How Does a Lutheran Go On Pilgrimage?

Many of my friends and family have asked me: Why are you going on pilgrimage? They ask this as though I had an answer.

The truth is, a substantial part of going on pilgrimage means discovering why exactly I have felt called to go. I suspect this post is something of my own way of asking the question, rather than an answer. I also suspect that I won’t be able to give any sufficient answer until well after I have arrived safely back at home, I perhaps even several years down the road.

Lets wrestle with the title first. Why does, or how can, a Lutheran go on pilgrimage? At St. George’s I was in the world of Anglicanism, which has a fine tradition of all those Catholic institutions—pilgrimage, monasticism, etc.—that Lutherans do not possess (I would say ‘lacks’). There was some attempt to come to grips with what exactly pilgrimage is, but no attempt to justify it in our minds. Lutherans, on the other hand, have inherited Martin Luther’s own rejection of pilgrimage (and monasticism, and relics) that goes back to our shared theology of justification by grace alone through faith alone. Such works cannot bring us closer to God.

Of course, I asked this question of our quirky English course assistant, Ben- “Why do we go on pilgrimage?- to receive the brilliantly sarcastic answer- “We go in search of relics!” Funny as it is, it cuts right to the heart of the matter: how does one go on pilgrimage to get closer to God when nothing one does can bring us closer to God?

There are two or three possible answers I’d like to seize upon. Lutherans have always made a strong distinction between Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what we ought to do; the Gospel tells us what Christ has done. The Law condemns, the Gospel proclaims the good news.

In particular, Lutherans (with Calvinists, though in a different order) have distinguished three purposes that the Law, acting naturally through the voice of conscience, fulfills in God’s plan:

First, the Law binds the conscience of human beings, to the end that we live rightly in civil society.

Second, the Law condemns us, making us aware of our own sin, and thus driving us into the loving, caring arms of the Gospel.

Third, for those on whom the second purpose of the law has done its work (namely, Christians), the Law instructs us how to live out our faith in Jesus as Lord, doing right by the God of our salvation.

I say there are two or three possible answers because the first and second ones are really the Second and Third Purposes of the Law. I have rarely been more aware of my own sense of alienation than in the Holy Sepulcher, the church of the tomb of Christ. Pilgrims have walked that road for years, far holier than me. They have trod that road in piety, saying ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ with each breath and each step (yes, literally). And the Holy Sepulcher itself- a rather dark and uninspiring building, filled with tour groups with guides holding up neon green umbrellas or light sabers in order to direct the flow of Japanese and American and Russian and Italian pilgrims crowding around taking flash photos in the middle of the Latin High Mass. How deep therein is the sense of removal from the resurrection of Jesus Christ that happened five feet away!

Yet rather than despairing, the personal and spatial sense of alienation there can be an object lesson in the Second Purpose of the Law, which thus drives us into the arms of Christ. What better lesson than going to the Holy Sepulcher and feeling nothing in how little works can achieve! All my months (or years) of planning and the steps I have taken, while they have achieve much in human terms, have achieved precisely zero in bringing me closer to God.

And yet, and yet!, the only response is to recall that it is not us that have gone on pilgrimage to God. Rather, it is Yahweh who has gone on pilgrimage to Zion, coming to earth through the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary to be clothed in the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who walked the first Via Dolorosa for us all. The Lutheran and Christian sense of pilgrimage is rooted first and foremost in the pilgrimage that God has taken on our behalf. Our feeble attempts to walk that path are critical lessons in how entirely Christ has accomplished his purposes in Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Galilee, Calvary, and in the Empty Tomb. And only through that empty tomb, where Christ’s body is absent, can the absence in our hearts be filled with his presence.

I may note, here, that this explains how St. Paul comes to the conclusion that we should not sin that grace may abound (Romans 6). For while it is true that grace overflows to cover sin, it is equally true that grace comes into greater focus when we work to live in holiness. A habitual sinner is not so aware of his or her sin as is one who strives daily to blot it out. But in striving to blot it out daily, and in failing to do so, one comes to appreciate so much more the abounding nature of grace.

As for the Third Purpose of the Law, there is no doubt that clinging to the Gospel in faith by grace produces the swelling of loving works. Lutherans (and Calvinists) have always held firm to the belief that the faith which alone justifies is not merely intellectual assent to some truth. Intellectual assent is a critical component, but the Protestant definition of faith includes something more than this. It includes fiducia—trust, faithfulness, fidelity. The true knowledge of the Gospel must always and necessarily produce good works. These works earn us nothing, but they are the natural outpouring of right belief (‘right belief,’ by the way, is the original Greek meaning of ‘orthodoxy’).

Thus, when the Second Purpose of the Law does its work, the Third Purpose of the Law is there to instruct us in how we should precisely express our loyalty, or fidelity, or faithfulness to God in Christ. Here my pilgrimage has shown me that while my works accomplish nothing, my pilgrimage is a crucible in which I may practice right living through denial of the flesh. It is also a time of prayer. Through abstinence and prayer, I can practice living rightly and draw strength from the One who lived rightly, in order that later, when real temptations arrive, I might be ready to face them (cf. Luke ).

