Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 86 - Pastoral Freedom within Liturgies (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 86.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: Your response is indeed helpful. Now, let me go one step further. How can we apply our analysis to our pastoral choices within liturgies? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Maybe the best way to answer a question like that is to work an example out of the previous considerations. Let's imagine that I need to make a choice in a service like Holy Communion at the point where we're going to sing glory to God in the highest. And I've looked at the people I'm working with, and I'm seeing in front of me primarily blue-collar workers. I'm looking at people that are educated. Maybe some of them have been to college. Many of them not. I'm seeing a large number of children, family groups. Most of these children who are in church are capable of reading and singing hymns when the tune isn't too hard. But I also have some older adults who are in retirement but capable with their eyes and their body to participate fully. I'm in a city situation in a region of the city that doesn't have high educated people or those who have traveled a lot. And they come from backgrounds that are Lutheran, some of them, maybe 40 percent of them. I have another 20 or 30 percent that were Roman Catholics at one point in their life or married to Roman Catholics. And I have a smaller number that came out of evangelical backgrounds and some that were brought to faith in this place. I want to apply what I know about them to the choices around this glory to God in the highest. Now, in Lutheran Worship if I were on Page 160, I would have a beat-driven kind of tune that has some of repetition, but it is indeed a page long. And it will certainly do the job of getting across what that text is about and give people a way to do it with music. I also have another resource, the Hymnal Supplement. And for the Gloria in Excelsis, we have a dynamic equivalent. Glory to God. We give you thanks and praise. Now this was a text specifically written to be a paraphrase of the other one. It's three stanzas long. Luther's was five stanzas. So it's short. It has four lines per stanza so it's reasonably easy to do. The melody is a rhythmic and hymnic in the design, and it has a kind of an excitement and sweep to the melody so even the last line arises in the scale with some kind of drive to it. And it has a kind of majestic start once they would learn it. I'm thinking of the particular group. They're not into really highly aesthetic things or highly poetic things. But I have here two versions. Now this hymnic version could be very powerful for the children, for the older adults, once we learn it. So I might choose their that I'm going to have a standard text that has a good *Lex orandi, lex credendi kind of features, and I'm choosing within the service itself to find one that allows them to express this, to say it to each other and to God with a certain amount of excitement and joy. On the one hand I have an excellent kind of tune and design but it takes a certain energy. It's a little bit high class. And here I have one that is not so high class and more direct, shall we say. Well, my choice might be in order to get it to be fully expressive and get better participation, I would choose, on most occasions, to be using this hymnic setting. Now, I'm assuming that I can get the permission to reproduce this or people learn it from memory over time or do it from the book. And that begins to solve that moment in the service. So that's how I go about thinking this through in my group. You can add ethnic questions. You can add more age factor, but that gives you an example. Just a single one.