Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 22 - Times of Movement (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 22.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: I've encountered the phrase times of movement. Once again, this phrase is unknown to me. Would you be willing to explain to us how the additional rites of entrance, preparation and distribution are times of movement. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: When I was discussing the development of Christian worship in a broad way, I talked about how during the imperial period in the post- Constantinian era, the church expands into this historic liturgy that has this five-fold shape. If you look at the diagram of the liturgy, you will see that the circular times are described as times of movement. Let me now explain how these developed and what is actually the content of these times. In order to do that, we, in a sense, have to place ourselves in the context of the liturgy in one of these now large basilicas that were built in the post-Constantinian era. When the church moves from a space of fifty to seventy-five people into a space of one thousand or more, there is a need, now, for the clergy to enter into the church, the bread and wine to come in, and the sacrament itself to be distributed. This necessitates that there be people moving throughout the liturgy. When they would have the Sunday morning Eucharist, they would ask people to gather in the midmorning. Now, for most of us that probably would be sometime around 9:00 or so. They never had a set time for the liturgy. They just said midmorning. And so there would be some who would come earlier and some who would come a little earlier. So there's a time of what we might call gathering. As people came into this large space and there came to be kind of a critical mass of people, what would happen in the church is that the choir or the cantor would begin to chant or sing a psalm. This would be done in such a way that there would be this responsive chanting back and forth between the people and the choir and the people and the cantor. And as more and more people came into the church, they would begin to join the singing. Now, you have to remember they didn't have worship books as we do. Anything that they did liturgically, they had to do my memory, or they had to be given what they needed to say. Now, some of you may be familiar with the way in which the hymnal supplement in our church is now chanting the psalms where there would be the chanting, say, of the choir, and then there would be an antiphon where everybody sings over and over again. This is very similar to the way the early church chanted psalms, the choir would sing the verses and then, at certain points, the entire congregation would sing these antiphons together over and over again. Now, one of the things that happens when you have this kind of back and forth between choir and people and as people come and began to join this and the church fills up, is that there is a rhythm that develops back-and-forth. One of the things that we've lost in our worship today is this sense of rhythm. Rhythm is so important to ritual. And rhythm not only simply means repetition, but the fact that you develop some sort of a back-and-forth that binds people together. Rhythm is something that helps people come together as a community. Certainly, not only primitive cultures understand this by the drum beat and the way in which they use rhythm to bind people together, but much of the music we have today, even in our secular world, it is the sound of that drum, the sound of that rhythm that causes people to come together. I always tell my students at the seminary that we oftentimes sing just enough of the psalm, we chant it just enough to kind of make people angry. If we did a little bit more, we'd begin to feel that rhythm where we begin to see how it is that we are bound together as a community. Well, they would sometimes do this chanting of the psalms. And this like a vigil as they waited for the service to begin. They would sometimes do this for a half hour or more. When there were enough people in the church, this is now where there would be the entrance rite of the clergy from the narthex into the church. And when we talk now about thousands of people in the church, you need many assistants of the pastors to commune all these people and to, in a sense, make sure that the liturgy runs smoothly. Now, what did the early Christians do? Well, what they did what, in a sense, they did in the pagan world when they had to get through a crowd. They had a parade. And the way in which they had this parade is they would take a kind of a stick and put a cross on and so as they come now into the sanctuary, people could see the parade by the lifted cross. And this would give them a sense of, you know, how they had to get out of the way so that the procession could come through. Now, some people didn't see the cross. And one of the things they did, and this is where they would have, kind of, the bowls of incense where they would swing these bowls of incense. If you can't see the parade, you can smell it. When you smell the incense, you go, ah, there's the clergy. It's time to get out of the way for the parade to come through. They would even have almost kind of like the flying wedge, you know, of these big burly guys with these staffs who would actually make kind of a dent in the crowd so that this procession of the clergy could come through. Now, while this perception is coming, they're chanting the psalms. And quite early on, they began to develop liturgical chants, what we're going to call the ordinaries, that are associated with the end of this procession rite, the Kyrie and the Gloria. When they begin to sing the Kyrie and then move into the Gloria in Excelsis, the people knew that they