According to a veteran-Christian radio producer, the specific audience that his station targets and has been proven over time to pull along all other demographics of listeners is ‘the middle-aged woman.’ Paraphrasing him this producer said, “if you target women, they will always bring along and influence the male listeners.”

How interesting, I thought. One can glean much from that observation. Mostly, however, if one looks throughout Scripture, they will read the many places where women were also a target audience, and brought others to faith in Christ; the woman at the well, Mary and Martha, Anna the prophetess, and the women with Jesus at the empty tomb-just to name a few.

We the Church would make no stark claims that women are somehow better than men in receiving the Gospel. The ‘Church’s Target Audience’ as the title indicates, is truly ‘All Nations,’ -men and women alike. However, if this radio producer, in his experience and wisdom regarding our culture is correct, then it is interesting how people come to faith in the way information is transmitted among the sexes. If I may make an assertion based on this information, then I believe our church body is off to a great start with the flourishing Deaconess Program here at Concordia Theological Seminary. An office whose purpose is to reach the lost and needy and point them to ‘The Office’ of the Holy Ministry, is exactly what Jesus bids us do.

But let’s face it. In a crippled economy, strains on Christendom for woman and homosexual ordination, we can’t pretend that a deaconess’ tasks or livelihood is easy (nevermind a pastor’s!). Our women are trained to embrace a broken world with the tenants of our faith. Further, they understand that this brokenness comes in the ever present and culturally familiar forms of single parent homes, abused children, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and the list goes on. Pastors face these same issues, but it would appear that our culture needs discipline and love–some theological parenting, if you will–that comes from what God gives in Jesus Christ. Theologically trained and caring pastors and deaconesses serve with a delight in these very things of God, namely Word, Sacrament, and through that-koinonia, for His people.

It is my opinion that the radio producer is contextually correct. Seizing the opportunity to employ women as deaconesses and embrace the good services of the LWML and all learned female laypeople, strives for the nurture and betterment of our Church today. This in NO WAY diminishes or detracts from men’s purposes as pastors and heads of households. Any notion towards that idea is ludicrous and antithetical to Scripture. In obedience to God, Men need to be exactly that: heads. However, in all of our gendered weaknesses, let us take comfort that our ultimate Head, Jesus Christ, makes sure that His Church is given all that it needs to support our bodies and lives, now and forevermore and for the mutual consolation of our souls in life eternal. Thanks be to God!

He is the archer, and we are His target.

Can Evangelical Christians write good fiction?  The answer is “no” according to Reformed theologian, Peter Leithart.  It’s a provocative position, to be sure.  No doubt, for every such assertion, a panoply of exceptions could be found.

Yesterday I blogged about the atrophying of the imagination of modern Christians.  I made the point that church leaders are often concerned about either over intellectualizing the faith, or under intellectualizing.  About emotionalizing too much or not emotionalizing enough.  Those balances are necessary to keep, but it seems to me that there is also a severe aridity of imagination in the church today.

In particular, I tried to point out that there is a problem when believers, especially pastors, diminish the importance of fiction and poetry by concluding that such things are not practical, have no benefit beyond mere amusement, and, as some have claimed, are a waste of time.  These are often the same pastors, I think, who feel that three hours listening to an aged home-bound parishioner detail her battle with sciatica for the ten gajillionth time is not an afternoon well spent.  Having a healthy imagination is critical to having an ability to empathize with others. Everyone knows instinctively that every meaningful story bears repeating.  Ask any toddler who pulls the same ragged choo choo train story off the shelf night after night.

Peter Leithart makes a fascinating case in this article that there is a serious theological flaw in large segments of Protestantism which disables them from writing creatively.  There may be more behind the feeble state of the arts in Christendom than just this one thing, but I’m sure he’s correct, up to a point.

