Papabile

 Pope Francis has been in the hospital for a week and a half at this writing.  Ten days are not so many for an old man, even in this era of shortened stays. Nonetheless, when you are the pope, every sneeze is greeted by worldwide murmurs of "conclave." 

Let us say from the outset that we wish Francis nothing but the best. He has been as fine a pope as it is possible to be given the realities of the Smalcald Articles 2:4:10 and their reiteration in the Formula.  We hope that he recovers and is able to serve the church for at least a few more good years, and failing that we wish him a speedy and painless return to his maker.

But one wonders, inevitably, what the future may hold for the world's largest Christian communion, which encompasses roughly half the planet's believers.  Outsiders, especially the press, frequently imagine that popes are like politicians, easily defined by adherence to a platform and described by "right" or "left." Insiders assure us, and we at the Egg firmly believe, that this is by no means the case.  All the conceivable candidates are bound by the same shared commitments and convictions: the same Scriptures, the same historic teachings, the same canon laws. There will be no pro-choice pope, no pope who ordains women priests, just as there will be no pope who despises the poor or encourages international violence.

But there are differences of style and emphasis. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were both "conservatives," as the press would style them, but only one wore red shoes. ( John Paul in fact introduced the same photogenically simple attire for which Francis is sometimes scorned by his opponents.) John Paul and Benedict were both scholars, Francis is not. John Paul and Francis were both far more comfortable mingling with crowds and kissing babies than Benedict ever appeared to be.  Benedict alone seemed to have a real softness for the Tridentine Mass and its advocates; both John Paul and Francis appeared to see them as troublemakers, if not outright enemies. Not one of the the three was a native of Italy, a fact of some historical importance.  It is factors like these, no less than doctrine and surely more than politics, which will influence whichever cardinals vote in the next conclave -- whenever that may be.

Those important things said, perhaps we can relax and play a little bit.  Predictably, the gambling houses have begun to lay odds on who will follow Francis, as well as what regnal name he will take. We have recently seen a story by the Asbury Park Press, which takes its information from something called BetUS. It identifies these potential popes, and gives them odds:

• Luis Antonio Tagle: +300
• Mark Ouellet: +400
• Pietro Parolin: +400
• Francis Arinze: +500
• Peter Turkson: +600
• Peter Erdo: +600
• Willem Eljk: +600

We have no idea who drafted the list, but we suspect it is nonsense. For one thing, Arinze is now 90 years old. Ouellet is 80. Not one in the group was elevated by Francis, although a large majority of the cardinals elector will have been. A couple look slightly nuts. On the other hand, Parolin seems … viable. 

But you know what they say about the man who goes into a conclave papabile, right? He leaves a cardinal.

We Can Give Up Sugar

 From a World War II-era essay by Pearl S. Buck called "Can the Church Lead?":

Here, then, is the spiritual confusion in which Americans now are, and out of which they must somehow be led. We are faced with the necessity of fighting a war for principles in which we say we believe but which actually we do not want to practice. We talk about the American way of life and we go on tolerating and encouraging and demanding Jim Crowism and Oriental exclusion which are the Nazi way of life. We can never get pure energy out of such a conflict. The spark is applied to wet tinder. There will be no flame.

The truth is that we have not yet carried the war into the places where it really hurts.  We can give up sugar, but we cannot give up segregation. We are willing to ration our gasoline but we do not want to insist that colored labor shall have equal rights with white labor. We consent to the heaviest of taxes for military warfare, but we are not ready to treat the Chinese as we treat the British. We are ready, that is, to give up anything material, but nothing else. Unfortunately, democracy cannot be bought with material goods, nor is human equality to be paid for with silver.  Democracy can only be won by the sacrifice of everything that is undemocratic, and human equality can only be had by the will to have it at all costs.

A Very Christian Concept

The War on God has a Catholic front, and it has seen some fighting lately.

The chief battle, of course, comes from crypto-paganism, in the form of what the press calls  President Trump's "transactional" view of relationships, which recognizes no principles except self-interest, and so cannot conceive of altruism or charity as ends in themselves.  This meshes easily with a variety of other ideologies: New Thought, the Prosperity Gospel, even good old Objectivism.  To be clear, the president is not himself an ideologue; he is rather a raging Id, a Hyde with no Jekyll; but he is surrounded by people who have constructed or borrowed ideological structures to justify their own self-interest.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider our vice-president, JD Vance.  Vance is quite a different figure from Trump.  Rather than privilege, he is a child of relative poverty, whose Horatio-Alger story has been the subject both of a bestseller and a movie.  Where Trump seems to have emerged from his father's brow a fully-formed braggart, liar, swindler and racist, Vance has engaged in a more interesting process of self-creation; his rise from poverty, his education, his profession(s), and even his name are the result of his own deliberate and purposeful choices. 

What interests us in all this is that Vance is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, having been baptized and confirmed in 2019, at the age of 35.  It would be a terrible injustice to attribute something as personal as a spiritual conversion to expressly political motives, but it should be noted that, rather than being formed intellectually by the church, Vance entered the church fully formed as an intellectual and a politician.  As he said to his friend Rod Dreher, 

My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. 

This remark is noteworthy because, to an outside observer, it raises the question of how much Vance knew at that point in his life about the details of Catholic social teaching.  Surely he knew about abortion and birth control. Had he yet been catechized concerning, for example, the rights of workers to form and join unions? The preferential option for the poor? Unclear, but he was already helping to lead a party that is sketchy about these things, and many other things spelled out in the documents.

Questions like this became more pointed on 30 January 2025, when Vance, during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, said: 

... as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. 

Many listeners resonated easily with this statement.  It appeals to our sense of what is "natural." It is hard to imagine caring about a far-off stranger the way one does for one's spouse or child.  As church council members never tire of saying, "charity begins at home." Right?

But Vance identified this as "a Christian concept," and one did not need to be an expert theologian to observe that, as such, it struck a sour note  After all, agape, a foundational Christian idea, is understood to be a universal love, one which is not conditioned by relationships of family, tribe, nation or what have you.  Specifically placing "neighbor" between family and community will have drawn a cringe from those reared on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Actual skilled theologians were quick to observe that, so far as they could tell, Vance had been referring to, and misrepresenting, the ordo amoris. That phrase literally means the "order of love," although it is often glossed in English as "rightly-ordered love," which isn't unfair. One finds it articulated by Augustine in The City of God, 15:22, and refined by Aquinas in the Summa, 2/2/Q26.  (Both, incidentally and somewhat strainedly, cite Songs 2:4, which says in the Vulgate "ordinavit in me caritatem.")

