Pastors’ Seminar, part 1

Transcript (edited for readability).

We're so glad you're here. And you all know Dr. Beverly Yankee. We're delighted she found the right Trinity — later this afternoon, this afternoon, finally. Good. You would really love Trinity, Moline, Illinois, but I'm not discussing it. Oh, mercy. It is a pleasure to have all of you with us today, and it's my special pleasure to be able to introduce the featured presenter for this afternoon's conference, Dr. Lucas Woodford. Many of you know him and have known him for quite a long while, and you're aware he's a fine Lutheran theologian who has the gifts to apply godly wisdom from the Bible and the Confessions to some of today's most absolutely crushing challenges in the church. He's going to be offering us some clear thinking, some guidance and encouragement for pastors as you deal with the souls that are entrusted to you. And quite honestly, no one knows better than you, gentlemen, just how difficult it can become when the culture is preaching against Christian truth regarding families and life and Christian sexuality.

Happily, Dr. Woodford's eager to take on the task and equal to the task — or less, that's a rumor we're starting. And happily, he has a distinguished and churchly pedigree. In brief, he's a 2002 Concordia Seminary grad, and he earned his STM there in 2003. He completed his Doctor of Ministry at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne in 2011, and used the work from that project to complete his first book, Great Commission, Great Confusion. His perspectives, as many of you know, are well rooted in a clear understanding of the parish and the parish experience and parish needs. He has been a pastor full time since 2003 until his election as district president in Minnesota South in the summer of 2018. And he continues to serve Trinity Lutheran Church in Farmington, Minnesota as associate pastor. There's a Trinity in Farmington — how could I have missed that? It could have been worse, is the moral of that story.

As a parish pastor, he was also a circuit visitor and he worked on an array of committees — continuing education, ministerial health — and served as a district vice president. Bottom line, he knows of what he speaks. In addition to his LCMS service, he's also a Doxology Fellow, and he is part of that group of eight pastors engaged in pastoral research and writing and service, helping Doxology to help pastors be the best that they can be. His most recent book, I believe, will be for sale tomorrow — it may not be for sale tomorrow, it's just being published, it's on the verge, right? And that book is Pastoral Leadership for the Care of Souls, which is well worth your time, authored with Dr. Harold Senkbeil. We're delighted to have Dr. Woodford with us, speaking candidly about Christian sexuality. Please help me welcome him to the conference.

I got this. Good afternoon — you can probably turn me down a little bit. All right, good to see all of you again. Many, I know; some I've met briefly a little bit before, but I look forward to getting an opportunity to meet each of you as well. You have the outline in front of you, or at least you can if you want. I have a few slides that'll correspond with that for you this afternoon, but that outline is what we will utilize. I'll be mindful of my time — I have a tendency to sometimes go over — but the framework for it is we'll go till 2:15 for some table discussion. I may steal a little of that time depending on how I go, but then we'll have an opportunity to process some of the things I was presenting to you, have a break, and then come back together again for a second lecture, same thing, and then a third lecture.

There are two outlines to go with the three lectures. So depending on the breaking point of our first one here will depend on that. The second lecture, on considerations on the theology of the body, is the more extensive one, and so we'll see if we can get through this whole first outline this time, and then divide up the one on the theology — considerations on the theology of the body — between the second and third lectures. Included in this, as also with tomorrow, I'll try to have some practical considerations for you. The outlines that you have for today have a sermon manuscript as an example, as well as a separate second sermon outline, to be able to utilize some of the things we're talking about — how might you preach about that? Likewise, tomorrow, for those that aren't able to be here tomorrow, it includes some outlines on what I call parent partnership workshops — things we had implemented in my previous congregation — as well as tips for how do you talk to your kids about sexuality, how do grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles talk to your children about sexuality. So those are tools as well, trying to make sure it's practical for you so you can have that, even as we consider the depths of the theological approaches to this as well. All today in the context of the care of souls — how do we give care to those who have been afflicted or affected by this disordered and chaotic world that we live in.

