The Lutheran Sanctoral Calendar

Lutheran Answers

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Today I’m joined by Gage Garlinghouse to discuss his work on Sacred Hours and the Lutheran Sanctoral Calendar.

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Transcript

[00:00:01] Remy: Hello and welcome to Lutheran Answers. Today I am joined by Mr. Gage Garlinghouse. Gage, how are you, bud?

[00:00:07] Gage: I’m doing well, Remy. How are you?

[00:00:09] Remy: I’m doing well. We know each other because of the aalc. Yeah, yeah. We.

[00:00:16] Gage: To your chagrin.

[00:00:17] Remy: Yeah. We’ve met at various conferences and conventions. In person, we’ve hung out.

We have.

Sorry, my cat. We have.

We’ve had several classes together.

[00:00:32] Gage: Yeah.

[00:00:33] Remy: During which.

[00:00:34] Gage: Your chagrin.

[00:00:35] Remy: Yeah.

[00:00:35] Gage: Well, you’re.

[00:00:36] Remy: I was gonna say you’re actually not the worst person to have a class with.

[00:00:42] Gage: That’s a win. That’s a win.

[00:00:44] Remy: Yeah. Yeah. There are others worse, but it’s great because I can just kind of springboard. You can be real smart and I can just kind of springboard off of that and look smart, and so that’s what I like.

[00:00:55] Gage: Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I was hoping this would be the reverse.

[00:00:58] Remy: No, no, no.

The only other thing I really know about you gauge is that you pretend to have a girlfriend on the Internet. So.

[00:01:11] Gage: Hi, Anna.

[00:01:11] Remy: I know you’ll listen to this, so tell me.

Yes, that’s right. Anna.

Yeah. Really creative, Gage. Good job.

[00:01:24] Gage: Wait until you hear her middle name. It’s even less.

[00:01:28] Remy: Is her last name Smith?

[00:01:30] Gage: No, no, her last name is a lot more creative. But her first two names are Anna Marie, which is.

[00:01:37] Remy: Which totally not made up.

[00:01:40] Gage: Oh, she gets so mad. She’s like, this is so basic. I sound like a boat.

[00:01:46] Remy: It would be Maria, though, right? It would be Anna. Maria would be a boat.

[00:01:52] Gage: Probably. I don’t know. I like. I don’t know anything about them.

[00:01:56] Remy: Before we get into it, I do want to say you were instrumental in this.

[00:02:00] Gage: I was. I was.

[00:02:01] Remy: This is great. I love this.

[00:02:03] Gage: I’m so glad.

[00:02:05] Remy: If people don’t have this, they need to get this. It’s from the old Justin Center. Yeah. Product placement. Wonderful little book. A lot easier.

[00:02:16] Gage: Just so we’re clear, we don’t get any of the money?

[00:02:18] Remy: No money? No. Jordan keeps all of the money for himself. So, yeah.

[00:02:26] Gage: Justin center totally makes enough money for him to do that.

[00:02:29] Remy: Yeah. Yep. Please don’t kill me, Dr. Cooper.

[00:02:33] Gage: So.

I love you.

[00:02:38] Remy: That’s okay. He doesn’t listen to this.

[00:02:40] Gage: It’s fine.

[00:02:40] Remy: As long as no one tags him, we’ll be.

[00:02:42] Gage: But his wife does.

[00:02:44] Remy: Oh, that’s true.

[00:02:48] Gage: Who is lovely, lovely woman.

[00:02:50] Remy: Truly lovely woman. And Dr. Cooper himself is very nice. I have often been within it several yards of him, and he’s been very nice.

[00:03:02] Gage: So he’s talked to me. It’s Amazing. Wow.

[00:03:06] Remy: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I. I went up to him at the National Convention this last year, and I was like, oh, hey, Dr. Cooper. I’m, you know, I’m Remy Shepard. And he was like, oh, yeah, you’re the guy from.

Yeah. You know, you do good. You do good stuff. And I like, oh, man. You know that. It meant a lot. It meant a lot.

[00:03:25] Gage: Is that. Is that what happened when you reached out to Pastor Roseboro, too, about being on the show? It’s like, no.

[00:03:30] Remy: Roseboro listens to my show faithfully. Rose.

[00:03:33] Gage: Rose.

[00:03:33] Remy: A big Lutheran answers Stan.

[00:03:35] Gage: Okay.

[00:03:36] Remy: Okay.

[00:03:38] Gage: To be honest, that doesn’t surprise me.

Yep.

[00:03:43] Remy: Well, hang on.

So, Gage, tell me a little bit more about yourself. How long have you been a Lutheran?

[00:04:00] Gage: Well, the short of it is technically my whole life. The long of it is bits and pieces. I can give you the full story if you want, but.

[00:04:09] Remy: Yes.

[00:04:10] Gage: Okay. So I was born to a family. The Garling Houses have always been Presbyterian for as far back as I can trace.

[00:04:19] Remy: Okay.

[00:04:19] Gage: Because we married one Scottish lady right before the American Revolution, and apparently she was pretty enough to make us convert.

[00:04:26] Remy: Yep.

[00:04:27] Gage: So. But we have a history of. Every woman we’ve ever married is Lutheran.

[00:04:32] Remy: Hmm.

[00:04:34] Gage: Don’t ask me how, but it works out. And it worked out with my parents, too. So I was baptized in the PC USA in the hopes. Yeah. To be fair, the pastor was great. The church body, not so much.

[00:04:47] Remy: I’m sure the pastor was a very nice woman.

[00:04:51] Gage: I would have been baptized again. Not really. Not actually want to make this clear. Not. But.

[00:04:58] Remy: But maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:05:02] Gage: Who knows? Maybe she was secretly a Mormon.

[00:05:04] Remy: Definitely, definitely would not have been baptized again. Unless.

[00:05:08] Gage: Yeah, it’s like one of those Roman things where Father has actually been saying the wrong words, and all of a sudden, three generations of a family have never been baptized.

No, I was baptized in the PC usa, But after that, it did not have the intended effect of trying to get my family to come back to the church.

And so my mother went, okay, I’m raising him Lutheran. Well, she was raised in the old alc, so all she knew was the elca. So I spent most of my life in the elca.

And I like to describe the parish I was in is one of the one was in is a parish that the bishop just kind of ignored.

The pastor there was too conservative for her to do what she wanted. So to tell you, the kind of guy he is, he bought me my first book of Concord.

[00:06:02] Remy: Oh.

[00:06:02] Gage: It’s like, this is who Hilariously, the other pastor told me, don’t bother with it. That’s just a seminary textbook, which, oh, wow. Tells you the attitudes you’re dealing with here. But I was in the elca. I’ve wanted to be a pastor my entire life. This pastor was training me and went to the 2018 youth gathering, which is the one in Houston. And for those who don’t know, this is the one where Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton walked out on stage with a trans child and the child’s mother and proudly supported it.

That’s the famous part. The part that got me when I was there was Nadia Bolsweber came out and took the baptismal liturgy, one of the most beautiful pieces of work the church has ever been able, by the grace of God, to produce.

[00:06:49] Remy: Right.

[00:06:49] Gage: Completely changed it. Made it the most heretical, liberal mess you’ve ever heard.

And I got back and I told my pastor, I don’t. I don’t know what I believe right at the moment. I know it’s not that, though.

[00:07:05] Remy: Oh, gosh.

[00:07:07] Gage: And so he said, okay, I understand.

And I left the elca. And then I never. I like to say I never stopped believing in God, but I definitely stopped believing in the church. I was like, well, if that’s the church, I’m good. Yeah, I will find my own way.

But as the Lord is want to do, he smacked me over the head really quickly and told me to knock that crap out.

Still does that regularly, by the way.

And he sent me a girl at the time who was not great on theology, but she regularly attended her church. The one thing she was definitely was a Christian.

And I like this girl enough to go, you know, I should probably figure this whole thing out.

So it gets me to read the Bible for the first time, and I go, great, I believe this. Now let’s find some people who believe this.

And then in the greatest act of providence, in a weird way, Covid happens. And so now I have an unbelievable amount of free time to go and research other church bodies. And also everybody’s livestreaming their services now, so I can go and listen and watch. Yeah, so I. I watched Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, the whole. The whole gambit.

Unlike you, I never spent any time with the Charismatics, though.

[00:08:31] Remy: Oh, man, missing out.

[00:08:34] Gage: That was pretty quick out.

I take that back. I think I watched one Assemblies of God service and the lady up on. Was it a lady? I don’t remember.

All I remember is they started speaking in tongues, and I went, wait, what? Nope, I’m good.

[00:08:52] Remy: Should have Bought a Honda.

[00:08:55] Gage: I’m more of a shoulda bought a Kia kind of guy.

[00:08:58] Remy: Amen, brother.

[00:09:00] Gage: So we. So I start watching these services.

Baptists get ruled out pretty quickly because while I didn’t understand justification as a Lutheran would, I did have enough Sacramentology beat into me to know this doesn’t seem right.

Then I go to the Methodist, because that’s what my girlfriend was.

I left pretty quickly after reading some Wesley. He does have some great.

[00:09:24] Remy: Okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You’re smarter than me. And I just want to know if you’re gonna back me up on this. Wesley, terrible theologian. Really, really not good theologian. People, like, get super hyped about Wesley and I cannot figure it out.

[00:09:41] Gage: So he’s great. If you want to be in a Reformed Arminian, and by that I mean buy into some of Calvin’s points, but still be an Arminian.

[00:09:51] Remy: Right.

[00:09:52] Gage: But for example, in his explanatory notes on the New Testament, which is a Wesleyan standard, that’s as close as a confession of faith as they get. Think. But they use them like the Anglicans use their formularies.

[00:10:04] Remy: Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:10:05] Gage: So it’s that kind of a tradition. It’s one of their standards. It’s those. It’s his standard sermons, and it’s the Articles of Religion that he revised. So he took the Church of England, revised their articles, and those are their standards.

[00:10:19] Remy: And just like the Church of England, you don’t actually have to believe any of it to be a Methodist.