To be clear, Augustine does not say what Vance attributes to him.  For one thing, and we may call this the first flaw, Vance doesn't mention God, whereas Augustine's central point is that God must be loved above all other beings.  This is because lesser things -- art, music, a spouse -- are susceptible to being loved wrongly, because they are loved in preference to to God or to the things God wants.  This is not because art, music or a spouse are bad, but because human beings are sinful. As Augustine puts it, "when a miser loves his gold more than justice, it is not the fault of the gold." Aquinas even argues that we are obliged to love our neighbor (a term he does not define with Vance's narrowness) more than our own body.

So if the first flaw in Vance's attempt at theology is setting God aside, the second is that he replaces God's desires for us with what we may (and Augustine does) call the desires of the flesh.  Because of these flaws, he proposes an order of love that is quite at odds with the one known to the Christian tradition. Vance wants us to love family first, a concept that would have been ridiculous to the generations of Christians who looked to the fable of St Thecla for solace when faith separated them from their families. He wants us to love our nation next, which would have looked suspicious to those same early Christians as they died rather than sacrifice to the emperors. What he does not ask us to love, but Augustine does, is virtue itself, and things virtuously.  

All Christians have a right to think as deeply as they are able about the things of God.  But when Roman Catholic leaders of nations begin to opine in public about theology, they will naturally draw the attention of those to whom theological judgments have been entrusted in their church -- meaning, ultimately, the Pope. And so on 10 February 2025, US bishops received a letter from Pope Francis which referred obliquely to "the crisis in the United States," meaning the Trump Administration's announced program of mass deportations, which it described as problematic from the point of view of Catholic social teaching.  (You remember:  the same Catholic social teaching that Vance was so excited about in 2019).

Francis also addressed, beginning with paragraph 6, Vance's misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine:

6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Yes, we know:  it is written in Vaticanese, so it seems dull or even obscure.  Read closely, however, this is a sharp rebuke.  "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests" -- which is just how Vance described it. Instead, the Pope reminds us, each of us Christians has a relationship with all people, and it is through these relationships, especially with the poorest," that we become our true selves.  Talking about our relationships, such as national identity, apart from this universal relationship and option for the poor is to take part in a lie told by the strong to harm the weak.

That's what the Pope's letter actually says, in print, and it is a swayt on the knuckles with the proverbial rule.  Reading between the lines, the message is more like a slap in the face:  Hey, JD -- leave theology to the theologians.

The Sense(lessness) of the House

 In a moment of crisis, when a display of courage and good judgment is called for, the U.S. House of Representatives can usually be counted upon to act like monkey in the zoo, throwing poop at all and sundry.

In witness whereof, we offer H. Res. 59, introduced to that august body by Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK-2) and his 20 co-sponsors on 23 January, 2025.  It seeks a resolution declaring the "sense of the House" that Bishop Budde's sermon at the National Prayer Service was "a display of political activism" with a "distorted message."

This is, of course, not merely nonsense but nonsense doomed to fail.  But as a record of these grim times, we offer here the text of the resolution:

Whereas the National Prayer Service is a longstanding tradition in which the United States publicly affirms dependence upon God and prays for the success of our President and Vice President;

Whereas, on January 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took part in the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC; and

Whereas the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop leading the inaugural prayer service, used her position inappropriately, promoting political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That—

(1) it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the sermon given at the National Prayer Service on January 21st, 2025, at the National Cathedral was a display of political activism; and

(2) the House of Representatives condemns the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s distorted message.

It is a sign of the times that a plea for mercy on behalf of the powerless is construed as either political activism or a distortion of the Christian message, when in fact is very nearly the heart of Christian social ethics.

Disturbing as the misunderstanding of Christianity may be, we find the misunderstanding of Congress's role more disturbing still. While the very existence of a National Prayer Service (and Breakfast, and many other things) raise significant questions about the separation of church and state, it is the attempt of Congress to condemn a preacher's sermon that poses those questions most sharply. 

Are our elected officials now theologians? Are they now, like King James I, going to summon tame court preachers, who tremble before them and flatter them for fear of retribution? In other words, is the Christian faith expected to be an unreflective servant of the civil power, a bit of ceremonial frippery tacked up to impress the rubes and impart a nimbus of piety to impious princelings?

The answer that politicians have always desired, to all those questions, is Yes.  But the answer proposed by the Constitution is a resounding No.

The War Against God

 Among the more curious books to be found in the Egg's reference library is a volume called  The War Against God.  It is a collection of essays by various authors, edited by Carl Carmer and published in 1943. The thesis of the book, if an anthology may be said to have a thesis, is that the Second World War, then being fought, was, among many other things, a deliberate assault on the Christian faith, conceived by Hitler and promoted by his deputies.

Nazi leaders are depicted as neo-pagans and outright haters of Christianity, who show to the faithful a display of like-mindedness so superficial that it might pass inspection only by the most willing suspension of disbelief. Hitler is personally quoted to the effect that "one is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both," and "Nothing will prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch, and annihilating it in Germany." Alfred Rosenberg's dream of a National Reich Church is laid out in thirty damning theses, including this one:

The National Reich Church is immutably fixed in its one objective: to destroy that Christian belief imported into Germany in the unfortunate year 800, whose tenets conflict with both the heart and the mentality of the German.

The book is not a masterpiece. Assembled in the midst of battle, it lacks any rigor -- the tone is uneven, many sources are not cited.  A review by Albert W. Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary and a noted pacifist, called it, disdainfully, an "arsenal" for the use of those who "believe[d] the war was a great religious crusade," and argued that it set aside the "economic and imperialistic nature of the ... conflict."  He found in it "that lack of discrimination by which partisanship so often tends to overplay its hand," contrasting "moderate" and "noble" essays by Pearl Buck and Martin Niemoller with the "extreme and violent" articles by other authors. The criticisms are fair.  

On the other hand, we do well to remember that while the war was by no means a religious crusade, it was in fact a moral one -- while there were racism and imperial ambition on all sides, one side, and only one, was plainly devoted to conquest and genocide.  The starkness of this distinction is undermined by many of the steps that were needed to prosecute the war, not least an alliance with the demonic Stalin, but the distinction remains valid.

We bring this up because there does seem to be a latter-day Kirchenkampf emerging in these United States. The second Trump administration began by authorizing immigration enforcement agents to enter houses of worship in pursuit of their quarry. In the following weeks, the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC has been called upon by the president to apologize for asking him to show mercy; the network of Lutheran social ministry organizations have been accused of "money laundering" for contracting with the federal government and with USAID; and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been accused by the vice-president of caring more about  "their bottom line" than about the needs of the poor or the right administration of justice.

