Please read with me from the Great Litany, in the prayer resources shared here and on Facebook:

Let us pray.

Almighty God, we pray that you would deliver us from every evil, those known to us, and those we do not see. Help us to know and do your will in all things. Through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

Around March 13 it became clear that celebrating Holy Communion in church at all--even distributing only the host, as we had previously indicated we would do--would not be wise or safe under the circumstances. We have a provision for non-Communion liturgy, but simply cutting it out seemed inadequate. It occurred to me that we could do the Great Litany to conclude the service. So we ad-libbed and had everyone present in the sanctuary open their copies of Evangelical Lutheran Worship to that curious, under-used piece of our history and we prayed it together. It was a powerful moment.

I don't know much about the Great Litany itself. I believe I first encountered it when I visited Wicker Park Lutheran Church in Chicago for the first time in 2005 (I wrote about that day, and that church, in an essay several years ago). It was the first Sunday in Lent, and the pastor explained that the Great Litany was traditionally recited on that Sunday as the congregation processed around the sanctuary. It's a powerful text but not easy to chant, for leader or congregation, and over the years it fell out of use even at Wicker Park.

From what I've read, this litany (or some version of it) has always been part of Lutheran liturgy. Litanies of all kinds are a big part of Christian worship (if you pray with us on Wednesday nights you've participated in a briefer, less elaborate litany), a haunting drone of call and response, often chanted in procession, plumbing some very severe depths of human fear and need. But for whatever reasons, it tended to disappear from American Lutheranism.

I wonder if this disappearance had something to do with the severity of its language. Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, our worship texts became softer and vaguer on the evils we prayed against and the supplications we made to God against them. The historical roots of American Lutheranism are in Europe, among regular folk subject to terrible turns of fate, and among immigrants to America who were largely poor. But by the time we developed the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), along with a whole warehouse of online supporting material, we were a largely suburban and middle-class denomination. The spiritual battles in our prayers are about apathy and compassion, acquisitiveness and simplicity, altruism and hard-heartedness. The was still a world of plague, famine, and civil strife out there but our role was to be helpful.

As it turns out, being helpful is not enough.

Reflect: What is your or your family's most recent experience of famine, crop failure, or civil unrest? What does that experience mean to you now?

For at least forty years our prayers didn't take much account of the possibility of drought and famine, fire and flood, or an "unprepared and evil death." That's the phrase that stood out to me when I first heard the Great Litany and it's stayed with me ever since. Like it or not, all this stuff is real. It never stopped happening, it happens now, and we should pray about it together.

And while this can be alarming and intense, I've found it oddly comforting as well. You have to face the worst things in order to pray for help with them. You have to acknowledge that the grave sorrows and evils of the world are not just "out there" waiting for our resources and good intentions but very close at hand in order to invoke God's aid in enduring and defeating them. One great gift of our Christian faith (and certainly not just ours) is that it gives us language for fears and dangers that we might otherwise struggle to articulate. One thing we discover in a crisis is the extent to which our world runs on wishful thinking and denial, and how far those things have reached into church itself.

So join me in appealing to God with this words. I can't claim that they will speed the end of this epidemic (though I certainly will not claim that they won't). But they are fitting words. They will help us face our world honestly.

Prayers:

Psalm 139

For the sick and those who care for them
for the lonely and isolated
for all pregnant women and new mothers
for those who come before God's throne today
for all who have no one to pray for them

Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy
Our Father, who art in heaven...

Please read with me from Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 13:

"Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers."

Let us pray.

Almighty God, whom heaven and earth adore and glorify: open our hearts to love you and our mouths to bless, praise, and entreat you. Grant us patience and steadfastness in our prayers. Give us words when we lack them, and hope when it is far from us. Guide our words and our works toward you and each other, today and always. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Christ Lutheran Church celebrates its 75th anniversary this year--though for obvious reasons the "celebration" has been rather muted so far. So much of history, locally and globally, has been experienced and prayed through by our community: the end of the Second World War, the movements for civil rights and gender equality, the assassination of President Kennedy, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the financial crash of 2008. And yet even our congregation is too new to have experienced the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Late in 1918, churches in Dallas (and many other cities) were closed along with many other public spaces. I would love the chance to read the thoughts of clergy and lay leaders at the time. Even more, I'd love to learn more about what people did during that time, when the city (and the whole world) was ravaged by a public health crisis and churches could not gather for public, communal prayer and worship.

There is, to be sure, a special power in praying together. The times when I hold the hands of someone having a crisis or waiting for surgery and pray with and for them are some of the most powerful moments in my work. The feeling in a small gathering or even a full sanctuary when we are concentrating together can be quite intense.

