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Silicon Valley Bank was the second biggest bank failure in American history. In the face of this Christians remain comforted by Christ. Which master do we serve? Money or God? Who is steadfast and will never fail you? Yeah, you know.
Walther Against the Theatre: stmarksferndale.com/waltheragainstthetheatre
Listen every Saturday at 9 AM (Pacific) at KFUO.org or on your favorite podcast app.
How does the Law serve the Christian? Does the Gospel mean the Law is useless for believers? What does Galatians 5 and 6 say? What about article VI of Solid Declaration and the Bible verses cited in it? Good stuff for the comfort of our souls!
Ferndale’s first official drag show happened at Ferndale’s Repertory Theatre on February 25, 2023. Let’s shine some light onto the performers of the show to see just how family-friendly drag really is. Caution: explicit content.
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Listen every Saturday at 9 AM (Pacific) at KFUO.org or on your favorite podcast app.
Was Walther being pietistic when he wrote his ten arguments against attending the theatre? He gives us his defense against those who think so. Then the Revs. William Weedon and Robert Preus help us sort out pietism and practical theology before Francis Schaeffer weighs in on pietism in relation to the battle we’re in against the spirit of our age.
Listen every Saturday at 9 AM (Pacific) at KFUO.org or on your favorite podcast app.
Listener comments continue the conversation on the curious topic of the evils of the entertainment industry. Rev. Theodore Graebner helps us navigate the Borderland of Right and Wrong. Also: social media, suicide, depression, The Chosen, and keeping one’s head!
Humboldt County’s Board of Supervisors joined the rulers whom the Lord holds in derision (Psalm 2) when they condemned as hate speech a warning against a drag show.
Ferndale’s City Council met last night (2/15/23) and public commenters cited the county’s resolution as a weighted reason for why the city should bring a similar resolution to next month’s agenda. I and another from our congregation spoke against it. My words are below. We both prepared for the standard five minute comment time, but the council decided to limit all comments to three minutes. It appears that all the comments were for nought as Councilman Skip Jorgensen had prepared a comment of his own, stating that he wanted the council to consider his anti-hate resolution.
Mr. Mayor and members of the council,
Thank you for your service to our city. May God bless you with wisdom to carry out your vocations.
Last month the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors passed what they call an anti-hate resolution, similar to what has been pushed on you. It was presented as a condemnation of recent incidents of local hate speech and St. Mark’s warning to our neighbors that the Old Steeple was working to bring a drag show open to children into Ferndale has been repeatedly cited as one of these incidents. In its stated rationale the county’s resolution leaned on the loaded language of tolerance, namely the neo-Marxist vocabulary of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is a recent example of local elected officials stepping outside of their office to cast a vote to govern the hearts and minds of residents. It is a breach of conduct and un-American given that it is antithetical to the first amendment of our Constitution; and it is authoritarian, though currently—by the grace of God—impotent authoritarianism. That they thought themselves authorized to condemn a Christian church’s freedom of speech during their civic proceedings communicates one of two things. Either they do not understand their own vocational responsibilities, the authority they have been granted, and the limits thereof; or they are willing to rebel against their office and seize power that they have not been given. A third option is that it could be a little of both.
Regardless, the members of St. Mark Lutheran Church recognize, in accordance with our religious views, that a so-called anti-hate resolution such as this is not in keeping with our Triune God’s Word as it not only promotes sin, specifically—but not limited to—the endorsement of LGBTQ sins, but that it also makes complicit in sin those who give any validity to the resolution.
The Christian conscience is bound by the Word of God alone. For this reason, when sinful dangers—such as drag shows—present themselves, we choose to use our freedom of speech, in accord with our vocations to warn our neighbors, that they might avoid sin. Likewise, as the 2021 city council members know, because of our Christian convictions we choose to use our freedom of speech to offer our neighbors the same healing we have received in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. That some call this act of love hate strikes us as odd.
Whether our speech is received with wisdom or scoffing is beyond our control. Likewise, we use our freedom to condemn resolutions that encourage sin. They are vocationally invalid and therefore undeserving of compliance, agreement, or whatever it is our public servants imagine we’re to do with the product of their self-aggrandizement. [My time ran out at the end of this paragraph.]
Our current sign points our neighbors to James 4:17. “[W]hoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” We know the right thing to do and regardless of what the civil authorities say, we will do it. As the apostles teach us, “we must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29). “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to [county supervisors, or city councils] you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19)
St. Mark Lutheran Church will continue to pray for each of you, that you will exercise your civic vocations appropriately and not be led into the trap of setting yourselves against the one true God.