So briefly, before we hop in, just a little bit about myself. My first vocation is certainly a baptized child of God. Second is a husband to Becca for over 23 years. And then, of course, a father to my six children. I have Isabella, who's the oldest — we call her Bella — Thaddeus, my oldest son, Alathia, my daughter, Ecclesia, next daughter — we call her Clacy — Soteria, next daughter, Titus, our youngest, and then just recently, surprise, number seven is coming at the end of February. We weren't necessarily thinking that, but — thank you, yes. As my coworkers often tease me and say, well, you had to at least have an idea, didn't you? You know, you probably were present. Yes, that's true, but they love to rib me. But nonetheless, child number seven is on the way as well. One of the challenges we face, though, is that my bride gets incredibly sick — she gets hyperemesis each time she has a pregnancy, so she's sick all day, all night, all nine months. She's already been having IVs, trying to manage her way through this. So I'm thankful to my mother — whose vocation has come down to assist and help her while I am absent from my bride.

Okay, so our disordered, anything-goes world — what I'd like to do first is give you a couple of pastoral care case studies to try to help frame the realities of the disordered world that we're dealing with. The first one is a case study through Autumn's eyes. Now, Autumn — that is her name — she's given me permission to use all the details and talk about this. You'll understand why as I unpack the situation that she has endured and continues to endure and recover from along the way.

Autumn is, at the time when we are first meeting her, years ago, a mother of five children, married to her husband, who is a fundamentalist Baptist pastor. Their children were at our day school. Not long after we had some interaction at a picnic, time passed, and my wife saw on Facebook that she reached out looking for anyone to give some help. They needed furniture, they needed some supplies, they needed a whole host of things. She didn't necessarily know why, but we responded and were able to help, and to figure out what the situation was, what was going on. We wanted to help — they had five young kids at that time, five under the age of ten, I think, was the oldest. So reaching out, we offered some assistance, some help, and in the midst of that, getting to know her a little bit, we found out she was separated from her husband.

At that time, what I understood was there had been significant fights. He had discharged a firearm in one of their fights right in their home, firing into the wall, angry at her. So he had been arrested and brought into custody for a time, and she had left and taken the kids. So we were trying to assist and help out with that, even though she could have been in the home, she wasn't. And then we found out there was another man involved, and she was with another man. I didn't know the extent of that at the time, but then it became apparent that she was with another man, trying to get from him, I suppose, encouragement, counsel, and affection. But later on we found out the significant extent of this.

As I got to know her, and my wife and I were trying to assist and help because of the five children, it then became clear — she came in asking for help because she was pregnant by this other man. She was formally seeking an abortion, and she still was, but she had looked up the wrong clinic, and actually went to a crisis pregnancy center — fortunately — and was then able to be directed my way. So we were able to assist, and my wife and I, and the congregation, as part of what we do, put our money where our mouth is — we're so glad you decided this, we want to help you, we want you to save the child, we would do whatever we can, we want to again assist where we can. And through that we began developing a pastoral care relationship where I found out the great depth and the challenges that she had dealt with.

I could spend the whole time unpacking the story, but I'll summarize it for you at this point. Her husband was addicted to pornography as a fundamentalist Baptist pastor. They had gone on their first vacation in ten years since they had been married — they went to the Dominican Republic. And there she was intoxicated, because her husband had kept pressuring her to bring other men and women into their bedroom, and had brought other couples along on the trip. And he was finally successful, because he would use scripture, saying, "I'm the head of the household, you have to do this, God says I can do this." So he was using scripture to pressure her to do that, so she was getting intoxicated to try and deal with that. And then she was raped by a local man on the beach. And that's when the chaos began.

They came back, and he was claiming more trauma from the event than she was, even though she was the one who endured it — he was the one who was getting counseling, and he was refusing to allow her to get counseling. Then he continued on, and became kind of infatuated with what had happened to her, and so continued to bring other men and women into their bedroom, multiple times. So she turned more and more to alcohol to try to deal with this chaos, and the only way she could bring herself to allow other men and women into her bedroom, into her body. And as that continued on, the fights continued to increase. And the only way she was finally able to try to get out from under him — she had to reject God, because that was her only way of being able to understand and try: this God can't be real. If this is who God is, and he's supposedly the representative of God — as this pastor, and also my husband — this can't be true.

