Often our critics complain that the Gottesdienst blog and podcast are “out of our lane,” that we are somehow breaking the eleventh commandment by commenting on things that are not strictly speaking, things liturgical. Father Braaten wrote well about this, and I would like to add my own two cents.

And indeed, some of our critics would love nothing more than for us to stop worrying our pretty little heads about things going on in the world and in the synod, and instead ensconce ourselves in research concerning when the Sanctus first came into the liturgy, or to compare the Eastern and Western Rites of the Kyrie, or discuss the relative merits of the fiddleback chasuble vs. the Gothic, or to hold symposia limited to educating our readers and listeners about the scope and sequence of Pope St. Gregory the Great’s 6th century liturgical reforms.

What they don’t want is for us to leave the Four Walls of the church and address the things happening around us. And that is ironic, as it has become fashionable to implore pastors to leave the Four Walls - just not us. In fact, our detractors seem to want to chain us to the chancel, or perhaps even lock us inside the sacristy, safely tucked away from public view, and certainly more than an arm’s reach away from a keyboard or a microphone.

And why is that, dear reader?

I’m reminded of an anecdote told to me by an elderly couple that I befriended when I was in my early twenties. They were very conservative, but like just about everyone else, they got caught up in the spirit of the age, in Progressive contemporary (and revolutionary) ideas about raising children. And being sophisticated, modern Americans of that time, when they had their first child, a boy, they bought Dr. Spock’s famous 1946 book and put it into practice. The book rested prominantly on the coffee table and was read as a sort of sacred text. So there would be no spankings for their little boy.

By the time he was about four, he had become an incorrigible brat. Finally, mom had had enough. In response to an outburst of disrespect, she grabbed his wrist, turned him around, and swatted his bottom. The boy was indignant. And to his mother’s surprise, he pointed to the Spock book on the table, and told his mother that she was not allowed to do that.

“Stay in your lane, mom. You are violating your mission statement.” Indeed, what four year old brat wouldn’t want Dr. Spock’s paradigm of no spanking? The Spock book went into the garbage, the parents reverted to the traditional “liturgy” of childrearing that they had learned from their parents, and the boy turned out out well as a man.

But this hands-off approach is what some of our critics want of Gottesdienst. They want us to be missional, and our mission, as they see it, is to put blinders on and focus on arcane esoterica, keeping our detractors safe from any undue criticism in the real world. For we are not allowed to do that, according to our own brat pack.

So what is our mission? What does it mean that we are a “liturgical” journal/blog/podcast? Well, it means that we can write and speak about whatever we want. “Liturgical” includes - but is not limited to - academic study on rite and ritual and vestments and reverent and proper conduct of the services. And we enjoy things like that. That said, liturgy is the epitome of the practical. Liturgy is our faith in action in the material world - the world we find ourselves in now. Liturgy is how our Incarnate God, in His infinite wisdom, comes down to us, to give the righteousness of Christ to us by means of holy gifts, and to do so in this messy, sinful, fallen world that we inhabit. It is in the Divine Service, the Gottesdienst, that the Most Holy Trinity deigns to give us both the discipline of the Law and the refreshment of the Gospel. Our sacred text is Scripture, not Spock.

Liturgy cannot be divorced from confession, lest it become a show, a sham. And that was the tragedy of the early Lutheran liturgical movement and its successors at Seminex/ELCA. That’s not us. We uphold both the credendi and the orandi: both our confession and our practice, both the fide and the rite. Liturgy is lived doctrine. To be truly liturgical in the Lutheran sense, one must also be confessional and biblical. And so we are going to comment on matters pertinent to our church body and confession. You are free to read us or not, or to agree with us, or not.

In one of our editors’ retreats, I actually proposed - tongue in cheek, but only a little - that our tagline be updated to “The Journal of Lutheran Liturgical Life.” For when one’s days and weeks are focused on, and ordered by, the Divine Service and the daily liturgical offices - then everything in our Christian faith and life is liturgical. There is no boundary between the Service Book and the Book of Concord. And rubrics are not meant to be read and examined under a microscope, but are rather to be lived out in space and time. The rubrics and the liturgy itself point us to Christ. A theoretical or academic liturgy is a dead liturgy, cosplayed by impotent chancel-prancers and dilettantes, safely ensconced in their own world, of use to nobody. And that is what some of our detractors want us to be, citing our own mission statement like a sorceror casting a spell. They seem surprised and appalled that we actually wear chasubles, and actually confess the faith and contend for it. That’s because they don’t get it at all. They think “liturgical” is just a box to check on a “worship preference” form. There is a reason Article 24 exists, and it exists within the larger context of the Augsburg Confession - itself a commentary upon the Holy Scriptures, as lived out in the life of the church - and especially in controverted times.

