Pastors’ Seminar, part 2

Transcript (edited for readability).

Rounding out the baptismal life — baptismal virtue ethics, again, character and identity rooted in — again, this is the joy of being Lutheran, and our confession, and the baptismal life that we have, so ready for the maladies of the culture that we're dealing with. So, under "walk by faith, live in hope, rest in love" — the baptismal life. And really, this is not just our own theological reflection, but this is also for the catechized in your congregation — the grandmothers and grandfathers, the moms and the dads, and the older siblings, aunts and uncles — who are all dealing with this at multiple levels, and understanding a reference point for them, of the baptized life, and where their identity comes from, and being able to engage with others who are struggling with the maladies of life in a hopeful, constructive manner.

So, under letter A: walking in faith is the beginning point to combat all the lies, the deceit, and the false beliefs that the devil, the world, and our own flesh throw before us. So, contrition and repentance — that's how you're exercising faith, living in that faith, exercising it — meditation and prayer, and we're going to dig in even more, focusing on God's Word, of course, and bringing about the life of faith through his Word in the next session.

Christian hope then provides a robust optimism, because it's rooted in the one who walked through the valley of the shadow of death and came through it as the resurrection and the life. So here, again, I'm going to encourage — and I'll do this on the theology of the body considerations — we need to be mindful, in the midst of all this, of the optimism that we can have, and the confidence that we can have, even in the face of potentially inevitable unrest or significant challenges. This includes then also standing for what we are for, not simply what we are against. That's important, particularly in a culture that wants to cancel anyone who has something positive to say but is deemed politically incorrect — it's much harder to do so when we're simply talking about, "Look, I'm simply for a strong family. Why are you upset with me if I'm talking about strong families, that I would want a husband and father to be present in the family's life, a mother and a wife to be present in the children's life?" We are for the family. So having a robust optimism about the contribution that the family can have — and by the way, also its contribution not just to society itself, but also to caring for those who might be the least of these: those who are single parents, those who are in the midst of gender dysphoria, those who are struggling with same-sex attraction — that we can care for those with great compassion and bring the light of Christ to them in the midst of those circumstances. So that's the Christian hope.

Faith, hope, and then love. Let's see — your baptismal identity helps sustain you in your search for love, helps clarify what true love is, and shapes how you express love in acts toward others. So here, again, this is the great conversation going on in our culture right now — "love is love." I was talking with lots of different pastors and their families, talking with one pastor's wife about the struggle they have with a son who is involved in a same-sex relationship, and that's the line that is often used: "Well, Mom, love is love — why can't I just love the other person?" Well, of course, if we're dealing again with someone who has a Christian understanding, where the Word of God is authoritative, then we can look at how you define love. And once we define love, and understand what it is, then we go forward on who you are — your identity with that — over against simply allowing the culture to define the terms of engagement in the Christian church. So when you are secure in his love, you can share that love with others in both word and deed. So the baptismal life is one full of faith, hope, and love.

So the Lutheran question then is: what does this mean in our daily life, within our vocations, our stations of life — not just for you as a pastor and your family, but also for the families in your congregation? So here, and tomorrow especially, I look at, for parents, pastors, teachers, grandparents, what we can do to help equip people. Often people simply feel overwhelmed, and so they don't know what to say, so they don't say anything. But the problem with doing so is, if we don't say anything, the internet is always saying something. So kids and grandkids are looking it up online to understand. TikTok right now — this is where they're getting it, if you want to get an education on gender dysphoria and all the new iterations of gender, right now just check out TikTok. I just saw — I don't have TikTok, but I usually get alerted by others about what's happening on it — a new iteration of gender and the nature of what it is. It's all-encompassing; whatever you think it is, they can throw it on there, and then someone will make a TikTok video of it. If we have time, I'll share some of those.

But what does this mean, then? How do we go about shaping, forming, informing, and equipping parents and grandparents to be confident, to be full of faith, hope, and love in the midst of these circumstances — while, as pastors, also having a framework to give care to our people, and also to those who may have never been in church before? We're going to find that the affliction to the body, the sexual dysfunction of culture, is going to provide a tremendous opportunity, if we're attentive to it, for great care of souls and bodies, because they have been so defiled and left in meaninglessness. So here again, we look at what we want to stand for, not just what we are against.

