Videos are dropping. (See this one and this one). Statements are being sent out (See this one). Times are fun in the LCMS. The topic of the day is pastoral formation and the restrictions regarding the SMP route to ministry. This is insider language and indeed the struggle is internal to the LCMS. I supervise an SMP vicar. I serve alongside SMP pastors. The designation is a human one not a divine one. It is one of the routes to certification and it is needed not only in this moment but in others. I don’t advocate for the SMP program because I think is better or because I think it is needed in a pastoral shortage. I advocate for it because I don’t believe pastoral formation is one size fits all, because I believe that theology, while not contextual, is applied contextually. It is spoken to and embodied by people in their locality and temporality. The SMP program, like the residential route I went through, produces good and bad examples, faithful and unfaithful shepherds. We should not judge the program on the basis of who it puts out, if we did the residential route would be shuddered by now. We should judge it on the basis of what it is attempting to do for the sake of the pastors being formed and the congregations being served. We should judge it on whether or not Christ is at work building his church. Is this program aiding that work or getting in the way? I have my thoughts, others have theirs. And this is precisely the problem. We have all made the church our going concern rather than letting it be what it is, Christ’s work. The fear, the games, the power plays, all of it bespeaks a church that is trying to direct its own ends rather than be led where it may not want to go. I have many more thoughts, some of which would break the 8th commandment again if I uttered what I thought in my heart. Instead of offering more of my own thoughts, I want to offer the thoughts of someone wiser than me. Paul asked a question in Galatians and Martin Franzmann pressed it into service. I am hopeful that those who read it will walk away committed to not making the church our going concern but being willing to be the church that dares to die. 

Avoiding What is Fleshly and Foolish

Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? (Gal. 3:3)

We Christians are all a bit like the man from the city who gave up his fresh-air holiday in the mountains and returned home complaining, “I’m going back to town where I can breathe properly; this air’s got no body to it.” The clean air of the high altitudes of the Spirit is too clean and clear for us; we long for some of the pollution that has been killing us.

So it was in the churches of Galatia in the first century. When Paul came to them with the good news of “Jesus Christ publicly portrayed as crucified” for their salvation and they heard and believed, they were baptized and received the Spirit. The Breath of God breathed on them, and they were free men breathing free clean air, no longer “in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods” but sons of a free mother born free, “sons of God through faith.” Those were exhilarating days; Paul speaks of them in his Letter to the Galatians, recalling how he had first preached to the Galatians because of a bodily ailment which grounded him in Galatia, how they had made nothing of his physical condition which was a “trial” to them and might even have given rise to a superstitious aversion to the apostle. They had received him “as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus” Himself. The man whose inspired word had taught them to confess Jesus as Lord was as dear to them as their Lord, and they were ready to pluck out their eyes and give them to the man who bore on his body “the marks of Jesus.”

THose exhilarating days had passed, and the Galatians soon found other voices more persuasive than Paul’s, the voices of men who came with what they termed a supplement to Paul’s Gospel of freedom. These voices were luring them back to the Law, back to bondage, back to the “flesh” of circumcision and the observance of days and season prescribed by the Law, back to the “flesh” of physical descent from Abraham, the “flesh” of man contributing something to his own salvation by his own reason or strength. When they had believed and were baptized, they had “begun with the Spirit,” with God’s work in free and sovereign grace for their salvation; they could then say with Paul: “Through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.” Now they hoped to carry that work of God to completion with their own devisings and exertions, “with the flesh.” 

“O foolish Galatians!” We join Paul in that exclamation of hurt wonder. But have we 20th-century pots the right to call those first-century kettles black? We are hardly tempted these days to revert to circumcision and the Law of Moses. And the lot of the Jew being what it is in Christian lands, who is still tempted to claim descent from Abraham? But the “flesh” is still a potent counterattraction to the Spirit; we who have begun with the Spirit in Baptism are still mightily inclined to end with the “flesh,” to supplement and supplant the incredibly good Good News of what God has done by grace with a “gospel” that gives room and scope to the bright ideas and strenuosities of man, to our ingenious and squirming flesh. 

We are all cater-cousins to the foolish Galatians when we decide to put “some life” into the church which is not the life of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life; when we attempt to make the church our going concern rather than His living concern; when we think to find in our eloquence and our persuasive devices a reasonable substitute for that divine calling voice which Jesus compared to the call of the mother bird coaxing her young under her wing; when we persuade ourselves that our new and improved mind-benders will do what Christ’s coaxing call alone can do. We are leaning fleshward when we feel entitled to make people promises which Jesus and His messengers never made—like promises of automatic “peace of mind” or that grandly ambiguous thing called happiness. And has not the church ceased to be the invincible bulwark against death created by the Spirit, and has it not come vulnerable “flesh,” when it takes up the sword (which God gave to Caesar, not to the church) and dreams of winning victories for Christ with new-style, respectable crusades as the church that dares to kill but is afraid to die?

Martin Franzmann, Alive with the Spirit (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1973), 48–50.

And only because I think this is also a fitting paragraph from a later devotion in the book that also fits: 

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses” was Jesus’ promise to His apostles. The story of the apostles and the apostolic church testifies how sure the promise of Jesus is. And the subsequent history of the church makes clear that Paul’s prayer for the church, namely, that the called saints of God “be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,” has been answered. There is a sad and still-continuing record which tells how men have striven to be strengthened with might without the Spirit and without the indwelling of Christ the Crucified in their hearts—how men have changed the church militant into the church military and have reached for hte sword which Jesus long ago struck out of His disciple’s hand. But there is also a record, often written in tears and blood, of those men genuinely strengthened  with might through the Spirit, men in whose heart Christ dwelt by faith, men who learned to speak Jesus’ “Thy will be done” and so come to share in His victory. The church is an anvil that hath worn out many hammers. 

Martin Franzmann, Alive with the Spirit (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1973), 57.