Finding Courageous Hope – Dr. Kleinig, Rev. Senkbeil, Dr. Yahnke

Transcript (edited for readability).

Good order, chaos. There's a remark from Luther's treatise Against the Heavenly Prophets which has haunted me since I noticed it about five years ago. And by the way, it's a treatise that's well worth reading in our present context. It comes out of the Peasants' War and social chaos in the middle of the Reformation. Luther says — he's speaking about the devil as the enemy of God's order. The devil is the enemy of God's order. Now, I think we are seeing that. It's always been the case, but I think we're seeing the truth of that more and more in the public domain.

This came home to me when my parish was vacant and I took a confirmation class in 2010. At the end of this class, I got the students to reflect, and I said, "Look, what part of the catechism did you find personally and pastorally most helpful?" Now, I expected them to focus on the Second Article or Baptism. Do you know what they all said was the part that was most helpful? The Ten Commandments. And the penny dropped, because — and I can't go into all of it — but in each of the nine members of the class was very much a fear of chaos: the chaos of their parents separating, the possible chaos of them getting married and being divorced, the chaos they'd seen in older siblings who got into trouble because they were living together, all the way through to mental chaos. All of them knew someone who had issues with mental illness. All of them knew somebody who was suicidal. Everything else in between.

And to some extent I had prepared them for that, because as I taught the Ten Commandments, what I focused on was that each of the Ten Commandments, as Luther says, protects a good gift from God. It's God's provision of order for life on planet earth — not just for Christians, but for everybody.

Round about the same time, I heard of a Lutheran pastor — I think it was Wallace Schulz, don't quote me on this, but I think it was him — who had been teaching in Kazakhstan, teaching basically Law and Gospel. He outlined the classic Lutheran teaching, you know: the three functions of the Law, and distinguishing Law and Gospel. And then at the end of that he asked the class, "Which of these is good news?" Do you know what they said? The Law. Because of the chaos that had resulted from communism, for them the Ten Commandments were good news.

Now, my generation was enamored with the rhetoric of freedom — the freedom of the Gospel. We prized freedom, and above all we feared order, because we understood order in the sense of a control mechanism, oppression, and all that kind of stuff — you know that well. One of the most important discoveries I've made in my life as a pastor and as a theologian is the biblical teaching, and the Lutheran teaching, on God's good order, as summarized in Genesis 1 — which is really not so much about the creation of the world as the ordering of the world — and it's there in the last part of the catechism: Holy Orders. The teaching that God has established orders for the transmission and reception of his blessings. Orders that are not there for him to exercise power over us, to control us, to exploit us, to oppress us — orders that protect human beings and life on earth from evildoing and from the devil.

Luther uses a very vivid picture of that. He says each of the orders is a wall, a city wall that protects us. In one place he has the picture of three or four sets of walls, like a city — you have the city, the city wall right at the center, and then you have three or four circles of walls beyond it. Luther teaches there are four basic orders, four basic walls that keep the enemy out from destroying these orders.

First there's the natural order, the life-giving, life-sustaining order on the earth. We're becoming increasingly aware of that with the science of ecology. There's the political order — of righteousness and justice, fairness we'd call it these days — for life and community, with systems of reward for good and punishment and penalties for evil. So: natural order, political order, domestic order — the order of human love, for the nurture of people in marriage and the family. That order is the basic unit in society. And then there's the holy order of the church, which focuses on the divine service, with the reception of heavenly blessings for holy living by the saints here on earth.

Now, we are seeing with our own eyes direct attacks on all four of those orders. Those four orders are under obvious attack out in public. Now the problem is that we get hoodwinked and fail to see who the real enemy is. People think the problem is Wall Street, or Obama, or feminism. Who's the real enemy that's attacking us? The devil. And he's the only enemy, ultimately. And since he is attacking God's orders, we needn't get overly pessimistic, because God is still God, and his judgment is at work in our world. Keep your eyes open and you will see the judgment of God coming upon the country of America as a result of the violation of these four orders. God protects the orders — we don't have to protect them. God maintains these orders; we just need to respect them. They are God's orders. He cares for them, and people violate them to their own detriment.

