Saint Matthew's

Christians are being killed in Iraq for being Christian.

Radical Muslims are moving to eradicate the tiny Christian population. I guess the cross scares the heck out of the armies of hate. Keep the Iraqi Christians in your prayers.

Why is it that a growing number of 18-30 year olds, known as millennials, have a negative view of organized religion? A recent survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that least 25 percent of 18-30 year olds do not have ties to a specific religion. They don’t go to church or pray. Religion is not important to them and their lives. Instead, they view themselves as “agnostic,” “atheist,”or “not affiliated.”

As a pastor, to hear that a quarter of “just out of high school, just out of college, just starting their lives” young people don’t have any connection to God is disconcerting. It saddens me that so many 18-30 year olds are ignoring their God who loves them beyond any measure. For a brief moment, while that 25 percent number is staggering, we have to take a step back realize a few things:

1. Seventy-five percent of 18-30 year old people do have some kind of religious affiliation;

2. People of my Generation X generation fell into a 19 percent non-religious number; the current millennials show a six percentage point increase that should be concerning many church goers; and

3. Could it be that the church is the problem?

This is an issue that every pastor has dealt with or is dealing with today. Here at Saint Matthew’s, we have a number of millennials who don’t attend church regularly. I don’t know if they read the bible on their spare time or even spend some time during the day in prayer, but if they are like those in this survey, they don’t do any of it. I’ve tried to gauge why these young people do not come to church regularly or reach out for God, but I don’t have any answers.

Personally, I believe it all falls under the banner, “A Victim of Culture and Society.” People live in the real world and they are challenged daily by issues and ideals that go against God. It is just easier for most people to reject God than to stand up for their faith.

While in my office this morning, I’ve been listening to Gus Lloyd, the host of “Seize the Day” on The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM and in the 9am hour, he’s been discussing this topic. One gentleman who falls into that 18-30 year old category called in and basically laid down his law – the church has nothing for him. Lloyd correctly surmised that this man had suffered some hurt at the hand of the church and tried to make a critical point – one that I totally agree with:

Sometimes God’s people stink.

Speaking of Lutheran churches specifically, they are run by older and established members and nearly none of them are willing to give anyone younger than 30 a chance at anything. There will be times of real conflict where the younger person will just leave the church altogether. It the old “It’s my church. I’ve been here longer” mentality.

This falls in line with my tired old line, “The problem with the Christian Church is Christians.”

When I have time later on today, I will expand on this point a bit.

Scientists have detected a planet some 247 Trillion miles away from Earth that apparently has similar characteristics of our home planet (it may have water) and could possibly sustain life (because it is possible that is has water).

This “Super Earth” is 247 TRILLION miles away (scientists contend this is relatively close to us), yet those who spend a lot of time looking into the sky can hypothesize that it has water, has temperatures that rise in the daytime up to 250 degrees, is a heavier planet than Earth, and it has an “extraordinarily deep ocean.”

Did you catch the point that this planet is 247 TRILLION miles away? Scientists can barely see to the bottom of our oceans (a distance that is a lot closer than 247 TRILLION miles), yet they hypothesize with some certainty that a planet 247 TRILLION miles away has a deep ocean and you’ll need a lot of sun screen if you pay a visit.

Without a sliver of doubt, people will readily accept this hypothesis while at the same time, they’ll go toe-to-toe with me regarding the true meaning of Christmas and doubt Jesus’ birth.

“I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to convince me that God exists,” (Bruce) Sheiman said in an interview, “but they can convince me that religion has intrinsic value.”

I saw this story yesterday in USA Today, but I was just lazy enough that I didn’t take time to comment on it.

Apparently, the recent attempt by atheists to claim that people who believe in God are just plain nuts hasn’t done much to swell their ranks. No one likes an arrogant, hard-nosed God hater. Instead, they’ve taken a new track, pushed by author Bruce Sheiman, one that puts a happier face on the non-God crowd. They now don’t want to criticize those who believe in God, but they want everyone to just get along.

Isn’t that nice? I guess the New Atheists have found that people don’t respond well when their religious beliefs are attacked as phony. Gone are the days when public religious expressions are mocked by the anti-God people — they now will speak of what unifies people of all faiths (you need a strong faith to believe that everything was creating from sheer dumb luck).