Likewise, individual prayer can be an intense experience too. When I'm on retreat or have the opportunity for relatively extended silence and solitude, I find myself praying more deeply and reaching places in my own need, or praise, or grief that I am not normally aware are present. If prayer is, first and foremost, an offering to God of ourselves, whether it is our needs or fears or gratitude, the more we give, the more powerful our prayer will seem to us.

Reflect: When do you pray? Where do you pray? Does prayer feel different when you're alone and with others? What do you "pray for"?

Christians have had a lot to say over two thousand years about when, how, why, and for what purposes we pray. I wrote about this in a magazine a few years ago and revisited the question in chapter six of my book. Those are all good and interesting questions (I promise!), but for now I want to focus on Paul's exhortation to the church in Rome to "persevere in prayer." In 1 Thessalonians (possibly the oldest text in the New Testament), he tells the church to "pray without ceasing." When I first read Romans it was in the King James Version, whose translators rendered "persevere in prayer" as "continuing instant in prayer." That phrase caught my imagination. It's as if prayer is an ongoing, maybe eternal moment and we step into and out of it.

Paul tells his hearers to pray all the time. I don't think he does this because prayer is a sort of incantation or shortcut that gets otherwise difficult or impossible things done. At least I'd warn anyone away from thinking that. These exhortations to prayer come in the context of lists of things Christians should be aspiring to do and to be: showing honor, not lagging in zeal, and so forth. Prayer is supposed to form us as believers. It's a dialogue with God in which the first step we take is to ask, often without knowing or saying it, to be the kind of people who trust God and come before God with all we have and are and wish for.

This is why we are not just told to pray fervently or passionately or earnestly but continually and with perseverance. We should, in fact, lay our cares and needs before God with as much earnestness and openness as we can manage. There is nothing wrong with urgent or emergency or last-chance prayer. But one important lesson from Paul's guidance here is that prayer changes us over time. The tedious times of showing up and saying our prayers with cold hearts do not, in the moment, feel very gratifying or effective. But it's by persevering through those times--when we really don't feel like praying--that we truly grow in our faith and in the oft-discussed "power" of prayer.

Reflect: When do you least want to pray? What are your go-to, default prayer practices? When was the last time you did one of them?

For years now I've tried to keep a regular schedule of Morning Prayer from the Episcopal version of what we call the Daily Office. This is a daily cycle of prayers, consisting of psalms, Scripture readings, and common prayers that is meant to make each day holy. And the truth is that over many years of keeping this schedule I've missed it about as often as I've kept it (maybe more), and of the times I've kept it, I've often felt bored or resentful.

But here's the thing: I never, not once, have regretted taking the 10-20 minutes I spend on doing it. It's remarkable how high a hill those twenty minutes can look from the bottom. And I've at times been glad when it's over. But if I had another chance at the last four years, I'd only try to do it more often.

So for this season of shutting down and staying in, I've decided to try to do the Daily Office every day. Right now that's on Facebook Live through our church page (please like or follow if you haven't already, and remember that if you wisely avoid having a Facebook account you can still watch the page without logging in). I already missed morning prayer once but we will keep it up as much as we can. And we've made a resource for you to download and use to follow along or pray on your own. One of the hardest aspects of prayer for people is the sense that they can't find the words. But the truth is you don't have to. The words are there for us. All we have to do is join ourselves to them.

Prayers

Please pray for:
the sick
those in prison or immigration detention
medical professionals
those who have lost income
people struggling with anxiety and depression
children home from school and their parents.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Our Father, who art in heaven...

Greetings, friends. I'm going to experiment with some specific online content for this time when we are being strongly encouraged to minimize our in-person interactions. Hopefully we'll get the hang of worship-by-Zoom and making little videos soon, but I'm starting out where I'm most comfortable: the old-fashioned written word. So please join me in hearing the words of Paul the Apostle from his letter to the Galatians (6:2):

Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

Let us pray.


Gracious God, you give us each other to love and to serve; you set our neighbor before us so that we might find you through her; and you set your Word and Sacrament before us so that through you we might see our neighbor. Open our hearts to the burdens and needs of our neighbors and give us the strength to help bear them; through your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.

Paul's words in his letter to the Galatians are a lovely expression of Christian life: bearing each other's burdens. It is so broad as to be impossible to complete--a burden can be anything, at any time--and yet it is perfectly specific. It is our brother or sister's burden, even if that brother or sister is not close at hand or is even unknown to us.