So she began having hookups on Craigslist, just advertising it, going out and having hookups, just so she could bring that home and put it in his face and say, "Look what I did — what are you going to do about it?" And that's what finally brought her to leave for a while. She met this other man, and then ended up becoming pregnant by him. And that's when we came in the midst of it — and still, these other five kids are in the midst of it too. So we were trying to give care to the children as well. As if it would be bad enough just that way — all those things to try to unpack. How do you give care to someone who has perpetrated sin, but also been a tremendous victim of sin, particularly abuse, sexually and spiritually?

So we were giving care to her, and about almost eight and a half, nine months into her pregnancy, all of a sudden her placenta ruptured. We had members in our congregation who are also first responders — one of our members happened to respond to it, and he got there and could see her face was white, she was bleeding, and they got her in the ambulance and got her to the hospital. The placenta had ruptured completely. She was bleeding out, and they did an emergency C-section and got the baby out, but the baby was without oxygen for 13 minutes. She nearly died, and they were able to save her and the baby as well, but unfortunately the baby had severe brain damage.

In the midst of this, over this time, I had been trying to talk to her about hope in Christ, and a loving God even in the midst of this — and she had grown up fundamentalist, where, by the way, her mother had actually literally beaten her with the Bible if she didn't have chapters upon chapters memorized. So now I've been trying to talk to her about the goodness of God in the midst of this, and then this happens — she nearly dies, and her baby, John, now has epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and a life expectancy of likely less than 18 years. How do you unpack all of that and give care to someone? One day at a time, significantly, taking it where she's at.

Now, fast-forwarding a number of years later, her story is still ongoing, but she has now gone back to willing to trust the Lord Jesus, seeing it anew from the point of grace and the gospel. She is a brilliant piano player and organ player, and so my former congregation — she's still now plugged in, playing there on occasion. She still has a lot of questions. She's now married to that man, the father of that child, and interestingly enough, he was also from that same denomination, a Baptist missionary who had come back because he had experienced something similar with his wife — his ex-wife — over in Spain. So this is multiple layers of sexual dysfunction and confusion and disorder. How do you sort this out? And of course, my hunch is you've experienced this in some ways, maybe not as extreme as this, but in many of your members, or they have family members who have as well.

I'll share another pastoral care case study coming up a little later that's a little different. The reason I share these is that this is the backdrop of what we're dealing with in the midst of our disordered world — how do we go about giving care, hope, and confidence in the midst of a sexually disordered and dysfunctional world? So I'll weave in the care that I gave, for example, to Autumn along the way as we go through this. That's a real-life example of someone living in the midst of the disordered world we're in.

But the reality is, now diagnosing this in a broader way — the new sexuality that we're dealing with is one of an explicit sexual culture that's been in the making for the last number of decades, beginning perhaps with Sigmund Freud, a psychologist who saw sex as the pinnacle of human existence, and he despised couples or people who would keep sex just between a monogamous husband and wife in a marital setting. So he began promoting it otherwise. Then we go to Margaret Sanger in the '20s, of course the mother of Planned Parenthood, but she also saw sex as the avenue to inner peace — so the expression of this, again, with whoever you want, as that which would give inner peace. Then, in the '40s and '50s, Alfred Kinsey wanted to liberate sex from morality. He held that all orgasms are morally equal, regardless of who or what you have it with — that they're all morally equal. Of course, if you've read his research, it was completely biased, some of it fake, and not objective. Nonetheless, he was a closeted homosexual and pedophile himself, trying to normalize deviant behavior.

Along with that, then Hugh Hefner, of Playboy, put it in magazine form to express that in the '60s and '70s and continuing on. Wilhelm Reich then said the core of happiness in life is sexual happiness, and he actually wrote a book in the 1970s titled The Sexual Revolution, laying out that the key to happiness is through sexual happiness. Then you get the postmodernist Michel Foucault, who said sex is worth dying for — it is more important than the human soul. So this is where the new sexuality has brought us, to an explicit culture that's in front of us all the time, where sex is now your right — if you aren't entitled to have the orgasm of your choice whenever, wherever, and with whomever or whatever you want to have it with, your rights are being violated.

