Rev. Matthew Wurm — Care for Families with LGBT Members

Transcript (edited for readability).

You were in for a treat this hour. This hour we have a pastor who serves on our collegium — I've heard it every way. We're very lucky to have Pastor Worm with us today. He brings to us a perspective that is vital to Doxology because he's not going to be talking about theories. He's not going to be talking about research. He's not going to be talking about doctors sitting in a circle and voting on diagnoses. He's going to be talking about God's baptized children who need care for the soul and who need caring, and he in his parish has done a wonderful job of that, where he is senior pastor at Mount Calvary Lutheran Church in Brookings, South Dakota. And he's going directly to the heart of the issue. In part, he's answering the question: how do we care for families that have LGBT members? His primary calling is that, as an undershepherd, a servant of Christ — and I think you are going to find him to be an amazing example of what it means to be compassionate, how do you silence the cultural noise and concern yourself with the most excellent way. He served two parishes in college towns. He's been aware of some of the people who are on the fringes, and he's chosen to determine how a pastor, a physician of souls, can respond to sexual sin or moral failure faithfully, with the desire to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. He's also served as a short-term volunteer in mission in Panama for LCMS World Missions. He received his MDiv from Concordia Seminary St. Louis, and in addition to serving his parish, he's also been appointed to serve as a circuit visitor, because he has so little to do in his church, I'm guessing. You can read more of his pedigree in his presenter biography. He was inducted as a Doxology Fellow in 2014, and he has spoken, written, and participated in services with pastors, parishes, and their people across the nation for Doxology. Please help me welcome Pastor Matthew Worm.

Thank you, Bob, for your kind words. Oftentimes I get the question, "Hey, Matt, how did you get into this?" So I don't have to answer that seven hundred times, I'll just let you know now. I've been a pastor for fifteen years. My first five years was in a wonderful congregation in northern Minnesota, in Bemidji. And I just got through Doxology, the Classic program, and it was just refreshing water, life-giving water, in the teaching I received from Bev and from Dr. Sinclair at that time. And it prepped me for what evidently the Lord knew was to come, but I didn't.

I had an elder who said, "Pastor, I've got to resign from the Board of Elders because I'm having a mental problem." And I said, "Okay, I understand — you're getting up in age, you're retired, and our minds aren't as sharp as they used to be." I didn't think much of it. It just kept growing from there.

My mentor, pastor, and also visitation pastor — a retired pastor in my congregation — had passed away overnight. He'd told me, when I first met him, "Matt, you're going to do my funeral." I said, "No, I'm not, Dr. Rogers. Look at you, you're spry, you're sixty-three years old." No — he was right. So I get called to his house to be with the family after the Lord called him to eternal rest. I wake up the next morning and have this scheduled appointment with my former elder. He presents me a letter saying, "I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. I want to make reaffirmation of my faith" — we'll call her Tammy — on the first Sunday after Independence Day.

So that's how I got into it, and I ended up writing a paper, leaning upon Bev and Dr. Sinclair quite a bit during those years. So this is not a new thing. Brian Wolfmueller's got some great resources as well on his website — you can scroll through, Google him. But write this down: Isaiah 56 is where the Lord promises to the eunuchs that if they return and keep the Lord's Sabbath — I think it's verse 6 there of Isaiah 56 — he will give them a place better than sons and daughters, actually a better place than daughters and sons, and their name will never be cut off. There's kind of a Wolfmueller joke at the end of that.

So that's how I got into all of this. If you haven't noticed in your folder for the conference here, I do have an outline. It's "Soul Care with Families with LGBT-Plus Members." So if you happen to fall asleep during my presentation, you'll at least get something out of it. I want you to turn to the last page, the resource list. Our presentations thus far in this conference have been very good, based on material, good food for thought, ways that we need statistics, argumentation, perspective, so that we can engage in conversation. My presentation is really aimed at being practical — something you can take home and implement in your own congregation, your ministry, give to your pastor, maybe use in your classroom, or use in your own home. Talk about it with your family and friends as well.

