Then there are those Lutheran pastors who think it important to have access to good coffee and bottled water during worship. Some even feel that the smell of freshly baked cookies wafting over the gathered congregation is an important addition to the worship of the Holy Trinity.

Duck blinds, Harley Davidsons, coffee and bottled water, the smell of cookies, the singing of the Hokey Pokey…..all while marginalizing (if not omitting or removing) the Sacrament of the Altar, the confessing of the Creeds, the praying of the Our Father, crucifixes, fonts, altars, pulpits, albs, stoles, and virtually anything which puts the focus on the presence and work of the Holy Trinity. This is increasingly what is occurring in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Oftentimes the congregations practicing this are praised and offered up as good examples to the rest of us. Perhaps they are good examples. Perhaps they are not.

Now I really do not think we ought to make fun of these folks and the novel activities they are importing into the Divine Service. The people who engage in this are quite sincerely trying to do what is best and most Christian, I am sure. They also have a great deal of zeal for reaching the lost. Good for them. We need more of that.

But I do think that we need to have an extended conversation about these matters. And by conversation, I mean listening and then responding…give and take…for a long time and in an organized fashion. There may or may not be something fundamentally wrong. I will admit my bias toward the former—I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong.

We confess the Church to be “catholic.” Catholicity always involves a vigorous engagement with whatever culture in which the Church finds Herself. But care must always be exercised that She does not lose her identity along the way.

Are we losing our identity?

http://www.speedmuseum.org/cranach_n.html

Just out of curiosity: During your long association with A.L. Barry, did he ever talk much about Kretzmann? I imagine he spent a *lot* of time with him in seminary.

LPC

One thing that I always found as interesting is how old many painters portray Joseph to be. We don’t know his age but we know that he have more child with Mary. I believe that this plays into the Roman teaching that Mary and Joseph never had any children together and that Jesus’ brothers and sisters were his step-siblings.

And you know guys, neither the Irish nor the Scots saved civilisation, the Benedictines did! Learned that right from them, and would a monk lie?

I was raised to regard the day as a holy day of obligation and stand apart from the distinctly un-Irish secular Americanisation of the holiday. Later, on studying Irish history and culture because I didn’t know yet what mine was (Angle) I read that the day should be a day of mourning for one of the many losses of Irishness to the violence of foreigners in a Druid land with a Druid tune, to borrow from Yeats.

These days I am quite content, though legally saddled with an Irish surname, to let 17 March be 17 March, period.