Concordia Seminary Institute of Lay Vocation

400 Years On: German-Americans with Pride

A physician in Jamestown was the first. He arrived and died in 1608. A new pursuit of roots

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Precisely four centuries ago, Dr. Johannes Fleischer became the first German to arrive in North America. Millions of his countrymen followed him, making German-Americans the largest ethnic group in the USA. After two world wars, their descendants often concealed their national roots. But among their offspring it has now become the rage to reconnect with their roots.

The first German ever to set foot on North American soil was the prototype of the learned, venturesome and high-minded Germans who came to be admired around the world in subsequent centuries. Johannes Fleischer, Jr. was a “Herr Doktor Doktor,” a scholar with two advanced degrees at age 26, one in medicine and the other in philosophy. Fleischer was also the first Lutheran on these shores; his late father had been “superintendent,” or regional bishop, of Breslau, which is now part of Poland. Moreover, Fleischer was English-speaking America’s first immigrant with a university education.

Unlike other colonists at Jamestown, Va., Fleischer had not come as a fortune seeker but in order to study the healing potential of “exotic” American plants, a goal he never accomplished, though: A few months after his arrival on board the tiny vessel “Phoenix” on April 20, 1608, the salt poisoning caused by the brackish drinking water from the James River, the heat, malnutrition and disease transmitted by the mosquitoes from the surrounding swamps claimed his life and the lives of most early Jamestown residents.

At the quad centenary of Fleischer’s arrival, German ambassador Klaus Scharioth unveiled a new National Park Service historic marker at the Jamestown Glasshouse honoring this harbinger of all German-Americans who today constitute the largest ethnic group in the United States; in the 1990 U.S. census, 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry. That this should happen at this point in history is no isolated event. All over the country, a new German-American pride is resurfacing after it had vanished for three generations since the end of World War I. Memorials celebrating German contributions to German history are springing up around the country, but that’s not all, says historian Joachim “Yogi” Reppmann.

“When I hitchhiked around the U.S. as a student in the 1970s, I met many warm-hearted people, but none would admit to German ancestry,” remembers Reppmann, perhaps the leading specialist on the veterans of the 1848 democratic revolution in Germany who fled to America after that rebellion’s failure. “Now all around me folks are scrambling to find German roots almost as a kind of apotheosis of German virtues. Genealogical research is en vogue among Americans with German family background; everybody seems to want to trace his family history back to Luther.”

Reppmann is not exaggerating. Traveling around the Midwest, California, the East Coast and the South, this writer is often bombarded with questions particularly from young Americans about Germany, its history, language and culture. In St. Louis, membership in a “German Special Interest Group” dedicated to lineage research has jumped from three individuals to 500 families in less than three years. “Germany’s reunification has been an important contributor to this development,” explains Gerald Perschbacher, the group’s leader. “Now it’s much easier to travel to the towns and villages our forebears had left in the 19th century or even before that.”

There is also a possible link between this phenomenon and the results of a new international survey conducted for the BBC World Service, which astounded Germans. The poll showed that their country had suddenly become the most respected nation of earth. Three out of five people see Germany’s influence on word affairs as “mainly positive.” Thus Germany came out ahead of 23 other countries, winning a 56 percent positive assessment by the 17,000 people surveyed.

The London-based GlobeScan polling firm credited Chanceller Angela Merkel’s leadership in Europe for this international popularity. “Germany’s reputation as a political and economic stalwart was most strongly reflected in the opinion of its neighbors,” the BBC reports. Lingering memories of the friendly and light-hearted atmosphere during the 2006 Soccer World Cup games, which Germany hosted, might also have contributed to her enduring esteem, as has the fact that for the first time in 1,000 years, a German has ascended to St. Peter’s throne in Rome.

But when Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, visited America in April, a close look at how he was received lends weight to Reppmann’s warning  not to underestimate how “thin the ice is,” meaning how fragile Germany’s popularity in the U.S. might well be. On the one hand, jubilant masses cheered the pontiff. On the other hand, he was massively vilified via the internet in the basest way. Type “Nazi Pope” into the Google search engine, and you will get nearly 20,000 thoroughly unpleasant results; “Nazi Pope” is also the term even comedian Bill Maher used to slander the visiting Benedict XVI on camera, never mind that Joseph Ratzinger’s anti-Nazi convictions and actions as a young man during World War II are well documented.

Richard M. Smyser, a senior retired diplomat now teaching German studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, attributes such nauseating blogs to “crackpots who have no sense of identity except in the negative,” and it is true that America is by no means the only country where blog sites have become cesspools for hateful streams of consciousness usually devoid of orthography or grammar. The same blight mars the readers’ columns in the online editions versions even of Germany’s most prestigious newspapers.

Still, the new display of German-American pride only nine years after scores of America Online readers rejoiced ghoulishly over what they called a “German barbecue” when an Air France Concorde jetliner crashed on takeoff in Paris killing more than 100 German passengers on board is nothing short of remarkable, especially as elite publications are not above sudden outbursts of Germanophobia.

Earlier this year, an article in the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the idiotic treatment of an American scholar at the hands of German bureaucrats drew 133 responses of which “one of the kindest stated simply, ‘Germany is crap,’” Gerald R. Kleinfeld, a retired German studies professor, reports with horror. The matter was so ridiculous that it should have been laughed off, especially as the education ministers of Germany’s 16 states immediately rectified the problem that had caused this flap, a problem concerning the recognition of the U.S. scholar’s academic title. But in America as in Germany humor is not necessarily the mark of every academic, and as Reppmann says, “the ice is thin.”

Reppmann has good reason to be mindful of how quickly the public mood can change. He is working on a biography of Henry Christian Finnern, one of the most prominent of the 1848 revolutionaries from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost region, who had settled in Iowa. On Oct. 6, 1918, at the height of the anti-German hysteria during World War I, an ugly mob threatened to lynch Finnern, the editor and publisher of the quality German-language newspaper, “Der Denison Herold.”
Finnern escaped this fate by promising to rename his paper “The Denison Herald,” and publishing it exclusively in English as of the following day.

At the same time a massive stone monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Schleswig-Holstein war of liberation and surrounding communities disappeared from Washington Square Park in Davonport, Iowa. Reppmann suspects that an anti-German rabble had thrown it into the Mississippi. Ninety years later things have changed radically for German-Americans in Iowa as elsewhere in the U.S.A. Almost contemporaneously with the unveiling of the Jamestown marker honoring Johannes Fleischer, America’s first German immigrant, a 24,000-pound memorial to the Schleswig-Holstein 48ers was placed near the banks of the Mississippi. It bears the German engraving, “Schleswig-Holstein Kampfgenossen” (Veterans of the Schleswig-Holstein War).

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Election 08's 'False Clerics and Schismatic Spirits'

Speaking Out

The ubiquity of religion in this campaign season is distinctly un-Lutheran.

Uwe Siemon-Netto | posted 4/02/2008 09:56AM

The campaign season has brought many news stories and analysis pieces on religion's role in the presidential election. Beyond questions of whether Democrats can win more evangelicals' votes or whose health-care plan is most just, however, are deeper questions of how God has called Christians to act in society. In the coming months before the election, Christianity Today will be publishing a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the proper role of Christianity in electoral politics. Here, Uwe Siemon-Netto offers his Lutheran perspective.

The religious aspect of the 2008 election leaves this confessional Lutheran once again mystified. First there was the kerfuffle over whether Christians could elect a Mormon to the White House, a dispute making no sense to followers of Martin Luther, who said, "The emperor need not be a Christian so long as he possesses reason." Meanwhile, the amiable Mike Huckabee mused inexplicably about an alleged need to conform the Constitution more to the Bible. Then John McCain got in hot water for accepting the endorsement of Texas pastor John Hagee, a vituperative critic of the Roman Catholic Church.

The latest uproar is over the church Sen. Barack Obama has affiliated himself with, and whether he should have fled Jeremiah Wright after the pastor offered such hideous political pronouncements as "God damn America."

All this makes a staunch Lutheran groan in desperation. Did not Christ tell Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36)? Which of these seven words is so hard to understand?

