ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 18.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. ******** >> JOSHUA: It seems to me your descriptions of worship in the earliest Christian gatherings suggest very small, very compact physical spaces. Is that correct? When did the worship spaces expand, and what effect did the expansion of physical space have on the rites of word and sacrament? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Your question, Joshua, provides a wonderful transition from the Biblical foundation of Christian worship now into a description of how Christian worship is built and grows throughout the history of the church. Let me briefly begin in answering your question by talking about what I would consider to be the various periods in the history of the church that have liturgical character to them. The first period we oftentimes call the domestic period from the year of Our Lord's ascension in the year 30 until the time of Constantine which would be somewhere around 312, 313 A.D. One of the things that you discover during this early period is that Christians worshipped in their homes. Now, there was a reason for this. This was a time of great persecution, and so Christians could not build buildings that were public and visible. They had to, in a sense, hide out in their own homes. And as they began, you see them actually just simply using the houses in which they live and on Sundays converting them into a worshiping space. Later on, these things become dedicated house churches that are essentially, for all intents and purposes, solely liturgical spaces. But they're still houses, and they are small. Now, because of archaeology, we have a real sense of what these places look like. And in fact, even today, if you go into the Mediterranean world, you'll find what are now essentially tenement houses and were also tenement houses at the time of Our Lord and in the history of the early church. There were some house churches that were discovered in *dura which is in East Syria, that provide a marvelous illustration of what these churches looked like. In fact, those particular spaces were reconstructed at Yale University, and you could actually, for a period of time, go to their archaeological museum and walk into this space and have a real sense of the smallness and the intimacy of the space in which Christians worshipped for almost three hundred years. We know that the average space that they worshiped in--this is a tenement house with a center courtyard and a large room that would have been used for worship--that the average size of these spaces was very small, about forty feet by sixteen or fifteen feet. Now, if you measure that out, you'll see that you can't fit a whole lot of people in their. When you get to fifty people or seventy-five people, it gets a little crowded in there. These are very simple spaces because there was no room for movement. And one of the things we're going to see as we watch the development of Christian worship, is that a lot of the changes or additions, we might say, to the liturgy itself, come because of movement in the liturgy. These spaces would be very simply adorned. There be a table in the center. There would be some benches along the side for, for example, people who were sick or the elderly or women with child. They were divided, as was the case almost up until the twentieth century in most churches, men on one side and women on the other. And everybody stood except for those who sat on those benches. And this is something of a lot of people don't realize, Christians stood in worship up until, really, the fifteenth century. They didn't stand for 1500 years, they stood in churches for 1500 years as they worshipped. You understand what I mean. So sitting in church is a pretty new phenomenon since the time of the reformation. These house churches, because there's very little movement, because they were crowded, really had very simple liturgy. People gathered together around the word of God. They listened to that word. They sang psalms. I'll explain that a little later on what that actually looked like. They would hear the preaching. They would pray. And then they would gather around the table to receive the sacrament. Again, very little movement. The bread and wine would be brought in. There were prayers over the bread and wine. There would be the consecration. There would be the distribution. And that was it. I think we would be struck by the simplicity and the elegance of early Christian worship. And because it was a time of persecution, they had to, in a sense, be hidden. So there was always this tension that was there as they worshipped. We mentioned before how the liturgy is, in a sense, heaven on earth. And the humility of these spaces is really quite extraordinary. And for them to believe that this is the kingdom of God in this dusty little house in Syria with a small table, a few scrolls of scripture, a little bread and wine. For them, in the context of the larger elegance and grandeur of the Roman Empire, to say this is the kingdom of God, this is the presence of heaven on earth, it takes faith to believe that. Those early Christians were completely, totally committed to that understanding. Now, I do briefly want to say this. There was a lot of competition in the time of the early Christian worshiping communities for other alternate types of worship, particularly among the pagans. Pagan worship was quite spectacular, and I mean that it was almost like what you would see today at Disney World with incredible props, incredible theatrical types of events. There was all kinds of smoke and mirrors, so to speak. And there was a deep attraction for these things. This was the entertainment, or part of the entertainment of the Roman world. What many people don't realize, and you can see this as you read between the lines of the New Testament, particularly in Acts or in the Corinthian correspondence, that when pagans worshipped, there were two kind of fundamental ways in which they communed with their gods. The first way was at the table. The most sumptuous food that you could eat in the ancient world would be found at the pagan feasts. So if you wanted the best food, you would either go to the feasts themselves, or you would buy the meat that was sacrificed to idols that was sold then in the marketplaces after these feasts. And so, if you just think about it this way, if you were to go to the best restaurants or have the best eating experience in the ancient world, it would be in the worship of the pagan gods. This was, in a sense,--I'll put it this way�this was one of the ways in which they communed