Burden-bearing is an important spiritual practice for many people, including me. For clergy, we are often "bearing" the sins of our people (through confession) or of the world (as revealed in the preaching of the Word)--not in the sense that we become guilty of them, but that we must hear, face, and take a kind of responsibility for them. In his treatise "On Whether One May Flee a Deadly Plague," Martin Luther includes pastors among those obligated to stay behind and care for the souls of the sick and dying, at the greatest risk to our own health. We worry about our people, even between pandemics. We think about challenges for the church or the community that are necessarily not front-and-center for almost anyone else.

But it's hardly just us. Parents are bearing burdens all the time. Family breadwinners. People in "serving" or "caring" professions. The fact is that a lot of us get our identity from what we do for others--what burdens we bear. If I am perfectly honest with myself, part of my negative reaction to the thought of restricting or even closing down church services is that I am not entirely sure who I even am if I am not serving in this particular capacity.

Reflect: Whose burdens do you bear? What roles or tasks in your life are important to your identity?

One challenge--and hardly the only or greatest--of this season will be to talk ourselves into doing less. We may feel that we can take risks on our own account. We may even be exhilarated by the thought of risking illness or even death for the sake of our duties. But the very hard truth is that our task, as Christians and as neighbors, is to keep ourselves safe for the sake of our neighbor. To be careless of one's own health may be foolish (please, please don't listen to people who say this is just the flu, or just like a cold; the symptoms often overlap but this virus is much more deadly) or it may be courageous. But in this case, by protecting ourselves we are also protecting the people we might otherwise infect, and whose resilience in the face of a disease may be less than we imagine ours to be.

Just a week ago I heard someone say "this is just the flu and it only kills 90 year olds." Unfortunately, this disease kills plenty of people who are younger. But what I wish I had asked this person is: "Do you not come into contact with any 90 year olds? Do their lives (or their suffering) not matter to you?" Not to mention the cascading danger that comes from hospitals being overfilled with acute cases, not all of which will be fatal but which will compromise care for many other diseases as well.

Bearing one another's burdens means, first and foremost, taking their own needs and welfare as seriously as we take our own. And sometimes that means letting something wait, or reaching out by phone, or taking additional precautions for ourselves that we do not want to take. It most definitely means not pushing through that minor dry cough or slight fever to do what we feel we are obligated to do.

It also means looking for ways to help people who are more greatly threatened or inconvenienced by these disruptions than we ourselves may be. Can we get groceries for a friend or neighbor who is (correctly!) advised to avoid public places? Can we share information when someone falls ill? Can we help with childcare during school closures? None of these things is risk-free, of course, and not everyone can or should do them. But bearing one another's burdens consists both in what we do and what we don't do.

It also helps to remember that the one thing you can always do is pray. That, too, is a real and legitimate way of bearing each other's burdens. Pray for those at the highest risk for this disease. Please, please pray for the medical and emergency professionals who are being exposed to it many times every day. Pray for everyone who is losing income or critically valuable social contact. And don't forget to pray for people to be prudent in the midst of dangers that are unfamiliar to almost all of us.

Prayers:
Psalm 31:1-5

Let us pray for:
the sick
those who care for them
the isolated
those in prison, detention, or awaiting trial
those who will become ill
those who have none to pray for them
ourselves in our daily needs and responsibilities
the church, her ministers, and all the faithful

Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy

Our father, who art in heaven...

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
 
“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit."
 
“Flesh” and “Spirit”: these are simple words with big meanings.
 
There is a way of understanding these words that goes back before the time of Jesus. On the one hand you have the flesh, which is identified with the physical body. On the other you have “spirit,” which is thought of as an immaterial essence or soul. The flesh is the site of our passions—our suffering and desire—while the spirit is the source of our reason and understanding. Our flesh is mortal, our spirit is eternal. Our flesh is the lower part of our being, the spirit is the higher part. The flesh may not be bad, but it is just a vehicle or a house. The spirit may not always be good but it is always the driver, or the occupant of the house.
 
As I said, this understanding of flesh and spirit goes back before the time of Jesus and it has been influential within Christianity. But does that mean Christianity is a “spiritual” religion? Does it mean that the “flesh” is bad, as we might think from today’s Gospel?
 
In the Bible—here in John’s Gospel and especially in Paul’s letters, these two words have a somewhat different meaning. “Flesh” does not mean our physical body, but our worldly or rational mind. It is, so to say, our merely human understanding. It is human existence without illumination. The Spirit is the breath or wind that comes from God and animates not just our bodies but our minds. The Spirit is what makes us into a new creation.
 
