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Condensation sounds as if I’m going to give a little science lecture.  I’m not.  All I remember anyway is to say when water vapor cools it condenses into liquid like when the clouds begin to rain or snow or when the steam in the shower begins to run as water down the outside of the shower door.  But another meaning is to compact something big into a smaller form.  Take Martin Luther’s Small Catechism completed in May of 1529.  It takes the whole of Christian faith and teaching and condenses it to the Six Chief Parts: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, Confession and the Sacrament of the Altar (Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper).  It is an enchiridion (Greek for “manual or handbook”) of Christian doctrine.  It is also part of the Lutheran confession in the Book of Concord and remains the fundamental text for confirmation classes as well as many other times of biblical study, especially to introduce the faith.

I would think that today’s generation should like the Small Catechism.  People like it short and to the point today.  “Text me” is the mantra of our times.  Granted, the Six Chief Parts are just a tad more than can fit onto our cell phone screens but when you think that Luther was condensing the fundamental truths of the Bible, I think he did a pretty good job.  I’m going to follow his lead this month and review all six but in four weeks of Wednesday Bible study (7:00 PM).  Condensation.  I seek to meet the spiritual needs of my busy generation.

There is another reason, though, I think Luther’s Small Catechism is still relevant today.  It was written with “ordinary pastors and preachers” in mind and also “in plain form in which the head of the family shall teach to his household”.  In other words, it wasn’t supposed to be complicated.  Condensation gets to the nitty-gritty and keeps it simple.  When you’re dealing with all the blessed truths of Holy Scripture, that’s hard.  But many busy people then and now can’t dedicate their lives to studying the Bible so Luther wrote a catechism to hit upon the essential truths.  The catechism allows doctrine to be more easily taught in a classroom or devotional setting, too.  Luther wrote a Large Catechism as well but it requires more in depth discussion so the Small Catechism remains the standard in which Lutherans teach the Christian faith in its most basic form.

I hope you’ll join me Wednesdays at 7:00 PM for our hour study of the Six Chief Parts.  I promise to keep us to one hour.  It will be good review or introduction depending where you are in your understanding of the faith.  Luther who wrote it said he had to study the catechism every day to keep up with its meaning and importance lest he forget or grow weak in faith.  We can at least find an hour in the week.  For Christ’s sake, may it be so.  Then we can have a happy Reformation Day on October 31st as we are well versed in the Word of God and it’s precious Gospel restored by Luther to the Church.

Why do we do what we do anyway?  Choices.  Sure but then what really dictates our choices?  I’m not so positive that we are always in control of them and I’m not just saying that our options are limited.  I know I can’t “choose” to headline the band line-up for Coachella because I don’t play guitar.  Okay, because of a few other things, too.  But I could have chosen to learn guitar when I was younger and then chosen to start a band that became famous, at least in theory.  Why didn’t I?  It’s not like if I was  “choosing” to go to Mars or something impossible.  Was there something else that conspired to keep me from a life of rock-n-roll?

I’m raising a big issue: free-will.  Does it exist?  Determinists would say that our lives are on a trajectory of a kind of cause and effect.  Things happen that place us on a path like throwing a stone in outer space.  It will go on straight ahead unless something intervenes to alter that course.  Extreme determinists talk about fate and destiny.  They contend there is no choice in life; we are on set paths to follow for life (even for eternity).  It can be comforting to think in a Newtonian kind of universe that God just wound us up and placed us in the direction we were supposed to go.  But 20th-century physics threw us a curve ball: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger’s “Cat”, the whole crazy, miniscule world of quantum mechanics.  Nothing’s for sure.  You can’t know both the exact place of something and its rate and direction of movement.  Little bits are too quirky.  This suggests that at the neurological level of our microscopic brain synapses it’s anybody’s guess why people do what they do and what they will do next which eliminates free-will, too.  The universe would be indifferent and fickle here.

Instead of worrying about my free-will, I count on God’s good will.  I trust His love as the glue that holds the universe together and the energy that makes it run.  I thank Him that He chose me in His grace from the dawn of time and created me in His holy image.  And when I exercised my will in sinful selfishness, He provided a path back to Himself in Christ’s cross.  I will then follow the path He leads me on confident it will bring me to Heaven one day.  The physicists and psychologists can continue the debate about man’s free-will.  I’ll be content with God’s grace that chose me for eternity.

Besides, I’m turning 50.  Now what do I do, worry about if I have a choice in the matter?  I’ll start with a good stout or maybe a mellow Pinot.  Maybe I’ll go to the beach and watch the sun set or see a movie.  I might have sushi or a tender rib eye.  Chocolate will be involved but will it be a fudge sundae or cake?  There’s lots of choices I’ll be making and frankly I don’t care why.  I know I must live with “my” choices, though.  So what I’ll do with the second half of my life (I’m optimistic) will take some prayerful consideration.  It’s enough to know God is there sustaining and guiding it.  Maybe I’ll learn guitar now?

