Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

Youth

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:14:56 -0600

Michael "internet Monk" Spencer is always a provocative read. As an Evangelical pilgrim in a "post-Evangelical wilderness," Spencer provides a unique perspective on the state of Christianity from the Protestant side of things.

In a recent post, Spencer does some critical reflection on his 35 years in youth ministry. His thoughts are worth pondering, especially considering Spencer's street cred and the fact that so much of what is called "youth ministry" is influenced by Baptist-Evangelicalism. Spencer's antidote to the maladies of youth ministry: Build meaningful and maturing relationships to Jesus Christ and to the Church. Here are some vintage IM quotes:

"We’ve been told that we can use any tool to make church interesting, so youth workers like myself were allowed to run a program of fun, trips, food, sports, recreation, etc. in order to keep young people hanging around for whatever the church was doing. We now know that those young people simply insisted that the church become like their youth group and, ta da- there is today’s evangelicalism. Oh…and there’s a bunch of our kids, never coming back to church again because they eqaute it with juvenile, shallow entertainment."

"The shift from getting 120 kids to a concert to getting 12 kids to pray every morning is huge, and most churches won’t put up with it."

"Let me be clear that families- where there are Christian families- are obviously crucial. But Jesus isn’t creating a community of families. He’s recreating the family around him."

You can read the rest here.

Vienna Teng

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:45:38 -0600

I've been listening to Pandora Radio lately, opening a literal Pandora's Box of possibilities on my variegated musical horizons. This turns out to be somewhat of a distraction since I'm always having to stop whatever I'm doing to check out who is playing, inevitably leading to an impulse download followed by a gargantuan iTunes bill at the end of the month.

As I've noted before, I'm a huge Alison Kraus fan, which, for a middle-aged rocker like myself, is a bit of a genre reach, but hey, she did a terrific collaboration with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame and won a Grammy for it. I'm still waiting for her to do an album with Roger Daltry of the Who, who in my humble opinion, can out sing, and out scream Robert Plant any day of the week.

My Alison Kraus-seeded station on Pandora turned up a 30 year-old Taiwanese-American singer/songwriter named Vienna Teng who records on the indie Zöe/Rounder label. Let's take a moment to be thankful for indie labels, which may well be the salvation of good music for yet another generation.

Vienna Teng (her actual name is Cynthia Yih Shih) is a Stanford grad who worked as a software engineer for Cisco Systems until 2002 when she quit to pursue a full time music career. Software engineers come a dime a dozen; decent singer songwriters are nearly an endangered species.

Vienna Teng is a classically-trained pianist with a versatile voice that seamlessly alternates between sultry alto and lilting soprano evocative of Joni Mitchell, sometimes all in the same measure. Her unique compositional style weds classical, jazz, pop, country, and world music-infused melodies with edgy, often melancholy, poetry. Topics range from meddling grandmothers, late winter snowfalls, corporate corruption, dead uncles, job burnout, abortion, gay marriage to an "atheist Christmas song," all with a certain postmodern ambiguity that forces you to listen closely. I don't know too many songwriters who would dare to lead with a line that goes "I died in a car wreck...." Her jarring juxtaposition of text and tune appears intentionally ironic at times, tweaking the tentative detente between medium and message. Though her songs sound autobiographical, they are actually a kind of lyrical fiction that hides much more than it reveals.

Needless to say, I'm smitten.

Her latest release is called "Inland Territory." I suggest you listen to her in chronological order and track her musical development: Waking Hour (2002), Warm Strangers (2004), Dreaming Through the Noise (2008), and Inland Territory (2009). There is clearly a progression.

Issues, Etc.

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:52:13 -0600

And now, a brief commercial announcement, while taking note of the fourth from the left in the bottom row.

Fathers

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:33:37 -0600

He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. (Malachi 4:6)

Happy Father’s Day! To those of you who are fathers of children, God bless you in your holy and honorable vocation. And to all, whether father or not, male or female, Happy Father’s Day, because we all are begotten of a father. Thank God for Father!