And so part of the challenge, of course, for us, as we see it in the church, is that it's being pulled apart, not only from the one-flesh union of husband and wife and being merely gratification, but it's also pulled apart from the procreative act, from what God had designed it to be. There are significant implications for that — how it has progressively come to be viewed that way, as you study the last 100 years or so of culture. So how do we reclaim that in our culture, understand the biblical principles for it — that's part of what our conversation is about. And so, twofold: we want to be able to diagnose the malady, but we also want to be able to provide a remedy that is full of optimism and hope.

I borrow this from John Kleinig, but it's very fitting: we can either sit and curse the darkness for how dark it is around us, or we can light a match and let the light of Christ shine in the midst of that darkness — and that's what we're here to do. Despite all the crumbling foundations around us, we're going to find out that in the course of history, and in the New Testament church, this is actually really nothing new — it's just new to us. There are a few new things along the way, like technology, that has exacerbated the situation a little bit more. But the reality is the Lord is still the Lord of the church, and his promise is that the gates of hell will not prevail. So we're going to go forward with that confidence and hope, even as we address the challenges of our situation right now.

So as we deal with this reality, that sexual identity, or "my sexual orgasm of choice," is the predominant understanding, we see then that family is being redefined. And that's being permeated through all of culture, certainly in the American marketplace, where it's normalizing and mainstreaming these new values. So just as an example of this, I want to show you a couple of ways in which this is normalizing and mainstreaming in the American marketplace.

"They are the ones we trust with our most secret secrets, who are always there when we need them. They are family. And while what it means to be a family hasn't changed, what a family looks like has. This is the new us — Chevrolet Traverse, with the highest possible overall vehicle score for safety, for whatever shape your family takes." All right, so the nature of family has changed — sorry, the resolution wasn't coming through, but same-sex families were featured in that. So in our marketplace, likewise, here's another example — oops — there's two men there. "No matter how things change, what makes us wholesome never will. Honey Maid — everyday wholesome snacks for every wholesome family. This is wholesome."

Okay, so you see how this is mainstreamed — and these commercials are already from about three to four years ago. This has been what's going on in our culture, what's happening, what we're dealing with, to mainstream and influence those around us — which is one of the reasons why I'm thankful that now you can get TV without commercials, subscription services and so on. But nonetheless, the challenge that we're dealing with is that family is being redefined.

Now, as we go through this and recognize these things, I also want to be mindful there will be sensitive things along the way. Likely you either have members in your congregation, or members in your community, friends, or family members, who are in the midst of either an alternate lifestyle or different struggles, or who have children in the midst of this. So I want to be very compassionate — that's one of the things we'll be expressing along the way — how can we be compassionate in speaking the truth and giving care, yet also at the same time maintain the truth of God's Word and his created order as we go about our life of faith.

Part of that also looks at human identity — even human identity is being redefined, particularly regarding the transgender and homosexual perspectives that we're dealing with and looking at. So here I want to give you a pastoral care case study — we'll call this individual Jefferson. He probably fits any number of those that you may have dealt with; I've had a couple who fit within this situation.

Jefferson is a young man whom I confirmed — went through confirmation and senior youth with as well — went to college, and then began experimenting and exploring same-sex relationships. He then began having problems within his own family, who were saying, "This isn't right, this isn't according to God's standard," but they were pretty cruel about it, in the sense that yes, they were speaking the truth, but they weren't speaking in any way that he might be able to hear and have confidence in their love. They were just essentially in his face, rejecting him. Part of the issue, of course, was that he would be equally antagonizing back. He wanted to bring his boyfriend at the time home, and so there was great friction in the family. He would then say, "They call themselves Christians, and they're treating me this way — doesn't the Bible say you are to be loving?"

So as he and I would talk, I thanked him for being brave enough to be willing to talk to me about it, to be willing to have a conversation about sexuality. I knew that if I came in real hardcore and said, "This is what God's Word says, you can't be doing that," I'd have the door slammed in my face and wouldn't have an opportunity to talk to him. So I had to look at the approach of how I was going to engage him in a way that would make him think, while also recognizing that I cared for him. So that was my promise — I said, "Look, throughout this whole process, I'm pledged to you. I'm going to walk alongside of you, and I'm going to speak God's word of love and Christ's word of love to you, but I'm going to give you the whole counsel of God as well."

