Freed and Freeing The Absolution

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, I want to say some words of thanks to all of you. You know that I am a refugee. I have been driven out of the ELCA, and, like the Son of Man, I have no place to lay my head anymore. So I am part of the NALC, and I take my company where I can find it. It's hard to find orthodox believers — you understand that, you folks know that very well. And when I come here, it's like being home. I just love it. So, thank you very much. It's an absolute joy to turn to your neighbor in the confidence that they do know Christ Jesus and are people of faith. What delight — a taste of things to come.

So I want to thank these two particularly for these invitations that I've received over the years. I've come to think of Doxology as one of the great things that's happening in the church, and I'm always happy to commend it to pastors — hopefully out of the NALC we'll get a steady stream this way, and that would be a lot of fun. There's a difference between the NALC and the other churches that were associated with the ELCA: we always think of Missouri as friends. And we're kind of proud of the fact that we've got a worse reputation than Missouri — we compete for that. So we look to you, and we count on you. I have to say that Robert Bugbee, the Canadian president, and Matt Harrison have been absolutely wonderful to us in our beginning years. There are still, as you understand, some issues that we have to discuss, but we're in the same family. We recognize one another as such, and rejoice in that.

So when I think of Doxology, I think of the high quality of pastoral ministry that emerges from these training sessions, and I hope and pray that some of my friends in the NALC will start showing up here, and then we can have more fun, huh? So it'll be good. Okay.

Since my lectures have revolved around absolution, the oral declaration of the forgiveness of sins, we are going to finish up by looking at a couple of classical issues that are associated with it. The first is the matter of authority. Typically, Luther does not stint or qualify or hesitate about the authority of the absolution. At the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, as you all know, he calls it a sacrament. By the end of the Babylonian Captivity, he's decided it's sacramental, not a sacrament. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two dominical sacraments, as they're called, and absolution lacks a sign in the same sense that the other two have it. And so, consequently — the beginning of the essay being in print already, he didn't have a chance to go back and revise it — he leaves us with two-and-a-half sacraments, or what I call the near-sacrament of Lutheranism. If it's not a sacrament, it's certainly sacramental — that is, a means that God uses to impart His gifts.

Thus the baptized, Luther will say, have a duty to absolve one another. When you're baptized, you're baptized into the forgiveness of sin, so that forgiveness becomes the very conditioning of your life. It's the springs on which you ride, the shock absorbers that carry you, that prevent the pitching and the yawing from turning you over into the ditch. And so, being baptized into the forgiveness of sins, you receive, in your baptism, the authority to impart this gift to another.

Though the Augustana classically retains confession and absolution, devoting a couple of articles to retaining it and its practice, later Lutherans have had big reservations about lay absolution. Questions have been raised: shouldn't pastors do this? Isn't this a pastoral duty? Should lay people be involved in absolution? And so we have to examine this issue a little bit.

Secondly, this in turn raises the question of use. In many congregations, especially those associated with the church growth movement, absolution has fallen out of use entirely. There are Lutheran congregations across the country that have not heard an absolution in years, wouldn't know it if it was spoken to them, and have no idea. And that is one of our deepest shames. It's nearly a sacrament for Luther, and nowadays, in Lutheran parishes countrywide, you couldn't find an absolution if you looked for one. It's just rotten, absolutely wrong. And so absolution falls out of use in the life of the church — here, there, and not everywhere, thank goodness. And people don't know, and don't use, the absolution.

Yet the workings of vocational life, as we talked about it yesterday — particularly in the family, and most of all in parsonage families — continue to kick up a need for absolution. People live with resentments and hatreds and memories that they can't resolve, and they carry them around, not knowing that Christ Jesus has provided a means for us to drop these off in His lap. He loves this. And He gets ticked off if you start carrying this junk with you. "Give that to me," He says, "I want that." He commands us to confess, right? We're commanded to confess. And so this is the means that we have to do so. So we should talk about how we can take the absolution home with us. That's what I'm most interested in today. It's lots of fun.

So, first of all, the issue of authority. In the medieval church — the pre-Reformation church, the church of the Council of Trent — the issue of authority was settled from the start. Absolution is one of the seven sacraments of the church. It is found in penance, a ritual practice, routing repentance and absolution, forgiveness, through the hands of the priesthood. It is the plank after shipwreck. When you have been baptized into Christ Jesus, you enter into a life of moral perfection. Along the way you slip — a lustful thought, the third dessert, banana splits in the parade, right? I mean, something fleshy gets you, and you're carried away. Caught.

And so it was the requirement of the medieval church that everybody had to make a full disclosure of all their sins at least once each year. So you went to confession under obligation. And when you got to confession, you dealt with a priest who was a professional at hearing it. Boy, these guys were really good — I mean, they could sense a shift in the tone of voice, they could hear the slightest movement of the conscience, and they hunted out sins like a pig rooting after chestnuts. I mean, they were just after it. They knew exactly where people hid things, and they knew exactly what was most predictable, and they knew exactly what people were going to hide, and they oftentimes had lists that they had compiled to check off, right?

