The Week That Changed The World (Pt. 2)
by Paul Luther Maier*
In the first part of his lecture, (FOCL Point, Spring, 1996), Maiersuggest-that Bible days and the days of Holy Week could be further explored for the authenticity of their reports as they are found in the Scriptures, from three avenues outside the Bible itself: geography, archeology and historical documents. We left his account of the witness of the extra-biblical documents as he was about to inform us of the contribution that the rabbinic tradition andFlaviusJosephus, a contemporary of the New Testament era, could give us to our wider understanding of biblical events and to the certainty of their occurrence.
The largest single reference to Jesus of Nazareth from secular sources, comes in Book 18 of Flavius Josephus1 Antiquities. Back in my Concordia Seminary days we were told never to use that reference passage, because it had been interpolated. Along about 270-280 AD. itwas corrupted by some Christian scholar thinking to do God a favor. He "baptized" the passage in which Josephus mentions Jesus.
His rendition goes, "About that time there was a man named Jesus (if indeed we ought to call him only a man, for he did wonderful things, miracles. He was the Messiah – he rose from the dead.)"
Any Jew who wrote that Jesus was the Messiah who rose from the dead would be a Jewish Christian, like St. Paul. Josephus, however, never converted. So scholars early on realized this was an interpolation.
Josephus' Witness to Jesus
The good news is that in 1972 Prof. Schlomo Pines of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, discovered a manuscript tradition of Josephus in which the words of the Jesus passage have not been interpolated.
It reads almost word for word like what the great Jewish scholar, Dr. Paul Winter, at London University, predicted this passage would have read in the original manuscript.
About 30 years ago I wrote Dr. Winter in London. I said, "Dr. Winter, I have two questions. First, do you think Josephus ever referred to Jesus in the 18th book of Antiquities, Section 63? And if he did, how do you think the original passage read?" I got a letter back in ten days from this Jewish scholar who was not a Christian. He said, "Yes, I'm convinced that Josephus did refer to Jesus in this passage, for in Book 20 he mentioned his name in recounting the stoning of James. Here is how I think the passage read." He then gave a reconstruction of the passage.
Tragically, Dr. Winter died, and never knew how close he had come, because the Agapian version of Josephus discovered by Prof. Pines reads almost word for word like Paul Winter's translation. This shows how good critical scholarship can be. The whole passage then goes like this:
1. Uniqueness of Jesus. Does the pastor see Jesus as one of a kind, never before or since the same as anyone or anything else? Or does the pastor see Jesus as belonging to a group of figures in history who have done similar things in teaching and healing? INTERVIEW QUESTION: In terms of what He did, how do you compare Jesus to Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa?
About this time there was a wise man called Jesus; and his conduct was good and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and from other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive.
Parenthetically, "They reported," is important. It isn't Josephus who says Jesus rose from the dead, as the hyped version had it. But "they" reported, something a good Jew could have written without converting to Christianity.
To continue the passage: Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders. And the tribe of the Christians named after him has not disappeared to this day." So the passage is back in the text as it was originally, where it belongs.
Extra-Biblical Benefits
By using these three lanes of geography, archeology and documentation to move back into the ancient world, I think we have four advantages. First, we have a way of checking up on the biblical record.
Second, we have a way to look at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus from a fresh and different perspective. The non-biblical documents give us a different camera angle on what was taking place, i.e., a third dimension created from the parallax of two views. We get a more colorful appreciation of some of the events in Jesus' ministry than if we did not use these resources.
The third advantage: we are able to clear up some of the biblical difficulties. And the fourth advantage: we are able to fill authentic data into the gaps in the biblical record.
And there are gaps. If you don't believe it – tell me what Jesus said when he was seven years old in Nazareth. Or, what happened after St. Paul waited two years for his trial before Nero in Rome? Why did he wait two years? – (Don't say, "Just like the American system of justice!")
There are answers to these questions, in the non-biblical materials. Even now we are getting windows into that great unknown territory of Jesus' life: his youth in Nazareth. The excavations at Sepphoris, three miles from Nazareth, are revealing fascinating ruins of a Greco-Roman city reconstructed by Herod Antipas. These have brilliant implications for filling in details of Jesus' youth. The first-century boat discovered in the Sea of Galilee is another example. It has much to say about the seascape episodes in the gospels.