It does not take a genius to see the pattern.  Administration officials recognize that their interest in further marginalizing immigrants, poor people at home an abroad, and LGBTQ+ people (with a special animus toward the "T")  puts them at odds with the organs of traditional Christianity, which have varying degrees of commitment to the well-being of those same communities.  They have long seen conflict with the mainline as an inevitable result of the policies that they pursue.

The traditional churches are naive, but not stupid.  They see this same inherent conflict. Bishop Budde's sermon was predicated on it.  But that sermon, bold in context but mild in content, is an example of the old-fashioned gentility with which mainline church officials are accustomed to proceed -- she pleaded with a leader to show mercy, among the chief Christian virtues, to those over whom he wields power.  It can be called a shot across the bow only if the thing shot is not a cannon ball but a badminton birdie. Bishop Eaton's response to being called a Mafia princess was equally genteel, with a touch of pedantry -- she quoted Scripture and told a familiar historical fable. She might have written it in Greek and made the same impression upon the same audience.

The evident conundrum is that mainline churches, and especially their leaders, are not prepared to engage in ideological battle with belligerent yahoos. They have been trained to speak cautiously, precisely, and respectfully, all the while remembering that they shepherd flocks among whom little internal unity is to be found. On balance, we admire this about them -- especially at the Egg, where our mouth often runs a few meters ahead of our judgment. But we are not sure that such admirable character will serve in the emerging crisis.

Meanwhile, the administration's next move has been to float the idea of a Faith Office, to defend religious liberty, oppose antisemitism and [the much, much more difficult to discern] displays of bias against Christianity and other religions.  The very idea raises the sort of hair-splitting legal problems that make a certain class of lawyers salivate.  While we suppose that the defense of religious liberty is a valid cause for the American government to undertake, it must be stressed that the defense of religion -- as opposed to irreligion in any of its constitutionally-protected forms -- is not.  And the defense of any particular religion -- say, Christianity -- is terrifying.

The anointed head of this office is a curious figure. Paula White-Cain is a televangelist, co-founder and former pastor of Florida institutions called New Destiny Christian Center and Church Without Walls, the latter of which declared bankruptcy soon after her departure.  White-Cain has long been part of Trump's circle, identified as his "spiritual advisor." 

While in theory it should not affect her call to public service, the most important thing for a Christian reader to understand about White-Cain is that she is not a Christian as that term is conventionally defined.  She is a proponent of the Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that God's desire is for the faithful to be rich -- not just in spirit, but in bank account and credit line.  Although it developed within the broadly Christian cultural milieu, and uses the Bible and other Christian symbols, the Prosperity Gospel is in fact a different religion, using the language of one faith to tell the story of another.  In this, it can compare easily with Mormonism or Gnosticism.

In effect, President Trump has followed the original playbook, and appointed a crypto-pagan to head his Reichskirche.  We are amused to note that, while liberals and Constitution-lovers are troubled by the existence of the office, many of the MAGA faithful have expressed dismay over its leader.  Evangelicals are often too quick, in our estimation, to accuse people with whom they disagree of "heresy." In this case, however, the term seems apt. Time will tell how they respond.

What concerns us at the Egg most, however, is the response of Christianity's more sedate traditional wing.  The new War Against God has begun, and we are eager to see whether the angels will fight on the side of those who typically disdain fighting altogether.

In (Faint) Praise of the "Palsied Limb"

 We have been haunted, these past few weeks, by an hymnic earworm, consisting largely of the phrase "and at Cana Wedding-Guest blah blah blah palsied limb and fainting soul." These are not the worst lyrics to have in mind while preaching through the Sundays following the Epiphany, but the mental hodgepodge created by those blah blah blahs almost demands that we return to the source, and think about the lovely song they have muddled in our minds. All the more so since the song, when we sang it in worship lat Sunday, didn't quite match our memory.  Has the earworm turned?

The hymn is Songs of Thankfulness and Praise, by the Rt. Rev. Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885), late Bishop of Lincoln and, not incidentally, nephew of the poet. Those of us burdened with Evangelical Lutheran Worship may find it there as # 310.  The hymn in question was not written during his episcopate, but years earlier.  Having been booted from the headmastership of Harrow on accusations of high-churchiness and suspicions of Popery, Wordsworth was made a canon of Westminster Abbey and vicar of the brilliantly named parish of Stanford-in-the-Vale cum Goosey.

It was at Goosey that Wordsworth wrote and published The Holy Year; or Hymns for Sundays and Holydays [sic] throughout the year, and for other Occasions in 1863.  The title explains quite nicely what are the contents of the book.  Our hymn is appointed for the Sixth Sunday following Pentecost, and we offer you a transcription of its original text.

1. SONGS of thankfulness and praise, 

Jesu, Lord, to Thee we raise ; 

Manifested by the Star 

To the Sages from afar ; 

Branch of Royal David's stem 

In Thy Birth at Bethlehem. 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

2.  Manifest at Jordan's stream, 

Prophet, Priest, and King supreme ; 

And at Cana Wedding-Guest 

In Thy Godhead manifest ; 

Manifest in power Divine, 

Changing Water into Wine ; 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

3.  Manifest in making whole 

Palsied limbs and fainting soul ; 

Manifest in valiant fight, 

Quelling all the Devil's might ; 

Manifest in gracious will, 

Ever bringing good from ill : 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest 

4. Sun and Moon shall darken’d be, 

Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee ; 

Christ will then like lightning shine. 

All will see His glorious Sign : 

All will then the Trumpet hear; 

All will see the Judge appear. 

Thou by all wilt be confest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

5. Grant us grace to see Thee, Lord, 

Mirror'd in Thy holy Word; 

May we imitate Thee now, 

And be pure, as pure art Thou ; 

That we like to Thee may be 

At Thy great Epiphany ; 

And may praise Thee, ever blest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

Amen. 

This is quite close to the text found in modern hymnals.  The most obvious difference is Stanza 4, which -- in many decades of singing the hymn -- we had never before encountered. It does not appear in ELW, LBW or SBH, nor in the PECUSA's Hymnal 1940.

Wordsworth himself explains the function of the hymn in a prefatory note.  It is a 

[R]ecapitulation of the successive Manifestations of Christ which have already been presented in the Services of the former weeks ...; and Anticipation of of that future great and glorious Epiphany, at which Christ will be manifested to all, when he will appear again to Judge the World.

