Transcript: Episode 0056

“Liturgical Life”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:27 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Moeller.

00:00:41 – 00:00:47:	And I'm still woe. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to

00:00:47 – 00:00:52:	separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days

00:00:52 – 00:00:57:	and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

00:00:57 – 00:01:02:	And it was so. And when God smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will

00:01:02 – 00:01:06:	never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil

00:01:06 – 00:01:11:	from his youth. Neither will I again strike down every living creature as I have done,

00:01:11 – 00:01:16:	while the earth remains seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and

00:01:16 – 00:01:22:	night shall not cease. These two readings from Genesis 1 and Genesis

00:01:22 – 00:01:29:	from the creation and after the flood are a reminder to us that seasonality is a part of

00:01:29 – 00:01:36:	creation. The way that God created everything involves seasons and patterns and repetition

00:01:37 – 00:01:44:	and resonances among those various patterns as they harmonize. And so today, as we wrap up the

00:01:44 – 00:01:51:	calendar year, as the church has just begun the church year in the West, I thought that we thought

00:01:51 – 00:01:56:	this would be a good opportunity to talk about the liturgical calendar, about our liturgical life

00:01:57 – 00:02:03:	in the church as we are observing all the things that are revealed in Scripture that are not revealed

00:02:03 – 00:02:10:	in creation. Because on one hand, you have God's seasons that are shown in the stars and in the

00:02:10 – 00:02:16:	weather that we have on the earth, and on the other hand, you have seasons that are only present if

00:02:16 – 00:02:22:	you are aware of the Word of God. And these have been historically observed before Christianity,

00:02:22 – 00:02:28:	before Christ, and then after Christ, and in different forms because prior to Christ's birth,

00:02:29 – 00:02:36:	the pattern of life in believers pointed towards his birth and all the prophecies that he would

00:02:36 – 00:02:43:	fulfill. When he was born, when he fulfilled them, when he died and was resurrected from the dead,

00:02:43 – 00:02:49:	he completed the patterns that had been established prior to his birth.

00:02:50 – 00:02:55:	But the church didn't abandon the idea of the repeating patterns that are observed

00:02:55 – 00:03:00:	in the yearly life of believers. And from the earliest days in the church, we have examples of

00:03:00 – 00:03:07:	holidays or holy days being observed for the same reason. It wasn't necessarily any longer the case

00:03:07 – 00:03:13:	that God was specifically commanding a particular day to be observed in a particular way,

00:03:13 – 00:03:19:	but as a means of remembrance, all believers clung to the fulfillment of those promises that

00:03:19 – 00:03:26:	Christ had fulfilled when he came. And so what perhaps in some cases was once a law,

00:03:26 – 00:03:32:	all those we'll get into in a bit, was also a teaching tool, remains to this day, a teaching

00:03:32 – 00:03:37:	tool of the church, to do the things that have been done in the past in a manner that's consistent

00:03:37 – 00:03:43:	with Scripture in terms of observing what God has revealed to us is a great way of teaching

00:03:43 – 00:03:49:	everyone the faith and to be reminded of it. Because one thing that I think Christians don't

00:03:49 – 00:03:55:	necessarily take seriously is you can't hold all this in your head at once. You cannot possibly

00:03:55 – 00:04:00:	have all of God's things in mind all the time. You would be God if you could do that. Only God

00:04:00 – 00:04:06:	does that. The rest of us can only do one thing at a time. And so it's valuable to have seasons

00:04:06 – 00:04:12:	to remind us. You know, Lent is a season of penitence. Advent is a season of anticipation.

00:04:12 – 00:04:17:	Christmas is a season of thanksgiving. And then Easter as well, the greater thanksgiving,

00:04:17 – 00:04:22:	that the fulfillment of the birth was even more greatly fulfilled in his death and then resurrection.

00:04:25 – 00:04:28:	So as we talk about the calendar today, it's in view of,

00:04:29 – 00:04:33:	you know, again, the church calendar has just begun as we're recording this, we're just in

00:04:33 – 00:04:38:	the middle of Advent. It's also right at the end of the calendar year. And just as a very brief

00:04:38 – 00:04:42:	housekeeping measure, as I mentioned last week, we're going to be taking a couple of weeks off.

00:04:42 – 00:04:48:	The next episode back will be January 10th. That should be the first week that we're back.

00:04:49 – 00:04:55:	This week is also, as we drop this on Friday, will be the winter solstice,

00:04:55 – 00:04:59:	which is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, because the earth is a globe

00:05:00 – 00:05:05:	spoiler. The earth is a globe. It's tilting on an axis. It's going around the sun.

00:05:05 – 00:05:10:	The incidence of the light varies. So it's attenuated at different angles as it passes

00:05:10 – 00:05:16:	through the atmosphere. It has longer and shorter amounts of light being delivered

00:05:16 – 00:05:21:	through the atmosphere, just based on that angle. It gets cold. That's what happens.

00:05:22 – 00:05:26:	We have winter in the northern hemisphere, because the earth is a globe, it's tilted,

00:05:26 – 00:05:30:	and it's how God arranged things. In the northern hemisphere, it gets cold in the winter,

00:05:30 – 00:05:34:	and hot in the summer. And then the seasons are reversed in Australia.

00:05:35 – 00:05:42:	They call it summer and winter for the weather, but not for the time of year. And so today,

00:05:42 – 00:05:45:	as we're talking about calendars, that's going to be part of it. It's what is a calendar to us

00:05:45 – 00:05:52:	historically, and when does it make sense for us to be on the same page? There are two things I

00:05:52 – 00:05:58:	hope that folks will take away from this episode. One, these calendars are for the harmonization

00:05:58 – 00:06:03:	of the Christian life, and they're for the teaching of Christians. Two, they're not a law,

00:06:03 – 00:06:08:	and we'll make that case especially towards the end. Nothing that we're saying here is a condemnation

00:06:08 – 00:06:15:	of people who use a different calendar, who don't observe a calendar at all, who have wildly

00:06:15 – 00:06:20:	different calendars, slightly different calendars. We're not picking a winner. What we're saying is

00:06:21 – 00:06:27:	the use of these things as they've always been done among believers is salutary. And therefore,

00:06:27 – 00:06:31:	when someone wants to abandon a salutary practice, the owner is on them to say,

00:06:31 – 00:06:36:	here's why we're not allowed to do this anymore. So as we'll make the case towards the end,

00:06:36 – 00:06:41:	we're not the ones making a law of these things by saying, hey, this is a good idea. People have

00:06:41 – 00:06:46:	always done it. It's salutary. Others are in fact making a law saying, you can't do that. Why are

00:06:46 – 00:06:50:	you doing that? That's wrong. That's not in the Bible. We're going to make the case today in part

00:06:50 – 00:06:56:	that that's nonsense. And when we picked the subject, we didn't intend for it to be polemical.

00:06:56 – 00:07:01:	We just wanted a nice, easy end of the year subject. But as we started looking at it,

00:07:01 – 00:07:05:	it was clear that some of this is going to have to be polemical because of some of the things that

00:07:05 – 00:07:09:	happened during and after the Reformation. They just weren't good. Sorry, at the end of the year,

00:07:09 – 00:07:15:	that we're going to maybe be ruffling a few feathers. We didn't intend to, but this is just

00:07:15 – 00:07:24:	part of the Christian life. And when people get mad at that, that's not good. So I think one of

00:07:24 – 00:07:31:	the first examples I want to just give of the teaching value of the liturgical calendar goes

00:07:31 – 00:07:36:	all the way back to Leviticus. And this is a case where this was God's law for the Hebrews.

00:07:38 – 00:07:42:	Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them,

00:07:42 – 00:07:47:	these are the appointed feasts of the Lord that you shall proclaim as holy convocations.

00:07:47 – 00:07:53:	They are my appointed feasts. Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh is a Sabbath of

00:07:53 – 00:07:58:	solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the Lord in all your

00:07:58 – 00:08:03:	dwelling places. These are the appointed feasts of the Lord, the holy convocations which you shall

00:08:03 – 00:08:08:	proclaim at the time appointed for them. In the first month, on the 14th day of the month at

00:08:08 – 00:08:14:	twilight is the Lord's Passover. And on the 15th day, the same month is the feast of unleavened

00:08:14 – 00:08:19:	bread to the Lord. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have

00:08:19 – 00:08:24:	a holy convocation. You shall not do any ordinary work, but you shall present a food offering to

00:08:24 – 00:08:29:	the Lord for seven days. On the seventh day is a holy convocation. You shall not do any ordinary

00:08:29 – 00:08:37:	work. Obviously, this is a law being given to the Israelites in part to cause them to be focused

00:08:37 – 00:08:42:	on God's things and in part to separate them from their neighbors. These were holy days set apart

00:08:42 – 00:08:47:	for the Lord. And these are things that we are released from. Christians should not be

00:08:47 – 00:08:53:	celebrating Passover because we have the Paschal Lamb on the cross. It is finished. There's no

00:08:53 – 00:08:58:	more Passover for any Christian. It's all this stuff with sater meals and crap. That is Judaism.

00:08:58 – 00:09:05:	Stay away from that stuff. We are not trying to suggest that anyone should return to observing

00:09:05 – 00:09:12:	the old forms because God made clear that they were finished. On the other hand, keep in mind

00:09:13 – 00:09:19:	what was going on with the Passover. This was a Lamb that was sacrificed in remembrance of God's

00:09:20 – 00:09:27:	salvation of the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt. What was this? This was typological of

00:09:27 – 00:09:32:	Christ. This was pointing forward to the perfect Lamb sacrificed on the cross.

00:09:33 – 00:09:39:	So when Isaiah prophesied in chapter 53, he was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet he opened

00:09:39 – 00:09:44:	not his mouth like a lamb that has led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before it shears

00:09:44 – 00:09:52:	is silent. So he opened not his mouth. The Passover Lamb and the prophecy of Isaiah involving a Lamb

00:09:52 – 00:09:58:	being sacrificed pointed forward to the perfect sacrifice of the Messiah who was to come. And

00:09:58 – 00:10:04:	what happened? When John saw Jesus coming, he said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the

00:10:04 – 00:10:08:	sin of the world. And everyone who was around him knew what he was talking about. This wasn't on

00:10:08 – 00:10:14:	the left field. They understood that what they had been taught in their Passover celebrations

00:10:14 – 00:10:21:	was fundamentally pointing towards the Messiah. And so when John and Claire's Behold the Lamb of

00:10:21 – 00:10:25:	God who takes away the sin of the world, they understood that that was typological. They

00:10:25 – 00:10:31:	understood that the small form that they had observed was being fulfilled completely by the

00:10:31 – 00:10:40:	birth of the Messiah. And this is one of the key elements of a liturgical life of observing

00:10:41 – 00:10:48:	whatever holy day is appropriate. It's a teaching tool. So you reinforce over time,

00:10:48 – 00:10:54:	this is a thing from God. This is important. When it is fulfilled, you receive it with Thanksgiving.

00:10:55 – 00:10:58:	Now in the case of the Passover, it was prophetic and it was pointing forward in time.

00:10:58 – 00:11:02:	It is no less important for us today where these things have been fulfilled

00:11:02 – 00:11:07:	to remember them. Because Jesus said, Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

00:11:07 – 00:11:14:	There's to be a cyclical nature to the way we interact with God's things. And when we look at

00:11:15 – 00:11:21:	the calendar, what do we have? We have a day and a night cycle. We have months that are based on a

00:11:21 – 00:11:28:	lunar cycle. The months are subdivided by four evenly divisible into weeks. Each week is functionally

00:11:28 – 00:11:37:	a season of a month. And then you have a year that is subdivided into months and also seasons.

00:11:37 – 00:11:43:	This is how God arranged things. God did that. This was not man-made. This is not something that

00:11:43 – 00:11:49:	guys discovered and did some math on. God handed this stuff to us on a silver platter and says,

00:11:49 – 00:11:56:	Here's how it works. Live within these constraints. Again, for the Hebrews, in this particular case,

00:11:56 – 00:12:02:	it was a law to observe a certain thing at a certain time. But for all of us, we're creatures.

00:12:02 – 00:12:06:	We live in a world that has seasons, that has days and nights, that has years. We are all

00:12:06 – 00:12:14:	subject to these natural forces for our good. And so it's only natural that also within the church,

00:12:14 – 00:12:20:	the same sort of cyclical nature would be observed as we live out the Christian life

00:12:20 – 00:12:26:	in parallel to the normal everyday life that we have in the world. So whether the calendar is

00:12:26 – 00:12:31:	the same or different, we should have observances that repeat year after year, because that's the

00:12:31 – 00:12:37:	sort of order that God has given to us. When we look at the Old Testament, it's very easy to recognize

00:12:38 – 00:12:44:	that there are certain feasts, certain organizations of the church year. The church year is,

00:12:44 – 00:12:50:	and I do mean to use church, because this is for believers in the Old Testament for the true Israel.

00:12:50 – 00:12:55:	The church year of the Old Testament is broken up into these seasons, these observances.

00:12:56 – 00:13:03:	But we need to focus on why are they commanded to observe these things. And it's not just in

00:13:03 – 00:13:06:	Exodus or Leviticus or these various other places in Scripture where

00:13:07 – 00:13:12:	specifics are given, where they are specifically commanded to observe the Feast of Booths or

00:13:12 – 00:13:18:	Unleavened Bread, whatever it happens to be. All of the places where God commands them to

00:13:18 – 00:13:26:	remember something that God has done for them are commandments from God to observe a form of liturgy.

