This is...

Most Christians are intimately familiar with Jesus' words as He observed the Passover with His disciples, just hours before He was arrested, tried, and crucified.  During two significant segments of the Passover celebration, Jesus took what had been in place for centuries and added new meaning to it.  Taking the bread, Jesus broke it, and as He gave it to the disciples, He proclaimed, "This is my body, given for you."  And then later, taking one of the four cups (very likely the cup of redemption), He gave it to them, telling them to, "Drink of this, all of you, for this is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins."

Now, I understand that there are Christians who take Jesus' words as symbolic more than literal.  The next few blog posts won't actually be addressing anything related to that issue.  Suffice it to say that, for our reflection over the next few days, we will be taking Jesus at His word, that He can indeed cause His body and His blood to be present in the Supper, even if we cannot reasonably fathom how such a thing can be so.

The first thing I want to point out from the mouth of our Lord is that He says this is done "for you".  Jesus gives His body into death "for you".  Jesus shed His blood "for you".  And so, as you take the breach which contains His body, He gives it "for you".  As you receive His blood in, with, and under the wine, He gives it "for you". 

These two words carry a great deal of importance for us as Christians.  We have a connection with Jesus that is renewed every time we receive this holy Supper from the hands of our Lord.  Jesus pours His forgiveness into us as we receive His body, broken for us, and His blood, shed for us.  And the thing for you and I to reflect upon is that we need this forgiveness so often.  Not only do we daily sin in what we do and in what we fail to do, but our inherited state from our first father and mother is that we are sinful.  This means that we desperately need that forgiveness and our connection to Jesus.  We daily sin much, and stand in need of God's forgiveness in Jesus just as much.  We also live in a state of separation from God, and need that forgiven every moment of every day. 

The connection we have with this holy Supper of our Lord Jesus is such that we need it "often".  Truly, we could spend every moment of every day receiving it, as that is just how deep our sinfulness runs, and how deep the forgiveness of Jesus runs.  But since a constant side of bread, blessed with the body of Jesus, and an IV of wine, blessed with Jesus' blood, isn't that practical, we desire to have this great gift as frequently as can be available.

When Not To Tell The Truth

In the Gospels, Jesus says that He is the way, the truth, and the life.  We have a commandment from God that tells us that we are not to bear false witness (i.e. lie) about our neighbor.  God delights in truth in the inward parts, and even calls us to be such an honorable people that our word is good, so that our yes actually means yes, and our no actually means no.

So we are to tell the truth.  But I put a question before you.  Is it always appropriate to share the whole truth?  For most of us, the quick answer is to say, of course.  We should always share the truth, and not tell lies.  And I agree with that.  However, I want to have us think about this a little deeper.

Let's say that you are over at some friends' house.  In the midst of your time there, the husband and wife have a sharp disagreement, which leaves one stalking out of the room in anger.  With the uncomfortable situation, you decide that it's best if you give them some space to work things out.  As you leave, you call another friend, whom you had been planning to chat with a bit later.  This person is surprised that you are calling early.  After all, weren't you at so and so's house? 

How much of what you witnessed do you share?  Sure, you could tell the whole truth, that they got into a fight and one of them left angrily, but does that do any good for anyone?  Do you want to introduce that into their reputation, as though they are angry people at each other in the eyes of others?  Or, do you say something like, my time got done there early, so I wanted to see if you were available? 

I believe that this is where Martin Luther's explanation to the eighth commandment (You shall not bear false testimony) comes in helpful.  He says that are not to betray our neighbor (as in, spill the beans on everything we know of them), slander them (as in, tell outright lies about them), or hurt their reputation.  Instead, we are to speak well of them and explain everything in the kindest way.

Sometimes that charge is more difficult to do than at other times.  Sometimes, we have to make major decisions without being able to tell others the full extent of what we know.  That can be difficult, and yet, as we seek to build up each others' reputation, can we do less in the eyes of God?

Money, Friends, and Reaching Out

There's a very interesting verse in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 16:9, found in the context of a parable that reads in Luke 16:1-13) in which Jesus says to make friends for yourselves using unrighteous mammon (a word we often translate as wealth), so that when it fails, those same friends will receive you into the eternal dwellings.

One of my favorite questions is "What does this mean?", and you can truly ask that about this story and saying.  It almost sounds like Jesus is saying that we should use our money to make people become our friends, and that they will then welcome us into the eternal kingdom.  If you take that at face value, it almost sounds like everyone gets to be there, and you are welcomed because you used your wealth to make friends with them.

This is one of those instances where we should not take an individual verse out of the overall context of the surrounding story or parts.  In fact, we actually don't get to the full meaning of this whole story until we reach the very end, where Jesus sums up what He is saying.  This story concludes with the somewhat well-known saying, you cannot serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and money. 

