lutherans... wtf?

[Sava]

so I guess today is that day where catholics spread the ashes of jews or witches on their face or something?

anyways

my dad's side of the family is lutheran

but my dad is not religious at all

so my dad was in the hospital the past few days (not really important to the story, but he came home today ), today, my aunt (his sister) came to see him. She had ash on her face. My dad says, "So what are you Catholic now?"

She goes, "No, but Lutherans are doing this now."



uhhhmmm

okay... all of a sudden, after nearly 500 years, they decide they want to be like Catholics again? HUH?

and figuring that my dad's health is not so good and that he may be ripe for "conversion", my aunt says to him, "So, are you gonna start coming to church?"

My dad quickly responded firmly, "NO!"

But wtf is this crap? "Lutherans are doing this now"?

Lutherans are trying to be more like Catholics now?

Doesn't that kind of go against everything that Lutherans supposedly believe in? Would Martin Luther be rolling in his grave? Is baby jesus crying?

My aunt kind of scares me. I love her, but that whole side of the family is kind of... off...

creepy Lutherans (not a troll on Lutherans, just the creepy ones )

Is this something that is going on throughout the Lutheran church, or is it just a local phenomenon? maybe my aunt just has a nutty pastor or something.



I NEED ANSWERS!!!

[Pekka]

I'm lutheran as is this whole country of ours and no, we don't put ashes to our faces and no, we don't even go to church normally. Weddings, funerals, confirmation and that's it. Also Christmas is OK.

If you go other than that, then you are old and prolly playing just to be sure and safe, other than that, do we put ashes on our faces? No.

And I should know because my mom is a pastor.

So yeah, your aunt is just.. losing the driver in the race of life

[Q Classic]

They're actually the ashes of the palms from the previous year's Palm Sunday.

But yeah, after five centuries of trying to back away from Catholic symbolism and practices, I find it quite amusing that modern Protestant churches are headed back to the robes and the pomp and circumstance that the Mass had.

That said, I suppose I should go get the ashes too. I've yet to figure out what to give up for Lent--maybe Catholicism.

[Imran Siddiqui]

That'd be a hilarious answer to "What are you giving up for Lent"!

[Sava]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
I've yet to figure out what to give up for Lent--maybe Catholicism.

[Pekka]

Lutherans will take over the world. Because we are right and you are wrong!

WOAAOAA I LEAD THE TROOPS OF GOD WARRIORS!!!

[Sava]

[Pyrodrew]

Not just lutherans...ON ASH WEDNESDAY, A WIDER OBSERVANCE

For centuries, the one sure way to tell a Catholic from a Protestant was to look for the dark smudge on the forehead on Ash Wednesday.
No more.

Reflecting an increasing demand for ritual and decreasing hostility toward Catholicism among Protestants, a growing number of Protestant churches today will be offering worshipers the traditional sign of penitence and mourning.

"Five-hundred years ago we gave up these rituals because we didn't want to be Catholic, and now we're saying there was a loss for us spiritually," said Susan P. Dickerman of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ. "There's a tremendous yearning for developing spirituality."

Christian worshipers have applied ashes on their foreheads to mark the start of Lent for about 900 years, harking back to an ancient Jewish tradition of using sackcloth and ashes to signify mourning.

But, beginning with the Reformation of the 16th century, many Protestants abandoned the practice of using ashes on Ash Wednesday, as well as many other rituals, in a rejection of what Protestant thinkers saw as the theological and liturgical excesses of Catholicism.

In recent decades, the imposition of ashes has returned to many churches in the Episcopal and Lutheran denominations, which are liturgically similar to Catholicism.

But a variety of other Protestant denominations, particularly those influenced by theologian John Calvin, resisted the practice until more recently.

"There was a time not so long ago when ashes were associated with the Catholic Church, and there was a lot more hostility between Catholics and Protestants," said the Rev. Larry L. Wimmer, pastor of Belmont United Methodist Church, who will be holding an Ash Wednesday service today. "Now I see us all as being part of one church."

Scholars trace the change to Vatican II, a watershed gathering of Catholic bishops in the mid-1960s that reformed Catholic liturgy and influenced many Protestant churches to rethink their own liturgies. Protestant denominations gradually introduced the possibility of Ash Wednesday rituals in their prayer books, and slowly the practice is catching on in churches.

"There is a growing trend among mainline Protestant congregations to do the imposition of ashes," said Benjamin Griffin, president of Andover Newton Theological School. "You see it in increasing numbers of Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, United Methodist, and even some American Baptist churches."

Scholars say a variety of changes in American religion have made possible the return to ashes by Protestant churches.

The hostility of Protestants toward Catholics, which was at times both theological and personal, has significantly decreased, making it possible for denominations to borrow from one another.

