No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
— 1 Corinthians 12:3

In the summer of 1962, my younger sister and I were taken to Sunday worship for the first time. It was Christ Church Episcopal, Sausalito, California. I was 7, and I remember the occasion vividly. The four of us took our places in a pew. For clothes, I had been bedecked in a little suit and tie, and my feet encased in polished black leather shoes. My mother wore a hat, which she never otherwise did. This was 1962, after all. When I saw my father fill out a little blue card, taken from the back of the pew, then put in it a big plate that was being passed around, I somehow knew that we were in for it. But I rather liked the whole experience.

I followed the service from the prayer book that my father held open for me. It was Morning Prayer (Holy Communion being offered monthly, at least at the middle Sunday service we were attending). Again, this was 1962.

In the course of the service, I heard and read the word Lord, which I didn’t recall hearing or seeing before. I had heard the word God, and knew (or thought I knew) what it meant. But Lord was new. I thought that it had a good sound and that it looked lovely on the page. I did pick up that it was a someone, and that it was a someone whom we were addressing. Who it was I didn’t know. Afterward, on the car ride home, I asked, “Who is the Lord?” My parents did answer, their answer did seem to satisfy, but just what they said, I no longer remember.

A few months later, my father, sister, and I were baptized — all on the same Sunday. That’s another vivid memory, most especially the feel of the water running down my face. In the next years, my family and I were exceptionally active (until we suddenly stopped attending). Church was a place (and what I’d now call a way of being) in which I felt I belonged — very much unlike school. Not until many years later did I become a good student; and neither then nor any time since then have I been athletically accomplished. School was not (then) a happy fit. But church was different; a place of belonging and blessing: a place of addressing (and being addressed by) someone called Lord.

But now, quite a few years later, our church is a place where Lord is frequently either being replaced or much thinned out in usage. In liturgies these days, it is frequently replaced with either God, or Savior, as though these three words were interchangeable religious synonyms. They are not. Each of them has its distinctive range of meaning. Each of them has its irreplaceable part to play in our historic vocabulary of faith.

To call Jesus Lord — and, of course, we aren’t talking about mere vocalization of some magic word — but to call him Lord doesn’t come naturally to any of us. That we should be able to call him Lord, with all that this is meant to mean, is itself God’s gift: a gracious, providential, and mysterious gift; given to us through the power of the Spirit. There’s a reason that the church’s earliest creed — and still its most fundamental creed — is precisely “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9). Christian history tells us that our sisters and brothers in the faith have sometimes faced the ultimate earthly risk for the full integrity of confessing that creed.

I’ve sought to understand the current resistance to the liturgical use of the word Lord. Probing to find underlying rationales, I’ve found two:

First, that Lord supposedly is a remnant — best relinquished — of aristocratic, hierarchically stratified society. (In the United States we like to think that we’ve left such structures behind. And maybe, to an extent, we have. Perhaps, though, more than we like to admit, we’ve just gone from overt expressions of such structures to the covert.) But in the point at hand, this argument misses a core dimension of what is involved in calling God or Jesus Lord. Our confession in faith of the One who is Lord includes the belief that nothing else and no one else truly is Lord. Not even the earthly “best of our best,” and certainly not we ourselves, either. Under the one true Lordship, all other “lordships” are either severely qualified or subverted. There was good reason why the early Christians were thought to be genuine threats to the order of the Roman Empire. We weren’t antiauthoritarian anarchists. But “powers and principalities” (see Eph. 6:12) don’t like to be told that their subjects will not give them unqualified allegiance. Our primal creed must not be regarded as a mere vestige of the past. It must be kept in our minds and hearts — and on our lips.

Second, it has been argued that Lord is a word that conveys great distance to the one being so addressed. Not so! While Lord and the words it translates certainly came to carry ultimate cosmic significance, in their roots they are household terms. They each denote someone who leads and cares for a household. They are terms, not of distance, but of immediate relationship. I believe that their root aspects still substantially inform their cosmic meaning and their religious use. An aspect of the English word Lord that I especially cherish is its derivation from the Old English word for loaf-bearer hlafweard — the one who provides the family its bread. Loaf-bearer. How apt this is for Jesus, who gives the Bread that he himself is for “the life of the world” (John 6:51).

