Yeah.
Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Cory J Mahler.
And
I'm still woe.
And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the
heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be
for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.
And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to
give light upon the earth, and it was so.
And when God smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his
heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man, for
the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth.
Neither will I again strike down every living creature as I have
done, while the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
These two readings from Genesis 1 and Genesis 8 from the creation
and after the flood are a reminder to us that seasonality is
a part of creation.
The way that God created everything involves seasons and patterns and repetition
and resonances among those various patterns as they harmonize.
And so today, as we wrap up the calendar year, as the
church has just begun the church year in the West, I thought
that we thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about
the liturgical calendar, about our liturgical life in the church as we
are observing all the things that are revealed in scripture that are
not revealed in creation.
Because on one hand, you have God's seasons that are shown in
the stars and in the weather that we have on the earth.
And on the other hand, you have seasons that are only present
if you are aware of the Word of God.
And these have been historically observed before Christianity, you know, before Christ,
and then after Christ, and in different forms, because prior to Christ's
birth, the pattern of life in believers pointed towards his birth and
all the prophecies that he would fulfill.
When he was born, when he fulfilled them, when he died and
was resurrected from the dead, he completed the patterns that had been
established
prior to his birth.
But the church didn't abandon the idea of the repeating patterns that
are observed in the yearly life of believers.
And from the earliest days in the church we have examples of
holidays or holy days being observed for the same reason.
It wasn't necessarily any longer the case that God was specifically commanding
a particular day to be observed in a particular way, but as
a means of remembrance, all believers clung to the fulfillment of those
promises that Christ had fulfilled when he came.
And so what perhaps in some cases, was once a law, others
we'll get into in a bit, was also a teaching tool, remains
to this day a teaching tool of the church to do the
things that have been done in the past in a manner that's
consistent with scripture in terms of observing what God has revealed to
us is a great way of teaching everyone the faith and to
be reminded of it.
Because one thing that I think Christians don't necessarily take seriously is
you can't you can't hold all this in your head at once.
You cannot possibly have gall all of God's things in mind all
the time.
That's you you would be God if you could do that.
Only God does that.
The rest of us can only do one thing at a time.
And so it's valuable to have seasons to remind us.
You know, Lent is a season of penitence, Advent is a season
of anticipation, Christmas is a season of Thanksgiving, and then Easter as
well, the greater thanksgiving, that the fulfillment of the birth was even
more greatly fulfilled in his death and then resurrection.
So as we talk about the calendar today, it's in view of
you know, again, the church calendar has just begun as we're recording
this. We're just in the middle of Advent.
It's also right at the end of the calendar year.
And just as a very brief housekeeping measure, as I mentioned last
week, we're gonna be taking a couple weeks off.
The next episode back will be January tenth.
That should be the uh the first week that we're back.
This week is uh also as we drop this on Friday will
be the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year
in the northern hemisphere because the earth is a globe.
Spoiler. The earth is a globe, it's tilting on an axis, it's
going around the sun.
The incidence of the light varies, so it's attenuated at different angles
as it passes through the atmosphere.
It has longer and shorter amounts of light being delivered through the
atmosphere just based on that angle.
It gets cold.
That's what happens.
We have winter in the northern hemisphere because the earth is a
globe, it's tilted, and it's how God arranged things.
In the northern hemisphere, it gets cold in the winter and hot
in the summer, and then the seasons are reversed, you know, in
Australia. They call it summer and winter f for the weather, but
not for the time of year.
And so today as we're talking about calendars.
That's gonna be part of it.
It's what what is a calendar to us historically and when does
it make sense for us to be on the same page?
There are two things I hope that folks will take away from
this episode.
One, these calendars are for the harmonization of the Christian life and
they're for the teaching of Christians.
Two Two, they're not a law, and we'll make that case especially
towards the end.
Nothing that we're saying here is a condemnation of people who use
a different calendar, who don't observe a calendar at all, who have
you know wildly different calendars, slightly different calendars, we're not picking a
winner. What we're saying is that the use of these things as
they've always been done among believers is salutary.
And therefore, when someone wants to abandon a salutary practice, the onus
is on them to say, here's why we're not allowed to do
this anymore.
So as we'll make the case towards the end, we are not
the ones making a law of these things by saying, Hey, this
is a good idea.
People have always done it, it's salutary.
Others are in fact making a law saying, you can't do that.
Why are you doing that?
That's wrong.
That's not in the Bible.
We're going to make the case today in part that that's nonsense.
And when we picked the subject, it we didn't intend for it
to be polemical.
We just wanted a nice, easy end of the end of the
year subject.
But as we started looking at it, it was clear that some
of this is going to have to be polemical because of some
of the things that happened during and after the Reformation.
They just weren't good.
Sorry at the end of the year that we're gonna, you know,
maybe be ruffling a few feathers.
We didn't intend to, but like this is just part of the
Christian life.
And when people get mad at that, that that's it's not good.
So
I think one of the first examples I want to just give
of the teaching value of
the liturgical calendar goes all the way back to Leviticus.
And this is a case where this was God's law for the
Hebrews. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of
Israel and say to them, These are the appointed feasts of the
Lord that you shall proclaim as holy convocations, they are my appointed
feasts. Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh is
a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation.
You shall do no work, it is a Sabbath to the Lord
in all your dwelling places.
These are the appointed feasts of the Lord, the holy convocations which
you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them.
In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at
twilight, is the Lord's Passover.
And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast
of unleavened bread to the Lord.
For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, on the first day
you shall have a holy convocation, you shall not do any ordinary
work, but you shall present a food offering to the Lord for
seven days.
On the seventh day is a holy convocation.
You shall not do any ordinary work.
Now obviously this is a law being given to the Israelites, in
part to cause them to be focused on God's things and in
part to separate them from their neighbors.
These were holy days set apart for the Lord.
And these are things that we are released from.
Christians should not be celebrating Passover because we have the Paschal Lamb
on the cross.
It is finished.
There's no more Passover for any Christian.
So all this stuff with Seder meals and crap that is Judaizing.
Stay away from that stuff.
We are not trying to suggest that anyone should return to observing
the old forms because God made clear that they were a they
were finished.
On the other hand, keep in mind what was going on with
the Passover.
This was a lamb that was sacrificed in remembrance of God's salvation
of the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt.
What was this?
This was typological of Christ.
This was pointing forward to the perfect lamb sacrificed on the cross.
So when Isaiah prophesied in chapter fifty three, he was oppressed and
he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb
that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before
its shears is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
The Passover lamb and the prophecy of Isaiah involving a lamb being
sacrificed, pointed forward to the perfect sacrifice of the Messiah who was
to come.
And what happened?
When John saw Jesus coming, he said, Behold, the Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world.
And everyone who was around him knew what he was talking about.
This wasn't a left field.
They understood that what they had been taught in their Passover celebrations
was fundamentally pointing towards the Messiah.
And so when John declares, Behold the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world, they understood that that was typological.
They understood that the small form that they had observed was being
fulfilled completely by the birth of the Messiah, and
this is one of the key elements of a liturgical life of
observing whatever holy day is appropriate, is it as a teaching tool,
so there's you reinforce over time this is a thing from God,
this is important.
When it is fulfilled, you receive it with thanksgiving.
Now in the case of the Passover, it was prophetic and it
was pointing forward in time.
It is It is no less important for us today where these
things have been fulfilled to remember them.
Because Jesus said, do this as often as you drink it in
remembrance of me.
There's to be a cyclical nature to the way we interact with
God's things.
And it when we look at the calendar, what do we have?
We have a day and a night cycle.
We have months that are based on a lunar cycle.
The months are subdivided by four, evenly divisible, into weeks.
Each week is functionally a season of a month.
And then you have a year that is subdivided into months and
then also seasons.
This is how God arranged things.
God did that.
This was not man-made.
This is not something that guys discovered and did some math on.
God handed this stuff to us on a silver platter and says,
here's how it works.
Live within these constraints.
Again, for for the Hebrews it was in this particular case it
was a law to observe a certain thing at a certain time.
But for all of us, we're creatures.
We live in a world that has seasons, that has days and
nights, that has years.
We're all subject to these natural forces for our good.
And so it's only natural that also within the church the same
sort of cyclical nature Would be observed as we live out the
Christian life in parallel to the normal everyday life that we have
in the world.
So whether the calendar is the same or different, we should have
observances that repeat year after year because that's the sort of order
that God has given to us.
When we look at the Old Testament, it's very easy to recognize
that there are certain feasts, certain organizations of the church year.
The church year is and I do mean to use church because
this is for believers in the Old Testament, for the true Israel.
The church year of the Old Testament is broken up into these
seasons, these observances
But we need to focus on why are they commanded to observe
these things.
And it's not just in Exodus or Leviticus or these various other
places in scripture where specifics are given, where they are specifically commanded
to observe the feast of booths or unleavened bread, whatever it happens
to be.
All of the places where God commands them to remember something that
God has done for them are commandments from God to observe a
form of liturgy.
And that's what all of these major feasts are, of course.
Because when you remember, say, the Passover, you're remembering the deliverance from
death in Egypt, and you're looking forward, of course, to the deliverance
from the second death, that is Christ's death and resurrection.