That helps to give a bit of an idea about why Jesus would say to use wealth (mammon) to gain friends.  In the end, you are either going to serve your wealth, or your wealth will serve you.  Since we are a people who are bought by the blood of Jesus, He rightfully is the one that we serve.  There is no room to serve Jesus, and also to base our life on what all we can get or buy. 

Since that is the case, what is the proper use of wealth (mammon)?  It serves us.  It helps us to get what is needed to sustain our lives.  However, God often gives more than what is needed for the basic necessities of life.  So what do we do with what's left?  That's when Jesus tells us that we would be shrewd to make use of it in the spread of the Gospel message.  Our wealth becomes a means of connecting with our communities, and bringing Christ into those connections.  Our wealth serves the Gospel, and as God works through those connections, He draws people to Himself by His Spirit. 

That's when we see the full meaning of this story and verse.  When our wealth serves God, God's Spirit often will create faith in the hearts of those whom we call friends.  As that Gospel message takes root in them, they receive God's grace in Jesus.  Our wealth has then served the Gospel in bringing them into the eternal kingdom, where they will give thanks for our wise and shrewd use of our wealth in seeing to their eternal life. 

We simply cannot serve both God and our wealth.  So why not turn the tables on our wealth and see that it serves a greater purpose, that of the Gospel message and eternal life?

Confirming the Faith

This coming Sunday, our congregation will be pleased to witness the confirmation of five of our young people.  They will stand before God's people to confess the faith that they have been baptized into, that they have been instructed in, and which is theirs.  As they prepare for this joyous day, I thought I would put a few thoughts about confirmation into a post.

What, exactly, is confirmation?  In my personal library, I have a number of books that seem to point to different answers.  For some, the view is that confirmation is the primary education that young people receive in the faith.  They learn about the Scriptures and about God.  They learn what Jesus has done, and what He continues to do.  They learn a lot of content, and when they have assented to that content, then they are confirmed.

Another view of confirmation is that of ritual.  It's a rite of passage, a time in which a young person is instructed in their faith, but more importantly, at the conclusion of the ritual, they are brought into a more meaningful relationship with the congregation.  For many congregations, this is the time at which the confirmands are first administered the Lord's Supper.  They pass through the ritual in order to receive this gift of God's grace.

Yet another view is that of responsibility.  Up until the time of confirmation, the young person faith is the responsibility of the parents or guardians.  They are the ones who see to it that the young person is brought to instruction, and brought to worship, and raised up in the faith.  But once the young person is confirmed, they assume that responsibility for their own.  Instead of relying upon mom and dad to nurture their faith life, they assume that responsibility on their own.  Not independent of the rest of the congregation, but they bear the primary responsibility.

Is there a right answer in these different views?  Is there a wrong answer?  In my experience, I see a little bit of each of these going on with confirmation.  I don't believe that confirmation instruction should rely solely upon the pastor or the teacher, but takes place throughout the life of the young one.  Sunday School, worship, youth group and activities, all of these are geared toward the nurture of the faith.  But perhaps most importantly, the family is the center at which the majority of this nurturing takes place. 

Then, the students go through a period to ensure that what they know and believe is in line with the Bible.  They learn and memorize Bible verses and portions of Luther's Small Catechism in our tradition.  Typically, the pastor or another faith-grounded individual leads a period of instruction to ensure that they believe according to the Scriptures.

Then, as this time is brought to a close, the students are ready and equipped to take responsibility for the continued nurture of their faith life.  It isn't a graduation, but rather, an acknowledgement that they have the tools to continue to grow.  They leave their father and their mother, in a sense, and assume the primary responsibility for their continued growth.  True, they still rely on their family a lot, just like they still rely upon the congregation for their nurture.  But now the responsibility falls on their shoulders.  They are ready to claim the faith, to declare it their own, and to ensure that they continue to grow.

Thoughts?  Differences?  Comments?  All are welcome.

Taking Education Seriously

Every year, I get the joy and privilege of teaching young people about the content of their faith.  At the end of our time together, they get to confirm that they believe the faith into which they were baptized, and they also get to acknowledge that they are ready and willing to take responsibility for their faith life.  Mom and dad no longer are to be the driving force for their continued presence with God's people, and in coming with God's people to receive His grace.

One of the things that I have noticed over the years is the difference in how serious the parents take this education.  It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise to see that the parents who took it seriously tend to have kids that are more prepared to take up the responsibility of their faith life.  Those parents who didn't take it seriously, or who just made efforts to drop their kids off and that was it, well, in the end, those kids tended to be the ones that wandered furthest away.  While there are exceptions to each of these, the general pattern speaks pretty powerfully that the commitment of the parents will tend to have a rather large emphasis on what happens with the kids.

