The Devil and ULC

This is the sanctuary of University Lutheran Chapel. This is the place where the Bridegroom cleansed and sanctified His bride.  This is the place where the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world.  This is the place where the Good Shepherd fed His sheep with salvation.

And those things will no longer happen in this place because the Board of Directors of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Minnesota South District took this place away from the pastor who was feeding with that salvation and the congregation who was feasting on that salvation in order to pay for a program that, no matter how well intentioned, is not the Church, not the forgiveness of sins, not salvation.

So the devil rejoices in this picture.  He rejoices because he now has another little chunk of this world where the preaching of the Gospel will not pierce his eardrums.  He rejoices because he was able to deceive those elected to lead a collection of believers that they were somehow serving Christ and His Christians by taking away the place where Christ made and sustained Christians.  The devil rejoices in this picture because he has never once triumphed over the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, but his bedroom wall is covered with the busts of programs and movements and methodologies that he slaughtered without breaking a sweat.

The devil rejoices in this picture.  

But the devil is already defeated, already a gory, twitching mess lying on the ground, his skull shattered beneath the weight of Christ's cross. 

And because of this Christ and His cross, because of the Bridegroom's union with His bride, because of the Good Shepherd's love for His sheep, University Lutheran Chapel will go on.  She will continue to receive Christ's salvation, continue being brought back to life through His word, continue being washed in His waters, continue feasting on His body and blood.

No matter how long she wanders in the wilderness without a home, no matter where she eventually settles, and no matter how hard the devil rages against her, Christ will continue crushing the head of the serpent with His once dead but now living foot.

I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.

So says our Lord in the Gospel of John, the sixteenth chapter.  

And so, to Pastor David Kind, and to all my brothers and sisters at University Lutheran Chapel, rejoice.  In the midst of your tears, rejoice that you have been counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name of Christ.  Rejoice that your faithfulness was great enough to capture the full attention of the devil.  And rejoice that the wicked foe will never defeat you because Jesus Christ your Lord will never stop defending you, never stop loving you, never stop feeding you with His forgiveness, life and salvation.




For more information on the ULC tragedy, click here.

On the Ceasing of Tongues

I try to avoid commenting on my Lutheran Satire videos on YouTube. There are two reasons for this:

1. YouTube comments have a character limit, which makes discussing theology rather difficult.

2. YouTube comments don't show up in order, so it's very difficult to keep track of a conversation.

By and large, this isn't a problem, since there isn't much gold in the comments section, either way.  Most of the supportive comments are not much more than cheer-leading, which, don't get me wrong, I greatly appreciate. And negative comments generally sound like the ramblings of wild haired anabaptists in straight jackets. So there's not much point in responding anyway.

But every once in a while, someone posts a comment that I believe deserves a bit of a thoughtful response.  And I think these words, from YouTube user Ph33rsPhun certainly do:

Just referring to the debates aspect of saying 1 Corinthians 13:8 has already occurred, because knowledge is also a part of what is going to pass away in 13:8. I suspect Paul was saying that when Christ comes again, prophesies, knowledge and tongues will pass away, but Love will not pass away. It seems quite a stretch to insert that tongues has passed away but knowledge has not. Note: I'm not defending the theology of speaking in tongues, just addressing the scriptural argument.

A stretch you say, good friend? A STRETCH?!?!?!?!?! Let me assure you, there's not a drop of Reed Richards' cosmically radiated DNA up in this Lutheran exegetical house. Which I shall prove to you. So let's break down some 1 Corinthians 13.

First off, I'm not asserting that tongues have passed away but knowledge has not.  I'm asserting that they both have.

Love never ends.  As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

If you look at the full context of chapters 12-14, it's clear that the knowledge Paul refers to here is the same direct revelation, stuff-you-only-know-about-God-because-He-told-You-directly-kind-of-knowledge that he mentions in chapter 12, when he lists off the various charismatic gifts, saying:

For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.

So when Paul states in 13:8 that prophecy, tongues and knowledge will cease, he's using these three terms to encompass all the charismatic gifts.  

And not only does Paul tell us that these charismatic gifts will one day be gone. He also tells us when they'll be gone, saying:

⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 

This is perhaps a minor point, but I would argue, as Dr. Douglas Judisch has before me, that the Greek words here translated as perfect and partial would be better translated as complete and incomplete. So, as Paul tells the Corinthians, tongues and all the other charismatic gifts are taking place in this incomplete era, but they will cease to take place in the complete era.  So what is the complete thing?  When does this complete era begin?

