Grace has the power of the mallet. Every other prong and heavy-lifting device that seeks to change people is an expression of law and accomplishes the opposite of what it intends. People fear that grace will give permission to be bad. This is the classic fear: that grace will issue in a license—“007”—to do whatever you want, without consequences.

As Marx said of a market-driven culture, “All that is solid melts into the air.” God, too, becomes a commodity—a product or therapy that we can buy and use for our personal well-being. Exemplifying the moralistic and therapeutic approach to religion, [Joel Osteen’s] message is also a good example of the inability of Boomers to mourn in the face of God’s judgment or dance under the liberating news of God’s saving mercy. In other words, all gravity is lost—both the gravity of our problem and of God’s amazing grace. According to this message, we are not helpless sinners—the ungodly—who need a one-sided divine rescue. (Americans, but especially we Boomers, don’t take bad news well.) Rather, we are good people who just need a little instruction and motivation.

A sermon, if it is a true sermon, takes up [the name of God and promise “I am the Lord, your God!”] and hands it on as a “proclaimable mystery” (according to Luther’s translation of 1 Tim. 3:16). This is not a mystery to be kept secret but one to be “proclaimed,” to be preached. It is a public mystery, and open secret. By proclaiming God’s name, the sermon is, by God’s will, his presence itself. Preachers deliver a message and are not the message themselves. But insofar as they speak “in the name of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” their human words are identical with the divine word, indeed, “they are on and the same.” For “whoever listens to you listens to me” (Luke 10:16; see 2 Cor. 5:20). IF in the name of God human beings preach God’s name, if they publicly, audibly, clearly, and intelligibly offer God’s promise of salvation to other people, then such a sermon, although it is a human word, is not only a pointer to God’s own word (like the extra long index finger of John the Baptist in Grunewaldt’s picture of the crucifixion on the Isenheim altar), but it is God’s own word itself. It is astonishing and highly offensive to a spiritualistic doctrine of God that God gives and forgives through human mouths and other creaturely means, such as the water of baptism.

“Our vocations [as pastors] are bounded on one side by consumer appetites on the other by a marketing mind-set. Pastoral vocation is interpreted from the congregational side as the work of meeting people’s religious needs on demand at the best possible price and from the clerical side as satisfying those same needs quickly and efficiently. These conditions quickly reduce the pastoral vocation to religious economics, pull it into relentless competitiveness, and deliver it into the hands of public relations and marketing experts.”

“First, a dad is a model of grace in the home. The fact that we believe that the Gospel is true and that we have a Father who sent His own Son so that we could be His children necessarily affects our view of father and the other way around as well. There is a misconception out there that if children grow up to be “bad,” it is because there was not enough law in their lives. Maybe, we think, if their parents had just been harder on them, stricter disciplinarians, the would have turned out better. I think the real misunderstanding is that we are blind as to how much law is present in our everyday lives. The world gives us plenty of law—law in abundance! What everyone, especially families and children, really need is grace. Fathers need to remember that we will never be able to give enough grace to offset the amount of law that our children receive in their everyday lives. It is just not possible. You may not even be able to hit the fifty-fifty mark; you’ll constantly be in a deficit. We need more grace and more Gospel desperately. The is why the father in the prodigal son is such a striking figure. He does the unexpected; he hands out grace when our inclination is that more law is needed.”

“Just as there are many kinds of nations in the world, each with its own laws, there are many kinds of rulers. Emperors, kings, tribal chieftains—these are all offices Christians are enjoined to obey. There is another kind of ruler, though, the kind found in the United States and other democratic systems. This gives Romans 13 a special twist for Americans and others who live under a democratic republic. Our governing officials are not imposed on us from above. Rather, we elect our governing officials. Ultimately we rule them. In a democratic system the ‘people’ rule. Their leaders are accountable to the citizens, who enact their own law through their elected representatives and who are endowed by their laws with the task of self-government.

The law, the stress of life driving you to a breakdown, reduces you to a walking question mark. The question is answered, amazingly, by God’s one-way love. Grace changes everything. You then enter some form of church or community. At this point, the iron curtain of the law comes down. You are told you need to be “disciple” or “mentored” or “coached”: held “accountable.” Sermons contain lists of things to do, “disciplines” to take up, a “Christian worldview” to embrace. The law is reimposed.

“The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales, which is to say, it isn’t. Which is to say, further, it is about how one ought to live one’s life. Moreover, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are the short and simple message are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems. Such beliefs would naturally have implications for our orientation towards political discourse; that is to say, we may being to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the television commercial.  For example, a person who has seen a one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures—or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty. Such a person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw and line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use and athlete, and actor, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to speak for the virtues of a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise. Political figures show up anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought odd, presumptuous, or in any way out of place. Which is to say, they have become assimilated into the general television culture as celebrities.”

“I cannot change all that I have consistently taught about this until now, namely, that “through faith” (as St. Peter says) we receive a different, new, clean heart and that, for the sake of Christ our mediator, God will and does regard us as completely righteous and holy. Although sin in the flesh is still not completely gone or dead, God will nevertheless not count it or consider it.