So I'm going to start actually from the bottom, with the Truth Exchange. There's this guy — a retired professor, Presbyterian flavor, much like Dr. Sinclair in so many ways in their circles — his name is Reverend Dr. Peter Jones. He does his ministry at truthxchange.com, and I have the website right there. I came upon his books actually through something that Brian posted on a Wednesday or something a couple of years ago, and I bought his books. He teaches — or taught — at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; now he's a scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary in California, and so he has different videos and whatnot on his website, but his books are fantastic. He's a New Testament exegete, and he's specialized his work and research into Gnosticism in the early church, specifically in the first century. He's written a number of books that bring great clarity to the Gnostic world in which we live right now. His first book was called — oh, I'm forgetting it now, I don't have it written down, I forget what it is, you'll have to Google him and you'll get it. A number of the bits I put in my presentation come from another book he has — of course this is what happens, your mind blanks in front of people — I don't remember the title, something about "the pagan…" Anyway, he's fantastic in giving us perspective and understanding into the Gnostic world in which we live.

The next one, going up from there, is the Holy Sexuality Project, developed by Dr. Christopher Yuan of San Diego, California. I have a couple of his books up here if you want to look — Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: A Qualitative Study of Reducing Marginalization of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Same-Sex-Attracted Students at Christian Colleges and Universities, by Christopher Yuan, and Holy Sexuality and the Gospel. The greatest gift he's giving out right now is this right here — you can come up and look at it — it's called the Holy Sexuality Project, you can just go to his website and get it there.

So, long story short: this man grew up first-generation Chinese, not Christian — neither were his parents Christian. He ended up being same-sex attracted, gay, lived that lifestyle, was in graduate school, was going to become a dentist, and then got expelled because he was a drug dealer. He had all these other problems as well, suicidal ideation. Anyway, he comes to faith in jail, of all places, and ends up becoming a professor at Moody Bible Institute for twelve years, and now he goes around to lots of different evangelical churches. He's Baptist in background. But this project, the Holy Sexuality Project, is a twelve-session video series to get parents talking about sexuality in their homes — twenty-to-thirty-minute videos with study guides along with them. It's like a $200,000 project, but you can access it for $20 — it's been sponsored. That's a fantastic way of getting into the conversation about things we're afraid of, don't know how to talk about, because we haven't talked about it — our parents haven't talked to us about it, our grandparents would rather go to their graves than talk about these things, depending on which generation you are. But it exemplifies it, and it's very easy — I think what it does is help us practice this conversation so we're not so timid about it.

Moving up here is the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, developed by the Reverend — sorry, Dr. Preston Sprinkle. He's not a pastor, he's in Boise, Idaho. I first came across his stuff about two years ago, and I've used his books and his series, Grace/Truth 1.0 and Grace/Truth 2.0, for the LGBT-plus support group I started at my congregation about a year and a half ago — a little over a year ago now. I don't agree with everything Dr. Sprinkle says. If you've been attuned to different news around this in the last couple of days, Rosaria Butterfield took him to task, along with some others, about false teachings and heresies, saying, "You've got to stay away from these guys." I'm not going to take that hard a line, I guess, as she does — though I will agree with some of what she says. His biggest error is that he doesn't understand concupiscence. He has a chapter that says the temptation to sin is not sin, and so you don't have to be ashamed about being gay. I think Yuan would also take him to task on that. He says you should not define yourself as a "gay Christian," and all those kinds of classifications and taxonomies are of the devil, because it all comes from Freud. We didn't stick people into different silos and boxes until Freud came along and said, well, there are homosexuals and there are heterosexuals, and then there are bisexuals, and then pansexuals, and then asexuals, and you need to identify yourself somewhere along this line, this stack of silos. No — we are made by our heavenly Father, clearly male or clearly female, for holy sexuality, whether you're married or unmarried, whether you're divorced or widowed or waiting to be married, whatever it is. But he's got some good material, and I really like his approach, his video series, his books — it really helps, in a small group, to help people in the conversation.

So there's my very long introduction. And I say all of this, I think, to give you a higher perspective, to understand and approach this topic in your own mind as you rehearse it with individuals you must live with or minister to as well.

Dr. German's presentation yesterday — my mind just went like this: you see the parallel between the beauty of us, our complementary nature as man and woman, and our heavenly Father's love for us, his giving of his Son, Jesus Christ, and his abiding with us always by his Holy Spirit. There's a wonderful picture there. So I want, as you listen to my presentation, to think of this picture: the Divine Service. Yes, the Divine Service. Dr. Nagel, of blessed memory, was so marvelous in so many ways — if you didn't know it, the foreword to Lutheran Worship was eventually penned by him, and I'll paraphrase it here. He says that our rhythm of worship is God to us, and we back to God, speaking back to him those words which are most sure and true. It's a wonderful conversation that, for some reason beyond our understanding, has endured for two thousand years. And when you look at it from an objective perspective, the world out there says, "Oh, that's really weird — why is that guy wearing a dress?" It doesn't understand it. It's so foreign to this world that constantly runs away from its Creator. But there's great wisdom in that, and hopefully my presentation will connect some dots there.

