A preface for every occasion. . .

Lutherans have a dearth of proper prefaces within the Canon of the Mass.  We too quickly defer to a seasonal generic set of words, not bad but clearly missing those prefaces which would be appointed for particular days.  Let me give an example.

In the Roman sanctoral calendar there is a day for St. Elijah, the Prophet.  Now, of course, we do not have such a day on our Lutheran calendar but the comparison is not about which days made it and which did not (or which became merely commemorations).  It is about the riches of propers which are tuned to the day.  The Roman proper preface for St. Elijah is:

Right indeed it is and just, proper and for our welfare, that we should always and everywhere give thanks to you, holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God; and that we should triumphantly praise, bless, and proclaim you on this solemn feast of blessed Elijah, your Prophet and our father: who, at your word, arose like fire, closed the sky, raised the dead, smote the tyrants, killed the impious, and laid the foundations of the monastic life; who, fed with bread and drink by the ministry of an angel, walked in the strength of that food as far as the holy mountain; who was carried off in a whirlwind of fire, to return as a herald of the second coming of Jesus Christ our Lord; through whom your majesty is praised by the Angels and the Archangels, by the Cherubim too and the Seraphim, who lift up their endless hymn, day by day, with one voice singing: 

Don't you just love how the preface itself is filled with the primary details of the life of Elijah in a poetic way which invites us to know him of whom the day is set apart to remember?  I do.  I miss the abundance of propers in our Lutheran orders and wish we had utilized more rather than less.  Less is more is not a good principle in just about anything, much less rites and texts.  Though our Lutheran inclination is to tend toward simpler rather than elaborate, I wish we had expanded rather than reduced such examples of liturgical riches. 

Making messes. . .

I will pick on Pope Francis because he is not here to argue with me.  I suspect, however, he would not argue.  He saw as his mission and purpose to make messes for the Lord.  In places and times when the need was for clarity, he was obtuse.  In places and times when the need was for bring people together, he seemed to delight in actually creating conflict.  In places and times when the need was for patience and deliberation, he seemed to act upon whim or impulse.  In places and times when the need was for holding to the faith once delivered, he seemed to press the edge of change and innovation in a way that actually undermined the tradition and dismissed it.  

Pope Francis actually left his successor many messes.  Some of them were people (Victor Fernández).  Some of them were moto proprios (Traditionis custodes or Fiducia Supplicans}.  Some of them were initiatives (governance of Rome or synodality).  I could go on.  I do not need to.  You get it.  He stirred the pot and then looked offended when somebody caught him with the spoon.  There are those in every organization and in the Church who like to do what Francis did -- make messes.  While it is easy to blame those who make the mess, that does nothing to clean it up.  Cleaning up is, after all, the goal.  It would be good if you were steward of the Church on any level that you leave to your successors not messes but things as clean and orderly as possible.  That is good on the parish level and it is good on every other level as well.

We find that in Lutheranism as well.  Rome is not the only one who has a few mess makers.  Our own LCMS seems to have enough folks who like to render obtuse what is clear, to focus uncertainty what is certain, and to simply irritate folks for the sake of watching how it all plays out.  I have no problem with conflict when it concerns that for which we dare not compromise or waver but I am deeply suspicious of salacious headlines and threats that masquerade as concerns.  Sometimes we need to call out those who simply delight in making messes and watching what happens.  It is simply not helpful when we spend the majority of our time trying to clean up the messes others have left to us.  It is wearisome to constantly be putting out fires or throwing oil on troubled waters.  We should all be working to prevent messes and where they exist to clean them up and to making sure that if we must create a mess it is for essential purpose and need.

I speak this largely to those entrusted with offices in the churches but I also commend this to those who hold no office except that of baptized child of God.  We live in an age in which the internet allows us to make known to the world things which could be handled with some discretion.  Hitting post is a delightful way to get rid of our frustration but at what cost?  I know that there are times when we cannot help but make a mess in the process of cleaning it up and yet too often it is in the judgment of some that it is more fun to explode things than to build them up.  That is my concern today.  It does not matter at what level you are or what job you hold, be faithful and work for and not simply against the Church by making a mess where there does not need to be one.  Plus, my mother's wisdom for those who used her kitchen applies -- if you make a mess, clean it up!   

Extending Eden to the wild world. . .

You learn new things all the time.  One of the things I learned a few months ago has to do with Eden, with the command of God to Adam and Eve, and how that is connected to our vocation as children of God.  When sin entered the world and Adam and Eve were forced to leave the Eden that God had created for them, it was not simply a consequence of their sin but a purpose and mission given to them,  To be fruitful and multiply was the call to participate within God's own creative activity.  It is not the burden which so much of the modern world complains about but the gift of a partnership with the God who alone is Lord of life and who generated all that is from nothing.  We are given the opportunity to work with Him, not in spite of Him or without Him but with Him, learning to delight in His will and purpose and His abundant goodness which undergirds the whole of creation.