New Light on Lent
Let's set the stage now for Holy Week with Jesus' "arrest notice," which is also not in the New Testament. We have it from the Jewish rabbinic tradition, a fascinating passage from Sanhedrin 43a: "Wanted: Yeshu Hannotzri. Heshall be stoned because he has practiced sorcery, and enticed Israel to apostasy. If anyone can say anything in his favor let him declare it to the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. But nothing was found in his favor, and on the eve of the Passover, Yeshua was hanged."
Note, the arrest notice uses the future tense – "he shall be stoned." While we know Jesus was crucified, this shows the credibility of the original notice. If it had said, "he shall be crucified" that would show it was invented. It would be like buying an ancient coin from a dealer, the date on which read, "16 BC". No, the future tense is used, and then the addendum, "Nothing was found in his favor."
"He shall be stoned." – How realistic. Anyone who has been to the Holy Land knows why they stoned people to death. We're talking about the rockiest place on earth. Remember the Infadada uprising with all the Arab boys picking up stones?
As for the other statement, that he practiced sorcery – I love that. I like hostile sources, because we can sometimes squeeze more truth out of hostile than out of friendly sources. If you find something positive in the context of a hostile source, that becomes self-authenticating. In court this is called "an admission against interest," and scholars call it "the criterion of embarrassment."
Here they claim Jesus was doing sorcery. That's a miracle when talking cause. Sorcery is something extraordinary or supernatural, with "help from below," while a miracle is the same with "help from above." Here, then, we have outside evidence for the miracles in Jesus' ministry.
Stage Set for Holy Week
This arrest notice was probably promulgated after the raising of Lazarus. After that happened, the priests were panicky, and asked Caiaphas, "What are we going to do? This man is doing wonders, and if we let him go on, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our Holy Place and our nation." That's when Caiaphas said, "You don't know what you are talking about – it's expedient that one man should die and that the nation not perish." {John 11:47ff.)
"And from that day they sought to arrest Jesus." The arrest notice sets the stage for Holy Week, for the week that changed the world. Why was that? Because this ultimate sign of Lazarus' resurrection was done in Judea and Jerusalem. The other extraordinary signs were done up in Galilee, and would cut no ice in Judea. If these were reports about a young man at Nain, or the daughter of Jairus brought back to life, for example, the Judean Jew would simply smile at the naivete of his cousins up in Galilee. Reports about Jesus' wonders in Galilee filtering down to sophisticated Jerusalemites would fail to impress them.
But when the wonder happens in the Eastern suburb of Jerusalem itself, it becomes terribly serious. The Gospel of John insists that this was what shifted the arrest of Jesus into high gear. It was a major turning point.
Before us then are these fascinating seven days that changed the world. All four gospels are tuned in on a day-by-day basis (50% of John's Gospel!), which was not the case earlier in Jesus' ministry.
On the first day of Holy Week we run into a problem. How could people singing "Hosanna to the Son of David" on Sunday, go on to scream "Crucify" on Good Friday? I raised that question back in Sunday School, and my teacher said, "Well, people change their minds." I asked the same question of my Seminary professor. He replied, "People changed their mind." Did they?
[EDITOR'S NOTE]: In his two subsequent lectures, Maier intermittently returned to this question of the Palm Sunday and the Good Friday crowd. His observations are summarized from editorial notes as follows:
To support the answer that "the crowd changed its mind," an abrupt change of mood would have had to occur between Sunday and Thursday. Granted, leaders do lose their followers. But typically it is a gradual erosion overtime. Luther began with 80-90 per cent of the people backing him, but lost a good share of them over the years. Among those defecting from Jesus might have been the merchant class. It is clear that Jesus would have lost their support when he drove them from the Temple on Monday of Holy Week.
That act, however, would rather at the same time have endeared him to the pilgrims who were at the mercy of the merchants and money changers who exploited Jerusalem's Passover
guests from afar. According to Josephus, the Temple economy was the biggest business in the city, and was presided over by a first-century "godfather," the perennial High Priest, Annas.
Five of his sons and his son-in-law, Caiaphas had all been elevated to that high-priestly office through his manipulations. "Annas and Company" was a hated commercial monopoly, or as Jesus said, "A den of thieves." Since there are always more buyers than sellers, Jesus' cleansing of the Temple no doubt would have dramatically increased rather than diminished his crowd support.
