Making Sense: Law and Gospel in a Senseless World Dr. Robert Kolb

Transcript (edited for readability).

Okay, let's go on to the nones — or making sense of life through the distinction of law and gospel. First of all, I want to talk about who the nones are. And if I'm lucky here, I'll find my outline. As I said, I went off in search of the millennials, and all of a sudden, Hal said, wait a minute, it's more than just the millennials. So who are the nones? There are no patterns, as you know well. Some of them are the people who are in the same room or the next room in an old folks' home with our own people. Some of them are the kids that play with our kids on the street, or in the playground, and everything in between.

So there's new generations, old generations. There are the rich who need no church, or maybe would indulge in church if they could, but they've got sports events or something else on Sunday mornings. And there are the poor who simply can't afford a church because of their work schedules, or they can't buy the proper clothes — though one of the things that disturbs me, both in this country and in Germany, is that people don't dress up for church anymore. Johannes Krieger and I are the only two in our largely older congregation in Braunschweig that wear ties anymore. It's just the decline of Western civilization. They don't have money to contribute. They don't have money really to be part of the church. And some of them are just busy survivors. They have enough prism in whatever objects of trust they have to get them by, but they're just trying to hang on. And so church is the last thing they could think about.

There are some who have a negative bias against the church, sometimes aggressively so in our day and age. And there are those who are just uninformed.

I was in a congregation of ours that has about a thousand people coming to services on a weekend. It was founded, I think, thirteen years ago, and the assignment from the district to the founding pastor was to reach forty-year-old males. It's a suburban area, and there are a lot of successful, semi-successful forty-year-old males. And the theory was that if you could get the father of the family into the congregation, you would bring the whole tribe. If you got the kids, or if you got the mother, you would get the kids and/or the mother. And I was there two months ago and worshiped, and I will admit that I've never seen more forty-year-old males listening intently to about a thirty-seven, thirty-eight minute sermon in my life.

The sermon was interesting too. It was one of a series of six, non-pericopal preaching. I've never found a set of pericopes that I couldn't make say the same thing as Romans 6:1-11, my favorite Bible passage, and so I could have done the same thing with the pericopes. But it was, I would say, twenty-eight to thirty minutes of instruction on how to love and honor your spouse. A lot of psychology, et cetera — just good third-use-of-the-law advice. And then all of a sudden, before I really — I wasn't even paying attention to the transition — we were talking about God's utter faithfulness in Jesus Christ, who will never leave or abandon you, so that you can live in trust with him. And there were six or seven, eight, nine minutes of wonderful gospel. On the faces of some of the men around me — I'm a shameless observer when I visit churches, even in my own home congregation — when I looked around, I knew that the law was accusing as well as instructing. We think we control — we do control the use, we know what we're using the law for — but it functions as the Holy Spirit needs it to, or as the consciences of the people take it in. And so that's another thing we have to be sensitive to.

But at any rate, reaching the forty-year-old married male is a target that, in this congregation's experience, works — whatever that means. But one of the great neglected populations in the U.S. are the singles, who are single for all sorts of different reasons, and who have a lot that they don't share, because some of them have never married, some of them have married three times already, some of them have children, some of them don't, some of them are rich, some of them are poor, but they still have a certain kind of aloneness — maybe not even loneliness, but aloneness — and that makes them targets of a special kind. I have in my notes here: those singles are all the way from yuppies, if you still say yuppie, to the survivors who are barely hanging on.

Well, the American story is told in terms of striving for — what good is it to have a U.S. passport if you aren't striving for something? Peaceness is not really the way we want to define satisfaction. We want to be ambitious. But at any rate, freedom is our highest goal — freedom not understood the way almost every other society has understood freedom, and probably there are at least a dozen good definitions of freedom, but we think it's standing on your own two feet as an individual and not relying on anyone else and just doing your own thing. It's a ridiculous idea. It will not work. My rights are way down the totem pole in terms of importance for almost every other society in human history — not all of which have lasted all that long. I know an empire that wanted to stay around a thousand years and made it to year twelve. But many of them have lasted a long, long time. Something I wouldn't bet on with ours.

