I ended up preaching about 2,800 sermons, and they are longer than your average blog post. This is the 500th blog post. I was goaded to start this blog in 2007. A member came back from the Lutheran Church Misery Synod’s national convention saying that my voice has got to be heard. Another member, about that same time, said that he wanted to know what I thought about synodical issues more than any other pastor. So it being hard to kick against goads, I started posting.
Originally, I had the comments turned on. I turned them off circa 2013 or so. That was also about the time I stopped sending a blog to Brother John Steadfast. Before there was such a thing as the Next Door App we confessional Lutherans already had our own little flame throwing sites. And the usual suspects could be found on many of them. As one who is prone to write letters to editors, congressmen, magazines, and blogs, I recognize the type. Singularly, such can be helpful but en masse it ends up to be a firing squad in the round.
In retirement, I have more time to write blogs in addition to the 23 I have from my days in office I have 16 more unpublished ones. I have never been able to stop writing. I don’t need to publish but I do need to write. I can’t see me ever doing a podcast or vlog; both of which I find ‘funny.’ Who would have thought we’d go from a visual back to audio? But from what I can tell it’s not truly going back to audio. It’s going to performance art. We all know that could audio can paint more vivid pictures that plain video or even video with visual effects. Making you think of a pink elephant is more vivid than showing you a picture of one. Or as recent Audible ad has it: “There is more to imagine when you listen.”
Once podcasts morph into vlog-casts, the party’s over. Once the mind’s eye is captured by the shallowness and banality of YouTube, so much for thinking. We’ll just tune in for the latest upload from the latest Internet Influencer. And EMP might forestall this, but what’s more likely a war, disease, disaster, or economic crush will cause it to not just morph but mutate. Covid restrictions gave us pastors and people accepting virtual consecration! There’s is no telling what the next meltdown will bring.
You know that adage where Christ plants a Church Satan builds a chapel? With each knew medium of communication, the Church thought she was seizing the high ground. Think of the Lutheran’s radio program “The Lutheran Hour” and TV show “This is the Life” or the Roman Catholic’s radio and TV star Bishop Fulton Sheen. Want the mutated version? Look up “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin.
Even if I concede the point that some of these were meet, right, and salutary for spreading, promoting, ‘selling’ (?) Christianity, will anyone gainsay the point that the Devil has done far more deleterious things with these ‘advances’ in communication technology? We’re there’s an internet connection, there’s a trunkline to hell. I’m not saying the Devil is the Internet, but it’s a pit the opening of which belches out smoke and locusts to obliterate the Son (pun intended) and to torture people to the point of longing to die but not being able to (Rev. 9:1-11). Fifteen minutes reading a Nextdoor thread ought to get you there.
To some, writing a blog and sending it out into the smokey hell of the Internet is about as useful as rearranging the proverbial chairs on the Titanic. I don’t see myself as doing that. I see myself as shouting, “Get to the Lifeboat!” That would be Christ, His Church, His Word and Sacraments not some disembodied Internet guru or pastor.
