Prayers hard to pray. . .

I will admit that too many of our table prayers have made their way into the formal or informal realm of prayer before Holy Communion.  Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest... is known and beloved to us all but it is not the sum or summit of the prayers we pray as we come to receive the body and blood of the Lord.  In fact, it is no wonder that we struggle with the idea that Holy Communion is not y'all come precisely because we do not believe that the Lord's flesh and blood can be taken for any but salutary effect.  St. Paul's words of caution in I Corinthians confuse and confound us so we explain them away.  Oddly enough, the Orthodox seem to have kept this concept although I do not know how wide spread.  Really, can you imagine any modern day Christian praying as such before receiving the Sacrament?  If you cannot, then our catechesis is not as good as we think it is.  We approach the Lord's table not with casual abandon but with awe, reverence, and a somberness that befits what we are receiving and how it can benefit us or harm us.

Take a look at the prayers below and think this over.  Can you drink of the cup of which I drink?  If this is Jesus' question to Sts James and John, then it should not be far from our minds as well.  The boundary of closed communion is not to separate us from God but to make sure we can come to Him in the right manner and receive His gift as blessing and not to our harm.  From the moment when sin corrupted our relationship with God and resulted in our expulsion from the Garden, God set up an angel at the gates to prevent us from entering in the wrong manner (and thus bring upon us an even worse destruction).  This boundary was a salutary one and not simply punitive.  1 Corinthians 11:17-34:

¹⁷ But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. ¹⁸ For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, ¹⁹ for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. ²⁰ When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. ²¹ For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. ²² What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.

²³ For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵ In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” ²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

²⁷ Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹ For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. ³⁰ That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. ³¹ But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. ³² But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

³³ So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another— ³⁴ if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home—so that when you come together it will not be for judgment. About the other things I will give directions when I come.

Prayers of Holy Communion:
I believe, Lord, and I confess, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. Moreover, I believe that this is Your immaculate Body, and that this is Your precious Blood. Wherefore, I pray to You: have mercy on me, and forgive me my transgressions, those voluntary and involuntary, those in word, those in deed, those in knowledge and those in ignorance; and make me worthy to partake of Your immaculate Mysteries without condemnation, for the remission of sins and life everlasting. Amen.

Approaching for Holy Communion, read the following verses from Saint Symeon the Translator:
Behold, I approach for divine Communion;
Creator, burn me not as I partake;
For You are Fire, which burns the unworthy.
But, rather, cleanse me from every impurity.

Then the following Troparion:
Of Your Mystical Supper, Son of God, receive me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of the Mystery to Your enemies; nor will I give You a kiss, as did Judas, but like the thief I confess You: Remember me, Lord, when You come into Your Kingdom!

Then again the following verses:
Be awe-stricken, O man, beholding the deifying Blood;
For it is a lighted Coal that burns the unworthy.
The divine Body both deifies and nourishes me;
It deifies the spirit, and wondrously nourishes the mind.

And these Troparia:
You have smitten me with yearning, O Christ, and by Your divine zeal You have changed me; but burn away my sins with immaterial Fire, and make me worthy to be filled with delight in You; that, leaping for joy, O good One, I may magnify Your two comings.

Into the brilliant company of Your saints, how shall I the unworthy enter? For if I dare to enter into the bridal chamber, my garment betrays me, for it is not a wedding garment, and I shall be bound and cast out by the Angels; Lord, cleanse my soul of pollution, and save me, for You love mankind.

And the following Prayer:
Master, Who loves mankind, Lord Jesus Christ my God, do not let these Holy Things be to me for judgment because of my unworthiness, but rather may they be for the purification and sanctification of soul and body, and as a pledge of the life and Kingdom to come. For it is good for me to cleave to God, to put my hope of salvation in the Lord.

And again:
Of Your Mystical Supper, Son of God, receive me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of the Mystery to Your enemies; nor will I give You a kiss, as did Judas, but like the thief I confess You: Remember me, Lord, when You come into Your Kingdom! Remember me, Master, when You come into Your Kingdom! Remember me, Holy One, when You come into Your Kingdom! 