Now, you can imagine that many men found this troublesome. But you've got a semi-celibate priesthood, at least officially committed to celibacy, locked in a room with nubile young girls just budding magnificently, and younger married women who have just had their early sexual experiences, and tried-and-true older women who have been around men for a long time. They know — they know where the temptations are for each. And so women hated confession like poison, because these priests were often very frustrated, and so lecherous, and asking the most prurient kind of questions, and literally invading the privacy. And so confession became torture. I mean, it was a rigorous moral examination, conducted by a priest who had something to prove, and by people who were there under obligation. You can just guess how it worked, huh? And so it got to be awful. This was the plank after shipwreck — after you had sinned against your baptism, you went to penance, and penance was to restore you on your way to moral achievement. So it had turned abusive, in the worst possible way.

One of the sources of success of the Reformation, insofar as we can speak of success, is the way it regulated, rethought, confession and absolution. It became voluntary. And when you read in the Small Catechism Luther saying, "Confess only the sins that are most troublesome to you," you know that this is a man who had to confess everything — who confessed every fart and every wet dream and every sorrowful longing. I mean, it was just awful. He drove his confessor nuts, particularly with his gas. "Stop it," he said, "every time you fart you come to confession." I mean, it was just — I mean, you know, golly. They suspected him of having a very common monastic disease called scruples. He believed them when they said he should confess everything. So he went after his sins like he was combing the lice out of his cowl — after every one of them, pinching and accumulating and disclosing and confessing. "Confess only the sins that are most troublesome to you." And that, of course, is liberty.

So, as Luther understood it, the authority of absolution emerged from the Word. Now we have to be careful these days when we talk about the Word — the Word can never be separated from Scripture. Scripture is the Word of God. Its narrative — in the beginning, on the last day — overarches all of creation and sweeps it up into a magnificent narrative. So, as we heard this morning, "Let there be light," and God separated the light from the darkness. And so, on the last day, the dwelling place of God will be with men, and there will be no more tears nor crying anymore. We go from Genesis to Revelation, from beginning to end, all the way. And in this narrative, God speaks — He discloses Himself to us. He lays Himself open to us in Christ Jesus. He exposes His fatherly heart, so that we come to know Him. And it's this wonderfully compassionate graciousness that's at work in absolution.

The authority of the Word happens in its speaking. The authority of the Word happens in the speaking. Its authority does not consist in this, that it's stored up in manuals and kept pure there. Its authority consists in this: that when God's Word comes onto your tongue, when it crosses your lips, it does what it says. It actually accomplishes what God purposes. It does not return to Him empty. It's not something that needs to be looked up and analyzed for its meaning. When God speaks, it happens.

One of the great experiences of my first couple of years in ministry came one Friday evening. The parsonage was right next door to the church, of course — there was a parking lot separating us. About 5:31 on a Friday night in November, when both the bowels of the earth and the skies had opened, in Oregon it was raining as if it would never stop — and it didn't really. I mean, it was my first November there, and it rained 27 inches. I thought it was Noah. Back in North Dakota it rained 13 inches a year. Now we had 27 in a month. I thought I was going to have to borrow some fins to get to church, you know.

But here, out of the rain, comes a woman walking down the steps to the parsonage, which was set low. And she knocks on the door and says, "The pastor's not in his office." Carolyn said, "No, he's not usually in his office at 5:30 on a Friday night, but I can find him if you need him." She says, "I'm looking for him — my husband needs him." And sitting up on the street was a red 1959 Cadillac. Do you remember those, with the huge fins? Just a street battleship, a huge mother of a car sitting up there, all red and beautiful. And out of it comes the roughest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He came walking down the steps to the house, and I thought, "Good Lord, what have I gotten into this time?" He was wearing an old cowboy shirt unbuttoned down to here, and a dirty T-shirt. He had tattoos all up and down both arms, and a hunting knife on his belt, and logger's boots. He looked like he'd just come out of the bush, and like he was mad.

So he said, "I need to talk to the pastor." I said, "Fine, we'll go over to my office" — first thing I wanted to do was get him out of the house. So we went across through the rain, and his wife comes padding along behind in her house dress, with the zipper at the bottom that goes all the way up to here, you know? She was so — a fat little thing, like a marshmallow on two short legs. We went walking across through the rain — she was wearing her bedroom slippers — and we padded over there. And we went up the back door into the church, and he said, "I need to talk to you alone." I said, "Fine," and I told his wife to wait in the hallway.

