On the question of repentance, the Lutheran reformers made a clean, decisive break with the teaching of the Pope, eschewing the Roman Catholic teaching that repentance has three parts (contrition, confession, & satisfaction), preferring instead the clear teaching of Scripture and the confession of the historic Christian church on repentance. In fact, the entire Reformation may be over-simplified into a question of repentance.
“Strictly speaking, repentance consists of two parts. One part is contrition, that is, terrors striking the conscience through the knowledge of sin. The other part is faith, which is born of the Gospel or the Absolution and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven” (Augsburg Confession, XII, 3-5).
Two parts. First, contrition, that is, sorrow over one’s sins. This comes from the preaching of the Law and the work of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8). Second, faith, that is trust in Jesus for forgiveness. This comes from the preaching of the Gospel, and is also the work of the Holy Spirit (Jn 15:26).
This is where Rome gets it horribly wrong. By adding a third part to repentance—satisfaction—all the comfort, all the reliance on Jesus’ full satisfaction for sins, is removed. Instead, removal of punishment and appeasement of God’s wrath comes from the works a person does to reverse the effects of his sins. Garbage. There’s no hope in that. With such a papist, false understand of repentance, we would see repentance as a once-and-done thing we do for each sin. Got a sin? Be sorry, confess it, make satisfaction for it; and you’re done. Not Scriptural; not Lutheran.
See how this plays out in a Roman Catholic understanding of confession. Why go to confession? Because you have sins that need to be taken care of. Compare that with a Lutheran understanding of confession. Why go to confession? Because you’re a sinner. Because you have full and complete trust that for Jesus’ sake, all your sin is removed. Because you love to hear the word of Absolution.
Repentance acknowledges your complete sinfulness and your utter inability to free yourself from your sinful condition. And at the same time, repentance relies completely and perfectly on Jesus for forgiveness. That’s why the first of Luther’s 95 Theses was, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He willed the whole Christian life to be repentance.” Repentance—sorrow over sin and perfect faith in Jesus for forgiveness—is where a Christian lives. Like the water around a fish, or air around a bird, repentance is your habitat.
True repentance, therefore, comes through the work of the Holy Spirit, through the preaching of the Word of God, properly divided Law and Gospel. Repentance is not your work; it is the work of the Holy Spirit within you. So, happy Pentecost. Thank God that you have received the Holy Spirit, who has worked repentance within you, who keeps you in that repentant faith by gathering you around God’s Word and Sacraments.
“One size does not fit all” is a popular marketing gimmick. And, for the most part, it’s true. How irritating is it to call a company—usually one with whom you do business—only to have the phone answered by a computer, with a “menu” of choices to direct your phone call to the right person (if you ever get to talk to a person at all). You want a more personalized response from your phone company (or your credit card company, your electric company, etc.). You’re not just an account number. Nevertheless, the bigger the company, the more impersonal it becomes.
During the recent recession, in response to the crisis at several investment banks, replete with multi-billion-dollar bailouts from the government, small, local banks tried to disassociate themselves from these behemoth banks. “We’re not like them,” they contended. “We’re in your hometown, and we know you by name.” A personalized approach to banking, was their sales pitch.
When you go to the doctor, you don’t want a general approach to your health. You want a doctor who will pay attention to you, who will consider your symptoms, your history, your family medical history, your lifestyle, your concerns, and more. In short, you want personalized treatment from your doctor. Colleges and private schools sell themselves with lower student-to-teacher ratios, which permit more interaction between the teacher and each student, thereby fostering a more personalized approach to education.
So also pastoral care.
When it comes to pastoral care, you don’t need a general approach. You need a pastor who takes into consideration your whole person, with your individual needs, your life’s situations, your particular circumstances. That’s not to say that the Word of God is relative to your personal needs, but how the Word gets applied to you should be done in as personalized a manner as possible.
This is the goal of private Absolution. When the Lutheran princes stood before Emperor Charles V at the Imperial Diet of Augsburg and declared to him that “our churches teach that private Absolution should be retained in the churches,” they did so because they knew the value of personalized pastoral care (Augsburg Confession, Article XI). It’s one thing to listen to a sermon and to hear the pastor proclaim the Gospel “for you.” It’s an altogether different thing to kneel at the rail and to hear him preach a personal sermon to you immediately after he has given Christ’s forgiveness to you individually. This time of individual confession and absolution, when you have confessed your personal sins, when the pastor, in the stead of Christ, has forgiven you personally, provides a special opportunity for very personalized pastoral care.