Discussions we can look at, then — simply invite what I call parent partnership workshops in our congregation. At my last congregation, and I'm beginning to look at implementing it in the congregation I serve right now as associate — because I'm also covering the vacancy, since my beloved senior pastor left me — nonetheless, an opportunity to have these conversations with our parents. The parent partnership workshop is simply 55-minute sessions together that carry conversations about these very things: How do I talk to my children about sexuality? When should I start talking about it with them? So you, as a pastor, becoming comfortable with that — if you have a day school, how do you help your teachers and staff also become comfortable with it? How do you partner with the parents in the congregation so they feel confident and equipped to have these caring conversations about it? It can be as simple as starting with: what does it mean to be a godly man? What does it mean to be a godly husband and a godly father, as we'll talk about in a little bit? There are multiple vocations that we understand, but right now something important to elevate is the vocation of being a male — what is a godly man or male, or female? What does it mean to be a godly woman, a godly wife, a godly mother, a godly grandmother? Have those simple conversations about that.

So part of the challenge, of course, comes as well from not just informing people — remember, it's not just mere intellectual assent, it's also forming people in their lives of faith, not only informing but forming them. So teaching how to think, not just what to think. Helping shape that, of course, involves understanding the manner of learning — using facts, logic, and rhetoric. This is especially important, as we're going to find out from Dr. Anderson tomorrow, using wonderful logic and reason. But one of the challenges we have in our culture is that reason is being simply cast aside. How do we still navigate when emotion is the primary language of people, and it's difficult to argue when how one feels is treated as truth? But the absurdity of that is imploding the culture, and that's what we're looking at. We want our parents, grandparents, and kids to be able to navigate this with reasonableness — and that's what Scripture says, by the way: let your reasonableness be known to all.

So that's informing them, forming them, certainly leading by example, wrapping them in the love and life of Christ, particularly through their worship life, through the liturgy. Lutherans have long been, and always been, a liturgical church body — worship wars aside. The Ordo — if you're simply using the Ordo, you see a line down and a line up, recognizing that God comes to us, and our response, in the divine service that's going on. But as we'll find, we're not simply stagnant observers within this — we are participants, and there is a life being formed in it, catechized in it, and used as forming the life of faith and a reference point to be able to weave into it. So, for example, in Autumn's case, understanding the depths of the Kyrie — when she doesn't know what to pray, learning the robust nature of the liturgy, being able to simply pray the Kyrie, "Lord, have mercy," and the weeping and laments that she has had, being able to capture all of that within it, and understanding that helps form her in her life of prayer. So we can use that as well.

So, keys to this — four keys. The broad four keys are: carrying conversations, rituals and traditions, biblical devotions, and a life of service — things we have advocated in my former congregation, and what I'm implementing in my current congregation — keys to forming and informing them in a life of faith, a baptismal virtue ethics.

For you as a pastor, though, of course: preach and teach on biblical sexuality, marriage and family, as well as on baptismal identity and character. But you have to do it as more than just one sermon, where you just blast them all in one sermon, or where you're really gung-ho on this and all of a sudden you're using explicit language — meaning not that it's bad, but language that's shocking to your people. And though it might be a very good sermon, if you haven't been building them up to receive that type of language, you're going to shock them more, and then have the elders come and visit you, as happened to me at one point in time as well. So you want to be mindful of building them up and preparing them, then teaching on it in Bible class as well, and being intentional, and being open to the hard, caring conversations. And if you don't have an answer for it, simply say, "You know, that's a good question," or "We're in this together, we've got to wrestle it out, I don't know if there's a good answer." Sometimes there are gray areas of life, and so we wrestle through that, but the Word of God is going to lead us forward.

