I hate sentimentality.  Keep it in the stores where you’re trying to get rid of a few more dollars (I don’t like the music there either, but at least it fits the materialistic mood).  I have my own nostalgia for Christmases past, but it really has nothing to do with the Nativity of our Lord.  If nostalgia is the only reason for the candlelight on Christmas Eve, you can keep it; I’ll have the Eucharist instead.

Nevertheless, there is good Christmas music out there; you just have to look hard, or have it fall without warning into your lap (let it fall, let it fall, let it fall).  The following albums manage to make songs and hymns sound as if you hadn’t heard them 8,000 times, and, at their best, they preserve some of the terror of the Incarnation (think: “Good Christian, fear; for sinners here/The silent Word is pleading” (Lutheran Service Book 370:2).  In no particular order:

• Over the Rhine, The Darkest Night of the Year
• Bill Mallonee, Yonder Shines the Infant Light (here or here)
• Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas
• Dustin Kensrue, This Good Night is Still Everywhere (looks like a new edition with two more songs–including a mewithoutYou cover!  “Fairytale of New York” and “This is War” are my favorites)
• Bifrost Arts, Salvation is Created (The title track will send chills down your spine; turn it up loud)
• Jason Harrod, Christmas Hymns (new!  It also has the same version of “O Come…” as The Gift, maybe my favorite version ever)
• Bruce Cockburn, Christmas 
• Sara Groves, O Holy Night 
• listener, Just in Time for Christmas
• Brown Feather Sparrow and Friends, How to Throw A Christmas Party
• Hymns from Nineveh, Endurance in Christmas Time
• And, if you can find it in a pawn shop or used music store, get The Gift, put out by WeatherVane Music in 1998.  Not all the songs are excellent, but it’s got great stuff from Harrod and Funck and Vigilantes of Love.
• And there’s always The Messiah

I also recommend Over the Rhine’s Snow Angels (get it with Darkest Night here), but not everything on there is as good as everything else (“Here it is” and “We’re Gonna Pull Through” are worth the price alone).

Down with muzak!

Timotheos

We advance our thesis somewhat tentatively as less than a conclusive fact but more than mere conjecture: we suggest that the de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers is what we might well call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”  The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews, sounds like this:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

…
First, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life.  It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person.  That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one’s health, and doing one’s best to be successful. … Such a moral vision is inclusive of most religions, which are presumed to stand for equivalent moral views. …  Feeling good about oneself is thus an essential aspect of living a moral life, according to this dominant de fact teenage religious faith.  Which leads to our next point.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is, second, about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents.  This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a divine sovereign, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etcetera.  Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. … It is thus no wonder that so many religious and nonreligious teenagers are so positive about religion, for the faith many of them have in mind effectively helps to achieve a primary life goal: to feel good and happy about oneself and one’s life.  It is also no wonder that most teens are so religiously inarticulate.  As long as one is happy, why bother with being able to talk about the belief content of one’s faith?

Finally, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly involved in one’s affairs–especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved.  Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance. … This God is not demanding.  He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good.  In short, God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process. [pp. 162-165]

If you don’t recognize the members of our congregations in this picture, you aren’t looking hard enough.  And if you don’t see a problem in this description, well, that’s a problem.  I don’t claim to have the answer, but it clearly involves being specific, not general, in preaching; teaching parents, who are the primary educators of their children; and destroying the god of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.  We should all probably take a long, hard look at our teaching and listen more closely to both the adults and the teenagers in our congregations for symptoms of this disease.  Something has to be done to inoculate people against this as much as possible.  The culture certainly is not helping, and often is actively inculcating this very religion in our people.