His desire was that I take him based on what he saw as his sexual identity and sexual orientation — that's how he saw himself. I think this is one of the maladies within culture as well, where broader culture wants us to allow that movement to set the terms of engagement, with the language of sexual orientation or sexual identity. But the reality is, from a scriptural perspective, there are no such categories. They're human beings, male and female, who do sinful or God-pleasing acts, which include sexual sins or sexual God-pleasing acts, in the way that God has defined it. So rather than taking him based on his sexual orientation or identity, I referenced back to him: "Do you remember in confirmation when we talked about baptism, and your baptismal identity, who Christ made you to be? That's how I'm going to talk to you, and that's what we're going to talk about — your identity in Christ, and what that means for you and how you behave, and the acts that you engage in."

So that's what we'll be looking at — a baptismal identity in these cases. Because the reality is, we can get sidetracked, saying, "Well, love is love, why can't you just let people love others?" Then we get lost, trying to take them on the basis of their sexual identity. Along the way, though, we should also distinguish: when I'm dealing with a fellow Christian who adheres to the Word of God, that's the standard we engage with, saying God's Word is the standard we're going to utilize. As you're probably hearing from Ryan Anderson tomorrow, if we're dealing with someone who is not Christian, who doesn't abide by the Word of God, and who laughs at the Word of God, then we have to have another approach — natural law, and using reason to engage them and demonstrate that. So what I'm talking about primarily right now is other Christians, those who would hold to the Word of God.

As we dealt with that, in this particular situation with Jefferson, it continued on where God's Word — we kept coming back to it — and he would find inconsistencies in there, but that would make him uncomfortable, because it would mean that if his identity is this, it would require him to stop behaving in a particular way. That became harder for him. I wasn't rude or angry about it, but I said, "This is what God's Word says, and we'll have to deal with that." So, as you can imagine, he continued to disengage, and it became a less and less frequent conversation, even though he was thankful I was continuing to talk with him — it just wasn't reaffirming his desired identity. That's the challenge we nonetheless have. Any number of situations, I'm sure, that you dealt with in similar ways.

But the problem, of course, is that when you're in a culture that is politically correct, or "woke," as it is now, you are easily labeled, deemed intolerant. And of course, that's the irony about the intolerance of tolerance — they want you to be tolerant, but tolerance defined according to their standards, and if you don't fall in with their standards, well, then you aren't to be tolerated. As an aside, you can teach your kids in confirmation class — this is when I first began experimenting with this years ago, particularly with my kids in public school, where this was more intense, where they would experience this: if they would say, "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman," and their friends would say, "Why are you being so mean?" You can say, all right, let's take them on that — if they're advocating for tolerance, ask them this: "You're saying that all people should have an opportunity to say their perspective and that they should be received, right?" "Yes, that's right." "So if you're saying that, why are you not being tolerant toward me?" It flips the tables, to help them understand, to put someone else on the defensive rather than having to be on the defensive themselves. As 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds, giving them a manner of reasoning and helping them interact with their classmates was helpful for them.

We also have, in terms of human identity, the reality of transgenderism pushing for new public policies. In Minnesota, we're dealing with the situation in the high schools — across the different states, everyone's dealing with it in a different way, particularly the Equality Act. Very frightening, if it were to be passed, regarding any discrimination against religious institutions. So there are a lot of challenges we're facing in our disordered world, particularly, for example, on pronouns. Here's an example you can talk about at your table when we do a breakout: if someone comes up to you, understanding you as pastor, and comes to you as, say, a transgender woman — which means they are a male identifying as a woman — and says, "You must call me 'she' and use female pronouns," how will you respond? Or how would you tell your people and your congregation to respond? Something to think about, because you're dealing with it regularly. We just had this conversation at my office at the Minnesota South District, because it was something that was happening with someone in their community.

So how do we go about being compassionate, speaking biblically, with good, compassionate care — while not, at the same time, also mainstreaming what one might simply call delusion? How do we balance that? That's part of what we're looking at. One of the things we recognize, though, as I said before, is that history is simply repeating itself. There's a nice quote here from Matthew Rueger's Sexual Morality in a Christless World, where he says acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage is nothing new at all. It's not progressive — it is regressive. Contemporary views about sexuality are simply a revival of an older and much less loving view of the world.

