Saint Matthew's

The controversy over a newly-elected Democrat Congress person Keith Ellison, representing the State of Minnesota, who intends to use a Koran at his swearing-in ceremony has raised the ire of some within conservative political circles. Their arguments that Ellison, by using a Koran, is ripping apart a national tradition whereby Congress people are sworn in using a Bible makes some sense, but in the end, it is a lot of nonsense. One of those raising this question is Dennis Prager, a great conservative thinker and writer, who contends Ellison must use the Bible and not the Koran when He is sworn in come January.

Prager says that national unity is important – and he is right…if we were using the Bible at the official swearing rather than at the photo-op. The reality is that pictures of Congressional Representatives where they are placing their hand on the bible while raising their other hands is just for publicity. It is a photo-op. It means nothing because members of the House of Representatives are sworn in corporately (all together in the well of the House). They then take pictures afterwards using the Bible, raising their hands and swearing allegiance to the United States. The bible is a prop in the pictures.

Why aren’t people upset that God’s Word is being used as a prop — how many of those taking those photo-op pictures with their hands on the Bible actually live their public lives according to it? How many of them turn the other cheek when they are attacked by their enemies? How many of them deal with shady people in order to gain political advantage? If the members of Congress are going to use God’s Word as a prop, they should at least know what they are putting their hands on.

More over at The Lede @ The New York Times.

Couldn’t help but smile at the story in this morning’s New York Times detailing the incredible town of Paramus here in Northern New Jersey. It is truly the shopping capital of Bergen County!! Take the opening lines from the article:

It is fitting that the first store drivers heading south on Route 17 see as they enter town is a Stop & Shop. After all, Paramus is one of the nation’s strongest shopping magnets, generating roughly $5 billion a year in retail sales, an amount about equal to the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Nicaragua or the sultanate of Brunei.

There are larger malls and there are fancier malls elsewhere, but few places rival the sheer concentration of stores in this otherwise unremarkable suburb 18 miles northwest of Times Square. In an already densely populated state, Paramus has more parking spots than people.

Four major malls and dozens of smaller shopping centers are packed into 10 square miles. Paramus is home to Garden State Plaza, New Jersey’s largest mall, whose two million square feet of stores attract 20 million shoppers a year. The town has 27,000 residents, and about 2,700 stores. There is a Saks Fifth Avenue and a Sears; at least two dozen chains, including Borders, Old Navy and Macy’s, have more than one outlet within Paramus’s boundaries.

It is a Faustian bargain that brings 200,000 cars a day into town during December, turning the roads into virtual parking lots, but also keeps property tax rates in Paramus relatively low — $1.55 per $100 of assessed value, compared with $3.88 in Maywood, the next town over.

And there is no sign of letup: two of the four malls are spending $100 million each to spruce themselves up, big-box stores are sprouting where strip malls and bygone department stores once sat, and traffic seems to get worse each year…

And there is one thing about shopping in Paramus that most people don’t know: stores are closed on Sundays. I thought I would never get used to the Blue Laws, but even I now have a longing for less traffic on the roadways on Sunday afternoons. I guess I am becoming a New Jerseyian more and more each day…

To read the story at the Times, click here.

Tonight is our final Advent Midweek service as we take a look at Saint Lucia of Syracuse. As with all of our Midweek services, our worship tonight will include Holy Communion. Following our service tonight, we will continue our review of the book of Romans. This week, we will actually read and talk about Chapter 1 (considering that is what we were supposed to do last week, but I never got to it). So, if you are in the Northern New Jersey area tonight, drive on by to Center Street in New Milford and receive the gifts of God in Word and Sacrament.

I was warned before watching my Tivo’d episode of Saturday night’s “48 Hours: Mystery” that it would make my blood pressure pop. On Saturday night, after Christmas caroling, I came home and did a few things and set up the Tivo to record the CBS News show (simply because I was tired and needed to prepare myself for today’s worship service). Why would I record “48 Hours,” especially since it was repeat?

