Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 2 - The Bodily Presence of Christ (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 02.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DAVID: It's nice to meet you, Professor Just. My name is David, and I serve a small, struggling urban congregation in Cleveland. I love my work among my people, but I must admit that designing worship is quite a challenge for me. I always seek to create worship experiences which are meaningful and faithfully Lutheran. So here's a question that has occurred to me on more than one occasion: What do we mean by the bodily presence of Jesus Christ? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, David. It's nice to meet you, and you have given a question here that flows right out of a biblical understanding of the theology of worship. At the center of our worship is Christ, and so when we talk about worship, we're going to see that it's a Christological issue. Now, I use the language of the bodily presence of Jesus Christ because this reflects our biblical Christology. As you know, during the early church�s controversies over the person of Christ, there were many ecumenical councils that fought hard and hammered out in some very clear, creedal language an understanding of what we mean by Christ in his presence and the person of Christ. Perhaps in your course on the early church you will hear about the Council of Chalcedon. And it is there that we have this wonderful description of how we understand Christ's presence among us today. When we talk about Christ, we always talk about the person of Christ who has a divine and human nature, never separating those natures, but always talking about the person of Christ. And that person of Christ, in his divine and human nature, is always present among us, not just his divine nature, but his divine and human nature. One of my colleagues who teaches early church always says it this way: that we can never separate our salvation in Jesus Christ from his flesh, that is, from his divine and human nature, the person of Christ and his bodily nature. And so when Christ is present, he's always present in the flesh. Now, this is so important to us as worshiping Christians because what happens when we come in to worship is that we come into a communion with his flesh. There is a participation and a union between our flesh and his flesh. Now, I'll start right out by saying this is a great mystery. This is a mystery that I in no way can explain to you in any kind of logical form. It is something we embrace in faith, that the scriptures describe, that the church has tried to hammer out, as I said, in this creedal language. But at the end of the day, how the creator of all things, the eternal one, can be present in a finite way in finite things is a great mystery. When we talk about this bodily presence, we have to be very clear that we�re not just simply talking about his bodily presence in the Lord's Supper. That�s actually, in some ways, easier to understand, although that's a great mystery. Christ is present there in, with, and under bread and wine, his body and blood. And that is something, as Lutherans, we hold dear as reflecting the biblical understanding of the Lord's Supper. But we also must speak about how Christ is present in the word. In fact, what we're going to find as we look at the liturgy of the church in our worship, is that the word of God is absolutely central to a biblical understanding of worship and to understanding this notion of bodily presence. Now, sometimes when we think of the word of God, we simply think of a book, you know, the writings on the page, the *inscripturated word, which of course it is. This is the inspired, inerrant word of God. But we also have to remember that the word is the word made flesh, Christ himself. And I'll illustrate this in his ministry where here the word made flesh speaks and reads the word of God, a remarkable moment in the history of Israel where the word reads the word. When you and I come into the presence of God in worship, what we are doing is we're coming into the presence of the word made flesh, and that word comes to us through the word that we hear. That's how the spirit works. The spirit works with the word of God, and by means of that word and spirit, Christ is present among us in his flesh, that bodily presence. When we hear the word of God, we hear it from a voice. Notice how-- and I'll use this word incarnational that is, how fleshly that is. By incarnational I mean how it's something that is tangible and concrete in a human being, and human flesh. We hear the word of God, and it comes into our ear. That's a voice that enters our ear, and it is in this way that Christ is bodily present for us. It is remarkable, if you think about it, that it is in the voice, the word heard that the spirit works. Now, again, some of you might ask what if a person can't hear. Well, they hear it through the hands if they know sign language, or they can read on the lips. But it still comes through a word, whether it's heard or not. We also need to express the fact that Christ is not only present in the word heard and the word that is spoken over the bread and wine where we now, after those words are spoken and the spirit works, we receive the body and blood of Christ, but Christ is present in us, the baptized. That�s one of the things we sometimes forget, that we bear in our bodies the bodily presence of Christ. In one of the services in Lutheran Worship, the corporate confession and absolution, we say very clearly in that liturgy, and this reflects the Biblical faith, that Christ dwells in us, and we'd dwell in