The placement of the Our Father. . .

Perhaps there was no set placement of the Our Father within the Canon of the West or a diversity of placements both before and after the Words of Institution.  We do not have a plethora of sacramentary information to detail any assertion one way or another.  But that all changed in the time of Pope Gregory I (c. 540 - 12 March 604), commonly known as Saint Gregory, who left his imprint upon the Church in many pastoral ways.  This is something of a surprise for someone who had been Rome's "mayor" at 30 before entering a Benedictine monastery.  Perhaps it was his monastic background which enabled him to offer what are widely held as great improvements upon the state of the liturgy and church music. Gregorian chant is named in his honor and it is not too much to offer him this praise.   In addition, Gregory is the author of many of the prayers  within the liturgy, including the Christmas Preface and the Preface of Easter and the Ascension.   But he is also receives the credit for a uniform placement of the “Our Father” after the Canon in the Mass.  Indeed, he found it impossible to consider that any words of man would follow or be prayed prior to the reception of the Lord's body and blood.

Pius Parsch, noted liturgical scholar, puts it this way:

According to the great Pope [Gregory the Great], the Our Father is not so much a preparation for the Holy Banquet, as a consecration prayer, in the ancient sense of a prayer for the offering of the sacrifice. For this reason, in the Roman liturgy, it is recited by the celebrant alone, whereas in the Greek liturgy it is considered the table prayer of the congregation, who therefore recite it in common as a family about to approach the sacred banquet. According to Gregory I, therefore, the Our Father should be considered the completion of the Canon, corresponding to the Preface, in such wise that the Preface and the Our Father mark the beginning and the end of the Canon, which is recited in mystical silence. 

Oddly enough, The Lutheran Hymnal violated the order (along with other Lutheran Church Orders based upon 16th century Lutheran practice) but kept the other part of Gregory's preference:  that the people did not say or sing the Our Father but that it was solely the priest.  When the priest says these words, he is supposed to be staring at the Host (Roman historic practice).  It is a profound moment to have the priest address the prayer to the Father while looking literally at the Son and it is an awesome expression of the mystery of the faith for that priest say who art in heaven while Christ is there present in the Eucharist!   Josef Jungmann sees “the people say[ing] the Our Father along with the celebrant. It is the people’s Communion prayer.”   It is certainly their pre-communion prayer.  However, when the people "take over" the praying of the Our Father, it does affect the way it is seen as a consecration prayer, along with the Words of Institution, which is a connection long held long before Lutherans made their liturgical adjustments to the order.

In a sermon St. Augustine says:

If perchance, in consequence of human frailty, our thought seized on something indecent, if our tongue spoke something unjust, if our eye was turned to something unseemly, if our ear listened complacently to something unnecessary, it is blotted out by the Lord’s Prayer in the passage: “Forgive us our trespasses,” so that we may approach in peace and so we may not eat or drink what we receive unto judgment.

Lutheran efforts to recover the Eucharistic Prayer over the years have dealt with the placement of the Our Father and left us with two orders as well as two canons.  I must admit that I find it hard to reconcile the two.  It is for me one of the difficulties of constantly switching liturgical settings in LSB -- the canons being so very different and the placement of the Lord's Prayer itself almost opposite.  I wish we had been more careful to make sure that the canons were consistent and the only consistency I think appropriate is to follow the Gregorian convention of the last 1400 plus years which is consistent with the East as well. 

The cleansed life of media and AI. . .

Everyone knows that life is messy.  You love the wrong people and the wrong people love you.  Love is not idyllic but hard, a struggle even at is best.  Children are mixed blessings and bring a lot of baggage into your lives.  Friends ignore, deceive, and betray you.  The good do not prosper and the evil seem to do just fine.  Moral people don't always make great leaders and immoral people sometimes lead better.  Wars are terrible but seemingly inescapable.  The weather always rains on your plans and your parades.  I could go on but I think you get my drift.  Life is messy and disappointing and hard.  That is the way it is.

We look for an easier life.  We insulate ourselves from people in an effort to prevent them from hurting or betraying us.  We hedge our bets even with the love of our lives.  We like the idea of freedom but find its practice is a dirty business.  So it is no wonder that social media has an appeal for us.  We can make friends who will never show up at an awkward moment or betray us (we can always unfriend them).  We can make sure that our friends are pure and without any nasty strain of conflict or disagreement with the views we hold.  We can be romantic through means and hit the off button when the feeling passes.  We can make sure a whole world knows our story and our slant on things but we can prevent theirs from interrupting us while we are on our soapbox.  I get it.  Media makes it safer to have friends and even live with your families.