But God throughout the pages of Scripture commands the Israelites, and by
virtue of that he is commanding his church, his true Israel, to
observe the remembrance of certain things that God has done for us.
And ultimately, in addition to teaching and unity and good order, the
purpose of the church year, the purpose of the feasts and the
festivals and the commemorations, is to remember all of these things that
God has done for us.
And if you look at the observances in the modern church calendar,
in the modern church year, you can look at those and compare
them to what was observed in the Old Testament, because they are
the fulfillment of those observances.
We won't go through those in detail because it's not the purpose
of the episode.
You can find charts for that.
There are plenty of comparisons.
The most obvious, of course, is Passover and Easter.
But when you look at the church year, what God is doing,
because this is something God has created, I'm not saying that exactly
what we have today was handed to us by God.
That's not what happened.
Because the modern church calendar is a creation of Christendom, of Christians.
As we've already mentioned, it's adiaphoron.
It is not absolutely required.
But the central point, the remembrance of these things that God has
done for us, that God has done for his church, that remembrance
is commanded in scripture, that is required of Christians.
And that is the central point around which the church calendar orbits,
around which this cycle occurs.
Because if you look at the church calendar, how does it begin?
It begins with Advent, which is the season in which we are
recording this.
This is the third week of Advent.
Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Messiah, for the
incarnation. So it revolves around Christ's life.
It revolves around really the central point of what it means to
be a Christian and of Christianity, it revolves around Christ.
You have Advent, which is looking forward to his birth, you have
Christmas, which is his birth as incarnation, and you proceed through the
calendar as you are proceeding through Christ's life here on earth.
And then yes, we also have about half the year, sometimes more
than half, because there's an issue of m movable feasts.
Not all of the feasts of the church take place on the
exact same calendar day every year, and there are reasons for that.
But we have about half the year, which is the season of
Pentecost, or the season after Pentecost, or the season of Trinity, depending
on how you name it in your church tradition.
And when you look at what that is, what that is as
a teaching tool, you have ordinary time as it is called, in
a way this represents the church age, the age in which we
are currently living, because we are living in that time after Pentecost,
and so it can be used as a teaching aid to highlight
not just the history of the church because you have half the
year that is retelling Christ's life, that is retelling that history, you
have the other half the year that is
Directly tied to how we are living here and now today in
the church age.
And again, the teaching aspect of the church calendar of this cycle
is incredibly important.
As we've mentioned in previous episodes, one of the ways that human
beings actually learn something and remember it, which is obviously important if
you're learning something, is repetition.
And what does the church calendar, what does the liturgical year afford?
It affords repetition.
Because every year, you go through looking forward to Christ, the birth,
death, and resurrection of Christ.
You go through these same
stories, through these same lessons, every single year, and that way you
remember them.
And just as an aside, but an important one, for those pastors
who have been in a liturgical tradition for many years, undoubtedly they
have dealt with a number of deaths in their congregations.
That is, again, part of the cycle of human life.
Not in the next world, but in this one.
Near the end, many people start to have memory and other issues.
That is simply one of the facts of getting old in these
fallen bodies.
It may be that you start to forget things.
It may be it gets to the point where you forget how
to tie your own shoes.
But if you talk to pastors in liturgical tradition, they will tell
you that those who have spent their lives in these churches will
remember the liturgy.
Now they may have forgotten certain things, they may have forgotten many
things. Again, you may forget how to tie your own shoes.
That's up to God how that goes at the end of our
lives. But these people, even that close to the end, will still
remember the blessing of the liturgy.
Now, I'm obviously conflating a little bit liturgy in the sense of
order of the church worship and order of the church year, but
they are comparable.
Because you have liturgy on the grand sense of the church calendar,
this cycle of lessons and remembrance, of thanking God for the things
that He has done for us and the things that He will
do for us, the things He promises us.
And you have that playing out as well in the church service
itself. And that repetition affords you comfort at the end of your
life. And it's not just comfort for the person who remembers it,
obviously it is, but it's also comforting for all the people around
that person.
Because you can look and see that even at the end of
life, where many things are trending downward, God has not abandoned that
person. You've trained up that child, because that's a child of God,
you've trained up that child in the way that he or she
should go, and when he's old, he has not departed from it.
That is a blessing from God.
And we should be thankful for
that. This is something that I witnessed firsthand when my dad was
doing his vicarage at the Lutheran home in Fort Wayne.
For one year, my family attended church services every Sunday at an
old people's home.
And it was a a full service retirement community.
They had everything from independent living to basically intensive care.
And it was probably three-quarters Lutherans there, but a lot of people
would come down for the Sunday services.
I think there were a couple of them, if I remember correctly.
And something I was a teenager, I think, at that time.
One thing that stuck with me from witnessing that for a year
was exactly exactly what Corey just said.
There were people there who were in advanced states of decay.
Men and women, mostly women, because you know a lot of them
were in their 90s, some were in their hundreds, who
some of them were pretty close to vegetative.
Yeah, they were they were basically non-communicative in most cases.
And yet when they were wheeled into the church service, they could
say many of the prayers, they could participate with some in some
cases almost all the liturgy, they remembered some of the hymns.
That was still a part of them, even when they didn't remember
their own name.
They may now remember their family names.
They still remembered God's things because they'd done the same thing their
entire lives.
So this sort of treasure that we just we look at it
today as bland and repetitive as though that's a bad thing.
It is a blessing that you don't realize until you begin to
lose your senses.
You know, when these churches that put everything up on screens and
it's different every week, what's gonna happen to someone who loses their
sight? They're no longer going to have access to what's ever going
on. And if what's going on is novel every week every week,
if you have new hymns every week, new words, whatever you're doing,
if it's always new, you are excluding the oldest people at the
end of their lives.
And some of them are going to end up in places where
maybe the only thing that they have is some sort of continuity
with a liturgy that they can still remember.
So as Corey said, it's not that this is a law.
This is not you must do this or you are sinning.
This is a teaching tool.
And when it is omitted, when it is deprived of people for
whatever reason, you're not simply depriving them of something man-made.
Because you know the the liturgy, you know, in the case of
the Western liturgy, the one that the Lutherans use is basically the
same in large parts to the ones the Roman Catholics use.
It's mostly just quotes from scripture.
One of the great things that the most recent Lutheran hymnal has
done, is putting Bible verses next to all the parts of the
liturgy that are Bible verses, and it's virtually the entire thing.
Almost every word that is said or sung or chanted is scripture.
So what some people look at as some sort of formal man-made
right, it's actually just God's words.
We're saying back to him what he's given to us.
And that sort of repetition of God's things is the greatest blessing
you can have.
I think one of the things that we talked a little bit
about meditation recently when we did the episode on the Eastern Orthodox,
meditation in a good sense is precisely
this. It's focusing on a certain element of the Christian faith at
a certain point, maybe in your day, maybe in your week, maybe
in the calendar year.
So when you have a penitential season like Lent, that is a
time specifically to focus on penitence, on acknowledging your sins in a
way that perhaps most of the year they don't get as much
attention. If nothing else, once a year for a number of weeks,
you're going to have a reminder baked into the calendar that you
are a sinner and that the Christ who is crucified on Good
Friday, that was for you and for yourself.
And our repentance, our turning away from the evil that caused God
to have to sacrifice Himself, is a part of the Christian life.
Acknowledging our sins, confessing them, and then acknowledging our Savior and confessing
him. It's cyclical.
But as I said earlier, you can't if if you spend every
minute of every day just dwelling on how terrible you are, that's
gonna fracture and break you.
And God doesn't want that either.
So we're given these times
according to God's time so that we can not skip anything, so
that God's word is preached in its fullness, and so that the
various aspects of everything He's revealed to us are
in our minds at various times.
And the more that is built up in your heart, in your
mind, when you're young, when you're healthy, as you get older, this
stuff is gonna matter to you more if you remain in the
faith. As your body starts to fail, as your mind starts to
fail, when you can have confidence that God's things are still there
for you, that is a tremendous comfort because you realize it is
not your doing.
It's that God has been there for you all along.
And so this sort of cyclical repetition, where I'm going to keep
repeating that because it that's what it is: the over and over
of weekly and seasonal and and annual observances of these things.
It's not men making a law and imposing it.
It's us returning again and again to the gifts that God has
given us in Scripture.
In
a very real sense, it's extremely odd that any Christian would object
to the idea of doing the same thing over and over and
over, of repeating things.
For one, it is a blessing from God if your life is
such that you get to repeat things over and over and over
because novelty is often not good.
We're not saying novelty is always bad, but novelty is often bad.
In a very real way, our lives are lives of repetition.
Just the 24-hour cycle.
You wake up, eat, go about your day, eat, go to sleep,
and then you do it again.
And every day you do that is a blessing from God.
Deviations from that are typically not good.
If you don't get to sleep, you generally don't feel very good
the next day.
Now that's going to be much worse if you're saying your forties
or your fifties versus your twenties, so for the listeners in their
20s, it's coming for you too.
But this repetition is part of human life.
