“Today’s Focus Give Thanks to the Lord” was the printed theme for this Thanksgiving service. The subtitle could’ve been “and you can do it if you try really hard”. This is my fourth visit to a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod church and my second to Holy Word, Austin. I’ve tried hard to like them, to accept them as Confessional Lutherans attempting to cross the barrier between churched and unchurched.
I’ll state my case right off the bat. It was my first good look at the WELS new hymnal ©2021. I thrilled to the fact that they had the calendar dates for the Church Year out to 2052 till I got home and saw that the last “new” hymnal had them out to 2040 and that one was copyrighted 1993. So what they are really being is realistic. The life of a ‘new’ hymnal among WELS is about 30 years. This is much better than the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. When I went to an orientation for Lutheran Service Book in 2006, the presenter, Rev. Bart Day, said that the LCMS believed a hymnal should be replaced every 10 years. That’s still better than Contemporary Worship which replaces their hymnal virtually (double entendre intended) every week.
Sorry, that’s a digression. I picked up the 2021 hymnal and noticed that it removed ‘ordained’ from the absolution in all three of their Divine Services. The pastor, or will it be laity also my wife wondered, now he, or will it be she too I wondered, now says, “as a called servant of Christ”. I was shocked till I noticed that WELS already did this with their 1993 hymnal. But this hymnal jettisoned the ancient Nicene Creed’s confession that Christ “became man” replacing it with “became fully human”. Didn’t want to offend the feminists I suppose. So, we ought not offend the laity either. Afterall who do you think pays the bills around here?
Where did ordination go? I suspect it was discarded because of Treatise 70 “And this also a most common custom of the Church testifies. For formerly the people elected pastors and bishops. Then came a bishop, either of that church or a neighboring one, who confirmed the one elected by the laying on of hands; and ordination was nothing else than such a ratification.” This is the Triglotta. Tappert is no better: “nor was ordination anything more than”. The Reader’s Edition is the same as Triglotta. This is the “nothing buttery” clause of the Confessions. You can say, “Ordination is nothing but the ratification of the prior election of a pastor. So, you can forget it.” Norman Nagel, I think, has an essay, a sermon, an article against this.
Nagel says that the statement is not a minimizing statement but a grouping one. It groups election, call, and ordination, so that they can’t be separated, or even thought of individually. That means the requirement of Augsburg XIV, “Of Ecclesiastical Order they teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called” includes ordination, and so can’t be viewed as an add-on, a dressing, a condiment, to be used or not.
This would also be far afield from what AP, XIII, The Sacraments which says, “But if ordination be understood as applying to the ministry of the Word, we are not unwilling to call ordination a sacrament. For the ministry of the Word has God’s command and glorious promises, Rom. 1:16: The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. Likewise, Is. 55:11: So shall My Word be that goeth forth out of My mouth; it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.” The Confessions don’t view ordination as a condiment but a sacrament – if rightly understood.
Even if it can be shown that Reformation era absolutions didn’t include ordination and only referred to being called, which could be, because the 1927 Evangelical Hymn-Book and forerunner of The Lutheran Hyman of 1941 from which both WELS and LCMS hymnals descend, or perhaps devolve from, doesn’t have an indicative absolution at all. Just the announcement from the page 5 TLH service. Even if all this is true, the decision to leave it off from 1993 matters.
The message of the Thanksgiving service was that you are not thankful enough. The young pastor’s[1] good news is that you can be if you work on it. Oh there was Gospel there, but it was mingled with the Law to such an extent it was corrupted. Then came the pièce de résistance. The real way to get to the over-the-top, 1990’s booyah, thanks is to sit in a small group for 3-5 minutes with each member required to contribute one thing for which they were thankful.
That ended the service for us. After a minute of my trying to write “Genuine Confessional Lutheran Churches” and my wife trying to grab the pen out of my hand, we left.
[1] My wife said, “He obviously knows the Gospel. He just mixes it up so much!” I don’t know that it was deliberate mixing as sloppiness. Here’s an example of what I consider his untidiness. He held a cornucopia in his hand and told the gathered children it was originally a basket for gathering the harvest, and you poured it out when you got home so the fruit spills out like the one on the altar. That didn’t sound quite right. This is what https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cornucopia says: “ Cornucopia Has Latin Origins and Greek History. Cornucopia comes from the Late Latin cornu copiae, which translates literally as “horn of plenty.” A traditional staple of feasts, the cornucopia is believed to represent the horn of a goat from Greek mythology. According to legend, it was from this horn, which could be filled with whatever the owner wished, that the god Zeus was fed as an infant by his nurse, the nymph Amalthea. Later, the horn was filled with flowers and fruits, and given as a present to Zeus. The filled horn (or a receptacle resembling it) has long served as a traditional symbol in art and decoration to suggest a store of abundance. The word first appeared in English in the early 16th century; a century later, it developed the figurative sense of ‘an overflowing supply.’”
