28 June 2017. Franz Ferdinand und Sophie.

"Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder! 

28 June 1914, about 1045.

Within minutes of this picture, both would be dead, assassinated.  To be sure, the events of 103 years ago this day in 1914 did not just up and start World War One all by themselves.  The major causes had been building for 100 years before that.  As war broke out in 1914, what were called the Central Powers (Mittelmaechte, middle powers, between France and Russia) were entities that didn't even exist in 1814.  That's the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both of which were founded out of the rise and fall of Napoleon's French Empire (1803-1815) and considerable social upheaval associated with that.

And by war's end, they would all be gone, after a "war to end all wars", as it was called at the time.  It didn't.  The aftermath of what was to be The War To End All Wars only set the stage for another even worse world war involving new and worse powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which in turn were long gone by 2014.  But their fall left a horrible aftermath, compounded by the fact that their rise never resolved the aftermath of the War To End All Wars, so there's that still there too.  For example, the disposition by the victors of WWI of the Ottoman Empire -- ironically for most of its history a threat to Europe, but which had joined the Central Powers on 2 August 1914, having been founded 27 July 1299, defeated the surviving Eastern Roman Empire in 1453 and replaced it as the dominant power between the West and the East -- set the stage for the conflicts we read about daily now, 100 years on.  And, all of this transformed the United States from an alternative to and respite from Europe's and the world's conflicts into a major player in them.  In reality, the war to end all wars is not a relic of history; it continues to this day.

The German Empire was founded in 1871, eventually emerging from Napoleon's satellite confederation of German speaking lands after his dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire was founded in 1867, although Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor,on 11 August 1804, shortly before the demise of the HRE, sensing what was to come, became also the first Emperor of Austria, thus continuing an unofficial Hapsburg monarchy.

Napoleon had attempted to model his French Empire after the Roman Empire.  The French Empire in turn dissolved and displaced a general order that had existed in one form or another for 1000 years, the so-called Holy Roman Empire.  And that in turn saw itself as the re-institution, in 800, of the Roman Empire, which had collapsed in the West in 476.

The Ottoman Empire resulted in modern Turkey, and its lands in southeastern Europe and the Middle East were partitioned into countries intentionally drawn without respect to cultural, religious and natural boundaries, thinking that such counties would be too unstable to solidify into a threat again but that instability instead resulted in conflicts to this day in southeastern Europe and the Middle East.

The events of 28 June 1914 were the match struck, which kindled a series of declarations of war, based on alliances, that would entirely remove a world order that had existed for millennia, and whose replacement has been the subject of even worse wars and social upheaval since and has yet to emerge if it ever does, even as new entities -- the European Union, the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Nations, etc -- emerge.

We are still in this period 100 years on --  everything controversial in world affairs now has its roots in the aftermath of World War One.  We seem to want to congratulate ourselves on having moved on, from a past most of which ought never have happened that we ought never repeat and can now largely ignore, to a future that will of course be better.  The problem is, that's the same illusion they had right after the war that began in 1914 years ago; the same illusion they had each time the human social order changes.

They?  No, the "they" is us, humanity.  Man's consistent record has been ever more spectacular accomplishments AND ever more spectacular failures.  And always thinking his latest spectacular accomplishments mean no more spectacular failures.  We say lex semper accusat (the law always accuses), but you know what, historia semper accusat (history always accuses) too.  That's why we like to ignore it.  Unless we learn from either the Law or history that Man cannot save himself, individually or collectively, we will have no ears for the Gospel.

RIP Franz Ferdinand und Sophie.

The Augsburg Confession, 487 Years On, 25 June 2017.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.

So we say every Sunday. Well, a lot of us Lutherans mean to say that, but we say "Christian" instead of "catholic", though the word in the original, and we're supposed to be so big on what's in the original, is katholike, which means whole, complete, entire, universal. So does the cognate word in English, catholic. But, there's this very large and well-known church that uses the word in its name, and we wouldn't want to seem to be saying we believe in IT, now would we? And too, some of us say it on Saturday late afternoon as if we did mean IT, since we follow their new custom since Vatican II of Saturday Sunday services, so hey.

Our essay is in nine short sections, detailing the drift of the post from a few days ago, "When In Rome ... ", on the challenges and dangers of presenting the faith of the Augsburg Confession in our time:

I. The Lutheran "Worship Wars"
II. The Nature of Roman Catholic "liturgical reform"
III. So Why Did We Reform the Liturgy First, Not Them?
IV. The Nature of Lutheran Liturgical Reform
V. The Nature of Catholic Liturgical Reform - Trent
VI. The Nature of Catholic Liturgical Reform - Vatican II
VII. The Difference Between Catholic and Catholic Liturgical Reform
VIII. What's the Point of All This Catholic Stuff? We're Lutherans!
IX. Conclusion. Why Catholic Liturgical Reform Has No Place In Lutheran Liturgy

I. The Lutheran "Worship Wars".

Much is said these days about Lutheran church bodies abandoning classic Lutheran doctrine, and also doctrine in motion, otherwise known as liturgy, for things that supposedly will bring greater attendance and to which we can add Lutheran content. Why would one want to infuse a form that evolved as it did to omit the content one seeks to put back in, or think that any numbers gained thereby represent a gain for the Gospel rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered?  It cannot be explained by anything but mistaking mission for marketing.

But even where the adoption and adaptation of American "evangelical" worship, which we might call Willow Creek For Lutherans, is opposed, little if anything is said about how we have let in the back door what we try to keep out the front, in the adoption and adaptation of Roman Vatican II worship, which we might call Vatican II For Lutherans. And the unintended influence of the latter on the former, one way of dropping our worship for a Lutheranised other way opening the door to dropping our worship for yet other Lutheranised ways, goes largely unrecognised. And the damage continues from Vatican II For Lutherans and Willow Creek For Lutherans alike.

On the face of it, one might indeed wonder whether there is not much a Lutheran can appreciate about the changes in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II. For example, using an Old Testament passage along with the Epistle and Gospel, praying the Canon out loud so the Verba are heard by the congregation, using the local language rather than Latin, for restoring intercessions and petitionary prayer of the people, and not in a fixed form but one that can be adapted to what is going on. Are those things so bad? Do they not return to an older and better tradition than what was set in the Tridentine Rite? While there is much that may be questionable about Vatican II liturgical reform, must we then ignore it altogether or not find in it good things we can use too? Let's look and see.

II. The Nature of Roman Catholic "liturgical reform".

It may, at first, seem so from a Lutheran standpoint. I don't, now, have any problem with the "blessings" mentioned. But a Catholic, which I once was, ought to have tons of pixels of reasons why those "blessings" are a few of the things that are neither necessary nor even desirable, and obscure other things that are necessary. But Catholics don't anymore. For example, the "silent canon". Used to be a good thing, as The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass reflected the life of Christ, wherein he taught first, then acted for our salvation. Therefore the first part of the mass is Scripture and preaching, verbal, but in the second the focus is the action, not the words, which are silent, let alone congregational "memorial acclamations", as in the novus ordo, which destroy the whole idea. The RCC taught something, then started teaching something else, but said nothing really changed; I still believed what they taught me before, so I left thinking the whole thing must be screwed up both before and after.

That was then. It isn't now. When I first read the BOC along with Adult Information Class, I would see in my mind the implementation of what is said there in contrast to the implementation that I actually did see before me during and after Vatican II. WOW. Throw in Babylonian Captivity, and I'm on board!

III. So Why Did We Reform the Liturgy First, Not Them?

So here's the deal -- WE didn't get those blessings just listed from Vatican II, THEY did! So what to us then is their catching up? With the exception of the OT reading, which kind of jacks with Jerome's model of Torah/Haftorah from the synagogue lectionary to Gospel/Epistle, but adds on without destroying it, WE ALREADY HAD THEM, four hundred and some years before they started playing catch-up! And they sure as hell didn't produce the ESV.