[Still to read: Souls in Transition and Lost in Transition]

Timotheos

Unfortunately, there are now many who are called Lutheran, who do not know what a great grace it is to be a member of the true church of God on earth.  They consider this such a minor thing that, even on a day like today, they do not consider it worth the effort of showing up in the house of the LORD along with their brothers to thank God for it…They only remain with the evangelical Lutheran Church because they were born into it or because their relatives or good friends are in it.  When they are tempted to leave the church they depart from it all too easily. …

Well then, my brothers, let us retain what we have, so that no one rob us of our crown.  Let us not be offended or angered that our evangelical Lutheran church stands before the world, small and insignificant.  That is exactly how a true church must look in an age of general apostasy, as in our time. [!]  Oh, let us not forsake the banner of the pure doctrine of the Gospel which God has raised upon the steeple of Zion for the redemption and the warning of souls in this terrifying age!  In these turbulent times the task confronting us is too great to be put into words.  Oh, as much as we value our salvation, let us not become unfaithful to her.  Let us not only reject and trample under foot every benefit we might gain by falling away from her, but let us also be prepared to suffer a thousand deaths rather than deny or surrender even one iota of the pure Gospel that has been entrusted to us Lutherans. (p. 16, 17-18, transl. Joel Baseley)

I, for my part, cannot understand why people who leave the Lutheran Church, who have denied and forsaken their confirmation vows, who hate everything she stands for, who would never darken a door of one of her congregations unless compelled by family, funeral, or wedding, who despise our “legalism” and our “arrogance,” still manage to huff and puff that we will not allow them to commune at Christ’s altar with us.  Go back, please, to your “open-minded,” “progressive,” “Gospel-motivated,” “open-hearts-and-open-arms” church, then.  We refuse to change; what’s the point of continually getting upset about it?  Go be happy in your “nice” churches, and leave us to our “meanness.”  Everyone wins, no?

Timotheos

But if there’s no conflict, there may be a problem.  Think about a married couple about to be divorced.  Do they even fight anymore?  What’s the point?  It’s over.  So while I don’t like conflict, I get a little worried if nothing can cause it.  In a local congregation, many things cause people to fight and argue with each other.  Most of the time, at least from the outside, those conflicts seem peripheral, if not completely irrelevant, to the actual life of the Church.  That’s not the sort of conflict I’m after.  St. Paul instructs Timothy not to argue about those inconsequential things, and he tells the congregation in Rome to welcome the “weaker brother,” but not to argue over opinions, such as what days should be fast days, or whether to eat meat, even if the animal was sacrificed to an idol.  The sort of conflict that should be present in the Church is a passionate argument about the things that are at the heart of what it means to be the Church.  Just because Christians have been arguing for 500+ years over God’s justification of the sinner doesn’t mean we should stop now.  As soon as we stop arguing, it means we’ve stopped caring.

And that is the point when it comes to the local congregation as well.  If we cease to argue over the things that actually matter–the Word of God, the Sacraments, the life that Christians live together as the Body of Christ–then maybe we’ve ceased to care.  It could be, I suppose, that if we’ve stopped arguing, that means that we’ve come to a full agreement on the “important stuff.”  That may be a purely eschatological hope, however.  Let me be as clear as possible about what I’m thinking: if you join a congregation and participate in the sacramental life of that congregation, you should be convinced that that congregation is teaching the Word of God rightly.  You might not agree about every pragmatic plan used to provide for the Word of God and the Sacraments in that place, but you should be convinced that the Word as it is taught and the Sacraments as they are administered there line up with the Scriptures.  If not, or if things change from when you first joined, you have a responsibility as a member of the Body of Christ in that place to attempt to correct the false teaching or the false practice (which will, eventually, always go together).

But let’s say that the leaders of the congregation, or the pastor, or even an individual member, proposes such-and-such course of action to promote the Word and Sacraments in that place (that is, the life of Christ there), and there is no discomfort, or no disagreement, or no enthusiastic support either.  Little red lights should be flashing and alarm bells should be ringing.  There is a problem.  If there is only apathy or a deafening silence, that congregation is probably as near death as it can be.  You only argue (or you should only argue) about things you care about.  If you don’t care about your congregation’s spiritual life, you won’t argue about how best to support it.  That argument should be an actual argument: it should have reasoning that leads to certain conclusions.  In the Church, both the reasoning and the conclusions must be Scriptural.  (Whether they are solidly Scriptural–i.e., centered in Christ–is part of the argument to be had.)