That is to say, his intent is to sum of the various manifestations presented by the Gospel readings up to and including the Sixth Sunday.

However, it should be noted that Wordsworth does not touch on certain of the Gospels.  Present are the Appearance to the Magi (Feast of Epiphany);  Wedding at Cana (Second Sunday); healing the leper and the centurion's servant (Third Sunday); "quelling all the Devil's might" refers to the wheat and the tares (Fifth); and the Matthean "Little Apocalypse" on the Sixth Sunday, which was present in Wordsworth's lectionary but is not in ours.  Missing, however, are the Presentation in the Temple (which was read on the Second Sunday in Wordsworth's BCP), and any discernible reference to stilling the storm (Fourth).  

Curiously, the final stanza, about discerning Christ in the words of Scripture, would fit quite nicely with the story of Jesus reading in the Nazareth synagogue, which is read on the fourth Sunday after Epiphany in the RCL, but did not appear among the seasonal readings of the old BCP lectionary.

Apart from the deletion of a stanza, the other changes to this hymn are easy to understand.  "Jesus" for the archaic "Jesu" is scarcely noticeable. "God in Man," while not wrong -- Jesus was indisputably a man -- is neither exhaustive, nor true to the Nicene formula , nor fit for contemporary tastes, and the LBW-era "God in Flesh" is a meet substitution.  Wordsworth himself changed "mirror'd" to "present" in a later revision.

But what about those palsied limbs?  They have been changed, in ELW, to a "weakened body."  The idea is certainly the same, and there's no apparent theological matter at stake. But as a matter of poetry, we think "palsied limb"s is considerably more specific.  

"Palsy," a medical term for partial or complete paralysis -- a weakening, sure enough -- is an old word, coming into English by way of Old French, which got it from the Latins, who (in typical fashion) lifted it from the Greeks.  Those stout Hellenes used a word for "loosening" (para + lyein) to indicate disability or enfeebling, and their use has remained strikingly consistent through the ages.  It's not a bad word, and not so far as we can discern a pejorative one. It is old, familiar, and clinically apt.

As for "body," it is simply less specific than "limb." Like "weaken," it isn't wrongly used here -- but it does help to make the expression a bit more vague.  We think it is an unnecessary and ever so slightly unhelpful change to a fine and carefully-wrought hymn.

About "Mary"

 Funny thing about the oldest known manuscript of John's Gospel.  The scribe who wrote down what we now call Papyrus Bodmer II, or more lovingly P66, seems to have been a careless type, prone to screw-ups and self-corrections, as many as 450 of them.  One such self-correction -- if that is what it is -- appears at 11:1, where the words "There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Mary his sister" have been corrected to the more familiar "... the village of Mary and of Martha her sister."

Looking at the manuscript, a reader can actually see where the iota has been scratched out and a theta added as a superscript, changing marias to marthas.

The question is whether this is just one more of a sloppy scribe's errors, as is commonly assumed, or whether it may be one small part of a larger strategy, to add Martha to a story in which she did not originally appear.

The latter thesis is is argued by Elizabeth Schrader Polczer in her paper ,"Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century," in Harvard Theological Review 110:3 (2107), pp. 360-392.  You can hear her non-technical, and very entertaining, discussion of the idea in a recent (2024) podcast with Dave Roos and Helen Bond, at Biblical Time Machine.

Polczer's argument does not by any means hang on this single cut-and-paste. She looks at a range of manuscript witnesses to John, notably Codex Alexandrinus, but also many other, both Greek and early Latin, and finds that Martha's presence is "unstable." Sometimes she appears in John 11 & 12, sometimes she does not; sometimes the grammar suggests one sister, sometimes two.  So persistent is the confusion that traces can be found in Tyndale and even first printing of the KJV.

Her suggestion is that the earliest scribes faced a dilemma of some sort.  Perhaps there was an earlier text of John in circulation, which did not feature Martha, or which featured her isn a smaller role. and they felt a need either to bring her in or to enhance her position.  Indeed, source critics, such as Bultmann, Fortna, and many others, have often suggested something like this, but without much reference to the textual history.

But if such an ur-John existed, why add or magnify Martha?  Merely to identify John's Mary the sister of Lazarus with Luke's Mary the sister of Martha?  Or to make a theological point by doing so?

We won't hold you in suspense.  Polczer suggests, tentatively, that the objective was to separate in readers' minds the Mary of John 11 and the Mary of John 20, "where one woman named Mary also cries and speaks with Jesus at another tomb."  In other words, she proposes a more-or-less concerted effort to reduce the prominence of Mary Magdalene in the Fourth Gospel. If so, this was ultimately accomplished "by dividing one woman into three," that is, into Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and Martha.

("But wait," you cry.  "Bethany is one town, and Magdala another.  How can she come from both?"  Briefly, there is, and always has been, a strong case that John's epithet "called Magdalene" refers not to a particular village, but to a nickname derived from the Aramaic migdal, or "tower." As Cephas and the Boanerges testify, Jesus liked to give his followers nicknames.)

If this is true, what was the theological objective of the Magdalene-minimizers?  Polczer's paper stops short of a clear proposal, although in the podcast she and the hosts engage in some banter about the Peter-o-philes, meaning Christians who wanted to depict Peter as the primary heir to Jesus' authority.  That such a faction existed in the early Church is clear, although offhand we can't think of evidence for it as early as 200 CE, the rough date of P66.

None of this is certain, but Polczer has many sources, and her thesis is interesting.  It does indeed suggest a possibility to which we were exposed, in a passing comment by a seminary professor many years ago, that the New Testament as we have received it shows signs of selective editing around the ministries of certain critical figures -- Peter and Paul, obviously, but also John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.

Nearer, My God: The Unitarian, Anglican & Lutheran Versions

 First published in 1840, "Nearer My God to Thee" quickly became a beloved hymn on both sides of the Atlantic -- and in the middle as well, if those stories about the Titanic are true.

The hymn has an interesting backstory. Its author, Sarah Fuller Flower Adams (1805-48) was a daughter of the genteel school of English leftists. Her father was a printer and editor who served time for insulting a bishop, but he was also the nephew of the wealthy and connected bankers Richard and William Fuller. Adams herself moved in circles that included the the young Browning and, far more significantly, the influential preacher William Johnson Fox.  It was an environment marked by concern for such progressive causes as opposition to Napoleon, rights for women, and concern for the working class. (After Fox left his wife for a younger model, he also became an advocate for easier divorce). 