So what should be our approach in the face of this cultural mayhem? Number one: we need to teach and preach God's ordinances — notice there's a connection between "ordinance" and "order." By his ordinance, his word, God establishes order and maintains order on planet earth. We need to teach them with his holy law, the Ten Commandments — our best data on that. Secondly, we need to respect these orders by living according to God's law in them. Thirdly, we need to put our hope not in political or social solutions, but in God. No political messiah, no second messiah after Obama can save the USA — only Jesus can. We need to put our hope in God, and to have people hoping not in princes, but in the Prince. Lastly, and most modestly and powerfully of all, we need to live faithful lives according to our station and vocation in each of these orders. Can I repeat that? The best that I can do in the face of cultural mayhem is to live according to my station, my position, in each one of those four orders — to live according to my station and my calling in each of these orders. Thank you.

My life, professionally, is a life that charts the course of disorder and dysfunction and disaffection in the lives of many other people. We have the wonderful opportunity to gather at this rather idyllic place for a weekend, leaving behind us, in many ways, the world. I haven't heard the news since Thursday, thanks be to God. This is an idyllic place — after all, we have Dr. Kleinig teaching, Philip Magness on the organ bench, the comfort and refreshment of divine service this morning, and some of you actually sat with your spouse in divine service for the first time in a long time this morning. And today, a final day of teaching and talking and thinking and planning, and, of course, eating, because that's what we do here.

And yet we're preparing, in these days, to go back to our real lives — lives that are a little less ordered than these, lives often rich and full with schedules and children and bustle and spouses and expectations and deadlines and too much to do. And yet that's not all, because we go back to a world that is predictably continuing its descent in what we know is a fallen world.

It occurs to me that I have been angrier of late than I have ever been in my adult life. I'm not actually a very angry person, and psychologists aren't well regarded if they're angry people — you don't want to break up with your spouse's back, it's just not good for business, after all. Now, I'm not angry with people, but I'm angry at what I believe many of us have detected. I believe there are many people among us — perhaps like me — who increasingly begin to feel somewhat helpless and increasingly vulnerable, in a world that seems progressively less safe, a world that seems progressively less sane.

I'm older than many of you, but I grew up in a Norman Rockwell bubble that promised all kinds of good and safe things, and the bubble burst, and I realized Norman Rockwell was not the source to whom I needed to turn for certainty and for comfort. I think many of us want to live a Lake Wobegon life, but the calamity of the events around us, and the chaos around us, prevents it.

I suspect that much of my anger and malaise is fed by social media, where the blogs and the web pages and the tweets insist that I pay attention, and insist that I fix something, do something, make something happen — because after all, every post is proclaiming the hopelessness of the situation, or the acute danger of the situation, and demands that I, along with everyone else, rise to levels of righteous wrath and do combat with all that is not good, right, and salutary in our world. And I am a simple person with simple means, and cannot take it on.

We are pushed each day, in every calamity, ever more toward the order of God and reliance upon him and his gifts. There are word explosions of all sorts — the news, Facebook, every imaginable activity contributes to our malaise. They're arguing for sanity and life and morality and common sense, and those are good things. But as the world argues itself into a little puddle of sweat, we begin to withdraw from it, and are overwhelmed by it, and feel that it may, in fact, be a world that is spinning out of control and out of order completely.

The dysfunction is no surprise to any of us who've been breathing air outside. The physical disorder at the macro level — our planet is either getting warmer or colder, and we know that the earth is quaking and flooding and shaking, and thousands of acres of fire are burning in some places, and shortages of precious metals, water, and air are occurring in other places. Our planet is in tumult.

At the home front, this morning we heard in the homily — and on my heart is clearly the awareness of the recent video revelations that have razored their way into our world: casual conversations about precious, small, yet-to-be-born lives that are being destroyed and dissected and sold. Our culture has become painfully aware that we have now moved to an economy where there is a commodification of baby body parts, and we are outraged, and we are horrified, and it is conscience-free, senseless destruction. And in that moment when we feel completely and utterly helpless, we turn to our God, and we say all that he has given us to say: have mercy upon us. Because there's nothing else left for us to say.

