W 8^th Sunday after Pentecost

On the Church

            In the name of him who is the Bridegroom and Lord of the Church, dear friends in Christ:  The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, of which our congregation is blessed to be part, had as its first president a very biblical, clear thinking, and wise man.  He was C. F. W. Walther, an immigrant pastor who came to this country with many other Saxon Germans in the early mid part of the nineteenth century.  Like the rest of these immigrants, he came to this free nation largely to escape the oppression of being forced to worship God in the state controlled Union church of Germany.  It was formed when the German Emperor, in a politically advantageous but theologically disastrous move, determined that there would be only one “other than Roman Catholic” church in Germany.  He decreed that all the Lutheran and Protestant churches be melded into one “Union” church, and that this church would adopt as its confessional statement of faith what the emperor’s own duly appointed theologians came up with. Since they weren’t Lutheran, it’s no surprise that neither was the Union church’s confession of faith.

            So the Confessional Lutherans in Germany were forced to give up their especially reassuring understanding of God’s forgiveness and grace that comes to us through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord.  It was replaced by the less certain and much less reassuring theology of the Calvinists who believe that the Lord is pleased to glorify himself by creating certain people for the sole purpose of damning them to hell forever. Gone too were the biblical truths that God acts in Baptism to give his Spirit, to create faith, and to forgive sins; and that the Lord Jesus gives his true body and blood for the forgiveness of sins in Holy Communion.  They were even forced to surrender the part of the worship service in which the pastor pronounces God’s forgiveness on the assembled members of the congregation according to the clear command and Word of God.  Some German Lutherans found this compromise intolerable and they refused to comply, and for their opposition they were punished.  The faithful pastors especially were jailed and mistreated in order to force them to conform.   Meanwhile, the government placed more “controllable” Union pastors in Lutheran congregations that didn’t want them.  Imagine how you would feel if tomorrow the government forced us in this church to take a pastor from a totally different denomination who started teaching things you knew were wrong.  You wouldn’t like it – and neither did many of your immigrant ancestors. That’s why they came here.

            They settled at first in large numbers around the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in what is today Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa.  At that point in history, these areas had only been open for settlement for about twenty years, so it wasn’t exactly the frontier – but it was a long way from being developed.  But land was cheap, and there were great opportunities for people who didn’t mind hard work.  And so these stubborn German Lutheran immigrants flourished.  They cleared farms and they built their communities – including, of course, their own churches and schools.

Of course, they had to make a lot of changes and adjustments – and with respect to the church, they had some major issues to work out.  Understand that they were used to a state controlled church.  That is, pastors were government employees.  They were appointed to their parishes usually by mayors or city councils. Church buildings, schools, and seminaries were all the property of the state.  The money used in the church to pay clergy and maintain the property came from taxes, not from the free will offerings of the members.  And there was a hierarchy within the church, not quite as rigid as that of the Roman Catholic Church with its bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and a pope; but a hierarchy nevertheless.  State appointed Lutheran bishops ordained Lutheran pastors.  The whole thing was very structured and controlled – just the way German like it.

But that’s not the way things worked in America.  Here the state was completely separate from the churches.  And what the immigrant Saxons found when they arrived was a crazy mish-mash of conflicting and competing Christian denominations.  They had never seen such a zoo of Christian expressions.  But in any given area there would be people calling themselves Methodists, Calvinists, Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a whole lot of other theological brand names, and there were even more people who were various shades of “in between” denominations – theological “mutts” if you will.  And for the most part there were no regular pastors.  Instead, because populations were pretty thin, you’d have circuit riders:  independent pastors on horseback who would circulate from village to village to preach a sermon, do the weddings, say a few words over the recently buried, and then move on to the text town – and maybe he’d be back in a month or two. You never knew.  Generally speaking, these fellows had no formal training. Pretty much anyone who could read a little bit and could stand on a tree stump thumping on a floppy Bible and make enough noise to attract an audience could present himself as a pastor.  And very often they did.