So when we hear “flesh” and “spirit,” we should look beyond “body” and “soul.” A soul can be “fleshly,” and not just because it craves popcorn or an extra hour of sleep. Jesus is not using the term “spirit” in a way that excludes our bodily existence. Our bodies and souls are not like two Legos stuck together that can just be pulled apart. Each of us is one whole person, with our bodies and minds deeply intertwined.
 
And so our faith has to be embodied. The word of God is not downloaded into our brains; we hear it with our frail human ears.
 
Baptism is not only words of promise but a promise with water and oil touching our bodies.
 
We do all kinds of ritual physical actions: We shake hands, we reverence the altar, we dip our fingers in the baptismal font.
 
Somewhere along the way I picked up the habit of bowing my head slightly when the name of Jesus is spoken in prayers, not because I am so darn in love with Jesus and in awe of him but because I would like to have more love and more awe. Bodily acts shape our souls. They are the things that make us “spiritual.”
 
Nowhere is this more true than in the celebration of Holy Communion. In third week of our series on the question “What are we doing here?” we are thinking about this most powerful and intimate act of the church. Luther calls it the Sacrament of the Altar, the third “holy possession” of the church.
 
How we should understand this “holy possession” was a major point of dispute during the Reformation. Luther insisted that Christ was truly present, body and blood, under the bread and wine. The whole creation is transparent and permeable to Christ, like air. Everything is present to him all the time, and he simply makes himself available to us in a special way in the Sacrament.
 
He made this argument against the view of a guy named Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli thought it was impossible for Christ to be present in the Lord’s Supper because his human body had ascended into heaven. Luther actually quoted today’s Gospel on being born a second time, saying, in effect, “too bad, you big baby, try harder to have faith.” It was Zwingli’s view that the bread and wine could only symbolize an absent Christ.
 
I know this is a controversial and difficult topic but I have to say I have never really understood the view of the sacrament as a symbol. I don’t understand how coming together to eat pretend body and drink pretend blood is a more reasonable thing to do. And I don’t understand looking at the whole creation and saying “wherever Jesus Christ is, it’s not here, in the bread that he calls his body and the cup that he calls his blood.” Jesus appears to be absent from so much of life. It seems that we should try to humbly embrace him where he promies to meet us.
 
So it’s important that this is not just a story, not just a memory of a past event, not just an image of an absent Savior. It’s a real thing we do together. We really do bring our gifts to the altar and kneel together and eat the bread that is Christ’s body and share the cup that is his blood, under these simple and human forms. We step into the moment of Christ’s sacrifice and we unite our lives to his sacrifice.
 
Luther said that the benefits of this sacrament are forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. It shows us how our flesh and our spirit are deeply united. And it shows, as we do this thing together, how enmeshed we are with each other.
 
The Sacrament gives us the body of Christ and then makes us into the Body of Christ, together. The body is there on the altar, then it disappears as we eat it, and then when we turn around, here it is again in all of us, sent forth into the world.
 
We do this together. We bless and uphold each other by our presence. We help each other up. We serve each other. We weep together.
 
We can get each other sick.
 
This has always been part of the Sacrament. One of the reasons early Christian worship was so powerful was because it broke down barriers between people who would not normally have eaten together. We have always lived with the fear that eating with the wrong person would subject us to the risk of “catching” whatever social or religious or physical ailment they bring to the table with them. Long before we knew anything about germs, we knew that we could “catch” ritual impurity or social stigma from the people we eat with.
 
And now, because we know about germs, we have a new way to express that old fear. And that’s the problem: fear of a virus can become fear of each other. We can’t live without each other, we can’t even be Christians without each other. But being together, eating together, sometimes even breathing together involves risk. It involves leaving the imaginary shell of our individuality and encountering each other and everything we bring, good and bad.
 
It is difficult to withdraw from each other. It is hard to stop shaking hands. It is hard to refrain from the Sacrament. We crave it, body and soul, just like we crave each other. I feel so sad and ripped off when I sit through a whole church service and there’s no Sacrament.  
 
But that’s what bearing each other’s burdens means: both accepting our own risks and making sacrifices to reduce the risks of others. Today we’re asking people to refrain if they live with a heightened risk or if they may pose a risk. As the current outbreak progresses, as now seems inevitable, we may have to take more drastic steps. I take the obligation to protect this community very seriously, and I would have no one suffer for being part of the worship of God.
 