Of Saint Symeon Metafrastes (Saint Symeon the Translator)
You Who have willingly given me Your Flesh as food, Who are a burning fire to the unworthy, do not consume me. No, my Creator; rather penetrate into my members, all my joints, my organs, and my heart. Burn all my iniquities like thorns; cleanse my soul, make holy my thoughts, make firm my knees and my bones as well. Illumine my five senses and make vigilant my entire being with the fear of You.  Watch over me always; shield and protect me from every deed and word which corrupts the soul.  Cleanse me, purify me, and put me in order; adorn me, give me understanding, and illumine me.  Show me to be the dwelling of Your Spirit alone, and not the dwelling place of sin; so that when You enter into the home of Your communion, every evil doer and every passion will flee from me as from fire.

A lesson learned too well. . .

The language of healing has always been a part of the Christian faith.  It is there both in the telling of the stories of God's healing grace at work to remedy the human ills of disease but also in the overall description of God's salvific work.  We have always said God is a healing God, taking what is broken and making whole and taking what is diseased and granting health.  They are good and salutary (itself a healing word) terms and descriptions of what God has done.  But at some point, the words stole the message.

Therapeutic deism did not begin recently.  It goes back to the demand of the sick for God to fix what was wrong and to the demand of the hungry to be fed without earthly labor to provide the food.  We have always found a temptation to substitute the present for the eternal.  At some point, however, it become the dominant image of God and the dominant image of salvation.  We are no longer the guilty or shameful who are searching for cleansing or the sinners in search of redemption.  We have become the discontent in search of pleasure, the sad in search of happiness, the bored in search of excitement, the lonely in search of friendship, and, under it all, the spectator in search of entertainment.  The problem with this is that you do not need a Savior, a God incarnate, or a cross and empty tomb to provide these things.  These live not in eternity but in the present, in the moment, if you will.

Though it would be tempting to place this blame at the feet of the liberals, we are all to blame.  We have so eloquently described God as healer that the people no longer look for or need a God who redeems.  They are looking for a therapist to listen, for someone to approve and commend them as they are, and for anyone to show them how they might satisfy their longings rather than reorder them according to God's will and purpose.  Christianity’s dalliance with healing and therapy has become greater than the quest for redemption, for salvation, and for righteousness.  When Jesus sent forth His disciples to heal (therapeuete) the sick, we all took Him at His word and made it into a promise that would be fulfilled now.  All of our expanded analogies using healing to describe salvation have born the wrong fruit.  We want and expect God to do more for us today than for eternity.  We want to flourish in the here and now — body, soul, heart, and mind — and this is what have come to expect and demand from God.  To quote Captain Piccard, "make it so."  

We were encouraged along the way by things outside the faith to look to our thoughts, emotions, and desires to define what happiness looked and how to live well.  We learned from society that our stories were more important than real truth and experience was more reliable than facts.  We have told ourselves this over and over again until we were convinced that this was God speaking to us and so the cultural mythology of the moment overwhelmed the Scriptural expression of need and Savior, sin and redemption, hell and heaven.  The worst evil was that which inhibited or put value judgments on those thoughts, emotions, and desires.  The best good was that which allow those thoughts, emotions, and desires to flourish unhindered by challenge or what others think — much less God.  Authenticity was to the self and the self-authenticating self desired and accepted approval only and nothing less.

When even conservatives stopped speaking of sin or of the evils of sin and began accepting brokenness and pain and disappointment as primary, we became mere puppets of the culture and weak echoes of what everybody already knew and believed.  Who needs heaven when you can expect it or find it on earth and who needs a Savior when the worst sin is not living by your unfettered desires and wants?  We ended up trying to sell the need for God in ways that made sin a sideline and the world loved it.  That is why there are so few churches and preachers speaking about sin and death, forgiveness and life, in the same terms as Scripture and why the substitutionary atonement model of salvation became a pariah to the pulpit as well as to the modern mind.  Lets admit it.  We all joined on the moralistic therapeutic deism model in some way or another and now we have to dig ourselves out of it before nothing of the real Gospel remains.

A few numbers and a thank you. . .

Since beginning this little enterprise some 16+ years ago, the readership has constantly surprised me.  So far, since the blog began, some 17 million folks have tuned in, fewer in the beginning and it has grown.  Every day some 6,000-10,000 people get on the blog for one post or another, some 60,000-100,000 monthly, and a million or so annually.  Obviously, some days more than others and some posts are better than others.  Some tune in and never come back.  Most return with varying degrees of frequency.  I deliberately have not monetized this blog though I have had tempting offers.  It was never mean to bring in the cash.  I like writing the blog posts.  I enjoy reading and my head is filled with useless information and a few decent pastoral and meandering thoughts.  Thank you for reading.  If I offend or upset, I do apologize.  If I get you thinking, I am glad because something got me thinking.  If I repeat myself, well, I am getting old.  LOL.  Cut me some slack.  Do I have familiar themes -- you betcha.  Am I always right?  Well, I think I am at the time I wrote it but I do change my mind and I have no guarantee of infallibility -- think what I could have accomplished if I had!!!  I do not know how long I will keep this up or keep up the pace of posting but it is still going strong.  And so am I.  Thank you all.  When I run into you and you mention the blog, it encourages me -- even when you think I got it wrong!  I am humbled by your kindness -- like the guy I ran into in the Denver airport who said, Are you Pastoral Meanderings as if I were somebody important.  Thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart.  And God bless you all.  

The value of our rites. . .

Recently  I read of a church and the baptismal font in which a saint of some renown who live a very long time ago had been baptized.  It suddenly occurred to me that we know not only where this man was baptized but, through the church's rites, we also know with confidence he was baptized and the liturgy that was used.  We did not have to wonder if he was rightly baptized or what was confessed.  We know.  We have the rite, faithfully preserved, and most of our baptismal rites to this day are a modest evolution of the rite used for this man.  So going back 100 or 1000 years, we know what was said, done, and confessed because we know the rites.

As a pastor dealing with people who did not come from a liturgical tradition with rites, it was often difficult to know if someone had been rightly baptized or not.  I did more than a few conditional baptisms because the person did not have any idea if or how water was applied, if the baptism was in the name of the Triune God, or anything else.  Perhaps it was a river or a tub in the front of a congregation, the rite was ad libbed and where an explanation point should have been was a question mark.  God does not mean us to live in the what ifs but in the because.  That is the gift of our rites.

This is why it is so disconcerting when you watch a worship service and the pastor is making it up as he goes along -- the spiritual euphemism is being led by the Spirit.  He does not even half to say bad things.  Because his words live only in the moment, they struggle to become the eternal Word that Christ has spoken.  When rites are published with the doctrinal imprimatur of the church's official sanction, they live beyond the moment and outside the particular space of one guy before one set of people saying what may be in his heart.  I do not judge the motives but the end result is to deprive the people of the confidence which Christ means for them to have.  That is the gift of our rites.

When the penitent comes for absolution, you can dance around it in a thousand different ways that sound great but end up leaving the person without the comfort the rite itself provides.  I forgive you all your sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Ego te absolvo.  They are not magic but they are a lifeline for the people whose sins trouble their consciences and who hearts are weighed heavy with grief and shame.  There is a place to address the folks with words to console and yet their must be the clear absolution so that the chains of what they have thought, said, and done are cast off and they can go home free.  That is the gift of our rites.

Someone will surely tell me that God knows.  God knows what happened in the ad lib by a stream or at the altar or in the confessional.  He does.  Thanks be to God!  But it is not God who needs to hear it.  It is the child or adult who comes to baptismal water without name or eternity who needs to hear what the rites say.  We are our rites.  Our confidence is not in the rites but in what those rites preserve -- the clear Word and promise of God.  It is not God who needs to hear the magic words at the altar before the miracle bread and cup appear but we do.  We need to know what it is that we are receiving, what is gifted to us in this bread and cup.  We need to know the familiar refrain of the rites which tell us that this is Christ's body given for us and His blood shed for the forgiveness of our sins.  We are our rites.  Our confidence that this is the body and blood of Christ lies not in a perfect performance but in the Word of Christ preserved in the rite as the voice to still our troubled souls with hope and peace.  God knows the sins of the penitent (and impenitent, for that matter) but it is that broken soul who needs to hear the absolution in the clear and plain words that have absolved the penitent for millenia.  We are our rites.  Our confidence is not in the words as a spell to make the magic happen but the words of Christ which tell us His blood cleanses us from all our sin -- including those named just then.  