Key to this, for shaping our children — for example, when we're talking about sexuality — their imaginations are being dulled, ironically, by having access to all the internet content and videos thrown in their face, and it's actually dulling their imagination. So certainly, having a fast from technology can be helpful, but also promoting ways to engage their imagination, particularly on virtue, for example, and in stories. Here are some simple examples of stories that engage the imagination about how you might talk about God. For example, Kleinig, in his book on the theology of the body, talks about engaging the imagination about sex — and Scripture does this, the Song of Songs, talking about the garden that it is, and being able to do it — again, because we're in such a perverse, explicit culture, we're only thinking of sex mechanically, in bodily forms, on the genitals. That deadens the imagination and limits it. When we talk about imagination, we're talking about it in the God-created, wholesome manner of the fullness that it is.

But on virtue itself, and the life of a virtuous life — for example, if you've read The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, you can talk to your kids about the virtue that's in the characters and the wonderful writing that they have. My kids have been engaged with Lewis and Tolkien for a long time, and even understanding, as they got older, the relationship those two had with one another as the Inklings in their writing. More modern, perhaps, is The Wingfeather Saga — again, the virtue that's there — and any other classics as well that you might read, where you can draw out the virtue of life and then weave in, of course, the biblical understanding. So we understand it — the virtue baptized into our identity that we have, and who we are, and whose we are, and what we do.

So I've provided for you a sermon sample — this one is in manuscript form, you can certainly utilize it as you might like, or adapt or disregard it. The next section, which we'll jump to momentarily, provides an outline if you'd like to use it. A pause here — any questions from your conversations on any of the foregoing that we had?

Yeah, Clint. One of the points that you made earlier about talking with confirmands and stuff about trying to turn the tables on tolerance. Yes. I have found that there is already an answer for that in the culture — I don't know if you've heard this in the last few months, I think it really came to the fore in the last few months — which is: true tolerance has to be intolerant. That's something I've run across recently. It seems to me that as people began pushing back on all this matter of tolerance, some thinker came back and said, "Well, in order to have true tolerance, you have to be intolerant about certain things." And so that's now opened the door to being able to say, "Well, how can you be intolerant? Because I have to be intolerant in order to protect all these other people." Right? So I've heard portions of that. For the Christian, if we're using reason, again — we're talking with someone who's not using Scripture — but "I have to be intolerant," so then where does the next point of that conversation go?

I'm not sure a 12-, 13-, or 14-year-old would be able to digest it in that way, because I'm guessing that's an intellectual conversation, but it is forcing honesty on their part. It's the same way within the abortion debate, by the way, where it previously said, "Well, we don't know if it's life or not." But now, with all the technology we have, we can unequivocally say it certainly is life. So now that's where we've gotten a change to personhood — well, certainly we recognize it's human, but it's not actually a person. So now it's forcing honesty, saying, "Well, we still think — yeah, we recognize it, but we still think we should be able to kill it." So I think that's the same thing here — okay, we weren't really being honest about "tolerant," because we only want to tolerate all viewpoints except yours, if yours is a moral one. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes as it works its way out in the culture — how it plays out that "we can't tolerate you." What does that actually mean, then? Are you going to put me in a camp? Are you going to put me in jail? That's the frightening thing, of course, about what's going on. But if they're coming to that, if they're becoming that honest about it — yeah, good.

Lucas, were you able to speak to Autumn about that — you know, someone goes through a tradition that says, "Oh, and God's own child," and yet… Yes, so that's a great question. Part of that story is, I've been working with her and talking about it. The older two kids had been baptized, but they were baptized by their father — here's another layer to that story: the father was sexually abusive to the daughter. They have four boys, one girl. So when we began talking about baptism, and she began bringing it up, talking to the kids at home about it too, and then, um, John was born, and they talked about it and wanted him to be baptized. Then we began having a whole conversation about this — they wanted to get rebaptized. How do you talk to someone who doesn't understand, who was baptized by someone who abused them, and say, "We're not going to rebaptize," while the other three siblings, and a half-sibling, are also being baptized for the first time? It's very complex.