AI is part of that deal.  Have you ever noticed how complimentary AI is when their bot reviews our work or helps us find what we want?  It is so nice how deferential they are to us -- the hidden wisdom of those data centers and the chatbots who are almost human.  We wish that the folks at work were that nice or the folks at home.  AI is appealing in part because they are nicer than people in their dealings with us.  You never have to say you are sorry and you never have to muster up the words to forgive the hidden humanoid who is there at your beck and call.  The bots can do all things well enough to be better than the real thing -- even relationships and sex!  Who is not impressed with the appeal of a make your own friend, companion, or lover?

Our virtual AI “companions” seem to be willing to trust our secrets, be sympathetic to our quirks, nice, and, even more importantly, attentive.  Lord knows, we live in a world of distracted, indifferent, duplicitous, and disappointing people.  Perhaps the promise of AI is that it will someday offer a real enough alternative to simply check out of the mess of relationships, friendships, etc... Even our own bodies can be transcended and we do not have to be bound by our looks or size or shape or, even, gender.  At some point, we will be able to travel without leaving home, just as eat food we do not cook or even leave the house to obtain.   The surprise here is not that these things are offered to us but that we are so attracted to them and tempted by them to surrender our very humanity to what can never be human.

If for these reasons alone, the Church should be wary about tying our fortunes to AI and media in general.  We do not have the luxury or having a virtual relationship with a real God.  It is about time that we said this out loud in public.   

Who are the real thought police?

The real thought police are not conservatives but those on the leading edge of progressive politics and thought, so-called liberals but really illiberal.  It is dangerous in liberalism to allow people to disagree with the status quo of progressive political and social thought.  The mechanisms are already being put in place to monitor, for now, and eventually control even the private messages of individual people -- messages which dare to express their independence from the woke ideals and their promoters in the world.

An example of this is the fact that the European Parliament voted early in July on the urgency of Chat Control—the scanning of the private messages of citizens charged with no crime and threatening no one except the powers that be.   Of course, this will be heralded as necessary access to prevent violence, to protect children, to end hate speech, and to make for a more civil society.  Who is naive enough to believe that it will end with scanning or monitoring of such messages?  As Rod Dreher as suggested, this is not for building an infrastructure to deal with today but the establishment of an infrastructure for tomorrow.  It is always good to remember that we never surrender our freedom all at once but in small steps over time.  We surrender it line by line of rhetoric and computer code and it is never to control but to protect -- a reason no reasonable person would dare to argue with but it never stops there.

You must hearken back to the case of Päivi Räsänen, the Lutheran member of parliament from Finland now convicted by a Finnish court of hate speech — for quoting the Bible, and for criticizing LGBT ideology  —  after being exonerated several times before. Though she was twice acquitted by the courts, the Finnish state was not satisfied and tried her a third time in order to gain the conviction they wanted. The consequences of this conviction are not limited to Finland.  In fact, Päivi was prevented from flying through London’s Heathrow airport on a flight back because she’s a convicted hate criminal and that made her either dangerous or a persona non grata in the UK even for a temporary moment in an airport awaiting a connecting flight!  The UK insists she is unwelcome there.  This is Päivi Räsänen, an elected European lawmaker, denied travel through Heathrow Airport on  orders of His Majesty’s government for daring to quote the Bible in public.  The irony here is that this is done in the name of the King who is charged with defending the (Christian) faith of the Church of England.

Now who is the thought police you should rightly fear?   

Update:   Räsänen has filed an application to appeal her conviction to the European Court of Human Rights in July, commencing the final legal juncture of a landmark case for freedom of speech in Europe.  Stay tuned.  

A strange paradox. . .

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.  Or something like that was said by Barry Goldwater.  It did not matter since LBJ showed a mushroom cloud with the express intention of saying it was either him or nuclear holocaust.  In the end it was enough to push the Texan to a mighty big victory and to tarnish the reputation of an otherwise honorable opponent.  I wonder if they were really as far apart as the commercial suggested.  In the end, the party that nominated Johnson went on to see Chicago riots and the landslide shift to the other side four years down the road.  It is a strange paradox when you set it up so that your friends are not friendly enough and your enemies are not who you think them to be.  Such is the case in religious politics as well.

