The B o C

It was an incredibly mind-blowing experience for me, learning that there was a reason that the small catechism was called the small catechism.  Mainly because there was a large catechism that I'd never heard of.  Now, unlike the vaaaaaaast majority of my blog readers, I didn't grow up exclusively in the Lutheran church.  When I got going in the Christian church, it was in the Anglican church, and we moved over to the Lutheran church when I was about seven, I guess.  Is that right?  Seven?  Whatevs.  The point is, that I didn't grow up exclusively in the Lutheran church.  There was no book of concord in our home.  Instead of the BOC, we had the BOCP.  That is, the book of common prayer, common to the Anglican church.  And here's where I get on my high horse, because of the disconnect between church and home.

Okay, here's how the Lutheran church works.  You have a Bible.  Your Bible stays at home, typically. Why does it stay at home?  Because it's big, clunky, and was given to you as a present from your godparents the day you were confirmed.  So, clearly, you can't be bringing that around.  And you may have a book of concord, but it is also thick, clunky, and not easily transportable (and yes, I do have a copy of the pocket one).  But even if you do have a copy of the pocket one, and even if you do bring it around with you, it isn't really a prayer resource, not proper.  The orders for the day aren't in there.  Your only other choice is the hymnal, but that's never really made the crossover between home and church life.  Right or wrong, it's still and perhaps always will be seen as for corporate, congregational worship only.  It's not a home devotion tool that the majority of our people use.

Why do I bring this up?  Because there's a significant shift between home and church worship, between home and church devotion.  We're not plugged into the same thing.  And it shows.

Think about your home devotional life.  If you have one.  Think about how it operates, and about how it tends to be if not in a separate room from what's going on in church, then perhaps in a different universe.  There are the readings for Sunday that exist in sort of a vacuum, and not in the real world of your daily life.  The hymns sung in church on Sunday don't exactly carry over to your home life, and the prayers you say at home don't show up in the prayers you say on Sunday.  And what this leads to is to a view that your church life is sort of separated from your home devotional experience.  And what does that lead to?  To a world in which, as usual, church and regular life run parallel to each other.

This breakdown in worship / real life is not limited to just how your worship life operates, it has to do also with your view of church and God as well.  Like it or not, typically we Lutherans view God and the real world as existing completely apart from each other.  God lives in church, and we go visit him once a week, like he's an ailing parent or something.  A shut-in, who needs us to stop by and spend an hour with him once a week.  And this is a problem not just with how we see the world, it's a problem with how we see God.

If you're a Christian (and reading this blog has automatically made you one, so congratulations), you don't have the luxury of believing in a God who lives in a temple, or who exists only in a monstrance or whatever.  You believe in an incarnate God.  What does it mean to have an incarnate God?  It means that when you come to worship God in church, it's not as though this is where he lives.  It's not as though he lives in palaces made with human hands.  Ask yourself what happened to the temple where God was thought to live.  It got torn down by the Romans, and will likely never be rebuilt, at least not as long as things stay the way they are.  You see, Jesus talked about this specific issue when he was speaking to a certain Samaritan.  And this passage is really telling, because it talks about our view of God, and where God lives.

¹⁹ “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.
²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, 
but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
²¹ “Woman,” Jesus replied, 
“believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father 
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know;
we worship what we do know, 
for salvation is from the Jews.
²³ Yet a time is coming and has now come 
when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, 
for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
²⁴ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

John 4:19-24

Not the smelliest or drunkest, but an
unexpected place to find God.

Jesus is the incarnate word of God, and as such, he knows that it's not about going to a specific place to find God.  He's everywhere.  Absolutely everywhere.  Now, we want to restrict him to churches, to where the paraments are ironed, and the albs are crisp.  We want to restrict him to nice places where nice people dress up nice, and sing nice songs.  But that's not the reality of things.  The whole point of the incarnation is that God is where you don't expect him to be.  He's everywhere.  He's spirit, and it's not as though he's in a temple or on a mountain.  We have to worship him in spirit and in truth.  What does all that mean?  It means that when you go home, when your devotional life continues, it's not as a parallel to your church life, as though it's something completely different.  It's all part of the same thing. The same God who is there with loud hosannas on Sunday morning is the God who hears your grace before meals, and the God who listens to your evening prayers.  Maybe you're not the type of Lutheran who feels disjointed by this, and in this case, you're a fortunate one.  The rest of us need to get our heads straight as to what the incarnation actually means: that God is in the dirtiest, smelliest, drunkest places on planet earth, because that's where the people who need him actually are.  

People probably like you.  People who aren't always proud of who they are and what they do.  People like me, too.  

PJ.