaching. “Brothers,
we must always be sure to preach about the gospel,” he said. Just then the venerable
Herman Sasse got up, shuffled his way to the microphone, and said: “Gentlemen, I
have preached sermons for most of my life, but I have never preached about the gospel; I
have always preached the gospel.”
Listen carefully to much of preaching today and I’m afraid you will hear more
preaching about the gospel than preaching of the gospel. There may be a lot of references to the love of God, but precious little of the entire forgiveness of sins in the shed
blood of Jesus Christ his Son, crucified and ascended, yet present in his word and sacraments for our forgiveness, life, and salvation.
Tullian Tchividjian says the hub of Christianity is not “do something for Jesus,”
but “Jesus has done everything for you.” Yet since we Lutherans believe, teach, and confess an efficacious word that does exactly what it says, we dare never settle for merely
explaining what Jesus has done for sinners. We proclaim that Jesus is still present personally with his church on earth through his word preached and sacraments administered
that sins might actually be erased, sorrows lifted, and wounds healed. Among us, it is the
same as in the synagogue in Nazareth where Jesus first announced the text from Isaiah
regarding liberty for the captives, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed and
then began to preach saying “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21).
The pastoral office, the church’s ministry, is the ministry of Jesus Christ risen
and alive, not dead and departed, you see. We do not preach about Jesus, we preach
Jesus present among us with his gifts. That is the first and perhaps most important part
of our treatment plan for the church’s acedia.
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Catechesis for Faith and Life
The magnificent cathedrals of Europe constructed during the Middle Ages might
be called archaeological artifacts from the age of faith. They are architectural gems that
leave visitors stunned with their jaw dropping, otherworldly beauty. The story they
enshrine in stone and stained glass is the story of the God of the Bible, who created
the universe, redeemed his church with the blood of his Son, and sanctifies his people
by his Spirit. Yet the story that gave rise to these edifices is largely unknown to the visitors—many of them descendants of people who built these great sanctuaries.
As Robert Jenson puts it, we live in a world that has lost its story. The collective
Christian memory is fading fast. It’s not surprising that the biblical narrative should lose
its luster in the world after two centuries of attack by modernist anti-spiritual worldviews, but the church has lost her story too. Obsessed with the self and self-improvement, the postmodern church often capitulates to expressive individualism.
But this is a great moment of opportunity for the church to be the church once
more. Modernism has collapsed; the age of reason is over. People are absolutely captivated by spiritual matters. They are so enamored by spirituality of all stripes that they
embrace everything spiritual that promises self-fulfillment and enhancement.
This is an opportunity too great to miss, Jenson suggests. While it’s true that
people today live in a world without a story, the church invites refugees from a broken
world to citizenship in the kingdom of heaven; and in so doing the church gives them
her story as their own:
If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world. The church has in
fact had great experience of just this role. One of many analogies between
postmodernity and dying antiquity—in which the church lived for her
most creative period—is that the late antique world also insisted on being
a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by
offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived
with dramatic coherence.27
I suggested at the beginning of this article that in order to connect with this culture, we must first step back from it. By that, I mean we must be careful not to be so
hobbled by the mad pursuit of expressive individualism that the church becomes a pale
copy of the culture, with a thin spiritual overlay. After stepping back to observe and
analyze, then it’s time to step forward and engage, as Jenson suggests, to be the narratable world that cultural refugees lack.
We have the tools to do that; they are the Scriptures, Creeds, and Confessions
of the church by which is taught the faith once delivered to the saints. To evangelize
the world and catechize the faithful, we need to be a teaching church once more. The
Catechism, “the layman’s Bible,” as Luther called it, needs to be dusted off and used
once again to learn the vocabulary of faith by heart. We can only speak of what we
have heard and seen, after all. The language of the Ten Commandments, the Creed,
and the Lord’s Prayer is our mother tongue, and we need to learn it again so we can
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speak concerning
our hope in Christ. From cradle to grave, baptized believers need to
be immersed in the divine saga of God’s creation, redemption, and sanctification.
In a world that loves story, what story is more captivating than how God’s Son
came among us disguised in human flesh to woo and wed his beloved bride, to claim
her as his own so that they might live happily ever after in righteousness, innocence, and
blessedness? That’s a story that puts Cinderella and her prince to shame. Only it’s not a
fairy tale. It’s no fiction at all, but God’s own truth. And there’s nothing boring about it.
What Dorothy Sayers wrote about the English church during the height of modernism
holds true for the postmodern church in America as well:
We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers
insist too much upon doctrine—“dull dogma,” as people call it. The fact
is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness.
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the
imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.
It would not perhaps be altogether surprising if, in this nominally
Christian country, where the creeds are daily recited, there were a number
of people who knew all about Christian doctrine and disliked it. It is more
startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and
despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what is is. If you
tell them, they cannot believe you. I do not mean that they cannot believe
the doctrine: that would be understandable enough, since it takes some
believing. I mean that they simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting, and so dramatic can be the orthodox creed of the Church.28
Do you see the possibilities? What would happen if we used the Catechism and the
Creed not just to prepare people for communion, but also to train young and old for lifelong baptismal living, to give them words to confess the faith to those who ask the reason
for the hope that is in them, to provide them a pattern for daily self-examination, daily
drowning of the old Adam, in preparation for the daily resurrection of the new man?
What would happen if our worship services were not places where people go for
a few helpful hints for living with a few jokes thrown in for good measure, or a spiritual pick-me-up, but an audience with the living God? What would happen if we began
to take liturgy as more than form and ritual, as enacted reality, holy ground where we
actually come into the presence of God to receive his gifts, then to praise him in word
and song, with bodies and souls? If we are to effectively treat acedia in all of its manifestations in the church, it is time we pay more attention to the catechesis of worship,
preaching, and teaching.
Prayer and Meditation
When God speaks to us, there is nothing more natural than to speak back. In
that sense prayer is as natural as respiration; first we breathe in and then we exhale.
God always takes the initiative. He addresses us in his word and then we speak as we
are spoken to. In this sense prayer—or the lack thereof—is indicative of the relation310
ship between
God and his people. As respiration is a sign of biological life, so prayer is
a sign of spiritual life. Lungs without breath are dead lungs.
If one of acedia’s symptoms is boredom with holy things, we need to do more
than treat the symptoms. I am sure the Anglican rector who inaugurated the Cat in the
Hat Eucharist was trying to create interest and excitement among his people, but he
went about it all wrong. Sacrilege does not undo boredom with holy things; rather, it
desecrates and defiles what God has made holy. So rather than treating the boredom,
let’s treat the cause of that boredom—that is, let’s treat acedia.
If we are in need of a deeper sense of the holy, we need sanctification, and
according to Scripture, all things are sanctified by God’s word and prayer (1 Tm 4:5).
That is, we receive the Holy Spirit by means of God’s word, and then we converse with
him by means of his Spirit. So while prayer has both God’s command and promise and
is as vital to spiritual life as our breath is to our physical life, it is also essential in the
treatment of acedia. Therefore, one of the most effective things we can do in confronting contemporary challenges effectively is to teach people to pray.
Prayer, while a natural part of the Christian life, doesn’t come naturally. We
wouldn’t have the Our Father, after all, were it not for the fact that one of Jesus’s
disciples asked him one day after he had finished praying: “Lord, teach us to pray, as
John taught his disciples.” (Lk 11:1). And so the Lord Jesus instructed them in the best
possible way. He didn’t lecture them on the principles of prayer, but he began to pray,
inviting them to pray with him. “Our” in Our Father does not just include our brothers
and sisters in the faith, you see, but the Son of God himself.
But what to pray? If people are to pray in every circumstance, they need to learn
the art of meditation also. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer,” the psalmist writes (Ps
19:14). To meditate does not mean to think hard; rather, to borrow from John Kleinig,
it is a form of “relaxed concentration.” He writes:
By entering into meditation, we give ourselves to what we see, hear,
imagine, or feel. We are mentally at attention, mindful and receptive to
something that comes to us. In meditation, something happens to us,
something is given to us. In meditation, we stop acting as thinkers and
doers and vacate the stage for somebody or something else to occupy that
space. Someone else or something else becomes the center of our world.
We receive what is said, done, or given to us.29
And so prayer begins in a receptive posture. First we listen to God speaking,
and then we speak back to him. Therefore meditation is the heart of prayer. In our
busy world, we could use a bit more peace and quiet. How much better if we were to
regularly be still and listen carefully to hear God speak in his word; how much better
if we were to hold our hearts still from fretfulness, hurt, and fear so that we could be
more receptive to God as he gives himself to us in his word. How refreshing it is when
we are constantly doing, to simply sit still and to simply be; to be the Father’s beloved
child, enthralled to hear what he has to tell us.
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This requires some discipline, of course—to create space in our harried, frenzied
world takes some doing. But it can be done, and the reward is great. Jesus instructed
his disciples to practice their personal prayer not in the marketplace or even in the temple, but to enter into an enclosed space where they could be still, meditate upon God’s
word, and then pray.
Because our world is filled with constant stimuli, it is important to find a quiet
spot for meditation—the church’s sanctuary, a room in our own house, a quiet path
perhaps, or even driving our cars. To be quiet is the first step, then to listen—to listen
not to the wild, racing feelings of our own hearts, but to the sure and certain promises
of God’s word. So, like children, Luther reminds us, we begin by reciting the Creed or
the Lord’s Prayer, a psalm, or some text of Scripture. It’s important that we speak out
loud so that the ear can hear and the heart believe an objective word that cuts through
the stream of conflicting thoughts that flow through our harried hearts and minds.
In such prayer, formed and framed by the Spirit of God by his word, there is
peace in the midst of turmoil, as Isaiah writes, “You keep him in perfect peace whose
mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (Is 26:3).
Conclusion: When Worlds Collide—Learning From Augustine
These are stressful times for Christians. Uncertainty is everywhere, giving rise to
mischief as church leaders scramble to connect with a world that seems to have come
unglued, and fear is often the result. But we need not fear. Our Lord promises that the
very gates of hell will not prevail against his church, and that he will be with us always,
to the very end of the age.
Besides, we have been in situations like this before. As the Roman Empire was
collapsing in ruins, there were many who blamed the new state religion, Christianity, for
its collapse. The comfortable world that had provided ease and security for a thousand
years was unraveling. In the year 410, Barbarian invaders had sacked the city of Rome,
which many had believed would stand forever, and her monuments lay in ruin. The
adherents of the pagan gods were looking for someone to blame, and Christians were
an easy target.
We should have some sympathy for these ancients, for in many ways we live
in a world much like theirs. The familiar and comfortable is vanishing and something
radically different is taking its place. I joked about the Eisenhower administration, but
I think we all know the tug of nostalgia and a longing for something simpler and more
predictable, less threatening and tumultuous, more comfortable and secure. But such is
not our lot.
We live in a time between the age of reason and whatever will come next much
like that of late antiquity, when the classic age was collapsing in ruin and the early
Middle Ages were beginning. That was the church’s moment in the sun, one of its best
times for vigorous mission and growth. It wouldn’t be too long before those Germanic
hordes that had sacked and looted the city of Rome would themselves become
Christians.
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These times between the collapse of one worldview and the dawn of another are
frequently epochs of great opportunity for the church. Rather than shrinking with fear
for what is coming in this post-Christian era, it’s time to rise to the challenge. We can learn
a great deal from Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. Over thirteen
years he drafted an apologetic for Christianity that still stands as a classic: City of God.
In his book, St. Augustine tells of two cities: the city of man, transient and passing; and
the city of God, transcendent and lasting. Here is an important lesson for us as we struggle
to discover how we should respond to contemporary challenges, especially since we, like the
citizens of the ancient Roman Empire, are much too comfortable and attached to our culture. We need a more objective vantage point. We, like Augustine, need to step back from
our culture to sort out what belongs to the city of man and what belongs to the city of God.
Simply put, here amid the kingdoms of this world we have no continuing city.
That’s why we dare not become attached to the passing values of any human culture.