Rome recently saw the SSPX, a traditionalist group loosely on the fringes of Rome, defy the papal threat and ordain their own bishops.  I get it.  They spat in the face of the pope, for Pete's sake.  That is how it appears, anyway.  But is it exactly that?  Watch the videos posted of the ordination of their bishops in Switzerland and the ordination of a bishop in Laredo, Texas, and it is not so clear.  The trad group is pious and reverent and churchly while the Roman group sounds almost Protestant casual doing the same thing -- a more liturgical version to be sure but not exactly high church either.  The dispute with the SSPX seems to fall around the Council nobody seems to agree on what it said or means -- Vatican II.  Some, like Benedict XVI and John Paul II, insist that Vatican II did nothing but a new coat of paint on the old church and nothing of substance in doctrine or practice really changed.  But that is certainly at odds with the liturgical reforms of Paul VI which were not quite Vatican II but have claimed the label.  The SSPX does not like some of what the Council said and little of what Paul VI promulgated.  On this, a host of folks uneasily within Rome seem to agree.

Rome has also seen others who seem to fit within the fold turn the Mass into a circus, resist every attempt at reverence, and make the little visit with God into a homey little sit down.  On top of that there are official voices clamoring for the ordination of women, for a voice and vote on the things of importance, and for a friendlier view to the LGBTQ+ community.  It is not quite important that they do not seem to be going anywhere to change Rome but the fact is that they get to flaunt their outrageous views seemingly without recrimination while Pope Francis tried to evict a conservative cardinal from his Roman apartments for daring to question him through official channels.  It certainly does seem that to err on the conservative side is more cause for Vatican complaint or discipline than to go the other direction. Does that mean that the liberal edge is more friendly with Rome than the more conservative, traditional side?  What a paradox?  Your friends are more those who stretch the limits of faith and practice within the boundaries than those who try to rein in the extremes?  Really?  Not to mention the fact that the previous Pope ceded control over who is ordained to the Chinese communists and the new one seems comfortable with that.  So four bishops from the conservative side are a bigger outrage than how many from the Chinese government?

Before you shrug your shoulders and suggest this is a Roman problem, the same thing exists in Lutheranism and in Missouri.  There seems to be plenty of latitude given to those who stretch the borders of faith and practice one way but not so much the other way.  If the people like a pastor who is not living within the boundaries of confessional Lutheran faith and practice, it seems okay to let him be.  But a conservative pastor who tries to bring the folk back into the fold is claimed to be rigid or overbearing and handed a resignation letter to sign.  Yes, I know, there are many nuances to these cases but it is no wonder sometimes it is hard to figure out who your friend and who is not anymore.  All of this attests to the fact that the most dangerous thing in any church body is someone who is pious and faithful on the conservative side of things.  Across Lutheranism it is the same.  Liberals get away with denying just about everything and ignoring our very Confession while conservatives who hold the line are seen as loving rules more than people and more like a law-giving Moses than a grace-giving Jesus.  But is it always that simple?  Are the folks more dangerous to the health and life of the Church more those who conserve or those who innovate?  We are still a church body intimidated by large parishes that seem more evangelical than Lutheran while fearful of the small parish that keeps the tradition without apology.

We all seem to love the muddy moderate middle more than anything else.  Liturgical but not too liturgical, conservative but not too conservative, and confessional but not too confessional.   We Lutherans know this only too well but apparently we are not alone.  Rome and the Episcopals would rather sell a building once used for Christian worship to a Muslim group than to a conservative one.  That statement can be shown truthful with myriad examples.  Even the ELCA was guilty of that.  Who are the friends of orthodox Christianity?  Those who hold to the creeds, councils, confessions and liturgy of the Church or those who like to live on the wild side?  The answer seems obvious but, depending upon who you talk to, it is not.  Leo will excommunicate the SSPX principals for their action but warn those who flaunt Roman teaching and practice on the other side.  Even a certain Tucho seems to exemplify this desire to live on the edge while talking tough with the rad trads.  It is not always different even among those who claim to abhor popes (like Missouri).  It is a strange paradox, indeed, that we treat those who skirt the left boundary different than those who do the same to the right. 

Political humor. . .

A wise person’s heart directs him toward the right, but the foolish person’s heart directs him toward the left.  Ecclesiastes 10:2 NASB