Abroad, ISIS continues a relentless journey through the landscape, distinguishing themselves as barbarians, delighting in senseless death and destruction. And as videos document their horror, we hear echoes of, "I thought we said never again," after the Holocaust. At the international level there is death and danger and threat, and we make agreements with dangerous men endeavoring to make nuclear weapons, and young women and young men continue to be shipped home in flag-draped boxes. We weep, and the loss is immeasurable, and we're tempted to hate other people and hate other cultures and hate other societies. But let us take all that rage and all that hate and direct it toward Satan indeed, who is the father of all lies and at the root of all destruction.

We reel in response to judgments made by others concerning disorder and calamity. You're all aware of the Supreme Court decision that shredded forever the concept of conjugal marriage, and in its wake, religious liberties are imperiled and will continue to be disputed in the years to come. In the state of Kentucky, preliminary legislation has been passed forbidding preachers to call homosexual behavior a sin — it is now illegal to do that — and we're left speechless at the arrogance and the consequences of such a judgment.

Disordered life and emotions are on parade absolutely everywhere, as the media lifts high its transgender hero, Caitlyn Jenner, and we wince, and we look away, and we turn our children's faces away, and we feel both pity and great sadness, and perhaps anger as well. Little ones as young as five are being encouraged to explore their sexuality when they're still trying to distinguish dogs from cats at that age. Junior high schoolers are getting to use the bathroom and shower rooms of the sex with which they identify. That's nuts. And I'm licensed to make those judgments. It is no longer legal for psychologists to counsel teens against transsexual behavior. It is illegal for me to assist individuals engaging in therapy to determine whether they can become more effective at managing such sex attractions. It's illegal for me to do that. We treat mental illness surgically, and lop off sexual body parts, assuaging the gender confusion of souls who are suffering.

We're marinating in a culture of death and a culture of dysfunction, and what frightens and angers me the most is that this has become normal, and our children are growing up in an age where that has become normal, and that is tragic beyond calibration in my mind. And so let's not miss this sobering fact: that just recently a nine-foot, two-ton statue of a goat-headed Satan was erected in Detroit, as the go-to destination for those seeking a satanic temple. The enemy is on the march, and is already capturing territory, again and again, more publicly now, and more openly. And that, of course, at the same time, scripture verses are being removed from public buildings and memorials. And we respond to it with dismay and disgust and contempt, and a desire to make it all stop. And the bad news is: it will not all stop.

In fact, we are probably at one of the peak times in terms of the well-functioning of our universe, and the more individuals with whom you talk professionally, the greater the likelihood that we will continue to devolve — physically, morally, structurally, and socially — as the years pass. That is not happy news for the Christian. And we say, what do we do with that? We should do something. So we write a letter to an editor, or we craft a new blog, or we share Facebook posts that sing to the choir of our friends, and we become news junkies, and chronicle the passing away of several dead decades of the most orderly time our planet has known — and it hasn't been all that orderly.

But at some point something very frightening happens, and I believe it happens when we simply surrender. And we shrug, and we begin to adopt the mantra of our culture, which says, "It is what it is. Whatever." Exactly — as if we as Christians can simply shrug our shoulders and walk away from a world that is fast fading from virtue and hope. But it is God's world. It is not Satan's world. Satan is his puppet.

We gain comfort believing that the threats and the danger and the harm and the instability of so many things is out there, and in these days we in the Christian community can still retreat to the safety of our own churches and worshiping communities, and our homes and families, and we simply want to move away from all of the threat, because quite honestly we don't have the time, energy, or wisdom to deal with chaos writ large.

So at some point, what is it we are to do? We surely live and rest in our freedom in Christ. And we don't worry — we live by the light he gives us. We do what we can as God gives us light. We pray for wisdom and guidance and discernment, and move forward in confidence that he will show us the way.

As I've listened to John these last two days, I'll acknowledge that this Christian psychologist is comforted by the fact that theologians understand the magnitude not only of the problems outside us, but the problems inside us as well, and that theologians and pastors alike, in parishes, are going to explore and understand the spiritual and emotional mayhem which afflicts all of us — the idolatry, the despair, the self-reliance, the distorted thinking that creates all the disorder within us — is real, and prompts the need for us to care for one another, and for our pastors to care for us as well. Because without it, the spiritual turmoil will rob us of trust and of hope and of healthy functioning.