Many, such as Ph33rsPhun, seem to be under the impression that this complete thing is the return of Christ on the last day and that the complete era is when all believers are taken into His kingdom.  It's understandable how one would draw that conclusion, but it's still wrong.  Here's why:

¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

So, when this complete thing arrives, prophecy, tongues and knowledge will be gone, but faith, hope and love will still be hanging around.

Will there be love in the heavenly kingdom?  You betcha.

But will there be faith and hope?  Heck no.  Because faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).

And when Jesus is seen, faith and hope give way to sight.  This is, after all, why those unbelievers who want to turn to Christ on the Last Day will find that it's too late.  Faith and hope in a Jesus who is standing right in front of you, in all His glorified glory, ain't no faith or hope at all.

So the charismatic gifts will cease before Christ's return, which is something that Zechariah also points out, stating in chapter 13 (how fitting!) of his book that, one day, you will be able to spot a false prophet simply by his claim to be a prophet, a claim he will still have time to repent of.  Which wouldn't be possible on the last day.

So, then, what is this complete thing?

It's the completion, the fulness of apostolic revelation.  In other words, it's the New Testament.

It's important to remember that, when Paul writes these words, not all of the New Testament has been written.  And even that which has been was not widely available (or available at all) to most Christians.  So, if a congregation wanted to know what to believe about the resurrection, but the explicit teachings of 1 Corinthians 15 hadn't been written yet, what were they to do?  Or if a bunch of divorce happy pagan converts needed to be rebuked for their sin, but their congregation didn't have access to Christ's words in Matthew, how did God solve that problem?  When those Christians looked in a mirror and couldn't see a clear picture of what they were to be and to believe, how did God address that incomplete reflection they were seeing?

Through the charismatic gifts.  

So God would give people the gift of tongues, where He put His Word directly into people's mouths.  And He would give others the ability to interpret those tongues so that the assembly could understand what God was saying and believe it.  Likewise, God gave the gift of prophecy, of direct revelation, so that those who received it could speak it to the Church and the Church could know better and more clearly who God was.  That's why Paul says, in chapter 14, that the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.  And God also gave the gift of testing the Spirits so that the Church would not be deceived by those who would falsely prophesy.  And surrounding all of this, God gave the gifts of healing on command and miracles, so that doubters would see that the proclamation coming from those who possessed these others gifts should be heeded.

So God gave the charismatic gifts to fill in the blank spots until He permanently filled in those spots with the writings of the Apostles.  As Paul himself said about these charismatic gifts, when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.  So, in other words, these charismatic gifts were for the Church in her infancy stage.  They were milk.  But now that the Church has grown up, through receiving the fulness of the Scriptures, we have moved on to meat.  Quite simply, we have the Bible.  We no longer need the charismatic gifts.  And that's why they have ceased.

And history backs up this interpretation.  Because, after the death of the apostles, there were no claims to the charismatic gifts within the orthodox Christian community.  After approximately 100 AD, there simply has been no charismatic presence in the Christian Church, Sacraments-denying early 20th century holiness weirdos notwithstanding.

So, in summary, the Bible said that the charismatic gifts would go away when the Scriptures were fully written.  And when that happened, the charismatic gifts did exactly that.  Their purpose disappeared and the gifts disappeared with it.  And those who claim to have these gifts today are either deceived or lying.

A Lutheran Manifesto

I am a soldier in the worship wars.  Though I've only been a pastor for a few years, I have already lobbed countless bombs at those who seek to pervert our confession of faith.  Though I am but a lowly grunt, I have fired innumerable rounds at those who attempt to inject our fonts and pulpits and altars with the poison of Calvin and Zwingli.

And as I look at my fellow soldiers, as I survey the men burrowed in the Confessional trenches with me, I must admit that the deadliest wounds and the deepest scars we bear are not the result of the enemy's attacks.  They are nothing more than self-inflicted carnage, the result of our collective frustration and exhaustion, the fruit of giving into our anger and pride and hatred and becoming exactly what the enemy has portrayed us to be in their vilest propaganda.  

