The Lutheran Review

Joseph of Arimathea

 How many of the following descriptions fit you?  Are you rich, a good, righteous, and respected member of the community, and a fearful secret disciple of Jesus who is able to act courageously?  Do you look for the coming of God’s kingdom?
Those are all descriptions of Joseph of Arimathea from the four gospels.  He asked Pilate for permission to take Jesus’ body down from the cross and then buried Jesus in his own new tomb.  July 31st is the day set aside for Joseph, who was from 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem and served on the Sanhedrin.
 Walter Wangerin, in his book “The Book of God” vividly describes Joseph using a rope and a claw to pry out the nails from Jesus wrists and feet.  When the task was done, “Joseph of Arimathea was holding his whole treasure in all the world - this world and the next one too.” 
 Nicodemus, another secret disciple, helped.  When Jesus was laid in the tomb, Joseph rolled the large stone across the entrance of the new tomb and “went away.”  Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) wrote a brief poem in which he noted that Jesus was born of a virgin womb and buried in a virgin tomb and a Joseph was betrothed to both.
 Jesus is able to use all his disciples to serve him, the church and the world.  Indeed we are not always courageous, nor rich, though we are rich in his grace, nor are we always good and righteous, save that we have Jesus’ goodness and righteousness.  How might Christ be planning to use you in his service today?
  

Robert Barnes

The newsletter from Concordia Plans arrived in the mail today.  Among the long listing of those who had died was Bob Barnes who came to St. Paul’s Lutheran, Stevens Point, Wisconsin about the same time bob Reinhardt and I were taking up our pastorates at Immanuel Marshfield.  I hadn’t had any contact with Bob since I left central Wisconsin in 1989.  However, I remember him for having a podium type desk in his office at which he stood and worked through the Greek as he prepared his sermons.  He is the first pastor I knew who took his Greek New Testament into the pulpit and translated the text.

By coincidence, if there is ever any such thing, July 30 is the day that LSB sets aside to remember Dr. Robert Barnes who was born in England in 1495.  He graduated from Cambridge and was named prior of the Augustinian monastery at Cambridge.  By 1525 he had been converted to Lutheran teachings.  He preached what is thought to be the first sermon of English reformation.  He was imprisoned for heresy, but escaped to Antwerp, Belgium.  Eventually, he and Martin Luther became friends.  He wrote a Latin summary of the main doctrines of the Augsburg Confession.  He returned to England and shared his views in person with King Henry VIII.  Though he at first received a positive reception he eventually got caught up in the political and church climate of England.  In 1540 he was one of six “heretics” executed.  Barnes was burned at the stake.

Luther published Barnes’ final confession of faith.  Luther wrote of Barnes as “our good, pious dinner guest and houseguest.  Thanks, praise, and glory be to the Father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, who again, as at the beginning, has granted us to see the time in which His Christians…are carried off t become martyrs (that is, carried off to heaven) and become saints.” 

Ommitting Hymn Stanzas

Omitting Hymn Stanzas

Over the course of my ministry I have made a habit of selecting sermon texts and hymns several weeks in advance.  I’ve done this for a couple of reasons.  One has to do with my mother being the organist at our church in Pipe Lake, WI.  Since we didn’t have a telephone until I was teenager, she first found out about the hymns for the service when she walked into church.  The second reason for selecting hymns etc ahead of time is that I don’t have to think about them on a weekly basis.  The drawback is that I once the hymns are selected I DON’T think about them.  So when I opened the hymnal to sing the Hymn of the Day I was surprised to see that it was Luther’s hymn of the Lord’s Prayer and had nine verses.  We also had communion last Sunday.  But how do you cut the Lord’s Prayer?  As I think about it now, the gospel lesson contained Luke’s version which is shorter.  So we slogged through nine stanzas of “Our Father, Who in Heaven Above.”

We usually omit stanzas in the interest of time.  It’s common when I would sing a hymn solo we would eliminate the third stanza.  In the service the pastor might announce, “We will sing verses one, two, and four.”  Well one pastor, Dr. Kirk Mariner, when he was pastor of Mt. Oliver United Methodist Church, in Arlington, Virginia wrote the following satirical two stanza hymn.

If salvation’s story

And heaven’s great glory

Were contained only in each third verse,

Scarce an ear would have heard

That most life-giving word,

And we’d all still be under the curse.

Each song is thus trimmed

To three-fourths of a hymn,

As if there were time for no more,

And the meaning is trounced

Ev’ry time ‘tis announced,

“We will now sing verse one, two and four.

 

 

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

In St. Louis we have “Bach at the Sem” a series of concerts Concordia Seminary featuring the works of Bach and other classical composers.  The Bach Society has been an important and popular part of St. Louis for decades.  Their Christmas concert brings in a packed audience.

When the Missouri Synod’s Board of Director were in the process of selling the license for KFUO FM there was a mighty uproar.  The station played the music of a wide range of composers, but Bach is always a staple of any classical station.  My Indian born endocrinologist and his wife commented on the sale at one of my appointments.  They always had their office music tuned to 99.1.  So did numerous other people throughout the area.  But money (mostly from baseballers Andy Benis and Albert Pujols) won over culture.  Even after the sale, letters expressing grief poured into the Post Dispatch.  I tuned into the new JOY station the other day.  I listened through about five songs.  Like much of pop music today, it all sounds the same.   Comparing Bach to modern pop Christian music is like comparing an inch thick New York steak to a bowl of Cream O Wheat. 