In matters of religion, Adams was a lifelong Unitarian, although she remained attached to Fox, who was expelled from Unitarianism and wound up as what we would call today a post-Christian public intellectual. Her hymns first appeared in the hymnal of Fox's own congregation; by the 1870s, "Nearer" could be found in something like 70% of the hymnals surveyed by Hymnary.com.

Perhaps it was the aroma of Unitarianism that disquieted some more traditionally-minded churchmen to write their own versions of this popular hymn, in the same meter.

The first was by William Walsham How (1823-97), a greatly admired Anglican bishop and the author of "For All the Saints."  His version of "Nearer" appeared, placed immediately after Adams', in Godfrey Thring's 1880 A Church of England Hymn Book.  It subsequently enjoyed modest popularity; Hymnary.com finds it in some 44 hymnals all told, as opposed to a colossal 2505 for the original.

The second, of more interest to Lutherans, is by Henry Eyster Jacobs (1844-1932). If you do not know Jacobs, you really should; he is an important figure in our history, specifically as a part of the General Council Brain Trust.  The son of a Gettysburg College professor, Jacobs went on to teach at Thiel and Gettysburg before moving to the seminary at Mt Airy (LTSP, as it was; ULS/Philadelphia, as it is). He taught systematic theology and served as dean and then president, and edited several journals as well as the still-valuable Lutheran Cyclopedia of 1899, which is not to be confused with the later LCMS volume of the same title. He was a member of the Joint Committee on the Common Service. His 1905 Summary of the Christian Faith is, in his own words, an "attempt to restate the doctrines of the Christian faith upon the basis of the Lutheran Confessions" -- and a fairly approachable one at that.

Among many other things, Jacobs also taught the first course at a Lutheran seminary in the US devoted to the history and theology of worship.  It was an elective offered to especially gifted seniors.  Years ago, Gordon Lathrop described looking through Jacob's papers from that period, and coming across a note that the worship students did not seem especially gifted, save that "...young Reed shows some real promise."  One must say that Jacobs was an excellent judge of promise.

Jacobs' "Nearer" was apparently written in 1880 or thereabouts, but first published (so far as we can tell) in an 1898 hymnal, Christian Hymns: for Church, School and Home, prepared by the Norwegian Synod. It appears there, as How's does in the Thring collection, after the original, and is apparently intended as an alternative. It also appears in the 1917 Common Service Book, which you probably have sitting on a shelf in your office right now.  And that is nearly it -- in contrast even to How's 44, the Jacobs "Nearer" appears in a pitiful 12 hymnals, the last of these in 1926.

The historicals thus introduced, we come to the big question:  Why was an alternative to Adams ever felt to be needed?

This chart (if you can make it out) shows the three hymns in question:

The Adams hymn is Biblical, a reference to Jacob's dream in Genesis 28, but not deeply or narrowly so.  The narrator desires to be like one of the angels on the ladder, alternately stepping or flying toward heaven.  A cross has been inserted, perhaps as a the reality of which the ladder was a type.  We can charitably assume that this is the Cross of Christ, rather than a metaphor for the narrator's own difficulties. The details of how the narrator will draw near to God are left vague, but the desire comes through strongly. It is hard to discern anything especially Unitarian about it, nor for that matter any hint of the author's social concern.  It is rather a fine example of the hymnody that seeks in God a path out of suffering and darkness.

How brings to this same search some more explicit ideas, albeit not original ones.  The "cross" in question is the one borne by a disciple (Mark 8:34 etc), and while bearing it we are called to pray, to follow Jesus through suffering, and to await his eventual return and a place in his eternal mansions.   One struggles to find any distinctively Anglican doctrine here, but where doctrine is concerned that is in itself a distinctively Anglican characteristic.  While the language is lovely, we will say that the sentiment seems a bit trite, basically the old and rightly-mocked depiction of God's promise as "pie in the sky when you die."

Unsurprisingly, Jacobs is by far the most explicitly doctrinal of the poets.  His opening thesis is that nearness to God is achieved through "word and sacrament," familiar Lutheran language for the ministry of the Church, identified here with divine grace and the presence of the Holy Spirit.  This is rooted in God's eternal love, which predates the Creation, and in Christ's Incarnation, which is God's entrance into the created world. There is a nod to one particular atonement theory, and an invitation to the Trinity itself to make a home among the People of God.  The final stanza argues that the assurance of salvation obviates any fear of death, a questionable idea without which the hymn would have been better.

To answer our own question, it is hard to say just why How felt a need to reconsider the Adams original.  Perhaps he felt it was insufficiently clear about how "nearness to God" could be achieved, and wanted to make an argument for discipleship. 

The case is easier with Jacobs:  the professor of systematic theology seems to have wanted a hymn that approached "nearness" in a ... systematic fashion. Some readers may find this a trifle stale, but we don't think it harms the poetry.  On the contrary, it turns the image of "nearness to God" into a story, which is quite a good thing in a hymn.  And  unlike either of the others, Jacobs' version makes it clear that this nearness is achieved not by human effort, but by God's own work in Christ.

We weren't sure when we started this post, but now we are:  the Henry Eyster Jacobs "Neaer, My God to Thee" is a solid hymn, that deserves to be used from time to time in Lutheran churches.

Easter Sermon Hints from Gregory the Great

 Holy Week having begun, many readers of the Egg (if only there were many such readers!) may be busy with printing bulletins, recruiting acolytes, arguing with cantors, and otherwise preparing for the Paschal Solemnity in ways other than prayer and study.  If so, there is some danger that such hypothetical readers might enter the pulpit come Sunday a tad unprepared.

Never fear.  Pope St. Gregory the Great has your back.

In his Homily 25, which is (mostly) concerned with St. John's account of the Resurrection, Gregory comments on some detail upon the Lord's appearance to Mary Magdalene.  It is all worth reading, including the fascinating and grotesque interpretation of Job 41:1.  In one lovely and much less grotesque passage, Gregory says:

"Mary Magdalene came and made known to [Jesus'] disciples, 'I have seen the Lord, and he said these things to me.'" See, how the sin of the human race was removed where it began. In paradise a woman was the cause of death for a man (Gen. 3:6); coming from the sepulchre a woman proclaimed life to men. Mary related the words of the one who restored her to life; Eve had related the words of the serpent who brought death.  It is as if the Lord was telling the human race, not by words but by actions, "Receive the draught of life from the hand of the one who offered you the drink of death."

