An Unlikely Member of The Gottesdienst Crowd™

By Larry Beane

Comedian Jimmy Fallon

Mr. FALLON: I just, I loved the church. I loved the idea of it. I loved the smell of the incense. I loved the feeling you get when you left church. I loved like how this priest can make people feel this good. I just thought it was – I loved the whole idea of it. My grandfather was very religious, so I used to go to Mass with him at like 6:45 in the morning, serve Mass. And then you made money, too, if you did weddings and funerals. You’d get like five bucks. And so I go ‘Okay, I can make money too.’ I go, ‘This could be a good deal for me.’ I thought I had the calling…

GROSS: Do you still go to church?

Mr. FALLON: I don’t go to – I tried to go back. When I was out in L.A. and I was kind of struggling for a bit. I went to church for a while, but it’s kind of, it’s gotten gigantic now for me. It’s like too… There’s a band. There’s a band there now, and you got to, you have to hold hands with people through the whole Mass now, and I don’t like doing that…Now, I’m holding hands – now I’m lifting people. Like Simba. [Laughter] I’m holding them [Singing] ha nah hey nah ho.

I’m doing too much. I don’t want – there’s Frisbees being thrown, there’s beach balls going around, people waving lighters, and I go, ‘This is too much for me.’ I want the old way. I want to hang out with the, you know, with the nuns, you know, that was my favorite type of Mass, and the grotto, and just like straight up, just Mass Mass.

You can read the full article here.

Fallon is a comedian.  He is being flip here.  Whether he really understands the christocentricity of the Mass or not, who knows?  But what is revealing here is his visceral sense (that I believe he shares with most people) that contemporary worship is not real worship.  It's a show.  It's at best a bait-and-switch manipulation.  And by repudiating tradition, the church has become a self-parody.

A good definition of burn out....

...how about this: if it were economically feasible for you to walk away from the ministry and into another line of work tomorrow, would you go? These statistics indicate that among generic "American clergy" the number who would respond in the affirmative stands somewhere between 50 and 57 percent.

Lord help us all...

+HRC

Cantemus, fratres

The following is from G.K. Chesterton's "The Little Birds That Won't Sing" in the collection of essays Tremendous Trifles. Compare Luther's "And then go joyfully to your work, singing..."

+HRC

-------------

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerks when casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praise of Simple Addition.

"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er. Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four.' Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar, Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."

"There's a run upon the Bank—Stand away! For the Manager's a crank and the Secretary drank, and the

   Upper Tooting Bank
         Turns to bay!
   Stand close: there is a run
   On the Bank.
   Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
   That she fired with every gun
         Ere she sank."

.....

And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine who actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions in rhyme to him for use among his colleagues. But he was not very hopeful about the matter. It was not (he assured me) that he underrated the verses, or in any sense lamented their lack of polish. No; it was rather, he felt, an indefinable something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we live that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks. And I think he must be right; though the matter is very mysterious. I may observe here that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of the Socialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, but to the chaos of private enterprise. Now, banks are private; but post-offices are Socialistic: therefore I naturally expected that the post-office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of my surprise when the lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing) dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done. She seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the verses themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of the Post-Office Hymn ran thus:

     "O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
      Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
      The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
      Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

     "Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain it seemed that the most important and typical modern things could not be done with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financier and sing; because the essence of being a great financier is that you keep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public man and sing; because in those circles the essence of being a public man is that you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorus of money-lenders. Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps of volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all said simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence." Men can sing while charging in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of my reflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feeling of my friend the bank-clerk—that there is something spiritually suffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about our life. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards I passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY were singing anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before: that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find the human. Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.

New Liturgical Resource Online

Fr. Eric Wismar has posted the entirety of Pro Ecclesia Lutherana, the journal of the Liturgical Society of St. James, online. Fr. Wismar's great-grandfather Father...well, Father Wismar (Adolph), was one of the founders of the society. From his introduction to the collection:

The Liturgical Society of St. James was in existence from 1929 until 1947.  The membership of the LSSJ included clergy and laity of the Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States.  The society expressed itself through convocations, an irregular periodical called Pro Ecclesia Lutherana, an even more irregular Bulletin, and other occasional papers.  My great-grandfather, Adolph P. Wismar, became the chairman of the LSSJ while he was the pastor at historical St. Matthew Lutheran Church in New York City.  In 1945 he took a call to Valparaiso University to teach in the Department of Theology and began his teaching duties with the 1946-1947 academic year.  The LSSJ followed him there and the last Convocation of the LSSJ was held at Valparaiso University May 20-21, 1947.  The next spring O. P. Kretzmann, President of the University, sent Wismar a memo requesting that he (and others) "serve as a committee to submit plans for "An Institute of Liturgical Studies" to be conducted on our campus next summer."  Thus the LSSJ transformed into the VLI. . . 

+HRC

Liturgical Homerun

Transfiguration is traditionally celebrated in the West on August 6. In Sweden and other Nordic countries, the Lutherans continued this tradition. But many German Lutherans (Church Orders authored by Bugenhagen and Veit Dietrich: See Reid, The Lutheran Liturgy pp 485-86) moved the festival to the last Sunday before Pre-Lent. This is a good example of doing liturgical change the right way.

To start with there are good reasons for the change. First, it moves a feast that is very important in the Gospel accounts from an obscure time (a fixed date in the middle of summer which would only fall on a Sunday occasionally) to a Sunday observance.

Second, the move is internally coherent, that is, the festival fits this liturgical season better. In the summer the focus of the lectionary is on typical Trinity season topics or in early August around Trinity X on eschatology. The Transfiguration fits there well enough, but one can argue it fits much better right before the penitential season leading up to Easter. This is its place in the Gospel accounts: a glimpse of glory before it is time to "set His face toward Jerusalem."

Third, it places a major festival in a good position to send off the Christmas/Epiphany season and its joy with a bang.

Fourth, it does no harm to the other stories the lectionary means to tell. If this feast were in the summer and transferred to the nearest Sunday (as it appears was the custom in Sweden) it would replace a Sunday in ordinary time. The same is true with moving it to the last Sunday in the Epiphany season. So that's a wash.

So the change is well-thought out and beneficial. So far so good - but there is more reason to think of this as a liturgical homerun. The change was made within ecclesiastical jurisdictions, not willy nilly in this parish here and that parish there. Some jurisdictions made the change and some didn't. And that's fine. But where the change happened, it happened in unison across an ecclesiastical jurisdiction in good order.

I don't think this is minimized by the fact that the Missouri Synod currently lives under two different church years. Within the logic of the 3-Year lectionary, Transfiguration needs to come right before Lent since Pre-Lent is no more. It's better to have two different lectionaries than no lectionaries at all.

+HRC