Thursday, August 11, 2011

How To Be Controversial: Director's Commentary

I know, I know.  I am a couple weeks behind in my current events with this latest video.  But I was gearing up for vacation right as this story was hitting and didn't quite have time to animate my snarkery before hitting the road.  

Well, technically that's not true.  I did have time, but I had to cancel Bible Class my last Sunday before vacation in order to go to my cousin's ordination in Iowa.  And, you see, one of the Lutheran Satire Rules is that all of my videos have their world premier in Bible Class before going up on the webbernets.  I do this for two reasons, those reasons being:

1. If I happen to get a little too mean or irreverent in my satiricizing, I want to give folks in my congregation the opportunity to pull me back from the abyss of angry cynicism before I embarrass myself and my congregation in internetland.

2. This is the core of my evangelism program where I create a bunch of Lutheran Satire addicts who will leave their high paying jobs and 6,000 square foot, ocean front mansions for Channahon, IL in order to be the first consumers of my confessional silliness.  You may think that this is a really dumb evangelism program.  And you are right.  In fact, it is so stupid and gimmicky and non-Lutheran that I'm quite certain I can convince at least half of the mission executives in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to adopt it by the end of the week.  

Zing.

But I digress.  My original point was that my brain came up with the idea to do a video something like what this one ended up being before I left town.  And after my brain came up with that idea, my brain then thought, "I should probably write a blog piece fleshing out a bit the Lutheran view of the pope as antichrist and why it's neither news nor terribly controversial."  But then, just a few days into my vacation, my dear friend Mollie Ziegler Hemingway wrote this superfantasticalbodaciouslyawesome piece for the Wall Street Journal.  So then my brain thought, "Sweet!  Now, I can just link Mollie's article instead of thinking!"  My brain is lazy like that.

So there you have it.  Read the article and enjoy.  And if you didn't know it before, you will now know why Mollie is one of the LCMS's greatest living treasures.


5 comments:

Will said...

What was the line about "a Wiccan priestess wearing goth face"?

Pastor Fiene said...

...wearing golf cleats.

Pastor Hess said...

The problem is that there are about 11 confessional Lutheran laypeople who believe that the Pope is the antichrist. And there are only about 3 Missouri Synod pastors that have ever preached that in public.

Nicholas said...

"I confidently affirm that whoever calls himself Universal Bishop is the precursor of Antichrist." -Pope St. Gregory Diologos

Anonymous said...

Wow, as a Lutheran pastor I am part of an extraordinary minority. One of three. :)