They were focusing on the mystery of Christmas – or, as I like to say, “CBS News trying to destroy the true meaning of Christmas.”

It was a sickening show that highlighted the thoughts of some “biblical scholars” who basically reject the biblical account of the birth of Jesus (and, in turn, reject the coming of our Lord in the flesh). Ugh. What an anger-producing show!! My blood pressure this Sunday afternoon is rolling high. And I’ve only gotten through the first 30 minutes!

CBS News has a transcript on their website. Read it at your risk!

But I can’t leave without highlighting this quote:

“We would like there to be records of all of this. And instead, what we have is Gospels,” says John Dominic Crossan, a former Roman Catholic monk and a professor emeritus at DePaul University.

Crossan has spent a lifetime studying the four separate texts of the New Testament that recount the life of Jesus – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. On the subject of Christ’s birth, Crossan says, their stories are very difficult to harmonize.

“The interesting thing is, of the four gospels, Mark and John of course have no nativity story. Only Matthew and Luke,” he explains. “They agree that Mary and Joseph are the parents. They agree about a virgin birth. They agree about a birth in Bethlehem. But pretty much apart from that, the stories go completely their own way.”

The shepherds, for instance, appear only in Luke, while the magi are only in Matthew.

“When you start looking at them and realize that you can’t make the way you heard it come out the same way, you have to ask, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here?’” says Michael White, a New Testament scholar at the University of Texas. Unlike fundamentalist Christians, White concludes that the Gospels include plenty of creative writing.

This garbage is nothing new. When scientists and “scholars” can’t figure something out about God, they just reject God. God’s Word is only God’s Word if it can be proven beyond a shadow of the doubt, these skeptics cry.

Last night, while NBC aired the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and ABC aired the wonderfully heartwarming children’s story “Finding Nemo,” CBS tried its best to tear down the Christmas story. No wonder fewer and fewer people are watching CBS News.

To our friends at CBS News, Merry Christmas.

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The teaching aspect of the pastoral office never ends. It is always extended far beyond the walls of a church. With the Internet, the teaching reaches every corner of the globe.

That is why I am excited over the start of a new blog, Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, a blog dedicated to an ongoing dialogue centered on the Book of Concord. It gives pastors and laity a blessed opportunity to ponder and study God’s Word and the confessions of the Lutheran Church.

I found this entry very revealing: the way Martin Luther and our Confessions view the congregation shows much as to how we Lutherans understand the church. Give it a read.

(A classmate of mine, Rev. Dr. Holger Sonntag, is a contributor to the blog)

I am on an email news list entitled “Reclaim” and it is written by an LCMS pastor. Usually the email postings deal with specific issues relating to the workings of the LCMS and the editor’s opinions on what is happening. This morning, the email list’s editor, Rev. Jack Cascione, decided to play movie reviewer of “The Nativity.” Even those pastors in the LCMS who disagree with Rev. Cascione on other issues can find themselves agreeing with him on this one.

To read Rev. Cascione’s review, click over to the next page…

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God is not a fan of sin.

Never has been. Never will be.

It is sin that has separated us from Him. It tore our relationship with Him. It caused us to think we are smarter than Him, which, of course, is foolish. But still, we are sinners, each and everyone of us. Failing to understand this is also a sin. But that’s not what this post is about.

Ask yourself: what is the only sin that is not forgiven by God?

It is the sin against the Holy Spirit – which is rejecting God and the blessed gift of faith.

Outside of that, all sins are forgivable. This is the hardest point about the Christian faith. To be honest, we don’t want to hear that. We want to believe that bad people who cause heartache and pain will be heading to Hades in the afterlife. The fact is we can’t say where bad people go in the afterlife. It is up to God. Scripture tells us that God is going to judge, not us.
But back to us — we repent of our failures and God promises to forgive. Each time we come into church, that is what we do at the start of our divine service – we repent of sin and cling to the cross of Christ, asking our Father in heaven to forgive us of our sins. And when the words are pronounced that we are indeed forgiven, a joy wells up inside of us.