Historically, Father’s Day is a newcomer on the calendar. It was first obsered in 1910 in Spokane, WA. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge suppored the idea of a national Father’s Day, but it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 that we had an official day to recognize our fathers on the third Sunday of June.

An estimated $1 billion dollars is spent on Father’s Day gifts in the United States, a good chunk of it, I imagine, at the home improvement store. Dad still foots the bill for the phone calls, though. AT&T reports that Father’s Day is the busiest day in the year for collect calls. About 140 million moms receive cards on Mother’s Day; about 90 million dads on Father’s Day.

As long as we’re on Father’s Day statistics, here’s a sobering one. According to the latest stats from the Census Bureau, there are 36 million fathers with kids under the age of 18 in the United States. That part is OK. The next part is scary. There are nearly 1 million fathers still providing for their kids aged 18 to 24. Happy Father’s Day!

In Charles Schultz’s comic strip Peanuts, Lucy is busy working on a hand crafted Father’s Day card. Charlie Brown says, “That’s great. I’m proud of you! Father’s Day doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. I find that it’s all too frequently ignored.” He tells Lucy how impressed he is with her effort. In the last frame, we see Lucy writes in her card: DEAR MOM - HAVE A HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

Like a good Cabernet, Dad’s seem to improve with age. The 4 year old says: My Dad knows everything. The 14 year old says: My Dad doesn’t know anything. The 40 year old says: I wish I were as wise as my Dad.

The days of “Father Knows Best” are seem to be behind us. Now Father knows virtually nothing at all, if the television and Hollywood has anything to say. Ozzie and Harriet have given way to the Osbournes, the perverse deconstruction of the family for the sake of entertainment. From TV’s point of view Dad can barely manage to program the VCR let alone his household. He needs a global positioning unit to navigate the grocery store aisle. His internet savvy kids and his omnicompetent, multitasking wife have declared him hopelessly irrelevent. He is, at best, a kind of snoring ATM machine, useful only for a quick dose of cash and the keys to the car. And we pray that dear old Dad doesn’t set himself on fire grilling the burgers.

The word “father” used to be sturdy noun, able to stand up on its own two feet without being propped up by adjectives. Father. Today father need qualifiers: Biological father. Step father. Absentee father. The adjectives the meltdown of the nuclear family, the great divorce of procreation and paternity, between begetting a child and taking responsibility for raising it. Thanks to modern technology, Dad is almost, but not quite, dispensible, on the endangered species list and may be on his way to extinction.

It’s unfashionable these days to speak in terms of Father and Mother. Now it’s generic, androgenous “parent.” We don’t talk of fathering and mothering, but “parenting.” Don’t be fooled by the popular rhetoric. A child needs Mother and Father. Just as male and female are complementary counterparts, Father and Mother complement each other. Without Mother, we’d be left to fend for ourselves, a testosterone-driven survival of the fittest. Without Father, we would drown in an estrogenous sea of nurture and kisses.

When a little child falls and scrapes his knee, he wants his Mommy. For good reason. Mommy will put a bandaid on the boo-boo and kiss it and make it all better. Dad will tell you to stop sniveling, dust yourself off, get back on your pony and try it again. Mom will remind you to wear your helmet at all times, be careful or you’ll poke your eye out. Dad will buy you a new bike after you wrecked the last one.

As fatherhood goes, so goes family and community and country. We bear the burden of the fatherless. The young woman doesn’t know her father, seeks surrogates from a long line of eager and less than honorable applicants. The young man who never knew the firm hand of Father, looks to the street gang, where his distorted sense of manhood turns to violence. It’s not a coincidence that 80% of the boys in juvenile hall had no father at home. The sins of the fathers trickle down to sons and daughters for three and four generations. The sin of Adam, our father in the flesh, has trickled down to us, driving us apart, driving us to our death.

One of the saddest sentences in the Old Testament is written of Adonijah, David’s fourth son. The sentence reads: “His father never interfered with him by asking, ‘Why do you behave as you do?’” Born after brother Absalom, Adonijah was a winner: smart, ambitious, good looking, privileged. But as many children born late in their parents’ life, Adonijah never got much attention from his aging father. His father never interfered with him. As David lay on his death bed, Adonijah was scheming to get his father’s throne. Even after David’s death, Adonijah still plotted until he was killed by the order of his half-brother King Solomon. A tragedy. A boy whose father never interfered in his life.

