A brother pastor reminded me this week of the very thing that I have pointed to and reminded others of over these past several years, namely, that we are “earthen vessels” through whom the Lord in mercy bestows His divine and heavenly treasures. And that is both a call to humility, on the one hand, and a word of promise and encouragement on the other hand. In and of ourselves, we have no sufficiency, no competence or certainty on which we or anyone else could depend. Apart from the Lord, lacking His help, we would ruin everything and bring it all to naught. And it is good and necessary to be reminded of that fact, that we should take heed lest we fall; for to whatever extent we depend upon ourselves, our own wisdom, reason, savvy, or strength, we are already in danger of falling into the snares of the devil. But so are we also called to fear, love, and trust in the one true God above all things, to fix our hearts and minds on Him alone, to rely upon His sure and certain Word in all things, and so to pray and confess what He has spoken.
For those who are called, ordained, and sent to be pastors and teachers of the Church, bishops and physicians of the soul, it is doubly important that we preach and teach what God the Father has spoken to us by His Son, and that we hand over what we have received from our dear Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, we have nothing worth giving but that which we have received from Him. Hence the need to return daily, weekly, monthly, yearly to the wellspring of the Holy Scriptures, to the significance of our Holy Baptism, to the forgiveness spoken by our father confessors in the Name and stead of Christ Jesus, and to the Holy Supper of the Lamb of God, crucified and risen. These heavenly treasures, freely bestowed upon us in the “earthen vessels” of our own pastors, in words and water, bread and wine within the life of the Church, are in turn handed over to those we serve with the sacred stewardship of the Mysteries of God in the Ministry of the Gospel.
This stewardship of the Mysteries, the handing over of the Gifts Christ freely gives, is the sacred tradition of the Apostolic faith – the Church’s ongoing confession of the faith once delivered to the saints, received and handed over from one generation to the next, from fathers to sons, from bishops and pastors to faithful men who will be able to teach others also, to shepherds who will feed and care for the little lambs and sheep of the Lord Jesus. That the little ones who believe in Him should not be caused to stumble and fall, but be nourished, protected, and strengthened for life everlasting in body and soul. And from start to finish, it all depends upon the Word of God, the Law and the Gospel, the preaching of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ Name, and the teaching and training of disciples in the faithful keeping of all that He has commanded.
Traditions of all kinds fill every nook and cranny of our lives, as the ongoing communication and community of generations over time. In our families, our schools, our towns and cities and states, our nation, our hobbies and pastimes, our clubs and fandoms, our concerts and sporting events – in all of these things and many more, we share and relish and savor and revel in traditions, which shape us, identify us, and bind us together with those who have gone before us, with those beside us now, and with those who will come after us. That is true within the life of the Church, as well. There are human traditions which assist us in the teaching and confessing of the faith, and by the grace of God they help to serve His purposes among us. And there are traditions which derive from the Lord Himself, such as St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 11 and 15, the proclamation of the Gospel of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ Jesus and the faithful administration of His Body and His Blood in remembrance of Him. Already in connection with those sacred traditions of preaching and the Holy Communion, St. Paul also points to the traditional practices of all the churches of God (1 Corinthians 11:16), and he summarizes the proclamation of the faith in the form of an early Creed (1 Corinthians 15:3-5), a beautiful example of the “faithful sayings” and the “patterns of sound words” that he references in his Pastoral Epistles to St. Timothy and St. Titus. By the second century such things could be identified and recognized as the regula fidei, the “Rule of Faith,” which was later codified in the Creeds and in the Lutheran Confessions.
Such traditions help to keep us on the straight and narrow by confessing the Holy Scriptures and pointing us always back to Christ Jesus as the heart and center of the faith from beginning to end. And that has been essential from the start. The scribes and Pharisees knew the Old Testament, in one sense very well, yet failed to recognize its fulfillment when He was standing right in front of them in the Person of the Incarnate Son. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus knew and relayed the facts of the Cross and Passion and the reports of the empty tomb, yet even with their love for Jesus they too were unable to recognize Him, until He opened the Scriptures to them, and opened their ears, their hearts, and their minds to comprehend and believe that the entire Bible was about Him. That is what the Rule of Faith, the ecumenical Creeds, and our Lutheran Confessions do to this very day, not by adding something new to the Bible, but by confessing what the Church has been taught by God in the Person and work of Christ Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead.
The heretics and heterodox, both ancient and modern, have almost always cited the Bible in support of their false teachings, and that can be quite confusing and misleading to the people of God, even to pastors and theologians. This is another reason why we “earthen vessels” dare not go it alone or rely upon ourselves. And even though the Holy Scriptures are clear, sufficient, and certain in themselves, we do not presume to read them in isolation, by ourselves, as though starting “from scratch,” depending on our own intellect and reasoning. The reading and study of the Holy Scriptures always begins and continues with prayer and depends upon the wisdom and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit (working in and with and through the Word). And the Word of the Lord is always coming to us from outside of ourselves, extra nos, constantly correcting our errors and calling us again and again to repentance. In humility, then, we look to the communion of saints to function as a curb to our cleverness and to hold us accountable to the Church’s faith.
I was reminded of these things last week, when the Treasury of Daily Prayer included an excerpt from St. Vincent of Lérins on “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” His point was that, in approaching the Holy Scriptures, we avoid novelties and idiosyncrasies by observing the rule of universality, antiquity, and consent. This point goes back to the regula fidei of the second century, which likewise took into account the ways in which the apostolic churches across the known world understood, taught, and confessed the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith from the Holy Scriptures. This broad consensus and tradition of the Church’s interpretation of the Bible was the measure by which every potential doctrine could be evaluated. It does not add to the Word of God, but it requires the orthodox reading and preaching of the Scriptures. The Augsburg Confession does the same thing, vis-à-vis the Roman Church, when it cites the early Church fathers and the ecumenical councils in defense of our Lutheran teaching and practice.
In the same way, let us also lean not on our own understanding, but look unto that great cloud of witnesses with which we are surrounded, who point us to Jesus Christ the Crucified and to His Word of Truth. Let us never suppose that we are strong enough, smart enough, or savvy enough to survive the assaults and accusations of the old evil foe on our own – nor imagine that we are able to care for the Church of Christ by our own capacities, ingenuities, and talents. Let us rather learn from our fathers in the faith, confide in our father confessors, and live as the children of God by daily returning to the fountain and source of life in the Word and Spirit of Jesus.
Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!