Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Enjoyed time this morning with the LCMS House members in D.C.
Congressman Reichert is famous for leading in the capture of the Green River Killer during his law enforcement days.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
St. Louis Lutheran leader responds to landmark Supreme Court case
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WASHINGTON • In a groundbreaking case, the Supreme Court on Wednesday held for the first time that religious employees of a church cannot sue for employment discrimination.
But the court's unanimous decision in a case from Michigan did not specify the distinction between a secular employee, who can take advantage of the government's protection from discrimination and retaliation, and a religious employee, who can't.
It was, nevertheless, the first time the high court has acknowledged the existence of a "ministerial exception" to anti-discrimination laws - a doctrine developed in lower court rulings. This doctrine says the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion shields churches and their operations from the reach of such protective laws when the issue involves employees of these institutions.
The Rev. Matthew Harrison, president of the St. Louis-based Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, said he was "delighted" with the high court's decision.
"The Court, in upholding the right of churches to select their own ministers without government interference, has confirmed a critical religious liberty in our country," Harrison said in a written statement. "The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod places great emphasis on the religious education of its children and the important role of commissioned ministers in promoting our faith, so we are thankful that the Court has confirmed our church's right to decide who will be serving as ministers in our churches and schools."
The case came before the court because the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School of Redford, Mich., on behalf of employee Cheryl Perich, over her firing, which happened after she complained of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Writing the court's opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said allowing anti-discrimination lawsuits against religious organizations could end up forcing churches to take religious leaders they no longer want.
"Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs," Roberts said. "By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which protects a religious group's right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments."
The court's decision will make it virtually impossible for ministers to take on their employers for being fired for complaining about issues like sexual harassment, said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United.
"Clergy who are fired for reasons unrelated to matters of theology - no matter how capricious or venal those reasons may be - have just had the courthouse door slammed in their faces," Lynn said.
But Douglass Laycock, who argued the case for Hosanna-Tabor, called it a "huge win for religious liberty."
"The court has unanimously confirmed the right of churches to select their own ministers and religious leaders," he said.
But since this was the first time the high court has ever considered the "ministerial exception," it would not set hard and fast rules on who can be considered a religious employee of a religious organization, Roberts said.
"We are reluctant ... to adopt a rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister," he said. "It is enough for us to conclude, in this, our first case involving the ministerial exception, that the exception covers Perich, given all the circumstances of her employment."
Perich was promoted from a temporary lay teacher to a "called" teacher in 2000 by a vote of the church's congregation and was hired as a commissioned minister. She taught secular classes as well as a religious class four days a week. She also occasionally led chapel service.
She got sick in 2004 but tried to return to work from disability leave despite being diagnosed with narcolepsy. The school said she couldn't return because they had hired a substitute for that year. They fired her and removed her from the church ministry after she showed up at the school and threatened to sue to get her job back.
Perich complained to the EEOC, which sued the church for violations of the disabilities act.
A federal judge threw out the lawsuit on grounds that Perich fell under the ADA's ministerial exception, which keeps the government from interfering with church affairs. But the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated her lawsuit, saying Perich's "primary function was teaching secular subjects" so the ministerial exception didn't apply.
The federal appeals court's reasoning was wrong, Roberts said. He said that Perich had been ordained as a minister and the lower court put too much weight on the fact that regular teachers also performed the same religious duties as she did.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also placed too much emphasis on the fact that Perich's religious duties only took up 45 minutes of her workday, while secular duties consumed the rest, Roberts said.
"The issue before us ... is not one that can be resolved by a stopwatch," he said.
The court's decision was a narrow one, with Roberts refusing to extend the ministerial exception to other types of lawsuits that religious employees might bring against their employers. "We express no view on whether the exception bars other types of suits, including actions by employees alleging breach of contract or tortious conduct by their religious employers," Roberts said.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote a separate opinion, argued that the exception should be tailored for only an employee "who leads a religious organization, conducts worship services or important religious ceremonies or rituals or serves as a messenger or teacher of its faith."
But "while a purely secular teacher would not qualify for the 'ministerial exception,' the constitutional protection of religious teachers is not somehow diminished when they take on secular functions in addition to their religious ones," Alito said.