were coming now to the entrance of the clergy and the end of what is called the gathering or the entrance rite. And when the clergy had made its way to the altar and had taken its place in the various spots where it was designated to sit, the presiding minister, the Bishop, would bring the entrance rite to a pious halt by the collect of the day, the prayer that is spoken there that would essentially invite the people now to hear the word of God. Now, what I have simply described is that circular time of movement called the entrance rite that simply brings us to the liturgy of the word. What is remarkable about how the word is read during this imperial period, is that is extremely similar structurally to the way in which it was read in the early church. If there is one difference is the fact that it now begins to shrink down. There is less word that is read because now they have access to the whole scriptures. There is a canon now. So there is a very specific lectionary developing. There are specific lessons that are read. And so the liturgy of the word begins to take less time as the church grows. The preaching is still around an hour, interestingly. But the word of God is probably read anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes. Structurally, though, it's the same. There is the preaching, the prayers of dismissal where they dismiss the catechumens, the penitents, and the *heterodox. And then there is the kiss of peace, very similar to what they did in the early church. When the liturgy of the word is over and it's time to bring in the bread and wine, they would have another procession. And this procession would be very similar to the procession of the clergy in the entrance rite. They stored the bread and wine in these houses outside of the church. This is where they would bake the bread and would have the wine cellars. And then they would have the attendants now bring these in with a procession with a cross and with the incense and the singing of psalms. Now, interesting, there wasn't any specific canticle or liturgical hymn like an ordinary that was associated with this. It was really kind of the choice of the Pastor to have various songs that come from the psalms that were sung at this time. And the one that really comes down to us as the major psalm is Psalm 51 which we sing. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. But as we can see in our new hymnals, there are new canticles. There are new songs that are sung during this time. When this procession would come, accompanied by the singing, the movement then would come to a halt when the table was set. Here you can see now it is time for the liturgy of the sacrament. And again, we see a very similar structure to the liturgy of the sacrament in this second period of the church�s liturgical life that we saw in the early church. The additions here would essentially be the proper preface, which because of the church year, as I said, is now becoming a regular part of the church. But there would be the Sanctus now that comes at the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer, the preface that flows into the Eucharistic prayer, the Lord's Prayer, and later on another ordinary which is called the Agnus Dei, lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. Here though, we see that the Eucharistic prayer, instead of shrinking, is expanding so that the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Lord's Supper begin to have a balance in terms of time. In the early church, the liturgy of the word was much longer than the liturgy of the Eucharist. But now, they are becoming more and more similar in the length of time in which it takes to go through these particular rights. When the Eucharistic prayer has ended, the words of consecration, the words of institution have been spoken, and the Agnus Dei is sung, the Agnus Day is the beginning of the distribution. It's the first hymn, the first song as the sacrament now is moved into the congregation. The way in which they distributed the sacrament in the early Christian communities that had now expanded into these large churches was in stations. And they would take the sacrament right into the congregations, and people would go to these various stations so that they could communed the people quickly. But here you have this, again, time of movement. There's lots of movement of clergy, people coming to receive the body and blood. And again, psalms accompany this. Psalms and later on hymns. We have in our church the communion hymns. And what we find in these churches now is that when people receive the sacrament, that was, in a sense, the end of the service. They were encouraged to receive the sacrament and leave so that it would make the distribution go faster. The service ended, really, very simply where those who remained after receiving the sacrament and the table was now veiled, the Bishop would simply say, the mass is ended, go in peace and the people would say, thanks be to God. Or, he would say, go in peace and serve the Lord. And they would say, thanks be to God. And sometimes there was a blessing like the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you. Or the *Aaronic benediction that we saw in the synagogue. But the service would end very, very quickly at that point. And so what we see in these times of movement are three times where we have psalms, and now these liturgical songs, these liturgical canticles, which we're going to call the ordinaries, now coming into the church to accompany these times of movement. Here we see the liturgy expanding, but we also see how biblical it is. And when we describe these ordinaries and their biblical content, I think you will see that the early Christians, now, in this imperial period are still seeing how important it is to provide biblical foundations for Christian worship.