It is easy to be against something; especially if we are basically ignorant of what we are opposing. It is much more difficult (and helpful) to be clear about what we are supporting. We certainly saw signs of this in the presidential election campaign of last fall. Both campaigns found it easier to articulate why we should not vote for the other guy. They were far less clear in giving us reasons to vote for their own candidate. That is always the way it is. Let's not throw the baby out with the baptismal water. Lutherans are not anti-Roman Catholic. They are pro-Scripture. Many modern Christians have found it easy to bash the papacy and its trappings and in the process they fail to see what was beneficial in the teaching and practice of the papal church.

Luther, despite being excommunicated by the papacy and, because of it, living as an outlaw his entire adult life, refused to take the anti-papal low road and condemn all things papal as contaminated and in need of being destroyed right down to its last vestige. Luther was wise enough to understand that the papal church bequeathed to western Christians Scripture, sacraments, preaching, faithful confessions, the keys, the catechism, the ministry, and others.

This clarity about the beneficial characteristics of the papal church would help in our time as well. When Luther went about reforming the rites of the church, he did not reject the liturgy of the church wholesale. He was not a revolutionary or destroyer. He always retained the worship forms that were not opposed to Scripture. For example, he removed prayers addressed to the saints from the canon of the mass, because such petitions were blasphemous. However, he retained the ordinaries of the mass: the Kyrie, the Gloria in Excelsis, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei.

Unfortunately, others sought not merely to reform the church but to destroy everything that had the slightest appearance of the papacy. The Anabaptists were rebaptizing anyone who had been baptized as an infant using the papal rite of baptism, even though the papal church had retained baptism itself within that rite. When Luther reformed the rite of baptism in the mid-1520s in Wittenberg, he merely excised anti-scriptural practices that had crept into the rite over the centuries. He kept the rest of the practices associated with baptism. Luther's reformation retained the order and discipline which had generally characterized Christian worship through the centuries. This past Sunday a young Roman Catholic man attended the Epiphany service of the parish I serve. A friend of his challenged him to attend a Lutheran service. He testified to me that he appreciated the order and sense of discipline displayed by the service that he witnessed.

Today Lutherans seek to maintain that order rather than willy-nilly to "reform" the liturgy according to modern canons of "worship and praise." Those who junk wholesale things they don't understand or appreciate damage the gospel-centered nature of the church's ancient liturgical practice. The reason that Luther could "discover" the gospel was that it was there to be discerned within and among all that had been maintained by the papal church for centuries. Like Luther, let's not throw the baby out with the baptismal water.

Martin Luther