Our problem is when we DON'T use our version of the pre-V2, and for that matter pre-Trent, historic liturgy, and instead start to worship after their new ones. It's when we DON'T add an OT reading to the historic lectionary going back to Jerome, but instead use their new one which was a conscious intended break with that tradition and the preaching associated with it. It's when we rehash their stuff, or worse rehash our stuff in the manner that they rehash their stuff, either way no different than others of us rehash American "evangelicalism" and Willow Creek or stuff like that.

So let 'em play catch-up. For THEM, not us. We don't need to start playing catch-up to their catch-up!

In short, the things from Vatican II which we cheer, WE ALREADY HAVE and a Catholic should deplore, and if they are now cheering them and doing them, something changed, and it wasn't us.

OK, well then that's a good thing, right? Well, again, from our point of view, yes. So, with all this good stuff happening, maybe we can even look at getting back to-gether, going "home to Rome", huh?

Just a second though. Something doesn't quite add up. If Rome has this divinely instituted guarantee in the bishops in succession from the Apostles in communion with the successor to St Peter, the Pope, where the church will always conserve the true faith of Christ, and we don't, we deny it and live outside it, and we therefore aren't even church in the strict sense of the word, then how is it that we do all this stuff 400 some years before without this guarantee, and how is it if it's such a good idea that is was held up with the guys with the guarantee for 400 some years?

Seems like it oughta be the other way around; it's the guys without the guarantee and all who oughta be catching up, so if there were changes here lately with them, they must have been a different sort of change than the sort of change we did centuries ago.

IV. The Nature of Lutheran Liturgical Reform.

And indeed it was. Which is our whole point here.

What was our intent? Whether we achieved it or not is another matter; what was our intent? Our Book of Concord makes it clear again and again our intent was not to come up with anything new, but quite the opposite, to preserve what was already there.

This is meant across the board; here, since the matters mentioned above are liturgical, let's look at how this works out liturgically. Just as we aim to teach no new doctrine, but the constant doctrine of the church pruned of later accretions, so also we seek no new order of worship, but the same order, corrected of abuses.

From the Augsburg Confession:
1) in the Mass, nearly all the usual ceremonies are preserved, the only thing new being throwing in some German hymns among the sung Latin (ACXXIV)
2)and we stick to the example of the church, taken from Scripture and the Fathers, which is especially clear in that we retain the public ceremonies for the most part similar to those previously in use, only differing in the number of masses (ACXXIV),
3) and even though the observance of holy days, fasting days and the like has been the basis of outrageous distortions of forgiveness of sins by Christ's merit, nonetheless the value of good order in the church, when accompanied by proper teaching, leads us to retain the traditional order of readings in the church and the major holy days (ACXXVI).

What is the intent here, what sort of change and by what means is confessed here? Is it to make our worship more authentic by remodelling it closer to that of the early church? Is it to make our worship more authentic by remodelling it taking into account other rites of earlier origin? Is it to make our worship more authentic by coming up with a new set of readings to offer more Scripture especially more moral teaching and less miracle stories? Is it to make our worship more authentic by offering options throughout the same rite, to make our worship more authentic by regarding abuses and distortions along the way as invalidating the way itself and the rite developed along the way? Is it to then, part stepping back in history, part stepping across in other rites, and part creating new things altogether, to step forward with a grand pastiche of a new order of mass, new lectionary, new calendar, to show we have gone beyond the abuses and distortions of the past and are now ready to address the future?

Nothing of the sort! In fact, the opposite of the sort! It was to accept and preserve the constant liturgy of the church, right along with the faith it expresses, pruned of excesses and accretions. It was not to do something new, or something new made by jumping back centuries to earlier, presumably purer, times.

V. The Nature of Catholic Liturgical Reform - Trent.

We ought remember too, that when the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, the Tridentine Rite, as it is called now, was 40 years in the future, and when the Book of Concord was complete in 1580, it was only 10 years old. The "Tridentine Rite" was precisely Rome's effort to both address the legitimate concerns of the Reformation and at the same time guard against its doctrinal errors from Rome's point of view, establishing one norm to effect both aims for the Western Church as a whole, allowing other rites to be observed locally or by religious orders only if they were no less than two hundred years old, which is to say, before 1370, the Tridentine Rite being promulgated in 1570, and therefore untainted by the Reformation.

The 1570 typical edition would have five revisions: 1604 by Pope Clement VIII, who had also revised Jerome's Vulgate (Latin) Bible and the two needed harmonising; 1634 by Pope Urban VIII; 1884 by Pope Leo XIII; 1920 by Pope Benedict XV, mostly making official the work of the late Pius X; 1962 by Pope John XXIII, mostly making official the work of the late Pius XII.

Revised typical editions don't just happen out of the blue. They codify and formalise specific papally mandated changes made in the years before. For example, when I was an altar boy, the 1920 typical edition was in force, but Pius XII had made extensive revisions to the Holy Week liturgy binding in 1955, which were controversial then. I remember older people grousing about this new stuff that changed what Holy Week was even like. They remain controversial now, in the larger context that some advocates of the Tridentine Rite do not accept the 1962 edition which incorporated them, and/or John XXIII's later revisions to the edition, but none advocate the original 1570 edition as some sort of purity. Rome insists upon the 1962 edition where the Tridentine Rite is allowed.

The point is, when we speak of how we've "always worshipped", nobody, absolutely nobody, takes that to mean that nothing ever changed, any where, any time, and never will -- it has, it does, and it will, change not being the question, but rather what kind of change and change into what.

VI. The Nature of Catholic Liturgical Reform - Vatican II.

The Tridentine Rite was replaced entirely by the novus ordo missae, the New Order of Mass, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1969 and coming out in 1970. It too did not just happen, bam, but was a codification, a finalising and formalising, of things introduced prior to it, this time during and after the Second Vatican Council. The new rite was a NEW rite, with a new calendar, a new series of readings over three years replacing the one that stood and grew for about 1500 years, and unlike anything before it in the same rite, different options for doing one thing such as confession and absolution, not to mention four different eucharistic prayers for the heart of the mass itself.

The old rite was not declared invalid, but replaced, with certain exceptions granted for its use. The motu proprio of 2007, Summorum pontificum, did not change that at all, but rather made simpler the conditions for exceptions. And then went one better -- while the novus ordo remains the lex orandi, the rule of prayer, for the church, now, in addition to the new multiform lex orandi, the 1962 edition of the Tridentine Rite will be considered an other-than-ordinary (the word extraordinary meant literally) expression of that same lex orandi! All the same thing, of course -- implying too, one must recognise the novus ordo as the normal use of the Roman Rite to use the Tridentine Rite as its extraordinary use, which does not in the least address the entire reason why some Catholics from the get-go continued with the Tridentine Rite, namely, that the new order was false to prior orders.

Thus, if it is true that for Catholics the new mass was a great step forward, and continued steps forward consist in being faithful to the new mass rather than endless departures from it in its supposed "spirit", then this is at best an unneeded step and at worst a step backward from that reform, and if it is true that for Catholics the new mass was the step backward, indeed a step away, from the true mass, then this requires an acceptance of the invalid new rite as valid.

So, change everywhere. Indeed. But again, change is not the issue. The issue is, what kind of change and change into what.

The fact is, the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, no less than those of  Trent, proceed from a basis completely different than, and completely foreign to, the liturgical reforms of the Lutheran Reformation. Yes, there are points of similarity in the results, certainly. There are large areas of similarity across the board. But the totality, and the underlying agenda, are an entirely different effort than ours, and in fact utterly hostile to the very thing our reform set out to reform and pass on.

VII. The Difference Between Catholic and Catholic Liturgical Reform.

The late Neuhaus, in his writings about his conversion to the post-conciliar RCC, expresses better than anything I have read in some time the utter disgust and rejection of the traditional Catholic Church by the Catholic Church put in its place at Vatican II. All very politely expressed, so Neuhaus doesn't even recognise it in himself as he expresses it! An entirely new church, containing nothing of anything before it, which it clearly despises. The violent caricature -- borrowing from Maritain, yet another who constructed, like Newman, his partly Protestant partly pagan "Catholic Church" to address his own needs -- that mindset offers of anything before Vatican II is as much the actual church before the Vatican II as the "spirit" of Vatican II is Vatican II, and is utterly obscene in its gross falseness (again, unintended and unrecognised) and in its disconnect from the Catholic Church (and again, unintended and unrecognised) that is more radical than anything in the entire range of the "Reformation".

