What a Roman Catholic Deacon Taught a Lutheran Pastor About Sacramentals

I came home from a retreat at Mustang Island Conference Center with a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals—and a theological problem I had not expected.

The problem was simple: what, exactly, is a Lutheran pastor supposed to do with them?

Let me tell you how I got into this strange position. The Anglican Order of Preachers—the Dominican community to which I belong as a life-professed friar—is, as the name suggests, a preaching order. Like many mainline religious communities, we are strongest in prophetic witness and social justice. What we are less practiced at is the simple, one-on-one conversation with people who have never heard the Gospel and have no particular reason to listen. So we decided to address that gap.

We invited a deacon from the Archdiocese of Galveston–Houston who practices street evangelism—not the aggressive, confrontational variety, but the kind that begins with genuine human contact and grows from there. He spent a day training us: classroom instruction, some role-playing, and then an hour on the streets of Port Aransas speaking with strangers about things that matter. Afterward we gathered for dinner and a long conversation about what we had experienced.

During the training, the deacon explained how his team uses sacramentals—rosaries, medals, prayer cards—as conversation starters and simple gifts. Not as magic. Not as luck. Rather, as physical anchors for a spiritual reality the Church has always insisted upon. He brought samples, and we took them with us onto the street.

At the end of the evening there were leftovers. The deacon did not want to haul them home, but since the group was mostly Episcopalians, he correctly assumed we were unlikely to make much use of them. I, however, grabbed a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals and brought them back to La Porte, TX where I live and serve the TX LA Gulf Coast Synod (ELCA) as an intentional interim pastor. 

My first thought was to give them to my Thursday night Bible study group at Light of Christ—a scrappy, lean, no-frills, refreshingly honest crew made up mostly of recovery alumni and people who know the margins of life firsthand. They are exactly the kind of people for whom a physical object that says you are not alone in this fight might matter. In a moment of craving or despair—when faith feels abstract and distant—the cold weight of a medal in the palm can provide a kind of sensory grounding.

Then it occurred to me that they would have no framework for what they were holding. The medal bears Latin inscriptions on both sides, including the potent Vade Retro Satana (“Begone, Satan”). It carries a theological tradition stretching back fifteen centuries. At its core, the medal is a scriptural invocation in metal—the Name of Jesus set against the dark.

So I wrote a teaching document—but before I could teach it, I had to work something out for myself: what does a Lutheran do with this?

Lutherans are not sacramental in quite the same way Roman Catholics are. We have a more narrowly defined set of Sacraments and a less developed theology of sacramentals. We reject any notion that an object works “by the mere performance of the ritual” (ex opere operato) as a mechanism of automatic grace apart from faith and the Word. We are often suspicious—sometimes rightly—of anything that appears to locate spiritual power in a thing rather than in the Word and the Name. Martin Luther himself was emphatic: it is the Word that makes the Sacrament. Without the Word, the element is simply matter.

Yet Luther also blessed things. He retained the renunciations, the exorcism, and the exsufflation in the baptismal rite—a reminder that the early church never imagined the Christian life as spiritually neutral terrain.  He wrote and sang about spiritual warfare as a present and serious reality. More to the point, Luther understood that God uses material means—water, bread, wine, spoken words—to deliver real promises. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted that the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is far more porous than Western modernity is willing to admit.

Given that background, there is a precedent, if not a full theological system, for the careful, non-superstitious use of physical signs, properly understood. The St. Benedict medal is not a lucky charm. It promises nothing automatically. It is best understood as a material confession of Jesus’s victory. Its power is entirely His—invoked through faith and prayer, and grounded in the scriptural commands inscribed on its surface. The medal is not a battery of power; it is a sign that points the Christian back to their Baptismal identity.

What the medal does is give the person holding it something to hold: a physical anchor in a moment of spiritual pressure. A reminder, pressed into the palm, that the Name of Jesus has already won the ground being contested—not by residing in the object, but by being confessed and trusted in faith.

For someone in recovery—someone who knows in their bones what it means to be pulled toward destruction by something that sounds almost reasonable—that is no small thing. People who have lived close to darkness do not need to be convinced that darkness is real. What they need is a theological framework for what they have already experienced—and clarity about what to do when the pressure returns.

The full teaching document--The Warfare of Things: A Guide to the Sacred and the Profane—is available as a free download here.  It explores the theology of blessed and cursed objects through a Lutheran lens, explains how the St. Benedict medal may be used as a prayer aid, discusses how to identify and remove spiritual footholds in a living space, and argues—concretely and pastorally—that the Church’s tradition of blessing and consecration is not superstition, but pastoral common sense.

If you are working with people in recovery—or serving a congregation that has never been given a framework for this territory—the guide was written for precisely that situation.

Because sometimes the most pastoral thing the Church can offer is not a new theory, but an old tool placed back into the hands of people who need it.
 
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​Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director
La Porte, Texas · Houston Area
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