After the absolution in Individual Confession and Absolution, the rubrics for the rite specify, “The pastor may speak additional Scripture passages to comfort and strengthen the faith” of those who have confessed their sins and been forgiven (Lutheran Service Book, p. 293). This is a time for the pastor to preach the Gospel to you individually and personally. This is an opportunity for personalized pastoral care like no other.
Private Confession and Absolution is not meant to be a burden. Quite the opposite. It’s meant to be a particular, personal comfort. God loves you personally, individually, so He sends pastors to proclaim the Gospel, His Word of forgiveness to you, both corporately, as a member of the whole Body of Christ, His Church, and individually, as a unique sinner-saint who has a story and a history different from the guy in the pew next to him, who struggles with sins different from those around him, who has unique needs, who isn’t at the exact same place as anyone else in his personal life of faith. So God sends pastors to do highly specialized, personalized pastoral care, not because he needs to hear your individual confession, but because He wants to speak to you individually, privately, personally.
In what other part of your life do you have access to such a personalized gift? Your doctor may see you personally, but you’ll have to make an appointment weeks or months in advance. Your banker might meet with you privately, but he doesn’t have set hours to meet with bank customers personally. But your pastor keeps regular hours (Wednesdays between 6 and 6:45) and is available anytime by appointment to speak these most precious words of Christ to you personally: “I forgive you. Hear these words of Jesus for you.”
Note: HT: to Pr. Rick Stuckwisch for his insight at the CCA Symposium that private absolution is like a personal sermon
"Peace be with you." This is the greeting after the prayers in Setting 4 of the Divine Service. Why do we do it? What should we say? What does it mean?
In learning this new setting of the Divine Service, the greeting after the prayers has more than a few people confused. Some have wondered what they should be saying. Others have inquired why we do this in the middle of the service. Still others have complained that it seems to break up the flow of the service.
What is this greeting? First, what it isn’t. It’s not a time for conversation, not a time to welcome visitors, not a time to catch up with friends, not even a time to say “hello.” When it becomes any of those things, the complaint that it breaks up the flow of the service is correct.
So what is it? A word of peace. The rubrics instruct, “Following the prayers, the people may greet one another in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘Peace be with you,’ as a sign of reconciliation and of the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Matt. 5:22–24; Eph. 4:1–3).” In short, it’s a word of forgiveness.
This is a time to set aside past hurts, to give up grudges, to promise not to dwell on sins committed against you. This is a time of saying, “Since in Christ God has forgiven me an insurmountable debt, I will freely and fully forgive anyone who has sinned against me.” It’s what we pray God would enable us to do in the 5th Petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Those who have been forgiven forgive one another.
“The sharing of the peace is an opportunity for the worshippers to be reconciled and to express the great love they have for one another” (Maschke, Gathered Guests: A Guide to Worship in the Lutheran Church, 146).
So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?"Choice" is just a name given to the idol "me." It's a refusal to have any authority except one's self. It's little different from the child who protests, "You're not the boss of me." It's my body/life/time/whatever; I can do what I want with it.
A number of thoughts come to mind when reflecting on the abortion debate. First, given the pro-life rhetoric, what is the actual Republican record on abortion like? Not very impressive. The Roe v. Wade ruling came down in 1973. Since that time, Republicans have enjoyed the lion's share of the presidency, and have also had periods of significant control of Congress. Yet, Roe still stands and rates of abortion are catastrophically high, to the extent that the pro-life movement is currently divided over the real pro-life credentials of a conservative president such as George W. Bust, now that he has left office (the rhetoric being somewhat less equivocal in 2000 and 2004). It seems clear that the democratic legislative path to erducing or even outlawing abortions is proving remarkably unfruitful, a fact that may connect to the complexity of getting legislation passed in the American system of checks and balances. Or, more cynically, this may be due to the fact that a majority of Americans are, sadly, in favor of abortion and politicians need their votes to get elected.
Reflecting on the Gospel for Trinity 15 (Matthew 6:24-34), where Jesus says it’s impossible to worship both God and Mammon, has gotten me thinking about opposites.
Trust & Worry
Trust and worry, or trust and fear, are opposites. Worry and anxiety are evidence of a lack of faith, a lack of trust in God’s gracious provision, in His day-to-day protection. Thus the Creed teaches us that our Heavenly Father “defends us against all danger, guards and protects us from all evil.” He does, He really does. Childlike faith knows this and expects it at all times, just as a child expects complete and perfect protection from her father. To worry is to believe that God either is unable to take care of you or is unwilling to do so. Faith, rather, knows that God disciplines those whom He loves, giving them crosses to bear from time to time to conform them to His Son, that their lives might likewise be cruciform, that they might likewise love others selflessly.