We await a city with foundations built by God. The city of God, that is, his eternal
kingdom built on the person and work of his Son, rests securely though all the world
is shaken. Thanks be to God, his kingdom comes all by itself without our prayer, but
we pray that it may come among us also. Our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit
so that by his grace we believe his holy word and lead godly lives both here in time and
there in eternity.
Late antiquity and late modernity have much in common. For those ancients as
well as our contemporaries, things comfortable and familiar are gone, apparently never
to return. Ahead is only uncertainty and confusion. Yet the church perpetually looks
beyond the current shadows of uncertainty and confusion to the dawning light of eternity. She has the promise of her living Lord to sustain her: “I will never leave you nor
forsake you.” In Christ Jesus her Lord the church in every age has a hope and a future.
As we search for vitality in the church’s life and mission in our own tumultuous
age we can draw inspiration from St. Augustine in the closing words of City of God. To
shed light on their present darkness he points the faithful to their glorious future, to
an end without ending, to that time when they would know God’s eternal kingdom no
longer by faith but by sight:
The seventh (day) shall be our Sabbath, which shall be brought to a close,
not by an evening, but by the Lord’s day, as an eighth and eternal day,
consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal
repose not only of the spirit, but also of the body. There we shall rest and
see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without
end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the
kingdom of which there is no end?30
Endnotes
Chad Walsh, Early Christians of the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1950), 9–10.
“‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Religion & Public Life Project, October 9, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.
3 David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1998).
1
2
313
4 Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (Wilmington, DE:
ISI Books, 2013), 3.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Ibid., 6.
7 Ibid., 28–29.
8 David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1994), 82.
9 Christopher Brittain, “Plague on Both Their Houses: The Real Story of Growth and Decline in
Liberal and Conservative Churches,” ABC Religion and Ethics, May 8, 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/
articles/2013/05/08/3754700.htm.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Three Treatises (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1982), 118.
13 Robert Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story,” First Things 36 (October, 1993): 20.
14 Ibid., 23.
15 Tullian Tchividjian, “The Missing Message in Today’s Churches,” The Washington Post, October 17,
2013.
16 Harold Senkbeil, Dying To Live: The Power of Forgiveness (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1994), 24.
17 Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013), 142.
18 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944).
19 “A Cat, A Hat, and A Eucharist,” Service at St. George’s Anglican Church, Guelph, Ontario, uploaded
June 30, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7rIbNCJGpI.
20 Dorothy Sayers, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974), 108.
The reference reflects an alternate numeration of classic cardinal sins, which fluctuated over the centuries.
21 Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (New York: Penguin, 2008), 1.
22 Ibid., 3.
23 Richard Leahy, “How Big a Problem is Anxiety,” The Anxiety Files, April 30, 2008, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anxiety-files/200804/how-big-problem-is-anxiety.
24 Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
25 Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 435–436.
26 Luther’s Works eds. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 56 vols. American Edition (St. Louis and
Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press, 1958–86), 42:121–166.
27 Jenson, 24.
28 Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” Creed or Chaos?, 1–9.
29 John Kleinig, Grace upon Grace (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2008), 92.
30 St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), 867.
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Homiletical Helps
COncordia
Journal
Homiletical Helps on LSB Series A—First Lesson to Series B—Epistles
Proper 27 • Amos 5:18–24 • November 9, 2014
The words of the first writing prophet, Amos, come to us only five times in
the three-year lectionary, and only once during the Series A year in this pericope. It
is paired with important New Testament eschatological readings of 1 Thessalonians
4:13–18 (a frequent funeral sermon text) and Matthew 25:1–13 (the parable of the Ten
Virgins) which also appear only once each in the lectionary. Some pastors may have
used Reed Lessing’s Lenten series Restore the Roar, which will have taken their hearers
through Amos wonderfully well. If that series wasn’t used, the pastor could import
some of those ideas into this sermon. Lessing’s Amos commentary should also be
consulted if one is considering preaching on this text, as it will give much more detail
than this short Homiletical Help can provide.1 Lessing begins his commentary with C.
S. Lewis’s wonderful conversation in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe between the
children and the beavers about Aslan the Lion which concludes with “Course he isn’t
safe. But he’s good.” We too often want a tame, safe God when in reality, thankfully,
we have an awe-inspiring, grace-filled God.
At the time of Amos, the people of the northern kingdom (Israel) had been on
the path of apostasy and syncretism for nearly two hundred years, and had been led
away from faithful worship in Jerusalem. About a dozen unfaithful kings had led them
away—the latest a new Jeroboam. Elijah and Elisha had preached God’s words of warning to Israel a few generations earlier. Now Yahweh calls Amos, a shepherd from Tekoa
in southern Judah, to the task. He does not hold back, and echoes of Amos can be
heard through the rest of the writing prophets. Through Amos, Yahweh roars judgment
to the neighboring kingdoms around Judah and Israel. The theme of a lion and roaring
occurs frequently in Amos (1:2; 3:4, 8, 12; 5:19). Starting at 2:6, Amos has the strongest
warnings for Israel, warnings about their false worship and the mistreatment of the poor
by the rich (e.g., 2:6–7; 4:1; 5:11–12). This pericope is amid these many warnings.
The Lord has tried less catastrophic methods to call Israel to repentance, like
withholding rain from some but not others, sending plagues, etc., “but yet you did not
return to me, declares the Lord” (4:6–11). Now Yahweh warns this generation that the
end is near (and the end actually does come about forty years later, with the Assyrian
invasion of 722 BC). The people are told that they will not get what they are expecting. They believe that if they mimic true worship through various feasts, grain offerings, and burnt offerings, that God will be pleased and continue to bless them. But the
songs of their worship will not be heard. They are also worshipping other deities of
Mesopotamia (5:26); they will be taken into exile into their realms. They cannot escape.
God wants them to continue receiving his grace, but they won’t have it.
Preaching this text will have its challenges. The pastor will not want to simply
equate today’s listeners with ancient Israel’s idol worshipers, but will know the syncretistic tendencies of his own locale (e.g., lodges or the belief that Jesus is not the only
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way to God). He will recognize that we all have a tendency to want a tame, safe, comfortable God. We do need constant reminders that this gracious, loving God is aweinspiring and to be feared when we stray. If the pastor uses this pericope as the main
text, the gospel will need to be imported from elsewhere. In his commentary, Lessing
points out that the darkness of the day of judgment connects to not only 722 and 587
BC, or AD 70, but to the three hours of darkness on Good Friday. He then uses Mark
15:33, John 19:30, and Revelation 21:23–25 to bring us to “the promise of unending
day.”2 The eschatology of 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 could also be used, tying the roar of
the lion to the cry of command, the voice of the archangel (v.16), which will announce
the glorious resurrection of the dead.
Possible opening (modify to your circumstance): I have a nephew who was a
brave, rambunctious preschooler. We visited the zoo together once. We came upon the
lion enclosure, which had a floor-to-ceiling window of thick glass. The king of the pride
was lying majestically just beyond the glass. My nephew, knowing the lion could not
possibly get through the thick window, began dancing in front of the king, just on the
cusp of teasing him. After a few seconds, the king was displeased; he roared and took a
swipe at my nephew. My nephew slowly backed away from the window, eyes wide and
mouth agape, awed by the teeth, claws, and roar of the king. He was a different little
boy for the rest of our day at the zoo.
Rick Marrs
Endnotes
1
2
R. Reed Lessing, Amos Concordia Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2009).
Ibid., 352.
Proper 28 • Zephaniah 1:7–16 • November 16, 2014
With the end of the church year near and coming quickly, Zephaniah deepens
the darkness of the “great and terrible day of Yahweh.” The pericope includes the
famous Dies Irae passage of the ancient hymn by that name (TLH 607). But this is only
chapter 1, which is focused against Judah (1:4). Zephaniah 2 continues this somewhat
typical prophetic outline with judgment against all nations and all creation, anticipated
at the outset in 1:2–3. But this is not the end of the matter. Such total and cosmic
destruction is then followed by restoration, renewal, and new creation (3:9ff), centered
in a faithful, confident Zion defined by the presence of Yahweh (3:16–18).
In sum, this is the basic biblical narrative in a nutshell, with the new creation
brought about in the presence of King Yahweh incarnate in Jesus, who establishes the
new Zion wherever he is present, no longer in the “land” of Judah.
But first the judgment; before resurrection, death; before Easter, Good Friday;
before gospel, law. One cannot be raised from death to new life until and unless one is
first dead.
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This is the challenge of preaching law in all its severity in a culture that is antinomian in every aspect except for whatever ideology that culture wants enforced. This is
also the problem with all therapeutic Christianity that hopes to salve, to heal, to solve
rather than absolve, and that fails to understand that the patient cannot be saved. God’s
opus alienum actually must kill in order to make alive.
So we must do better than to blast away at a decadent culture and the preacher’s
list of pet sins. The issue is greater than that; it is the fate of a fallen creation, groaning
in travail even now. There is something wholesome about finally getting to the judgment: only then can we get on with the new life.
This is very much the message of Zephaniah and his contemporaries Jeremiah
and Ezekiel. It remains a mystery why they are so silent about Josiah’s reform. Whether
their message pre-dates it or, more likely, follows it, it is clear that whatever short-term
good came of this last attempt to salvage the Davidic line and temple, the fact that its
effects did not last actually helped seal the fate of God’s people and impress upon the
prophets of Yahweh that the end was inevitable now also for Judah.
Exegetical Notes
The text is rich in poetic style, with word repetitions and synonyms piled high,
especially in vv. 14ff. Space allows only a few highlights:
“I will “visit” (yTiid>q;P’) in vv. 8B, 9A, 12Bb
“Near is the Day of Yahweh” in v. 7 and v. 14. Note that the emphatic fronting
of “near” (hwhy ~wOy bwOrq’, “near is the Day of YHWH”) is lost in most translations.
The staircase parallelism, e.g. in v. 14Aa, where the ominous “near” (bwOrq’) is
picked up from v. 7, but now with the addition of “great” to “the day.” The “near” is
then repeated in the next colon (14Ab), but the tension is extended, “near and coming
quickly” (daom. rhemæW bwOrq’).
The pounding drumbeat of the “day” (I~wOy) in vv. 14–16 (9x).
Explanation of Idioms and References
The strange “hush” (sh;) in v. 7 implies a shock and awe of silence in the presence of God (Hab 2:20). In the presence of this judge, there is nothing to say!
The sacrifice (v. 7) likely suggests that Judah now will be offered as a sacrifice,
with the nations watching. This may be a reference to a covenant sacrifice (some commentators suggest a distant reference to the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 15, with
the cutting of an animal). A reference to Abraham would complement the echo of the
Mosaic covenant in Deuteronomy in v. 13 (cf. Dt 6:10–11), and the judgment on the
royal house in v. 8 (though the king himself is not mentioned), so that the whole of
Israel’s history stands judged.
The “foreign attire” in v. 8 may refer to pagan cultic dress, not simply expensive
“imports,” though the general abuses of the wealthy are often in view.
The “leaping over the threshold” in v. 9 may refer to the pagan practice of the
Philistines (1 Sm 5:5).
The various references to local parts of the city of Jerusalem (vv. 10–13, likely
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known to the hearers of old if lost to us today) notes the very specific and real nature of
this destruction and may be defining the boundaries of the city. No one can escape the
searchlights; more profound and penetrating than Diogenes’s quest it would be! (v. 12).
No one escapes the judgment, from the priests and participants in false worship
(v. 4), to the royal house (v. 8), to the merchants (v. 11), and to the general atheists and
agnostics who say, “God is irrelevant” (v. 12).
Homiletical Application
Biblical theology takes sin and judgment seriously, because it also understands
grace and new life so profoundly. The final days of the church year bring this to culmination and then lead round once more to the advent solution: Christ has come, died,
risen, and will come again.
This is not a cry to “shape up” or even “repent,” but to recognize the inevitability of the great day of Yahweh against all fallen creation, focused on his special creature, humanity, represented by his chosen people, Israel and now only Judah. There is
no escape.