I witnessed a great illustration of fatherhood at the bighorn sheep display at the San Diego Zoo. There was a large male, with about two and a half turns of horn, and with him, a little male, with about three quarters of a turn. The little one strode all the way up to the highest rock, put his head down, and took a running charge at the big male, who appeared not the least bit interested, until the very last second when he turned his head, and wham! knocked horns with the little male and left him flat on the ground, and then went back to munching grass, as if to say, “Is that all you have?” The problem we face today is that there aren’t enough old males with a few turns of horn around, to gently but firmly guide as only a father can do.

It’s no quirk of culture that the Bible addresses fathers when God says: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4) Fathers are the spiritual heads of their households; mothers are their deaconesses.

The book of Hebrews reminds us, “We have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!” (Heb 12:9) Fathers can be, can be, an image of our Father in heaven. One who disciplines the children he loves, who brings order and stability in their chaotic lives, who applies the Law and the Gospel, hopefully with the Gospel prevailing.

Father is the source of life. Without our fathers we wouldn’t be here this morning. Luther says, “That’s reason enough to get down on your knees daily to thank God for your father.” Father begets, provides, protects, defends, disciplines.

Jesus revealed the Father. He taught His disciples to pray to His Father as “our Father.” God is our Father precisely because He is the Father of the eternal Son through whom we have our existence, through whom He sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts who cries out “Abba, Father!” We are, thanks to Christ, children of the heavenly Father, who can approach God with the kind of boldness and confidence of little children coming to their dear Father in heaven.

We have many “fathers” under the 4th commandment - pastors, teachers, governors, leaders - God’s representatives, whom we are to honor, love, cherish and obey, not for what they’ve done for us, but for who they are. “By virtue of their office.” We suffer when fathers are not honored, just as we suffer when our fathers are not honorable. A week ago, we paid honor and respect to Ronald Reagan, and recovered, if only for a brief moment, that sense national fatherhood. Whether you liked him or not, whether you agreed with him politically or not, you recognize that Pres. Reagan occupied the office as a father figure.

Fathers and children live under the cross as justified sinners. That’s the reality for us as sons and daughters of Father Adam. Father’s Day calls for repentance, forgiveness, faith and renewal. We have not honored, cherished, loved, respected, and obeyed our fathers as God commands. We have not been faithful in our fatherhood. We have not shouldered the weight of our fatherly responsibility, we’ve abrogated our authority. We’ve given our children the leftover crumbs of our time, the stale bread of our distracted affections. We need to confess, tell the truth to God and to each other. As children to their father: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” As fathers to their children: “My son, my daughter, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” And we need to forgive each other, to let go. “Father, I forgive you.” “Son, daughter, I forgive you.”

Then perhaps Father’s Day will become something more than barbeques and power tools and collect phone calls and all the guilt and anxiety that goes with our sinful brokenness. In the all-reconciling death of Jesus, fathers are reconciled to their children and children to their fathers. Broken childhood and broken fatherhood are redeemed and raised up. Jesus is the Father’s love Incarnate. He exposes the fatherly heart of God who calls His wayward, wandering children home to Himself. In His death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus presents our humanity to His Father, and says, “Father, forgive them.” And bids each of us to say with Him, “our Father.”

In Jesus, we know the truth of God as our Father - our Maker, our Provider, our Defender, a Father gives good gifts to His children, not because we get good grades in religion or high marks in citizenship, but because He is good and gracious and merciful Through His Son, the Father sends the Spirit, the Spirit who grabs hold of our hearts and our tongues so that we cry out Abba, Father with delight and joy.

I know of no greater picture of the Gospel father in all the Bible than Jesus’ parable of the man with two sons. The point of the parable is about rejoicing in the repentance of another. But the details give us the picture of the Father as the Gospel Dad who embraces his children in the arms of his forgiveness and acceptance.

