Shane Claiborne doesn't seem to know what he's talking about

For some strange reason, Shane Claiborne's article from 2009 has been reposted by several of my social media buddies.  Has nothing better been written in the last three years that this is getting airplay again?

Let me ask a couple of questions: why are we giving so much attention to the writings of a heterodox, emergent liberal-Christian who discounts the Word of God as the very Word of God (as evidenced by quoting the dangerous paraphrase of the Bible, The Message)? What right does he have to interpret the Scriptures or speak on behalf of Jesus, the Logos who wrote the Old AND New Testaments through His Holy Spirit by His prophets?

Case in point, the parable of the good Samaritan is a standard that cannot be lived up to by us unholy people, and is instead, in fact, the very declaration of what the Prince of all Creation, Jesus Christ, the Son of God in human flesh, gave up for His bleeding, beat-up creation, not what we are to give up. Jesus gave up his throne in heaven for a cross and somehow it's comparative that I give up a little money?? Or some time?? Or a bed to sleep on?  Seriously?  Seriously.... There's NO comparison.

Jesus certainly says, "Go and do likewise," following the parable in the Lukan account, but, in context (one must ALWAYS put Jesus and all of Scripture into context, this follows Jesus' own statement: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”

We need to see and hear what Jesus then says in the parable, for we are given the keys to understanding it: that which Jesus hides from people who can't hear the keys to the Kingdom of God, that is Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus is ALWAYS the interpretive key. What is the referent to "likewise?" Find a beaten Samaritan? Pay for a guy's medican care? Love our neighbor? Ding ding ding! And can we? NO! That's Jesus' point!

The parable is there to help us realize that even by loving our neighbor, the most hated person to us we can think of, even that's not enough. Can you do what Jesus did? Become man and take on the whole sin of the world to save those you love?  No! Jesus is saying that we can't do righteousness; we can't fulfill the Law; only Jesus can and He has and He has given that benefit to you. You are forgiven of all your sins and declared righteous by the One who will judge all people, sending them to either heaven or hell; we do not do righteousness. We can't, because everything we do is tainted with sin and is therefore imperfect and unrighteous. In other words, WE can't DO the Gospel; the Gospel is already done by Jesus for us.

However, the beauty of forgiveness in Christ is that as we are declared righteous, as we are forgiven of our daily and consistent sins and sinning, it gives us the freedom to do good works to our neighbor because it does not merit anything good for us. This does get us closer to heaven. And contrary to Claiborne's declarations, this does not "fascinate" other people and gives them a spiritual example of Christianity, but instead gives Christ-like love to them through Christ's Word, which is always what is delivered through our works, for we do not do them, but Christ in us. They reject our motivations for Christ just as they have rejected Christ.

The Word ALONE is efficacious to bringing people into faith, not me or my works. When the Word is preached to me, when it tells me that I am an unrighteous sinner, this brings me to repentance. And then, when the Word tells me that Jesus has died for my sins and I am forgiven, this works faith in my heart, bringing me to delirious joy in the absolution of my sin. This is the motive and foundation for my Christian life, sinful as it consistently is.

Therefore, it is not my works that bring people to faith, but, as always, the very Word of God that Claiborne discounts completely. And when people don't come to faith, it's not because I've set a bad example (I'm a SINNER!! I'm ALWAYS setting a bad example!!), but because those people are conceived and born and live rejecting the Word of God in their own sinful flesh. It's not a nice message to hear. It won't make them all fuzzy inside, but it's true and it's necessary and it must be preached, in season and out of season, in Christendom and in secular America. I'm not saying street preachers are the best way to do it, nor am I saying that I like them or that they are effective, but let's be honest: despite the trend of pseudo-Christianity towards emphases in mission and community, the Scriptures make it clear, our works won't save ANYONE, Jesus will. And He died for the whole world. And the whole world has rejected Him.