But, if Judah becomes central, even as a sacrifice for the nations, central to is
the goal that a renewed Judah, embodied in the Son of Abraham and Son of David,
“reduced to One,” will rise from the death of judgment to establish the new creation
and resurrection life that is ours in Christ, who has taken this cosmic and personal
judgment onto himself.
To take Jesus’s sacrifice seriously and completely, we first take God’s judgment
fully and completely, which he has done for us.
Andrew Bartelt
Proper 20 • Ezekiel 34:11–16; 20–24 • November 23, 2014
God Protects and Heals His Flock
When faced with the fall of Jerusalem, Ezekiel describes the judgment on those
shepherds responsible and the reasons for the fall. In our passage he declares that God
will provide new shepherds who will care for the flock and will tend to them properly.
In the intervening verses, he then warns the people about panicked and shortsighted
selfishness in the face of crisis, as well as indicating that judgment is coming and God
will send one righteous Lord from the line of David to care more deeply for the flock.
Preceding Context
In chapter 33 Ezekiel speaks of the consequences of not warning sinners of
their evil acts and judges those responsible for such warnings that they will face the
same consequences if they do not warn the wicked. Ezekiel then announces that it
was because of the wickedness of the city and because of its defilement that God has
judged Jerusalem. The beginning of chapter 34 is a diatribe against the rapacious shep-
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herds who
have only been concerned with their own gain and not with the good of the
city and the kingdom. God will rescue his flock from such rapacious men.
Following Context
God will restore the city and beat down the chaos caused by its abandonment.
The savage beasts probably indicate foreign threats (as opposed to the fat sheep, who
are an internal, domestic threat, see below). This makes sense as the next chapter deals
with the fall of Edom.
Problem with the Pericopal Selection
I wish the committee selecting the passage would have left the passage alone and
not have excised verses 17–19. The passage as edited eliminates some clear statements
of law and the original text makes a superior presentation to the redacted version. As a
preacher, I would modify the reading to include the redacted verses. In this contribution I will use the full text.
Points of Interest
God will restore his flock by gathering the scattered among them, as the text
describes in some detail. Furthermore, he will richly feed his flock on the mountains
of Israel. This means that the entire land will be at peace. God will search for the lost,
restoring them. God will destroy the sleek and the strong, and he gives the reasons why
in the passage not included. They have not only had enough for themselves but have
selfishly taken more than they needed and have also ruined the environs for the other
sheep so that they starved. This point represents significant law for a culture of greed
and narcissism. God will therefore judge the strong, bullying, selfish, fat sheep, and
he will protect and feed the weak sheep. He will do this through the “David” he has
appointed, the Christ. And God will, through this Christ, usher in a kingdom of peace
and righteousness.
Law and Gospel
There are three axes of law in this text: the first is law against the shepherds who
have neglected their duties, the second is against the sheep who have brutalized their
own people, and the third is against those foreign powers who would take advantage
of the situation (the wild beasts). The main issue of law here is selfishness under duress
where love for the neighbor is required.
The gospel is found in God’s restoration of his kingdom through the work of
the Christ, the new David who is to come. It is found in the provision of a gracious
and just Lord, who will bind up and care for the weak and injured and make them to
lie down in those green pastures. Here Psalm 23 would be appropriate as a supporting text. Although there are tie-ins with the gospel reading for today, I would consider
using the John 10 text on the good Shepherd and his sheep. The feeding of the five
thousand in John 6 would also work well as it specifically says, “Jesus said, ‘Have the
people sit down.’ There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down . . .” (Jn 6:10).
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difficult on the basis of this passage alone to make direct tie-ins to the cross
It is more
and resurrection, but there is no reason that these matters cannot be brought in as support for what and how Jesus gives us his body and blood as “grass.”
Two Kinds of Righteousness
For those who would preach using the two kinds of righteousness as a paradigm,
one could begin with a briefer presentation of the matters of law and gospel above
treating how God brings his righteousness to us through the new David and then discuss how we can also love our neighbor in times of hardship and trouble. To me, this
text lends itself more easily to a law-gospel presentation.
Timothy Dost
Advent 1 • 1 Corinthians 1:3–9 • November 30, 2014
The church journeys into Advent, anticipating renewal in the vital proclamation
of Jesus’s incarnation—embodied grace in the embryo of a woman’s womb. The church
becomes that vessel of incarnate grace where we are saturated in baptismal living waters
that have claimed, redeemed, and forgiven us. The Church remains an eternal community gathered around the table of Eucharist grace—where, by faith, we receive the
real, incarnate, inseparable, incredible forgiveness food of Jesus’s own body and blood
in bread and wine. Abundant grace is revealed, proclaimed, and preached in the word.
Abundant grace soaks, nourishes, recreates, and feeds us in the sacraments. Abundant
grace in life and death strives and thrives for God’s believing and broken people!
Paul’s inaugural greeting infuses grace language into the Corinthian church. This
is intentional. This is profound. Christian invocation and benediction decrees grace
to the faith-filled keeping us connected and inseparable from the name of the Holy
Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is our liturgical ritual, the grammar of our
dialog in worship and community. Grace repeatedly forms us as Christians. We receive
book-ended grace; it initiates us into the Christian faith, it sustains us and finishes
our paradoxical oscillating journey between rebellion and redemption, rebellion and
redemption, rebellion and redemption, over and over again. Without God’s intervening
grace in Christ Jesus, life would end only in death—a mortal finish line!
Rend the heavens and come down is an incipit of an Advent collect that hints
at the enormity of God’s intervention! Advent is not just anticipatory of a saccharinsweet nativity story, but bona fide bitter judgment against sin! Heaven and earth collide
and are mingled in Jesus! God and man! Jesus is wrapped in human flesh; the world is
wrapped in divine grace . . . a God-given shield and armor defending us against overt
satanic assault and evil’s subtle, deceptive influence. God grace is sufficient to safeguard
us. God grace is steadfast through life. God grace keeps us buoyant until that final day
of judgment, the resurrection of flesh, and eternity’s unrivaled revelation—our immortal un-finish line!
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The church treasures the counsels of God and throughout its rituals, symbols,
catechesis, and preaching evangelizes the world with gospel! Our confession of faith in
repetitive cyclical liturgies—ancient, apostolic, catholic, contextual, confessional—shape
our dialog and our community with the Triune God and give us solidarity in our communion gathered around word and table. The church’s speech and song on our lips and
in our ears continually announces unfathomable divine grace. It is our endeavor to speak
divine truth into our own contexts; to engage our intellects into understanding the Holy
Scriptures . . . and to care for our fellowship of believers with unrelenting love.
Redemption from our loving God in Christ Jesus is our chief gift. God alone
directs, aims, and claims our hearts making us recipients, agents, and disciples of the
redemption story. Redemption in Christ is the final cadence in a grand symphony.
God creates, composes, directs, and inspires all of our gifts and weaves all of our distinct counterpoints into community . . . into being one holy people. God’s speech and
knowledge creates, redeems, sustains, and orchestrates Church. Jesus’s incarnation graces this holy church, this bride of Christ, on a baptized trajectory toward the marriage
feast of the Lamb where guiltless saints are fed with him forever.
David A. Johnson
Advent 2 • 2 Peter 3:8–14 • December 7, 2014
The seven verses just preceding our text describe a cultural milieu that seriously
doubts the existence of God or a literal judgment day. This first century attitude fits the
current context where “[many] see no tangible evidence of the Lord’s second coming
and thus doubt its reality. As a result, they see no need for moral restraint because they
deem themselves free of accountability, since Christ said the judgment would take place
upon his second coming.”1 Today, the culture that is constantly encouraging people to
follow their own desires, cater to their own lusts, and live as though the world will carry
on forever (3:4). But, the world will not carry on forever, just as it has not existed from
eternity. Just as God created the heavens and the earth at a specific time (3:5) and sent
a flood as judgment upon the world in the past (3:6), so God has set an appointed time
for the return of Christ and the final judgment (3:7).
Today’s text is not answering the scoffers of verses 1–7, but instructing the
faithful regarding the concept of time—human and divine. The faithful are directed
to remember how God is eternal and doesn’t fit human categories of time. Verse 8
stresses this: “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”(emphasis added). A human perspective is captive within time and can only encompass a limited number of years; God is
eternal with a divine perspective that encompasses all things at once. This difference
has implications for how the believer understand God, his promises, and his mission.
Any perceived delay resulting in impatience would be from a human point of view;
however that same span of time from God’s point of view is undeserved patience “not
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wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (3:9). Is that not
divine love demonstrated daily, for us who believe and for the salvation of others who
have not yet believed?
The first two weeks of Advent combine elements of Christ’s second coming with
his first coming in Bethlehem. From a human perspective it is traditionally a time of
expectant waiting and preparation for Christmas. But, based on our text, could Advent
also be a time to prepare the world for Christ’s second coming? This text enables the
preacher to remind the congregation that as believers in Christ, we are already prepared
for the end of the world by Christ’s death and resurrection (Titus 3:5–7, Romans 6:3, 5,
and Ephesians 2:8–9). Since this is true, then the importance of diligence in living lives
of holiness and godliness (3:11) is not to somehow improve upon one’s own salvation;
rather, it is for the sake of the scoffers who do not yet believe, the neighbors who have
not heard, and for mutual encouragement among the faithful. God spreads his gospel
through the lives of his saints on earth, the baptized, to demonstrate His love for the
lost: “. . . not wanting that any should perish apart from Christ” (3:9).
The goal of the sermon is not for the hearer to make time for witnessing and
outreach as if it is another thing the baptized must do; rather, witnessing and outreach
should happen naturally by how Christians live all the time. Scoffers take notice when
believers are living differently. When the baptized devote themselves to sacrificial acts
of kindness, forgive freely, care for the poor, obey the laws, help the stranger and the
co-worker, and generally invest in the lives of those around them—people notice,
especially unbelievers. Such holiness and godliness will not go unquestioned in today’s
world—and that is a goal God has for his people—to be witness of his gospel in preparing the world for the upcoming advent of Christ.
Jeff Thormodson
1 Curtis P. Giese, 2 Peter and Jude Concordia Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
2012), 168.
Advent 3 • 1 Thessalonians 5:16–24 • December 14, 2014
It would be tempting to regard this text, a series of short imperative clauses, as a
random series of “inspired one-liners” that exhort the Thessalonian believers (and us)
to general Christian behaviors and attitudes. To be sure, there’s some truth in such a
description, for there is no complex argument involved and the hardest structural question might be to ask whether the grounding clause (v. 18b, “for this is God’s will in
Christ Jesus unto/for you”) supports only the immediately prior clause (v. 18a) or the
triad of clauses that precedes it (vv. 16–18a). Set in context, however, Paul’s exhortations (and that is what they are) naturally flow as part of the ending of his letter; they
express the ordinary manifestations of the extraordinary Christian life of faith and hope
and exhort us to this life.
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Rejoice always. This is not a power of positive thinking admonition, nor is it to
be taken in a literalistic and legalistic way, as if Christians do not have their times and
ways of grieving—although never without hope (1 Thes 4:13). Rejoicing is a regular
and consistent expression of life in Christ. The work of the Spirit in the lives of fellow
believers is regularly a cause for joy (1 Thes 3:9). All such rejoicing, however, is done
ultimately in the Lord (Phil 4:4), that is, in the past, present and future work of Christ
for us and all creation.
Pray unceasingly. Ditto on not reading this literally. But, as Ole Hallesby reminds
us, prayer is designed precisely for the helpless, and as believers live in unending and
joyful dependence on God’s care and provision in Christ, those believers will simply
pray as dear children as their dear heavenly Father—without ceasing.
Be thankful in everything. One of the most difficult things I experience in life
is the need to adjust to constant change. But, if the God who delivered me in Christ is
ever and always at work through (and despite) life’s changes, then at the least I can in
faith be thankful to him for the work he is doing. Thanksgiving, prayer, and rejoicing
are God’s will for me in Christ Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is like a fire, purifying and flaming in and through our lives. He
comes through the gospel powerfully to create faith and to sustain joy (1 Thes 1:5, 6).