There was, however, also the command to exercise dominion over the earth in the Lord's name.  This was not because God could not but an invitation to work with God.  It was gift and blessing for God to call us to work in Him to do what He has given us to do.  The world was no longer Eden but a wild place which needed to be tamed, if you will, and domesticated [another word which comes from dominion].  So by exercising dominion, Adam and Eve [and that includes Christians to this day] extend God's order into the wildness of the world, taming it not by raw power but by the proclamation of the Gospel of forgiveness and life stronger than death.  It is a profound gift and blessing for us to do this.  Part of the way we do this is to be fruitful and multiply.  Children are a gift, blessing, and heritage from the Lord.  By having those children and catechizing them into the knowledge of God and encouraging their faith by bringing them to the font and teaching them the Gospel, we are domesticating the world to be a domus or house of the Lord instead of the wild place resistant to and antagonist to God's gracious will and purpose.

To say that the Gospel is somehow new or connected to the New Testament alone is foolish.  God's goodness is not an idea but flesh and blood in Christ.  We do not honor His goodness simply with cerebral activity but also by the ordering of our lives together as husband to wife and wife to husband, parent to child and child to parent.  The wildness of the world should be something fairly obvious to us today and the radical nature of the traditional call to marriage and children and family should also be obvious to us.  This is not about forcing through legality or command but by the application of the love that forgives, restores, and sustains the people of God in their life together just as they have received this grace from God Himself.  Marriage has become a radical thing in our world today.  Having a child or many children is a scandal in a world which lives for self alone in the pursuit of pleasure/entertainment alone.  Fidelity in marriage and faithfulness even in sacrifice for the sake of spouse and child are not burdens we must bear but the glad burdens of love from the love we have learned in God and His merciful goodness toward us.

We are, by God's grace, extending Eden into the wild world around us.  By this, God is giving order to the chaos and meeting death with the power of the resurrection.  It is not simply coincidence that these connect in this way but, again, by His order and design.  This is our vocation as the people of God who have been given new life in baptismal water, called by the Spirit to faith and life in the new identity we have as the people of God, led by the Good Shepherd's voice in His Word, and fed and nourished at His table.  This is not simply for us only but for the sake of the world as well.  There is witness simply to going to Church, valuing and practicing the power of forgiveness, living not as a faint echo of the world's own righteousness but as a people planted within the wilderness as God's domus or house.  The Church is an outpost of this house of God in the wilderness, the instrument of God's kingdom in bringing those who were not into that house.

 See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. (Eph 5:15-17)

Luxury. . .

While it is tempting to consider luxury in terms of what you have, there is another way of looking at this thing.  Luxury is also in what you have not.  In the riches of a world where nearly everyone has a smart phone and lives, to one degree or another by the screen, luxury may well be turning off the phone and making dark the ever present screen and its light.  In a world replete with information and, indeed, on overload with the abundance of it all, could luxury be silencing the ever present push of what is new or what is happening a world away in order to curl up in a comfy chair with a good book?  In a life defined by the press to be entertained and the pursuit of the newest and latest entertainment, is might be that luxury is taking rest, ending the cycle of pleasure seeking if only for a little while. 

In this respect, the Sabbath of God's own creation was a tremendous gift and blessing.  It was the gift of luxury in a world demanding labor and tempting with distraction to the point of losing one's own soul.  God knew this even though we are still trying to figure it out.  He created six days for labor (even the labor in pursuit of happiness) and insisted that for one day, rest would be the focus.  It was then as it is now an extravagant gift of largess to release us not simply from work but from the ordinary pursuits that become their own labor.  Of course, we have disowned His gift and restored to the Sabbath the same burdens placed upon the rest of the week.  Even on this day of days we are still wondering "what are we going to do now?"

It has become popular.  Charlie Kirk argued for something like Sabbath keeping and rest in his book “Stop in the Name of God.” Even the noted spiritual authority President Trump has encouraged Americans to embrace a “national Sabbath” and invite “friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds” to step back from their devices for a day of gratitude and rest.  Perhaps the good President might well take his own advice and put down his tweeting fingers more often.  Were they serious?  I think so.  They do not have to be sage oracles of wisdom to figure out that too much is worse than too little when it comes to the things that cross the crowded paths of our lives.  For world in perpetual insomnia and dependent upon sleep aids, it would be logical that we need to rediscover the idea of rest and learn again to call it a gift of God and a luxurious one at that.