What else happens when a congregation or a church body or the whole Church stops arguing about Christ and what is His?  We start arguing about things that don’t matter; or, rather, we argue about things that don’t matter to the Church; that is, things that matter to everyone.  We start making resolutions or statements about Israel and Palestine, or genetically modified food, or health insurance, or national debt.  Christians can argue about those things, but the Church has no business there, precisely because anyone or everyone may have a stake in the argument, whether Christian or not.  The Church’s business is Christ, Gospel, Sacraments, forgiveness, eternal life, Trinity, etc.  Things that are not obvious to everyone.  Things that must be proclaimed, rather than rationally argued.  The Church’s business is always foreign to the vast majority of the people around her.

Hermann Sasse has an insight into what the Church’s business is vis-à-vis the world.

The great political experiment of the Constantinian age, to save the empire by means of the church, had failed.  What Constantine had seen as the promise of the church, the church did not fulfill…But is it not really the case that the church had failed?  Did it not have anything better to do in these world-transforming times than to argue about theological problems?  Before Nicaea Constantine had warned the church against this.  Did not the great synods of the empire face more compelling and practical tasks than the hammering out of theological formulas?  Think of the enormous mission opportunity with which the church was suddenly confronted when Constantine laid a world at its feet.  Think of the problems the Migration of Nations[!] placed before it.

But the resolutions which modern churches and synods feel themselves compelled to make in taking a position regarding events in the world had not yet been invented.  And so the Synod of Constantinople in 381 achieved “nothing more” than the enduring confession that the Son is “of one substance” with the Father and that the Holy Spirit is truly God.

But is this not actually much more than anything the synod could have achieved if it had put out some word for the hour, for the situation of the church, a message to the world, to the empire, and to the nations?  Is not the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed perhaps the very word, the message which modern Christians yearn for in the church of that time? … This confession [Nicene Creed], made by the Christians of a dying world, became the confession of those new peoples and the confession of all succeeding generations of the church.

Is that not something much greater than all the “relevant” and “practical” resolutions and releases produced by church meetings in our day? [1951!]  Where are all the pronouncements with which the ecumenical world conferences have accompanied the secular history of our day?  The world never even heard them, and the churches have long since forgotten them.  You will not even find them in the textbooks of church history.  The creed of that ancient synod, on the other hand, is prayed in thousands and thousands of churches every Sunday.  More martyrs have probably died for this creed in the 20th century than in all the foregoing centuries of church history combined.  [Hermann Sasse, "The 1,500th Anniversary of Chalcedon," Letters to Lutheran Pastors, no. 21, We Confess Jesus Christ (St. Louis: CPH, 1984), 57-58]

So I pray that the Church keeps fighting, until her Lord puts an end to it Himself.

Timotheos

Both the religious Left and the religious Right are apparently unable to make distinctions.  The religious Right will abuse Old Testament texts to show how the justice of God ought to be carried out in this nation; and the religious Left will abuse New Testament texts (and this one is a banner example) to show how the mercy of God ought to be carried out in this nation.  Neither seems willing or able to understand that God rules this world in two different ways, with two different purposes, and it all hinges on the fact that this world is divided between those who trust God in Jesus Christ, and those who don’t.  The wheat and the weeds will grow together until the end of the age.

The question is, who is to forgive whom?  Is this a parable telling the United States, as a nation or government, to “forgive” the 9/11 hijackers or Osama bin Laden?  What would that even mean?  And whom does that make the fellow servants?  Liberal Europeans?  The United Nations?  “Prophetic” mainline preachers?

It all sounds very pious and religious for Christians to call on the United States to forgive its enemies and decry the “vengeance” that the U.S. took in Iraq or Afghanistan.  But that would be a terrible country in which to live, and it would be a far worse theocracy than one governed by Old Testament laws (which, we should remember, were partly enacted to set limits on vengeance in a community).  I know it sounds anti-Christian to say that a government “forgiving” its enemies opens such a country up to anarchy and destruction.  That sounds like I don’t trust the “grace” of God to do its work.  Doesn’t Jesus Himself say to forgive your enemies?