[00:10:25] Gage: To the Global Methodist’s credit, you do.

[00:10:27] Remy: Oh, good. Okay.

[00:10:28] Gage: So. So the Global Ma. Now, grant, it’s still a little loosey goosey, but they will actually require you to believe things.

[00:10:35] Remy: Good, good.

[00:10:36] Gage: Yeah.

But like in his explanatory notes on John 3, because if you want to understand Wesley, you have to understand his idea of the new birth. Like, that’s. It was just in the water.

And he explicitly says baptism is not the new birth.

[00:10:51] Remy: Oh.

[00:10:52] Gage: And that’s all he says, by the way. He doesn’t even deal with what the water in John 3 is. He just says, it is clear. It’s not baptism. Anyways, moving on to this other thing.

[00:11:01] Remy: Yeah.

[00:11:02] Gage: Wait, what?

[00:11:03] Remy: Yeah, it’s not. Well, here’s the thing, Old John, it’s. It’s not that clear, actually. Yeah.

[00:11:09] Gage: And he says it like, it’s just obviously. What. What else could it be? So I always laugh when I see Wesleyans defending baptismal regeneration because I’m like, okay, Calvin, I see what you’re doing.

[00:11:21] Remy: Yeah, it’s like, it’s like reading through just about any Reformed study Bible. Yes. And then you hit, like, first Peter 3, 20 tons of notes. First Peter 3, 21 crickets. First Peter 3, 22 tons of notes.

[00:11:37] Gage: Well, because the new birth is mentioned, so I know this isn’t about Methodism, but I just have to.

[00:11:43] Remy: It’s fine. Yeah.

[00:11:44] Gage: The new birth isn’t talked about in that term a whole lot. Like it’s you must be born again is brought up a couple of times now. The actual theological meaning is all over the place. But you would think that for a guy whose entire movement is based upon the idea of preaching to people about the new birth, living out the Christian faith, and truly being given a new heart, you’d think he’d have some more to say about John 3, where Christ explicitly says, you must be born again.

Nope.

[00:12:22] Remy: Just gonna. Just gonna let that one hang.

[00:12:25] Gage: Yeah. And it is so weird because he gives some notes, and I disagree with all of them, but besides the point, he gives some notes and he’s genuinely being a very. I’m gonna upset every Methodist with this one. He’s being a very good Calvinist in how he goes about dealing with some of these things.

[00:12:41] Remy: Just so you know, as we continue down the John Wesley rabbit hole here, this is. The show is not called Methodist Answers, so fire away.

[00:12:50] Gage: True entire sanctification, Am I right?

[00:12:54] Remy: Yeah, Yeah. I had a teacher at my charismatic high school. I went to a charismatic Christian high school associated with my church. And we had. We had hired a Methodist teacher because Charismatics, much like Anglicans. This is also not Anglican Answers.

[00:13:09] Gage: You can believe anything you want to be an Anglican.

[00:13:11] Remy: So, yeah, you will. You can believe anything you want be charismatic. That’s why they’re so full of heresy. As long as you can roll around on the floor during the emotional music, you’re. You’re in, bro.

[00:13:21] Gage: Yeah.

[00:13:22] Remy: So we hired a Methodist, which I.

[00:13:24] Gage: Couldn’T, by the way.

[00:13:25] Remy: Yeah, yeah.

[00:13:26] Gage: I never could. I always thought it looked stupid.

[00:13:28] Remy: No, I mean, you know, I’ve done it. It’s kind of fun. So we.

We had a Methodist.

[00:13:33] Gage: I’ll take your word for it.

[00:13:35] Remy: And she. She upset everybody when she started talking about, you know, sort of Wesleyan perfectionism in this entire sanctification, this idea that she could go without sinning. Really.

[00:13:48] Gage: Charismatics got upset about that. Interesting.

[00:13:51] Remy: Yeah.

[00:13:51] Gage: Praise God.

[00:13:52] Remy: Yeah. Because she said. Because she. Well, she. And she specifically, I think, said during, like, a teacher devotion that she was sinless now and really upset some people.

[00:14:03] Gage: That reminds me of a story that Our beloved father and president of our seminary, Bishop Lyons. Bishop Curtis Lyons, who’s just an angel.

He likes to tell the story of one time he came across a man who. And I think he said he was a pastor who said, I don’t sin anymore.

[00:14:23] Remy: Wow.

[00:14:23] Gage: And I’m just like, teach me.

[00:14:27] Remy: Yeah.

[00:14:27] Gage: What am I doing there? To quote the Desert Fathers, how does. How do I become all flame like you?

[00:14:34] Remy: Yeah. Honestly.

[00:14:35] Gage: Which is legitimately some advice they give, by the way.

[00:14:37] Remy: You.

[00:14:37] Gage: You must become all flame.

[00:14:40] Remy: I’m scared to know what that means.

[00:14:43] Gage: It’s. What they want is for you to. To participate more in God. So the whole point is, like, when they say all flame, imagine, like, Holy Spirit, fire on Pentecost kind of flame. Not, oh, no, I’m in hell. I quite literally am all flame, though I guess based on the wording, that does fit.

But no. So I spent some time with the Wesleyans, mostly his girlfriend. I am just very. I want to know.

She was not, at least at the time, theologically a Wesleyan. She was just blank evangelical. But she attended the Methodist Church, and I just couldn’t with Wesley. Entire sanctification was one. Sacraments were another. It’s just the basic run list that every Lutheran will give about why they’re not a Wesleyan. So that leads me to Presbyterians, because I’m like, oh, well, my grandfather was one. Maybe I should look at it. He doesn’t seem like.

I look at him. And a couple of problems arise.

The nearest conservative Presbyterian church is not a realistic, like, location to drive to, which, unfortunately, is a practical concern. How am I supposed to be in a Christian community I can’t be a part of? Yeah.

And then also this. Honestly, it’s the same issues that I had with Wesley. I couldn’t get behind the sacraments. Well, baptism regenerates, just not at baptism. Wait, what? What.

[00:16:12] Remy: So what you’re saying is that baptism is an outward sign of an inward cha.

Wait.

[00:16:21] Gage: And then also just double predestination. So, again, all the same stuff every Lutheran will say.

And at this point, I’m feeling kind of. Kind of doomed. Like, well, what. What am I gonna tell her?

Well, then I discover the magic that is the papacy, Orthodoxy. And by magic, I mean they have really pretty art. Mm.

But as I soon discovered, too Western to be an Easterner and too Protestant to be a Roman.

[00:16:52] Remy: Mmm.

[00:16:53] Gage: And as I had just experienced, apparently I’m too Catholic to be a Protestant. So now I really feel just doomed.

And so I’m not considering Lutheranism at this point because, again, All I know is the elca. I don’t even know the Missouri Synod, aalc. Anything exists at this point, which is to my shame, considering, like, half of my family was a part of a Missouri Senate church. So that’s to my shame.

Mea culpa. But so I start looking, and the only thing I can find is Anglicanism.

And I’m like, well, cool. They’ve got. I’ve also discovered the fathers by this point, so now I’m like, just especially about baptism. Very convinced that this. It’s not even just my understanding. This was the Catholic understanding.

Small C here for those just listening.

But I started looking at Anglicans, and as we just said in. Unfortunately, you can really just run the gambit and be an Anglican. You can be a charismatic Anglican, though all the other Anglicans will deny that one. You can be. You can be Rome without the Pope and be an Anglican.

[00:18:06] Remy: You can be Rome with the Pope and be an Anglican.

[00:18:09] Gage: Yeah. Thanks to Benedict, you can now be Rome with the Pope and be Anglican. Although I don’t think they’d say that, but whatever.

You can. You can be Calvin with bishops.

[00:18:21] Remy: Mm.

[00:18:22] Gage: And be an Anglican, which, admittedly, I always found to be the most attractive because it felt the most honest to the. To the formularies. But.

And it’s not to say that what Anglicanism does. Well. They. They don’t. They do well. They really do. The problem is they major in the accidentals and not so much in the. The substance. To quote a very dear Anglo Catholic friend, they’re called the Articles of Religion, not Articles of doctrine for a reason.

And to go back to the Presbyterian point, the nearest Anglican church that isn’t the Episcopalians is, like, an hour away.

[00:19:02] Remy: Right.

[00:19:03] Gage: And it, like, has seven people attending regularly.

In their defense, it’s a church plant, so I can’t get too angry about that one. But.

So I’m legitimately like, well, the Anglicans feel like the ones I agree with the most, but there’s no Anglicans here. And the only way for me to be an Anglican is to be in communion with people who ordain women.

And that’s like the. Don’t talk about this issue.

So at this point, I go. And I quite literally rediscover that Book of Concord my pastor had bought me. And I say, out of respect for you, I will read this book. I read it, and I’m just like, wow, this is awesome. It’s just such a shame nobody else seems to believe it in the world.

[00:19:46] Remy: Oh, no, we need better marketing.

[00:19:50] Gage: Yeah, that Sounds like the perennial Lutheran problem.

But that leads me to YouTubing videos about Book of Concord. I find Dr. Cooper’s videos. I interestingly don’t find the AALC because of him somehow missed that he was a part of the aalc. But I did find confessional Lutheranism. And by this point, the point I have determined I’m a confessional Lutheranism.

I am confessional Lutheranism, by the point.

[00:20:21] Remy: All right, well, the show’s all yours, bud. I’m going home.

[00:20:25] Gage: I am the Lutheran answer.

God help us all if that’s true.

No. So I. By the time I’ve realized I am a confessional Lutheran, that girl breaks up with me, and thankfully, God gave me. I now have a church to go to, but. And so I’m looking at the seminaries, I’m looking at Fort Wayne, St. Louis, and it’s just personal problems, other issues that mean I just can’t go right now. But I feel this call to be a pastor. And I’m still dealing with the breakup. And my beloved cousin is finally tired of listening to me mope. And so he tells me, gage, you need to do two things. Number one, get interested in sports so we have something to talk about. I did. And number two, get on Twitter and complain like a normal human being.

I did get on Twitter, didn’t complain about the breakup.

