Who is our "neighbor?"

At my district interview, the pastor conducting said interview asked me the question, "Why Lutheran?"  As in to ask/say, "Why do you want to me a Lutheran pastor?"  Not just why do I want to be a pastor, but specifically, "Why Lutheran?"  I have had many interactions with other Christians of all stripes during my life, most notably Roman Catholics.  But certainly others such as Baptists, Methodists, "non-denominational," Presbyterian, etc. etc.  

But wow, what a question this was.  I thought about it for a moment as if I never really gave this much deep thought, and then it hit me, it is because of the theology.  I really dare one to find a tradition richer in theology and theological education than the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod today.  It would be a difficult find.  But another reason why I love Lutheran theology is not just because I can wax poetically about a rugged piece of wood that a 33 year old Jewish man hung on and claimed as His throne.  But because that same rugged piece of wood and that same 33 year old Jewish man are where Lutheran theology is most fully alive.  It is not most fully alive stuffed behind never ending controversies and fights.  But rather it is most fully alive when it is used the way God intended it:

To love our neighbor.

In Martin Luther's Small Catechism under the Ten Commandments he talks about this "neighbor."  Commandment Number 5 is "You shall not murder."  Luther does a cool thing where he explains the commandments by asking and answering the question, What does this mean?  Luther's explanation of the fifth commandment is, "We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need."

Interesting.  Jesus re-defined this commandment by saying, "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment."  So do we get the picture?  Jesus says having anger is on par with murder.  Jesus goes on to talk about that if his brother does not have something and yet he does, he should withhold from offering it up lest he neglect his brother.  

Well Luther gets into that as well with his explanation of "neighbor."  We have to ask ourselves the question, "Is our children learning?"  Sorry, that was a former president, not Luther.  We have to ask ourselves, "Who is our neighbor?"  Are the poor our neighbor?  Are the sick, both physically and mentally?  If they are then we better heed the words of Christ and how Luther explains them by saying we should not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body but help and support him in every physical need.

"Well, that's just not possible, I can't possibly do that."  You're right, you can't, but we can.  Luther understood this, and I'm sure that Jesus guy did as well, as meaning every means every.  

Well then, at least it's only commandment five we have to worry about, right? Wrong.  "You shall not steal" What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not take our neighbor's money or possessions, or get them in any dishonest way, but help him to improve and protect his possessions and income.

OK, well I don't steal, and I make a decent and honest living, no problem there.  Read on.  Yeah this is heavy stuff, but Luther goes on to basically say just because you don't steal or aren't dishonest doesn't mean you still can't break this commandment.  He goes on to say that we are to "help him to improve and protect his possessions and income."  Very little of us does this because we spend all our time looking at these things as ultimatums or things we have to do.  Look at them with great joy as things we get to do.  We get to help and support our neighbor! We get to help our neighbor to improve and protect our neighbor's possessions and income!  WE are the body of Christ.  There is no "I" in this.  So if anyone, including you (including me!) ever says, "I can't do this."  Correct, you can't.  That's why when we were baptized we were baptized into a family and not a go it alone, take as you please halfway membership.  No, we were bought with a price, and we have been adopted into a family.

There are many neighbors of ours out there, many family members, who need us to help and protect them in the worst way.  If it were up to a bunch of individuals it could not and would not get done.  But it isn't.  We, the church, move on as an unstoppable force.  Christ said the gates of hell won't prevail, and they surely won't.  

This is why I am a Lutheran.  Our rich theology is matched by none, and it's time for our practice to catch up.

Prayer

An underestimated, oft over looked practice today is prayer.  Speaking from personal experience I know I get too tired at the end of the day to "say my prayers" and have often fallen asleep during them.  I'm not so sure that's the kind of peace of mind God speaks about when we come to Him in prayer.

Prayer is not so much about a laundry list of things that we beseech the Creator for.  Rather it is an expression of gratitude and love for what He has done and will continue to do.  In Luther's Small Catechism under the Ten Commandments the explanation of the second commandment, "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain" reads as follows:  "We are to fear and love God so that we do not curse, swear, use satanic arts, lie, or deceive by His name, but call upon it in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks."

