The Gottesdienst Crowd

TGC 132 — Feminism, Complementarianism, & Patriarchy (Part 1)

In this first episode of a two-part series, a follow up to the episode on the Persuasiveness and Pervasiveness of Feminism, David Ramirez and I look at the roots of feminism and why it’s so hard resist, and Satan’s back door of bringing feminism into the church: Complementarianism.  

Host: Fr. Jason Braaten

Special Guest: Fr. David Ramirez

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[Gottesblog] Weoponized Vice — Larry Beane

Weaponized Vice

How often have you heard people say that all sins are equal?

If that’s the case, committing genocide is the moral equivalent of copying your friend’s homework in fifth grade. Yes, both are sins. Yes, both can be mortal sins if one doesn’t repent. Yes, both break the commandments (the former the fifth, the latter the seventh) - and yes, someone is going to point out that other commandments are involved here too.

But even the most dogmatic Lutheran will be forced to admit that there are indeed worse sins than others.

There is a category of sin that is known as “vice.” Vices are sinful personal failings that are not acts of aggression against someone else. One could call them “victimless” crimes. And yes, I realize that there are unintended “victims” of vices (such as family members of a father with a gambling addiction) - but there is a categorical difference between a man who physically rapes a woman vs. a passing lustful thought. Even the most doctrinaire Lutheran would probably not want people jailed or sent to the gallows for gossip or for coveting thy neighbor’s Mercedes.

There is a danger that Pharisaic people make a big deal out of vices for the purpose of pointing to their own self-righteousness. A teetotaler may enjoy gossiping about the crowd gathered in the bar for happy hour. Someone with no interest in gambling may scowl at the betting going on at horse races. The war on vices has led to blue laws and even national alcohol prohibition, not to mention the horrific unintended consequences of the War on Drugs. Censorship has now come full circle and is being used to stifle the free speech of conservatives and Christians.

Examples of vice abound. Every family and every community have examples of those who go a little overboard with the drinking. Aunt Sally may not be face down in the ditch, but maybe she has one or two too many and begins to embarrass herself. Your brother in law Bill may foolishly blow his tax refund at the casino, but he’s a young single guy with a lot of money, so it’s not that big a deal. Nobody is calling for his excommunication or for a police investigation.

And in days past, everyone had an uncle who was unmarried, who always seemed to have a close male friend hanging around, who went out to bars on the weekend. Everybody knew that he had same-sex attraction issues, but nobody berated him for it, but neither did anyone condone it. So, he wasn’t ostracized from the family - he was your uncle after all - but neither did he bring up sodomy at the Thanksgiving table. There was a social arrangement. And as long as he stayed away from underage young men, there was a sense of tolerance toward his vice. The pastor may have even given him communion because his sexual proclivities were so well hidden that he genuinely didn’t know. Or maybe your gay uncle knew that this was a sinful lifestyle. Maybe he even confessed to the pastor and struggled against this sin - you wouldn’t know because it’s none of your business, and the pastor probably knows more than you think he does.

But we live in a different era. It is as if everything before 2015 was the age of black and white television and Marcus Welby doling out paternal advice on “Father Knows Best.” Today, homosexuality is no longer considered by society as a whole to be a vice, but a virtue. It is a point of pride. It is socially celebrated without exception in movies, TV, music, and every aspect of popular culture. There are local holidays and lurid celebratory parades. It is venerated by mental health professionals and politicians, and now the celebrated category even includes people with sexual fetishes, gender dysphoria, and a host of subjective sexual issues. But nearly every sexual vice has been metamorphized into being the the moral equivalent of, if not the superior to, heterosexuality. At this point, even pedophilia and bestiality are losing their stigma. And there is a concerted effort to normalize sexual deviancy even to pre-school children.

I recently saw a back-and-forth on social media between a rostered LCMS male teacher at a Lutheran high school whose FB profile includes a pro-LGBT statement and the six-color rainbow. He also happens to champion Critical Race Theory. When he was challenged on it, he did not address the questions, but simply retorted that “there are gay members of the LCMS” and that people “seem awfully hung up on one sin out of millions.” He never answered the question about whether this view of sexuality was congruent with the Scriptures. He ended up just deleting the thread.

