Lutheranism

And so what happens, and you see this.

I remember a Lutheran woman pastor, big time air quotes there.

She's like, "Yeah, Paul's kinda icky." People love Jesus or claim to love him, but when you consider the whole of the New Testament, Paul is the weight and the thrust and the intellect that ground all of these positions that leave no exit from it.

And so what you're forced to do is when you come to the text and you realize what it really says, you have to say, "I don't like Paul," which means I don't like the Holy Spirit that worked through Paul, and I don't like the third member of the Trinity, meaning I also don't like the second, and I also don't like the first.

Let's go back to Bunny in St. Louis.

Okay, Bunny in St. Louis, you had asked me just before the break about a priest who told you that Lutherans have the real presence of Jesus in their Eucharist.

Is that right?

Well, he was saying, oh, think about it.

And I said, well, there's a lot of crumbs and stuff involved.

And he said, well, once it's not edible, it's no longer the body of Christ.

Anyway, that's what I think he was saying the Lutherans believed, and that makes sense to him.

I had never heard that before.

My mom had been raised by a Methodist minister.

And her mom was German Lutheran.

So a lot of religion was going on there.

But they didn't have a shared faith, my parents.

And then there was my church.

And at my church, you know, it was a old, old white Lutheran German church.

Huh.

And my grandfather actually was an evangelist and my family helped integrate that church during civil

What we also know, according to the exorcism diary anyway, is that Odell and Anna are still at this point blaming Tilly for everything.

Eventually, they turn to their Lutheran pastor.

Troy says that his name is Reverend Schultz.

He says, Reverend Schultz came to the house and listened politely to the litany of strange events they claim were happening after conferring with colleagues.

The first night they spent in the Normandy suburb, which is located inside the 270 loop, just a couple of miles southeast of the airport.

The Normandy address was the home of Odell's sister.

They were a Lutheran family too, and they had spoke to their minister in advance of the family's arrival.

And the minister pretty much told them, you need a priest, not a Lutheran minister.

As a matter of fact, Dad, I don't know if I ever told you this, but before we moved to Pennsylvania, where we are now, I don't think I've ever announced that on the podcast, in case anyone hasn't figured it out yet.

I am now the pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania.

Yay! But anyway, before we came here, we were spending time in Minnesota with Andrew's parents, my husband's parents, and I got in the habit of going to the Saturday morning, i.e.

Sabbath, Shabbat morning Torah study at the nearby Reformed Synagogue, and Because I was just genuinely curious how Jews received and read the scripture that was also scripture for me, but obviously interpreted through a very different lens.

You can feel some compassion to the people who get suckered into it, and you can feel angry at someone who deliberately garbles it up for their own purposes, whatever those might be.

But you can't just, it's not fair to deny that it can ever happen.

And the other thing is maybe it's worth asking, well, why bother with the Jesus story at all if you're going to distort it so much from the Irenaeus version or the Apostle John version? And maybe as a little teaser to my eventual God-willing book on the Lutheran doctrine of Mary, believe it or not, Dad, I have had to take a detour into fan

fiction studies.

Well, yeah, it's about the love, but we did, you know, we, uh, where we, most of the people we sing for are in Minnesota.

And so we have had to learn some Lutheran hymns because a lot of people want to hear

those from their childhood and

plus some of them are great songs.

And they had a very interesting twist because they also dealt with the problem that the Balkan Marxists dealt with, which is that they have a very multi-ethnic state and that if you try to conceivably divide it along ethnic lines, you're going to have chaos.

So instead, they come up with this idea of personal autonomy, where essentially belonging to nationhood would be The equivalent of, you know, if you know, like, what is it like to be signed up to be a member of a particular church in Germany today, right? So you pay special taxes as a Catholic or a Lutheran and that tax money goes to that church specifically.

So you have your kind of own community, but it doesn't actually have any kind of territorial expression.

Mm-hmm.

Okie dokie.

Might surprise you that Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, celebrate Lent.

It's not just Catholics.

And in fact, in the last, this is baffling to me, in the last 20 years, the adherence to Lent has gone up in the Protestant denomination by 30%.