Part of this also came from a comment Matt Richard posted on Facebook the last couple of days about liturgical boredom. He said something along the lines of: the reason people are leaving the Lutheran Church in droves is because they've become bored. They don't understand, they don't see the beauty, the use of this great treasure that has abided in the Christian Church — the universal Christian Church — for time immemorial. So maybe think about that: the conversation of the Divine Service, of all the Services of the Word, of God to us, us to God, speaking back to him — as you practice in your own mind having a conversation you've wanted to share, for years and years, with a parishioner, maybe a family member, a neighbor down the street.

So I'll get into my outline. "Jesus Changes Hearts and Lives." I have a dear friend who lived in the LGBT community and lifestyle, much like Dr. Christopher Yuan, for many years, and he said to me, "Man, nobody's going to want to change and leave that community — which is loving, which is inclusive, which is caring, which provides for you. They're not going to want to leave that community and lifestyle, which feels good to the flesh, until they know Jesus." So our focus should always be simply John the Baptist: point to Jesus, point to Christ. And, you know, good presentation certainly has its place — the statistics, the knowledge, the argumentation, the apologetics of it — but that's not the Word that works faith, that strengthens faith, that keeps the faith. So in all of it, keep yourself focused on Jesus, and the Divine Service helps us with that.

So a few examples from Jesus' ministry. First off, Jesus calling his disciples — Simon and Andrew the fishermen, James and John — Jesus calling them to himself: "Come, follow me, and I'll make you fishers of men. Come, follow me, and I'll give you purpose. Come, follow me, and I'll give you identity, a place to belong." And then there's this joyful camaraderie of learning what it is to be a follower of Christ — an invitation.

Along Jesus' way he meets two figures I think are good to dwell upon. One would be Zacchaeus, who of course is the outcast of the outcasts, and I think there are parallels to the LGBT-plus community today as well. They feel as though they're outcasts from the church, and so we have a lot of liberal churches raising the flags, saying "everyone is welcome." I don't know that all LCMS churches do that. I'd like to have a sign that says "only sinners welcome" — I don't know what that would look like, but my elders prohibit me from doing that. So Jesus comes his way, and as you know it goes, he comes to his house, into his life. So Jesus changed Zacchaeus's heart and his life, and you see it in his life afterward — he gives back four times over what he had defrauded. That's Luke 19.

And then we have the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus comes and breaks all social norms. In my youth group a few years ago — probably four years ago now — I used to think I was a real hip young pastor, and all these young kids would want to talk to me, and I was very personable, told funny jokes, things like that. Evidently they said, "No, Pastor, our LGBT friends — you're the last person they want to talk to about this." I thought, what? How am I supposed to give help? And I think there's a parallel here: in first-century culture, Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman just wouldn't have happened. He broke down the preconceived notions. Because with the LGBT community, they watch these videos — the algorithms on whatever app they have say, "You need to watch this video that says pastors, that Bible-believing Christians, are going to tell you you're going to hell and there's no hope for you, and you're the worst person ever." That's kind of what they believe. But Jesus, in this beautiful dialogue, breaks through all of that. He meets her in her shame — she's running away from that — and after that encounter with Jesus, she goes back and tells everyone, "You've got to go find this guy, you've got to go see him — could he be the Christ?"

So Jesus is at the head, in control of all of this conversation, and he's in control of your conversation — the conversation we have in our services, the Divine Service, of God to us and us back to God, speaking back to him those things which we know are most sure and true, are the words the Lord has given us to speak in these situations of conversation with families and with LGBT-plus members.

So — the Incarnation. There is so much to dwell upon as we come into the season of Advent, on why Jesus would leave his ease, right? Our life today in America is all about convenience, about ease. Just think about what life was like — well, if you're from South Dakota, come drive around in the middle of winter and ask why in the world anybody would want to live out there, or northern Minnesota. Our Lord Jesus Christ, for our sakes, leaves all of that. He puts himself underneath the burden, the pain of our flesh, to understand us. He comes our way, and he begins this conversation — he comes from heaven to earth. And once we get back to our services in the church, you cannot go through the church year without understanding, getting, the Incarnation. You have this prep in Advent — he comes, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, as we heard last night. These are the refrains that are always in our minds because of the church and this beautiful union we have with our heavenly Father.