Nor can we imagine that Jesus lost crowd approval when he took on the intellectuals during his Tuesday and Wednesday visits to the Temple. With brilliant responses he shattered the verbal swords of those who tried to entrap him with their baiting questions about paying taxes to a hated occupying government, conundrums about immortality, and esoteric semantics about the Torah and God's laws. Besting an elitist intelligentsia is always a crowd-pleaser.
There is a better answer to the question of a fickle and volatile crowd's emotional flip-flop from "Hosanna" to "Crucify him." It is that the gospelsare speaking about two different crowds. The crowd that shouted his praises on Sunday were the pilgrims on the way to the Passover ceremonies. Congregating in the streets on their way to the Temple, they lined the roads and wept as Jesus passed by on the Via Dolorossa in that early morning hour on Good Friday. They never did give up their loyalty to this Son of David who promised new life to them.
Who then were in that speech choir in Pilate's courtyard, who chanted "Crucify him, crucify him?" As Washington officialdom troops out to welcome their leader's return to the White House lawn, so these were the civil servants who were recruited and told what to sing out when they were cued in at the trial of Jesus.
Among them no doubt were many of the 10,000 temple police that Josephus said were on duty in those days. This disciplined blood-seeking crowd, screaming to release Barabbas and kill Jesus, was not the same as the pilgrim throng who saw in the prophet of Nazareth their hope for a new day and a new life. Neithercrowd changed its mind.
* Paul Maier is Professor of Ancient History, Western Michigan University, and author of Josephus, the Essential Works. Among his other books are, Pontius Pilate, Flames of Rome, In the Fullness of Time, and the religious fiction best-seller, A Skeleton in God's Closet.
His Basel University Ph.D. degree under Karl Barth and Oscar Cullman was granted with that university's first summa cum laude bestowed upon an American student. This popular article is excerpted from his first lecture given at the 1996 LUTHER AND THE BIBLE CONFERENCE at Lutheran Bible Institute in California.
HOW MUCH IS THAT PASTOR IN THE WINDOW?
by Pastor Dave R. Garwick*
Your current pastor leaves. During the vacancy, your congregation is assigned an Interim" pastor.
After a month or more under a long convoluted process of "visioning" where it thinks it wants to go, the congregation calls a new pastor to help pilot the way into the future.
Sometimes congregations find themselves quite surprised at the road on which they have been set, presumably according to their own words and visions.
Shopping for a Pastor
You may know this pastor's priorities on things like preaching, teaching, youth work, evangelism, etc. But how can you begin to know WHAT she or he will preach or teach or evangelize? How can you get past the cliches and formula-answers to get an idea exactly WHAT she really means when saying she would preach about Jesus, the Gospel, the Bible?
Here are some questions which might help you get a better handle on how and what aparticular pastor might preach and teach. These questions do not constitute a "litmus test" which someone must pass. The effort has been to avoid some of the "hot button" buzz words. However, these questions are written with the conservative evangelical confessional Christian in mind as the seeker.
2. Necessity of Jesus. Is Jesus the ONLY way to heaven, or are there other possibilities? INTERVIEW QUESTION: Why should or shouldn't the Church evangelize Jews and Moslems?
3. Naming Jesus. In sermons and conversation, does the pastor "name the Name" which is a stumbling block to nonbelievers? Or, does the pastor exclusively use terms like "God" or "spirituality," which could mean whatever a Jew, a Moslem, a New Age thinker ora Christian may interpret it to mean? Observe how often the name of Jesus comes into writing or conversation. INTERVIEW QUESTION: Why is it or is it not important to name the name of Jesus Christ in preaching and teaching?
4. The Essence of the Gospel.
Where does the pastor place the emphasis in the Good News – primarily as an improvement to conditions here on earth (political land reform, hunger, ecology, human relations) or on Jesus Himself as the link between – and from – this realm to heaven?
INTERVIEW QUESTION: What did Jesus come to save us for or from?
5. The Nature of Salvation.
Does the pastor think that all or most will be saved? Is hell a physical and horrible place? INTERVIEW QUESTION: Who will be saved, and from what?
