# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 04 02_S122
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

122

Church at the same time the most diverse services had been held, every divine service now had to be so arranged that it formed a whole subsisting by itself. With these and other related principles concerning the aim and arrangement of the divine service, the drafting of definite church orders became ever more necessary, for what confusion would have arisen if the arrangement of the divine service had been left to chance or to the pleasure of the individual congregations and the individual preachers, especially when one thinks of the great Lutheran territories. Above all, the participation of the congregation in the divine service, as something new, was a point whose careful determination was as necessary as it was difficult. A fixed, unchanging order and much that was settled in the divine service was also necessary for this reason, that the congregation might feel at home in it and find its way again and again by what is well known. Therefore all the church orders bestowed great diligence on the exact arrangement of the divine service. But they also proceeded therein with great caution, for they never neglected to send a protestation before them, that they did not mean to set up in such an order anything suited to all circumstances, unalterable, or necessary to salvation; rather, with one accord they separate God's unchangeable gifts, namely His Word and the holy Sacraments, far from all human ceremonies or ordinances.

But when these church orders often call the ceremonies adiaphora or things indifferent, which in God's Word are neither commanded nor forbidden, this is by no means to be understood as if it were all one to the Lutheran Church whether one conducted the divine service thus or otherwise. Rather, according to the 10th Article of the Formula of Concord, it is to be understood that a human ceremony is called a thing indifferent only in opposition to the papal view of the sin-removing power of their ceremonies. Likewise one would err if one supposed that the Lutheran Church had laid great weight upon arbitrariness, contradiction, or the love of innovation on the part of the individual congregation or of individual clergymen; rather, history teaches abundantly with what unsparing rigor it dealt in its proceedings with such refractoriness of individuals, from Carlstadt on. And in doctrine, resting on 1 Cor. 14:33: “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints,” it has always regarded and treated the right of arranging and altering the divine service as a right of the whole Church, has held the local congregation joined to it and the individual clergyman bound to such prescriptions of the whole Church (naturally only for the sake of the law of love), has insisted on uniformity of ceremonies, forbidden all arbitrary innovations, and well recognized the great harm of levity and changeableness in this matter. So it came about that the Lutheran order of divine service took shape fairly uniformly, not only in each several Lutheran territorial church, but — setting aside the church orders in the southwestern territories of Germany that were uniting from the beginning — in the whole of Lutheran Germany. The divergences of the German Lutheran territorial churches from one another are no greater than the differences which even the single territorial church permitted within itself.

2) The Sundays and Festival Days of the Church Year.

The Advent Season. Dr. Luther explains its significance not so much from the waiting for the coming of the LORD as rather from this, that salvation has already come and is present (Rom. 13:11), namely through the advent of Christ in the flesh, as also through His advent in the Word and in the Sacraments, without which the former would help us nothing. Yet, he says, salvation can also be referred to the future in this respect, because it is to be fulfilled only in eternal life at the coming of Christ to judgment; then he describes the significance of the Advent season in the following words: “Inasmuch as salvation was promised and believed in former times, but now is fulfilled and begun, men still keep the remembrance of the old promise of the salvation then to come; for since we live, as it were, midway between the two Advents, we ought rightly to praise both, God's mercy, who of old promised it, and God's truth, who has kept His promises and will at last fulfill them in eternal life, for this is the time in which the goodness of the promise and the truth of the fulfillment meet one another (Ps. 85:10), and so the present time comprehends in itself both, the future and the past.” (Luther's Works, XII, 1406.)—The Advent season was in the ancient Church a season of fasting, of which the Lutheran Church has retained only the prohibition of weddings and public amusements. The Gospels and Epistles now in common use are the same which were already in general use in the 6th century.

The Christmas Festival. In honor of the article that JESUS Christ, true God and true man, was born of the Virgin Mary, it shall, according to all purely Lutheran church orders, like Easter and Pentecost, be celebrated on three days (the third, however, for the most part only half), according to some uniting ones on two, according to all Reformed ones on only one day. Since the ancient Church, which still kept the vigils or holy eves before the festivals, had a fullness of pericopes, the great variety in the arrangement of the Christmas pericopes in the Lutheran Church is to be explained from this; thus there are found in Luther's writings down to the year 1522, for the third festival day, four sermons on Sirach 15:1. Only by exception does the second festival day retain the pericopes of St. Stephen's Day, and the third those of the day of John the Evangelist, for the use of the proper Christmas pericopes dates already from the fourth century; therefore our church orders mostly speak of it with Luther thus: “Instead of the festivals of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist it pleases us that the whole office of Christmas Day be held.” (X, 2753.)

As Christmas Gospels for the three festival days there are commonly used Luke 2:1–14, Luke 2:15–20, and John 1:1–14; as Christmas Epistles: Isa. 9:2–7, Titus 2:11–14, and Titus 3:4–7; the last two were not in use in the ancient Church and are sometimes transferred in the Lutheran church orders to the Sundays after Christmas. Dr. Luther especially loved the Epistle Isa. 9, which is properly a lesson for the vigil or matins. In particular he preached five sermons upon it on Christmas Day of the year 1532.

The Sunday after Christmas has, according to Dr. Luther's remark, unsuitable pericopes, in that what the Epistle says of a young heir has been wrongly referred to the child Christ, and what is told in the Gospel of Simeon and Hannah took place only five weeks later, at the presentation of Christ in the Temple; in this he indicated the right standard by which similar mistakes in the choice of pericopes are to be judged, saying: “It matters nothing about the order; it is all one which is preached at which time, if only the sense remain in its order.” (XI, 322.)

The Festival of the Circumcision of Christ occurs first from the sixth century on, and indeed at first without connection with the New Year's festival, which the heathen celebrated in honor of their idol Janus on the 1st of January amid many abominations, over which the Christians showed their grief. Only from the eleventh century on is a connection of these two festivals found; but Dr. Luther, and after him many others, returned in this also to the earlier usage of the ancient Church and preached on this day, to give the festival its right and the day its honor, solely of the circumcision and the name of JESUS Christ.

The Sunday after New Year has several pericopes, especially as the Gospel Matt. 2:13–23, the history of the innocent children, of which Dr. Luther says: “This also is an excellent history, which one should by no means let pass out of the Church, both for the sake of the doctrine and, besides, of the comfort which is therein set before us Christians.” (XIII, 2480.)

The Festival of Epiphany (January 6) is, according to all pure Lutheran church orders, to be celebrated as a whole festival day; according to the testimony of Dr. Luther the ancient Church celebrated and kept it highly, namely on account of three high miracles and revelations of God which took place about this time, namely the arrival of the Wise Men in Jerusalem, the changing of water into wine, and the revelation of the divi-