00:13:27 – 00:13:31:	And that's what all of these major feasts are, of course, because when you remember,

00:13:32 – 00:13:39:	say, the Passover, you're remembering the deliverance from death in Egypt, and you're looking forward,

00:13:39 – 00:13:44:	of course, to the deliverance from the second death that is Christ's death and resurrection.

00:13:47 – 00:13:53:	But God, throughout the pages of Scripture, commands the Israelites, and by virtue of that,

00:13:53 – 00:14:00:	He is commanding His Church, His true Israel, to observe the remembrance of certain things that

00:14:00 – 00:14:09:	God has done for us. And ultimately, in addition to teaching and unity and good order, the purpose

00:14:09 – 00:14:14:	of the church year, the purpose of the Feasts and the Festivals and the commemorations,

00:14:16 – 00:14:22:	is to remember all of these things that God has done for us. And if you look at the

00:14:22 – 00:14:27:	observances in the modern church calendar, in the modern church year,

00:14:28 – 00:14:33:	you can look at those and compare them to what was observed in the Old Testament,

00:14:34 – 00:14:40:	because they are the fulfillment of those observances. We won't go through those in detail,

00:14:40 – 00:14:43:	because it's not the purpose of the episode. You can find charts for that. There are plenty of

00:14:43 – 00:14:50:	comparisons. The most obvious, of course, is Passover and Easter. But when you look at the

00:14:50 – 00:14:57:	church year, what God is doing, because this is something God has created, I'm not saying that

00:14:57 – 00:15:04:	exactly what we have today was handed to us by God. That's not what happened, because the modern

00:15:04 – 00:15:10:	church calendar is a creation of Christendom, of Christians. As we've already mentioned,

00:15:11 – 00:15:18:	it's Adia Foran. It is not absolutely required. But the central point, the remembrance of these

00:15:18 – 00:15:24:	things that God has done for us, that God has done for his church, that remembrance is commanded

00:15:24 – 00:15:31:	in Scripture. That is required of Christians. And that is the central point around which the church

00:15:31 – 00:15:38:	calendar orbits, around which this cycle occurs. Because if you look at the church calendar,

00:15:38 – 00:15:43:	how does it begin? It begins with Advent, which is the season in which we are recording this. This

00:15:43 – 00:15:50:	is the third week of Advent. Advent is preparing us for the coming of the Messiah, for the incarnation.

00:15:51 – 00:15:57:	So it revolves around Christ's life. It revolves around really the central point of what it means

00:15:57 – 00:16:03:	to be a Christian and of Christianity. It revolves around Christ. You have Advent, which is looking

00:16:03 – 00:16:10:	forward to his birth. You have Christmas, which is his birth as incarnation. And you proceed

00:16:10 – 00:16:15:	through the calendar as you are proceeding through Christ's life here on earth. And then,

00:16:15 – 00:16:21:	yes, we also have about half the year, sometimes more than half, because there's an issue of

00:16:21 – 00:16:27:	movable feasts. Not all of the feasts of the church take place on the exact same calendar day every

00:16:27 – 00:16:33:	year. And there are reasons for that. But we have about half the year, which is the season of Pentecost,

00:16:33 – 00:16:38:	or the season after Pentecost, or the season of Trinity, depending on how you name it in

00:16:38 – 00:16:45:	your church tradition. And when you look at what that is, what that is, the teaching tool,

00:16:46 – 00:16:54:	you have ordinary time, as it is called. In a way, this represents the church age, the age in

00:16:54 – 00:17:00:	which we are currently living, because we are living in that time after Pentecost. And so it

00:17:00 – 00:17:06:	can be used as a teaching aid to highlight not just the history of the church, because you have

00:17:06 – 00:17:12:	half the year that is retelling Christ's life, that is retelling that history, you have the other

00:17:12 – 00:17:19:	half the year that is directly tied to how we are living here and now today in the church age.

00:17:21 – 00:17:28:	And again, the teaching aspect of the church calendar of this cycle is incredibly important.

00:17:28 – 00:17:34:	As we've mentioned in previous episodes, one of the ways that human beings actually learn

00:17:34 – 00:17:37:	something and remember it, which is obviously important if you're learning something,

00:17:39 – 00:17:46:	is repetition. And what does the church calendar, what does the liturgical year afford? It affords

00:17:46 – 00:17:52:	repetition, because every year you go through looking forward to Christ, the birth, death,

00:17:52 – 00:17:59:	and resurrection of Christ. You go through these same stories, through these same lessons every

00:17:59 – 00:18:07:	single year, and that way you remember them. And just as an aside, but an important one,

00:18:08 – 00:18:16:	for those pastors who have been in a liturgical tradition for many years, undoubtedly,

00:18:16 – 00:18:21:	they have dealt with a number of deaths in their congregations, that is, again, part of the cycle

00:18:21 – 00:18:28:	of human life, not in the next world, but in this one. Near the end, many people start to have

00:18:29 – 00:18:35:	memory and other issues. That is simply one of the facts of getting old in these fallen bodies.

00:18:36 – 00:18:40:	It may be that you start to forget things. It may be against the point where you forget how to tie

00:18:40 – 00:18:48:	your own shoes. But if you talk to pastors in liturgical tradition, they will tell you that

00:18:48 – 00:18:54:	those who have spent their lives in these churches will remember the liturgy. Now, they may have

00:18:54 – 00:18:59:	forgotten certain things. They may have forgotten many things. Again, you may forget how to tie your

00:18:59 – 00:19:07:	own shoes. That's up to God how that goes at the end of our lives. But these people, even that close

00:19:07 – 00:19:14:	to the end, will still remember the blessing of the liturgy. Now, I'm obviously conflating a little

00:19:14 – 00:19:20:	bit liturgy in the sense of order of the church worship and order of the church year, but they

00:19:20 – 00:19:26:	are comparable because you have liturgy on the grand sense of the church calendar, this cycle

00:19:26 – 00:19:31:	of lessons and remembrance, of thanking God for the things that He has done for us and the things

00:19:31 – 00:19:37:	that He will do for us, the things He promises us. And you have that playing out as well in the church

00:19:37 – 00:19:43:	service itself. And that repetition affords you comfort at the end of your life. And it's not

00:19:43 – 00:19:47:	just comfort for the person who remembers it. Obviously, it is. But it's also comforting for

00:19:47 – 00:19:53:	all the people around that person because you can look and see that even at the end of life,

00:19:54 – 00:19:59:	where many things are trending downward, God has not abandoned that person. You've trained up that

00:19:59 – 00:20:03:	child because that's a child of God. You've trained up that child in the way that he or she should go.

00:20:04 – 00:20:08:	And when he's old, he is not departed from it. That is a blessing from God. And we should be

00:20:08 – 00:20:13:	thankful for that. This is something that I witnessed firsthand when my dad was doing his

00:20:13 – 00:20:19:	vicarage at the Lutheran home in Fort Wayne. For one year, my family attended church services

00:20:19 – 00:20:25:	every Sunday at an old people's home. And it was a full service retirement community. They had

00:20:25 – 00:20:31:	everything from independent living to basically intensive care. And it was probably three quarters

00:20:31 – 00:20:36:	Lutherans there. But a lot of people would come down for the Sunday services. I think there are

00:20:36 – 00:20:41:	a couple of them, if I remember correctly. And something I was a teenager, I think at that time.

00:20:42 – 00:20:48:	One thing that stuck with me from witnessing that for a year was exactly what Corey just said.

00:20:49 – 00:20:54:	There were people there who were in advanced states of decay. Men and women, mostly women,

00:20:54 – 00:20:58:	because a lot of them were in their 90s and some were in their hundreds, who

00:20:59 – 00:21:06:	some of them were pretty close to vegetative. They were basically non-communicative in most cases.

00:21:07 – 00:21:13:	And yet, when they were wheeled into the church service, they could say many of the prayers.

00:21:13 – 00:21:19:	They could participate with some, in some cases, almost all the liturgy. They remembered some of

00:21:19 – 00:21:24:	the hymns. That was still a part of them, even when they didn't remember their own name. They may

00:21:24 – 00:21:30:	now remember their family names. They still remember God's things because they'd done the same thing

00:21:30 – 00:21:37:	their entire lives. So this sort of treasure that we look at it today as bland and repetitive,

00:21:37 – 00:21:44:	as though that's a bad thing. It is a blessing that you don't realize until you begin to lose your

00:21:44 – 00:21:51:	senses. When these churches that put everything up on screens and it's different every week,

00:21:51 – 00:21:56:	what's going to happen to someone who loses their sight? They're no longer going to have access to

00:21:56 – 00:22:02:	what's ever going on. And if what's going on is novel every week, if you have new hymns every

00:22:02 – 00:22:08:	week, new words, whatever you're doing, if it's always new, you are excluding the oldest people

00:22:08 – 00:22:12:	at the end of their lives. And some of them are going to end up in places where maybe the only

00:22:12 – 00:22:17:	thing that they have is some sort of continuity with a liturgy that they can still remember.

00:22:17 – 00:22:24:	So as Corey said, it's not that this is a law. This is not you must do this or you are sinning.

00:22:24 – 00:22:30:	This is a teaching tool. And when it is omitted, when it is deprived of people for whatever reason,

00:22:31 – 00:22:39:	you're not simply depriving them of something manmade. Because the liturgy, in the case of the

00:22:39 – 00:22:45:	Western liturgy, the one that the Lutherans use is basically the same in large parts of the ones

00:22:45 – 00:22:51:	the Roman Catholics use. It's mostly just quotes from Scripture. One of the great things that the

00:22:51 – 00:22:57:	most recent Lutheran hymnal has done is putting Bible verses next to all the parts of the liturgy

00:22:57 – 00:23:03:	that are Bible verses, and it's virtually the entire thing. Almost every word that is said

00:23:03 – 00:23:10:	or sung or chanted is Scripture. So what some people look at as some sort of formal manmade

00:23:10 – 00:23:15:	right, it's actually just God's words. We're saying back to him what he's given to us.

00:23:16 – 00:23:23:	And that sort of repetition of God's things is the greatest blessing you can have. I think one

00:23:23 – 00:23:28:	of the things that we talked a little bit about meditation recently, we did the episode on the

00:23:28 – 00:23:36:	Eastern Orthodox, meditation in a good sense is precisely this. It's focusing on a certain element

00:23:36 – 00:23:41:	of the Christian faith at a certain point, maybe in your day, maybe in your week, maybe in the

00:23:41 – 00:23:48:	calendar year. So when you have a penitential season like Lent, that is a time specifically to

00:23:48 – 00:23:54:	focus on penitence, on acknowledging your sins in a way that perhaps most of the year, they don't

00:23:54 – 00:24:00:	get as much attention. If nothing else, once a year for a number of weeks, you're going to have a

00:24:00 – 00:24:07:	reminder baked into the calendar that you are a sinner and that the Christ who is crucified on

00:24:07 – 00:24:15:	Good Friday, that was for you and for your sins. And our repentance, our turning away from the evil

00:24:15 – 00:24:21:	that caused God to have to sacrifice himself, is a part of the Christian life, acknowledging our

00:24:21 – 00:24:27:	sins, confessing them, and then acknowledging our Savior and confessing him. It's cyclical,

00:24:27 – 00:24:32:	but as I said earlier, you can't, if you spend every minute of every day just dwelling on how

00:24:32 – 00:24:36:	terrible you are, that's going to fracture and break you. And God doesn't want that either.

00:24:36 – 00:24:44:	So we're given these times according to God's time so that we can not skip anything,

00:24:44 – 00:24:50:	so that God's word is preached in its fullness. And so the various aspects of everything these

00:24:50 – 00:24:56:	reveal to us are in our minds at various times. And the more that is built up in your heart and

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	your mind when you're young, when you're healthy, as you get older, this stuff is going to matter to

00:25:01 – 00:25:06:	you more. If you remain in the faith, as your body starts to fail, as your mind starts to fail,

00:25:06 – 00:25:11:	when you can have confidence that God's things are still there for you, that is a tremendous

00:25:11 – 00:25:16:	comfort. Because you realize that it's not your doing, it's that God has been there for you all

00:25:16 – 00:25:22:	along. And so this sort of cyclical repetition where I'm going to keep repeating that because

00:25:22 – 00:25:29:	that's what it is, the over and over of weekly and seasonal and annual observances of these things.

00:25:29 – 00:25:35:	It's not men making a law and imposing it. It's us returning again and again to the gifts that

00:25:35 – 00:25:42:	God has given us in Scripture. In a very real sense, it's extremely odd that any Christian would

00:25:42 – 00:25:48:	object to the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over, of repeating things.

