Why, indeed?

As the Catholic writer Tim Stanley commented, “if the average liberal saw a Sufi or a Hindu doing this, they’d call it beautiful and sacred. When they see a Catholic doing it, they laugh. Why praise ritual in the faith of others but denigrate it in ours?” (emphasis added)

Funny how we are adamant that ceremonies be rightly observed when it comes to military burial, the sports rituals across the board, and a host of other arenas but then shift uncomfortably when we find them in Church.  Lutherans, among others, are rather guilty of this.  We are, it seems, supposed to do the rubrics without really liking them or thinking them important or, better, to bend the rubrics to our own preference (which is the ultimate goal of freedom or adiaphora, after all).

I have asked pastors to fill in for me when I was away and they instantly respond, "I don't wear a chasuble and I don't do all that fancy stuff and I don't chant and I don't bow and I don't . . . etc...."  In other words, it does not matter what the people in the pew have come to know and expect over my nearly 25 years here, their own pastoral preference (aka their formal complaint with formality) must rule the day.  Okay, well, maybe I don't need to be gone if my people are going to be so summarily dismissed in their appreciation of rubric, tradition, and practice. I have filled in for pastors who insist that they don't do anything special on Sunday morning but that has not prevented them from handing me a two page list of how to and what not to do.  Even though it goes against my grain, I try to comply.  I am, after all, the guest in the house most frequently visited by others.

It is rather amazing that the same people who go off like a firecracker when somebody screws up the national anthem or who so doctors up the words and melody to own it as their own that the rest of us cannot recognize it, well, they cannot stand ceremony in Church.  The people who are pro-military and all the ritual and ceremony that goes with it are also the ones who constantly wonder why we need to be so fancy in Church.  Surely God is more impressed with our restraint than with all the flourish of word, action, and ceremony?  God knows that this kind of stuff is not really me and God wants me to be true to myself first, right?  Wrong.  If that is all God wanted, it would not have required the death of His one and only Son.

We are fascinated by the ritual and ceremonies of others but when it comes to heading through the door of our Lutheran congregation on Sunday morning, we insist upon our rite right to be ceremony and ritual free (something like the gluten free craze that seems to make this more important that the Word of the Lord and its regular practice -- speaking here of preference and not of medical necessity).  Nope, we think it impressive to watch others but when we enter a Lutheran congregation on Sunday morning we cannot understand why Pastor Fancypants wears dresses and plays like he is somebody he is not.  What is underneath it all is our own disdain for our own doctrine.  We have, for all intents and purposes, reduced the office to its functions and reduced the man to be representative of what we all could (and probably should) do.  And don't forget our own sense of expertise that makes all of history and all our Confessions irrelevant on the topic, after all, who can compare with the way good ole Pastor van Derfoolische did it at St. John of the Brewery when my Grandma Schtuckindermudt was running the congregation.

Okay.  Rant mode off.  I feel better now.  Do you?