And it's time for this to stop.  It's time for a strategy change.  It's time to fight the worship wars by putting down our guns and picking up our megaphones.  It's time to fight the worship wars by leaving the Pseudo-Lutherans with no one left to deceive.

In our nation, in 21st century America, there is no culture of Lutheranism.  The world around us does not know who we are and what we believe.  While your average American is highly ignorant of the basic teachings of the numerous religious groups in the world, his ignorance of Lutheranism is far greater than his ignorance of most other Christian-ish groups.  Here is a table to illustrate my point:

A phony Romanist can't trick the world into believing that the Catholic Church has women priests because the world knows better.  A false Evangelical can't convince people that his community cherishes the Word and Sacraments because everything else those people have ever seen tells them that the real marks of his church are Starbucks and soul patches.  But, with a slate as blank as ours, a Pseudo-Lutheran can get away with pretty much anything.

And he will get away with pretty much anything until we teach the world who we are, until we teach our children and friends and neighbors to know what a Lutheran looks like and sounds like.  And if we want to fill in that blank Lutheran slate, we won't do it by expending all our energy firing shots at the rebels.  We won't do it by out-politicking the opposition at the synodical convention.  We won't do it by mocking our enemies in secret rooms, in between puffs of cigars and sips of fine scotch.  And we won't do it by sniping at the other side from a nest woven together with confessional message boards and blog posts.

No.  If we want to stop the false teachers in our midst from digging their fingers into the toilets of Willow Creek and passing off their findings as compatible with the Book of Concord, then we must teach the people around us to recognize the lie of evangelical form and Lutheran substance.  And in order to teach them to recognize that lie, then, when it comes to those who sell it, we must out-confess them, out-proclaim them, out-evangelize them, out-outreach them.  We must simply out-work them, both inside and outside of our congregations.

So when they sing vague, meaningless, mantra-driven,spiritualistic blech, we sing the best of our hymns and we sing them right in the face of the word.  We pour those hymns out in concert halls, in youtube videos, at our dinner tables and anywhere else we can fit them until the world knows what Lutheran music sounds like and knows that Lutheran music doesn't sound like a horrible, husky voiced U2 sound alike.

When they teach purpose-driven poppycock, we teach Law and Gospel and we teach this to any set of ears we can find in this world.  We teach it, with the aid of the internet, to people starving for the Gospel halfway across the country and on the other side of the world.  We teach it in conversations with our friends.  We teach it to our neighbors when a couple of Mormons come knocking on their door and we insert ourselves into the discussion in order to show them that our Gospel is so awesome it just swallowed Joseph Smith's gospel in one bite and crapped it out the other end.

When they teach their youth to talk like hipster-evangelicals, we teach our youth to talk like Lutherans.  We brand the Catechism into their memories.  We give them the vocabulary of the Scriptures.  And we train them to know their theology so well that the pastors of the other churches in town secretly hope their youth group members don't bring any of their Lutheran friends to the next Bible study, lest another 14 year old respond to their denial of baptismal regeneration by tearing them apart in a fury of theological evisceration so bloody it would make Quentin Tarantino nauseous.

And when they embark on gimmicky outreach programs riddled with a theology of glory and a denial of original sin, we respond by reaching out further with our hands filled with big, fat chunks of Lutheran bread.  So when they build sleek websites that boast of their faithfulness to God, we build equally sleek websites that make it very clear to people in half a second that Lutherans aren't interested in marketing themselves but in confessing Christ and His forgiveness.  When they build coffee shops for seekers where one can learn how to have a proactive faith walk, we build shelters for the needy where sinners can say to themselves, man, when those Lutherans feed me and clothe me and care for me and pray with me and talk with me, they don't tell me about how my suffering will be gone if I just believe more or trust more or obey more.  Instead, they tell me about Jesus and His love for me in the midst of my suffering, even as they're trying to take my suffering away.

So this is what we do.  When the Pseudo-Lutherans speak, we speak louder to our friends and neighbors.  When they yell, we shout to the public.  When they shout, we scream to the world.  And we don't stop screaming until God gives us what we need-a culture of Lutheranism, a world where people who have never even set foot in one of our churches know what a Lutheran looks like and sounds like, and a world where people understand that the only reason a Lutheran doesn't preach or teach or worship or act like a Lutheran is because he's not a Lutheran.  

