In his little book Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, Michael Downey suggests that we can learn things about being human from the mentally handicapped that we can’t learn from the healthy.  Handicapped people are often entirely dependent, and have to bow at every moment to the direction of others.

It is easy for us who are free from mental handicaps to think that being human means being self-directed, rational, or independent. When we examine ourselves in the mirror of handicapped people – including fetuses – we realize that being human is less about standing tall than about receiving a gift.

This is not relativism.  It is not true that we are “all handicapped” or that mental deficiencies are only so in the eye of the beholder.  But it is true that all human beings share, to one degree or another, the very dependencies that make the handicapped so strange and awkward.

Perhaps this explains why Paul says that in the church we bestow abundant honor upon the “unseemly members.”  Perhaps he wants us to learn more deeply what it means to be a “seemly member” by considering our “unseemly” brothers and sisters.

- Taken from Peter Leithart, Touchstone, p. 5, October 2008

The third pillar of our seminary mission statement is that CTS exists to form servants in Jesus Christ who … care for all. Sinful humanity is radically self-centered.  But it was not always so.  In his pristine state, Adam understood the nature of love because he was in full communion with his Creator.  Only with self-serving disobedience did our race forget the essence of love.

By His incarnation, obedience, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ restores us to full communion with the Creator.  To be in God means, quite simply, to love.  Whom?  All people.  Even your enemies just as God in Christ loved His enemies and reconciled us to Himself.

But love is not merely an inner working of the heart.  Love always acts.  John 3:16 does not say that God so loved the world that He had nice warm emotions toward us.  Rather, it says that He gave His only-begotten Son.  Though the sacrifice of Christ to atone for sin was once-for-all, God is still giving His Son to mankind.  Only now, He is doing so by the working of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Church.

Christians help those who suffer.  We do not, like Buddhists, wish it away.  We work it away.  And when we cannot, we trust in the Creator to make us anew when the new creation is fully revealed.

It is our understanding of God’s mercy toward sinners that moves us to serve our neighbor in his physical and temporal needs.  We follow the example of our Lord Jesus, the apostles and all Christendom.  He has sent us first to proclaim the forgiveness of sins but also to heal.  For in the Kingdom of God, all things are renewed, soul and body.

It is precisely this understanding of God’s living mercy that has guided Concordia Theological Seminary – Fort Wayne to place so much emphasis upon our deaconess program.  Not to say that only professional church women can serve and help the neighbor.  But to invest our resources in godly women, and men, who will make the presence of Christ known, not in words only, but through their lives and deeds is our goal.  To the glory of God.

We will, by God’s mercy, shape and build you as a servant and laborer in God’s Kingdom and prepare you for a consecrated life of ministry in the LCMS.  Our mission statements sums it up: Concordia Theological Seminary exists to form servants in Jesus Christ who will teach the faithful, reach the lost and care for all. This is what CTS is all about, the formation of pastors, deaconesses and laity for service in the church.  I’ll extend this topic into a total of three separate posts: teach, reach and care.

Teach. If our curriculum were a tree, the roots would be Jesus Christ and the trunk would be the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Sacrament.  I’ll talk about the role of the Eucharist momentarily.

As a student at CTS, you will become immersed in the texts of the Old and New Testaments.  Every seminarian studies, in their original languages, all four Gospels, all five books of Moses (Gen-Deut), the epistles of Paul, the major OT prophets and the Psalms.  Every student takes a Greeks Readings course for six of the nine on campus quarters.  That’s the minimum.

We believe that it is extremely important for the pastors of the church to have competency in reading the Greek and Hebrew texts of God’s Word.  This is possibly more important today than it has been in over a thousand years.  The society in which our graduates will be placed is more pluralistic and religiously diverse than America has ever been.  We are also more drenched in communication technologies.  This adds up to a  very confused and confusing mess.  False teachings abound.  People need and often hunger for someone to give them good spiritual food to eat.  We must be able to speak the Truth clearly, winsomely, and with precision.  Lives depend on it.

Add an in depth examination of the Lutheran Confessions, Liturgics and hymnody, pastoral practice, preaching, etc.  Not only are there specific courses in each of these fields, but our faculty strives to bring a wholistic approach to the classroom.  In other words, it is not beneficial to teach the Gospel of Luke, for instance, without talking about how to preach these texts, how they’ve been understood by historical heros of the church, how they appear in the liturgical life of the church, their significance for counseling and outreach.  We practice an intentionally inter-disciplinary form of instruction.  So when you study the Psalms, to take another example, you will have two professors.  One will teach you the Hebrew constructions and the interpretation of the texts while the other will tie that in with the liturgical and devotional use of the psalter.