One of my Facebook friends recently posted on my timeline that he was told that I “like controversy” and just want to “stir the pot.” The funny thing is, I actually don’t. I’d rather there be no pot to stir. What I really like is riding my motorcycle, drinking coffee and conversing with my dear wife, and reading. Most of all, I love preaching and celebrating the Mass, teaching, giving pastoral care, and serving as a chaplain. I have enough things that I like doing to keep me very busy without attending to controversy. There are many other things I would prefer to be writing about, and I would love nothing more for our synod to be actually walking together instead of pretending that we do under duress and social pressure.

Let us call a thing what it actually is.

Maybe a good analogy is being a fire chaplain. As I said, I love serving. I believe that God called me to this service. I serve the brave men who serve. But I do not like fires. I don’t like getting an alarm at 3:00 in the morning, to smell the acrid odor a few blocks away, to see the ominous flashing red lights and black smoke, to watch the men risking their lives, running inside with hoses and oxygen tanks while the flames flare up around them. I don’t enjoy ministering to people when a loved one has just burned up inside. Who enjoys death notifications? I’ve been on both sides of that fence. There are things that I would rather do than to give chaplaincy care to a fireman who had to carry out the charred body of a baby from a house, when he is a young father himself. None of this is fun. There are many other things that I would rather do. But when there is a fire, my duty is to be there. And do it to the best of my ability.

We Christians - especially we pastors - are rather like volunteer firemen, or like citizen-soldiers of heaven, serving in the Church Militant. There is a time for peace, but there is also a time for war. And sadly, some wars are civil wars. Seminex was ugly, but it was not a fight our forbears could have avoided. When there is a fire, confessors may not simply ignore the alarm and go back to bed.

And to be sure, we are not living in the days of martyrdom, nor when the Arians were winning. We are not being exiled from our parishes like many of our early church fathers. We are not looking at being burned at the stake like our Reformation fathers. We are not seeing families torn apart by Seminex. But we are seeing families torn apart by Wokeness. We are seeing young people in our families and parishes going off to university, and coming back radicalized, having lost their faith, and perhaps even their sense of godly sexual identity. This is happening. We are seeing Christian business owners forced to violate their consciences. We are seeing employees, of both private businesses and government, forced to participate in Marxist struggle sessions and celebrations of deviant sexuality - or else. Some of our pastors in Canada must choose their words carefully, or risk arrest. This is the world in which we live and serve. That is the contemporary application of our Christian faith and life. And we are called upon to confess and to be militant in our day and age. We do not choose our battles or our crosses. We do not choose whether we are at peace or at war.

And we do not want to end up like the ELCA.

Our battle today is indeed Wokeness: the latest manifestation of Criticism. It is the sequel to the Higher Critical Method of our former civil war in the 1970s. This Criticism has metastasized beyond the church and her texts. Now all texts, all history, and all narratives are subject to deconstruction - well beyond the Four Walls of the Church. Our entire civilization is being torn down and lit aflame by Critical Theory in its many and various manifestations: racial, sexual, historical, and ecclesiastical. They are indeed Legion. And isn’t it suspicious that some among us want Gottesdienst to passively play music while the conflagration rages? Cui bono?

At any rate, if we are called upon to fight, we are called upon to fight well, to fight with excellence, to fight honorably, to fight as men, to fight as Christians, and to fight to win. We must resist those who tell us that the Christian is not called upon to confess the truth of God’s Word, but instead to passively “love” and “judge not” (meaning tacitly, if not actively, to support sexual deviancy and other tenets of the Woke faith through DEI and “allyship”). We must resist those who would degrade one ethnicity against others - to compel some children to loathe themselves and their ancestry, and to refuse to honor their fathers and mothers, in one variation or the other of the Master Race theory. One is just as bad as the other. We must resist those who would push Socialist economic theory and attempt to baptize it as “Christian” - when in fact, it is a diabolical ideology with at least a hundred million corpses of men, women, and children that it has gathered as trophies for Satan. We must resist those who tell us to “stay in our lane” and to refuse to push back against things that are not in accordance with the Christian faith, the Word of God, and the plain and simple truth of natural law, that even unbelievers have written on their hearts.

And so it is the mission of the Christian, the pastor, the Gottesdienst editor, the podcaster, the blogger, the professor, the father, the mother, the university student, the employee - each and every person in the pew - to confess, to correct, to jump into the fray - in whatever way he is called to do according to his vocation. And we must also understand that there are some in vulnerable positions who may not be able to place themselves on the front line or in the trenches. And that obligates those of us who can do so, to do so.

And when our “friends” tell us to shut up, when they resort to ad hominems and outright lies - we should treat that as a signal that we are on the right track, double down, and speak out all the more.

That is our mission.