Pastors, on the first evening of our gathering together, I said to you that you are the local purveyors of hope. You may recall that. I made the comment that one of the most important things you do, among your many responsibilities, is that you, in fact, bring us God's own hope and comfort for a life and a culture and a community and a world that is hopelessly reeling out of control. You are the purveyor of hope to the helpless, to the grieving, to the angry, to the debased, to the sinned-against, to the demoralized — and they may not hear hope from anyone if they do not hear it from you. Hope is one of the most precious commodities that sustains us in the midst of chaos and in the midst of disorder.

And as John spoke yesterday, how marvelous the inexhaustible comfort of the Word — every weary body, every frightened heart, every confused mind, and every betrayed soul requires comfort and hope. And pastors, we look to you with confidence, because every Sunday that's precisely what you do. You bring to us the Word of God. You bring to us the holy body and blood of our Lord and Savior, and, amid all the chaos and the babble and the bloviations of the world, you quiet our hearts, you bring us into the presence of God, and you speak his truth, and you speak his promises, and you speak his hope, and we are comforted in a way that we cannot be comforted without you. And we thank you for that, and we see you every Sunday, because without you, and without the Word you bring us, we would be so vulnerable, and so helpless, and so alone indeed.

And so, as you have each recommended, all of you in your parishes will continue to absolutely blaze to the throne of our heavenly Father, empty the contents of our hearts to him who made and redeemed us, and then, by his grace, we trust his will will be done. And we wrap our families and our loved ones and our communities in prayer, and commend them to a Father whose tender comfort will provide all that is needed, one day at a time, in the midst of the chaos, whatever may come. And we've gotten to the end of the book, and it ends rather well. And so his grace, his peace, and his mercy are ours, in the midst of, and in spite of, the chaos that surrounds us.

I think some of you have heard me tell this story. In the late '90s, I frequented a used bookstore — if Jane were here, she'd tell you that's one of my prevailing temptations — and I was there on State Street in Madison, looking in this used bookstore, and I found a book in fairly good condition titled Early Christians of the 21st Century. I thought it was out of place; I looked it up, and it was published in 1949. Its thesis was that, given what had happened in postwar America and in the West, by the time of the turn of the century, the dawning of the new millennium, Christianity would be only a lingering distant memory. Collectively, people would no longer be living out of that Christian story. They would no longer know it in terms of their culture. In other words, the church would be in a minority position over against the broader world. And the author made this point: do not despair, because — in other words — we've been there and done that collectively. If you open up the New Testament, the church is in precisely the same position. The church in the book of Acts, in the time of the apostles, is a time of glorious growth and fantastic vitality, as she proclaimed a living Lord and a ransomed kingdom that has no end.

And so I guess that is a theme that struck me at that time, and certainly in the passing decades we've seen how much that has come to pass. Now, of course, we live in this world, and we love it, and those memories that they've talked about — I'm older than she is, but even the younger folks can remember, not that long ago, when things were very predictable and very comfortable. We are indeed in for a rough ride. But we want to be people of good news. We always proclaim the Gospel, which is good news of redemption and salvation. It is a life of order and predictability in a world of chaos and uncertainty.

It was back in 1978 that Malcolm Muggeridge, the late British — I guess you could say — TV commentator, and also the editor of Punch, delivered an important lecture in Canada, actually, to our brothers and sisters there, titled "The End of Christendom." And he too was pointing out that the world as we've known it was coming apart at the seams. And interestingly enough, he said that, in contrast to the invasion of the Christian world that was very comfortable at the time of the Roman Empire, unbeknownst to most, it was not barbarians from outside the gates dismantling the comfortable world — it was from within that this dissolution was coming, and the crumbling was coming from within.

He too pointed to hope, because Christendom is different from Christianity. Christendom is the alliance between the culture — the state — and the church, launched back in the early centuries under, for, Constantine. And that's what we know as that comfortable world in which everything was kind of expected, if not enforced, to be quite predictable and somewhat godly. But that dissolution, that uneasy alliance between church and state, is very clearly fracturing apart. His point again was: this is a time to rise and to shine, to be who we are.