So he came into my office with me, and I put up my dukes. I said, "What do you want?" He said, "I need to confess all my sins." Boy, I was not prepared for that. I said, "Well, I'll tell you what — I'm glad to hear your confession, but I think you'd better confess the sins that are most troublesome to you, because it looks to me like we could be here for a while." That's called non-directive counseling, right? So we kind of haggled for a while about how much he was going to confess. He wanted to confess them all, and I didn't want to hear all that. My wife had already gone to get the babysitter. I mean, what was I supposed to do — face murder in my office, or go home and get it in the parsonage? It was one of the two.

So finally he knelt right down on the floor, and he started confessing, and I knelt beside him. I've heard confession all my life, but I've never heard a confession like that. Through the whole thing ran a litany: "I have committed every sin except two — I never killed a man, and I never raped a woman." But it was right up to it, if not including. He'd spent time in prison, and he had learned about confession in prison. So he went through this whole thing, and when he finally started to repeat himself, about 45 minutes later, I said to him, "Have you confessed the sins that are most troublesome to you?" "I think I got most of them," he said. So I stood up, and I put my hands into that greasy hair, and I said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins, named and unnamed." He stood up, and he hitched up his — you know, I signed God's name, in the name of the triune God — and then he stood up and hitched up his pants, and he said, "Good." And he went out to his wife and said, "I'm okay now." And they got in the car and they drove away, and I never saw him again.

I still think that the good Lord sent me an angel. I mean, I'd been bragging about an unqualified absolution, and he tried me out to see if I'd really do it. So much fun. I gave him — we had those "Good News for Modern Man" Bibles, back then, across the quarter — and I underlined the key passage in there, and I said, "We say this every Sunday here — come on back." No such luck. He just disappeared into the sunset.

Well, you know, you have the authority, and there you see it. It happened in him. That was the atonement — it didn't happen in heaven. Well, it did happen in heaven, but it happened in him — in his conscience. "I'm okay now." You see, he was literally put right, and that's what happens in absolution. You see, Christ Jesus, through His Word, reaches into the conscience to silence the accusation. To silence the accusation.

This friend of mine, whom we've prayed for — I've been absolving him on the telephone. He's a wise man. He's the best counselor I've ever met in my life. I've seen miracles, literally — we were in Ethiopia together, and he was chasing out demons right and left, and we came home and went to work in Idaho and got a bunch more. I thought we should mount them, you know, above the door, like elk — here's one, here's one, what fun. Well, he is — no, he is now in the streets himself. And so every time I talk to him, I say, "Your sins are in Christ Jesus, and He won't give them back. They belong to Him now. He did them for you, and He is carrying them for you. It's as though you had nothing to do with it. They all belong to Him. Now don't go skin-diving in the outhouse" — I mean, this is done, don't try to retrieve it. Oh — sometimes he laughs, and sometimes he just cries for joy. I mean, this is the atoning word. This is the word that frees and releases. The prisoner dances loose for joy. I mean, that's happening right here and right now.

Thus, as Gerhard Forde used to argue, the logic of the absolution, as with the other means of grace, is flood logic. It's the logic of the slop pail. It's the logic of overflowing goodness. Death imposes shortage. Death shows up in want. Death seeks control, and death seeks limits. But the resurrection comes from an open tomb — here, now, life breaks free, it's running, it's overflowing, it's good. And so the logic of absolution is the logic of speaking this word like the sower sowed seeds. He is not like me — I have a rototiller. By the time I'm done, the rocks are gone, and my garden is clean, and when I find another one I very carefully take it out, and if I find a weed I triumph over it like it's a pimple on one of my kids' backs, and it's gone. That's just — I mean, you know. But the sower — what does he do? What does this sower do? Oh, this is flood logic. He throws it everywhere. He throws it on the rock, on the road, in the ditch, in the middle of the road, between lanes of the freeway — there it is. He's throwing it, throwing it, throwing it, for the joy set before him. He's just blessing everybody. I mean, it's just fabulous.

Thinking this way — in the Small Catechism's articles, Luther could call even the mutual conversation and consolation of the brethren a means of grace. The word has gotten loose, it's out. The question is not who can say it — the question is how we can say it fast enough, how we can get it out there, because our risen Lord has commissioned us to forgive sins in His name. And so the blessing of being able to say it — I mean, just handing it over. What in the world is better than that?

So I'll tell you my favorite story about this. I suppose some of you have heard it, but I'll tell it again, just because I like to — you'll indulge me. This was back in the old days, you know — they actually liked me in the ELCA for some reason, and I preached all over the country. So I was down in Savannah, Georgia, preaching, and I forgot — I had my clergy shirt on when I got to the airport. I don't like to fly with my clergy shirt on, because usually I'm tired, and I have to teach all week, and I've been working all weekend, and the only time I can sleep is Sunday afternoon on airplanes. So if I wear my clergy shirt, you know what happens? The first turbulence, and I've got a line. Right? So I work all morning, and I work all afternoon, and then I go back and work all week, and then I go and do it again the next weekend — it's dumb.