If you haven't read the book, it's quite fascinating — a very helpful read of what has actually happened in history, going through all the different rulers of the time who were very perverse and what they put forward. Even at one point in the second century, Marcus Aurelius asked his surgeon to cut an incision in him so he could be "the female" to receive male sperm — so he could play that role. The history book by Suetonius, who recorded that, doesn't tell us if the surgeon actually went through with it or not, but the request was made. Simply the point being — as Scripture says — there is nothing new under the sun. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

So that's a diagnosis of where our disordered, chaotic culture is at. So what do we do about it? Sometimes it's nice to say, "Look, the sky is falling and woe is us," and then we're left to simply pray, "Lord, your kingdom come, and hurry, please." But we have hope. We are a people of hope, and we are a people of character who have a specific identity as well. So that's what we're going to look at now — a baptismal identity, living with faith, hope, and love in a disordered world.

So here I'll begin with the premise from Matthew 28:19. In the waters of Holy Baptism, God has named you and claimed you as his very own. You are his beloved and precious child, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. That's the short version of what I call baptismal virtue ethics — meaning whose you are determines who you are and what you do. In other words, identity informs your behavior and your actions, and you have taken on the identity of Christ.

This was the approach I took with Jefferson. It's also the approach I began weaving in for Autumn — recognizing who she is, and the unconditional nature of Christ's love for her, despite not only that she knew the law very well, because it was almost physically beaten into her, as I told you, but also her shame and her conscience weighing down upon her as a victim of sin heaped upon her, but also of spiritual abuse, of God's Word being misused upon her as well. So, "let her be" — it says Jesus unites himself to you. Again, that's simply from Galatians 3: "For as many of you who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ." That's the joy, of course, of being Lutheran — Christ at the center of it all.

So baptism, then, is the beginning of Christ at work in you — Galatians 2:20, where Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." So faith is not some simple, ethereal, out-there, intellectual assent — it is a living, active thing in your life, which leads you forward and gives you an identity, and then direction for your behavior and your actions. Even more, baptism connects you to the death and resurrection of Christ: "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life."

So the point is, God's grace gives you the strength to live each day by faith, and the ability to see him at work in your life. Even when your world seems dark, you walk by faith, live with hope, and rest in love. Now, of course, this goes for the people you care for, but also certainly for you as pastors as well. As a district president, one of the things I'm certainly mindful of, trying to approach being a district president a little bit differently than just a mere bureaucrat — though sometimes the bureaucracy is maddening, but you're obligated to it in some ways — you guys know who is the pastor to the pastors. So I speak part of this in diagnosing our culture, and as a framework for caring for your people, but also for you, brothers, as well. You who have been weary and worn, you who are overburdened and over-scheduled, you who are trying to please everyone at all times and never being able to be successful — this is God's promise also to you. It also gives you your identity, your character, and your hope as well.

So where Paul says it here, 1 Corinthians 13: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love." Here it especially emphasizes "even as I have been fully known" — you see, Christ knows you. He knows you better than yourself. He knows every skeleton that you have in your closet, everything that you want to keep hidden, that you don't want your congregation to find out. And yet he says those precious words, "I love you." If you are going to speak that to your people in the midst of whatever circumstances they are in, you also need to receive it yourself. This is who you are, and your identity in Christ.

So moving forward in this framework of care of souls, understanding vice and virtue is a helpful tool simply for us to diagnose. How in the world was I going to begin understanding what were the maladies afflicting, for example, Autumn — in her case, any number of them? You didn't want to just give a generic "Jesus loves you" — she wasn't going to take that. In fact, she was just waiting for that, because she wanted to shove it in my face. She was flabbergasted the first time — she was so angry, using expletives left and right, finally unloading how angry she was at God for all this, because, as you see, each layer gets deeper and deeper, she had also had five miscarriages before. I don't know if it would be called stillbirth, but at 22 weeks, and the devastation that was for her, and how desperately she prayed at the time — and then, if God is really good, why are all these bad things happening?