Just as there is a "spirit" of Vatican II and Vatican II itself, there was a "spirit" of Trent and Trent itself too. Then, as now, this confusion of the two is seen in primarily two places, one being popular piety, where things are done thinking they are based in the real thing whereas they are based in the grossest of misunderstood caricatures of it, the other being the actions of priests and bishops who do essentially the same thing but with far greater implications due to their position.

How utterly ironic that, as the post-conciliar RCC attempts to address the confusion of Vatican II with the "spirit" thereof by some sort of "reform of the reform", the real Vatican II itself is based on a confusion of Trent with the "spirit" thereof.

The things which, as a Lutheran now thank God, I am happy to see seem to indicate the RCC is in the early stages of catching up with where the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church has been for some centuries now, and are largely the same things which, as a Catholic, indicate the RCC is in the final stages of becoming a Protestant church but with the pope at the top, as my dad, a 1941 RCC convert, used to put it.

Newman, Bouyer, Maritain, on and on, Protestants all, constructed a "Catholic Church" intellectually that allowed them to remain essentially Protestant but with the external validity supplied by the institutional RCC church, which at Vatican II was crystallised and codified and made official by the institutional RCC church itself. These theologians were collectively called the Nouvelle Theologie, the New Theology, and in the decades leading up to Vatican II were repeatedly warned against by popes up to and including the last pre-conciliar pope, Pius XII.

de Lubac in 1946 was forbidden to publish by the Catholic Church; de Lubac was a peritus (theological expert and adviser) at the Council and was made a cardinal by John Paul II.
Chenu's book Le Saulchoir was put on the Index of Forbidden Books by Pius XII; Chenu was a peritus at the Council.
Urs von Balthasar in 1950 was banned from teaching by the Catholic Church; JPII named him a cardinal.
Congar was banned from teaching or publishing by the Catholic Church; after the Council, JPII, greatly influenced by him, made him a cardinal.

Chenu and Congar, along with Rahner, Schillebeeckx and Kueng, were part of the founding of the journal Concilium, begun in 1965 during the Council as a scholarly journal of the thought behind the reform. Urs von Balthasar and de Lubac, along with Bouyer, Walter Kasper and Joseph Ratzinger, were part of the founding of the journal Communio, founded after the Council in 1972 thinking Concilium though on the right direction had gone too far.

The direction was not the issue; it is the same for both, the question being only how far it goes. The more conservative answer is Vatican II Catholicism as officially taught by the hierarchy collectively and the post-conciliar popes, the more liberal answer being the "spirit" of Vatican II, the "excesses" etc. from which the conservatives think a "reform of the reform" will deliver that church.

VIII. What's the Point of All This Catholic Stuff? We're Lutherans!

All of them, along with Rahner, Kueng, Schillebeeckx, Bouyer, Gilson, and Danielou, were the Nouvelle Theologie, warned against not by name but by description by Pius XII in Humani generis (1950). And three years earlier, in Mediator Dei, Pius XII specifically rejected a liturgical archaeology, as he called it, as a model for liturgical change, as if there were no organic development of liturgy by the Holy Spirit, and as if validity were to come from scholars uncovering earlier therefore purer or better sources which become current models.

All of that is dissent, and was recognised as such by the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II. That has one kind of consequences within the Roman Catholic Church, which amount to this: what is now normative Catholicism was prior to Vatican II dissent from Catholicism. A more conservative version of that dissent won, and now maintains supremacy over the more liberal version of the same dissent. The direction of Mediator Dei and Humani generis was left in the dust.

As Lutherans we may note indeed that liturgical reform at Trent specifically sought to remove any taint of the Reformation. But we must also -- and this is the point of going through all this "Catholic stuff" -- note that the liturgical reform at Vatican II absolutely did not accept Lutheran ideas expressed in our Confessions, but rather proceeded on a basis of "liturgical archaeology" that is foreign to both our Confessions and the Roman Catholic Church, a basis which rejects the common element of organic growth accepting and  treasuring its results.

Sasse wrote in We Confess the Sacraments (Concordia 1985, the particular passage quoted on Pastor McCain's excellent but now defunct blog Cyberbrethren for 18 June 2010) that if the right relationship of liturgy and dogma can be known in Rome, as seen in Mediator Dei, then how much moreso among us who also make the right understanding of the Gospel a criteria of liturgy.

IOW, what was lacking in Mediator Dei and in the liturgical reforms of Trent is the same thing that was lacking that led to the Lutheran Reformation, namely, a right understanding of the Gospel.  At Trent, steps were taken to ensure that no taint of what were, in their minds, our incorrect and novel understanding of the Gospel would influence the liturgy, but the organic growth process itself rather than liturgical archaeology was not in dispute, just Rome's stranglehold on the process as well as on the catholic church itself.

What was lacking in Vatican II and its novus ordo is the common element not in dispute between us and Rome, the participation in that organic process, accepting what has been handed on to us rather than recreating it based on liturgical archaeology of a Romantic ideal of a lost pure Apostolic or Patristic age. In so doing, as the banned theologians of one decade became the conciliar theological experts (periti) and Cardinals of the next, Rome in no way came closer to us with a right understanding of the Gospel as a criteria of liturgy, but in fact turned its back on the right relationship of dogma however understood and liturgy that was not in dispute at the Lutheran Reformation.

Yet we (we being LCMS, not only just Lutherans in general) follow right after them, "them" being now not just Rome but the other liturgical church bodies, such as the Anglican Communion, the ECUSA and ELCA here, and the EKD in the "old country", all of them predictably doctrinally heterodox too, in either or both of adopting and adapting Rome's novus ordo liturgy, including its lectionary and calendar, and applying the principles of liturgical archaeology to our own liturgical past.

And so we place the results on an equal basis with the historic liturgy, then wonder why others wonder why yet other things, or no liturgy at all, cannot also be placed on that equal footing!

IX. Conclusion. Why Catholic Liturgical Reform Has No Place In Lutheran Liturgy.

What is important for us Lutherans about that is this: both Trent and Vatican II resulted in new Roman missals, but neither effort sought what our reforms seek and therefore neither are the models to which we turn and neither produce a lex orandi consistent with our lex credendi. In the novus ordo, while on the surface it may seem to move closer to our reforms, we see an order of service that resulted from entirely different ideas and objectives than our reforms, ideas and objectives which in fact are contradictory to ours and reject their entire basis. Ours seek to retain the usual ceremonies except where contraindicated by the Gospel, theirs seek to replace the usual ceremonies with new ones based on the concepts of Nouvelle Theologie.

The fruit of their effort has nothing to contribute to ours, and, in seeking to "Lutheranise" this manner of worship we are no less attempting to make Lutheran a kind of worship based on a kind of belief that is not ours, attempting to make a lex orandi from something based on a lex credendi that is not ours, than those who go to Willow Creek et al seek to "Lutheranise" a content and a lex orandi also derived from a belief and a lex credendi that is not ours.

If the latter has become popular and in many eyes not only permissible but desirable, why should that surprise us when we have done the same thing in the former, since either way the result is "contemporary worship" rather than the conservation of the ongoing liturgy of the church?

Concilium, Communio, Nowayio!

Textual Note: This is a revision of my post "On being catholic, on being Catholic" from 18 March 2009. Understanding the nature of "catholic" as distinct from "Catholic" seems more urgent than ever on this anniversary of the presentation of our most fundamental confession.

The Nativity of St John the Baptist. 24 June 2017.

This feast, which passes largely unnoticed now, is one of the oldest in the Christian church year. The Council of Agde, held 10 September 506 and presided over by Bishop St Caesarius of Arles, places it among the major feasts of the church, and it had, just like the Nativity of Jesus, three distinct liturgies -- a vigil, a dawn and a day one.