him. That's what happens when we're baptized. Our flesh is joined to Christ�s flesh, and we now have dwelling in us Jesus Christ himself. That's why Luther used to call us little Christs, and that comes right out of the early church, who, after they are baptized one of the early Fathers said you are probably now called Christs because you now bear in your bodies Jesus himself. This understanding of Christ being present in the baptized is accentuated when the baptized come together as a community gathered around this bodily presence of Christ in word and sacrament. And one of the things we need to say so clearly about this bodily presence of Christ is that it is a way in which God gives us his gifts. The gifts that we're going to talk about are gifts that are beyond compare. But before we talk about those gifts, let me just talk a little bit about what it is that Christ gives to us as we now bear him in the world. You know, we�ve been talking, just now, about the liturgy as we gather together as the people of God, the liturgy of those who are assembled in the presence of Christ around word and sacrament. But, you know, there is another liturgy, and that is a liturgy of life where we are serving out in the world because Christ is present in us, and we bear witness to him by our presence in this dark world with his presence in us. Now, If you think about Jesus and what it is that kind of overwhelms you about his presence as he walked and talked in Galilee and Jerusalem and in this world in which we live, he was the center of God's love, God's mercy, God's compassion, God's forgiveness. And that's what we are. When we bear Christ in the world, we bear Christ as those who love the world as Christ loves the world. What we mean by that is that we're willing to serve that world as he served it, with our own lives, to sacrifice ourselves to bring his gifts to this world. And we do that in the way in which we live together as Christians, not only among ourselves, but with a world that knows not Christ. We are people who love one another, and love the world, namely, the people of this world. We're merciful. We are kind and generous. We�re hospitable. We�re compassionate. We're forgiving. Luther summarized that with the word love. And he follows Jesus here. We talked about that earlier, loving God and loving our neighbor. That presence in the world of Christ in us is also part of what we're talking about when we talk about the bodily presence of Christ. Now, why do we have to talk about this today? Well, one of the things I think you'll discover if you just go out into this world in which we live--and this is certainly true in the secular world--but even in the American, Protestant religious culture in which we live, they do not have this understanding of Jesus. I don't know the best way to describe this. Perhaps it�s too strong to say they have a different Jesus, but they certainly have a different understanding of Jesus that we do and they don't believe that Jesus is present in this world according to his flesh. They have a very interesting way of describing this. This is not our understanding; this is this kind of Protestant American religious cultural understanding of Jesus that the finite is not capable of the infinite, which means that Christ cannot be present in finite things like water or bread and wine or even in us. For them, it's kind of what they would call a spiritual presence. And it's one that's mediated by their experience or their feelings about God but does not have this objective reality of Christ presence bodily there in word and sacrament and in us. Now that's a big difference, and in some ways, that's the difference that makes all the difference in the world. And it really changes the way we worship. It changes the way in which we understand ourselves as Christians. In a sense, it's an identity issue because we identify with these objective means of grace. And that's what we're going to talk about word and sacrament as means of grace, means by which Christ comes to us bodily. Whereas, for this culture in which we live, they do not see these objective means of grace, but they are focused in on their response to that. The response is where they center their worship, and as we began, we begin with God, not with us. So how do they know that Christ is present? It's their experience. It's their feeling. It's their emotions. And that's why their worship is going to take a different shape than ours. That is why our worship is different from many other Christians. I hope to show you in the next questions that we will discuss together how ours comes out of and flows out of the scriptures themselves and the worship of Israel. But one of the fundamental things we need to return to as we begin this discussion of the biblical foundations for worship is to return to the gifts. When Christ is present, and we have communion with him, he gives us gifts. He is the giver, the giver of gifts beyond compare. And these are treasures. One of the things in this world in which we live and which perhaps they don't have as clear an understanding of this real presence of Christ among us, we have to recognize these treasures and rejoice in them and share them with these people who perhaps don't see the fullness of what we see in this extraordinary gift that God gives us in his son. These gifts are gifts that Luther describes so beautifully. But these gifts are ones also that we must recognize as gifts that come to each and every one of us individually and as a community. And as we talk about these gifts, we will see that these gifts are always attached to the person of Jesus Christ who is bodily present among us.