May our crucified and risen Lord, Jesus Christ, bless you and keep you today and forever,
Rev. Tyrel Bramwell (2 Cor. 12:10)
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The Ferndale Fortitude (Vol. 3 No. 1, February 6, 2023)
Proponents of drag shows make the argument that they are performance art. The defense, as I have heard it in recent weeks, often includes an appeal to popular movies and, ultimately, Shakespearian plays, where men played the role of women on stage.
With a little more knowledge of history, the advocates of drag shows could extend their examples well beyond Elizabethan England to the Romans and Greeks and the beginning of Western civilization. And there is no need to stop there either. Cross-dressing was prevalent in 1406 BC, for instance, when Moses penned Deuteronomy. “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God,” (Deut. 22:5).
Far from a ridiculous prohibition against women wearing jeans—or whatever dismissive straw man the professors at Cal Poly Humboldt present to their students—in this verse, God tells His people not to behave like the Canaanites, whose fertility worship was directed toward Asarte (Baal’s twin sister) and often featured men masquerading as women and vice versa and with links to homosexual behavior associated with Baal worship.
Though drag is clearly not something the Triune God approves of, let us be gracious to our LGBTQ neighbors and concede the point that drag shows are theatre. Does this please you, neighbor? Wonderful.
Now, regarding theatre, Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca were brilliant thinkers, and they had nothing but disdain for it. Plato said, “Plays excite the passions, turn them into a wrong channel, and are, for this reason, hurtful to good morals.” Aristotle wrote, “Attendance of plays ought to be forbidden the young folks. The permission of attending them is dangerous until maturity of age and education have established them in soberness, and until they have been rendered strong in virtue and shot-proof against temptation and debaucheries.” It seems Aristotle was opposed to transing the children. He adds, “Moral corruption was generally peculiar to the profession of actors.” Hollywood confirms his claim. Seneca said, “One will seldom leave the theatre without having grown more ambitious and voluptuous.” The latter adjective speaks to sensual pleasure, while the former’s negative use conveys selfishness.
These men, not one of them Christian—lest I am accused of appealing to my biases—employed common sense alone to conclude that theatre, which we grant includes drag shows, harms a healthy society, not to mention the children. 600 years before Christ and 200 hundred years before Plato, the Athenian legislator, Solon, knew that the theatre’s particular threat to society was that the plays represented, in an interesting and entertaining way, the deceptions of man, thereby encouraging audiences to practice the immoral behavior portrayed on stage. He asked Thespis, who introduced theatre to Athens, if he was not ashamed of the lying in the plays. The father of all thespians, drag queens included—we readily acknowledge—replied, “I am merely lying for fun.”
Solon answered, “If we love such jest, the jest will turn into earnest!” And this is exactly what has happened, isn’t it? What once was tolerated, even celebrated, as pretend is now declared to be true. Where once a man in costume pretended to be a woman—in thespian language—for fun, now all of society is supposed to take seriously men who act like women. Anything less than earnest acceptance and approval of immoral behavior is today referred to as hate.
So it is that theatre corrupts nature. And as we acknowledge this, though not limited to local LGBTQ efforts to corrode Ferndale’s morals through drag shows, it certainly includes it.
But again, we are talking about theatre in general, not one particular aspect of its debauchery. Sadly, the reasoning of the ancient sages was on full display at The Ferndale Repertory Theater’s recent performance of The Elephant Man. I, to my shame, attended this performance at the first publicized showing. I encountered a “gender outlaw” when buying my ticket, a noteworthy example that the jest of the stage is now taken seriously in the world. The only time during the evening when I wasn’t exposed to a lie was when an actress forgot to act and exposed her breasts to the audience, thereby proving that the theatre is no place for children or Christians.
So, yes, we may readily acknowledge that drag shows have their place in theatre, but that appeal does nothing to mask the odor of its immorality. If anything, it adds stink to the stench. The question is whether we’re honest enough to confront this threat to Ferndale’s morals or not? My words are, no doubt, ridiculed by non-Christian residents of our city.
What about you, Christian? Will you dismiss them?
To quote the 3rd-century African martyr, Cyprian, “To me it seems wholly incompatible with the majesty of God and the precepts of the gospel to permit the church to be defiled with anything like this. The Law forbids men to wear women’s garments. Deuteronomy 22:5. But how much worse is it not to put on women’s garments only, but also to give expression to unseemly manners, and so instruct others therein? Thereby the young… learn nothing good, moreover, they are thoroughly spoiled.”
If you want to learn more about why Christ’s Church opposes drag shows and the corruption of good morals, I can be reached via the contact page.
This is the video version of Pastor Bramwell’s February 2023 letter to St. Mark.
Revelation 21:7-8 tells us that it’s eternally detrimental to be cowardly. Thank the Lord, Christian, that you are not cowardly. You are courageous! When the world rages against you, you need not fear. God has given you the courage to stand before Him and confess your own individual sins. There is nothing cowardly about that.
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St. Mark Lutheran Church 