They reinterpret them to suit their own invented dogmas, like their sibling the Vatican.
You just can't help yourself, can you? It seems that you have retained the anti-Catholicims of your Lutheran days.
No, just stating the Truth:as you look at the Lutherans, we look at you. Sort of like the same problem with the Anglicans: they are upset that the Vatican doesn't accept their orders, but then the Vatican gets insulted when the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church don't worry ourselves over your orders.
The Lutherans have their own take on everything, including the filioque (odd for Protestants. Most just kept it without thinking). Apostolic succession is, as far as I can see, one of the few exceptions, but that's only because only the Swedes and Finns have consistently claimed what is recognizable as apostolic succession (other groups claim it less consistently), and I've never seen their explanation about it, so I can't tell if they "the ceremony and gestures of Catholicism but not the meaning behind them": Martin Luther himself said nothing about abolishing the episcopate, and the Augsburg Confession and Book of Concord follow him in insisting a minster has to be "called." So because the meaning they give to those cermonies and gestures differs from the Vatican's does not mean that they are void of meaning, or that we should prefer the Vatican's over Luther's, being comparable in many ways (e.g. filioque).
