ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 42.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: What view of liturgy do you gentlemen wish us to hold as we come away from this course? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: About ten years or so ago, I was on my way to a conference on the worship of our church, maybe even longer than that. And one of my children asked me where I was going. He was 5 years old at the time. I told him that I was going to talk about the liturgy and to defend it. And all of a sudden I thought to myself as I told my son that I was out to defend the liturgy that the liturgy does not need our defense. Our worship is not something we have to go out and defend. And it was at that point that I began to recognize that the way in which we need to talk about our worship is to talk about its treasures, its gift. And, in a sense, that's what I've tried to do throughout this course to give you a sense that what you might take away from this course is the fact that our liturgical tradition, our worship life, is one of the great treasures that we have as Lutherans. And that's because, as I mentioned in one of my questions, that treasure is Christ himself. When we enter this world on a day-to-day basis, I think most of us find it to be sometimes a pretty tiring experience where you can get beat around quite a bit. There's a great deal of suffering and anxiety, especially in this post-911 world in which we live. And I think everybody is looking for a place where they can go and rest and feel like they can be at home. If we could somehow communicate to our people and to the world that the place to be at rest, the place to be at home is in the worship of the church because that's where Christ is bodily present with his gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation. If we could communicate that and see liturgy as our summons home to God, then I think we will have communicated the most important thing that we can say about the Christian faith and about the really first things of life, namely, that ultimate question of where we have been called by God to be now and forever. What worship is all about is nothing more and nothing less than communion with Christ, Christ in his flesh, where being in him and him in us, we are freed from our sins. We're given his life. And we're rescued from those enemies that plague us day in and day out. Our worship is one of the great treasures that God has given us. And as we now move forward in some exciting new ways with our new Lutheran Service Book, I think we need to recognize that all that we have done in that book, all that we really speak about when we speak about our worship, is the fact that this is where we can come and be with Christ. That is, in a sense, whey we were created. We were created in the image of God in his good pleasure so that we might worship him, Father, Son, and Holy spirit. And, in a sense, we do that now so that we might have a foretaste, a dress rehearsal, for our eternal life which is worshiping Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at that marriage feast of the lamb in his kingdom that has no end. To see ourselves in this larger reality, and to see this as the real-world, this is what I hope you have taken from our course. This is where we come home to be with Christ. >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: With Christ, word, I think is exactly right on. A couple of decades ago, I realized in the worship war talk of those days that a little image in a central question that really needed to be answered, and it kind of summarizes what people are asking. It summarizes what God is trying to get across. And that was a commercial which had a very short lady walking up to a counter at a fast-food place, it could have been Burger King, and kind of questioning because she knew other products about this burger business, why it was such little between the buns. And it was phrased this way: where's the beef. I think it was when they introduced the Quarter Pounder or a double decker one or something. Where's the beef? So this is what the Reformation had to rediscover. What's at the heart of this? Not the works, but the faith, the faith in Jesus Christ. And indeed, he is here. He is received, received in faith, but it can be experiential with the word and so forth. God has chosen to do this in the sacraments and the word. And this is what, in a sense, we offer to God as a church, as a ministry, as a pastor. Now, we also take it to bedsides. We take it into teaching situations. We take it on retreats. We do it even in social situations. Mainly, when the people of God gather, what has to be at the heart of it is Jesus Christ and the trust in him. So I would like the student to take away the definition that I find in Apology 24, 27 and which I gave them early on, that the worship of the New Testament is spiritual. It's not the outward act. It is spiritual. It is the righteousness of faith in the heart which comes from the work of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of faith that grow out of that trust in God also the work of the Holy Spirit. This is a mystery. We can't explain it. We don't control it. It's God doing it through the message of Christ, the gospel. We don't really trust in anything else for this is God's way of doing it. And when we see that at the heart of our work, and we look out and we say, what am I offering people when I'm here leading worship, preaching, doing the Lord's Supper, administering it. It is that they receive Christ. That's the beef that must be there, or it's just empty buns to use that. And we have to hold to that, keep that uppermost, and that's what God has chosen to bless. It's in our confessions in a marvelous way. It's in the tradition of the church for that's what the confessions wanted to, in a sense, lay out once more. And that's what I hope the student would have as kind of a central image and thought as they go about work as a pastor.