Most of you already know the story by heart, but it bears retelling. A man had two sons. The younger son demanded his share of the inheritance early, ahead of time, before his father died. In effect, he told his father “drop dead,” which is essentially what the old man did. He dropped dead to his life, gave the older son the farm and the younger one his share of the estate. The younger son took his money, and wasted it on wine, women, and what have you. He wound up slopping hogs for a Gentile pig farmer, about as low and lost as a Jewish boy can get..

About the time the pig food was starting to look like a square meal, he came to his senses. He cooked up a little plan to save himself. He was going to go home to his father and say, “Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and against you, I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” And then he was going to offer a little deal, “Make me one of your servants.” And with his little confession and deal, he returned to his father’s house.

As he’s coming down the road to town, while he’s nothing more than a little bump on the horizon, the father recognizes him and runs down the road to greet him. Never mind what the neighbors think. The father doesn’t care. He runs out to meet his long lost son. And before the boy has a chance even to say a word, the father already has him in his embrace and is kissing him. My boy! My boy! And in the embrace of his father’s forgiveness, the son makes his confession, “Father, I have sinned against you. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” But in this fatherly embrace there is no room for deals and transactions. He never gets to the part about being one of his father’s servants.

That’s the picture of fatherhood I want to fix in your minds and hearts on this Feast of All Fathers. The Father who embraces you in forgiving arms, who clothes you with the robe and ring of the family, who throws a party your behalf when we least deserve it, who welcomes you without any merit or worthiness on your part, for no other reason than you are His child and He is your Father.

You are in your Father’s house. Happy Father’s Day.

Iron Preacher

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:50:20 -0600

Listen to yours truly challenge Iron Preacher Bryan Wolfmueller on Table Talk Radio.

Addendum: Sermons are located here at our church's web site. This is also the home for "Sermons from Holy Trinity" broadcast weekly on Pirate Christian Radio and podcast on iTunes.

Depression

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:00:57 -0600

Pr. Todd Peperkorn has written an important little book on depression entitled I Trust When Dark My Road published by LCMS World Relief and Human Care. This is both a timely and a courageous work. It is timely because depression is one of those things "we just don't talk about" in the stoic corridors of Lutheranism. It is courageous, for seldom does one hear of a pastor speak of his own struggles with depression. Pr. Peperkorn nicely summarizes the mindset that underlies our pietistic denials:

"Far too many well-intentioned Christians are imbued with the conviction that strong people of faith simply don’t become depressed. Some have come to believe that by virtue of one’s baptism, one ought to be insulated from perils of mind and mood. Others whisper unkindly that those who cast their cares upon the Lord simply wouldn’t fall prey to a disease that leaves its victims emotionally desolate, despairing and regarding suicide as a refuge and a comfort — a certain means to stopping relentless pain.

Although Christians are willing to acknowledge that illness and tragedy can befall God’s children, many are less charitable about characterizing depression as a legitimate, biologically based illness. Sadly, clinical depression is often misunderstood as a character flaw, a deficit of will or an absence of sufficient faith. Some glance aside, wagging their heads sadly believing that depressed people simply don’t choose to “snap out of it” or that they just don’t choose to “suck it up” and get on with what it is they’ve been given to do."

Pr. Peperkorn charts his journey in first-person narrative through the "dark road" of depression. He is bluntly honest, revealing the inner darkness all too often veiled by white robes, colorful vestments, and a pastoral smile. He is vulnerably articulate concerning his pain, frustrations and failings. Unlike so many pastor-as-protagonist narratives, Pr. Peperkorn does not come out the Christian super-hero, triumphing over depression with a "victorious faith." Instead, he emerges with a deepened and humbled sense of his own brokenness and God's infinite grace in Jesus, through whose suffering our suffering is transformed into gift and blessing.

This book causes me to reflect on how intimately interconnected are body, mind, and spirit and how careful we must be when speaking the language of repentance and faith to those who are suffering. Depression is not a choice. One does not choose to be depressed, nor does one choose not to be. Living in the fallen world as we do means that we are often dealt a hand that is considerably less than a royal flush, but under the all-reconciling cross of Christ even a pair of deuces can be played out as a winner.

