religion

From a very congenial Facebook discussion (it is possible!) regarding divergent worship practices. I said:

I think we as a church body suffer when we see the liturgy as some sort of impediment to the Gospel — I wish that were a straw man, but it isn’t. We should look at it not as law but as gift, as structure to make sure that our well-meaning pastors do have the bases covered.

The liturgy is safety. Pastors have rewritten creeds trying to make them more relevant only to introduce modalism. The confession of sins morphs into apologizing only for not taking care of the earth or other social ills. The absolution turns into a statement that God loves us as we sinners are (so why did Jesus die?).

I don’t think pastors are trying to be unfaithful. It just happens a lot when they try to roll their own worship practices. Can there be variety? Sure, and there will be. But newness, freshness, and relevance do not make the change beneficial.

I had an interesting discussion on Google Plus with someone who thought churches should merely preach on Sunday and do nothing else. Then, he argued, it wouldn’t have its religious freedom infringed upon by the government.

I responded with:

When you take a look at the names of many hospitals in this country: Riverside Methodist in Columbus, St. Luke’s and Trinity Lutheran in Kansas City, for starters, and when you see the endless amount of soup kitchens, retirement communities, and missions for the blind, the deaf, the homeless, etc., you see that church hasn’t been and can’t be constrained to what we do for a few hours on Sunday morning. The Christian church receives the forgiveness of sins in worship and then goes out and serves its neighbor with acts of mercy. It would stop being church if in fact there were no service to our neighbor.

The Church drips with acts of mercy: first, from God from the baptismal font and the chalice of blood, and second, from each other, as we serve each other in our vocations and realize what we can do to serve our neighbor.

Nature and its Creator have given us a gift. Take a step back and look at what has been given to us. Our bodies are built so that one man and one woman are to be together, and that pleasure in being together produces children. Pleasure of course can be obtained in other ways that don’t lead to children, but biology tells us the highest purpose of how our complex equipment works together.

Sadly we regard this gift as law. We don’t like law; we like license. We want to plug our ears, cover our eyes, and shout down the consequences of our actions, and therefore because we perceive no consequences, it doesn’t matter to us what we do.

(more…)