So it happened to fall simply on Palm Sunday, where I believe there's an ancient rite or tradition involving being baptized and using palms. So I simply sprinkled them with water on Palm Sunday, as a reminder that they had been baptized, and gave them each a palm, then proceeded to baptize all the other four children. As kids at that time, 11 and 9 years old, they could still understand something significant was going on — I wasn't rebaptizing them, but it was something they could mark as a milestone. And then I went through with each of the other younger three siblings, and the fourth half-sibling as well. For her, and then for her now-husband as well, it exploded their minds a little bit, understanding the fullness of God's grace — especially now, all the more, when John, who has epilepsy and cerebral palsy, could still receive that light. It's the way I've explained it: we put John in the light — what did he do to receive that light? Nothing. It was a gift of God's grace. And as he grows, he could certainly continue to receive that as a gift. So for her, then, the same thing would go back to her, because she asked about it — "Do I need to be rebaptized?" No, but here's what the promise is in baptism.

And so those moments of clarity, where the gospel finally comes clear, are utterly moving — not just for her, but for me, as I'm giving care to her as well, because of the great relief that it is, by grace. Even because — she would, the weight of guilt and shame on her would be so heavy, because she knew very well God's law, since that's all that fundamentalist tradition would be in her mind — straight law, condemnation, condemnation. So relearning — I mean, this girl had chapters upon chapters memorized, but she had only understood them in one particular way, devoid of grace. So seeing it all anew had to happen over and over and over again, because it had been ingrained in her so significantly the other way. Yeah.

For — from baptism to communion there, when you're dealing with somebody like Jefferson, I think you said — and struggling with same-sex attraction — I mean, how much patience do you show? Yep, and that's a great question, a very important question. So in a situation like that, it comes to the point of — and I had this conversation with him — I said, "If you're in conversation with me, and you're willing to continue this conversation, you need to be receiving the Lord's Supper. If you stop having a conversation with me, and say, 'I don't care what it says anymore,' then I'm going to have a concern, because it's telling me that you're rejecting and stepping away from what the Lord's Word says at this point in time." So that's where I tried to balance that in that situation, for the individual, so that I was not giving, in his mind, permission for him to keep on going, but I was giving the benefit of the doubt, saying maybe he's struggling with same-sex attraction, much like, for example, a heterosexual who is promiscuous might be struggling with it, and needs to stop giving into that — needs the Lord's Supper when they are repentant. So that's where I would see, if you will, repentance and having a repentant heart. But I very clearly walked him through, saying, if this is where you're going to be, this would not be good for your soul at this point — we looked at eating judgment on himself at that point. So I tried to be upfront and very clear, being compassionate but speaking the truth at the same time. Now, the time frame for it depended on what was going on in his life, in terms of his frequency there, back at college, coming back. Good question.

Yeah, one more question. Should we, can we ever use someone's non-actual preferred pronoun? My answer: it depends. If I want an opportunity to build a relationship with an individual I've never met before, but who is now in the community where I reside — for example, this was the exact conversation we had at a staff meeting — they were supporting some community event going on, and it was obvious that she is a "he," but was saying, "This is the pronoun I want you to use." What is my risk assessment as I go into that conversation? Do I want to prove to them that I know the truth and they don't, and therefore I will not endorse delusion? Or do I want to assess whether there might be an opportunity for me to build a relationship so that I can speak the truth and, over time, invite them to come to the truth of the situation? So it's on a case-by-case basis. I think there are certainly times where you have to, on principle, want to speak the truth, because it wouldn't matter how kind you were — the individual has no desire to have a conversation. So that's a non-answer, perhaps, or an "it depends" pastoral answer — how about that?

Yeah, amazing. Any others? All right, let's keep rolling, then, if you would. Let's go to the next section: considerations on the theology of the body. All right, I want to be mindful here — let's see, we go till 3:25, I'll maybe do 3:30 if I can steal five minutes.

All right, so here's the general overview on the theology of the body: we are studying God while studying the body. In other words, does the body give us some insight into who God is when we study the body? And we're doing so in a post-sexual-revolution reality — we are in a moral revolution. Morality itself is at stake. So the doctrine of God and creation are at stake in the midst of our cultural circumstance right now. We do this with a Lutheran approach to our theology of the body here. So we are at a moment of creedal confession, where we can state again what we are for — and so we're going to take this approach through the lens of the Apostles' Creed, looking at it through the first article, second article, third article approach. A creedal perspective provides an avenue of comprehensive consideration for us here.