In this day and age when Critical Theory and the endorsement and celebration of violations of the Sixth Commandment have become the norm in the secular world, parents who don’t want their children “educated” in this manner either homeschool or put their children in Christian schools. They especially turn to LCMS institutions, given our confession of the infallibility of Scripture and the role of the Word of God as the “norming norm” to which we unconditionally submit. For this is not the case with denomination after denomination that has surrendered to the world.

So why do we have a rostered teacher who is openly flouting and celebrating adultery?

That’s what homosexuality and other sexual proclivities celebrated by the secular culture are according to our Small Catechism. Sexuality is a matter of holy matrimony - between one man and one woman for life. In the church, we don’t wave flags celebrating divorce. We don’t throw a party when a man is unfaithful to his wife. We don’t tell an unrepentant woman that she is “courageous” for admitting that she cheats on her husband and has no intention of stopping. We don’t have a parade to laud people for looking at pornography.

But the vice is now a virtue. It is no longer a vice. This alternative morality, this rejection of Scripture, is being normalized even in our churches. We had at least one Concordia in our university system that had a student club dedicated to the breaking of the Sixth Commandment: an adultery club that met with the blessing of the former university president. Why not a pro-abortion club? Why not a club dedicated to profaning the name of God? Why not a club dedicated to character assassination? Why not a club mocking the idea of church attendance?

This teacher’s line of reasoning that the Sixth Commandment is being treated differently than all the others is actually true. One could not imagine him promoting Atheism or lusting after his neighbor’s wife or committing acts of aggression against other people or even killing them - without incurring the ire of the school’s administration or the District President. But this teacher’s advocacy of adultery - specifically the socially acceptable variation of sexual inclinations and behaviors that are not heterosexual - seems to be just fine.

What we are seeing all around us is weaponized vice.

The old social contract of not persecuting your “happy” uncle so long as he was not making it public and keeping his activities between consenting adults has been torn up. Now, your uncle is on a rampage. He will compel business owners to violate their consciences. He will sue them and harass them. He will show up at your church with his friends and protest outside. He will call you names and make you out to be the moral reprobate. He will dox you at your job and try to render you impoverished and socially ostracized. Some of his friends will insist on their right to expose their genitals to women and girls in a spa. He will argue in court for the right of school children to use whatever bathrooms and dressing rooms that they like, and will argue that you parents have no say in the matter. He will make sure that the virtue of violating the Sixth Commandment makes its way to children’s TV shows, cereal boxes, and even on the flagpole at the hospital where Christian families may be dealing with illness in the family. He will make sure that his flag flies alongside of national and historical flags - even at American embassies. He will successfully agitate so that federal government jobs include a day set apart to honor the violation of the Sixth Commandment and that all employees will take part. Any Christian who so much as winces will be written up or fired.

And now, he will also insist that rostered LCMS teachers celebrate the breaking of the Sixth Commandment, and the school administration and the District President will either pretend not to see it or openly support it.

In time, we will get new pastors and seminary professors who will read the Sixth Commandment - and all of the Bible - with a different hermeneutic, one befitting of a hashtag campaign. In time, our churches will redefine marriage to conform to the state and to the New Orthodoxy. And whatever pockets of resistance that are left will just be marginalized and bulldozed over. And who’s to say the Nine Commandments in our catechism won’t become the Eight Commandments, or the Two Commandments, or the Zero Commandments?

We either hold to our confession, or we change it. He either hold our RSOs and DP’s accountable, or we will not. We either believe the Holy Scriptures and submit to them, or we don’t.

TGC 131 — Trinity 16 Sermon Prep

This episode is devoted to the Gospel reading for Trinity 16, Luke 7:11-17.

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[Gottesblog] We Will Not Shut Up — Larry Beane

We Will Not Shut Up

The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear arguments against a new Texas law that outlaws abortion once the child has a heartbeat. President Harrison caught a lot of grief - even from many claiming to be LCMS members - because he wrote on the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod Facebook page (September 6, 2021, 9:56 AM), “Thank God the folks in Texas and on the SCOTUS think 63,000,000 dead babies is enough.”

For this advocacy of human life, President Harrison was pilloried. In the comment thread, the Synod President doubled down: “SIXTY THREE million. I’m just not shuttin up.”

And this is precisely what his detractors want. They want to gag him, our church body, and members of Synod, including pastors and representatives of our schools and universities from expressing any support of the pro-life movement. The arguments are the usual canards: we hate women, we only care about babies when they’re in the womb and when they’re born we don’t care about them, men have no right to an opinion on this issue, we don’t support crisis pregnancy centers, the Bible never addresses abortion, the Bible was only written by men, etc.