So we got to the airport, and I went to the men's room, and I took off my clergy shirt and put on a sport shirt. And my wife, dear Carolyn, was with me — we had gotten our tickets late, of course, so she was sitting further back. I sat down. There's a rule about people my size: if you're a person my size and you get a middle seat on an airplane, the person on either side of you will be bigger. Right? Exactly how it works.

So here comes this guy — a size and a half of me — and he sits down beside me, and we're taxiing down the runway, and he says to me, "You're a pastor." I said, "I am." He said, "Lutheran." I said, "I am." He said, "Do you mind if we talk?" "No, no." We started visiting, and he started to confess. He was a Vietnam vet, and he'd been carrying that poison in him for years. And he started to confess, and the confession got deeper and dirtier — he was getting right down to some primeval stuff. I mean, it was just wretched stuff that had hung in him like a constant indictment, and it just poured — it was just pouring out of him. And we finally — we were approaching Minneapolis when he started to repeat himself. I said, "Have you confessed the sins that are most troublesome to you?" He said, "I didn't know I was confessing." I said, "You've been confessing all the way from Savannah. I am a pastor of the church. I am under obligation to my Lord Jesus to say this." And I stood up in the landing pattern. The cabin attendant just about flipped — "Get down, get down, get down." I put my hands on his head, and I absolved him. And he wailed like a stuck pig — he just cried, just wailed. "That's the best thing I ever heard," he said. And I sat and held him while we landed. And when we landed he said, "I never dreamed I would hear anything like that." I said, "I was sent to you by the Lord Jesus to say this — it's my voice, it's His word. You are His. He will never fail you." He says, "You say this anytime?" I said, "Yeah, particularly Sundays, but you come — you come by." He came and saw me six days in a row. He still calls me. It's like that old ventriloquist on Ed Sullivan — "Is it still the same?" "Yep, it's the same."

You know, well, this is what it is: we have been released with this word, and so we say it. We don't talk about forgiveness — that's like the boys sitting in the locker room talking about the girls, that doesn't do any good for anybody. You say it to the sinner: "Your sin is forgiven." Nothing better than that. Boy, is that fun. I mean, you can hardly get over the joy of just speaking that word.

Now, an absolution is used therapeutically in informal circumstances. There are some good reasons for confining its authority to pastors — there's an argument for saying the pastor should speak the word of absolution. To begin with, pastoral confidentiality is still recognized to some degree across the country. So when you hear a confession, the court is at least going to be somewhat hesitant about forcing you to acknowledge it. It's not perfect, but it's workable — you have some protection. And because pastors have this protection, it's better that the pastor hears something that really troubles someone. I mean, if I had stood up and gone to the sheriff with what I heard from that logger kneeling on my floor, I could have put him away for a little while. But I was protected — unprotected — as a pastor, I don't have to say anything to anybody. And so when pastors have this legal protection — you have to look into your own state, you have to find out how much you've got, you have to know your district attorney, you have to know if he's a jerk, you know, you want to be real careful about that, or if she's out to prove something, you want to watch that — but generally pastors are fairly safe. And so when there's a confession involving something that is a breach of the law, it's better that a pastor hear that.

Further, the office of the pastor prevents the absolution from dissolving into a personal relationship. This is what happens: people come to you because they like you, and when they come to you because they like you, then they think you're saying the absolution because you like them — which is probably true. But the easiest explanation of the authority of the absolution is friendship: you want them to feel better, and so you say the absolution. And this is dangerous. The personal relationship is helpful — that's true, they probably wouldn't come to you if they didn't feel you were trustworthy — but if they believe in you instead of the absolution, that's really dangerous. Then you've gotten in the way. "He must increase, you must decrease." And so lots of times when I hear confessions I put on my cassock and surplice, or I put on an alb, so that I'm in my office hearing the confession. That way you protect the person from the relationship, and yourself from the relationship. You're in your office now, you're serving your call now, and when you say, "As a minister of the Church of Christ and by His authority" — you see, you are invoking your office. That's a good thing.

Finally, the formal use of confession and absolution in the life of a congregation multiplies and personalizes the reality of Christ's gracious act. It takes a long time to teach a congregation about confession and absolution. If you advertise it, they won't come. If you build it, they won't come — because, of course, there's shame involved, and there's particularly shame in exposing what is troublesome to another person, especially a pastor. So you begin by using the public absolution — make sure you use that liturgically, Sunday by Sunday. And when you're counseling, when you're dealing with these things, then you take the opportunity to speak the absolution personally. It's not done until Christ Jesus has got it — you're handing it off to Him. And most people, in my pastoral experience, are more than glad to hear His voice.

