The Bronze Idol of Infrequent Communion
“At the outset we must again make the preliminary statement that we do not abolish the Mass, but religiously maintain and defend it. For among us masses are celebrated every Lord’s Day and on the other festivals, in which the Sacrament is offered to those who wish to use it, after they have been examined and absolved. And the usual public ceremonies are observed, the series of lessons, of prayers, vestments, and other like things.”
The Book of Concord is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is not a book of rules. It is a confession of faith. Confessions cannot be prescribed. As Professor Marquart said so eloquently: “One believes something because one is convinced that it is true.” We confess the Bible and the Book of Concord because we are convinced that they are true. The Bible is the Word of God, and the Book of Concord is a correct exposition of that Word. The Book of Concord describes our faith - as we express it in our doctrine, and in the way that we carry it out in practice, “in doctrine and ceremonies” as the Augustana puts it.
One of the descriptions of what it means to be Lutheran - especially at the intersection of doctrine and ceremonies - is Article 24 of both the Augsburg Confession and the Apology. According to Apology 24:1, Lutheran worship is described by every Sunday Mass (the celebration of Holy Communion in the Divine Service), and the celebration of Holy Communion at “other festivals,” with communicants being “examined and absolved” with traditional “public ceremonies” that include “the series of lessons, of prayers, vestments, and other like things.”
Having said that, there may well be good reasons for not having vestments (such as having to forego them because of some kind of adiaphoristic controversy, in which, for example, a prince were to compel pastors to wear certain vestments under pain of punishment or under the theological understanding that such things are necessary for salvation). A more common explanation for not having vestments might be poverty - especially in third-world countries. Or perhaps a pastor may find himself called to a church who, for even terrible reasons, doesn’t use vestments. He may have to forego this Lutheran practice for a time to teach why such things are described in our Book of Concord as a Lutheran practice that serves the cause of the Gospel.
Similarly, there may well be good reasons why a congregation cannot practice every-Sunday communion. One of my colleagues in Kenya - who serves six congregations - can only afford to celebrate the Lord’s Supper every two months because wine must be imported and it is expensive. In the US, we don’t have that kind of limitation - either of agriculture or of poverty. But again, a pastor who finds himself called to a congregation that practices infrequent communion - unlike that described by the Book of Concord - might very well injure the “weaker brothers” who do not realize the blessings that they are missing out on in their deviation from the Book of Concord if he were to implement it right away. He may well labor in that vineyard for years preaching and teaching so that the people themselves hunger and thirst for the Body and Blood of Christ.
Sadly, however, there are apologists for infrequent communion. There are those who argue that changing a congregation’s practice from non-weekly to a weekly celebration is somehow to dishonor the pastors and laity of times past. Others argue that weekly communion leaves less time for preaching. Others argue that frequent communion is not “special.” Others argue that weekly communion suggests that the congregants are terrible sinners. Still others make the bizarre case that moving toward weekly communion is some kind of idolatry of the Lord’s Supper itself!
Why is weekly communion the norm in apostolic practice, church history, the Lutheran confessions, and until recent centuries, simply the way that the churches of the Augsburg Confession lived out the Gospel? The Lord Himself established a weekly pattern of life when He consecrated the Sabbath Day as a Day of Rest. The Sabbath was codified in the Ten Commandments, and this weekly cycle of life plays out in our worship life as well, as we confess in the Small Catechism’s explanation of the Third Commandment:
We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.
The weekly cycle of work and rest includes a weekly cycle of worship, of “preaching and His Word.” And we experience the Word by means of what Article 24 calls the Mass (missa reflecting Latin usage) or the Divine Service (Gottesdienst reflecting the German usage). The Word, that is, Christ, comes to us by means of the Divine Service, by the public reading of the Scriptures, by preaching, and by the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
The author of the Small Catechism, Dr. Luther, would not understand why an evangelical congregation bearing his name would deliberately schedule regular Sunday prohibitions against the Sacrament of the Altar - which is what a “non-communion Sunday” actually is. The author of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology (Philip Melanchthon) never experienced such scheduled Sunday non-celebrations or even read apologies from our clergy for less frequent celebration - arguments which often pit Christ against Christ by pitting Word against Sacrament.
Historically, Pietism and Rationalism provide the fuel for withholding both the chalice and the paten from the laity. Pietism looked inward to the soul’s condition and to emotion as a means of grace, moving churches away from the liturgical formality that often accompanies the Lord’s Supper. Rationalism is ashamed of this childlike belief that the bread “is” the Body and the wine “is” the Blood. Surely, Jesus must have meant something different than what He said. It makes sense for a rational church to downplay the mystical, the sacramental, in favor of rational discourse from the pulpit.
For whatever reason, in American Lutheranism, infrequent celebration of the Supper became common, if not normative. There was a dissonance between what we confessed and what we practiced. Pastors who shepherded their flocks to the green pastures of the Lord’s Supper in accordance with their ordination vows and their confession that “we do not abolish the Mass, but religiously maintain and defend it. For among us masses are celebrated every Lord's Day and on the other festivals,” may have been pilloried as being “too Catholic” - for no other reason than the Roman Catholics - through the very narrow lens of communion frequency - were more Lutheran than the American Lutherans. This accusation is still made against confessional Lutherans, pastors and laymen alike, who advocate for every-Sunday communion.
Why weekly, and not daily, some may ask, in an attempt to mock the motives of those who wish for the sacrament every Sunday. Well, the Lord Himself established a weekly cycle of life, as did the Early Church in Acts 2:42 in terms of worship. The apostolic practice continued unabated throughout the centuries, including our Lutheran fathers of the Reformation and the Age of Lutheran Orthodoxy. It is only in modern times that we decided that we - in the pique of, to use the Lewisian term, “chronological snobbery” - knew better than our fathers. We tore down Chesterton’s Fence - perhaps in a desire to fit in with, and be like, non-Lutheran Protestant English-speakers in our adopted America. Nevertheless, it is the established, historical, and confessional custom to attend the Chief Divine Service - Word and Sacrament - on Sundays. This is not to say that we don’t have the Evangelical freedom to celebrate and offer the Eucharist on the other days of the week. Indeed, some pastors and congregations do offer a daily Divine Service during Lent, for example. My congregation celebrates the Divine Service every Wednesday evening - a custom originally designed to accommodate railroad workers. We are certainly free in these matters.
But if the use of one’s freedom means that denying parishioners the Holy Sacrament on Sunday, or scheduling a bi-weekly prohibition of the Lord’s Supper, and somehow justifying this as spiritually edifying, such an apologist may want to check his premises and examine himself as to why he would confess any such thing.
And those of us in the LCMS who heed the confessional call to offer the Holy Sacrament every Sunday typically likewise emphasize the evangelical and confessional positions of the infallibility of the Holy Scriptures, a reverent celebration of the liturgy, faithful preaching of Law and Gospel, rigorous catechesis, and the pastoral practice of closed communion. These are certainly the positions we at Gottesdienst unequivocally support.
Here we stand.