So, by way of introduction: the first article — God the Father, Creator of the body. Remember, in the creation account, day six — up to that point, God had seen everything, and it was good. Day six, he said it was very good, all right? And that includes the body — matter matters. God uses creation to display his splendor. So creation here, from the first-article perspective, is going to help us as a bulwark against both a Gnostic approach, which says matter is bad and spirituality is good, and so therefore we must get rid of all matter, or treat matter however we want, because only our internal sense of identity and pleasure counts — so it's a bulwark against Gnosticism, as well as against materialism, the abuse of the good creation God has given, so that we make it into the idolatry of our life and worship the creation.

So the second article, by way of introduction, is God the Son incarnate, the Redeemer of the body. It's quite significant for us to recognize that human flesh becomes the hinge of salvation. As Paul says to the Colossians, "In him the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily." So the Creator of the universe, in other words, becomes a zygote — a man in skin and bones like yours and mine — but now, in bodily form, sits at the right hand of the Father in glory and fills the universe with his presence. So the incarnation — which I am asserting here is of absolute significance — means we cannot therefore forget about the ascension of the body of Christ as well, and the significance of the body of Christ: the resurrected body, ascended and sitting at the right hand of the Father in glory, and filling the universe.

All right, then the third article: God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier of the body, who also raises the body from the dead. So the body — pastoral care here is what we'll be looking at, as Harold Senkbeil says in his book, the primary place where pastoral care is worked out and takes place is within the third article — the life of sanctification, and that includes the body. How is the body being treated? How has it been affected, and what's the care of that soul? So that's the premise here — we're looking at it through the first, second, and third article approach.

So the first article: "I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, Creator of heaven and earth." What does this mean, particularly for the body? "I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason, and all my senses, and still takes care of them." So our male and female genitalia are included in the body and all the members that he gives to us. "He richly and daily provides me all that I need to support this body and life." So the understanding, then, is that our God has created us, and ours is an infleshed religion — we must be very careful, then, not to un-flesh it. That's the Gnostic error — it's always the enemy who wants to deny that Christ came into the flesh. So we want to be mindful of the significance of the flesh.

So Genesis 1:26-31, the first creation account, the sixth day: male and female were created in the image of God, and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good — in other words, the goodness of the body. It's difficult for us to comprehend, on this side of the fall, that goodness — we can attempt to do so, but particularly when it comes to the body, the genitalia, and the sexual one-flesh union, our culture, and our own fallen nature, have so perverted our minds that sometimes it's difficult to grasp the utter fullness and goodness with which God created it. Nonetheless, God gives us insight into his design and order for maleness and femaleness, in all their splendor, in this account.

And you can think about it this way too: the Bible begins and ends with a wedding. In the beginning, Adam and Eve are given in marriage; it ends with Christ and his bride, the church. We'll unpack it a little more tomorrow, but when Paul talks, in Ephesians 5, about the one-flesh union, he says it's a mystery, and it refers to Christ and his church — but the church is seen as the bride. Why would that be? Again, this goes toward — sometimes these conversations, when we unpack this a little, are difficult, because our minds might go in perverse ways — but why is the church called the bride, or why is Christ the bridegroom? Again, if we're thinking in terms of how God designed the one-flesh union and the nature of procreation — the male gives, the female receives — understanding the goodness of God's created order.

Now, throughout history, there have been those who have perhaps abused this in a chauvinistic manner, not giving care to females, or subjecting females by saying, well, males are the givers and females are the receivers, and that's why males are the leaders, or however they would abuse that relationship. Of course, that's not how Paul lays it out in Ephesians 5: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church." I was — the sermon I just gave, the last one, you can see in there — I don't know if I actually put it in there, one of the ad-libs I made — when we talk about loving our brides, it's more than just being willing to take a bullet, jump in front of the bus for her. It's a sacrificial, daily love that's involved. And if we husbands actually loved our wives in the way Paul describes there, would there ever be a problem with what Paul requests of wives — that they respect the husband as the husband is head? No, there wouldn't. But what's the problem? Well, sin intervenes — there are all kinds of blemishes, marks, and the nature of sin. So husbands are yelling, "Respect me!" while wives are yelling, "Love me!" and neither is willing to go first until the other one does.

