No Valerie, I’m Not Out Of Blogging Ideas

My absolutely favorite niece, Valerie, just sent me a short note with a link suggesting that I might need blogging ideas. That’s why she’s my favorite niece, she’s always looking out for her uncle.

No Valerie, I’m not out of ideas for blogging. I’ve just been a little busy at work (a pleasant change) and was on vacation last weekend. The boss took all his employees and their significant others to the beach. The missus and I got a chance to go ocean kayaking for between four or five hours just north of Myrtle Beach.

With the short getaway and picking up two new customers, Uncle Frank has just been a little busy, but not too busy to see that email from his favorite niece. And I certainly saw that email from LCMS, Inc. highlighting increased revenues while losing market share. (sorry for that folks but sometimes ya got to talk the right lingo to be understood by corporate types)

Thank you Valerie for making sure I gots me some ideas, that’s why your Aunt and I love ya.

Oh, that’s a picture of your Aunt playing in the ocean.

Just A Layman? Yep.

In his monthly column in the Lutheran Witness this month President Jerry Kieschnick writes;

“When I am “out and about” and meet someone new, it is not unusual for that person to tell me his or her name and then say, “I’m just a layman (or laywomen).” When I hear those words, I reply with an affirmation of that person as a redeemed child of God, a faithful member of a congregation, and a man or women called by God to a life of service in his or her chosen vocation”

I applaud President Kieschnick in this proper response of holding up vocation as how we serve one another through the gifts and talents given by God. He goes on to talk about people who use these gifts and talents to continue to help those who have suffered because of recent tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods. It’s all good so far, right? Yep.

Now, if President Kieschnick asked me to tell him a little about myself, I would tell him my name, I explain to him that I’m a metrologist and what that is and is not (no, I’m not a TV weather guy; that’s a meteorologist), and then I would say that I’m a simple layman, a plain and simple layman.

There’s no doubt that President Kieschnick would give me a similar talk as the one he laid out in this month’s column. I would however restate that I really feel that I’m just a simple layman and that’s it. Now, if my history with giving this answer would hold true, President Kieschnick would start to get a bit of a puzzled look.

I would have to explain that because I hold such a high view of the Office of the Holy Ministry, I can say nothing else but “I’m only a layman”. Allow me to elaborate;

In a time when a deaconess who feels that her confession of what the Office of Holy Ministry means differs so much that she must resign her position to go an ELCA seminary and then be told by her district president that if she changes her mind she can come back to her old position no questions asked…

In a time when congregations can tell their pastor that he needs to take the first call that he receives or his employment will be terminated and upon bringing this to his district president he’s told that’s just the way things work…

In a time when congregations promoted as what the future church should look like state publicly that there is no difference between the pastor and the lay elders…

In a time when a pastor at his district convocation can publicly state that he has his elders read his sermons because that’s just not something he’s good at without anyone batting an eye…

In a time when laypersons have such a low view of the Office of Holy Ministry that they can call their pastor by his last name only without being corrected by anyone around them…

In a time when laypersons who chair mission boards talk of “hiring a pastor for six months or so” as if they were hiring someone to clean up the yard or sweep the floors with not a word of admonition from the ten ordained clergy sitting around the table…

In a time when so many laymen and laywomen express such a low view of the Office of Holy Ministry, I go out of my way to make sure to say that “I’m only a layman.” What I see in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is an unwillingness to defend what the Office is. What should be done is a proper catechesis, that is teaching, of the fact that the Office of Holy Ministry was instituted by Christ himself for the preaching of His Gospel and the administering of His Sacraments. Don’t believe me? Read about the Office of Holy Ministry here in John 20:22-23, Matt 16:19, Matt 28:18-20 or here in the Small Catechism.

In addition, there is an unwillingness to properly instruct laymen and laywomen on the doctrine of vocation. Instead, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has fallen headfirst into the Americanized Christianity’s trap that everyone’s a minister.

The end result of this mistake is not the elevation of a laypersons God given gifts used to take care his brothers and sisters in his or her vocation but rather a tearing down of the Office of the Holy Ministry. None of the examples I listed occurred in a vacuum but did and do occur precisely because of a lack of a willingness to properly teach what the Office and vocation are and what that means for both pastors and laypersons.