His call to obedience must not be resisted in the area of sexual purity (1 Thes 4:7) or
elsewhere lest we run the risk of quenching that Spirit’s work within and through us.
God’s word is the source of every good. When genuine prophecy comes directly
from the Lord or (by extension) when God’s apostolic word is proclaimed, the only
proper response is to believe and respond. To despise prophecy or God’s word is to
despise the speaking God who gives it and to regard his word as merely the words of
men (1 Thes 2:13).
There is still mourning; death and decay and evil still lurk everywhere. Believers
must learn to test everything so as to turn away from what is evil and to hold fast to
what is good—Christ Jesus, the Spirit-born word about him, the Spirit-produced fruit
that blesses our neighbor even when he offers us evil (1 Thes 5:15). The evil in our
world and (still) in our flesh comes in many shapes and sizes. Every form of it must be
kept at a distance. This too is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus the Lord.
One could preach the whole text, and offer to the congregation a general and
powerful testimony through St. Paul to the life lived in Christ. Or, one could focus on
any of the exhortations and illustrate what it would look like to live the sanctified life
of faith even as we look for the day when the God of peace will sanctify us completely,
having kept us until the Parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thes 5:23). This God is
faithful. We are up and down, and back and forth, but this God is faithful and he will
do it (1 Thes 5:24).
Jeff Gibbs
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Advent 4 • Romans 16:25–27 • December 21, 2014
On the final Sunday of Advent, just a few days before the glorious celebration of
Christmas, these three verses at the end of the Epistle to the Romans are full of homiletical possibility. In just a few days, the people of God will join in countless hymns
which all use the word “glory” (“Angels from the Realms of Glory,” “Angels We Have
Heard on High,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Joy to the World,” “O Come All
Ye Faithful,” and others). A preacher might prepare his people to sing these hymns by
unpacking one of the earliest hymns of glory, the “doxology” at the end of Romans.
The words of Romans 16:25–27 read like a hymn and are thought by many
scholars to be from the liturgy of the earliest Christians. One scholar points out, “The
style of the doxology is elaborate. Three prepositional phrases depend on the infinitive
στηρίξαι; three participles in apposition qualify μυστηρίου; two prepositional phrases
illuminate φανερωθέντος and two amplify γνωρισθέντος. There are three indirect
objects including one relative. There is one dative of time. δια appears twice, κατα
three times, and εις three times. No finite verb is expressed. All of this occurs within
just over fifty words.”1 In addition to the style of language, there is another reason to
think of these three verses in their liturgical setting. Martin Franzmann notes in his
commentary, “The picture of an early Christian service of worship shimmers through
verses 16–20. The assembled congregation has heard Paul’s apostolic Word; the service
of the Word is concluded, and the solemn celebration of the Lord’s Supper is about
to begin. The church marks and expresses its solidarity in the Lord by the exchange of
the holy kiss.”2 Our text, then, becomes a hymn sung right before the Lord’s Supper,
pointing us to what God has done for us in Christ.
With the Greek text in hand, the preacher will notice that these verses are in
brackets. The reason for this is these three verses show up in different places—or not
at all—in a variety of manuscripts of Romans. Some versions of Romans have only
fourteen chapters and therefore have our pericope following 14:23. Some versions
have our pericope at the end of both chapters 14 and 16. Other manuscripts omit the
pericope altogether. Of course the Textus Receptus have our pericope as 16:25–27.
Though there has been plenty of scholarly discussion in recent years regarding this
phenomenon, the Sunday sermon will probably not need to wade into these difficulties.
The verses certainly contain plenty of echoes of the main theological emphases of the
Epistle to the Romans. Note especially the echoes in the early verses of the first chapter and in 15:1–13. The doxology in 11:36 seems to glorify God for his plan to save all
Israel. The doxology in 16:25–27 would then be a counterpart for Gentile salvation.3
While the preacher might utilize a number of different sermon structures, the following main points of the text should come through clearly. God is able to strengthen
and establish his people through the Scriptures. Paul drives this point home throughout
his epistle from Romans 1:16 to Romans 15:4 and many places in between. God is able
to do this because the “prophetic writings” and Paul’s own gospel are all centered in
Jesus Christ. He is the mystery which was “kept secret” until that “O Holy Night” in
Bethlehem. In Paul’s day, throughout the last two thousand years, and even up to this
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God’s command is being fulfilled and people are being saved through Christ
very day,
and through the Scriptures that testify to him. The purpose of the sermon will be to prepare God’s people to sing the Gloria with the angels on Christmas Eve!
Ben Haupt
Endnotes
1 J. K. Elliott, New Testament Textual Criticism: The Application of Thoroughgoing Principles: Essays on
Manuscripts and Textual Variation (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 322.
2 Martin Franzmann, Romans: A Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968), 277.
3 Larry Hurtado, “The Doxology at the End of Romans,” New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance
for Exegesis, Essays in Honour of Bruce Metzger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 198.
Christmas 1 • Galatians 4:4–7 • December 28, 2014
The celebration of Christmas begins, in stores and media, months before
December 25. Advent has led up to the church’s celebrations of Christmas Eve and
Christmas Day. Now, three days later, the season of Christmas continues. But what
is left to say? What is left now that the children’s program has brought the trip to the
manger back to life for us? What is left after once again hearing (and preaching on)
Luke 2 and Matthew 1? The climatic services are over and it’s time to muster up the
energy for preaching on . . . the First Sunday of Christmas.
Ironically, our text gives us too much to preach on in one sermon! Fullness of
time. Sent. Birth. Law. Redemption. Adoption. Spirit. Abba. Inheritance. With so many
metaphors for the gospel and actions by our Triune God the preacher needs to be
selective. At the same time, Paul’s thought progression is so tight and sequential, that to
leave something out disrupts the force of the passage. Hence, this approach follows the
flow of the text, but does so under the dominant metaphor of birth or adoption into a
family. The structure begins with the human family into which we are born, and moves
the hearers into the adopted family made possible by Jesus’s birth into the human family. The goal is that hearers will believe more firmly that they have been adopted into
God’s family.
Born into One Family; Adopted into Another1
I began with the quip “You can pick your friends but you are stuck with your
family.” We are born into our families. We don’t pick our parents or other relatives.
We’re stuck in that family. While many happy family moments occur, we also can be
hurt in families. Dysfunctional families can damage the members within them in ways
that are not pretty.
I encouraged the people to think bigger than the immediate family. We are all
born into the human race. We are stuck with the human family. It is a dysfunctional
family and does things to us that are not pretty. I went to Paul’s list of the works of the
flesh (Gal 5:19–21). After reading the list, I focused on three areas:
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First—sexuality. God’s gift of sexuality is to be celebrated in the husband/wife
marital relationship, but the human family has misused it. I followed the pattern of
smaller to bigger again, with smaller being the everyday moments we experience and
the bigger more worldwide. TV, movies, magazines at the grocery checkout line, billboards; then pornography; and then sex-slave trafficking (I Googled the last one to get
a few disturbing statistics). The refrain I used here and in the next examples is—“This
is the family we are stuck with.”
Second—anger, enmity, and divisions. Again, I started with small examples that
led to bigger ones: Anger from hitting four red lights in a row, or getting in the slow
checkout line; using words on social media when tired and impatient that damage or
break relationships; then school shootings, domestic violence, abuse, rising rates of violent crime (again I Googled for the stats); and then terrorism, and war.
Third—drunkenness. I used some stats from an article from Christianity Today in
which the author moved into a low-income apartment complex in a large urban area to
carry out a caring ministry.2 She saw how alcohol disproportionately affected minorities
and the poor. One in six Americans has a drinking problem. Seventy percent of children in foster care show the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure.
This is the family we are born into. We are stuck in this family. But, it is not the
only family. Jesus opens the door to a different family home. Here I followed the text’s
structure:
In God’s time, he decided when the time had come to fulfill his promises in
Genesis 3:15 and Isaiah 9:6.
Jesus is born of a woman. He is born one of us. Here I described the manger
scene, and spoke especially of Jesus having arms, legs, fingers, and toes. Mary could
caress his cheek. But, he is born into the human family!
Under the law. This phrase gave me the opportunity to mention the law’s accusing and punishing roles. The death declared in the garden of Eden is physical and
spiritual. But, Jesus is unique. The law can’t convict him. No punishment is due him. I
retold the Transfiguration scene, emphasizing the Father’s words “With him I am well
pleased” to show he had done nothing wrong.
To redeem us. Here is the gospel proclamation of Jesus, now with grown–up
hands and feet, hanging on the cross. He takes the punishment for us. He goes through
the punishment of separation from his Father, a spiritual death, with “My God, My
God, why have you forsaken Me?” It’s the same for his physical death. His heart stops
beating; his arms and legs go limp. He is buried. He takes the condemnation of the law
we were under onto himself so that we could be adopted into a new family. It is the
greatest Christmas present ever (John 3:16; Romans 5:6–8).
We are adopted. Here I returned to the “pick your friends” quip of the introduction, only to have God as the one who chooses us. I went to two or three people at
each service and declared: “Bob, God has chosen you.” Joyce, God has adopted you.”
“Dave, God has selected you.” Then I included everyone with a sweep of the hand to
say, “We may be born into the human family, but because of Jesus we are adopted into
God’s family.”
It is Christmas every day because the Holy Spirit has been sent into our hearts.
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us to say “Abba Father.” I used the Lord’s Prayer here. Then I went bigger
He leads
again to speak of what it’s like to be in God’s family with the gift of the Holy Spirit
present in the life of the church. In answer to the works of the flesh earlier in the
sermon, I brought in the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23). Then I spoke three short
prayers, each beginning with “Abba, Father.” One was for patience in an angry world.
Another was for compassion for those who struggle with abuse and addiction. The
third was for kindness and gentleness.
I finished the sermon by telling of a pastor who, at the time of the sermon, was
adopting two children from overseas. The family would need to live for at least six
weeks in that country to complete the adoptions. The congregation where he had been
a pastor for only one year was incredibly supportive, giving him time away from the
congregation that was needed and helping with fundraisers. The pastor and his wife and
their two children flew overseas to adopt the children. The children to be adopted were
at an orphanage. One has scoliosis and is in a wheelchair. Within a couple of visits that
child was starting to say “papa.” And, where is the adoption taking place? Ukraine.3
In the midst of the anger and violence is compassion, kindness, and patience. This is
what the family of God looks like when adopted by our Abba Father because of the
Christmas gift named Jesus, and the Holy Spirit forming his fruit in us brothers and
sisters. We may be born into the human family, but when you are adopted into God’s
family, it’s Christmas every day.
Glenn A. Nielsen
Endnotes
1 I had the opportunity to preach this sermon at a congregation in the St. Louis area on Pentecost Sunday.
The following annotated structure gives a summary of each section and the examples I used during the sermon.
Since the structure is to be used during the Christmas season, examples that are more recent may be available, especially ones that connect with the congregation’s celebration of Christmas.
2 D. L. Mayfield, “Why I Gave Up Alcohol,” Christianity Today, June 2014, 34–41,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/june/why-i-gave-up-alcohol.html?paging=off.
3 When I asked the pastor what agency he and his wife were working through, he wrote: “While we are
technically doing an independent adoption we found our facilitation team through the fine folks at
reecesrainbow.org who also hosted our grant fund.”
Epiphany • Ephesians 3:1–12 • January 4, 2015
Notes on the Pericope
The Old Testament people knew that God had promised life and salvation to
all nations (e.g., see Genesis 12:3 and Isaiah 60:1–6, the appointed OT lesson), but
they did not know how he would do that. God made this clear through his Son and in
the witness of the apostles. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians both explains this and offers
God’s promises to all people.
From Sinai on, the requirements of the law had distinguished Jews from Gentiles.