In 1529, reforming churchmen gathered in Marburg to attempt to compose a statement of agreement.  Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were the two main headliners.  The parties drafted a document with fifteen bullet points and everyone could agree completely on the first fourteen.  It was the final point, the one dealing with the presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, where they parted.  Luther was for it.  Zwingli was agin it.  This, according to Leithart, is the root cause for the dearth of great literature from the Zwinglian (evangelical, fundamentalist, protestant) wings of Christianity.

He makes his case more effectively than I can here.  You should read his article.  As Lutherans, we would probably make a similar case, though a bit differently.

I could argue this psychologically and say that the part of the mind which allows one to accept the notion of Jesus’s real bodily presence in the bread and wine is the same part of the brain which permits one to suspend his disbelief to become enthralled in a novel.  This is not to say that the presence of Christ is a fiction.

I hope I can do justice to Leithart.  Zwingli denies that Jesus is bodily present in the supper to be eaten and drunk because he finds such a thing unreasonable.  The finite (bread and wine) cannot contain the infinite (God).  Of course, the Lutherans know that this is not just a statement about the Lord’s Supper.  It is an attack on the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  If Zwingli is correct that the finite cannot contain the infinite, then how, as St. Paul teaches, could the fullness of the Deity dwell in bodily form?

Leithart accuses the modern theological heirs of Zwingil of a type of Manichaenism, a vast separation of finite and infinite, body and spirit, sign and reality.  No so within classical Christian thought.  That signs can be more than empty symbols, hollow mental constructions, is central to a Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper.

Is it too much of a stretch then to conclude that an incarnational, sacramental theology – in the broadest sense – is necessary to fully appreciate the brilliance and power of myth / story / poetics?  Not really.

One of the humble but great little gems on the CTS campus is the fitness room located in Wamsganss gym. I am no fitness expert. Far from it. I like to take my dog on walks, but beyond that, “working out” is rarely in my vocabulary. But lately, I’ve been visiting the fitness room, doing some cardio and meeting some new people. In the fitness room, there are free weights and other “traditional” weight-lifting equipment, several treadmills, ellipicals, and stationary bikes. There is also a circuit of machines, similar to the total-body-workout type machines at a fitness club like Curves. Rev. Al Wingfield often leads exercise classes helping to motivate and teach those who hope to get in better shape. The best part, of course, is that the fitness room is free to students and their families. What a great bonus, especially considering how much gym memberships cost these days.

In this photo, you’ll notice Andy Richard studying his Greek vocabulary while on one of the machines.

- Julie Stiegemeyer

Kramer Chapel

June 4, 2008

Text: Matthew 7:15-29

Probably most of you know about a structure called the leaning tower of Pisa. In the year 1174, Bonnano Pisano, an Italian engineer, began to work on a bell tower for the cathedral in Pisa, Italy. The tower was to be 185 feet high. Construction started and three stories were completed when it was noticed that the tower had begun to lean. Pisano tried to compensate for this problem, but his efforts only caused the tower to lean still further. Construction stopped and started again over the centuries. The tower was finally finished in the 14th century, but each year it leans another 1.25 millimeters further.

In 1934, fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini ordered that the tower be returned to a vertical position, so concrete was poured into its foundation. However, the result was that the tower actually sank further into the soil.

What was the problem? Poor design? No. Poor workmanship? Certainly not. An inferior grade of marble? No, only the best. The problem was below the surface. The tower was built on weak soil, not stable enough to support a structure this size. There was no firm foundation. A beautiful tower, but in danger of collapse.

Perhaps you are in danger of collapse. Perhaps your life is the Tower of Pisa, where in a certain sense everything is brilliantly designed and crafted, but it’s obvious to everyone around you that it won’t last and your eventual breakdown is only a matter of time.

Many other buildings don’t have the same advantage of the Tower of Pisa. At least in that case, you can detect the coming catastrophe and hopefully do something to amend it.

I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and I recall a terrible tragedy that occurred in 1981. At the downtown Hyatt Regency hotel, in the ballroom, there were two skywalks, several floors apart, one above the other. It was a high society dance and all the local cultured elites were there dining and dancing. Suddenly, the top skywalk filled with revelers came crashing down, hitting the skywalk beneath it bringing both to the floor. 114 people were dead and 200 more were injured. The reason, poor construction. Shortcuts had been taken and inferior materials were utilized. The dollars that were saved were paid for with human blood.

