Keeping our children safe

On the recent, auspicious 40th anniversary of the legalization of abortion in the United States, I was struck by something our President stated.  Speaking in context of the grizzly Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, he remarked:

This is our first task as a society: Keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged. And their voices should compel us to change. (http://m.cbsnews.com/fullstory.rbml?catid=57564298)

Why do I draw this connection?  I agree with our President: one primary task of our society, even of any society, is to keep our children safe.  However, it is disturbing how we pick-and-choose who qualifies as "children" we should be keeping safe.  Why are children outside the womb people whom we keep safe, while children inside the womb are at risk of death, often with little-to-no protection from our society?  Why are they denied the basic human right of life?  This picking-and-choosing of who qualifies for human rights, and who does not, is an ethical evil.

Applying his comments to this different context, our President is frighteningly correct:  this is how we will be judged, and these voices should compel us to change.

Thoughts on Resurrection Sunday

Again stepping outside my typical tradition, a friend recently shared portions a work by Gerhard Forde titled On Being a Theologian of the Cross. He writes:

The question for Luther's doctrine of atonement is thus not that of abstract payment to God but rather how God can succeed in giving himself to us so as actually to take away our sin, to destroy the barrier between us and God. This is the reason for the prominence in Luther's thought of 'the happy exchange.'  Christ, through his actual coming, his cross and resurrection, takes away our sinful and lost nature and gives us his sinless and righteous nature. This cannot be an abstract metaphysical transaction. We must, through the cross of Christ, his terrible suffering and death, be actually purchased and won, indeed, killed and made alive. If it is to be a 'happy' exchange, our hearts must be captured by it.

... Christ must be one who has and bears our sins; he must actually become a curse for us to set us free from the curse of the law.

...Yet in the resurrection the divine power overcomes even death, and thus conquers, kills, devours, destroys, buries, and abolishes death, sin, the curse, the law, and all the tyrants.

Wow! Powerful thoughts on this day. And more importantly, powerful actions by our God on our behalf. Thank you, Jesus, for as Forde correctly writes, "The point, however, is that Jesus put himself there willingly."

fly unto God for grace

Tonight, while eating dinner (by myself while traveling on business), I was reading from  Luther's Commentary on Galatians.  He wrote (page 327):

"All the ungodly are utterly ignorant of this knowledge and this cunning. Cain knew it not when he was shut up in the prison of the law and seriously felt his sin. At the first he was without the prison: that is, he felt no terror, although he had now killed his brother; but he dissembled the matter craftily, and thought that God himself was ignorant thereof. ...

He remained still shut up in prison. He joined not the Gospel with the law, but said: “Mine iniquity is greater than can be forgiven.” He only respected the prison, not considering that his sin was revealed unto him to this end, that he should fly unto God for grace. Therefore he despaired and denied God."

That phrase - fly unto God for grace - stopped me in my tracks.  It is a frightening thing to pray, but be that as it may: Lord, please reveal unto me my sin that I might fly unto You for grace!