But, in his life, death, and resurrection, Christ brought down the “middle wall of partition”
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(KJV; τὸ μεσότοιχον τοῦ φραγμοῦ) made of “the law of commandments” (Eph
2:14–15). In his life, he did not strictly uphold the Law, and he openly engaged and
brought blessings to sinners, Samaritans, Canaanites, and other Gentiles. He did so,
even to the point of being rejected and crucified (2:16; cf. Gal 3:10–14; 4:4–7). But, God
raised Jesus from dead, which vindicated Jesus on all counts, including his stance toward
the law and toward Gentiles. Now, instead of the law separating Jews and Gentiles,
God offered salvation apart from works of the law to both Jews and Gentiles. As Paul
explained, Gentiles had become “fellow heirs (συγκληρονόμα) and members of the body
(σύσσωμα) and partakers (συμμέτοχα) of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel”
(Eph 3:6).
Paul calls this “the mystery of Christ” (3:4; see also 3:3 and 3:9; cf. Romans
11:25–32 and Colossians 1:24–29). God had long kept it hidden (3:9), not revealing in
the past as it was now (3:5). But, in Christ Jesus, God had now accomplished his eternal purpose (3:11). God was revealing his plan through the apostles and prophets by
the Holy Spirit (3:5) to all humankind (3:9) and even to the spiritual “principalities and
powers in the heavenly places” (3:10). Paul himself was a minister of this gospel (3:7),
preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ to the Gentiles (3:8).
Notes for Preaching
As with other major festivals, Epiphany gives preachers the opportunity to
review God’s plan and work of salvation and to draw their hearers into that account.
Epiphany’s particular theme is the revelation to all nations of God’s reign and salvation
through Jesus Christ.
A sermon based on this pericope could begin with the point that one can appreciate fully what this revelation to all nations means for us only when one understands
to what “all” should be compared. In this case, the contrast is not “all or nothing,” as
seems often to be thought. It is not “all or some,” either. It is “all or one.” Under the
old covenant, when the law of Moses was in effect, there was “one nation under God”:
Israel. The rest—the Gentiles—were aliens and strangers as far as life and salvation
were concerned (Eph 2:11–12). And, if that had not changed, then most of us who call
ourselves God’s people would have remained outsiders.
What happened? What changed? Those are the questions to address. The answer
is, of course, Jesus. In his life, death, and resurrection, he brought an end to the old
covenant, including the reign of the law, and he called for followers to be made of all
nations—not just Israel (Mt. 28)—and sent apostles like Paul to all people (Eph 3:1)—
not just Jews. Moreover, “what happened” is that the message and the promises of God
came to us, in our time and place, and we have become “fellow heirs and members of
the body and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:6).
The sermon might conclude by asking “what now?” Here one could follow Paul
himself, who urged the Ephesians to lead lives worthy of their calling (Eph 4:1) and
to “walk as children of light” (Eph 5:8), not in darkness or ignorance (Eph 4:17–18;
5:8–11), which echoes the Old Testament lesson: “Rise, shine, for our light has come.”
Joel P. Okamoto
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Baptism of Our Lord • Romans 6:1–11 • January 11, 2015
This pericope has all the dangers of a familiar text: we recall parts of it perfectly
but may not remember how those parts all fit together. The themes of this passage are,
no doubt, regular themes within our preaching. This day, however, can provide us with
an opportunity to present this passage as something new, to see it from a new perspective, to connect it with Epiphany themes in a way that will restore its impact and let it
be truly heard again.
The gospel reading for today (Mark 1:4–11) is more immediately about Jesus’s
death and resurrection than it is about our baptism, so the pairing with Romans 6 can
work very nicely. Our Lord accepts the judgment of John the Baptist that Israel is sinful and unprepared to welcome her Lord. He places himself under the condemnation
of Israel’s last prophet, yet hears from his Father that in him the Father has, at last,
found a son who pleases him. As servant-king Jesus goes forth to do his Father’s will
and to complete the work he has been given to do. This leads directly to Romans 6.
Romans really is quite an “Epiphany book.” Paul is very concerned in this epistle
with things that are being “made manifest”: first God’s wrath and then God’s righteousness. Martin Franzmann refers here to our old status and our new status—very
appropriate themes for January preaching!1 Having demonstrated that God’s righteousness is revealed in Christ Jesus, and having let Abraham illustrate his point, Paul now
begins to explore the new status and the new life we have as people justified by faith in
Christ. We are set free from old slaveries, especially from our bondage to sin. Living as
free sons and daughters rather than as slaves to sin doesn’t come easily or naturally for
us. In order to silence our confused chatter and clear our jumbled thinking, Paul has to
give his first command in this epistle: λογίζεσθε (logízesthe), “reckon! think! evaluate!
consider!” (v. 11).
Suggested Outline
Introduction: Many people take time in January to reflect on the year just past
and consider the year just begun. It can be a very valuable time for evaluating and
correcting where needed. The whole world finds itself in need of even more serious
considering, evaluating, and repenting in light of the epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As he makes himself known through word and deed, everyone must stop and consider
what God is doing in this man Jesus and what that means for us now and forever.
I. Consider his baptism and yours
A. With respect to sin and grace
1.Jesus comes as the Lamb of God who bears away the sin of the
world so that he might be the bringer and revealer of God’s grace.
2.It’s a devilish logic that tempts us to think we can enjoy even
more of God’s grace by continuing to sin.2
B. With respect to death and life
1.Jesus lives to die: He emerges from baptism to a life of service
and suffering that will lead to his death for us.
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2.We die to live: We emerge from baptism as those who have
been buried with Christ and raised to new life through the
glory of the Father.
II. Consider yourselves
A.Dead
1.Our old self—our body of sin—was crucified with Christ. At
Christmas we celebrated with great joy the fact that God’s
Son took upon himself our human nature and all our sin. For
us he goes to the cross. In baptism, faith unites us to him so
that his death is truly our death.
2.“Death puts an end to all claims and cuts all ties.”3 Our former
master, the tyrant sin, no longer has any claim over us.
B.Alive
1. Baptism is burial and resurrection.
2.We are alive to God, with a new status and relationship as
children of God.
C.Free
1.We are free to live to God in this new-year-new-begining
new life.
2. We are free to let Christ make himself manifest in us.
Jeffrey A. Oschwald
Endnotes
1
Martin H. Franzmann, Romans: A Commentary (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1968), 19.
Cf. Franzmann, 108–109.
3 Franzmann, 112.
2
Epiphany 2 • 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 • January 18, 2015
Relevant Background
Acts 18:1–17 describes Paul’s eighteenth-month stay in Corinth. When both Silas
and Timothy came to help him, he was able to spend all of his time ministering to the
Jews (v. 5). But eventually, opposition to his message forced him to stop preaching in
the synagogue. He moved next door to the house of Titius Justus and turned his attention to Gentiles. In addition to the Jews and proselytes who had left the synagogue
with Paul, the congregation grew to include converts from both Jewish and pagan
backgrounds. Socially, the church included people of high status (Erastus, a city official
[Rom 16:23]), and low (Chloe, a domestic slave [1 Cor 1:11]).
The text is in a section of the letter in which Paul discusses problems in the
Corinthian church (5:1–6:20). In the section that follows (7:1–14:40), Paul answers
various questions that have risen: Is celibacy the Christian ideal? Is it okay to eat meat
sacrificed to idols? What behavior is appropriate in Christian worship? In 6:12–20,
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about how Christians should think about our bodies in relation to our sexual
Paul talks
behavior.
What led to the problems in Corinth? Scholars discuss many possibilities. In a
discussion on the influence of Hellenistic religions, D. R. de Lacey, gives a helpful summary relevant to 6:12-20: “Many of these religions developed a strongly dualist outlook
. . . This easily led to a premium on knowledge; to a belief (also found in Hellenistic
Judaism) in the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body; and,
perhaps rather strangely, to both asceticism . . . and libertinism (in which the ‘good’
soul is held to be undefiled, no matter what the illusory body may do).”1
Text Notes
Verse 6:12 “All things are lawful for me” In vv. 12-13, Paul echoes slogans
used by some people to justify their behavior. Paul doesn’t dispute that the slogans
have their proper use, but he works to correct their misuse. Here he counters, “but
not everything is beneficial.” The “point--counter point” creates an interpretive space
where Christians must use wisdom and discernment in their lives together.
“All things are lawful (ἔξεστιν) for me” is again countered with a nifty wordplay
by Paul, “but I will not by mastered (ἐξουσιασθήσομαι) by anything.” Paul assumes
that we are subject to one master, the Lord.
“Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, but God will destroy them
both” Scholars debate whether this entire utterance is the “slogan” or whether “but
God will destroy them both” is Paul’s “counter point.” I favor the former for at least
two reasons: 1. If one of the problems in Corinth is an extreme “dualism” (see notes
above), Paul’s rejoinder would implicitly reinforce the problem he is trying to counter.
2. In connection with this, in the remainder of the text, Paul is arguing for the importance of the body. If this is his rejoinder, it would undercut his arguments here and in
other parts of the letter (1 Cor 15).
“The body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the
body” Throughout the text, Paul argues against the idea that our physical bodies are of
little value and so the way Christians use their bodies is “morally irrelevant.” On the
contrary, our bodies are incredibly valuable and are to be treated as such. They don’t
belong to us. They belong to the Lord, and vice versa (v. 13). God will raise our bodies
(v. 14). Our bodies are members of Christ (v. 15; Rom 12:1–5). The one joined to the
Lord is one spirit with him (v. 17). Our bodies are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. We
have been bought with a price (vv. 19–20).
“Sexual immorality” (πορνεία) vs. “glorify God with your body” (δοξάσατε
δὴ τὸν θεὸν ἐν τῷ σώματι ὑμῶν) In Paul’s letters, these abstract terms are “filled up”
by him in definite ways. In other words, the line between “sexual immorality” and
“glorifying God with your body” is drawn so that the Christian community knows
what he is talking about. It is worth mentioning because in other communities, and
in our culture today, the lines between what is “moral” and “immoral” are blurry and
ambiguous.
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Verse 6:18 “Every sin which a person commits is outside his body” Scholars
debate whether this is Paul’s assertion or a slogan of the Corinthians. I favor the latter.
In other words, the Corinthians are using this slogan to justify their belief that anything
done with the body is of no moral relevance. Paul argues against this kind of distinction
in thinking of “sin.” The body is not an “amoral vessel.” It is the Temple of the Holy
Spirit. We are to glorify God with it.
Sermon Thoughts
The idea that the body is of relatively minor importance because it is merely a
temporary vessel for the soul is still an assumption of many Christians. That assumption enables some Christians to adopt views about God’s Creation, and our place in it
that are not necessarily in accord with God’s Word or his will for our lives. However,
the text also speaks to an issue in the larger culture: the belief that this material world
is all there is (materialism). There is no God, no soul, no meaning to life. We are not
“being led” by One greater than us but must forge our own way. As a result, we have
the freedom to do what we want with our bodies. We must shape our own morality.
In the The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt suggests two questions that we can ask
ourselves:
1. Do you believe that your body is a playground? Or,
2. Do you believe that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?2
The way you reason about your life, justify your morals, and make moral decisions spins out depending on the answer you give.
Opposing Moral Truths: Our Culture and the Human Body
If you believe that your body is a playground, it implies that we are “just animals
with an extra serving of consciousness.”3 It implies that our mission in life is to satisfy
our own desires. Under this vision of human flourishing, how does the culture shape
our desire and behavior?
Paul captivates us with a countercultural vision of who and what we are. He
argues for a different picture of what it means to be human: think about your body as
the temple of the Holy Spirit. This implies that we are children of God and should act
accordingly. It sees spiritual emptiness in our consumer society that trivializes sexuality.
How does this vision of humanity direct our desires? What beauty do we see in it?
Tim Saleska
Endnotes
1 D. R. de Lacey, “Corinthians, Epistles to the,” The Illustrated Bible Dictionary Vol. 1 (Leicester: IVP,
1980), 316.
2 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 117–118.
3 Ibid., 117.
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Epiphany 3 • 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 (32–35) • January 25, 2015
At the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, there is an installation called
Cup by Thomas Skomski. It’s basically a shelf extending out of the wall with a cup at
the very end. The shelf is about the height of a countertop, making the cup perfectly
within reach. Suspended there, this cup promises water for the weary. There is a problem, however. The shelf is actually a wire cage, surrounding the cup. So, you have a cup
perfectly positioned . . . but ultimately inaccessible. Desire and denial—that’s what the
artist is playing with. You desire to take the cup and drink. Yet, you are denied.