I don’t think you would probably know better.

[00:21:26] Remy: All right, Internet, go ahead and search. It’s Alightone.

[00:21:33] Gage: Watch me, like, watch me have complained about it and just not remember it at all. Well, that prompts me to start following some Lutherans, which leads me to people like, starting with Dr. Cooper, but also you on your old account and your pastor, who.

And then Joe reached out to me, asks if he could send my number on to, at that point, Bishop Lyons, because he is the presiding pastor at that point.

And that’s how the AALC was given its institutional penance, as I like to call it.

And how. How Pastor Stoner was given his own personal penance.

[00:22:10] Remy: Poor Dean.

[00:22:12] Gage: Poor Dean.

[00:22:13] Remy: One time, it was a guy. I want to say it was like the. The pastors conference last year, where he mentioned that he was, like, taking you home.

[00:22:23] Gage: Yeah.

[00:22:24] Remy: Because I guess you’re on the way to wherever he’s going.

[00:22:28] Gage: We’re both in Ohio, so. Right.

[00:22:30] Remy: And so he was like, yeah, so it’s gonna be four and a half hours in the car with Gage, and then another hour and a half by myself. And I said, well, Dean, I don’t know what sin you committed.

[00:22:39] Gage: Oh, did he Say three and a half.

[00:22:42] Remy: He always like that.

[00:22:43] Gage: It was like cuz it’s from, let’s just say from Toledo to Minneapolis is.

[00:22:50] Remy: Like 10, 11 hours and notoriously, notoriously small bladder Mr. Garlinghouse has stopping every hour and a half.

[00:23:03] Gage: I wish I had an excuse like that.

No, that poor man. I ride with him to events and ride with him home from events. I truly want to know what horrible sin he committed that even the Lord said, no, no, no, you penance.

[00:23:23] Remy: You should, you should do him a favor, Gage. Just fly to just fly.

[00:23:28] Gage: I did, I did. But to be fair, he gets free labor out of me.

[00:23:32] Remy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I do my best, man. And I, this is, this is probably going to sound terrible and know I apologize and I, I do my best to not do labor, especially like the pastor’s conference. Cuz like I’m an adult with a full time job and a family and like stuff and so when I go to like the conference I want to be on vacation and it’s just, it’s so brutal when like I get there and it’s like, oh, we can’t go to the hotel for seven hours because you got to work. It’s like, oh geez, I do it, I do it. You know, I love them. I’m, I’m proud to help but man, I really like going to the hotel room and taking a nap after that flight.

[00:24:16] Gage: Yeah. The one nice thing about arriving with pastor Stoner is we arrive at night so I get to sleep because it’s late and we’re not going to the church or the convention center a day early. Yes, we get there a day early so we can set up, do all that stuff and then we leave after everybody but the clergy commission has left because we’ve torn down and packed the car and everything.

[00:24:40] Remy: Yeah. And honestly, I would love to spend 18 hours in a car with Dean.

It’s fun. Pick his brain because like the he.

[00:24:48] Gage: Will deny this and I will be getting a text as soon as this goes live.

But the man is Mark.

[00:24:55] Remy: Clip.

[00:24:56] Gage: Really smart.

[00:24:57] Remy: Oh yeah.

[00:24:59] Gage: Incredibly smart. Incredibly pastoral.

[00:25:03] Remy: We are so blessed. Our little association is so blessed to have all of the men that we have. I mean we have some truly wonderful men.

[00:25:12] Gage: And then there’s us.

[00:25:13] Remy: Yeah, unfortunately. Look, somebody has to drag down the average. You know what I mean?

[00:25:19] Gage: Hey, somebody like, like I said, institutional penance for what? I don’t know, but don’t know.

[00:25:28] Remy: So you discover Lutheranism and my pastor Joe gets you into the aalc.

[00:25:34] Gage: Yes, he.

[00:25:35] Remy: Wow.

[00:25:36] Gage: So by this Point. I had discovered the ALC had a seminary, and I started thinking about it, but I know absolutely nothing about the aalc. You know how they have the jokes about as soon as you start talking to a girl, she does, like, the complete stalker. Dive onto all of your social medias, who have you ever talked to kind of stuff. I did the exact opposite with the ALC and was just totally. Yeah, the vibes seem all right.

[00:26:04] Remy: And it’s good vibes. It really is.

[00:26:07] Gage: They are.

Although.

Yeah. So Joe sends that. That Pastor Joe sends Bishop lines a message, and I’m at work, and I get a call, and obviously his number’s not my phone anymore, but Verizon tells me Curtis lines. I’m like, okay, who is this?

So I let it go to message and starts talking, and he’s like, I’m the presiding pastor of the aalc. I was given your number. I’m like, what?

[00:26:39] Remy: Huh?

[00:26:41] Gage: And he says, call me back when you get the chance. I’m like, cool. Will do. Like, two hours later, I get another call from the guy. I’m just like, hello. Hi. Ends up inviting me to the general convention back in 2022. Yeah, 2022. And immediately, by the way, after that phone call immediately puts me on stoner. It’s like after one call, I am stoner’s problem.

[00:27:09] Remy: He was like, I’m not dealing with this.

[00:27:12] Gage: Which, fair enough. The man had earned his rest, and then he ran for seminary president.

[00:27:19] Remy: Yeah.

[00:27:20] Gage: Because he’s a saint and just can’t stop.

Yeah. But one phone call was all it took for him to go. This feels like a stoner problem.

[00:27:32] Remy: So, Gage, I just want to say, for anybody listening at this point in time, we pick on you, but we love you so much.

Guys like you, man, you really are the backbone of our little association. Just out here, out here doing the Lord’s work.

[00:27:47] Gage: Nah, I am just so grateful because I realized we haven’t even talked about our topic yet, but I’m just gonna brag on the ALC for a little bit because, Lord, we can’t do that enough.

It’s just so wonderful. You. We get together maybe once as a. As a body, once a year, and then all the laity, not even all the lady, but as a whole body every couple years. And it’s just.

It genuinely feels like, oh, you’re the family I’ve been looking for.

[00:28:19] Remy: Yeah.

[00:28:20] Gage: This. When you. When we get together, you read about how the early church was in the book of acts and how they cared for one. Everything. It’s like, wow. This is who these guys are.

[00:28:31] Remy: Yeah.

[00:28:32] Gage: Like, wow.

[00:28:33] Remy: You can, you can just sit. This is something. So this will be my third pastors conference this year and.

Yeah. Nice. And you can, you can just go and sit down with anybody, whether you know them or not, and just immediately you have found a friend and a brother that you know is just right there. It’s so amazing. I can’t describe it, but.

[00:29:04] Gage: And the laity, at least in my experience, are also like that. So this past summer, our seminary hosted a practicum at Ascension in Ames, Iowa. If you’re in Iowa and looking for a church, Ascension, actually there. We have several churches in Iowa, two of which are named Ascension.

[00:29:21] Remy: Either one is fine.

[00:29:22] Gage: Yes, both of them. Wonderful.

But we were there because the pastor there, Pastor Twydo, had a little area that could house us. And the ladies of the church came, they cooked for us, they took care of us, made different church members stop by and my goodness, you would have thought you were their long lost grandson.

Even some of our older seminarians, who I think were older than some of the ladies were still the long lost grandson. It’s like, yeah. Oh, you poor, precious little thing. I will care for you. It’s like, thank you. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your name yet, but thank you.

[00:29:57] Remy: Yeah, it was great.

[00:30:00] Gage: And that’s how that’s been my experience, the alc. See, now that I’ve said that though, and especially Stoner, I feel like I’m just gonna get dragged behind the SUV this year. But. Oh, well, I’m not allowed to say nice things about him, I don’t think.

[00:30:13] Remy: Well, no, it’s okay because this isn’t going to air until much later.

[00:30:19] Gage: Yes, I am free.

[00:30:21] Remy: Yeah, so you’re good. Until at least whatever next year’s thing is.

[00:30:26] Gage: I’m going to wake up one day and there’s just going to be Pastor Stoner outside my door being like, what did you say about me? How dare you spread rumors that I am a loving, caring and pastoral human being.

I have a reputation to uphold.

[00:30:40] Remy: I went to in 2019, I was brand new to the AALC.

[00:30:46] Gage: And there was a Joe that brought you in too.

[00:30:48] Remy: No, it was Roseboro.

[00:30:51] Gage: Okay, that makes sense.

[00:30:52] Remy: It was Roseboro. I wanted to be whatever that Rose bro guy was. And I said, there’s no way. This little church body has like 80 churches. There’s no way there’s one near me. And there was one five minutes from my house and I was like, I was still just fresh enough out of the charismatics to be like, well, that means something, I think. And to this day, I still think that.

[00:31:13] Gage: Oh, yeah, no, that there’s. There are moments where we can just straight up say that was divine providence.

[00:31:17] Remy: Yeah, absolutely. So. But that I had started was the Sunday before Reformation 2018. My wife and I went to Christus Victor. We sat down in the pew, and there on our little bulletin inserts, it always says, whoever’s preaching that day. And it said.

It said sermon, Pastor Christina. And I was like, oh, this ain’t gonna work.

Isn’t what I thought it was.

[00:31:46] Gage: Oh, that Roseboro is not as equinox as I thought.

[00:31:52] Remy: No. But it turns out his name is Joseph Christina, and he’s a dude. So that actually did work out just fine.

[00:31:59] Gage: And the literal St. Francis of the AALC.

[00:32:02] Remy: Really, honestly. Honestly. And so I ended up getting invited. Joe told. Well, Joe doesn’t invite you to things. Joe tells you to do things, and you do them.

And so he told my interactions.

[00:32:16] Gage: That sounds about right. Yeah.

[00:32:17] Remy: It’s 100.

[00:32:17] Gage: He’s just straight up told me, give me your number. I’m giving it off to the same pastor.

[00:32:20] Remy: So that’s how I ended up in seminary. I went to breakfast with him one time the next week. He was like, hey, you’re assisting with the service today. I was like, brother, this is my second Lutheran service ever.