So when you absolve in counseling relationships — it's not always appropriate; sometimes, for instance, with shame, you've got to be real careful about speaking an absolution, you have to be careful about the words you use in the absolution — but generally speaking, this is why there's — what I love about Doxology — that pastoral care is rooted in the divine service. And what you're doing here is extending the divine service in the form of the absolution. So you do this now, and when people know that it's available, you can't keep them away with a stick. By the time I left Luther Seminary, that was about one of the only things I was doing. People in the area knew that I pronounced the absolution, and I could have kept office hours, because they couldn't find it anyplace else. And of course, I love drunks. So I always tell them, "You've got friends in low places, I'm here for you." And so I'd have them lined up outside my office, and people would start complaining about the kind of clientele I attracted — some of those guys had never seen a drunk in their whole life, because they were sober themselves. I mean, it was ridiculous.

So once people know that you're trustworthy, they start asking you for this, and then you can put up hours — you can say, "Confessions will be heard from 3 to 6 on Friday afternoon," and you can sit and wait, and pretty soon people start to come. My friend Ron Marshall in Seattle posts regular hours, and he sat there many days all alone, but now, of course, everybody in the neighborhood knows where the absolution is, and so he had to extend his hours. When people know what this is, they want it. That's exactly true.

Now we should talk about taking the absolution home — but I should say this first. It's very important to know that when theologians and pastors start retaining absolution for themselves, the good Lord still gets it out. I mean, if pastors don't hear confessions, you know who does — bartenders, beauty operators, taxi drivers, you name it, anybody who's with somebody in an enclosed and safe situation. Most pastors hear confessions when they're giving people rides to church conventions and the like — you're in the car for a while, and people say, "Can I talk to you about this?" and then that starts. So there are all kinds of people who hear confessions. The problem is that they don't have the absolution, and so when people make confession to them, what they hear is some cliché. "I've been there myself, I've had the same problem."

My friend Lou Smith — do you know his name? He used to write for some of the church magazines. He was my closest friend — every Tuesday night we were on the phone for two hours. He lived in West Virginia, I was in Minnesota. I just loved him — he was just fabulous. The only problem I ever had with him was that he liked the Yankees, and I retained the absolution on him for that. You know, but Lou went to confession one time, and he confessed his sins, and the confessor said, "Yeah, I know, I've had some of the same trouble myself." Lou confessed another sin, and the confessor said, "I've been there, I've had the same temptations." And kept trying to identify with him, when Lou finally loosed it up and said, "Would you shut the — up? I didn't come to hear about your problems. I came to hear from Christ Jesus. Now, if he doesn't have your mouth, be quiet." That was — you know, when you grew up in the Bronx next to Yankee Stadium, you learn to speak the English language in an effective way, right?

Oh, he was beautiful. He came out one spring and we went to six ball games in four days — it was just fabulous. And that was when we had that great Dominican pitcher who went to the Mets, and Lou was telling me all the time how good he would look in Yankee pinstripes. I wanted to murder him. But then he died. It was just — I'll tell you, my heart broke. When Lou died, I was lost. I sat by the phone the next Tuesday night and waited, and I wept, because he was gone. What an angel — I mean, you get somebody like that, bigger than life, a sinner Christ redeemed. How can you love him enough? Well, Christ Jesus found some replacements, but they're not nearly as colorful. Really fun.

So we should talk then about taking the absolution home. The loss of the absolution in the life of the church can be traced to the loss of its eschatological dimension. This is the problem: we've thought of forgiveness exclusively in therapeutic terms — we think of it as the solution to a problem. And so the critique of absolution that kicks around among pastors, and particularly among theologians, is that it assumes forgiveness is simply therapeutic. Luther was speaking to an age of guilt — now our problem is not a guilty conscience, what we're looking for is a good neighbor. I mean, if that's not a crock, you never saw one in your whole life. When I was a kid in North Dakota, we used to take that kind of thing out in the morning and empty it — we didn't let it sit in the house. This is ridiculous — if you need guilt to fuel your machinery, if you need guilt to make forgiveness relevant, you can find it anywhere. It's everywhere, it's all over.