[But] “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. - Romans 10:13-17

Why Christians need the Church Year, or doing it new is close to doing it wrong

I am genuinely jacking this post from another site. It's so good. I wish I had written, but I didn't. This is the whole reason why Lutherans have a different understanding of, well... seemingly everything as opposed to other Christians. We live in time, but out of time. We wait for the end, but the end is already here and has been for quite a while. Too philosophical? Read this post by Pastor Peters here, and then read everything else on his blog. You'll thank me later.

We call it the Church’s “year of grace” because, over the course of a year and through her liturgy, the Church makes present the saving events of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection and rehearses His teaching in the non-festival half. Like most cultures, Christianity has a calendar, a cycle of time that orders its life. Though distinct from kronos or civil time, sacred time is not separated from it. Like the Chrisitan in the world but not of it, the Church's "year of grace" is within the secular days and months of the year and yet apart from it. For the Christian and for the Church, this means we must be biligual -- speaking both in the language of earthly time and its calendar of months and days that flow from January 1 to December 31 each year and in the language of the church year as it flows from Advent through the Sundays after Pentecost (ordinary time).

Time is not incidental to Christian worship -- no, not the clockwatching that usually defines how we connect time to what happens in the Lord's House on the Lord's Day -- but a sense of time, unfolding time, fullness of time, and time fulfilled. In the context of the Sunday morning liturgy, time is held in suspension. Yesterday (the day of Christ's death and resurrection) are not past but present. Tomorrow (the day of His coming to bring all things to their culmination) is anticipated -- already here but not yet fully here. The present enfolds the past and contains the future (at least the fullness of the glimpse that we are allowed for now). Nowhere else does time live in its suspension except in the context of Christian liturgy with its proclamation in word and in sacrament. In the Word we are so very conscious of the the Hebrews verse: In many and various ways... but NOW. Now in the hearing of this living voice the past is made present with all its salvific effect. Ini the same way, the Eucharist, the foretaste of the feast to come, is also the witness and proclamation of the Lord's death until He comes again.

It is not simply a different calendar but a different understanding of time. Unlike the relentless clock that ticks away at the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years of a life marked by death's boundary, the Church knows time differently. It is the arena of God's grace, the disclosure of His mercy, the redemption of the fallen, and the freedom of life from its captivity to decay. We do not beat to a different drummer when it comes to the measure of our days, we have a completely different measure of those days. Because God has unfolded in the past the ever present redemptive work of Christ (through the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments), we are free from the chains of our yesterdays and see that time as the domain of God's redemptive work as well as our fallenness. Because God has filled the present moment with His presence in the means of grace, we do not live on bondage to the moment. The present becomes God's domain as well and our refuge for grace, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. Here the absolution is the key to the freedom for goodness and holiness and righteousness (that in which we were clothed in baptism). In addition, in the present moment, God has hidden the future. It is not fully revealed but glimpsed by faith and where the Word is rightly preached and taught and where the Sacraments administered according to Christ's institution.

The Church does not enter the world in competition with the time and calendar the world uses. We engage in no tug of war. It is gift and grace. In the midst of time with all of its fears, God unfolds the answer to those fears and ushers in the era of mercy while the days, weeks, and months peel away the pages of our earthly calendars. Christ was incarnate not only in our flesh and blood but also within this earthly realm of time, the ticking time bomb of death and amid all its fears and hastened pressure to complete our bucket lists, Chris stands as Lord of the day, the night, and all time. He does the unthinkable in reclaiming what sin stole by manifesting His Kingdom amid the precious seconds and minutes of our decaying lives and world. We come to the world not as those who have a different time but as those who know within time the eternal. That is why the Church Year is so important. It manifests the eternal amid the very temporal and temporary domain of our days. It is a gift to us and to the world, inherited from the Jews but fulfilled in Christ to extend past the markers of the ancient rhythm.