The bedlam of the religious scene in America was unlike anything the poor Saxon immigrants had ever imagined.  Of course, they had come over with a fairly tight church structure themselves – trying to import what they had known in Germany to the New World.  They even had their own genuine bishop, and several duly ordained pastors recognized by the German state … but they really hadn’t worked out how it was going to function in America without the continued control of the government that they were used to.  They might have worked out a satisfactory solution in time – but as it turns out, a crisis in the church forced them to move a whole lot quicker.

Their bishop, a man named Martin Stephan, who was a very good Lutheran theologian, sadly also turned out to be a man who was unequal to the responsibilities he’d been given.  That was the nice way to say it.  In fact, he acted like an absolute dictator.  Worse, it was revealed that he was carrying on a number of illicit affairs with some of the young ladies of the immigrant community.  When that became public, he was deposed in short order, and literally put in a rowboat and sent floating down the Mississippi River without a paddle.  And good riddance to him.

But … that left the immigrants in a something of a dilemma.  With respect to their church organization, they now found themselves upstream without a rudder.  With the officially recognized bishop gone, who would lead the church? And since they were used to the government appointing bishops, who now had the authority to appoint a new one? And without a real bishop, who would ordain new pastors?  Or train them?  This may be hard for us to understand, but for them it was a real problem.  Some even wondered if their churches were now even legitimate at all.  With no proper authorities and no proper means to get new ones, did that mean that we aren’t the church any more?  And if we aren’t in a church, does that mean our Baptisms are no good?  Or that our Lord’s Supper is meaningless and ineffective? Or that we can’t be saved?  Believe it or not, these questions concerned some people so much that they returned to Germany just so they could be sure that they were in a real church with real authority to do the things a church is supposed to do. 

            Well, like I said, this may be hard for us to understand – but if so, the reason it is, is largely because of the work of C.F.W. Walther. In the midst of this church crisis, he said, “Now is not the time to panic.  Nor is it time to go back to Germany.  Remember? We came here to get away from a government that was forcing us to practice our faith in a way we believe to be wrong.  There must be a better answer.  And the place to look for it is in God’s Word.  That’s where we will find our solution.”

So, going to the Scriptures, Walther began an intensive study of what the church really is, where it gets its authority, what responsibilities it has, and how it’s supposed to use its authority to discharge its duties.  He discovered, among other things, that as far as the Bible is concerned there really is no intrinsic connection between the church and state as he and the other immigrants had experienced growing up.  Yes, it worked that way in Germany, but there was no scriptural reason that it had to be that way.  In fact, for most of the first three hundred years of its existence, the church had been outlawed by the state, and it got along just fine that way.  But again, bear in mind that this concept was a major breakthrough for our immigrant ancestors.

In any case, the fruit of all Walther’s studies on the church and its ministry were a series of theses (doctrinal statements supported by Scripture) that he developed.  You have the nine Theses on the Church as an insert to the bulletin.  There are also another ten Theses on the Ministry that we’ll take a look at next week.  But together, these nineteen theses on church and ministry are the great Magna Carta of our church that guarantees by God’s own Word both the legitimacy of our congregations and our complete freedom in the Gospel from any human coercions and controls.  They are to our church, in a sense, what the Declaration of Independence is to our Nation. And for that very reason, we should be familiar with them.  So please, take out the theses on church and we’ll spend the few moments reviewing them.

Okay, taking the first three theses together, we see that the Christian Church, strictly speaking, is not a visible human organization or political entity. It is instead a spiritual communion consisting of all those people who have been called to faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God.  Everyone who trusts in Christ for salvation is part of the Church.  Those who do not trust in Christ for their salvation are not part of the Church, even though they may have their names on a congregations’ membership roster, and attend regular worship, hold a congregational office, and generously contribute offerings every week.  No faith – not part of the Church.  It’s that simple.  And because you cannot tell by looking at a person whether he or she believes, the Christian Church is invisible.  That is, you cannot see who is and who is not part of the Church. You might say though that it’s hiding in plain sight.

