Pastor's Letter - Christ the Servant Lutheran

Christ the Servant Lutheran Church

March 2006 Letter

Pastor Peter Bastien, in Footnotes:

Dear Friends in Christ,

In Adult Sunday Forum lately, we have had some interesting "discussions" of what to do about our theological differences. Should II John 7-11 be our model? It calls for us to exclude those who think differently about "the doctrine of Christ." It was noted that there is impressive precedent in Church history in the ecumenical councils, whose creeds we still confess today. At Nicea, if you said Jesus was of "like substance to the Father" instead of "the same substance," you were anathematized, excommunicated, and excluded. I wondered if that was the best way to go.

Friedrich Heiler once said, "Religion does not consist in a particular representation of the divine, but in a dynamic relationship to the Sacred...It is the worship of the Mystery and our surrender to it." In other words God, "the Mystery," can never be adequately compassed in any representation. Some may come closer than others--a Rublev icon, for example, or the Mass in B Minor. Linguistic representations using Aristotelian language games are fairly far down on my list of adequate representations. I personally wish Athanasius and Arius had put the love ethic first and had their arguments on the solid ground of mutual love--nobody was going to leave Nicea excommunicated. Christianity would be a lot healthier today if they had.

Pastor Peter Bastien

But this does not mean that we shouldn't have really big debates about our theological representations of the divine, and about Christian ethics, and about church structure. These are all really, really important matters and we should go to the mats for them. It is for the sake of a good argument--this is my conviction--that we need to know what is at stake and what is not. What should be at stake is the important task of expressing our faith in words that capture as much as possible of all the affirmations we want to make about God and our relationship to God. What must never be at stake is our love and acceptance of each other. Real families stay together even when they disagree.

NEVER has this been more important than it is today. People are not just excommunicating each other today over religious differences--they're killing each other, blowing people up, burning embassies, taking over countries, going to war. Cherem, Jihad, Crusade--these are all religious wars! What kind of an example is that?

St. Paul says that Christians are to show the world "a yet more excellent way." This is the way of faith, hope, and love--the greatest item being love. Paul wants us to model this new way of dealing with each other, especially in conflict. We dropped the ball at Nicea. We've been dropping it ever since. We've been more "worldly" than Christian.

So--do we have something to think about (a theme) for our Lenten repentance this year? Wouldn't it be great if we could come out of our Lenten observance this year a little bit more prepared, as Church, to model a yet more excellent way? Tim Lull, a Luther expert who died recently, once speculated that in heaven, God put Martin Luther and Pope Leo X into the same Bible study class together. Maybe Arius and Athanasius too? Jeez, I'll probably get put in a class with Jerry Falwell. It will serve me right--not for having the argument--that must go on, but for letting go spiritually of a brother loved by Jesus Christ. The best way to teach exclusionists that exclusion is wrong is by refusing to exclude them. Whew!

Yours in Christ,
—Pastor Bastien

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CTS is a Reconciling in Christ Congregation and

a member of the Washington Metropolitan Synod of the ELCA

(Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

We are located in Montgomery Village (Gaithersburg) Maryland