Hearing Wright's unsettling videos (and Obama's elucidations) made me think fondly of my own congregation. I belong to Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in downtown Washington, D.C. This is an all-black parish, just like Obama's. My wife and I, along with another congregant and the organist, are the only white members. We did not join Mount Olivet to make a political statement, however; we did so simply because it was closest to our home, and because it was liturgical and faithful to Scripture and the confessional writings of the Lutheran Church. That was all we needed.

No doubt our pastor, John F. Johnson, and many congregants have experienced just as many frustrations as Wright on account of their race. But I have never heard about it from the pulpit or in committees and voters' meetings. Johnson preaches every Sunday on the prescribed readings for that day. That's the beauty of lectionaries in liturgical churches; they are meant to shield homilists from the hubris of their urge to be "original." Therefore our pastor is a much more convincing preacher than Wright. As a confessional Lutheran, he knows, as do his listeners, that personal gripes have no place in divine service. They have learned from childhood to distinguish properly between the spiritual and the secular realms, between law and gospel, between the "two kingdoms," as we Lutherans call the two realities constituting every Christian's paradoxical existence - kingdoms in which every Christian holds dual citizenship.

There is the "right-hand" kingdom that will ultimately be glorified in the kingdom of God. It is infinite, and the church is part of this realm. Here God has revealed himself in Christ. Here Christ rules by grace. Here all are equals, all forgiven sinners, all members of Christ's body. And then there is the temporal "left-hand kingdom," where God conducts a strange mummery and never reveals himself. "Through good and bad princes God governs the terrestrial world," Luther said. In a democracy, these "princes" include all of us, the voters. We make mistakes, of course, but God will ultimately correct those. This is the realm of the law and of practical reason, both under sin, yet gifts from God to operate in this world.

The kingdoms are not antagonistic toward one another. Both are God's, and their dialectic is "one of the most valuable and enduring treasures of Luther's theology," wrote German theologian Paul Althaus. It is a treasure because of the liberating message proclaimed by Luther "that society need not be run by the Church in order to be ruled by God," according to William Lazareth, the former Lutheran bishop of New York. Yet too many Protestants have a hard time grasping the breathtaking implication of this insight, which reminds me of Luther's grumble in his commentary on Psalm 101:

    Constantly I must pound in and squeeze in and drive in and wedge in this difference between the two kingdoms, even though it is written and said so often that it becomes tedious. The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms into each other. In the devil's name the secular leaders always want to be Christ's masters and teach Him how He should run His church and spiritual government. Similarly, the false clerics and schismatic spirits always want to be the masters, though not in God's name, and to teach people how to organize the secular government.

This is not to say that every Lutheran is immune to the disease we see in this year's electoral battles; all too many Lutheran pastors in Nazi Germany hailed Hitler as a redeemer. But if Lutherans stick to their theology, they are more likely than others to eschew social gospel heresies that made Christian idealists welcome the United States, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and even Pol Pot's Cambodia as precursors of the kingdom of God. Lutheran theology teaches that transforming culture is precisely not what the gospel is all about. Christ made himself small not for "the culture" but "for me." He did not die at the cross to make our society nicer or fairer; no, he suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.

In the 1930s, Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was later martyred for his resistance against Hitler, observed during his stays in America:

   

One of the characteristic features of church life in Anglo-Saxon countries, and one from which Lutheranism has almost entirely freed itself, is the organized struggle of the Church against some particular worldly evil. ... It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking, which sets out from human problems and which asks for solutions on this basis. Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ, and therefore the way of all Christian thinking, leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems, and that the solution of human problems cannot be the essential task of the Church.

Nine years from now, in 2017, Protestants will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. This is a good time to remember its theological treasures, which differ from earthly treasures in that they multiply when shared. Where the world is concerned, Lutherans have perhaps the soberest message of all Protestant traditions. Like Paul and Augustine, Lutherans know that our secular reality cannot be fixed. They know that it is finite. It will disappear. Until that happens, though, we must roll up our sleeves and manage our fallen world as well as we can, preventing chaos and lovingly serving each other - not by the gospel, which would be impossible, but by natural reason. We are free to act rationally in this world thanks to our knowledge of our redemption in the kingdom of grace. But the gospel has nothing to say about traffic rules, illegal immigration, the price of gasoline, or the deployment or withdrawal of forces to or from the Middle East. The gospel cannot really be associated with any worldly cause. The gospel will illume the Christians' good sense, we hope, and affect their personal comportment to the extent that it makes others curious about their faith. But the gospel is no instrument of secular power.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a lifelong journalist, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

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Cooking and Brewing Two Kingdoms Together

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Some Protestant denominations are already preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation less than a decade from now, on Oct. 31, 2017. Given the religious issues in this American election year, this might be a good time to return to one of his most perceptive insights. “The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms together,” Luther wrote, meaning the spiritual and the secular realms.

With these words in mind, traditional Lutherans shake their heads over the misuse of Scripture in American politics on both sides of the political divide, to wit Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor thundering in a sermon, “God damn America,” or Mike Huckabee’s musings about an alleged need to conform the U.S. Constitution more to the Bible.

To adherents of the oldest major Protestant tradition, it seems counterproductive to constantly invoke the Bible, when fighting politically over human concerns. In the Lutheran understanding, natural law should be the appropriate tool for dealing with worldly matters, including the mass slaughter of unborn life and “marriages” of members of the same sex.

Citing Paul, Luther reminded Christians that natural law is “written by the finger of God” on everybody’s heart, and that the conscience of all people, including non-Christians, bears witness to this verity. So if you want to stop abortions, why not team up with the likes of the “Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League,” whose conscience tells them that it is wrong to kill the innocents, instead of clobbering these people over their heads with the Bible?

Except in Roman Catholic theology, natural law thinking became unfashionable -- sadly even among many Lutherans -- in the two centuries since Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution, extolled man-made “positive law” as freedom from internal obstacles that limit vice.

In this context it is worth noting how the martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer judged the French Revolution whose utopian dream was the liberation of man. To Bonhoeffer, this Revolution was “the laying bare of the emancipated man in his tremendous power and most horrible perversity.” He warned that “the liberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man’s self-destruction,” and he saw both Communism and Nazism as the French Revolution’s heirs.

The law – Mosaic for Christians and Jews, natural for all others – is the “operating system” in what Luther called the “left-hand kingdom,” where God reigns in a hidden way “through good and bad princes,” who in a democracy include the voters. In this secular realm “reason is the empress,” Luther said, describing reason as a gift from God that enables humanity to manage this temporal world.

However, if reason presumes to speak about God’s nature it becomes, in Luther’s words, “the devil’s whore.” Only by faith does the Christian know what God is like; faith is reason’s equivalent in the “right-hand kingdom,” where God has revealed himself in Christ, and where the Church has its place.

In Lutheran parlance, this is the kingdom of the Gospel, but the Gospel cannot fix the temporal realm, as Christ told Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:38). The Gospel hopefully illumes the believer’s comportment in his relations with others; yet it offers no solution to secular concerns such as illegal immigration, the economy or the war in Iraq. Those have to be dealt with by virtue of reason, and according to the law.

Bonhoeffer considered the inability to distinguish between these two kingdoms a major flaw of American theologies featuring constantly organized struggles of the Church against some particular worldly evil. He would doubtless have placed the homiletics of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, in this category.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking, which sets out from human problems… Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ and therefore the way of all Christian thinking leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems.”

In the light of these compelling observations, Lutherans might be forgiven for asking their fellow Christians why they keep exposing their highest good – the good news of their redemption by Christ’s vicarious suffering and resurrection – to public derision by using it for the wrong purpose.

Half a millennium after Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg it would make sense to ponder his down-to-earth comment that in politics as in all other aspects of secular life Christians must act reasonably according to the law. The Gospel has freed them to do just that; it must not be perverted into a weapon to be slapped around other people’s heads.

Where Bach was jailed, Asians pay homage

    
Weimar gets ready for the tercentenary of the composer’s arrival – thousands of Japanese expected

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From Januar 2008 issue of The Asia-Pacific Times)

This year, thousands of Japanese and Koreans will be among the visitors pouring into the central German town of Weimar where Johann Sebastian Bach took up residence exactly three centuries ago, composed most of his organ works and was jailed by the local ruler after seeking greener pastures elsewhere. Bach’s popularity in Asia has become an enduring phenomenon, particularly because of its missionary attributes.