Jesus is already the rightful Lord of all things. But truly to call him Lord is to recognize him for who he is — and who he is for us. It means to be in living relationship with him; practically and directly, personally and in fellowship. It means that our first allegiance — both immediate and ultimate — is to him. It means that we cherish his leadership, and trust, utterly, in his protection and provision. It means, in short, that we know ourselves to be a part of his great household.

The liturgical replacement (or notable reduction) of Lord is a marked departure from the prayer books, both of 1928 and 1979 (and all others before them) — and a marked departure from the language of both the Holy Scriptures and historic Christian devotion. Something (or Someone) is missing. A lordless liturgy may seem less risky, but — to me — it’s both less real, and more lonely.

I’d much encourage far deeper reflection on, and less mere reaction to, the word Lord, as well as much greater caution in setting it aside in our liturgies, lest we awake one day — and to channel a phrase of St. Jerome’s — groan to find ourselves disconnected from both our being and our belonging (see Jerome’s Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19).

The Rev. Adam Linton is an active retired Episcopal priest, now living in Montana. He served parishes in Illinois, Utah, and Massachusetts, and as Deputy to General Convention 2006.

Land acknowledgments at meetings and gatherings have become widespread in certain circles of academia and the corporate world. Some churches now also use them in worship services. I have reservations about their use in general, but I have grave pastoral concerns about including such in the church’s liturgies.

I’m aware that General Convention 2022 (in its Resolutions C072 and D019) called for the implementation of “land acknowledgment liturgies and prayers to begin any public meetings or worship held in North America.” With deep regret, I have to say — particularly in regard to mandating them in worship — that I found this not only profoundly ill-considered, but also an extraordinarily bad idea. Nevertheless, the phenomenon seems to be taking off, and my sense at this point is that “Resistance is futile” — at least institutionally speaking. But, most certainly, I do resist: respectfully, in fact, lovingly; but also very clearly.

Here are a few qualifiers:

1. I do not impugn the good intentions of those who have advocated such practices, nor do I wish to cast personal aspersions on those clergy who see things differently than I do.
2. I believe it necessary to become aware of historic injustices, to ponder most seriously what actions we might undertake to rectify such injustices, and then to work collaboratively, by God’s grace, for “the repair of the world.” And I emphatically include among these what was done to communities from pre-European immigration to this continent by (and in the name of) those of European settlement.
3. My objections are therefore specially focused on the use of land acknowledgments in regular parish worship, including both what is said in the services and also what is printed in bulletins.

I believe that clergy and churches are responsible, not only for what they think they intend to convey, but also how they may come across. “How will be we heard?” and “How will we be perceived and experienced?” are questions that come with the territory.

To be sure, there are elements, hard-wired into the very heart of our faith that may, at least for some, be difficult or even scandalous: such things as addressing God as Father, and calling Jesus Lord. It would be an essential self-contradiction for the church to eliminate these from our devotion out of fear of giving offense (although such eliminations are well underway, precisely for this reason). Those elements of our historic worship that are difficult for some to receive certainly call for appropriate instruction and pastoral response. But to create a difficulty, not warranted from Scripture or tradition, but from sociopolitical preference (no matter how good that preference might be) and then insist on the non-negotiability of that difficulty is not faithfulness, but corporate self-indulgence.

Here, then, are some of the specifics of my objections to any use of land acknowledgements in worship services:

One: I am acutely aware of the great number of people who have seemingly been told by life, in all sorts of ways, that “they don’t belong here,” and even more that it would be better if they weren’t here at all. Those coming from life stories more privileged, and more secure, often find it difficult to feel what a colossal burden this is, and how it can profoundly color the rest of life. Land Acknowledgments, especially in worship, can come across as shame-mongering counsels of despair. What are people supposed to do, just go away? Feel even worse about themselves than they already do?