00:25:50 – 00:25:55:	For one, it is a blessing from God if your life is such that you get to repeat things over and

00:25:55 – 00:26:01:	over and over, because novelty is often not good. We're not saying novelty is always bad,

00:26:01 – 00:26:08:	but novelty is often bad. In a very real way, our lives are lives of repetition,

00:26:09 – 00:26:18:	just the 24 hour cycle. You wake up, eat, go about your day, eat, go to sleep, and then you do it

00:26:18 – 00:26:24:	again. And every day you do that is a blessing from God. Deviations from that are typically not

00:26:24 – 00:26:30:	good. If you don't get to sleep, you generally don't feel very good the next day. Now that's going

00:26:30 – 00:26:34:	to be much worse if you're saying your 40s or your 50s versus your 20s. So for the listeners in their

00:26:34 – 00:26:41:	20s, it's coming for you too. But this repetition is part of human life. You have the daily cycle,

00:26:41 – 00:26:46:	you have the weekly cycle, the monthly, the yearly, you have the seasons that repeat every year as

00:26:46 – 00:26:51:	God promised as well read at the beginning of the episode. These are blessings from God.

00:26:51 – 00:26:59:	And even beyond that, we are commanded to be daily in the scriptures. That is repetition,

00:26:59 – 00:27:06:	that is repeating the same thing every single day for your entire life, reading the same book

00:27:07 – 00:27:14:	every day until you die. That's part of the Christian life. Repetition is a good thing.

00:27:14 – 00:27:20:	Anyone who has learned a second language knows that the only way you can learn a second language

00:27:20 – 00:27:24:	is repetition. Spaced repetition is one of the best ways, but

00:27:26 – 00:27:30:	generally it is repeating those words, it is using those words, it's using the language,

00:27:30 – 00:27:35:	that is how you learn it. The same thing for scripture, how you learn the things of God

00:27:35 – 00:27:38:	is reading the book that he gave us, is learning them.

00:27:40 – 00:27:46:	Part of that learning as we are commanded in the Third Commandment is observing the Sabbath.

00:27:46 – 00:27:51:	Part of that is going to church, is not forsaking the gathering together of the saints,

00:27:51 – 00:27:57:	and how that is organized is around the life of Christ, the life of the church,

00:27:57 – 00:28:04:	the life together as Christians. And we have this cycle of lessons and teaching so that we can make

00:28:04 – 00:28:10:	Christians, so that people can remain Christians, so that those who are Christian can become stronger

00:28:10 – 00:28:16:	Christians. Don't forget, just because you are in the church service and you know every

00:28:16 – 00:28:20:	single word that's going to be said, that's a good thing, that's a blessing from God,

00:28:20 – 00:28:26:	and you will remember that when you grow old. But don't forget, the young and the old are also there.

00:28:26 – 00:28:31:	There are those who are just beginning to learn the things of God, and they need this,

00:28:32 – 00:28:36:	and there are those who are at the end of their lives, as we mentioned, who still remember these

00:28:36 – 00:28:41:	things, because they went through it when they were young during the prime of their life, and then

00:28:41 – 00:28:50:	in their old age. We do these things to teach the next generation of Christians, but also to make

00:28:50 – 00:28:57:	the current generation stronger. This is part of life as a Christian, and it is a blessing from God.

00:28:57 – 00:29:05:	So we shouldn't look down on repetition. We shouldn't try to seek out novelty, this drive to look for

00:29:05 – 00:29:10:	things that are always new, always different, is very much a part of modernity, and it would be

00:29:10 – 00:29:16:	entirely alien to our forefathers in the faith. That is not something that would have driven them,

00:29:16 – 00:29:24:	either culturally or religiously. It would have been, again, totally alien to them. This repetition

00:29:24 – 00:29:30:	is a blessing from God. Each day when you wake up and have a normal day, that is a great blessing

00:29:30 – 00:29:35:	from God, and you should thank Him at the close of the day in your evening prayers. If you have a day

00:29:35 – 00:29:41:	that is entirely novel, seldom is that good. Now, there are days where you can have some novelty

00:29:41 – 00:29:46:	that's good. If you get married, that's a novel day for you. That's different from the rest of your

00:29:46 – 00:29:53:	life. But following that, you want every day after that to be roughly the same. Yes, you have the

00:29:53 – 00:29:58:	mile markers in life as it were. You have the birth of your first child, and you have various

00:29:58 – 00:30:04:	points where you move from one part of life to the next. But by and large, and these are

00:30:04 – 00:30:09:	really seasonal parts of life, so you can compare the seasons in the grand sense of things, the way

00:30:09 – 00:30:16:	the earth experiences them, and then the seasons of a human life. But really within those seasons,

00:30:17 – 00:30:22:	you want each day to be roughly the same as the last, and you want the next one to be roughly the

00:30:22 – 00:30:27:	same as the day you're currently experiencing, because, again, that is a blessing from God.

00:30:28 – 00:30:34:	Just as Scripture says that God gives to his beloved sleep, that is a blessing from God at the

00:30:34 – 00:30:40:	end of the day, that you get to sleep, that you have restful slumber, all of these repetitions,

00:30:40 – 00:30:48:	all of these parts of life, and it is a human life. It is really the core of our life when you have

00:30:49 – 00:30:54:	each successive day being comparable to the last. That is a blessing. That is a good thing.

00:30:55 – 00:31:01:	This comes from God, and we as Christians should recognize that, and we should want the same thing

00:31:01 – 00:31:06:	in our churches. We should want the same sort of blessings as God gives us in our lives,

00:31:07 – 00:31:13:	also to occur in the church, because then we can lead the young into the faith, we can strengthen

00:31:13 – 00:31:19:	those who are either young in the faith or in the prime of their life, and we can retain those who

00:31:19 – 00:31:24:	are at the end of their lives. We shouldn't look down on these things. These are blessings that

00:31:24 – 00:31:30:	were given to us by our ancestors, passed down through generations of faithful Christians,

00:31:31 – 00:31:37:	and preserved in the church. Ultimately, they are blessings from God. But we should not look down

00:31:37 – 00:31:45:	on what has been given to us by our forefathers, particularly when you look at those forefathers,

00:31:45 – 00:31:50:	look at the lives they lived, look at the societies they built, were they more Christian or less

00:31:50 – 00:31:55:	Christian than we are today, or put another way, are we more Christian or are we less Christian?

00:31:57 – 00:32:03:	When we look back to the very earliest days of the church, we find already in the second century

00:32:03 – 00:32:10:	accounts of Christmas and Easter being observed. I think it's important when we're thinking about

00:32:10 – 00:32:16:	these things, especially if you want to delve into the history of the way certain holidays or

00:32:16 – 00:32:22:	holy days, it's the same thing. When someone says, do you happy holidays or writes merry Xmas,

00:32:23 – 00:32:30:	usually they're trying to deny Christ, but they can't, because holiday literally means a day set

00:32:30 – 00:32:36:	apart and consecrated for a holy purpose, is a holy day. In Xmas, the X is the first character

00:32:36 – 00:32:43:	of Christ. It's a Christian abbreviation too. There's no way to remove the reason for the

00:32:43 – 00:32:48:	season from it. All they do is make fools of themselves. So it's right to get aggravated

00:32:48 – 00:32:53:	when they're deliberately besmirching and blaspheming something holy. On the other hand,

00:32:53 – 00:32:59:	they're losers. They can't. This is God's stuff. Other people don't get to mess with it.

00:33:00 – 00:33:05:	Back from the very beginning of recorded history, of recorded Christian church history,

00:33:05 – 00:33:13:	we find accounts of these celebrations being held. I think one of the things that we mistake

00:33:13 – 00:33:19:	when we look back through time is to try to pinpoint which council or which father first said,

00:33:19 – 00:33:23:	yes, this is an official thing, and then here's the date on the calendar, and now it's official.

00:33:23 – 00:33:33:	Now it's Christian. Imagine if you lived in 40 AD in the Jerusalem area and you were a believer,

00:33:33 – 00:33:39:	you're a follower of the way. You knew that Christ was born, he died, he was resurrected,

00:33:39 – 00:33:46:	he ascended into heaven. You were a Christian. Do you think that seven years, give or take,

00:33:46 – 00:33:51:	depending on which calendar you want to go to, seven years after Christ ascended into heaven,

00:33:52 – 00:33:58:	do you think that it might have occurred to people who were witnesses to that event? On the

00:33:58 – 00:34:04:	anniversaries of such events might have said to themselves, hey, we should remember this. We have

00:34:04 – 00:34:10:	the historic pattern of things like Passover, where we have annual celebrations in remembrance

00:34:10 – 00:34:16:	of these important events. Are there any more important events in the way of the Christian

00:34:16 – 00:34:22:	than the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ? I think the answer is clearly no.

00:34:22 – 00:34:28:	That should be the answer to all of us. Today should be no. That is the most important thing

00:34:28 – 00:34:33:	that has happened in history. Those events are paramount in all of human history.

00:34:35 – 00:34:40:	When you're looking at what the first people were doing, don't focus on the councils

00:34:40 – 00:34:47:	that ratified. Here's a good time for us to establish a norm for all believers to do it,

00:34:47 – 00:34:55:	because remember what transpired between AD 40 and AD 340. You had the church going from being

00:34:55 – 00:35:03:	this tiny nascent, in many ways, persecuted fringe thing to becoming an official state

00:35:03 – 00:35:11:	church in some nations. As the number of believers grew, the unity of practice became more important.

00:35:12 – 00:35:17:	We talked last week about how Americans tend to clap completely differently. Everyone else tends

00:35:17 – 00:35:22:	to clap on the same beat. When you're just spontaneously clapping, most people tend to

00:35:22 – 00:35:29:	converge. We don't. There's a natural tendency among people to try to converge on similar patterns.

00:35:29 – 00:35:34:	You want to do something similar to your neighbor. It's abnormal to try to fight your neighbor and

00:35:34 – 00:35:40:	try to be different just for the sake of doing your own thing. Of course, it would make sense

00:35:40 – 00:35:45:	that the early believers would remember Easter. They would remember the day that Christ rose from

00:35:45 – 00:35:50:	the dead. That's a pretty big deal seven years after it happened, one year after it happened,

00:35:50 – 00:35:55:	on the one year anniversary. Do you think they forgot? These people had calendars.

00:35:55 – 00:36:02:	Calendars have been around forever. Astrology was one of the oldest disciplines in humanity.

00:36:03 – 00:36:11:	Today, we think of astrology as this pagan practice. It is today, but the way that God revealed himself

00:36:11 – 00:36:16:	in the stars has been lost to us. I don't think it's recoverable. I don't think we need it.

00:36:16 – 00:36:23:	But the fact that we find astrology in every single old civilization is more than just

00:36:23 – 00:36:28:	they liked looking up a lot. There was a lot of very sophisticated math and a lot of tremendous

00:36:28 – 00:36:33:	achievements for them to be able to figure that stuff out on their own. What they were looking for

00:36:33 – 00:36:38:	were the very portents that God recorded in Genesis 1 that he was putting there.

00:36:39 – 00:36:43:	Of course, one year after Christ was raised from the dead,

00:36:43 – 00:36:48:	Christians are going to remember and celebrate it. Now, does that mean that Easter, when it was

00:36:48 – 00:36:55:	first formalized as a celebration on a particular day of a calendar, was the exact day? No. Does it

00:36:55 – 00:36:59:	matter? I don't think so. I think we should try to get it as close as possible, but it doesn't

00:36:59 – 00:37:08:	matter if it's exactly the day because consecrating a day as a holy remembrance is itself what God

00:37:08 – 00:37:14:	says is important. We'll get to some passages about that later. But again, when you're looking back

00:37:14 – 00:37:20:	through time and you see these debates about calendars and who's got the right date or the

00:37:20 – 00:37:25:	right offsets for these things or changeovers between one style of calendar and another,

00:37:26 – 00:37:30:	none of that matters. We're not saying you must use this particular calendar in this particular way.

00:37:31 – 00:37:39:	On the other hand, a calendar is functionally a local thing. So there's a difference between

00:37:39 – 00:37:47:	the calendars in the east and the west today. Historically, if my ancestors lived in England

00:37:47 – 00:37:52:	and somebody else's ancestors lived in Russia 2,000 years ago, did it matter if their calendars

00:37:52 – 00:37:56:	were the same? Absolutely not. They're going to have the same seasons. They're going to have the

00:37:56 – 00:38:02:	same years, but are they going to recognize exactly the same months and dates? Who cares?

00:38:02 – 00:38:06:	They're never going to meet each other. They're never going to have any commerce. So agreement

00:38:06 – 00:38:14:	across vast distances on calendars is irrelevant. It's trivia. As empires spread and as there was

00:38:14 – 00:38:22:	more commerce among various nations, it became more important for calendars to be unified. It

00:38:22 – 00:38:31:	just gets easier. Today, time is one of the most important things in the world for GPS, for ATMs,

00:38:32 – 00:38:39:	for computers. Everything relies on incredibly precise time. So it's not enough just to have

00:38:39 – 00:38:44:	like the same days. You need to have the same milliseconds when you get down to certain levels

00:38:44 – 00:38:49:	in order for everything just to work. That's how interconnected we are today. So

00:38:50 – 00:38:57:	yesterday, there is a need for a single unified calendar and the divergence from that is

00:38:58 – 00:39:02:	usually crazy. There are historical reasons why there are disagreements, but we eventually had to

00:39:02 – 00:39:08:	get on the same page. And it really didn't matter who won. It didn't matter. It just mattered that

00:39:08 – 00:39:15:	we would agree on a common form of the thing. Because again, the Sabbath observance doesn't need

00:39:15 – 00:39:23:	to be on Saturday or Sunday. Sunday was chosen because it was a confession of Christ's resurrection.