Yes, it is a public relations move.

Should be interesting…

I laughed when I read that the Roman Catholic Church is moving to allow fallen-away Anglicans who are upset at their church for allowing gays in their clergy ranks to come home to mother church to keep their liturgical worship rites they used as Anglicans.

Pope Benedict XVI approved a new church provision that will allow Anglicans to convert while maintaining many of their distinctive spiritual and liturgical traditions, Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official, told a news conference Tuesday.

Essentially, Anglicans will have to convert to Catholicism, but then they are allowed to keep their liturgy and worship style.

To me, this doesn’t make much sense.

If an Anglican converts to Catholicism, then they are no longer Anglican, but Roman Catholic.

(I copied this post from my personal blog – reviovine.com)

The title of this post comes from the Washington Post “On Faith” blog. This week, they challenge religious-oriented people to tackle the question whether God has been or should be taken out of the marriage rite.

Legally, a church cannot officially “marry” anyone in the eyes of the state without the couple receiving a state-issued marriage license. Hypothetically, if a couple walked into my office this morning and asked me to marry them this afternoon, my first question to them would have to be whether they have a government-issued marriage license. Of course, I’m talking hypothetically — I wouldn’t marry anyone who showed up on my doorstep and begged me to marry them right away.

The relationship between God and marriage and the state is challenging one, especially in our day when gay marriage is a hot topic. Those who subscribe to the biblical and traditional marriage rite of one man and one woman are being questioned as to their subscribing to their beliefs and, when they hold to their understanding of marriage in a God pleasing sense, are being described as wanting to take away civil rights from their opponents. Or, as I’ve been accused of, being filled with hate for gays. On the other hand, those who want the government to allow same sex couples to be legally married, are being attacked as being deviants.

(more…)

This morning, I wrote a semi-lengthy piece responding to a quote that a friend of mine found in a book he is reading. My post deals with how my mother instilled in me the importance of going to church.

To read it, click over to my personal blog.

I think this is going to be my weekend parish announcements article – it just fits.

Just when you thought that the Episcopal Church — split by its recent acceptance of homosexual clergy — couldn’t get even more torn apart, they do this.

It is almost like the Episcopalians are intentionally trying to eliminate the true voices of Bible scholarship from within their denomination in order to create a secular, socialized church. Their leadership is taking this church down a secular path by making the entire theology and structure devoid of any centralized Scriptural understanding of the law and replacing it with a post-modern thought process.

“Well, God loves everyone. So should we,” goes the mantra of secular Christians who reject the Law as holding any part in their lives. This creeping rejection of the Holy Bible as God’s Word is nothing new — even within the Lutheran house, we’ve battled this reduction of God’s Word during our bitter battles in the history of the LCMS.

Secularism creep is trying to destroy the church. Thanks be to God that God promises this will never happen. We need to stand firm in His Word and trust in Him while fighting for Him who saved us from sin.

From page one of the Holy Bible to the last, the message is the same: God’s plan of salvation for His people. That is the most basic and critical understanding of the biblical canon. To see the bible as anything less or anything more misses the point that God so loved His creation, He did everything to see that we’d be with Him for all eternity. And He did so by sending his only-begotten Son to die for the sins of the world, that all who believe in Him would not perish, but have eternal life (paraphrase of John 3:16).

No matter the different authors, writing over centuries and centuries, the Bible that we have today is the Word of God and His plan of salvation for us. There is nothing inconsistent with that one basic and central thought that is woven through each word and page of that blessed book.

But…

According to Bart Ehrman, we would be wrong to centralize the message of Holy Scripture into this one area. We must, according to Ehrman, take into account the history surrounding the writers and why they may have written to a particular audience to express a specific topic, of course minimizing why the authors, especially of the Gospels, would write what they would write – to tell the story of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ. Maybe the authors wanted to tell a particular story about Jesus instead of telling the Good News in its blessed glory: God the Father sending God the Son to save His people.

Ehrman is more worried about perceived inconsistencies in the Gospels rather than what the Gospels express and extol. To him, apparently the Gospels are more about the audiences of the writers rather than the deep-rooted meaning of salvation. Take Matthew’s Gospel for a moment — Ehrman seems to be more concerned as to why Matthew would write for a Jewish audience instead of the importance of seeing how God’s plan of salvation comes through God’s chosen people, that they are central to this salvation, not apart from it.