But that aside, forgiveness has another dimension to it — it's for the future, not simply the past. Christ Jesus is opening the door to the future in the forgiveness of sins. You don't have to feel guilty. If you do feel guilty, that's fine. If you don't feel guilty, Luther says, reach into your shirt and pinch yourself under your arm, and if you feel flesh there, look at what Scripture says about flesh, and you'll find enough guilt to keep you going for a while. Guilt is not necessary to absolution. What's necessary to absolution is the death of Christ and His resurrection. And so forgiveness is only secondarily therapeutic — it's above all —

I was talking about this once with Tuomo Mannermaa — once, Tuomo, my Finnish theologian friend, and I, we had a debate together in front of Robert W. Jenson and Carl Braaten about this. We were talking about therapeutic and eschatological forgiveness, and the two of them and I agreed that in Luther, forgiveness is only rarely therapeutic — its whole use is eschatological. This is part of God's universal reclamation of the whole creation. He comes to remove us from our sins, to break the grip of our sins, so that He can free us into the future. This is why the forgiveness of sins is a synonym for freedom. Here Christ is opening the jail — He's freeing you, He's freeing you so that you can enter the future unencumbered, full of hope, full of confidence, full of faith. And so we don't need guilt to make forgiveness work — what we need is the death of Christ, and that's been done, thankfully. He has risen, He is risen indeed, and so the prison is open, and you are free now to enter into life.

Thus confining justification to a problem-solution model is literally building on the sand. Of our deepest sins we're rarely aware — we're surprised: "I didn't intend that, I had no idea." You see, we're caught from behind by our sins, we're not aware of them, we don't know what we need — we're sinners. And so if we wait for people to be aware of what they need, we're going to wait a long time — that's literally building on sand.

If we begin again with the eschatological dimension of the absolution, then its critical importance comes right out into the open. What's happening here? Why is it that the first thing after He was raised from the dead, Jesus went to His disciples and commissioned them to forgive and retain sin? It's because forgiveness is the present form of the resurrection. When we speak it, we are literally raising the dead, freeing the prisoner, releasing the captive. We are participating in Christ's restoration of the creation — He's claiming it back again from the power of darkness, opening up a new future, and He's doing it by telling people their sins are forgiven. Thus, in its verbal or sacramental form, the forgiveness of sins is the turning point to the new.

Now, if we begin this way, we can talk about what happens in families. You have all been baptized into Christ Jesus — you are His. I heard Him say to you at the table this morning, "This is my body, given for you, my blood shed for you." There is no doubt about this — that He has laid His claim on you, that you belong to Him, and He has called you into office. He has called you into the office of mother, or father. He has called you into the office of wife, the office of husband. He has called you into the vocation of your family.

Now, when you live together in families, you live with the north side of you exposed to harsh winds. Just think of this passage: "Therefore a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife." Leaving and cleaving are both violent. When you leave, you leave something behind, and so generally there's a push — there's some conflict, there's some sorrow, there's a sense of loss.

When my oldest son went to Finland to study, we dropped him at the airport, and we went grocery shopping. I got into the cereal aisle — good night, he used to eat a box of Cheerios for breakfast, and I realized I didn't have to buy any breakfast food for him. And I was standing in that aisle crying — I couldn't stand it. And my wife came and consoled me, and we checked out, and I was eating a banana going out the door of the grocery store, and a guy rolled up in a '55 Chevy hardtop, all gussied up, and he blew his horn at me to get out of the way. Bad procedure. In North Dakota there's a language of horns — you know a polite horn, and you know a friendly one, and you know a horn that's mean, and that was a mean horn. And I blew my stack — I took the banana peel and threw it at the car, and it hit him right in the face. And he got out and said, "You want to fight?" I said, "I'd love to." And Carolyn's jumping up and down, and the guy — I mean, people of my size have a slight advantage in these things — the guy looked me over, and he knew what I was going to do to him, and he knew how mad I was, and he says to my wife, "You poor thing, are you married to him?" Boy, I've heard that quoted for years.

Well, leaving is violent — I mean, we cried for days, our oldest son gone. And, of course, you know what it is to marry your kids off, and you know what it is to walk down the aisle with a beautiful daughter and hand her to some guy who's going to be pawing over her that night. Jeez. "Therefore a man" — a woman — "leaves father and mother and cleaves." This is hard stuff. And so there's conflict, and there's disappointment, sorrow and pain, and low grades of hostility, day in and day out.

Well, what would happen if you said this to your husband: "Your sins are forgiven, for Jesus' sake"? What would happen, after disciplining your child, if you were to say, "I love you, and Christ Jesus told me to tell you this: your sin is forgiven"? What would happen? This morning on the telephone my wife said to me, "God's peace." And I said, "I can live another day." That is Christ Jesus coming to me on the lips of a woman I love without reservation — the two greatest people in the world, Christ Jesus and my wife, in one sentence. Can you imagine? This is the authority you have.

And so, if you think of the leaving and the cleaving — if you think now of courtship — holy smokes, look at what's happened to courtship. It's become a jungle. Nobody knows quite how to behave. When most of us were young there was a very simple rule: good girls don't, bad girls do — and the boys knew how to sort them out very quickly, right? But that rule, which was horribly unfair and put women into a horrible situation, is now completely gone. Nobody knows quite what is right and quite what is wrong. And so courtship becomes one of the most arduous and difficult procedures of life — that's horrible under the best circumstances. But when the society takes away the rules, when people don't know what is appropriate and what is inappropriate —

I had one woman come to me for confession. She had had 31 lovers. She kept a list — kept the list in the drawer with her panties, which was more information than I wanted, right? It was awful — she had been pawed and poured over and used and abused. At her wedding, the men of the bridal party all sat together and talked about their experience of her, and what a great time the groom was going to have that night — of course he already knew what he was getting into, he'd been in the same line as all the rest of them. Well, people literally don't know up from down at a time like that.

