Reddit mentions of The One Mediator, the Saints, and Mary (LUTHERANS AND CATHOLICS IN DIALOGUE)

You may regret bringing up one of my favorite topics. ;)

Modern Lutherans generally do reject praying to saints, but vary on how much they emphasize praying with saints. At the very least, the Eucharistic prayer (the "holy holy holy" part) is prayed explicitly "with all the saints and angels". That's a very old tradition of all of heaven being present for the Eucharist. The ELCA publishes a schedule of days for honoring saints - not praying to them, just honoring their memories and thanking God for their examples of faith. The LCMS does too. There's a spectrum as far as what actual Lutheran congregations do with these days, but they are there for use should you want to honor them.

Luther himself didn't believe that praying to saints was inappropriate, per se, just that it was unnecessary. His goal in emphasizing the direct mediation of Christ was to make the cult of the saints go away, but not by banning it. He (mostly correctly) thought that if average people didn't think they had to pray to the saints for salvation, that they simply wouldn't. He believed that the medieval cult of the saints was an excess, and the modern Catholic Church more or less agrees with him on that. As far as we know, Luther continued to pray to Mary for at least a decade or so after beginning his reformation.

However, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) is definitely the fundamentalist end of the Lutheran spectrum. However, I should back up and say exactly what that means. Lutherans derive their doctrine officially from the Bible (sola scriptura), but there's also this set of documents called the Book of Concord, which contains some writings of Luther and a few writings by people like his friend Philip Melanchthon. You'll find his Large Catechism and the Formula of Concord and a few other things in there.

The approach to the Book of Concord is sort of the initial binary of modern Lutheranism. The LCMS and a few other conservative Lutheran groups worldwide follow the Book of Concord "because (quia) it agrees with Scripture". That is, the Book of Concord's agreement with Biblical Christianity is taken as an axiom. Most other Lutherans (mainly those who are members of the World Lutheran Federation) follow the Book of Concord "insofar as (quatenus) it agrees with Scripture". The quia vs. quatenus disagreement is why the LCMS and ELCA will never see eye-to-eye on some major issues. (Edit: These issues include young-earth creationism, LGBT relationships, and women in ministry, among others.)

The quatenus churches, for the past sixty years, have been reevaluating the legacy of the Lutheran Reformation as it relates to Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. There have been a series of ecumenical meetings between the two groups, which have a stated ultimate goal of inter-communion. (The LCMS explicitly rejects all of these agreements.) For example, in 2016, both the US Catholic Church and the ELCA approved Declaration on the Way which is a summary of the areas where we two churches most agree and have agreed to adjust our understandings to reflect the conversations we've been having.

The ecumenical document that's relevant to this topic is The One Mediator, the Saints, and Mary, a published book which is inexplicably not available in electronic form. I have it but sadly can't link to it. This blog has a good summary of the areas of agreement. There are still a lot of differences about the role of the saints, but the existence of the saints and the fact that we can all pray for the church together isn't in question. I also don't think you'd get a lot of pushback in an ELCA church if you admitted to praying to saints or Mary; maybe just some weird looks.