In response to my commentary on the new sanctuary recently consecrated by Zion Lutheran Church in Winter Garden, Florida, a semi-anonymous commenter offered:

Dear “Dale”:

Thank you for this opportunity to further explore the idea of holiness.

Yes, pews are holier than chairs. There is nothing wrong with chairs qua chairs. I like chairs. I have chairs in my house,. In fact, some of my best friends are chairs. I’m sitting on one now. And in fact, I have one in the chancel, though we elitist chancel prancers have a fancy-schmancy Latin name for it: sedilia.

But when it comes to furnishing a church, there is a difference between pews and chairs. Churches generally use chairs for the flexibility they afford. You can move them. That way, your sanctuary can be a “multi-use space.” Like one of the churches I belonged to as a young layman, where we had chairs, and we moved them around, brought in tables, and had a Valentine’s Day dinner right there in front of the holy altar in the sanctuary. Chairs made that possible.

And here is the key. Holy means “set apart.” There is a separation between the sacred and the common. Common isn’t evil, it’s just ordinary. That which is holy is out of the ordinary; it is extraordinary. So, holiness is infringed when a congregation that could afford permanent structures opts for the flexibility of chairs.

Pews typify more formal usages: churches, courtrooms, and beautiful old lobbies in buildings that were made before the advent of particle board.

Zion Lutheran Church used to have chairs in their former “worship space.” In the new building, they opted for pews, even though they were not cheap. Why? Because such furnishings confess the holiness of the space. The sanctuary (Latin: “holy place”) should not be used for a dinner, a sock hop, or to shoot pool. Now mind you, there is noting wrong with dinners, sock hops, and shooting pool.

Some of my best friends are meals, dances, and billiard tables…

And this is why - according to Pastor Rojas - the church opted for the extremely heavy cast stone furniture. It bespeaks the permanence of Christ’s Church. My forbears at my own congregation understood this when they imported an imposing marble font, and a marble pulpit. Our altar is wood, but it is beautifully carved, and it is apparent to everyone that it isn’t a place upon which to run an electric drill or belly up to in order to drink beers. My congregation’s furnishings date back to 1913, in the days when, for example, banks were furnished with marble and granite and finely carved wood and heavy glass. It confessed a sense of stability in the days when you could lose your savings in a bank failure. You would not want to deposit your money in a place that looked fly-by-night. And ditto for the churches of that era. It was not that long ago when they were typically apportioned to confess permanence rather than modular practicality: a celebration of the ordinary.

So your suggestion that the ordinary is insulting is just plain silly. Our lives are typified by ordinariness. That’s the point. In spite of the stereotype, we Fort Wayne grads to do not mow the grass in our chasubles. That would be ridiculous. We do yard work in cassock and surplice. Chasubles are for Mass. Holy Mass, as we blackshirts say. Indeed, there are times when we opt for the extraordinary. On Thanksgiving, your grandmother may bring out the fine china. At Christmas, you might decorate your house with a tree and bright lights. At Easter, your church may have music that is out of the ordinary, even for the life of the church. Some of my three-year lectionary friends (yes, I am very ecumenical that way) even speak of ”ordinary time” in the church calendar. Yes, there are degrees of holiness even in the church - just as we see concentric circles of holiness in the Lord’s plan for the Holy Place of the tabernacle, and later the temple.

No siree “Dale”, no beers in the Holy of Holies for the high priest. And we don’t drink beers in the sanctuary, either - especially if we have pews. Beer is for Bible class, not for Mass. That may not be in the “Booka Conquered” as my friends up north call it, but maybe it should be (I think there might be an Article 29 in the Variata. Note to self: ask Latif Gaba. He’ll know).

And indeed, when we are pressed by necessity to celebrate Mass outside of the sanctuary, we bring as much holiness to the situation as we can. We don’t serve the Sacrament in a Dixie cup on a cat food lid. If we had to, we certainly could. But in my own 19 years in the Office, that has not come up. Not yet, anyway. That’s why we have dedicated, set apart communion kits. There is a paten and a chalice and bottles for water and wine. There is a crucifix and small linens. And so even if we celebrate on a hospital meal tray or on the hood of a Jeep, we bring holiness with us. And what’s more, the communion kit is holy. We don’t drink shots of bourbon out of the chalice, or put cheese slices on the hosts - even if they are not yet consecrated. The communion kit is for communion, nothing else. It’s not ordinary. But guess what? I eat almost every meal on ordinary plates with ordinary cutlery. I drink coffee out of an ordinary mug.

In fact, some of my best friends are ordinary coffee mugs.

Your comments about “Sunday Best” are more an indictment of our current culture than anything else. My folks were West Virginians. My mom’s parents literally lived in a shack with a dirt floor. But even my grandfather had a tie. Until the revolution of the 1960s, people wore dress clothes to church - yes their “Sunday Best” - even the very poor. Just pull up the old pictures. We don’t do that anymore, but not because we are poorer than our grandparents. The style has changed because we have lost the cultural touchstone of holiness. We have gone from Casual Friday to Casual Sunday.

