ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 44.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: When you say that we are to be diagnosticians of some contemporary expressions of Lutheran worship, what do you mean? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: In many ways what we have been talking about so far in this course has provided us with the foundation for what it is that pastors and musicians and those who serve in the church, especially in her liturgical life, are called to do as they lead the people of God in worship. That is to provide a worship life that reflects who God is, that speaks clearly about the wonderful gift of Christ's bodily presence and the gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation that come with that presence, and also reflects our response to their presence that does respond to God as He has called us to respond. I think we're all aware of the fact that we live in a world now, particularly because of our technology and the ability to exchange information, that there are many, many choices out there for us, not just in our own lives, but particularly in our life in the church and particularly in our worship life. And we're called, as professionals, as those who have been trained in theology and in the practice of the church to make decisions for our people that help them to worship God rightly. We oftentimes use the word in the church orthodox, and what we mean by that is right teaching. And that certainly is a meaning which is very, among us, and it's one of the marked meanings of that word in the world in which we live. But if you go back to its original form, and its original meaning, what it really means is right worship. Ortho, right; worship glory. And when we talk about being orthodox, we mean standing in the presence of God in such a way that we do it in good order, rightly, in the spirit of the biblical faith in such a way that we are doing this as God has called us to do and with this he is well pleased. In order to have orthodox worship, we need right teaching * Ortho and right practice, *orthopraxis. One of the ways in which we can make sure that what we do in our services that is something that reflects who God is and our response to God, is to be able to analyze what it is that's going on in the forms that we're given to use and the forms that have been handed down to us and many of these new forms that we're being asked to use by our people and our church leaders. When we do that, there are a number of questions we want to ask as we diagnose these things. Think of the three categories that I used earlier: diagnosing rite, diagnosing space, and diagnosing time. Let's start with, perhaps, the easiest one, time. I think one of the things we need to do as those who are given to lead the church in her worship is to make sure that Sunday is still the day of worship and to try to preserve Sunday as the main day of worship. Now, this does not mean that we cannot have Saturday night services or Sunday night services or Monday services. What we need to have is Sunday as the primary day and to see that as the day in which we gather together around the supper of the Lord. I think we also need to analyze our church year to make sure it reflects what it was intended to reflect, and that is Christ. I think if you look at what the commissions on worship have done in the last few hymnals, they have really done a wonderful job of accenting the Christological character of our worship Life. That means we don't want to have intrude in our church year days that don't necessarily reflect Christ, and many of you who work in the church know there are a lot of demands upon our Sundays to recognize all these various things that we have in our world and our church that are important to us but should not necessarily dominate the day. When we talk about our space and diagnosing the space, we want to make sure that when we enter into this space, it is a space that reflects, in a very reverent way, that Christ is present. That means our space must be organized around the chief things that reflect that presence. That's why in most Christian churches that are sacramental, the altar is the most prominent place. It is there in the center or it�s raised up in such a way that you can't walk into the church and not see it. That is fundamental, especially as we look at the lines in the church that lead us to the altar so that we might go to this place, as I said before, as if we were traveling to Jerusalem. It's also important that where we hear the word read and the lessons and where we hear it preached are in places that are also central and visible, but most important, they are places where we can hear the word of God. Our sound systems must be such, or the acoustics in our church must be such that we can hear everything that is said that comes from God's word. This is fundamental to understanding who we are as Christians because faith comes by hearing and by hearing the word of God. This is why we have to be very careful about our space acoustically. And even though the temptation may be to lay down some very thick carpets and pad all the pews, we have to ask ourselves: Is that the best thing for hearing the word of God and hearing the singing and the hymns and the music of the church. We also have to be careful where we place our fonts. We don't want to hide them in a place in the church where they are not visible because baptisms are to be the way in which we see ourselves as the people of God. For Lutherans, the baptismal fonts were in one of two places. They were either at the very, very beginning of the church in the narthex so that you enter by baptism, and so you see that we're constituted by baptism, and that's how we begin our life because it's the frontier sacrament of our life. Or, they're up in the altar area, not next to the altar, but outside the rails but central, oftentimes in the center or sometimes off to the side, but certainly visible for everybody to see as the constituting part of our life. Perhaps the most difficult thing, however, is the rite itself. And this is where most of the changes in our liturgies today are taking