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When Yuko Maru-yama launches into her organ prelude Sunday mornings at the beginning of divine service in a Minneapolis church, chances are she will be playing something Johann Sebastian Bach wrote three centuries ago during the period he was the court composer to Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxony-Weimar. 

There are two reasons for this probability. First, like an ever-growing number of Japanese, Maruyama is passionate about Bach - she attributes her conversion from Buddhism to Christianity to his music. “When I play a fugue, I can hear Bach talking to God,” she told Metro Lutheran, a monthly church paper in the Twin Cities.

Second, Bach composed three quarters of his organ works in the enchanting Thuringian town of Weimar, which captivated him in a strange sort of way at the end of his nine-year tenure there from 1708 until 1717. When he accepted a more lucrative position in nearby Köthen, Weimar’s Duke Wilhelm Ernst sent him to prison for four weeks, reducing him to a daily diet of bread and water. The lock from his cell is still on display at the Bach Museum in Eisenach, the town where the composer was born in 1685.

Still, this year Weimar will benefit from the persistent Bach boom sweeping East Asia. Scores of Japanese journalists have already roamed this town on pre-tercentenary research assignments, according to Uta Kühne, spokeswoman for Weimar GmbH, a company promoting the city’s economic development and tourism.

Two major tour operators in Japan and another in South Korea have added Weimar to their destinations. Not only is it the site of his brief incarceration but also the birthplace of two of his sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, who were also stellar musicians whose compositions are as much admired in Asia as they are in the Western world.

The influx of Asians to Bach sites in Germany has been perplexing musicologists and theologians alike for decades now. They come in droves not only as tourists but also as serious students of music. Of the 850 students at Germany’s oldest state conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in Leipzig, 148 are Asians, chiefly South Koreans and Japanese, according to Ute Fries, dean of students. Bach was musical director of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche for the last 27 years of his life and wrote most of his cantatas there.

Leipzig’s late “superintendent” (regional bishop) Rev. Johannes Richter used to wonder even back in the days when this city was part of Communist East Germany: “What is it about his work that evidently bridges all cultural divides and has such a massive missionary impact for Christianity in faraway parts of the world?”

For years, Richter observed with growing fascination how in his Gothic sanctuary, Japanese musicologist Keisuke Maruyama studied the influence of the weekday pericopes (prescribed readings) in the early 18th-century Lutheran lectionary cycle on Bach’s cantatas. When he had finished, he told the clergyman: “It is not enough to read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me.”

But this scholar’s conversion could have been attributed to the impact of pericopes’ biblical texts on Maruyama. Why, though, would a fugue have such evangelistic powers as it did on the Japanese organist in Minnesota? Why would even listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which contain no lyrics, arouse someone’s interest in Christianity? This happened when Masashi Yasuda, a former agnostic, heard a CD with Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s rendering of this complex Clavier-Übung, or keyboard study. Still, Yasuda’s spiritual journey began precisely with these variations. He is now a Jesuit priest teaching systematic theology at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Some theologians tend to attribute the astounding impact of Bach’s music particularly on the scientific minds of many Asians to the Holy Spirit. Canon Arthur Peacocke, a Church of England clergyman and noted biologist who is also one of the leading spokesmen in burgeoning international dialog between theology and the natural sciences, once suggested that the Holy Spirit personally dictated “The Art of the Fugue,” Bach’s arguably most challenging work, into the composer’s plume.

“The reason why Bach’s most abstract works guide some Asian people to Christ is because his music reflects the perfect beauty of created order to which the Japanese mind is particularly receptive,” suggested Charles Ford, a mathematics professor at the University of St. Louis.  “Bach has the same effect on me, a Western scientist,” added Ford, who is also one of America’s foremost experts on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred Lutheran theologian hanged by the Nazis.

Henry Gerike, organist and choirmaster at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, a Lutheran school of theology, agrees with Ford: “The fugue is the best way God has given us to enjoy his creation. But of course Bach’s most significant message to us is the Gospel.” Gerike echoes Swedish archbishop Nathan Söderblom (1866-1931), who famously called Bach’s cantatas “the fifth Gospel.”

Rev. Robert Bergt, musical director of Concordia’s Bach at the Sem concert series, has first-hand experience with the missionary lure of Bach’s cantatas in Tokyo. He used to be the chief conductor of Musashino Music Academy’s three orchestras in the Japanese capital. Bach’s compositions brought his musicians, audiences and students into contact with the Word of God, he said. “Some of these people would then in private declare themselves as ‘closet Christians,’” Bergt told Christian History magazine. “I saw this happen at least 15 times. And during one of them I eventually baptized myself.” While only one percent of Japan’s population of 128 million is officially Christian, Bergt estimated that the real figure could be three times as high if one includes secret believers.

After two failed attempts to popularize Bach’s music in Japan since the late 19th century, a veritable Bach boom has been sweeping that country for the past 16 years. Its driving force is organist Masaaki Suzuki, founder and conductor of the Bach Collegium Japan that has spawned hundreds of similar societies throughout the country.

During Advent or Holy Week, respectively, Suzuki’s performances of the “Christmas Oratorio” or the “St. Matthew Passion” are always sold out, even though tickets cost more than $600. After each concert, members of the audience crowd Suzuki on the podium asking him about the Christian concept of hope and about death, a topic normally taboo in polite Japanese society. “I am spreading Bach’s message, which is a biblical one,” Suzuki said.

But why do Bach’s melodies and harmonies, so alien to the Asian ear, appeal to the Japanese? Some musicologists attribute this to Francis Xavier and other Jesuit missionaries, who introduced the Gregorian chant to Japan and built organs from bamboo pipes 400 years ago. Though Christianity was soon squashed, elements of its music infiltrated traditional folk song.

Four centuries later, this curious fact is now enabling tens of thousands of people in one of the most secularized nations on earth to turn to Christianity via Bach. But here’s the irony: As some of these will come to pay homage to Bach during the Weimar tercentenary celebrations, his own land has become mission territory after 56 years of Nazi and Communist dictatorships. In Thuringia and neighboring Saxony, only one quarter of the population belongs to a Christian church.

– Uwe Siemon-Netto, a Leipzig-born veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran Lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis (U.S.).

Melancholy Christmas Postscript from England

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Now that the Twelve Days of Christmas are behind us, I can’t resist the urge to write this melancholy postscript. I celebrated the birth of Jesus in an enchanting little 800-year old country church in Sapperton, an unspoiled Gloucestershire village in England. I promise I’ll never forget this event, and here is why: It was one of the most distressing disappointments in my life as a Christian.

There was nothing wrong with the Sapperton congregation that Christmas Day morning. They were a cheerful lot of all generations, men and women, boys and girls with Brueghel-like faces, welcoming warmly us strangers from overseas.

Then the priest materialized, a middle-aged man whose facial expression reminded me of someone with a fish allergy in a seafood restaurant. But that didn’t matter as long as the congregation and the choir sang their carols lustily and the lessons were read. The joy ended, though, when the Reverend read monotonously and almost inaudibly – he couldn’t be bothered to climb into the pulpit – an inane tale linking Christ’s incarnation to the Sermon of the Mount.

Theologically this can be done, of course, but he did not do it well; in fact I doubt he had written it himself. Clearly this blighter had not spent much time preparing his homily – and this was Christmas!

At first the agony seemed short-lived. A warden interrupted him, asking if there was a doctor in the congregation. There wasn’t. Imagine – a sizable English congregation at Christmastime and not a physician in their midst! It used to be that doctors counted among the most faithful of Christians.

Anyway, here is the reason for this interruption:  An elderly man had collapsed in a rear pew. Wouldn’t you have thought that the priest might have approached him, said a little prayer, given him a blessing, asked the congregation to pray for him or softly sing a hymn as he was being carried out?