But here we have, as we'll unpack, God's creation for it — Christ is the bridegroom who does go first, who does lay down his life for the church, who does give to his bride his righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, the forgiveness of sins. So the creation of male and female, again, is a reflection upon God through the creation of human beings. We recognize, here again, that we are embodied souls, or spiritual bodies — we do not separate body from soul, they are one when we are dealing with a created being. The body is not divine, but it is a sign of the divine mystery.

So the image of God — what does the body tell us again about God? If human beings were created in the image of God, male and female, what does that tell us about God? What observations could we make? So God made humankind, male and female, as they are fully sexual prior to any sexual union. In other words, the idea that someone would only finally become fully male or female after engaging in sexual intercourse, as some would try to contend, is not the case. God created them fully as sexual beings prior to sexual union. So, again, their creation as male and female — what might that tell us about God himself? So, the image of God, the imago Dei — ontologically, there are three realities to look at in the image of God: the ontological, the functional, and the relational.

Ontological is simply the state of being. This is where Luther came down when he dealt with it in Genesis, on the image of God, particularly on the original righteousness of God — that's where Luther landed on the righteousness of it. The functional nature is the purpose of the image of God, how they function in their life, what they are designed to do — so they were to oversee all the fish of the sea, work the land — that's the function, that's what it was for the image of God. Or the relational aspect — the relational nature of the image of God — and here, particularly, relationships, the marital sexual love as an icon of the physical image of the inner love of the Trinity, language of the Creed. Again, that we would talk this way — our culture is so perverse in its explicit sexuality that we're not always comfortable thinking about the one-flesh union as an icon of the inner love of the Trinity. But remember, who created sex? God did. He didn't pervert it — we did a fine job of doing that — but he's the one who created it. So these are three angles of looking at the image of God, particularly as male and female bodies, and in the sexual union together.

So, point two: the reflection of God's image sexually through human bodies. Understanding our human bodies, male and female — and here, I don't think I put this in the notes, but perhaps it's worth noting, I love studying words, etymology is always a fascinating thing if you study it. The word "gender" itself — that's a pretty important word we understand right now, and there's all kinds of debate around it — but if we look at the root of the word, "gen" — that root, from which we get words like generous, generate, Genesis, genetics, genealogy, progeny, gender, and genitals — "gen," in its original meaning, means "to give birth." A person's gender, therefore, is based on the manner in which that person is designed to generate new life. In other words, contrary to the widespread secular insistence that it's a social construct, a person's gender is not malleable, is not a social construct — a person's gender is determined by the kind of genitals he or she has. Of course, the problem is not only that Americans are having difficulty even writing English words and knowing their etymology — but it's important to recognize that a degendered society is likely, therefore, bound to degenerate. And that's why it's important — it goes back to the question — there comes a point in time where we'll have to make a stand on the pronouns that are used; we'll have to take a stand, recognizing where our culture is heading, where our society is heading.

All right, so that's a little excursus there. Back to number two: reflections on God's image sexually through human bodies. Human bodies, again, sexually — that includes single bodies, meaning not married. Bodily devotion of men and women to God, like Jesus, as his brothers and sisters in Christ — being single does not make you less of a person, just because you're not engaged in what culture says is the ultimate sex, as the ultimate inner peace. Scripturally speaking, of course, they are fully human, male or female, and if they're single, they have a devotion to God, just like our Lord Jesus did as a single male.

Married bodies — the one-flesh union in marriage, again, mirrors the one-flesh union of Christ with the church. Our culture, again, isn't comfortable thinking automatically in those terms, because sex nowadays has become so much only focused on, just like pornography focuses on, the genitalia, on technique and performance, and on having the best mind-blowing orgasm of your life, as somehow the greatest fulfillment in life. And so we have destroyed what the fullness of the one-flesh union is all about — giving of heart and mind and the full self, not just a momentary gratification.