A joy? Yes. We have been forgiven by God of horrific things – each of them was a smack in the face to our Creator. But because our faith and trust in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and what He did for us at the cross, our sins are most assuredly forgiven. And we get that assurance in the absolution following our confession.

That is why I say that when we speak those words at the start of our worship service we should give serious consideration to what we are saying. We acknowledge our failures and sinfulness. We acknowledge that we have not kept the Law that our God in heaven wants us to live our lives by. And we acknowledge that without God – without our Savior Jesus Christ – we are wandering in the wilderness of sin. But yet, for all of our failures, our Father forgives.

The purpose of this post is not to talk about sin, confession, and absolution.

It is to talk about when the theology of sin goes bad.

Today in The Record, a local Glen Rock minister says that he left the Baptist faith because of their constant hammering of homosexuals and the belief that gay people are headed to hell. Now an Episcopalian priest, the Rev. Horace L. Griffin, who is gay, says he found a home in a less-condemning church from the churches he grew up in. Those Baptist churches focus a lot on how people should live their lives. And yes, they condemn individual sin. But when they do so, they miss the point about the individual sins – they are still forgivable (except for that one sin).

When theology goes wrong, it has a backlash. It causes confusion. God doesn’t like sin – any sin, for that matter. Whether one is gay or straight, sin is sin to God. Homosexuality is against the Law of God. Read Leviticus 18. But so is lusting in one’s heart after someone who is not your wife. And so is sex before marriage. The church MUST stand for something. It cannot preach something that God does not tell us in Scripture. If it does, we would be leading God’s children astray. The fox would be leading the sheep pen.

That is why we must stay firm to the Word of God. We must preach the condemnation of sin and, most especially, the sweetness of the Gospel. The Gospel must predominate our preaching. And that Gospel is our Lord Jesus Christ humbling Himself to sacrifice His body for the sins of the world. It is the blessed gift of eternity that comes to people by faith alone, not by keeping the Law.

When theology focuses so much on the Law, there is a response — people reject it. The sinner will rebel and reject the Law, just like it has done since the Fall. The promise of God is the response to Law, and the fulfillment of that promise in Christ is what saves. Simply put – the Law kills; the Gospel saves.

And as a church, we cannot hide the Gospel from God’s children.

The rabbi out in Washington State who caused the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Seatac) to pull down its Christmas trees after threatening to sue the airport is now saying the airport overreacted. Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky “requested” the airport erect some menorahs to balance out the “holiday” trees that they had installed…or else he would sue.

Well, the airport decided to pull down all the trees in response. They figured if they had to start erecting other religious and cultural symbols, it would cause them too much stress. Heck, why should the airport fight a potential lawsuit when they could just cave and save themselves the heartache?

But now that they have pulled down the trees, their customers aren’t happy. And so are the employees at Seatac. On counters throughout the airport, small trees are popping up. Workers are taking up collections to buy small trees. Good for them.

Now the rabbi and his lawyer claim the airport went too far in taking down all the trees. They only wanted the airport to erect a few menorahs to celebrate Hanukkah which starts on Friday. They didn’t mean for the airport to take down the “holiday” trees. The fact is, after threatening the airport with a lawsuit, and now that people who work at the airport are “fighting back,” the rabbi is looking bad.

I think these employees should be patted on the back for a job well done.

It seems that Americans are as fed up with the sickening “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” garbage that is shoved down our throats each December. Americans overwhelmingly like the term “Merry Christmas” and don’t have many nice thoughts for “Happy Holidays.”

Amen.

The magi – better known as the Wise Men in the story of the birth of Jesus Christ – never visited Jesus while he was lying in the manger in the stable, regardless of what Disney’s New Line Cinema says in their latest film, The Nativity.

