ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 04.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. ******** >> NICK: Hi. I'm Nick. I'm a former high school biology teacher now serving a tiny congregation of diverse cultural heritage in Los Angeles. I would appreciate hearing you explain some of the Biblical foundation of Christian worship. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, Nick. It's a pleasure to meet you in this wonderful opportunity for us, now, to expand upon some of the things I've already said. When one looks at a culture, one wants to ask oneself: What are some of the core values of that culture? There have been some wonderful studies in recent years about the first century culture in which Jesus and the apostles lived. And some of those studies have gotten at this idea of core values. One of the core values of the first century, and this, of course, would expand back to the Old Testament as well, is the core value of holiness. We're going to talk now about the biblical foundations for worship. We must center ourselves in that understanding of holiness. What do we mean by that? Well, when you look at the early church, as they began to develop their forms of worship, they recognized immediately that the old places of worship in Israel were no longer places they could go to. But there was something they brought from those places that was present among them, and that was the holy presence of the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Now, this idea of holiness is so important when you read the Gospels, for example. I'm someone who has spent a lot of time with the Gospel of Luke, and so I'll use Luke throughout this course as an illustration of the way in which Jesus worshipped, or some of the ideas that are associated with a biblical foundation of worship. And if you look at the Gospel of Luke, you'll see very clearly that the idea of holiness is at the very beginning of the gospel. Now, if you were to ask a Jew at the time of our Lord, what is holy, they would say, well, the holiest place is the holy of holies in the temple in Jerusalem. And Jews would mark everything in terms of kind of levels of holiness in relationship to that holy of holies. So, for example, if you're outside of Israel, say, across the Jordan River, you're less holy than when you cross the Jordan River and you come into the Holy Land. And the closer you get to Jerusalem, the holier it is, and then you enter into the city of Jerusalem, there's holiness. And then as you get closer to the temple, etcetera. There are these boundaries, and that these boundaries are not only, kind of, simple physical boundaries, but they are boundaries that are also ones that are related to the worship life of Israel. The Jews would say there are two ways in which God's holiness, and by holiness they're talking about presence. There are two ways in which God's holiness, God�s presence, comes to them. I've already mentioned the first, and in fact, probably the most holy one. That is the holy of holies in the temple in Jerusalem where the sacrifices were, where God was present. But God was present also wherever his word was. And so in the synagogue, which we're going to talk about later, where God's word was read and preached upon, would be considered a place of God's presence and therefore, a place of God's holiness. God's word was something tangible that, you know, the Jews would speak of how they would eat God's word. They would consume it. It was something that they took into themselves. The idea of God's holiness in temple and in his word, was fundamental to a Biblical foundation for Christian worship. In the Gospel of Luke, just to illustrate this, you see it begins in the temple with Zachariah in the holy place offering the sacrifices. But then it's very interesting a couple of passages later when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary to announce to her the birth of Jesus. What he is saying to Mary--and this is absolutely fundamental to understanding, not only the Gospels, but our worship--is that there is now going to be a shift in the locale of God's presence. That God is going to continue to be present in the temple and the holy of holies, and he's going to continue to be present to wherever his word is read and preached upon. But now, God is going to be present in another way. He is going to be present in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He's going to be present in Jesus, the very Son of God. As we said earlier, the person of Jesus, divine and human nature, now rests in Mary's womb. It's remarkable when you read the Annunciation because you can see that in the language that Gabriel uses, he is describing Mary as the new Israel. He�s calling her the daughter of Zion which means that she is now Israel reduced to one. But then when he says to her, after she asks him, you know, how can this be since I know not a man. She's asking the biological question: How is it that I can conceive a child when I have not known a man. He says that that which is conceived in you will be called holy, the son of God. Now, by saying that what is going to be in her womb is holy, he is describing the presence of God. And so in a way, not because of anything that Mary is or brings to the table, nothing that she offers in and of herself, but because of what God is doing to her and in her, Mary is not only the new Israel, she is also the new temple because she is simply the locale of God�s presence and therefore, God's holiness. It's interesting, too, if you look at the Annunciation--and this is related to what I said before in a previous question about God's word. You know, Luther asked the biological question, too. How does