You have the daily cycle, you have the weekly cycle, the monthly,
the yearly, you have the seasons that repeat every year as God
promised as well read at the beginning of the episode.
These are blessings from God, and even beyond that, we are commanded
to be daily in the scriptures.
That is repetition.
That is repeating the same thing every single day for your entire
life. Reading the same book every day until you die.
That's part of the Christian life.
Repetition Repetition is a good thing.
Anyone who has learned a second language knows that the only way
you can learn a second language is repetition.
Spaced repetition is one of the best ways, but generally, it is
repeating those words, it is using those words, it's using the language
that is how you learn it.
The same thing for scripture, how you learn the things of God
is reading the book that He gave us, is learning them.
Part of that learning, as we are commanded in the third commandment,
is observing the Sabbath, part of that is going to church, is
not forsaking the gathering together of the saints, and how that is
organized is around the life of Christ, the life of the church,
the life together as Christians, and we have this cycle of lessons
and teaching so that we can make Christians, so that people can
remain Christians, so that those who are Christian can become stronger Christians.
Don't forget, just because you are in the church service and you
know every single word that's going to be said.
That's a good thing.
That's a blessing from God.
And you will remember that when you grow old.
But don't forget the young and the old are also there.
There are those who are just beginning to learn the things of
God, and they need this.
And there are those who are at the end of their lives,
as we mentioned, who still remember these things because they went through
it when they were young during the prime of their life and
then in their old age.
We do these things to teach the next generation of Christians, but
also to make the current generation stronger.
This is part of life as a Christian.
And it is a blessing from God.
So we shouldn't look down on repetition.
We shouldn't try to seek out novelty.
This drive to look for things that are always new, always different
is very much a part of modernity and it would be entirely
alien to our forefathers in the faith.
That is not something that would have driven them, either culturally or
religiously. It would have been, again, totally alien to them.
This repetition is a blessing from God.
Each day when you wake up and have a normal day, that
is a great blessing from God, and you should thank him at
the close of the day in your evening prayers If you have
a day that is entirely novel, seldom is that good.
Now, there are days where you can have some novelty that's good.
If you get married, that's a novel day for you.
That's different from the rest of your life.
But following that, you want every day after that to be roughly
the same.
Yes, you have the mile markers in life as it were, you
have the birth of your first child, and you have various points
where you move from one part of life to the next.
But by and large, and these are really seasonal parts of life,
so you can compare the seasons in the grand sense of things,
the way the earth experiences them, and then the seasons of a
human life.
But really within those seasons, you want each day to be roughly
the same as the last, and you want the next one to
be roughly the same as the day you're currently experiencing.
Because again, that is a blessing from God.
Just as Scripture says that God gives to his beloved sleep, that
is a blessing from God at the end of the day, that
you get to sleep, that you have restful slumber.
All of these repetitions, all of these parts of life, and it
it is a human life, it is really the core of our
life, when you have each successive day being comparable to the last.
That is a blessing.
That is a good thing.
This comes from God, and we as Christians should recognize that.
And we should want the same thing in our churches.
We should want the same sort of blessings as God gives us
in our lives
also to occur in the church, because then we can lead the
young into the faith, we can strengthen those who are either young
in the faith or in the prime of their life, and we
can retain those who are at the end of their lives.
We shouldn't look down on these things.
These are blessings that were given to us by our ancestors, passed
down through generations of faithful Christians, and preserved in the church.
Ultimately they are blessings from God.
But we should not look down on what has been given to
us by our forefathers, particularly when you look at those forefathers, look
at the lives they lived, look at the societies they built.
Were they more Christian or less Christian than we are today?
Or put another way, are we more Christian or are we less
Christian?
When we look back to the very earliest days of the church,
we find already in the second century accounts of Christmas and Easter
being observed.
And I think it's important when we're thinking about these things, especially
if you want to delve in to the history of the way
certain holidays or holy days, it's the same thing.
You know, it's when someone says to you happy holidays or writes
merry Xmas, usually they're trying to deny Christ, but they can't because
holiday literally means a day set apart and consecrated for a holy
purpose, is a holy day.
And Xmas, the X is the first character of Christ, so it's
a Christian abbreviation too.
There's no way to remove the reason for the season from it.
All they do is make fools of themselves.
So it's right to get aggravated when they're deliberately besmirching and blaspheming
something holy.
On the other hand, they're losers.
They can't.
That this is God's stuff.
Other people don't get to mess with it.
Back from the very beginning of recorded history, of recorded Christian church
history, we find accounts of these celebrations being held.
I think one of the things that we mistake when we look
back through time is to try to pinpoint which council or which
father first said, yes, this is an official thing, and then here's
the date on the calendar, and now it's official, now it's Christian.
Imagine if you lived in 40 AD, in you know, the Jerusalem
area, and you were a believer, you have a follower of the
way. You knew the Christ was born, he died, he was resurrected,
he ascended to heaven.
You were a Christian.
Do you think that seven years, give or take, you know, depending
on which calendar you want to hew to
seven years after Christ ascended into heaven, do you think that it
might have occurred to people who were witnesses to that of event
on the anniversaries of such events might have said to themselves, hey,
we should remember this.
We have the historic pattern of things like Passover, where we have
annual celebrations in remembrance of these important events.
Are there any more important events in the way of the Christian
than the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
I think the answer is clearly no.
That should be the answer to to all of us today should
be no.
That is the most important thing that has happened in history.
Those events are paramount in all of human history.
So when you're looking at what the first people were doing, don't
focus on the councils that ratified, like, here's a good time for
us to establish a norm for all believers to do it.
Because remember what transpired between you know A.D.
40 and A.D.
340. You had the church going from being this tiny, nascent, in
many ways persecuted fringe thing to becoming an official state church in
some nations.
And so as the number of believers grew, the unity of practice
became more important.
We talked, I think, last week about how Americans tend to clap
completely differently.
Everyone else tends to clap on the same beat.
And when you're just spontaneously clapping, most people tend to converge.
We don't.
There's a natural tendency among people to try to converge on similar
patterns. You want to do something similar to your neighbor.
It's abnormal to try to fight your neighbor and try to be
different just for the sake of doing your doing your own thing.
And so of course it would make sense that the early believers
would remember Easter.
They would remember the day that Christ rose from the dead.
That's a pretty big deal.
Seven years after it happened, one year after it happened, on the
one year anniversary.
Do you think they forgot?
These people had calendars.
Calendars have been around forever.
Astrology was one of the oldest disciplines in humanity.
You know, today we think of astrology as this pagan practice, and
it is today, but the way that God revealed himself in the
stars has been lost to us.
I don't think it's recoverable.
I don't think we need it.
But the fact that we find astrology in every single old civilization
is more than just they've liked looking up a lot.
There's a lot of very sophisticated math and a lot of tremendous
achievements for them to be able to figure that stuff out on
their own.
What they were looking for were the very portents that God recorded
in Genesis 1 that He was putting there.
So of course, one year after Christ is raised raised from the
dead, Christians are gonna remember and gonna celebrate it.
Now, does that mean that Easter when it was first formalized as
a celebration on a particular day of a calendar was the exact
day. No, does it matter?
I don't think so.
I think we should try to get it as close as possible.
But it doesn't matter if it's exactly the day, because consecrating a
day as a holy remembrance is itself what what God says is
important. And we'll get to some passages about that later.
But again, when you're looking back through time and and you see
these debates about calendars and who's got the you know the right
date or the right offsets for these things?
You know, there are changeovers between one style of calendar and another.
None of that matters.
We're not saying you must use this particular calendar in this particular
way. On the other hand, a calendar is functionally a local thing.
So there's a difference between the calendars in the East and the
West today.
Because historically, if my ancestors lived in England and somebody else's ancestors
lived in Russia 2,000 years ago, did it matter if their calendars
were the same?
Absolutely not.
They're gonna have the same seasons, they're gonna have the same years,
but are they gonna recognize exactly the same months and dates?
Who cares?
They're never going to meet each other, never going to have any
commerce. So agreement across vast distances on calendars is irrelevant.
It's trivia.
As As empires spread and as there was more commerce among various
nations, it became more important for calendars to be unified.
It just became it gets easier.
And today, time is one of the most important things in the
world for for GPS, for ATMs, for computers.
Everything relies on incredibly precise time.
So it's it's not enough just to have like the same days.
You need to have the same milliseconds when you get down to
certain levels in order for everything just to work.
That's how interconnected we are today.
So, yes, today there is a need for a single unified calendar,
and the d divergence from that is usually crazy.
Like there are historical reasons why there are disagreements, but we eventually
had to get on the same page.
And it really didn't matter who went.
It didn't matter.
It just mattered that we would agree on a common form of
the thing.
Because again, the Sabbath observance doesn't need to be on Saturday or
Sunday. Sunday was chosen because it was a confession of Christ's resurrection.
It was the eighth day of creation.
But it's not a law.
On the other hand, if Christians where you live are gathering on
Sunday and you come along and say, Well, that's not a law,
I don't have to do that, I'm gonna worship on some other
day because I'm not beholden to that.
It's not that you are exercising Christian freedom to despise what your
believing neighbors are doing is that you're being a jerk.