So Jesus understands us. Hebrews 4 says tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin. And in his body — the significance of the Incarnation in his body — as Peter says in 1 Peter 2, he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed, connecting back to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, which the Ethiopian eunuch is reading as Philip shows up on the scene. What does Philip do for the eunuch? Brian made a — I forget if it was a sermon or a joke last night, I don't know the difference sometimes, sorry, I get to roast him today, Bev, she didn't paint me to be like this.

So, as he was talking about — and I think it was Peter Jones that Brian got this from — in the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, there were these men who wanted a better place for themselves in life than being homeless, so they would say, "I want to serve as a priest," and they would emasculate themselves, bathe themselves in bull's blood as a symbol of pagan baptism, and then serve in their bodies — bodies that had been clothed by the evil one in desecrating ways. They mutilated their bodies in service of a pagan god — actually the opposite of the Incarnation, the gift God gives to us. And Philip converts this Ethiopian eunuch. And, two chapters earlier, you get this great promise — for, I think, the transgender people of today — of Isaiah 56.

So Jesus understands us — we have great examples in Scripture of that. And third, Jesus gives us a place to belong. I think you can understand this too: during the COVID time, there were some hidden blessings, and I think one of them was that it caused us to focus on what we know is most sure and true — the Lord's gifts to us. I have a dear friend, we'll call him David, and during that time he had no other Christian colleagues and friends except at the church. He had no family around except at the church. And we said, during those days, during those weeks, "You have no family — the Divine Service is silenced." The song of salvation had been halted for fear of something we don't know, something unseen, this nebulous knowledge out there of what other people were telling us. And so we lost all things.

But within the church, Jesus gives us a place. He names us there, and he blesses us all the way. In that place we hear the conversation, we practice it — what God has said to us, and what we say back to him — so that we can say it in confidence to other people. It's the conversation of corporate confession and absolution, of the Incarnation, our place with Jesus, underneath him, and he is our head, and our place in the choir. I think, for LGBT people, they migrate to certain communities — here in Milwaukee they call it the Third Ward, down in St. Louis it's the Central West End, different places all around — and they come into this community surrounded by the same conversation. In the church, we come from communities of every stripe, but we come into the same conversation, centered not around the identity we make for ourselves, but the identity given to us by Christ. There's a place for everybody at the communion rail, confessing their sins. There's a place for everybody at the baptismal font, as their sins are washed away. There's a place for everyone to sing in the choir, no matter how bad your voice is, as he confesses the faith, the Apostles' Creed of the historic church. And so there's an attachment to this broad community, this mystical body of Christ. In that we have these healing attributes of the body of Christ, as he gives to us his divine Word and his sacraments.

Evidently the first constitution of the Missouri Synod said any congregations and pastors that are not actively practicing individual confession and absolution should actively work toward reinstituting and emphasizing that practice once again. In my first years of ministry, I had a vicar doing campus ministry, and he had a student come in — we'll call him Jim — and Jim confessed his problems to him, and the vicar said, "Oh, I can't help you with this, you need to go see Pastor Worm." So I brought him into my office. He had a stuttering problem, and I had to be so patient with him — he'd speak a word, and then thirty seconds later another word would come out, and after an hour and a half he finally got it out: he had been raped. I knew the man, he was nineteen years old, and he thought that because of that, because of the sin done to him, there was no hope for him. That's the voice — not the Divine Service voice, not the preaching-of-the-Word voice — that's the voice of the evil one, that other conversation. And so I said, "Jim, I've got good news for you, come on up here, give me a minute" — I put my pastor stuff on, and, stammering through it, he confessed his sins, and I absolved him. It wasn't anything spectacular. He was, again, on his motorcycle afterward — I was just talking to him about his pretty sweet ride. And I said to him afterward, "What would have happened if you hadn't come in today?" And just like that he said, "I would have killed myself."

So my point here is that these healing attributes of the body of Christ give life. They cut away the sin, as confession does — especially individual confession and absolution. It makes you form your lips around your sin and spit it out. Very cathartic. It cuts it off, it removes it. And so in the church we have these healing attributes to the body of Christ: sanctification and the truth, order restored in the church and in the individual.

Bev had a slide up earlier juxtaposing "the way, the truth, and the life" versus — I forget what the acronym was — but it was kind of redefining what truth is. And this goes back to pointing people to Jesus. We want to follow Jesus, as the Greeks said to Philip, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Ongoing holiness and treatment: atonement removes sin and makes holy. In the Old Testament you had the hands of the priest on the scapegoat, all the sins of the people, and it was sent away, and then you have the blood of atonement for this sin and that sin, for all these other sins — the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, covers over all your sins.

