 Our culture preaches a gospel of radical autonomy wearing the mask of freedom: “My life, my business. If no one gets hurt, what’s the harm?” We like to imagine our sins are private — personal, contained, no one else’s concern. As long as a sin stays hidden or feels small, we feel no urgency to name it.
But Scripture tells a different story. Sin is never only your problem. What we keep in the dark doesn’t stay hidden — it festers, and it does not stay contained to the one carrying it. This is Law-work, and I want to be honest about that before going any further: this piece isn’t going to tell you how to fix it. That’s not what the Law is for. The Law’s job is to tell the truth about what’s actually happening when we sin — and the truth is harder, and stranger, than “I made a mistake.” The Illusion of Radical Autonomy Someone will object: “You’re telling me that some stranger’s sin halfway across the world lands on me? That if I lash out at my spouse, I’ve somehow wounded people I’ve never met?” Yes! That objection is exactly the autonomy the Law is here to expose. You are not your own. You were bought with a price. You were baptized into a Body — not a symbol, not a metaphor, but the actual crucified and risen Body of Christ. And in that Body, Paul writes, “if one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). That is not poetic exaggeration. It is the most literal thing Paul says about the Church. When you sin, the wound is not contained to your own conscience. It is a tear in the communion of saints. Our connection in Jesus is not sentimental — it is, as St. Cyril of Alexandria put it, that we are “blended together with one another and with God.” (In Jo. ev., 11,11:PG 74,561.) Picture a family gathered for a meal, and one member is down with the flu — coughing, sharing the serving spoon. Only one person is sick, but everyone at that table is affected. The mood shifts. Others may catch it. The celebration is marred, whether or not anyone names why. That’s a rough picture of what unrepented sin does inside a congregation: it doesn’t announce itself, but it changes the air everyone is breathing. The Weakest Link and the Air We Breathe Paul makes the same point to the Ephesians from the other direction, urging them to “preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) — as though unity were something that has to be actively guarded because it is just as actively threatened. A chain holds only as well as its weakest link. Ninety-nine sound links don’t save the chain when the hundredth gives way. In a congregation, the sins we think of as small or private are those fraying links. They erode trust slowly, but just as surely:
The High Cost of Hidden Sin Jesus prayed that his followers “may be one... so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). That means our disunity isn’t a private failing either — it’s evangelically costly. The world is watching whether the people who claim to be one Body actually act like it. And the sin of one member doesn’t stay isolated even when it stays hidden, because, as St. Paul warns the Galatians, “a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough” (Galatians 5:9):
This is what St. Augustine meant when he called the Church the Corpus Christi mysticum — the mystical Body of Christ — and preached to his congregation, “You are the body of Christ and his members... Be what you see; receive what you are” (Sermon 272). That sermon was preached at the altar, about the bread they were about to receive. It was not a pep talk about trying harder. It was a description of what they already were, true whether they felt it that morning or not. So here, for now, is where this has to sit: you do not get to sin privately, because there is no private compartment in the Body of Christ for it to stay in. That is simply true, whether or not it feels fixable. Next time, the other half of this: what the Body does with a wound it cannot heal by trying harder — which is not nothing, and is not what you’d expect. How have you seen seemingly “private” actions shift the spiritual air in your own communities? Let’s discuss in the comments below. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]
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 Image: freepik.com Every Pentecost I return to the same question that has shaped my ministry for more than twenty years: does the Holy Spirit still distribute extraordinary gifts to the Church — healing, prophecy, words of knowledge — or did those things end with the New Testament era?