Of course, this final note borders on the philosophy of Catholic and Orthodox monasticism, which Luther rejected. If I may, I’d point out that Luther had a particularly poor experience with monasticism, given the emphasis upon personal piety. In the Orthodox East this is certainly true, where the monks do not have the same emphasis on works of service to the community, travelers, etc. as in the west, where St. Benedict of Nursa’s monastic rule prevailed. St. Benedict had a strong belief that monastic communities should serve those around them. The monks of German in Luther’s day were still helping wayfarers and such, but they did so in order to make themselves better people; this was a perversion of Benedict’s original vision for monasticism.

In keeping with St. Benedict’s original vision for monasteries (which translates readily into the life of pilgrimage), I would note that I am going to be attending seminary and, whether I end up as a professor of theology and biblical studies or as a parish priest, there is much spiritual formation yet to be accomplished. So think of my times of abstention, asceticism, and prayer as preparations for my time of work and service, just as monks spending the hours praying and reading the scriptures in order to better serve God, his people, and the world.

The third reason to go on pilgrimage is to discover whether God may use the pilgrim way as a means of grace. Lutheran theology has concentrated its life of worship and spirituality on the sacraments as means of grace. That is, baptism is not merely a declaration of something we believe, or an outward sign of an inward faith, or a mark that denotes those who belong to the earthly church. No, it actually does something. It is a means of grace by which God imparts salvation to the recipient, whether they are an adult or an infant. It actually and truly transforms us from the damned into the saved. And the Eucharist: it is not merely a memorial meal that commemorates what Christ has done some time in the distant past. It actually and truly is the physical body and blood of Christ, the same body broken along the Via Dolorosa and the same blood shed on Calvary. This body really does bind us together in the body of Christ, and this blood really does impart the continued forgiveness of sins.

So can pilgrimage be a means of grace? I think it can. Moving from the commercial America Israel Tourism tour to the devotional path of St. George’s Palestine of Jesus, I have been ushered from the realm of the tourist and into the world of pilgrimage. This, to me, goes right to the heart of the Christian faith, and permit me a few more lines to explain how.

In philosophy, whether political or theological, there is a strong distinction between individuals and persons. We can speak of an individual dog- Sadie, for example- but can we speak of canine persons? No, because personhood is something that goes beyond mammalian instinct or even primate sentience and intelligence. Personhood is the very image of God. Yes, that is my answer to that long question of what the image of God is: it is personhood.

It is personhood because of the Christian belief in the Trinity. The Trinity is not three manifestations of one God (a heresy called modalism). Nor is it three individuals of one divine species. Nor, importantly, is it even three individuals of one God. It is three persons, three persons in one God. Three persons in such a deep relationship with one another that they are one being. As the great theologian Robert Jenson has rephrased it in order to allow us to comprehend the formula ‘one God in three persons,’ there are ‘three identities within one entity.’

Why can we speak this way? Because individuals can only make contracts. In the past three hundred years of political thought, we have tended to speak of autonomous individuals who have certain rights and privileges and duties, but who are essentially out there, floating alone in a sea of other isolated individuals. And these individuals can make contracts, whether the social contract of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that creates the state and respects all persons as individuals, or an economic contract.

However, persons can be in covenant. Individuals in contracts can say ‘this is yours, and that is mine.’ But persons in covenant can say ‘I am yours, and you are mine.’ The Trinity is a covenant from all eternity. The new covenant, through baptism and the Eucharist, unites us through the Holy Spirit to Christ and through him to the Father. The marriage covenant is not an exchange of goods but an exchange of persons (and the only legitimate way to exchange persons). Western civilization has treated us as individuals; Christ implores us to treat one another as persons.

What does this have to do with pilgrimage?

With St. George’s we had a most profound experience on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. We stayed for the night at the Pilgerhaus in Tabgha, where it is said Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. Through the morning we also went to Capernaum, his ‘base camp’ through the early months of his ministry and to the Mount of Beatitudes, where a beautiful church (funded entirely by Benito Mussolini, oddly enough, but built by the eminent Antonio Barluzzi) commemorates the site of the Sermon on the Mount. It was a morning of profound prayer and silence. We took half an hour at each place in the quiet, and then went on a boat ride where we read script, and prayed, and enjoyed the silence at the middle of the lake.

But after all that, we went to an outdoor chapel near the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter (does it get any more Catholic?). There we celebrated the Eucharist under the direction of Father Andrew. After the Mass, we processed down in silence to the water’s edge, where we removed our shoes and stepped in the water. There we renewed our baptismal vows, affirming the grace that God imparted to us as infants or as adult converts.

There, ankle-deep in the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by people I have come to care for so deeply and whom I will love forever, I realized that I had been transformed from a tourist into a pilgrim.

That is, the individual Western tourist had been turned into the pilgrim person, walking the road that God had walked on his return to Zion.

Can pilgrimage be a means of grace? Oh yes.

So perhaps that was a bit of an answer. But there are so many more questions I have. Why does my pilgrimage go on from Jerusalem to Constantinople and Rome? Why four and a half months, and not a week or a year? How will I return to the United States after months abroad, a very different person? Will this fill me, or leave me longing for more?