No, he hopped discontentedly from foot to foot, asking, “May I continue with my story now?” Alas, he eventually did. The reference to the Sermon of the Mount might given him an opportunity to say something appropriate about the sick man now waiting in the narthex for an ambulance. But, no, this did not occur to the Reverend.

He did not even mention this suffering congregant in the intercessory prayers.

Later, after the service, the Reverend stood aloofly in the church's graveyard not asking any of the strangers where they had come from and what they were doing in Sapperton on this blessed Christmas Day.

Just two days before on the ferry from Calais, I had read that in 2007 more people had attended Catholic than Anglican churches in England for the first time since the Reformation. At first I was inclined to attribute this to the sodomite crisis in the CofE, a crisis that seemed to have reached a climax when the Archbishop of Canterbury was found out having attended a secret Eucharist organized exclusively for homosexual, bisexual and transgendered people in St. Peter’s Church on London’s Eton Square – a theological absurdity.

In Sapperton, Gloucestershire, it became clear to me that the crisis was much deeper. I realized that the CofE’s implosion was not just caused by fiends in clerics but probably even more so drippy priests like this country vicar who was so little endowed with any sense of pastoral care that he could not find words of blessings and prayers for an elderly congregant who collapsed in his church on Christmas Day.

May God have mercy on this once wonderful Christian country now cursed with a clergy who show so little compassion even now, at this late hour, when it is threatened from within by a belligerent alternative faith determined to devour it!

Christmas Town in a Time Machine

(From the Christmas issue of The Atlantic Times)

200 years after the birth of its founding father, Frankenmuth in Michigan is still very German – clean, safe, efficient

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Two centuries ago this coming February 21, the Rev. Wilhelm Löhe was born in Fürth in Franconia, which later spawned Henry Kissinger. Like Kissinger, Löhe had a significant impact on the U.S.A., a country he never visited, though. A Lutheran village pastor, he sent missionaries to set up colonies in the Michigan wilderness. The largest of these is Frankenmuth (Frankish courage), one of the safest and cleanest towns in America. It has also evolved into the nation’s Christmas capital.

If you attend divine worship on any given Sunday at 9:30 a.m. in Frankenmuth’s huge St. Lorenz Church you might wonder whether a time machine had propelled you back to the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche in Nuremberg, circa 1908. Accompanied by a roaring 50-rank pipe organ, some 1,000 men, women and children belt out their hymns lustily, rolling their “R’s” the way Franks do. And this would already be the third service that weekend, with yet another one to follow.

They bear the unmistakable features of the Frankish people, a Western Germanic tribe whose main contribution to European history was Emperor Charlemagne (742-814 A.D.), founding father of both Germany and France. Like Charlemagne, these Michigan Franks are men with strong, square faces, while many of their comely womenfolk are of the strapping variety prevalent in the northern Bavarian countryside. In Nuremberg, rarely more than 150 faithful sit in the Sankt-Lorenz-Kirche on ordinary Sunday mornings. By contrast, in Frankenmuth, congregants fill every pew in the nave and most seats on the balconies as well. 

And they pay attention to the preacher in a white pulpit high above the chancel. They listen assiduously as long as nothing disturbs their routine. “I am sorry, pastor, I could not concentrate on your sermon this morning,” one woman apologized recently as she shook the minister’s hands at the door, “you see, somebody else had taken my seat.”

With 4,700 baptized members, five pastors and three organists, St. Lorenz is clearly the 600-pound gorilla among all institutions, religious or otherwise, in Frankenmuth, a town of 4,800. Some of its congregants live in outlying communities, of course. Still, the congregation’s membership roll reads like a Midwestern equivalent of the genealogical register of Mayflower families, except of course that the German colonizers of Michigan’s wilderness arrived 225 years after Pilgrims from Plymouth, England, had landed on Plymouth Rock, Mass.

But there were parallels. Like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the German colonists endured a grueling journey on their sailing ship, the “Caroline,” as it circumnavigated in thick fog iceberg upon iceberg in the North Atlantic, where at one point seven successive storms forced Captain Volkmann to remain on his bridge for 48 hours without sleep.

And like the Plymouth Pilgrims, these southern Germans came for reasons of faith. Following a Notruf, or appeal, from the Rev. Friedrich Wyneken, a Lutheran minister in America, Neuendettelsau’s pastor Wilhelm Löhe sent them out in 1845 to establish model communities whose perfect Christian lifestyle would so impress the Chippewa, a native American tribe, that they would readily convert to Christianity.

In a sense, Löhe’s settlers succeeded at first. One year after the Franks’ arrival, 30 Indian children inhabited the home of their exacting first pastor, Rev. August Friedrich Crämer, known to all as “the iron man.” But being nomads, the Chippewa eventually moved on – and certainly not into a life of destitution. Today, though led by a stalwart Methodist chief, they are immensely wealthy thanks to their gambling casinos that would not normally be allowed in Michigan, except on autonomous Indian reservations such as the ones in Mount Pleasant and Sault Sainte Marie.

So there are no American Indians at prayer anymore at Frankenmuth’s St. Lorenz Church, a redbrick sanctuary wedged in between streets named after Löhe and Neuendettelsau. But the Franks are plentiful – wealthy Franks, too. Four generations of the Zehnders are there, for example, always filling the same pew. The Zehnders, whose ancestors’ tombstone is among the most visible on the graveyard next to the St. Lorenz church, own two of America’s largest restaurants. These are good, old-fashioned German-style eateries where all the Zehnders young and old work diligently in good, old Germanic fashion six days per week, and that includes Dorothy Zehnder, the sprightly 80-year old matriarch of the giant “Bavarian Inn,” whose kitchens she supervises.

Then there are the Bronners – whimsical old Wally Bronner, another octogenarian, and his wife Irene, and their offspring Wayne, Carla and Maria with their wives and children. And guess how the Bronners make their living? Well, they observe Christmas 361 days a year, from January through December. They own and run “Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland,” the largest Yuletide specialty store anywhere on earth. The salesroom alone is the size of almost two football fields, and that’s only a fraction of the Bronner buildings’ 320,00 square feet of floor space located on 45 acres of elegantly landscaped grounds.

You have got to see this giant supermarket filled with unparalleled glitter, running up an electricity bill of $900 every day. It sits on a piece of real estate almost twice the size of a football field. Two million people drop by every year in hundreds of thousands of cars and motor coaches. They come to be stunned by artificial snowstorms twice every hour even at the height of the summer at the store’s south entrance. They gawk at 500 different nativity scenes and 150 styles of nutcrackers. And they buy, and they buy, and they buy – anything from the most expensive wares here, such as17-foot Santa Claus figures for $7,000 a piece, to trinkets costing less than two bucks. Altogether, the Bronners have 50,000 Christmas items for sale.

He is a marvelous old guy with eyes twinkling as brightly as his Christmas candles, Wally Bronner is. Dressed in a bright red blazer like the rest of his staff he bustles about armies of animated figures, and forests of Christmas trees with their blinking lights. You can tell he feels like a kid in a candy store as he lovingly takes in all those toys, and those Yuletide ornaments imported from around the globe – the cheap stuff from China, the     more valuable wares from the Erzgebirge in eastern Germany. “He really does celebrate Christmas every day,” insists his oldest son, Wayne, “and he has done so ever since starting this business back in 1945, gradually building it up from his miniature commercial sign painting enterprise he began in his father’s basement to earn pocket money as a high school boy.

Up the road at the local Historical Museum, director Mary Nuechterlein and Dave Maves, an amateur local historian, smile benignly at the way the Zehnders and the Bronners have transformed their part of town into a wannabe alpine wonderland, albeit one that in part also looks like a German spa. Let it be known that while Franconia is politically part of Bavaria, it has little in common with the yodeling, thigh-slapping, lederhosen-wearing, beer-guzzling natives of the southernmost corners of the German-speaking world many Americans associate with everyone saying “ja” instead of “yes.”.

If Wilhelm Löhe rose from his grave in Neuendettelsau and flew into Frankenmuth he’d be baffled to find at Bronner’s the exact replica of the St. Nikolaus Church of Oberndorf in Austria, yes, Austria, where ten years after Löhe’s birth Father Joseph Mohr, a Catholic priest, and his organist Franz Grüber wrote the lyrics and music of what today is the world’s most beloved Christmas carol: “Silent Night.”