We can all relax a little as Christians.  In a recent survey, people generally like Jesus.  They think He’s a swell guy.  They like what He says about judging not lest you be judged and loving your neighbor.  They admire His simple lifestyle.  Some even respect His grit.  It so often seems like we have to defend Jesus that this comes as welcomed news.  Of course, the survey didn’t ask if participants thought Jesus was really God come in the flesh and that His death on the cross alone saves them from eternal judgment but why rock the boat, right.  They like Jesus, they really like Him.  Just not His Church.

The trend in America, at least, is that people are growing even further away from what is called “organized religion” and tradition church bodies toward a vague kind of spirituality.  A recent Newsweek article’s title was “Follow Jesus, Forget His Church” and goes on to extol Thomas Jefferson who removed all the miraculous, religious stuff from the New Testament leaving only the moral teaching and also Francis of Assisi who gave up his inheritance favoring an austere lifestyle. Look around and see how many young people come to church or are involved in any significant way in our ministry.  Look around at your neighborhood and see how many cars are still in the driveway Sunday morning.  But yet most Americans say they are spiritual and even like Jesus.

I’ve noticed this trend for many years now.  It’s concerned me that some church bodies have abandoned their traditions and, in some cases, their doctrine to try to appeal to the shifting whims of current culture.  It also concerns me that others have moved away from prioritizing worship and Bible study in favor of other events designed to get people in their doors.  I’m all for fun and fellowship but we can never forget that Jesus called us to make disciples by baptizing and teaching.  That has always been the staple of church ministry.  But many see public, corporate worship as optional and incidental to their “spirituality”.  Church, shmurch.  To this I ask, “Then why did Jesus establish His Church and promise that nothing, not even hell itself, would abolish it?”  He did this 50 days after Easter when He sent the Holy Spirit.  We call this day Pentecost.  Believers were then gathered together as the Body of Christ to grow through the Gospel given in Christ’s Word and Sacraments.  He calls pastors to administer these means of grace faithfully.  We were also gathered together to go forth into all nations to share that Gospel.  Jesus never envisioned an individual spirituality apart from one another.  We experience His continued presence, in fact, by the gathering together of even two or three Jesus said.

Maybe it will be that I’ll only be preaching to the “choir” for awhile; in other words, to those interested in hearing the Gospel.  At least until someone gets sick, fears dying or hell, wants a “church wedding”, wants free counseling, gets tired of all the world’s bad news, needs a letter of recommendation, needs a friend or wants to connect with God and really know that He loves them.  And when they do… we’ll be here.  Oh yes, we’ll be here.  Jesus said so.  He promised He’d be with us always ’til the end of the age as we gather in His name around His Word, His Body and Blood given in His Church.

O.K., O.K… I admit it!  It’s a guilty pleasure.  It could be worse.  I… I…I enjoy watching AMC’s “The Walking Dead” TV show.  (exhale) There.  I said it.  I’m human like the rest of you but you already knew that, huh. Really it isn’t so bad.  As shows go these days, aside from the zombie gore, there’s none of the smut and blatant immorality you see on so many other shows.  In fact, there’s a definite moral thread going through the show as the characters each have to come to a daily understanding of right and wrong in a kind of post-apocalyptic world of flesh eating zombies (they call them “walkers”, though).

Sorry… this isn’t a fan magazine or the latest manga novella.  So why do I write about the “walking dead”?    Because I see a parallel between the characters in that fictional world and those in my world.  What constitutes being alive, especially as we Christians add being alive in Christ.   I know this much- life isn’t just about having the ability to move or eat.

For a time a Christian character in the show named Hershel couldn’t kill the walkers because he saw them as alive but just sick.  Love for some of those “sick” which included his family and friends blinded him from the truth.  He later embraced the harsh truth that these former people were truly dead though moving about with eyes wide open.  Walkers move and follow a basic instinct of hunger not unlike unbelievers who have mobility and pursue the sinful lusts of the heart.  The truly living are those who are not slaves to their baser instincts but free to act according to conscience and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  We who have come out of the darkness of sin into the light of Christ have awakened to true life.   But are we sometimes like Hershel being blind to the truth of real versus false life?

Going through the motions of religion or piety doesn’t constitute saving faith and a relationship with Jesus.  Read the prophets ministering at and after the fall of Jerusalem to see that clearly.  Mere knowledge of God’s Word doesn’t save either.  Salvation is a matter of repentance and believing the Good News.  It is having a baptismal faith that daily dies to self and to sin and arises joyfully in Christ to the new day God gives.  It is to be aware of God’s love and to cherish it above all else.  Salvation is to seek God’s will each day and not blindly follow your own hungers.  Salvation is to love God first and your neighbor as yourself.  Yes, salvation means you have a living faith!  There is no such thing as a dead faith which is really no faith at all.

For a living faith, start thinking about what you do and why you do it as well as why you don’t do other things you know God calls sin.  As you pray, read the Bible, come to church, give, serve, love– ask why am I doing these things.  And at the end of the day if you haven’t, ask why and for God’s help and mercy.  Catch yourself at various times of the day and ask why you are doing that right now.  Be mindful of your actions.   Be in touch with what you are feeling.  Listen for God.  It is to be alive.  It is to be in Christ; as Paul writes “pray without ceasing”.