I need to pick up Ehrman’s book to understand his thought process that is clearly linked to the historical critical method that takes Christ and His work on behalf of humanity at the cross and minimizes it to virtually nothing.

Earlier today, a pastor friend from Indiana sent this over – a cute and well-meaning message to remind us all about our lives as Christ’s children. Watch it till the end.

Christian Mexicans today celebrate the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe:

The feast commemorates the virgin’s appearance before Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531.

Legend has it that when Diego received a vision of the Virgin Mary she was unlike more traditional, European images of the mother of Christ: She was brown-skinned and with indigenous features.

To make it clear, we Lutherans – whether we are Mexicans or not – do not celebrate this day.

O.J. Simpson was sentenced to up to 15 years in jail today for an attempted robbery and kidnapping at a Las Vegas casino/hotel. 

When the sentence came down, I was with a group of people in a meeting. Due to the influx of smartphones (my iPhone and three Blackberries), my meeting was interrupted by text message beeps and bored people searching the Internet, we all knew that one of the greatest running backs in NFL history is heading off to the big house.

Around the table, opinions were mixed. One person said that this sentence is too long in coming; that jury in L.A. in the mid-1990s should have had the guts to sentence Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife and a waiter who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was payback, he said. Another said that this verdict and sentence shows that bad people get what is coming to them — the “O.J. had bad karma” idea. Finally, another clergyman at the table, said that we should forgive O.J. and move on.

I held my head in my hands.

All three of them are so off-base. Let me explain:

1. First, the karma thing: There is no such thing as good or bad karma. Christians aren’t supposed to believe in this mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is garbage. O.J. doesn’t have good or bad karma; he is just a bad person. And bad people eventually do other bad things and get caught.

2. That leads us to the first guy — whether we like it or not, a jury found him not guilty of murder. Yes, in Los Angeles in the 1990s, they found 12 morons to sit on a jury. They somehow found the man not guilty. I think he did it. Most people do, as well. But the jury said he didn’t do it. O.J.’s sentence today doesn’t make up for the failures of that L.A. jury. It shows that the jury in the Las Vegas case took the evidence into consideration when they deliberated and decided the Juice attempted to rob people at gunpoint.

3. And then, finally, the other clergyman at my meeting who said that we should forgive O.J. and move on. OK. Let’s play the hypothetical game of “forgiveness.” O.J. is now forgiven. That means he shouldn’t pay for his crimes? Should we forgive all those white-collar criminals who stole money and just let them out of jail? Or what about all those drug dealers and thieves? Can’t we give them all blanket forgiveness and let them free?

O.J. did something wrong, really wrong. He was found guilty. If he is forgiven by some East Coast clergyman, fine. But he still owes a debt to society — the punishment for breaking the law. 

That’s why we need a little brush up on the two kingdoms – the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man; the Kingdoms of the Right and Left. We, God’s people, are IN the world, but because of our faith in God, we are not OF the world. In the Kingdom of God, forgiveness of sins committed in the earthly kingdom is imparted to us because of the work of Christ. We repent of our sins and God forgives. However, in the Kingdom of Man, there is still that little “order” thing we have to deal with. We have government because God gave it to us — whether we like it or not, government has been established to keep order. If the government says you can’t go into a hotel room with a loaded gun to steal sports memorabilia, then that is the law. If you break that law, then you pay the piper. 

See, God forgives the sin while the world says that there is debt to pay.

The entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem is a terrific way to begin a new church year. When we look at the entirety of the church year, this one act encapsulates the entirety of Christianity – Jesus entering Jerusalem to go to the cross to die for the sins of the world. Today’s Gospel reading sets our hearts not on the manger, but the cross.

It is the cross that opens up the church year and it is cross that leads us home, tying a beautiful bow on our last two weeks at church.

I was struck today by an article below the fold in the Wall Street Journal: Apparently a rather important Islamic scholar in Germany believes that Mohammed, the man who established the Muslim faith, never existed.

Apparently, there is a slow growing movement that believes that the name “Mohammed” is more of a title, not the name of a particular person. Instead, these scholars believe that Islam is actually just a Christian heresy.