When we fail to bring new people into the domain of the Church Year, we leave them helplessly exposed to all that time lost in the fall with but an mental image of God's gift. The Church Year and its ordering of liturgical time points us to more than an idea but the experience of this gift in time but not of it, the blessing of the eternal within the temporal. The fight for the Church Year is not some battle for bragging rights, it is the opportunity to see in the midst of time the eternal that is Christ and His gifts. The loss of the Church Year is not a loss of externals but the surrender of the gift of time to its evil foes of the devil and death. The Church calls the faithful to make the year of grace their very own that the gift of time might be manifest within earthly days, the place where we are daily made new in Christ. The unfolding mystery of Christ heralds His life before us and the world, beginning with the expectation of his Advent to the days of Pentecost and then in the ordinary time when events give way to teaching (doctrine). And it all begins anew in Advent again. The repitiion of the liturgical year is itself part of the preaching of the Word, the sanctification of our lives, and the anchor of the eternal amid the ever changing experience of mortal life.

Podcast Sermon for August 12, 2012: Last Sermon of Vicarage: Take Away My Life

A sermon preached by Vicar Lewis Polzin on August 12, 2012 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Troy, MO, on 1 Kings 19:1-8. The text of this sermon may be found at the following web address: http://apastoralapproach.blogspot.com/2012/08/sermon-for-august-12-2012-last-sermon.html. The sermon recording may also be accessed by clicking the title of this blog post and playing it in your browser.

Sermon for August 12, 2012: Last Sermon of Vicarage: Take Away My Life

     Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The text for today's sermon comes to us from the book of 1 Kings, the nineteenth chapter:

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.” And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.

Thus far the text.

Dear friends in Christ,
     We have arrived. The very last sermon of my vicarage year. I’m a little older now. I’m perhaps a little wiser. Thanks to some of the Dorcas cooking, even though I tried to stay away as much as I could, I’m a little heavier (gotta work on that back at Seminary). I have a few more gray hairs. Yeah, yeah, the bald guy has gray hairs. You can’t see them up top, but they’re in my beard. I blame you for all these things. Thank you.

     I spent a lot of hours on this sermon, not just in study, but in what I was going to say. I had different styles of preaching in mind. I had different topics in mind. I was thinking that I could even preach the title of this sermon, like, "I have to go BACK to school? Oh, Lord, take away my life!!!" I could continue to say how great vicarage was, I could say how much I learned, I could say how wonderful it has been serving you all this year. I could say these things. And they’re true.

    But, that’s not my job. You see, this morning, I’m still working. I’m STILL doing my job. Yes, I’m hired by you, Trinity Lutheran Church, during this vicarage year, and you have taken care of me generously. And my supervisor is Pastor McCracken, but he's not the one in charge. Not really. You see, my Boss, my Master, my Lord, He has other ideas. He tells me I can't preach about myself. I can't preach about how sad I am to leave vicarage. I can't preach about the desires of my heart and the fancies of my mind, like so many other pastors. My Boss has told me that I am to do something this last morning of my vicarage, and that is to preach His Word, my Boss' Word, the Word of God. Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, and yours as well, has called me this morning to preach to you. So, while I could certainly make this sermon all about me (after all, I’m very good at talking about me), I want you to know that this sermon isn’t really about me, it’s about us and Jesus Christ in us.

Great Commission, Great Confusion, or Great Confession? (Hint: it's usually the middle one)

Everyone, every Christian, if they want to understand the true calling and work of the Christian, MUST NEEDS read the book "Great Commission, Great Confusion, or Great Confession?" by Lucas V. Woodford (Wipf and Stock Publsihers, Eugene, OR). This book is quite probably the best book I have EVER read regarding the Great Commission. It is almost certainly one of the best practical books I've ever read when it comes to ministry. And it is an excellent answer to the deficiencies (a discussion for another time and another post) that are inherent in Reggie McNeal's mostly-okay and mostly-interesting book "The Present Future," a book where, after reading it for the first time in five years, made me more mad and upset than it ever had, due to its lack of Sacramental influence (which, incidentally, I have always felt would be fixed by such an influence) and my growth in understanding true theology and practice by practicing theology.