So let me be very explicit here: the ongoing holiness and treatment that our Lord gives to you in his Divine Service — think of everything Kleinig has written, if you've read it, his commentary on Leviticus, or any of his talks on the Divine Service as being the hearth, the place from which the family gathers and is granted life. That's around the altar, around the pulpit, the Word that is given to us. And from that altar, that fire goes out to your family, provides protection in life for you. It should also give you a picture in your mind of the reality of the heavenly Divine Service that's going on, that the saints before us are in — this hymn that never ends, with all the angels and archangels gathered around the throne and the Lamb, around the river of life, around the light of Christ in the world.

And all of this — this holiness of God — comes not to crush us, to squash us down, like the devil wants for all sinners, but to believe, like Jim, whom I talked to you about earlier. He comes to us to lay his hands upon us and take away our guilt, take away our shame, take away the guilt of our action, the shame of our silence for not speaking on these issues, not knowing how to talk about it to these people. All of that is taken away, for he is the propitiation for our sins, and not our sins only, but for the sins of the whole world. So every time you join in this joyous conversation — what God has told you, and you speak back to him — remember this: that his words are your words. His absolution is the absolution for you, and his life now lives within you, so you can go confidently and courageously to speak of these things you don't think you're able to speak of.

There's atonement for the individual, as with my little story about Jim, the nineteen-year-old who was offended and grieved in his body. Hebrews 2:17: "Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people." So we ever have Jesus forgiving us. We ever have Jesus forgiving those for whom we meet. So we point them to Jesus — he's our solution.

A path of Gnosticism today — this really comes from Peter Jones, the scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary in California. I still can't remember the name of his book — it starts with "pagan" something — I wish I remembered. He's written a bunch of books and I'm just embarrassed I don't have it in front of me. Anyway, about Peter Jones — I'll do this as quickly as I can. Gnosticism, at its very roots, exists at all times and in all places throughout humanity. It started in the intertestamental period — it arose actually as a Jewish heresy, and then it migrated over into the Christian church, and the early church fathers had to fight Gnosticism. Peter Jones argues that Paul writes in his letters against Gnosticism, and if you look at the trigger words — like Dr. German was talking about the other day — as you read through the epistles and focus on the words "flesh" and "knowledge," "body" and "spirit," if you're reading Peter Jones, your brain just explodes with this, and you get to see the parallels between the early Christian church and our church today, and the struggles we have today.

Along with that, you had the Roman roads expanding far to the east, going to the west, and right in the middle is Israel, the Promised Land, where all roads meet — you have to go through Greece and so forth over to Rome. So you have all these different ideas and philosophies and religions and technologies that come out of the East, and they meld themselves with the religion of Judaism during that day, and you get all these heresies, because God is silent — he's not speaking by the mouth of his prophets. And then the early church gets to be the recipient of this other heresy, but they have to refine themselves in their teaching on the doctrine of Christ, of who Christ is, who came in the flesh — then they have to refine their doctrine on the Trinity. Maybe today it's just refining our doctrine on the body — theology of the body. And that's not such a bad thing.

So, going to the philosophy of our times: I'm going to run through Enlightenment, rationalism, modernism, postmodernism. If you don't know Gene Veith — well, come talk to Bev or me or somebody, he's fantastic. His latest book, The Spirit of Our Age: Christian Renewal in Post-Christian Society — I think that's the title — he gives, I think, a digestible way to run through how we got to where we are right now, and then he proposes a new definition, which is constructivism.

So — Gnosticism today, and the philosophy of the time. I'll go quickly through Enlightenment, rationalism, modernism, postmodernism. In the eighteenth century, mankind started to value human happiness and the pursuit of knowledge by means of reason and the senses, and this comes out of the scientific revolution before it, and it preps the way for modernism, which comes a hundred years or so later. Along the way we have rationalism, which regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge — reason is the source of knowledge, or its justification. So at this time, with Enlightenment and this pursuit toward knowledge, with rationalism, you have knowledge standing in authority over other things, like Scripture. And then we get, in the 1970s, the battle for the Bible coming out of that.

Then after that we get this wave of modernism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — the world is in turmoil at this time, World War I, World War II, revolutions in Europe prior to that. And so it begins to be this kind of age of rebellion, a step away from whatever your father talked about, whatever your father valued, a step away from religion, rejecting that in this pursuit of knowledge by means of reason. It's not as though the Gnostic underpinnings were gone — there is still this pursuit of knowledge, really, over the last, well, speaking of Gnosticism, about 2,400, 2,500 years or so now. So there's still this pursuit of knowledge, but the end of that knowledge, and the direction of that pursuit, has changed through Enlightenment, rationalism, and modernism.