God does not judge the form or the heart but both, not as the unmerciful looking for cause but as the God who seeks to assure us that what He has promised is, indeed, ours in this water, bread, wine, and absolution.  This is what the rites preserve.  Only a fool would attach this to some unchanging incantation secretly passed down through the ages as if ordination is the passing of the secret handshake.  No, ordination is the same thing as I have spoken before.  In the words and the rite the Church says to those whom this man serves that you do not have to imagine or wonder or decide if his ministrations deliver what they promise and bestow what they sign.  The rites and this man's serve as a man under orders tell the people in the pew that this is the case.  The rites can change but incrementally, not some mighty shift that upsets everything and makes strange what was familiar but as the careful update of the timeless.  I am not bound to one of the rites only but when the rites have the imprimatur of the church's seal upon them, any one of the rites approved, it gives to those in the pew the assurance that there is more to it than feelings.  The value of our rites is too often treated as something casual and irrelevant when those rites are very important to the faith of those who come and to those who come looking for faith.  We are our rites.  We can be more but we should not be less. 

Mortal or sinful or both. . .

Although there is much in Orthodoxy which attracts me, I remain confounded by the refusal of Orthodoxy to speak of original sin except in terms in mortality.  Sometimes modern Orthodox tend to characterize the Western definition of original sin in almost comedic terms -- criminals living out their sentence here on earth before they suffer it eternally.  It does little to help with the understanding but it does make it clear to me that for the East original sin amounts to nothing more than the presence of death as a shadow over life.  It is that, of course, but is that all it is?  Our mortality is certainly one continuing consequence of the Fall but it is not the only one.  All the talk of sin in Scripture cannot be summarized as a problem of will on the part of the mortals or else Jesus is come merely to open the door to the grave and leave the stone of sin unturned.  I do not get it.

In Western theology, it is common to all theological traditions that human beings are born with “original sin,” which, in includes the curse of death and the inability to free ourselves from either death or the sin that caused it.  But that is not all.  This also means that we suffer from the continuing consequences of what our first parents did in Eden.  We share a communal guilt in addition to a personal one and this is not something we choose or suffer because of our sins we have thought, said, or done.  It is guilt inherited from Adam and Eve and the common malady of those born of woman.  Furthermore, we are born sinful and unclean, that is, we are born as sinners.  We are neither innocent nor are we good from the moment of our existence.  Every man born of woman needs to be redeemed and this is not simply the release from death.  The East does not speak in these terms.  I would suggest that it does not speak fully the language of Scripture which does speak in these terms as well as in others.  I would suggest that the original sin which speaks of our bondage to sin of which we cannot free ourselves includes death but is not merely that we are mortal and that this is not some novel invention of the West but the witness of the Scriptures and the testimony of the early Church as well.

Indeed, it seems to imply that Jesus came to liberate us from our bondage to death but our bondage to sin is something we can handle -- at least by the choice of virtue and asceticism.  That would place everyone of us back in Eden in the place of our first parents except for the shadow of mortality which is cast over us until Jesus lifts it from us and brings us into His own immortality.  How curious it is that we can handle the problem of sin but not death!  Indeed, modernity seems intent upon testing this notion.  We as people seem to be working very hard to be masters of death, making it also a choice.  Since we have already worked to eliminate sin as a category of our fallen lives, we moderns seem poised to neither to need saving nor to need a Savior at all.  While I would agree that we in the West can sound rather dismal in the way we speak of this mortal life lived in bondage to sin, the East seems too hopeful that a good choice can fix what sin has done to us.  I wish that were true but we all know it is not.   Original sin seems to be the one truth that requires no revelation.  Every newspaper account of our wrongs and every obituary speaks volumes of what sin is and what it has done to us.  

For Orthodoxy, original sin is ancestral sin, but while we suffer the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin, such as death and a tendency to sin, we do not inherit guilt for that sin.  It is no wonder that Augustine is no favorite of the East.  For the Orthodox “original sin” refers to the “first” sin of Adam and Eve.  While those born since bear the “consequences” of sin, the chief of which is death, there is also a weakness before sin.  In the West, humanity likewise bears the full “consequences” of the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, and this includes both the “guilt” of the sin of Adam and Eve and a condition which makes us more than merely weak to sin but captive to sin of which death is the universal sign of this.  In the East man is guilty only of his or her own sin but does suffer from the mantle of death which is passed to all humanity from Adam and Eve.  As Lutherans we insist that we are both mortal and sinful, wearing the guilt passed down to us from Adam and Eve and caught in sin so that we cannot free ourselves.  While this does something to the notion of man's nobility and dignity which some might find offensive, it also reflects a higher view of Christ and the accomplishment of His work on our behalf.