What KFUO needed was for Labron James to put his announcement that he was leaving Cleveland for Florida on KFUO and not buy the time on ESPN.  JS and others need some ballplayers on their side.

The Treasury of Daily Prayer quotes Martin Luther, who was born 200 before Johann Sebastian,

“I would certainly like to praise music with all my heart as the excellent gift of God which it is and to commend it to everyone…Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise…After all, the gift of language combined with the gift of song was only given to man to let him know that he should praise God with both word and music, namely, by proclaiming [the Word of God] through music and by providing sweet melodies with words.    

 

Car/Church Shopping

Car/Church Shopping

Becky and I shopped for cars last week.  Two different dealerships provided customers opposite experiences..  One dealer is only a couple blocks from our house.  Our experience has been the same both times we have stopped in within the last year.  They don’t seem to be interested in selling cars.  Not offering to let us sit inside or encourage us to go for a test drive made it easy to leave.  I really did want to drive a Ford Flex. Those are the crossovers that remind me of a juke box.  Having owned two PT Cruisers, a Honda Element, and Honda Fit, I have a taste for funky cars.  I could have pressed the issue, but I was the customer. Did I have to do all the work?  Becky really isn’t interested in taking test drives.  We intended to go to a Ford dealership further down Lindberg, but never made it because on the way we stopped in at a Buick/GMC store on a whim.

Well there, we couldn’t get away.  They welcomed us, and introduced to people.  That evening the owner of this large network of dealerships personally called us, no recorded message.  So we stopped in again the next day.  You already know the result.  We now have a GMC Acadia, having traded in the Fit.  We think we got a good deal.   Of course, no matter what deal we think we got, I assume the dealership got a better one.

 At home, I described the experience to Becky, “It’s like they have a huge spider web over the door.”  Becky happened to be standing in the bedroom door and asked, “Where?”    “No, no,” I said, “At the door of the dealership it’s like ‘Come into my kitchen,’ said the spider to the fly.

Often churches act as differently toward “customers” (sinners/saints) as these two dealerships on Lindberg Road.  One church completely ignores the visitor.  Oh, sure, if you want to join, “we’d love to have you,” but you have to do most of the heavy lifting.  Another church, Styrofoam cups containing the “third Lutheran sacrament,” welcomes you and surrounds you with a community who would love to have you among them.    There is no guarantee that the friendly church is going to be a better fit than the one who leaves you on your own.  Just as there is no guarantee that the Acadia will be a better vehicle than the Flex and maybe we should have went with a Honda Odyssey, but we owned enough station wagons when the kids were growing up that a minivan just doesn’t appeal.

Now I’m not trying to make joining a church a matter of consumer choice alone.  I don’t mean to disparage the work of the Holy Spirit.  However, the Holy Spirit does work through physical means and it won’t hurt a church to cooperate with those means and give the Spirit an opportunity.  For that matter, worship that is well done and preaching that not only divides Law and Gospel but is also interesting surely can be used by the Holy Spirit as well as sloppy worship and ill-prepared sermons.  Maybe even better?              

James the Elder

Today is the day to remember the disciple James, sometimes known as the “Elder” to distinguish him from James the Less whom we remember on May 1 and James of Jerusalem whose day is October 23.  It’s as confusing for me to keep the James boys straight as it is to keep track of the several women named Mary.

In Matthew chapter 4, Jesus is walking by the Sea of Galilee when he calls two brothers, Simon (Peter) and Andrew to “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.“  Jesus continued on down the shore and finds two more fishing brothers, Andrew and James. Jesus called them and “Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”  I know this is an example of the power and urgency of Christ’s call to discipleship and the need for our immediate response.  However, Jesus call that day must have seriously affected the fishing industry along the Sea of Galilee.

James and his brother John were known as “sons of thunder.”  On one occasion they asked Jesus for permission to call down lightning on a Samaritan village that had refused to welcome Jesus.  Another time James and John requested that they be given the most important cabinet posts in Jesus administration when he finally got around to running the Romans out of the country.

James was the first of the disciples to be martyred.  His is the only martyrdom of a disciple recorded in the New Testament.  He is frequently pictured with a scallop shell.  It recalls his life as a fisherman, his call to fish people, and the gift of our baptism into Christ.

In the hymn, “By All Your Saints in Warfare” we sing of James the Elder,

O Lord, for James we praise you,
Who fell to Herod’s sword;
He drank the cup of suff’ring
And thus fulfilled your word.
Lord, curb our vain impatience
For glory and for fame,
Equip us for such suff’rings
As glorify your name.
     LSB 518, St. 20

Glory, Glory Hallejulah

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Mary Magdalene

From ancient times Mary Magdalene has been thought to be the sinful woman who repented and anointed Jesus’ feet.  However, there has been long standing debate over whether the repentant prostitute is Mary Magdalene.
Valerius Herberger writes, “We do not want to grow grey hairs over this debate…”  Neither do I, since mine are already grey.

