Thanks to all the regular bloggers here and my friends from elsewhere on the Internet who sent greetings to my parish family! They were a big hit -- and the references to Asbury Park ("BRU-U-U-UCE!") and the sleepy backwater village of Berkeley got laughs. I posted the "hellos" on our fellowship-hall bulletin board.
Consider yourselves all members-at-large. If you're ever in Michigan and can actually find where we're at...no cover charge, I promise.
5 comments:
Glad to participate! Thanks for saying hi.
(BTW, I've been meaning to give you this link to a site called "Renewing Worship in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America."
Do you know about this? Is it of interest to you? What the heck is it?
;-)
(BTW, I did my usual pre-scan of the site - yes, it's come to that - and it seems to have no offensive religio-political slant. It mentions ECUSA - the blackest of sheep at present - in a neutral context, and I figure if they're not screaming at us, it means they're OK and not some weirdo "re-asserter" site. Right?)
Yeah..."Renewing Worship" is our new hymnal project. Our current hymnal, The Lutheran Book of Worship, is vintage late 70's, so I suppose it was inevitable in our telescoped age that the powers that be would want to change it again. There was also a sticky mess with the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod -- they were originally a partner church body in the LBW project -- it was hoped that the two denominations could at least share a hymnal -- but when the Ueberconservatives took over in that denomination, they repudiated the hymnal, supposedly for theological reasons (even though they helped create it), and published their own hymnal instead. (Marty's kids do not play well together.)
Anyhow...I really love the LBW and will be sorry to see it go, but on my list of things to be upset about, the new hymnal isn't one of them (yet). Maybe I will when I see their hymn choices, or hear the settings for the liturgy.;-) And I do like their inclusion of the catechism in the hymnal, the way it is in the BCP. I'm glad to see the Daily Office included; we have this aesthetic/ideological tug-of-war going on between High Church Lutherans and let's-be-more-Protestant Lutherans, and I was a little worried that the latter was going to gain ascendancy in the hymnal revision process. Again...we'll see, I guess.
(Oh, I pre-scan too, just to keep my sanity at a manageable level on a day-to-day basis. Which I thought I'd been doing quite well at until this weekend when I went postal over this individual on the Lutheran forums who, while he keeps hanging out there, never misses an opportunity to tell us that he used to be Lutheran but isn't anymore because we are not morally rigorous enough...if pushed, it comes out that he has his shorts in a knot over the homosexuality issue; Lutherans aren't judgmental and punitive enough when it comes to gay people. His rhetorical twin is an ex-Episcopalian, now LCMS Lutheran, who posts on the same forum, who also never misses an opportunity to mutter darkly about the "social issues" that made him bail out of the ECUSA. I'm not sure what these guys want from the rest of the group, or from me in particular, but they're incredibly patronizing and annoying, and I finally told the one individual so.;-) You know, I've never thought of myself as a particularly aggressive individual, but I did one of those "What kind of animal are you?" Quizfarm tests awhile back that identified me as a scorpion, LOL.)
Which just reminded me of the old "Far Side" cartoon where the scorpion is standing on a terrified guy's sleeping bag, saying, "The others sent me up here to ask you not to roll around so much."
BRUUUUUUCE!
*flicks lighter*
My remark about nothing ever happening seems to have put a jinx on my Happy Little Parish, as the celebrant didn't show up and didn't call, either. Mind you, I only knew it because I was back in the sacristry finishing setup at the time the deacon had her conference with the fill-in.
I love Annie Dillard's comparison of the average church service with that ill-fated polar expedition -- can't remember the explorer -- where they did absolutely everything wrong, and everyone wound up freezing to death...Dillard has a tendency toward morose Calvinism, but she says something to the effect that it's a miracle God doesn't just zap us all in exasperation.
She'd love my parish, where we work without a net most of the time.;-)
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