Don’t be just a “spiritual walker” going through the motions of religion with no real thought, blindly following hunger pangs only when you feel you need something from God or His church.  He lives that you might truly be alive!  Live in His grace always and be hungry only for His love.

“Why Bother?”

                I wasn’t really sure I should have gotten out of bed this morning, let alone write this article.  I mean, the world is going to end in less than a year.  December 21, 2012, to be precise as say the Mayans and they should know being the scientists of their day and all.  But even the scientists of our day are saying we’re living on borrowed time.  It could be a mega-explosion in the Canary Islands that causes a super tsunami or in Yellowstone National Park, a virtual caldron, that blankets the earth in ash and magma– or maybe a global pole reversal because of a weakening magnetic field thus letting in greater cosmic radiation that destroys the world-wide electric grid and, well, you can imagine the panic if we couldn’t watch “Dancing With the Stars” next season– or then there is the ever popular asteroid strike like the one that was supposed to have killed all the dinosaurs, or at least the ones that didn’t make it on Noah’s ark.  I’m mean why bother?  The world is going to end!

                I’ve got to confess that I’ve know this dire truth for a lot longer that this past year.  I remember hearing that the world was going to end as a child in church.  I remember reading all about it in the Bible.  Things were doomed almost from the beginning when Adam screwed everything up in the Garden of Eden.  Couldn’t he have just been satisfied with Paradise already?  But no.  He wanted to be his own god.  God’s been working on fixing things ever since.  It’s taken this long because of us.  God wants everyone to be in the new heaven and earth He’s making.  This one just won’t do anymore.  All that secret toxic waste dumped in the landfills would take billions of years to be safe.  Not to worry.  God’s making a new place for us to live like the first one before Adam ruined it for everyone.  Well, let’s not be too hard on him.  We haven’t exactly made the world a better place ourselves now have we?  So we’re waiting for Jesus, who made it possible to go to this new heaven and earth by the way, to come back for us.  Any time now He’s coming.  Just be ready.

                But why bother until He comes?  Because of them, not us.  Jesus took care of us.  Sadly, not all of them believe it yet.  They’re more worried about catching skin cancer because of a shrinking ozone than the judgment of God that is the real reason this world will end.  We’ve already had earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis along with other great signs in the heavens to tell us of this judgment but to little avail.  I wonder if an asteroid did pummel the earth if that’d get their attention.  The virgin birth of Christ and His bodily resurrection three days after crucifixion didn’t.  Still, we hope.  We keep praying and testifying to the Gospel.  The Holy Spirit keeps moving through His Word.  Missionaries are still going into all nations baptizing and teaching and helping by offering all manners of mercy.  Maybe some of them will repent, believe and so be saved.  But understand, that’s why we bother.

                So don’t get too comfortable under your bed covers waiting idly for the call of God and the trumpet blast of the archangel to take you to Heaven.  The end will come in God’s time soon enough.  His offer of grace now prevails. So the heck with doomsday prophecies of world calendars ending or geological ticking time bombs.  Get up, get out, tell your friends that Jesus’ loves them– before it ends!

“The Power of Punctuation”

“Conjunction junction, what’s my function?”Remember that one.Grammar rock… what a gift to modern learning.Well, not so modern any more but those tunes stuck with me.If nothing else, those little Saturday morning cartoons about the English language impressed me with the truth that grammar and words have life.And they can have power, too.Look at what an exclamation mark can do.It makes a sentence explode!

But it isn’t all titillation.Sometimes grammar is necessary just for clarifying meaning.Take punctuation marks for example.Where would we be without the comma, period, semicolon or question mark?It’d be chaos.We wouldn’t know where one thought ended and another began.Ideas would be lost in the haze of melding letters.Numbers wouldn’t fare any better.911 would just be a big number; 89 less than a thousand.316, too.Even putting “John” in front of it wouldn’t necessarily help us understand.

911 with a dash between the first two digits, though, means something almost sacred to Americans.9-11.It then means September 11th, the infamous day of the terrorist attack on America that set off two Gulf Wars and a campaign in Afghanistan not to mention one of the biggest manhunts in human history (a successfully concluded one I might add).And 316 with a colon between the first two digits and that word “John”, it can offer the greatest comfort that ever could be to all people everywhere.It then means that God sent His only Son to be the world’s Savior from sin and death.A colon makes that clear.

They say that the devil’s in the details but I think God is too.Certain ones anyway.”I tell you, Today you will be with me in Paradise” is different than “I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise.”Oh what a comma can do!It clarifies when we are in Paradise.The why, however, is because of that 3:16.God came in Christ to die for the sins of the world.Oh… sorry…!!!That’s great news demanding an exclamation mark or three!

In this fast paced world of ours, punctuation marks are even being used to abbreviate certain words or even phrases.There is the ever popular that means you smile at a thought and pleasantly agree.Or the opposite is out there, too.In time these could evolve into a new script for a new language.Maybe a silent one where no one talks but just texts?I hope not.I’d miss the beauty of words and of a well constructed sentence that is made clearer by proper punctuation.Indeed, because of 3:16, 9-11 needn’t be so sad. Thank you Jesus!