The problem is in that “your.”  Whose enemies?  Mine.  Yours.  Not the U.S. Government’s.  Not the State’s.  The State cannot forgive, just as it cannot preach the Gospel.  Nothing could be worse, from a Christian perspective, than the government doing the Church’s job.  (Read Michael Burleigh’s two books on the religious pretensions of States, if that doesn’t make sense.)  If the government cannot even spend wisely, how would it do with the Gospel?  And I don’t trust the Church to do the State’s job, either.  I don’t want preachers keeping the civil peace, and I don’t want denominations with prisons.  Only individual Christians can forgive, and the Gospel can only be applied individually, thought that same Gospel then binds individuals into the one Body of Christ.  Within that Body, the Church, I can only and always put my trust in the Gospel.  That’s all there is.  Within the boundaries of the State, however, there is no Gospel, only rationally applied justice (which can and does fail).

Back to 9/11: if an individual Christian lost a loved one in the terrorist attacks, without a doubt, this parable applies.  Likewise, if individual Christians bear hatred toward the hijackers under the guise of patriotism, they are forsaking their King and denying themselves His forgiveness.  But I wonder if an excessive focus on 9/11 by most preachers in most congregations (who were probably not directly impacted ten years ago) can become an easy way out of calling to repentance the individual Christians in that congregation.  It would be easy to focus on the tenth anniversary of a single national tragedy and forgiving its perpetrators, while the countless, particular tragedies of hard-hearted unforgiveness go unaddressed.  That is the same danger that accompanies preaching against national sins or sins “out there” when those sins are not the sins of the people in the local congregation.  It is indeed necessary to warn against the sins of the age, but hatred of those sins can quickly innoculate sinners against hatred of their own flesh and its particular, personally devastating sins.

I will preach forgiveness on Sunday, but it will not be the pseudo-prophecy of calling the United States to forgive her enemies.  It will be the same message as always: the mercy of Jesus for each sinner, and the forgiving love for particular neighbors that flows from Jesus’ mercy.  The Reign of the Heavens is manifest in Jesus’ Presence with His Church; He has not yet revealed Himself to all people as King of the World.  That day will come, but the theocrats of all stripes will not bring it any sooner.

Timotheos

It was the great error of Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it thought it could pave the way for the modern world to Christianity by surrendering the church’s doctrine.  The only thing that it accomplished was that no one any longer took its proclamation seriously.  For who should take a church seriously which no longer knew itself what it believed, taught, and confessed?  Do we really believe that such a church could have been prepared to stand its ground in the gigantic battles to maintain the substance of Christianity in the once Christian peoples of the West?  Neither ought we believe that a contempt for the church’s confessions could enhance the authority of the Holy Scriptures.  It is a completely incontrovertible fact of church history that the authority of the Bible stands and falls with the authority of the confessions which interpret the Bible.  The greatest example of this was the Reformation itself.  Without the confession of the church with its “service to the Word,” with its respect for the Word, the Bible becomes the plaything of arbitrary, sectarian exposition.  Is there a deeper, more humble expression of the Holy Scriptures, more obedient to the Word than the confessional writings of our church?  No one asserts that they say everything there is to be said.  No one contests that there are truths of the Scriptures which must be still more deeply and better understood.  No one claims infallibility for their statements and formulizations.  But we do believe that the church can only be granted a new recognition and a deeper understanding of the Scriptures if it does not forget or despise the truth which was granted it in Luther’s Reformation once and for all time.

–Hermann Sasse, “Are We Still the Church of the Reformation?” The Lonely Way (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), 1:477

That was all pretty much down the line, as far as someone might expect.  What I found most significant was the segment that Ling did with the counselors and campers at a camp in Minnesota, called The Naming Project ([TNP] held at an ELCA camp, and founded by two ELCA pastors and another ELCA-trained leader).  The impulse behind the camp is good: provide a camp for kids who have been bullied or otherwise marginalized by other people.  It does not help anyone to call them names or reject them because of their sin; they, like everyone, are individuals for whom Christ died–that, in itself, should be enough to end any form of aggression by Christians.  (Of course, this whole issue depends on what is or is not sin, which automatically determines what is and is not forgiveness.)  For TNP, Christianity is equated purely with acceptance and what amounts to greater self-esteem.  The entire segment with the mirrors and the affirmation of individuals no doubt feels good, and maybe those kids feel like no one has ever loved them unconditionally.  Unfortunately for this camp and for the kids who go there, unconditional love has been equated with acceptance of every person along with his or her every sin.  It seems that for every call to “hate the sin but love the sinner,” there is an equally loud call to love the sinner and the sin.

