While attending a conference, I ran into my friend, colleague, and brother in arms under the cross, Father David. He joyfully related that he had recently conducted two baptisms, that he had thus raised two people from the dead. I was struck by the expression, because I used it myself a couple years ago to explain the work of the church to an unbeliever.

Those of us on the one-year lectionary had just celebrated the Divine Service of Trinity 16 - in which both the Old Testament and Gospel lessons were the raising of the dead. For my congregation, this was particularly poignant having just laid to rest a beloved 92 year old sister in Christ, and this was certainly on everyone’s mind during my Trinity 16 sermon.

Remembering my conversation years ago with a young university student led me to consider just how little unbelievers - and these days even believers - really understand what the Church does, and what the purpose of the Church’s liturgies are.

Dating back to the Reformation, the radical reformers, were under the influence of rationalism when they began to refuse baptism to infants and to deny baptismal regeneration. They perceived a Christianity not grounded in the eternal and transcendent mystery of God’s grace, but rather in the imminent work and rational confession of the individual in this world.

Rationalism’s lines became sharper during the so-called Enlightenment. The Deist Thomas Jefferson’s edited Bible removed things like miracles, and claimed to reduce the Christian faith to ethical principles. As the Deists denied the literal resurrection of Jesus, they certainly would disagree that in Holy Baptism, we raise the dead. Much of American Protestantism - especially those in the low-church Methodist and Holiness movements - took a hard turn toward the imminent, that which is found in this life as opposed to the life of the world to come.

The Quakers were an influential sect in the Colonial period in America. They essentially abolished Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and liturgical worship - and replaced these supernatural, sacramental acts that occur in space and time (and yet are eternal) with an emphasis on the pedestrian and imminent - what later came to be known as the Social Gospel, and what is known today as Social Justice.

The Pentecostal/Charismatic movement in the 20th century likewise downplayed the sacraments established by our Lord in search of placing the focus on the believer himself, in his ability to “speak in tongues” or display some manifestation in the here and now - sometimes called “Baptism of the Holy Spirit”. We often see members of these church bodies argue that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are “man-made rituals” - when they really should capitalize the first M. They are indeed “Man-made rituals,” established by the Man who is God, who has commanded the Church to administer these sacraments in His name, and has promised to work through them for salvation, that is, for the raising of the dead to everlasting bodily life.

Pietism did not eliminate the sacraments within Lutheran churches in which it holds sway, but Pietism emphasizes good works over and against theology. One result is a de-emphasis of the sacraments, shifting the emphasis instead to ethics and morality. The watering down of the American Lutheran liturgy, the gutting of ceremonial actions among American Lutherans, and the commonplace practice of infrequent communion are the offspring and the effects of of Pietism - past and present.

Modernism also picked up the theme of downplaying the supernatural in favor of a leftist political, moral, and theological agenda. Former Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong denies the resurrection of Jesus and the virgin birth. He is essentially an atheist who denies the supernatural, but who believes in keeping the Church around as a do-gooder organization - with the do-gooderism being identified with left-wing politics and economics.

The effect of Rationalism, Pietism, and Modernism are laid out in the three novellas that comprise Bishop Bo Giertz’s work, The Hammer of God.

Today, we have moved into a new phase: Postmodernism. We are now, culturally speaking, heavily influenced by Cultural Marxism - typically under the rubric of so-called Social Justice. Mainstream Christian denominations - including the Francis-led left-wing of the Roman Catholic Church - have most certainly moved in this direction. They downplay the transcendent and focus on the immanent. They see the Church’s job in terms of this world rather than the next - with leftist politics and economics predominating.

And this is where my conversation with an unbelieving young woman falls into place.

She saw my clerical collar and came up to me to engage in a confrontation. She described herself as an “intersectional feminist.” Unlike the questions of unbelievers in the past who wanted to challenge us, she did not ask the old questions like:

• Who made God?

• Why do you believe an old book written by men that is filled with contradictions?

• What about dinosaurs?

• Do you believe in a talking snake?

• Do you believe people who believe in other religions are going to hell?

Instead, the first and only question out of her mouth was:

• What are you doing about racism?

To an “intersectional feminist,” a “Social Justice Warrior,” the one overarching sin is "intolerance” or “bigotry.” And this sin manifests itself in the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia (and its variants). It is a sin that is essentially only capable of being committed by straight white men - especially if they hold to traditional religion, conservative politics, or free-market economics.

To her question, “What are you doing about racism?” I replied, and this is pretty close to a verbatim:

“Well, I love my parishioners of every ethnic group like my own family members. I give them the blood of Christ and I drink it from the same cup with them. I am with them on their deathbeds and as they die. I’m with them when they are suffering and struggling. I’m with them in the good times as well. I love them like my own family. I don’t care what race they are. But you know what the Church really does? We raise the dead.”

She looked at me with a smirk, blinked, and said, “You raise the dead?”

“Yeah. We raise the dead. That’s what we do.”

She wandered away.

The poor girl has been brainwashed into the cult of Social Justice - which is confessed and proclaimed in the two major universities of New Orleans, the once-Jewish institution Tulane, as well as the allegedly Roman Catholic Loyola, run by the Jesuit order. Both of these universities are raising young people to disregard the transcendent and the sacramental in favor of leftist politics and Cultural Marxism.

Social Justice has even been permitted to define the purpose of the Mass at Loyola.

While we, the Church, continue to raise the dead by the proclamation of the Gospel and the administration of the Holy Sacraments, fewer unbelievers - and even Christians - seem to get it. There is more to what we do when we baptize a person or gather around the altar to receive Holy Communion than meets the eye. As we confess in the Nicene Creed, there are indeed “things visible and invisible.”

Perhaps it is a little more abstract for many lay people. But for us pastors, who spend a lot of time in hospitals, at deathbeds, in funeral homes, and at graves - not to mention giving pastoral care to sinners, baptizing young and old alike (I have baptized people from one day old to folks in their seventies and eighties), witnessing the joyful reception of Holy Absolution, and having the divine and supernatural privilege to place the true body and blood of the living Christ into the mouths of our parishioners - this command to “raise the dead” that our Lord gives us is the substance of our daily lives.

“We raise the dead. That’s what we do.”