The Christ-as-new-Adam typology is well known, as is its counterpart in Mary-Eve typology -- but of course the Mary in that usage is normally the BVM (surely, you recall the palindromic Ave/Eva from so many Annunciation paintings). We cannot remember seeing this blog's patroness recruited to make the same point.

The typology is rife with problems, not least the danger of a misogynistic reading.  Still, Gregory's image of the Apostle to the Apostles as the one who delivers the "draught of life" to her comrades is a powerful one, and raises Mary Magdalene to a stature more often afforded the Lord's mother.  (It is almost as if Gregory is apologizing for his great mistake, of officially identifying his subject as a prostitute).

A preacher might also find use for the pairing of Eden and the Empty Tomb as loci for life and death.

As a bonus, a very tired preacher looking for inspiration on Quasimodo Geniti, these days called Easter 2, might borrow from the stirring conclusion to the same homily:

Let us find evils distasteful, even if we have experienced them. Almighty God freely forgets that we have been guilty; he is ready to count our repentance as innocence. If we have become dirtied after the water of salvation, let us be born again from our tears. Accordingly, we must listen to the voice of our first pastor: Like newborn children, desire milk ((1 Peter 2:2). Return, little children, to the bosom of your mother, the the eternal Wisdom. Drink from the bountiful breasts of the lovingkindness of God. Weep for your past misdeeds; shun those that avoid what lies ahead. Our Redeemer will solace our fleeting sorrows with eternal joy -- he who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

These references to God's breasts, while they may seem a little mischievous to contemporary congregations, were common enough in the Middle Ages, as Carolyn Walker Bynum has shown, and continued to be so at least into John Donne's time.  Easter may not be the best time to marshal defensive citations in proud array, but remember that they exist.

The Two Christianities

 It often seems that there are two different religions called "Christianity."  

One of them is stern, hierarchical, dogmatic to the point of fanaticism.  It possesses both Catholic and Evangelical forms, marked by differences of style as well as by mutual animosity, but sharing equally in contempt for women, in sexual and financial scandals, in a culture of coverups and an intense resistance to internal criticism, much less external review.  This religion divides into cult-like subcommunities in which children are scarred for life, left with gaping wounds in their sense of self which render the church and its ministries unbearable to them. In the public square, its adherents have sought and often attained positions of considerable power, at least in the United States, from which they conspire to impose their theological judgments and apodictic moralities even on those who profess different faiths or none at all. 

This is the Christianity reported daily in the media, both traditional and social.  It is quite real.  I encounter its refugees often, and have occasionally brushed up against its adherents and apparatus. But I must also say that it seems strange to me, genuinely foreign, and when I encounter it, I feel not a like a compatriot in the same heavenly commonwealth, but like an anthropologist attempting to puzzle out the cultural peculiarities of a people utterly different from himself.

This is because I was raised, and have lived my life, in the second "Christianity." This religion is superficially similar to the first.  It shares the same sacred texts and, for the most part, the same metaphysical tenets. It also comes in Catholic and Evangelical flavors, as well as more exotic mixtures called Orthodoxy and Mainline Protestantism, as yet undiscovered by the mass media but dimly remembered by those of a certain great age.

I often hear people who are familiar only with the first Christianity wish that there were a second.  "If only," they sigh, "there were a Christianity that valued women; that did not make gay people hide in closets shaped like the organ bench; that saw the beauty of science as a means of understanding the Creation; that welcomed dialogue with other faiths; that  wrestled honestly with the moral complexity of abortion and warfare; that critiqued itself and remained humble when others challenged it; that was not merely capable of change, but desired to change."

In fact, such a Christianity does exist, not merely as a movement within the first (although that too), but as a distinct, organized group of churches.  It is more or less what is meant by the term "Mainline Protestantism," although large swaths of the Roman Catholic world share in its character as well.

Mind you, the second Christianity is far from perfect. For half a century or more, much of it has embraced women in leadership with nearly the same passive-aggressive mixture of adulation and resentment it has long offered to men. (More recently, it has extended gay and trans people an equally awkward, stiff-armed side-hug.)  It talks, almost incessantly, about the need to create a more just society, while steadfastly failing to accrue or exercise the actual power required to do so. It is by no means immune to missteps and even scandal, the chief difference being that, rather than rushing to denial, its adherents are the first to point the finger at each other, demanding personal repentance and institutional reform.  Its ministers are each others' harshest critics, and its official organs are quick to exclude -- like Caesar his proverbial wife -- any who have faltered or even been rumored to falter.

Imperfect?  Yes, indeed. Much of this blog's seventeen-year tenure has been devoted to documenting the imperfections. But the fact is that the second Christianity -- mainline, moderate, ecumenically open and socially engaged -- offers precisely what people complain that they find lacking in the church they see in the news.

Each time I hear a friend wish that Christianity were different, I cough a little, probably too little, and mutter something like, "Have you considered Lutheranism?  Or Episcopalianism?  Presbyterianism? The United Church of Christ? American Baptist Convention? Watched some videos by Richard Rohr, or read an essay by Anne Lamott?"

Because -- and here's my point -- the second Christianity (which is arguably older than the first) exists.  It does not often make the news, and it has certainly seen days of greater prosperity, but it exists.  It is sitting right where it always has, on the main street of most downtowns, going about the business of loving God and a neighbor.  You might visit, sometime, and see if it isn't what you wanted all along.

We have coffee.

For Kings and For All That Are in Authority

Strolling about our idyllic small town last Saturday, dragging an Impressionable Child, we could not help but notice a pair of dueling political signs, one for a Republican candidate and another for his Democratic opponent.  Both signs were extremely large, perhaps 5x7 feet, and mounted a yard or two back from the curb.  They faced each other across the street.

One of them -- the blue one -- had been defaced.  Somebody had spray-painted "FJB," a blunt and crude dismissal of America's incumbent president.

Fr. Anon and Impressionable Child clucked our tongues. We wondered just how unhinged a person needed to have been to resort to trespass and vandalism of private property in order to express a political opinion that was implicit in the very large sign fifteen feet away.  We also shook our heads sadly at the vulgarity, which, while a perfectly understandable result of intense passion, is also ... awfully vulgar as signage goes. All in all, we concluded, this particular vandal brought shame rather than honor to his or her cause.

Days later, the Father and Child were driving through the same small town, and found ourselves behind a black SUV decorated with a yet-more-vulgar expression of the same sentiment.  It read "Fuck Joe and the Hoe [sic]," an idea so foreign to our own way of thinking that we took several seconds even to glean its import.  We took several seconds longer to grasp that the verb was spelled out using guns.  Just like this:

Classy, eh?