There is really nothing bad at all about or in this book. Proving the point, after previously quoting an excellent passage from Tulian Tchividjan's mostly-excellent book, "Jesus + Nothing = Everything," which helps to put the Law into its proper place (only guiding, never giving, only accusing, never forgiving), Woodford sums everything up with a definition of the Gospel from the late, great C.F.W Walther on pg. 158: "[T]he Gospel, or the Creed [of the Church], is any doctrine or word of God that does not require works from us and does not command us to do something but bids us simply to accept as a gift the gracious forgiveness of sins and the everlasting bliss offered to us." The definition of the Gospel is one that is sorely lacking in the Church today, and most churches in America think (and some have plainly said), "Yes, we know Christ has died for our sins. Fine. Now let's get on to living." The Church is sick, and it always is, always has been, and always will be because of one simple problem which is daily compounded: sin.

Thus, Woodford's book is a clarion call to repentance and forgiveness as well as a true understanding of the remedy: Christ for us, Christ in us, Christ with us. For context, prior to the coming quote, Woodford has a short, but important, passage on the importance of vocation, something to which readers and listeners to my sermons and good theologians, especially in the Lutheran tradition, are no strangers. Vocation is the life and living of the Christian, the call to do work which is given to us, e.g., father, mother, friend, neighbor, daughter, pastor, servant. All Christians have vocations, gifts from God, that we live out and we have many and varied, even at the same time. From there, he addresses the inherent problems, demanding efforts, and ultimate promotion of the Law of the current efforts of some (read: most) churches emphasis on mission and missiology.

Simply, mission and missiology on its own is something to be avoided. The Church proclaims the mission and it does this by Word (written, read, and proclaimed) AND Sacrament (Baptism and the Lord's Supper). When a church or an individual misses or is denied either one of these two gifts of God, they are denied the gift to the church's people and the church does exactly the opposite of what the Great Commission is about. A Christian needs Word AND Sacrament, and continually so. From here, I'll let Woodford speak for himself in this most excellent, and book-summarizing, quote.

Unfortunately, this profound understanding of vocation is often undermined when the church service and church programs are elevated as the primary modes of outreach. This is also the case when the organizational structure of the church is geared toward "making disciples who make disciples" rather than proclaiming the Word and administering the Sacraments to the disciples so that sinners can be forgiven and freed, renewed and refreshed, discipled and dispersed back out into their vocations.

Harold Senkbeil provides a good reminder: "[T]he key to Christian living is the real presence of Christ with His church through His holy Word and Sacrament. The best way to tell you what to do as a Christian is to tell you who you are in Christ. He will do the rest." In short, when the value of the mundane estates of everyday life are trivialized and dismissed as unimportant by the church in the name of what is claimed to be a more important missional way of life – whatever that means – a great loss is suffered and an undue burden begins to afflict the believer.

For example, a Christian mother and her four young children go to the grocery store and meet a fellow shopper, but because she needs to tend to her children and do the grocery shopping for her family, she do not evangelize to the fellow shopper. Does this mean that she is not a missional person or, worse, that she is sinning? What about the college student who is tending to his studies instead of formally evangelizing the students of campus? Does he lack a missional attitude? Is he sinning? Or is he simply living his vocation as a student?

I am by no means saying they cannot or should not share the faith. Rather, my point is that demands to be missional can often evoke guilt or even the illegitimate abandonment of a God-given vocation. And again, to be clear, this is by no means meant to discourage witnessing to others. It is simply meant to celebrate and intentionally recognize, as Wingren demonstrated, that the mission of God encompasses the greater whole of life. Tree reform, if we are being honest, perhaps we should consider whether or not a missional pressure to abandon one's vocation is not actually a disservice to the church.

Yes, there is always a balancing act. But I believe we need to be careful. Demands to be missional flow out of the Law. They have a tendency to make the Gospel into a burden. And when this happens, joy is lost, Good News is gne, and love becomes an obligation rather than a genuine manifestation of the Gospel.

Lucas V. Woodford, "Great Commission, Great Confusion, or Great Confession?," pg. 165.