Mary conceive by the Holy Spirit? And his answer is, kind of typically Luther. He says that Mary conceives in her ear. That when she hears the word of the angel, that the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you, and that word overshadow is the same word that is used of the *Shechinah which is that cloud over the temple that bears the presence of God, that that overshadowing is now over Mary. And that when she hears those words of the angel, those words come in her ear, and the Spirit works through that word, and she conceives Christ in her womb. Now, what is wonderful about that is that that's exactly how Christ comes and dwells in us, that faith comes by hearing and by hearing the word of God, we hear the word of God and the Spirit works through that word and Christ comes and dwells among us. Now, this idea of holding us, Mary as Israel and the new temple, that now wherever Jesus is, there you have God's holiness is fundamental to the understanding of a biblical foundation for worship. And you know, as you read through the Gospel of Luke, for example, you'll see that Jesus portrays himself as the new temple. In fact, the person who speaks about that best in the New Testament is John himself in Chapter 2. And you know this story very well. And then I'll illustrate some of these things in Luke. But you know the story very well where Jesus is in a discussion there with the Pharisees and he says, I will destroy this temple, pointing to the temple in Jerusalem, and in three days raise it up and of course, the Pharisees are fighting with one another saying, Herod took forty-six years to build this temple, and you're going to destroy it and raise it up in three days. And of course, the evangelist St. John has to say that Jesus was talking about his body, about himself. Wherever Jesus is, there is God's holiness. There is the new temple. This is one of the things that took time for even the apostles to understand how wherever Jesus was, there is the place of worship. A great illustration of this from Luke is the cleansing of the ten lepers in Luke 17. You know the story. Nine of them are Jews. One of them is a Samaritan. Now, those nine Jews, they were right in after being cleansed by Jesus, these lepers, of going to the temple because that's what you do if you're a Jew. You go to the place of holiness and you have your baths there and you have the sacrifices that affirm by the priestly offerings and the priestly baths that, in fact, you are indeed cleansed and you can now enter into the world and become part of Jewish society again. And so the nine Jews do exactly what they were taught. They go to the place of holiness, the temple in Jerusalem. But it's only the Samaritan that recognizes that there is a shift now in the locale of God's presence and holiness. That it is still, certainly, in the temple, but more importantly and enduringly, it is in the person of Jesus Christ. And so that's why that Samaritan comes back to Jesus because he is the holy presence of God, because he is God himself. He is the new temple, and he gives thanks to Jesus because Jesus is the one who cleansed him. In our culture, if you were to think about what the core value is, the core value in our culture is individualism, that we are really, in a sense, obsessed with ourselves. Everything centers in who we are, and if there was a place that we would say is holy, it is ourselves. Now, that's certainly true for Christians because they are bearer's of Christ in their bodies, or as Paul says, they are temples of the Holy Spirit. But we have to be very careful, now, as we talk about worship, how we need to recognize the need for us to go back to some of the core values of the first century culture. We're going to talk about how we need to be reverent to this holiness, to this presence, in the way in which we worship, how we behave in worship, what orders we use, what hymns we sing, the way in which we enter this presence. We're also going to talk about how we need to be faithful to that presence, how in the orders that we use we're using words that speak clearly about what we truly believe about God, what the scriptures have said, and, in fact, use scripture itself as a way of talking about what it is that we say and do when we enter into his presence. One of the ways in which we're going to do this is by looking at the liturgies of the Jews and of the first early Christians. And as I mentioned earlier, we're going to look at three structures. And this is where we're going to get at the foundations, the biblical foundations for Christian worship. We're going to look at the structures of rite. How did Jesus worship? What were the forms that he used? What were the structures? We're going to look at places. Where did Jesus worship? We're going to see he worshipped in temple, synagogue, and the house. And then finally, we're going to look at where we worship now and where Jesus worshipped, not only ourselves in our churches, but house space, now, is important in the way in which we see ourselves. That also is going to bring us into time. Jesus worshipped on the Sabbath. We now worship on Sunday. Why is there a difference? And in the course of doing that, we're going to, therefore, be looking at the Jewish Foundation for Christian worship or what I might call the Jewish precedents. We're going to look at liturgy in the life of Jesus and how Jesus himself worshipped. And then finally, one of the ways in which we're going to get at the foundations of Christian worship is we�re going to look at the table fellowship of Jesus. But to begin, we need to go back to the beginning. And that means we need to look at the Old Testament and the foundational structures of Jewish worship.