6. Absolute Truth. Does the pastor believe in the existence of absolute truth and that it is knowable through Holy Scripture? Or does the pastor lean more toward the idea that all truth is relative, or that it is a function of the believer, or that it is unknowable? INTERVIEW QUESTION: When it comes to issues of morality or to the business of knowing the nature of God, do you believe in a universal absolute right and wrong?
7. The Authority of the Bible. Is the Bible a collection of human ideas influenced by God (and therefore needing to be "taken with a grain of salt") or is the Bible the written Word of God, therefore incapable of error and contradiction, therefore communicated perfectly through human transcribers?
INTERVIEW QUESTION: Would it be more appropriate to say that "Paul wrote..." or that "God has told us through Paul?"
8. The Nature of the Bible. Does the Bible stand in a class by itself, or is the Bible more like other ancient spiritual literature which is to be interpreted in a similar way? INTERVIEW QUESTION: How do you compare the Bible to other ancient spiritual literature such as the Koran?
9. The Approach to interpretation. Does the pastor tend to interpret a scriptural event as something that actually happened or more likely as an illustration of some other truth? INTERVIEW QUESTION: Do you believe that Adam and Eve, the parting of the Red Sea, and the Resurrection of Jesus all actually happened?
10. Obedience. How important is it and why is it important to be obedient to all that Jesus has taught us? Is it primarily in order that things work out better here, or is it simply because our Lord commanded it? What emphasis does obedience play in the pastor's theology? INTERVIEW QUESTION: How does Jesus serve as the link between the matter of Law and the matter of Grace?
11. The Nature of Evil. Is it spelled with a little "e" or a big "E"? In other words, is evil something humans do because of lack of understanding or motivation, or is it the work of Satan who is real and active? INTERVIEW QUESTION: What is at the bottom of what's wrong that Jesus came to fix?
12. Evangelism. What does the pastor see as the primary business of evangelism: the business of increasing church membership, the alleviation of suffering in the world, cross-cultural understanding, or the saving from eternal death of lost souls who have not heard the Gospel? INTERVIEW QUESTION: With limited resources of time and money, how would you like to see the outreach dollar of this congregation spent in terms of social improvement programs, disaster relief and Bible translation ministries?
13. Prayer. How important is uproar in the professional and personal life of the pastor? INTERVIEW QUESTION: Does the pastor have a set-aside time every day specially reserved for prayer and meditation?
14. Professional Literature.
Another way to get a handle on a pastor's orientation is to ask what professional literature and writers she/ he reads. Pastors with a more liberal bent (i.e., more willing to entertain nontraditional alternative theological and politically correct concepts) are more likely to read journals like Christian Century and Sojourners. Pastors with a more conservative orientation (tending toward traditional orthodox theology, and less enamored with politically correct words and thinking) are more likely to read material like Christianity Today, First Things, Forum, Pro Ecclesia.
15. Specific Issues. Of course, you can get a quick sense of how a pastor thinks by asking his or her perspective on abortion, homosexuality, the Jesus Seminar and the Re-Imagining Conference.
Not only do these questions apply to prospective pastors, but the questions can be asked of the "visioning"process itself. For instance, are these questions even addressed at all in the visioning process?
More importantly, does the visioning process regularly pause and seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit and then pause to listen for His direction? How easily can you imagine this visioning process being written into the earlier chapters of the Book of Acts?
If not, why? Is this visioning process something that could just as easily be conducted in a business, for the purposes of organizational development? Does the process resemble a secular enterprise or something specifically set aside for the Body of Christ? In short, whose vision is the process seeking, toward what ends, toward whose ends?
*Garwick is pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, Maple Plain, MN. Reprinted from Networking Together.
A PEW VIEW
by Lee Horn
I have just lost another friend, a dear friend, who first touched my life more than 45 years ago. What made her special was that we had a common foundation upon which our friendship was based, the Lutheran Church. Yes, we went back to Luther League days, here in California.
It is interesting how the Lord works. We had only known each other for a short time when circumstances took us on separate paths. But some 10 plus years later our paths crossed again while we each worked within our church.
I have lost many precious Lutheran friends over the last ten years. I grieve over each one because a part of me is gone. You too may have had the same experience. These friends had been leaders, teachers, prayer warriors, retreat chairmen, Bible study leaders, committee chairmen, choir members in my church and in neighboring Lutheran churches.