Pr. Peperkorn offers no easy answers, no pious prescriptions, no religious bromides. This is, as the subtitle says, a Lutheran view, which means that it deals with the thing as it is under the cross of Jesus. His book will be a comfort to anyone who is suffering from depression, and will enlarge the empathy of those who do not so suffer. It is available free as a pdf download or in book form from LCMS World Relief and Human Care.

While you're at it, check out some of the other enticing offerings at the LCMS WR/HC bookstore.

Swirla Communion Trays

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:25:50 -0600

It's amazing what you discover when you Google your own name. I just discovered that I have an innovative communion cup holder named after me by some Aussies. Well, sort of. They apparently had to change the spelling so you'd pronounce it right in Australia.

This is an innovative as the individual cup itself, sporting anodized aluminum plate, high impact plastic, and unique peanut shaped design. I wonder if I have a trademark claim here?

This is a lot better than the bathroom rendition of my name from 2nd grade:

Faith and Doubt

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:21:32 -0600

"I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him...." (The Lutheran Small Catechism).

The author of BeAttitude recently announced his "de-conversion" from the Christian faith. Normally, such posts do not draw my attention as they all sound pretty much the same, much like Christian "personal testimonials" of conversion. Funny how that is. What caught my eye was the fact that this author claims in his profile to have been baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church. He's "one of ours," so this one hit a bit closer to home for me.

The post is not the usual triumph of reason over superstition nor does it have the typical broadside against believers. It is really more like the last breath of the dying, a quiet sigh of resignation. The last breath is always a sigh.

The author lists his "Top 20" reasons for making the break. In a word, they mostly deal with credibility - the credibility of God, of the Bible, of the Church, of Christians. They are worth pondering, not for their profundity so much as for their ubiquity. There are many people who quietly think these things. Some of them occupy pews and pulpits. Ask yourself, "How would I respond if my son, daughter, or best friend said these things to me?" If your reflex is a 20-point refutation, you're starting off on the wrong foot. A draw is the best one can hope for when arguing with a skeptic.

The skepticism of our age has had a cumulatively corrosive effect on faith. I've seen it in my own people, especially our youth, and, to be quite honest, I experience it for myself. There are times when I find myself kicking and screaming against faith. I cannot by my own reason or strength believe. I believe that. Faith is a gift of God's grace, an orientation of trust worked by the Spirit who calls us by the Gospel. I also believe that we can by our own reason and strength undermine faith by our own relentless questioning of things that cannot be fully answered to our satisfaction.

I trust my wife and believe her claim to love me. Her actions support her claim of love, not as "proofs" but as consistent actions. But if I continually question her love, demand further irrefutable proofs from her, and constantly approach her with an attitude of skepticism, I will risk two things. First, I will endanger her love to me. She will be hurt that I do not believe her words or trust her. Second, I will destroy my love for her as I become consumed by my own skepticism when attempts to "prove" her love do not live up to my expectations for convincing evidence.

None of us is immune. You can't read the Bible to any degree of depth without being aware of its difficulties. You can't hang around with Christians for very long without being painfully aware of their foibles. You can't spend any serious time in the church without encountering power grabbing institutions and bureaucrats, corrupt clergy, and a checkered past along with a spotted present.

There is a place for healthy skepticism, what Luther called the "ministerial use" of reason. There is room in the life of faith for Mary's "how can this be?" Jesus warned His disciples of deceptive signs and wonders, and His apostle John urged his hearers to "test the spirits." We don't cry "it's a miracle!" every time we can't explain something, and we're rightly suspicious of weeping statues and beatific visions in the burn marks on a tortilla or the watermarks on the side of a barn.

Skepticism ceases to be healthy when it closes the mind and hardens the heart, when it sets the rules for evidence and becomes prosecutor, judge, and jury. The skeptical mind is closed by its own set of presuppositions and untestibles. Things like "There is no such thing as miracles" or "Matter and energy is all there is" or "The only way of knowing things is through scientific observation." The believing mind turns out to be more open than the unbelieving, while a healthy dose of skepticism keeps one's brains from falling out on the floor. Hardened skepticism, however, can best be described as a colossal failure of the imagination.