In the middle ages there were parents who would promise their children to monastic orders to insure that they would earn their place in heaven. That’s not really all that surprising when you consider the low view of the common layperson that was held back then by church officials.

Today we have something of an opposite situation where folks are held up for praise not based on purity of doctrine that they are willing to give a defense for; but rather how many people they talked to about Jesus, how many website hits they recorded and publicly logged, and how much money they raised which is outside the arena of duties covered by the Office of the Holy Ministry. The pendulum has now swung back and hit us all squarely on the head. If you feel that you have Jesus in your heart and are willing to do something worthy enough for a mention in a circuit, district, or synodical newsletter, to be sure you’ll be awarded the title of ministry of something or other; guaranteed.

Yes, we need to minister to our brothers and sisters, our neighbors, everyone including our enemies, but we are not all ministers. Without a proper call from a congregation, you know what I am? I’m a metrologist and a darned good one at that, but I’m only a layman. And at the end of the day, being just a layman, well, that’s good enough for me.

Tasmanian Devils Are Evolving?

It is often said that you’re either a man of faith or a man of science. I happen to be both.

I’m a metrologist and that means when carrying out my vocation I get to deal with the measurement of mass and volume. Metrology is considered an exact and precise science. However, there are always uncertainties in measuring mass and it is my job to make uncertainties quantifiable and for the most part recordable. When my customers require it, I am capable of listing for them nearly every variable that will effect their measurements and recording it in a way that will keep their quality control departments confident that required standards are being met. Measurement uncertainty calculations can go on endlessly and are only limited to the amount of money a customer wishes to spend for me to measure and list things that can affect the final readings.

I’ve always been a man of science. I like knowing how and why things work the way they do. I like tangible and concrete realities. I am analytical to a fault and that is probably why I first worked in aviation and then ended up in the metrology field. Absolutes are always good and uncertainties absolutely drive a person like me crazy.

Even during my fifteen year stint as an atheist, I had problems with scientists laying claim to the both the age of the earth and evolution as fact. To my analytical mind, complex life forms evolving from nothing was an uncertainty that couldn’t be quantified. I wasn’t going to say that some god created everything but I certainly wasn’t going to say we had evolved from nothing either. What I always maintained as an atheist was that we were incapable as humans of ever finding out about our origins.

When I was down in Florida earlier this month I listened to a story on the news about a contagious form of cancer killing off the Tasmania Devil. This relatively new disease has researchers thinking that the Tasmanian Devils could be extinct in as few as twenty five years. Sounds pretty bad eh?

As it turns out the Devils have adapted to their impending demise by breeding as many as two years earlier than they had previously been observed in the wild or in captivity. From the AP:

In the past devils would live five to six years, breeding at ages two, three and four, but with the new disease, even females who breed at two may not live long enough to rear their first litter.

Jones, who has been studying the animals' life cycles since before the disease outbreak, noted that there has been a 16-fold increase in breeding at age one.

Says zoologist Menna Jones later in the article:

"We could be seeing evolution occurring before our eyes.”

We’re seeing evolution? Really? If I remember my science courses correctly, evolution takes place over huge periods of time, millennium even. For the current theory of evolution to work, the earth has to be billions of years old so that all the various species have time to adapt or evolve into their current form. Imagine the chaos that the Tasmanian Devil throws into the equation by evolving in a ten year span.

For years people of faith have been told to sit down and shut up when it came time to explain how things came to be. Men of science have told men of faith that the idea of creation was mere superstition refuted by science. Men of science have told men of faith that evolution completely disproves the idea of God creating everything in six days and animals in one.

So I wonder what explanation do the men of science have for the men of faith when evolution occurs within a ten year span? If I were only a man of science, I’d go get some help with my uncertainty budget from those faith people; they might be able to fill in some of the gaps causing havoc and uncertainty with my equations.

Vocational Compliment Of The Day

Today’s vocational compliment of the day is:

“When you’re here, it’s like going to the dentist.”

Yep, that was a compliment, and a very good one at that.