00:39:23 – 00:39:30:	It was the eighth day of creation. But it's not a law. On the other hand, if Christians where you

00:39:30 – 00:39:36:	live are gathering on Sunday and you come along and say, well, that's not a law. I don't have to do

00:39:36 – 00:39:41:	that. I'm going to worship on some other day because I'm not beholden to that. It's not that

00:39:41 – 00:39:46:	you are exercising Christian freedom to despise what you're believing neighbors are doing,

00:39:46 – 00:39:51:	is that you're being a jerk. You're saying, I don't care what any other brothers and believers

00:39:51 – 00:39:56:	in Christ do. I'm going to go my own way. And this is how judges ended up. The very last passages

00:39:56 – 00:40:00:	and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. That's not a happy ending for that book.

00:40:02 – 00:40:07:	This is kind of where some people are spiritually today. They think that if there's not an explicit

00:40:07 – 00:40:12:	command from God, they can just do whatever they want. And so one of the points of this episode

00:40:12 – 00:40:18:	is that that's not the case, not because the calendar is a law. Again, pick whatever calendar

00:40:18 – 00:40:24:	you want. Eastern Orthodox and some others use a different church calendar. So they celebrate

00:40:24 – 00:40:29:	Christmas a couple of weeks after us. I'm not mad at them. I think it's a little weird, especially

00:40:29 – 00:40:35:	in the West, for someone to be celebrating such an important holiday on a different day

00:40:35 – 00:40:40:	than everyone around him. But that is far less important a question than whether or not he's

00:40:40 – 00:40:45:	celebrating Christmas at all. The fact that someone using a different calendar is still

00:40:45 – 00:40:50:	celebrating Christmas is the important part. That's the big ticket item. I think if we got rid

00:40:50 – 00:40:54:	of the other doctrinal disagreements, we'd all be on the same calendar. But the calendar is not

00:40:54 – 00:41:01:	the concern. I hope that's coming through here. You must use this particular calendar with this

00:41:01 – 00:41:07:	particular set of dates. Who cares? The observance, the regular observance in faithfulness to

00:41:07 – 00:41:13:	remember God's gifts is the important part. And then when you live in a certain place

00:41:13 – 00:41:18:	where all believers are doing the same thing, you should do what they do. Not because God commands

00:41:18 – 00:41:24:	you to be on a certain calendar, but he commands the faithful to gather together. And so if everybody

00:41:24 – 00:41:28:	in your neighborhood, everyone in your community is a church on one day, and you're like, I'm going

00:41:28 – 00:41:32:	to go a different day. I'm not going to celebrate that Christmas. I'm going to celebrate my own

00:41:32 – 00:41:37:	that's different. What are you doing? You're separating yourself from the body of Christ.

00:41:37 – 00:41:43:	And we're members of one body. We're not individuals. We're not we're not solo agents in

00:41:43 – 00:41:48:	this thing. We are members of something that's been going on for thousands of years.

00:41:49 – 00:41:54:	One of the great advent hymns in anticipation of Christmas is Savior of the Nations come.

00:41:55 – 00:41:59:	This is a, I think one of the great things about this hymn not only is it beautiful,

00:41:59 – 00:42:05:	but it's a hymn that's been sung continuously among Christians for 1600 years. It was written by

00:42:05 – 00:42:10:	Ambrose of Milan over 1600 years ago, and Christians have been singing it ever since.

00:42:11 – 00:42:18:	So when you have some churches, they have the new hymns up on the, on the projectors every week,

00:42:18 – 00:42:22:	you know, the whatever garbage stuff is being produced by pop vocalists

00:42:23 – 00:42:26:	versus the churches that are singing the same hymn that's been sung for 1600 years.

00:42:28 – 00:42:33:	I think that's a fundamentally different experience. And again, we're not saying

00:42:33 – 00:42:38:	this one is sin and this one is not a sin. We're saying that this one is a continuation of the

00:42:38 – 00:42:45:	faith that we inherited from our fathers. Why on earth would anyone take a 1600 year old beautiful

00:42:45 – 00:42:49:	hymn and say, I'm not going to do that. We got this new thing. It's got drums. It's great.

00:42:50 – 00:42:56:	Seriously, why do you not want to join with all of the saints in heaven in worshiping the way they

00:42:56 – 00:43:02:	worshiped as much as possible? And so admit we're going to get into the Reformation, but just

00:43:02 – 00:43:07:	keep in mind that when Lutheran in particular, the Lutherans looked at what Rome was doing,

00:43:08 – 00:43:11:	they did not want to sever all ties. They didn't want to sever any ties. They just

00:43:11 – 00:43:19:	wanted to clean up some doctrinal layers. And so as they altered aspects of the liturgy and altered

00:43:19 – 00:43:25:	aspects of the calendar, it was not for the sake of destruction. It was simply to remove

00:43:25 – 00:43:31:	things that they believed were false teachings, because your calendar is necessarily a function

00:43:31 – 00:43:38:	of whatever you teach. And that's a good thing. Whatever doctrines your church teaches should

00:43:38 – 00:43:44:	be reflected in your church's liturgy and its liturgical practices. And if your church frankly

00:43:44 – 00:43:51:	despises all historic norms, that's also a confession. The show art for this episode is an

00:43:51 – 00:43:58:	excerpt from Owen Cyclops on Twitter, his full year liturgical calendar. It's beautiful. It's

00:43:58 – 00:44:04:	done in his style of art. If you like it, it's a great example. I think it's a particularly good

00:44:04 – 00:44:09:	illustration of this point because he's a Roman Catholic, and the calendar is a Roman Catholic

00:44:09 – 00:44:14:	calendar. So the inset that we used for the art is something that I think we all pretty much agree

00:44:14 – 00:44:21:	on in the West. We're looking at the advent period of the calendar. If you zoom out, once it gets

00:44:21 – 00:44:27:	into Pentecost, fully a quarter of Owen's calendar is dedicated to various observances

00:44:27 – 00:44:33:	for the Blessed Virgin Mary. And they're almost all doctrines that are

00:44:34 – 00:44:39:	evolutions in Rome that are not shared among some other churches. In fact, some of them were

00:44:39 – 00:44:47:	ratified very late. That's fine. I disagree with the doctrine that's represented in that portion

00:44:47 – 00:44:51:	of the calendar, but I think it's a very good thing that it's on the calendar because that is

00:44:51 – 00:44:58:	the liturgical confession of his denomination. That's the way it should be. Your church calendar

00:44:58 – 00:45:02:	should teach your doctrine because that's exactly what it's going to do. Whatever you're repeating,

00:45:02 – 00:45:08:	whatever you're visiting, is going to be teaching people. So I look at that, and I think it's

00:45:08 – 00:45:12:	beautiful. I look at the part that has some things that I don't agree with doctrinally.

00:45:12 – 00:45:18:	I'm not mad at the calendar. I'm not mad at him. I just think that a different theology would be

00:45:18 – 00:45:24:	reflected differently on the calendar. So we'll link in the show notes his poster. If you are

00:45:24 – 00:45:28:	Roman Catholic, check it out. Everyone should check it out. If you're Roman Catholic, you should buy it.

00:45:28 – 00:45:35:	If you're not Roman Catholic, I think it's also an important illustration that when you look at that

00:45:35 – 00:45:41:	and see the historic claims of Rome, some of which are very true, some of which get increasingly

00:45:41 – 00:45:48:	tenuous. One of the arguments that we see today against church calendars, against the liturgical

00:45:48 – 00:45:54:	calendar, is that that's popish. That's papus. That's what those guys in Rome are doing. I want

00:45:54 – 00:46:00:	nothing to do with that. Pope bad. It's all bad. That's simply not true. That's not Christian

00:46:01 – 00:46:08:	because Rome inherited many of the things on that calendar. It's not a Romish calendar. It is the

00:46:08 – 00:46:15:	Western Christian calendar. There are things on it that are particular to Rome. A lot of the

00:46:15 – 00:46:20:	calendar is shared by Lutherans and Anglicans and a number of others. That's a good thing.

00:46:20 – 00:46:24:	And wherever we have agreement, we should celebrate it. It's a tremendous blessing

00:46:24 – 00:46:30:	that we all go to church on the same day, not only every week in that weekly cycle,

00:46:31 – 00:46:36:	but seasonally when we all go to church on the same day for Christmas and for Easter and the

00:46:36 – 00:46:41:	other important days that are shared across Christendom. That's valuable. It's a reminder that

00:46:41 – 00:46:47:	regardless of some disagreements, we hope that we still have the same God and we're using the same

00:46:47 – 00:46:53:	book and we're pointing towards the same immutable true facts that are written in time and in eternity

00:46:53 – 00:46:58:	because God did them for us. So if you look at that, don't think, oh man, I'm really missing

00:46:58 – 00:47:02:	out because I'm not Roman Catholic. I don't want that to be your conclusion. I want you to think,

00:47:03 – 00:47:09:	I wish that my church had a liturgical calendar that reflected our beliefs. And if your belief

00:47:09 – 00:47:17:	calendar is empty, think about that. Think about why it is that your church body has abandoned

00:47:17 – 00:47:22:	something that has been done for thousands of years. That's an important question. Like you said

00:47:22 – 00:47:28:	at the beginning, we didn't intend for this to be polemical. I naively had forgotten that this

00:47:28 – 00:47:35:	was a huge matter of dispute. I'm off Twitter until we start recording again. So I'm not doing

00:47:35 – 00:47:41:	any DMs or anything for a few weeks. I'm not going to read my get back because even the podcast is

00:47:41 – 00:47:46:	a job, responding to DMs is not a job. So please just wait for me to get back. I did happen to

00:47:46 – 00:47:52:	look just this morning briefly at Twitter and the one thing that I'm glad I caught was somebody

00:47:52 – 00:47:58:	yesterday had posted about the liturgical calendar and said, hey, this is a great teaching tool.

00:47:58 – 00:48:03:	Pastors consider using this as part of how you teach your parishioners throughout the year.

00:48:04 – 00:48:09:	And most of the comments to him were nasty. They were mean and they were hateful comments

00:48:09 – 00:48:17:	despising a Christian calendar with Christian holy days on it. Why? Because it's too popish

00:48:17 – 00:48:23:	because it's not in the Bible. So that's an argument. If the inheritance of our forefathers

00:48:23 – 00:48:30:	was to do certain things in certain ways, we don't get to just torch it. In the generations episode,

00:48:30 – 00:48:35:	we talked about how that's kind of the approach that boomers have to everything else. They'll buy

00:48:35 – 00:48:41:	a property and chop down all the trees and sod the lawn and just have this carpet of green where

00:48:41 – 00:48:48:	there used to be beautiful lush plants. This is what people have done in other places like the

00:48:48 – 00:48:53:	church calendar. It's the same energy. It's the same rebellious destruction to come in and find

00:48:53 – 00:49:01:	something beautiful and say, I'm going to remake all this in my image. So looking at these things,

00:49:01 – 00:49:08:	if it's causing you to be angry, you're in the wrong. And so it's not that the calendar is a

00:49:08 – 00:49:15:	matter of law, but despising it, despising other Christians for their sincerely held observation

00:49:15 – 00:49:22:	of what they believe to be holy days is wrong. I disagree with the Roman Catholics who observe

00:49:22 – 00:49:27:	things like the Annunciation or all the various aspects of Mary ascending in heaven and stuff

00:49:27 – 00:49:32:	that are not scriptural. But I'm not going to be mad at them for observing them on the calendar.

00:49:33 – 00:49:37:	They're doing that according to their conscience. I wish that their conscience were differently

00:49:37 – 00:49:45:	formed, but I'm never going to get mad at the practice because the practice itself is intended

00:49:45 – 00:49:50:	to be proper worship. And the fact that there's doctrine behind it that I would disagree with

00:49:50 – 00:49:55:	is a separable matter. I think it's important for us to separate doctrines that are observed

00:49:55 – 00:50:00:	in the act of the observation itself. Because again, if this is for teaching,

00:50:00 – 00:50:06:	then whatever your calendar teaches is a reflection of what your church body should teach.

00:50:06 – 00:50:13:	And if there's no overlap, you're missing out. We should be careful to note here that

00:50:14 – 00:50:20:	the Western Church calendar has a core on which we all agree. And we've already gone

00:50:20 – 00:50:27:	over part of that, obviously, of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. We agree on the

00:50:27 – 00:50:33:	core of the calendar. And incidentally, the East agrees as well. The East disagrees on the dates,

00:50:33 – 00:50:41:	but as mentioned, that doesn't matter that much. When it comes to the specific inclusions or removals

00:50:41 – 00:50:48:	from the calendar, if you look at the church in, say, the year 1000 and then compare the calendar

00:50:48 – 00:50:55:	currently used by Rome to that, it's different. The same is true for the Lutherans. There is no

00:50:55 – 00:51:00:	Christian group that is using the exact same calendar that was used a thousand years ago,

00:51:00 – 00:51:07:	1500 years ago. That's not the point. It may be that there will be observances that get added

00:51:07 – 00:51:12:	or removed over the centuries. The core remains the same, that teaching function remains.