An examination of Luke 7:36-50 provides no biblical basis for Mary Magdalene being the repentant prostitute.

What we do know for sure is that she saw Jesus die.  She also witnessed his burial.  And most important of all, she was the first to see Him alive after His resurrection (John 20:11-18).  Bernard of Clairveux calls her “the apostle to the apostles.” For as we read in John 20:18, she “announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’ - and that he had said these things to her.”

Because John’s gospel reports her as weeping at the tomb, she is often portrayed with red eyes.  Icons depict her standing by the tomb holding a red egg.

We sing Your praise for Mary,
Who came at Easter dawn
To look for Jesus’ body
And found her Lord was gone.
But, as with joy she saw Him
In resurrection light,
May we by faith behold Him,
The Day who ends our night!
LSB 855 st. 11, For All the Faithful Women

Powerful Bread for a Stranger

Powerful Bread for a Stranger

Sometimes things just don’t fit in our neat theological categories.  I found the following in a sermon by Brett Younger of the McAfee School of theology, Atlanta, Georgia.

“Sarah Miles is a former atheist who is director of the food pantry at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco.  She calls it the ‘Church of the One True Sack of Groceries.’  As a journalist she covered the 1980’s wars in Central America up close where people were dying and later became an editor for the investigative magazine Mother Jones.  It was after that that she found herself walking into St. Gregory’s Church.

‘I was just curious.  I’m a reporter.  I’m curious.  I like to poke my nose in places, and I walked into this building thinking, Huh, wonder what’s going on in there?  I had wandered into a church that offers communion to everyone, including strangers.  (A most unlutheran practice, though for those of us who served in large churches it probably happens more often than some people in the LCMS might condone.) A woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine.  I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me.  So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening.  I got out of church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.  I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals.  The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger.  It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.’”

I was just looking at I Corinthians 10-11.  While not discarding the need to discern the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, in 12:4, Paul writes of the varieties of gifts that come from the one Spirit.  Any time we deal with the Holy Spirit we have to take into account that like the wind, the Spirit blows where it wills, even blowing where Pieper’s Dogmatics may not want it to blow.  Of course the Spirit always wills to bring people into contact with Jesus.  We have Jesus word on that.  We also have Jesus word that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, perhaps even if they don’t realize it. 

The Holy Spirit used the bread Sarah Miles ate to lead her to know that “The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God.’” (Psalm 14:1) On the Gospel side the Spirit invited her, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!”  It is as Mary sang, “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”

May the Spirit help us be hungry next Sunday when we take bread in which our powerful Lord is present.  

 

 

A little Water and a Morsel of Bread

A little Water and a Morsel of bread

I would have loved to be around the campfires of Israel or in the city gate listening to the elders tell the story of the three men who visited Abraham as recorded in Genesis 18.

Moses awoke from his nap and through the shimmering heat he saw three men standing at a respectable distance.  Though showing hospitality was incumbent, a visitor would nevertheless stay at a polite and safe distance lest their sudden presence appear threatening.

Abraham leaps to his feet and rushes out to meet his visitors bowing before them.  He says, “O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant.”  Just who are these three men?  Are they the Lord?  Is Abraham only addressing them as he would any visitor?  Is he saying more than he realizes?  Does he have an inkling of their identity?  These are questions that the story never quite answers.  Yet we come away from the story knowing the answer.

Besides mystery there is humor.  “Let a little water be brought.”  “Here wash your feet.  Refresh yourselves.  Have a seat over here in the shade. I’ll bring a bit of bread.

He hurries back to the tent.  “Quick Sarah, three seahs of the best flour.  Knead it, and make cakes.”  A seah is two thirds of a peck.  It’s going to be like all-you can-eat Pancake Day at IHOP.

Then he runs to the herd picks out a calf that will make the best veal cutlets and directs a young man to kill, butcher and grill the meat.  These guys are going to be stuffed.

Abraham wasn’t done yet.  He had some cheese made.  Finally, (how many hours did this “morsel of bread take to prepare?) he served the meal to his visitors.

Now for the big surprise.  When they had eaten their fill the men ask about Sarah.  Of course she was in the tent.  “Tell Sarah, when we return a year from now she will have given birth to a son.”

Well, tents aren’t exactly sound proof and perhaps the Lord spoke loudly enough to be sure she heard.

The story teller now lets us in on some information.  Abraham and Sarah are old, really old.  Sarah had long ago gone through menopause.”I’m worn out and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?”  More questions arise.  Was she talking about a renewed interest in sex?  Or had that never waned and she spoke now of the pleasure of having a child?  Who is going to bring up this kid anyway? 

So she laughs to herself.  I suspect women do a lot of laughing and head shaking at the ways of men.  These three men didn’t seem to show any more sense than her husband did at times, like when they went down to Egypt and got mixed up with Pharaoh.

Of course the Lord always holds the highest trump in the deck.  “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

We’ll hear that same line used with Mary a couple thousand years down the road.

Well, you know the rest of the story.