So let me get to postmodernism — I guess what we grew up in, if you want to classify it that way. Everything's relative — you can have your truth, I can have my truth, and we'll all just get along, but we can talk about it, and we would, to some degree, respect other people's opinions on things and listen to each other. All aspects of human psychology during this time were socially determined. That was a stepping stone to where we are right now. What it did was make the search for knowledge — that our fathers had through reason and logic — invalid. How are you supposed to come to common ground and understanding if you don't have reason, logic, and nothing is sure and nothing is true? Going back to Nagel's foreword: speak back to God what is most sure and true — great words of peace, in the regularity of our services, of a Divine Service, and a peace that lasts, that has lasted two thousand years and will last until Christ comes again.

So, at this time, all aspects of human psychology are said to be completely socially determined. Well, who gets to decide that? We have government overstepping its bounds, as Dr. Anderson was saying yesterday — morality gets decided by some vote, as if that's the highest end of all authority. So then Veith proposes this constructivism, which is what he says we're in these days, where you have this authority of feelings. So no longer is it "your truth, my truth" — at least then we could discuss some kind of truth we think is real — now it's got to be feelings. "I have to accept your feelings, you have to accept my feelings" — but I can't have your feelings, you can't have my feelings; feelings are just there, and there's nothing objective about them whatsoever. All basis of conversation is just ripped right out from underneath you.

So for our generation today — and I think what causes so much of this anxiety, so much of the depression, is that everything is hoisted upon our young people's shoulders. They need to manufacture, for themselves, an understanding of their place within the cosmos, of their value before the world, of their value to themselves. And all they can judge and follow their compass upon is their feelings — which are, well, you know what Jesus says about feelings: as fickle as can be. So all of this rests upon me, and upon my fears.

The joy that I think we have, in bringing this to our burdened ones — burdened by these various temptations and lack of knowledge of where they're supposed to be in the world — is this: right back to the Divine Service, right here, right at the communion rail, confessing their sins with all the rest of us. You want to hear what a sinner is? You come talk to me. They have a place, and all that weight is taken off by him who bore all our offenses upon the tree. The basis of truth — lowercase truth, or capital-T Truth — for the constructivist, the basis of truth and of all knowledge and of all things is upon me. But Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

Gnosticism in the first century — I just talked about that a little bit earlier, and it just dawned on me, I guess I never knew this, I must not have paid attention when I was a student. The pagan world's complaint against the Christians, for the first three hundred years before the Edict of Milan, was that they were atheists — they believed there was only one God, and didn't believe in hundreds or thousands of gods like all the other Gnostics did in that age. You just had to be a Gnostic living in that Greco-Roman culture. But with Gnosticism, flesh and matter were just utilitarian. You could use your flesh, in the Gnostic understanding, in one of two ways: you could use your flesh, and your flesh should be used to deny everything about it, so you could ascend your mind to the divine — whatever the divine is — or you could use your flesh as a utilitarian object or matter, kind of like you'd rent a tractor, something like that — you'd just use it for your own purposes. And so we get the hookup culture today out of that Gnostic understanding, that the body doesn't matter, you just use your body for whatever makes you feel good, because your feelings are your highest truth. In Gnosticism, in the first and second century, you had this pursuit of knowledge around these gurus, these teachers, with people assembled around them going after the same sort of desire for knowledge. We have the same thing today — just look at all the different followers on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook. Those are the thought influencers. So today it's just Gnosticism remarketed — we have these thought influencers of today.

Knowledge versus faith: our arguments don't convert people, Jesus converts people. So we point them to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, the one who delivers to us all knowledge by his divine — point C — deliverance, the deliverance of the faith through the body of Christ. I never thought about it this way until recently: the UPS guy will actually take packages for you and ship them away — I'm always just receiving packages from the UPS guy. And within the body of Christ, I guess, for me as a pastor, and as a layman, I've valued so much receiving from Christ. Remember when I got ordained, on this side and not that side — I didn't get to hear "and," instead it was "by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ." And it was such a burden, but then I kind of flipped my brain around, and I could trust that those words are for me as well. So we have this deliverance of the faith in the body of Christ.

