Are you connected?

Are you connected?

Written by Dan McDonald

            A perceptive Facebook friend, who has known me for probably twenty years (“time keeps on slipping into the future”), said as we were exchanging messages:  “I hope you are connected and complete.  Take care of yourself.”  She was sort of asking a question, but knowing me she was putting it in the form of a sentence.  With the Lenten season approaching her sentence sort of affirms what I have been feeling lately.  I need to focus on my connections.

            Everyone has their own perceptions of what the important things are in life – but I think most of us know that being connected is among the most important.  For a long time I’ve had this theological framework around what it means to be connected to God in Jesus Christ.  If I remember correctly I came to see this theological framework concerning connectedness in the theology of Martin Luther, either as discussed in Roland Bainton’s biography of Luther entitled Here I Stand or in Philip Schaaf’s volume on the German Reformation in his eight-volume set on Church History.  Luther, during the German Reformation came to believe that God reveals Christ to us in three loci (or places of revelation or channels of revelation).  Luther’s concept of “Sola Scriptura” did not mean that he viewed the Scriptures as the only place where we met Christ.  For Luther, “Sola Scriptura” meant that the Scriptures were the highest authority by which Christians and the Church could determine what was doctrinally correct.  He believed the Bible taught that normally speaking God was revealed to His people through the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the Church.

            His Biblical reasons for these were simple.  Jesus when discussing eternal life with the religious leaders who either failed to understand him or actually opposed Him, said to them “You search the Scriptures for eternal life, and it is they which testify of Me.”  The Scriptures, according to Luther’s understanding, revealed eternal life because they revealed and pointed to Christ.  The Scriptures were the means to an end, not the end of the means.

            The sacraments were also important.  This truth was understood in simple ways.  Christ described the elements of the Supper he was distributing to them as his body and his blood.  Whatever perspective we might use to explain this, our participation in the Supper became a physical way of remembering Christ's death until he comes.  The idea of remembering is not a mental only remembrance, but a physically active reenactment in which Christ offers us his body and blood and we partake.  I am not going to try to figure out in a blog which of the varied traditions of understanding the Lord's Supper and the taking of communion is the most perfect.  I am just pointing out that Christ called upon his disciples to partake of his body and blood in the supper and so we in some manner do that not by forming mental images in our head but by eating and drinking what we are given.  Sacraments are physical acts requiring something even if not a lot in regards to the employment of our bodies.  Sacraments help us to respond bodily to the reality that Christ entered into humanity with a human body to die for our sins and to rise for our eternal life.  He entered the physicality of our world and we receive this gift and the promise of his presence partly by partaking of a supper in which he reaches out to us and says "Take" - "my body" - "my blood".  Baptism is similar.  We have our bodies anointed or immersed in Christ, into his death, burial, and resurrection.  Luther also spoke of “confession and the absolution or forgiveness of sin as a sacrament.  He wasn't always consistent, as he wanted people to feel free to confess to God apart from the sometimes legalistic way the practice was conducted in the late Middle Ages, but he viewed confession and absolution as something Christians could do with one another to encourage one another in the Gospel.  We should be able to smile at some of our differences, for if I have been to Protestant churches where the Roman Catholic practice of confession and penance and absolution are condemned, these same churches often have a counseling ministry where people may talk about their struggles, be given Biblical counsel or directives (not penance mind you) and forgiveness (nah this isn't absolution keep moving, we're Protestants).  The point is Christ is presented to us and us to Christ in baptism, the Lord's Supper, and in confessing and having our sins forgiven through the ministry of the Gospel.

            The final channel, in Luther’s perspective, through which God revealed Christ to his people, is through the Church.  The Church is described as the body of Christ.  But perhaps we think of the Church in an abstract way.  I also think He intended it to be characterized by mystery until it was revealed in the Great Day.  The Church by a minimal definition is the body of Christ, in which those who are being redeemed by the grace of God are being grafted into the body of Christ.  If we define the Church as the body of Christ in which all believers are being grafted, then we discover an amazing truth in the Gospel regarding how you and I will be judged in the final day.  Jesus never described how we would be saved by giving a right answer about how we were saved.  He didn't even tell us that we can't be saved without believing in justification by faith.  He instead told a story about the separating of sheep and goats based very simply on how we treated Christ through the way we treated the "least of these."  That is how much we see Christ in the Church.  We see him in the least of these.  We see him in the brother and sister.  We can have a religion that has all the right answers doctrinally but doesn't have the right response to when we see him in the least of these.  He is there even if we don't see him.

            If you want to understand what a healthy church is, it is the place where “the least of these” is welcome.  It is the place where the least of these are being given a haven in which to reside, to seek, to confess, to be forgiven, to be taught, and to learn to love one another in the Gospel.  It is a place where through the teaching of Holy Scripture sin will be identified, but it is also the place where when sin is identified the weak will be reminded that this is the house where the least of these are welcomed by a Savior who has died for our sins and has risen for our eternal life.  The strong will likewise be reminded that this is where they find salvation by how they show love to Christ in showing love to the least of these.  Let every Church have a cross on it and let every believer seeing the cross think of how this means it is for the least of these.

            I am drawing near to the time of Lent in my church tradition.  I know what my focus needs to be.  It needs to be on making these connections, especially those to my church and those to the least of these people within my church.  One of the things I am tentatively thinking about doing during Lent is not writing on my blog.  I will spend a strictly limited amount of time on Twitter and Facebook, so as to focus on making connections in my local church and in my community.  I will keep reading some of the blogs I read because you have important things to say.  But I have some needs at this time and I will be addressing them during the season of Lent.  May God richly bless every person reading this.