In writing the Small Catechism, Martin Luther wanted to have the people of Germany become knowledgeable about their faith.  And in the writing of the Small Catechism, he makes it very plain that this knowledge is not to come primarily from the pastor or the priest.  It's the responsibility of the head of the household.  Each section begins with "As the head of the household should teach his family in a simple way", or something along those lines.  Parents who take the education of their kids seriously tend to have kids that also take their education seriously.

Sadly, in our day and age, Christian education seems to be simply one more thing among the many choices that are available for kids.  Even more sadly, more and more parents are letting the kids be the ones who do the primary choosing of these.  What becomes important is what the kid wants, rather than what the parent thinks would be most beneficial.  And what kid is ever going to choose a class over soccer, or baseball, or football, or whatever other activity there is?  The role of the parent is of the same importance that it always has been.

I'm always looking for good ideas on how to encourage parents in this, and to emphasize the importance of their say-so in their kids activities.  If anyone has any good suggestions, I'm always open to hearing them!

I Struggle With Myself

Before you read on today, you may find it helpful to review the words of Romans 7:13-25.  (I believe you can simply scroll over it in this blog entry and read it.) 

There are times in my life where I find myself in a struggle.  It's the kind of struggle that I'm pretty sure most of us are acquainted with.  We know the good and right thing to do.  We even want to do the good and right thing.  But when the moment arrives, we don't do the good and right thing.  Our friend confides something in us, and for some reason, our mouth has a hard time keeping it quiet.  We see the lady whose groceries have just fallen out of their bags as she's loading them in her car, but we really don't want to be bothered to stop and help.  We know that others will not like the language that comes from our mouths, but we fail to put the filter into place and just allow those words to slip out.

I could add many more things to this list, some much more terrible than the ones I have already mentioned.  But that's a struggle we find ourselves in.  We know what's right, but we fail to do the right.  We know something is wrong, and we try not to do it, but we cannot keep it from slipping out.  It's not a unique battle to any one of us.  We all go through it.  And as we read these words, it should also be comforting to know that Paul went through the same thing.  (As a brief aside, I know we often tend to make the biblical people more holy than they really were in their lives, and sometimes think that they didn't go through the same struggles and doubts that we do.  Rest assured, there were not somehow more super-human than us.  They went through the same things.)

I want to do the right thing, the good thing, but so often I find the wrong thing, the bad thing, actually taking place.  It's the struggle that I have with myself, and that you have with yourself.  And for those who are Christians, God tells us that we shouldn't be surprised at this struggle.

When God made us His very own in the washing waters of baptism, we suddenly found ourselves in a new position.  The old, sinful self was still very much alive and present within us, as it had been since we were conceived.  But now, something new was present.  The new life, the new creation that we are in Jesus, came to be present within us as well.  And suddenly, we became a battle ground.  These two fight against each other.  As we live our lives, sometimes it seems as though one is winning, and then the other one seems to gain the upper hand.  It's kind of like the kid's game of tug-o-war.  One minute the Spirit and our new life seems to pulling harder, and then the next, our sinful nature seems to gain more strength.

Over the next few weeks, I want to spend some time reflecting on these two "selves" that we find within us as Christians.  Different parts of God's Word speak to one or the other, and sometimes to both.  We apply the things we read in the Bible to each one in different ways.  And so I intend to walk us through some of these differences, since there is a lot of confusion out there in our world when it comes to talking about our life in Christ Jesus.  As always, throughout these moments of me thinking out loud, I welcome your thoughts, comments, and questions.

Spiritualizing Faith

During the time of the Reformation, there was a group of people that Martin Luther regularly made as his targets.  Granted, you could say that there were quite a few groups that he targeted, but for today, I want to focus on the monastic orders of his day.  There seems to have been a prevailing thought that, if you offered your life to God and then went away to a convent or abbey, you were serving God in a far "higher", holier way than anyone else. 

The problem with this, as Luther saw it, was that the individual who did this basically left the rest of society in order to focus on God.  While the focus on God part wasn't bad in and of itself, Luther did take exception to a couple of things that this gave birth to.  First, such an action started to be seen as far higher and holier than any other act of faith.  Second, it took people away from their relationships with their neighbors.  Their faith, in essence, started to become a thing between them and God, without any interaction with those that the Bible rightfully would call their neighbors.

Faith was becoming spiritualized.  Your "rightness" with God came to be seen as how much you could focus on Him rather than in living out your faith in the relationships that God has given in life.  So Luther went to battle against this idea.  He would point out that, for example, a husband who loved and cared for his wife and family was fulfilling God's will and commands far greater than the man who left society behind to focus only on God.  The milkmaid who milked her cow to provide for her family and neighbors was doing far more in fulfillment of God's law than those in the convents and monestaries.