These friends have left the Lutheran Church. Now they are active and alive in other churches. These people were the "cream" of the Lutheran Church, who 'spilled over' into other fellowships when things got too watered down. They are using their spiritual gifts in other churches. The churches they have chosen are those which are B.C. (Biblically Correct) not P.C. (Politically Correct).
No, there is no perfect church here on earth. But can we keep drifting away from the core of our beliefs – the Bible? How many more friends, leaders, and churches must we lose before the course is corrected? Doesn't Scripture say to the church of Sardis, "Wake up!" They think they are alive but they are dead.
At least for the present, I still have hope that our leaders of the ELCA will choose to lead the church to repentance and new life in Christ.
Bottom Up Leadership
by James Hoefer*
We Lutherans have such a wonderful theology, and yet it seems that as we develop ecclesiastical structures, we look everywhere but there for insight. Strangely, in the case of the ELCA, the Committee of Seventy who framed the church, chose an outdated, top-heavy model, and then eliminated any accountability that might have made it work.
Over a dozen years ago, Alvin Toeffler helped us distinguish emerging "Third Wave" structures from those of the "Second Wave" brought in by the Industrial Revolution. That unprecedented movement from rural agricultural to mechanized industry quickly immersed us in a sea of centrally planned manufactured products, along with the not so subtle suggestion that we were expected to consume as much of it as we could. Second Wave institutions such as banking, education, government, as well as business, were organized around six goals: centralization, maximization, concentration, synchronization, specialization, and standardization.
Also in the Church
It shouldn't surprise us that something similar happened with churches in those years. Denominations merged, bureaucracies grew, until fewer and fewer made decisions for more and more. Grassroots missionary societies folded into national groups. The most important outreach strategies and social-political stances were made "top-down" by select committees, or simply by decision of the presiding officer. The assumption was that they would be the best suited to discern the will of the Holy Spirit for the rest of us.
Local congregations were expected to look the same, worship the same, and have nearly identical governing boards and structures. The chief goal of the pastor was to push everyone together and enlist them in the franchise-like, on-site programs, which were assumed to be the right ones in which to pour the resources. Success was measured like Walmart, by how many people and how much money passed through the building.
This top-down model was chosen by the ELCA, with much talk about being more inclusive and responsive to the grass roots than ever before. Unfortunately, there is no accountability built into the system. The ELCA is supposedly governed by an Assembly of delegates. But these delegates will never meet together again! Nor will they ever have to report or justify their decisionsùleast of all to the congregational delegates atthe synod assembly who voted them in as national delegates, 75% of whom will not be delegates again, even at the Synod level.
Astonishingly, that national Assembly never meets again; it immediately passes out of existence. It never has to answer for any theological, political or structural decision it hurriedly makes in response to some microphone spellbinder, or to the ponderous biennial reports of the bureaucratic executives. Yet we are expected to live out these decisions in congregational trenches. As someone said recently, "The ELCA is taxation and pontification without representation." No wonder there is so much frustration among even the most optimistic and hard-working ELCA members.
Learning what works
Since the 1950s, industry has learned the shortcomings of top-down leadership. It is moving as fast as possible to decentralize, moving from how big can we get to optimization (how effective can we be); from concentration of powerto participatory management; from synchronization to flextime; from specialization of "experts" to entrusting decision-making as far down the line as possible; from standardization to customizing. Today's business is learning what works!
A quick look at the New Testament will show this was the pattern of the early church. As Slocum points out, we see the picture of the Body of Christ, with every member gifted uniquely to serve in a different way. The Holy Spirit was directly leading and empowering each membertobring the ministry of the Gospel into homes and to all levels of society. They gathered in small groups in homes, in barracks, in catacombs, where the ministry of each was valued and exercised. Individual believers infiltrated the government, the military and commerce with the values of the Kingdom. There was a special rite of ordination for this ministry. It was called BAPTISM. Without top-down leadership, the Roman Empire was conquered and transformed.
This was also the initial vision of the Reformation. When Martin Luther proclaimed the "priesthood of all believers," he radically challenged the top-down leadership of his day. There was no difference among the baptizedùexcept in functionù between pope, priest, or the most humble believer.