But the fundamental problem with the way that this camp goes about its “project” is symbolized by the very thing that the leaders think will show unconditional love: looking at themselves in a mirror.  “Look at yourself, don’t look at me.”  “You are a child of God.”  “We offer kids a place to be at peace with who they are.”  “Look what God has made: you are made in the image of God.”  This would fit very neatly at a free-will Baptist camp, but I see no way that it can fit at a so-called Lutheran camp.  For Lutherans, it doesn’t matter how you “self-identify,” and, for that matter, it doesn’t matter how others identify you.  It only matters how God identifies you; and how God “identifies” you is only good news if you are not a sinner.  And, for Lutherans, no one is not a sinner.  Gay, straight, married, single, there is no one righteous, not even one.  Looking in a mirror at what and who you are and saying that this is the fullness of who God has made is the opposite of everything the Scriptures say about human beings–unless one confines the Scriptures to Genesis 1 and 2, as the pastor in the clip seems to do.  We may have been made originally in the image of God, but unless we are remade by the Image of God, Jesus Christ, we are not children of God.  Instead, as our (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod) baptismal rite says, “The Word of God also teaches that we are all conceived and born sinful and are under the power of the devil until Christ claims us as His own.  We would be lost forever unless delivered from sin, death, and everlasting condemnation” (Lutheran Service Book, 268).  If you are at “peace” with who you are, you either haven’t been paying attention, or you’re lying to yourself.  Whoever is at peace with himself has given up the Holy Spirit’s fight with his own sinful nature, which is not eradicated until physical death and physical resurrection.  As much as looking at themselves means not looking at the one holding the mirror, it also means not looking at Jesus, whose judgment of us is the only one that matters.

Jesus does not say that we should just be ourselves, or be at peace with ourselves; He says we must deny ourselves (Matthew 1624-25; Luke 9:23-24).  He says not that the person is good, but that everything that comes from our own hearts is evil: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person” (Matthew 15:19-20).  (No doubt this bible, listed under TNP’s resources, will help you understand these passages in a different “light.”)  To look in a mirror and accept oneself is the opposite of confession (which is essence of a wholly Christian life): it is pure narcissism.  It is much more Lady GaGa than Lord God Omnipotent.  Confession is to acknowledge that I am, along with all my impulses and desires, opposed to the God who made me originally in His image.  I have rebelled against that image.  I have nothing good in me.  I am, not to put too fine a point on it, evil.  That is the truth about me, and if it is not the truth about me, than I have no need of a Savior.  I may need a life-coach, or an encourager, or a self-esteem raiser, but I don’t need a Savior.  This camp teaches the opposite of everything that actual Lutherans believe.  And it’s not really relevant that these teenagers have identified themselves, or are being encouraged to identify themselves, as homosexual.  The relevant question is, what is the truth about human beings?  What is the truth about every human being?  And it is not good enough to “confess” that we are all sinners.  Christ did not die for generic “sin.”  He died specifically and particularly for sinners who do not “sin,” but who actually and specifically lie, lust, murder, steal, fornicate, commit adultery, covet, and make idols for themselves.  It is not good enough for the counselors and campers to confess that they are sinners in general, and then talk about God having made them that way.  What God made must be unendingly distinguished from what we are now.  To say that we are, without remainder, children of God who are “born this way” (it is a serious problem when a supposedly Christian camp’s slogans are indistinguishable from Lady GaGa’s), is to deny any doctrine of Original Sin.  If we are born “this way,” and if “this way” is okay with God, then either God is the author of sin; or we are not sinners, though we make mistakes.  I don’t know which one the leaders of the camp would choose, but they are alike denials of the entire Scriptural witness, not to mention a denial of Jesus Himself.