But what that means is: no permanent ties, no permanent commitments, no permanent responsibilities. I will take on responsibility for a while, but I'm not going to make a lasting commitment. If we have lots of time, we'll talk about what church membership means tomorrow. One of the things that I think your seminary ought to be doing is helping students think through those questions of membership. We have another volume like the American Mind volume coming out fairly soon, I hope, called Inviting Community, in which David Peter has explored some of those issues, but we need to do a whole lot more of that thinking with you, because I'll bet you we've got close to fifty different definitions — working definitions, not formal definitions; probably have three or four formal definitions of membership in the room, but I'll bet you we've got fifty different working definitions of whom we count as members and don't count as members. That's always been true. There's always been these circles of pastoral care, spiritual care, that just circle out from core members, inactive members, more inactive members, casual acquaintances for whom we're the only religious person in the community, but they'll come to us if they need us — all that sort of thing.

But at any rate, so we breed selfishness. We breed self-centeredness, simply as the way that kids have to learn to grow up. I've never actually gone googling for this, but I'm told that Ronald Reagan said greed is a virtue, and it would fit in with at least the mood of America in the last thirty years, that really counts material success and material acquisition as at least one significant measure of how human, how good our lives are. I'll tell you, when you get to be almost seventy-two, and look at all the stuff you've accumulated and think you don't have long to clean out the house, or somebody's going to have a terrible headache — all that material stuff doesn't seem quite as necessary as it once did.

One of the results of that is that sex is pretty open. Family relationships are not only varied, but variable, depending on what I need and what I want this year — this year means temporary. Family relationships are, as a matter of fact, for many people growing up in these dysfunctional families, scary. And people who otherwise long for community just don't want to undertake the responsibility of a spouse and really don't want to undertake the responsibility of children.

It's a society in which the material is important, and particularly money. We are all kind of Silas Marners. We like to feel the coins slip between our fingers. And worse yet, we actually think that'll get us through when things get tough, and so we really do rely on our bank accounts. In the Large Catechism, Luther said Mammon is a problem. He hadn't seen nothing yet. It is a terrible disease, and we shouldn't be surprised by that. My German ancestors came here in part to dodge the draft — but none of you would have liked to have been in Bismarck's army either, so don't think ill of us. But fundamentally, they also came because there was cheap land here, and my Norwegian ancestors also came because things were really tough in Norway, and there was almost free land here. And so, of course, we're a materialistic culture.

We have experienced so much good — and it really is good — from technology, that we have sold ourselves into slavery to it. Reverend Cindy Beau isn't here, so I can show you this, but it doesn't work in this country, and it's the only one I have. My goal in life is to be unreachable, not to be reachable. We really depend on technology for things that even in the youth of the older of us, at least, we didn't have to depend on. And that is a wonderfully liberating thing and a terribly enslaving thing. But again, we think that it will solve problems that let us abandon the relationships and the cooperation that human beings are designed to have.

And so all these factors come together. And how do we live with that? How do we live with a worldview that is based, or at least operates, with all these things and still come piously to church every Sunday and be active in the congregation?

I have, right now in Confessions II, a student who has been a high school teacher for I don't know how many years — they all look so young now, but I would say probably ten, twelve years. And so I posed that question as we were talking about the Small and Large Catechisms a couple weeks ago, and Michael said, they compartmentalize. And I suppose that's been true in every culture, but I think it's particularly true in our culture. We have a place for God, and we really like to have a place for God, but we don't let him into large parts of our lives.

Martin Marty wrote an oversimplified, but kind of profound, analysis of the Enlightenment. He said in France, where Roman Catholicism was dominant, the Enlightenment brought atheism, a rejection of God. The heavy hand of God was so heavy that you just had to reject the whole thing. The British, who've never taken religion all that seriously — that's my comment, not Marty's — they could just be agnostic about it. Could be, maybe not, who knows, I'll just suspend judgment for a while. The Germans did something more interesting, I think — to a certain extent in Roman Catholic circles, but especially in evangelical Lutheran Reformed circles, they just invented liberal Christianity. And in the United States — Marty says he didn't have the German part, but in the United States, he said, we reserved a part of town for God, the church corner, and a part of the week for God, Sunday morning, and we liberated the rest of the week and the rest of the town from him. And again, that's overgeneralized and oversimplified, but it's not a bad analysis of a certain tendency that we have to recognize and face.

Tomorrow I will begin, if I remember, to say: being a Christian in our day and age is more work. It's harder work than it was being a Christian in the 1950s, when I was — I mean, and all was good, for white North Americans at least.