Kierkegaard said that faith and doubt must always coexist. I cannot for a moment imagine Joseph looking at Mary lying next to him at night and wondering "Really?" just as I stand before the altar at Holy Communion and often wonder the same. Faith in something that is promised and unseen will always have an element of uncertainty. It goes with the turf. The question is whether we would have skepticism become the governing principle in our lives, which at least for me, would be like having a library filled exclusively with science textbooks. You won't find poetry or literature in the chemistry library.

Science can inspire awe and wonder, but it can't inspire trust much less love, charity or self-sacrifice. The slogan of the skeptic is "trust nothing and no one apart from the evidence." In his published letter to his ten year old daughter, Richard Dawkins tells her never to trust anything based on tradition, revelation, or authority but always to seek the hard evidence. He concludes with this poignant paragraph:

What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

He signs his letter with a tender "Your loving Daddy." I have no reason to question his fatherly affections, but were Dawkins' daughter to take her father's sage advice, she would immediately respond to his "Your loving Daddy" by asking, "What kind of evidence is there for that?"

In a perfect world, the Bible would be a perfect book, logical and coherent, glowing with unearthly radioactive luminescence or something equally scary. It would not be filled with ambiguities and contradictions and hares that chew the cud (Lev 11:6), but then, what would people in religious studies departments have to argue about? The church would be a perfect reflection of the kingdom of God on earth, and Christians would walk around with glowing nimbi hovering behind their holy heads like you see in the icons. Talk about weird. But when God deals with us through the ordinary and the mundane, we seem to pass it all off as beneath the dignity of a respectable Deity.

We all have our pet notions of what a respectable holy book and God would be like if we had things our way. Richard Dawkins likes to say that "a universe with a god would be a different sort of universe," which sounds really profound until you stop and realize that he thinks God is a delusion. How can you speculate on a universe with a God when you deny the God in the universe you already have? That's like saying that the Taurus would be a better car if it was built by Toyota, while not believing that Toyota exists. How exactly is an n-dimensional being supposed to reveal Himself to our four-dimensional world except in four dimensions? And wouldn't one reasonably except at least some measure of messiness around the revelatory edges?

As for me and my house, I'm running with the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who died and rose again and called the shot three times in advance. The record of Him is as credible as any other event in human history, regardless of what Bart Ehrman thinks. One thing my healthy skepticism does tell me is trust no one in a "religious studies" department. As for BeAttitude's Top 20, I've thought of most of them in my own skeptical pilgrimage and can add a few more to the list. Some are debatable; some dismissable; most we'll just have to ponder. I choose to ponder these things in prayer, in the Word, and at the Lord's Table, trusting that at the close of the day and at the end of my days, I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him.

I guess sometimes you need to lose your religion in order to find Christ, or better, to come to the recognition that He has already found you. It's kind of like admitting you don't know anything before you can learn something. The nice thing is that the Father is always waiting to welcome his prodigal children with open arms and a party.

"Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief."

Pentecost

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:11:52 -0600

COME, HEAVENLY FIRE

Come, heavenly fire!

Refine the ore of our humanity

Fouled by Adam’s rebel dross

Burn what mars divine reflection,

Image of the Son on us emboss.

Come, heavenly fire!

Fiery flame beneath the holocaust

Father, where’s the sacrifice?

Behold the Lamb! Behold the Son!

Cross-shed Blood, our redemption price.

Come, heavenly fire!

Light the path through parted desert sea,

Fiery pillar in the darkness.

Rain on us a baptism flood;

Grant our tongues your holy Name confess.

Come, heavenly fire!

Spark the dimly burning wick of faith,

Faintly glowing ember soul;

Lift the smoke of priestly prayer

Burnish sinful lips with cleansing coal.

Come, heavenly fire!

Gather, sanctify, enlighten, teach;

Burning bush aglow with holy fusion

Shekinah on Torah mountain

Kindle hearts anew with Scripture passion.

Come, heavenly fire!

