Category: Faith

During Lent, I’m leading a small study of the Augsburg Confession. It takes place at a lovely apartment on Monday nights in a fantastic apartment looking down on Harlem (making me, inside, not-so-secretly jealous) and we’ve had a great group of participants. In our first week, I set out the historical context for the document and then we dived straight into Article II and IV. Yesterday, we continued with Article III and V. The great thing about this group is how open they are. Groups have personalities above and beyond just the individuals inside it and this group has a great personalities. Opinions, thoughts, concerns, questions, all can be shared in this little safe space. We have lifelong Lutherans, Missouri Synod confirmation kids, pastors, theologians, and even the-about-to-be-baptized, enjoying popcorn together and digging into a 500 year old piece document. It’s really great.

All day, I’ve been thinking about some of the things that were said last night – specifically about the idea of God meeting us/loving us where we are at. It was raised specifically in regard to the concept of Christ as satisfaction for our sins – i.e. Article III and IV to some degree – and I’ve been a tad stuck on it all day. I think what bugs me about that phrase is, at least to me, it just sounds so…static; time-sensititve; historical, momentary. I think, in a lot of ways, I project into that statement a time boundary. My next question is, always, what about next week? Or tomorrow? Or next month? If I’m a dynamic individual, who changes, then what does that phrase “God loving us where we are at” mean? I think an easy way is to merely expand what “at” means – God loves me at this point, and at this point, and at this point. But, in a lot of ways, that makes God a static character. Or, at least, God becomes a static character in God’s relationship to me. I think what really bothers me about that phrase (a phrase I’ll admit that I’ve used all the time) is that it loses the “for you” aspect of Lutheran Christian theology. Without the “for you” being explicit, laid out in concrete terms, I can easily not include myself in that theological phrase of what God does. Maybe, as Luther would say, that’s the old creature in me, trying to figure out how I can, through my own mad skillz, include myself in the sphere of God’s love. But when that phrase is changed, when Christ is made explicit, when the “for you” gets said and done to the point where I can’t even exclude myself out of that relationship…where it’s all a gift? That does it. It’s something I can’t fight even though I do all the time. And, in my mind, it lets God be dynamic, expansive, bigger than me, and I actually feel like, oh hey, God actually cares about me. It’s less “it’s not all up to me” and more “God made it not up to me.” That, that I can get behind. At that point, the phrase actually does something to me. Something happens; an action takes place; things move. Otherwise, I feel like I’m allowed to draw my own boundaries and, if that’s true, why do I get up so early every Sunday?

Today, my field education experience was a little…uh..full. With two pastoral associates out of town and the CYF director enjoying the beach, it was just little ol’me and the senior pastor manning the battlements. It was kind of wild. Altar guild, Sunday School, CYF management, Children’s Church, Tech Support, Chalice Bearing, Manager, Safe-breaker – I did it all (or tried to at least). I basically didn’t stop for a few moments and, well, I’m not sure I actually worshiped today. Luckily, the sacraments came to me anyways.

During Sunday School, I corralled my posse around a kid-sized (i.e. Marc-sized) table. Our agenda consisted of five different action items and, well, we got through two. Today we shared the story of building a house on a rock (Spark Bible Style) and played that game where you draw lines to form squares. We split into two teams, three girls on one and two boys on the other. The girls chose the color purple for their team which allowed the guys to be pink. And I must give them credit, those boys OWNED that color. They didn’t bat an eye! I’m proud of those two. However, one of the girls didn’t think that it was fair that there were more girls than boys. She announced, loudly and with authority, that I should play on the boys side because “You’re just a kid anyways – just taller and older looking.”

I’ll take it.

On Friday, I wandered down to the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary to do some research on the individual communion cup issue at the turn of the last century. I hoped to discover a massive display of minutes from the conventions of various Lutheran synods but I found their pickings to be very small. I flipped through probably a dozen, spanning the years from 1866 to 1924, and found very little pertaining to the controversy. The library was missing many of the critical pieces that I was hoping to find and look through. The only tidbits I noticed involved a couple of fights pertaining to the adoption of the Common Service for Worship (though whether how communion was done mattered in that, I don’t know), a 20 point theological agreement between the a couple of synods written in 1902 by the guy who wrote an article against the individual communion glasses in 1903, and the fact that the PA ministerium in 1923 had a committee called “Advisory to Congregations Contemplating Change in Method of Administering the Lord’s Supper” (which gave no report that year) and, in 1924, that said committee no longer existed (nor was there reference to why it went away). After those little “discoveries,” I felt like I had wasted a lot of my time. I left the tomb of books, sat down at a computer terminal, and went through some of the electronic databases that Union has access to. I pulled about a dozen articles, most of them from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Lancet. This afternoon, I sat down to read and digest them and, it was then, that I met Mr. Howard S. Anders, M.D.