So she's finally unloading on me, and she wanted to see what I would do, because in her tradition you aren't allowed to question God, you aren't allowed to ask those questions. And I simply said, "That's okay, God's a big boy, he can handle it." She had never been given permission to ask such questions, and so it was a tremendous avenue for her — the tears just, the floodgates opened. She had always been very reserved, and then once she would finally begin unloading, because she had permission to be the broken human being that she was — yet, along the way, I still had to figure out how I was going to apply this love of Christ in the midst of this very complicated situation.

So understanding vices and virtues, in the classic sense but also in the biblical sense, helps us be able to diagnose, like a doctor, the situation. And so, often, we certainly want to apply the light of Christ to this very difficult situation, but it's like shining a light through a prism — you shine it through the prism, and what happens? All the spectrum of that light comes out, and yet it's all from the same light. That's how we, as pastors, give care to the souls in our care, in whatever various circumstances they might be dealing with. The way we apply that light to guilt may not always be the exact same way we apply it to shame. How are we able to know the difference, so we can apply it, particularly in sexual sins?

In her case, she had committed sins, but also had sins that were heaped upon her, committed against her and her body. So I had to be able to carefully unpack that, and the way I allowed that to happen was by dealing with what she was comfortable talking about at the time, rather than me prying. And by the way, in this particular case, I had others around me to consult with, because, as you can imagine, early on, as I began understanding how promiscuous she was at the time, anyone was a potential target for her. So you have to be very mindful of how Satan would certainly potentially use that. If you're not keeping your guard up, if you're not being mindful of that and doing spiritual sentry duty along the way, you become a target as well. So don't go in thinking you are the hero — all of a sudden your ego gets stroked, and then you find yourself in a very difficult and precarious situation where all of a sudden your guard is down, and all of a sudden you've given in to temptation. I was given counsel a couple of times — "Be very careful, Lucas, how you're proceeding here" — and I had to be mindful of that, so I give that encouragement to you whenever you're dealing with sexual sins in a particularly significant situation like this.

So the list of vices here is helpful — these things can give a name to the anything-goes culture, what's going on. It helps pastors again diagnose the malady of the soul, and then provide an avenue for the appropriate remedy. Classically understood, these are the seven deadly sins, from which all other sins emanate: gluttony, lust, greed, anger, envy, sloth (or acedia), and slothfulness — not just simple laziness in life, but here, especially for pastors, reminding us of this acedia, spiritual apathy, where you can't rouse yourself to care about the holy things of God, because you're simply overwhelmed by life.

You see, where does this tie into sexual sins? Well, in the manner of which many pastors — and likely here, so I speak this as a brother to you in Christ — when you're full of acedia, your life is numb, and you can't rouse yourself to care about the holy things of God, though you might intellectually note it. Emotionally, you're tapped out. So where do you turn to try to get some kind of emotional jolt? You turn to pornography, to try to shock your senses, to have something, because you've become so numb. This is one that particularly afflicts pastors, and I've got good news for you, though, brothers, if this is you: we have a loving God, and that light of Christ brings cleansing and hope for you. If you haven't had a chance to talk to a brother pastor or father confessor about that, do so — I encourage you to do that. Sins left untreated — this is where the devil and his demons love to flock, to continue to plague you in those regards. And then, of course, vainglory and pride. There can be any host of these mixed in with any soul that's disordered, but particularly in sexual sins, lust might be there, certainly, but there's a much deeper sense — for example, in Autumn's case — than lust simply alone.

Of course, Scripture reflects this — simply Galatians 5 identifies these things, vice and virtue, in Scripture: "Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." A stark warning — left untreated, these things are condemning, and they separate us from the kingdom of God. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit."

So these are good things to help diagnose it. And you see, below, teaching vice and virtue in a congregation, school, and home — the basis of that, of course, is law and gospel. But pastoral care, soul care, is more than simply ensuring people know right doctrine. There is something incredibly important about right doctrine, and we need to have that — don't misunderstand me here. But if all we do is reduce soul care to ensuring people know right doctrine — in other words, an intellectual assent to right doctrine — it's like applying the light of Christ, the long gospel, without understanding the context in which the soul is being plagued.

To reduce soul care to intellectual assent to right doctrine is like telling a starving person that the remedy to their situation is simply for them to recite the fourth petition and its meaning, while you sit there and eat a sandwich, making sure they say every word correctly. It's missing the importance of the context, the care of the soul that you are to give — the whole person, body — and as we're going to find out, not just body and soul, because we're embodied souls, we treat the whole person, not just the mind, but the whole person.

