As I walked to the car, I had this thought, “How could I be bitter at the Lord?  He carried my cross, he walked the via dolorosa, he was mocked and flogged and crucified in my place.  How could I be bitter at the Lord?” 

So here is what I have learned through this trial.  If you want to keep yourself from bitterness as you suffer, keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and his suffering for you.

Be Christ-centered in your theology and not providence-centered in your theology.  Let me explain.  Perhaps you are like me in that you have a theology that lays great stress on the sovereignty of God.  That’s good, but during trials if you only think of the Lord as the sovereign Lord upon his throne who ordains whatsoever comes to pass, you might be tempted to get mad and say “Why, O Lord, have you ordained me to go through this trial?”

But if you fix your mind’s eye upon Jesus and the crown of thorns piercing his brow because of our sins, it’s very hard to stay mad at him.  Very hard to keep complaining in the presence of his suffering love.

And you know what God has used more than anything else to keep my eyes on Jesus this year? … The Lord’s Supper.   The bread and the cup keep his broken body and shed blood before me.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Different fellowships emphasize different phrases in these words of institution.  Baptists – do this in remembrance of me. Catholics – This is my body.   But I want to underscore the last phrase in verse 26, “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”  The Lord’s Supper is a proclamation.  The Supper preaches.  It proclaims the Lord’s death.  It preaches the gospel to you.  And through that preaching, you receive grace to strengthen your faith.

We are already used to thinking sacramentally about preaching, right?  When you listen to a sermon, it’s not just your brain thinking about the truths and applying it to your life.  No, we believe that through the proclamation of the Word, grace is given and faith is created and strengthened.  Romans 10:17, faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the Word of Christ.

So too the preaching of the gospel through the sermon of the Supper gives grace and strengthens faith.  So the next time you come to the Lord’s Table, let me encourage you to come expecting to receive faith-strengthening grace as your hear it proclaiming that his body was broken for you.

[Gerhard] Forde rightly shows that when we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better,that is what it means to get better! When we stop obsessing over our need to improve,that is what it means to improve! Remember, the Apostle Paul referred to himself as the chief of sinners at the end of his life. It was his ability to freely admit that which demonstrated his spiritual maturity–he had nothing to prove or protect because it wasn’t about him!

I’m realizing that the sin I need removed daily is precisely my narcissistic understanding of spiritual progress. I think too much about how I’m doing, if I’m growing, whether I’m doing it right or not. I spend too much time pondering my failure, brooding over my spiritual successes, and wondering why, when it’s all said and done, I don’t seem to be getting that much better. In short, I spend way too much time thinking about me and what I need to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he’s already done. And what I’ve discovered, ironically, is that the more I focus on my need to get better the worse I actually get. I become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my performance over Christ’s performance for me makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. After all, Peter only began to sink when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on “how he was doing.”  As my friend Rod Rosenbladt wrote to me recently, “Anytime our natural incurvitas (fixture on self) is rattled, shaken, turned from itself to that Man’s blood, to that Man’s cross, then the devil take the hindmost!”

Gerhard Forde and Rod Rosenbladt!  Those are my peeps!  May Lutheran gospel-centeredness continue to evangelize evangelicalism!  I’m being silly by framing this like it’s a team sport rivalry between Lutherans and Calvinists.  But I truly am thankful for the way Luther’s persistent focus on the gospel extra nos is getting more and more press in mainstream evangelicalism.

“The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail.  If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out.  If there was any idea of a sort of bargain—any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him to perform His side—that has to be wiped out..everyone has the idea of an exam or of a bargain; the first result of real Christianity is to blow that to bits.”

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

I’ve always been interested in law.  It was the subject of my project for the fourth grade career fair.  I won a state championship with our high school debate team in 1984 when the national debate topic was the criminal justice system.  I majored in Philosophy/Pre-Law as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois.  But during college I felt a call to Christian ministry.  Although I did not grow up in a religious home and although I began my spiritual searching in the writings of Eastern religious thinkers, I eventually came to believe in the good news that Christ died for the forgiveness of sins.

I have not lost this faith in Christ, but I have just about lost my faith in the institution of the traditional American church.  I still pastor a church and I still love the people I am serving, but it is becoming increasingly clear to me that as Christians we have domesticated the mission of the church.  We look to our pastors to be directors of family-friendly programming and providers of religious goods and services rather than leaders in the mission of doing justice and showing mercy in the world.