So we can either spend the rest of our lives firing on an enemy we'll never hit, or we can let him shoot himself in the foot by letting the world call into question his doctrine and practice.  We can either keep piercing ourselves with our own ricocheted bullets, or we can teach the world to walk away from that enemy when he tries to sell them a Lutheranism that isn't real.

I've already torn my flesh apart enough doing the former.  It's time to try the latter.

What Oscar could learn from Grammy

Disclaimer: Every post I've ever written to this point deals with theology.  This post does not deal with theology at all.  It deals with movies, which I love almost as much as I love theology.  The only reason I'm posting it here is because I couldn't think of anywhere else to post it, except as a note on facebook.  But that would have been lame.

Unless your name is Colin Firth or Natalie Portman, the 83rd Academy Awards left a really bad taste in your mouth.  Producers seeking to reach a younger demographic selected fresh-faced actors James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the program, and the result was generally viewed as disastrous-a tedious, rambling mess of a program that dropped 10% in ratings from the year before and was labeled as the worst ceremony ever by 57% of responders to a Fox News poll.

Producers of the 84th Academy Awards, which will take place on February 26 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, are obviously hoping not just for a ratings recovery from last years debacle, but for a genuine viewership boost as well.  And in order to accomplish this, they've turned to Oscars legend Billy Crystal, who will be returning to host the show for the ninth time.

But as great as Crystal will surely be, the most his presence at the Oscars will accomplish is dramatically improving the twenty or so minutes throughout the four hour show where the host is featured.  To use a cinematic analogy, using Billy Crystal to improve the Oscars is like sprinkling a handful of clips from the original Star Wars into The Phantom Menace.  Just like with Episode I, the real problems with last year's (and virtually every other year's) Academy Awards are much deeper.  And if the producers wish to solve those problems, they'd be best served not by looking to Billy Crystal for salvation, but by looking to the Grammy Awards for inspiration.

I recognize that it's a bit of a strange thing to say.  The Oscars are a highly polished production, with far more pretty and far less weird than the Grammys, Bjork's swan dress notwithstanding.  And there are plenty of things that the Grammys do horribly, horribly wrong.  Like not locking Nicki Minaj in her dressing room after yesterday's dress rehearsal.  

But as goofy as the Grammys can be, there are a few things they get absolutely, positively right.  And if the Oscars would follow suit, their ceremony would improve dramatically, both in terms of ratings and in terms of sheer audience enjoyment.  Here are two of those things.

Thing 1: Don't give out so many awards in the televised ceremony.

Question: What do Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Tia Carrere have in common?

Answer: They're all Grammy winners, for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, Best Spoken Word Album and Best Hawaiian Music Album respectively.

Would you like to know why you didn't know that?  Because they don't give out those awards during the televised ceremony.  And would you like to know why they don't give out those awards during the televised ceremony?  Because nobody cares who wins these awards.

And nobody cares who wins Best Sound Editing or Best Original Non-Acoustic Score for a Documentary-Short Subject either.  So do what the Grammys do.  Give out those trophies at another ceremony, and reserve the big awards (acting, writing, music, directing, maybe cinematography, and certainly best picture) for the televised one.  Do this and you'll cut out about two hours of intolerable filler.  Those two hours can be replaced with some kind of content that normal human beings actually find entertaining (see below) or they can just be subtracted from the show altogether and we can all get to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thing 2: Have the nominees show us why they were nominated for something in the first place.

Whenever a community convenes to give itself awards, that community brings with it a noxious cloud of self-important pomposity.  And if one is not a part of this community or does not desire to be a part of it, the only chance this community has to make that cloud dissipate is to convince people that these awards are being given by true artists in appreciation of true art.  And the best way to do that is to let people see the people giving and receiving these awards put their art on display.

The Grammys get this right.  Because a Grammy is an award for musicians.  And when you watch the Grammys, musicians actually perform their music.  For example, last night, Paul McCartney performed with a Bruce Springsteen, amongst others.  And as these two Grammy winners joyfully made music together, that made the audience think, "wow, this guys really love music, and so maybe these awards are about the purity of art, and not just self-congratulation."  That performance also made people think, "wow.  I bet Bruce Springsteen's amp hasn't actually been turned on for the last 30 years."  Likewise, Adele performed her award winning song Rolling in the Deep last night.  And that performance made people think, "wow, what a great singer and what a great song.  I can totally see how people want to give her awards for that."