In the years 2015-206, we recall a great deal of conversation about whether America was home to an outright Fascist movement.  We drew great comfort from an expert on the history of such movements who argued that although many of our compatriots had begun to express crude ethno-nationalist sentiments, with an ideology that actually scorned facts in favor of feelings, and in its worst case extended even to purposeful cruelty toward the marginalized, nonetheless they had not displayed the true hallmark of 30s-style Fascism, a belief in the redemptive power of political violence to purify a nation.  

 This, of course, was prior to the Epiphany Riot of 6 January 2021.  

It is now pretty clear that the old vision of democracy as a respectful dialogue between Americans who disagree about policy but still regard one another as compatriots and even friends -- the relationship often claimed for President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill -- is a thing of the past.  Mob-style threats are now the sort of thing we put on bumper stickers, and political violence is no longer a tool of the extreme fringe.

We could go on about this sad state of affairs, especially to note that the imagery of violence is not distributed equally among parties (the unvandalized yard sign featured a crosshairs, ostensibly because the commander once captained submarines, but still ...).  But it is more pertinent to our vocation to consider the deep challenges presented to such a culture by this coming Sunday's Bible readings.

Like much of the Bible, the passages for Lectionary 25 C of the RCL (also known as Proper 20, or the 25th Sunday in Ordinary) deal with questions of public morality -- what it means (for Israel) to be a God-pleasing people, or (for Christians) to be a God-pleasing people who live as citizens of a pagan polity.  Parenthetically, we may note, the past few years have taught us to see themes like this -- the question of civic righteousness, or more bluntly of the church and politics -- as the driving force of much of the Bible.  Personal morality and spiritual health, while real concerns, seem distinctly secondary.  This perspective, of course, challenges another well-known set of interpretive assumptions.

Anyhoo.  In Sunday's lessons, Amos -- one of the prophets most concerned with the treatment of the poor as a marker of the nation's holiness -- lambastes as usual those who place their commercial goals over their religious commitments, who take advantage of the poor, and who deny them even their traditional right to freely collect the remainders of the harvest. This has many possible applications to life in our second Gilded Age, with its unspeakable accumulation of wealth in the loftiest percentiles. 

The Lord's parable concerning the dishonest servant is more complex, and especially its awkward first  summary -- "make friends by means of dishonest wealth."  But it is possible to find here a hint that Christians cannot stand aloof from public life in order to preserve some notional purity of soul (as might be inferred from the suspiciously tacked-on sounding second summary, about not being able to serve God and Mammon).  Rather, this line of thought might go, we are called to engage -- as Christians, so charitably! -- in the gritty and unpleasant business of actual public business, however that is defined.

But in the context of America's deeply divided polity, it is the Epistle for the day, from 1 Timothy, that seems most challenging.

Much of the New Testament envisions an inevitably hostile relationship between the followers of Jesus and the civil authorities in whose dominions they exist.  This is certainly apparent in the Lord's warning about "those who are persecuted for my sake," and in stories like those of St. Stephen and St. Paul.  It is, at least according to some schools, the entire point of the Revelation.

It is an academic commonplace that some of the lattermost documents, of which I take 1 Timothy to be an example, suggest a deliberate effort to accommodate Christian communities to the reality of life in an un-Christian world.  The notorious household codes (e.g., Eph. 5:22-6:9) seem to mute, if not emasculate, the countercultural message of the older tradition.  A movement that once taught followers to leave -- even "hate" -- their parents, now encourages filial piety of a perfectly conventional sort.  A movement that once declared "there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female," now seems surprisingly invested in head coverings, hair styles, and obedience according to pagan social norms.  And a movement that once envisioned confrontation with Empire as an apocalyptic battle now encourages its followers to avoid persecution by performing the social rituals of "good citizenship."

This often seems despicable on its face -- ersatz "Paul" selling out his echt eponym! -- but it is more than that.  After fifteen centuries of hegemony in the West, Christianity and culture have so thoroughly influenced each other that their values can be distinguished only by an act of historical study.  That is our context, and it is much like the one sought by the author of 1 Timothy.  This writer wants Christians to be good, socially-acceptable Romans.  Doing so may well have seemed a matter of life and death, individually and for their movement.

So, long story short, we are urged to "pray for kings and all in authority."  And these prayers are to be "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings."  Through most of the last half-millennium, this was unexceptionable; Anglicans have contentedly prayed until recently for "our most gracious Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth," and have now effortlessly exchanged that formula for her less popular but equally royal son.

But for Americans living in the era of "FJB" graffiti, this may well seem to be impossible, or impossibly distasteful.  In our own recent experience, we have had one assisting minister ask permission to omit the name of the then-sitting president from the weekly intercessions, on the grounds that he simply could not utter the name in prayer.  From there, it is a short albeit significant jump to crude and threatening denunciations of "Joe and the Ho[e]." 

It is is such a context -- in which one's own deepest values seem sharply at odds with those of the civil realm and its leadership -- that the instruction of 1 Timothy 2:1ff seems most powerful.  You don't like your leaders? You think their pagan values threaten you and those you love? You may be right!  And guess what?  Too freaking bad, says the pseudonymous author.  They are still your leaders, and if God does not bless them then you and the people around you are in even worse trouble.  As Lutherans might say, it is often difficult to discern God at work in the Kingdom of the Left Hand -- but it is still God's Hand.

In our time of profound political anger and unrest, this message is worth considering seriously, not least while standing in the pulpit.  Hatred for our leaders -- including some of the very bad leaders who have held office in recent years -- is still hatred, which is a questionable emotion at best.  And it is still hatred for our leaders, meaning the people who -- whether we believe they are capable of doing so or not -- have been called to govern the nation of which we are citizens.  While we are not called to pray for the imposition any particular policy (and thank heaven we are not!), that is separable from our call to pray even for those who promote it, if they hold legitimate civil authority.

We may well pray that God change their hearts; that God improve their moral character; that God reveal to them a new path in life leading to a period of monastic silence and seclusion.  What Christians must not do is cease to pray for our leaders, with love and hope, and in pursuit of a national life marked by "quietness, peace, godliness and dignity." To abandon this practice, especially at a time when carrying it our may be emotionally challenging, is to abandon hope for better times, and to assist in driving the sword more deeply into the heart of our divided nation.

"An Awful Thing"

 "The priesthood is an awful thing."