Most Lutherans don't formally deny it. They just don't expect it. I've spent a long time with that assumption. What does Scripture teach? There is no kill switch in the New Testament. No moment where the promises are marked temporary. No sunset clause on the gifts of the Spirit. Cessationism is not derived from careful exegesis followed by a reluctant conclusion. It is constructed after the fact, to explain an absence already present in the church's experience — and then the inference passages are recruited to provide the biblical rationale. It is not primarily an exegetical position. It is an apologetic one. Which raises the uncomfortable prior question: what kind of church life produces that absence in the first place? A congregation whose calendar is organized around activities requiring no particular intervention from the Holy Spirit is unlikely to encounter such intervention. You don't need a word of knowledge for a bake sale or discernment of spirits for a car wash. The absence of the gifts and the absence of expectation are not independent phenomena. They produce each other. Here's the Lutheran angle that I find most compelling: we confess that Jesus is genuinely, bodily present in the bread and wine of communion — not symbolically, not in memory, but actually. If Jesus is genuinely present in the bread, we should be slow to argue that He is absent from the suffering body brought in prayer before that same altar. Real Presence, properly understood, is not a fence. It is a door. I've had almost thirty years of parish experience pressing on this question — three Alpha courses a year at Good Shepherd Lutheran in Pasadena back in the mid- 2000’s, a traveling team that went from Houston to Canada, a trip to Uganda in 2007 where deliverance ministry looked exactly like Mark 1:21-28 on an ordinary day in an ordinary place, and a recent healing evening at Light of Christ Lutheran a person's impaired vision was restored to 20/20 and has remained so. I'm not building doctrine on experience. I'm arguing that cessationism provides the least adequate theological account of what the Church continues to witness — and that what Lutherans already believe about Real Presence points somewhere more interesting than we usually follow it. None of this is an argument for religious enthusiasm. The gifts are for the neighbor, not for spiritual self-promotion. Not everyone is healed — suffering is a real participation in Jesus, not a failure of faith. Word and Sacrament remain the Church's sure and certain means of grace, and nothing supersedes them. A direct word to preachers: on Pentecost Sunday you will read 1 Corinthians 12:3-13 from the lectern. Someone in your congregation will hear that passage and feel something move — a recognition, a hope they've been carrying quietly for years. They will look at you to find out whether it means anything. You don't have to have all the answers. You do have to have thought it through. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor… to set at liberty those who are oppressed." (Luke 4:18) Come, Holy Spirit. The full version of this argument — with exegesis, Lutheran theological framework, global witness, and parish testimony — is available at The Marginal Note on Substack. Look for “There is No ‘Kill Switch.’” Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ordained ELCA minister, spiritual director, and intentional interim specialist based in the greater Houston area. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: Freepik.com Most people who come to spiritual direction are waiting—not for the session to begin, but for themselves to be ready.
They are waiting to feel like they believe what they say they believe. They are waiting for the fog to lift, the doubt to quiet, or the sense of God’s presence to return—or arrive for the first time—before they feel they can really begin. There is a version of the spiritual life that quietly trains people to clean themselves up before they speak. It treats prayer as something you earn access to by getting your interior house in order first. It suggests you must feel sufficiently sincere or resolve the outstanding business between you and God before you presume to show up at the door. I want to explore where that version comes from, and why it misses the radical nature of grace. The Breath in the Locked Room On the evening of the first Easter Sunday, Jesus walked through a locked door into a room full of people who had spent the weekend in hiding. He said peace—before they had explained themselves, before they had demonstrated remorse, and before they had shown any sign of having learned a single thing from the previous three days. And then he did something that John describes with a word that appears only one other time in Scripture. He breathed on them. The Greek word is emphysaō. The only other place it appears in the biblical text is Genesis 2:7, when God formed the first human being from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. What Jesus did in that room was a new creation act. The same breath that animated a human being from dust was exhaled again into people who had not earned it or prepared for it. The Spirit is not the reward for readiness; the Spirit is what makes readiness possible. The Grace That Goes Before This is what the tradition calls prevenient grace—the grace that goes before. That same breath is not just a moment in a locked room; it is the pattern of how God deals with us. It is the grace that exists before your first conscious prayer, before your decision to take the spiritual life seriously, and before you sat across from a spiritual director for the first time. The breath had already been exhaled. In the waters of your baptism, the same Risen Jesus who stood in that upper room breathed the life of new creation into you—not because you were prepared or understood what was happening, but because that is what God does with dust. What this means for the interior life is more practical than it sounds: You do not begin to pray in order to establish contact with a God who is waiting at a distance. You begin to pray because the Spirit who was breathed into you is already praying. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The prayer is already happening. You are not initiating it—you are joining it. Grace First, Comprehension Following This changes the posture of the whole interior life. You are not reaching for what has not yet arrived; you are learning to live from what was already given. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, understood this deeply. He put candidates for baptism through the rites of initiation first—in the dark—before they fully understood what was being done to them. They went into the water before they could explain it. The body received the oil. Only afterward were they told what had happened. His point was not that understanding is unimportant, but that the Spirit was not waiting for understanding to arrive before showing up. The grace came first. The comprehension followed. It still works that way. The Honest Starting Place Spiritual direction, at its best, is simply the practice of helping someone notice what the Spirit has already been doing in them—often in the places they were least expecting it, and frequently in the experiences they most wanted to leave behind. If you have been waiting to feel ready—ready to pray, ready to trust, ready to believe that the forgiveness is actually for you—I want to suggest that the waiting itself, with its doubt, hesitation, and quiet fatigue, may be the very thing to bring to prayer. Not as evidence that something is wrong, but as the honest starting place it already is. You are not behind. You are not disqualified. You are dust that has already been breathed into—and the breath has not left you. That is where the interior life begins. Not with your readiness. With his. If you find yourself waiting like this, spiritual direction can be a place to begin—not once you are ready, but exactly where you are. You can learn more about how I work here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.  