In another forum I commented that the modern contraceptive ethic leaves us with a burdened conscience and unnecessarily so. Katie helpfully reveals in the following post that it is the whole baby-making ethic that is corrupted. The consequence is undue burden for the fertile and infertile alike.

What is the cross of barrenness? Surely it is one of loss and death and grief, but many in the church don’t realize that the cross of barrenness is also one of warring against the world’s religion of control.

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In a recent post The Church of the Consumer, I considered how our expectations of church can either give us an appreciation or a dissatisfaction with how the Trinity works through sacrament, liturgy, hymnody, and preaching. Pr. Peters offers a helpful summary of how unpractical the church is by worldly standards:

Hardly anything you see or we do on Sunday morning is practical.  Not the vestments or the liturgy, not the organ or the choir, not the paraments and painting or the wooden pews and kneelers.  But that is the point.  It was practicality that got us in trouble in the first place.  We sought a short cut to achieving our dreams of glory and it came with a price tag of death, disorder, and disappointment.  We don’t need a better life now as much as we need a life that is stronger than death, mercy to forgive our sins, and hope to carry us through a life too filled with suffering, disappointment, and pain.  Christian faith does not guarantee a path void of mountains or valleys.  This is not some great interstate highway to heaven in which the deep places of life have been filled in and the hills cut down to make it all easier on us.  Oh, sure, somebody will throw Isaiah and John the Baptizer at me here and say but…  Well, I don’t think that is exactly what those words mean.

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