Dr. Anders really enjoyed the individual cup. He gathered research, spoke at medical conferences, and did all he could to propagate the concept of the individual communion cup. And his language was fightin’ words for those of us influenced by the later liturgical renewal movements. He was one of the first to do a before and after study of the common cup, found some bacteria, and claimed that you could get cancer from sharing the common cup. Even though he admitted that no one would probably be able to show that a disease was passed via the common cup, he argued from silence that IT COULD HAPPEN and, thus, the churches should stop using them. He also argued, quite often, about how gross the common cup could be because of mustaches, cigarette smells, and people with bad teeth. He did what he could to make it sound like even looking at the common cup might give you an STD. Yet, even though he was a doctor and tried to claim objectivity, I noticed that his theology heavily influenced his view of how the Lord’s Supper should be administered. He spoke, quite often, about it’s symbolic nature and, well, stuck by his baptist background, and he adamantly pish poshed any idea of unity or oneness from using the common cup. He also said that churches who do this will have an increased number of communicants because of the appearance of cleanliness and that the church services would go faster! For some overworked clergy, I bet that sounded like a good idea.

If Dr. Anders’ data is to be believed, the first church to use individual glasses was in Maine in late 1893. But the most serious scientific and systematic attempt took place in early 1894 in Rochester NY (a trial run at a congregation with 260 members followed by the main event – Central Presbyterian with 1600). Six months later, the shenanigans moved to NYC at Bedford Avenue Baptist Church in Brooklyn. At the American Medical Association conference in Philadelphia in 1897, Dr. Anders claimed that 224 congregations (including 5 Lutheran!) were using individual communion cups. In a letter to the editors of the The Lancet in late 1900, Dr. Anders claimed nearly 800 congregations were using the shot glasses. By 1902, the number was now 1500, with approx 7% being Lutheran. Dr. Anders, in that last report, ended his letter with the following:

It is extremely rare that any antagonistic official action is taken by ostensibly representative ecclesiastic bodies, the matter usually being left to each local church to investigate and decide. The only opposition that has come to my notice for many years was lately that of the Lutheran ministerium meeting at Easton, Pa., at which its action of 1895 was reaffirmed, condemning the use of individual cups, apparently for dogmatic and ritualistic, certainly not for cleanly or sanitary reasons.
“The Prevalence of the Individual Communion Cup,” J. Am. Med. Assoc. Vol 38 (24), 1586.

So there’s the Lutheran connection! And, according to Dr. Anders, its action was rather abnormal. I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere now.

I saw this last night and I’m seeing it explode on the internets so I felt like I should get on the ground floor here. The Lutheran Insulter: get insulted by Martin Luther daily. Like a friend of my said – Luther was sassy.

With it being the second day of Lent, my Facebook news feed is blowing up with reflections on yesterday. Piety, love, God, Jesus, dust, ash, etc! There are status updates galore from my Episcopalian friends who spent their entire days standing in subways, going to firehouses and police precincts, giving ashes to those who requested it. Sore thumbs, it seems, is the name of the game. But not only are ashes being talked about, but sermons, fasting, and all that we’re giving up for Lent, is dominating my feed. And even I, very briefly, got into the act. In a way, I am part of the “problem”.

But, lo and behold, I’m back to my old self today by posting, on facebook, on how to wear a tuxedo (i.e. IT SHOULD FIT). I think I’ll point to the gospel reading from yesterday as the reason why this needs to be shared: someone’s olive oil is someone else’s formal wear and just because you gave up eating cookies or refined sugar doesn’t mean you have to look like it, amirite?

This is what setting up for the joint noon day service with Broadway United Church of Christ on Ash Wednesday looked liked today.

Last week in New Testament, we were talking about the differences between Paul’s letters and some descriptions in Acts. The class split into groups and were given the task to either look at Paul’s conversion experience or the Apostle Throwdown in Jerusalem and Antioch. I, luckily, got assigned the Apostle throwdown – Galatians 2 and Acts 15. And, then, after our groups met and chatted, we had our own in-class throwdown. Sadly, no metal cage descended down from the ceiling but I was surprised to find that, at least vocally, my view of the throwdown differed from others because I take Paul’s view much more seriously than Acts. And that made me, in some way, the outsider – or at least the outsider willing to vocalize an outside view.

Now, I don’t mind that one bit and I’ll admit that, before that little exercise, I never had compared the two descriptions of the events. It just had not showed up on my radar. But I think the major difference, at least in how Paul describes the events, relates through Paul’s use of Peter’s name. In Gal 2:7, Paul uses Peter; in Gal 2:9, Paul switches to Cephas. Is Paul just flipping back and forth between Peter’s names because Paul and Peter are so close, Paul uses all of the versions of his name? Maybe….but, well, I don’t think so. Instead, Paul is calling Peter Cephas for a reason – he’s explicitly labeling Peter as the “other” to the gentiles of Galatia. It is Paul’s way of showing his authority (which is why he never calls himself Saul). Peter is labeled as different, the other, the one called to preach to the circumcised, not the gentiles. His authority, in the matter of Galatia, is different from Paul’s – and this is a difference that was sanctified not only by the apostles in Jerusalem but by the ultimate authority, Jesus. And even though Paul describes his logic throughout Galatians 2, he really didn’t have to. The fact that he called Peter Cephas laid this all out well enough.

In essence, Paul is a gamer; a baller; a playmaker. Paul is playing rhetorical hardball right here. He is willing to throw it down, and, in a sense, defend his house. And I like the idea of a Paul who’s willing to throwdown. But should I really trust Paul’s vision of the throwdown since he’s speaking to a people where he had to throw around his authority? Maybe not. I should probably consider his explanation with a huge grain of salt. But that willingness to throw his weight around, his cattiness, that willingness to fight? That feels more real to me and it’s why I give Paul’s point of view more weight than Acts. Is that one of my biases? I think so.