One lady decided to take a different tack with me. She attacked my personal Facebook posts dealing with politics and historiography. What this has to do with the Abortion Holocaust is beyond me. It is a classic case of ad hominem argumentation, gaslighting, and passive aggression. I’m not going to be bullied or intimidated.

But it is also a case of deflection.

The new Texas law doesn’t outlaw all abortions, but it goes a long way towards defending the innocents in utero (which all of us were at one time, and which our Lord Himself was as well). Ad hominems and deflection are actually the best strategy that pro-abortion Christians - especially LCMS members who are angry about the new Texas law and are on the attack against President Harrison and other members of Synod who support it - can muster.

The best argument for supporting the new Texas law and supporting similar laws to be passed in other states is the simple reality of what the law now bans. Here is a video. And although it is an illustration, it is still disturbing and horrifying. You may not even want to watch it. But those who support abortion as a right, those who oppose the new Texas law, those who are lambasting President Harrison really should watch this:

 

As you can see, even the decidedly left-biased YouTube finds this too intense to imbed in this article. To watch it, you have to click on the YouTube link and state that you are 18 years of age or older. This is the way our society used to deal with pornography. We all intuitively know across the political spectrum that this procedure is barbaric and morally indefensible. And that is why the argument has to be deflected to ad hominems and discussions of anything and everything except what exactly happens to the baby.

Although the lady’s attack on my views of American History are an irrelevant distraction, there is something to be said about historical symbols of the past and why it is not wrong to honor our ancestors and our heritage in spite of their flaws.

When I’m in uniform, I stand at attention when the flag of the United States is posted. I salute the flag. The flag represents my home and my American ancestors who were already here before the United States was founded. Many of them fought in the War for American Independence and in subsequent conflicts. I have affection for the flag in spite of the fact that it flew over slave ships, segregation, war crimes, ethnic internment camps, adventurous imperialism, and in spite of the fact that every stripe represents a slave state when the states declared their independence. Moreover, Old Glory flies over the Holocaust of the Unborn: 63,000,000 children killed in utero with the protection and blessing of the United States government, namely the Federal court system and the Supreme Court. The decree Roe v. Wade compelled all of the states to legalize, allow, and defend infanticide within their borders. At the time of Roe, gone was the old federalism of the founders that decentralized such decisions and allowed the people of the states to protect the unborn. Hamiltonian Nationalism replaced Jeffersonian Federalism (states’ rights), and until now, the State of Texas has been powerless to protect the powerless.

Without the top-down Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution - not as a compact between the states but as the master of the states - converting the states into provinces of a single unitary state - my own State of Louisiana and many other states (especially, but not only in the South) would have passed laws protecting the unborn. Perhaps the pendulum is now starting to shift from Hamilton to Jefferson, and maybe a new federalism and decentralization of authority from Washington will once more allow the people of the states to protect our little ones without interference from Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. I’m certain the Nationalists won’t simply roll over. This may lead to court-packing so they can maintain their dominance over the Jeffersonian view and over human life itself.

And speaking of Jefferson, I have a bust of him, admire him, and consider him to be a great man. To many people, this would make me a “racist.” But that just isn’t true. I honor Jefferson because of his greatness and because of his ideas of decentralized government and the idea that rights come from God and not from the State. I don’t honor Jefferson because he was a slaveowner, because of his 18th century views on race, or because he did not believe in the divinity of Christ. I honor him in spite of those realities. The Left has no place for such nuance. This is why they are on a jihad against patriotism, against our American heritage, against our founders, and against a Jeffersonian historiography that does not interpret American history along the Socialist lines of Howard Zinn and Eric Foner.

I love my country, its history, its heritage, its heroes, and its symbols: slavery and the Holocaust of the Unborn notwithstanding. Slavery was eventually abolished, and one can hope that abortion will be as well. Perhaps a hundred years from now, there will be museums dedicated to this Holocaust, and the world will look in horror at what their ancestors did.

And nevertheless, hopefully they will continue to uphold the Fourth Commandment by honoring their male and female ancestors (as the Hebrew text reads), flawed as they were.

At any rate, thank you President Harrison and to other leaders of our Synod for defending the unborn, created in the image of God, knit together in their mothers’ wombs, known by God, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

We will not shut up indeed.