00:51:14 – 00:51:22:	We in the Lutheran Church, for instance, have Reformation Sunday, which is celebrated immediately

00:51:22 – 00:51:29:	before all saints. We have that on our calendar, because we consider the Reformation to have been

00:51:29 – 00:51:35:	a vitally important restoration of right doctrine to the church. And so we celebrate that as a gift

00:51:35 – 00:51:44:	from God. Obviously, Rome is not going to have that on its calendar. We do not have the Marian

00:51:44 – 00:51:49:	dogmas on our calendar. Rome has added those to its calendar. You are going to have these

00:51:49 – 00:51:54:	distinctions, these differences. As Woe said, this is going to flow from your teaching, from your

00:51:54 – 00:52:00:	doctrine, from your theology. But just to make certain that we are absolutely clear

00:52:00 – 00:52:06:	on what Lutherans hold, on what we are saying about what the calendar is and what the calendar is

00:52:06 – 00:52:12:	not, what these practices are in the church and what these practices are not. I want to read

00:52:13 – 00:52:17:	Article 15 from our Confession, because it lays out exactly what we believe. I will also

00:52:18 – 00:52:21:	link to this and some other parts of the Book of Concord in the show notes. They go over it in

00:52:21 – 00:52:29:	greater length, this article is quite short. Of usages, and by usages it means practices,

00:52:29 – 00:52:33:	in the church they teach, which is saying we teach, that those ought to be observed,

00:52:33 – 00:52:39:	which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquility and good order in the

00:52:39 – 00:52:46:	church, as particular holy days, festivals, and the like. Nevertheless, concerning such things,

00:52:46 – 00:52:52:	men are admonished that consciences are not to be burdened, as though such observances

00:52:52 – 00:52:58:	were necessary to salvation. They are admonished also that human traditions instituted to propitiate

00:52:58 – 00:53:04:	God, to merit grace, and to make satisfaction for sins, are opposed to the gospel and the doctrine

00:53:04 – 00:53:11:	of faith. Wherefore vows and traditions concerning meats and days, etc., instituted to merit grace,

00:53:11 – 00:53:16:	and to make satisfaction for sins, are useless and contrary to the gospel.

00:53:17 – 00:53:23:	And so in some, in short, the Lutheran position, is that we should maintain those things that are

00:53:23 – 00:53:29:	good. You keep the things that were handed down from your forefathers, when they are good,

00:53:29 – 00:53:35:	when they are profitable, when they are useful. Now, we have to be very careful what we mean by this,

00:53:36 – 00:53:40:	because there are some who attempt to turn this argument around and say,

00:53:40 – 00:53:45:	unless you can show me exactly why we must do this, I'm going to get rid of it. That's not the

00:53:45 – 00:53:53:	standard. The standard is, if you want to remove something from church practice, the burden is on

00:53:53 – 00:54:01:	you to show why it should be removed. With the Reformation, we showed, amply, abundantly,

00:54:01 – 00:54:07:	why we removed certain practices, why we changed certain things, why we got rid of things that

00:54:07 – 00:54:12:	had crept into the church over the centuries. There are others who did not do that. There are

00:54:12 – 00:54:18:	others who basically said, whatever looks like Rome, smells like Rome, we have to get rid of it.

00:54:18 – 00:54:22:	And so we'll get rid of the candles, we'll get rid of the incense, we'll get rid of the artwork,

00:54:22 – 00:54:27:	we'll get rid of the hymns, we'll get rid of, and the list goes on and on. And they just jettisoned

00:54:27 – 00:54:32:	practically the totality of the Christian faith. They retained nothing of Christian praxis.

00:54:32 – 00:54:38:	That is not what we advocate. That is not what Christians advocate. You retain the things that

00:54:38 – 00:54:44:	are good. And so, insofar as these things have been handed down from our forefathers and do not

00:54:44 – 00:54:52:	conflict with the faith, they should be maintained. We don't have to make some sort of particularly

00:54:52 – 00:54:57:	compelling argument. And we are, of course, making the argument, but it is not incumbent on us to

00:54:57 – 00:55:06:	make the argument that these things are necessary or that these things are somehow the pinnacle of

00:55:06 – 00:55:13:	praxis in the church. The standard is, if they do not conflict with the faith, and they have been

00:55:13 – 00:55:18:	passed down to us by our forefathers, they should be maintained. And that is what we see in this

00:55:18 – 00:55:24:	article, if they are profitable unto tranquility and good order in the church, and particularly

00:55:24 – 00:55:30:	singled out, holy days, festivals, and the like. That is what we're talking about with the church

00:55:30 – 00:55:36:	calendar. We maintain this cycle because it is profitable for teaching, it is profitable for

00:55:36 – 00:55:41:	good order. And it's not just profitable for good order within a specific church, within a national

00:55:41 – 00:55:49:	church or a denomination or tradition. This also aids with unity across all of Christendom.

00:55:50 – 00:55:57:	Even if we disagree on the date specifically, we all still celebrate Christmas. We all still

00:55:57 – 00:56:07:	celebrate Easter. This leads to an international unity, a universal, a Catholic unity amongst

00:56:07 – 00:56:12:	all Christians. And that is a good thing. We don't have to have these same specific

00:56:12 – 00:56:18:	rights, the same specific traditions, all these other things across national churches. You're

00:56:18 – 00:56:23:	going to have a different church in Germany than you're going to have in Uganda or Japan

00:56:23 – 00:56:30:	or even France. That's fine, that's good. To some degree, praxis in the church should be a reflection

00:56:31 – 00:56:37:	of that church, of that nation, of the people who constitute that physical church at that time.

00:56:38 – 00:56:43:	However, insofar as we can agree on these matters, on these overarching matters,

00:56:43 – 00:56:49:	that is good, that's profitable. It shows us that we have Christian brothers in other countries.

00:56:50 – 00:56:53:	And we should recognize them as Christian brothers. Yes, they're Christian brothers over

00:56:53 – 00:56:58:	there. They are not my neighbor. But they are still Christian brothers. They are Christians

00:56:58 – 00:57:06:	who also celebrate these major holidays, these holy days, who recognize the history of salvation

00:57:06 – 00:57:13:	in the church and the work of Christ. And in order to have that unity, we have to have something

00:57:13 – 00:57:20:	upon which we are unified. Yes, ultimately, our unity is in Christ, is on the gospel. But to have

00:57:20 – 00:57:27:	the unity in praxis, the unity with regard to observances, is incredibly profitable. It helps

00:57:27 – 00:57:34:	us to view other Christians in other places as our brothers in Christ. So it's important to know

00:57:34 – 00:57:42:	that while the emergence of specific festivals and holidays is the function of men saying,

00:57:42 – 00:57:48:	hey, it would be a good idea if we did X. That's undoubtedly the origin of them. Even the very

00:57:48 – 00:57:53:	first Easter and the very first Christmas was undoubtedly believers saying, hey, let's make

00:57:53 – 00:58:00:	sure we remember that. That does not make them manmade in the sense that other things are manmade.

00:58:01 – 00:58:06:	When they said those things, they weren't saying, it is now the law and you go to hell unless you do

00:58:06 – 00:58:10:	it just like this. They were saying, wouldn't this be profitable for all Christians?

00:58:11 – 00:58:17:	As Corey said, it has always been the case and it is entirely permissible. In fact, it's necessary

00:58:18 – 00:58:26:	for the observed liturgical calendar to evolve over time because God continues to operate in time.

00:58:26 – 00:58:31:	The ordinary time period of the calendar in Pentecost, that's about half of the church year,

00:58:31 – 00:58:39:	where it's focused on the time of the church. It's focused on what happened from acts forward

00:58:39 – 00:58:47:	unto the last days. In fact, the very last Sundays observed at the very end of the church year,

00:58:47 – 00:58:54:	just prior to Advent, are specifically focused on the actual end times, which frankly is one of my

00:58:54 – 00:58:59:	favorite parts of the church year, just before getting back into Advent, looking forward to the

00:58:59 – 00:59:06:	birth of Christ, is that recognition of the end of all things, of thy kingdom come, finally being

00:59:06 – 00:59:12:	answered, being fulfilled by God, he is going to come. It will be terrifying. God says we're all

00:59:12 – 00:59:18:	going to hide in caves and pray for it to be over. I'm not sitting here thinking, wow, the world's

00:59:18 – 00:59:23:	going to be a lot of fun, but it's promised by God and he says it's what he's going to do. That's

00:59:23 – 00:59:30:	something for Christians to look forward to, and the prophecies of the end time are also cyclical.

00:59:32 – 00:59:37:	When Jesus was giving the parables about the virgins and the various other ones that pointed

00:59:37 – 00:59:45:	towards the end times, he was promoting an awareness and a watchfulness in what better way to keep watch

00:59:45 – 00:59:53:	than by having regular observations to keep those things in mind. I think that it's not for nothing

59:53 – 01:00:00
that some church bodies, some even call themselves bodies, but there are certain Christian sects

01:00:01 – 01:00:06:	that will go close to, if not over the line, of actually rejecting Christmas and Easter,

01:00:06 – 01:00:13:	they're the most basic Christian holidays. It's not for nothing that that sort of rejection

01:00:14 – 01:00:20:	invariably follows rejection of the creeds, because they'll say, well, those are man-made too.

01:00:20 – 01:00:24:	As we've talked about in past episodes, no, they're not. The Nicene Creed is a collection of

01:00:24 – 01:00:31:	quotations from Scripture, just like the Lutheran liturgy is a collection of quotations from Scripture.

01:00:32 – 01:00:40:	Is the Creed or the liturgy inspired by God? Not according to itself, but insofar as every word

01:00:40 – 01:00:46:	of it is strayed from God's mouth. It's all good. It's all profitable. It's things that we should be

01:00:46 – 01:00:50:	remembering and bringing to mind and confessing publicly.

01:00:52 – 01:00:57:	One of the good examples, I think, of the church calendar evolving over time

01:00:57 – 01:01:04:	is Trinity Sunday. This is a Western observance. I think the east also has a form of it that is

01:01:04 – 01:01:11:	fairly late in church development, but it's interesting for the reason that the Trinity

01:01:11 – 01:01:18:	Sunday observance began not with the clergy, but with Christians. It began with Christian

01:01:18 – 01:01:26:	observances forcing the clergy to recognize what became Trinity Sunday. This was before the

01:01:26 – 01:01:32:	Reformation. Initially, Rome fought it, but it was salutary, so they permitted it. Then,

01:01:32 – 01:01:38:	eventually, after a couple centuries, it became formalized. I think it's a good example of something

01:01:39 – 01:01:45:	do you have to have Trinity Sunday? No. It's clearly not a law. For over a thousand years,

01:01:45 – 01:01:51:	Christians had no such thing. Then one day, someone said, you know what, it'd be a good idea to devote

01:01:51 – 01:01:57:	one of these special days specifically to the doctrines of the Trinity. Others agreed.

01:01:57 – 01:02:00:	Frankly, it was mostly the Christians and the pews who agreed, and then, eventually,

01:02:00 – 01:02:08:	the church capitulated. That's a good thing. One of the great things that I really enjoy on

01:02:08 – 01:02:14:	Trinity Sunday is the recitation of the Athanasian Creed, because it's something that's an important

01:02:14 – 01:02:19:	creed from antiquity that doesn't get much play today, but it's very important just for revealing

01:02:20 – 01:02:27:	almost everything that we can faithfully say about the Trinity in such a way that is

01:02:27 – 01:02:33:	understandable to the extent that it's plain language, but you start to get a sense from reading it

01:02:33 – 01:02:39:	how inscrutable God is in ways that are omitted from the Nicene and the Apostles Creed,

01:02:39 – 01:02:45:	because they were solving different problems. So Trinity Sunday became an occasion for Christians

01:02:45 – 01:02:51:	in numerous denominations to recite the Athanasian Creed at least once a year. I think that's a good

01:02:51 – 01:02:56:	thing. It's profitable. Is it law? No. Are you going to hell if you don't do it? No, of course not.

01:02:56 – 01:03:01:	On the other hand, if it's a good thing that's been going on for at this point close to a thousand

01:03:01 – 01:03:09:	years in varying degrees of observance, why would you get rid of it? It's kind of a jerk

01:03:09 – 01:03:13:	question that some people ask that's not necessarily sincere, but I almost wonder, what are you afraid

01:03:13 – 01:03:20:	of? What is it about having a Trinity Sunday that might make certain preachers nervous,

01:03:21 – 01:03:26:	because as we said when we were talking about the creeds in past episodes, when you bookend

01:03:27 – 01:03:33:	the preaching with one of the creeds, it provides a contrast with whatever the preacher is saying.

01:03:33 – 01:03:37:	And so a faithful preacher is never going to say anything that's going to contradict the creeds.

01:03:38 – 01:03:42:	An unfaithful preacher, if he's messing with some of those core doctrines,

01:03:42 – 01:03:45:	there's going to be a contrast that even a typical Christian in the pews

01:03:46 – 01:03:51:	is probably going to be able to pick up on. So you know, Pastor, you said this in the sermon,

01:03:51 – 01:03:57:	but the creed says this. Can you help me understand why there seems to be a disconnect?

01:03:57 – 01:04:00:	Am I misunderstanding something? And hopefully that's the case. You know, most of the time,

01:04:00 – 01:04:05:	that should be the case. If you have a faithless pastor or one who's simply confused and neuroneous,

01:04:05 – 01:04:13:	then the creed is acted as an ancient bulwark against false teaching. Now, is that man made?

