Shameless (A Poem)

During a beautiful ten-hour road trip yesterday, I enjoyed listening to Dr. Fickenscher’s discussion of this Sunday’s Scripture readings. I loved how he brought together Abraham’s plea for Sodom in Genesis 18 and Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Luke 11. Abraham, although admitting that he is “but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27), boldly makes his request to God. He exemplifies the bold persistence commended in Luke. Jesus tells the story of a man who comes to his friend in the middle of the night to request bread for a guest. The friend gets up and helps him, not because of his friendship but because of the man’s impudence (Luke 11:5-8). Dr. Fickenscher noted that the word translated “impudence” or “persistence” also means “shamelessness.” It is only because God is the initiator of prayer and because our prayer is through Christ that we pray to our Father without shame.

^{The Importunate Neighbor by William Hunt (1895)}

The wonder of being able to pray shamelessly through Christ inspired me to compose a poem (which I had plenty of time to do, given the length of the drive). I recently read some of Johann Gerhard’s prayers in Meditations on Divine Mercy, and I have been struck by how his confession of sin always turns into a plea that God would look upon Christ’s righteousness instead. Here are a few examples:

• Original sin – “I place before You the holy conception of Your Son in place of my foul, unclean nature” (p. 33).
• The sins of youth – “For the disobedience of my youth, I offer to You, holy Father, the obedience of Your Son. I offer to You the perfect innocence of the One who became obedient to You, even to death, even death on a cross” (p. 35).
• Daily lapse into sin – “For these sins that I commit every day of my life, I offer to You, O holy Father, the precious blood of Your Son, which was poured out on the altar of the cross” (p. 37).

Through Christ’s righteousness, our prayer is acceptable to God. The Father hears us because we are in Christ, our Savior and Intercessor. Our sin covers us with shame. Isaiah writes, “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear” (59:2). But Christ covers us with His righteousness and brings us before God. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16).

*****

Shameless

Holy Father, bend Thine ear

To the prayer You’ve said You’d hear.

I who am but dust and ash

Come before Thee unabashed.

Shameless kneel before Thy throne

For Thy Spirit for me groans.

And Christ my Savior intercedes

And for my full acquittal pleads.

I whose thoughts and words are chaff

Claim Christ’s prayer on my behalf. 

Do not look upon the sin

In which I from youth have been.

Look on Your beloved Son

By whose passion I am won.

Look on Him who lovingly

With Word and water washes me,

Presents me spotless in His sight,

Clothed in His pure robe of white.

Hear the prayer Christ prays for me.

Look on Christ; His purity see.

The Unpreached Sermon

I heard a story once that went something like this: A pastor walked up to the pulpit to preach. He looked at the congregation and said, “I can’t preach the sermon that I had prepared for today because it isn’t true in my life.” And he dismissed the congregation and went home. 

^{Photo by Kaihsu – https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75915931}

The man who told this story had been in that congregation, and he described this occurrence as the most powerful sermon he never heard. When I heard this story as an Evangelical, it made sense to me. Surely a pastor shouldn’t preach something that he doesn’t practice. Surely he shouldn’t expect the congregation to listen to something that he hadn’t made true in his own life. Since becoming Lutheran, however, I’ve looked back on this story more critically. When I think of it now, I feel sorry for that pastor and his congregation. 

The most glaring problem this story exposes is the lack of Gospel in the prepared sermon. If this pastor had intended to preach the Gospel to his congregation, it would make no difference to what degree he thought he was applying his message. The Gospel remains true, regardless of what we do or don’t do. It is the good news that Christ has done everything. It is that message of “first importance”: Christ’s death for our sins, His burial, His resurrection, His appearance to the apostles and the early church (1 Cor. 15:3-8).

In the book Has American Christianity Failed? Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller claims, “Holding back the Gospel from Christians is one of the greatest failures of American Christianity … Christians are fed a steady diet of commands and instructions without a shred of mercy and grace.” I’m afraid this is what was happening in the church in this story. Christians need the healing balm of the Gospel, but it seems this pastor had prepared only Law.

Not only was this church deprived of the Gospel, but I gather from this story that the preaching of the Law was also weakened. What happens when a pastor limits his preaching of the Law to the commands he considers to be “true in his life”? Instead of proclaiming God’s good and holy Law as the standard–a standard before which we all fall short–he makes himself the standard. When a pastor preaches only on the laws he thinks he is keeping, it is quite possible that many in the congregation will think they too are keeping the Law. They are less likely to realize their need for a Savior. When the Law is preached in its fullness, all of us are found guilty. The Law stops our mouths, exposing all of us as sinners who fall short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:19-23). It convicts and condemns, driving us to the Gospel for our salvation. But if this congregation hears of an achievable righteousness through keeping the Law, they may never realize their need for the Gospel that is missing in the sermons.

The pastor, like all believers, is both saint and sinner. The sinner will never keep the Law. Though this pastor’s statement may seem like a gesture of humility, it is pride that would lead any of us to think that we are keeping some of the Law. It is good that this pastor realized he did not keep the Law in his prepared sermon. The problem is that this should be the case for all his sermons. “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10). Did the pastor honestly think that every other time he preached the Law he was preaching something that was “true in his life”? What does that even mean? Whenever a pastor preaches the Law in all of its strictness, he is preaching something that he does not keep. 

It is true that pastors should be “above reproach” (1 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:6) and that those “who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Jesus had harsh words for the scribes and Pharisees who preached but did not practice (Matt. 23:3 and following). There is a sense of hurt and betrayal among the hearers when a Christian teacher is found guilty of the very sins he has been condemning. But I would argue this is especially true when the teacher has focused on those sins to the exclusion of others or has gone beyond Scripture to preach his own man-made laws. (I think here of the sex scandals of prominent leaders in the purity culture movement.) The problem is not in the preaching of God’s Law, and the solution certainly is not the watering down of God’s Law.

The congregation in this story needed to hear God’s Word. They needed God’s Law and Gospel. But they received nothing because of the pastor’s own perception of what was “true in his life.” If sermons are supposed to be merely inspirational or informational, then their loss was not too great. But if the preaching of God’s Word delivers grace to His people, then this poor congregation was sent away without the thing they most needed. The sheep were not fed. 

It is not my intention in this blog post to tell a pastor how to do his job. Rather I write as a layperson to fellow laity. If you are in a church where the delivery of God’s grace in His Word depends on the pastor’s application, I beg you not to stay there. You don’t have to leave church unfed like the congregation in this story. There are churches where the Law of God is preached in its firmness, not lowered to an attainable height. There are churches where the Gospel is more than an altar call invitation given to the unbeliever. The Gospel is for you too. Again and again, you can receive what our loving Father wants to give you. You can be fed with the Word of life.

I realize this may be a controversial topic, and I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. Do you think this pastor did the right thing? Or should he preach God’s Law even when he doesn’t keep it? What about the preaching of the Gospel? Is it for the unsaved only or for Christians too?