You're saying, I don't care what anyone other brothers and believers in
Christ do, I'm gonna go my own way.
This is how judges ended up.
The very last passages and everyone did what was right in his
own eyes.
That's not a happy ending for that book.
This is kind of where some people are spiritually today.
They think that if there's not an explicit command from God They
can just do whatever they want.
And so one of the points of this episode is that that's
not the case, not because the calendar is a law.
Again, pick whatever calendar you want.
You know, Eastern Orthodox and some others use a different church calendar,
so they celebrate Christmas a couple weeks after us.
I'm not mad at 'em.
I think it's a little weird, especially in the West, for someone
to be celebrating such an important holiday on a different day than
everyone around him, but that is far less important a question than
whether or not he's celebrating Christmas at all.
The fact that someone using a different calendar is still celebrating Christmas
is the important part.
That's the big ticket item.
I think if we got rid of the other doctrinal disagreements, we'd
all be on the same calendar.
But the calendar is not the concern.
I hope that's coming through here.
It's not you must use this particular calendar with this particular set
of dates.
Who cares?
The observance, the regular observance in faithfulness to remember God's gifts is
the important part.
And then when you live in a certain place where where all
believers are doing the same thing, you should do what they do.
Not because God commands you to be on a certain calendar, but
he commands the faithful to gather together.
And so if everybody in your neighborhood, everyone in your community is
a church on one day and you're like, I'm gonna go a
different day.
I'm not gonna celebrate that Christmas.
I'm gonna celebrate my own that's different.
What are you doing?
You're separating yourself from the body of Christ.
And we're members of one body.
We're not individuals.
We're not we're not solo agents in this thing.
We are members of something that's been going on for thousands of
years. One of the great advent hymns in anticipation of Christmas, as
Savior of the Nations Come.
This is a I think one of the great things about this
hymn not only is it beautiful, but it's a hymn that's been
sung continuously among Christians for sixteen hundred years.
It was written by Ambrose of Milan over sixteen hundred years ago,
and Christians have been singing it ever since.
So when you have some churches that have the new hymns up
on the on the projectors every week, you know, the whatever garbage
stuff is being produced by pop vocalists, versus the churches that are
singing the same hymn that's been sung for sixteen hundred years, I
I think that's a fundamentally different experience.
And again, we're not saying this one is sin and this one
is not sin.
We're saying that this one is a continuation of the faith that
we inherited from our fathers.
Why on earth would anyone take a sixteen hundred year old beautiful
hymn and say, I'm not gonna do that?
We got this new thing.
It's got drums, it's great.
Seriously? Why do you not want to join with all of the
saints in heaven in worshiping the way they worshipped as much as
possible. And so in a minute we're gonna get into the Reformation,
but just keep in mind that when Luther in particular and the
Lutherans looked at what Rome was doing, they did not want to
sever all ties.
They didn't want to sever any ties.
They just wanted to clean up some indoctrinal errors.
And so as they altered aspects of the liturgy and altered aspects
of the calendar, it was not for the sake of discussion.
It was simply to remove things that they believed were false teachings.
Because your calendar is necessarily a function of whatever you teach.
And that's a good thing.
Whatever doctrines your church teaches should be reflected in your church's liturgy
and its liturgical practices.
And if your church, frankly, despises all historic norms, that's also a
confession. The show art for this episode is an excerpt from Owen
Cyclops on Twitter, his full year liturgical calendar.
It's beautiful, it's done in his style of art.
If you like it, it's it's a great example.
I think it's a particularly good illustration of this point because he's
a Roman Catholic and the calendar is a Roman Catholic calendar.
So the inset that we used for the art is something that
I think we all pretty much agree on in the West.
It's we're looking at the the Advent period of the calendar.
If you zoom out, once it gets into Pentecost, fully a quarter
of Owen's calendar is dedicated to various observances for the Blessed Virgin
Mary. And they're almost all doctrines that are evolutions in Rome that
are not shared among some other churches.
In fact, some of them were ratified very late.
That's fine.
I disagree with the doctrine that's represented in that portion of the
calendar, but I think it's a very good thing that it's on
the calendar because that is the liturgical confession of his denomination.
That's the way it should be.
Your church calendar should teach your doctrine because that's exactly what it's
going to do.
Whatever you're repeating, whatever you're visiting is going to be teaching people.
So I look at that and I think it's beautiful.
I I look at the part that has some things that I
don't agree with doctrinally.
I'm not mad at the calendar.
I'm not mad at him.
I just think that a different theology would be reflected differently on
the calendar.
So we'll link in the show notes his poster if you are
Roman Catholic, check it out.
Like everyone should check it out.
If you're Roman Catholic, you should buy it.
If you're not Roman Catholic, I think it's also an important illustration
that when you look at that and see the historic claims of
Rome, some of which are very true, some of which get increasingly
tenuous, one of the arguments that we see today against church calendars,
against the liturgical calendar, is that that's popish.
That's papist.
That's what those guys in Rome are doing.
I want nothing to do with that.
Pope bad, it's all bad.
That's simply not true.
That's not Christian.
Because Rome inherited many of the things on that calendar.
It's not a Romish calendar.
It is the Western Christian calendar.
And there are things on it that are particular to Rome.
There a lot of the calendar is shared by Lutherans and Anglicans
and and a number of others.
That's a good thing.
And wherever we have agreement, we should celebrate it.
And it's a tremendous blessing that we all go to church on
the same day, you know, not only every week, you know, in
that weekly cycle, but seasonally when we all go to church on
the same day for Christmas and for Easter and the other important
days that are shared across Christendom.
That's valuable.
It's a reminder that regardless of some disagreements, we hope that we
still have the same God and we're using the same book and
we're pointing towards the same immutable true facts that are written in
time and in eternity because God did them for us.
So if you look at that, don't think, oh man, I'm really
missing out because I'm not Roman Catholic.
I don't want that to be your conclusion.
I want you to think, I wish that my church had a
liturgical calendar that reflected our beliefs.
And if your belief calendar is empty, think about that.
Think about why it is that your that your church body has
abandoned something that has been done for thousands of years?
That's an important question.
Like you said at the beginning, we didn't tend for this to
be polemical.
Like I I naively had forgotten that this was a huge matter
of dispute.
There was a I'm off Twitter for until we start recording again.
So like I'm not doing any DMs or anything for a few
weeks. I'm not going to read when I get back because even
the podcast is a job, or responding to DMs is not a
job. So please just wait for me to get back.
I did happen to look just this morning briefly at Twitter, and
the one thing that I'm glad I caught was somebody yesterday had
posted about the liturgical calendar and said, Hey, this is a great
teaching tool.
You know, pastors consider using this as part of how you teach
your parishioners throughout the year.
And most of the comments to him were nasty.
They were mean and they were hateful comments, despising a Christian calendar
with Christian holy days on it.
Why? Because it's too popish, because it's not in the Bible.
And so that's an argument.
If the inheritance of our forefathers was to do certain things in
certain ways, we don't get to just torch it.
You know, it's in the in the generations episode we talked about
how that's kind of the approach the boomers have to everything else.
You know, they they'll buy a property and chop down all the
trees and sod the lawn and just have this you know just
carpet of green where there used to be beautiful lush plants.
This is what people have done in other places like the church
calendar. It's the same energy, it's the same rebellious destruction to come
in and find something beautiful and say, I'm going to remake all
this in my image.
So
looking at these Looking at these things, if it's causing you to
be angry, it's you're in the wrong.
And so it's not that the calendar is a matter of law,
but despising it, despising other Christians for their sincerely held observation of
what they believe to be holy days is wrong.
I disagree with the Roman Catholics who observe things like the Annunciation
or the all the various aspects of Mary, you know, ascending into
heaven and stuff that are not scriptural, but I'm not going to
be mad at them for observing them on the calendar.
They're doing that according to their conscience.
I wish that their conscience were differently formed, but I'm never gonna
get mad at the practice because the practice itself is
intended to be proper worship.
And the fact that there's doctrine behind it that I would disagree
with is a separable matter.
I think it's important for us to separate doctrines that are observed
and the act of the observation itself.
Because again, if this is for teaching, then whatever your calendar teaches
is a reflection of what your church body should teach.
And if there's no overlap, you're missing out.
We should be careful to note here that the Western church calendar
has a core on which we all agree.
And we've already gone over part of that obviously of Advent, Christmas,
Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost.
We agree on the core of the calendar, and incidentally the East
agrees as well.
The East disagrees on the dates, but as mentioned, that doesn't matter
that much.
When it comes to the specific inclusions or removals from the calendar,
if you look at the church in, say, the year one thousand
and then compare the calendar currently used by Rome to that, it's
different. The same is true for the Lutherans.
There is no Christian group that is using the exact same calendar
that was used a thousand years ago, fifteen hundred years ago.
That's not the point.
It may be that there will be observances that get added or
removed over the centuries, the core remains the same, that teaching function
remains. We in the Lutheran Church, for instance, have Reformation Sunday,
which is celebrated immediately before all saints.
We have that on our calendar because we consider the Reformation to
have been a vitally important restoration of right doctrine to the church,
and so we celebrate that as a gift from God.
