Love and Saying No

I made the mistake of reading an opinion piece from the New York Times . I usually don't read from the Times, whether it's what they call news or what appears on the op/ed page, as I wouldn't even trust it as fish wrapping for fear of food poisoning. Anyway, in this piece, the writer attacks a political figure for things she said based on the Christian Faith which is formed by the Word of God.

The source isn't important, really, since the Times is by no means the only rag that considers it their "journalistic" (and I use that word loosely) and editorial duty to attack the Christian Faith and those who cling to it. And the target isn't all that important, either, as the world is fond of calling the Church a collection of hypocrites and vilifying Christians because we do not blindly accept every travesty of humanity--things like the GLBT agenda, abortion (in the name of the feminine agenda), et cetera and ad nauseam--in the name of "love." After all, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." "Love your neighbor." "Love bears all things..." 

In the end, sometimes the Church has to love someone so much that it says, "No." No, we cannot abide what the Word of God calls sin. No, we cannot look the other way. That doesn't make us homophobes. That doesn't mean we hate women. Rather, it means we love them so much that we do not desire to see them abide in sin. Jesus said, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me" (John 14:23-24). That means that Christians do not--or should not, rather, though it happens--choose indiscriminately what teachings of the Word of God that we keep and which ones we discard. If you consider yourself a Christian but don't take seriously what the Word of God says, maybe you shouldn't call yourself a Christian. "Be thou faithful unto death" doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room.

Do you love your child enough to say "no" when he reaches for a knife or a pill bottle? Do you love your friends so enough to keep them from climbing in a car when they're drunk? How can you then love someone so little that you'll let them live in a way that leads to their eternal death?

The world can keep what it calls love. I'd rather have the real thing.

A change in the tide

"The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up." -- Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

As you probably know by now, I am a pastor in the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. The LCMS has just finished its triennial convention. For those of you unfamiliar with this process--and blessed are you--the Synodical Convention is where the "business" of the church body is transacted. Synodical officials are elected. Reports are given. Changes are considered.

And to say that changes were made at this Synodical Convention would be an understatement on a level with saying, "The Obama administration has been slow to act during the BP Gulf oil spill crisis." I don't think it an understatement to say that the changes made at the 2010 LCMS Convention will affect American Lutheranism for many years to come.

Let's start with change for the good, namely, the election of Matthew Harrison as Synodical President. For the past 9 years, the Reverend Gerald L. Kieschnick has been President of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. President Kieschnick during his tenure has been fond of saying, "This is not your grandfather's Synod," and his decisions during his tenure have reinforced that statement. Early in his tenure, he gave permission for the Atlantic District President, David Benke, to participate in "A Prayer for America", an Oprah Winfrey-organized prayer service in Yankee Stadium in which Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jews, and others prayed together to their various gods; and Kieschnick refused to discipline him for this blatant syncretism. When pastors and laypeople objected to these actions through signing the document That They May Be One, President Kieschnick considered the signers to be schismatic and sent a memo to the district presidents of the LCMS in which he encouraged the DPs to take action against the signers. It took five years for President Kieschnick to repent of that. Other events, actions and statements from Kieschnick have further led the LCMS away from its theological roots, including his crusade against what he calls "incessant internal purification"--in other words, the desire to continue to keep our doctrine and practice true to Scripture and the confessions. His desire for outreach by whatever means stands at odds with the history of the LCMS, where we have been encouraged to "get it straight" and then "get it out".

The 2010 convention saw the election of the Reverend Matthew Harrison as LCMS President. Pastor Harrison has served as Executive Director of LCMS World Relief and Human Care, the mercy arm of the LCMS, since 2001. He is skilled as an administrator, but more than that, he is a gifted theologian. He knows the Scriptures, the Lutheran Confessions, and the history of the Church--including the history of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. When someone speaks about "our grandfather's Synod", Harrison knows what that means. His election as President is a shift away from the mainline Protestant leanings of the past nine years, and it has given hope to those whose concerns have grown over that time. I had hoped Pastor Harrison would win, and with his election and that of other solid confessional Lutherans to positions of leadership in the Synod, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of the LCMS.

And now, the troublesome change, namely, the restructuring of the LCMS. President Kieschnick pushed hard for a restructuring of the LCMS under the guise of cost reduction and building consensus in the LCMS. (Because really, our problems in the LCMS have been about structural inefficiency, not about a departure from the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions.) My concern about restructuring is that it seems to me to be a departure from the traditional LCMS polity of congregational power and a recension of the Treatise on the Power and the Primacy of the Pope. I'm sure there will be those who will say I'm dealing in hyperbole. However, for 470 years, the Lutheran Church has seen the dangers of centralizing the authority of the Church in anyone but Christ Himself. With the passing of Resolution 8-08 and other resolutions from the Synod Structure and Governance Committee, based on the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Synod Structure and Governance (also known as the BRTFSSG[HIJKLMNOP]), we have given the President of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod more authority than anyone in the history of the LCMS has wielded . . . possibly even more than Martin Stephan wielded before he was exiled. Perhaps I am an alarmist. Perhaps I am reading this wrong. But I have a great deal of concern about this. I'm less concerned than I was when I believed that President Kieschnick, the man behind the BRTFSSG[HIJKLMNOP], would be wielding that power, but even with a man I believe to be the right man for the job, I've experienced first-hand how great power can be abused by a synodical bureaucrat. I can only pray that the Lord will preserve the LCMS and President-Elect Harrison from that kind of abuse of power.

