Luther had the entire altar area ripped out of the front of the church where he spoke. High up on one of the pillars of the church was a little rostrum, or Pulpit, which the Catholic priest had climbed up to by means of a circular staircase to read dutifully the weekly announcements to the faithful flock below. (If you're ever visiting a "tourist cathedral" and there's no one around, you have my permission to sneak up into the pulpit and look down, imagining you're addressing a full house of upturned faces. If your circuitry is anything like normal, you will experience an enormous, almost dizzying sense of power.)
Luther had one of those high pulpits placed in the front and center of the church building where the altar had been. That was new. Brand new. And so, dear reader, was born the mighty Protestant pulpit. A step in the right direction, definitely-but still
Luther faithfully preached every Sunday at dawn. The hour was exactly the same that Catholic mass had been scheduled for eons.
Luther, however, did not enjoy getting up that early. (Night owls, take comfort!)
What he really preferred was to go down to the tavern-or sit in his kitchen-and talk theology with his friends and drink beer on Saturday night. In fact, the tune of his famous hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," was a popular German drinking song of his day. (Even if you don't drink, you just gotta love a guy like that!)
So, before long, he moved the Protestant worship service to the saner hour of 9 A.M.-though not without sustaining numerous complaints from the early bird faction. But the older he got, the longer he gabbed on Saturday night and the more beer he drank. He moved the service to 10 A.M.-to the tune of more complaints.
But as he talked still longer, he found even 10 A.M. to be uncomfortably early. The last possible hour he could set for the service and still call it "morning worship" was 11 A.M. So he did. And that is how it came about that 500,000,000 Protestants today hold church services every Sunday at 11 A.M.!
So the next time you roll over and catch up on your sleep on a Sunday morning, remember to thank the Lord for Martin Luther and his endless late-night Bierfests.
Luther also set in concrete the order of worship you'll probably follow next Sunday morning. (He may have adapted Calvin's version of the Sunday morning worship service. It's a moot question. Calvin and Luther both invented their Sunday morning rituals about 1540, and the two are virtually identical.) He set the Protestant ritual for Wittenberg and, with only the slightest variations, we all follow that same liturgy today. Regardless of our denomination, across the face of the entire planet, we copy the immutable, sacrosanct order handed to us down through the ages ... at 11 A.M., of course ...
The Golden Arches have flourished worldwide, largely for one reason: You can go into any McDonald's anywhere, and you know exactly what you'll get, right down to a few thousandths of a pound. Luther's hymn sandwich, like the Big Mac, also thrives on predictability. It's the same week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, world without end, amen.