It was Wally Bronner who had a copy of this edifice erected on his grounds to give thanks to God for “CHRISTmas Wonderland’s” huge success; he also had wooden plaques bearing the lyrics of Silent Night in 300 languages planted along the walkway leading up to the chapel where loudspeakers play this hymn over and over again, and where on Christmas Eve he, Wally, personally leads hundreds of visitors in singing it.

With all this you might be forgiven for thinking that Löhe’s Frankenmuth has “gone Roman.” But no! Remember of Garrison Keillor’s famous quip? “The whole Midwest is Lutheran. Even the atheists in the Midwest are Lutherans. The God they don’t believe in is Luther’s God.” Keillor coined this adage for Minnesota, his own corner of America. But he might as well have had Frankenmuth in mind.

Though the Bronners and the Zehnders and David Maves can’t think of a single Lutheran atheist in their community, this town is so awesomely Lutheran that even the second church in town, St. John’s, is Lutheran. It belongs to a still more conservative branch of Lutheranism than St. Lorenz, to which the Bronners and the Zehnders belong, and which is a founding congregation of the strictly confessional Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that counts Löhe and Crämer among its fathers.

In fact, so Lutheran is Frankenmuth that when the Roman Catholics finally set up a parish in 1963, they asked the elders of St. Lorenz for advice on how to name their new sanctuary, and received a very Lutheran answer: “Blessed Trinity, of course!” Now, there is nothing un-Catholic about these two words, but lumped together as one name, they sound quintessentially Lutheran, at least in America. At any rate, in Frankenmuth a reversal in the historical trajectory occurred. The Catholics took their cue from a much younger branch of Christianity, and everybody seems happy.

Now, if you talk to the Rev. Mark Brandt, senior pastor at St. Lorenz, he will sound a cautionary note. Yes, he readily admits, while there are no longer any Chippewa to convert, Frankenmuth by and large had clung to the values handed down from its Frankish founding fathers (perhaps, one might add, even more so than their cousins in the old country). Yes, yes, this is a wonderfully safe place almost free of crime, which is why so many people from nearby Saginaw, Flint or Detroit went to retire here. Yes, there is practically no crime in Frankenmuth, although “there is sin here, too,” pastor Brandt insists, “drunkenness, for example,” but then one must allow that this is a place filled with German Lutherans, and German Lutherans drink.

True, true, the Lutheran parochial school, with 500 students the largest in the Missouri Synod, is as excellent as ever, as is the local public school, which was founded much later. So good is the educational system in fact that 98 percent of Frankenmuth’s high school graduates go on to college, an extremely rare phenomenon in America. And yes, local census figures show that the town’s divorce rate is well below the national average and is share of two-parent families well above.

“But,” warns Rev. Brandt, “church attendance is in decline, even though our membership remains stable. When I came here 17 years ago, 2,000 came to our services at least once a week, and now only 1,700 show up” – a complaint, which every pastor in Germany would comment thus: “I wish I had your problems.”

But one thing is definitely in decline in Frankenmuth and the neighboring Frankish settlements called Frankenhilf (Frankish help), Frankenlust (Frankish pleasure) and Frankentrost (Frankish comfort): More than one and a half centuries after the first settlers’ arrival, the gnarling Frankish dialect is finally fading. The older generation still speaks is with such purity that it brings tears to the eyes of tourists from Franconia, Germany. And German is still a compulsory subject at the parochial school.

But only 30 or 50 worshipers show up for the German-language service on every second Sunday of the month, a service inscribed in the congregation’s constitutions.  And, as local historian David Maves grumbles, while 300 people still come to the annual meeting of Frankish-speakers at the Bavarian Inn, fewer and fewer still master the dialect. Imagine the dire consequence, according to David Maves: Most participants, Americans all, now communicate in High German.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and Lutheran lay theologian is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Work Is Our Mission

Why the godly baker's most significant task is baking good bread.

Uwe Siemon-Netto

(from Christianity Today)

    When I taught at the remarkable World Journalism Institute a few years ago, I routinely asked students at the beginning of a new class: "What do you think is the calling of a Christian in secular media?" Inevitably, several young men and women would reply, "To report the news from God's perspective."
    Right? Wrong. It would be great if we knew God's cell number to ask him, "Lord, what are your views on immigration and social security?" Alas, we don't have this option. Thus from a Lutheran perspective, the proper response to the question about a Christian journalist's vocation must be: "I am called to report as fairly and as accurately as humanly possible. If I do this as a service of love to my readers and viewers, rather than with selfish interests in mind, I will render the highest possible service to God."
    Luther would say that when Christians in secular journalism serve their readers and viewers altruistically, they prove themselves members of the universal priesthood of believers. A reporter on the police beat does not have the divine assignment to "share the gospel" with cops rushing out to arrest a mugger; indeed, trying to share the gospel with them would seem foolish when officers perform their own priestly function by nabbing criminals.
    "Each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him," writes the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 7:17). In our context, this means that a reporter does not have a calling to be a preacher, even though he or she might be a devout Christian. It also means that a journalist's vocation must not be confused with that of a prosecutor or a lobbyist, two self-aggrandizing roles many contemporary journalists slip into (which is one reason the media are so disliked).
    Lutherans thrive on contradictions, and the doctrine of vocation is another example of this verity. Non-Lutherans might ask, "What do you mean calling me a Christian priest on the condition that I do not spread God's Word at work? Why call me a priest if all you want me to do is write or bake bread or pilot an airplane or serve a thirsty man a glass of beer in a bar? What's so priestly about that? You want me to be a Christian by not being a Christian?"
    It's impossible to understand Lutheran teachings on vocation and their immense significance for our time without knowing the "two kingdoms" doctrine, which even many Lutherans struggle to appreciate, though it is a keystone of their theology. In a nutshell, this doctrine says that every Christian has "dual citizenship."
    On one hand, a Christian lives in the spiritual "kingdom to the right." This is the redeemed realm of Christ, the gospel, and the church. Here we are forgiven sinners. Here we remain inactive, resting and feasting with God and freely receiving his grace because here he has revealed himself to us in Jesus. This realm is infinite. It will ultimately be glorified in the kingdom of God.
    On the other hand, Christians live out their biological lives in the finite "left-hand kingdom"—their secular reality. It too is God's realm, and must therefore never be disparaged. But here God conducts a masquerade, governing in a hidden way through worldly rulers who are his "masks," as Luther said. This realm, which will disappear at the end of time, is under the law; its operating system is natural reason—a gift from God enabling us to find our way around this place. Reason, not the gospel, can tell us how to bake bread, fix someone's plumbing, or cover a court case.
    In the left-hand kingdom, we exercise our common priesthood by serving each other lovingly, though we are fallible (we are human after all). We make mistakes but also take comfort in the knowledge that "God will put things right in the end," as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his prison cell before becoming a martyr at the hands of the Nazis.
    Though we must not embrace the ways of this sinful world, we are called to engage it fully, lest we disobey the hidden God. He has created us as his co-creators—partners in the ongoing process of cultural renewal. We are his associates when we give love to others, when we plow the land, start a family, develop new medicines, teach the next generation, invent machines, tend to the sick, and at some future date, colonize the universe.
    This idea—that by doing our daily chores we are priests equal to the minister serving at the altar—is hugely liberating, especially as we know that in our other abode, the right-hand kingdom, we are already redeemed. With this theology, Luther put laity on par with liturgists, preachers, and others officiating in divine service, and thus laid the groundwork for the modern vision of democracy. And this is perfectly biblical. Down here, in this imperfect environment with its dirty politics and asinine talk shows, we are nevertheless "a kingdom of priests," God's chosen nation, his very own possession, as St. Peter wrote (1 Pet. 2:9).
    As masks of the hidden God, we perform our priestly duties by going to the polls and running for election, by cooking for our families and doing the bookkeeping, by cutting someone's hair and issuing speeding tickets, and by storming with guns blazing an enemy position in Iraq. We are priests when we create beauty in music or other forms of art and when we teach the next generation to do the same—and when we appreciate beauty, which Scripture sometimes uses as a synonym for God. We are priests until the moment when our last priestly act might be to let doctors and nurses, friends and family tend to us in love.    Max Weber, the father of modern sociology, found that by internalizing this doctrine, Lutherans became manufacturers of some of the best products in the world (the quality of German and Swedish cars serves as a good example). Tragically though, even faithful Lutherans have forgotten this theological treasure, which is badly needed in our perplexing era.   
    This deficiency became apparent in the results of the last U.S. midterm elections. Of the 535 members of Congress, 37 are Episcopalians, even though no more than 2.2 million Americans belong to this denomination; 43 are Jews of which 5.2 million inhabit the United States. In comparison, Lutheran denominations in the United States have 9 million members and only 18 men and women elected to Congress. My own confessional Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (almost 2.5 million members) has two men in the House of Representatives—significantly fewer than the five that Christian Scientists (estimated membership: 150,000-450,000) managed to get elected.   
    Does this mean that American voters hold a bias against Lutherans, who otherwise excel in the sciences, the military, and many other fields? I don't believe so. I suspect that although their realistic theology explicitly frees them to dirty their hands in national politics and the major media—CNN's grumpy Jack Cafferty is the only well-known Lutheran on U.S. television—Lutherans, especially those of the confessional variety, are simply dragging their feet. It just might have something to do with what sociologist Peter L. Berger calls "Lutheran tribalism."
    There is a German saying: A baker who does not eat his own rolls will find it hard to sell them to others. I fear this insight applies here too, and it's a shame that this marketable item of Lutheran vocational doctrine should be left to grow stale in these befuddled times.
    Evangelicals, like those at the World Journalism Institute, need not retreat to tribal spheres like the Lutherans, nor exercise the exhortations of the evangelist in their worldly professions. Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms frees us to minister as bakers, news reporters, and accountants.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and a Lutheran lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in St. Louis, Missouri.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today.

