ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 01.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: Hello, Dr. Just. I'm Joshua, and I come from the wide open ranch lands of eastern Wyoming. My ministry is very rural in character. I have a feeling the other students and I will have many more questions than usual for this class. So I'll work to keep my questions brief. I'll begin by asking: what is central to a biblical understanding of the theology of worship? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, Joshua for a most excellent question and perhaps the most important question that we will discuss in this course on worship. The question about the biblical understanding of the theology of worship is central to what we're going to be talking about because everything that we are going to say flows from that theology of worship. The fact that our worship is centered in the Scriptures is one of the great comforts that we have as Lutherans and as Christians who gather together around the presence of Christ. One of the ways of getting at an answer to that question is to ask this: what is God doing when we gather together around the word and the sacrament? When we look at a biblical theology of worship, we have to begin by asking ourselves how did Jesus worship. Where did he worship? What rites did He use? What was the time framework in which He worshipped? That not only includes Jesus, but that includes the apostles and all the first century Jews, and it's a question that involves us in how the Old Testament worshipped. One of the great things about the biblical understanding of a theology of worship is that it shows us very clearly the continuity of our own worship with not only Jesus and the apostles, but going back to the very beginning of scripture itself. One of the things I will be doing throughout my time with you in this course, is talking about the structures of worship and how important they are, the structures of the rite itself, that is, how we worship, the form that we use as we go from one point to another, the space in which we worship which is very important, and we're going to see historically have that space shaped the way in which Christians worship. And of course, time, how Christians understand time, when they worship, and how, in Christ, everything seems to change in the way in which we understand the time in which we live. When you look at a biblical understanding of worship, what you see very clearly is that we must focus our attention on what I'm going to call the liturgical structures of word and sacrament. Now, there are a number of ways of talking about a theology of worship from a biblical perspective. One way is to talk about it from our perspective, from what we might call a theology from below, from the perspective of our worship. And when we talk about it that way, we will use the word worship because worship involves what we do, and our praise, our thanksgiving, our response to God. This is, of course, fundamental to the way in which Israel worshipped and the way we worship. But it's interesting when you actually look at the scriptures itself, as important as our response is, as important as the idea of worship, that is our praise and adoration is in the scriptures, the scriptures always begin from God's perspective, from what God is doing. And we're going to discover that here the biblical understanding of worship and the Lutheran understanding come together beautifully. When we look at it from God's perspective, what we will discover is that God is giving gifts. I'm going to use the language of gifts throughout this course, and it's so important to recognize that worship is all about the gifts, the gifts that come to us. And here's the second thing that's just so important, they come to us through the real presence of Jesus Christ. No, I use will real presence because that�s Lutheran language. But you're going to see that I am also going to talk about the bodily presence because I think that describes the real presence in a more concrete and particular way. This bodily real presence of Christ is at the center of a biblical understanding of worship. And when we talk about the real bodily presence of Jesus Christ, we're talking about a mystery that is almost impossible for us to understand. I'm also going to use the language of eschatology which means the last things or, as some people would say, the end times. Jesus himself is, in a sense, the last thing. When Jesus comes, when he breaks into our world and becomes flesh, becomes one of us, the end has come. The eschaton, you might know that language. The end, the eschaton has come. And so we have present in our world, when Jesus comes in the flesh, heaven itself because wherever Jesus is, there is heaven. And one of the things we're going to see when we look at the biblical understanding of worship is that it's not only centered in Christ, but it is centered in the fact that where Christ is bodily present, so also is heaven, and as we're going to see, the angels, the archangels, and the whole company of heaven. We're going to use a lot of different words in this course that you may not be familiar with, or you may be familiar with, but you don't necessarily have the specific definition. I'm going to use the language of the church. And part of that language is going to use the language of such words as eschatology but also a word that is familiar to you that I want to define now, and that is the word liturgy. There were a number of different ways in which early Christians could have defined their worship. They could have used all kinds of different words. The word worship is used in the Scriptures that describes our praise and our adoration, our response to God. One of the other words they could use--and here's a technical word which I won't use often, but it might be interesting for you to know--the word *synaxis