Kneading Bread

For most of my “converted” life I’ve been attending Lutheran churches, but gradually it has become less of a community of worship for me and more of a community within which I must be a missionary. The doctrines, the treasures of Luther, the things he would say “everything hinges on this” exist abandoned on the side of the road as they make a anti-pilgrim’s progress back to the “city of destruction.” Reflecting on the reformation (since yesterday was reformation day) I am pained, the great teachers have long since gone home and I truly am weighted with the sense that the vineyard must still be worked, we still need workers – God, please call more workers, even at this late hour!

From Luther’s commentary on Galatians:

Or do I seek to please men?
“Do I serve men or God?” Paul keeps an eye on the false apostles, those flatterers of men. They taught circumcision to avoid the hatred and persecution of men.

To this day you will find many who seek to please men in order that they may live in peace and security. They teach whatever is agreeable to men, no matter whether it is contrary to God’s Word or their own conscience. But we who endeavor to please God and not men, stir up hell itself. We must suffer reproach, slanders, death.

For those who go about to please men we have a word from Christ recorded in the fifth chapter of St. John: “How can ye believe, which receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor that cometh from God alone?”

For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.
Observe the consummate cleverness with which the false apostles went about to bring Paul into disrepute. They combed Paul’s writings for contradictions (our opponents do the same) to accuse him of teaching contradictory things. They found that Paul had circumcised Timothy according to the Law, that Paul had purified himself with four other men in the Temple at Jerusalem, that Paul had shaven his head at Cenchrea. The false apostles slyly suggested that Paul had been constrained by the other apostles to observe these ceremonial laws. We know that Paul observed these decora out of charitable regard for the weak brethren. He did not want to offend them. But the false apostles turned Paul’s charitable regard to his disadvantage. If Paul had preached the Law and circumcision, if he had commended the strength and free will of man, he would not have been so obnoxious to the Jews. On the contrary they would have praised his every action.

What prompted this? Several things:

1. At a church event a whole table of women claimed that the word Sadducee was not in the Bible.
2. On Sunday a woman told my wife, “No, I don’t need to come to Wednesday night Bible Study; I already know the whole thing, I taught Old Testament for three years at Parochial School.”
3. And the constant trickle of theological mediocrity (at best) coming out of the synod, national, and international bodies. The current product of the ELCA is the religious equivalent of where’s Waldo – except it has become “where’s Jesus?” This is cumulatively the real death of a national church, the overwhelming man-pleasing and hypocrisy. I agree that certain things are important (I agree with most of the justice, environmental, and poverty issues), but the process which drives their opinions is not one of Jesus first, it is one of tacking on Jesus to an issue.

Ultimately, I’m deeply saddened, please pray for me to have the humility to listen to God’s directing – What is my Ninevah? What is my Galatia? Where Lord? Give me eyes to see!