Co-missioners,
I was planning to have something else for you today. It was going to be a Lenten lament about what seems to be some changes in the way the church I’m institutionally connected to is talking about God these days. I’m hearing less of the language that has always struck me as of the essence in conveying a message that can seriously be labeled “the Gospel.” I’m hearing more of the prose that lays yokes on people’s necks and tells them to start tugging. “Thou shalt do justice!”—that sort of thing. I think I’m hearing a lot more about a hectoring Jesus whose chief role in the economy of salvation is to tell us what to do to make this justice happen, as if Moses didn’t get it right the first time.
So that’s what I started off intending to talk about. And along the way I was going to underscore the risk of having such discussion lapse into either a whine or a rant. God save us from such things! We Lutherans have a record both solid and sordid of scorning each other. I for one grew up in an LCMS where nasty nit-picking was a game of sorts and still is from what I hear. Those of us who passed through Seminex are obliged to be on particular guard about coming across ourselves like doctrinal police.
And yet there are things to say—things that need to be said and discussed—if the dear people God’s Son was crucified for are going to bask in his life-giving benefits as the Holy Spirit would have them do.
Anyway, all this is what I failed to get to this week, try though I did. I’ve returned it to the pot for some more simmering. Next time, perhaps.
Meanwhile I share with you something I stumbled across quite by accident earlier this week. It’s a hefty fragment of what I said from a pulpit seven years ago on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. St. Luke’s was the prevailing Gospel that year, and the day’s texts included the parable of the Prodigal Son fortified by the astonishment of 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. When I glanced again at this, I found myself using the very language that I’m hearing less of these days, the faintness of which in current ELCA discourse is starting rightly or wrongly to trouble me.
So what I give you here is a setup of sorts for the lament to come. It helps, I suppose, that what I said to some American saints in 2019 remains agonizingly pertinent to anyone who might encounter it in 2026. Even more pertinent, come to think of it. Kyrie eleison.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
for the Crossings Community
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Why Christ Matters: A Down-to-(our) Earth Account
by Jerome Burce
[The remarks below followed a presentation by a representative of the ELCA’s Division for Global Mission who spoke of startling growth taking place in some African churches.]
I want to thank [our speaker] for challenging us just now to get serious about our Church’s mission in the wider world. I think a lot of us were listening closely. I hope we were. I hope we listened just as closely in the moments after that when the Word of God laid out the reason of reasons for Lutherans in America to be every bit as eager to get busy with that mission as Lutherans in Tanzania and Ethiopia seem to be.
JESUS MAFA. Prodigal Son, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54662 [retrieved March 11, 2026]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).
Lutherans in America. Weary, jaded America. Smug and know-it-all America—which, like it or not, and of course we don’t like it at all, is how people in all kinds of other countries experience America. I’ve been there, I’ve felt that, and others here have too. We are the world’s big brother country, on the one hand very taken with ourselves, and, on the other, very quick to criticize all those little brother countries when they don’t behave themselves the way we think they should. And more and more we play that same game right here at home, among ourselves, most all of us lined up with either the red team or the blue team, each with its preferred TV channel that spends 24 hours a day telling us how stupid and evil those other people are—and yes, I do exaggerate, but not too much, I think. I can’t recall a time when I’ve felt as much angry, ugly judgement crackling in the air as I have these past few years.
And then, on top of that, there’s the God thing in America, with half or more of us still pausing now and then to sing God Bless America in a way that suggests that this is something God ought to do, or else what’s wrong with him. Meanwhile more and more of our fellow citizens—our children too, for that matter—are rushing down the European path of shrugging God off as yesterday’s bad joke. Jesus, I think, would put it this way: we Americans too are busy grabbing the rich inheritance that came to us through the Word of God and the faith of our grandparents, and one after the other we’re buzzing off to a far country of our own choosing, there to fritter it away in lives that land us inevitably in a pig sty of one sort or another.
And with that, a quick time out. I need to admit how hard it is to say such things from a pulpit without feeling smug and superior—superior, that is, to all those unbelieving wastrels out there; and I should think it’s just as hard to hear such things in a church pew without feeling smug and superior too. How is it, I wonder, that God puts up with any of us?
I spoke earlier of judgment crackling in the air. The fiercest judgment of them all is the one we all deserve to hear from God. “There is no one who is righteous, no not one,” as the prophet once said. And this, as it happens, is the last and final judgment that any of us would hear if God were anything less or other than the astonishing God-in-Christ that all of us are bumping into once again this very morning, in this very place.
This, by the way, is the God that our friends and children in the far country will need to hear about some day. That’s what the church’s mission is finally all about. At some point some other younger brother, or sister, is going to wake up to the harsh reality of life in a God-free pigsty. And when they do—if they do—God whose heart is set on them will want them to know that they too have a home to head for and a party to attend, thrown in their honor. But if we, his people in Christ, don’t sprinkle the world with big fat hints that this is so, who will?
As it happens, the word currently on the far country streets is that God is mean, and that God’s church is nothing more than a collection of nasty sour elder siblings, bossy and nagging, all of them forever trying to clip our wings and tell us what to do no matter what politics they prefer. Quit sleeping around. Quit using plastic. Behave like this. Behave like that. Clean up your act. That, I fear, is the church’s takeaway message on those far country streets—though it’s not the message we hear in church, at least not in this church. Nor will you hear it in any other real church where the message is anchored in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the one we call “Lord,” the one who stands at the very heart of who we are as baptized people.
In real church we don’t talk on and on about just plain God. In real church our talk first and last is about God-in-Christ. There’s a difference here. A huge difference. Just plain God is the only God the world is able to imagine. He/she/it stands there frowning with their arms crossed. Next to them stands a flunky keeping track as they count up our trespasses and decide whether or not we’ve been good enough for them to treat us nicely That’s the picture people see all over the world when they hear the “god” word. No wonder so many run from it. Shame on Christians when they help to reinforce this because they think that’s their job. It isn’t.
Our job instead is to surprise the world with our constant talk about God-in-Christ, talk that drives home the message we heard God repeating through St. Paul this morning. A wild message it is, and ever so good. So good that it defies belief. It flies straight in the teeth of the reality that every human being lives with day after day in this world that crackles with judgment—constant and unrelenting judgment, never a moment when somebody isn’t muttering some sort of unhappy opinion about you, and so often the voice that mutters most loudly is the one inside your own head.
From Canva
Against that come this word: God was in Christ not counting our trespasses against us, not totting up our good/bad balance sheets, not standing there with arms crossed as he watches us with beady eyes that miss nothing. Instead “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Or to put that another way: where Christ is, there sin is not an issue. That’s because he deals with it, as we cannot. And when he’s done dealing with it—when he has drawn that sin into the death he died to kill all sin—then there stands God with his arms wide open and a huge smile on his face, seeing as he does how good and right his Christ has made us all to be. Party time, God says.
But really, who out there believes that God is into parties, full of joy and not the slightest speck of judgment?
In the story Jesus told, the last thing the younger son expected to see was the father running down the road to meet him with tears of joy running down his face. That’s how God-in-Christ finally is—and not just for that boy, but for every younger sibling who comes staggering home from whatever far country they may have happened to get lost in.
And that’s the message that God-in-Christ so wants the world to hear. It’s also the message that nobody will hear, and certainty not in America, until the elder siblings get as serious as they seem to be in other countries about spreading it around.
March 31, 2019
[An editorial P.S.: Might some wonder if all I’ve done in the above is to replace “do justice” with “talk about Jesus” as the thing of things for the baptized beasts of burden to tug away at? That would make for an interesting discussion down the line. Again, later. —JB