Obviously, Rome is not going to have that on its calendar.
We do not have the Marian dogmas on our calendar.
Rome has added those to its calendar.
You are going to have these distinctions, these differences, as Woe said,
this is going to flow from your teaching, from your doctrine, from
your theology.
But just to make certain that we are absolutely clear on what
Lutherans hold, on what we are saying about what the calendar is
and what the calendar is not, what these practices are in the
church and what these practices are not.
I want to read Article fifteen from our confession because it lays
out exactly what we believe.
I will also link to this and some other parts of the
Book of Concord in the show notes that go over it in
greater length.
This article is quite short.
Of usages, and by usages it means practices, in the church they
teach, which is saying we teach, that those ought to be observed,
which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquility
and good order in the church, as particular holy days, festivals, and
the like.
Nevertheless, concerning such things men are admonished that consciences are not to
be burdened, as though such observances were necessary to salvation.
They are admonished also that human traditions instituted to propitiate God, to
merit grace, and to make satisfaction for sins, are opposed to the
gospel and the doctrine of faith.
Wherefore vows and traditions concerning meets and days, etc., instituted to merit
grace, and to make satisfaction for sins, are useless and contrary to
the gospel.
And so in sum, in short, the Lutheran position is that we
should maintain those things that are good.
You keep the things that were handed down from your far your
forefathers, when they are good, when they are profitable, when they are
useful Now, we have to be very careful what we mean by
this, because there are some who attempt to turn this argument around
and say, unless you can show me exactly why we must do
this, I'm going to get rid of it.
That's not the standard.
The standard is if you want to remove something from church practice,
the burden is on you to show why it should be removed.
With the Reformation, we showed amply, abundantly why we removed certain practices,
why we changed certain things, why we got rid of things that
had crept into the church over the centuries.
There are others who did not do that.
There are others who basically said, Whatever looks like Rome, smells like
Rome, we have to get rid of it.
And so we'll get rid of the candles, we'll get rid of
the incense, we'll get rid of the artwork, we'll get rid of
the hymns, we'll get rid of and the list goes on and
on, and they just jettisoned practically the totality of the Christian faith.
They retained nothing of Christian praxis.
That is not what we advocate.
That is not what Christians advocate.
You retain the things that are good, and so And so, in
so far as these things have been handed down from our forefathers
and do not conflict with the faith, they should be maintained.
We don't have to make some sort of particularly compelling argument.
And we are, of course, making the argument, but it is not
incumbent on us to make the argument that these things are necessary
or that these things are.
somehow the pinnacle of praxis in the church.
The standard is if they do not conflict with the faith and
they have been passed down to us by our forefathers, they should
be maintained.
And that is what we see in this article, if they are
profitable unto tranquility and good order in the church, and particularly singled
out, holy days, festivals, and the like.
That is what we're talking about with the church calendar.
We maintain this cycle because it is profitable for teaching, it is
profitable for good order.
And it's not just profitable for good order within a specific church,
within a national church or a denomination or tradition.
This also aids with unity across all of Christendom.
Even if we disagree on the dates specifically, we all still celebrate
Christmas. We all still celebrate Easter.
This leads to an international unity, a universal, a Catholic unity
amongst all Christians, and that is a good thing.
We don't have to have the same specific rites, the same specific
traditions, all these other things across national churches.
You're going to have a different church in Germany than you're going
to have in Uganda or Japan or even France.
That's fine, that's good.
To some degree, praxis in the church should be a reflection of
that church, of that nation, of the people who constitute that physical
church at that time.
However, in so far as we can agree on these matters, on
these overarching matters, that is good, that's profitable.
It shows us that we have Christian brothers in other countries, and
we should recognize them as Christian brothers.
Yes, they're Christian brothers over there.
They are not my neighbor.
But they are still Christian brothers.
They are Christians who also celebrate these major holidays, these holy days,
who recognize the history of salvation in the church and the work
of Christ.
And in order to have that unity, we have to have something
upon which we are unified.
Yes, ultimately our unity is in Christ, is on the gospel.
But to have the unity in praxis, the unity with regard to
observances, is incredibly profitable.
It helps us to view other Christians in other places as our
brothers in Christ.
So it's important to note that while the emergence of specific festivals
and holidays is the function of men saying, hey, it would be
a good idea if we did X.
that's undoubtedly the origin of them.
Even the very first Easter and the very first Christmas was undoubtedly
believers saying, hey, let's make sure we remember that.
That does not make them man-made in the sense that other things
are man-made.
Because when they said those things, they weren't saying, it is now
the law and you go to hell unless you do it just
like this.
They're saying wouldn't this be profitable for all Christians?
As Corey said, it has always been the case and it is
entirely permissible, and in fact it's necessary for for the observed liturgical
calendar to evolve over time, because God continues to operate in time.
The ordinary time period of the calendar in Pentecost, that's about half
of the church year, where
it's it's focused on the church, the time of the church.
It's focused on what happened from Acts forward unto the last days.
In fact, the very last Sundays observed in at the very end
of the church here, just prior to Advent, are specifically focused on
the actual end times, which frankly is one of my favorite parts
of the church here just before getting back into Advent, looking forward
to the birth of Christ, is that recognition of the end of
all things, of thy kingdom come finally being answered, of being fulfilled
by God.
He is going to come.
And it will be terrifying.
God says we're all gonna hide in caves and and pray for
it to be over.
I'm not sitting here thinking well the end of the world's gonna
be a lot of fun, but it's promised by God and He
says it's what He's going to do.
So that's something for Christians to look forward to.
And the prophecies of the end time are they're also cyclical.
God, when Jesus was giving the parables about the virgins and the
various other ones that pointed towards the end times, he was promoting
an awareness and a watchfulness, and what better way to keep watch
than by having regular observations to keep those things in mind I
think that it's not for nothing that some church bodies, some even
call themselves bodies, but there are certain
Christian sects that will go close to, if not over the line,
of actually rejecting Christmas and Easter.
They're the most basic Christian holidays.
It's not for nothing that that sort of rejection invariably follows rejection
of the creeds.
Because they'll say, Well, those are man-made too.
Well, as we've talked about in past episodes, no they're not.
The Nicene Creed is a collection of quotations from scripture.
Just like the Lutheran liturgy is a collection of quotations from Scripture,
is a creed or the liturgy inspired by God not according to
itself, but insofar as every word of it is stray from God's
mouth, it's all good.
It's all profitable.
It's things that we should be remembering and bringing to mind and
confessing publicly.
One of the good examples I think of the church calendar evolving
over time is Trinity Sunday.
This is a Western observance.
I I think the East also has a form of it, that
is fairly late in church development, but it's interesting for the reason
that the Trinity Sunday observance began not with the clergy, but with
Christians. It began with Christian observances forcing the clergy to recognize what
became Trinity Sunday.
And this was this was before the Reformation.
So initially Rome sort of fought it, but it was salutary, so
they they permitted it.
And then eventually after a couple centuries, it became formalized.
I think it's a good example of something where, you know, do
you have to have Trinity Sunday?
No. It's clearly not a law.
You know, for for over a thousand years, Christians had no such
thing. And then one day someone said, you know what, it'd be
a good idea to devote one of these special days specifically to
the doctrines of the Trinity.
And others agreed.
Frankly, it was mostly the Christians and the pews who agreed, and
then eventually the church capitulated.
That's a good thing.
The one of the great things that I really enjoy on Trinity
Sunday is the recitation of the Athanasian Creed.
Because it's something, it's an important creed from antiquity that doesn't get
much play today.
But it's very important just for revealing everything that we can faithful
well, almost everything that we can faithfully say about the Trinity in
such a way that is understandable to the extent that it's it's
plain language, but you start to get a sense from reading it
how inscrutable God is in ways that are omitted from the Nicene
and the Apostles' Creed, because they were solving different problems.
So Trinity Sunday became an occasion for Christians in numerous denominations to
recite the Athanasian Creed at least once a year.
I think that's a good thing.
It's profitable.
Is it law?
No. Are you going to hell if you don't do it?
No, of course not.
On the other hand, if it's a good thing that's been going
on for at this point close to a thousand years in in
varying degrees of observance, why would you get rid of it?
Yeah, it's i i it's kind of a a jerk question that
some people ask that's not necessarily sincere, but I almost wonder what
are you afraid of?
what is it about having a Trinity Sunday that might make certain
preachers nervous?
Because as we've said and we were talking about the creeds in
past episodes, when you bookend the preaching with one of the creeds,
it provides a contrast with whatever the preacher is saying.
And so a faithful preacher is never going to say anything that's
going to contradict the creeds.
An unfaithful preacher, if he's messing with some of those core doctrines,
there's going to be a contrast that even a typical Christian in
the pews is probably gonna be able to pick up on.
Say, you know, I Pastor, I you said this in the sermon,
but the creed says this.
I'm can you help me understand why there seems to be a
disconnect. Am I misunderstanding something?
And hopefully that's the case.
You know, most of the time that should be the case.
If you have a faithless pastor or one who's simply confused and
erroneous, then the creed has acted as an ancient bulwark against false
teaching. Now, is that man-made?