Two: “Land Acknowledgments,” most of all in worship, can easily come across as pseudo-penitential acts of self-congratulation. Even if not intended, the impression given is virtue signaling. “We few, we happy few” are so very thankful that we are “not like other people” (Luke 18:11). How good it can feel to “repent,” so earnestly, of other people’s sins, especially when we ourselves are actually doing precious little (if anything) to address the grievances that are ostensibly being lamented. (And it is hard for me not to wonder, if Native Americans do not experience such acknowledgements with at the least very mixed feelings. How many organizations, including churches, making such statements have even the remotest intention of returning the property?)

Three: Land acknowledgments in worship inevitably function as boundary-markers.  Despite the good intentions of those who advocate for them, they are an example of coded language, which works as a very unsubtle sociopolitical dog-whistle communicating that this church, this worship space, this worship event belongs to one very particular portion of the sociopolitical spectrum. In pointed irony, they therefore function over against those not in that portion of the spectrum as a territory-marking claim that the institutional privilege is held by others. And as I see it, land acknowledgments in our worship are but one of a number of increasing practices among us that unwittingly — but very regrettably — establish and enforce a sociopolitical monoculture in our congregations. I see a pattern of less actual “diversity and inclusion” among us, despite our frequent espousals of these noble values. I believe this diminishes us, and most certainly does not serve the gospel.

This is by no means an excuse to avoid awareness of historic injustices in the Americas in the wake of European settlement, and the rectification of such, wherever and whenever possible, in the here and now. (Such injustices were profound indeed, and with serious consequences to this day.)

Dut at the heart of it, my objection to the use of land acknowledgements in Christian liturgy is that they import into our worship a distinctly secular modal of sociopolitical expression. They do not draw from the only authentic ultimate source for that worship: the Holy Scriptures.

Anglicans have never endorsed the “Regulative Principle” (the idea that the church’s worship may only contain what is explicitly described in the New Testament). Nevertheless, we historically have affirmed that the Scriptures are to be the source and standard — the divinely given fount and frame — of all our worship. It’s significant that our Book of Common Prayer has been called “the Bible set to prayer.”

Other modes of expression certainly have their places in human life. But they never will have the particular normative authority, for us, of the Scriptures. To be sure, the Holy Scriptures — humanly speaking — reflect particular times and places. Yet we have received them as the decisive Word of God that they are, addressing all human times, places, and circumstances. The Word of God, both Incarnate in Jesus Christ, and written in the Scriptures (which are his enduring prime witness), is the Particular that encompasses the universal. This is always true for us, but nowhere more so than in worship.

Of course, this is not at all to say that Christian liturgy never can specifically name acts — or patterns — of human injustice, including the call to repentance and rectification. Sometimes these are very necessary. But when doing so, the manner, tone, and wording must not communicate the usual ubiquitous sense in secular political discourse these days, of “us versus them” — the division of people into the distinct social categories of those we shame and those we congratulate. (The shamed wind up, predictably, being “the others,” and we, the congratulated.)

The Scriptures most certainly do give substantial warnings to the advantaged, the comfortable, and the powerful. But the Scriptures also — as we consider the whole sweep of their witness — address us, at the heart of the human condition, as beings in radical solidarity with one another:

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 3:22b-24)

It is a serious mistake simply to equate the church with the kingdom of God. But the church’s worship is — and is meant to be — an inbreaking, here and now, on earth, of that kingdom.

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.

Outside of Lent and Eastertide, this is what the Book of Common Prayer (1979) places at the beginning of every Eucharist — with good reason.

Certainly, when the church gathers, it is to do so with deep respect to time and place, and all those abiding in that time and place. But the use of secular land acknowledgements, with their immediately recognizable coded language, especially at the beginning of a service, will convey to many that it is not the church which has gathered, but a sociopolitical affiliation.

If the church really needed a land acknowledgement, how about one that our faith actually gives us?

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

The Rev. Adam Linton is a retired Episcopal priest, canonically resident in the Diocese of Massachusetts, now living  in Montana. He served parishes in Illinois, Utah, and Massachusetts, and as Deputy to General Convention 2006.