Professor Sven Mohammad Kalisch, a Muslim convert and the first professor of Islamic theology in Germany, has shocked and stunned the Muslim community. Of course, German police believe this public belief has put Kalish on a sort of Muslim hit list  – but then this regularly happens to people to say bad things about Mohammed. Remember the Danish artist who  drew cartoons that made fun of Mohammed? Riots broke out around the world.

For Christians, this whole idea that our religion is a fabrication is not new. People have questioned the deity of Jesus Christ and His very existence since He was born. However, from what I have studied, there have been no riots promoting death to the infidels, especially lately when Jesus has been mocked in movies, on Broadway, and on TV shows.

OK. There have been some protests. But really, no one has gotten scared over a bunch of moms and dads or a group of priests holding signs outside of MTV in Times Square.

Kalisch is the first “important” Muslim scholar to doubt the core of the faith. In Islam, Mohammed’s existence and his receiving the Koran are central to what Muslims believe. By kicking out the step-stool of this religion, Kalisch is opening up a door to questioning everything about the faith.

Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad’s existence “more probable than not.” By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” he says.

He has doubts, too, about the Quran. “God doesn’t write books,” Prof. Kalisch says.

Of course, God doesn’t write books, especially the Koran. Instead, we Christians believe that writers who were inspired by God wrote the books of the Bible.

But Kalisch has opened a door that will invoke outrage and possibly further study on Mohammed and the Islamic religion.

Why don’t young people come to church?

Why don’t people frequent worship services?

Why is it that when children get confirmed in the Lutheran Church, many of them decide to skip church thereafter?

These are three questions that have perplexed social scientists and church leaders for decades. Every year, church attendance dips. Some churches want to increase their young people attendance and are trying "contemporary worship" styles that include a lax liturgy, more "upbeat" music, and messages that are generic in terms of their "Christ died for you" context. And for a short while, these churches have a slight up tick in attendance.

However, what happens in most of these churches, these additional contemporary worship services end up being populated by people who used to attend the more traditional worship service as the "new people" fall off and spend time at home sleeping.

I have read many of these studies and I have always come away with an empty feeling. They try to scientifically account for why people decide to stay home instead of receiving the gifts of God, and no matter how hard they try, them seem to miss the boat.

And the latest? It seems that the television show, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has something to do with why women are abandoning church.

I have a more simple answer as to why many people don’t come to church: They feel that they don’t have to.

This lack of church attendance is a societal and cultural reaction to the commonly held notion that all religions are equal and that all have their own way to eternal life. As Christians, we say this is bunk. But this is what is being promoted by the media and everyone — not just young people — are being swayed by the notion that we Christians don’t have the only way to get heaven.

Society says that in the end, God will let down his eternal guard and let everyone, except the bad people as determined by society, into his Kingdom. Killers in heaven? Nope, says the world. Mean people sitting across from you in heaven? Oh, not in my version of heaven, our culture promotes.

With this understanding being so pervasive in the world, people decide for themselves that they don’t need God on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. God is just some nice old man sitting on the commode up in heaven waiting to finish his business before He ends the world and everyone can join Him in heaven. If this is how God is perceived by society, why do you need to go to church?

The challenge of the church is not to try and be something different than what it has always been — it is to remain being different than what the rest of the world preaches!!

We have to make church relevant in the lives of the people again not by watering down our beliefs or our liturgy, but by strengthening it, keeping our doors open, and providing people with a sanctuary from the craziness of the world.

For example, when I started here at Saint Matthew’s, I laid out my mission that our church had to become a 7-day a week church. During these last three years, we’ve worked on making this a reality. We have church services everyday with Morning Prayer on Monday through Friday; a midweek divine service with Bible class following; and a Saturday night divine service each week. That is why we are opening a preschool to say to the community that Christian education is essential to a child’s development. And in the future, we have other ideas that will expand the mission of Saint Matthew’s.

All of this fights the notion of our sinful world that rejects God and Jesus Christ as being just one of many different deities that will lead to eternal life. But most importantly, we need to have the guts to preach Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins as the way to eternal life. We cannot water down our message to make people feel good. We need to preach Christ and His sacrifice for the world — that is what truly makes us feel free.

It’s not Buffy’s fault that women are leaving church. It is the sinful world that is doing it.