At some point it doesn't matter.
The question is is it true and is it salutary?
If it is, let's keep it around because it's going to be
beneficial. It's certainly going to be far more beneficial than whatever crap
is going up on the projectors every Sunday.
Because that stuff is all ephemeral.
That stuff is not going to stick.
It's in one ear and out the other.
And in you've you've forgotten by the time you get home, never
mind when you're ninety.
The things that we're talking about, the things that are important in
the church life, in the liturgical life, are ones that reinforce and
build up the faith, that keep us focused on God's promises and
on his things and give us a reassurance that we are part
of the whole body of Christ, not simply one denomination, but part
of the entire church writ large.
And these major marks are marks of the church.
And so when someone comes along is like I don't need any
of that stuff, the more they say that, the more in danger
they are of rejecting things that are actually fundamental that are That
are actually matters of sin.
And so it's not that these are necessarily all guardrails, but when
they're good affirmative teaching tools and you get rid of them, you're
necessarily getting rid of whatever teaching is going to have been in
enforced by that sort of repetition.
It's just it's a natural way that humans work.
You do the same thing over and over enough times.
You get really good at it.
That's a that's a beneficial thing.
That's not a matter of boredom.
It should be a matter, you know, most occasions of pride.
I don't know that there's necessarily the occasion for pride in the
in the church service, but there's certainly the occasion for giving thanks
to be part of something as much as possible that's ancient.
It's ironic that although Lutherans split from the Roman Catholic Church, today
some of the liturgical practices that are closest to what you used
to be Roman practice are found among some LCMS congregations that have
preserved many of the rites, many of the forms, apart from those
things where we doctrinally disagree, with what pre-Vatican II churches had.
So I've had Catholics see streams of LCMS services and say, Man,
I wish my local parish were like that, because it was more
Catholic than what they have now.
The reason for that is that we didn't despise the things that
were good by themselves.
One of the really cool things in the video I've we've linked
a few times from Matt Whitman with the 10 minute Bible hour,
when he visited the Lutheran church, the LCMS church, at the end
of the very first video, he said something I always suck with
me because it was such a great quote.
He said, When he went to that church, he expected something that
would be very 1600s.
What he found was something that was all two thousand years of
church at once.
And he sort of paused and reflected and said, I have a
lot more to think about.
It was clear that it really made an impression on him that
he was a reformed guy of some stripe.
And so the doctrine that was taught in that one service he
was at was very familiar.
That was his words.
Like, I get all the doctrine, but the practice was very distinctly
to his eyes and ears, it seemed very Roman Catholic.
But when he looked at it analytically, he's like, no, that's just
he realized that it was just Christian.
Like it was it was the Western Christian Church without the stuff
the stuff that was specific to Rome, which was Luther's entire goal.
Like that was that was a purpose.
It wasn't revolution.
It wasn't to throw away everything that had ever been done.
It was just to clean up a mess because it was the
Rome had become a depreciating asset.
They had some deferred maintenance that needed to be it needed some
upkeep, needed some doctrinal upkeep.
And when that attempt was rejected, we had to go in our
own direction.
But it was never the desire.
And so we preserved as much as we could because it was
good. The things that were good were kept.
And so we continue to do things that you know, singing hymns
that were sung sixteen hundred years ago, using liturgical forms that in
some cases are even older than that.
That's a good thing.
Personally I take comfort in that.
And the fact that I'm not standing there every Sunday doing something
entirely new, that I'm part of something that's been going on for
hundreds and thousands of years.
that's part of what it means to be Christian.
You're not solo, you're not by yourself doing your own thing.
It's not what every man thinks is right in his own eyes.
It's what Christians have agreed on is a good thing.
it's a blessing.
And that's what this is about.
Again, this is these are about blessings from God's things preserved through
time. As tradition, these are not laws.
These are not matters of damnation.
But when you start throwing them away and saying, well, I can
do better, turns out no one ever does.
No one has ever improved on any of the things that they've
thrown away.
They've only ever ended up with worse either shoddy or they're an
imitation that's crummy or just ripped it out entirely and done something
that is demonstrably poorer for it.
And
in this modern modern age where there's so many men who are
looking for something that feels traditional.
They don't understand doctrine, they don't understand the historical stuff.
They just want something that seems a bit more atemporal because they
understand that where they are today is a hellscape and is terrible.
Churches, including Rome, yet the Latin Mass in particular and the East,
frankly, one of the appeals of the East is that it feels
old. It feels atemporal.
Latin Mass, the same thing.
The liturgical forms feel old because they are.
And everyone senses it.
You come in and you're like this is some people think it's
anachronistic. I think that what Matt said was correct.
it's all two thousand years of church at once.
It's not an anachronism, it's that it has been preserved throughout time
because God's things are eternal.
God's word is eternal.
And so where when it comes to us in the liturgy, it
should feel a bit like that too.
It shouldn't be a laser light show.
It should be something that would be recognized in other centuries as
familiar. that's part of being a participant in the body of Christ.
And it's we as Lutherans think that that's a beneficial.
It's a good thing.
Part of the core of the cycle of the church year is
alternating fast and feast.
And that is both a technical term, but it is also literal
because fasting again is part of the Christian life and yes it's
fallen by the wayside for most modern Christians but it is something
that we should be doing because it does not say if you
fast, it says when you fast.
But each Sunday is a feast day, so even during penitential seasons,
you have
the punctuation of the joy of a church service, you have the
feast day that is the divine service, that is the Gottesdienst.
But there's another aspect to
having a liturgical calendar, having a church year that I think is
often neglected, but I want to highlight it specifically, and that is
there's a delayed gratification built into the church year.
We know this when it comes to cyclical readings.
If you have a particular part of scripture that you like and
you're following a lectionary, you'll eventually get to that book that you
really like and you'll very much enjoy that.
And we've mentioned books we like before.
The same thing happens with the church year, with the calendar, because
there'll be, for instance, certain hymns
There will be certain hymns that are sung on certain days in
the church year.
And so, for instance, you may really like for all the saints,
and that's sung on all saints' day, so you have to wait
for November for that one to come back around.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think that churches should reserve certain hymns for certain days.
It's good to have that expectation to look forward to that.
And you have that if you have this liturgical worship.
If you just go to your church service and it's whatever the
worship leader feels like singing that Sunday, there's no looking forward to
these things.
There's no expectation of
we'll have this part of this service on this day and I
can look forward to that and I know it's coming.
And part of the Christian life is expectation.
It is looking forward because ultimately, of course, we're looking forward to
paradise. But you look forward to the blessings of God.
If you are married, you look forward to the blessings of children.
There are all these blessings, this expectation built into the Christian life,
and you have that in the calendar.
If you don't have the calendar, you're missing out on these things.
And so you won't get to look forward to Reformation Sunday and
singing a mighty fortress, although that one is used other times in
the church here as well Or if you like, thy strong word,
which is used as part of our music for this podcast.
You have these things that are blessings from God and pictures of
the Christian life.
Again, these are teaching, but you have them only if you keep
the good things that were passed down to us by our forefathers,
instead of jettisoning them because well I don't see the reason why
we should have to have these.
They had very good reasons for maintaining them, and the men who
instituted them originally had very good reasons for doing so.
And unless we have even more compelling reasons for altering them we
should not.
Because we lose out on part of the Christian life, on part
of Christian practice, if we do not have these things.
And as has been the case with so many other episodes of
this podcast, we're not speaking of things that are absolutely required for
a Christian.
The issue of baptism comes to mind.
Must you absolutely be baptized in order to be saved?
No. That is the position of Scripture, quite frankly, but it is
the Lutheran position.
That is what we believe.
Should you be baptized?
Absolutely. Is it a blessing from God?
Of course.
That is the case with so many of these things.
What we are saying, the thing for which we are advocating, is
that you have the fullness of the of the Christian doctrine, the
fullness of the Christian life, not the minimum.
Yes, you could go ahead and live your life as a minimal
Christian, with a minimum of God's blessings, with a minimum of the
blessings passed down to you from the historic church, and you may
very well still be a Christian.
That is entirely possible.
But why would you want that?
If God is offering you this wealth of blessings, why would you
say no I'll just have the appetizer?
Don't do that.
That's not the Christian life.
The Christian life is receiving the fullness of God's blessings.
Whatever blessing God wants to give you, say, by all means, and
more. That is the response.
That is part of what prayer is.
Prayer is asking God for things.
Yes, there's a returning of thanksgiving as well, but the greatest worship
of God is turning to him, looking to him in the day
of trouble and expecting good from him.
And we see that in all aspects of the Christian life.
The sacraments are a blessing from God.
If you don't have the sacraments in your church, can you still
be Christian?
You can still be Christian, but you're missing out.
You've rejected some of the good things of God.
If you have a pastor who focuses only on, say, the synoptic
gospels and reads nothing else from scripture.
Can you still be a Christian?
Sure. You're missing out.
The same thing with the church calendar.
If you jettison these good things, you are missing out on blessings
that are freely available to you.
And there's no reason to do that.
You are limiting your Christian life, you are limiting the blessings from
God for no reason.
And so no, it's not required of Christians.