Ever.

But, you know, did it anyway. And then at the end of that, he was like, great, so here’s how you enroll in seminary. And I was like, what? So anyway, now here I am. Awesome.

Yeah. So Joe tells me that we got invited to a Hold the Line conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was an LCMS church being pastored by an AALC guy.

[00:33:01] Gage: Okay.

[00:33:02] Remy: So we.

[00:33:03] Gage: We go there.

[00:33:04] Remy: And that was the first time I met Pastor Stoner. He met me at the door where, fun fact.

[00:33:11] Gage: He get in his hold the Line conference. He talks about the 2018 youth gathering where I. Where I was at.

[00:33:17] Remy: Oh, amazing.

[00:33:18] Gage: That’s one of the things I had to. I’m copying my. The little guidebook they gave. Give you so he can use it in that hold the Line conference.

[00:33:27] Remy: Yeah. So it was. It was actually Lines and Cooper that were given the talks at that. Okay, okay. But Stoner met us at the door, and I did. People were paying, like, a registration fee at the door door, and I was completely unprepared. And he was like, oh, don’t worry about it. You’re good. And he just sent me in. And that was my first ever experience With Dean Stoner. And then also my first experience with Dr. Lyons. I started talking to him, and it’s like drinking from a fire hose.

And also, do you hear the angelic.

[00:33:59] Gage: Choirs every time he speaks to. Or is that just me? Okay.

[00:34:02] Remy: Yeah. No, really, you do there. I mean, there has never been, like, a more holy and humble man, I think, on this planet than that guy. What a. What a wonderful guy.

[00:34:13] Gage: Amen.

[00:34:13] Remy: So anyway, yeah, man, we’re halfway through this thing, man. Let’s. I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about this and product placement.

[00:34:24] Gage: Buy my book. Yeah, buy Gabriel’s book, actually, realistically, by Pastor Matthew Fenn. He is a fellow injustice there. Also an ALC pastor, the general editor of this. Of this book, myself and the other editor, Mr. Lancaster, just helped him out. We added things. We. We contributed things. This really is pastor. This was Pastor Fenn’s main book, but it was an honor to get to help him out with it.

[00:34:52] Remy: Yeah. Also, I love that guy, too. Yes.

[00:34:56] Gage: By the way, buy the book.

[00:34:57] Remy: Yeah, buy the book. Dr. Cooper needs a second house.

[00:35:01] Gage: Could you imagine if Justin Sinner actually made him enough?

[00:35:05] Remy: It would be. It would be something.

[00:35:06] Gage: He would be ecstatic.

[00:35:08] Remy: Yeah. Yeah.

So this book, for those that don’t know, has a couple different lectionaries in it, and in those lectionaries has various feast days and saints, and you have become something of the liturgical calendar guy on Twitter.

[00:35:30] Gage: Yeah.

[00:35:31] Remy: How did that come about?

[00:35:34] Gage: So before we even start work on sacred hours, this was right before I officially. This is right before I graduated from Capital University with my undergrad.

I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

I was already scheduled to go to seminary, and that wasn’t the issue. It was more. So I wanted to get my head. And this is very counterintuitive language because it’s not me who gets my soul. Right. It is Christ. But we do still have to figure out, I’m a Christian, what does it mean to live like a Christian?

What does it mean to live as one who has been baptized and bought with Christ’s blood? And so where that started for me was, well, I should probably be reading the Bible and praying more, which you should always.

And in it, I notice in Acts, chapter two, the. The brethren, when they got together, they said the prayers. The article there actually is important.

They. They read the sacred writings, they broke bread, they said the prayers. Well, that got me wondering what the prayers are.

And so it got me starting to pray. What’s called the daily office, which is what sacred hours Is.

[00:36:47] Remy: Is.

[00:36:47] Gage: It’s a book about the daily office.

Well, during the daily office, as you pointed out, it is like the divine service, like the Mass, Communion, whatever name you want to give. The liturgy has propers, and it has. Excuse me, it has ordinaries. The propers change week to week, month to month. They are proper to that day. The ordinaries are the things you go in. I know I’m singing the Kyrie today. I wish pastor had a better voice, but I know it’s coming.

So things like the collects, the readings, the hymns are propers.

Those propers are influenced by the time of the church year, by what Sunday you’re on. We’re in. When we’re recording this, we’re in Ordinary time, which does not mean the Sundays are ordinary for your listeners. It just means they are ordinal. They’re just numbered.

So all of that changes. And the other thing they can change based on is, is today a feast day? Is it a commemoration? What is it? And so that gets me wondering, well, what are these feasts? What are these commemorations?

And that sends me down a very large rabbit hole of trying to inculcate into my life a liturgical way of being so trying to live with the rhythm of the church, trying to live with all this. And also, just side note, I majored in history, so talking about dead people, it’s just kind of my thing.

But at this point, Sacred hours is not a thing. And I take a look at good old lsb, which has matins and Vespers, which is what the daily offices in it. And the Missouri Senate has their own calendar of saints, commemorations, and feasts. And like, this is perfect. This is what I wanted. And so I spend about a month just trying to keep up with that. And I have this note. I’m like, you know, other people should really just know what the church is doing today or what the church wants us to think about today. And so I start posting about it, and. And then I expand that calendar to include things that Missouri just didn’t have on it. And then sacred hours happened, and I went overboard, and here we are.

[00:39:05] Remy: When are you doing your doctoral study on any of this?

[00:39:09] Gage: Oh, this. This is my hob. This is a hobby horse, man. The calendar, the liturgy.

Yeah, this is a hobby horse. The. The thing I. If I get to do my doctorate on is actually symbolics.

The Confessions are really what brought me back to Lutheranism. I love them.

But, no, this is the hobby horse. The calendar, the saints, and then specifically the common service as it’s called is my big hobby horse. And I could fill a whole program about the Common Service. But I’ll spare you.

[00:39:44] Remy: Don’t actually tell me more.

[00:39:47] Gage: Oh, okay. So the Common Service for just. Let’s just stick with lsb because I imagine that’s what most of your listeners are familiar with.

[00:39:56] Remy: Okay.

[00:39:56] Gage: The Common Service was a liturgy put together by a committee of the.

Actually, let’s move back. American Lutheran history with Gage.

We American Lutherans actually start before America is even a country.

[00:40:11] Remy: Okay. All right, let’s go back. Lutheran history with Gage.

[00:40:18] Gage: In the beginning.

No. So Lutheran’s been in this country for a very long time, though. We’ve been a very minute population. We actually started here as a bunch of Danes who got lost trying to go to Newfoundland.

[00:40:32] Remy: That happens a lot with them where they get lost going somewhere and end up in America. What’s up with that?

[00:40:38] Gage: I don’t know. But that is the first recorded moment of Lutherans being in this country.

[00:40:42] Remy: Hor for sailors.

[00:40:44] Gage: A stout. Which you’d think would be the exact opposite.

[00:40:47] Remy: Right.

[00:40:49] Gage: The Vikings great at terror. That’s actually why they ransacked everybody. They just got lost and they didn’t have the.

[00:40:54] Remy: They were bad.

[00:40:58] Gage: But then New Sweden is a really the first major establishment. And then that guts gets conquered by the Dutch, which then gets conquered by England. But fast forward. There are sporadic Lutheran congregations throughout this country and Lutheran bodies start forming the. The three major ones that we hear everybody talk about are the General Synod, the General Council and the Synodical Conference. The General Synod is.

It is the predecessor of the ELCA just in terms of history, but the methodology is pretty much the same thing too. It was just. You have the name of name Lutheran on your sign. We want you coming.

The General Council were people in that body who said no, being Lutheran means something. And then the Synodal Conference was Walther and all those guys out West.

But the Common Service comes about as Lutherans in America decide, we want a common way to pray. We want a common liturgy. Hence the name. So the best and brightest of the General Council, the General Synod, and at the time the Senate, the United Synod of the South.

Yes, there were enough Lutherans in the south to constitute their own church body, apparently.

[00:42:12] Remy: Amazing.

[00:42:13] Gage: Yeah. Shocking to everyone who’s ever been to the south, honestly.

But they get together and they form a committee of the best and brightest of Lutheranism. Outside of the Synodal Conference, the. The Canonical Conference really wants nothing to do with us because they think we’re all a bunch of liberals, to put it bluntly.

So they. They start going through and they look at the Lutheran liturgies that were brought over by the Prussians, the Saxons, the everybody, and they realize this is not the full liturgy. See, what had happened was thanks to rationalism across the seas. You start with when Luther did his Deutsche Messe, he did not translate everything into German. Some things were left in Latin. The things that got left in Latin got dropped during the age of Rationalism.

[00:43:06] Remy: Oh, wow.

[00:43:06] Gage: Which is why if you look at, like, Muhlenberg’s liturgy, when he came to America and proposed one, it’s just all the things that got translated into German, he cut out all the pits that had been Latin. It’s not that he didn’t think they were important, it’s just he didn’t care about Latin.

[00:43:21] Remy: Can I. Are we getting there? Can I ask what were the Latin bits?

[00:43:25] Gage: Things like the Introit, actually. The Introit, actually, it’s a lot of the propers in a lot of places. But there were actual ordinaries. And I’m trying to remember what they were. It’s been a minute. Forgive me, but there were bits that were left in Latin.

Oh, hymns. A lot of hymns, too, got left in Latin.

[00:43:43] Remy: Wow.

[00:43:45] Gage: Which, if you ever want a great resource for the Latin hymns that are in English, the Liber Hymnorum, which I believe is put out by manual press, does a great job of collecting some of those.

Anyways, this committee gets together and decides we want, for the first time, because this wasn’t even something the Swedes or Danish or anybody any other Lutheran church had done yet for the first time, to take the entire Western liturgy and put it into the common tongue.

And so they started doing it. They looked at the church orders, that Chemnitz, that Luther, the Melanchthon, that Bugenhagen, everybody worked on.

And they assigned some more importance, like if Chemnit’s name was attached to it, it was kind of more important than some random German in Bavaria.

[00:44:30] Remy: Sure.