Saint Paul's example: he says, "to know Christ, and him alone, and him crucified" — 1 Corinthians 2 — and "the truth is in Jesus" — Ephesians 4 — "you are bought with a price" — 1 Corinthians 6. So Saint Paul contends for knowledge, but it's not just some ethereal knowledge out there — it's the knowledge of Jesus Christ, that he came in the flesh for you. We have Saint Jude's example, as he says, "contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints."

I'll tell a little story, and then we'll get to some questions. I had a girl a number of years ago — call her Julie — whose parents brought her to me. Her dad was a Missouri Synod pastor. They drove four and a half hours, once a month, to come see me, because they heard I had worked with transgender people. Well, this young girl had some health problems, and, unbeknownst to her parents, she got on some message boards, chat boards, things like that, influenced by this other community, this other conversation. I think she was preyed upon by a lesbian activist, really, to convince her that she was an ugly woman and that she was supposed to be a man. Beautiful hair, beautiful — the pinnacle of God's creation in so many ways — but she was ill, she had an autoimmune disease for some time. Just the crazy stories you hear in pastoral ministry — I have no reason to doubt this family, but they said the FBI was tapping their phone line and their internet, because Child Protective Services tried to take their daughter away numerous times. And every month, even through the winter, they'd make a four-and-a-half-hour drive up to Brookings. Well, God be praised — through patient conversation with her, an immense amount of prayer, and stumbling through things, asking God for forgiveness — she now has a marvelous boyfriend, and she has regained the physical capabilities that her disease had taken from her for a period of time, and she's just so content and so joyful — she doesn't want to take her life or run away from her family anymore. So when I say "contend for the faith," that's what her parents did, to such a great extent, and it saved the life of their child.

"LGBT-Plus: A Conversation for the Soul" — this comes out of Dr. Preston Sprinkle's material, the Center for [Faith, Sexuality and Gender], Grace/Truth 1.0 and 2.0. I've boiled it down: people are not issues. So transgenderism is an issue we should talk about — it's a political ideology — but the flesh, it matters, right? The flesh matters. We have this commonality, this understanding, on whichever side you're on — the LGBT community or the conservative Christian community — that the flesh does matter. The flesh is joined together in mind and body and spirit — there's not this separation that Gnosticism wants to make, doing away with one or the other for the sake of the other. But the flesh matters. Why does the flesh matter? Because Christ died in his flesh for us. What kind of hope do we have? Well, the flesh comes to us in the Lord's Supper.

Point B, "the fulfilling life": life with Christ, baptized into his church, is marvelous, and everyone has a place in it. Dr. Christopher Yuan says in his work that he was afraid to be a Christian because he didn't know if the Christians would accept him. And the Lord accepts sinners — he doesn't condone our sin, but he accepts us and gives us a place, a place of forgiveness.

Point: put people before arguments. Logic doesn't work at first, but it needs to be said. All the stuff I've said, the argumentation of Dr. Anderson, all of that does need to be said — you do need to know these statistics, and I think you do need to share that information with your families, your school, your congregation. But for the Gnostic mind today, you can't lead off with that, I think. You have to put people before arguments — step back, slow down, invite them over for dinner.

I have a member — I confirmed her a few years ago — who got into the high school here — I call Brookings the San Francisco of South Dakota, it's so crazy liberal there — and she started to get gender-confused, and stuff like that, and I didn't know what to do with it. Well, I just spent a marvelous weekend with her last week at a conference in the Twin Cities on identity, and she came along and received the teaching there. It was marvelous. For God's Word stands — it's our confidence, our hope, and our security. So remain faithful to the Word and faithful to the care of souls.

Preston Sprinkle, near the end of one of his sessions, talks about Aslan the lion — you know how that goes, right, at the end — I forget the young man's line — he says, "He's not safe, but he's good." And so the Lord, in his holiness — it's not safe, he's a refining fire — but he's good for us. There's eternal safety for sinners to have a place among those who are being sanctified, and there's eternal goodness under the care of the Lion of Judah, and in that we have great pictures of strength for our salvation.

So I'll wrap up here with this model, at least what I've been doing, for the LGBT-plus family and friend support group. For a number of years, I had people in my congregation come to me and say, "Pastor, is there any support group?" We have grief support groups, we have AA support groups, we have NA support groups, we've got support groups for this, that, and the next thing. "Is there one for LGBT?" I'd say no. Talk to my colleagues — they'd say no too. So finally I said, I'll start one. And I did, using these resources I've listed out here from Preston Sprinkle, which is okay, and Christopher Yuan, which is okay as well. And so if you want to do this — and I would encourage you to — I think you can. Take up the mantle, the conversation, be courageous, and just put it on the calendar, put something together through these resources, or, if I ever get my act together, I'll put out a resource as well. Briefly talk and discuss some points, ask a few questions, listen, and absolve, and point them, of course, to Jesus.