place. To be a diagnostician of the rite means that we have to carefully analyze what it is we do in that structure as we move from Point A to Point B. Well certainly, one of the things we've talked about in this course is that we have to see that the two most important things we do are word and sacrament. And our life must be constituted around them, and our liturgy must be as well. We must see that in the preparation for the liturgy of the word, we begin to see this momentum build up until in the liturgy, there is a climax. And that climax is the reading of the gospel. And if we could constitute our lives in such a way liturgically and see what we do in such a way that we are moving towards that climax, people would see that beautiful rhythm. There is a symphony of movement here. There is a symphony of action and things that are going on that are very important as we move toward that climax. And likewise, in the liturgy of the Lord's Supper were we move from the preparation of the table through the liturgy of the Lord's Supper to the climax of the words of institution. If we could see this in our liturgies, if we did it well so that people could make those moves towards that moment of climax in gospel and words of institution, I think we would see how well it is that we can worship together as a people of God. That means that the pastor needs to know the liturgy. He needs to be confident in the way in which he presides. He must have good coordination with his musicians, particularly the organist, so that they work together well. That means that the congregation needs to be able to know the liturgy well and sing it. And oftentimes, the best way to participate in the liturgy is without the book, to have that memorized so you could just simply sing it from the heart as one who embraces this as part of one's very being. I always tell people if a visitor comes into our church and sees a beautiful liturgy done well without many interruptions, enough to perhaps get people to find the right place if there's a big change, but basically, without, you know, a lot of places where there are stops and starts, but this wonderful flow towards these climaxes, if the people are singing it enthusiastically and you can see that they are completely and totally in love with what they're doing and they love their hymns, those visitors are going to come in and say, I want to be a part of this. I want to capture the joy and delight and the enthusiasm and excitement that I see. I want to be part of this beautiful movement of the liturgy. Now, as we diagnosis this rite, we have to ask ourselves: are we reflecting this five-fold shape? Are we capturing the movement? Are we capturing that wonderful symmetry between word and sacrament? One of the other things we have to ask ourselves is the content of what we say. When we look at content, we're talking about what it is through it when we confess our sins, what it is what we hear in absolution. What is the content of the hymns we sing? Or if we don't do the ordinaries and replace them with something else, are they as substantial and rich? Do they speak of what we believe and confess? Or to put it in even more simple way, do we hear Christ? And do we hear the Christ of the Bible? Or do we hear the Christ of culture? Do we hear the Christ who has suffered and died? Do we hear the theology of the cross? Do we hear about his resurrection? And do we recognize that this Christ continues to be present among us in the hymns and the liturgy that we sing and say? Which Jesus is very important? And when you begin to look at the content of the worship and begin to diagnose that and analyze it, one of the things you discover is that our worship life is its own culture. That's something I think some people may rebel against a little bit. But think about it. If a culture is, as T.S. Eliot says, a way of life, then the liturgy is our way of life in Christ. And so it is distinct from the culture outside of us. It is distinct from our work culture. It is distinct from our leisure culture. It is distinct from our entertainment culture, the television culture, the popular culture, whatever culture you want to compare it to. It is its own culture. And one of the most wonderful things about the historic liturgy and this continuity between generations is that it is transcultural. It is not identified with any one culture. It's not a German culture. It's not a Scandinavian culture or Spanish culture. It's not an American culture. It is the culture of the church at worship where Spaniards and Germans and all different nations and all different colors can come together in one place and embrace the one Christ who unifies us together as the baptized. To say that we are diagnosticians of rite, space, and time is to say that we are people who recognize that it's the liturgy that transforms the culture, not vice versa. And that really what we do when we come into our worship is we step out of our everyday lives into heaven itself because of the presence of Christ there, the heavenly one. If you look around you a little bit, you'll see that in many of the liturgies that are coming into our Lutheran Church, we find a reflection of the popular culture, particularly the Protestant religious culture in which we live, that does reflect a little different understanding of the Biblical faith in ours. If you remember the principle *Lex Orandi, Lex prudende, that is the way we worship is going to establish the way we believe, we have to be careful not to let that culture infuse our church culture, our worship culture too much. Now, there is certainly going to be a cultural impact, and that is, in a sense, a good thing. But that's at the essence of this question. You, as professionals, as theologians, as those who have been trained to diagnose this culture and determine which is good and which is not, you're the ones who have been called by your people to make these decisions. And the better equipped you are, the more you know about the tradition, the more you know about the biblical foundations, the more you know about why we do what we do, the better able you will be able to lead your people in their worship.