Looking Back into Our Future

The irony of the article title was too much to pass up: “The Church of Tomorrow is FOR SALE.”
The fascination with “the future” – OUR FUTURE – possesses a strong, magnet-like pull. Tomorrowland was one of Disney’s five original “lands” and remains a major attraction. The space-family The Jetsons was a highly successful animated series many of you will remember. Future-themed films like the Star Wars brand still dominate a box office whenever released.
It’s a well-known urge to want to know what’s coming – what lies ahead. But more than that, the desire is to know and have certainty that the future we have is a desirable “future,” one in which the things near us and the plans dear to us are not left in “yesterday-land” – irrelevant to the “great tomorrow.” And because this investment in a certain and desirable future is so innate, it’s also not surprising that many efforts and great means have been and are put toward affecting that future toward our desirable end. In that way, this futuristic church building constructed in Oklahoma City in the 1950s (pictured) was way ahead of this curve, maybe even keeping pace with the great visionary, Walt Disney himself!
This entire issue of the Lutheran Sentinel has been spent chronicling our synod’s 100-year history in prose and pictures. And a worthy and rewarding endeavor that is. But as much as many of us like history and the reminiscing that goes with it, you know just as well as I do that appetite for a certain and desirable future is no less alive for us. Who of us doesn’t want to know what the future holds for our local churches and our church body?
Though it may seem a surprising place to look for our future, we know of its blessed certainty by looking into a past full of Promise. This Promise-Full past says our future is as the body of Christ.
Our certain future has to do with our Body. Now each of us was born from our mothers with our own bodies. Our physical bodies are God’s workmanship, but they are marred with sin and poised from their very conception to die sin’s death. And so God in His grace birthed you anew of Water and the Spirit, not into your own body, but into One Body – into Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13).
And so our future is inseparably tied to the Body in which we, the Church, now live. Life in the body of Christ is a treasure to be sure! But it is a treasure that is held in “earthen (fragile) vessels” – our mortal bodies in this embattled life of temptation, trouble, and hardship.
We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body (2 Corinthians 4:7-10).
Our Promise-Full past says our future is on the rock of Christ.
Music on the radio sounded a lot different 80 years ago than it does now. Tastes change. Trends come and go. How instruments sound or are used even transitions from one generation to another. The Body of Christ – the Church – has been rescued from the rat-race of keeping up with “sound changes.” Jesus announced the eternal “audio” of His Body when He highlighted Peter’s confession of Jesus as “The Christ…”
“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven…and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:16-17).
The future of the Church is being the “echo-rock,” resounding Peter’s confession that our ears and those all around us in the world might hear and believe on the Name of our salvation.
Our Promise-Full past says our future is as living sacrifices in Christ.
God the Father has “mercy-ed” us. Shouldering our shame and suffering the death of our sins, Jesus kept our death sentence from us by becoming our dying sacrifice. And as a result of our being born into His body, the life of His body, The Church, is a life of “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). Our place in Christ animates our lives so that they are spent being “poured out” – offered in love and service to those redeemed neighbors given us by God in our daily life.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service (Romans 12:1).
Our Promise-Full past says our future is as blessed beggars.
The Promise-Full past means we have our posture for the future – we ask, yes, BEG all things for life and salvation from The God of Promise.
In Jesus, we beg of God not as a stranger, but as our loving Father. We beg His name to be set apart and glorified among us. We beg His kingdom to come to bless the body and to grow the body. We beg for His will to be done, even if it thwarts our own ideas or wishes. We beg for the daily blessings good for our bodies and for the bodies of our neighbors. We beg for the Father’s forgiveness to us as the body of His Son AND for that forgiveness to flow through us to others. We beg that the deceptions of the Devil, the despair of the world, and the weakness of our flesh not dismember us from Christ our head, but that amid such trials we might remain embodied in Him. And finally, we beg deliverance. We ask that the Father send Christ to bring His body home.
And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely (Revelation 22:17).
We are Christ’s Church. We know this by looking back at what God has done for us in Christ Jesus, in His suffering, dying, rising again – because of what God IS doing for us in delivering Christ to us now in the Gospel preached for our ears, sprinkled on our heads, and placed on our palates. So we DO have a future. It is not a nebulous future. It is, as St. Paul says, full of “good works prepared beforehand that we might walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
Dear members of the ELS, but more importantly fellow members of The Body of Christ, the future is NOT “for sale.” For Christ’s Body, The Church, the future is sure and certain because it is in Christ. For Christ’s Body, The Church, the future is full and it is free as only life in Christ is.
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless
Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, To God our Savior,
Who alone is wise,
Be glory and majesty,
Dominion and power,
Both now and forever.
Amen. (Jude 24-25)
Rev. Kyle Madson
Editor, Lutheran Sentinel
Norseland Lutheran Church
St. Peter, MN
Norwegian Grove Lutheran Church
Gaylord, MN