If you read the artist’s reflections, however, you notice that he pushes this experience deeper. He pushes it to the point where it strikes a spiritual nerve.
All who would follow Jesus and drink from his cup are caught in the difficulties
of discipleship. To follow Christ involves both denial and discovery. When you enter
the discipleship and drink from the cup, you suddenly discover life in denial. Cup and
cage are joined together. To be joined to Christ is to be brought into a different relationship with the things of this world. The joy of hanging out with friends is rich and
rewarding but pales in comparison to the joy of an answered prayer. The sorrow of
losing your job is painful and distressing but pales in comparison to the sorrow of your
child walking away from the faith. To be a disciple is difficult because you are always
living at the intersection of this world and the kingdom of God. Baptized into Christ
Jesus, you experience life differently.
The apostle Paul knew the difficulties of discipleship. Blinded on the Damascus
road, he was baptized and, when he opened his eyes, he suddenly saw things differently. He discovered grace and nothing was ever the same. The wisdom of the world
was foolishness to him. The strength of the world was weakness. God, the Father,
took that which was low and despised, the crucified Christ, and raised him to rule over
all. That one act changed how Paul saw the world. The foolishness of a crucified God
was Paul’s wisdom. The weakness of a dying Savior was Paul’s strength. Paul lived at
the intersection of this world and God’s kingdom, and that is a difficult place to be.
This difficult discipleship is what lies at the heart of Paul’s words in our epistle
this Sunday. Paul is writing to the Corinthians about marital relations. His words offer
guidance to those who are married and to those who are single. You need to be careful,
however, for Paul is not really writing about marriage or the single life. He is writing
about your relationship with Christ.
Paul affirms the married life (7:1–5, 9–16) and Paul affirms the single life (7:6–8,
32–35). Being married or being single is not the issue. The question is “how is your
relationship with the Lord?” You see, there are married couples who served the Lord,
like Priscilla and Aquila. And, there are married couples who fell away from the Lord,
like Ananias and Sapphira. There are single individuals who served the Lord, like Paul,
and there are single individuals who fell away from the Lord. It is not a matter of being
married or being single. Paul is not writing a law to “lay any restraint upon you” but
rather seeking “to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord” (7:35).
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If you read this text to establish a law about being single or being married, you
miss the larger picture. Paul wants to foster your relationship with Christ . . . whether
you are single or married. Paul wants to know, “how does your life support your relationship with the Lord?”
Discipleship is difficult. Our relationship with Christ changes our relations with
this world. Listen to how Paul describes this. “Let those who have wives live as though
they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those
who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had
no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it”
(7:29–31). We are to experience the things of this world but not in an all-consuming
way. Whether we are married or single, mourning or rejoicing, buying or selling . . . the
most important thing is that we are in Christ. Since Christ is our life and Christ has
given us life, we seek to live all of life in him.
In looking at the exhibit Cup one could discuss all sorts of things. How foolish it is
for an artist to stick a cup in a cage and put it on the wall. But, the artist is seeking to bring
you into a conversation that leads you closer to the Lord and to the difficulty of discipleship in him. In the same way, Paul’s letter raises all sorts of questions for people today.
“Is Paul advocating the single life?” “What does Paul have against marriage?” But, Paul is
not seeking to bring about that kind of a conversation. Instead, what Paul wants to foster
among us today is a conversation about life in Christ and how our joys and our sorrows,
our buying and our selling, yes even our marriages and our singleness lead us closer to him.
Preaching on this text involves engaging in that conversation. Using a central
image sermon structure,1 the preacher could (1) begin with the art installation of Cup
and the strange conversations that would occur in front of it; (2) move to this text and
the strange conversations that arise because of Paul’s words about marriage and the
single life; (3) return to the image and discover the deeper truth about difficult discipleship revealed there; (4) return to the text and proclaim the deeper truth about difficult
discipleship that is guiding Paul’s words; and (5) lead the hearers in contemplating their
lives in Christ, articulating how God works in their experiences of this world (joy, sorrow, buying, selling, marriage, the single life, etc.) to lead them closer to Christ.
David Schmitt
1 For the theory of this sermon structure, see description at http://concordiatheology.org/sermon-structs/
dynamic/imagistic-structures/central-image/.
Epiphany 4 • 1 Corinthians 8:1–13 • February 1, 2015
The goal of the human person who wishes to achieve everything that there is to
achieve in life is _____.
How would each one of us fill in the blank? According to the Hellenistic philosophers of the apostle Paul’s day, the pinnacle of human experience, of human existence
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and achievement,
was not faith, hope, and love (“and the greatest of these is love,” 1
Cor 13:13). No, according to Paul’s contemporaries, the goal of humanity was instead
knowledge. The goal of the truly ascendant, the exemplary, the perfected human person
was not love but was instead enlightenment. How narcissistic, how self-congratulatory
and self-aggrandizing such philosophies can be in practice for those who make them
their own.
Therefore, Paul writes of the pursuit of such things––of that which we all have
in common (“we know that we all have knowledge”) but which the Hellenists took
to another and alien level. Paul’s response? “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up”
(8:1). To be sure, adds Paul, “If anyone imagines [with the misguided pursuit of knowledge] that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (8:2). His
pursuits are woefully misdirected. The invariable result of his efforts is bankrupt indeed.
“But if anyone loves God,” if anyone loves he who is love and who loved us first, that
person shows himself to be one who has been touched, transformed, united to, God
in his person, in his very nature. He shows that what truly is excellent actually has happened to and in his life. For the purpose of each and every human person’s existence,
the proper, genuinely fulfilling goal of every human person in this world, is not to know
as no one else has ever known but to be “known by God” (8:3). For in blessed union
with the one who declares, “I know you, I have called you by name, you are mine”
(Is 43:1), does one become everything that our God would have us to be, does one
become the image and reflection of the one who loved us first.
“Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols” (8:4), writes the apostle,
how we should respond in the stead of the one who loved us first, how we should
respond to any issue that scandalizes and/or misleads a brother or sister, is clear. “We
know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one’” (8:4). In
other words, we know that the question of food purportedly sacrificed to a “god” who
is nothing more than a figment of the human imagination is really a moot question.
Such food offered to a fiction is in reality no different than any other food, and so it
neither helps nor harms more than any other food. “For although there may be socalled gods in heaven or on earth––as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—
yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we
exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we
exist” (8:5–6). Therefore, rightly understood, the Christian is in principal free to eat or
not to eat. It matters not.
“However,” cautions Paul, “not all possess this knowledge” (8:7), that is, not all
in their walk of faith have a full understanding of such things. Misunderstanding still
clings to us all, causing some to view these and other matters in an unfortunate, even
harmful, light. So, “some, through former association with idols, eat [and, when they
do so, view such] food as really offered to an idol [in other words, to them, to eat is,
by definition, to affirm the existence and to seek the favor of the god to whom such
sacrifice is given], and [so] their conscience, being weak, is defiled [when either they or
a brother eats]” (8:7). “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we
do not eat, and no better off if we do” (8:8). “But take care,” warns the apostle, that
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this freedom
and “this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to
the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will
he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak [that is, if his understanding of what he
is seeing is unfortunate], to eat food offered to idols [that is, to see such idols as actual
deities to be honored whose favor must be sought]?” (8:9–10). “And so by your knowledge [in the exercise of your so-called freedom] this weak person is destroyed, the
brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their
conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ” (8:11–12).
This, urges the apostle, must never be. Therefore, “if food [or any other matter of Christian freedom] makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat [that is, I
will refrain, even when I otherwise am free], lest I make my brother stumble” (8:13).
For that which is preeminent is that which God is. “Faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13). Therefore, concludes the apostle,
“let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor 16:14).
Bruce Schuchard
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BOOK REVIEWS
COncordia
Journal
MARK 1:1–8:26 Concordia
Commentary. By James W. Voelz.
St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
2013. 624 pages. Hardcover. $49.99.
This first volume of a projected
two-volume set presages that the final
commentary will likely be the finest available on the Gospel of Mark. Whether the
readers be pastors, seminarians, students
of religion, or professors, they will find
the substance of the commentary to be
masterful, provocative, and comprehensive. This volume attests to the commentary’s masterful nature in that Voelz
bases his argumentation on an extensive
analysis of evidence drawn mainly from
the gospel itself. This volume attests to
the commentary’s provocative nature in
that Voelz argues on behalf of numerous
positions that are strikingly at odds with
settled scholarly opinion. And this volume attests to the commentary’s comprehensiveness in that Voelz devotes thirtyseven pages to the linguistic features of
the Gospel of Mark, thirty-three pages to
the literary features, and fourteen pages
to major isagogical issues—all before
readers turn to Voelz’s interpretation of
the gospel itself. Imbued with these features, this volume shows that the commentary is linguistically and grammatically driven, literary in the sense that it
describes how Mark’s story is presented,
and theological in that it strives to capture the meaning of Mark’s story.
Linguistically, Voelz argues that the
text of the Gospel of Mark, written in
Koine Greek, is nonetheless not simple,
as is commonly asserted, but complex
and sophisticated. The best manuscript
witnesses to the gospel are Codex
Vaticanus and texts related to it. In terms
of the Synoptic Problem, Voelz contends
that the Gospel of Mark is not earlier
than Matthew and Luke, which scholars
customarily assume, but later than they.
Also, a peculiar characteristic of Mark’s
Greek, which scholars have scarcely
noticed, is that Mark shifts the tone of
his gospel in line with the story he tells.
In chapter 8, Jesus is depicted as leaving Galilee and setting out on his way to
Jerusalem. Correspondingly, Mark shifts
from a more Semitic Greek (Galilee) to
a more Hellenic Greek (Jerusalem). In
conclusion of his linguistic discussion,
Voelz treats readers to two important
excursuses, the first on grammar and the
second on basic linguistic categories and
principles of interpretation.
Literarily, Voelz draws out the implications of the fact that Mark’s Gospel
conveys meaning not only through the
use of language on its most basic level
but also through the story it tells in narrative form whereby the focus is on the
development of characters and plot. The
protagonist, of course, is Jesus, who is
authoritative, powerful, fearsome, human,
strange, and divine. To punctuate the
divinity of Jesus, Mark highlights, at the
beginning of his story, the declaration by
God at the baptism that Jesus is his Son
(1:11), which is essentially repeated at the
transfiguration (9:7), and, at the end of his
story, the centurion’s confession that the
crucified Jesus truly was the Son of God
(15:39). The followers of Jesus are the
disciples, whom Mark nevertheless paints
in largely negative hues. In contrast, Mark
casts the minor characters, such as Jairus
(5:22–24, 35–43) or the Syro-Phoenician
woman (7:24–30), in a positive light.
Arrayed against Jesus are the Jewish leadership, demons, and even his family. With
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a view to the plot of Mark’s story, Voelz
cites eleven characteristics, three of which
are conflict, the concealment of Jesus, and
Jesus’s increasing abandonment. Finally,
in brief summary of Mark’s story, Voelz
provides a narrative outline in five sections, calling attention to the third section
(8:1–26) as constituting the critical tum
at which Jesus leaves Galilee and heads
toward Jerusalem. To round out this literary section, Voelz attaches two more
highly informative excursuses, the one on
literary assumptions regarding the Gospel
of Mark and the other on the hermeneutics of narrative interpretation. The significance of the latter is that it dwells on
what happens when a narrative is interpreted; here is where Voelz explains the
model he himself uses in interpreting the
Gospel of Mark.