You don't have to have a church calendar
you could have a Christian church service where you did the exact
same thing, sung the exact same hymns, never deviated from that whatsoever,
didn't change with the seasons, didn't recognize Christmas officially.
Obviously, you have to believe in Christmas, but you didn't change at
all for the seasons of the church and you could still be
Christian. But why would you do that to your children and why
would you deprive yourself of all of these blessings that have been
passed down to us.
Again, to be explicit, to make sure we are absolutely clear, these
things are not required, but they are good.
They are good for unity, they are good for order, they are
good for teaching, and they are quite frankly also good for your
soul.
One of the passages that often gets used against those who would
advocate for some form of Formality and worship like using a calendar,
a shared calendar in particular, is Romans 14.
I want to read this long passage because as I was taking
a look at it again today in light of that Twitter thread
that I mentioned earlier where a guy just made a very neutral,
inoffensive comment saying, Hey, the liturgical calendar is beneficial for teaching in
churches. And he was attacked.
He was dogpiled by people who called themselves Christians.
And so when I then looked at this passage in Romans fourteen,
I realized that it was not a condemnation of what he was
saying. It was actually a condemnation of those who used use the
so called regulative principle as a tammer against Christians?
I'm going to read this whole thing here and talk about it
for a minute.
As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but
do not quarrel over opinions.
One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats
only vegetables.
Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and
let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who
eats. For God has welcomed him.
Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?
It is before his own master that he stands or falls, and
he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him
stand. One person esteems one day as better than another, while another
esteems all days alike.
Each one should fully be convinced in his own mind.
The one who observes the day observes it in honor of the
Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since
he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains abstains in
honor of the Lord, and gives thanks to God.
For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies
to himself.
For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we
die, we die to the Lord.
So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the
Lords. To this end Christ died and lived again, the he may
be the Lord for both the dead and the living.
Why do you pass judgment on your brother?
Or you, why do you despise your brother?
For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God, for
as it is written, As I live, says the Lord, every knee
shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.
So then each of us will give an account of himself to
God. Now this passage specifically deals with one man esteeming all days
alike, and another man esteeming one day is better than another.
And this is generally one of the key proof texts that's used
to attack any form of liturgical calendar.
I think a crucial thing to acknowledge when you're looking at this
passage is to whom was Paul writing?
Obviously he's writing to all of us.
I'm not trying to pluck this from its context so we can
say that doesn't apply to us.
But when you specifically look at the church in Rome, when Paul
was writing, he was addressing a nascent church.
I don't think it's clear that anyone had actually visited there before
any apostles.
I'm not sure if it's recorded.
So what we can infer from from the historical context is that
it would have probably been a large number of Jews who had
converted to Christianity or had fleshed out their Jewishness as Christians and
believing in the Messiah, along with Roman converts to Christianity.
Because remember, they had the Septuagint there, they'd been primed.
Some of them may have already been believers.
When the Messiah came, there was an influx of men saying, I
want to be part of the way.
And so they would have been gathering together Jews and Jews and
Gentiles alike in the same place, probably in synagogues at this point,
and some of the things that Paul was addressing in that place
were disputes among them, because the very first heresy that emerged in
the early church was Judaizing.
It was those Jews who had been practicing when they recognized
that the Messiah had come, they still didn't fully understand what that
meant. Even Peter himself, God had to come to him in a
vision multiple times with the animals on the sheet coming down from
heaven, and God said take and eat, and he said, Lord, nothing
unclean has ever touched my lips.
And God said kill and eat, eat it.
Anything that I have made is not unclean.
Peter specifically needed to be told that the old separations were set
aside, and that Jesus completing the old covenant meant that it was
no longer restricted for these things to occur.
And so it's inevitable that in this day where you have Jews
and Gentiles gathering together in a synagogue, there would have been Judaizing
naturally occurring.
Because frankly at that point a lot of the Jews didn't know
any better.
And so a number of Paul's epistles were specifically saying, look, you
guys are believers in Christ, you have received the faith that the
Messiah came.
Now stop holding others to the old law.
You don't tell someone who's a convert to be circumcised.
You don't tell them to observe the specific patterns of feasts and
festivals. You don't tell them not to eat certain things, all of
that is completed in Christ.
And this was certainly one of the disputes that he was addressing
here. So when Paul says to them, One person esteems one day
is better than another while another esteems all days alike.
In that context, that's absolutely what he's talking about.
The Gentiles who were coming in, they didn't have the baggage of
the old ceremonial system.
Now again, I'm not trying to say this only applies to them
and it doesn't apply to us, but I'm saying when you specifically
look at what was going on there, I think it's frankly kind
of the opposite of what the regular principle guys say today.
Because what's happening today when someone posts or says something like we're
saying here that the church calendar is good actually, and it inevitably
will make a bunch of guys angry for saying that's not a
law, you're making that a law.
Well, I'm telling you guys, you are violating Romans 14.
You are sinning by condemning someone for observing a church calendar.
Full stop.
That's what this passage is saying.
You are the ones who are prohibiting someone for practicing in such
a manner.
You're saying that's not Christian.
No Christian would do that.
Well, you are condemned by Romans 14.
Period. Now, as I said earlier, we didn't want this to be
a polemical episode.
I don't want to beat up on you guys.
I want to have a break and come back and everyone'd be
happy and everyone getting along.
Hopefully it'll be just one church, maybe Jesus will come back and
none of this crap will matter anymore.
It's not okay for us to be at each other's throats over
those things, which is from the very moment that we began this
episode, the spirit of what we're trying to say.
I'm going to go back to the very first thing.
As for one who is weak in the faith, welcome him, but
do not quarrel over opinions.
Church calendar is absolutely an opinion, it is not something to quarrel
over. I'm not going to argue with the ortho guy who wants
to celebrate Christmas two weeks after I do.
Whatever. I'm glad he's celebrating Christmas.
That's a good thing.
The fact that there are differences in calendars, that there are differences
in the specific observations, some of that's just natural.
If you're separated by space and time, of course they're gonna be
different traditions.
That's okay.
It will be quarreling over opinions to condemn them for those practices.
And again, even the practices where I would condemn some of the
things on the Roman Catholic calendar, it's not that they're observing the
wrong feasts, it's that I think that the doctrine underlying it is
not substantiated by scripture.
So that's my concern.
And that ceases to be a matter of opinion because it's a
matter of doctrinal correctness, which they would agree as well, just in
the opposite direction, because the Pope dogmatized some of those things.
It was one of the few areas where there were ex cathedra
pronouncements specifically dealing with some of the Marian stuff.
Those cease to be matters of opinion when they go to such
strongly held beliefs.
And this is also the case with the guys who will swoop
in and condemn someone for saying, hey, the church calendar is good
actually. To condemn that is to functionally act as a Judaizer.
You may not condemn a man for observing a calendar because you're
the one who's quarreling over opinions.
And separately, in the rest of this conversation today is about the
fact that this is a salutary opinion.
Yes, somebody came up with Christmas, somebody came up with Easter as
the idea that hey, let's remember what happened last year, let's remember
what happened a hundred years ago, remember what happened two thousand years
ago. That's a man's opinion only insofar as it's a rational recognition
of something.
It's absolutely true.
And again, when we look to the the cyclical nature of history
itself, of creation itself, and of how church practice going back to
you know the Levitical days, it's always been the case that these
there were observances.
Do you do you think that the same God who told them
to observe the Passover and those other things.
Do you think that he stopped caring about observances?
Do you think that he said like it doesn't matter, Amy, you
just forget about it.
As Corey said earlier, that's that's it's explicitly not the case.
It is not a law which day you do it, but there
are certain things that you must confess.
You must confess Christmas as Christ was incarnate, that's in the creeds.
You must confess that he died.
That's Good Friday.
You must confess that he was resurrected.
That's Easter.
If you confess those things, why would you then not remember the
days as days of commemoration?
So see, we're not turning a calendar into a law, but if
your calendar is not a reflection of your confession, what is it
that you're really confessing?
To confess that Christ was resurrected from the dead is to confess
that there's an Easter-sized hole missing in your calendar if you don't
observe it.
So observe it.
Is that a law?
No. But it's consistent with your confession.
It's the Christian life being aligned with the Christian confession.
And that's really where the rubber meets the road with this stuff.
It's not making a law to say we should have a calendar
and we should use it consistently.
But when you start chipping away and say, I don't believe this,
I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do the
other thing, you very rapidly get to the heart of the Christian
faith itself.
And that's where it really becomes an issue.
And again, Romans 14 expressly condemns anyone who would attack a man
for observing a calendar.
We are not attacking those who don't observe it.
We're saying you guys are missing out.
There's a treasure from the church, from Christians going back thousands of
years that you're missing out on.
Please join us in enjoying these treasures of the church collectively.
This is for all of our benefit.
It Doesn't belong to Lutherans, just like it doesn't belong to the
Pope. That's why we were not shy about taking whatever was preservable
from what Rome had.
If it was good, we kept it, because it's Christian.
It's not his.
And so this for someone today to say that's the Pope's stuff.
No, it isn't.
It's my stuff.
It's your stuff.