My point in that illustration is simply that sometimes, as in Pisa, you can easily see the problem but in other cases, you are caught unaware, as in Kansas City.

A life that is founded on the warnings and promises of God is firm and stable and can withstand the storms of this world. A life founded on any other basis will only come to ruin.

Jesus used the illustration of the building of two houses. It would be fair to say that these houses would have looked pretty much the same to the average passer-by. The difference between the houses was in the foundations. He was not giving hidden messages to the Masonic order, nor is he merely making the mundane observations of a civil engineer. Rather, he is explaining the kingdom of God.

The Christian Church is indeed the House of God, founded as St. Paul writes, upon the prophets and apostles with Christ Jesus as the chief cornerstone. Furthermore, the psalmist writes that Except the Lord build the house, its builders labor in vain (Psalm 127:1).

Many of you are here today because you are in preparation to serve in the church, either as pastors or deaconesses or dedicated laity. Jesus Christ is the One ultimately who builds and edifies his Kingdom, not your labors or mine. By His grace, we find ourselves in His service, becoming indeed the living stones of the structure itself. What brittle clay He chooses. But justified by Him and eternally fortified by Him, you will not fall down.

Like the unhappy Tower of Pisa, all of your efforts to patch yourself back together, to improve yourself by fits and starts, to buttress one area only to find dangerous structural cracks somewhere else, are essentially futile. Our defect is something so basic, something so foundational, that instead of duct tape and bubblegum, we need simply to be torn down and rebuilt by the Master Builder Himself upon the sure foundation which never moves.

Jesus’ own body is the Temple or House of God. While the ultra Orthodox Jews and the modern Judaizing Christians look at a block of real estate in Palestine and place their hopes in a building made with the hands of men, we rejoice to dwell in the Temple of God today, namely the very body of Christ, the Holy Church. We who eat the Body of Christ are, in fact, made the Body of Christ, an eternal temple not made with hands. When God knocked down Solomon’s building in the year 70 A.D., He proved that the presence of God is not to be found in the labors of mankind but in a new and everlasting edifice, the man Jesus.

He who had no flaws of his own, took upon himself the very foundational defect which underlies all the other children of Adam. He became a sin offering in the place of sinners, making Himself the willing recipient of the condemnation of His Father. Like a derelict building, he was declared condemned, that is unsafe, unwholesome, unwell, and unsound. And He underwent the demolition we deserve. But so also was he reconstituted fully in the resurrection, undoing all the errors of Adam and more than that. I say more than that because what we have gained in Christ is greater than what we lost in Adam.

In the summer of 2006, I spent a couple of weeks traveling by train across eastern Russia. And to help myself prepare for such an adventure, I read what many consider to be the greatest modern novel, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. His famous first line is right up there with the greatest first lines. He wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I mean no disrespect to the literary genius of Leo Tolstoy, but I think he’s got it the wrong way round. There is nothing more boring than the catalog of human sorrow. Likewise nothing is more interesting, nothing is more invigorating or beautiful and engaging than life in God through Christ. The new Household of God, the sons of Abraham who share the faith of Abraham, know joys even in the face of torrents and tornadoes. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

No, I’m not kidding.

Chicago Tribune, 16 May 2008, section 1, pp. 1, 23.

I think I’m just going to toss this one out there for some discussion. Aliens or not: What say you?

Well, ok, here are a couple talking points:

Isn’t it ironic that those who would limit God’s ability to create out of nothing will suddenly assert that God’s creativity should not be limited to Earth alone?

What about mankind being the crown of God’s creation. Does this preclude life on other planets?

Could plant or animal life on other planets simply be an extension of our flora and fauna?

Does God’s establishing man as ruler and subduer of creation extend into the cosmos?

Talk amongst yourselves . . .