But the Oscars don't do this.  When you watch the Oscars, which are awards for film makers, you never see people make film.  You never see writers write or directors direct or actors act (except when they act happy after losing).  Even when the acting nominees are listed before giving out those awards, producers often won't show clips of the performances that are supposed to be so worthy of an award.  And the only time we see fellow nominees interacting with each other is when they praise the work of the other people they totally just beat for an award, which comes across as a rather passive-aggressive form of rubbing it in, even if it's not intended that way. So the result is that the Oscars basically tell people, "what we're doing is super duper really important and worthwhile and you should totally watch us praise each other for doing that stuff, but you should just take our word for it that it's worthy of praise, since we're not actually going to show you why."

So here's the Grammy-inspired solution to this problem: Have the film makers make film.  

Have each of the screenwriting nominees write a segment of the show, even if it's only a minute or two long.  Have each of the directing nominees direct a short in the show-whether it's the segment for the Honorary Oscar winner of the night or that awful In Memoriam segment where we clap louder for some dead people than we do for others because we're super sad that they're dead and we're only a little sad that those other people are dead.

And have the actors act.  In particular, have them act in pre-taped segments poking fun of their own movies.  Not only does this help dissipate the noxious cloud of pomposity by showing that these folks don't take themselves too seriously, it will also make the show much, much more entertaining  Think about it...you weren't that bummed when Eddie Murphy dropped out as host this year because you weren't sure that his monologue would be all that great.  But if his departure meant that you would no longer get to watch a skit involving Eddie Murphy and Minnie's chocolate pie, you would be covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes for the next six months.  As well you should.

So there you have it.  If you want to make the Oscars better, if you want to improve the entire ceremony, beyond the few minutes that the host is cracking wise on stage, that's how you do it.  If you want to ensure that the show will still be great even if the monologue bombs, it's not hard to accomplish.  Cut the filler.  And fill its place with the art you're praising.  

That and don't praise the moral superiority of the Academy three years after the Academy gave a standing ovation to a guy who couldn't collect his Best Director award in person because he drugged and raped a 13 year old girl.  Because that makes it really hard to take you seriously.

How Sweet It Is to Be Mocked by You

Pat Robertson is right.

My fingers still hurt from typing that, but it's true.  At least in this very specific instance.

Last weekend, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch where Jesus comes to visit Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos, the highlights of which were Jesus asking the Broncos QB to tone down his public displays of faith a notch and telling the rest of the Broncos that, if he's going to keep helping them win, they need to stop playing terrible football for the first three quarters of the game. 

So the sketch was pretty sacrilegious concerning Christ and pretty rough on His sheep Tim Tebow.  And that made televangelist (and cuckoo-bananas false prophet)  Pat Robertson mad.  While discussing this sketch on whatever "Christian" channel he's on, Robertson had this to say:

If this had been a Muslim country and they had done that, and had Muhammad doing that stuff, you would have found bombs being thrown off!

Now, aside from "bombs being thrown off" not making any prepositional sense, Pat Robertson is right.  Islam does not take kindly to mockery, especially concerning its chief prophet Mohammed.  And had SNL done a skit mocking the Koran, the prophet and/or Muslims the way they mocked Christianity, I'm sure that somewhere in the world, you would have found some bombs being thrown off in some form or another.  So it's not as though SNL's lack of Islam-mocking sketches is born from a genuine appreciation of the religion.  I sincerely doubt that the head writers at 30 Rock haven't asked Jason Sudeikis to dress up as Allah's prophet because they genuinely respect the beliefs of 1.6 billion Muslims throughout the world.  Rather, any respect they give to Islam is born out of fear of violent retaliation, the same fear that caused Comedy Central to wimp out of showing a depiction of Mohammed in a South Park episode a number of years ago.

And while respect born from fear may be an acceptable thing if you're Tiberius Caesar, it's not worth squat if you're a pope or a prophet or a Presbyterian.  So, as Christians, the fact that we're not given the same respect as Muslims shouldn't make us angry.  Instead, that should make us happy, very happy.  Because that means that people view the Church precisely the way Christ said they'd view her-as something lowly and meek, something that can be mocked with impunity. It means that people expect us to do exactly what Jesus told us to do when they strike us-to turn the other cheek.  