This isn't just a regional or even Western thing; in the Eastern Church, where he is more commonly known as St John the Forerunner (maybe that would be good for those thinking his customary Western name makes it seem like he was a Baptist in the denominational sense), his birth is also celebrated on 24 June, and has a vigil and an afterfeast the day after.

So why 24 June? Well, the details come only from St Luke, who says that when Gabriel announced to Mary she would bear the Messiah if she agreed, that her cousin Elisabeth was already six months pregnant. But hey, if Jesus' birthday is celebrated 25 December, shouldn't it be 25 June?

In our calendar yes, but they didn't have our calendar. In the Roman  Imperial calendar, days of one month were counted backwards from the first, called the kalends, from which our word calendar comes btw, of the next month. Christmas is eight days before the kalends of January, so St John's birthday was put eight days before the kalends of July, but, due to our present Germanic way of counting days now, that makes it fall on 24 June.

No-body, btw, supposes these are the actual birthdays of either Jesus or John, but only that it puts them correctly relative to each other.

Either way, it puts the Nativity of St John around the time of the Summer Solstice. Some suppose that therefore this feast is just a Christian cultural appropriation of the solstice from pagan culture in the process of evangelisation. Not likely, since the feast is centuries old and in the Julian calendar that was in use in mediaeval Europe until 1582 the Summer solstice is earlier, in mid-June!  Not to mention the date of the feast of St John is calculated from when Jesus' birth is celebrated, not the Summer solstice.

Nonetheless the coincidence with the approximate time of the solstice is clear and did have influence.  Though people had no idea it was because of the tilt of the Earth's axis toward or away from the Sun, they could see that daylight hours in a day increased and decreased through the year. The Summer Solstice is the so-called longest day of the year;  while all days have 24 hours it has the most sunlight hours, and sunlight hours begin to decrease until the Winter Solstice or so-called shortest day of the year with the fewest sunlight hours.

In pre-Christian Europe, the beginning of shorter daylight during the day was marked in many and varied ways, the common element being bonfires.  Why bonfires?  The idea was, that with more and more darkness during the day, evil spirits and/or other not so well-intentioned factors may move about more easily, so light was lit to ward them off.  Bonfires, and the jumping over thereof, are still a feature in northern European countries.

The Christian version of all that has more to do with the relation of St John to Christ.  Right after the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, sunlight hours begin to decrease, even as John said of Jesus "He must increase and I must decrease" (John 3:30).  Many period documents reflect the tension between earlier non-Christian observances of solstice with the Christian observance of the birth of St John.

The Summer solstice is still called Midsummer (Sommersonnenwende in German, gotta throw that in) from its solstice observances.  One of Shakespeare's most popular and enduring plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, is named from it. The play is loosely based on antics from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Publius Ovidius Naso, Books of Transformations, 8 A.D.), ending with the suggestion that it's all a dream.  It may have been written for Queen Elizabeth I in celebration of the feast of the Nativity of St John, though there is no conclusive documentation of that.

In between the two solstices are the two equinoxes, with about equal daylight and dark hours, and these four formed the Quarter Days, the four days marking the turn of the seasons. In the olden times in Mother England, the Quarter Days were when rents were due, worker contracts were made, and magistrates had to complete tours of even the most outlying areas of their jurisdictions to assure that none went unduly long without a hearing and resolution. Justice delayed is justice denied, as we say.

This last was one of the provisions the barons got from King John in the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215. The Magna Carta, meaning Great Charter in English, was the first time that subjects -- though these subjects were themselves local ruling land owners, barons, the original "free men" (in German, Freiherren) -- got from a king certain rights and limitations of royal power as a matter of law.

This set in motion a development of rule of law rather than a king's or ruler's will, one of whose descendants is the Constitution of the United States.  2015 was the 800 year anniversary of the Magna Carta.  We shouldn't be so surprised that the rule of law doesn't always take so well, as if it just takes naturally, when we try to export it to other places.  Have they been working this out for 800 years?

The "Robin Hood" movie of 2010 takes its context in the beginning of this development, specifically, the Carta de Foresta, or Charter of the Forest, of 1217, hammered out after numerous violations of the 1215 document.  In fact it was with this charter that the first charter of 1215 began to be distinguished as the magna carta, or great charter.  The Magna Carta version of 1297, which includes amendments, is still part of English law.

The Quarter Days are:

25 March. Called Lady Day, also known as the Feast of the Annunciation, and until 1752, New Years Day. In Mother England 6 April is still tax day, which you may hear echoed in our 15 April. Hold on, wasn't that 25 March? Calendar change, remember -- 25 March in the old Julian calendar became 6 April in the now current Gregorian one.

24 June. The Nativity of St John the Baptist, also known as Midsummer Day, with reference to the Summer Solstice.

29 September. Michaelmas, the mass on the Feast of St Michael the    Archangel, for which this blog (as with all the Quarter Days, actually) posts.

25 December. Christmas, the mass on the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus.

Saints are usually commemorated in the church calendar on the day of their death, that being the day of their birth into eternity, but Jesus, his mother Mary, and St John the Forerunner are the only three whose births into this life are also commemorated.

So lots to celebrate -- John, and even more importantly his whole significance, Jesus whose forerunner he was; the development of our present form of governance; Summer and all the daylight and warmth! And a really cool movie to see!

And may you have a pleasant, uh, Midsummer Night's dream too!

When In Rome ... 2017.

do as the Romans do. Yeah, yeah, a common phrase, whyrya posting about that?

Here's why.  Three reasons.

1.  Guess what? This often heard and used phrase actually first came from a resolution to a controversy over proper observances in the Christian church. Yeah, really, it comes from the "worship wars" but hardly anyone even knows that.
2.  It's only half of what was originally said, and once the other half is known, it puts a whole different meaning to both the first half and to the whole.
3.  The whole matter leads nicely into the upcoming post on the commemoration of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession later this month, giving important lessons on confessing that confession now.

About "Saint" Ambrose, the Guy Who Said It.

Here's the deal. The guy who first said it was "Saint" Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Ambrose lived from about 337 AD or a little later until 4 April 397. He was born in Augusta Treverorum, Praefectura Praetorio Galliarum. What in the hell is that, and where?

OK, Augusta Treverorum is still around.  That is its Roman name.  These days it's called Trier, in Germany.

So what's a Praefectura Praetorio Galliarum?  A prefecture (praefectura) was one of four large administrative areas set up in the Roman Empire on the death of Constantine the Great on 22 May in 337, the same year Ambrose was likely born. So a prefecture is the highest unit under the Empire itself, and it is governed by a prefect (praefectus). Galliarum means "of the Gauls", and the Praetorian Prefecture of Gaul included basically what is now England, France, the western part of Germany, Spain, and Mauritania in Africa. What's this Praetorio thing? A Praetorian Prefect (Praefectus praetorio) was originally the commander of the Praetorian Guard, an elite military special forces unit that guarded the Emperor, but Constantine disbanded the Guard, and the adjective "praetorian" was applied to the four prefects who as it were guarded the four prefectures of the Empire for the Emperor.

OK, takes care of Praefectura Praetorio Galliarum, it's the Praetorian Prefecture of Gaul. And Ambrose's father was the Praetorian Prefect of the Praetorian Prefecture of Gaul. One of the four top officers of the Empire. A major player. Which is also why Ambrose was born in Trier -- that was the capital of the prefecture, and also by that time an Imperial residence in the West and a functional capital of the Western Roman Empire rather than Rome itself.

I gotta digress here a minute. I've been to a hell of a lot of places, but Trier is absolutely the most captivating, enchanting and wonderful place of them all, and maybe one day again I will have dinner outside the Porta Nigra, the "Black Gate", the only surviving of the four gates the Romans built to guard each side of the city, against most likely some of my ancestors before we moved to England. I have never felt like I felt in Trier anywhere else, and that was forty eight years ago as of 2017.

The Governor Of The Imperial Diocese of Milan Becomes Its "Bishop".