TGC 130 — Eckardt Medley

In this episode, Fritz Eckardt, the Editor-in-Chief of Gottesdienst, thinks out loud about all things on his mind lately. 

Host: Fr. Jason Braaten

Regular Guest: Fr. Fritz Eckardt

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TGC 129 — Trinity 15 Sermon Prep

This episode is devoted to the Gospel reading for Trinity 15, Matthew 6:24–34.

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TGC 128 — On Dying Well

From the moment we are born we are dying. We are brought into newness of life in Christ and the Church through the death of Holy Baptism. Much of our Lord’s teaching and the teaching of Scripture is about learning to die well, which leads to a life lived well, now and for all eternity. In this episode, Travis Berg (pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Latimer, IA) walks us through the art of dying well and thus living well. We will confront the charge that Christians are so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good, and much more. 

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TGC 127 — Trinity 14 Sermon Prep

This episode is devoted to the Gospel reading for Trinity 14, Luke 17:11–19.

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[Gottesblog] A Reply to the Texas District Paper on Internet Communion — Larry Beane

A Reply to the Texas District Paper on Internet Communion

Here is the video of the recent three-martini Texas District convention.

Someone shared this with me as a chance to respond to the “Bible Study” that begins at roughly 1:09 and ends at 2:04. The official title is “The Church in a Post-Covid World,” but that’s not really what it is about. It is, in fact, an advocacy and apologia for “internet communion.”

The presenter is the Rev. Zach McIntosh of Concordia Lutheran Church in San Antonio. He seems like a nice, bright guy. And I have to say that I like the fact that he’s a McIntosh. His Highlander ancestors probably fought with mine in the wars of Scottish independence with a confederation known as the Clan of Cats. I have to give him props for that, especially as we Celts are dreadfully outnumbered by Germans in our synod. Having said that, the cuisine in Texas and Louisiana beat anything cooked up by Scots or Germans.

That said, I have to give him a demerit for lecturing about Holy Communion (part of his argument for internet communion is the profound importance of the Holy Sacrament) given that his congregation only celebrates it on the first Sunday of the month. I cannot even grasp it. Not counting holidays, that’s twelve times a year. That sounds like starvation rations to me. My little congregation offers the Holy Sacrament more than a hundred times a year. Perhaps Pastor McIntosh can give a presentation to his own congregation on Article 24 and the importance of the Holy Eucharist and its frequent reception. I notice that other advocates of home-internet communion tend to be pastors of churches that practice infrequent communion. I have no explanation for this.

All that said, Pastor McIntosh is open and honest that this is indeed a position paper more than a Bible Study. He presents it based on four “theses.” A thesis is part of an argument. And during the course of his talk, he openly admits that the real question behind the paper, that is the real thesis statement is: “Is it possible for a local church to rightly participate together in a livestreamed Word and Sacrament service while remaining in their individual homes?” And he is open about his answer: Yes, he is “sympathetic” to the idea of a livestreamed “Word and Sacrament” service. He also admits that the service of the Word is not really problematic, but the service of the Sacrament is the actual controversial issue. And that it is.

His four theses are:

1. The Church is Invisible.

2. The Church is Confessional.

3. The Church is Inter-Spatial.

4. The Church is Fraternal.

    

The Church is Invisible

This is really nothing more than the assertion that faith is invisible. He cites Eph 5:33, AC 7&8, he quotes Luther using the term “invisible,” and cites 1 Cor 6:19 and 1 Pet 2:5.

The Church is Confessional

He explains the development of the ecumenical creeds and the Lutheran confessions. He argues that although the Bible, Creeds, and Confessions never address remote electronic worship, we can use these resources to discern whether we should or should not make use of such technology. One statement that he makes is “There was no Mass when the New Testament was written.” This is simply untrue. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper “on the night when He was betrayed.” St. Paul, in 1 Cor 11, explains that the Words of Institution were already a tradition that was handed over to him when he was writing the letter in about 55 AD. Indeed, the Sacrament of the Altar was being celebrated by the apostles on a weekly basis very early on, according to Acts 2:42, when none of the New Testament had even yet been written. Pastor McIntosh refers to this very verse later on.

This thesis that “The Church is Confessional” is really just a premise to use the confessions to make arguments regarding administration of the Sacrament. For some reason, he omitted the longest treatment of the Divine Service and Holy Communion in the Book of Concord: Article 24 in the Augsburg Confession and the Apology.