On Words and Vocations

(from the November 2007 issue of The Lutheran Witness)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

    Not so long ago when my clients allowed me to travel First Class, I deeply offended a member of the cabin crew on an international flight by addressing him in the way I had addressed his colleagues ever since taking to the air 50 years ago. “Steward,” I said, “may I have a Scotch, please?”

    He mustered me reproachfully from top to toe, and then hissed: “Flight attendant, please!”

    “Oh,” I replied, “so you are an attendant -- like a parking lot attendant perhaps? Is that what you want to be called?”

    He threw back his head in outrage and wafted down the aisle, never to return to my part of the cabin. Clearly, a backward klutz like I wasn’t worthy of his service. Fortunately, a stewardess who did not mind being called a stewardess eventually took my order.

    Now you might wonder why I would want to regale you with this anecdote in a Lutheran publication. I have two reasons:

    1. To all intents and purposes, this “flight attendant” objected to his vocation as a steward, a perfectly noble and ancient job description for one who serves – in fact who serves in a managerial position. Had he mastered his English mother tongue he would have known that the most important officials in royal households and the first of the great officers of state in England are called stewards. Like all vocations in the secular realm, this one too is from God. Viewed from a Lutheran perspective, the apostle Paul’s admonition from 1 Corinthians 7:20, “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called,” applies to cabin crews as much as to anyone else.

   

    2. Why have airlines abandoned this elegant title for the admirable people looking after passengers on planes – employees I have even seen perform surgery in a medical emergency high over the Arab Sea, men and women prepared to die in flames as they are trying to help travelers out of a crashed aircraft? Because “flight attendant” is “gender inclusive,” while “steward” is not. A steward is always male; his female counterpart is called a stewardess, and such a distinction is not politically permissible in a demented era when ideologues endeavor to undo the distinction between male and female, a wonderful gift that is part of God’s created order.

    When ideologues set out to undo created order they first destroy the beauty of a naturally grown language. Two decades ago, they created the absurd idiom, “waitperson,” in order to spare servers in restaurants to be verbally discriminated as “waiters” or “waitresses,” whose sanity, on the other hand, mercifully survived so that we now still have waitresses and waiters in our midst, unless of course they invite you to address them by their first names, which reminds me of a marvelous cartoon in the New Yorker magazine decades ago.

    It showed two rather fay men, one a waiter, the other a guest holding a long cigarette holder. Said the guest to the waiter, “I say, Bill, would you mind very much if I just called you, ‘waiter?’” Based on the doctrine of vocation, I would speculate that the author of this cartoon might have been a Lutheran.

    I suppose the destruction of the English language began when feminist ideologues fabricated the unpronounceable title, Ms. This occurred at about the same time when men of a certain sexual preferences hijacked the beautiful vocable “gay,” which still makes me angry. It precludes my professing the lovely sense of gaiety that overcomes me when, for example, I relax with my wife savoring a bottle of wine and listening to a Mozart recording. Let it be known that I resent this theft.

    My wife, by the way, has been heroically refusing to respond to “Ms.” for four decades. At first, she returned every letter addressed to “Ms. Siemon-Netto,” until nobody who knows her dared to address her that way. Those who have not encountered her obduracy -- insurance or credit card companies soliciting our business come to mind -- ought to know that their mail winds up in the wastepaper basket, unopened. My wife, bless her, is an Englishwoman who loves her native language and will not allow ideologues to bastardize it with vowel-less sounds.

    What troubles me about today’s politically correct neologisms is that they so much resemble the absurd new words created by murderous regimes. So grotesque was the distortion of job descriptions in Communist East Germany that the citizens of this now defunct state poked fun at this trend mercilessly, calling cleaning women “semi-circle engineers,” to name one example. I hope that the street sweeper in St. Augustine, Fla., who recently handed a friend of mine his business card, did so with an equal sense of the absurd. This ridiculous card identified him as an “environmental specialist.”

    But that’s harmless. Think of the inscription, Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free), above the Nazi extermination camps or the label Hygiene-Amt (office of hygiene) camouflaging the true task a department at SS headquarters in Berlin, which was find the most efficacious way to slaughter Jews, Gypsies and others deemed “unworthy of living” by Hitler and cohorts.

    It doesn’t take much imagination to draw a parallel between misnomers like these and those of some present-day institutions doing the exact opposite of what their names suggest. Planned Parenthood does not plan parenthood but assists people in becoming non-parents, and “women’s health centers” – a term I have even heard a (non-LCMS) Lutheran pastor use in a sermon -- are in reality slaughterhouses for unborn children.

    New Testament Greek has a word for such distortions: diaballo, literally, “throwing across.” It has given the devil his name.

    That’s why Christians should beware. As a matter of fact they should resist any willful deformation of their language because it inevitably creates a lie. This thought occurred to me when I recently visited a perfectly honorable corporation, which refers to its hundreds of thousands of employees as “associates.” But this is nonsense because it says precisely what they are not.

    Associates are companions, partners, perhaps junior partners, but partners still. Associates are not people “human resources officers” – meaning, folks from the personnel department – would ever frog-march off the premises when the “associates’” contracts are terminated. What’s wrong with calling a worker just what he is – a worker? As in the past, we would do no more than identify a worker by his God-given vocation until he rises in rank -- to director, for instance.

    Which reminds me: The title, “director,” has also fallen victim to our contemporary inclination to overstate our import. I come under this rubric. Officially I am the director of the Concordia Seminary Institute on Lay Vocation.  But whom do I actually direct? Myself and Aaron Franzen, a part-time graduate student, who assists me two hours per workday.  In truth, I am just a retired old journalist put out to pasture at our seminary in St. Louis charged with pondering a Lutheran doctrine I happen to find extremely significant. So I’ll start with myself: What, I wonder, would be a good title for me if indeed I needed one?

    I’ll let you know when I have found the answer. Please stay posted.