Isagogically, Voelz emphasizes that
because a literary approach to the Gospel
of Mark takes seriously the story of the
narrative as a whole, interpreters ought
not feel constrained, as has been and is
still the case, to use the text as a “window” to discover matters of history lying
behind the text (e.g., what really took
place in the life of Jesus, or what the
Marken community was like out of which
the gospel arose). Hazardous though it
is to make of the Gospel of Mark a window, the historical questions interpreters
endeavor to answer this way are common
and popular. Thus, although one cannot
specify who the author of the gospel was,
it appears that he was a man named Mark
who wrote his gospel from memory in
the late 50s or early 60s for Christians
facing rising persecution in Rome. This
man Mark knew Matthew and Luke and
perhaps even Paul, and was especially
dependent upon the oral presentations of
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Peter. Generically, the Gospel of Mark
is best understood as a tragic drama on
the basic story of Jesus. The strength of
these aforementioned suppositions is that
they are congruent with both the historical evidence of early church fathers and
the literary evidence of the Marken narrative itself.
Two crucial questions we have thus
far ignored are these: Where does Mark’s
story end, and what is the gospel story
about? Voelz pegs the end of the story at
16:8. He then deals with the implications
of this and the theme of the Gospel of
Mark on two levels: the penultimate and
the ultimate. On the penultimate level,
he agrees with the majority of interpreters who see Jesus as the one who walks
upon the way of the cross and leads
his disciples therein. Should, however,
one read the gospel on the ultimate, or
literary, level, he or she will find a more
strange and fascinating story and a more
strange and fascinating Jesus. Jesus now
becomes an ambiguous figure and the
gospel becomes an ambiguous story.
Ambiguity, in fact, lies at the core of
the Gospel of Mark. Even as Jesus is a
powerfully divine figure, so he is also
a frail, strange, and scary human being.
Equally, the plot of the story is ambiguous. Whereas God declares Jesus to be
his Son and Jesus performs miracles and
reveals the mystery of God’s kingdom,
his family takes him to be crazy, the disciples wonder who he is, and he himself,
despite being God’s Son, utters the cry of
dereliction on the cross. Voelz puts it this
way: in the Gospel of Mark, one finds a
story that is hard to follow and a protagonist who is difficult to understand.
To elaborate on the latter, one cannot, in reading the Gospel of Mark,
“see” clearly
so that one may “believe”
(cf. 8:22–26; 15:32). On the contrary,
one must first “believe,” and then one
can “see” clearly. To explain what this
means, consider the ending of the gospel
(16:1–8). Unlike the authors of the other
three gospels, Mark does not describe
one or more scenes in which the disciples “see” the risen Jesus and have
Jesus interact with them or lead them to
understanding. Far from seeing the risen
Jesus, the disciples in the Gospel of Mark
receive only promises. Atop the Mount
of Olives, Jesus tells the disciples, “But
after I am raised up, I will go before you
to Galilee” (14:28). Then, after Jesus has
been raised, the women are told at the
empty tomb by the young man in white:
“But go, tell his disciples and Peter that
he [Jesus] is going before you to Galilee;
there you will ‘see’ him, as he told you”
(16:7). To “see” Jesus clearly and therefore with understanding, the disciples are
first called to “believe” these promises.
To believe these promises, however, is to
believe the Word. When this is applied to
the readers of Mark’s story, Mark exhorts
them to “believe the Word”: the Word of
the gospel; Jesus, who is the Word; and
Jesus who speaks the Word. The theme
of the Gospel of Mark is now apparent:
“believe” so as to “see.”
Those who read this review will
wonder why it deals with prolegomena
and does not focus on Voelz’s commentary itself. The reason is that Voelz’s
commentary is linguistic and literary in
nature and hence different from the great
number of other commentaries on Mark.
Voelz’s commentary rests on matters set
forth here, and to rush to the commentary without bothering with these matters
is surely to misunderstand not only the
character of the commentary but also
why Voelz proceeds with the Gospel of
Mark as he does. It is crucial, to cite but
two examples, that readers know how
Voelz defines both the theme of the gospel and the place of ambiguity within it.
Jack Dean Kingsbury
Richmond, Virginia
LUTHER’S WORKS, Volume 75,
Church Postil I. Edited by Benjamin
T. G. Mayes and James L. Langebartels.
St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House,
2013. 460 pages. Hardcover. $49.99
This is the first of four volumes of
a new English translation of the 1544
edition of the Church Postil, or as it is
referred to here, the Luther-Cruciger Church
Postil. This volume contains epistle and
gospel sermons for the Advent and
Christmas seasons. Martin Luther recognized the need for and potential value of
material to support preaching early in his
career as a reformer. The tools he created
became the starting point and foundation
for subsequent collections of sermons
that represented his preaching with varying degrees of fidelity and success.
The story of those collections, various editions of what became the Church
Postil, is told with remarkable clarity by
Ben Mayes in the introduction. The
Church Postil can be divided into two main
parts: sermons (or sermon material) for
Advent through Lent prepared for publication by Luther himself and known as
the Winter Postil and sermons for the rest
of the church year prepared by editors
from Luther’s sermons, Luther’s lectures
or other works, or from other sources
entirely and known as the Summer Postil.
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Roth was the first to attempt
Stephan
to complete what Luther had begun in
the Winter Postil, and Luther generally
approved of his work, though he wrote
prefaces for the editions without necessarily reading them. Roth reproduced Luther
accurately when he had a work by Luther
in front of him, but he felt free to include
other material in his editions when he
lacked something by Luther. This was
especially the case in his Festival Postil
that provided sermons for saints’ days
and other festivals. This in itself eventually caused Luther and his colleagues to
question Roth’s efforts, but the breaking
point came only when they discovered
that Roth was earning money from these
editions. Later, Luther had the idea of
revising the postils not only because
Roth’s versions were lacking but because
decades had passed and the situation had
changed. There was a new version of the
German Bible in use and many of his
earlier criticisms of Rome or accommodations to the piety of his hearers that the
sermons reflected were no longer necessary. Luther managed a 1540 revision of
the Winter Postil but quickly lost his enthusiasm for the task, so revising the Summer
Postil became the job of Caspar Cruciger.
His revision appeared in 1544 and later
appeared together with Luther’s portion as the Church Postil. This is necessary
background for understanding the present
translation itself and the larger editorial
decision behind its publication.
The introduction argues that the
Luther-Cruciger Church Postil is the definitive form. The earliest modern editions
of the Church Postil, beginning with
Philipp Jakob Spener’s in 1700, are faulted for not following this final version of
the text, that is, for privileging Luther’s
344
own early work and the contributions
made by Roth. The Walch and St. Louis
editions of Luther’s works more or less
followed Spener’s tradition, as did John
Nicholas Lenker’s English translation.
More recently, volume 52 of Luther’s
Works, the only volume of the first part
of the set dedicated to the postil tradition, presented selected sermons from
the Christmas section, texts that most
clearly bear Luther’s imprint as author.
This text in this volume is a revised
and updated version of Lenker, since
these sermons are part of the Winter
Postil. (The Summer Postil will be a new
translation, since that will follow Cruciger
rather than Roth as Lenker did.) The
updated English is nicely rendered.
Where awkwardness or infelicity remain,
it is almost always the fault of the text
itself rather than the translator. The revision of the text in subsequent volumes,
too, can be commended for offering
readers a variation of the Church Postil
that has not previously been available in
English. Whether an English version of
this variant is entirely necessary is another question.
Readers have two reasons to be
interested in the content of these sermons: to know what Luther himself
preached on a given Sunday and to
understand what kind of Lutheran teaching was disseminated through sermons in
the sixteenth century. The Luther-Cruciger
Church Postil presented here cannot be
used without qualification for answering either question. While it is true that
Luther edited the winter part of these
postils, he did it unevenly and even
haphazardly. Cruciger, for his part, was
quite free with his sources in the summer
portion that he edited. The introduction
“Whereas Roth’s edition preexplains:
sented the contents of his stenographic
notes from Luther’s preached sermons
with little emendation, Cruciger’s edition
shaped his sources into a uniform whole,
which Luther was able to claim as his
own intellectual property. Luther’s desire
and intention was not at all to present to
the reading public a literal transcript of
his pulpit utterances. . . . That is to say,
Roth catches better what Luther said;
Cruciger captures better what Luther
meant to say” (xxiv). So the Church Postils
are of limited value for those interested
in what Luther himself actually said, or
even wrote, about a text. We are still left
with the question of the dissemination of
Lutheran teaching through such sermon
collections. We stand on firmer ground
with the use of this text, but its influence
should not be overestimated. The flap
of this volume’s dust jacket advertises a
text whose “publication remained strong
for the remainder of Luther’s life and
long after his death in 1546.” Yet the
introduction to the volume states, “After
the late 1560s, the popularity of Luther’s
Church Postil waned” (xxv). This leaves a
period of about twenty years when this
version of the postils was heavily used.
What that means is it served a single
generation of Lutheran preachers in the
middle of the sixteenth century. By way
of contrast, earlier versions of these sermons served two generations in the crucial formative years of the Reformation.
Nevertheless, this volume makes a
legitimate contribution by presenting a
different text of the postils in English
translation. In addition, the introduction
itself is a valuable piece that clearly and
carefully explains the complicated and
contentious history of the Church Postil.
Whether the differences are significant
enough to demand four new volumes,
however, depends on what the reader is
looking for in the text.
Paul W. Robinson
BLOOD AND LIFE: Sermons on the
Old Testament. By Michael Kasting.
Morgan Hill, CA: Bookstand Publishing,
2013. 275 pages. Paper. $15.00.
Another book of sermons? Well,
yes—and no. Yes in a quantitative sense.
But most certainly no in a qualitative
sense. Blood and Life is not just “another” book of sermons in the negative
sense that the word “another” sometimes
conveys. Although the successful sale of
sermon books is often by grace rather
than by merit, Pastor Kasting’s collection of thirty-one sermons should be a
successful publication on the basis of
its merits. This book is extraordinarily
good—and, above all, unique—in a number of ways.
“Let me count the ways” (at least
some of them).
Pastor Kasting demonstrates a
superb mastery of effective literary techniques in his writing. Take, for example,
his use of the frame (or bookend) device
in his wedding sermon on Jeremiah
29:11. That sermon is framed by a reference at the beginning to the author
viewing his daughter’s marriage “with a
father’s eyes” and a reference at the very
end to God’s viewing the same marriage also “with a [F]ather’s eyes.” The
author revels in paradox: the wetness of
the Red Sea as a locale for a miraculous
dry path for the Israelites to escape the
pursuing Egyptians and a dry rock in
the arid desert as a miraculous source
345
to slake the Israelites’ thirst.
for water
God transforms wet into dry and dry
into wet! Sharp contrast (as well as paradox) characterizes the juxtaposition of
Moses’s Old Testament prohibition not
to drink the blood of sacrificed animals
with Christ’s New Testament invitation
“Drink of it [the blood of Christ], all of
you.” One sermon, both in its title and
its content, puns on the words “holy”
and “wholly.” There are striking coinages: “put on your Isaiah 53 glasses,”
“America’s plastic trinity: Visa, Master
Card, and American Express,” and the
author’s nomination of Nathan for “Best
Supporting Actor” in his dramatic confrontation of King David for his adultery.
Pastor Kasting uses refrains to conform
to the homiletical dictum to hammer a
point home to his audience: “Choose
Whom You Will Serve” in his sermon
on Joshua 24:14-15; “All For You” in
his sermon on Ruth’s loyalty to her
mother-in-law; Christ’s love “keeps on
ticking” (like the Timex watch in John
Cameron Swayze’s familiar commercial)
even though Christ (like the same watch)
“takes a [continual] licking.” In addition
to these literary techniques, homiletical
virtues that are more customary, such as
illustrations and visual aids, abound.
The foregoing examples document the commendation “extraordinarily good” in my opening paragraph.
Buttressing the commendation “unique”
in the same paragraph is the format
Pastor Kasting uses for all thirty-one
sermons, brief paragraphs of symmetrically indented lines, a format borrowed,
as the author acknowledges, from Peter
Marshall. Pastor Kasting has a tremendous feel for the rhythms of word
arrangement, and his format accentuates
346
those rhythms. His practice is a sort of
visual punctuation. The main function
of periods, commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, and ellipses is to help the
reader (and the hearer too) to negotiate
more easily the sequential and hierarchical relationships of the preacher’s
ideas. But who, besides a proofreader,
consciously notices punctuation marks,
helpful as they are? Pastor Kasting’s
use of the Peter Marshall format makes
these sequential and hierarchical relationships visible, vivid, and alluring. For
a change—a rare change indeed—the
written sermon has as much appeal to
the reader as the oral sermon has to the
hearer. That is the unique feature of the
author’s sermon methodology!