The Church is Inter-Spatial

This is where the rubber meets the road, as they used to say in Akron, Ohio. This word “inter-spatial” is a neologism coined by the presenter just to make the obvious point that the Church is both universal and local. He addresses the universality of the Church by appealing to the Una Sancta of the Nicene Creed. More accurately, the Church is “catholic.” The word “Universal” is a weak translation of καθολικός, which comes from two words: κατά (kata - according to) and ὅλος (holos - the whole).

Catholicity not only means that the Church is more than simply the local congregation, it means that the Church is una owing to a wholesomeness and fullness of doctrine. And it is ironic that he should appeal to the Church’s catholicity to argue for communion celebrated by either laymen speaking the verba, or the remote words of a pastor who is not present for the consecration. This is as un-catholic as you can get. It is sectarian, as no historic communion that confesses the Real Presence ever had, or has, practiced this, or confessed a doctrine that allows it.

Pastor McIntosh points out the both/and nature of the universality and the locality of the Church by comparing it to an interstate highway that is both within states, and crosses state lines. I think this illustration betrays him, as we are talking about roads that actually exist in space and time. You cannot be on Interstate-10 and not exist somewhere physically. If I’m in a Zoom session in Iowa, then I’m not on I-10. Roads are incarnational. The fact that the road is in California doesn’t negate the fact that when I’m driving to Baton Rouge, I’m in Louisiana.

He uses the term “ecclesiis sanctorum” from Jerome’s Latin of 1 Cor 14:33. He translates this as “multiple churches with many holy ones.” “Sanctorum” is a genitive plural. It is better translated as “churches of the saints,” as does the ESV. Of course, there are multiple churches in the sense of local congregations, even as there is one holy catholic and apostolic Church (una sancta). This reality has nothing to do with internet communion.

He tries to argue for internet communion based on Acts 4:42, 46-47 - “breaking bread in their homes.” Of course, prior to Constantine, nearly all Christian worship was conducted in homes. There is no indication that these services were lay-led, or that the pastors somehow conducted services from afar, perhaps by epistle or messenger or carrier pigeon. And local churches meet in homes to this very day, including parishes of our sister church body, the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church. I visited one such congregation in 2015, with a Divine Service held in a parishioner’s apartment. But the Mass was officiated by ordained clergymen who drove a long way to lead the service. It would be unthinkable to our sister church body to conduct a Divine Service over Zoom, or to just have the laity speak the verba over bread and wine themselves - in spite of the reality that it takes a lot of time and money to physically travel. And it was the same way in the LCMS’s frontier days.

Pastor McIntosh cites Luther giving assent to meeting “alone in a house somewhere… to baptize and to receive the sacrament” (AE:53:63-64). But the larger context is not lay-led communion or allowing pastors to somehow consecrate from afar. This quotation comes from The German Mass and Order of Service (1526). In it, Luther identifies three types of “divine service or mass.”

The first is the Evangelical Latin Mass, to be used in a parochial setting where the people speak Latin. The second is the German Mass, which is to be used for “untrained lay folk” who do not speak Latin. And then there is the “third kind of service,” which:

should be a truly evangelical order and should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people. But those who want to be Christians in earnest and who profess the gospel with hand and mouth should sign their names and meet alone in a house somewhere to pray, to read, to baptize, to receive the sacrament, and to do other Christian works. According to this order, those who do not lead Christian lives should be known, reproved, corrected, cast out, or excommunicated, according to the rule of Christ, Matthew 18. Here one could also solicit benevolent gifts to be willingly given and distributed to the poor, according to St. Paul’s example, II Corinthians 9. Here would be no need for much and elaborate singing. Here one could set up a brief and neat order for baptism and the sacrament and center everything on the Word, prayer, and love. Here one would need a good short catechism on the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Our Father.

Nowhere does Luther advocate lay-led or remotely-led clerical ministry of Sacraments. He is describing a house-church - obviously where there is no Evangelical parish church to attend. This was certainly the case in many places during the Reformation. Luther is describing what we would call today, a “church plant,” and avers that “the rules and regulations would soon be ready.” In fact, Luther goes on to say that church planting is not his particular thing, but “if I should be requested to do it, and could not refuse with a good conscience, I should gladly do my part and help as best I can.” He adds, “In the meanwhile, the two above-mentioned orders of service [i.e. the Latin and German parochial Masses] must suffice.” He also warns of the risks of such a church, that care should be taken lest it “turn into a sect.”

