Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 57 - Analyzing the Liturgy (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 57.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. ******** >> PAUL: I would like to ask a practical question. According to these principles, how would a pastor analyze the liturgy, whether he found it in a book or from another source such as the Internet? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: It's about time we dealt with a practical question. Thank you, Paul. We have been talking about these principles guiding us so this, indeed, brings us to the point where we're going to bring that the principles together with dealing with what we find in a source like a book or some suggested service. Often pastors are sent these for Lutheran Women's Missionary League Sunday or other such events. And you're going to think through how to use such a resource. Let me go back to my categories of worship. The principle is that we are working with justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This is a gift. So when we look at a service as pastors, we think of which are the gift-giving moments that faith can be receiving what God has for us. Obviously, the word and the sacrament are such times, and in my symbol system, I use an ear for the word. Now, often our friends in evangelical circles will think of just the book. But we mentioned earlier, that Lutherans think of the preached word as the word of God in the same way they think of the word read from the scriptures. Now the preached word should always agree with the scriptures. And so the way we receive this is through the ear. Therefore, it is an active thing to listen to the word, and it brings the gift of God, forgiveness, life, salvation. Likewise, the hand of the minister brings the water with the word or the Lord's Supper elements, the bread and wine, which in the Lord's Supper is the body and blood of Christ. This is how God comes among us. And this is how we receive the gifts of God, the benefits of Jesus Christ. So we can look at a service with this in mind and say, this is the *sacramentum part of the service we're receiving. If this were not in the service, we could ask, well, what is it that God is bringing to us in this service, liturgy rite. Likewise, when we receive a gift, we often send a thank you card. Now, when we got wedding gifts a long time ago, you wrote a thank you card whether you really thought the gift was wonderful or not. But for Christians, the gifts of Christ are really wonderful, and you want to send this. We didn't know quite what to say about the lamp that we were given for our living room. It didn't quite fit. But nonetheless, you mentioned the lamp when you do the thank you card. And so it is typical for Christians to lift up the gifts of God, what Christ has done for us in his death and resurrection, particularly, when we thank God for being merciful to us. And this is done, obviously, in the act of prayer. This is the typical way to do it. It also can be done in the way of praise. Praise can be a pretty exuberant thing at times. So when we're looking at liturgy, a rite, a service, order or form, we say which of the moments that are the *sacrificium side of it that are lifting up the prayer and the praise of people who are exhibiting now in front of God, not only faith in what they receive in the gift, but the fruits of faith how they respond to God. We could also look at how other elements are used like ceremony. And here, my simple symbol for that is a particular posture or movement. So in this case, we'll just take kneeling as a symbol for that ceremony side. So this is how we can take the principles and the parts of worship and look at them and begin to analyze how the service actually works from a pastoral viewpoint.