Well back to the story. Ambrose's father was a Roman bigwig and Ambrose was sent to Rome for his education. He rose through the governmental and political ranks to become what we would call a Governor-general, but they called vicarius, vicar, meaning representative.  A vicar represented the Praetorian Prefect who in turn represented the Emperor, in this case to the diocese of Milan. Hey, aren't diocese run by bishops? No they're not originally, and the church had nothing to do with them. A diocese is an administrative unit of the Roman Empire set up by Diocletian.  Hey, diocese, Diocletian -- yeah, he named his new units "diocese" after himself. And Milan was also by then the official capital of the Empire.

The same Diocletian, ruling from Milan, in July 285 had split the unwieldy Empire in two, to try to hold it-together, and set up a system where each half would have its "Augustus" and its "Caesar", a system called the Tetrarchy. Diocletian was the last Emperor of an undivided Roman Empire.  He designated Nicomedia, in modern Turkey, as the Eastern capitol in 286, and in 293 designated Milan, then called Mediolanum, which had been a functional capital as was Trier, the official Western capital.

Diocletian became the Augustus in the East with his fellow general officer Maximian as the Augustus in the West. The Romans themselves weren't real happy with the Empire no longer seated at Rome btw. (Short aside:  I've been to Milan and Rome too and beautiful as they are, give me Trier any day.) Diocletian then became the only Roman Emperor ever to retire from office, on 1 May 305. Whereupon the Tetrarchy fell apart amid the schemes of Maximian's kid Maxentius and a guy named Constantine. Diocletian, racked with despair at this and illness, died on 3 December 311, possibly by suicide.

Ambrose was the Governor-general of the diocese of Milan for a couple years when in 374 the "bishop",  the head religious figure of the diocese, a guy named Auxentius and an Arian Christian, died, and a great uproar ensued over whether the next "bishop" would be an Arian or a Trinitarian Christian. When Governor Ambrose intervened to calm things down, everybody said Hey, YOU be the bishop. He fled but the guy hiding him got a letter from the Emperor (Gratian) saying it was OK for Ambrose to be "bishop" so he was turned in.

Little problem here though. Ambrose was not only not clergy, not trained in the faith, he wasn't even baptised. But hey, not a problem when the Empire says OK. Within a week he was baptised, ordained, and made bishop. I'm not making this up! And we bitch about SMP being a fast track! Think that's wild, hell, six years later when the "Catholic Church" was defined by the co-Emperors (Gratian again, Valentinian II and Theodosius), and became the state religion for the whole Roman Empire on 27 February 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica, you got a state church so entrenched that it's still around over 1500 years after the state whose religion it was, the Roman empire, collapsed in the West (476) and over 500 years after it collapsed in the East (1453).

Yup, the RC and the EO. Who still maintain the name for their administrative units that they had when their "bishops" were the chief religious figures of the Imperial units the diocese.

So here's Ambrose, from an imperial residence and functional Roman capital in Trier, "bishop" in Milan, the official Western capital of the Roman Empire since Emperor Diocletian made it so in 293, and guess what, he gets the holder of the most prestigious professorship in the world of its time, guy named Augustine from Carthage who got the gig in Milan, as a convert and baptises him in 387, seven years on into the "Catholic Church"!

I ain't getting into Augustine's career here, that's in another post in the Past Elder Blogoral Calendar, but he ends up in this new state religion, basically morphing the neoPlatonism dominant in philosophy at the time into Christianity, then goes back to North Africa and ends up as, you guessed it, "bishop" in Roman Imperial diocese of Hippo Regius (now Annaba, Algeria).

How the Phrase Came About.

So here it is. Amid all the turmoil of the age -- which again, I ain't getting into here, it's in that same post, "Eastern Church/Empire, Western Church Empire", revised and posted each year on 16 January, founding day of the Roman Empire -- there's a controversy about what are the correct days on which to fast. None, if you ask me. Anyway, fasting was done on different days in different places, so Augustine asks Ambrose for his advice on settling the matter.

Well, Ambrose was known to be, as we put it in SEPs for call candidates now, flexible in his worship preferences. So he writes to Augustine: "When I'm in Rome I fast on Saturdays (the local Roman custom) and when I'm in Milan I don't. Follow the custom where you are."

Anyway his advice eventually crystallised as a proverb in mediaeval Latin as si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi. OK OK, I'll translate -- if you are in Rome, live in the Roman way; if you are elsewhere, live as they do there. Which has come into English, though only the first half of it, as "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".

So there, now you can impress the hell out of people at your next cocktail party, fund raiser, reception, winkel, or whatever the case may be. But that was not my point in going through all this stuff. The reason I bother with, and bother you with, this kind of stuff at all, both in this post and all the others on this blog, is what does it show us about things now.

Guess What? We Ain't In Rome!

So what does the advice of Ambrose to Augustine about the correct days to fast show us about things now?

As we saw, our modern English descendant of that advice leaves out half of it. It's not just when in Rome do as the Romans do, but also, when someplace else do as they do there. Which means, the Roman church way does not have to be imposed on anywhere else, and also, how they do it in other places is just as fine too and does not have to be imposed on Rome.

What does this mean? Or for our non-Lutheran readers, what does that mean?  (If you're a non-Lutheran reader and don't get it, don't worry, just having fun with the usual English rendering of the phrase "Was ist das?" which Luther puts before each explanation of things in his Small Catechism.)

Several things to note.  First:  Ambrose is not telling Augustine to chose what seems right to him, but to stick with existing customs in the places they are found. Ambrose is also not telling him to come up with a new custom.  He is also not telling him to decide which is right and impose one place's custom on another.  He is also not telling him to come up with a new and better custom.  And, he is also not telling him hey, why not put a synthesis or pastiche to-gether from both customs thus presenting the wider rich heritage to everyone everywhere.

IOW, he is not telling him to act in any of the ways our "liturgical movement" scholars, or is it liturgical movement "scholars", do in coming up with liturgical service books, but quite the opposite.

Second:  What are the right days to fast is not a question on the same level as what is the right way to celebrate the Divine Service.  The controversy addressed by "when in Rome ..." was about when to have fasting days, not whether to have fasting days or what they are.  Fasting days per se were not in question, just when to do them, so when in Rome do them when they are done there and when someplace else do them when they are done there.

IOW, "Christian Freedom" does not mean "Do What You Want" and "adiaphora" is not Greek for "whatever".  Some differences in practice do not alter what is practiced, for example, fasting on this day or fasting on that day does not change what fasting is.  But, some differences do reflect a difference in what is being practiced, for example, differences in what is said at and around the consecration of the bread and wine at communion services reflect differences as to what exactly is happening -- is it an action we do or an action Christ does, is this actually his body and blood or rather a symbol or memorial of it, etc.  Ambrose is not referring to differences as to what is done, just differences of how or when.  Everything is not ok.

The validity of Lutheran liturgical reform included both kinds of difference, that Rome does not have to authorise and control liturgy and impose its way throughout the church and ceremonies may be different in different places, as well as difference with Rome as to the nature of what is happening.  That was a major issue in the Reformation.

Yet now, having established that, and, our forefathers in LCMS having come to the US to escape a government imposed synthesis of Lutheran worship with Reformed (Calvinist) worship, what do we do?  We turn around and impose both Roman and other worship on ourselves, that's what. We escape the forced Prussian Union of Lutheran with other German Protestant worship, then here seek to combine Lutheran and other American Protestant worship ourselves. And when we are not doing that, we seek to combine Lutheran worship with Rome's latest, the novus ordo of Vatican II.  All of such efforts false to Ambrose's advice!

Si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi.

Do as the Romans do when in Rome. We are not in Rome any more than we are in Willow Creek. Walther knew this, and in his day founded LCMS with like minded pastors to counter the efforts to recast Lutheran worship with what were called "new measures" drawn from churches with big attendance, supposedly taking forms that better address people now, as evidenced by bigger attendance, and endowing them with Lutheran content.  Hey, that's just what they do now -- never mind that those forms are as they are precisely so as not to express the beliefs we have about worship.