Next, drawing from the Scriptural truth of the priesthood of all believers and other passages, Thesis Four says that Christ has given his church “the keys to the kingdom of heaven”.  That means that the Church has the authority to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and forgive the sins of those who repent and believe.  You may recall that Jesus said to Peter and the other disciples, “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven”, and that after his resurrection he appeared to his disciples, breathed on them the Holy Sprirt, and said, “Whoever’s sins you forgive, are forgiven; whoever’s sins you retain, are retained.”  This is the true power and authority of the Church:  the ability to free people from the curse of sin and Satan’s bondage and to give them life and forgiveness in Christ.  This authority belongs to everyone who is part of the Church.  Or to say it another way: whoever trusts the Gospel and has the Holy Spirit (they go together) can share the Gospel and the Holy Spirit.

Thesis Five is a little tricky.  What it says is that even though you cannot see the Church because you cannot see the faith of other people, you can still tell where the Church is.  You can see it by its marks:  namely, by the proclamation of the pure Gospel and the presence of the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion.  These are the means by which the Church shares the Gospel and the forgiveness of sins.  So, where these things are going on, you can be sure that through them God is giving his Holy Spirit and bringing people to faith – thus making them part of the Church. It’s like saying even though I didn’t see the bear, I know there’s go to be one around here because of the footprints it left behind.  The unmistakable “footprints” of the Church are God’s Word and Sacraments.  If you see them, there must be real Christians who are part of the Church around, because God’s Word is powerful and it does not return to him without accomplishing the purposes for which he sends it.

Okay, moving on to Thesis Six, it says that we also use the word “church” in a broader sense to refer to visible organizations like, say, “the Roman Catholic Church”, or “the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod”, or even “St. Paul [St. Timothy] Lutheran Church”.  These are visible organizations in which we see the marks of the Church, so we know that within them there must be people who are in the Church. Also within these churches are people who are not in the Church because they don’t truly believe.  However, since God makes true believers through the marks of the Church, we should not expect to find true believers outside of these visible churches where the marks are.  To say it another way, no true believer could ever say, “I can be a Christian without the Word of God and the Sacraments.”

Thesis Seven is best explained by illustration.  Suppose you had a visible church body where the true marks of the Church were present.  Sadly, within this church everyone except two or three people are complete hypocrites.  They don’t truly believe.  It doesn’t make any difference:  the power of the Church to proclaim the Gospel and forgive sins is still there. Likewise, a church with ten thousand truly believing members has exactly the same power and authority as one with only ten true believers.

Thesis Eight puts forward three separate ideas.  The first is this:  There are some visible churches that proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but they do so with certain errors and mistakes.  They don’t properly teach some things, or they add and subtract from God’s Word.  We call these “heterodox” churches.  Because they still have the Gospel and to some degree the Sacraments, we can say that within them there are people who are part of the Church. However, false doctrine is inherently dangerous and tends to cloud and conceal the true Gospel where the power of the Church really lies.  False doctrine is spiritual poison.  The only question is, “How much will it take to kill a true and living faith?”  The answer is, “Don’t try to find out.  It might be fatal.  Instead, if you know that your visible church holds and teaches certain false doctrines, you are obliged to leave that church and seek one that adheres to the whole truth of God.”  Not specifically stated here, but heavily implied is the responsibility that every true Christian has to study and know God’s Word well enough to be able to discern the difference between true and false doctrine.

Finally, Thesis Nine states that salvation from sin, hell, and eternal death belongs to everyone who is part of the invisible Church – that is, everyone who is part of the spiritual communion of faith who believes in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and trusts in him and his passion and death as a sacrifice for sin, and also his resurrection to life.  Everyone who believes that is saved.  In the LCMS, we are often accused of saying otherwise; but we teach and believe that salvation is not the sole possession of any visible church body – including our own.

This is how we understand the Church.  It’s built on God’s Word and its foundation is the Lord Jesus Christ.  It does not depend on any human government or outward organization – but it works through visible organizations to accomplish God’s will.  Though a departure from a normal Law and Gospel sermon, I hope you’ve found this discussion helpful.  Next week we’ll take a look at how we understand the Ministry of the Church. Until then, may God keep us in his grace in a true and living faith as members of the one, holy, apostolic Church.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!