And as someone who very frequently fails to act in a Christ-like manner, it's pretty comforting to see that, somehow, the world still expects me to be exactly who Christ says I am.   It's a great reminder that neither my sins nor SNL sketches can stop Jesus from being Lord of His Church.

Zach Wahls is messed up. Here's how.

I've seen this video floating around facebook quite a bit the past day or so.  If you haven't seen the video, watch it.  If you already have, just to refresh your memory, the YouTube video summary says exactly this: Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student spoke about the strength of his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls has two mothers, and came to oppose House Joint Resolution 6 which would end civil unions in Iowa.

In many of the facebook threads I've seen linking this video, those sympathetic to his cause have asked the same question. How can you possibly disagree with him?  People want to know.  After watching this, how can you possibly believe that being raised by a gay couple is harmful to children?

Easy.  By hearing what Mr. Wahls says.  By merely listening to the words that come out of his lips.  Because when I do that, it's quite clear that being raised by two women has, for lack of a better phrase, really messed him up.  Here's how:

30 seconds into his speech, Mr. Wahls informs us that he and his younger sister are full blooded siblings because his biological mother was artificially inseminated twice with sperm from the same anonymous donor.  And how does he feel about that?  That's something which is really cool for me, he states.

So, to dial things back a bit, Mr. Wahls' biological mother wanted to be fruitful and multiply and raise her children with another woman.  This, however, was problematic for her because, per the natural laws of the God who made the heavens and the earth, it takes man parts and lady parts in order to make a baby, and neither she nor her lesbian partner had such man parts.

So to remedy that problem, what did Mr. Wahls' biological mother do?  She went to a sperm bank.  And by doing so, however indirectly it may have been, she encouraged a man to take the precious gift of life that God put into his loins and spill it into a cup.  She took the gift of fatherhood, the sacred title that our Father in Heaven blesses men to share with Him, and she mocked it.  She looked at the titles husband and father, and said,  I don't want your love.  I don't want your sacrifice.  I don't want your guidance or your courage or your care or your forgiveness, and I don't want to cherish you as one flesh with me.  All I want is something very specific from your sexual organs.  And I'll give you money for it, if you'll agree to just go away once we're done.

That's what Mr. Wahls' biological mother did.  She paid money to sexually humiliate another human being.  She paid a man made in God's image to give her what God Himself had told her she could not have as long as she lived contrary to His law.  Though she never saw this man's face, and though he may have left his "donation" willingly, she treated the father of her children like a prostitute.  

And what does her son, Zach Wahls, think about all that?

That's something which is really cool for me.

The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character, Mr. Wahls says later in his speech.  And I have no doubt that he wants that to be true.  But it's not true.  Because, in service of their sexual orientation, the two women who raised Mr. Wahls told him that men are entirely disposable once they've been harvested of their seed.  They spent 19 years proclaiming to their son that a man's faithfulness to his offspring can be purchased for nothing more than fifty bucks and a pornographic magazine.  In every day of his life, Mr. Wahls two "mommies" taught him that women have every right to humiliate men, to pimp them out, to demean and shame them if it suits their purposes.

And in the end, he believed them.

So, while Mr. Wahls may be very polite and articulate, while he may be intelligent and dignified and a million other things that nobody has ever said that children of gay couples can't be, he doesn't respect men.  He doesn't value fatherhood.  And he doesn't understand the horrors of glorifying yourself by shaming your neighbor.  And he doesn't do those things precisely because he was raised by two women.

In Defense of Shyamalan Preaching

Back in 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released his movie The Village.  And I went to see it because, like most of the nation at that time, I had not yet fully realized that Mr. Shyamalan was a one-trick-pony who was going to make increasingly horrible movies financed with the credit that is our increasingly begrudging continued respect for The Sixth Sense.

This one-trick that Mr. Shyamalan rode to fame was the plot twist, especially towards the end of the movie.  So, in The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis was really dead the whole time.  In Unbreakable, Bruce Willis was really a superhero the whole time.  And in Signs, Mel Gibson was really Bruce Willis the whole time.  I think.  I never actually saw Signs.

So by the time The Village came out, we all knew how this guy's movies worked.  Something was not going to be as it seemed.  Crazy twisty twists were going to happen and we would have to reevaluate everything we'd seen in the movie thus far.  And, like most people in the theater that day, because I knew that a twist was coming, I immediately went into The Village trying to figure out what it would be.