01:04:14 – 01:04:19:	At some point, it doesn't matter. The question is, is it true and is it salutary? If it is,

01:04:19 – 01:04:23:	let's keep it around because it's going to be beneficial. It's certainly going to be far more

01:04:23 – 01:04:28:	beneficial than whatever crap is going up on the projectors every Sunday, because that stuff is

01:04:28 – 01:04:33:	all ephemeral. That stuff is not going to stick. It's in one ear and out the other. And you've

01:04:33 – 01:04:38:	forgotten by the time you get home, never mind when you're 90. The things that we're talking about,

01:04:38 – 01:04:44:	the things that are important in the church life and the liturgical life are ones that reinforce

01:04:44 – 01:04:48:	and build up the faith, that keep us focused on God's promises and on His things, and give us

01:04:48 – 01:04:55:	a reassurance that we are part of the whole body of Christ, not simply one denomination,

01:04:55 – 01:05:01:	but part of the entire church writ large. And these major marks are marks of the church.

01:05:01 – 01:05:04:	And so when someone comes along and is like, I don't need any of that stuff,

01:05:05 – 01:05:11:	the more they say that, the more in danger they are of rejecting things that are actually fundamental,

01:05:11 – 01:05:16:	that are actually matters of sin. And so it's not that these are necessarily all guardrails,

01:05:16 – 01:05:22:	but when they're good affirmative teaching tools, and you get rid of them, you're necessarily getting

01:05:22 – 01:05:29:	rid of whatever teaching is going to have been enforced by that sort of repetition. It's just,

01:05:29 – 01:05:34:	it's a natural way that humans work. You do the same thing over and over enough times,

01:05:34 – 01:05:39:	you get really good at it. That's a beneficial thing. It's not a matter of boredom. It should be a

01:05:39 – 01:05:45:	matter in most occasions of pride. I don't know that there's necessarily the occasion for pride in

01:05:46 – 01:05:52:	the church service, but there's certainly the occasion for giving thanks to be part of something

01:05:52 – 01:05:59:	as much as possible that's ancient. It's ironic that although Lutherans split from the Roman Catholic

01:05:59 – 01:06:06:	Church, today some of the liturgical practices that are closest to what used to be Roman practice

01:06:06 – 01:06:13:	are found among some LCMS congregations that have preserved many of the rites, many of the forms,

01:06:13 – 01:06:18:	apart from those things where we doctrinally disagree with what pre-Vatican II churches had.

01:06:18 – 01:06:25:	So I've had Catholics see streams of LCMS services and say, man, I wish my local parish were like

01:06:25 – 01:06:31:	that because it was more Catholic than what they have now. The reason for that is that we didn't

01:06:31 – 01:06:36:	despise the things that were good by themselves. One of the really cool things in the video we've

01:06:36 – 01:06:42:	linked a few times from Matt Whitman with the 10-Minute Bible Hour when he visited the Lutheran

01:06:42 – 01:06:47:	Church, the LCMS church. At the end of the very first video, he said something I always stuck

01:06:47 – 01:06:52:	with me because it was such a great quote. He said, when he went to that church, he expected

01:06:52 – 01:06:58:	something that would be very 1600s. What he found was something that was all 2,000 years of church

01:06:58 – 01:07:04:	at once. He paused and reflected. I have a lot more to think about. It was clear that it really

01:07:04 – 01:07:11:	made an impression on him that he was a reformed guy of some stripe. The doctrine that was taught

01:07:11 – 01:07:16:	in that one service he was at was very familiar. That was in his words. I get all the doctrine,

01:07:16 – 01:07:22:	but the practice was very distinctly to his eyes and ears that seemed very Roman Catholic.

01:07:22 – 01:07:27:	But when he looked at it analytically, he realized that it was just Christian.

01:07:28 – 01:07:35:	It was the Western Christian church without the stuff that was specific to Rome, which was

01:07:35 – 01:07:40:	Luther's entire goal. That was a purpose. It wasn't revolution. It wasn't to throw away

01:07:40 – 01:07:45:	everything that had ever been done. It was just to clean up a mess because the

01:07:45 – 01:07:52:	Rome had become a depreciating asset. They had some deferred maintenance that needed some upkeep,

01:07:52 – 01:07:59:	needs some doctrinal upkeep. When that attempt was rejected, we had to go in our own direction.

01:07:59 – 01:08:04:	It was another to desire. We preserved as much as we could because it was good. The things that

01:08:04 – 01:08:11:	were good were kept. We continue to do things like singing hymns that were sung 1600 years ago

01:08:11 – 01:08:16:	using liturgical forms. In some cases, they are even older than that. That's a good thing.

01:08:16 – 01:08:21:	Personally, I take comfort in that. The fact that I'm not standing there every Sunday doing

01:08:21 – 01:08:27:	something entirely new that I'm part of something that's been going on for hundreds and thousands of

01:08:27 – 01:08:35:	years, that's part of what it means to be Christian. You're not solo. You're not by yourself doing

01:08:35 – 01:08:40:	your own thing. It's not what every man thinks is right in his own eyes. It's what Christians have

01:08:40 – 01:08:46:	agreed on is a good thing. It's a blessing. That's what this is about. Again, these are about

01:08:46 – 01:08:52:	blessings from God's things preserved through time. As tradition, these are not laws. These are

01:08:52 – 01:08:59:	not matters of damnation. When you start throwing them away and saying, I can do better, it turns

01:08:59 – 01:09:03:	out no one ever does. No one has ever improved on any of the things that they've thrown away.

01:09:03 – 01:09:09:	They've only ever ended up with worse, either shoddy or they're an imitation that's crummy,

01:09:09 – 01:09:14:	or just ripped it out entirely and done something that is demonstrably poorer for it.

01:09:17 – 01:09:23:	In this modern age, where there are so many men who are looking for something that feels traditional,

01:09:23 – 01:09:27:	they don't understand doctrine. They don't understand the historical stuff. They just want

01:09:27 – 01:09:32:	something that seems a bit more atemporal because they understand that where they are today is a

01:09:32 – 01:09:39:	hellscape and it's terrible. Churches, including Rome, the Latin mass in particular in the east,

01:09:39 – 01:09:44:	frankly, one of the appeals of the east is that it feels old. It feels atemporal. Latin mass,

01:09:44 – 01:09:50:	the same thing. The liturgical forms feel old because they are. Everyone senses it. You come

01:09:50 – 01:09:55:	in and you're like, this is, some people think it's anachronistic. I think that what Matt said

01:09:55 – 01:10:00:	was correct. It's all 2,000 years of church at once. It's not an anachronism. It's that

01:10:01 – 01:10:05:	it has been preserved throughout time because God's things are eternal.

01:10:05 – 01:10:12:	God's word is eternal. When it comes to us in the liturgy, it should feel a bit like that too.

01:10:12 – 01:10:16:	It shouldn't be a laser light show. It should be something that would be recognized in other

01:10:16 – 01:10:23:	centuries as familiar. That's part of being a participant in the body of Christ. We as Lutherans

01:10:23 – 01:10:28:	think that that's beneficial. It's a good thing. Part of the core of the cycle of the church year

01:10:29 – 01:10:38:	is alternating fasts and feasts. That is both a technical term, but it is also literal because

01:10:38 – 01:10:45:	fasting again is part of the Christian life. Yes, it's fallen by the wayside for most modern

01:10:45 – 01:10:52:	Christians, but it is something that we should be doing because it does not say if you fast. It says

01:10:52 – 01:10:59:	when you fast. But each Sunday is a feast day. So even during penitential seasons, you have

01:11:00 – 01:11:06:	the punctuation of the joy of a church service. You have the feast day that is the divine service

01:11:06 – 01:11:15:	that is the Gottesdienst. But there's another aspect to having a liturgical calendar,

01:11:15 – 01:11:21:	having a church year that I think is often neglected, but I want to highlight it specifically.

01:11:22 – 01:11:28:	And that is there's a delayed gratification built into the church year.

01:11:30 – 01:11:36:	We know this when it comes to cyclical readings. If you have a particular part of scripture that

01:11:36 – 01:11:40:	you like and you're following electionary, you'll eventually get to that book that you really like

01:11:40 – 01:11:47:	and you'll very much enjoy that. And we've mentioned books we like before. The same thing happens

01:11:47 – 01:11:52:	with the church year, with the calendar, because there'll be for instance, certain hymns.

01:11:54 – 01:12:01:	There will be certain hymns that are sung on certain days in the church year. And so for

01:12:01 – 01:12:07:	instance, you may really like for all the saints and that's sung on all saints day. So you have

01:12:07 – 01:12:12:	to wait for November for that one to come back around. And I think that's a good thing. I think

01:12:12 – 01:12:18:	that churches should reserve certain hymns for certain days. It's good to have that expectation

01:12:18 – 01:12:26:	to look forward to that. And you have that if you have this liturgical worship. If you just go to

01:12:27 – 01:12:31:	your church service and it's whatever the worship leader feels like singing that Sunday,

01:12:32 – 01:12:38:	there's no looking forward to these things. There's no expectation of we'll have this part of this

01:12:38 – 01:12:43:	service on this day. And I can look forward to that and I know it's coming. And part of the

01:12:43 – 01:12:48:	Christian life is expectation. It is looking forward because ultimately, of course, we're

01:12:48 – 01:12:53:	looking forward to paradise. But you look forward to the blessings of God. If you are married, you

01:12:53 – 01:12:57:	look forward to the blessings of children. There are all these blessings, this expectation built

01:12:57 – 01:13:01:	into the Christian life. And you have that in the calendar. If you don't have the calendar,

01:13:02 – 01:13:08:	you're missing out on these things. And so you won't get to look forward to Reformation Sunday.

01:13:08 – 01:13:12:	And singing a mighty fortress, although that one is used other times in the church year as well.

01:13:14 – 01:13:20:	Or if you like thy strong word, which is used as part of our music for this podcast.

01:13:21 – 01:13:27:	You have these things that are blessings from God and pictures of the Christian life. Again,

01:13:27 – 01:13:33:	these are teaching. But you have them only if you keep the good things that were passed down to us

01:13:33 – 01:13:39:	by our forefathers. Instead of jettisoning them because, well, I don't see the reason why we

01:13:39 – 01:13:45:	should have to have these. They had very good reasons for maintaining them. And the men who

01:13:45 – 01:13:52:	instituted them originally had very good reasons for doing so. And unless we have even more compelling

01:13:52 – 01:13:58:	reasons for altering them, we should not. Because we lose out on part of the Christian life on part

01:13:58 – 01:14:05:	of Christian practice if we do not have these things. And as has been the case with so many other

01:14:05 – 01:14:12:	episodes of this podcast, we're not speaking of things that are absolutely required for a Christian.

01:14:13 – 01:14:20:	The issue of baptism comes to mind. Must you absolutely be baptized in order to be saved? No.

01:14:21 – 01:14:25:	That is the position of Scripture, quite frankly, but it is the Lutheran position.

01:14:25 – 01:14:31:	That is what we believe. Should you be baptized? Absolutely. Is it a blessing from God? Of course.

01:14:32 – 01:14:38:	That is the case with so many of these things. What we are saying, the thing for which we are

01:14:38 – 01:14:45:	advocating is that you have the fullness of the Christian doctrine, the fullness of the Christian

01:14:45 – 01:14:52:	life, not the minimum. Yes, you could go ahead and live your life as a minimal Christian with a

01:14:52 – 01:14:57:	minimum of God's blessings, with a minimum of the blessings passed down to you from the

01:14:57 – 01:15:02:	historic church. And you may very well still be a Christian. That is entirely possible.

01:15:02 – 01:15:09:	But why would you want that? If God is offering you this wealth of blessings, why would you say,

01:15:09 – 01:15:14:	no, I'll just have the appetizer? Don't do that. That's not the Christian life. The Christian life

01:15:14 – 01:15:20:	is receiving the fullness of God's blessings, whatever blessing God wants to give you, say,

01:15:20 – 01:15:27:	by all means, and more. That is the response. That is part of what prayer is. Prayer is asking

01:15:27 – 01:15:33:	God for things. Yes, there's a returning of Thanksgiving as well. But the greatest worship

01:15:33 – 01:15:37:	of God is turning to Him, looking to Him in the day of trouble and expecting good from Him.

01:15:38 – 01:15:44:	And we see that in all aspects of the Christian life. The sacraments are a blessing from God.

01:15:44 – 01:15:47:	If you don't have the sacraments in your church, can you still be Christian?

01:15:48 – 01:15:52:	You can still be Christian, but you're missing out. You've rejected some of the good things

01:15:52 – 01:16:00:	of God. If you have a pastor who focuses only on, say, the synoptic gospels and reads nothing

01:16:00 – 01:16:05:	else from Scripture, can you still be a Christian? Sure, you're missing out. The same thing with

01:16:05 – 01:16:12:	the church calendar. If you jettison these good things, you are missing out on blessings

01:16:12 – 01:16:18:	that are freely available to you. And there's no reason to do that. You are limiting your Christian

01:16:18 – 01:16:25:	life. You are limiting the blessings from God for no reason. And so no, it's not required of

01:16:25 – 01:16:30:	Christians. You don't have to have a church calendar. You could have a Christian church service,

01:16:30 – 01:16:37:	where you did the exact same thing, sung the exact same hymns, never deviated from that whatsoever,

01:16:37 – 01:16:41:	didn't change with the seasons, didn't recognize Christmas officially. Obviously,

01:16:41 – 01:16:44:	you have to believe in Christmas, but you didn't change at all for the seasons of the

01:16:44 – 01:16:49:	church. And you could still be Christian. But why would you do that to your children?