[00:44:31] Gage: But other things like that. And they came up with the Common Service, which for your listeners would be divine service setting three in lsb, Matins and Vespers. The Common Service refers to all three.

And this really did become the universal Lutheran liturgy in America for a good bit of time.

So much so that even the Synodical Conference, though, they thought the people who put together a bunch of liberals looked at it and said, actually, this is better than what we’re doing.

So in their second or third hymnal, they actually adopted it alongside their old Prussian liturgy. And then by the time you get into tlh, the old Prussian liturgy is just gone and they’re just using the common service.

And then you get to the issue of LBW and it just introduces a whole bunch of new stuff. But the common service alongside it came with a lot of propers, things like that. And again, it was their hope that this service would be a way for you to inculcate yourself not only in life of prayer and with the scripture, but also with the church.

And the matins and Vespers, by the way, in sacred hours are the common service, Matins and vespers.

So with just musical differences. The common service, by the way, is just the text, different hymnals, different people were allowed to do the settings that they wanted.

So we get all that and I get interested in it. Then Mr. Lancaster and I start working together and then we meet Pastor Fenn, all get together and because of my interest, a lot of the calendar and one of the lectionaries is me.

So.

[00:46:20] Remy: So we get which lectionary?

[00:46:22] Gage: The Saints David and Solomon lectionary.

[00:46:25] Remy: Oh yeah, I love that one.

[00:46:27] Gage: It’s the whole point of that lectionary is every month you pray all 30, 150 Psalms, you read all the. All book of Proverbs, and then you will work your way through the Old and New Testament entirely throughout the year.

The other one comes, the other lectionaries are very flexible. One meant to be, how much time do you actually have in the day?

[00:46:48] Remy: Right.

[00:46:48] Gage: And then the other one is called the daily office Lectionary, which we got permission to just borrow from the acna’s Book of Common Prayer.

[00:46:57] Remy: But I have to, I have to ask not to rabbit hole us again, but because it’s called the Saints David and Solomon lecture. Do you think Solomon is a saint?

[00:47:09] Gage: I.

[00:47:11] Remy: Do you think he ever truly repented?

[00:47:14] Gage: See, I fall in the camp. I’m go lay out my cards. I fall in the camp. I do think he wrote Ecclesiastes and I actually tend to think he was. I tend to think actually that Ecclesiastes is his repentance. It’s just an old Solomon.

I know there is some debate about who wrote Ecclesiastes and I don’t want to get into that, but it really does read like.

The other reason I think is he does identify himself as a king of Israel who lives, who’s ruling from Jerusalem. And realistically that gives us technically three options, but Rehoboam doesn’t count.

And David, I don’t see a reason for David to have written Ecclesiastes.

[00:47:55] Remy: Right. Well, he says son of David.

[00:47:57] Gage: Exactly.

[00:47:58] Remy: In verse one. In verse one, he just says.

He just says the son of David ruler in Jerusalem.

[00:48:05] Gage: Yeah.

[00:48:06] Remy: He doesn’t identify himself as over Israel.

[00:48:11] Gage: What am I thinking of then? Because I thought he did.

[00:48:13] Remy: Well, he does. Later in the text. He does. Okay, later in the text, but in verse one, he doesn’t.

But the Septuagint nonetheless inserts over Israel there in verse one, even though it’s not there in our earliest attested Hebrew texts, which is fascinating.

[00:48:32] Gage: I’m not gonna do the Septuagint debate. There are people smarter than me on that one. But I do. I think that Solomon wrote it. Regardless. We do get a huge chunk of our Old Testament from Solomon, a good chunk of Proverbs, some of the Psalms.

I’m gonna just say it and say Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon. And the more I read about it, I’m kind of convinced Job, too, But that’s another. It’s a. There’s much smarter people than me to talk about that one. But it really does read like a discourse on the application of Proverbs.

[00:49:10] Remy: And. And I have also. I’ve also heard it said. And I’m not saying that this is true.

[00:49:18] Gage: You heard it here, folks. This is Pope Remy.

[00:49:22] Remy: Yeah.

[00:49:22] Gage: Speaking ex cathedra.

[00:49:24] Remy: Yep. This is. This is the true Lutheran understanding that all Lutherans subscribe to, by virtue of my having said it here on this show. But I’ve. I’ve heard it.

[00:49:34] Gage: I’m ready to add it to the Book of Concord. Don’t worry.

[00:49:37] Remy: The Book of Concord? Add it to the Bible.

I’ve heard it said.

[00:49:44] Gage: The New New Testament.

[00:49:45] Remy: That Job is. Is a Hebrew fable.

[00:49:52] Gage: That wouldn’t surprise me.

[00:49:53] Remy: That was written down for us.

Inspired by true events. Maybe, maybe not.

But it’s definitely like the. The dating is like, well, it’s got to be older than Abraham.

[00:50:07] Gage: Yes. You know, so the argument I’ve heard about Solomon writing it is obviously this comes with a caveat. All scripture is breathed out by God.

[00:50:17] Remy: Yeah.

[00:50:17] Gage: The Holy Spirit. Whether Solomon wrote it by hand or not, God, the Spirit did inspire it.

[00:50:23] Remy: Yep.

[00:50:24] Gage: So that comes with the caveat. But the. The argument for Solomon usually goes that the story of Job in some sense happened in Canaan. Because if you. If you read Job, it. It’s definitely not in Israel. Well, it’s in Israel, but it’s not in Israel.

It reads older than the kingdoms.

[00:50:46] Remy: Yeah.

[00:50:47] Gage: And yet if you go through it, Job and his friends, for all intents and purposes, are quoting the Proverbs. All the freaking fracking time.

And yet the friends are usually just misapplying it or making this idea, this nugget of wisdom, an actual maxim that it’s like, well, if I live exactly to the T. Right.

[00:51:08] Remy: Yeah.

[00:51:09] Gage: And so that’s what it really reads like. And honestly, if we buy, if we believe that, if we believe Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, the end of Job also makes a little more sense for Solomon because Ecclesiastes ends with fear God.

Just let it go. Fear God?

[00:51:24] Remy: Yeah.

[00:51:24] Gage: And Job? How does Job end? Well, to quote. Was it Mark Twain? No Mark Twain comment on Christianity. Anyways, there’s a. There’s an English author who comments on Job being the worst tragedy ever because it’s. It just ends with God saying, I did what.

What say do you get? And they’re mad because it doesn’t solve the problem of evil which seeth and cope, but.

[00:51:49] Remy: Right.

[00:51:51] Gage: God said it from a whirlwind. I don’t care.

Ex cathedral gauge. God talks only from tornadoes and fire. Tornadoes, dude. This.

[00:52:04] Remy: This religion is so metal. I love Christianity. God, dude.

[00:52:09] Gage: Well, at the very least, we eat the body and drink the blood of our Lord after having been literally bathed in his blood.

[00:52:16] Remy: So somebody on Twitter one time said they were like, if Jesus had been a Roman citizen instead of a Jewish citizen, he would have been beheaded. He would have been executed by beheading.

[00:52:27] Gage: Yeah.

[00:52:28] Remy: Rather.

[00:52:28] Gage: That’s why Paul was beheaded.

[00:52:30] Remy: And I was like. I was like, God, dude, could you imagine how awesome our church art would be?

[00:52:37] Gage: Well, I mean, look at how it be. Look at. So on the day of recording this. This will tell your audience it is St. Denis Day. St. Denis of Paris. Yeah.

[00:52:45] Remy: They’re all gonna know what day it is. Specifically now.

[00:52:49] Gage: Well, you will if you buy the book. If you buy sacred hours or just Google it. It is the traditional day, but buy the book.

[00:52:59] Remy: It’s. It’s great.

[00:53:00] Gage: I’m not biased or anything, but St. Denis was a Christian martyr. I believe he was the first, according to church tradition.

Bishop of Paris. And he was martyred by beheading.

If you look at any art of St. John the Baptist, it’s either he’s wearing his camel skins or he’s holding his head.

[00:53:21] Remy: Yeah.

[00:53:23] Gage: St. Paul was executed actually for that exact reason. He was a Roman citizen. They couldn’t crucify him.

[00:53:28] Remy: Yeah.

[00:53:28] Gage: So Nero just chopped his head off.

[00:53:31] Remy: There’s. There’s quite a few pictures in church history of various saints holding their heads.

[00:53:39] Gage: Yeah.

Because.

And dealing with the saints because, like, the reason we remember these saints. The reason we have these days is not because St. Paul was some awesome guy. He was. Who just, like, made such an impact on history that he himself is worth remembering.

He did. I. I realized I picked the worst possible example.

Let’s go with St. Denis. St. Denis. It’s not. The St. Denis himself was some awesome guy, and he was actually like, they beheaded him for a reason. But the reason we remember these saints is because in their lives, we can talk about God, his grace, what it means to walk as a Christian. The saints are meant to be, to us, an example, but also a lens for us to look at what God does. And in my opinion, one of the best examples Here is St. Augustine. Right. Take aside the fact that the man was just brilliant. De Trinitate on the City of God. Set those aside. The most popular work of his is probably his Confessions.

And why is that? Well, it’s because it’s this man genuinely going through his own walk with God and seeing the grace of God in his own life. Yeah, right. Anybody who’s read The Confessions of St. Augustine can tell you he’s going narrative and narrative. And then all of a sudden, he gets, like, horribly melancholy for a little bit and just starts going, oh, I’m such a fool. Why? What was wrong with me? Why? Why couldn’t I see? Lord, what have I done? And then he’s back, and then my lovely mother.

[00:55:20] Remy: Right.

[00:55:20] Gage: Which is true. St. Monica is wonderful. But the whole point is to see that. The whole point of the saints and seeing them as a witness is to testify to the faith, is to testify to Christ.

That’s the whole point of, for example, Hebrews 11 is look at the. As we like to call it, the great hall of faith. Looking at these saints from the Old Testament and seeing the work of God throughout history and seeing these men and women who were willing to put everything on the line for a guy who, according to the secular world, was just some Palestinian Jew who liked to lead a revolt and got crucified for his troubles, when in reality, he was so much more. And we see that in their lives.