So we live in a society of superlatives. We think satisfaction means having it all. We make ourselves so unhappy by being dissatisfied when there's the least little chink in the plate. And a lot of people in this world are still just glad to have a plate at all, and some don't have a plate.

I added to the outline, after I sent this to Hal, something from a radio broadcast I heard, somebody pushing a new book entitled Present Shock. You remember Future Shock, thirty years ago or so, talking about how we're like deer in the headlights looking at the future. This author contends that for U.S. Americans today, there are no horizons ahead, there is no future to be terrified by, and there's no memory of significance. We're inventing, reinventing, the world for ourselves. But the present in which we try to live is terribly shocking. It turns out to be much colder than the warm, fuzzy environment we wanted. But the attitude today is: I will get by today and tomorrow, and the day after is out of my control anyway. And so I have enough skill, I have enough money, I have enough connections to get me out of every jam — today and tomorrow. And who knows if I'll be around on Wednesday.

I'm not sure what causes all that, but it would help to know, especially in individual cases, just exactly how people fall into this. Part of it is that that's really the only alternative they hear, in many cases — it is the message that comes in various ways through various media. But I also wonder if part of the loss of hope, loss of a sense of future, loss of a sense of planning and so forth, and also loss of memory, doesn't come from abuse. I am not sure that families are more abusive places to be than they used to be, but it may be there is less moral restraint on parents and older brothers and sisters selfishly seeking their own pleasures and their own advantages at the expense of a younger and weaker and more vulnerable member of the family unit. So I hold it at least as possible. But certainly our sensitivity to abuse is there.

Secondly, I think that while Americans tend to ignore bad memories in a way that not all cultures do — if you were a Serbian, one of your most important memories would be the battle in 1389 in which the Serbian kingdom was defeated by the Turks, and that still determines the way I feel about a lot of people, especially the Bosnians — you call them Bosnians — who mixed blood with the Turk. 1389. That's current. We don't really live in that kind of world.

And so, on the eleventh of September, 2001, I was in Germany, and among the many things I said to myself that day, as I checked in on the television every once in a while: by the time I get back at the end of November, people will have forgotten about this. And I was amazed that the first week in chapel, four out of five sermons mentioned 9/11 still. But in fact, the lives of almost none of us, I would guess in this room, were very much affected, except when we go to the airport. And it's not really a part of our consciousness. And I find the importance of place very clear from knowing a few New Yorkers, for whom 9/11 is a present and vivid memory. But as a matter of fact, I bet that none of us will ever go to a Cardinals game or a Rams game or a Vikings game again without thinking about April 15th, 2013. We'll forget the date, but we'll remember that bombs go off at sporting events. But how many of you are canceling your tickets? That's what I thought. We're not those kind of people. If we had tickets, none of us would cancel them, because I think it's, in general, the way we are. But especially in the U.S., it probably isn't going to happen to me.

I suspect that by 1941 or '42, most Germans realized that the Gestapo could come for them, certainly most East Germans realized, throughout the German Democratic Republic, that the Stasi could come for them — might not throw them in jail, but at least follow them in for questioning, even members of the party weren't immune. So we don't feel our vulnerability to a great extent in this country.

And then I think another cause is simply our prosperity. I don't want to harp on that, but I'm harping on that, because I really think that we need to be — we need in this room to be preparing ourselves to help people understand that. On the basis of my conversations every Sunday morning with David Meyer, a member of our congregation who teaches East Asian finance at Wash U, I think we will almost certainly have the experience of a serious financial downturn, perhaps shorter, perhaps longer term.

And then we also need to remember — well, let me say one more thing. There's a kind of new faith emerging, if you read the literature, except that I don't think it's a new faith at all — I think we've experimented with this certainly throughout U.S. history — trying to create God into a distant but benevolent God, a kind of deistic approach that says: of course God exists, but he doesn't want to interfere with us. He'll help us when we need him. He's there at our beck and call. And secondly, we want to pursue happiness, and sometimes we have rather strange definitions of happiness that seem to me to be ever more self-indulgent.