In the last two years I have also become more Lutheran in my theology.  Luther’s doctrine of vocation declares that there is nothing more holy about a call to be a minister than any other calling.  Luther has assured me of the freedom not to be a pastor.  Some contemporary Lutheran theologians have critiqued the evangelical subculture as a “new monasticism”.  This subculture exists as a far less inspiring but equally wrongheaded way of avoiding engagement with the world.  But as Luther experienced no little persecution for shutting down the monasteries, so jeremiads against the evangelical subculture do not play well in Peoria.

But I know that if I go to law school as a second effort to save the world, I will just experience a very expensive transition from disillusionment with the American church to disillusionment with the American legal system.  There are some noble reasons for a Christian to be an attorney.  As Christ is called our Advocate with the Father, so I could be a voice in the courts for those who cannot speak for themselves.  In June we became foster parents to an infant and this has brought me into the courts and rekindled my interest in being an advocate.  For the last two years I have volunteered at a homeless shelter that serves as a transitional facility for many men just released from the penitentiary.  In the course of helping one of these men I have again found myself in the courtroom.  But I won’t get fooled again.  I don’t want to be a lawyer so I can change the world.  But I do want to live out my faith more in the world and less in the monastery of church culture.

Ecclesiastes 3:12-13 says, “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live.  That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil– this is the gift of God.”  I hope to find enjoyment in my second career, and if I get to do a little good along the way, thanks be to God.

- John 15:2

From Luther’s sermon on this text:

With these words Christ wants to teach us to have a view of the affliction and suffering of Christians that is far different from what appears on the surface and before the world. …it is a sign of grace and fatherly love, not a sign of wrath and punishment, and must serve our welfare.  This requires the art of believing…

This is indeed a fine and comforting picture.   Happy is the Christian who can interpret it thus and apply it in hours of distress and trial…

Here’s my current dream:  I’d like to concentrate on disability/special education law.  It’d be cool if my career had commonalities with the career of my wife, who has her master’s in Early Childhood Special Education.  It would be fun to sue the government to make them give kids what they have promised to give them.  Also I wonder if, instead of focusing on a particular area of the law, I could focus on a particular sort of client and their various needs.  Families with children with disabilities face other legal issues.  For example, their estate planning can be more complicated.  And there are probably some other ones that I haven’t thought about or learned about yet.

There’s a law firm in Chicago that specializes in this area.  One of my tasks for this winter break is to send them a resume’ and see if they’d let me loiter there for several weeks this summer and learn how to do what they do.  Probably a long shot.

This fall semester has been the first time in my life that I’ve really struggled to find a few minutes a day to read the Bible.   The greatest blessing of being a pastor was that I could spend hours a day in the Word and still have hours a day left over.  I am confident that God has good reasons for giving me a new vocation.  But some days I do grieve the loss.

So I’m going to try to enumerate some of the upsides of these new limits on my time for the spiritual disciplines.  First, I am experiencing what I have always professed to believe–that I don’t sustain my spiritual life by holding on to God through my devotions, but that God is holding on to me.   Second, I am gaining understanding and empathy for the challenges other Christians have faced in their vocations.   Third, I long for Sunday morning more than ever and find it to be the oasis in my week.

I need to go on more about that one.  Maybe one use for this blog can be to journal about the things I receive on Sunday mornings.   Last week, the gospel text was Luke 7, where John the Baptist is put into prison and sends to Jesus asking, “Are you the One who is to come, or shall we look for another?”  My pastor pointed out that until John was thrown in prison, he had been on quite a roll.  His ministry had been very popular.  But now he is tempted to impatience and disillusionment with Jesus.  Sometimes I am tempted to feel like I’ve been cast aside.  But my pastor talked about vocation and brought the good news that God isn’t done with us.

Then during the Lord’s Prayer I had one of those ineffable moments.   As I spoke the words, “Thy Kingdom come,”  the Holy Spirit enabled me to believe that the Kingdom is my future, and so it doesn’t really matter that much what kind of job I get if and when I finish law school.  I hope and trust he’ll use my work to shape a stone or two for the walls of the New Jerusalem.   But even if I never see how my work fits in, still the Kingdom is coming.