I really thought I was done grousing about ELW. I said my piece about the erasure of military imagery and ran Philip Pfatteicher’s incisive criticism here on the website. But at the time I did both those things I was still using the green book. Of late I have been in a congregation that uses the cranberry book. It’s kind of fitting: real cranberry juice is so intense you can barely swallow it, but the usual stuff you get that claims to be cranberry juice is significantly cut with water, high fructose corn syrup, and other kinds of juice. An apt metaphor for the new hymnal indeed.

After my recent run-in with ELW, all I can conclude is that it hates “the Lord.” “The Lord” is avoided at all costs, no matter how stupid and repetitive that makes the liturgy sound. In the dialogue preceding the Great Thanksgiving. In the dismissal. In any conceivable place that a worshipper might make the mistake of offering up praise to the all-powerful sovereign majesty Who works life and death and all in all and therefore deserves, unlike every single other thing in existence, the title “Lord.”

Here I go on my suspicion-of-anti-Judaism kick again, but if we can’t call our God “the Lord” as our Israelite forebears did, are we really worshipping the same God?

Remember what our old pal Martin Luther said. You’re always going to have a god and you’re always going to have a lord. Stop calling the Lord “the Lord” and it seems to me you’re already bowing down to some other lord.