ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN CONFESSIONS LC2 40 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800 825 5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> DAVID: But how do I find the neighbor in genuine need? >> DR. KOLB: God has so structured his world, Luther believed, that it's not hard to find those neighbors that he wants us to serve, David. Luther, as a social theorist, was not terribly original. The medieval world taught that there were three the technical term we usually use in English is estates. The German word is "stand" and the Latin word is "status" (phonetic) and the translation estate is almost meaningless. So we might say there were three walks of life or three situations in which God had placed people. They were the household, the community or the state isn't really the correct word for a political organization in the 16th century yet. There weren't all the trappings of the modern state at least in place. But the family community; the political community; and the church, the religious community. Now, I think when we talk about our Christian callings, we need to recognize that in Luther's day the family community not only had family functions but also had the functions that we would place under the term occupation or job, the economic activities of human life. So, if we were going to translate Luther's understanding of Christian calling into our language, we would say that there are four situations in which God finds us. There are four paths or walks of life which we take through life in family, in occupation, in our communities, and in our congregations. Luther recognized that this is a pattern for all of human life. It's not something that just Christians experience. Different societies will organize institutionally these four walks of life in different ways. In his culture, as we've said, occupation and family were combined. In many modern totalitarian states, religion was supposedly abolished but was really being subsumed under the political. The Nazi party had liturgies, had many religious activities, even though they described them as secular political activities. And the same is true in the Soviet Union. And so, institutionally, we may organize these four walks of life in different ways. But these four walks of life govern all of human life. And so Luther could talk about the fact that unbelievers, false believers, could be righteous in terms of their horizontal outward performance as what he called the civil righteousness in a civic way, a way that serves the political community without having a heart that truly pleases God through faith. So all people are born into these four walks of life. Then Luther said we are given his word in German is ompt or more empter (phonetic) in the plural in any given walk of life. The term that we have used in English comes from the Latin word for ompt. The word we use is office. And we still use the word in that sense in the sheriff's the office of sheriff. I'm running for the office of sheriff or the office of president, certainly the office of pastor. We don't talk very much, though, about the office of mother, the office of husband, the office of child or the office of physician or teacher or factory worker. And so I like to use the term "response ability" for as a kind of loose translation or paraphrase of what Luther meant when he said we have offices. The word ompt (ph) in German like the Latin officium (ph) in the 16th century had really a double thrust. It was a certain position in society to which you might be appointed or which you perhaps just inherited, so to speak, the role of father or mother, husband or wife. So you had that position in society. But within the concept of ompt was also the function that goes with that position. So, though Luther didn't develop the language in this way, as we are talking with our people about how they live their daily Christian lives, we can talk about both roles and functions under this concept of responsibility. As you've seen on the screen, I also like to misspell "response ability" in this case. I like to talk about our offices as the ability to respond, to respond specifically to the neighbor's need, as we've just been talking about. Because God interweaves our lives in such a way that we are called to serve each other. We aren't atoms. We aren't like pearls on a string in human community. Our lives are placed together in mutual interdependence. We are called to serve one another in all these various response abilities in the various roles we are given father, mother, son, daughter and in the functions of those roles. A father's function may be to change diapers, to play football with the kids or all the other functions that go with that. Now, again, Luther points out we actually have functions and roles whether we are believers or not. But Christians recognize that these functions and roles aren't simply duties. They're not simply things God says you have to do. They are callings from God. There's not some inner sense that boils up from within us that says this is what you ought to do. No, it's God calling. It's God saying, "I have a role for you." God generally provides for us provides food for us, let's say, by having grain grow out of the ground and the like. But sometimes he gives us manna. God usually sees to it that we are taken care of by other people, in spite of the fact that on occasion, on rare occasion he has sent the food directly from heaven. So we receive from the hands of our bakers, of our ranchers, of our farmers, of our mothers and fathers, other members of the family, we receive the food that sustains our lives on a daily basis. And that's God working. That's God working through the calls he gives us. The calls to exercise our responsibility as vocations from him. That's the way Luther confessed the presence of God right in the middle of our lives and saw faith blossoming as we listened to the call of God, so that we can fulfill God's plan for us by taking care of the needs of our neighbors.