Well, you know what happened to that woman when I said to her, "Your sin is forgiven"? I said, "Now you are dressed in the righteousness of Christ Jesus, and I want to see you walking down that aisle in a white dress." It's like the resurrection of the dead right there in my office. That poor thing had been hauled and used and put away wet, over and over and over again, and now she heard the love of Christ Jesus. There's nothing better than this.

So you say it — you say it in your family, you say it to your friends, you say it to your husband and to your wife, when he comes home from a church council meeting where he stayed too long, where you know he's been driven crazy by some stupid guy who's got some fly up his rear end — don't bawl him out. You say to him, "Your sin is forgiven, for Jesus' sake," and take him to bed with you, and forget it, right? This is the forgiveness of sins. This is the joy of the gospel. So we don't sit on our laurels — say it, say it to one another. This is for your family. You have this authority in your baptism. You have this authority given to you, and so with this authority you can speak it — to your children. What are you doing when you speak it to your children? You are teaching them what is most precious to them. You are teaching them the liberty of the gospel. And when you say it to your husband or your wife, you short-circuit the conflict, and you begin again. There it is.

So we take it home simply by following our Lord Jesus. There's no redeemer like Him, there is no savior that can compete with Him — He is the best there is, and the only. "I am," He says, "for you." And that promise enables us to face — with that promise we can go home to one another, into one another's arms, rejoicing in the goodness of God. My goodness, what a gift.

Well, thanks a lot. I started to play today — I suppose I should apologize for that, but it's Sunday afternoon, we should take some time and fool around, huh? Okay? God's peace to you.

A few years ago I was translating this essay — oh, years ago — it was called "The Table of Grace." And in there — this is one that I had to wrestle with for a long time, because I think he's right, I think he's absolutely right on this — but he says, if you deny someone communion at your table, you have, in essence, not absolved them — you have left them in their sins. And every Sunday I stand up there and unqualifiedly absolve everybody of their sins, and communion comes around, and for whatever reason there are some people, on some Sundays, that don't come to communion. Some of them are our little kids. And I don't really rightly know why I'm denying them communion. Sometimes it's a faithful couple from the ELCA that is coming through, and they didn't go to the ELCA church down the street because they really don't feel at home there anymore, but they do feel at home in their home congregation. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, good. First of all, we have to distinguish between ultimate and penultimate in this question — we have to distinguish between in relation to Christ and in relation to the community. In relation to Christ, you're absolutely right — He has called you into your ministry, He has chosen to work through the means of grace as you administer and preach, and He has promised that He will be in, with, and under, and at work. So ultimately you're exactly right. But penultimately, in the human community, we run into some political problems, and that's really what they are — and those political problems have to do with the proper age to commune. That's been a question forever. In the Orthodox Church you get communed when you're baptized, and then communed again when you're in grade two, and continue for the rest of your life. In the ELCA, they commune people like they're slopping the pigs — anybody can come, and there's no discretion whatsoever. And Missouri, of course, has long had the practice of close communion. And so these are political issues that have to do with the community that we belong to, and it's real important to keep them in that proportion and not let them ascend, get too high.

When you've got an ELCA couple that shows up like that, I pray that you will take them aside, alert the usher — if he sees somebody like that who obviously knows the divine service but isn't participating, you should be aware of it right away, and there's no reason in the world why you can't stop and go down and talk to that couple during the hymn, and say to them, "Look, I would like to welcome you to the table, but I am under some political constraints here — let's talk. Can you come on Monday? Can I come and call on you this afternoon?" Because nowadays, of course, there are all kinds of people like me — refugees, who are looking for home and can't find it — and when you are so kind as to pursue them like that, you will be remembered with joy for a long time.

Well, then, with children — I wish that when our churches made that decision — when the ELCA made that decision — we would have said, "Catholics start communing at grade two, we're going to do the same thing." Because now we're in a terrible mess — at least the other Lutherans are in a terrible mess, because you just literally don't know if a kid communes or not. So I ask — I say to the mother or father, "Has your child started communion?" And there's nothing better than pursuing those people afterward.

So I think that's what — first of all, thank you very much for all your talks, they've been wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm delighted, thank you.

