One of my favorite scenes of The Simpsons is from the episode “Bart the Murderer.” Bart is in jail, pumping iron, when two guards usher in the family pastor to visit Bart. “Rev. Lovejoy!” Bart exclaims. “You’ve come to comfort me?” “Yes, Bart,” he says, then sits next to him, and pats him on the shoulder, saying, “There, there. There, there.”

Rev. Lovejoy has no real comfort to give. The prophet Jeremiah accused the clergy of his day of the same thing. “They have … healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ When there is no peace” [6:14].

A few months ago my son had a seizure. In the ER he was non-responsive. He wasn’t breathing. He had to be intubated. It seemed like the end. And that’s when a hospital chaplain showed up….

“Daily the world is oppressed by new and growing evils.” Thus spake Gregory the Great, in the 6th century. “Daily the world is oppressed by new and growing evils.” A thousand years later, in the 16th c., Luther said, “There has never been greater error, sin, and falsehood on earth from the beginning as there has been in the last century.”

It feels like our day is different. The transgender craze seems a unique rebellion against nature itself. But each age has its madness, as we spin closer to the day of judgment. Luther saw the immorality of the clergy as a harbinger of the end: “Unchastity has taken forms against nature and has drowned no estate as much as the spiritual estate” - the spiritual estate meaning the clergy and monastics. The depravity of our day may be uniquely celebrated by government and corporations, but the rebellion against the Creator is not new. The historic Lutheran complaints about abuses testify that the deep perversions inside the Roman Catholic monasteries and seminaries were already scandalous five hundred years ago….