Worlds Old and New

Pastor’s Epistle—September, A.D. 2019 C

In Stockholm my wife and I visited what is arguably the world’s first Lutheran church, or at least the first one with state sponsorship. Gustav Vasa, the king who broke Sweden away from the Kalmar Union with Denmark, tasked the priest Olaus Petri with preaching the Lutheran Reformation in the Storkyrkan; that is, the “Great Church” of St Nicholas in Stockholm. After that first sermon, the congregation pulled down Petri’s pulpit and tore it apart with their bare hands. “People took religion very seriously,” deadpanned our guide.

The Reformation took, of course. Sweden became the world’s first Protestant nation. And things went pretty well with Gustav and Olaus, until one day the priest had the temerity to criticize the king, and the king thus stuck a barrel of gunpowder under the priest’s pew.  Issues of Church and State are nothing new, it seems. Don’t worry, though; it all worked out in the end.

Magnificent churches dominated every city that we visited in the Baltic. Finns proudly showed us the Helsinki Cathedral, which they called “the simple Lutheran church,” despite its ornate Corinthian columns, massive statues of the Apostles and Reformers, 20-foot pulpit, and domes decorated with gold-gilded stars. It even had a coffee shop and art gallery in the underground crypt, cannily titled Kafe Krypta.

Indeed, compared to the soaring Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals of Europe, the Lutheran church was the simple one. Places like Estonia boasted skylines of gorgeous towers and steeples, from the onion domes of the Russians to the gothic spires of the Germans. Despite the reported secularity of Europe, all seemed proud of their Lutheran heritage—except of course St Petersburg, which is about as Orthodox as one can get.

These days we don’t build towering edifices to Christian faith, nor get so worked up about theology that we tear pulpits apart with our bare hands. Rather, we save our soaring structures and violent outbursts for the religion that matters most to postmodern man: economics.

Whereas Lutherans and Catholics used to feud over ideology 500 years ago, now we roar-and-war over notions of socialism, the free market, government intervention, taxation, and universal healthcare. We’re just as religious as ever, though our god these days tends to be the almighty dollar, and we still wage crusades and cold wars in his name. Bidden or not bidden, God is present. And wittingly or not, so is religion.

The relative youth of our country is a double-edged sword. We are freed from the burdens of history that weigh so heavily upon the peoples of Europe, but we also lack the stability and perspective that such deep roots provide. Faith, like life, is for us a much more individualistic endeavor; a matter of personal taste and choice; the ever-evolving consumerist quest for self-definition. Europeans, however, while they certainly have a choice in the matter, pay greater heed to culture, community, and family history.

Would that we might have the wisdom to harvest the best of both worlds.

In Jesus. Amen.