Pray for strength, pray for faith, and pray for health.  But above all pray the prayer our Lord taught us so that we can say faithfully and trust worthily, "Thy will be done."  

Don't under estimate the power of prayer.  Not because of any magical outcomes, but rather because of how it is an expression of a people yearning for their God to be near them.  Pray for faith so that God can and will increase it and we can be a faithful witness to Him in this age.

Life

In honor of January and the recent "Right to Life" March in DC just two days after our historical inauguration.  Here are some thoughts from LCMS President Dr. Kieschnick.

And here are some statistics concerning abortion.

I don't mean to sound preachy here.  But if we are to care for the "least of these" outside of the womb, I think this also applies to those still inside the womb.  This DOES NOT mean there is no reconciliation for an abortion.  Where there is repentance, there is ALWAYS forgiveness.  But the abortion issue begins with a culture that has decided the method can and will be used 95% of the time as a form of birth control.  Here are some thoughts I posted earlier on an online Lutheran forum:

Here's the prevailing "wisdom" of my contemporaries (please excuse possible lewd, crude, and offensive language):

Speaking from the men side, since I don't engage in recreational sex talk with women, girls.

"Had sex with ____ again last night."
"Oh? Did you use protection?"
"Nah, better without the rubbers."
"What if she gets pregnant?"
"She's on the pill."
"Not 100% you know."
"Whatever, I'll take her straight to planned parenthood then (chuckles)."

I cannot tell you how many times I've had some version of this conversation.  It usually leads to me shaking my head and walking away and sometimes the person telling me not to judge.  THANKFULLY I will say that those contemporaries of mine (high school classmates) who have gotten pregnant have made the "choice" to KEEP the baby and get married.  So far, so good.  Granted, has not been much time, but thankfully LIFE was chosen.

The prevailing mindset is that abortion is birth control.  The president and his supporters on this issue want to make the exception the rule.  No way Jose, I say.  The prevailing practice, from what I've witnessed thus far, is that life is the way to go.  Thank a gracious God for that.  But there has to be a way that we can engage culture on a level that doesn't just say, "Well I'm personally against it but I don't wanna tell others what to do with their bodies..."  Cop out.  As someone who has gone home with tears in my eyes after Chicago or New York visits because of the "least of these" trying to take refuge in the harshest of conditions, I cannot stand by and say "well I'm personally against poverty but hey I don't want to invade other peoples lives."  Nonsense that would be.  Abortion is a cultural issue, not an individuals rights issue.  It is the greatest of lies to tell women this is some right they have as a sense of empowerment.  Shame on the culture that put women down and abused them for so long that abortion would be seen as some sort of leverage or control that they wield.  

The stats and facts remain that over 95% of abortions are birth control methods.  Did we really just allow over 47.5 million lives to be ended to because 2.5 million of those cases have been due to other issues (rape, incest, health of the mother)?  Does that make those issues insignificant?  Absolutely not.  But I cannot see the justification for abortion based on a small minority.  Clearly women do not come to such a decision easily.  There has got to be a way to engage a culture which sees the method of abortion as by and large birth control, but hides behind the extraneous circumstances.

Women have far too much to be proud of and to offer to need something like abortion to use as leverage.  What we need to do is put down the signs, put down the bull horns, and grab the hand of a girl or woman who wants to have an abortion and tell her there is a way out--to life.  And we need to grab the shoulders of the men who think they can just knock up girls and "take her to planned parenthood" to "fix" the situation, and teach them to be MEN and not little boys with no sense of responsibility.  The president has called for a "new era of responsibility,"  I agree, let's start with teaching men and women the responsibility of sex and parenthood.  

Every time I hear of a classmate who gets pregnant and talk about it with others they say something like "Wow, I couldn't stay if I were that guy" or "I wouldn't keep it, that would ruin my life."  I always respond that that man or woman is a hero in a society gone mad.  And I pray they see life through together.  

