An irrational fear, perhaps?

Perhaps Luther was so consumed by the almost exclusive character of the Roman Canon that he saw everything through that lens.  His reform of the canon was more to excise that canon, removing it as if it were a malignancy destroying the faith.  So it might have been but Luther's answer was to remove other parts not cancerous in and of themselves and to leave the patient, in this case the Mass, distorted and scarred by this surgery.  I do not mean at all to suggest that Luther was acting irrationally but in the throes of a conflict, actions intended to eliminate an abuse have become almost intolerable even in the communion that bears his name.

It is rather easy, of course, 500 years later to suggest that a more careful scalpel could or should have been applied.  Yet that is exactly what I am doing.  Surely we have some advantage from being five centuries removed from the events of the Reformation to reclaim what was lost without surrendering the whole of the evangelical cause.  The work behind the Common Service was not the work of reform or restoration but one rite, itself cut and pasted from various rites, in an effort to bring some order to the liturgical chaos among Lutherans of that day.  So we are not justified in expecting the Common Service to provide a counter to Luther's omission of the entire canon and his abrogation of the offertory.  This is not merely then about Luther but about Lutherans and what we do and why we do it.

It seems odd to call "Create in me..." an offertory.  It is not a proper as it was before and has literally nothing to do with an offering at all.  It has become something very different and Lutherans have been adept at using later justification for its transformation.  It is as if the congregation which has just heard a rip roaring sermon rushes then to stand up and say "Message received!"  I suppose that it is not so bad to do so but it hardly lives up to an "offertory."

Luther, oddly enough, would have treated the taking of an offering sort of like showing up for private confession -- it is a good thing to do but it is best if no one sees you doing it and it would be better if you forgot about it yourself on the way home.  Thankfully we have forgotten what Luther said in this regard.  The exigent financial urgencies of every congregation have made it easy to leave Luther behind.  We are more than glad to pick up the cash, checks, ACHs, credit card payments, or every other tangible form of money and do so every week -- even more often than some congregations offer the Sacrament!  We rise as the holy mammon is brought forward to God and consider it all good, right, and salutary.  So why do we have such an aversion to a real offertory, to bread and wine brought forward to the altar and to the formal setting of the table.  Irrational fear, anyone?

With our aversion to the sacramental side of the offertory, we are also adverse to praying Eucharistically.  We pray about everything except in thanksgiving for God's good creation and His ordering of all things, His provision for us still, and His mighty acts for our salvation -- the very context of the first Lord's Supper.  Maybe we learned this from Rome whose canon has and remains more like a Prayer of the Church than a real Eucharistic prayer -- some of which we see in the Eastern variety.  So our loss of a real offertory becomes an even larger deficit when placed in the context of an anaphora absent all but the essentials of the Verba Christi and Our Father.

Modern liturgical renewal tried to fix that.  In the Divine Services 1 and 2, we gather the offering, prepare the table, and sing Psalm 116 as an ordinary (not quite a proper but at least a real offertory).  Interestingly, the subject of offertory and Eucharistic prayer seem to be governed by more a consideration of how long they take than what they mean.  Now we should make an effort to restore the offertory as a proper, allowing even more of the Psalms to be woven into the liturgy, and perhaps give a liturgical choir something more to do.  I would love that.  It will not hurt the people to see the altar reverently prepared for the Sacrament and it can be done without any reintroduction of any adverse sacrificial emphasis.  Without these, we will invent ways that ultimately highlight the money part of it and do all the liturgical prep of the altar beforehand.

While we are at it, we might work on recalling what the rightful sacrifice of the Mass ought to be -- a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving from those who receive the fruits of the one all sufficient sacrifice here in this bread and cup.  Perhaps we could formalize this whole idea by turning the Roman Canon into the Prayer of the Church (it would not be that hard) and learning from the East how to actually pray Eucharistically with a hearty voice of praise and thanksgiving.  Well, a man can dream, can't he?