So that brings us to baptismal virtue ethics. There's a particular behavior and action that we're looking at here, but soul care also recognizes that baptismal virtue ethics has a corollary: baptismal therapy. We heard about it in the homily this afternoon — baptismal therapy is applying the good news of Christ that's been given in baptism to that soul. So baptismal virtue ethics is advocating for moral character and the virtuous life from the point of view of Christ, from his virtues and his identity, which are all received from baptism.

Now, the Large and Small Catechisms are very helpful for us in understanding that. The Large Catechism says: "Every Christian has enough in baptism to learn and to do all his life, for he has always enough to do by believing firmly what baptism promises and brings — victory over death and the devil, forgiveness of sin, God's grace, the entire Christ, and the Holy Spirit with his gifts." And likewise, when we teach this in catechesis, Small Catechism, Part Four: "What does such baptizing with water indicate? It indicates that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever."

So it looks at putting to death those things — sins and evil desires — contrition and repentance. This is the core of putting baptismal virtue ethics into action, over against — and this is where, as helpful as they can be, our fellow Roman Catholic counterparts take a slightly different approach to ethics, which is: if you act upon virtues and habituate yourself to them, then they become part of your life eventually. But that, from our perspective as Lutherans, doesn't treat the fallen nature of the human soul and recognize the depravity of the soul — that behavior must first come, and that freedom must first come from Christ, and that it's his virtues that we receive by faith that can then be put into action.

In other words, Christian identity and character are rooted in Christ and his virtues through baptism. And so a baptismal, virtuous, ethical life begins and ends with daily contrition and repentance, with prayer and meditation rooted in the forgiveness of sins earned by Christ.

I'll touch on this a little more in the next section, on considerations on the theology of the body, but it's fitting here: in your pastoral care, particularly, for example, when dealing with a case like Autumn or Jefferson, there's the recognition and distinction between moral infractions and spiritual contamination. Moral infractions is the idea that I've done a bad deed, so that brings guilt. But spiritual contamination is defilement that then attracts darkness, that attracts the devil and demons — I'm borrowing again from John Kleinig here — but it's simply like vultures flying in the wild. Why are they circling? Generally, what do they have? They smell something foul and dead, and so they're flocking to it. This is what spiritual contamination does, left untreated. This is especially so with sexual sins, sins of the body.

So how do you give care to those who have received such sins and so deal with shame, or who have committed such sins and are dealing with guilt? Remember, guilt says, "I did a bad thing." Shame says, "I am bad." So applying the light of Christ in those situations, in these specific directions — that follows out of baptismal therapy. Walking in the virtues of Christ, and of Christ's Spirit, comes from where? For example, 1 Corinthians 1:30: "Because of God you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption." In other words, it's been given to us, it's gifted to us by faith, and so we enact that by faith — wisdom is a virtue, we enact it by faith.

So I'll quickly look at the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — and then faith, hope, and love. Those are the contrast, of course, to the seven deadly sins — the cardinal virtues, recognizing this. So when a soul that you're dealing with wonders, "Well, what does this life look like?", you can utilize these to help describe that life, or better yet, simply use the Scriptures that describe it, in the midst of diagnosing that new life they have in Christ.

All right, I think probably we're at time to break, right? All right, so we'll finish up — I'll wrap this next portion up, looking at how do we form and inform people in that baptismal life, particularly the simple things we do as pastors in ordinary care, even as you also might be given extraordinary care to afflicted souls. So what we'll do is take a few minutes here to have conversations at your table. One of the questions you could look at, again, is: would you address someone by their preferred pronoun if they came up to you, or if you have a parent who has come up to you and said, "My child now wants me to address them by this pronoun" — what type of counsel or care would you give? Or if it's a grandparent, what type of counsel or care would you give? Or, if you have any thoughts or reflections on anything said to this point, formulate questions together that you'd want to throw back at me, and I'll look to answer them at the start of the next section, and then we'll finish out and dig into the next part.

So that's break-time conversation, and then after about ten minutes, they can take a break, a bathroom break too. Okay.