And I guess my word then is a word of encouragement to you. Beginning in your homes, as mother and father, as husband and wife, as Christian, and then in your parishes — that there would be a place of life and light and truth in a world that is quite frankly filled with death and darkness and lies. We must be a people who are a bright beacon of light, and that comes not by way of restriction, but by way of gift, because we know that we shine with a borrowed light — the light of him who is the light of the world, the light whom the darkness cannot overcome.

So it doesn't — it's not rocket science. All we do is dust off our Bibles, open up our hymnals, and we confess the creed, and we turn to the third article, and we see there the formula — for our age, as it has been in every age. "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." You can call that a formula for success. I call it a formula for fidelity and constancy. In the days ahead, I think this third article will be our daily bread.

The Holy Spirit alone calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies his church, and he does it — not me, by my own reason or strength. There's nothing that we can do, humanly speaking, to stem the tide. But our job is not to save the culture, but to save the people for whom Christ died, to live within the culture. And we bring something to this world — we don't simply try to commodify ourselves so that we're more attractive to the prevailing trends of the time. There is an eternal Gospel to proclaim that is not of this world, and yet very much in this world.

The holy Christian church — the fragmentation of people's lives, being so isolated and divided: what our culture gives with one hand, our technology takes away with the other. Instant communication — I've got a bunch of questions here — but it gives with one hand and takes away with the other, and so now we're isolated and fractured and broken apart from one another. And at this time, especially at this time, we need to be deliberately more corporate and connected with one another, to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the right place. It is a communion of saints, of holy people, communion in holy things, where each one must indeed bear his own burden, but we gladly share the burdens of one another, and we do indeed weep with one another and rejoice with one another. And we have brothers and sisters, not just the visible ones, but the ones you cannot see. As G.K. Chesterton said, the church does not disenfranchise the members who happen to have died — they're very much alive and well, thank you very much. And we confess with one voice the same faith that they believed, taught, and confessed during their lifetimes.

We believe in the resurrection of the body. And because — think of the sexual aberrations around us — we need to revisit once again what it means to be created body, soul, and spirit, to live very fleshly — dare I say sexy — lives, faithfully within the covenant of our baptism, and within the institution of holy matrimony, in fidelity to family. In other words, these are times of opportunity, not of despair.

And then, finally, the life everlasting. That's not "what you see is what you get," because what you see is pretty defeating. But we know there is a glorious future, guaranteed in the risen flesh of our Lord Jesus, who calls us to follow him through thick or thin, good times and bad, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse. We are his beloved bride, and he is our groom. He will guard and keep us, and take us to himself. So we find refuge in every time of trouble in his sure word, and in the company of the faithful.

Maybe once again we'll need to know what the ancients meant when they said that the church is a ship of safety and security in an ocean of chaos. We are not hiding away in fear, but rather, boldly and confidently, we follow the one who leads us on. And he says to us: "Behold, I am with you always, even to the close of the age." Tough times, yes — but we need not fear, for he goes with us. Thank you.

Okay, so we have a number of excellent questions, and we'll chat with you about those. We can't promise to get to all of them, because that's a wonderful thing about texting questions — I have immense power. That's the question — power in the world, no authority, but a lot of power here. So I'm going to weed through some of these so that we can get to our closing prayers.

Let's start out with one for John. In the midst of this kind of mayhem that we've been talking about here, is there a role for apologetics in the faith, and what might that be?

Paul gives us the right kind of apologetic. I don't think the rationalistic kind of apologetic works anymore — I doubt whether it ever did — which is to construct all sorts of philosophical arguments which prove the existence of God and disprove all other systems of philosophy. I don't think that works very well; I doubt whether it ever did. The kind of apologetic that I would recommend is the apologetic that Paul talks about in Second Corinthians — chapter — yeah, where am I, uh, you've caught me on the hop here. So — here we are — Second Corinthians chapter 10. He says, "Though we walk in the flesh" — he says — "we are not waging war." That's the apologetic, if you like, "according to the flesh," and that means not rational arguments on the same level. "But the weapons of our warfare" — the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to demolish strongholds. "We destroy arguments, and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ."