01:16:49 – 01:16:54:	And why would you deprive yourself of all of these blessings that have been passed down to us?

01:16:56 – 01:17:01:	Again, to be explicit, to make sure we are absolutely clear, these things are not required,

01:17:02 – 01:17:07:	but they are good. They are good for unity. They are good for order. They are good for teaching.

01:17:07 – 01:17:09:	And they are, quite frankly, also good for your soul.

01:17:11 – 01:17:17:	One of the passages that often gets used against those who would advocate for some form of

01:17:18 – 01:17:21:	formality and worship, like using a calendar, a shared calendar in particular,

01:17:22 – 01:17:30:	is Romans 14. I want to read this long passage because, as I was taking a look at it again today,

01:17:30 – 01:17:35:	in light of that Twitter thread that I mentioned earlier, where a guy just made a very

01:17:36 – 01:17:42:	neutral, inoffensive comment saying, hey, the liturgical calendar is beneficial for teaching

01:17:42 – 01:17:48:	in churches. And he was attacked. He was dogpiled by people who called themselves Christians.

01:17:48 – 01:17:54:	And so when I then looked at this passage in Romans 14, I realized that it was not a condemnation of

01:17:54 – 01:17:59:	what he was saying. It was actually a condemnation of those who use the so-called regulative

01:18:00 – 01:18:06:	principle as a tamer against Christians. I'm going to read this whole thing here and talk about it

01:18:06 – 01:18:11:	for a minute. As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but do not quarrel over opinions.

01:18:12 – 01:18:16:	One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables.

01:18:16 – 01:18:21:	Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains

01:18:21 – 01:18:27:	pass judgment on the one who eats. For God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on

01:18:27 – 01:18:32:	the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls, and he will be

01:18:32 – 01:18:39:	upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day as better than another,

01:18:39 – 01:18:45:	while another esteems all days alike. Each one should fully be convinced in his own mind. The one

01:18:45 – 01:18:51:	who observes the day observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats eats in honor of the Lord,

01:18:51 – 01:18:55:	since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains abstains in honor of the Lord

01:18:55 – 01:19:00:	and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we

01:19:00 – 01:19:05:	live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we

01:19:05 – 01:19:11:	die, we are the Lords. To this end, Christ died and lived again. That he may be the Lord for both the

01:19:11 – 01:19:16:	dead and the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you? Why do you despise your

01:19:16 – 01:19:21:	brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. For as it is written,

01:19:21 – 01:19:26:	as I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.

01:19:26 – 01:19:29:	So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

01:19:31 – 01:19:37:	This passage specifically deals with one man esteeming all days alike, and another man esteeming

01:19:37 – 01:19:42:	one day as better than another. And this is generally one of the key proof texts that's used

01:19:42 – 01:19:49:	to attack any form of liturgical calendar. I think a crucial thing to acknowledge when you're

01:19:49 – 01:19:53:	looking at this passage is to whom was Paul writing. Obviously, he's writing to all of us.

01:19:53 – 01:19:58:	I'm not trying to pluck this from its context so we can say, oh, it doesn't apply to us.

01:19:59 – 01:20:03:	But when you specifically look at the church in Rome, when Paul was writing,

01:20:03 – 01:20:08:	he was addressing a nascent church. I don't think it's clear that anyone had actually visited there

01:20:08 – 01:20:16:	before any apostles. I'm not sure if it's recorded. So what we can infer from the historical context

01:20:16 – 01:20:21:	is that it would have probably been a large number of Jews who had converted to Christianity or had

01:20:22 – 01:20:26:	fleshed out their Jewishness as Christians and believing in the Messiah,

01:20:27 – 01:20:32:	along with Roman converts to Christianity. Because remember, they had the Septuagint there,

01:20:32 – 01:20:37:	they'd been primed. Some of them may have already been believers. When the Messiah came,

01:20:37 – 01:20:43:	there was an influx of men saying, I want to be part of the way. And so they would have been

01:20:43 – 01:20:48:	gathering together. Jews and Gentiles alike in the same place, probably in synagogues at this point.

01:20:49 – 01:20:54:	And some of the things that Paul was addressing in that place were disputes among them.

01:20:54 – 01:21:00:	Because the very first heresy that emerged in the early church was Judaism. It was those

01:21:01 – 01:21:07:	Jews who had been practicing. When they recognized that the Messiah had come,

01:21:08 – 01:21:13:	they still didn't fully understand what that meant. Even Peter himself,

01:21:13 – 01:21:19:	God had to come to him in a vision multiple times with the animals on the sheet coming down from

01:21:19 – 01:21:24:	heaven. And God said, take and eat. And he said, Lord, nothing unclean has ever touched my lips.

01:21:24 – 01:21:30:	And God said, kill and eat, eat it. Anything that I have made is not unclean. Peter specifically

01:21:30 – 01:21:39:	needed to be told that the old separations were set aside and that Jesus completing the old covenant

01:21:39 – 01:21:44:	meant that it was no longer restricted for these things to occur. And so it's inevitable that in

01:21:44 – 01:21:49:	this day, where you have Jews and Gentiles gathering together in a synagogue, there would

01:21:49 – 01:21:54:	have been Judaism naturally occurring. Because frankly, at that point, a lot of the Jews didn't

01:21:54 – 01:21:58:	know any better. And so a number of Paul's epistles were specifically saying, look,

01:21:59 – 01:22:03:	you guys are believers in Christ. You have received the faith that the Messiah came.

01:22:04 – 01:22:11:	Now stop holding others to the old law. You don't tell someone who's a convert to be circumcised.

01:22:11 – 01:22:15:	You don't tell them to observe the specific patterns of feasts and festivals. You don't tell

01:22:15 – 01:22:22:	them not to eat certain things. All of that is completed in Christ. And this was certainly one

01:22:22 – 01:22:29:	of the disputes that he was addressing here. So when Paul says to them, one person esteems one

01:22:29 – 01:22:33:	day is better than another, while another steams all days alike, in that context, that's absolutely

01:22:33 – 01:22:38:	what he's talking about. The Gentiles who were coming in, they didn't have the baggage of the

01:22:38 – 01:22:43:	old ceremonial system. Now again, I'm not trying to say this only applies to them and it doesn't

01:22:43 – 01:22:48:	apply to us, but I'm saying when you specifically look at what was going on there, I think it's

01:22:48 – 01:22:54:	frankly kind of the opposite of what the regulars principle guys say today. Because what's happening

01:22:54 – 01:22:59:	today, when someone posts or says something like, we're saying here that the church calendar is good

01:22:59 – 01:23:04:	actually, and inevitably will make a bunch of guys angry for saying, that's not a law, you're

01:23:04 – 01:23:11:	making that a law. Well, I'm telling you guys, you are violating Romans 14. You are sinning

01:23:11 – 01:23:17:	by condemning someone for observing a church calendar. Full stop. That's what this passage is

01:23:17 – 01:23:22:	saying. You are the ones who are prohibiting someone for practicing in such a manner. You're

01:23:22 – 01:23:28:	saying, that's not Christian, no Christian would do that. Well, you are condemned by Romans 14.

01:23:28 – 01:23:32:	Period. Now, as I said earlier, we didn't want this to be a plan club. So I don't want to beat

01:23:32 – 01:23:36:	up on you guys. I would have a break and come back and I'd be happy and everyone getting along.

01:23:36 – 01:23:40:	Hopefully it'll be just one church, maybe Jesus will come back and know this crap will matter

01:23:40 – 01:23:47:	anymore. It's not okay for us to be at each other's throats over those things, which is,

01:23:48 – 01:23:51:	from the very moment that we began this episode, the spirit of what we're trying to say.

01:23:52 – 01:23:55:	I'm going to go back to the very first thing. As for one who is weak in the faith,

01:23:55 – 01:24:01:	welcome him, but do not quarrel over opinions. Church calendar is absolutely an opinion. It

01:24:01 – 01:24:07:	is not something to quarrel over. I'm not going to argue with the ortho guy who wants to celebrate

01:24:07 – 01:24:12:	Christmas two weeks after I do whatever. I'm glad he's celebrating Christmas. That's a good thing.

01:24:12 – 01:24:16:	The fact that there are differences in calendars, that there are differences in the specific

01:24:16 – 01:24:22:	observations, some of that's just natural. If you're separated by space and time, of course,

01:24:22 – 01:24:27:	there are going to be different traditions. That's okay. It would be quarreling over opinions

01:24:27 – 01:24:33:	to condemn them for those practices. Again, even the practices where I would condemn some of the

01:24:33 – 01:24:39:	things on the Roman Catholic calendar, it's not that they're observing the wrong feasts.

01:24:39 – 01:24:44:	It's that I think that the doctrine underlying it is not substantiated by scripture. That's my

01:24:44 – 01:24:50:	concern. That ceases to be a matter of opinion because it's a matter of doctrinal correctness,

01:24:50 – 01:24:54:	which they would agree as well, just in the opposite direction because the pope dogmatized

01:24:54 – 01:24:58:	some of those things. It was one of the few areas where there were ex-cathedra pronouncements,

01:24:58 – 01:25:04:	specifically dealing with some of the Marian stuff. Those cease to be matters of opinion when

01:25:04 – 01:25:09:	they go to such strongly held beliefs. This is also the case with the guys who will swoop in and

01:25:09 – 01:25:15:	condemn someone for saying, hey, the church calendar is good actually. To condemn that is to

01:25:15 – 01:25:21:	functionally act as a Judaizer. You may not condemn a man for observing a calendar because

01:25:21 – 01:25:27:	you're the one who's quarreling over opinions. Separately, in the rest of this conversation

01:25:27 – 01:25:33:	today is about the fact that this is a salutary opinion. Yes, somebody came up with Christmas.

01:25:33 – 01:25:38:	Somebody came up with Easter as the idea that, hey, let's remember what happened last year. Let's

01:25:38 – 01:25:43:	remember what happened 100 years ago. Remember what happened 2,000 years ago. That's a man's

01:25:43 – 01:25:50:	opinion only insofar as it's a rational recognition of something that's absolutely true. Again,

01:25:50 – 01:25:57:	when we look to the cyclical nature of history itself, of creation itself, and of how church

01:25:57 – 01:26:03:	practice, going back to the Levitical days, it's always been the case that there were observances.

01:26:04 – 01:26:11:	Do you think that the same God who told them to observe the Passover and those other things,

01:26:11 – 01:26:14:	do you think that he stopped caring about observances? Do you think that he said,

01:26:15 – 01:26:20:	it doesn't matter. I mean, you just forget about it. As Corey said earlier, it's explicitly not the

01:26:20 – 01:26:25:	case. It is not a law which day you do it, but there are certain things that you must confess.

01:26:26 – 01:26:32:	You must confess Christmas as Christ was incarnate. That's in the creeds. You must

01:26:32 – 01:26:38:	confess that he died. That's Good Friday. You must confess that he was resurrected. That's Easter.

01:26:38 – 01:26:43:	If you confess those things, why would you then not remember the days as days of commemoration?

01:26:44 – 01:26:51:	See, we're not turning a calendar into a law, but if your calendar is not a reflection of your

01:26:51 – 01:26:58:	confession, what is it that you're really confessing? To confess that Christ was resurrected from the

01:26:58 – 01:27:03:	dead is to confess that there's an Easter-sized hole missing in your calendar, if you don't observe

01:27:03 – 01:27:09:	it. So observe it. Is that a law? No, but it's consistent with your confession. It's the Christian

01:27:09 – 01:27:15:	life being aligned with the Christian confession. That's really where the rubber meets the road

01:27:15 – 01:27:20:	with this stuff. It's not making a law to say we should have a calendar and we should use it

01:27:20 – 01:27:24:	consistently, but when you start chipping away and saying, I don't believe this. I'm not going to do

01:27:24 – 01:27:28:	that. I'm not going to do the other thing, you very rapidly get to the heart of the Christian

01:27:28 – 01:27:34:	faith itself. That's where it really becomes an issue. Again, Romans 14 expressly condemns

01:27:34 – 01:27:39:	anyone who would attack a man for observing a calendar. We are not attacking those who don't

01:27:39 – 01:27:45:	observe it. We're saying you guys are missing out. There's a treasure from the church, from

01:27:45 – 01:27:50:	Christians going back thousands of years that you're missing out on. Please join us in enjoying

01:27:50 – 01:27:55:	these treasures of the church collectively. This is for all of our benefit. It doesn't belong to

01:27:55 – 01:27:59:	Lutherans, just like it doesn't belong to the Pope. That's why we were not shy about taking whatever

01:28:00 – 01:28:06:	was preservable from what Rome had. If it was good, we kept it because it's Christian. It's

01:28:06 – 01:28:11:	not his. For someone today to say, that's the Pope's stuff. No, it isn't. It's my stuff. It's

01:28:11 – 01:28:18:	your stuff. It is your inheritance as a Western Christian. If you despise it, you're not despising

01:28:18 – 01:28:23:	the Pope. You're despising your fathers in the faith. Frankly, you're despising your children,

01:28:23 – 01:28:29:	too. If you take away something that was an inheritance and you refuse to pass it on,

01:28:29 – 01:28:35:	you're breaking a chain that God has established through time because the faith is transmitted

01:28:35 – 01:28:40:	through time from man to man. When you start picking away and tearing pieces out of it,

01:28:40 – 01:28:48:	you're doing real harm. This continuity is not a law, but as a matter of human wisdom,

01:28:48 – 01:28:52:	why would you remove that, which is good? It's fundamentally what it's about. I'm not saying

01:28:52 – 01:28:55:	you're going to hell if you don't do it. We're saying you're missing out if you don't do it.