Unique also is Pastor Kasting’s
way of achieving textual preaching. To
be sure, he preaches all or most of the
Scriptural text’s content in his sermons.
We expect that. While such treatment
of the biblical text is certainly a virtue, it
is not automatically a virtue. Who of us
hasn’t heard so called textual sermons
that not only exhaust the text but exhaust
the listener as well? But Pastor Kasting
has another way of making his sermons
textual, and that is phrasing his law and,
especially, his gospel in the very language
of the text. The sermon on Jonah illustrates this law: “On Judgment Day there
will be no ships to Tarshish. No place at all
to hide.” Gospel: “Jesus endured the worst
storm, the darkness at noon that came as
He hung on the cross . . . Jesus went down,
not merely into a fish, but into the very jaws
of death, of the grave, of hell itself to rescue and reclaim us” (emphasis mine).
All of the above homiletical virtues,
desirable as they are, are but “as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal without
love”—God’s
love in Jesus Christ, what
we call the gospel. And here is where
Pastor Kasting excels. The gospel is the
obvious goal and climax of every one of
his thirty-one sermons. And that gospel
is present quantitatively and qualitatively;
it is abundant and fresh. In a sermon
involving mountains, the author moves
from Mt. Townsend in Washington State
to the biblical Mt. Sinai to Mt. Nebo
to the Mount of Transfiguration to Mt.
Calvary. In a sermon involving trees
he moves from the Giant Sequoias of
Washington to the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil to the oaks of Mamre to
the tree on which Absalom was caught
by his hair to the tree of the cross. His
approach to the gospel often resembles
the gospel-handle technique that I have
taught my homiletics classes for many
years, that is, using the non-gospel language of a biblical text as a way of connecting to other biblical passages where
the same (or similar) language is used in a
gospel sense, in addition often describing
that gospel creatively in the non-gospel
language of his selected text. (He does
this despite the fact that he was never
a student in my homiletics class!). In at
least three instances he produces genuine
Gospel handles. In a sermon on Esther
he uses the non-Gospel language “for
such a time as this” as a bridge to the
Gospel of Christ’s birth in “the fullness
of time” in Galatians. Pastor Kasting
connects Micah’s desperate effort to get
right with God by offering to sacrifice
his firstborn to the fact that God indeed
sacrificed his firstborn Son on a cross
to make us right with God. The Jews’
fanatical self-imposed curse that Jesus’s
blood be on them and their children
becomes in Kasting’s skillful treatment an
ironic link to the truth that Jesus’s blood
is on us and on our children in a blessed
saving sense. Kasting’s sermons do more
than delight—they are “the power of
God for our salvation.”
I sometimes quip to my homiletics
students, “Anyone can write an occasional good sermon; the trick is to write
a good sermon time after time.” Pastor
Kasting has done so thirty-one times in
Blood and Life!
Francis C. Rossow
WHY PRIESTS?: A Failed Tradition.
By Garry Wills. New York: Penguin
Books, 2013. 320 pages. Hardcover.
$27.95.
Early in 2013, Garry Wills, Pulitzer
Prize winner and writer of What Jesus
Meant and Papal Sin, published Why
Priests? This is his latest book and attack
on the priesthood in the Roman Catholic
Church. Though he had five years of
training for the priesthood by Jesuits,
Wills writes as a lay person. His book has
aroused interest among Lutheran pastors
of our neighboring Chicagoland communities.
Some of us felt, “So what’s new?
Wills sounds like a good Lutheran.”
What is new is the fact that Wills is not
Lutheran. He is a practicing and devout
Roman Catholic, a friend of priests
attacking the priesthood of his own
church. In his “Address to the Nobility
of the German Nation” of 1520 Martin
Luther sounded the death knell for the
priesthood of his reformation movement.
He claimed with the apostle Peter (1 Pt
2:5, 9) that all the saints in heaven and
on earth, not just the clergy, are called to
be a royal priesthood.
347
points out Jesus never calls
Wills
himself a priest in the Gospels and
throughout years of persecution the
early Christian church survived and even
prospered quite well without priests.
He focuses his attention upon the writing that he claims should be titled To
Hebrews, not To the Hebrews. He asserts
that Hebrews is the only writing in the
New Testament where Jesus is called a
priest and his suffering and death is portrayed as his sacrifice in ransom for sin.
According to Wills, Hebrews should
not have been accepted into the New
Testament canon. In the Western church
its acceptance came late, close in time
to the recognition of Christianity by the
emperor Theodosius as the religion of
the empire (AD 380).
Wills’s second point in the development of the priesthood as a powerful
political office is the development of the
doctrine of transubstantiation. In time
only the priest could “put God in your
mouth.” Wills believes the role of the
sacrament in the early church was primarily to promote fellowship with Christ
and other Christians and this was confirmed by St. Augustine (AD 354–430)
The medieval church, ignoring Augustine,
reinterpreted the sacrament based upon
the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas (AD
1225–1274) who lived more than eight
centuries after Augustine. Aquinas treated
the sacrament as a re-presentation of the
sacrifice of Christ enacted by the priest
with the bread and wine changed into the
body and blood of Christ by words of
consecration that could only be spoken
by the priest.
348
There is much I did not like in Why
Priests? including something as apparently insignificant as Wills’s use of the
word “pact” for “covenant.” This I
found demeaning to the mystery of
God’s unilateral covenant of grace for
mankind. His interpretation of the “Last
Suppers”[sic] of Christ might appear
more amenable to Reformed theology
than to the Lutheran theology of the
sacrament defined by Martin Luther in
his Small Catechism. Few if any Muslim
readers would find fault with Wills’s
final statement “. . . let me say simply
this: There [sic] is one God and Jesus is one
of his prophets and I am one of his followers” (259, emphasis mine). There
appears to be little of exegetical value in
Wills’s translation of Hebrews. It reflects
the theological bias he revealed in his
book. Most serious for me is Wills’s
assertion that atonement as ransom and
Christ’s death as sacrifice appear only
in Hebrews. One might wonder how
carefully Wills reads the New Testament
especially the Gospel of Matthew (e.g.,
20:28), Mark (e.g., 10:45), and Revelation
(passim).
In conclusion, I am happy to keep
Wills’s book in my library. He presents
us with a clear but brief introduction to
Saints Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, and
Thomas Aquinas. Though he does not
include a bibliography, the breadth of
his reading and frequent quotation of
respected authors is impressive. Short
chapters and Wills’s crisp writing style
make for enjoyable, thought-provoking
reading.
John E. Helmke
Forest Park, Illinois
BEFORE
NATURE: A Christian
Spirituality. By H. Paul Santmire.
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014. 272 pages.
Paper. $39.00.
H. Paul Santmire’s latest book Before
Nature: A Christian Spirituality follows the
similar theme of many of his previous
works in an exploration of the relationship between nature and theology. For
the past forty years Santmire has been
contemplating nature, what he calls a
theology of nature, from within the classical Christian tradition. In other words,
Santmire wants to reclaim Christian
themes and re-envision them in light
of nature with an eye focused on what
he believes has now become a global
environmental crisis. In his previous
works, Santmire explored a theology
of nature historically, he devoted an
entire book to outlining his theology
of nature, and he has explored nature
in relationship to Christian worship. In
Before Nature, Santmire claims that this
book now brings him full circle in his
spiritual journey with nature. This book
is for him a spiritual testament. Now he
asks other spiritual seekers, Christian
and non-Christian alike, to attempt the
impossible, to stand in two places at one
time, in other words to be bifocal. He
is not referring to eyeglasses but to the
root meaning of the word, having two
foci. Santmire asks, “What if we were
to imagine the cathedral of the great
outdoors engulfing, surrounding, embracing the cathedral of Christian practices,
and imagine ourselves standing at the
entrance of that Christian cathedral, contemplating the vastness and the mystery
and beauty of the world of nature before
and all around us in the cathedral of
the great outdoors” (xv). In this book,
as with many of his others, Santmire
leans heavily upon his understanding of
St. Francis of Assisi whom he believed
ultimately taught a true bifocal view of
Christian spirituality.
Early in his book, Santmire sets the
groundwork by defining his two key
terms, nature and spirituality. Nature is
to be understood as “all things visible,”
configured theologically in light of the
Christian church’s Trinitarian and creedal
traditions. In other words, everything
that is tangible in the world around him
or the material aspects of God’s good
creation. Santmire emphasizes two main
parts in his working definition, material
human artifacts and the human body.
Santmire also clearly defines what nature
is not. It is not some romantic notion of
past poets and philosophers, nor is it a
self-enclosed universe as defined by many
natural scientists, nor the alleged world
of “resources” as defined by capitalists.
This definition, with a few additions,
has remained consistent throughout all
his previous works. The term spirituality, for Santmire is a different kind of
construct. He defines it as a religious
experience; religious being a more popular cultural understanding as opposed to
Christian spirituality, yet spirituality is
an experience that is both powerful and
that which transforms one’s life. Here
Santmire is clear that his definition is not
in opposition to religion, but its meaning could swing in both directions of the
pendulum, which includes the practices
of any religious tradition, from Hinduism
to Buddhism, and back to Christian. His
definitions, whether one agrees or disagrees,
allow Santmire to include discussions of
Christian baptism, which for him is the
349
heart of his own spiritual journey.
Throughout the book Santmire ties
his and the reader’s spiritual journey
together with what he calls the “the
Trinity Prayer.” He uses the prayer not
only as a way to structure the book’s
chapters, but also as a way in which to
engage the reader into a deeper knowledge of the Triune God. He claims that
by speaking the prayer throughout the
day and throughout the week, one’s spiritual journey grows in spiritual knowledge
of the Triune God and more importantly the ability to envision the Trinity
through the lens of nature. There is no
doubt that Santmire uses his book as a
way to divulge his own personal spiritual
journey, which may encourage others to
do the same. But that is jarred about a
third of the way into the book when he
makes the claim that he has never actually “taken” a spiritual journey, but has
only lived his journey through the lives
of those who have, Martin Luther, Jürgen
Moltmann, Celtic monks, and Henry
Thoreau, to name a few. He states, “As
I have reflected about my life, I have
realized that, to date, I have never really
encountered that ‘dark night of the soul’
that masters of the spritiual life talk about
. . . I have not sought out spiritual trials
. . . I have never aspired to be a spiritual
child of the wilderness. I traveled once
to edges of a desert in Namibia, but I
did not venture any further. I have pondered the mysteries of the ocean from
the Maine and Cape Cod coastlines but I
have never gone sailing on the open sea”
350
(72–73). Instead he claims that he has
been inspired, if not more so, by what he
calls the spirituality of ordinary places,
for him this pertains mainly to marriage.
Santmire’s personal journey of life,
more than just his spiritual journey, is
deeply felt in the pages of the book as he
wrestles with questions of theodicy, theology of facts, and who he really is. As
he wanders in and out through various
stories, many carried forward from past
works, he at times wanders away from
what he had originally set out to do, to
engage the reader into a deeper knowledge of the Triune God. Yet, he does
help the reader see that prayer, in this
case the Trinity Prayer, reinforces what
one sees with one’s owns eyes, the beauty
of nature.
Santmire’s work is richly devotional;
his writing is honest and vulnerable. He
opens himself up by exposing his life’s
trials and tribulations along with his many
blessings. He uses familiar “Lutheran”
language that will comfort many readers.
The three main parts of the book unfold
the three petitions of the Trinity prayer,
which asks the reader to contemplate
one’s own life, to open oneself up to the
same vulnerability and honest reflection.
This is well done and brings value to his
book. He asks the reader to seriously
consider one’s spiritual journey, and to
ask the tough questions of one’s own life
along the way.
Beth Hoeltke
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