All it takes is a brief thought-experiment to highlight the (Christian) absurdity of accepting the person in the mirror: imagine if we were to do that with any other sin (for the sake of the progressives/enlightened, let’s call it a “negative behavior”).  Imagine an alcoholic who beats his wife: look in the mirror; you are a child of God; God made you this way; be at peace with yourself.  Or a chronic philanderer: be at peace with the person God has made.  Or an abuser of animals: look in the mirror and accept that you are made in the image of God.  Or even someone who lies or steals only once in a while: be at peace with the person in the mirror.  If we do it with LGBTQ youth, why not with those people?  What possible argument could be made?  There is at least as much or more public opprobrium connected to an alcoholic wife-beater than to a gay teenager.  The wife-beater is marginalized and oppressed, and it may even get him beat up by a better man.  Those are his impulses and inclinations, maybe even his orientation, and there are studies that connect alcoholism to genetics.  Why doesn’t he get a mirror in which to look and affirm what God has made?  Try to make an argument that could not also be applied to homosexual youth.

They are free to deny that we are sinners; but sinners don’t need a Savior.  Why not just say, we’re happy with who we are and we don’t need God to tell us that?  Why must we seek justification from some higher Power for our choices?  That’s a far more fundamental question than whether my personal god likes me or not.

Timotheos

And what about the Lutheran Churches of America? They would have been entitled to speak and act for the Lutheran Confession at that time. In the thirty years which now have passed since the formation of the L.W.F. at Lund they have increased in stature and in favor with man. Whether also in wisdom and favor with God remains an open question. They have sent their young men to Europe to get a European degree in theology, preferably
a German one which is supposed to be the seal of perfect wisdom and knowledge. The time may come whcn our American brethren will realize that “authentic scholarship” and “relevant scientific thcology” does not save churches….  It was a false “critical” theology which has destroyed the Word of God instead of explaining it. A theology is false and a nuisance to the Church which destroys the dogmatic substance of the church under the pretext
to make it plain or to express it in “relevant” terms which modern man would readily accept. It is true of mankind in all ages: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” even not the man who has reached the state of “maturity.” … [Hello Seminex!]

Why do neither the church historians nor the dogmaticians nor the practical theologians examine these claims? Why does no one ask, in an age of alleged deeper Biblical studies, what the New Testament teaches on Church, church unity, the ministry? Why do we all take modern concepts of the ecumenical movement for granted? Who tells us that God wants all who call themselves Christians to be united in one big visible church? Certainly not our Lord and His Apostles. We read that into the New Testament. Who has invented the idea that the Church as the Body of Christ consists of churches and that this body is unfortunately divided? The body of Christ cannot be divided, neither the sacramental nor the spiritual body. “A sumente non concisus / non confractus, non divisus / Integer accipitur.” Who has invented the myth of an “Ancient undivided Church” which must be “reunited” into the “Future Reunited Church”? Who has invented the idea that by means of a dialog we can attain unity? In some cases it may be possible, in others not. Most certainly it will not be possible if this dialog aims at a minimum of doctrine and at formulas of compromise. A lot of these have been written in our time to overcome the doctrinal differences concerning the sacraments.  No formula has been found yet to overcome the contrast between those who teach that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and those who teach that it is not. Even if in Holland, the home of Cornelis Hoen from whom Zwingli took over his doctrine, Roman Catholics now try their hands at a compromise by suggesting a new doctrine of “transsignification” (“In Holland everything changes in the Church except bread and wine”), the alternative remains. And all compromises on the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Baptism are marred by the fact that when unity seems to be reached the representative of the Quakers and the Salvation Army rises and states that all is nice and good, but that external sacraments are not necessary. Then you may try to convince him that this is wrong. In the very moment when the Quaker admits, he ceases to be a Quaker and must be replaced by another Quaker.  So the dialog must be continued until the last member of the Society of Friends has accepted the sacraments. And the dialog itself? We already hear alarming statements that our separated brethren in Rome, after they have converted the other churches to a renewed Catholic Church wish to extend the dialog to the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, the Marxists and atheists.