They did get most of the story right, minus the Wise Men flub. If you are looking for some wholesome family entertainment that actually tells the story of the coming of Jesus Christ, The Nativity is not a bad one to pluck down a few bucks on this Advent.

And speaking of this movie, the girl who plays Mary — the 17-year old is pregnant in real life and is unwed.

Last night, our church’s annual Adventfest Pot Luck dinner went exceedingly well. The food was terrific. The fellowship was wonderful. And "A Christmas Story" was side-splitting funny. Blessed thanks go out to all of those who cooked and baked and purchased food for the event. A hearty thanks to the mystery person who set up fellowship hall before last night. If you didn’t make it to church last night, you missed a good time.

We’ll have to do this more often in the coming year.

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I FINALLY finished next week’s devotional/prayer list. Here it is.

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Today’s Bergen Record contained some rather intriguing issue-articles:

1. They fronted (meaning they put it on their front page) above the fold a story about a conservative Jewish group that is moving away from their nearly 3-millennial old opposition to homosexual rabbis. Originally, they held to the Torah where, in Leviticus, God rejects homosexuality and admonishes His people against it. But today, more "well intentioned" rabbis think they know better than God and His Word.

We in the Missouri Synod reject the calls to ordain homosexual clergymen and to approve of homosexual marriage. We don’t do it out of hatred or vitriol – we do it out of Christian love. We don’t lock gay members out of the church or even change what we preach if there are gay members in churches – we stand firm on the Word of God and never strive for anything less that God’s Word. It is paramount in our preaching and teaching. We pray that it always remains so!!

2. And speaking of homosexual marriage/civil unions that are all the rage here in the New Jersey, State Senator Gerald Carinale (R) and State Senator Loretta Weinberg (D) debate on the op-ed page the recent State Supreme Court ruling that is leading New Jersey to offer ‘civil unions’ instead of ‘gay marriage.’ Not to be political, but Senator Weinberg proves my contention that the supporters of "civil unions" are only using the name as a way to mask what they are doing: they are approving gay marriage without using the name.

Personally, I wanted to use the term "spousal unions" in our bill to take it out of marriage and gender issues. But I’m also practical and savvy enough politically to know what will pass…

On the positive side, this bill will provide committed same-sex couples who choose to enter civil unions with every marital right and protection available through heterosexual marriage – the legal and financial entitlements that weren’t provided under the 2004 Domestic Partnership Act.

The same people who preside at marriage ceremonies will be authorized to solemnize civil unions, and no clergy members of any faith would be required to officiate at them against their wills.

Essentially, the State Legislature is going to approve gay marriage by masking it under language the people of the state will accept. They have no guts. Call it what it is – marriage. I would have more respect for what they were doing if they weren’t playing some language gymnastic games.

Senator Cardinale takes the other route – he wants the public to vote on a state constitutional amendment that would codify that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

In the wake of this judicial intervention, I am compelled to seek a constitutional amendment that would ensure that only the union of one man and one woman shall be a valid or recognized marriage in New Jersey. My proposal would give voters a choice and the final word on what is a legally recognized union, whether homosexual or heterosexual.

I also am confident that New Jersey voters want legally recognized marriages to consist of one man and one woman to retain the time-honored definition of marriage. To comply with the court’s order, I would also support legislation that would provide equal rights for same-sex couples and others in non-traditional domestic relationships.

If the Legislature votes in favor of civil unions, I can’t see how they wouldn’t vote in favor of the proposed constitutional amendment. Why? The Legislature is essentially voting to limit "marriage" (at least in name) to a man and woman if they pass civil unions. So why not codify it in the state’s constitution?

This is a political issue. God has already spoken – He ordained marriage between a man and a woman. Society is now speaking and rejecting what God says. The church catholic cannot change its position on homosexual marriage because if we are to remain a church, we need to cling to the Word of God.

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Sometimes, I need to vent. (more…)