I read how many folks actually are turning to a flip phone so that it is for calls and not for everything else from business to entertainment.  The small screen and its larger cousins are as demanding upon us as they are blessing and we forget that they are to be ruled by us instead of ordering us and our lives.  This is also the meaning of Sabbath.  Ordering our lives deliberately and within the rhythm God created and created for us, in particular.  No one but an idiot would believe that we will go back to a legalized fast from business as was in the past but perhaps we should all learn to simply say no for a little while, anyway.

Some weeks ago when our internet had been down for a couple of days, I called for repair and was informed that the fixit guy would show up at 11am on a Sunday morning.   Since we had been suffering with its outage as well as paying for it all in the reliable bill for services, I welcomed his coming until, when that Sunday arrived, I suddenly felt the disconnect of having the internet restored on a day in which Christians focus upon the Lord, the day of His resurrection having granted us another version of a Sabbath, so to speak.  It was embarrassing that on this way when we were planning to do not much at all, we required a man to work so that we would no longer be unplugged from it all.  Ouch.  At least we did not miss Church!

Africa can teach us something. . .

There are times when we presume that our situation is unique to us today and that because we have such unique circumstances today, there is nothing that we can learn from the past.  This is not simply foolishness but wrong.  The world is not a constant string of new and unique circumstances and situations but often a constant refrain of what was and still is, what was once but has come back again.  We would do well to pay attention to and learn from how the Church dealt with the same challenges and issues we are now facing.

In my reading a while ago, I was pleased to come across this history of the the African Church, only to discover that it fermented into one of the most intellectually formidable areas of the early Church.  Indeed, it is said that had Christians casually walking its streets during the Apostolic age -- even in times of persecution throughout the empire.  Africa provided very fertile soil for early Christianity and gave birth and formation to some of the intellectual giants of our early history -- men like Tertullian and Cyprian.  Yet it did so amid a very cosmopolitan atmosphere which blended conflicting cultural influences that did not exist in other parts of Rome's influence. It was Africa which was home to Augustine, not only a profound figure in Africa but throughout the West.  Although he was bishop of Hippo, his shadow was cast well beyond that domain.  It was here that synods and councils enumerated the Western canon, where formative teaching on original sin, the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates, monasticism (at least in the West), and moral theology.

By the time of Augustine, North Africa had become a vibrant and deeply Christian community.  With  hundreds of bishoprics and the site of many councils and synods, the Church in Africa was catholic and apostolic, rooted in tradition, and practiced a vibrant sacramental theology.  By the time of Augustine's death in 430, the Vandals created a climate that led many Christians to flee to Italy and southern Gaul.  But the history remains and it shines a light upon our current situation.  Although we have some differences in our society and culture, the Church has tended to decline in the midst of diversity and has not held its own in the public square nor has it flourished in the kind of cosmopolitan shape of modern society in the West.  Clearly, one of the keys might a difference among the leaders today.  Are our bishops, pastors, and members as clearly orthodox and vocal in their public witness as were those of Northern Africa in the earliest days of Christianity?  Can we learn something from the way they gave testimony to and demonstrated their Christian witness within a diverse and cosmopolitan setting which is common to nearly every urban area in the world today?

With the arrival of the Vandals and the beginning of the end of the shining moment of the African Church, we find how things can change with the force of power against Christians.  The Church certainly suffered but so did the rest of the culture and civilization when the conditions caused  Christians to flee.  Indeed, it was Tertullian who first raised the question that haunts us today, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  To put it another way, what does culture have to do with the Church?  What is revealed is, of course, the fact that the Church and the culture around it are not insulated from each other and deeply entwined on several levels.  Yet at the same time, it also reveals what happens when the Church becomes captive to that culture and how the culture itself suffers with the absence of a vital Christian presence.

Christianity can never simply be reduced to culture.  We all know that on some level.  But what is the relationship between the Church and the world around the Church?  Christianity does not live in a vacuum but neither is the Church a sponge to absorb all that is around it.  When it did flourish, the African Church lived in a flourishing world and it provided a setting in which Christianity could develop, expand, and build upon its witness and draw people into the life of the Church.  When things fell down due to the invasion of the Vandals, the absence of the Christian voice, and the decline of the institutions of the community, it was not simply the Church that suffered.  In the end, those who remained among the Christian community could not preserve what was severely tested by the threats to the civilization and the Church itself suffered by abandoning its former place within the society.

Within the West, we find ourselves as Christians increasingly isolated and insulated, some by threat and force against us and some by our own surrender, choosing to embrace the values and culture more than to stand forth and stand out in testimony to the Biblical witness and in continuity with the catholic tradition.  What is clearly apparent is how the culture itself is suffering without the vibrant presence of a committed Christian community but what is not always apparent is how the Church suffers when we no longer carry forward the banner of Christ's death and resurrection and the yeast of His Gospel into the world around us with the same urgency and lively proclamation.  That is also something to be learned by the African lesson as well.