Image: freepik.com Most people who contact me about this topic start the same way. They apologize first. They say something like, “I know this probably sounds crazy,” or “I don’t know if this is even a real thing,” before they get to what they actually called to say. And what they actually called to say is usually some version of this: something is wrong in my house, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I want to say clearly: it doesn’t sound crazy. And yes, it is a real thing. The Christian tradition has always understood that places are not neutral to us. Because of the Incarnation—the fact that God became flesh in Jesus—we know that the physical world matters deeply to Him. What has happened in these spaces continues to affect those who dwell there: through memory, through relationships, and sometimes in ways we do not fully understand. This is not because places themselves hold some independent power, but because God’s creation, though good, is not untouched by sin, suffering, and history. For that reason, blessing and consecration matter—not as magic, not as superstition, but as the church’s practiced response to the reality that the physical and spiritual are not as neatly separated as modern Western culture assumes. When the church blesses a space, we are speaking God’s Word into it, naming it as belonging to Jesus and placing it under His promise. A blessing properly done does truly set a place apart. It becomes more than a mere building; it is consecrated—rightfully reclaimed and marked as holy ground for the life of the family and the glory of God. The ancient church blessed homes, fields, ships, tools, and thresholds. The medieval church developed rites for the reconciliation of spaces marked by violence or desecration. Martin Luther retained the practice of blessing and the liturgical tradition has never entirely lost it. In practice, this often looks like a pastor moving through the rooms of a home, speaking Scripture aloud, praying specifically over each space, and anointing doorposts and thresholds with oil—a physical, unhurried act of reclaiming territory for the Lord who already owns it. What the church has mostly lost is the pastoral fluency to talk about it plainly. So let me offer a framework. These are not steps to diagnose a phenomenon, but ways of listening carefully so that what is needed can be brought to bear. The Weight of History First, I want to understand the history involved. What do you know about what happened in this space before you arrived? Not because every difficult history produces spiritual disturbance, but because history matters. Sin and trauma leave what we might call a “social debt” in a space—a residue of what has taken place that continues to shape the life of those who dwell there, both visibly and in ways harder to name. We look at the past to see where the peace of Christ needs to be specifically applied. Discerning the Experience Second, I want to understand what is actually being experienced. There is a significant difference between a vague sense of unease, a pattern of relational conflict tied to a space, recurring nightmares, a sense of presence, and phenomena that are more difficult to categorize. I am not interested in sensationalism. Many presenting problems are explainable in the physical or psychological realm—structural issues, environmental factors, or even the heavy lingering fog of personal trauma and grief. (I recently saw a meme that showed a guy with a flashlight exploring his attic with the words, “Homeowner relieved to discover disturbing sounds in attic to be ghosts and not structural issues he can’t afford to repair.”) But I am going to take your report seriously, helping you discern whether what you are feeling is a matter for a home handyman/contractor, a counselor, or a pastor. The Spiritual Landscape of the Heart Third, I want to understand the spiritual condition of the people in the space. This is not a judgment—it is a pastoral question. A Christian is not defenseless; you belong to Jesus. But where we turn away from Him—toward things that promise control, knowledge, or power apart from God—we can place ourselves in a state of confusion and vulnerability. We must be honest about the fact that such vulnerability is rarely left a vacuum. Jesus himself describes malicious spirits as creatures who, finding themselves wandering through arid places, are perpetually looking for a place to rest (Matthew 12:43–45)—and they are more than happy to take up residence where the door has been left unlatched. When we seek spiritual agency outside of Jesus, we inadvertently offer a standing invitation to forces that exploit our desire for control. This is not to say that suffering is always the fruit of one’s own choices, but that the doors we open matter. Our interior lives shape both what we perceive and how we bear it; therefore, the remedy is not just “clearing” a room, but a return to the protection and presence of the Lord. The Church’s Provision Fourth, and most importantly, I want to point toward what the tradition actually offers. There is no space in which Jesus is not already Lord. The question is not whether He is present, but whether His presence is being trusted, spoken, and received. Theologically, we live in the “between time.” Because of Good Friday and Easter, the decisive victory has been won; the cosmos is redeemed. In military terms, D-Day has passed and the outcome is certain, yet we have not yet reached VE Day. In this tension, there is still resistance, suffering, and “groaning” as we await the final fulfillment of that victory. While the greater strategic battle is over, skirmishes remain in the shadows. The church has specific resources for this reality: prayer, the formal rite of blessing, the speaking of the Word into the space, anointing, and the presence of the community. These are not folk remedies or spiritual placebos. They are the church’s concrete, practiced response to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord of every space, every history, and every power that operates within creation. We are simply applying the victory of the King to the territory He has already claimed. Now what? This is not paranormal investigation. I am not interested in evidence of the supernatural for its own sake. I am a pastor. My concern is for the people who are suffering and for bringing to bear the gifts Jesus has given His church. This is not something you are meant to carry alone or solve privately. If you are carrying something like this and don’t know where to bring it—and I understand that making that first contact can feel as awkward as the apology you rehearsed before calling—the contact page is the place to start. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] |