And now for one more troublesome note from the LCMS convention: the Red Chair videos. The purpose of the Red Chair videos was to demonstrate the power of forgiveness in the life of the Church. In and of itself, this is a good thing. However, in the practical application of these videos, it can be interpreted that some of the district presidents who spoke in the Red Chair videos have violated their Ordination vows--namely, where they vow never to divulge the sins confessed to them. I have gone to private confession and absolution, and I have done so with a man who is now a district president. The thought that he could possibly have spoken of my sins in front of the Synodical convention was mortifying to me. Even having been given permission by those who confessed to them, they are violating their vows. These sins are no longer to exist. They are to be removed from the penitent as far as the east is from the west. Pastors are never to speak of those sins again. God help all pastors to remain faithful to our Ordination vows.


I will admit that I am hopeful for the future of the LCMS. I believe that President-Elect Harrison will be good for the LCMS and for Lutheran Church throughout the world. That doesn't mean I am without concerns about the future of he LCMS. We have always sought to faithfully confess the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord. We must also be strong to faithfully reject error. Confession of faith and rejection of error: that is the format of our Lutheran Confessions, and that must be our work in the Church today.

"Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better." -- Richard Hooker

An intereting (and very sad) week in Lutheranism

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the largest "Lutheran" church body in North America, this week voted in their body-wide convention to approve a document called a "Social Statement" in which they give approval to same-sex relationships. In a subsequent vote, they also approved the ordination of homosexual clergy who are in committed, monogamous, same-sex relationships.

This is only the latest step in a journey which has taken the ELCA further away from the Word of God. The ELCA in its colleges and seminaries teaches that Bible is a document which was written by men under the influence of God, and that the hand of man in the Bible means that certain things that the Bible contains are not actually God's Word, and so it is their responsibility to decide what God actually said and what was written because of the patriarchal, misogynistic bigotry of men. With this method, sometimes called "historical criticism", the first determination the ELCA made was that the Biblical prohibition against the ordination of women must be abolished. Then they determined that they should be in fellowship--meaning that they share pastors, altars and pulpits--with church bodies with which there are doctrinal disagreements, even when these disagreements concern matters of vital imporance and were matters over which Luther himself could not bring himself to declare fellowship with those who held these beliefs. (This includes but is not limited to the understanding of what the Lord's Supper is and what it means.)

And now they have further stepped away from God's Word by choosing to accept homosexual relationships and to ordain actively homosexual clergy. This is not a surprising step, but it is a disappointing one. When a church body allows itself to pick and choose what from the Bible to believe and what from the Bible to discard, it is usually the least popular teachings which fall by the wayside. Notice what they have already excluded:
1. Denying ordination to women means that the Bible discriminates against half of the world's population! Surely God wouldn't mean to do that, so that must be the influence of the patriarchal society in which the men who wrote the Bible lived.
2. Forming fellowship with church bodies based on an agreement in doctrine means that we are discriminating against everyone who doesn't believe exactly as we do. Surely God does not desire the Church to be divided, so for the sake of love we will declare fellowship with bodies with whom our historical statements of confession do not agree.
3. And what about homosexuals? Sure, God talks about homosexuality, but he does so in the same book in which he declares menstruating women to be unclean! Those laws aren't taken serisously today by anyone, so we can do away with the whole lot--including the outdated thought that homosexuality is sinful. It doesn't matter that this prohibition was repeated again in the New Testament through Paul. Paul was just a homophobe.
These Biblical doctrines were eliminated in the name of love. The problem is, by affirming people in these errors, they are literally loving people to eternal death.

I say none of this in a boastful manner. The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod (LCMS), the church body to which I belong, has its own problems right now, and our problems are not small ones. Nonetheless, we are duty-bound to "test the spirits" (I John 4), to examine what is taught concerning God's Word. And when someone so obviously steps away from the Word of God, we are duty bound to say so.

Paul tells us in II Timothy 4, "Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables." The ELCA as a body has chosen to turn away from the truth. Instead of clinging to what is right, they have turned to what is popular. Kyrie, eleison!

Please keep these wayward brethren in your prayers. And keep in your prayers all who would hold to the truth of Scripture in spite of its unpopular teachings. This is a difficult time for all of us.