with God. It was kind of like a sacrament. The second way was through the temple prostitutes, through sexuality. And this was a natural normal part of pagan worship. So just think about the competition here. You've got these small, little house churches where there is this extraordinary sense of the hiddeness of God in, with, and under these simple means of water and word, scrolls of God's word, bread and wine, where they are speaking now of the presence of the creator giving his gifts. And then you�ve got this extraordinary, dynamic pagan worship in which the pagan worship is a communion with God through sumptuous feasts and consorting with temple prostitutes. Now, this was a very, very kind of attractive thing for many of those Christians because this is the world in which they lived. And especially if you lived in that world, the entire world would shut down during this time. So if you wanted to be part of this society, you know, you are expected to participate in these feasts. And so you can see there is a lot going on in that early period. And this is why we stand back and we look at those who gave up their lives. The seabed of the church is the blood of the saints, as we say. Those who give up their lives in this humble state with this humble worship are a great example for us today. Liturgy changes, though, when Constantine becomes emperor. Not only does he declare that Christianity is now a legal religion, but what many people don't realize is he declares that Christianity is the religion of the empire. And what Constantine does is quite remarkable. He opens up the coffers of the Roman Empire and he says to Christians, build churches. And they do. They build huge ones. They build churches that go from accommodating fifty to seventy-five people to ones that can now fit 1000, 2000 even more. One of the great builders of churches was Constantine's mother, Helen, who was one of the first inspirations for archaeology in the Holy Land. She went there, and she excavated all the holy places and built huge churches on all these holy spaces where Jesus died and rose again, where Jesus was born, where Lazarus was raised from the dead, a number of churches on the Mount of Olives, the place where the Last Supper was celebrated. All these kind of holy sites became places for huge basilicas. Now, you cannot help but see that something is going to happen to the worship of the church when these huge basilicas are built. And what we see happening, and you're going to see this in a diagram that I'll have the graphic, you'll see that the liturgy goes from the two simple structures of simply word and sacrament into what we're going to call the five-fold shape of the historic liturgy of the church, or what some people call the great tradition. Now, I'm going to begin to use the language of the historic liturgy to describe these five-fold structures. The two main structures of word and sacrament are shown by rectangles because these are times of deliberation where people essentially are standing still listening to the word of God or observing the liturgy of the sacrament as the body and blood of Christ are consecrated by the word of God. But the other parts of the liturgy which are designated by circles are times of movement. The first one is the entrance rite which brings us into the liturgy of the word. The second one is between the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Lord's Supper, a time of preparation where the table is prepared with the gifts. And then the third time of movement is the distribution of the sacrament. Now, one of the things we see happening in the second period, which I'm going to call the imperial period that dates from about the time of Constantine, 312, 313 until about the year 600, that this time is a time you see very clearly the liturgy expanding and these times of movement being significant additions to the church. What the church did during these times of movement is accompany the movement of people within the liturgy by song. And so, when you see these circular times, times of movement, you will see that this is where much of the singing, much of the canticles, many of the hymns come into the liturgy. As people move, there is a song that kind of takes them along on their way. When we see this five-fold shape, which we call the historic liturgy, now come to its completion here in this imperial period, we will see that very little happens after this in the history of the church's liturgical life. In the next period, which is from 600 to the time of the Reformation, 1517, we're going to call the medieval period, and this is, in a sense, a period of disillusion where these very clean five-fold shape structure becomes more and more clouded over, becomes, in a sense, you could almost say perverted by some of the things that happen in the church. I'll explain these a little later. But what happens is you have this beautiful, clean, flat-footed structure that begins to dissolve. The structure is still there, you just can't see it. It's like if you were to draw it on a board and you can see the clean lines of the circles and rectangles, and then you were to take an eraser and just kind of go over it lightly. You can still kind of see the lines, but it's clouded. It's as if it's in a mist or fog. One of the things Dr. Brower will talk about when the time of the Reformation comes is how what Luther does is kind of blow away the fog so all of a sudden you can see the five-fold shape again. As we now take a run through the history of the liturgy, we're going to see how these liturgical structures are developed, how they are founded in the early Christian communities, how they grow, and then later, the dissolution of those structures in the medieval period. As we do this, we're going to see how what we said before in terms of the structure of rite, space, and time, how they are intimately integrated with one another. I think I've already suggested to you that as the space, the structure of space grows, the rite changes. It grows as well. And when we talk about Sunday in the church year, we're going to see how the structure of time is very much a part of what is going on in terms of the changes and the expansion of right and space And so our history of liturgical structures now are going to show us how Christians are responding a very practical way to things that are coming to them, in many ways unexpectedly, from the cultural context in which they lived, and how as they, in a sense, develop what we now have as the historic liturgy, how they are trying, as best they can, to be reverent to the presence of Christ in their midst and faithful to their presence.