Central to everything is our chapel.  This is because we understand that our students, as their primary identity, are children of God.  They must receive the Lord’s gracious gifts in scripture, preaching, Eucharist, prayer and song.  Their own heart are nourished by the presence of Christ in our midst.  That much is fundamental.  Otherwise, we become a stagnant academy of abstract ideas and theories.  God is not a “subject” to be autopsied by our skilled technicians.  He is a living person who relates to us by His Son.

These emphases of our curriculum form a person into a well equipped teacher and preacher.

Here is a link to a sermon preached a couple weeks ago by Rev. Jason Braaten here in Kramer Chapel:

Audio // Text

Sometimes there are those sermons that stick with you. They stand out either because they taught you something, struck your stubborn conscience with God’s law, or soothed an aching heart with the sweet Gospel of forgiveness. Rev. Braaten certainly proclaimed law and gospel, and I was duly comforted with the forgiveness of sins, but additionally, his preaching was also a lesson in how to read scripture.

“For the crucified and risen man Jesus is the key to unlock the Scriptures, and only with this key in hand, only with him in mind, do we rightly understand them. “

That is how you should read scripture: look through the lens of the incarnation and see Jesus as the plan and purpose for everything that God does leading up to, and flowing from, the death and resurrection of His beloved Son for your salvation.

The names of the sons of Israel find their meaning and fulfillment as Jesus is the praise and glory of God (which we have beheld, full of grace and truth) and Jesus is the increase as all things earthly decrease. Jesus is the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets as He Himself demonstrates in Luke 24:25-27 (ESV).

In the new curriculum here at CTS we do not have a formal class in hermeneutics. We have received some criticism for this, perhaps because the critic believes studying the abstract theories of how to read scripture are vital to the work of the pastor, or it could be a misunderstanding that for some reason we are not teaching the students how to read scripture. By no means!

As demonstrated in this sermon our students are daily taught applied hermeneutics as they hear the proclamation of the Word of God as they gather for chapel. At the foundation of the new curriculum is an interdisciplinary approach to theology which demands the study of scripture in every aspect of pastoral formation, whether in a course on scripture, doctrine, history, or pastoral practice.

Every class, every chapel service, every opportunity to discuss theology then becomes a lesson in how to read and interpret scripture, and how to teach it and proclaim it. This is ultimately the work of a servant of the church, and that is why Concordia Theological Seminary exists, to form servants in Jesus Christ who will teach the faithful, reach the lost, and care for all.

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Saint Paul once instructed a young pastor, “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13).This apostolic direction is hard to follow today. If someone is to read, preach and teach, then the rest of us are to listen and hear. But we live in an age of seriously short attention spans. We grumble if the preacher is long-winded. A friend once said of my preaching, “Verbosity is an atrocity.” Or as one professor here has been known to demand, “Get to the point.” O.K. Fair enough. It is important to be concise. However, it is tempting for the church to mirror the unwholesome values of the culture and resort to soundbite theology, to reduce the Ministry of the Word to repetition of religious-sounding slogans or principles or steps. Many people today, deeply shaped by the rapidly flashing images of a TV screen, have virtually lost their ability to listen and hear the spoken word unless it is as brief as a hamburger commercial. What shall we make of the words of Jesus today, “He who has ears, let him hear”?

Christianity is counter-cultural in the sense of being highly verbal, oriented around authoritative speech and texts. The Church cares about words, specifically God’s Word. As the Savior said, “Man shall . . . [live] on every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

But God’s Word is never mere chat. It is alive and active. The Divine Speech which long ago brought all things into being from nothingness still today brings order to chaos and reverberates in the Divine Service to create new life and usher us into a renewed fellowship with God. Each day we recall that “the Word became flesh.” Never a mere intellectual abstraction, God’s Word entered the concreteness of our existence through Mary, the virgin, for our redemption. His incarnation speaks new realities into being.

Because of this emphasis on the Word of God, we also assign great importance to the Office of the Ministry of the Word of God. Speaking God’s speech is constitutive of the Holy Office. CTS, as a place where pastors are formed, is devoted to Divine Speech. Our community life is structured around the Word of God. We devote ourselves as seminarians and pastors to the intensive and reflective study of the Sacred Texts. We mine these treasures in the classroom using the original languages, and we gather daily to hear the Scriptures read and proclaimed in public worship. We receive Him weekly in the Holy Supper. All of this is part of a program that molds the seminarian into a Servant of the Word.

As pastors, chief among our tasks is to bring people into communion with the Body of Jesus Christ. This we do through administering God’s Word in oral proclamation (reading, preaching and teaching) and Sacrament. In this Ministry, the blessings of Divine Speech are conveyed, namely, life and forgiveness. May Christ bless you as you pray and consider entering this life of speaking God’s speech.

The Lord be with you.

From Volume 2, Issue 1, January/February 1998 of Pilgrimage