He wrote in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, "We are all equally priests...whoever therefore does not know or preach the gospel is not only no priest or bishop, but he is a kind of pest to the church. What we call the priesthood isa ministry." Luther urged all social classesto be ministers, bringing the light of God's Word into whatever vocational ministry God had called them. Europe was never the same. What centuries of top-down leadership couldn't accomplish, unleashing the saints did.
Cell-church Movement
This is also the experience of the "Cell-church Movement," mushrooming on every continent. Pastors of the largest churches of the world say they are also pastors of the smallest churches in the world, because the real action is in the cell groups. Meeting in homes where genuine community and ministry in Christ can be experienced, they are energized to reach out beyond themselves as salt and light. This cell-church structure can work so well simply because it takes seriously Christ's call for every believer to be a priest of Jesus Christ. And it has real accountability built in as a covenantal community, from the bottom to the top. At every level, leaders are responsible and responsive.
How about the ELCA?
What if the ELCA decided to move from "second" to "third wave" thinking? What if our denominational heads decided to stop proclaiming for us our church's public policy positions on partisan issues, lobbying in our name, and instead, entrusted the common priesthood of the baptized to penetrate society in the name of Christ?
What if we relied on the Holy Spirit, and honored the vocational ministry of every member? What if as many resources for the training of the 99% of the laity for ministry were as available as for the 1 % of the clergy? What if every Christian were part of a decentralized small group, where his gifts were recognized and her ministry was prayed over?
What if each congregation developed a unique strategy and structure according to the needs and subcultures of its community, and the giftings and motivations of its individual members? What if pastors were as interested in getting the church into the ministry of the members as in getting the members onto the committees and boards of the church? What if success were measured not by well-attended programs, but by transformed lives?
Can you imagine that? I can. It would simply be doing the unfinished work of the Reformation. It would be a new Wave of the Spirit of Jesus Christ flooding into our lonely, dark, imprisoned world!
* Dr. Hoefer is currently the pioneer pastor of Living Christ Fellowship, a new cell-based Lutheran Church in Arizona.
The Cruelest Month?
by Robert J Morrison*
T.S. Elliot wrote in The Wasteland, "April is the cruelest month." I never understood why. Now I do. And April 10 is the cruelest day, the day when the bill to ban partial birth abortions was vetoed, the day when the country was distracted by the seemingly endless funeral ceremonies for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. It was a veto from hell.
I generally complain when my wife usesthe term "the commute from hell," a common term used around the Washington, D.C. beltway, because I thinkthe term trivializes something we Christians are supposed to take very seriouslyùhell.
But I use the term "veto from hell" advisedly when it comes to the veto of the ban on partial birth abortions. It seems that the act itself is so horrifying as to qualify as hellish. If stabbing a child in the base of the skull with surgical scissors minutes before birth and sucking out the child's brains with a suction device in order to collapse the skull is not hellish, then we have no earthly understanding of the term.
The Prince of Liars
The veto was the capstone of a campaign characterized by such low cunning, such craft, such brazen mendacity as to give every sign of being a pet project of the Prince of Liars.
Despite the written testimonyfrom one ofthe few abortionists bold enough to claim credit for doing these ghastly procedures, the defenders of the indefensible claimed again and again on the floor of the House and the Senate that the partial birth abortion was done only for severe health complications of the mother, or for a profound handicap ofthe child. Martin Haskell, who boasted of having developed this technique in an article in American Medical News , himself admitted that eighty percent of the partial-birth abortions he does are elective. It was breathtaking to watch Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Pat Schroeder stand on the floor and deny what Haskell had plainly written. But, then, there is literally no abortion thai these two would not defend.
Then, there was the crowning lie: the abortionists tried to claim that the late-term babies did not feel a thing because the anesthesia had already killed them. That gross fabrication brought a howl of protest from honest anesthesiologists who rushed to form a truth squad before a congressional committee. If that bold lie were to go unchecked, millions of pregnant women might put off needed surgery for fear of harming their unborn children.
April is the cruelest
April's title to the cruelest month cannowstandunchallenged. Itwasin April that our War for Independence began bloodily. April also saw outbreak of the fratricidal struggle we call the Civil War. April is the month of Lincoln's assassination, 'when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.' Oklahomans will not soon forget the deadly attack on the Murrah Building of April 19, 1995.