Pastor McIntosh does finally admit the real crux of the problem: “There’s not a pastor there.” So how does a pastor give care and oversight when he’s not in the same room? He acknowledges the limits of pastoral care even in the same room, such as the pastor’s inability to know about all people who should be excluded from the Christian congregation because of wickedness. He points to St. Paul’s giving pastoral care remotely. And here, I think Pastor McIntosh sinks his own boat.

Giving remote pastoral care is nothing new. But let’s consider how technology has or has not been used. We have audio and video livestreaming today, but we have had the ability to send remote visual and audio images over the air since the 1940s. The LCMS was actually a pioneer in television programming. But no one in decades past, in the Golden Age of television, ever encouraged people at home in the viewing audience to put bread and wine on a TV tray while a televised pastor “teleconsecrated” the elements. There were services for shut-ins, but no suggestion of some kind of “private Mass” with “home communion” over the airwaves.

And before TV, we had radio, the technology of which predates the 20th century. And yet not even during World War I and the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was anyone suggesting the use of the pastor’s transmitted radio voice to “teleconsecrate” remote elements. Before radio was the telephone. And even before the telephone, dating back to 1844, Samuel Morse found a way to encode words over telegraph lines. And again, not even in remote frontier locations did anyone even dream of having a pastor send a consecratory telegram or phone in the Words of Institution.

And long before electronic communication, we had pen and ink technology and mail delivery. And this is where Pastor McIntosh defeats his own argument. St. Paul indeed provided pastoral care remotely by means of epistles. But not even in 1 Cor 11 does the apostle ask that the verba be read by a layman over bread and wine outside of the pastor’s sight and control. Rather, Paul preaches the Word and gives catechetical instruction in writing. Baptisms and Eucharists were conducted by “elders” (presbyters) who were appointed for pastoral service in the local churches.

The Church is Fraternal

Pastor McIntosh’s last thesis has nothing to do with the argument other than to try to prevent argument. He uses AC 26:44 “Diversity does not violate the unity of the Church” to argue that whether one uses internet communion or not, this doesn’t affect our unity. He said, “False doctrine, yeah, that’s a problem… but not every diverse practice is evidence of doctrinal disagreement.” And that is true. But it is equally true that not every expression of diversity is evidence of correct doctrine. He should not assume that internet communion is as indifferent as the color of the walls in the parish hall. We are dealing with the consecration of the elements. That is not a matter of “anything goes.” Contextually, Article 26 is dealing with diversity in fasting practices, not with consecrating the elements.

This is a very different matter.

In his conclusion, Pastor McIntosh says, “It’s so important to continue to offer, whether it’s in a cathedral or in a condo, the gifts of God to the people of God” [including] “the reception of the sacraments.” Yes, this is true. And parish pastors typically celebrate Masses in church buildings on Sundays, and often during the week at hospital beds for patients and at kitchen or living room tables for shut-ins. Yes, we do this both “in the cathedral and in the condo,” so to speak. But the point is that we pastors celebrate and consecrate, we preach, baptize, and absolve as circumstances dictate. We don’t just tell the shut-ins to commune themselves. We don’t just facetime them and say “magic words” while they hold the phone over bread and wine. That would be to treat the consecration as ex opere operato.

Pastor McIntosh’s presentation overlooks and omits all of the potential problems of remote consecration - assuming that it is even valid. But let’s say that it is valid for the sake of argument. There are unintended consequences.

For example, if I’m consecrating at the altar, and I misspeak a word, or get tongue-tied, I can simply repeat the verba. This is what celebrants are instructed to do based on the fact that we have been doing this for nearly two millennia, and stuff happens. But what happens if, unbeknownst to the remote celebrant, the Zoom transmission gets garbled, and the pastor’s voice begins to sound like ET on Quaaludes? That happens all the time. So what then? What happens if only part of the verba are heard and the connection drops? What do we tell the viewing audience at home to do with the bread and wine? Are they, or are they not, the body and blood of Christ? It matters. It really does!

And how can the pastor be a “steward of the mysteries” while he isn’t there? The steward was an ancient office dedicated to table service. The steward could water down a diner’s wine if he were getting inebriated, or even cut him off. That’s because he is able to watch and listen and make changes based on feedback. Pastors do something similar when they officiate. They may need to consecrate more hosts, or break some in half. They may need to get stingy with the Lord’s blood at the last table, or they may need to consecrate more. A theoretical remote communion separates the pastor from his vocation of stewardship. He cannot say what is being consecrated and what is not. In my practice, I count out how many hosts I need and only consecrate those in the paten on the corporal. The rest in the ciborium remain unconsecrated. I consecrate only the wine in the chalice, not every drop in the cruet. So I know what is the Lord’s body and blood, and what is not.

