Strange but true. . .

As we are now in the holy season of great decoration, I have noticed a rather peculiar phenomenon.  Where I live the Halloween decorations seem to have reached the heights of Christmas and perhaps eclipsed them.  House after house had towering skeletons or ghosts along with giant sized spiders and speakers that sent loud spooky laughter into the night.  These were not the domain of the well to do but on meager homes and yards even more.  They had been up for a long time prior to Halloween and after the trick or treat day was gone, some of those folks merely thrust a Santa next to the skeleton or put a baby in a manger before the ghostly figure or turned the scary troop into a marching band for Christmas.  Strange but true.

I do not know what to make of this all.  When did Halloween graduate from pranks and candy and dress up to a full fledged decoration day?  The motorized blow up craze surely helped but they are still pricey and hard to store.  When did it become normal to clutter your hard with homage to the devil or fake tombstones or spiders big enough to eat Manhattan?  Is it the same way where you live?  The weirder colors of Halloween lights somehow evolve into red and green or other more Christmassy colors but it is fairly obvious that the spooky stuff has taken prominence.  Do church goers also engage in this kind of dance with demons on All Hallows' Eve or is this a sign of the growing size of the nones or dechurched population?  I wish I knew what to think of it all.

I also find it amazing that there is a growing business of folks who will put up your decorations for you (and, I presume, take them down when the season is ended although I see a lot of them up year round).  Is the quest for self-expression so great that if you have no time, you will pay somebody to do it for you?  Have the decoration stores been so successful in touting their wares that if you don't put something up because you are too busy you feel obligated to have somebody do it for you?  I wish someone would explain to me how all of this came about.  It seems rather sudden.  One day there were a few oddballs who had a skeleton here or there and the next it was pandemonium.

Is this some sign of the darker side of things beginning to show itself in the light of day?  Are people owning up to feelings and thoughts they had before but did not feel able to express them?  Or is this merely the success of marketing and sales?  I well recall the time my younger son had a storm trooper costume and sat in a chair on our porch to give out the candy.  As soon as he moved, the kids screamed and ran away.  Some parents thought this was over the top.  Baby, they had not seen anything yet.  Perhaps the most troubling to me is that it has all become somehow oddly normal.  Wow.  What a world! 

The best way to start your day. . .

It probably does not matter much whether you are a morning person or awake into all hours of the night, a cup of coffee is in your cards.  In fact, coffee consumption is up (as if the ubiquitous presence of all those drive through coffee places had not already alerted you to this).  In the past twenty years, the number of American adults who enjoy a daily cup of joe has jumped 37 percent to the highest level in decades.  The daily drink of Americans is hardly a new invention but has its source to 850 AD, to the Arabian colony of Harar near present-day Ethiopia, where it seems the brew began.  It spread across to Mecca and through the Arabian continent but took its time to get to Europe.  Only in the 1600s did Europe really begin to notice the blackish brown beverage we would call coffee.  In the 17th century, the Roman Catholic Church condemned coffee as a “Muslim drink,” leading to a temporary ban on its consumption in some European countries -- until a pope tried it and liked it.

About the same time, coffee hit the Americas.  By 1689, there were coffee houses in Boston -- the precursors of Starbucks, Dutch Bros, etc. -- though with a more limited fare on the menu. Two out of every three adults in the US start the day with coffee -- Americans consume about 400 million cups of coffee per day!  It became so popular in the late 1770s that coffee replaced the daily rum ration for soldiers.  Ever since our armies have run on coffee just like the industry.  Nashville is home to one of the coffee dynasties -- the Maxwell House family brand.  Folgers is known far and wide.  At home the brand of choice seemed to be Butternut (is it even still around?).  At every meeting of pastors, there is always a very large pot brewing (followed later in the day with some other libation!).  In 1966, America got its first real coffee chain — Peet’s Coffee  — starting life as a small storefront in Berkeley, California.  There has been no looking back since.

I will admit to drinking a lot of coffee.  From a better blend in the pod machine to French press to a big drip machine to my nostalgic favorite -- Swedish egg coffee, there is not much I do not like about coffee -- except for those drinks that are coffee in name only but really caffeinated milk shakes or such.  I am not a fan.  No cream, no sugar, no flavors from a bottle — just hot and black and strong.  Alone or in a koffee klatch, every day begins with coffee.  It is the one unchangeable part of my breakfast.  I drink less now that I am retired but seldom less than two cups.  I do love tea but not first thing in the morning.  That prime place and time is reserved for a good cup of java.  Indeed, I find it hard to image anything without the start of coffee.  Staring into the deep brown steamy liquid seems to get my devotion started, my blog juices going, and whets my appetite for reading.  If it is morning when you are reading this, I hope you are enjoying a great cup of coffee today.

