# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 05 11_S122
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...church, at the same time, the most various kinds of worship services had taken place, every worship service now had to be so arranged that it formed a self-contained whole. Given these and other related principles concerning the purpose and arrangement of worship, the drawing up of definite church orders became ever more necessary, for what confusion would have arisen if the ordering of worship had been left to chance, or to the discretion of individual congregations and individual pastors, especially when one considers the large Lutheran territories. In particular, the participation of the congregation in worship, being something new, was a point whose careful determination was as necessary as it was difficult. A fixed, unchanging order, and much that was constant in worship, was also necessary so that the congregation might feel at home in it and might always find its bearings again in what was well known to it. For this reason all church orders devoted great diligence to the precise arrangement of worship. But they also proceeded with great caution in doing so, for they never failed to issue a disclaimer beforehand, stating that they did not mean to set up in such an order anything suitable for all circumstances, unalterable, or necessary to salvation; rather, they unanimously distinguish 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 matters of indifference, which are neither commanded nor forbidden in God's Word, this is by no means to be understood as though it were all the same to the Lutheran Church whether one observed it this way or that in worship. Rather, according to Article 10 of the Formula of Concord, it is to be understood that a human ceremony is called a matter of indifference only in opposition to the papal view of the sin-removing power of its ceremonies. Likewise one would be mistaken to believe that the Lutheran Church attached great weight to the arbitrary preference, contradiction, or love of innovation of the individual congregation or of individual clergymen; rather, history teaches abundantly with what lack of consideration it dealt, in its practice, with such unruliness of individuals, beginning with Karlstadt. And doctrinally, resting on 1 Corinthians 14:33 — "God is not a God of disorder but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints" — it has always regarded and treated the right to order and alter worship as a right of the whole Church, has held the associated local congregation and the individual clergyman bound to such regulations of the whole Church (of course only for love's sake), insisted on uniformity of ceremonies, forbidden all arbitrary innovations, and recognized well the great harm of frivolity and changeableness in this matter. Thus it came about that the Lutheran order of worship took shape rather uniformly, not only within each individual Lutheran territorial church, but — apart from the church orders in the southwestern territories of Germany that from the beginning tended toward Union — throughout the whole of Lutheran Germany. The divergences among the German Lutheran territorial churches from one another are no greater than the differences which even a single territorial church allowed within itself.

2) The Sundays and Festivals of the Church Year.

Advent. Dr. Luther explains its meaning not so much in terms of waiting for the coming of the Lord, but rather in terms of the fact that salvation has already come and is present (Romans 13:11), namely through the coming of Christ in the flesh, as well as through his coming in the Word and in the sacraments, without which the former would help us nothing. Yet, he says, salvation may also be referred to the future insofar as it is only to be fulfilled in eternal life at Christ's coming to judgment; he then characterizes the meaning of Advent in the following words: "Since salvation was promised and believed long ago, but is now fulfilled and begun, one still now keeps the memory of the ancient promise of the salvation that was then still future; for since we live, as it were, in the middle between the two advents, we ought rightly to praise both — God's mercy, who once promised it, and God's truth, who has kept his promises and will finally 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 (Psalm 85:11), and thus the present time comprises within itself both the future and the past." (Luther's Works XII, 1406.) — Advent was, in the ancient Church, a season of fasting, of which the Lutheran Church has retained only the prohibition of weddings and public entertainments. The Gospels and Epistles now customary are the same ones that were already generally in use as early as the sixth century.

Christmas. In honor of the article that Jesus Christ, true God and true man, was born of the Virgin Mary, it is, according to all purely Lutheran church orders, to be celebrated — just like Easter and Pentecost — on three days (the third, however, for the most part only half a day), according to some Union-leaning orders on two, and according to all Reformed orders on only one day. Since the ancient Church, which still kept the vigils, or holy evenings, before the festivals, had an abundance of pericopes, the great variety in the arrangement of the Christmas pericopes in the Lutheran Church is to be explained from this; thus one finds in Luther's writings, up to the year 1522, four sermons on Sirach 15:1 for the third festival day. Only exceptionally does the second festival day retain the pericopes of St. Stephen's Day, and the third those of the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, for the use of the proper Christmas pericopes already dates from the fourth century; hence our church orders speak of this in agreement with Luther, thus: "In place of the feasts of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist, we are pleased that the whole service be kept as belonging to Christmas Day." (X, 2753.)

As Christmas Gospels for the three festival days, the customary ones are Luke 2:1–14, Luke 2:15–20, and John 1:1–14; as Christmas Epistles: Isaiah 9:2–7, Titus 2:11–14, and Titus 3:4–7 — the latter two were not customary in the ancient Church and are, in the Lutheran church orders, sometimes shifted to the Sundays after Christmas. Dr. Luther was especially fond of the Epistle Isaiah 9, which is properly a lesson for the vigil, or matins. In particular, he preached five sermons on it at the Christmas festival of the year 1532.

The Sunday after Christmas has, according to Dr. Luther's observation, unsuitable pericopes, inasmuch as what the Epistle says of a young heir has been wrongly applied to the Christ child, and what is told in the Gospel of Simeon and Hannah actually took place five weeks later, at the presentation of Christ in the Temple; in this connection he indicated the correct standard by which similar missteps in the choice of pericopes are to be judged, saying: "It matters nothing about the order; it makes no difference which is preached at which time, so long as the understanding remains in its order." (XI, 322.)

The Feast of the Circumcision of Christ first occurs from the sixth century onward, and at first without connection to the New Year's festival, which the heathen celebrated in honor of their idol Janus on the first of January amid many abominations, over which the Christians expressed their distress. Only from the eleventh century onward is a connection between these two festivals found; Dr. Luther, however, and after him many others, returned in this matter too to the earlier practice of the ancient Church, and preached on this day, in order to give the festival its due and the day its honor, solely on the circumcision and the name of Jesus Christ.

The Sunday after New Year has several pericopes, in particular as its Gospel Matthew 2:13–23, the account of the innocent children, of which Dr. Luther says: "That too is an excellent history, which should by no means be allowed to disappear from the church, both for the sake of the doctrine and also of the comfort which is held out to us Christians in it." (XIII, 2480.)

The Feast of Epiphany (January 6) is, according to all pure Lutheran church orders, to be observed as a full festival day; according to Dr. Luther's testimony, the ancient Church observed and celebrated it especially on account of three great wonders and revelations of God that took place at this time, namely, the coming of the wise men to Jerusalem, the changing of water into wine, and the revelation of the...