Yet over a century later so many of us fall for the same siren call of the new measures of our day, trying to adopt them, in hopes of getting the numbers the churches from which they are taken, and imbue them with a Lutheran content. And so many others try to counter that with a tradition that is no tradition at all but simply taking another non-Lutheran new measure, the novus ordo of Vatican II, and making it our own, joining the bandwagon of liturgical heterodox churches whose common property such adaptations have become.

And in neither case remaining true to Ambrose's advice, not to mention to what our Confessions say -- "nearly all the usual ceremonies are also preserved", "we keep many traditions that are leading to good order (1Cor. 14:40) in the Church, such as the order of Scripture lessons in the Mass and the chief holy days." Not revised, not adapted, not to be recast as soon as Rome makes a move, not to locate ourselves within developments in the wider Christian community, but to PRESERVE, to KEEP, except only that which, not that is not found in the Gospel, but that contradicts the Gospel.

In these two equal but opposite departures from the basis of our liturgical reform we find the greatest challenge, which is not external but internal, to the presentation of the faith of the Augsburg Confession now.

This is a prolegomenon, an introduction, and after the post for the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, we shall take this up in more detail in the post for the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession.

Si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi. We are not in Rome, we are elsewhere, let us live like where, and who, we are.

St Boniface, OSB. 5 June 2017.

Or, How an Englishman became the patron saint of Germany, and how a Benedictine monk set in motion what would lead to the Lutheran Reformation. Festschrift for his festival day.

What a guy! For starters, the patron saint of Germany is an Englishman. Now how did that happen? Here's the story, starting with what an Englishman is anyway.  Then, how it lead, had to lead, to a reformation.

What's an Englishman?

Well, Winfred -- that's his real name -- was born to a wealthy family (funny how that happens a lot in what become "great" saints) in Wessex around 672 or so. What's Wessex? We English love contractions for stuff; Wessex is a contraction for West Saxons. Great geographic Judas, isn't Saxony in Germany? Yeah, it is. We English are basically a German people, with some Roman stuff mixed in from before, and a bunch of stuff mixed in from later, largely French. Although the main kind of French, Normans, are basically German too.

So are the Vikings who were always raiding and conquering stuff.  Those Vikings were probably looking for some decent food, if you've ever had lutefisk or other Scandinavian food. Unfortunately our food isn't that great either, which is probably why the coastal raids were so fierce -- they were ticked, came all this way and the food is still crap, so they trashed the place.

Anyway, a bunch of us German types came in about the time the Romans were losing their grip and the original peoples were losing what was left of theirs too. So, you had Wessex, the Kingdom of the West Saxons in the western modern United Kingdom (which really is a union of formerly separate kingdoms), Sussex, the Kingdom of the South Saxons, and Essex, the Kingdom of the East Saxons. Essex is just South of East Anglia, which is where my people came -- hey, we were invited, the locals were having trouble holding off the Scots after the Romans left -- from Anglia, in modern Schleswig-Holstein, a state in modern Germany.

Just for the record, there's seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and eventually they became a united Kingdom of England.  "England" comes from us, it's a contraction of Angle-land.  Told you we love contracting stuff.  The seven kingdoms are: Wessex; Sussex; Essex; East Anglia; Mercia (they were some bad dudes, but I ain't getting into that now); Northumbria (that's where the Venerable Bede is from); Kent. Collectively, they are traditionally called the Heptarchy.

The Missionaries Are Coming!

Anyway, here's Winfrid in Wessex. Against his father's wishes, he takes off to a Benedictine monkatorium -- one extreme to another. In 716 he sets out to convert the Frisians, since his language, which we now call Old English, wasn't all that different than theirs. OK, what's Frisia? Well, it's die deutsche Bucht.  Oh for the cat's sake, what is THAT?  Well, it means the German Bay, or cove or bight; it's the German coastal area on the southeast corner of the North Sea.

Trouble is, there was a war on between Charles Martel and the King of Frisia, so he and his company went back home. They came back though. This time he had the support and protection of Charles Martel. Whozat, came up twice now? Well, Charles Martel,  Latin name Carolus Martellus or Charles the Hammer, Karl Martell in German, was King of the Franks.  Well, in effect he was king; he himself never assumed the title "king" and turned down the Roman title "consul" from the Pope too, sticking with the Latin title dux (duke, leader, a military role) et (and) princeps (prince, a ruling role) of the Franks.

The war with Frisia was part of his larger effect of pretty much setting the course for all later European history.  Amid his conquests in Europe (Bavarians, Saxons, Frisians etc) itself, he also held off the Islamic invasion of Europe (you didn't think this sort of stuff was anything new did you?) after 21 years of nobody else being able to at the Battle of Tours in 732.  There, with no cavalry against arguably the finest military in the world at the time, the Umayyad Caliphate (Sunnis, hq Damascus), he defeated them with such decisiveness that he got the nickname "Hammer".

This consolidated with his son Pippin and grandson Charlemagne, aka Carolus Magnus, aka Karl der Grosse, whose Carolingian Empire would become the Holy Roman Empire (Imperium Romanum Sacrum, or das heiliges römisches Reich) with the blessings of the bishops of Rome, some of them in turn put there by the empire, call it a symbiotic relationship, which lasted from 962 until 1806 (we'll get to that in a bit here). Wanna spice it up at your next let's-impress-each-other cocktail party? Call France West Francia and Germany East Francia, which is pretty much what they are.

Anyway, the object of the game involving Winfrid (in case you thought we forgot about the subject of the post!) was for the Christian Carolingians to conquer the non-Christian Saxons, which of course meant making them Christian too. Now just a bleeding minute, didn't we just go over Saxons being in England? Yes we did, but, two things. For one, some of them stayed home, and for another, it's often hard telling in accounts from those times whether "Saxon" means literally people from Sachsen or is a reference to Germans generally.

Winfrid Takes On Thor.

So, in 723, under royal and military protection, a famous thing happened. Winfrid -- who was not yet known by his Benedictine (everybody who's anybody is a Benedictine, you know that) name Boniface, from the Latin Bonifacius, meaning well-made -- thinking of Elijah in the Bible story, goes up to a sacred tree, near Fritzlar in the modern German state of Hesse, that was a major religious site to Thor in the native German religion, and chops the bleeder down, saying if Thor were real he could strike him dead.

Which didn't happen, and the story is that on seeing that all these Germans, from outside the former Roman Imperial boundaries, became Christian. Then the next year (724) he builds a chapel from wood from the oak. Then he set up a bishop -- guess you didn't need a papal appointment -- and established a Benedictine monastery in Fritzlar, and its first abbot, Wigbert, built a cathedral on the site of Boniface's chapel on the site of Thor's Oak. The bishop died and it became part of the bishopric of Mainz, which is the old Roman Imperial provincial capital called Moguntiaticum.

Thor Loses Big Time, Boniface Becomes First Of Germans Via The "Pope".

There had been bishops in Moguntiaticum since Crescens around 80AD, although the first one with any verifiable record is Marinus in 343. But when Boniface, by now an "archbishop" becomes bishop in 745, the place really took off. Boniface made several (three, I think) trips to Rome and was granted the pallium (we'll get to what that is next paragraph). The archbishops of Mainz became the Primas Germaniae, First of the Germans, the Pope's legatus natus (representative by virtue of his office) north of the Alps.

Holy crap what's a pallium then? It's a wool scarf worn by the pope as a symbol of his supposed authority, which the popes later also gave to some regional bishops to show their support of, and support from, papal authority. Silly enough, but these things were sold and the right to wear them brought in millions to the papal fortune, and that's serious business! So Pope Gregory II in 732 gives Boniface the pallium and also authority over what is now Germany, whereupon Charles Martel started setting up bishoprics all over with Boniface over them. Pope, king, what the hell, all "apostolic succession". Boniface himself said he couldn't have done it without the military and political power of Charles Martel. He said it to Daniel of Winchester, but Godfrey was there by institutional memory and told me about the whole thing, plus it's in all the history books if that isn't good enough for you.