SAINTS AND PRIESTS POSTMODERN AND REAL

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(Lecture given at the Lutheran Prayer Breakfast at Concordia Seminary St. Louis on All Saints Day 2007)

    What are saints, anyway? Do saints have to be teenagers like Joan of Arc tied to a stake as flames consume their bodies? Should saints be gaunt old men staring right through you from the ancient icons of the Eastern Church? Must they be stylites like those ascetics of early Christendom who sat on pillars preaching? Do you have to spend your life laboring in the dark hole of Calcutta, like Mother Theresa, in order to qualify as a saint? Do you have to be monks and nuns remaining single and impecunious? Or courageous men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave his life preaching the truth and plotting to overthrow Hitler?
    So what are saints? Are they just human metaphors for religious doctrines - Christian, Buddhist or Muslim? If so, should there not also be postmodern saints - you know: living images of the faith that has the Me as its central deity?
    In this case, my candidate for postmodern sainthood would be Jennifer Hoes, a winsome, auburn-haired Dutch artist. Four years ago, Jennifer made history by marrying herself in the Trouwzaal, or wedding chambers, of the city hall of Haarlem in the Netherlands. She wore a wedding gown studded with hundreds of perfect pink latex copies of two bodily attributes most people keep covered up.
    Here is the reason why I propose Jennifer's canonization as a postmodern saint: She said, "I am sooo much in love with myself." Now, if you are sooo much in love with your god, then surely you qualify as a saint - from a postmodern perspective, that is, not necessarily from ours.
    But who knows? Jennifer might even be a saint in the Lutheran sense. Let us think of the following scenario, unlikely though it seems: Suppose Jennifer is baptized. Suppose she really is a committed Christian. Suppose does believe that she is sanctified and cleansed by Christ's blood. Then she would meet Martin Luther's criteria for sainthood. She would be a saint. Period.
    Now you might say: How can a self-centered woman marrying herself be considered a saint? And even it she were a saint, what about her saintly love for others? Has she lost her sainthood? Or has she never heard of the third use of the Law?
Let us look at it this way: The universal sainthood of all baptized believers frees them to engage the world fully - not to succumb to its ways, but to participate in it instead of avoiding the world the way the Amish do.  If we operate in this world out of love for our neighbors we render the highest service to God. This makes us priests in the secular realm.
    At the risk of excommunication I claim that Jennifer's marriage to herself might fit the bill. It could quite possibly have been a priestly act. It's time for all of us to think out of the box, especially when we consider divine assignments in perplexing times, which is my point here. Suppose Jennifer is one of those Dutchwomen with a great sense of irony. Perhaps she has just been pulling our legs trying to make a vital point.
    Listen to how she explained her auto-marriage:  "Since we are living in a Me culture it seems only logical to vow faithfulness to oneself." Jennifer is a jester. By her marriage she mocks the absurdity of the self-centered world we live in. Now, if she did this out of her Christian love for her fellow man she would have followed a divine assignment, and that would make her in fact a priest.
    Secular priesthood and sainthood are properties of two distinct realms - both God's kingdoms --, which are linked. We Lutherans believe that we are all saints propter Christum per fidem, on account of Christ through faith. This was the message we heard on Reformation Day. "Left to ourselves each and every one of us would be a devil," Martin Luther said, "but because of Christ we are saints."
    Our sainthood is a position we hold in the spiritual right-hand kingdom. Our common priesthood, on the other hand, we exercise squarely in the temporal world, in the left-hand kingdom. The two, sainthood and priesthood, travel in tandem. Without our sainthood we would not be priests; we would at best be a bunch of do-gooders. Without priestly comportment in the left-hand kingdom the credibility of our sainthood seems questionable. Bonhoeffer's remarks about cheap grace come to mind.
    It is our sainthood that sets us free to serve God by serving each other in millions of ways, and hilarious humor, such as Jennifer's, might well be one of these ways.
    In my country, Germany, it has been estimated that there are about 25,000 vocations you can learn either by apprenticeship or internship, at a trade school or at university - all potentially priestly vocations if exercised with the neighbor in mind. I suspect the same is about true for the United States.
    This number is staggering and makes you look a fool if you so much as tried to judge divine assignments other than your own and the ones you are immediately familiar with. Therefore we have to be careful not to disdain other peoples' callings. If I started naming all officially listed vocations here, my undertaker might have to take over eventually. And even then we would bypass an entirely different set of vocations, which are not apparent to us on first sight.
    Marriage and friendship, sometimes even fleeting encounters, rank among vocations.  There also exist countless seemingly small situational assignments from God, assignments such as making your wife of 45 years laugh as the two of you are getting up with creaking bones in the morning if you are my age. There are assignments such as her holding my hands through the night, when she senses that something is troubling me, assignments going down to the level of basic civility, which can be so essential in making or breaking a person's day. Yes, we do have a calling from God to holding the door open for somebody behind us.
    We all have experienced people of identical professions, some with a sense of vocation, some without. Once, before President Dale A. Meyer inducted me into this institution extracting from me a vow of chastity, poverty and a little niceness, I traveled from New York to Caracas in business class. I badly needed a drink. "Steward, a Scotch," I begged the haughty young man serving in my cabin. He threw back his head in disgust and hissed, " Flight attendant, if you don't mind." Then he wafted off. I never got my whisky.
    Clearly, a man refusing to serve you because he was put off by a very noble job description had a limited sense of vocation.
    A few weeks later, I flew on a British Airways plane from Colombo in Sri Lanka to London. Suddenly, high over the Arabian Sea, the purser walked past me carrying an alarming-looking surgical implement. She nudged me and said, "Be thankful this is not for you." Then, in the cabin behind me, she was on her knees performing an extremely unpleasant emergency procedure on a groaning passenger who would probably have died had she not done this.
    Never in my 50 years of flying have I marveled at the competence and professional commitment of a stewardess as much as on that day when there was no place for the plane to land in time. When she had finished she looked absolutely drawn. "Praise God, h'ell live," she exclaimed for all to hear.
    By God, did she have a sense of calling! I told her so, and she just answered quietly, "Yes, I suppose I do."
    This was priestly stuff. But it was no more and no less priestly than what we are experiencing here in Koburg Hall this morning. We have a divine calling to thank the men and women who have prepared and served this breakfast lovingly. Thanking them is a priestly act responding to their priestly work. They are also priests; they are just as much priests as the men who institute and serve the Lord's Supper at the altar in church. The only difference is that these two sets of priests exercise their priesthood in different realms.
    If you follow my logic radically - the logic that God created us to serve each other lovingly thus making all of us priests -- you have probably met priests in action even as you were driving here in the morning dawn. Those other drivers who had their headlights switched on and their cell phones turned off as they came towards you from the opposite direction probably did so to protect you - and themselves - from harm, a priestly deed.
    While Lutherans don't believe in higher and lower orders of saints in the right-hand kingdom, our common priesthood in the temporal realm has hierarchical appearances. This is so because that's what our finite world is like - hierarchical. The point here is not that God values the priestly performance of a janitor less highly than the priestly love of Mother Theresa.
    But as a journalist I must tell you: Thank God for the late Mother Theresa's stardom: What more effective way to show the world that some things are more important to consider than the Me?
    This brings me to a wonderful local story about the incredible interaction of left-hand kingdom priesthoods, a story moving many people in St. Louis right now, a story also reminding us that the Christian's priesthood in the world does not end until we literally draw our last breath.
    You have probably heard of Pastor Mark Meschke, biology teacher, former football and baseball coach and former chapel dean at Mayer Lutheran High School. He is dying of cancer. Yet in the face of his grave illness he has continued teaching. In so doing he exercised his priestly assignment of lovingly serving his students and colleagues and at the same time making them aware that dying, too, involves being priestly in two ways:
    You lovingly show the people around you how to die well - in a Christian way, in faith, bearing your cross. In our final moments we exercise our priesthood by lovingly allowing our family, our friends, our caretakers to be priests by giving us their love. You might call this a priestly happy exchange in the left-hand kingdom. If you have observed this once you will probably agree that this is the most powerful dynamic anyone can think of in the human experience.
    From what I hear, Pastor Meschke is no longer able to teach. But he corresponds by email with his students and friends daily, telling them in detail and step-by-step how he is dying, how much liquid had to be removed from his lungs that morning, and how their love reaches him.
    What we are witnessing here is a priestly back and forth. It is the very interchange of love God has created humans for. This is not about "being good" on a schmaltzy way. It is about fulfilling God's assignments for us in this temporal world. If we hear stories like this we begin to understand why Luther said that there is no higher service in God's eyes than the service we render to our fellow man. This is imperative to know especially at a time when two competing monotheistic religions confront each other on a global scale.
    Let me contrast two different religious scenarios here, both involving an act that seems at least superficially as alien to Christian thought as Jennifer Hoes' marriage to herself. I am talking about suicide.
As we speak, American forces in Iraq experience daily the madness of religious people volunteering to become living bombs with one sole purpose: killing as many children, women, and men as possible, sometimes hundreds.