So both single and married bodies, then — there's bodily participation in Christ's purity, whether single or married, bodily participation in his purity and holiness, through his body and blood that is given. So again, as a side note here, reminding myself of the notes I've given, understanding the sexual nature of things in the manner that God has designed — this isn't the one-flesh union, for example, but the first covenant that God made was with Abraham — what was that covenant, and how did it involve the body? Circumcision, all right? Now, on the one hand, I've seen — I forget the comedian's name, he does a hilarious bit on this, he's a Christian comedian — but of all the physical possibilities that God decided to use, "let's make a covenant," that's the one he decided to do. From a male's perspective, it's a little bit painful, and perhaps if we had been asked what we wanted to do to make that covenant, we'd have made other suggestions. But he decided to do this.

Why in the world would he decide that severing the male foreskin was the way to go? Nonetheless, that is what he decided. And some would say, well, that just demonstrates how it's a chauvinist God, and that's why the feminist movement would say — why would he only include males? You should never abide by a God who would only do that. But how in the world are females included in that covenant? How were they included? Either through their father or through their husband, through the sexual union. It was a wonderful gift that the Lord had given — the woman would be still under the father's care, as a result of the sexual union, until she went out on her own, or was under the care of a husband, or remained under the care of her father. So that's the covenant he first made.

The body is a good gift of creation, but is now corrupted by sin and defiled by sinners. And by the way, again, Christopher West has a great book on this — he's a Roman Catholic, a phenomenal, prolific author on the theology of the body, and unpacks Pope John Paul II's theology of the body very robustly, in an accessible manner. But he has one book, a more recent one, which I am in complete agreement with, on the nature of how there are so many bodies that have been assaulted, or defiled, or desecrated. Evangelism moving forward is going to be on the basis of care for those who have been so afflicted in their bodies, and we need to make sure we are mindful of this and compassionate toward it — not simply only looking at what we are against, "you did that, so you are tainted goods," but rather saying what we are for: you have been wounded, you have been hurt, or you have your own sin — we are for giving you the grace of Christ.

This recognizes, then, that sin brings disorder, and it puts out of order the things which God has ordered. So right now we're seeing that all over — same-sex marriage puts out of order what God has ordered, and not only same-sex marriage, but now thruples and foursomes — New Mexico looked at marriage leases, five years, for being able to lease a woman for a marriage — putting out of order that which God has ordered. We've got disease — and again, this goes toward the body's frailty, the fragility of the body, and how we are afflicted by the curse of sin and everything that comes with it. And therefore, suffering — we'll talk a little more about that in a moment, what do we make of suffering — our Lord himself suffered in his body.

One minute? Oh, boy. All right, all right, I'll make my final point here, and we'll wrap it up — or at least take a break — then: death to the body. Remember, death, says Scripture, is our enemy, and we need to be mindful, as pastors giving soul care, of that when we conduct funerals. I'll speak both as a pastor, but also as a DP, a little bit — and I'll try to be evangelical in my thoughts here — funerals are for the proclamation of the resurrection. When we tend, as our culture now does, to move them toward a "celebration of life," we take away the understanding of the severity that death is to us.

Likewise, typically, when I have seen celebrations of life, it's for those who perhaps have died under what we might consider ordinary circumstances, having lived a long life, and so, let's celebrate the life they had. But I come from a different perspective. My first funeral was at four years old, when my six-year-old sister was in the casket. What celebrations were my parents wanting to have at that time, other than the celebration of the resurrection? I come from a place of multiple funerals — six months before her, my uncle had died; six months after her, my other uncle had died, one of cancer, the other of a farm accident, when the combine had dropped on his head. I come from the place where my 27-year-old brother and his unborn child were killed in a car accident and put in a grave. We celebrate the resurrection of the body.

So the significance of that, in our pastoral care, is that we emphasize the care of the body. So as we move forward, we look at all the considerations on the body, and are mindful of how God has created this body, how he has redeemed this body, how he sanctifies the body, and how he raises the body from the dead — which we live out by faith.

So that's — well, I'll pause here for conversations, for you to take a look at any number of those things. I didn't grab a question — any questions you'd want to look at? Otherwise, well — all right, we can take a break, and we'll reconvene — let's see, the last one at what time — 15 minutes, 3:45. Okay, 3:45.