I switched John for Mark this year, and I may suggest to our other worship leaders that we not observe Reformation Day next year. No offense, Lutherans, but it may be time.
When I applied for a Horizon internship, an interviewer asked me this same question, Why are you a Lutheran? I talked about people and intellectual openness and I-don't-know-what-else until his leading follow-up questions brought me to the right answer: justification. Then he made some disapproving notes in his folder about my unLutheranness or lack of commitment to the Reformation or something. It was weird.
Recently the online emergent world buzzed about N. T. Wright's book, Justification. I haven't read it or paid much attention beyond reading a few impassioned tweets.
I call myself a Lutheran because I heard the gospel in bible study at a Lutheran congregation. I remember the night. After study, I walked back to my dorm in the frigid upstate New York winter, tingling but not feeling the cold. "It's not that God expects perfection before accepting us. Instead, God accepts us so God might perfect us." I hung on that for days. Hearing it ended one life and began another. After that, whatever I did with my life, it would be so others might hear that news and meet that God.
Even before this, I was falling in love with liturgy. Since, I've discovered wisdom and power in Lutheran Eucharistic theology and theology of the cross. And then, there's all the people like you who have embodied grace.
So, if such things endure, I expect I will always be part of a denomination that stewards the Lutheran tradition. Having not grown up here, I can conceive of not remaining here. Rostering and pension aside, I at times imagine being somewhere else. You know, where the grass is greener. Any denomination or non-denomination is much less interesting than the gospel. Jesus overturns all our neat tables. And yet, loving the church in all its fleshiness is just what the gospel has freed us to do.
So, for me, being Lutheran means living in awe of the price God paid in Jesus Christ for the sake of all creation. Anything but the cross is tinny and worthless, and a cross so precious can never be ours unless it is given. To claim a gift so valuable is to be claimed. So, we are subject to a gift not a law. When even worship of such a Giver is yet another gift, we may serve and gratefully submit only by returning from our selves to serve others. It's hard to be smug in a world bathed in grace so costly.
I could go on, but it's all the same old Lutheran stuff. Same and old, yet rich, engaging, challenging--the grist in the mill of my life. The jalapeño in my popper.
So, Anthony, what are you learning about grace from Hauerwas? Jay, from escaping?
Also, I believe that baby Jesus will bring the Phillies victory over the age-old enemy, the Yankees.
Clark