But I’m sure somebody’s gonna say, that sounds great, but that sounds a little Roman Catholic to me. Right.

We can talk about the liturgy, and we’ll get that same response. So it’s okay.

So if you wouldn’t mind, I think it would be worthwhile because there is scriptural precedent for us to not only remember the saints, but also have to feast, have feast days.

There is scriptural precedent for this. There is Scripture. And according to our confessions, there’s precedent for this.

And I guess it’s also worth saying in Lutheranism, we don’t. In Rome, we have like the three tiered level of feast day. So you have the solemn feast. So this is Christmas, Easter, I believe.

I believe the assumption of Mary’s up there.

[00:56:58] Remy: There’s gotta be a Marian one.

[00:57:00] Gage: Yeah, there’s a couple of the really important ones. And if I remember correctly, these overlap with what they call holy days of obligation.

So the days you go to church, you go to Mass, period. After that you get your regular feasts and festivals. And then after that it’s kind of more like the, the memorials.

In Lutheranism, the way the tradition is developed is we really only have two groupings, but one of the groupings kind of does have that separation. The first is commemorations. So this is like 99% of the saint days. You, you might mention them in like the collect of the day, saying, thank you Lord for their witness. It’s worth remembering them. So in our tradition, St. Denis is a commemoration.

We’re not the Dennis, the Denison. We’re not the denizens.

[00:57:49] Remy: We’re not the denizens.

[00:57:51] Gage: Yeah.

So actually Saint Luther, his day is a commemoration as well, so.

[00:58:00] Remy: Oh, wow. You mean we don’t worship Martin Luther?

[00:58:03] Gage: No, no. Thank God for him. But I’m so glad he didn’t write the Augsburg Confession. I’m just gonna leave it there.

[00:58:13] Remy: Thank God.

[00:58:14] Gage: Melanchthon, too.

[00:58:15] Remy: I was on a Catholic podcast recently and, you know, he kind of asked about Martin Luther and I was like, dude, if you ask any Lutheran theologian who their top five historic theologian is, Luther’s probably not even in the list.

[00:58:32] Gage: Like he’s from the 20th century.

[00:58:36] Remy: Yeah, he’s in like, nobody’s top three. Right. Like, everybody’s top three is going to be like Kimnitz, Gearhard, Pieper, Walther, or.

[00:58:45] Gage: Some German guy you’ve never, never heard of.

[00:58:47] Remy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s not even Kal, obviously.

[00:58:51] Gage: Answer.

[00:58:53] Remy: Far from far, far from worshiping him. He’s not even our best theology guy.

[00:58:57] Gage: No, he’s not. Luther is at his best, actually, when he’s talking about the Old Testament.

There’s a lot of. Within Lutheran scholarly circles, it’s pretty much agreed if Luther was alive today, he’d be an Old Testament professor.

[00:59:11] Remy: Yeah, his pastoral letters too. Really wonderful. Really. The brash Luther that people see from his very few polemical writings where, where he was so reckless with his language and they like to hold that up as true. Luther, you should read his letters. He’s got thousands of letters that he wrote to parishioners.

And he is not brash, angry Luther. He is.

[00:59:37] Gage: And that. That is Luther. The table talk, which is pretty much what everybody cites, aside from a handful of works. That.

[00:59:44] Remy: Which is all hearsay, by the way.

[00:59:46] Gage: Yes.

[00:59:47] Remy: All secondhand.

[00:59:48] Gage: The table talk. It. I find it to be ridiculous that we translated it in Luther’s works.

[00:59:54] Remy: Yeah.

[00:59:54] Gage: I think it’s stupid. I think it needs to die.

It’s not that there isn’t some funny stuff in there. There really is. Yeah, but it’s not.

Don’t take it as if this is certainly what Luther said. This is certainly what Luther believed. And to be fair, Luther changes. He does over his life. He develops. In some places he gets worse, some places he gets better.

It’s like everybody likes to talk about the theology cross theology of glory distinction. And it is a. It can be a very helpful distinction.

[01:00:26] Remy: It’s a single throwaway line.

[01:00:27] Gage: And.

[01:00:28] Remy: What do you mean.

[01:00:31] Gage: Like. And it’s not even just like, this was Luther while he was being Luther. Right. This isn’t at the time Babylonian. This is, if I remember correctly, 1518 at the Heidelberg Disputation.

[01:00:43] Remy: It is.

[01:00:43] Gage: Yeah. It’s the Heidelberg one year after the 95 theses, which, if you’ve ever read, are the least Protestant. Protestant document on the face of the planet. He spends the whole time defending the Pope because he’s like, the Pope can’t be this stupid. Right?

[01:00:56] Remy: Yeah.

[01:00:57] Gage: Fun fact. He was.

It’s.

[01:01:00] Remy: But yeah, it’s still. It’s. It’s a single throwaway line from a still pretty Catholic Lutheran.

[01:01:06] Gage: Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, it can be a very useful thing. The Spirituality of the Cross book, modern classic.

It uses it to great effect. Also, it can be used to just say anything I don’t like is theology of glory.

[01:01:21] Remy: Yeah, it’s. But screens and worship. Theology of glory.

[01:01:25] Gage: Yes. I’m actually okay with this one. I’m okay with this usage. This gets the gauge seal of approval.

[01:01:31] Remy: I have seen.

I have seen screens used to very great positive effect.

[01:01:38] Gage: I haven’t. But it’s mostly because it was just put. They were put up poorly and it was distracting.

[01:01:43] Remy: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[01:01:44] Gage: It’s like the. The TV you just hung. It shouldn’t be like diagonal, guys. Pick vertical or horizontal. Pick one.

The z axis has no place here.

But no. So Luther. Luther deals a lot with us and he is a commemoration. He’s a very important commemoration. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be like, but he’s just a commemoration. And a way to think about this, in a sense, is if. Imagine you go to a Dominican Catholic church. It’s run by the order of preachers, the Dominicans, and it’s the feast day of St. Dominic.

They’re gonna make a big deal out of it, like it’s their founder. But also, it’s not as big a deal as Christmas, as Easter, as the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

It’s important to us, but it is still just a commemoration.

[01:02:42] Remy: Right.

[01:02:42] Gage: The next step up for us, though, is a feast festival. And that distinction, by the way, is not clearly defined it. What it sometimes is, is a feast is a singular day. Festivals, multiple days. But some people just throw the term around either way.

[01:03:00] Remy: Sure.

[01:03:01] Gage: And those would be feasts are things like Saints Peter and Paul, Saints Matthew, St. John, Holy Innocent, St. Stephen, Reformation Day, All Saints.

[01:03:14] Remy: Right.

[01:03:14] Gage: Things like that are feast days for us.

There are three feast days, however, that are given very special place. So if we had a place of, like, solemnity, which I actually think could be a useful distinction for these three up here, it’s specifically Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.

[01:03:32] Remy: Right.

[01:03:33] Gage: Like the three feasts, two of which are the most attended services of the church. Pentecost kind of got beaten by Mother’s Day.

[01:03:44] Remy: Which go to church on Pentecost. Also an important. An important feast day.

[01:03:48] Gage: Yes. Well, no. The most attended church services are Christmas Eve, Easter, and Mother’s Day.

[01:03:54] Remy: Yeah. Wow.

[01:03:55] Gage: Pentecost is not in. If I remember correctly, Pentecost might be in the top 10. Usually, though, it’s. I’d be willing to bet, because confirmation, which, if you do confirmation on Pentecost, don’t distract from the fact that it’s Pentecost. Don’t make everything about Confirmation, please.

[01:04:11] Remy: So I do have a question.

Triduum festival or liturgical season?

[01:04:23] Gage: Complicated.

Complicated. For those who don’t know, that would be Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. But realistically, Easter vigil.

And the reason it’s complicated is because, language wise, it feels strange to call this a festival.

Traditionally, festivals are a little more joyous and a little less solemn.

But I also hesitate to call it a season because technically, Lent has ended by the time you get to Palm Sunday. Lent does technically end, Right. Traditionally. This is a weird anachronism. Traditionally, in the West, Lent has ended with Palm Sunday. Your Lenten fast, however, does not end until Holy Saturday.

Traditionally, it would end at noon on Holy Saturday.

So you’ve gone through all this stuff, but the Reason it’s hard is because Holy Week is a special beast unto itself in the liturgy of the Church.

[01:05:24] Remy: Right.

[01:05:24] Gage: It is the only. Holy Week is the only thing that can displace. Well, Easter, too, but Holy Week is the only thing that can displace another feast.

So I want to say it’s the.

It’s a Marian feast, which, by the way, Lutherans have retained Marian feasts.

[01:05:46] Remy: Love, Mom.

[01:05:47] Gage: I knew you were gonna say that.

But no, Our lady unfortunately gets to displaced. So I believe. I want to say it is the Feast of the Annunciation, but I could be wrong.

And if it happens during Holy Week, it actually gets bumped to after the octave of Easter, which would be a festival, by the way.

So Holy Week is a very weird time liturgically, because it’s also.

Those three days have liturgies unlike anything else in the church here. Because in a lot of ways, as important as Easter is, the Easter liturgy is just a really fancy, divine service.

[01:06:29] Remy: Right.

[01:06:30] Gage: To put it bluntly, whereas the Easter vigil is the divine service, plus literally four other things.

Good Friday is its own beast. It’s like Tenebra is a weird service, and then Maundy Thursday is just a weird service.

[01:06:51] Remy: Yeah.

[01:06:51] Gage: So the calendar can be weird.

[01:06:54] Remy: And it’s. And it’s the. The fact that each one of these things has their own liturgical colors or no liturgical color.

[01:07:03] Gage: Yes.

[01:07:05] Remy: You know, I think sort of the fact that each service of Triduum. Triduum as a whole, but each service is its own unique, independent thing, I think kind of keeps it from being a liturgical season.

[01:07:20] Gage: I would agree. If anything, Holy Week, maybe you could call it a liturgical season, but it’s weird. And like you said, colors are weird during Holy Week.