If I were not in the room, how would I do this? Is the wine in the glasses on the table the only ones consecrated? What about the bottle on the table? If there is a leftover piece of toast from breakfast on the table, is that now consecrated? These are not inconsequential questions. The Eucharist is not do-it-yourself project. Jesus established an office of steward.

And how is the reliquiae taken care of afterwards? And if an accidental desecration happens, why should we put the burden on laymen, perhaps miles away, when we pastors are the stewards?

And all of the above problems grant the assumption that remote consecration is possible, that this is a valid consecration. One glaring problem is that the pastor’s voice never actually comes into contact with the elements. What comes out of a speaker is a simulation of the pastor’s voice that fools your brain into thinking that it is his voice - not unlike the RCA Victor dog. In the same way, a Zoom image or a photograph is not actually the person, but is rather a simulation of that person that gives an appearance of that person’s presence. Da Vinci’s Last Supper is only a painting. It is not really Jesus and the apostles. I argue that because of this reality, it is physically impossible to consecrate the elements remotely. And even if it were possible, it would still open up a Pandora’s Box of problems.

And this is why we don’t tear down Chesterton’s Fence. This is why we don’t do sectarian things. This is why catholicity is more than just “universality” in the sense that local manifestations of Church are to be found hither and yon.

In times past, there have been wars, plagues, tyrannical rulers, and natural disasters that have impeded the ability of pastors to preach and administer Sacraments. We do what we can with our human limitations, and we accept those limitations as part of our humanity - the same humanity that our Lord Jesus Christ took on at His incarnation. Unlike the technocratic Klaus Schwabs of the world, we don’t look to transcend those human limitations by means of turning ourselves into transhumanistic cyborgs.

The Church is indeed invisible in the sense that faith is not seen by the naked eye. But the Church is also visible, as she gathers around a visible preacher even as faith comes by hearing, heard from someone preaching, one who has been sent (Romans 10). The Church is visible as the administration of the Sacraments is visible, as real, physical bread and wine and water occupy space and time, and we experience them with our bodies by means of our senses. Pastor McIntosh only spoke of the invisible Church, not the visible Church. We must consider both halves of the paradox to get the full picture.

The Church is indeed confessional, and our confessions address the question of who is charged with consecrating the elements (AC 14) and how that is to be done (AC 24, Ap 24). The Church is both local and trans-local - as evidenced by the fact that instead of a single temple, we have altars all over the world with the miraculous presence of God resting on them. And Holy Communion is not called “the Sacrament of the Altar” by our confessions for nothing. The elements are consecrated by the Word by means of one authorized to proclaim that Word - not just any person, and not by a simulacrum of a pastor’s voice. And indeed, the Church is fraternal. It is an act of fratricide to introduce a divisive, sectarian, ahistorical practice in the Church that leaves people in doubt and scandalized, not to mention leaving behind a host of other chaotic consequences in its wake.

At the conclusion of Pastor McIntosh’s “Bible Study,” President Newman pointed out that there just so happened to be resolutions pertaining to internet communion yet to be voted on by the body, and that the CTCR and seminary faculties have already weighed in. And to my knowledge, none of them agree with Pastor McIntosh and President Newman that this practice should be done in our churches.

Hopefully, this whole uproar about internet communion will be nothing more than an eyebrow-raising little episode in LCMS history that future generations will find quaint when they read about the synod’s 21st century history. And in the short term, I hope that our synod will find some way, even with our convoluted polity, to enforce biblical, confessional, and catholic doctrine and practice, and facilitate the restoration of a genuine Eucharistic piety and of yearning for its frequent reception in our churches, an ethos that would make internet communion - not to mention the practice of churches withholding the Sacrament of the Altar for three weeks out of the month - unthinkable.

TGC 126 — The Mortification of Sin

What does the Bible say about killing sin? What role does the Christian play in this? How is this done? What are some practical considerations in the killing of sin? These and other questions, will be answered in this episode, which is devoted to the teaching on killing sin in your life.

Host: Fr. Jason Braaten

Special Guest: Fr. Willie Grills

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