For many Protestant theologians and clergy, Ash Wednesday serves a useful symbolic purpose, helping worshipers understand the liturgical calendar by setting off the 40-day penitential period of Lent that runs from Ash Wednesday to the celebration of Jesus's resurrection on Easter.

For some Protestant worshipers, the return to Ash Wednesday allows them to participate in a ritual they treasured from their Catholic past. The United Church of Christ, for example, reports that 70 percent of its new Massachusetts members over the last five years were raised in the Catholic Church.

Other Protestant worshipers, like many spiritual seekers, are simply demanding more ritual, unsatisfied by the intellectualism of many American churches. Even some Unitarian Christian churches, most notably King's Chapel in Boston, offer the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday.

"One of Protestantism's great problems has been its wordiness, and the return of certain ritual activities seems to be expressive of something," said the Rev. Horace T. Allen, a Presbyterian minister and professor of preaching and worship at Boston University. "It's a clear, visible, tactile sign, and people need that."

Ash Wednesday remains one of the most frequently observed practices for Catholics, who will jam into churches today to receive the public sign of penance.

Although an increasing number of Protestant churches are introducing Ash Wednesday rituals, the crowds there will be much smaller.

"It's not a custom I follow because it's not a tradition I'm used to," said Harold F. Worthley, the historian at Congregational Library on Beacon Hill.

The Rev. Patricia L. Daley, pastor of Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, said Worthley's sense that ashes are a feature of another faith is a common sentiment among those who decline to participate.

"For some people, it seems a foreign experience that they associate with a tradition other than their own," said Daley, who today will host a joint Ash Wednesday service for four Hyde Park churches. "We've been doing the ashes for five or six years, and when we introduced it, I did a lot of preparation in my congregation. I said that I felt our Catholic brothers and sisters were experiencing something very powerful, and it was something we should recover in our tradition as well."

Many Protestant clergy say that, like their Catholic counterparts, they generate ashes for Ash Wednesday by burning the palm fronds from the previous year's Palm Sunday. But some have experimented with new rituals - at First Baptist Church of Wollaston, for example, the Rev. Carol L. Snow-Asher also asks worshipers to write their fears and doubts on paper, and burns those papers with the palm fronds.

Some mainline Protestant churches are reclaiming other rituals, introducing footwashing ceremonies on Maundy Thursday, a ritual closely associated with Catholicism. But that will take more time.

"I haven't quite worked out my courage for that - I just feel awkward," said the Rev. Craig Bailey Adams, pastor of Wellesley Hills Congregational Church, who introduced ashes on Ash Wednesday several years ago. "I'm an old Yankee, and we don't take our shoes off in church."

[Rufus T. Firefly]

And from Tuesday's Slate:

Get Lent
Protestants do the sober season.
By Andrew Santella
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006, at 12:22 PM ET

If you grew up, as I did, thinking of Lent as the Time of the Frozen Fish Sticks, you can't help but be surprised by the expanding enthusiasm for the pre-Easter season of penitence and fasting. Lent, it seems, isn't just for Catholics anymore. Over the last few years, more Protestant churches have begun daubing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in Western Christianity (March 1 this year). Fasting, long familiar to Catholics as a Lenten fact of life, is increasingly popular with evangelical Christians striving for spiritual awakening. A few mainline Protestant churches even conduct foot-washing services on Maundy Thursday—the traditional commemoration of Jesus' washing the feet of his disciples—that takes place on the Thursday before Easter. Which seems like a sign that Protestants may be starting to beat Catholics at their own game.

The showy practices typical of Lent—fasting and vigils, ashes and incense—once helped define the split of the Reformation. When they broke away in the 16th and 17th centuries, most Protestant churches left behind anything that smacked of Catholic practice. (Though a few "high-church" denominations—Episcopalians, for example—remained partial to ashes and other staples of Catholic ritual.) So, what's at work when Protestants and Catholics find common cause in fasting and foot-washing? While no one's ready to declare an end to 500 years of ecumenical disagreement, the widening appeal of Lent reflects the interest among believers of all kinds in traditional ways of worship.

The fast and the ritual wearing of ashes predate Christianity—Job repents "in dust and ashes" in the Hebrew Bible. In the early church, it was a common to prepare for the celebration of Easter with a two- or three-day period of penitence and fasting. Originally, the fast was for new Christians preparing for baptism. But it became a way for all church faithful to commemorate Jesus' suffering and by the fourth century had expanded to 40 days. In the Middle Ages, believers limited themselves during Lent to no meat and just one meal a day. Some fasts were more extreme. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, some church members abstained not just from meat, but from eggs, milk, cheese, and any "fruit covered by a hard shell." The ritual of putting ashes on the forehead grew out of a public confession ceremony for Christian sinners that preceded Easter. It became a prescribed practice throughout the church by the 11th century.