They are the same. . .

The premise behind everything from the style and substance can be different to those who advocate for a contemporary form of worship borrowed from evangelicalism more than the church catholic is that liturgy and ecclesiology are different.  One does not imply another and they can not only be distinguished but can be intentionally different.  That is an idea that is patently false.  Ecclesiology and liturgy are the same -- at least in the sense that to change the liturgy is to change ecclesiology and to change ecclesiology is to change liturgy.  It is a slightly different version of lex orandi, lex credendi.

Let me illustrate from Rome.  The liturgy of the Latin Mass (following from Trent) and the Mass in the wake of Vatican II are not the same and neither is the ecclesiology.  Rome is fighting about this now although it would seem that the Vatican II side has pretty much won and Pope Leo is not showing any sign that this is not true.  Some are trying to say that what was promulgated in the wake Vatican II is the same form, merely updated in language and style.  Everyone who has been to a Latin Mass knows this is not true.  The post Vatican II Mass is focused much more on the people side of the equation.  It is not simply that the priest faces the people but that the whole thing is focused more on the nave than it ever was in the Latin Mass.  The most glaring abuses of the new Mass are not abuses of the form so much as they are taking the whole idea of that new Mass and pushing it to the extreme.  

Reverence and the focus on God's work and the people's work to God has been replaced with the idea that the focus is horizontal more than vertical and the the relationship of the people to each other and the people's work in the liturgy are central in the new Mass.  What has changed is not merely liturgy but ecclesiology.  That new ecclesiology has been pushed to its limits in the idea of synodality (even though this was given the imprimatur of a pope who acted more like a dictator than nearly any other in modern memory).  Synodality deposits the authority in the process and conversation even more than in the creed and doctrine.  It invites people to invest these with their feelings and to change them as needs determine.  So in Rome the natural outcome of the new Mass is to begin talking about changes in marriage, morality, the role of women, etc...  These things are connected.

Okay, so lets talk about Lutherans.  Tinkering with the liturgy is often seen as a technical thing which does not have that much to do with the body of belief.  I think it is just the opposite.  The great divide which has resulted from and fostered even more the worship wars of old was not simply about doing things differently but doing different things in worship.  It is not merely about worship but the church -- it is about ecclesiology and the pastoral office and the sacraments and a host of things.  We end up arguing about whether this pop gospel song is good or if a Lutheran chorale is better but it is a debate at the fringes.  It is not about taste.  It is about what we believe, teach, and confess.  It is also greatly about how we see the church and what we believe the church is about.  It is the great divide between mission and confession except it is played out on Sunday morning.

My point here is not to definitively solve or define this but to challenge us to see that we are not simply talking about what we like to do on Sunday morning or what kind of music hits our souls.  Things have legs and consequences.  Contemporary worship is walking us into another kind of church and the consequences of ditching the historic ordo and abandoning the liturgical form which has accompanied our confession since the get go have consequences.  We are becoming a different church because we are using different forms of worship and because even where the historic form is retained the way we view it has evolved to the point where we no long bind liturgy and confession nor connect worship and ecclesiology together.  That is why our conversations are so difficult and so difficult to resolve.  We focus on one thing but are really talking about another. And, by the way, Christology is not far behind!

A quiet mind. . .

Compline's opening versicle bids the Lord grant us a quiet mind and peace at the last.  In one of the older prayers of the Church we ask God to grant grace to those who rule that we may lead quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and honesty.  In one of the bidding prayers of the Church we pray that we may serve Him in peace and quietness.  In an evening prayer we beg the Lord to shelter us in the quiet hours of the night that those wearied by the changes and chances of this passing world may rest in His changeless peace.  In one of the prayers for good government we ask God to graciously regard those in authority over us that we may be governed quietly and peaceably.  We pray for the gift of a quiet sleep.  There is no shortage of collects in which we pray for godly peace and quietness, to serve Him in all godly quietness, and to serve Him with a quiet mind.  We pray in the collect for peace to live in peace and quietness.           