You could have. I think Monty Thursday has.

Traditionally, it’s either scarlet or it’s white.

[01:07:40] Remy: Mm.

[01:07:41] Gage: It’s weird. Good Friday has nothing.

Although most people just wear black.

[01:07:46] Remy: Mm. So we. We. I think, start black right on Good Friday.

[01:07:56] Gage: Easter vigil is white. That. That one’s a lot easier, by the way.

[01:07:59] Remy: Yeah.

[01:08:00] Gage: Easter can either be white or gold. I like gold, because gold is reserved for two days of the church year in the West.

But so we. In Lutheranism, we don’t have those. We have those two divides of commemorations, feasts, and then special feasts that we really should just call something else. Never being blunt.

And the practice really does originate with the Jewish church, with the church before Christ.

And we see this.

Our Lord isn’t just God in general here, institutes the Passover for the Jewish people in Exodus and Then as soon as they head on out, he also starts, he institutes two other major feasts, the feast of Pentecost and the feasts of Booths or Tabernacles. These three feasts are the pilgrimage feasts of Israel. So all the people were meant to pilgrim to where the tabernacle or the altar of the Lord was.

Fascinatingly, these three feasts actually continue in the church. Pentecost is the easiest one. It’s. It’s Pentecost.

No points for guessing that Passover becomes Easter and then the, the Feast of Booths actually just. It’s our tabernacles becomes Christmas because it is God tabernacling now with us.

So these three major feasts do continue in our Christian, in our Christian church, in our Christian tradition.

But the Lord also institutes other feasts or, and festivals. In Leviticus, you have the seven main ones. You also have Shabbat or the Sabbath, which is a feast, it’s not a fee. It’s. It’s weird.

[01:09:46] Remy: Yeah.

[01:09:47] Gage: So we, but we have this precedent. And then the Jewish people themselves add to this as a liturgical calendar. Think Hanukkah.

And it’s not that this was necessarily a bad development. In fact, in John 10, our Lord is speaking specifically of Christ here.

Attack. It goes to the feast of the dedication, which is the dedication of the temple for Hanukkah. So we know our Lord actually participates in this man made tradition of this feast commemorating.

[01:10:16] Remy: So you. Jesus celebrated Hanukkah?

[01:10:19] Gage: Yeah.

[01:10:20] Remy: Wow.

[01:10:21] Gage: Yeah, it was Hanukkah because Hanukkah was.

I’m trying to. I don’t remember how many years before Christ the Maccabean revolt was, but no Christ as far as. Unless John 10 is speaking about something we have lost all historical record of. Right. And for anybody who wants to go check it out, it’s right after the Good shepherd passage. It’s like this random paragraph that says, and then Jesus celebrated like the feast of the dedication. It’s like, wait, what?

So he celebrated Annika. So we have this. And we also have precedent for saying, well, this isn’t just a one off thing, because our Lord also makes use of the synagogues, which were a human development.

And so we have this precedent. And now the church is spread out and Christ has ascended into heaven. The apostles are spreading the word and we start seeing them keeping remembrances, especially the Lord’s Day, which becomes the new Sabbath. So Sunday.

But other feasts, other commemorations start popping up. And if you read the church fathers, they’ll talk about the martyrs and the blessed Saints and the apostles and remembering them. This is where you get the tradition of. This is where relics grow out of. Actually, every altar used to be built over the tomb of the martyrs as a symbol of what we believed. That just develops into what becomes relics. But we start getting this. And by the time of. And I’m going to make all of the conspiracy theorists go nuts for this one. By the time of Constantine, actually, things do start to get cemented. The lectionary itself is developing and the calendar is developing alongside of it. The lectionary also has Jewish roots. It grew out of the synagogue service.

At the synagogue, they would read. There were traditionally two readings. There is one reading from the Torah and then one reading from the rest of the Old Testament.

Just. And just like we would put the emphasis on the Gospel reading, they put the emphasis on the Torah reading.

And so our lectionary develops out of that.

And by the time of Constantine, these things do start to get cemented. And then a century later, at least in Jerusalem, we know that a set calendar and set of readings had been established within the Armenian, or Armenian. Armenian liturgy. And we know this because Saint Cyril of Jerusalem invited pilgrims to come to Jerusalem and some of those pilgrim reports, reference readings and other things that had been established. And by that point, they actually said had been established by tradition. So they’ve been around for a little bit.

[01:13:10] Remy: Yeah.

[01:13:12] Gage: So we know that as the liturgy develops out of the Jewish service, our lectionary and our calendar does too.

And as the church continues to grow, Christians choose to remember these. These blessed saints that the Lord has blessed us with. And it keeps going. And by the time. But like all good things, it’s ruined by Rome. So.

[01:13:40] Remy: Deal with it. Catholic answers.

[01:13:43] Gage: So by the time we get to the time of the Reformation, these saint days, these holy days of obligation, these feasts, have morphed well beyond trying to remember these saints, trying to live with the rhythm of the church, trying to use them as a remembrance. And it was. Now, if you don’t participate in saint, just keep using Dennis. If you don’t remember St Dennis, who was actually a big deal during the Middle Ages, if you don’t remember St. Denis, you’re sinning, and that’s time in purgatory or some other mess. And they’ve evolved into an abomination that just completely obscures the Gospel. Luther talks about this in the preface to a small catechism, and he says, the people know about saint days. They know what days they need to fast and when they need to feast, and all this stuff. And yet they don’t know the first thing of the faith, and rightly so. Luther gets really mad at the calendar.

The lectionary develops, and he has no issue with the lectionary. He actually thinks that’s a really useful tool. But he gets mad about the calendar because it’s obscuring Christ in a lot of ways. And so he infamous, infamously cuts pretty much every saint day from the calendar because they had morphed into an abomination. Yeah, with a few exceptions, specifically the feast days. So Luther was no puritan. We still had Christmas, we still had Easter, we still had Pentecost.

We retained other major feasts of Christ like the baptism, transfiguration, ascension, things like that. We retained both the Nativity of and the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist.

We retained actually several Marian feasts, so the Annunciation, the Visitation. And then to recognize saint. The Blessed Mother’s role, we actually gave her. Also, we recognized her Nativity and her dormition.

I would actually love to see The Nativity of St. Mary come back. It was the reason we kept it, by the way. Part of it was to mirror St. John the Baptist.

We celebrate three nativities in the church here traditionally. Mary, Christ and St. John.

So I’d love to see that come back. But we. Luther retains these. He also retains a couple of feasts that are really popular with people, to put it bluntly. So All Saints Day gets retained, and I think this was a really smart one considering Lutheran theology of what actually is a saint. Yeah, All Saints Day is brilliant to retain, but it does partially seem like Luther might have retained it because a lot of people just really liked it.

That being said, he. I don’t. As far as I know, he never directly speaks against it, so.

And the same with St. Michael’s which we actually just had at the end of last month. St. Michael and all Angels is. Was an incredibly popular feast. And if you look at your lsb.

[01:16:42] Remy: Still kind of is.

[01:16:43] Gage: Honestly, it is. If you look at your lsb, it’s considered one of the principal feasts of the church year, which in LSB meat terms means you’re supposed to actually replace whatever is on Sunday with that feast. Right.

There are a few feasts like that in lsb, but we also retained other days. So specifically the apostles and the evangelists, we kept. So those major figures of the New Testament, those major events of Christ, and then also a couple others Luther kept. Otherwise, though, the calendar pretty much just gets stripped because again, people are now worried about, have I prayed to St. Thomas Aquinas enough, or have I prayed to St. Denis enough? Have I. Have I remembered the fast of St. Mary of Egypt?

[01:17:27] Remy: Right.

[01:17:28] Gage: And so now it’s back. The calendar is meant to be reoriented to Christ feasts.

Moving forward, however, Lutherans began wondering, should we keep the calendar beyond just these fasts or these feasts?

And we start to see that, especially in America, it starts to develop alongside the common service, and you start to see names get added, specifically biblical names, and the church fathers most of the time. So, like, St. Augustine and St. Ambrose are almost always there. Moses usually gets thrown on, but, like, very slowly, it starts to build back up.

And you still, however, see some of that hesitancy from Luther in modern calendars. So if you look at your LSB calendar, most of the people on it are either Luther himself, Right.

Some very, very early church father, or some random guy from the Reformation, admittedly.

And then a lot of Old Testament saints.

And that’s one thing I’ll praise LSB for, is it does give recommend recognition to those Old Testament saints. But there’s a lot of hesitancy to encourage the New Testament saints.

[01:18:44] Remy: Right.

[01:18:45] Gage: Which is a hesitancy I threw completely out the window with sacred hours.

[01:18:48] Remy: Yeah, I was gonna say. I was going to say that there’s still a lot of hesitancy retained, you know, in the calendar until Gage.

[01:18:56] Gage: Yeah. And my reasoning for this is thus Luther got rid of them for a pastoral reason.

We have now, however, reached a point in the church where most congregants don’t know church history, don’t know their fathers in the faith, don’t have these examples. And honestly, in a lot of ways, live secular lives, except for like an hour on Sunday where I. Where I go to church and maybe some day part during the week where I get. Where I open my Bible, gotta clean the dust off it, after all. And maybe I say a couple of prayers at meals.

But we’ve reached the point now where it’s the exact opposite of Luther’s day. It’s not. The people know too much about the saints. They know nothing. They know nothing about the faith. There’s a. There’s a great Charlie Brown cartoon that was made. And Charlie walks up to his sister and says, what are you writing about? And she’s writing an essay. And she says, I’m writing an essay on church history. And the very last panel is my. The church began in 1914. I think it is when Pastor Blank is born and it’s her pastor. And it’s like, yeah, that’s how people look at this.

And again, the point of the saint is not to remember the this guy is awesome, or this gal was killer.

Even though, to be totally honest with you, most of them are like, St. Moses the Black is one of the coolest dudes to have ever walked to face the planet.

Or St. Lawrence has the funniest death I have ever encountered in my life.

[01:20:29] Remy: The greatest death.