Thankfulness & Entitlement
“Get the car that you deserve,” says the commercial on the radio, which pretty much summarizes most marketing: you deserve better. That’s the mindset of entitlement. You deserve something nice and comfortable, some handsome reward for your hard work. That’s what you deserve, so it’s what God should give you.
Again, the First Article of the Creed teaches differently. “All this He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.” Faith is not concerned with entitlement, with what you think you deserve. Rather, repentant faith knows you deserve nothing good. Everything good you receive, is because of God’s fatherly, divine goodness and mercy. So faith receives all the daily bread God provides with thankfulness, not entitlement.
Forgiveness & Tolerance
One of the culture’s highest virtues is tolerance. Despite how liberal Christians want to reinterpret God, though, He is anything but tolerant. If He were tolerant of sin, foibles, peccadilloes, or deviations from His law, He would not have sent His Son to die for sin. If tolerance were an option, forgiveness would not be necessary. Instead of “tolerant,” God describes Himself as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
Faith seeks not tolerance from God but forgiveness. In repentance, faith acknowledges that God is intolerant of our sin and even intolerant of sinners. The proof of God’s intolerance, of His hatred for sin, is on the cross. There, sin’s ugliness and God’s contempt for sin and sinners was displayed when God the Son cried out in dereliction—abandonment—to an unanswering God the Father. The Father had no ear for Jesus’ plea, having laid on Him the sin of all humanity, having made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.
Unbelief seeks tolerance, acceptance of our sins. Faith looks to Jesus for forgiveness. Faith knows that Jesus answered for all sin, so that we might be the very righteousness of Jesus.
All of these pairs are essentially expressions of faith and unbelief, which are opposites in every way. I’m sure there are plenty more expressions of faith and unbelief that are opposites, but these are the ones I’ve been thinking about the most.
Faith is a gift; unbelief is a work. Faith clings to Jesus; unbelief trusts in our selves. Unbelief lives inside the self; faith lives externally, in receiving the gifts God delivers outside ourselves and in loving and serving those we encounter in our vocations.
Contraception affords people the ability to choose against children, against God-given fertility. This pro-choice mentality is the same that drives those who are pro-abortion, even if the pro-choice, pro-contraception crowd stops short of choosing to kill pre-born babies.
I was struck by the sheer bankruptcy of this thinking while hearing people recently describe themselves as “accidents,” “whoopses,” and “mistakes.” While the conversation was largely in jest, as no one of these participants in the conversation probably sees himself as still a “whoops” in the eyes of his parents, and even unintended children can be loved by their parents, it nevertheless belies the pervasiveness of this kind of thinking.
We want to be our own gods. We want the authority to choose how many children we will have. And when a child is born against our planning and desires, when we have to face the reality that there is another God who controls fertility and who gives children as gifts, we call our children “mistakes” to avoid relinquishing control of our own lives to Him who is the Author of Life.
I’m thinking about all this as my wife and I yesterday marked the 7th anniversary of being joined together by God in marriage. Anniversaries are always bittersweet for us as the age of our marriage and the age of our children remind us of our real mistakes, of our years of choosing against God’s gift of children.
No child is ever a mistake or an accident. Every child is always a gift. That such a conversation can happen among Christians, even Christians who rejoice in God’s gift of children, whether such gifts are in concert with our plans or not, exposes the shallowness of our thinking and the pervasiveness of our culture’s anti-child, pro-self mentality even in the church. Yuck.
That’s not just what I think. It’s what God thinks, too. The Third Commandment calls you not to despise preaching and God’s Word but to hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. But that’s not the only commandment that tells you to receive the gifts God offers in the Divine Service as often as you can. There’s the First Commandment, too. You shall have no other gods. We should fear, love, and trust in God alone.
Whatever could keep you from church is a false god. Work and the desire for money, recreation, vacationing, camping, resting, sleeping in, time with family or friends, laziness, anger at the pastor or other parishioners, selfishness, shopping, and more are all false gods when they keep you from being in God’s house—where He comes to deliver His gifts—during any Divine Service.
“How often must I be in church?” is the wrong question. It’s akin to asking how often you must have dinner with your family or make love to your wife. Every time the opportunity is there is the answer. Faith never says “no” to God’s gifts.
Skipping church is like having an affair. It’s never permissible. Ask your wife if it’s ok if you spend an occasional night in someone else’s bed. Ask your husband if you can be a good wife by making sure that at least 51% of your sex is with him. Being in church “most of the time” is the same. That’s not my crass illustration. It’s God’s. Want to know what he thinks of breaking the First Commandment? Grab a Bible and read Ezekiel 16, preferably in a translation like the ESV or the KJV to get a good sense of the verb in Hebrew God chose to describe Israel’s unfaithfulness in chasing after false gods. God calls pursuing false gods whoring.