So according to the literature that Lucas, I think, will talk a little bit more about, we're faced with a grand moralism and a therapeutic deism. We want a moral structure that protects us, and we want to be healed when we get sick, but we don't want interference when we're not. This is a view that has no eschatological perspective. Luther is very strong on the fact that we are today right in the middle of the eschatological battle that will go on to the ends of the earth, and we deceive ourselves if we don't believe in the reality of Satan and the reality of his plans for us today that are countered to God's plans. That battle is happening, and we shouldn't be spooked by it, because Satan's been defeated, but we need to take it seriously. And then also, we don't have in this country any real concept of a future day of liberation or judgment. And so we have to tell the story from God's creation to God's culmination at the very end.

Now, again, I say, I grew up with Norman Vincent Peale, and that was kind of a be-happy religion. Already in the '60s, Philip Rieff wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and Peter Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy, saying much the same thing about religion in the Eisenhower and post-Eisenhower years.

Well, let me go on to the next. We need to go to them if we're going to meet them. Only in the movies can you build a baseball diamond in the cornfields and expect them to come, and then only in Iowa, from which I am proud to say I am. But I'm not even sure it'll work there now, and if it would, we probably wouldn't have the money to do it spectacularly enough. So we have to remember that one of the conditions — the part is simple — at the beginning of the command at the end of Matthew, to make disciples, is going. That's simply God's expectation. And I suppose it's natural to expect that from a God who went himself, who didn't think hanging on to his godness was something he had to insist upon, but who came to be a servant, to be one of us, to take on our human flesh.

And so where do we meet the nones? You know, there's certain calls that you're just glad you didn't get. And one of my students, ten years ago, got a call to begin a new ministry to young people in the suburban area of St. Louis. I forget exactly what the description was, but he said that the first six months of his ministry were spent chiefly between about nine or ten p.m. and four or five a.m., and that when he came home from work, he went to the basement and took off every stitch of clothing and put it in the wash machine and showered, because he stank of cigarette smoke. He had been hanging out in bars. At the end of that experiment, he had a very small group of people who were interested enough to join his Bible class, but it was the core of a congregation that he formed then, also with people like you and me. The miracle, of course, was that the people like you and me were willing to come together with the other people to work together with them.

I wrote into my outline, as I was preparing this, that we go to the sports clubs and playing fields. Then I went to St. Catherine's in January to teach, and a former fitness club manager said that when he goes to the fitness club, it's not like ten years ago, that people have their earplugs in, and there's not the kind of community. The closest I ever got to a fitness club, as you can tell, is when I had to do rehab, and there three-quarters of the whole fun of it was being on the treadmill talking to the guys next to me. But apparently that may be — well, I think playing fields, especially with coaching our kids and whatnot, may be a way. I'm told that the internet is also a possibility — I've never been in, do they still call them chat rooms — but I think there are any number of possibilities, both for putting our message out there but also for engaging in conversation. But probably just being a part of our communities, and that's going to look different in every last community that we represent.

I was in South Dakota, in Pierre, for a pastoral conference, the days after the death of the governor in a plane crash, and the two pastors at the congregation where I was, Faith and Pierre, walked the streets and visited the coffee shops where they — one of them had a more upscale coffee shop, the other had a more working-class coffee shop — but they were familiar faces. And I saw how they exercised pastoral care for people from their congregations, but also for people from across the community, in a crisis situation. And that may not show up on our books, but it may. It may be that people who have no need of a pastor, but kind of like running into you at a coffee shop or on the playing field, don't need you for anything else but a friendly conversation for years, but you're the closest thing to God they know. I know that's a scary thought, but it's true. And so being part of events in our communities and schools is also another simple part of our life, but with evangelistic potential that we don't always realize. And again, we don't go out and hand out tracts at those things, but our presence lays the basis for future proclamation and persuasion.

I think it's important that pastors meet these people, because pastors are the experts, and Americans like experts. And I think it's important that our lay people meet them, because they are coming in contact with all sorts of people that we don't come in contact with much.

I grew up in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in the geographical bounds of Corpus Christi Parish. That was the Irish parish, and Father McEvoy could have been cast-typed as the tough Irish priest. "Father" was the last thing I ever wanted to be called by members of a congregation. And so you can imagine how chagrined I was when I read the Large Catechism, Fourth Commandment, and Luther says that pastors are fathers to their congregations. I once asked my advisor, Robert Preus — no, I didn't ask him. Well, I asked him many things, but he said — I can't remember what how that came up — he said, it's easier to have ten kids than two. I didn't ask Donna that ever, so I really don't know the full story there. But I asked Daniel once — well, I just said, your dad told me once it was easier to have ten kids than two. And he knew exactly the illocutionary force of my statement. His answer was not yes or no; he simply said, I changed more diapers before I was eighteen than after. And so fathers know the difference. I know it's hard to learn — sometimes our kids have to bring us up short — but fathers know the difference between their infant children and their adult children.