01:28:56 – 01:29:00:	If you say we're sinning by doing it, you are clearly sinning. I wish that weren't the case.

01:29:00 – 01:29:06:	I wish we'd get on the same page about this stuff, but as a bare minimum, we cannot quarrel over

01:29:06 – 01:29:12:	opinions and emphatically as not what we're doing here. You can tell very clearly that we're not

01:29:12 – 01:29:17:	quarreling over opinions because it's Advent and we haven't said which color you should use for your

01:29:17 – 01:29:23:	candles, as that is one of the minor points over which people will quarrel during the season of

01:29:23 – 01:29:28:	Advent. Completely ridiculous. For historical reasons, some churches use blue, some other

01:29:28 – 01:29:33:	churches use purple, or they'll call them sarum and violet, depending on what you want to call

01:29:33 – 01:29:39:	the colors. Use whichever one matches your pyramids. That's probably the best advice. I have one set

01:29:39 – 01:29:45:	of each. These are the minor things that don't matter. These are the little things over which

01:29:45 – 01:29:52:	you can squabble that ultimately it's a matter of preference when it comes to some of these

01:29:52 – 01:30:00:	matters, which color candles you use is largely a matter of preference. Yes, there is a meaning to

01:30:00 – 01:30:07:	the colors established as historic precedent in the church. Yes, it is good in some way to follow

01:30:07 – 01:30:15:	some of these. For instance, using black pyramids on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and Holy Saturday

01:30:15 – 01:30:21:	is good as a teaching tool to remember the point of these days in the church here.

01:30:22 – 01:30:27:	Incidentally, I think it's worth noting that Ash Wednesday is a great example of what I said earlier

01:30:27 – 01:30:32:	where you can look forward to something in the church here and maybe it ties into the fact that

01:30:32 – 01:30:40:	we both like the Book of Job. But I think it is important to hear at least once a year the words

01:30:40 – 01:30:46:	of Genesis 3 and you hear these on Ash Wednesday and those churches that recognize that observe

01:30:46 – 01:30:53:	Ash Wednesday for dust thou art and unto dust shout thou return. That is a vitally important

01:30:53 – 01:30:59:	thing for the Christian to hear and to remember it gives you the context of not just the reality

01:30:59 – 01:31:05:	of human life, but it gives you that necessary foundation to understand

01:31:05 – 01:31:12:	what Christ did, the meaning of Christ's sacrifice, the meaning of that redemption of creation,

01:31:14 – 01:31:19:	what happens to us in this life and how it would have been an ultimate fate without Christ.

01:31:20 – 01:31:25:	And so you have that reminder in the church calendar, something you can look forward to

01:31:25 – 01:31:28:	as part of the cycle of your year in the church.

01:31:29 – 01:31:35:	But the matter of these minor things, we are not going to squabble over those and Christians

01:31:35 – 01:31:39:	shouldn't squabble over those. That doesn't mean you can't discuss them. You can have a

01:31:39 – 01:31:43:	civilized discussion of whether you want to have purple or blue candles. That's fine.

01:31:44 – 01:31:52:	You don't start a fight over it. The church should not be divided over minor matters.

01:31:52 – 01:31:59:	Now, division over doctrine and disagreeing on the sacraments, these things, those are

01:31:59 – 01:32:04:	reasons to be in separate church bodies, because if you do not agree on the core matters,

01:32:05 – 01:32:12:	you're not in communion. And then you can't have communion because part of that is discerning

01:32:12 – 01:32:17:	the body and blood. It's not just discerning the body and blood in the literal sense there.

01:32:17 – 01:32:22:	Discerning that you are part of the greater body. And that means that you have to have these

01:32:22 – 01:32:28:	agreements in doctrine, agreements on the grand issues, but you can have disagreements on the

01:32:28 – 01:32:35:	color of the pyramids. There are matters that require division and there are matters that

01:32:35 – 01:32:42:	do not require division on the issue of matters that do not require division. Those who have

01:32:43 – 01:32:49:	rejected things, that were inherited from our forefathers, that were good, that should not

01:32:49 – 01:32:54:	have been rejected for which there was no sufficient reason to reject them, that is

01:32:54 – 01:33:01:	an impermissible division. And those who have left the church over those issues should not

01:33:01 – 01:33:08:	have done so. It was sin to do that. Schism is not always sinful. It depends upon the

01:33:08 – 01:33:14:	reason why. If it is again over doctrine or theology, then you are required to separate

01:33:14 – 01:33:22:	from a body that is teaching falsely. But if it is over adiaphora, you are not permitted to separate.

01:33:23 – 01:33:28:	Just because you, again, it may seem trivial, but there are people who take this this seriously,

01:33:28 – 01:33:32:	just because you do not like the color of the candles does not mean that you need to find a

01:33:33 – 01:33:38:	new church. It means that you need to just deal with it. Ignore the color of the candles. Or

01:33:39 – 01:33:44:	learn why this other color is used, because it is probably profitable to learn the teaching you

01:33:44 – 01:33:50:	can derive from that. And so if you like the purple candles, which typically represent royalty,

01:33:50 – 01:33:56:	its representation of Christ's royalty, of his incarnation, descended from the line of David,

01:33:56 – 01:34:00:	well, maybe you should look into why they use the blue, it's a little bit different.

01:34:00 – 01:34:04:	Well, maybe you should look into why they use the blue, it's a reminder of the night sky,

01:34:04 – 01:34:10:	and many of the teachings surrounding the nativity, the angels appearing in the night sky,

01:34:10 – 01:34:15:	they have reasons for using these things. And so don't separate over these minor issues.

01:34:17 – 01:34:22:	One of the goals of the Christian church should be unity amongst those who believe.

01:34:23 – 01:34:31:	And the calendar is actually beneficial to that. And again, as I said earlier,

01:34:31 – 01:34:36:	I'll repeat it now, one of the reasons the calendar is beneficial for the purpose of unity

01:34:36 – 01:34:42:	is that it reminds us across church bodies that we all believe these core matters,

01:34:42 – 01:34:49:	that we all affirm the promises concerning the coming of Christ. Advent looks forward to that.

01:34:49 – 01:34:53:	We all affirm the incarnation, that is why we have the season of Christmas.

01:34:54 – 01:35:01:	We all affirm that Christ came to redeem the nations, that it is available to all human

01:35:01 – 01:35:08:	beings, all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. And so we observe epiphany. We affirm

01:35:08 – 01:35:13:	that we should be sorry for our sins, that we should repent, that we should recognize the fullness

01:35:13 – 01:35:18:	of our sin in order to recognize the fullness of Christ's sacrifice. And so we observe the

01:35:18 – 01:35:25:	season of Lent. We recognize that it was Christ's perfect life, death and resurrection,

01:35:25 – 01:35:31:	by which we can be saved in faith. And so we recognize the season of Easter. And we recognize

01:35:31 – 01:35:36:	the church. We recognize the communion of the saints. We recognize that this is the mystical

01:35:36 – 01:35:41:	body of Christ that exists throughout all time and is comprised of all believers,

01:35:41 – 01:35:46:	from Adam all the way until whatever unfortunate man is the last one left on this earth.

01:35:47 – 01:35:49:	And so we recognize the season of Pentecost.

01:35:51 – 01:35:57:	I just went through the entirety of the church calendar. No Christian can disagree

01:35:57 – 01:36:01:	with any of those things, because these are core parts of the Christian faith.

01:36:02 – 01:36:07:	And so there's no reason to reject this. It is a teaching tool. It is good for order.

01:36:08 – 01:36:14:	It not only creates but it highlights the unity across Christian groups. And that which is good

01:36:14 – 01:36:20:	for order and is good for unity and informs Christians, teaches them, brings them up in the

01:36:20 – 01:36:25:	faith, solidifies them in the faith. These things are good and should be preserved. And when they

01:36:25 – 01:36:31:	have been handed down to us by our forefathers, we should not squander that inheritance. It is a

01:36:31 – 01:36:37:	good thing that was preserved for us, not just by those men who came before us, but by God preserving

01:36:37 – 01:36:45:	his church. Again, we will put in the show notes a link to Owen's church calendar that has his very

01:36:45 – 01:36:50:	artistic version of the Roman Catholic calendar. He's selling copies of that. It's beautiful.

01:36:50 – 01:36:55:	If you're Roman Catholic, you should probably buy a copy. If you're not, you should enjoy it.

01:36:55 – 01:37:03:	We'll also link to another website that shows the Lutheran liturgical calendar. They're also

01:37:03 – 01:37:10:	selling less fancy, but still very nice posters of the entire church here. Just as a good reminder

01:37:10 – 01:37:17:	of what we go through as we're enjoying God's gifts week after week in church. Because if your

01:37:17 – 01:37:23:	church is observing the seasons and using the lectionary, it's going to have readings that

01:37:23 – 01:37:28:	reflect whatever is going on at that particular time of the year. On the subject of lectionary,

01:37:29 – 01:37:36:	Corey has another podcast that's just him reading from the daily lectionary every day. Then on Sunday,

01:37:36 – 01:37:42:	in particular, their readings are appointed for each day. We'll link that in the show notes as

01:37:42 – 01:37:46:	well when we're on our brief hiatus. It's something you should be listening to anyway. Again,

01:37:46 – 01:37:50:	not because Corey's doing it. He's a very good narrator and reader. He has a great voice for

01:37:50 – 01:37:57:	that. But if you do nothing else devotionally, if all you do is listen to 15 minutes of Scripture

01:37:57 – 01:38:03:	every day, you're in better shape than most people. Maybe things get screwy and that's all you have

01:38:03 – 01:38:10:	time to do. You're not able to focus and do more than that. It's still salutary. If you can spend

01:38:10 – 01:38:15:	15 minutes a day listening to Scripture while you're getting ready for work in the morning,

01:38:16 – 01:38:22:	that is a great thing. In particular, the lectionary is going to work through the entire church

01:38:22 – 01:38:27:	calendar so the readings will reflect what's going on seasonally. They're going to cover all the

01:38:27 – 01:38:34:	various stories. The lectionary and the liturgy go hand-to-hand. On the subject of opinions,

01:38:34 – 01:38:39:	there are a bunch of different lectionaries too. I personally despise the arguing over them.

01:38:39 – 01:38:44:	I don't care. For you to say that somebody is reading the Bible wrong, that makes me angry.

01:38:45 – 01:38:51:	Use whatever lectionary you're going to use. Just read the Bible regularly. While we're

01:38:51 – 01:38:55:	going for a couple of weeks, go back and listen to the back catalog. Subscribe to Corey's confident

01:38:55 – 01:39:00:	faith podcast where he does the daily lectionary readings and just start enjoying them because

01:39:00 – 01:39:05:	that is part of the church calendar. It's not super over. He mentions it every day. Here's the time

01:39:05 – 01:39:13:	of the season. But those readings are just, it's God's word and it's his gifts being poured out to

01:39:13 – 01:39:20:	us and because faith comes by hearing, frankly, I think in some cases it's almost more profitable

01:39:20 – 01:39:25:	to hear someone reading something than reading it yourself. There's just something about the way

01:39:25 – 01:39:31:	our brains work that God understood. That's how he's given these things to us. Be sure to check

01:39:31 – 01:39:35:	out the show notes this week because there's some good stuff in there that'll be interesting.

01:39:35 – 01:39:40:	It's not homework, but it's beneficial for you. That's the purpose of all this. It's not homework.

01:39:40 – 01:39:46:	It's not making laws. It's just look at these blessings. Look at these good things that God

01:39:46 – 01:39:51:	has preserved in time through the church. Let's enjoy them together. That's my entire hope for

01:39:51 – 01:39:59:	all of this for everyone. And so we will end this week's episode with a short reading from

01:39:59 – 01:40:07:	Ecclesiastes 3, something for you to ponder in the remaining week, less than a week leading up to

01:40:08 – 01:40:15:	Christmas Day. And of course this is the fourth Sunday in Advent this coming Sunday.

01:40:16 – 01:40:19:	But our reading to end this episode, Ecclesiastes 3.

01:40:38 – 01:40:43:	A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance.

01:40:44 – 01:40:50:	A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace

01:40:50 – 01:40:57:	and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to seek and a time to lose. A time to keep

01:40:57 – 01:41:04:	and a time to cast away. A time to tear and a time to sow. A time to keep silence and a time

01:41:04 – 01:41:20:	to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.

01:41:34 – 01:41:36:	Ecclesiastes 3.