which is very similar to the word synagogue which simply means to come together to do something in common. And what Christians did is they came together to receive gifts from Christ's presence in word and in sacrament. The word *synaxis was a word that you'll see in the literature that describes the worship of early Christians but for some reason that word was not the word that Christians used to define what they did when they gathered together as a community to stand in the presence of God and receive these gifts. The word they chose was liturgy, and it's an interesting word that they should choose because it's not necessarily a uniquely biblical or Christian or Jewish word. Now, you will see that word, and in Greek it's *laetergia. You'll see that word in the Scriptures, but it's also a word that comes out of the pagan, secular world of Jesus and the apostles. In fact, it's a very, very popular word in the Roman Empire, and it's a word that describes the obligation or the responsibility of a Roman citizen as that Roman citizen sees himself or herself as serving the greater good. Or, to put it this way, a Roman citizen would understand his or her *laetergia, his or her liturgy, to serve of the empire for the sake of the empire. I'll illustrate it this way. Let's say I'm a rich Roman citizen, and I have a huge estate on the Appian Way in Italy, which is, I think, the road from Rome to Brindisi. This is a wonderful road that has a significant place in the Roman world. This is where the military would go up and down. This is a place where you would have commerce. It was a vital road. As a Roman citizen with an estate on this road, my *laetergia, my service, my obligation, my liturgy to the Roman Empire was to take care of that part of the road. That was my obligation. That was my responsibility, and I did it for the greater good. This is how I understood my place in this world in which I live. Now, if you think about it, if you look at that word from the Roman perspective, it is what I'm doing. It's very similar to the understanding of worship. This is my response to God. Christians flipped it a little bit. And here's how they took that word, borrowed it, and redefined it for themselves. What was important for early Christians was the Father�s *laetergia, the Father�s liturgy, the Father's service. And what does the Father do? And I'm talking, of course, about God the Father and the Holy Trinity. The Father sends his Son, and that sending of the Son is this extraordinary, divine invasion. One of the ways of looking at this is to see Jesus as an alien coming from another cosmos, another world, and invading our world. We must understand that when the Father sends the Son, He is sending the creator, the one who spoke in Genesis, and all things came into being. That creator must now come back to his creation as one of us, breaking in, invading us, becoming one of us, becoming a creature like us, a human being, flash of our flesh, bone of our bones, so that he, the creator, might recreate this world that had fallen into sin. One of the things that we all know so well is that we live in a world that is deeply, deeply infected with the virus of sin. If you go back to Genesis, and you must go back to Genesis if you want to talk about the biblical understanding of worship, you know that God created everything good and everything right. And then all of a sudden, something went terribly wrong. The creation that was so good and so right went suddenly wrong with the disobedience of our first parents. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, in God's good pleasure, as a reflection of his glory. They were created to worship and praise him which is what, in a sense, they did in the Garden of Eden. They did nothing but engage in this glorification of God because they were in his image, and they were a reflection of his glory. But when they fell into sin, they were infected with the virus in which everything that was so right now went so totally wrong. And one of the things I know that you can identify with, and everyone can identify with, is that in this world in which we live, you and I, no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, we can not make right what has gone wrong. Only God can do that, and that's why God needed this *laetergia, this service to us, this liturgy. The Father�s liturgy is to restore this creation, to make right what has gone wrong. And the only one that can do that is the second person of the Trinity sent by the Father into this world to make right what has gone wrong through his death. The Father�s liturgy ends in a cross. And it is only there in the cross where we see Jesus making right what has gone wrong. Only he can do that. We can't. And this liturgy of the Father in sending the Son to die for the world is the way in which the early Christians understood the biblical foundation for worship. Because what Jesus does when he comes into this world is he serves us. Jesus� liturgy, his *laetergia, is at the foundation of our biblical understanding of worship. And when we stand together in the presence of God, the Son, who has been sent from the Father, is their bodily present among us giving us gifts, serving us through the gifts of forgiveness and life and salvation that flow from his presence, his bodily presence. It's interesting if you think of it this way, this is God's perspective all over, God�s perspective of giving gifts through his Son. It all begins from above, what God is doing, how God is serving us, and it's centered in Christ, the giver of gifts. Now, when we talk about our worship, we're the ones now who having received those gifts, we respond. Now, it's interesting if you look at the biblical understanding of worship in this way, *laetergia is God serving his people, this is at the heart of what Luther understands worship to beat. Later on, we're going to talk about