Tim Townsend of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
Posted in Faith-and-values on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 3:24 pm Updated: 5:44 pm. | Tags: Hosanna-tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church, Supreme Court Of The United States, Lutheran Church, Matthew Harrison,
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/faith-and-values/harrison-responds-to-landmark-supreme-court-case/article_9ef07f9e-3c9c-11e1-bc10-001a4bcf6878.html#ixzz1jD4l9Wqs
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Real Presence, "epiphanies" and Christ's Historic Epiphany
And so we come to the question of the Real Presence, which we must touch on here at least briefly. Why was this for Luther the question about the Gospel itself? The Lord Christ is present in all the means of grace. He comes to us in the preaching of the Gospel, in Baptism, and in absolution. In these He is present in His church, which is His body. Also where two or three are gathered in His name, gathered around His Word and Sacrament, there is the body of Christ, the whole body. For the body of Christ is not some sort of organism. It cannot be separated into pieces. It is always completely present, just as the sacramental body is always completely present in each part of the consecrated bread. “Whether one this bread receiveth, or a thousand, still He giveth One sure food that does not fail.”[1] Luther and our Lutheran fathers loved to quote these words from Aquinas's "Lauda Sion salvatorem." They ring on in the Communion hymns of our church. They can and must be applied in an analogous way to the "mystical body," the church, in order to avoid the unbiblical, romantic theory of the church as an organism. The presence in the Sacrament of the Altar, however, is not the same as the presence in the other means of grace. There is today a most earnest struggle going on to understand this presence. There are Catholic and Protestant theologians who speak of it as making Christ's death, Christ's passion contemporary, a re-presentation of His sacrificial death. Among Catholic theologians such theories emerge from the effort to clarify the doctrine of Trent that identifies the sacrifice on the cross with the sacrifice in the Mass. According to the doctrine of Trent the sacrifice of Mass is to be understood as memoria, repraesentatio, and applicatio of the sacrifice on Golgotha. It was the late Benedictine monk, Odo Casel,[2] who propounded the mystery theory that has engaged so much discussion. The point of departure for his exposition of the "cuItic mystery" was the Hellenistic mysteries.
These are then seen as "shadows" of the future mysteries of the church, corresponding to the relationship between nature and supernature [Ubernafur]. The Kyrios of a mystery is a God who has entered into human misery and struggle, has made his appearance on earth (epiphany) and fought here, suffered, even been defeated; the whole sorrow of mankind in pain is brought together in a mourning for the God who must die. But then in some way comes a return to life through which the God's companions, indeed the whole of nature revives and lives on. This was the way of pious faith and the sacred teaching (hieros logos), of society in the earliest mystical age. But the world, society is always in need of life; so the epiphany goes on and on in worship; the saving, healing act of God is performed over and over. Worship [Kult] is the means of making it real once more, and thus of breaking through to the spring of salvation. The members of the cult present again in a ritual, symbolic fashion, that primeval act. ... The mystery, therefore, embraces in the first place the broad concept of ritual "memoria1"---(Anamnesis, co memoratio) the ritual performance and making present [Gegenwaertigsetzung] of some act of the God's, upon which rests the existence and life of a community. (Das Christliche Kultmysterium, 2d ed. [1935]; emphasis added [The Mystery of Christian Worship (l962), 53]).
Justin and the early church could never have dreamed up something like this, certainly not if they remained in agreement with Paul, who did not regard these mysteries as earlier stages of Christian worship but as demonic perversion of divine truth. This whole theory falls to pieces before the simple fact that while the Hellenistic mysteries rest on myths, the Sacrament of the Altar is a matter of history. When did Attis and Osiris live? When did they die? The question is senseless because the myth does not tell of historical events. Jesus Christ, however, is a historical person. His death is a historical event that happened outside the gates of Jerusalem "under Pontius Pilate." The women who went to find His body did not have to wander all around like Cybele and Isis in the myth. They knew the place of His grave. And His resurrection was also a historical event: "On the third day He rose again from the dead." [I Corinthians 15:4] The whole theory was constructed to provide a foundation for the dogma of the identity of the sacrifice on the cross and the sacrifice of the Mass as defined by Trent. But where is there any such foundation in the New Testament? Is it by chance that the passage in the New Testament putting the high priestly work of Christ at the center has the word "once" [ephapax] right at the crucial place? He "entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Hebrews 9:12). Who dares to interpret away this "once" in view of the words that conclude this great chapter: "Just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him" (Hebrews 9:27f.).
Hermann Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 42, 1956
[1] Sumit unus, sumunt mille/ Quantum iste tantum ille/ Nec sumptus consumitur.
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