So reads the translator's description of a chapter in John Chrysostom's Treatise On the Priesthood (3:4), as found in the venerable NPNF collection, volume 9.  It's a funny remark -- many of us, over the years, have found our vocation to be awful indeed, in the colloquial sense, and yet we soldier on. But that's not the point.

Obviously, the word "awful" has changed its sense a bit, as latterly has even "awesome."  Chrysostom is trying to say that priesthood inspires awe, particularly in the priests themselves. He is certainly correct, and the way that he says it is worth considering. Here is the passage, lightly edited for clarity:

[T]he priestly office is indeed discharged on earth, but it ranks among heavenly ordinances; and very naturally so: for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete himself, instituted this vocation, and persuaded human beings still abiding in the flesh to represent the ministry of angels. This is why the consecrated priest ought to be as pure as if he were standing in the heavens themselves in the midst of those powers. [...]

For when you see the Lord sacrificed, and laid upon the altar, and the priest standing and praying over the victim, and all the worshippers empurpled with that precious blood, can you then believe that you are still among human beings, and standing upon the earth? Are you not, on the contrary, carried at once to Heaven, and casting out every carnal thought from the soul, do you not with disembodied spirit and pure reason contemplate the things which are in Heaven? 

Oh! what a marvel! what love of God to the human race! The One who sits on high with the Father is at that hour held in the hands of all, and gives himself to those who are willing to embrace and grasp him. And this we all do through the eyes of faith!

Donne on Luther on Baptism

Racking our brains for something new (but not very new, if you take our point) to say about the Baptism of Our Lord last Sunday, we skimmed over a few dusty texts in the Egg's Central Archive, a grand name for such a cramped, poorly-lit newspaper morgue.

Doing so, we stumbled over this nice passage from a sermon by the Dean:

[Christian] Baptisme is to us Ianua Ecclesiae as S. Augustine calls it, The Doore of the Church, at that we enter, and Investitura Christianismi, the investing of Christianity as S. Bernard cals it, there we put on Christ Jesus, (and as he whom wee may be bold to match with these two floods of spirituall eloquence for his eloquence, that is Luther, expresses it) Puerpera regni Coelorum, the Church in Baptisme is as a woman delivered of child, and her child is the Kingdome of heaven, and that kingdome she delivers into his armes who is truly baptized. (John Donne, Sermon 41, Preached at S. Dunstan's, Trinity-Sunday 1624).

The first are splendid, if familiar images:  the Door of the Church, the Putting-On of Christianity. But that third image, from Luther, is less familiar: a woman giving birth to the Kingdom of Heaven.

We ourselves spend a fair amount of time with Uncle Marty, but the phrase rang no bells. So we Googled it, and discovered a couple of interesting things.

First, the phrase in question is quoted in several 17th-century Lutheran sources. To take them in reverse order:

• The estimable Johann Gerhard uses it, without attribution, in a commentary on 1 Peter, published at Jena in 1660. (As does Richard Baxter in his 1653 Plain Proof).
• It appears in a loci communes, or commonplace-book, taken from Luther's Latin writings in 1651. The citation there is to Tome 3, p. 157a. Presumably, this refers to the Jena edition, but we do not know for certain. (For those unfamiliar with commonplace-books, they were essentially indexed collections of other people's works, based in part on the older gradus ad classsicum -- essentially, a quick reference guide to some compendious body of work.)
• Christian Dauderstadt quotes it, in the section regarding the Ascension, in his multi-volume neo-Scholastic treatise on Church festivals, published at Jena in 1646.
• It appears in another 1617 commonplace published at Wittenberg and gathered by pastor and economist Christian Gilbert de Spaignart, and given the glorious title Stars of Lutheran Piety [Softly shining in the works of blessed Father Luther]. There it is given a different citation, which is 8.3.f.557.a  

These are all trivial in themselves, but they do raise an interesting question about Donne's sermon preparation. His sermons are rich with references not only to the Scriptures but to the Fathers and, to a somewhat lesser degree, to medieval and Reformation-era writers, up to and including regular appearances by so unlikely a writer as Bellamine. But did he know them all with equal intimacy?

Donne's references to Bernard, in particular, are so frequent that one must assume a deep acquaintance. But Luther's name appears only a handful of times in the sermons, often in proximity to the catchword "paradox." It is quite possible that, rather than keeping a stack of Luther's works on hand, Donne consulted de Spaignart or some other commonplace book.

The second thing that a quick search teaches us about this phrase, and the reason it is likely not as well-known as it might be, is that its source is not one of Luther's major works.

The only source that we can find for the phrase in question is from a brief sermon (or "coniuncula") on John 3 preached on Trinity Sunday. It was published in volume 7 of the Wittenberg edition, in 1557.  It is reprinted in Heinrich Schmidt's 1873 edition, volume 7, pp. 413ff.  The phrase occurs in a longer sentence, which changes its grammar from the epigrammatic form in which it is otherwise cited:

Igitur statuendam est, hic aquam esse intelligendam veram aquam, et ut distingueretur ab aliis aquis veris sine verbo, additur: Et Spiritu, ut sciamus, baptismum esse puerperam regni coelorum, ubi aqua, non ut aqua sola, sed Spiritu coniuncto et cooperante, eduntur filii regni coelorum. 

Very roughly: Let us be clear, that this water is to be understood as true water, and so that it will be distinguished from other waters without the Word, is added: And the Spirit (John 3:5), that we may know baptism to be a mother giving birth to the kingdom of Heaven, wherever water, not water alone, but rather joined to and working with the Spirit, the children of the kingdom of heaven are brought forth.

The relative obscurity of the phrase may have a great deal to do with its source. The coniunculae (a rare word, and one not in our trusty little Latin dictionary) are sermons transcribed by Luther's friends. This limits their reliability, as they can be no more accurate than the notes or memories of the transcriptor. So a phrase like this must be treated with caution, as it may not be precisely what Luther said.

On the other hand, consider the customary sources of the "quotable Luther." Unless we are mistaken, the great majority of popular quotations from Luther come from three sources:  (1) The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, an early essay on the sacraments which seems to be the most-assigned-in-class of Luther's works; (2) the Table-Talk, which like the coniunculae are transcriptions from memory, often by people who had been drinking; or (3) one's imagination, like the spurious remark about the apple-tree.  A sermon transcript is at least as solid a source as any of the Table-Talk.

In any case:  baptism is a mother giving birth to the Kingdom of Heaven. It's a lovely thought, and one we are a bit surprised has not been more widely taken up by the present era of female-positivity in matters of ecclesiastical imagery. Perhaps it will be, once the masses read this blog post and take heed.