Inspire languid tongues so slow to speak,

Warm our Laodicean apathy

Unleash new predicates of praise

To preach Good News in grand diversity.

Law and Gospel

Rev. William M. Cwirla — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:45:14 -0600

“The distinction between law and Gospel is an especially brilliant light which serves the purpose that the Word of God may be rightly divided and the writings of the holy prophets and apostles may be explained and understood correctly” (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration V.1).

This distinction between God’s commands and His promises is to be numbered among the “Lutheran distinctives,” though Lutherans certainly hold no monopoly on it, and other Christians are often much better at it. However, the Lutheran tradition has uniquely made this distinction an explicit part, indeed the very hermeneutical heart, of its doctrine.

The Law and the Gospel are the two impacts or activities of the Word of God as a sharp two-edged sword. They are not two words but two edges of one Word . Each edge reveals different aspects of God. The Law reveals God’s wrath against humanity’s sin and His righteous judgment of the sinner; the Gospel reveals God’s mercy toward sinful humanity in Christ and His undeserved kindness toward the sinner for Jesus’ sake. Each also reveals two different aspects of ourselves. The Law reveals who and what we are in ourselves as sinners under the wrath of God. The “gospel” reveals who and what we are in Christ as saints under the mercy of God.

As two sides of the one Word, Law and Gospel are indivisible. “Antinomianism” and “legalism” result when Law and Gospel are divided into static, systematic categories, leaving open the possibility of having one without the other. They partake of the same error in opposite directions. One can no more speak Law without Gospel than one can speak Gospel without Law. Apart from the other, both will be distorted. Both Law and Gospel “are always together, and both of them have to be urged side by side, but in proper order and with the correct distinction” (FC SD V.15).

The distinction of the Law and the Gospel is the paradoxical inner tension of the Word as it goes out into the world. Like a guitar string pulled taut, the Word can be heard properly as the wisdom of God for salvation only as it is held in this dynamic inner tension. This is also true for the hearer as believer, who is caught in the existential paradox of being simultaneously a sinner in himself under the Law and a saint in Christ under the Gospel.

The distinction of the Law and the Gospel is actually a “double reading” of the Word, like reading through 3-D glasses in which each eye yields a different perspective giving a stereoscopic view. This explains how the Lutheran reformers could read Genesis 3:15 (the “protoevangelium”!) as a “frightful sentence” and the preaching of the passion of Christ “an earnest and terrible revelation and preaching of God’s wrath over sin.” We are initially surprised at this assessment because we are most inclined to read these as purely Gospel. But viewed through the lens of the Law, the promise of God to make enmity reveals that there is no enmity between man and devil and that God Himself must act if we are to be saved. Similarly, the Passion of Christ reveals the enormity of man’s sin that the Son of God Incarnate must die in our place.

Ye who think of sin but lightly

Nor suppose the evil great

Here may view its nature rightly,

Here its guilt may estimate. (LSB #451)

This is the theme of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Pharisaic Judaism, in which Paul himself had been thoroughly schooled, read the Torah in the way of the Law as a “Torah of works” and not in the way of the Gospel as a “Torah of faith” and so missed the Christ at the center of the Torah. The “righteousness of God” is understood only in a double sense - as the righteousness of God that stands in judgment against our sin, and as an imputed righteousness granted the sinner by grace through faith for Christ’s sake.

Practically speaking, what does this mean for us, whether as pastor preparing a sermon or as Christian reading the Bible?

It means we do not sort passages of Scripture into a Law or Gospel bucket, like a fisherman sorting fish. We do not, as is the way of all “pietism,” delay the Gospel until we are sure the Law has done its job, nor do we presume that the Law has done its work and skip straight to the Gospel. We do not preach conditional “If Law then Gospel” (“If you...then God will forgive you.”) or “Law but Gospel” (“You are a sinner but Jesus died for you….”). We proclaim Law and Gospel (“you are a sinner and Jesus died for you”). We allow the paradoxical inner tension of the Word to remain unrelieved and unresolved, as it must be, for the Word to accomplish its killing and making alive work in us.

In this way, the writing of the holy prophets, apostles, and evangelists will be explained and understood correctly.