Now, unlike our families — well, maybe not terribly unlike our families — we have to recognize that sometimes those who have been adults will become children again. But we need to know whom we need to father in one way, and whom we need to permit to help change the diapers, to help carry the Word of God, to which they're commissioned according to Luther by their very baptisms, how they carry it into the lives of those around them.

We have to take individual nones seriously, and we have to recognize that their worlds may make sense to them, but they may not make sense to us. Our world probably will not make sense to them. They need to learn it.

I think Lucas, this evening, will talk a little bit about some of the findings of people who have looked at what people are saying as they leave the church or have abandoned the church for some time. They think, first of all, that we're hypocritical and judgmental. And it probably doesn't hurt up front to say, yeah — I wouldn't spring the joke on them that you always hear, "I don't come to your church because it's hypocritical." "Oh, you're more than welcome, we always have room for one more." But we need to repent. We also need to help people understand that all people are judgmental for their own good, and that our judgments are pronounced hoping to warn and protect and guide people.

We are boring and old-fashioned and out of touch with reality. Sometimes that's true. So we really need to be aware of the fact — and Mark Jansen was just telling me about his adaptation of the Ahab-idolatry lesson to Green Bay Packers worshipers. That may be going too far, actually. But no — there are, if we use our imagination — I can see I touch some raw nerves here. If we — yes, that's right — thank you. We need to remember that these stories are historical stories that happened once, but they have an uncanny parallel to much that we experience, and to help people read the Bible with those kinds of eyes that say: what's different, but also what's the common historical experience? I don't find the Bible boring. I find it both old-fashioned and new-fashioned. And it is not out of touch with reality, but puts me in touch with reality.

Another one of the charges is that we're anti-homosexual, and there isn't much we can do about that one either, except to explain that — sometimes Lucas and I were talking at lunch — sometimes we make it seem as though that's the only sin, and we need to remember that as serious as the homosexual aggressive pursuit of their agenda is for our society right now, we need to remember that we come with both law and gospel, with the power of the gospel that can help people combat also that sin. And we remember that we single it out no more than we single out the other really oppressive sins under which people are suffering in our society.

Some people just can't figure out what advantage there would be to being in the community of believers. A classmate of mine at senior college did not go to seminary, and turned up, when I got to graduate school five, six years later, in Madison, and we got together, and he said, well, you know, there was one Sunday we just didn't go to church, and it made it a little less difficult to skip the next Sunday, and all of a sudden I realized that I didn't really have any reason to go back. He was a successful — at that point, student of the law — went on to a successful career, I've been told; we haven't had contact since — a successful career in Washington. And I don't know if today he's a Christian or not. I pray for him occasionally, and I suppose with the wonders of Google, I could find him again. But he said there was no great crisis, there was no great doubt, there was just a kind of realization that it wasn't there — whatever had been there before, as if he couldn't even remember.

So we recognize that there are atheists, and some of them are aggressive. It's very interesting that studies — I think a Roman Catholic sociologist it was — who recently studied some of these new atheists that are very aggressive in their critique of Christianity — and again, I don't want to psychologize things, but I often do, I fear — they come largely from broken homes. They come largely from places where a father has abandoned a family, and/or perhaps abused the family, and that's kind of telling too.

And then there are people like my friend who just sort of drifted into agnosticism, which is supposedly modest but really quite arrogant. And I guess it's a form of agnosticism, but just the apathetic — those who don't have enough energy really to even say, no, I really don't know. They will grant you very gladly that there might be a God, but, you know, again, no need. And some, of course, will find an active source of their identity, security and meaning, their place and respect, in other activities that become false spiritualities for them.

The question we have to ask is: why would a none want to associate with our congregation? One of my saddest memories from teaching Theology for Evangelism at the college level was the time a student came back to report on another class activity — for an activity for another class, he was visiting people as part of an outreach program in a local congregation. And he said, well, you know, these people finally decided they would like to come, and that was really great, and they will enjoy life at Messiah, I'm quite sure — I just couldn't do this in my home congregation, because I don't think my home congregation would receive them.