Though the rules for fasting and abstinence have relaxed over the centuries, Catholics still see Lent as a sacred time of self-denial, prayerful contemplation, and, yes, breaded cod. Adult Catholics are expected to fast (usually defined as eating one meal a day) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday* and to abstain from eating meat on each Friday in Lent and on Ash Wednesday. Catholic-school kids see their lunchroom hot dogs replaced with meat-free fare. Many Catholics still "give up something for Lent"—chocolate or alcohol, for example. But the emphasis is as likely to be on almsgiving or acts of charity, in hopes of making the world or one's self better rather than simply abstaining from pleasure.

The Swiss Protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli mounted one of the first protests against Lenten traditions in 1522. Zwingli defended Zurich printers who insisted they needed their daily meat to have the strength to do their work properly. He complained that the rules of Lent had more to do with obeying Rome than with obeying the Gospel, which, after all, said nothing about whether or not to eat sausages in the weeks preceding Easter. Martin Luther cautioned against fasting "with a view to meriting something by it as by a good work," arguing that Catholic teachings gave believers the false idea that fasting could cancel out sin and win points toward salvation. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin criticized Lent as a "superstitious observance."

Protestants remained conflicted about Lent into the 20th century. Ashes and fish sticks were the stuff of Catholic life, and Catholics were very much the other team. Evangelical Christians in particular skirted Lent because it smacked of high-church liturgical rule-making. In 1960, Christianity Today ran an editorial describing Protestant believers torn between the obligation to " 'do something' about observing the most sacred season in the Christian calendar" and the "sense of indignation that stirs within the Protestant breast, even to the pitch of revolt, at what the Church has done with Lent in the past." These Protestants could not separate Lenten traditions from their disdain for Rome and its elevation of "manifold regulations" over scripture.

So, how did Catholic Lenten traditions spread across the border? For one thing, the boundaries between traditions are not what they used to be. Crossing them is a steady traffic of believers and seekers. Want to meet someone who was raised Catholic? Try an evangelical megachurch, or the local United Church of Christ. About one-third of believers change churches at least once, according to commonly cited studies. Inevitably, all this changing of churches ends up changing the churches, as people bring bits of their worship traditions with them. Catholic liturgy has appropriated pop music and hand-holding in evangelical style. So, maybe it's not that surprising that more Protestants are now dipping into the well of Catholic ritual and devotions. In that sense, Lent may be part of a trend: Check out the Ecumenical Miracle Rosary, which recasts Catholic devotional beads for Protestant use by eliminating those troublesome Hail Marys.

Observing Lent is also part of a Protestant move in the last generation toward more classical forms of spiritual discipline. The hugely influential 1978 book Celebration of Discipline, by Quaker theologian Richard J. Foster, encouraged churchgoers to rediscover fasting and meditation in "answer to a hollow world" and as a way to turn toward God. Some questing Protestants started making like monks, practicing silence and solitude. All this was made more palatable by the improved relations between Catholics and Protestants that followed the Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s.

Perhaps it's the things that made Lent hard to take as a Catholic kid—the solemnity, the self-denial, the disappearance of hot dogs from the lunchroom—that account most for the season's broadening appeal. I was schooled to see Lent as a time apart, a respite from the daily pursuit of self-gratification. That apartness seems not unlike the "inward and spiritual reality" that Foster suggested could be found in the ancient disciplines. Catholics have for so long thought of themselves as the defenders of ritual—the masters of incense, genuflection, and splendor—that it still seems strange to be sharing ash-wearing with Presbyterians and Methodists. But our shared affection of late for some of the old ways of worship represents a small victory for mystery, ritual, and awe. Now if we could just come to ecumenical agreement about the evils of frozen fish sticks.

http://www.slate.com/id/2137092/

[Flip McWho]

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Christianity heads back into one large revised church again.

[Sava]

wow


scary

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


That'd be a hilarious answer to "What are you giving up for Lent"!

[DanS]

As a catholic who grew up in a 95%+ prot area, this amazes me.

Standing room only this evening at the cathedral for ashes.

[Flip McWho]

wow


scary

Let me expand. One large (only because of whats left of all the churchs when it combines will be relatively large compared to all other churchs) amalgamation of Christian values (thus probably more generalised/mainstream) into a Church which is slowly but steadily getting irrelevant.

[Sava]

I should say that my aunt, and that side of the family for that matter, despite being "creepy Lutheran", is quite liberal when it comes to politics.

pro-choice, anti-Bush, anti-war in Iraq, has always voted Democrat

and growing up, they were never really like into God and stuff... this seems like a recent thing with them...

even my cousin (daughter of my aunt), who recently had her first child, is starting to get into this whole "creepy Lutheran" thing... it's really freaking me out because she was sort of the rebel of that side of the family. And now it's like, she's conforming to everything and it's weird. Just... weird. She's always been sort of a partier... mostly drinking, some ... but basically, always very cool

and now she's creepin' me out too