But if the risk we share as human beings, as fleshy souls bumping into each other sharing space and microbes, requires that we refrain, I hope we will all refrain together. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that those who believe might be saved. God did not give us this most precious and powerful and holy Sacrament so that we might harm ourselves and each other, but so that our bodies may be fed and we may be lifted up, in flesh and spirit, to God. Amen.

Someone wrote to me last week asking about Ash Wednesday and our observance of it, despite no Scriptural reference to this particular day and the rite of imposing ashes. Here's my answer:

Regarding Ash Wednesday, almost nothing in the order and structure of Christian worship is explicitly specified in Scripture. Christians did seem to worship on the "Lord's day," i.e. Sunday, but there was certainly no provision for festivals like Easter, Christmas, or anything else. All of these things were developed as ways for the churches to order their practices of worship. The liturgical season of Lent is very old, going back at least to the 3rd century, and the use of ashes in connection with mourning and penitence goes back well before the time of Christ. Ash Wednesday emerged late in the first millennium in the Latin churches as a way to mark the beginning of Lent, which had been a season of fasting and penitence for several centuries by then (Ash Wednesday is not practiced in the Eastern churches, as far as I know). The Lutheran churches retained the seasons of the church year, including Lent, and continued to celebrate Ash Wednesday, though in many places the imposition of ashes itself was suppressed (along with the palm procession on Palm Sunday!). In recent decades, Lutherans have recovered some of these practices which are neither commanded nor forbidden by Scripture but which enrich and deepen the experience of worship.

Luther wanted to simplify church calendars but he did not attack the seasons or their major observances. The critical distinction for Lutheranism wasn't between "Scriptural" and "man-made" rules necessarily, but between what is specifically commanded or forbidden and what is optional. Ash Wednesday falls into the "optional" bucket--the Eastern churches never practiced it--so it could be dispensed with for some good reason, but it does not in any way contradict the precepts laid out for worship in the Scriptures.

Some of our Reformed and Baptist brethren go farther than Luther, insisting that only Scripture be used as a source for rules and orders of worship. The problem with that view is that no such rule or order exists in Scripture, and the church did worship just fine for a long time without needing to refer to Scripture for every single practice and custom. Much of what happens in worship is in fact older than the written New Testament, and it's probable that some New Testament passages originated as worship texts or songs.

If you're interested in a very early, fairly extensive picture of early Christian church life, check out the Didache. It's roughly contemporary with the New Testament and has a lot of information about how some churches may have been worshiping and organizing themselves before there was any agreed-upon list of books called "Scripture."

This week in "What Are We Doing Here?", a Christian practice that goes by many names: the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Altar, or Holy Communion. On the night of his arrest, Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples and left them a new act to observe until his return:

Versions of this event circulated, with variations, before the Gospel was written down (Luke's version is probably not the oldest or most "accurate," it's just the one I chose to quote). Paul heard a slightly different version:

A very early Christian text called the Didache ("Teaching" or "Instruction"), from roughly the same period as the New Testament texts, includes version still more different:

So looking at the different texts it's hard to know what the "original" version of the Eucharist was.  What we know from this diversity, however, is that a meal of thanksgiving and remembrance was part of Christian worship from the very beginning. And this makes sense because meals were an important part of Jesus' ministry. Jesus feeds multitudes and sits with friends; around the table he may be the guest of honor or he may be engaged in theological disputation. Meals were at the heart of the life of the church even before Christ's death and resurrection gave those gatherings a new meaning: a Messianic feast anticipating his return and in which his body and blood would be present to us by his promise under the bread and wine.

This is such an intimate and flexible ritual action that it can sustain, and has sustained, all kinds of practices and interpretations. Christians argue over it relentlessly. In the 16th century, some theological writers started having a problem: if, as John's Gospel suggests, "God is Spirit" and "the flesh accomplishes nothing," how can Christ be really present in the Eucharist? This is a question raised by our Gospel passage for Sunday:

To understand this passage, it's important to know that the same Greek word is translated here as both "wind" and "Spirit" (it also means "breath"). This seems to suggest that Spirit/wind/breath is a force that is totally separate from "flesh/body."  It is tempting to create a strictly "spiritual" interpretation of Christianity that makes the physical body somehow irrelevant or disposable.

But then what do we do about all those meals in the Gospels? Why is a meal the central act of the early Church? Is the Sacrament we share today just an empty remembrance of an absent Christ? And if that's so, why would Jesus command us to keep this ritual until his return?

Something else is going on when we gather around the altar--something big and mysterious and sacred that transforms our relationship not just with God but with each other, and not just "spiritually" or in our minds but in our bodies too. Hear more on Sunday!