Interfaith Prayer as a Cause for Hope
In the aftermath of the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans, the Roman Catholic archbishop hosted an interfaith prayer service in the St. Louis Cathedral in the heart of the French Quarter. And the scandal of vested women clergy standing in the pulpit of the most prominent Christian church in one of the major cities of the United States - along with imams and rabbis and Buddhist priests, as well as the president of the United States - should be a cause for Christians to be hopeful for the future.
You can see the program - including all of the participating ministers, their religions, and their titles, here.
So how could this abomination be a cause for hope for the Christian? Because Jesus prophetically described a future time of “people fainting with fear and with foreboding on what is coming on the world,” (Luke 21:26) with distressing signs both in the heavens and on the earth (Luke 21:10-36). There will be a time of false teachers and false Christs “and they will lead many astray” (Matt 24:4-5, 11). Christians will be persecuted by their own governments (Matt 24:9). And “lawlessness will be increased” and “the love of many will grow cold” (Matt 24:12). And while we lament these things and pray for mercy to be spared such things, and while we pray earnestly for those who are deceived, who are falling away, and while we mourn with those who mourn in this time of lawlessness and bloodshed and chaos - Jesus tells us that it is when things are at their worst that we are to have hope: “Now when you see these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).
And furthermore, Jesus speaks of “the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand)” (Matt 24:15). And while there are competing speculations about what specifically our Lord is referring to here, we can get a clue from the prophet Daniel, who speaks of a profanation of the holy (Dan 11:31) and that it has to do with worship (Dan 12:11). I suspect that as the time of our Lord’s return gets closer, we will see more and deeper and more common abominations invading holy places, manifesting themselves within the church and within Christian worship. And again, while we are appalled and distressed at the holy being profaned, it should call us to repentance and a renewed vigor to confess rightly in our own sanctuaries and from our own pulpits.
And this is not merely a Roman Catholic thing. Churches that at least nominally bear the name “Lutheran” are also involved: the laity and the clergy - even those who call themselves “bishop.” We have seen the abomination of female “ordination” enter the once-faithful churches of Scandinavia, Germany, Japan, and Australia - as well as in North America. We have seen homosexuality become tolerated, then accepted, then dominant in “Lutheran” churches around the world. We saw the world’s first lesbian “bishop” (who flew under the false colors of the title Lutheran) remove crosses from a church in Sweden to make Muslims feel welcome. And where were the men - laity and clergy alike - when this abomination happened?
In Germany, we likewise saw impotent and complacent men do and say nothing when Islamic prayers were said in a nominally Lutheran church - and were put to shame by a godly woman named Heidi Mund (known at first simply as the Brave German Woman) who spoke out against it and invoked the name of Jesus (as well as vindicating Dr. Luther). It is also sad that her story is mainly found in non-Lutheran sources (this Gottesblog article by Dr. Eckardt is an exception)!
As far as a Roman Catholic bishop hosting an interfaith prayer service in his cathedral, can anyone imagine Bishops Sts. Ambrose or Augustine inviting worshipers of Jupiter or Venus or Sol Invictus to come and participate in a worship service in the cathedrals of Milan or Hippo? How about inviting Gnostics who believe our God is an evil demiurge? Can we even begin to imagine the scandal that these doctors of the church would be enduring were God to allow them to glimpse through to this side of the veil to see what Christian bishops are doing now?
Moreover, given that those governing the city of New Orleans (officially and unofficially) have created a lawless “sanctuary city,” routinely denounce the police, cannot even keep street lights on, can’t keep the emergency water pumps running (in spite of the reception of federal money), is facing an infrastructure crisis of bridges that are falling apart and roads that are in many cases impassable because of years of neglect - with generation after generation of corruption being so routine that nobody blinks when former mayors of the city go to jail - why is the bishop not holding the political leaders accountable? They are not upholding their holy vocation to protect the people of New Orleans. The bollards that are there to prevent auto traffic on Bourbon Street were not operating. And yet, nobody is accountable. Nobody will say, “This is my fault.” The archbishop just licks the boots of these people. Can you imagine Ambrose and Augustine behaving like geldings in the face of worldly politicians? How about John the Baptist?
Furthermore, the best part of Bourbon Street only features heterosexual pornography being displayed on the outside of the peeler bars. Walk a bit to the east, and rainbow flags are ubiquitous. Does the archbishop ever have anything to say about any of this? Any call to repent? No, it’s nothing but hugs and kisses for the kings and queens of Sodom. And I say this as one who used to love going to the city. Bourbon Street is a you-know-what show mainly populated by tourists. The rest of the Quarter is nothing like that. There is so much to be enjoyed in the city. That said, the crime rate has gone through the roof, and once again, nobody is held accountable. I have been mainly avoiding the city for several years now. Why does the archbishop not speak the way Ambrose and Augustine would in the face of these sexual and criminal abominations? Instead, why does he invite worshipers of false gods and vested priestesses who mock Christ by their counterfeit office to stand in the pulpit and at the lectern?
I’m still stunned that the LCMS Youth Gathering continues to push its luck by coming back to New Orleans again and again.
The prophet Isaiah was read by a priestess from the pulpit in one of the readings at this service. Can anyone imagine Isaiah taking part in a joint prayer service with the worshipers of Baal or Asherah? Can anyone imagine Moses, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha - or any of the other holy prophets - joining the worshipers of Pharaoh, the golden calf, Baal, Asherah, Dagon, or the various Babylonian, Persian, and Greek deities - for such a syncretistic worship service? Can anyone imagine the apostles and apostolic fathers/martyrs deciding to join with the worshipers of Caesar or the pantheon of Roman deities - or even joining with Jews who deny the divinity of Jesus in a kind of confessional unity to pray together?
Where are the examples from the early centuries of faithful Christian bishops conducting joint worship services in their cathedrals with Muslims, or traveling to Muslim territories to join in Islamic rites? Maybe this is part of the problem: biblical and historical ignorance.
One silver lining is that my district president wasn’t there. None of our LCMS pastors were there - at least not as a speaker (and hopefully not at all). The lone “Lutheran” (sic) representative was a pastrix from the ELCA.
Perhaps the archbishop could have rhetorically asked why such horrific things happen. And he could have answered his own question by quoting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened…. The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century…. Today’s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: ‘This is the Apocalypse!’ Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Yes, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” And much of the church has lost the salt of her confession that Jesus is Lord, and, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Men have forgotten God, and have forgotten that God became man.
But that is not what the archbishop had to say.
These kinds of abominations (terror attacks, violence, and Christians joining together the joint worship of Christ and Belial (2 Cor 6:15)) are appearing with increasing frequency, like the contractions of a woman in labor (Matt 24:8). And we do well to see this for what it is: the spiraling of the world into chaos, and the increasing apostasy of the church. We pastors and laity of those who confess rightly the Bible and the Book of Concord would do well to increase our time spent in prayer and in God’s Word in these “gray and latter days” (LSB 834) for the lost and the deceived, to find our prophetic voice to fearlessly confess Christ ever more courageously among friends and foes alike, and to not lose heart, but rather “straighten up and raise [our] heads, because [our] redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).