Luther's understanding of worship as *Gottes Diest which simply translated, is God's service or divine service, and that's the words that we use in one of our hymnals, Lutheran Worship, as a way of describing the liturgies, Divine Service I, Divine Service II, God serving his people with the gifts. Luther understood this as fundamental for worship, beginning with God, what God is doing. And Luther is, you know, brilliant in the sense that he always understands how to translate this down into the language of the people. In other words, he uses this as a way of teaching or what I'm going to use, the language of catechizing, instructing. Catechesis is the instruction of the faith. He uses this in his catechism to instruct the people of God. And he does it when he talks about the Ten Commandments, how the Ten Commandments are fundamental in understanding how God relates to us. Now, the two categories that Luther uses to describe this liturgy, this divine service, the Father�s *laetergia in sending his Son is to use the categories of faith and love. Now, here, when we're talking about faith and love, we're talking about us, our faith, the faith given to us by God through the spirit. And when Luther speaks about God serving as, he talks about how we receive these gifts from God in faith. And notice how different this is from the Roman understanding. We receive these gifts passively. This isn't an active thing because faith is not active when it receives gifts. It's a passive thing. It just simply stands there and is forgiven. It simply stands there and receives the body and blood. It simply stands there and hears the word of God in which the spirit works and creates and sustains faith. Faith is passive in receiving the gifts, and this is how Luther describes this divine perspective. But then the other side is love, love, not just for God but love for neighbor. And here's where the Ten Commandments comes in. The first three commandments are about loving God, and that's at the heart of it. If you remember the lawyer and the Good Samaritan who questions Jesus, Jesus gets him to ask the most important question and that is: what does the law say in the laws about loving God and neighbor. The first three commandments about loving God, the last seven about loving neighbor. Luther puts it this way: When we receive gifts from God, one of the natural things given to us in faith is to respond to those gifts in thanksgiving and praise. That's worship. That's where that word worship comes, having received gifts, we respond. But here's the interesting thing about it. We don't respond just simply ourselves alone. Just as it's Christ there giving the gifts, when we stand there and receive these gifts and respond back to God, it's always in Christ. Christ is in both aspects the giver and the one who in him we respond to the Father. So Christ is the one who is singing the praises to the Father first, and we in him. Christ is the one who is giving thanks to the Father, and we in him. And that is our expression of love. One of the greatest ways to express your love for somebody is to give thanks and praise for the gifts that have been given. But there is a neighbor, and when we talk about the neighbor and loving the neighbor as ourself, as Jesus says in the sermon on the plain, we understand that neighbor in a twofold way. That neighbor is the neighbor who stands there with us in the assembly, the fellow Christian, the baptized. The way in which we love our neighbor in our worship is we do things in community. Most people don't think of it this way, but one of the greatest ways to express love, and this is really maybe not as true in our culture as it is in other cultures or in our culture hundreds and hundreds of years ago, is to stand together or sit together and sing. To sing together is an expression of love. I always use the illustration of my parents growing up in the Walther League or when they would date together, do you know what they would do? Their friends would gather together around the piano and they would sing songs. They would sing because this was an expression of their common understanding of their relationship and, really, their love for one another. When Christians sing, they are expressing that love. When Christians pray together, they are expressing that love. When they receive the body and blood together they are expressing that love. When they confess their sins, they express their love for one another. It takes love to have the freedom and the courage to publicly confess sins, to publicly confess faith, to respond to God in thanksgiving and praise. But there is also that neighbor who knows not Christ, the one who is not a believer. And this is the second part of that understanding of Luther concerning love for neighbor. To love one's neighbor who knows not Christ is to go out into the highways and byways, as the early Christians did, and to tell that neighbor about the love of Jesus Christ and then to invite that neighbor into the presence of Christ so that neighbor who knows not Christ can hear the word of God, can come into the presence of Christ, his bodily presence, and receive the gifts. In fact, I would say the greatest act of love we have for our neighbor who knows not Christ is to invite them into our worship so that they may receive these gifts. We'll talk more about that later. But just to summarize, the biblical understanding of the theology of worship centers in Christ and in his bodily presence, a presence that comes to us when we hear his word and when we receive his meal, his body and blood in, with, and under bread and wine. This is at the heart of the New Testament, and as we're going to see, this is preceded by the history of Israel at worship in the Old Testament. And so our worship is all about Christ, and that's why it's so important to begin with a biblical understanding of a theology of worship.