There are dark days ahead. Indeed, they are upon us. As these evil days tick by, there are few things that disquiet me more than the lack of insight and the lack of will within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) to speak openly about the waxing global totalitarianism which looms over our lives. Rather, all too often I see a baffling credulity when it comes to the narratives we are daily subjected to from on high, which are designed to gaslight us about what is rather openly taking place, and render us mentally and physically inert in its face.
What follows is further musing on the failure of the LCMS Synodical Leaders and Tastemakers (SLT) to apprehend the times we are living in. My purpose is less journalistic than journal-istic; by which I mean that I am not seeking to report the facts, but rather to record their happening with an unapologetic bias. As one would in a diary, the key to which has been lost, and where I function as my own older sister, impishly posting its contents online.
Knowing of my older sister’s peccadillos — and fearing, as I do, a slow day for the local editor of the nightly news — I have of course tried to keep my rambling semi-coherence classy. Regrettably, I am unable to void the other artifacts of such journaling; namely, that it tends to be incomplete and episodic, with indeterminate periods of time between entries.
With that said, let me begin my recitation proper.
At the outset of what we call the COVID-19 pandemic, reasonable people disagreed on the severity of what we were faced with. Those who adopted a pessimistic — or, dare I say, catastrophic — outlook also reasonably disagreed on the measures necessary to productively react to it.
For my part, having lived through SARS, the Bird Flu, the Swine Flu, and Ebola (as too have the SLT, it must be noted), I took a dismissive approach to this new panic. When the question was posed in my family group chat, wondering in February 2020 what preparations we each had made against the impending “pandemic”, my response was one of levity: “I bought a bed pan, and a cyanide pill for if I overfill the bed pan.”
Weeks later I was more concerned. Not for the virus, but for the response, which was already promising to be orders of magnitude greater in scale than anything I had seen before. In late February/early March 2020 I messaged my brother and an LCMS Pastor we are close with saying, “They are going to seize the opportunity to restrict our freedoms further. We will see a new Patriot Act over this.”
Within a few more weeks we saw the national shuttering of businesses and houses of worship alike. Our just-in-time economy, which can suffer insults of this kind about as well as a heart in arrhythmia when the pacemaker battery has just died, was shut down over a virus with a prognosis that was already at that time demonstrably similar to that of the seasonal flu. Which, in a convenient twist, disappeared from the radar at exactly the same time and has been missing ever since.
But the real tip-off that something Lucifarian was afoot came at the end of the 15 Days the powers that be promised would get us through the worst of it. The lockdowns were extended through April. More specifically, through April 12th, the date for the High Holy Day of the Christian calendar in 2020: Easter Sunday. The Paschal Feast was cancelled by government edict. Issues, Etc. guest David Sander informs us with approbation that all the REAL sciency scientists knew from the beginning that this would be necessary, but they had to get the camel’s nose under the tent with 15 Days first. Meanwhile the SLT assured us this was for the purpose of loving our neighbors.
Instead, we view this limitation of church services more as a duty and opportunity to act for the benefit of our fellow citizens, especially those most vulnerable (“love your neighbor as yourself,” Mark 12:31). We respect government authority as it acts for the physical well-being of our great nation and the world.
From President Harrison’s Comments on Government Recommendations, March 16, 2020
Obedience to the government barring Christians from the Lord’s table was justified by Romans 13. One wonders what the Roman Christians themselves, secreting bread and wine to the catacombs for consecration, would have said about this.
During this time we were also treated to SLT think pieces emphasizing how we can still be the Church… separately. “We are the church when we are unable to meet together with other believers.” Those who know the meaning of the word “ecclesia” will, I hope, not miss the irony of this saying.
Time passed under lockdown yet, even with the passing of the 45-days-to-slow-the-spread, many of our LCMS churches remained closed. It wasn’t until a month after the April shutdowns ended that Rev. Harrison published his “Encouragement and Resources for Reopening Churches” on May 29th, 2020. And we can be glad he took the time to do this when he did, because he was soon to be occupied elsewhere.
On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd died of a Fentanyl overdose while in police custody, under suspicion of passing counterfeit bills. The incident sparked nation-wide protests, often manifesting as riots, which lasted through the month of June and into the month of July. The reporting on the resultant May 27th looting of the Minneapolis Target showed me images of thieves walking the same aisles my southwestern feet have trod — albeit me without a free big screen TV.
Now, mind, for those of you who have lost recollection of this period to the memory hole: these riots happened as churches were STARTING to THINK about opening back up. Again, see the date on Harrison’s resources guide above. The nation was still (as it is now) very much in the grips of COVID paranoia. Yet the government officials spearheading the perpetual fear and isolation campaign placed their full support behind these riots. At a time when state actors were keeping funerals to immediate family only, George Floyd was given 3 State funerals (or permutations thereof) in Houston, Minneapolis, and Raeford, North Carolina.
Standing in the lobby of my workplace on June 8th, 2020, watching CNN display the stream of thousands (yes, thousands) of mourners parading past that casket was when any lingering credulity I had granted the COVID narrative utterly left my body.
Eight days after the inciting event, Floyd’s death, Rev. Harrison published his Statement on George Floyd and the Ensuing Riots on June 2nd.
I do not here wish to belabor what a colossal political and theological misstep that was. Others have done so (or, at least, I assume they have). Rather, what I am interested in pointing out is the fact that the series of events following the death of Floyd was so clearly spun up for the purposes of ruling class machinations, and so blatantly at odds with the simultaneous COVID narrative, that failure to apprehend the blatant falsity of both can only speak to a form of spiritual blindness. Again, a failure to interpret the signs of the time.
This was not the last the Synod had to say about racism over that summer. In a spectacular example of turning at the direction of the oligarch-controlled news media’s bit and bridle, LCMS Inc. carried water simultaneously for the racism narrative (see here, here) and the COVID narrative (see here, here). And this rather than challenging the both of the narratives as the obvious social manipulations that they were and are.
I also want to point out the level of urgency the statement was published with, denominated by the number of days from the inciting event to Harrison’s statement. God willing, we will return to this in another installment.
Because this one is done.
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