And that recalls for me now the story of a brother who told about winning a family through a confirmand — a girl who came along with her girlfriends to confirmation class, and became enthusiastic about the teaching of the church, loved Jesus, brought her family with them. They did not dress very well because they didn't have the money, but were assured that would be okay. But then all of a sudden a couple of the elders came to the pastor, and they'd heard the girl cussing, and saw her smoking, and — not unjustifiably, I think — didn't want their own kids exposed to that, and made it clear enough to the family that they went to the Baptist church a few miles away. Now, I can understand not wanting your kids to learn cuss words, although it's probably not going to depend on one person, but I think there might be other ways to combat that. But that's the problem we have, trying to be a haven for sinners and trying to be the place where we indeed build Christian lives, for those who are already deeply into the faith.

So I don't know what you think about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but I put it on the outline, just because it's again one of those things that in our society people think in terms of, and it may be helpful — although my colleague Herm Wenzel at Concordia St. Paul had been at Columbia, I think, he'd taken Maslow for a seminar, said he didn't do any research on this, he sat at his desk and philosophized and came up with it. But philosophers come up with good descriptions of humanity too. So, well, what Maslow would tell us is that if people's physiological needs aren't met, they're probably not going to listen to the gospel.

In that same class on Theology for Evangelism, another quarter probably, students came back from making calls, and said that the two lay people that they had been with, making this call, had come back thoroughly disgusted, because the people they called on — the man had lost his job that week, and all he wanted to talk about was the dilemma of unemployment, and didn't want to listen to the gospel at all. And the students were not real pleased with that way of approaching this couple, but that was what their — the people they were with — were thinking of. They were there to give witness to Jesus, and the people who were struggling with how to make ends meet until another job was found weren't connecting at all.

So a pastor's wife tore into me just awful once in one of my witness workshops, because I was giving Maslow credibility. She said, every mother knows that she doesn't need her physiological needs or her security needs or any of these needs satisfied before she sacrifices herself to protect her kids. So Maslow is just wrong. Well, I think probably Maslow himself would have admitted that his — it's not an airtight description of our humanity — but there is a certain level that says we have to recognize the impact of physiological needs as we give witness to people. And that is not only true of the poor, who don't have some things, but it's also true of those who are filled, and whose sensitivity simply may be dulled to the extent that they can't hear the message. And what that means is we simply have to hang around, we have to build trust, we have to be the person you could go to if you didn't someday have everything you need to secure your identity.

So the next level is that of security and safety. And there's both a temporal level and an eternal level to that. There's a core identity issue with security, and there is a practical day-to-day level. The practical day-to-day level is similar to the physiological needs. The more critical questions, of course, come when there's a crisis — not necessarily in whether you're going to heaven or not; that's an important question, but we're not alone in the twenty-first century in thinking that heaven can wait and will wait. People in the Middle Ages were far more interested — thank you — we're far more interested in taking the host home in their mouths, to pound over the door of the pigsty so that there would be soup with a little pork fat in it throughout the winter. They wanted to heal Grandma by putting the host in her soup. And they figured that someday, too, purgatory could be taken care of, so you could get on to heaven.

But the security questions in the vertical realm of our lives come when questions of personal integrity arise and crises come. On the plane on the way up, there was a New York Times Magazine describing a Belgian sociologist, I believe, who had faked his data and who had been stripped of all his honors, his university position, and all the rest. He cheated on the data, he said, not so much because he wanted to have a good reputation — he was building a good reputation before he started cheating on his data — he simply wanted an orderly world, and research on human beings was just too messy for him. Christians call that sin, but it offended his aesthetic sense, and so he tried to doctor the data to make it work. And now, as the reporter interviewed him, he was in the midst of a crisis of personal integrity, that on smaller scales than that, probably people face fairly often. And if we're around to chat with them about that, that can be critical — that is the exercise of God's judgment that brings healing and new birth for such people.