The Christian life: Safety?

Needless to say I've been going through some growth.  I know it started a long time ago, but it has really come to a head in recent months.  Those words of Jesus in that book we call the Bible have wrecked me.  Just about all of Matthew 5, 6, and 7 have sent me into a tailspin.  And if the Sermon on the Mount weren't enough, there are the other things Jesus has to say.  You know like, "Take up your cross and follow me."  

Take up your cross and follow me?  To us living within the walls of comfort in the west during this 21s century, those words simply do not resonate with us.  We must ask the question, "What if he really meant this?"  And of course the conclusion one reaches is that He did and still does.  Obviously one has to be mindful that they do not turn their zeal or reading of scripture into something that is not false and it has to be read in context, but Jesus' words stand alone on themselves.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it best when he said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."  The cross is not some cute little thing.  The cross is a brutal and terrifying thing.  But oh us Lutherans and our paradoxes, we know that brutal and terrifying thing is also beautiful and life giving.  And that's what our Lord calls us to.  

Jesus calls us to carry our cross, and to suffer and die with Him.  To go to the desolate places of society and to become uncomfortable.  The Christian life is not about comfort, and if it becomes about comfort it is a false sense of security.  Christ says "Come die with me."  And by looking out into the world the deal becomes we either go and die with the world, and that includes by being "comfortable."  Or we go and die with the Lord.  The One who shed His blood on a cross for us to reconcile the world unto the Father.  In His death there is life.  In his life there is also death.  But that uncomfortable feeling of death and that brutal suffering of the cross is what makes life worth living.  We can waste our lives in our comfort, or we can lose it for the sake of the Gospel.  Count me in on the latter, and God help me.

Thy will be done.

Epiphany

LCMS Daily Devotion for today got my mind rolling and thinking, check it out:

Epiphany.  The Greek word for appearance.  And what exactly is being celebrated by this?  Well the daily devotion for today certainly tells us, but it can be taken further.

Our God is all about the appearing and the appearance.  Now, in a 21st century western mindset that could be taken to mean that God is all about how things look, and that they better look good.  The nonsense in that our western and materialistic mindset is quite disheartening.  As I've said previously, our God is about taking the ugly and making it beautiful.  God appears to all.  

Where is it that God appears to all?  The most desolate place on earth: Mount Calvary.  It is there that God appeared and continues to appear to all.  That saving act of grace on the cross, Christ's throne, is the most glorious of appearances.  The sci-fi adventure books Left Behind by sci-fi biblical fans Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins entitled the last book of their series The Glorious Appearing.  Like many of their theological mindset, and many in general, Mr. Lahaye and Mr. Jenkins are looking for the dazzling, "stomp out" the bad guys, glitter and glamour of our God appearing.  We have been fooled into thinking that God appears in the beautiful and stays there.  The culture tells us Britney Spears was worthless because she put on a few pounds, and not because she went down the self destructive path.  Well, Britney has slimmed down, is as beautiful as ever, yet is still surrounded by many of the same distractions that led her down that path to begin with.  Her message has not changed, it has just become more vengeful.  Yet society has deemed this a "comeback."

The joke of thinking God is about appearing in the glamorous is that God has never done that.  God took the form of a human baby from a young woman and took the world by storm beginning in a stable and lying in a manger.  Where's the beauty in that?  Some king!  The culture and many Christians like Lahaye and Jenkins would have us believe that God is for the upper echelons of society, when the reverse is really the case.  The King took his throne on a wooden cross on a desolate mountain so raw, so ugly it was called "The place of the skull."

The culture may say that God, or anything of worth, makes its epiphany or appearance in the things of high glitz and worth.  Scripture says otherwise.  The first will be last, and the last will be first.  The worthless will become worthy, the ugly will become beauty.  That's the God of the Bible.  Not the God of American culture or religious sci-fi adventures.  

His glorious appearance was and is on the cross.  Right in the midst of the desolate and the destitute.  That's where God is.