Your great-grandfather wore a tie to the baseball game. Your great-grandmother wore a hat and gloves to go shopping downtown. My great-grandmother was a domestic servant, and she dressed up for church on Sunday. And being an old Gen Xer who had a career as an IT consultant, I remember when the norm for airport attire did not include yoga pants, fuzzy slippers, pajama bottoms, and shirts with the f-word on them. There were also amazingly few fistfights and loud drunken rants in the old aluminum flying tubes. Today, we consider that “onboard entertainment.” But I think we are the poorer for it today - and not because we can’t afford to dress properly. Even the shredded jeans and tops that do not feature much by way of surface area worn by young women cost a lot of money to look that way.

Your accusation of elitism is funny. I’m going to read it to my parishioners. At Bible class. Over a beer. I have Wednesday night Masses, and some of my parishioners come straight to church after work. They are often in jeans or scrubs. That is the best that they are able to do under the circumstances. And again, this is key. Time does not allow a change of clothes for many people. Also, I live in the deep south. I have to drive north for an hour over the longest bridge in the world to get to Southern Mississippi. And in the summer, sometimes our air conditioner is running 100 meters in a 200 meter race. So we do our best. That’s the point, It is our best, not simply the ordinary, and certainly nor our worst. All that said, our sanctuary is holy. It is not ordinary.

I also belong to a really obnoxious Lutheran motorcycle gang that terrorizes nice communities and attends church services in biker gear. But at least my jeans are not torn. They are not the jeans I wear to mow the grass (you know, the ones that go with my cassock and surplice).

But when it comes to the church, your aforementioned Wisconsin farmers often worship in beautiful sanctuaries that their agrarian great-grandparents built. There are pews, not modular stackable chairs. There is a font bolted to the floor, not on wheels. Those older rural churches feature beauty, not buildings that look like barns or hardware stores. Meals were eaten in the parish hall. Bowling was done in the basement.

And under normal conditions, pastors - even the poor ones - wear some kind of holy vestments. It’s really only the super-bourgeois well-heeled suburban hipsters that wear “ordinary” (read: expensive and trendy) clothes to conduct worship. Our poorest of the poor Lutherans who worship in mud huts in the global south have pastors wearing vestments, and bishops in copes and miters. Often, the ladies’ heads are covered - even in the heat. Why? because they believe in holiness. Why? Because they believe in the Bible.

They believe in Jesus.

Again, regarding your “elitist” trope, you’re just showing that you don’t really understand holiness. In my 2011 trip to Siberia, it was a great joy to take the Holy Sacrament from the hand of my dear brother in Christ, Father Vladislav at Holy Spirit Lutheran Church in Chelyabinsk. The parish had (and still has) has no building of its own. This small congregation meets in a rented room in a community center. I visited on a Monday, and they wanted to celebrate the Divine Service with me. The problem was their usual room was booked. They were able to rent a beauty salon that was closed.

So amid the barber chairs, sinks, hairdryers, and mirrors, we celebrated the Holy Mass. That is the picture at the top of this article. This really was a case of necessity. But even in that space, the pastor and people brought holiness with them. A table was covered with linen. A crucifix was placed on top. A crucifix was also hung on the wall near the posters advertising hair product. The men discreetly moved the towels out of sight. The celebrant and the deacon were vested. We sang the liturgy and hymns a cappella. It was beautiful, moving, reverent, and holy. We did the very best possible under the circumstances. In spite of the deprivation, we found a way to create a set-apartedness.

If you have ever seen the movie version of Hammer of God, there is a subtlety that was not lost on me. In the scene where Johannes has been comforted by Katrina, and he asks Pastor Savonius for the Holy Sacrament, the pastor is setting up the communion in this primitive shack with a man who is dying - with all the attendant sights and smells that this entails - Katrina and Johannes’s sister quickly fix Johannes’s hair and straiten out his clothes (see the video below at 31:23) That’s because they understand the holiness of the situation, and they do their best. I get that, as a pastor who makes home visits and hospital calls. And indeed, there is an intuitive sense - especially among the elderly - that even if it just means tying their flannel bathrobe a little tighter and trying to sit up straight in their chair - they confess the holiness, the set-apartness, the extraordinariness of the body and blood of Christ.

Yes, indeed, God uses the ordinary. He elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. We use books in the chancel. We put flowers near the altar. We put bread and wine on the altar. These ordinary things become holy because they are set apart. God also uses ordinary men to celebrate and preach; but he places them into a holy vocation, set apart not because of their worthiness, but rather because of their office. Children - who ordinarily run and play and laugh and shriek, because that’s what children are meant to do - are taught to tone it down in the sanctuary. They do their best. And that’s what holiness means. We teach them from a young age that what is appropriate on the playground is not appropriate in the pew or at the communion rail. That is not elitism. That is love.

No, Jesus wasn’t elitist. I don’t know why you are using the past tense. He’s not dead. He isn’t elitist. But He is God. He is not our homeboy, He is our Lord. We don’t treat Him like just one of the guys. He’s not a tame lion. We fear, love, and trust in Him above all things. And we listen to His Word. He has Himself told us what He prefers in worship, when and where He is present. He is holy - not to demean us ordinary men as beneath Him, but rather to bid us to partake in His holiness - by means of His blood.

We eat His body and drink His blood in a sacred space set apart for worship. And this place of worship may be humble or ornate, but it is never ordinary or common.

How could it be?