    Make no mistake about it: Suicide bombers act out of faith - but what kind of faith? They do this because their religion, unlike ours, tells them that there is no certainty of salvation. We know that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ's vicarious death for us. They on the other hand have been taught that only if they die as martyrs they will definitely fast-forward to Paradise. An even then they will never spend eternity with Christ or even see God. All they are promised is eternity in the company of 72 virgins. But that's what they kill themselves and others for: the certainty of winding up in what they perceive as paradise. Yes, they are sacrificing themselves, but in a horribly selfish way. In truth they are serving not God but the very deity Jennifer Hoes is mocking - the Me.
    Compare this with what I saw as a war correspondent in Vietnam back in 1968. I had accompanied a U.S. Army platoon into a village. Immediately hundreds of civilians surrounded this unit Suddenly somebody threw a live hand grenade into the crowd now made up chiefly of children, women and old men.
In a flash second, the platoon leader, a second lieutenant whom I come to know as a deeply believing Christian, threw himself on this grenade. It exploded. It killed him instantly. But with his body he saved all the others.
    Need I say more? Unlike Muslim suicide bombers who only have their salvation in mind, this lieutenant gave his life out of his love for others. His suicide was priestly. It was an act performed by a young man who knew he was a saint propter Christum per fidem, on account of Christ through faith.
      I wish all of you a blessed All Saints Day.

Sick of today's media? Let's make new journalists

(From the October 2007 issue of the Reporter, official newspaper of the LCMS)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Christopher Hitchens, the witty British-born journalist and author, earlier this year joined the growing flock of godless writers swamping America's bookstores with atheist tomes.
    This in itself doesn't bother me.  The man is entitled to his opinion, and at least one can be sure that his God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything is stylishly written.  Moreover, I agree with my former boss John O'Sullivan, a fervent Roman Catholic, that by declaring himself God's enemy rather than a dim-witted agnostic, Hitchens might yet turn out not to be a lost cause; it is easier to hope for thinking atheists than for the mentally idle who don't know and don't care.
    What gets my gall, though, is something else.  No sooner was this book off the presses than CNN's Lou Dobbs literally fawned over Hitchens on prime time.  You would never get that much adulation on cable TV if you had just written brilliant work affirming your Christian faith.  Not once did Dobbs ask Hitchens the obvious question: “Tell me, Christopher, don't you think it rather shoddy to use the current global anguish over radical Islam as an excuse to strike out against all forms of religion, including the Christian and Jewish faiths your forebears owed their culture to?”
    Here is my point: So haughty have the major media become in recent decades that the beliefs and sensitivities of the vast majority of their audience no longer matter to them.  This applies to many areas of the human enterprise, but is especially true in questions of faith.
    Although nine out of 10 Americans believe in God and most consider themselves Christians, they don't seem to take offense at powerful media corporations such as CNN, whose founder, Ted Turner, once said Christianity was for losers.  I fear most Americans have been cowed into defeatism by the conceited stars of the small screen
    William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, appears to be the only one with the guts to hit back instantly at media bigots -- often with significant success.  Lutherans might grumble, but like so many other Christians, they seem to have long accepted the huge disconnect between journalists and the community they serve as if it were some kind of inevitable natural phenomenon, like tornadoes or hailstorms.  We shrug when we read that 91 percent of people working in the national media do not think that belief in God is necessary to be moral, while 58 percent of the general public are certain it is.
    A dozen years ago, Peter Steinfels, then the senior religion correspondent of The New York Times, pilloried the media's failings in covering religion properly in a forum organized by Commonweal, a Catholic magazine.  He explained this deficit thus: “I'll assign responsibility symmetrically to three sorts of causes -- one-third to ideological hostility; one-third to ignorance, incompetence, and insufficient resources; one-third to the inherited definitions of news, and the inherent constraints of time and space.”
    Ideology, ignorance, and incompetence -- these three are constituent parts of arrogance, a human property Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once defined as a synonym for stupidity.  Arrogance has become the mark of a crop of college-trained journalists that emerged in the mid-1960s.  The Australian-born publisher Rupert Murdoch described them disdainfully as “self-important pundits out of touch with the public taste.”
    This has not always been so.  Like some of literature's finest wordsmiths, such as G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh, journalists of another generation did not understand themselves as professionals or intellectuals but as craftsmen trained not in some ivory tower by liberal arts professors but by masters in their field -- tough old craftsmen themselves.  These men and women taught fledgling journalists to respect the “little guy's” values, which today's media and academia have largely replaced with political correctness.
In a 1996 study of the contemporary press, James Fallows wrote: “Until about the mid-1960s, journalism was essentially a working-class activity.  In big cities the typical reporter would make about as much as the typical cop.  Many reporters had not gone to college.”  Fallows went on to quote Richard Harwood, a longtime Washington Post correspondent: “In early times we were not only describing the life of normal people, we were participating in it -- we were more or less on the same level.  We lived in the same neighborhoods.”
    This is precisely the point where confessional Lutherans are superbly equipped to help reverse a perilous development that before long will destroy freedom and democracy because both depend on a well-informed public.  We have all the tools for such an undertaking at our disposal.  We have the right doctrine by which journalism must be seen as a divine vocation for the secular “left-hand” kingdom if exercised unselfishly -- meaning without hubris -- out of love for one's neighbors, in this case readers and viewers.
    The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod owns the second-largest parochial school system in the country.  If its teachers were only aware of the severity of this problem they might try to identify journalistically gifted children at an early age and steer them in the right direction, chiefly by encouraging the unquenchable sense of wonderment that should be a journalist's premier quality.
    Retired editors and reporters -- master craftsmen -- could be brought in to help train these kids, send them on assignments, publish their work in internet publications especially developed for this purpose, and farm them out as interns to small-town newspapers and radio stations that have remained faithful to old standards.  Then, after graduating from high school, these prospective journalists should train for two years as copyboys and copygirls in such media outlets or indeed in the Missouri Synod's own radio station, KFUO in St. Louis, which should be turned into an institution we might call “Concordia Public Radio.”
    Once they have been “on the beat” for two years, I am confident that well-trained young journalists will not allow their minds to be closed in college, and that danger would be even less if this school happens to be a Concordia University.  But this means that the Concordias and their benefactors first have to wake up to the pressing need for such a novel journalism program whose goal must not be to create “Lutheran” journalists but equip Lutherans and other Christians to function competently (and be driven by a Christian ethos) in the secular media.  In other words, this is meant to be an authentically Lutheran gift to the community at large.
    True, I am proposing a revolution.  It will require confessional Lutherans to begin an excursion out of the 17th century into the 21st century. There they will find out that it is almost as important -- if not equally important -- to form editors and reporters as it is to train future teachers and pastors.  It will also mean that the more “evangelical” wing of our brothers and sisters become a little more Lutheran by accepting the fact that our theology includes great care for the left-hand kingdom, where secular journalism is perhaps the most substantial force.  Further, it will necessitate innovative faculties willing to venture into new fields and methods in the Concordia University curriculum, including granting academic credits for the students' work on the beat.
    And finally, Lutheran benefactors will have to be persuaded that such an undertaking is necessary and worthy of their generosity.  Should there be any doubt about this, please do watch television, read the papers, listen to what people out there say about the distressing state of the media, and consider the assets at our disposal -- theology, schools, universities, and plenty of smart young people.
    If you say you are sick of today's media, let's go ahead and make new journalists.  If they turn out to be good, they'll find employment -- and help reverse a potentially calamitous trend in our society.

    Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto is director of the Concordia Seminary Institute on Lay Vocation in St. Louis