What was Luther's basis for this?  It basically boiled down to one major point.  God tells us in the Bible that we are to care for our neighbor and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  One can hardly do that by separating oneself from the neighbor.  God's Word doesn't command us to go off and live life separated from everyone, but does speak much about our relationships with one another.  From that basis, Luther asserted that it's far better to do the things that God's Word does say rather than to invent things that may seem more holy, but aren't actually spoken by God.

We can still find ourselves in this same dilemma, though.  It's far easier to tell someone that we will pray for them than to actually find a way to help them in their need.  And this is part of the reason why I think Luther explained the commandments in his Small Catechism the way he did.  For almost all of them, he doesn't just explain what God wants us to avoid, but he then adds a part of what it actually means that we do in fulfillment of the commandment.  Not murdering doesn't simply mean that we don't kill our neighbor, but that we lift up our hands to help him in every physical need.  Not bearing false witness doesn't mean simply that we don't lie about our neighbor, but that we seek to build him up with our words and how we talk about him. 

In many respects, our faith is between us and God.  However, the realm in which that faith is lived out is always in the context of our neighbor.  So I encourage you today to think about how God gives you the opportunity to put flesh and blood to your faith in your relationships with your neighbors.

Personal Faith and Shared Faith

This fall, I'm planning on adding a daily Small Catechism component to my blog.  Each day, we will focus on one part of Luther's Small Catechism.  I will include a brief Bible verse that helps explain what we believe based upon God's Word. 

However, I also want to emphasize how our Christian faith is both a personal faith and a shared faith.  So as part of those daily devotions, one day we will focus on what that particular teaching means for us as an individual, and then, the following day, we will see how it applies to us as we live our lives in a shared faith with other Christians. 

Part of the reason I want to highlight this distinction is because it is very easy to focus on just one part of our faith life.  Indeed, as North American Christians, we are influenced so much by our individualistic culture that we often fail to consider how our faith and life impacts other believers, or even how it impacts those who do not believe.  So I hope to give a few thoughts each day about how we see these various parts of our faith life lived out, both personally and all together.

I realize you may wonder what I mean by this.  Let's take, for example, the 6th Commandment (as the Small Catechism numbers them); You shall not commit adultery.  Most of us would look at that commandment and see it as a very personal one.  This is especially true in our culture which emphasizes that "I can do what I want with my own time, and it's none of your business."  And yet, we cannot take a look at our society and culture without seeing the impact that unhindered sex has had on our morals and values.

So, for example, I might highlight ways that we can live out our faith by defending our Biblical view of sex.  From a personal standpoint, it may mean that we control what our eyes see (from such things as TV, magazines, calendars, etc.) and be cautious about the type of language we use when we speak.  But from a shared faith standpoint, we may also look at how we help encourage each other to live lives of purity, and how we can help one another withstand the onslaught of images that will daily tempt us to fall.

Our faith is personal, but it is also a shared faith, one that we have in common with many people.  On top of that, how we live and what we believe has an impact even on those who do not share our faith.  True, they may not agree with us a good portion of the time, but we still are encouraged to take our faith seriously enough that we not only focus on the personal, but on the shared aspect of our faith.

A Few New Things for the Fall

For all of you who have been following me for a while, you've probably gotten used to my occasional scattered appearances on here.  Sometimes work and life get in the way of posting, but at other times, it may simply be that I have nothing worth posting running through my head.

That all will be changing in the next week or so, though.  As part of a way to get God's people thinking about how simple it is to understand God's Word and commands, and to get an idea of just how deep they penetrate into our lives, I will be starting a daily "Catechism Thought for the Day."  In these daily blog posts, I will introduce a small section of the Small Catechism, have a Bible reference associated with that thought, and then give a brief devotional thought or suggestion for what that part of the Small Catechism may mean for our daily life.

This is part of a fall theme that I will be leading that is simply titled, "Taking Faith Seriously."  Much of what we do in our lives shows how seriously we take our faith as we go about living our lives.  So my intent for these daily catichetical thoughts will simply be to provide ways for us to think about how we take our faith lives seriously, and how that may look as we go about living our lives.

There will not be a standard format for these thoughts or devotions.  One day may simply be a thought on what it means, another day may be a suggestion for how to find moments in our day that reflect our faith and our seriousness of it, and other days may simply be explanations.  However, the thing that will be remain constant will be an emphasis on the simplicity of what we know and believe about God, as well as encouragement for how our lives reflect the seriousness with which we take our faith.

I'm looking forward to doing this, for both the discipline and the discovery that it will call forth from me.  I hope that you feel comfortable sharing any thoughts that may strike you along the way, too!