He's painting the picture here that every unbeliever — and all of us still, as being in the flesh — has strongholds inside the mind, and particularly in the conscience, in order to keep God out. So there's a stronghold here which keeps God out. And what he says is that he, as a pastor, destroys all the arguments that people use to maintain that castle — the lofty opinions in which I build myself up as my own god and look down on everybody else. There's a picture there of a strong tower: I can sit there and look down on everybody and pass judgment on everybody. He says, we demolish that in order to take every thought captive to Christ.

There is a role in apologetics to clear the ground — not to directly attack people, but to target their conscience, because if you take their conscience, then you take their souls, and then they become obedient to Christ. By the way, part of that targeting of the conscience is targeting the imagination. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the other Inklings were well aware that most educated people have their strongest defenses against God in their mind, their intellect. So it's stupid for us to attack people at the point where their defenses are strong. What you need to do is attack them from behind — subvert their defenses by appealing to their imagination. And that's the kind of apologetic that I think we need. We need Christian preachers who preach not just to the conscience but to the imagination, and above all we need Christian artists who can do that for us.

I can just add to that — there was a hymn somewhere in the handbook, "in definitely season," capturing hearts with his life-giving story. Yes, capturing hearts — and I think that's a challenge. We heard that clearly this weekend, and just a little commercial: that's all I was — sponsoring the Spotlight Passes, only Spotlight, where — passes only, September 20th, Sunday evening, through all day Monday the 21st of September, in St. Louis. And the title is "In the Suburbs of the City of Man." At this point about apologetics, maybe — but I hear John saying there's a place for coming in and clearing the underbrush, but that's not the whole thing in terms of Christian mission. The goal here is to look at what belongs to our common humanity that's been lost. In other words, the thesis of the presenter is that the ancients had a world that was much more helpful for the Christian message, because at least they had a category of the good, the true, and the beautiful. So we have to bring people up to the level of their basic humanity first, before they can even listen to what it is we have to say. So I think that's a very interesting opportunity, September 20–21. I think it's in your — take it home, it's serviceable.

A short footnote: when I was a high school chaplain, which I spent quite a lot of time doing in the first part of my life, I ministered to a lot of young people who came from a non-Christian background — I catechized and baptized them — and almost all of them had been drawn to the faith by reading the Narnia Chronicles and Tolkien. Okay, I went for that one.

Do you think that pastors can learn helplessness, because of the sheer burden of constant exposure to hearts that don't respond, that burden them? Exposure to hearts, that is, to hearts to which we cannot respond — we seem to be powerless — do we learn helplessness in those situations?

We have a chance to talk about that together in the gathering with pastors, and we talk about the fact that learned helplessness is a natural response to any circumstance. When we have done our very best, when we have exhausted our finest efforts, when we have imagined every possible means of escaping or improving the situation, and nothing changes — at some point we've learned that no matter what we do, we are not going to prevail in the circumstance before us. And in that very moment we stop trying, and in that very same moment we become captive to the situation, and we've surrendered any ability to control or influence it.

Pastors who are willing to assume all responsibility for doing the things given them, and to leave God out of the equation, can indeed learn helplessness very quickly. We are limited. There are things we cannot manage so easily. There are circumstances that overwhelm us. But the very moment that we move beyond our own resources, and the very moment that we are able to invite God into the situation, and look for his wisdom, discern his will and his way — that is what hope is all about. And the best enemy of helplessness is the ability to imagine that there is hope, that this situation could change by the grace of God. So even in a situation of learned helplessness, you can move through it and beyond it by total reliance upon the good grace of God.

I would add to that, I think from a doxological point of view, in terms of what we're trying to teach the men here: that we address situations that seem helpless, not out of our own resources, but out of something else — we do ministry out of the gifts that Christ provides for his people. So I move in kind of a sheepdog direction, in terms of working with immovable objects which I can't budge myself, but let's see what Jesus is about here, and what he would have me do. And that little diagram you have in your spiral there, of the shepherd and his dog, and the relationship between the two — if you haven't looked at that carefully, ask your husbands about it. Hopefully they can spit out something, about ten or fifteen words about that. The whole thing is: the more time the dog spends with the shepherd, the more equipped he is to do his work. Private devotion and family devotion is so important.

