ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 81.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: What other major influences were there for the liturgies of Lutheran worship? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: This easily follows on the Common Service story, and I think the best way to answer that is to focus on what happened in the Lutheran Book of Worship project with our own version of it being called Lutheran Worship. There was great interest for a century before this book was produced among Roman Catholics and others that studied liturgies to discover what the early church had done. And scholars had produced many tools for knowing what that was in the ancient church. So it's not surprising when specialists on liturgy tried to assist us with how to do liturgy in the late twentieth century, that they would look back to the fourth and fifth centuries for certain features that could be useful to us. Maybe the most interesting and common one that most people don't think about is how we do the general prayer, or as it's called, the prayer of the church, after the sermon, the longest prayer that we have. They went back to the early church when it was an oral society, not a literary kind of society, and people could join simply by saying, Lord have mercy or obviously in Greek, kyrie eleison as the response to a petition, actually, making the prayer. So in the service rubrics you will find directions to make petitions each of which can have a response, Lord have mercy. And then they get an alternate one so that you don't wear out that particular phrase. Actually, people don't seem to mind because is it generally a week or so or at least a day between using it. So that prayer of the church design has a fancy name in some writings called *attenae or deacons prayer because it could be led by somebody other than the pastor. Typically, in the Greek Orthodox Church, the deacon would lead it, therefore that name. It was one of those contributions from the early church. Along the same lines then, the Kyrie which had been through the centuries abbreviated down to what Luther said would be good just Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. A three-part one with no particular petitions named, just a general prayer now has some specific things to pray for the church early in the service. Another influence from ancient times is the reintroduction of the kiss of peace. That is exhibited in the Lutheran Book of Worship. It's not so apparent in Lutheran Worship. And here's a bit of a story. In the ancient church, those who were still being instructed in the faith and not yet been baptized were allowed to come to the part of the service that had the word of God through the sermon. Then, they were dismissed with a blessing. This was a kindly act, not a kicking out kind of act. And then those who were catechized, who had been baptized, who were committed to the Lord in their life stayed to do the prayers and the Lord's Supper. Now, that part of the service began with this greeting of a kiss. This is already reflected in the New Testament writings that such a greeting, a holy kiss, something different than a handshake in society or bowing to each other, but actually a special greeting regarding the closeness that you had when you are one in Jesus Christ. That started off the liturgy that belonged to those that are baptized and would be communing. That happens in the history of liturgy that when Augustine around the year 400 put together his service for North Africa that he moved that little greeting, the peace of the Lord be with you always in which we respond and also with you. That's kind of the peace move. He moved that next to the distribution so when everything was ready, people came forward. He had a series of actions there including this peace of the Lord. So the western liturgy, now Rome, in the fifth century and following follows Augustine on this, and that's how it comes to be in Europe and comes to be in our practice until the Lutheran Book of Worship project reaching back to an earlier century and to the eastern practice move the kiss of peace greeting earlier like it is in the east. And then Luther, in his wisdom, understanding the power of the gospel took that as kind of a gospel in a nutshell following the words of institution and when everything is ready, that peace of the Lord, kind of a reference to communion in the peace that we have with God in the forgiveness that comes through the sacraments. So that would be a second kind of influence from the ancient church. Now I could speak a little bit about something that showed up in the common service. We didn't describe the elements of it, but if you examine that versus what was going on in the sixteenth and seventeenth century after Luther, and you look at his designs, in the Latin Mass and the German mass by Luther, you do not have a confession and absolution as part of the service. So what did they do? They actually did this as a separate service. Often, it would be an individual confession and absolution. So that was the primary design. Within some years, they started to insert this into the service a make it a general one where people speak a common prayer for forgiveness and receive the words of the pastor, you are forgiven, within the service and this could be even done, say, after the sermon from the pulpit. And this is a practice you find in the Missouri Synod that do this after the sermon, from the pulpit, where the German influence of liturgy has continued. I saw it, say, in areas around New York City in congregations that just preferred to keep it in that old way, even though the book said to do it earlier. Now, the Common Service looked to the agenda of *Leah, one of the confessional Lutherans who was sending missionaries to Michigan, Iowa, Ohio in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is being founded, he had a practice of putting this at the beginning of the service and so the common service understood that and they saw some precedent for it in the sixteenth, seventeenth century liturgies so our practice in English, at least, in the common service tradition is to have it at the start of the service. But it�s considered optional in that spot if you study the history of it. So that would be the order of mass, the divine service, the Holy Communion service influences. We can see in the Lutheran Book of Worship project also some influences from the ancient church in the matins, morning prayer. The restoring, for example, of the chant of the pastor within the printed page so that this is a musical dialogue, a congregation singing canticles. Now I mentioned in the earlier portion of my lectures that the underlying beat occurs with canticles. So this is kind of an influence that they used Anglican chant or Gregorian chant design in which there was a reciting note. So you have a starting little melody and then a long time on a text and then at the concluding part half way and a long note with much text or however much you want to put on it and a conclusion to it. A chant tone was the way to do it. When they were making music for the canticles, they actually knew congregations preferred hymn-like designs and they designed melodies that could be extended in this way but are driven by beat in the accompaniment. So that's kind of an interesting, subtle influence. And in the morning prayer design you find in Lutheran Worship, you'll see there is a pastoral blessing at the end that can be done at the font to connect people in a regular way to their baptism within that service and allowing, in some places, at least even to sprinkle water on people as a reminder, so more ceremony. In the evening prayer, they also looked to the early church and took the lighting of the candles that started the service, the so-called service of light, so you have a little musical dialogue as you enter between pastor and people or leader and people. And then you come to a little song during which the candles are lit and a prayer referencing Christ as the light of the world as a way to start the service. Now, if you do this at each occasion, it's possible to do that. You kind of wear it out, but if you save it for special occasions, as the rubrics suggest, it can be a really nifty feature kind of allowing people to gradually enter this time of meditation and interaction with the word and prayer. So those are a few of the influences that come from the early church, from our Reformation heritage, into our hymnals.