These are prayers to be released from anxiety, to be sure but not simply so.  Freedom from anxiety is not the absence of trouble but a heart which rests upon Him in whom such quietness is to be found.  To live with the peace of a clear conscience is to live within the grace of forgiveness and to forgive those who sin against you. The sacramental grace of absolution is not merely an external one but internally acquaints the heart with peace and quietness in a conscience troubled with sin and guilt and shamed by them as well.  One does not go to confession to fulfill some perfunctory ritual obligated to us but to enter into that precious state of peace and quietness which the world and the devil works to steal.  It is also the fruit of our participation in Christ's redeeming work, receiving the gift of His mercy in the Holy Eucharist.  As once we prayed in the embolism:   Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  It is quite literally a tossed in prayer summarizing all the petitions -- as common to the praying of the Our Father in the Latin Church as the doxology is to Protestantism. 

Peace and harmony and therefore quietness are in short supply today.  It shows in the statistics for depression and anxiety that have made these epidemic.  It is revealed in the way we close ourselves off from each other and from the world because we do not know how to deal with our discontent.  But this is an elegant grace and a generous gift to a people who live in a world of change -- dizzying change.  Some of it is by our own making and absolution promises us some peace for these.  Other of it is beyond our ken.  We are like the small boat upon the mighty waves.  We beg the Lord for some peace, for a place in the storms of our lives, and for quietness to catch up on it all before it all overwhelms us.  God help us in this.  The haunts of yesterday's sins and the quavering heart before temptation will surely steal from us every last ounce of our peace unless we rest in the Lord and in Him rest all that would taunt and trouble us.  It is not simply okay to pray for peace and quietness -- it is exactly this for which we pray at God's bidding and promise.  He will not turn away.                                 

Being the Church. . .

According to Pope Leo, being the Church means recognizing that truth is not possessed, but sought together, allowing ourselves to be guided by a restless heart in love with Love.  It sounds nice.  It certainly expresses the commonly held convictions of the day that the pursuit of truth is bigger and better than possession of it.  It reflects the sort of gobbledygook that has pervaded Rome since Francis.  It does not sound like the carefully nuanced words of Scripture or the confession of the faithful down through the ages.  Indeed, it begs the question.  Do we possess the Divine Revelation of God's Word or not or is that Word somehow either incomplete or insufficient for the day?  I guess Leo and folks like me will simply have to agree to disagree.  It is precisely this kind of talk that gets us all in trouble.

What good is a church made up of people seeking unless there is something to be sought and known?  That seems to be the issue.  Either we have the truth in God's Word and this is the ground of being for the Church or else we don't and are left with one big guesstimate.  So either the Church is a group of blind people feeling their way along or we are those whose eyes have been opened and on whom the light has shown.  It has to be one or the other.  For that matter, either the Spirit has been given to us merely as a companion on our common journey or the Spirit actually guides the Church into all truth.  I mean, really, we are two millennia away from Christ's death and resurrection and, according to Leo, we are still far from the truth.  Now, of course, we would all agree that we are not there yet in the sense of the perfect consummation of all things but as possessor of the truth, why else is there a Church?  The Scriptures?  The Spirit?  The Church has the illumination of Scripture and the Spirit along with the catholic witness down through the ages and possesses the fullness of the truth within the bounds of our human frailty.  

What is the Church the guardian of except the truth?  Indeed, while it fits with the modern idea of an evolving and changing truth in which the seeking is even more significant than the truth itself, it does not accord with the promise of Christ, the gift of the Spirit, and what the Scriptures claim of themselves.  Jesus did not claim to be a companion with us along the way but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is not a means to an end but the end.  To know Him is to know the truth in all its fullness.  These words of Leo do not even accord with customary Roman teaching regarding the pontiff and the teaching magisterium of Rome.  So what is it?  Is this merely an unfortunate example of the kind of imprecise language used by the advocates of change or is it the sign that Leo has joined Francis, against Benedict and JPII and others in seeing the role of the faithful in discerning where God wants them to go instead of proclaiming what God has done in Christ on behalf of the whole world?  If it is the latter, then the Gospel is reduced to a mere marker along the journey or a principle for the path instead of the eternal Gospel of Revelation meant for the all people.  If that is the case, Leo and those who think like him will have transformed Rome into a fully contemporary Protestant church -- something for which Luther did not aim nor should he be blamed.