[01:20:30] Gage: Yes. For those who don’t know, St. Lawrence is a Roman martyr, and he was burned alive as he was being burned alive. However, he told his captives, you can turn me over now. I’m done on this side.

It’s hilarious.

St. Francis was also apparently well known for his humor.

But it’s not because these guys are awesome. It’s because they give us an example. As St. Paul sells the Corinthians. Follow me as I follow Christ.

[01:21:01] Remy: Right.

[01:21:02] Gage: And that’s what the Saints should be. We are not an isolated group. We’re gonna be spending eternity with the Saints.

[01:21:11] Remy: Yeah.

[01:21:12] Gage: And we. You, first of all, they can serve as examples. And also, if you don’t know the Saints, you don’t know where the church came from, which leads us to repeating the same errors like we mentioned at the start of this program. We have issues with, like, the charismatics, reviving Arianism, modalism, restorianism, everything. Hell Reformed already did Nestorianism, but.

But we’re still dealing with all. Sorry. Specifically Zwingling. I. I have to be kind.

[01:21:39] Remy: Eighth commandment, Cage.

[01:21:40] Gage: Yes. Eighth commandment. Zwingli was a heretic.

But.

Oh, I live by this rule. The line between heresy and heterodoxy is the line between Zwingli and Calvin.

[01:21:53] Remy: Oh, that’s. Yeah. Okay.

[01:21:54] Gage: I. I live by this rule. I will not call Calvin a heretic. But Zwingli definitely was. I will.

[01:21:59] Remy: Calvin a heretic. I’ll do that for both of us.

[01:22:03] Gage: Okay.

[01:22:04] Remy: All right.

[01:22:04] Gage: As long as you get the hate mail, that’s fine. Yeah. Which. But no. I. I have a queer subscription to the part of Table Talk where Luther talks about Zwingli’s death, and that’s the only part I think should have been translated into English.

But St. Paul tells us, follow him as he follows Christ. He is the example. It’s like, imagine walking behind your dad, your little kid, and it just snowed outside. I don’t know how much experience you have with snow down south, but never seen it. Okay, well, for everybody else, like a normal person who has experienced snow or sand.

Yeah. Sand can work for this, too. Imagine your dad is walking in front of you and he’s leaving footsteps. And then you as a little kid in the snow, you’re trying to get in them so you don’t have to trudge or in the sand, you’re trying to put your footprint inside your dad’s. That’s kind of what’s going on here. It’s not that the saints are worth anything on their own. They’re worth something because they’re in Christ, and they’re worth something remembering because they can point us to Christ.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

We talk a lot about lexerrandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer is the law of belief. What you do, you believe what you believe. Hopefully you’re doing.

And I’m not here to get into the worship wars part of that debate, though Lord knows I have opinions on it.

The point, however, is even more than that, the way you live just period. Not just what we’re doing in worship. The way we live reflects our faith.

I’m a Christian for more than just an out. I hope for more than just an hour in the week.

And so I want to try to steal a term that was used by a liberal, but it’s actually a good term. I want to sanctify the time.

St. Paul talks about redeeming the time. And the only reason I don’t use that phrase here is because I’m saying something different than what he necessarily says, kind of.

But I want to sanctify the time. I want my day, my hour, my life to point me back to Christ. I want to live in the rhythm of the church because she is united to Christ by his blood. She is his bride. And so by being united in the church, I am united with Christ by virtue of my baptism and just the fact that he’s really cool and hasn’t let me go yet, just to put it bluntly, because Lord knows he dragged me kicking into this. I It’s a Pastor Roseborough likes to say he was dragged against his will into being a Lutheran. Well, all of us are dragged against our will into him.

[01:24:55] Remy: Yeah.

[01:24:55] Gage: Thankfully, his will wins. So praise him. But we want to sanctify the time. We want our days to remind us of Christ. We want to build our lives around Christ. And the calendar allows us to do that. It allows us to remember. Maybe today is just some day during ordinary time, and there’s really nothing special on this random Tuesday afternoon.

But then you can look and go, oh, today the church remembers this Saturday saint who gave his life for Christ. And all of a sudden now you’re back thinking about sacred things. You’re now thinking about someone who is standing before the throne of God, praising the Lamb for eternity and can look at his example. It’s the same thing with sanctifying space. That’s why we put crucifixes up. That’s why we have religious imagery. We want to live as though we are not alone with Christ. Christ is always with us. But so too is the Church Triumphant.

[01:25:57] Remy: Right?

[01:25:58] Gage: We are not alone on this earth. We are not alone in the Church.

So why should we live like that?

And why should the devil get any of your time? Why should Satan, who is the cosmic temper tantrum throwing baby, he is, get any of your respect in time? And by taking our focus off of Christ and putting on anything else, that’s what we’re doing. It is idolatry, as Luther says. Now, because of our sinful flesh. We do that all the time. I’m not saying, to go back to our Wesley discussion, I’m not saying you’re not gonna do that. You are.

[01:26:36] Remy: You should strive against it.

[01:26:38] Gage: Yes. And the Church has given us a way to kind of strive against it. A tool that we can use for our own sanctification and to sanctify and redeem the day. It is. It’s something you should do. And a great way to do that is by making use of some sacred hours.

Roll credits.

[01:27:03] Remy: Gage, in closing, what is your favorite saint or feast day?

[01:27:09] Gage: Oh.

[01:27:12] Remy: Or least favorite. We can go the other way on it. Which one do you just be like?

[01:27:17] Gage: My least favorite day is. I think the elca. The ELCA commemorates Calvin. I think that’s stupid.

[01:27:22] Remy: Oh, that’s my least favorite too. Now. You’re welcome.

[01:27:28] Gage: No favorite saint. That’s really hard. So I’m gonna give two that are on sacred hours that should have been in the lsb. It’s kind of silly that they’re not because Luther wrote a whole hymn about these guys, Jan von Essen and Hendrik Voss or John and Henry.

They are remembered on. I have to look real quick.

I’m looking in sacred hours.

July 1st. They were the first martyrs of the Reformation. They died Lutherans in Belgium, having been burned at the stake for their faith. And when Luther finds out about this, he writes an entire hymn. And it’s a beautiful hymn. It’s called A New Song, Now Shall Begun Be Begun. And he writes a whole hymn talking about them and about how the work God has done in them is now complete.

There are other. By the way, there are other Lutheran martyrs too, like In England, Robert Barnes gets killed by Henry because he’s a Lutheran.

Stuff like that. Which should be on the LSB calendar.

[01:28:32] Remy: Yeah.

[01:28:33] Gage: And I have Pastor Will Whedon’s approval because he has said that on issues, etc. So from the words of the man, dude, yes. I would have gladly given all my time just for a minute of his.

Probably them. In terms of feast day though, it’s.

Liturgically, it’s kind of hard to beat the.

The vigil of Easter is such a beautiful service and in many ways it is probably the most beautiful service just out of the church here, period. So I guess I’ll say that. But you know, anyone will do.

[01:29:09] Remy: Yeah, I don’t know, man.

[01:29:10] Gage: I’m.

[01:29:10] Remy: I’m. As far as beautiful liturgical services go, I’m really partial. Like Trinity 14.

That’s what’s.

[01:29:18] Gage: What’s the. I’m now I’m looking. What is even the copy for Trinity14?

[01:29:21] Remy: I don’t know.

[01:29:25] Gage: Okay.

[01:29:25] Remy: It’s green. That’s all I can tell you.

[01:29:28] Gage: It is green. It is green.

It’s Trinity. The Sundays after Trinity. Easiest liturgical coloring. They’re very easy.

[01:29:38] Remy: Yeah. Well, it’s 14. It’s got to be near the end. We gotta be.

[01:29:42] Gage: It’s in the middle because you have 20 something possible Sundays after training. Yeah. Most of the time we don’t go that far though. It’s a. It’s really just. When does Easter. Cuz Easter is.

Praise God for Easter. I am so glad I don’t have to calculate when Easter is gonna be though.

[01:29:58] Remy: Yeah. The Orthodox get it wrong every year and I’m shocked.

[01:30:02] Gage: I think they’re gonna get it right next year. I think next year is the year we’ll see.

Probably not. Yeah. And then there’s even a subset of the Orthodox who get it even more wrong.

[01:30:14] Remy: They’re going to be typing in the comments. They’re going to be like, we just calculated different. Sure you do, fella.

[01:30:19] Gage: Sure you do. No, it’s going to be. God’s divine energies have infused themselves into the calendar according to sacred tradition. How dare thou, Westerner.

[01:30:30] Remy: Wow. Yeah.

[01:30:31] Gage: No, that’s true.

[01:30:32] Remy: That’s. That’s a good point.

[01:30:35] Gage: Palamus, man. It’s in there, I promise.

[01:30:37] Remy: Yeah. Going to go. I’m now going to leave the Lutheran Church and go join some random autocephalous ethnic micro Synod.

[01:30:46] Gage: Yeah. You know, listening to myself talk, I realized actually all of this is awful and in vain and solo. I should really just go back to just being Bible only. So I think I’m just going to join the Amish.

[01:30:59] Remy: Oh, no, just go ifb, Dude. Just go ifb.

[01:31:03] Gage: No, because then I don’t get a nice hat.

[01:31:05] Remy: Oh, that’s true.

[01:31:07] Gage: And that’s probably vain. Which maybe that’s why I need the Amish.

[01:31:09] Remy: Yeah. Well, Gage, it’s been a wonderful time talking to you, sir.

[01:31:16] Gage: Thank you for having me.

[01:31:17] Remy: Thank you. You’re welcome back on the show anytime.

[01:31:21] Gage: Well, we’ll see if anybody actually wants to listen to this voice.

[01:31:24] Remy: I’m sure a few people will.

[01:31:26] Gage: Probably my girlfriend.

[01:31:27] Remy: Aww.

[01:31:28] Gage: Who exists, I swear.

[01:31:30] Remy: We love you, Anna Gage. Thank you, sir. God bless.

[01:31:36] Gage: Thank you. God bless you, too, Remy.

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