Repenting in Four Steps

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The True Way of Lent

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, February 13, and ends on Easter. These forty days are devoted to enhanced fasting and repentance. But what is it to repent? Martin Luther argued that it has to be something more than the “remorse of Judas” (Luther’s Works 35:16) since that didn’t help him at all (Matthew 27:5, Luke 22:3)!

God’s Law: So first repentance has to do with measuring yourself against God’s law to see where you have failed. You shouldn’t make up your own failures in order to soften them for yourself. Nor should they be imposed on you by others to manipulate you. Instead your failures must be declared to you by God through his own holy word.

Shame: Next you have to feel the failures shown to you by God’s holy word. It isn’t enough to coolly acknowledge them. They has to make you ashamed of yourself for dishonoring God’s glory. Without that shame you’re only faking it.

Matthew 27:5, Luke 22:3

Joy: Third you need to compare your shame to God’s mercy that you might hear the Gospel declaration that though your heart condemns you, God’s mercy is greater than your heart (1 John 3:20)! That means that everything that is confessed for Jesus’ sake will be forgiven!! The joy that comes from this is at the heart of repentance. So if repenting only makes you sad, you’ve missed the boat!   Improvement: Finally we must be open to a new way of living. If we think repenting is only saying we’re sorry, we haven’t repented. That’s because we not only repent to be forgiven, but also to be changed and improved upon (Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18, 13:9)!                                                                           Pastor Marshall

With the Mind:  Readings in Contemporary Theology

3-5 pm in the Church Lounge, Saturday, February 26th.

The book for February is What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007), by Chandra Manning. She explores the affect of religious belief on the soldiers of that war. “By the Civil War’s midpoint,” she writes, “the ferocity of its wrath had stripped away any romantic visions, forcing soldiers to explain not only why it began, but also why it became the horrible convulsion that it did. The explanations that seemed to fit increasingly had to do with God. Specifically, from the middle of 1863, many troops in both armies saw the war as God’s punishment for ‘our sins,’ though Northerners and Southerners differed in who they meant by ‘our’ and what they meant by ‘sins’” (p. 113).

ANNOUNCEMENTS:  GOLDEN FELLOWSHIP is planning a luncheon for Tuesday, February 26th.  Sign up on the sheet that is posted in the lounge. 

FOOD BANK COLLECTION suggestions for February are canned fruits & vegetables. 

NEW MEMBER ORIENTATION will start on Sunday, February 3rd immediately following the 10:30 am liturgy, in room D.  If you know someone who is interested in the class, suggest they talk with Pastor Marshall. 

SUNDAY EDUCATION:  Once Is Enough: Against Rebaptism. In this eight week class we will study Luther’s 1528 treatise against rebaptism. This treatise is an important part of Luther’s understanding of the cherished Christian sacrament of Holy Baptism. This class is another in our series on studies in the Reformation leading up to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation of the Church in Germany in 2017.

HOLY EUCHARIST – Communion:  Those who are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and believe are welcome to receive the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.  If you are not able to walk up to communion but would like to receive, contact the Parish Deacon before the liturgy.

Dr. Fosdick on Immortality

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The Centennial of His Classic Defense

By Pastor Marshall

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) published his classic defense of immortality under the title, The Assurance of Immortality (1913) (New York: MacMillan, 1917). Last month I began my three month study of his defense.

      In the middle part of his book on the reality of life after death, he tries to show that immortality cannot be ruled out as a real possibility. He tries to show how all the arguments against it have not shown that it is impossible. And so he concludes:

    The assurance of its truth must rest on considerations that overpass the boundaries of scientific investigation, but when the stream of human life turns the great bend in its banks which we call death, and passes out of sight, there is no fact known to man which [negates] our right to seek those further reasons which may assure us that the stream flows on (p. 93).

    Fosdick doesn’t think the alternative to heaven is very pleasant: “It is not easy to think of my loves vanquished,” he writes, “my ideals unattained, my memory quite extinct, and I as though I had never been at all” (p. 52). And so he is encouraged that “coupled” with the fact that we cannot prove it, we also have seen that it is “absolutely impossible to disprove it” (p. 54). For those who think heaven would be boring, he pits 1 Corinthians 2:9 about its unfathomable wonders (p. 59).

Fosdick ends this middle section of his book with a refutation of the thorny identification of the mind with the brain. For if they are tightly joined together, then there is no “disembodied” soul and immortality becomes nonsense (p. 86). But Fosdick doesn’t accept this identification because the brain does not create the mind but only is temporarily used by it instead (p. 81). The case of the “bird in the egg” makes it clear that “the present contingency of a living being upon a physical structure does not by itself argue that such a relationship must exist forever” (p. 82)!

Extended Ministries

2 Charities for February

EXTENDED MINISTRIES for the month of February will be emphasizing 2 charities.  Since Ash Wednesday is February 13th, let’s begin to donate extra non-perishable food to the –

West Seattle Food Bank

Like last year, remember to bring a food item to donate every time you attend church.  Last year we collected over 750 items during the Lent/Easter season.  Let’s purpose to meet and hopefully exceed this goal. 

Also the Sunday School has chosen –

Gospel for Asia

to direct its donations to this year.  So let’s pray to help support this valuable work with them, and consider making a monetary gift to GfA.  The students want to be able to give at least a dozen pairs of chickens to help others in Asia.  Be part of a wonderful offering to others!

Remember to think of Extended Ministries as a way of extending our ministry to others. 

Garbage:

Part of Our Defilement

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Extending Mark 7:18 – 23

Throwing away things doesn’t always get rid of them. They can come back to bite us, by lingering around – some for thousands of years! – polluting and stinking things up all around us. That’s what we call our garbage! Jesus taught in Mark 7:20 that it is what comes out of us that defiles us – and by that he mostly meant our nasty thoughts and words. But he also includes the more general category of “wickedness.” And that might well include our garbage too!

In his book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (2012), Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Humes notes that

garbage costs are staggering: New York City alone spent $2.2 billion on sanitation in 2011. More than $300 million of that was just for transporting its citizens’ trash by train and truck – 12,000 tons a day – to out-of-state landfills, some as far as three hundred miles away. How much is 12,000 tons a day? That’s like throwing away sixty-two Boeing 747 jumbo jets daily (p. 7).

But that doesn’t have to happen! It is possible for us to purchase more wisely and recycle more diligently. In the last chapter of his book, Hume tells the story of Bea Johnson of Marin County, California, who reduced her annual garbage output, from the American average of about 7 pounds per person per day, to “one mason jar full of trash” for the entire year for her family of four (p. 13)! This is the challenge in Hume’s book – to be like the Johnson family! Hume’s reason for this goes beyond Biblical tenets – but it still bears repeating:

Archaeologists long ago figured out that the real nature of human life isn’t that we are what we eat. They know we are best understood by what we throw away (p. 22).

A copy of this profoundly unsettling book is in the church library. Bon appétit!

by Pastor Marshall