And figure it out I did in the first five minutes.  You see, the setup of The Village is that a bunch of old timey people are living in an old timey town and are all afraid of a bunch of monsters living in the woods.  And so, before the inciting incident, I thought to myself, "oh, the twist is obviously that they're only pretending to live in old timey times and the monsters are just made up to scare the kids away from the modern world."  

And once I figured that out, watching the remaining 103 minutes of The Village became a virtually unbearable experience.  It was like having to sit on your couch for an hour and a half while all of your friends and family gathered in your room, turned off the lights, then turned them back on and shouted "happy birthday" to commence the surprise party you knew they were throwing for you the whole time.

So the moral of the story is that if your audience knows you're going to pull the rug out from underneath them, you'd better make sure that they don't know precisely how you're going to do it.  At least, that's the moral of the story when it comes to three or five act story structure.  And that's why, in great part, M. Night Shyamalan is a really terrible filmmaker.

But when it comes to two part sermon structure, when it comes to Law and Gospel preaching, I don't think this rule applies so much.  In fact, I think there's great value in being a Shyamalan preacher.  Because unlike the job of a thriller filmmaker, the job of a pastor isn't to take you someplace that you never imagined you'd go.  His job is to take you exactly where he takes you each week: to the cross of Jesus Christ.

Look at it this way:

A pastor is preaching on the Parable of the Tenants.  And the setup, he tells us, is that we are all tenants of God's vineyard who have sinned against the ones God has sent to collect His fruit.  God sent us pastors to harvest from our hearts repentance and faith by preaching the Word to us.  But we abused them by refusing to turn from our sins and treating our pastors cruelly.  And in doing all of this, we, as tenants of that vineyard, are guilty of having killed the Master's Son.

So that's the scenario that the pastor presents.  That's the setup.  But because the pastor preaching this is a good pastor who won't walk out of the pulpit until he preaches the forgiveness of sins, the twist comes in.  And yet, the pastor tells us, through this very same death, the Son forgives those who put Him to death.  Through the blood that those wicked tenants force out of His veins, the Son erases their wickedness, undoes their despising of the preached Word and the preaching office, and gives them the right to join Him in His everlasting vineyard.

So who saw that coming?  Who expected that twist in the story?  Well, pretty much everyone who's heard this guy preach before.  They know that his story isn't going to end with sin ruling the day.  They know that his movie isn't going to conclude until Christ has drowned the sinner's sin in His blood.  They know that the sermon won't end until the twist occurs where the sins condemned become the sins forgiven.  And they know all that because that's what the pastor does every week.  Just like M. Night Shyamalan in The Village, his writing is really predictable and anyone who's paying attention already knows where he's going long before he gets there.

And that's exactly how it should be.  Because the Gospel is always different forms of the same story with the same twist and the same ending.  It shouldn't have come as a surprise to the Jews when John identified Christ as the Lamb whose blood would cause the wrath of His Father to pass over the sins of His people because that's the plot twist they'd heard every single time they celebrated the Passover.  It shouldn't have come as a shock when Caiaphas prophesied that Christ's death would forgive the sins of the world since that was the big reveal that had already been revealed a bagillion times throughout the Old Testament.  Nicodemus shouldn't have been caught off guard at the twist that God would save people through faith in the Son of God lifted up and made into sin for them because that's exactly the same twist God used when He had Moses lift up the Bronze Serpent in the wilderness.  So, to put it quite simply, if God's preaching is this predictable, ours should be too.

Granted, the same thing that happened to me when I went to see The Village is bound to happen when pastors preach in such a predictable manner.  People will get bored, roll their eyes, and mentally check out because they already know where their pastor is going.  But that's not a preaching problem.  It's a listening problem.  We only do that because our sinful nature will take any chance it gets to close our ears and ignore the Word of God.  Boredom is perhaps the most frequently used name on Unbelief's fake ID.  

But if ever a pastor encounters this reaction to the predictability of his preaching, he ought to consider it a blessing, a wonderful cross to carry, because it means that he's preached the Gospel so much that people just assume he's going to do it again.  If our world is facing a dearth of good filmmaking, M. Night Shyamalan is certainly not the answer.  But if our world is facing a dearth of good preaching, and it certainly is, a few more Shyamalan preachers would go pretty far in turning that around.

Peace out, cub scouts.