The truth is our sinful selves know no other way than to wander from God, to commit spiritual adultery against Him with false gods. If it were up to us to quit “playing the whore,” we would be hopeless. But it’s not up to us.
Every day you wake up, be thankful you’re not the prophet Hosea. God called many of the prophets to prophesy both in words and in actions, and Hosea was called to be a living example of God’s mercy. The Lord called Hosea to take a wife who would be unfaithful: “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom”(Hosea 1:2). So he did. And then God called Hosea to restore his adulterous wife to himself, to forgive her: “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (3:1). God redeems His bride, buys her back from her sins, restores her to Himself, forgives her and makes her pure.
Though God through the prophet Jeremiah at the beginning of the book of Jeremiah called Israel a whore, by chapter 31, a chapter of pure Gospel, God calls Israel “virgin Israel.” You don’t need a sex-ed class to know that once virginity is lost, it can’t be regained. And a prostitute is the polar opposite of a virgin. And yet, all things, even the salvation of sinners, are possible with God. His forgiveness makes our adulterous hearts virgin and sin-free again.
Christ presents His Bride to Himself pure, spotless, dressed in white (Ephesians 5, Revelation 19). She wears His righteousness. She is pure and holy as her Groom is pure and holy. He takes her sin away.
The solution to chasing after false gods is to be found again by Jesus. The gifts He gives in the Divine Service are still here for you. They make you spotless and pure, virgin and sin-free, part of the holy Bride of Christ. Don’t ask how often you must receive them; ask how often you may.
If you take your own life, can you still be forgiven of your sin?
If you remember a few weeks ago, the topic for the Ask the Pastor was intentional sin. (You can find that ATP here.) In short, Christians do not sin intentionally. Willful, intentional, persistent sin is incompatible with faith. In fact, it wars against faith. Christians do still sin, but they always hate their sin. They do not intentionally persist in it.
So what about suicide? Isn’t suicide an intentional breaking of the 5th commandment? Yes, suicide breaks the 5th commandment (as well as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and maybe more). But how intentional is it?
A Lutheran understanding of repentance, unlike the Roman Catholic understanding, is not something that we do for each and every sin. Rather, a Christian is always repentant, always sorry for his sin, always trusting Jesus for full forgiveness. To illustrate how much this divides Rome and Wittenburg, note the first of Luther’s 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He meant the whole Christian life to be one of repentance.”
So the problem with suicide is not that you don’t have the chance to repent. Repentant faith is the way of life for the Christian.
Moreover, it’s incorrect to oversimplify suicide and to call it an intentional sin. Depression, which is almost always the disease that motivates a person to commit suicide, is an illness. Just like other diseases have symptoms and effects, so does depression. Among the effects of depression are despair and hopelessness. A depressed mind does not think clearly; the chemical pathways are biologically altered because of the disease. So a person does not exactly intend to sin who commits suicide.
Those suffering from depression should seek both pastoral help and medical help, even if they have not had any suicidal thoughts.
A Christian lives in forgiveness. If a person who commits suicide retains God’s gift of faith until death, he remains in that forgiveness. Nevertheless, Christians seek to avoid suicide as they seek to avoid any other sins that are contrary to their new identities in Christ. As Christians, we humbly acknowledge and give thanks to God that our whole lives are in His hands. The death of Jesus and His resurrection redeem our suffering and enable us to endure our crosses, praying for the day of His return, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
Can you be forgiven of sins you have not yet committed?
So, to the person who is worried that Jesus might return before he has the chance to confess sins and receive forgiveness for those sins, the answer is, “Yes, as long as you remain in the forgiveness delivered to you at Baptism, you are already forgiven of those future sins.” There’s no partial forgiveness. Either all of your sins are answered for by Jesus or none of them is.
But to the person who wants a license to sin, the answer is “No, you may not plan to sin and also remain in the forgiveness delivered to you in Baptism.” Plain and simple, Christians don’t plan to sin. Planned repentance (“If I do this, God will still forgive me”) is not repentance. And to plan to sin is to fight against faith and forgiveness. “If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26).
The means through which God forgives our sins, Absolution, the Lord’s Supper, and the preached Word, are means by which God holds us in the water of our Baptism. They don’t bestow new forgiveness or extra forgiveness. They do deliver forgiveness, but they do so in concert with Holy Baptism, not in addition to it. All of God’s means of grace have this as their goal: to hold you in the forgiveness delivered to you in Baptism. If you remain in the faith and forgiveness delivered to you at Baptism, all your sins are forgiven, taken away and given to Jesus, who has already answered for them.