Then Maslow moves on to community, and I think that perhaps the largest problem that brings people to know that they need a new start, a new something, is loneliness, estrangement, alienation. It afflicts us in our families, it afflicts us in our workplaces, it afflicts us with our neighbors. The individualism of the United States today is a curse that makes people not only alone but also lonely. And so they may come to the church, first of all, simply because they find friendly people there. And we can't bait and switch — we can't say we're just a friendly place, you know — we have to say we are the community of Jesus Christ. But we can't expect that people will understand that and everything that means right off. And so if they can walk alongside us simply because we're a friendly community, that's okay. We just have to be in conversation about the One who makes it a friendly community, and to explain the larger framework out of which our lives proceed.

I will have to admit that I was a Christian for quite a while before I understood it well. I may have been a Christian for seventy-some years before I understood it really well. Well, maybe I don't understand it all that well — you're probably saying that to yourselves already. So we recognize that growth in the intellectual part of the faith, and in the emotional part of the faith, is something in progress. But we also recognize that that progress is anchored in the once-and-for-all act of God's forgiveness and reconciliation that comes to us. In a moment most of us probably can't identify — called conversion — I mean, I can identify mine, but I can't remember it. Some people can remember a moment; that's fine. But however it comes to us, it is God's commitment, and God's commitment is a promise, and he doesn't go back on his promises. But we recognize that people who, for instance, need community, they will have to grow. And also it can be something as simple as just finding a member of our congregation who respects somebody who doesn't feel they're getting much respect.

The next stage for Maslow was the matter of esteem or respect, and that will be a level at which we will meet some people too. According to Bishop Zulu, the whole population of South Africa, the whole black population of South Africa needs to get that message, but there are lots of people in the U.S. too. So much in our media militates against being able to respect yourself or to earn the respect of others, simply because of the standards that the advertising, for instance, sets.

And then finally, Maslow talks about self-actualization. I don't know about you, but I have never actualized myself. I can't ever remember having the possibility of actualizing myself. I don't know what that means, of course, but I think what it means is what my parents did to me, and what all my relatives did to me, and my teachers did to me — everybody else is actualizing me. That is, they are making me the person I am. And so that level of human need is addressed again with the simple promise of new life, of integrity, of wholeness, that Jesus Christ gives us. And that is, of course, the big crisis, and the law addresses that, especially that last one.

The route to the nones, then, finally, is the route — and this is, I know, theologizing way above the level of reality — but the route is, first of all, the personal relationship. We're created in the image of God, we're into personal relationships, the personal relationship that makes us someone who is trustworthy enough to be heard. Now, some people will trust almost anyone who comes along, because people are very desperate in our society, and some people will be very suspicious of us a long, long time. But if they are tempted to come into conversation with us, if our contacts with them have been such that they are willing to risk a conversation, then we are well into the possibilities of effective Christian witness.

And what the law does is it kills. And we have a lot of people in our society who carelessly toss around the phrase, oh, I wish I were dead. You know, when your boyfriend or girlfriend sees you not looking the way you want to look on Saturday, you tell your girlfriend or boyfriend, oh, I just wish I was dead, because he or she saw me looking like that. That's probably not a real death wish. But already in teenagers, even in preteens, and certainly in the adult population, we have a lot of people who really wish they were dead, who just don't like themselves, who find what they have done, and the sense of who they are, insufficient to make life worthwhile. And we come to people like that, affirming them, and saying to them: do I have a deal for you? We use the law to explain why they don't like themselves, and we offer the gift of death.

I particularly — it's not as much fun with seminarians because they kind of figure me out — but with college juniors, some of you may have fallen into the trap. I used to love to say the third definition. The first definition is "to make righteous," of justification, in the sixteenth century. The second is "to pronounce righteous," like in a courtroom. And the third is "to do justice to," to give the sinner what the sinner deserves. And, in justification, does the sinner deserve what the sinner gets in justification? And all the pious Lutherans said, no. Paul's answer is: you betcha. Because Paul says that justification that comes to us on the basis of Christ dying for our sin and being raised for our justification — the result of justification, as it is conveyed to us in our baptisms — is that we are buried as sinners; our sinful identity, our sins, are buried. They're not in God's sight at all anymore. And we are raised up as righteous, as justified people.

And so we can tell them: that you may be able to change your future, you might be able to change the present. You think you can't change the past, and you're right. But God can. He's the only one who can change our past, because it is God who determines reality. And when God imputes to us — that is, regards us as his righteous children — the fundamental reality of our lives is that we are his righteous children. We still, in the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptized, experience another reality. But it is trumped by the reality of God's imputation, God's regard, God's word, that accepts us as his children, and promises us that relationship forever.