But there was still these frigging Frisians, who still weren't converted. Bloody coastal areas anyway. So in 754 he sets out to get them after all, but they weren't so hot to be gotten, and he ended up getting killed. His remains were taken to Utrecht, and then to Fulda, where Boniface's disciple Sturm -- hey, didn't he have a brother named Drang (if you're laughing, a special welcome to Past Elder) -- started a Benedictine monastery on 12 March 744, which lasted until Napoleon shut it down in 1802, in what we call in German -- are you ready for this -- Reichsdeputationshauptschluss.

What Is THAT?

Relax, that's just the nickname! Its real name is Hauptschluss der ausserordentlichen Reichsdeputation, howzat, which means the Main Conclusion of the Extraordinary Imperial Delegation, which was the last thing the Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire really did, on 25 February 1803, before the HRE ended in 1806. Basically, caved to Napoleon and secularised religious stuff.

If you're thinking continuity, or hermeneutics thereof, forget it. Fulda started up again as an episcopal see, meaning a bishopric, in 1829. The German Catholic bishops still have their conferences there, but this is not the old Fulda. Likewise, the current Catholic Diocese of Mainz is not the old Archbishopric of Mainz; the latter ended and the new one began in 1802 too and they ain't the Kurfuerstentum Mainz no more either. Who the hell were they? One of the seven guys who elected Holy Roman Emperors, that's who.

For the record, the other six electors besides the Prince-Archbishop of Mainz were 1) the Prince-Archbishop of Trier (man I love Trier, Judas Priest even Constantine was there, that's where he ditched his wife and married another, whom he later had killed along with their son, in a power deal as part of becoming "Great" and "Equal of the Apostles", the whole bleeding Empire was run from there at times, I haven't been able to get that utterly captivating city out of my mind since I was there in 1969, man I love Trier), 2) the Prince-Archbishop of Köln (Cologne, couldn't understand bupkis of the local dialect there), 3) the King of Bohemia (a Habsburg since 1526, think Austria), 4) the Count Palatine of the Rhine (always a Wittlesbach, the royal family of Bavaria, yay!, whose money started the Benedictine place in Minnesota where I, well, I don't know exactly what the hell I did there), 5) the Duke of Saxony (a Wettin since 1423) and 6) the Margrave of Brandenburg (a Hohenzollern since 1415, think Prussia).

Conclusion.

Oh yeah, Boniface. His body is still there in the Fulda cathedral. Before we get all misty about the "Apostle to the Germans" and all, we should remember that the spread of Christianity through the Apostles took no such course as the one described above. Demonstrating that was the whole point in describing the above.  The Apostles' course was anything but the increase of the state church right along with the increase of the state to which it belonged. The above is not a story of the triumph of the Gospel, because as Boniface himself said, it would hardly have been possible without the triumph of the state. To get misty about some triumph of the Gospel one must also get misty about the triumph of the, specifically that, state. And its prince-bishops. And the "pope" of Rome, who still bears the title of the chief priest of the pagan Roman Imperial religion, pontifex maximus, a title held by the Roman Emperor.

The head of state no longer carries that title, the church of Christ knows neither such a title nor regional versions. The spread of Christianity brought with it the same things that would later make the Reformation necessary. As the church had become deformed, so it would need to be reformed. And so it was. While we might, and should, admire the zeal, Christianity should never be spread in this way, and the Christianity that is spread in this way is a deformed Christianity that will eventually need to be reformed.

Thanks be to God that it was. This deformed Christianity came about where, 800 some years later, it would be reformed, bringing the good Boniface brought that we celebrate to-day to its true nature. Or rather, IS being so reformed. The Lutheran Reformation is a process, not a past historical fact. It's now 500 years and counting since the Lutheran Reformation began.  The authentic Gospel of Christ and his Church is for all people, not just us Germanic types. And ironically to-day it's as needed by some church bodies with "Lutheran" in their names as it is by those state churches now without their state, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

PS. Old Boniface didn't totally get rid of the Thor, or in German Donner, thing. The sacred oak may be gone, but we still have his day, Thor's Day, or Thursday -- we English love contractions. In German it's Donnerstag, same thing. And, the 2011 movie "Thor" was a box office smash hit as was the sequel "Thor: The Dark World" in 2013, and a third one is scheduled for release in the UK on 27 October and in North America 3 November 2017! That will be "Thor: Ragnarok".

Holy crap, what's a Ragnarok?  BIG stuff, eschatology, which is the big English word derived from the Greek words meaning "study of the last stuff".  In both the Poetic and the Prose Eddas (13th century; 1200s) the end of the present age is described as a huge war resulting in the deaths of major gods, Odin and Thor among them, all sorts of natural disasters resulting in a worldwide flood, after which the surviving gods get to-gether and the earth is repopulated by the surviving human couple, whose names in English are Lift, from the Norse word for "life" so that's the female, and Lifthrasir, which means "lover of life".  Twilight of the Gods!  Yep, the source of Wagner's great work.  Should be all sorts of special effects in this one, and they say the Hulk's gonna show up in it, but no worries, Wagner took a lot of liberties with the story too.  And anyway Thor appears in other movies based on Marvel characters, such as the Avengers series.

Hey, after you wow 'em with the East/West Francia thing, hit 'em with why you must see "Thor" movies on a Thursday!

Pentecost / Shavuot / Pfingstfest. 2017.

So why does the "birthday of the church" have the Greek prefix for fifty in it?

Because Pentecost wasn't originally the "birthday of the church", but something else, that's why, which is also why the account of Pentecost speaks of it as something already there.  Just as Passover was transformed into the Eucharist, Pentecost was about to be transformed too.  Here's the deal.

What was already there is an observance commanded by God in the Law of Moses which is to be held fifty days after the second day of Passover, with each day formally counted.  The name for this feast in the Bible is Shavout, which means "weeks" in Hebrew, so it is called the Festival of Weeks in English, but when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, since that's what most Jews spoke at the time (that's the Septuagint, the version of the OT the NT quotes), it was called Pentecost, meaning fifty days, the length of the count from Passover.

The Original Pentecost In The Law Of Moses.

The counting is called the Counting of the Omer. What's an omer? Omer are the sheaves of a harvested crop. During the days of the physical Temple, the priests would offer newly harvested barley on the second day of Passover, which represents the start of the seven week harvest season. Which is why Pentecost is also called the Feast of Weeks. In the Law, Shavuot is called Hag ha-Katzir, the Holiday of Harvest's End.

Ah, so we have a harvest festival, taking its place among the various harvest festivals in world culture and religion. Well, yes and no. Yes, it's another harvest festival, another instance of a human cause for celebrating a human milestone, the end of the harvest, particularly in a pre-industrial society. But there's something a little different about this one.

The Talmud (what's a Talmud? -- ancient rabbinical writings; for more, look it up, Wikipedia is linked at the bottom of the sidebar) says it was on the 6th of Sivan (a month in the Jewish lunar calendar), which is the first night of Shavuot, that God gave the Ten Words, better known among Gentiles as the Ten Commandments. Consequently, a popular observance has been an all night Bible study at home or in the synagogue, breaking for the morning service, called shakharit, the ancestor of our, well, morning service. This all nighter is called tikkun.

Traditionally only dairy foods are eaten on Shavuot, and while no-one knows why for sure, the thinking is that on the first Shavuot they had slaughtered all these animals for food but after the Law was given it turned out they were not kosher so they only ate dairy foods.

In the liturgy of the synagogue, the readings for the service for the first day of Shavuot are: Torah portion Exodus 19:1 - 20:23 and Numbers 28:26-31; haftorah Ezechiel 1:1-28 and 3:12. In case you're a little rusty, this is the Exodus account (actually the first of two Exodus accounts, the other being Chapter 34, and there's another account in Deuteronomy) of the giving of the Law, specifically the Ten Words, and Ezechiel's account of the chariot of fire -- you know, the flying saucer.

This is the feast that Acts 2:1 (in the Epistle for Pentecost, which even the Vatican II three year lectionary couldn't overturn) refers to when it speaks of Pentecost arriving, and why there were men from all over everywhere in Jerusalem for it. It's to celebrate the giving of the Law, the reception of which is the whole reason why there was a Passover and a deliverance, the most important event in Judaism. And like Passover just had been, it was about to be transformed!