I would say this: when I started it, I thought, "Oh boy, we're going to have the room full, there's going to be forty people here" — I'd never done a support group before. No, there weren't. There were six. Six have come back every month since, and we've grown to twelve now, and it's been marvelous. The members that I've experienced, that need this conversation so much, are so afraid to have a conversation. They don't want you to know about it, Pastor — but of course you know about it. They don't want the teacher to know about it, but of course the teacher knows about them too. And so the approach with them has to be patient, and gentle, and kind, just like your Good Shepherd coming to you, but it's faithful. Over the course of time, they'll let you in — they'll tell their stories, and there's this great cathartic effect in the body of Christ, that when one member suffers, all suffer, and when one rejoices, all rejoice. So they'll share in the lows, they'll share in the highs, and they'll be supported along the way. And something you just never back off on is the forgiveness of sins. My goodness, the amount of guilt that parents have over "causing" their child to be transgender, "causing" their child to be gay — the amount of guilt pastors have for not being able to teach on it, or teach on it adequately, or follow up on it — the amount of anger you have as well, all these other emotions — all of them are removed by the regular conversation we know so well with our Lord and Savior, in the Divine Service, in the services of this church. And so that is yours.

So that's what I have, and I have five minutes left for questions. Is that acceptable? All right — questions for Pastor Matthew Worm.

Question: What do you call the group you do at your congregation? [inaudible] And the title is probably…?

Pastor Worm: Sure — I call it STILL. Pardon, repeat the question? [The question is what he calls his group.] You can call it whatever you like, but I call mine STILL — it's an acronym for "Speaking Truth in Love," which is so hard to do. You have parents who love their children but are afraid to death to talk to their kids about what they're struggling with. So that's kind of loosely what I based it off of, and it's good — for questions, put it on the calendar, members say, "STILL — what's that? Making some moonshine, Pastor?" No, we're making some other kind of balm for the soul, by God's Word.

Question: I've got Mark Barth's — is the Holy Sexuality Project adaptable for younger children?

Pastor Worm: Yeah, Christopher Yuan's Holy Sexuality Project — like I said, I've got a little printout of what the study guides are for it up here. It's really for teenagers, but he says this: when you relegate the conversation of sexuality to the experts, you've lost already. When you relegate it to the teachers, to the pastors, and you don't talk about it at home, you've lost already. You've got to talk about it at home. He gives a great tool — my opinion is you can't watch his videos or read his material without having a conversation afterward. It's just so profound.

Another question: I have a number of parishioners — they don't come to church much, and they have adult children who are in this lifestyle. I don't know if they know that I know about it. Any advice? I've tried to visit with these folks…

Pastor Worm: Yeah, similarly in my congregation I have numerous same-sex-attracted, tempted, and transgender people, and parents with children — similarly, one of my church leaders, his wife has two sons who identify as transgender. But for some of these families, I invite them month after month, and they're just not quite to that point. So I pray for them, I speak to them when the Lord opens a door, and I write letters to them. Just — honestly, the emotional response I have in myself, of getting myself to step out courageously to begin this conversation — you have no clue where it's going, you just know you love this family, you love that person. It's like the first time I asked my wife out on a date — I was scared. But the Lord blessed us.

Another question, kind of piggybacking on the last one: are there parameters within your support group? Is it only for those personally struggling, or for parents, grandparents, relatives? How does that work, and do you have any age parameters?

Pastor Worm: Yeah, it's just — the group I started is for family and friends of LGBT-plus people, and it encompasses anyone around that topic. It's not just Lutherans, not just my members who come — there's a Roman Catholic family, a Wesleyan family, we have another guy from another LCMS congregation as well. You just talk about it, and there's this great cathartic effect, just having somebody to talk with, being in a safe place where you can be honest about your struggles with your daughter, your stepson, your wife even, on these issues — it's so absolutely complex. At the end of it I just say, "Well, I haven't really helped you guys," and they say, "No, Pastor, you did, because we got to practice the conversation. We got to speak about the things that have been in our minds, keeping us up at night for weeks on end, but we have a safe place, surrounded by the Word of God and prayer." And I bring it back into the routine I have — absolution and the Lord's Prayer, right — just these simple elements of what God has spoken to us, that we speak back to him.

Please join me in thanking Pastor Worm.