It is your inheritance as a Western Christian.
And if you despise it, you're not despising the Pope.
You're despising your fathers and the faith.
And frankly, you're you're despising your children too.
Because if you take away something that was an inheritance and you
refuse to pass it on, you're breaking a chain that God has
established through time because the faith is transmitted through time from man
to man, and when you start picking away and tearing pieces out
of it, you're doing real harm.
So this continuity is not a law, but as a matter of
human wisdom, why would you remove that which is good?
It's fundamentally what it's about.
I'm not saying you're going to hell if you don't do it.
We're saying you're missing out if you don't do it.
And if you say we're sinning by doing it, you are clearly
sinning. I wish that weren't the case.
I wish we again the same page about this stuff.
But as a bare minimum, we cannot quarrel over opinions.
And emphatically, that's not what we are doing
here You
can tell very clearly that we're not quarrelling over opinions because it's
Advent and we haven't said which color you should use for your
candles as that is one of the the minor points over which
people will quarrel during the season of Advent.
Completely ridiculous For historical reasons, some churches use blue, some other churches
use purple, or they'll call them sarum and violet, depending on what
you want to call the colors.
Use whichever one matches your pyramids.
That's probably the best advice.
I have one set of each.
These are the minor things that don't matter.
These are the little things over which you can squabble that ultimately
it's a matter of Matter of preference when it comes to some
of these matters.
Which color candles you use is largely a matter of preference.
Yes, there is a meaning to the colors established as historic precedent
in the church, and yes, it is good in some way to
follow some of these and so for instance using black paramets on
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and Holy Saturday is good as a
teaching tool to remember the point of these days in the church
year. And incidentally, I think it's worth noting that Ash Wednesday is
a great example of what I said earlier where you can look
forward to something in the church here and maybe it ties into
the fact that we both like the book of Job.
But I think it is important to hear at least once a
year the words of Genesis three, and you we hear these on
ash Wednesday in those churches that recognize, that observe Ash Wednesday, for
dost thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
That is a vitally important thing for the Christian to hear To
hear and to remember, it gives you the context of not just
the reality of human life, but it gives you that necessary foundation
to understand
what Christ did, the meaning of Christ's sacrifice, the meaning of that
redemption of creation, what happens to us in this life and how
it would have been an ultimate fate without Christ.
And so you have that reminder in the church calendar, something you
can look forward to as part of the cycle of your year
in the church.
But the matter of these minor things
we are not going to squabble over those and Christians shouldn't squabble
over those.
That doesn't mean you can't discuss them.
You can have a civilized discussion of whether you want to have
purple or blue candles, that's fine.
You don't start a fight over it.
The church should not be divided over minor matters.
Now division over doctrine and disagreeing on the sacraments, these things, those
are reasons to be in separate church bodies, because if you do
not agree on the core matters, you're not in communion.
And then you can't have communion because part of that is discerning
the body and blood.
It's not just discerning the body and blood in the literal sense
there, it is also discerning that you are part of the greater
body. And that means that you have to have these agreements in
doctrine, agreements on the grand issues, but you can have disagreements on
the color of the parents.
There are matters that require division, and there are matters that do
not require division.
On the issue of matters that do not require division, those who
have rejected things, that were inherited from our forefathers, that were good,
that should not have been rejected, for which there was no sufficient
reason to reject them, that is an impermissible division.
And those who have left the church over those issues should not
have done so, it was sin to do that.
Schism is not always sinful.
It depends upon the reason why.
If it is again over doctrine or theology, then you are required
to separate from a body that is teaching falsely.
But if it is over atiaphora, you are not permitted to separate.
Just because you again, it may seem trivial, but there are people
who people who take this this seriously.
Just because you do not like the color of the candles does
not mean that you need to find a new church.
It means that you need to just deal with it.
Ignore the color of the candles.
Or, learn why, this other colour is used, because it is probably
profitable to learn the teaching you can derive from that.
And so, if you like the purple candles, which typically represent royalty,
its representation of Christ's royalty Of his incarnation descended from the line
of David.
Well, maybe you should look into why they use the blue.
It's a reminder of the night sky and many of the teachings
surrounding the nativity, the angels appearing in the night sky.
they have reasons for using these things.
And so don't separate over these minor issues.
One of the goals of the Christian Church should be unity amongst
those who believe.
And the calendar is actually beneficial to that.
And again, as I said earlier, I'll repeat it now, one of
the reasons the calendar is beneficial for the purpose of unity is
that it reminds us across church bodies that we all believe these
core matters, that we all affirm the promises concerning the coming of
Christ, Advent looks forward to that.
We all affirm the incarnation.
That is why we have the season of Christmas.
We all affirm that Christ came to redeem the nations, that it
is available to all human beings, all sons and daughters of Adam
and Eve, and so we observe epiphany.
We affirm that we should be sorry for our sins, that we
should repent, that we should recognize the fullness of our sin in
order to recognize the fullness of Christ's sacrifice, and so we observe
the season of Lent.
We recognize that it was Christ's perfect life, death, and resurrection, by
which we can be saved in faith, and so we recognize the
season of Easter.
And we recognize the church, we recognize the communion of the saints,
we recognize that this is the mystical body of Christ that exists
throughout all time and is comprised of all of all believers, from
Adam all the way until whatever unfortunate man is the last one
left on this earth.
And so we recognize the season of Pentecost.
I just went through the entirety of the church calendar.
No Christian can disagree with any of those things, because these are
core parts of the Christian faith.
And so there's no reason to reject this.
It is a teaching tool, it is good for order.
It not only creates but it highlights the unity across Christian groups.
And that which is good for order and is good for unity
and informs Christians, teaches them, brings them up in the faith, solidifies
them in the faith.
These things are good and should be preserved, and when they have
been handed down to us by our forefathers, we should not squander
that inheritance.
It is a good thing that was preserved for us not just
by those men who came before us, but by God preserving his
church.
Again, we will put in the show notes a link to Owen's
church calendar that has the his very artistic version of the Roman
Catholic calendar.
He's selling copies of that.
It's beautiful.
If you're Roman Catholic, you should probably buy a copy.
If you're not, you should enjoy it.
We'll also link to another website that shows the Lutheran uh liturgical
calendar. They're also selling less fancy but still uh very nice posters
of the entire church here.
Just as a good reminder of what we go through as we're
enjoying God's gifts week after week in church.
Because if your church is observing the seasons and using the lectionary,
it's going to have readings that reflect whatever's going on at that
particular time of the year.
On the subject of lectionary, Corey has another podcast that's just him
reading from the daily lectionary every day, and then on Sunday in
particular their readings are appointed for each day.
And so we'll link that in the show notes as well when
we're on our brief hiatus.
It's something you should be listening to anyway.
Again, not because Corey's doing it.
He's a very good narrator and reader, he has a great voice
for that.
But if you do nothing else devotionally, if all you do is
listen to 15 minutes of scripture every day, you're in better shape
than most people.
Maybe things get screwy and that's all you have time to do.
You know,
you're not able to focus and do more than that.
It's still salutary.
If you can spend 15 minutes a day listening to scripture, you
know, while you're getting ready for work in the morning.
That is a great thing.
And in particular, the lectionary is going to work through the entire
church calendar so the readings will reflect what's going on seasonally.
And they're going to cover all the various stories.
The lectionary and the liturgy go hand to hand.
And on the subject of opinions, there are a bunch of different
lectionaries too.
I personally despise the arguing over them.
I don't care.
For you to say that somebody's reading the Bible wrong, that makes
me angry.
Use whatever lectionary you're going to use.
Just read the Bible regularly.
So while we're gone for a couple weeks, go back and listen
to the back catalog, subscribe to Corey's Confident Faith podcast where he
does the daily lectionary readings and just start enjoying them because that
is part of the church calendar as well.
Like it's not it's not super over.
He mentions it every day.
Here's you know the time of the season.
But those readings are just it's it's God's word and it's his
gifts being poured out to us.
And because faith comes by hearing, frankly, I think in some cases
it's almost more profitable to hear someone reading something than reading it
yourself. It's there's just something about the way our brains work the
bot God understood.
So that's how he's given these things to us.
So be sure to check out the show notes this week because
there's some good stuff in there that'll be interesting.
It's not homework, but it's it's beneficial for you.
That's the purpose of all this.
It's not homework.
It's not making laws.
It's just look at these blessings.
Look at these good things that God has preserved in time through
the church.
Let's enjoy them together.
That that's my entire hope for all of this for everyone.
And so we will end this week's episode with a short reading
from Ecclesiastes three, something for you to ponder in the remaining week,
less than a week leading up to Christmas Day.
And of course this is the fourth Sunday in Advent this coming
Sunday. But our reading to end this episode, Ecclesiastes three.
For everything there is a season and a time for every matter
under heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die,
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is
planted, a time to kill, and a time to heal, a time
to break down, and a time to build up, a time to
weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a
time to dance, a time to cast away stones, and a time
to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to
refrain from embracing, a time to seek and a time to lose,
a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time
to tear and a time to sow, a time to keep silence
and a time
to speak, a time to love, and a time to hate, a
time for war, and a time for peace.