Feature: Smells and bells in Luther's land

GURAT, France, April 4 (UPI) -- "The Germans are always late," Thomas Mann quipped about his fellow-countrymen. Could it be that changes in Lutheran liturgy are proving him right?

Consider this: Clouds of incense waft through a lecturer's sober office at Leipzig University's divinity school. Seven young men and women swing gold-plated thuribles. Now the vessels whoosh past the left sides or their bodies, now past their right sides.

What do we have here -- future acolytes training to officiate at Catholic Mass? No, these are Protestant theology students preparing for a development in Luther's land that has occurred in the United States 40 years ago -- the return of smells and bells in worship.

This is a class of the Institute for Liturgical Science of the United Evangelical Church in Germany, which seeks to reconnect its future ministers with its heritage -- its catholic heritage, of course.

"It matters how a pastor sings, moves and gesticulates during a service," says the Rev. Joerg Neijenhuis, the instructor. "As you walk toward the altar you should not look like a soccer player measuring out 11 meters to the goal. And at benediction, please remember that you are not raising your arms surrendering to a gunman."

In many parts of Germany with its peculiar mix of Protestant denominations, the sober comportment and appearance of Reformed clerics has somehow rubbed off on their Lutheran colleagues over the last 200 years.

By contrast, in Sweden, parts of Africa and America, Lutheran ministers often seem unabashedly Catholic. In many sanctuaries such as New York's St. Peter's Church, Mass is celebrated colorfully, and with masses of incense on high holidays.

According to Northern Baptist liturgist Robert Webber, high-church services with smells, bells and 16th-century chorales are becoming increasingly popular among an elite of very young educated Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians in the United States -- probably as a reaction to the stark sobriety of evangelical worship.

But in the homeland of the Reformation, their brethren have been lagging behind. Joy is rarely the mark of a Protestant service here.

Pastors typically wear somber black robes with white preaching tabs, not albs with stoles and chasubles that change their color from one liturgical season to the next. Liturgies are chanted alright, but not cheerfully like in the United States, and as for incense, well, isn't that popery?

This has not always been that way. Luther himself has said that as far as he was concerned a pastor could wear 25 different sets of vestments on top of each other as long as he preached the Gospel well.

For a quarter millennium, Lutherans in most of Germany retained the Catholic Mass, amending it only slightly to suit their theology. In some places, such as Leipzig, they even celebrated Mass in Latin until well into the 17th century.

The hymns, of course were in German. Singing, the congregants responded theologically to scripture lessons and the sermon.

And incense? Thick clouds of it filled some Protestant sanctuaries, especially in times of pestilence, wrote Paul Graff, a renowned student of liturgical practices. At wintertime, vergers placed billowing barrels of holy smells throughout Magdeburg Cathedral to give the celebrants at least the illusion of warmth.

So what went wrong? Graff blamed mainly the Enlightenment for the disappearance of elaborate Protestant ceremony. Liturgies shrank because pastors then felt that nobody understood "that kind of stuff anymore," an argument that sounds almost postmodern nowadays.

Then there was Frederick William III, the Calvinist King of Prussia. He forced the majority Lutheran church in his realm to merge with the Reformed minority. And guess who prevailed in this match -- at least liturgically? The Reformed.

But now, things are beginning to change back, albeit slowly. Here and there, German pastors vest the "Catholic way." Gradually, too, Protestants in the land of Luther and of Bach cease being mere consumers of sacred music.

For decades, it was customary not to stand up to sing hymns, but to sit there with a squeezed-in diaphragm, moving one's lips silently to some of Christianity's most glorious tunes as they were being played by the organ.

"But now we congregations seem to be rediscovering the joy of singing again," says Mathias Pankau, one of the divinity students in Neijenhuis' liturgy class. "Who knows? Perhaps one day we'll also smell incense again."

Even this new generation of young theologians does not lack its share of what in Germany is called Essigprotestanten, or vinegar Protestants, though.

"Man, open the window!" groans one of Pankau's classmates, holding his nose. "This stuff is giving me a headache. How do you expect me to concentrate on God with these smells all over the place?"