Here's one I think the two of you could have fun with. We live in a society at a time — in fact, in a litigious society — in which touch is anathema. You get in trouble when you touch people. So how do we determine what might be appropriate touch?

Okay, I'll have my bit, and then Bev can correct me — I doubt that. We pastors have an asset that nobody else has, which is that there are certain ritual ways of touching people which are generally accepted, and, to some extent, socially and sexually neutral, and we need to maximize these methods of touch. Most importantly, you can touch people even without touching them. I quite commonly do this to people — do you see what I'm doing? Do you see? I didn't actually touch a forehead, and I don't even say "God bless you," but I just go like that. I quite often do it all over the place, and I get a response: "Thank you, Father." Right? I was touching Bev without touching her — there's that kind of thing. But also, most importantly, is laying on of hands, on the head — the head is very sensitive to touch, women know that, that's what makes going to get your hair done so attractive; it's not just getting your hair done, but you get a massage as well, and you get stroked as well, and all sorts of stuff. That's acceptable, and in fact hairdressers are trained, I hear, to go beyond that, and actually touch the shoulders and massage the cheeks. Now, why is that acceptable outside? Because, in a sense, it's professional touch — it's ritual touch. But the most important kind of touch we pastors have is that on the head, and also folding hands over people. So what I do quite often is that. Or else, what's becoming more common as ritual touch: you pray, and you put your hand on the shoulder. Now, the shoulder is fairly, in terms of body part, to some extent a neutral place, but what you're doing is a very powerful ritual touch, because whereas the other is sort of over the person, this is standing next to them, beside them, in solidarity with them. There are other forms of touch, and we need to explore the possibilities of these.

Well said, and I wouldn't imagine correcting John Kleinig about anything — especially in front of a group of theologians, they'd love it. Well, I've just been blessed four times, and I'm feeling pretty special, thank you.

From my perspective, as a psychologist, I recognize that you have a temptation to want to provide comfort by touching and hugging, and we talk a little bit about that, ladies — your husbands and I spend some time talking about safe touch, unsafe touch, because your liability carriers want your husbands to know the difference, and so do you. The touch that I find most important, outside of ritual touch, which is essential — and I would like to underscore and highlight everything John has said about ritual touch, it is remarkably powerful. Hal and I had in common one individual who was hospitalized — he was schizophrenic, very disordered mentally — and after he was released from the hospital, he said that he had gone through a fog of recovery in the hospital, with medication and all, and his single recollection of his time in the hospital was a visit from his pastor, where his pastor put his hand on his head and blessed him. He said, "I had perfect clarity about that, and only that, moment."

The touch that I tend to see, short of ritual or liturgical touch, is a touch just on the forearm — we don't see that as a particularly sexualized body part. And so the touch that we may think is — there's a five second delay there, I think, I don't even know what that means — but I do know that we may not regard it as significant, we may even regard it as a throwaway touch, but what the research tells us is: it matters. It creates an almost instant loss of defenses, and a willingness to move forward in developing relationship. And used car salesmen do it constantly. I would encourage you to go visit a Mazda salesman and see it in action — you don't need to buy a car, but you will see: they will greet you, they will ask your first name, and within two minutes of meeting you they will have touched you. But you can, oddly enough, cut through an awful lot of static by simply doing that, even before the kind of ritual touching, which often comes at the close of a conversation.

Okay, I'm one of the executive directors, so I'll make an executive decision — you'll have two more questions. John, here's a question — it's a bit theoretical, but if anyone can make it practical, you can: how would your model of affective meditation compare to Lectio Divina?

I'm glad he asked that one. Yes, it's very closely — it develops out of Lectio Divina. Now, what's Lectio Divina? It's to read the scriptures aloud, yourself — it's the reading of the divine word, it means "divine reading," and it comes from the monastic communities in the early church. One of the most important things was just to read the scriptures out loud, either in community or, more importantly, by yourself. You read the scriptures slowly — that's divine reading — and you let the words hit your ear rather than seeing the words and analyzing them, and the understanding is to let the word come to your heart. Now, what the advocates of that did, as it developed over the years, was work it into a very simple method of meditation: you read until something strikes you.

