Like most Lutheran kids, I memorized Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Although most people quickly forgot what they had learned from the Small Catechism, it’s still stuck in my mind. I’ve long advocated that people review the Catechism from time to time. It was meant for adults as well as children.

What’s interesting me right now is the order of the Catechism: Ten Commandments, Creed, Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, Sacrament of the Altar. This order strikes me because it’s not much different from the way people were taught about Christianity for more than a thousand years before Luther.

In the fourth century (and probably much earlier) we know people were first taught about ethics, how the Christian should behave. That instruction might go on for several years. Only shortly before they were baptized were they taught the Creed which they would be questioned on during the baptismal ceremony. Then they were baptized and brought into the church where for the first time they would have heard the Lord’s Prayer and then participated in communion.  (By the way, they would have only had baptism, the Lord’s prayer, and communion explained to them after they had experienced them.)

I wonder if there is something for us modern folk to learn from this practice. We need right behavior–practicing virtue and avoiding vice, we need knowledge about God the Holy Trinity, we need prayer, we need to understand and participate in the mysteries–baptism and communion.

It might be nice to use the Catechism to see how we’re coming along in being a Christian.

Read Proverbs 2:6 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne