What ails the LCMS- and the Church catholic

Since leaving Saint Mary, I've been looking for a new church home. I visited what was one of the top contenders Saturday night. It's dropped off the list.

The sermon was about that notoriously sinful woman who "loved much-" who washed Jesus' feet with her tears and dried them with her hair one evening while he was having dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. The sermon title was something about how our love flows from being forgiven by Jesus. In short, we seemed all set for a good, strong Lutheran sanctification sermon- one which starts by breaking the hearer with the Law, but then- instead of trying to extort obedience through guilt or threats- recognizes the fact that "we love Him because He first loved us," and that it is the Gospel, and not the Law, that change hearts and causes them to love Jesus.

I'm not sure exactly how we managed to get a sermon on that text and with that title that was at least 90% Law, but we did. I have the feeling that somehow the pastor was trying to say what I said in the previous paragraph. But the sermon was just about entirely about what we need to do to remedy our own lack of love for Jesus. We were directed, if our love to Jesus isn't what it ought to be, to consider what huge sinners we are. Good start. I think the pastor was on the right track. At one point he even said that if we recognized that we didn't love Jesus as much as we should, we should go to the Cross.

But even that is Law. It's about what we should do. We don't need to be told about the Gospel, somehow ungospeled by being transformed into something we achieve through our own efforts; we need the Gospel. What we needed to hear- what causes us poor, miserable sinners to love Jesus, and changes our selfish, sinful hearts- is hearing about what Jesus has already done for us. And alas, we didn't hear that Saturday night.

We heard a very little bit about how we need to consider what Jesus had done for us. But we heard very little about what He has done for us- and even less about what He has done specifically about our failure to love Him as we should! Ok, given the last paragraph, maybe we didn't really need to hear that last. The Gospel itself is sufficient. But only the Gospel is sufficient, once the work of the Law has been done.

We didn't need to simply hear that we should be ashamed for not loving Jesus more. That might make us feel guilty. It might even accomplish the essentially meaningless task so many Pietistic and "Evangelical" sermons strive for- to get us to re-double our efforts to love Jesus.

But I wonder whether that pastor thought his wife would be impressed if he told her, "Honey, I have to admit that I don't love you as much as I should. I promise to re-double my efforts to force myself to love you in the future." I suspect that,rather than being gratified, she would flee to the bedroom in tears and slam the door behind her.

Why do we think that Jesus is any more pleased by our dutiful attempts to force ourselves to love Him? True, we needed to be broken by the Law. We needed to be accused for our failure to love Jesus. But you can't increase your love for somebody by trying extra hard to love them. Nor can love be produced by guilt. We needed to hear that Jesus died for our failure to love Him, too. If we do, indeed, love Jesus because He first loved us (and we do), then what will increase our love for Him is not merely hearing what ungrateful creeps we are (and we are!), but rather how much He loves us!

Saturday night I got a reminder of why I left the Missouri Synod in the first place. There are simply too many LCMS pastors who have trouble distinguishing between Law and Gospel in the pulpit. An old-timer who participated in Pastor Siegel's installation at Saint Mary told me after the service that his congregation had been upset with him for a while because a visiting pastor had presented his congregation with an essentially Reformed doctrine of sanctification, and they therefore jumped to the conclusion that he was wrong for not trying to get the Law to do what only the Gospel can do: work sanctification. Patient catechesis straightened that congregation out. But unfortunately, not every LCMS congregation has a pastor with his theological ducks in a sufficiently straight row to understand the relative roles of the Law and the Gospel in sanctification.

Or maybe that's not it. Maybe, like the pastor I heard Saturday night, he sort of understands the theory, but can't quite put it into homeletical practice. In any event, as grave a threat as antinomianism- the failure to preach the Law, or to take it seriously- truly is in this lawless age, let us not miss the point that there is something which the Old Adam hates even more than being told what we need to do, and we needn't pat ourselves on the back for avoiding the antinomian trap when we cater to the old coot in a more subtle but equally lethal way.

The Old Self hates being told that we haven't, that we don't, and that we can't make the moral grade.

It hates having to depend on Jesus.

That pastor certainly preached our need for Jesus. He just didn't preach Jesus. And when an attempt is made to get the Law to do what only the Gospel can, the result is spiritual- and homeletical- disaster. That's a lesson Missouri as a denomination, and the Church catholic as a whole, both desperately need to learn.

Maybe that pastor merely had a bad day. I hope so. But for myself, I need more than to know how little I measure up to the minimum demands of God's Law. And the last thing I, whose heart is desperately loveless and corrupt and finally helpless of myself to become otherwise, needs to hear is what I need to do about it.

I don't just need to hear that I ought to love Jesus more. I need to actually do so- and the only way my sinful heart can be changed so that I do is by contemplating how much He loves me.

I could have handled the schmaltzy final hymn from Lift Up Your Hearts, to the tune of The Church in the Wildwood (the words, at least, weren't half bad, even if I do think it's a mistake to give even an inch to the would-be Reformed Evangelicals in our midst by aping their inferior and sentimental musical style). I could have handled the pastor's verbal play-by- play on the liturgy, telling us what we would do now and which page it was on (thereby disrupting the flow of the service and distracting from the impact of the Word of which the historic liturgy consists), and even the reprehensible practice (which I myself, I'm sorry to say, followed through most of my career in the ministry) of having the prayers, not led by the pastor, but prayed by the congregation in unison (the current confusion in WELS, the ELS, and parts of Missouri over the nature of the pastoral office is responsible for the widespred character of this regrettable habit).

But I need the Gospel. I am too big a sinner to waste my time wallowing in the gravity of my sin. I need to be lifted up out of the mud- and only Jesus can do that.

To the miserable and inadequate extent to which I love Him, it is solely and completely because He first loved Me. And what I need more than anything else is a deeper and more profound understanding of how much He loves me.

That's what you need, too.