“[St. Paul] would dearly love to stir and persuade [the Galatians] to not let themselves be influenced by the false apostles and not to let these men ensnare them once more in the yoke of slavery. It is as though he were saying: ‘The issue here is no trifle or mere nothing; it is an issue between either endless, eternal freedom or slavery.’ For just as freedom from the wrath of God and from every evil is not political freedom or a freedom of the flesh but an eternal freedom, so the slavery of sin, death, and the devil, which oppress those who seek to be justified and save through the Law, is not physical slavery, which lasts a while, but a perpetual slavery. For self-righteous people of this kind, who take everything very seriously—and they are the ones whom Paul is discussing—are never serene and peaceful. In this life they are always in doubt about the will of God and are afraid of death and of the wrath and judgment of God; and after this life they will suffer eternal destruction as punishment for the unbelief.”

“The effect that the law creates is not surprising. One has no trouble understanding what it means to rely on oneself and on one’s own deeds; the action-consequences relationship has its own logic. But the gospel is absolutely, completely incomprehensible. That God rescues one from, and brings one safely through, the deserved judgment is a miracle. Law and gospel cannot be plausibly intertwined together; their existence is hard and fast in opposition to each other. The gospel is literally a paradox: it stands against that which the sinner can reasonably expect; it stands against damnation.”

“The deep symbol of sin is one we also often trivialize by terming it merely a mistake. Many sins we euphemize; for example, we label fornication ‘sleeping together,’ which sounds so nice and cozy. We call it ‘fudging on our income tax’ when we cheat the government or a ‘little white lie’ when we do violence to the truth. Since in our culture we do not name sin for the despicable sin that it is, we rarely recognize how truly dead we are (see Ephesians 2:1-3).”

“One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for the Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God, the gospel of Christ, as Christ says, John 11:25, ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live’ and John 8:36, ‘So if the Son makes you free you will be free indeed’; and Matthew 4:4, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ Let us then consider it certain and firmly established that the soul can do without anything except the Word of God and that where the Word of God is missing there is no help at all for the soul. If it has the Word of God it is rich and lacks nothing since it is the Word of life, thrust light, peace, righteousness, salvation, joy, liberty, wisdom, power, grace, glory, and of every incalculable blessing.”

-Martin Luther

“If I now seek the forgiveness of sin, I do not run to the cross, for I will not find it given there. Nor must I hold to the sufferings of Christ, as Karlstadt trifles, in knowledge or remembrance, for I will not find it there either. But I will find in the sacrament or gospel the word which distributes, presents, offers, and gives to me that forgiveness which is won on the cross. Therefore, Luther has rightly taught that whoever has bad conscience from his sins should go to the sacrament and obtain comfort, not because of the bread and wine, not because of the body and blood of Christ, but because of the word which in the sacrament offers, presents, and gives the body and blood of Christ, given and shed for me.”

Mercy

By John F. Deane

Unholy we sang this morning, and prayed

as if we were not broken, crooked

the Christ-figure hung, splayed

on bloodied beams above us;

devious God, dweller in shadows,

mercy on us;

immortal, cross-shattered Christ—

your gentling grace down upon us.

“[V]arious unfortunate opinions…are offered as life and death solutions for a church in dire need, but which do more to increase her need because they simply increase confusion. An evangelical church that views the teaching of the righteousness of faith as self-evident—but about which no one should trouble himself further because other issues are more important—has in principle robbed itself of the central solution by which all other questions are illuminated. Such a church will become increasingly splintered and worn down.”

“But, I question whether [Christian literature] has any literary qualities peculiar to itself. The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature. And if we enlarge the idea of Christian Literature to include not only literature on sacred themes but all that is written by Christians for Christians to read, then, I think Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist. It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan.”

“In the first place, Noah filled the office of bishop; and because he had been plagued by various temptations, it was his foremost concern to oppose the devil and comfort the tempted, to restore the erring, to give confidence to the wavering, to encourage the despairing, to shut out the impenitent from his church, and to receive back the penitent with fatherly joy. These are almost the same duties that must be performed by a bishop through the ministry of the Word.”

“Since God has given us his Word in a living voice, we can see why Luther, although intensively concerned with the text and every letter of the Bible, rates the oral character of the Word more highly than its written form…[It] is through preaching the gospel that ‘Christ comes to us, or we are brought to him.’ Communication takes place. The gospel ‘signifies nothing else than a sermon or report concerning the grace and mercy of God merited and acquired through the Lord Jesus Christ with his death. Actually, the Gospel is not what one find in books and what is written in letters of the alphabet; it is rather an oral sermon and a living Word, a voice that resounds throughout the world and is proclaimed publicly, so that one hears it everywhere.'”

“For the Spirit of prayer is joined to the  Spirit of grace. But it is the Spirit of grace who convinces one of sin (John 16:8) and gives instruction about the forgiveness of sins, who condemns idolatry and gives instruction about true worship of God and who condemns greed, lust, and oppression and teaches chastity,  patience, and charitableness….But when the Spirit has been  taken away, the Spirit of prayer has also been taken away. For one who does not have the Word cannot pray.”