"I'm struck by the fact that April more recently has become the month of Remembrance for our now dwindling numbers of survivors of the Holocaust. The selection of the month is made more poignant by the fact that Allied forces liberated many of the death camps in that month in 1945.
Each year during April, I try to read something to deepen my understanding of that world historic catastrophe. This year I read Nightly, Nobel Prizewinner Elie Wiesel. It is a haunting work. We find ourselves in the cattle car being transported to Auschwitz. Weheartheshrieksofthe young mother who, maddened by thirst, has a vision of flames and cries out to the doomed Jews to heed her warning. In the midst of horrors, for they have seen babies tossed from windows to be caught on bayonet points, the victims in the car cannot conceive of greater horrors yet.
Wiesel has received a gift from God. It is his ability to recall and to communicate with such force and clarity the feeling of the Holocaust. Jewish friends recoil when I mention the Holocaust in the same breath with abortion. But is the partial-birth abortion sodifferentfrom pitching living babies onto burning pyres? If so, how?
Whether or not we have Elie Wiesel standing with us, we must resist this sickening new descent into barbarism. If this is the starting point, to what depths might we descend by the year 2000? As our Lord asked on His way to the Cross, "If they do these things in the green wood, what will they do in the drv?"
The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban isn't hard to understand. Unborn babies who have been in their mother's womb five, six, seven monthsùand even longerùare delivered except for the head. Then they are killed.
The stroke of a pen could have saved their lives. Now these precious children will be killed in the most pagan, barbaric, and painful way imaginable. The bill was written to stop an abortionist from stabbing a baby in the back of the head and suctioning out his or her brains. It wasn't a complicated piece of legislation. It was a simple choice between good and evil.
World Reactions
Worldwide reaction to the veto was swift and unmistakable. TheU.S. ambassador to the Vatican broke with the Administration and denounced the veto. All eight American Roman Catholic cardinals and the President ofthe National Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the veto. Their letter said in part, "Your veto of this bill is beyond comprehension for those who hold human life sacred. It will ensure the continued use of the most heinous act to kill a tiny infant just seconds from taking his or her first breath outside the womb."
Next, evangelist Billy Graham went to the White House and chastised the president for his veto....Even the leadership of his own church denounced the veto in unflinching terms. Dr. Richard D Land of the 15.6 million member Southern Baptist Convention wrote, "The president has now made it unmistakably clear that there is no circumstanceùeven a baby who is fully delivered except for his or her headùin which he will make it illegal for the mother to instruct the doctorto execute thechild." ùWanda Franz, Ph.D.
*Morrison is the former director of the LCMS Office of Government Information. His remarks are excerpted from Living, Summer 1996
In Ulanovsk, St. Mary's Lutheran Church has been rededicated and reopened after being confiscated in 1930 and its pastor shot. Praise God especially in view of the fact that this is also Lenin's birth-city. The Lord is ever VICTOR, but always in His timeù-not ours. (EPS, 94.04.52}
The whole Bible has never been read by 85% of Western Christians, according to an estimate from the United Bible Societies. Gallup reports only 12% of Americans who attend church once a month or more read their Bibles on a regular basis (EPS, 94.02.52). ELCA members who hold with FOCL's mission "to encourage evangelical, biblical and confessional faithfulness to our Christian heritage" have their work cut out for them.
"Association" Evangelism
As a home mission pastor, I found my most persuasive invitation to membership in our infant congregation was, "Do you want your children to associate with families you can trust them to be with? ù families in our church you will get to know personally?" Not hard to answer. As the Boston University economist Glen Loury puts it: "No deterrent to teen pregnancy is as powerful as believing your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit."
No affirmative-action law unites the races as effectively as the conviction that "God is no respecter of persons. Real change comes from the heart."
This may be an increasingly effective invitation. Harvard University's Robert Putnam has found that Americans have stopped joining associations such as bowling leagues, and are spending more time alone. This contrasts with De Toqueville's astute observation some few years after the founding of our country, that Americans joined more groups, societies and associations than any people on earth. And therein lay their strength.
The Church – your congregation – may be the single association still able to offer a compelling invitation to today's Lonely-American.
– The Editor