Let's say I've got this here that I read before, First — Second Corinthians 10: "For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but we have divine power to destroy strongholds." Now, I was once, some years ago, meditating on this, and the word that came to me out of that was "destroy strongholds," connecting with "destroying arguments." Okay, that hit me, so I stopped there and worked out what was impacting on me. Then I realized it was the picture of a stronghold — what kind of strongholds, where were the strongholds, what's going on here — and then it began to speak to me and said, okay, what stronghold is Christ trying to destroy in me? A stronghold is a castle, you keep the enemy out — but here you get a funny stronghold, which keeps not the enemy out but keeps the friend out, God out, the helper out. Now I could go on further, carrying you along the way it struck me. What struck me initially was that word, and I didn't know what was going on — that word came at me, it impacted my imagination, you can see that stronghold. And then, from there, it began to touch me personally, and touched me affectively.

One for you — no, this one's for you, I didn't ask the question. Speaking about disorder — how can I, or should I, receive hope regularly, when there are so few pastors of hope anywhere near me?

I think that's a pastoral care question, actually — he'll get there. I think hope can be found in a number of places. It can be found among those people who care for you — people who may not be in your immediate family, but could be a brother or sister, a mother or father — who, if your pastor seems unable to communicate God's word of hope and encouragement to you, perhaps a loved one within your family can share that with you. I think it's remarkably important for pastors' wives to have pastors as well, and sometimes it's very difficult to have your husband as your own pastor, particularly if you may be embroiled in a disagreement with him, and suspect that his capacity to be totally objective is limited. I think it's reasonable to determine if there is a pastor whom your husband might suggest, to whom you both might turn with confidence, to receive hope, to receive counsel, to receive care, to receive absolution, as might be necessary.

When you say your pastor may not be able to preach about hope to you — I'm assuming it is your husband — and I would extend the conversation one other step to say: if your husband is having difficulty preaching with confidence about hope, it may be that your husband, and you, need to talk about how it would be useful to share with his pastor that this is an issue — that it does require a bit of a conversation, a spiritual care conversation. A pastor who has difficulty preaching the hope of God in Christ is probably struggling with some issues we've talked about, ladies — burnout, or depression, or discouragement, or demoralization — and he should not be alone with that. So don't ignore it, don't be afraid to raise the issue. Seek assistance, seek pastoral care from someone to whom you can turn, and be confident that a word of hope can be preached and assistance can be given.

I'll just add that, in the event this question came from a pastor, we could read a sort of isolation into it — again, our best point there is that we are not designed to live all by ourselves. That's a constant Trinitarian doxology: we need community, we need connections with each other, for Christians, all of us — but specifically for pastors, you're in jeopardy if you don't have a pastor yourself. And sometimes, because of geography or other factors, we are simply isolated, and that's going to take some special effort. I think it's worthy of your time, and even your money, to set aside part of the day, or even a full day on occasion, so that you can be together. Proximity is important, but thanks to technology as it is, we can amplify that, or supplement it, with a concerted effort — say, "let's connect by FaceTime or Skype," which adds another dimension besides just voice and telephone. Devise what's meaningful, so that there can be a clear approach of connection with someone else, so that no man is alone with his sin. And the wonderful thing is, in the church we have that gift our Lord gives us — the reality of presence, and his forgiveness, through the mouth and voice, and yes, it reminds us of the embodied presence of another. So let's make that an effort.

Little footnote: something I just discovered recently — I read a study about grandmothers, and the importance of grandmothers, both from a secular point of view and a religious point of view, and how significant grandmothers have been for many people on their faith journey. Now, we think the purveyors of hope should be pastors — I think the purveyors of hope in our community are old people generally: grandfathers, grandmothers, real or honorary, and the most important of all of them is grandmothers. The article spoke of them as givers of hope, particularly to young people. But what we need is not just fathering and mothering, spiritual fathering and mothering in the church — we need spiritual grandfathering, and most importantly grandmothering, in the church. I'm also glad that I live with a grandmother — she is indeed a gift.