We have five minutes for questions.

As you're talking about the trials and tribulations, I just remember back to fifth grade, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and our teacher — a friend of mine and I talked about it after we got out of high school — our teacher had us convinced that our grade school was the prime target of the Russians. If they could take out our grade school, they could take over the country.

Well, that may have been true. No, I don't think so. Phil, do you want —

I was just going to agree with something that you had said, but I've noticed over the years — it seems to be the growing phrase, more and more lately — is, "I just can't know for certain that God would forgive the past that I've lived." That seems to be a much more prevalent thing now, or at least much more vocalized now. Do you think that's — well, what do you think about that?

I might change my mind in five minutes. My first reaction is, I suspect this uncertainty was there all along. And in part, I think, within Lutheranism, that explains why often pietism — and I'm a fan of pietism, in Eastern Europe and in Northern Europe, the pietists were those who saved the confession of the Lutheran confessions — but I think that pietism also strove, among other things, to offset that uncertainty that is sort of always there, because Satan comes to us with a couple of good arguments, by looking not to the cross, but to our own works as proof. So I think you're right, it's probably more openly expressed today, and I think the only thing to combat it is to repeat the gospel. How often do we need things repeated to us before we believe them, before we really take them in? And so, I have a friend, a scholar, who always thinks that she's not going to get certain things written, and she does research that assists and expands my own, and so I need what she's working on in sixteenth-century history, so I just keep repeating, no, it'll get done, it'll get done. We go through this so often when we're together. And that's what we have to do with our people too.

I think the devil comes with two arguments, and it's often based on a false understanding of forensic justification. Already in the sixteenth century, Andreas Osiander — whom you probably do not remember as the heretic behind the third article of the Formula of Concord — is the one who said our divine righteousness is what makes us righteous in God's sight — not our divine righteousness, Jesus' divine nature dwelling in us — that's our righteousness before God. And he said that because forensic justification is a legal fiction. Well, no, it's not, it's God's word. God doesn't indulge in fiction — when he says something, it creates reality. But you see, we come at it with this attitude — well, you know, the judge let my brother-in-law off too, but he's guilty of sin, so I know that I'm still carrying around my guilt. No, you're not. Christ claimed it, Christ put it in his tomb. It's grand larceny to fetch your sin back — that's law. So I think we just have to keep repeating it, imaginatively if we can.

But the devil has a couple of arguments with forensic justification. One is: well, just look at yourself, you can see you're still a sinner, that's the real you, you don't have a chance of getting to heaven, so you might as well play the game my way. The other interpretation of forensic justification he has is a little more pious. He says, well, of course that's what God said, you've got your ticket, you don't have to worry about a thing. But just look at yourself, you can see you're really a sinner, you really got these desires — go with them, the ticket is there at the station, just pick it up as you leave. And both those arguments then lead to a reaction, also within Lutheranism, but in other traditions as well, that says: we've got to reinforce this somehow, by going back to the same old story, my works at least confirm that God's grace is working in me. No — my works are products of God's grace. Because of the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptized, they may be there in more or less prominence, but the word of the Lord is there. So you just have to keep repeating it. It's like dealing with kids — it is dealing with kids, God's kids.

Do we have time for one more? Shortly.

I don't know — because we're talking about these from outside, feeling this guilt, but it seems to me that a lot of people deny that they are even sinners. So what would you say about that?

Yeah. But they are. And something down deep — I just deal with the facts. Part of why our society doesn't function as well as it could is that we don't deal with guilt. Karl Menninger, who is not a Christian, I think, wrote a book — Whatever Became of Sin? I always say "whatever happened to sin" — but he explains that you need some sense of sin and guilt to make society function, because you have to take responsibility for yourself. So I think we never tell them the way it is with them. We always tell them what our experience is, and we tell them that our experience is that by coming clean and saying, I may be a victim — and that also points me to God — but I'm also a perpetrator, and my ability to honestly confront that is liberating, not because I can liberate myself, but because Jesus Christ liberates me. And I know that's only my opinion, but listen to me — just think about how that might be true. Well, the first time, nobody's going to believe it, I suspect. Or if they're so desperate that they say, oh, yeah, I believe that, they'll go through many a crisis on the road to really having it firm in grip. But yep.

Thank you very much.