Concordia Journal | Fall 2014

Concordia Journal

Concordia Seminary 801 Seminary Place St. Louis, MO 63105

COncordia Journal

Fall 2014 volume 40 | number 4

Fall 2014 volume 40 | number 4

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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David Adams Charles Arand Andrew Bartelt Executive EDITOR Joel Biermann Charles Arand Gerhard Bode Dean of Theological Kent Burreson Research and Publication William Carr, Jr. Anthony Cook EDITOR Timothy Dost Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Thomas Egger Jeffrey Gibbs Theological Publications Bruce Hartung assistant editor Dale A. Meyer President

Benjamin Haupt Erik Herrmann David Johnson Todd Jones Jeffrey Kloha David Lewis Richard Marrs David Maxwell Dale Meyer Glenn Nielsen Joel Okamoto Jeffrey Oschwald

David Peter Paul Raabe Victor Raj Paul Robinson Robert Rosin Timothy Saleska Leopoldo Sánchez M. David Schmitt Bruce Schuchard William Schumacher James Voelz Robert Weise

Melanie Appelbaum

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Issued by the faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, the Concordia Journal is the successor of Lehre und Wehre (1855-1929), begun by C. F. W. Walther, a founder of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Lehre und Wehre was absorbed by the Concordia Theological Monthly (1930-1974) which was also published by the faculty of Concordia Seminary as the official theological periodical of the Synod.

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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: Luther’s Rhetoric of Location

A. Trevor Sutton 292 Engaging Our Culture Faithfully

Harold Senkbeil

317

HOMILETICAL HELPS

341

BOOK REVIEWS

Fall 2014

volume 40 | number 4

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

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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.

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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

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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:

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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.

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ARTICLES

COncordia Journal

Christ Coming To Us

Luther’s Rhetoric of Location

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.

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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.

Luther’s Rhetoric of Location 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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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

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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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Engaging Our Culture Faithfully 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 300

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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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

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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 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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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 326

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: Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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.

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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, 332

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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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

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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.

Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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

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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

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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.

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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.

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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 Concordia Journal/Fall 2014

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

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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”

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(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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Issued by the faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, the Concordia Journal is the successor of Lehre und Wehre (1855-1929), begun by C. F. W. Walther, a founder of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Lehre und Wehre was absorbed by the Concordia Theological Monthly (1930-1974) which was also published by the faculty of Concordia Seminary as the official theological periodical of the Synod.

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COncordia Journal

Fall 2014 volume 40 | number 4

Fall 2014 volume 40 | number 4

Helpers of Joy Christ Coming To Us: Luther’s Rhetoric of Location Engaging Our Culture Faithfully