But it may then happen that not only the walls between the Christian denominations become transparent (Edmund Schlink), but also other walls. We quote only one example. At the meeting of the International Missionary Council at Tambaram, Madras, in 1938 Walter Marshall Horton spoke of his friendship with “a Buddhist priest whom to this day I persist in regarding as my brother in Christ. He gave me a picture of a Bodhisattva . . . which to him perfectly symbolized the spirit and attitude required by his simple creed: ‘to cleanse the heart of evil, and endeavour to make this world a kingdom of God.’ There is a faint smile of self-congratulation on that picture face, which reminds me of the great gulf that remains forever fixed between Buddhist self-discipline and the Christian sense of grace toward sinners; but when I talked with the priest who gave me the picture, that gulf was not there. Differences of tradition seemed to vanish behueen us, as I often felt them melting away between Christians of different communions at ecumenical gatherings, and our souls met in something less tangible and definable than forms of speech and thought, but infinitely more real and authoritative. If I belong in any sense to the Body of Christ,-then he does too. It would be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the Wind of God that bloweth where it listeth, for me to deny my Buddhist brother his place in that Body. When I ventured to say as much to a group of Christians in Kobe the next day, I was sternly reminded that ‘There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved’; but I thought to myself that I have rather have the Spirit without the Name, than the Name without the Spirit” (Tambaram Series vol. I, “The authority of Faith,” London 1939, p. 149f.; emphasis added). This is the end of the dialog, if consistently carried on. We all should love our pagan brother in Adam. He is a sinner, as I am a sinner. But to make him my Brother in Christ, this is the denial of Christ, the only Saviour of sinners, of the Holy Spirit, of the Living God and His eternal Word. (Hermann Sasse, “Confessional Churches in the Ecumenical Movement,” The Springfielder, XXXI:1 (Spring, 1967), 25-27 [http://bit.ly/iX9ka2])

May God grant us to listen again to Sasse, and raise up his heirs among us.

Timotheos

It is my favorite memory
To take out
And dust off
And hold up to the light
To rotate in its gyroscopic frame

The morning, cool
And the deep, fishless water
Next to a camping couple
Who did not want us there

And that overlook, past where you used to cut wood,
Which seemed so significant and beautiful to you.

Who knows how long it took us,
Up those hot and winding roads,
To find that first pond, guarded
By an embankment of orange gravel
Past where there was a grassy,
Flowered descent into those Oregon hills.
Or maybe I imagined that
But I did not imagine the tugging trout
And the sandwiches you made
Or the hours we drove and fished that day
And again the next, so that my mother and wife were annoyed—how your back must have ached!
(It was a two-day license, so what could we do?)

But I cannot remember what you told me
About your father and your time in the Navy.
Now I would ask you about my mother’s mother, long dead by then,
The woman confined to those few photographs
In the album after your funeral:
Smiling with you on a beach, or leaning out the window of your car,
Or looking giddy and flushed on the couch next to you
and my child-aunt and my slightly older mother—who says she still remembers that dress her mother wore—
Or on a pier in San Diego
Who was she and how did you fall in love with this woman
Who gave me one-fourth of my genes?

I would have asked you that, but I was already riding in the hearse (a converted minivan, really)
With the funeral director, who was also
The grave-digger, and occasionally even offered a few words
For families who had no congregation
Or maybe no religion
This man, a year and a half on from a fatal esophageal cancer, and a prognosis of months;
He told me this story as we passed through, and out of town
As out of a life, and up a hill filled with the bones of the dead I never knew, and never saw,
just like you in your closed casket,

From where I looked out, eyes straining against the wind
That was making everyone huddle together against it and against their tears,
I could see out toward those hills where we fished
And talked and I will remember your voice, even without words,
and your profile and my sunburnt head in one of your hats
And those ponds marked on a GPS
In the truck my grandmother sold

Six days of silence and rest
And on the seventh day
A walk
Up a mountain in the dark

There, looking east,
Day broke upon them
And scattered blooming shards
In an ever-expanding arc of light
Two billion sparks and more; no fear–yet

There, Moses on Sinai and Elijah on Horeb:
Heard the Name of God as a synonym for promise,
Or the whisper, still and small,
In a cloud and a cave’s mouth.
Then, down they went–
To an easily unsettled congregation
And to anoint Hazael and Jehu and Elisha,
With crowns and swords and a cloak,
Thrown without a word

But there the cloud, so black so bright,
(Morning, once broken, put back together again as night,)
Stops words that fall from Peter’s mouth like broken teeth
With the Word; now fear!
Now glowing faces buried in the dirt

The Word not only speaks but touches,
Raises from holes punctured in the ground at regular intervals.
(Easier to mow around.)
And, eyes opened, there’s only One to see
In all the Law and Prophets and Psalms
Sand still dropping from their foreheads and empty hands