I have a question that's two-sided — I'm wondering about it from both perspectives, your thoughts on it. What seems to be a cultural dilemma: saying the words "I'm sorry," and a person responding, "That's okay, don't worry about it, no big deal" on that side. But then also, on the other side of the coin, saying "I'm sorry" for something that's not a sin. Could you speak to that from both ends?

Yeah. You know, there's an old thing — "I would rather die than ask" — and that's a very important thing, because it indicates the truth of it, that asking is a form of death. When you ask, you acknowledge that you are incomplete, that you need the help of another. And so there are all kinds of these kinds of words — "don't let it bother you" — in the culture that are intended to comfort somebody who's exposed a weakness. It's polite. That word is insubstantial and inconsequential, but it allows the person to continue in the conversation, it gives the person some standing — you say, "That's fine, don't let it bother you," and that's the end of it. In conversation, that's probably a good thing — you don't want to be like me and start fighting in front of the grocery store. It's a social grace, and a good one.

But when you say that to somebody who's confessed, that's a different thing. Because when somebody confesses, the proper response is not, "I know, I've had the same trouble myself," or, "Don't let it bother you." When somebody exposes themselves to you by confessing, you know that they're seeking Christ Jesus, and then your job is to say, "Your sin is forgiven." That's the only solution — that's the absolution. That's what you have, that's your goal, to say that. And pastorally, I look for every opportunity I can to be able to say it. You can do that graciously — you can say, "Christ Jesus can handle that." You don't have to use the full absolution, you can say it informally — you can say, "Christ died for the sins of the world, and it looks like He had you in mind. It looks to me like you qualify, I think you probably fit in." In these ways you can encourage people. But finally, what you're looking for is the chance to say, "Your sin is forgiven, for Jesus' sake." And everything moves to that point — everything moves to that point. And then you know Christ Jesus has found you useful, and what an incredible delight that is. You're handing over His gift, you're handing Him over. Is that the question? Good.

Quick question — thank you so much for presenting, it was really one of the highlights of this conference. Thank you very much. You mentioned on Friday that Luther's children had become — could you expand on that somewhere?

Yep, good — many of you have asked me about this. When I said that Luther's children had left the faith — when I was teaching at Luther Seminary years ago, one of my closest colleagues was a guy named Roy Harrisville. We called him the world's oldest living adolescent — he's over 90, and he's 14, but brilliant, one of the best preachers I ever heard anyplace. He and I were noticing the number of pastors' children who came from very fine pastoral homes that had lost touch, that had no sense of the faith. I'll never forget, I was walking across the campus, and the son of the president of the old American Lutheran Church went by on a BMW or a BSA motorcycle, 60 miles an hour — he dropped it to the ground right at the corner, popped it right back up again, and was around the corner and gone. He was a renegade. And we had all kinds of them. We started noticing that the sons of some of the best pastors in the church had been burned out by their fathers, and it became such a common problem in those days that it was predictable — we'd start watching those guys before they got there, because we saw so much of it.

So one day we were talking, and we said, "What about Luther's kids?" And we started looking, and you can kind of guess what happened. In Luther and Katharina von Bora you've got two type-A personalities, both of them engaged to the maximum, both of them at full speed, and you've got kids who are raising one another, and a household of people all participating in the raising. And you get kids who resent that. I think probably the word "unbeliever" that I used on Friday is too hard, but I would certainly say that they were not active confessors, and the problems that they had confronted in their own families continued with them for a long time.

So this is painful, of course, but we face this pain in our own families — I think all of you do, as I do. My oldest son married a Jew, and he's got two beautiful girls whom I love with my whole heart, who are, as far as I can tell, as remote from the faith as anybody could be. I teach them Bible stories — I'm subversive, I read them stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and I tell them about Jesus, but it's like talking — like a cow looking at a new gate, they don't have a clue. They come to our house and they pray at the table. Last Good Friday, we were in Seattle, and we took them with us over to Ron Marshall's church, and Ron, whom I love, took our granddaughters in his arms, and he took them to the baptismal font, and he stood with them right there, and he told them what baptism is. Carolyn and I just about died — that's as close as they've come. You just grieve.

But this is what it is to grow up in a parsonage. My father-in-law and I brought the seminary home, and we sat at the table night after night and talked about all the bad stuff, and we poisoned Andy against the church. We poisoned him — he doesn't want anything to do with it, and he doesn't want his kids near it. He's scared to death of what might happen to them. I'm the guilty one. So there you go — this is what it is to grow up in a parsonage. But the Holy Spirit is greater than our sins, and Christ Jesus is better than anyone. So I pray, and I pray, and I pray, and I sneak — Carolyn said, "I'm going to baptize them next time, I'm going to do an Archie Bunker, I'm not even going to tell you." But that's — you know, we'll figure it out. One day, one day, Christ Jesus will come after those two girls, and they won't have an alternative in the world, and Carolyn and I will be cheering our hearts out.

Yep, it's good.