The Original Pentecost Transformed!

For God himself had become Man in Jesus Christ, suffered the condemnation for our sins in his death, and then rose again. Now, if this were all to the story, why didn't he just stick around, proof positive that he had risen? If the whole point were "All you need is Jesus", "I am saved because Jesus died for my sins and rose again", "Jesus first, as long as you believe that the rest isn't that important", then what would make that point better, what would make that point more irrefutable, than if he had stayed right here, so you could see him, talk to him face to face, hear him teach, and say to those who don't believe "Look, there he is right there, doing pretty well at age roughly 2000, go ask him yourself".

But it didn't happen that way, because that is not the whole point and not all to the story. Just as the Passover and exodus from bondage in Egypt had been not for its own sake but in order to gather with God so he could give his people his Law, so the Passover of the full paschal lamb Jesus had been not for its own sake but in order to gather with God so he could give his people his Spirit! Just as God had commanded the counting of the Omer, the fifty days connecting Pesach, aka Pascha, and Shavuoth, Pentecost, so now God himself counts the Omer from the Pascha of the Lamb he provided, his Son, to the Shavouth or Pentecost so that on the very day where his people once celebrated only the giving of the Law, they still celebrate that and added to it is the giving of the Spirit!

And what happened as a result of that? The Apostles were men who knew all you need is Jesus, men who knew for a physical fact that Jesus had died and risen again, men who knew Jesus is first.  They had all that, but on that basis alone were scared and afraid and huddled around each other in the comfort of others who had all that, tending to their prayers and the internal matters of their little band.  "All that" is not all, and not sufficient, neither for the Apostles nor for us.  The rest came on this day of celebrating the giving of the Law -- they gave the Law, and then the Gospel, and were no longer scared and afraid. Not only that, each one there heard it in his own language, addressed directly to him!

And what did the people do after this amazing event? Everybody just up and believed?  No.  They did the same as the Apostles had done when the women told them the tomb was empty and he had risen. They did NOT believe them. Some thought this is just a foolish wishful story, others sought to figure out what this means, others thought they're just crazy, probably drunk, out of their minds. That's what happened first. That's what STILL happens when people hear the mighty works of God told to them -- when WE hear the mighty works of God told to US. Some form of the same three reactions:  1) it's a really nice story stemming from our deepest wishes; 2) let's talk about this and dialogue as to what it all means; 3) those guys are crazy.

That's what happened first. The amazing event wasn't the amazing event.  It wasn't and isn't about the languages.  After the languages was nothing but unbelief.  The rest didn't happen until something else happened, and THAT'S the amazing event and the big deal about Pentecost.

The Biggest Sign and Wonder Of Pentecost.

Peter then stood with his brothers in the Office of Holy Ministry and laid it right out for them, clean and clear. He said this is what Joel and David had spoken about, Jesus delivered by the plan of God to us, whom we in our sinfulness abandoned the Law and in turn delivered him to the power and law of the world to be killed, Jesus delivered by the power of God from the power of death and our sinfulness which inflicted that on him, Jesus risen again and now placed on the throne of David at the right hand of God, Jesus having been given the promise of the Spirit so that now you see and hear this: Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord  and Christ.

That's the Law. And when they heard the Law, given now for the first time in its fulfillment on this day of celebrating the giving of the Law long ago, they were cut to the heart. People by nature want a religion of works, stuff they can do to make it all right, stuff they can do to feel OK with God, with each other, and within themselves. And the world offers all sorts of versions of that. Some of them go by the name Christianity. And the feelings and purpose they impart are utterly false.

God himself has shown us in the Law exactly the stuff he wants us to do, and we showed ourselves absolutely incapable of it by our own reason and strength, even in a scenario where there are but two people and one commandment, even when a people is called and set apart to do the full Mosaic Law and be an example to the nations who are only expected to keep seven of the laws, to the extent that we handed his prophets and finally the One he sent over to the power of our own ideas and law to be killed, and still reject their message to this day.

So much for a religion of works. We can't do it even when God himself shows us exactly how, no matter how hard we try in purpose driven living or to attain our best life now. What's worse, just like those on this Pentecost, and just like those delivered from Egypt in the first one, we don't get it even when the mighty works of God are directly addressed to us even with wondrous signs, preferring instead to think it over or think they're just nuts!

Pentecost came to-gether not in the signs and wonders, which can still leave us in unbelief, but when Peter and his brothers in the Office of Holy Ministry laid it out clean and clear. It still does. It was then, when Peter had given the Law in its horrible consequences, that they, we, thought not about what it all means, not let's think this over, not maybe there's some good ideas here, not maybe these guys are nuts, but instead were cut to the heart by the fruitlessness of their, our, own reason and strength, and asked Peter and his brothers, Men and brethren, what shall we do? It was then and only then that they could tell them the Good News, the Gospel.

Repent, and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.

What happened then? Same thing that happens now. They that gladly received his word were baptised, and they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

The Holy Ghost Church.

Guess what! There's an emerging church all right. Not just lately, not out of some marketing scheme supposedly crafted to the taste of the times, but ever since the outpouring of the Spirit on that Pentecost whose historical happening we celebrate every feast of Pentecost.

We may not be in Jerusalem, the Temple is not physically there to go to in one accord, and Peter and the other Apostles are not personally our preachers. And it makes not the slightest difference. The taste of our or any time has no taste for the Gospel and it is worthless to pander to it thinking that will produce a taste for the Gospel. That will produce only what it always produces -- a religion of works, stuff to do to catch the God buzz in a quest after one's own feeling better, on the surface all about Jesus or God but really all about me, or, a lot of discussion about what it all means, or, a rejection of it as wishful thinking at best and lunacy at worst.

What produces a taste for the Gospel is the Law. That's why the Spirit was given to proclaim the Gospel on the feast celebrating the giving of the Law! And we have the reality of Pentecost before us no less than they. Huh? The Temple is in ruins and Peter and the Apostles are gone. So how's that, how is Pentecost not just another thing you read in a book that supposedly comes from God, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

Because the true Temple Jesus has been raised again on the third day, and has taken his place with the Father, and has sent his Spirit as he promised. And that Spirit speaks the same message to us now as it did that day in unbroken continuity and succession, which is not that Peter and the Apostles are still physically here, not that other men are still here in a succession of corporate hierarchy, not in those who produce signs and wonders or miracles of church growth and attendance in his name, but that the clean and clear laying out of Law and Gospel as was heard that Pentecost continues to be heard in the faithful preaching of those in the Office of Holy Ministry unto the ends of the earth despite sin, the world and the gates of hell itself.

And when this happens, the same thing follows as did then. Those who receive this proclamation of Law and Gospel are baptised, they continue steadfastly in the Apostles' teaching handed on in the church, especially in those books upon which the church has said you can absolutely rely as the inspired word of God without error, the Bible, and in preaching by those called to do so of that Word, they continue steadfastly in fellowship and community and gathering with each other, they continue steadfastly in the breaking of the bread, the mass, the church's liturgy, wherein Jesus was only fully discerned for who and what he is even when he was bodily here for forty days after he rose, and they continue steadfastly in prayer.

Conclusion.

That is the gift of the Holy Ghost, and every bit of it is as available here and now as it was on that day we read about in Acts, in the Epistle or Christian haftorah for Pentecost, every bit of what was pointed to in Ezechiel's chariot of fire we read about in the original Pentecost haftorah. Pentecost comes to-gether, despite all our vain and sinful efforts to make it happen in some other way more to our liking, the same now as then as ever. Accept no substitute! There is no substitute, even if it claims his name or produces signs and wonders and warm feelings in his name, as true and false teachers and even Satan himself alike can do!

Pentecost is about the one thing they cannot produce and only the true Spirit of God can. As the Little Catechism explains:

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Christian church; the communion of Saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.

Amen.

What does this mean? I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith; even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith; in which Christian church He daily and richly forgives all sins to me and all believers, and will at the Last Day raise up me and all the dead, and give unto me and all believers in Christ eternal life.

This is most certainly true.