ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 05.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: I'm curious to ask about the worship of Israel. What was the fundamental structure of Jewish worship? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: The structures of Jewish worship may be centered in where they worshipped, how they worshiped, and when they worshiped. I'll wait for a later question to talk about the places of worship, temple, synagogue, and the house. But let me briefly here talk in a general way about these three structures of space, time, and rite. As I do that, I want to step back a little bit and speak about how, no matter whether it�s Jewish worship or Christian worship, we are talking about the ritual life of a people. One of the things that has happened in the last fifty, sixty years or so in liturgical studies, is a growing awareness of how important it is for us to understand what they call an anthropology of ritual behavior. Now, let me explain what I mean by that and then illustrate it a little bit by means of some of the structures of Jewish worship. Human beings are, by nature, ritual beings. And what I mean by that is that the way in which we behave in life, the way in which we kind of construct our days, the way in which we understand ourselves in the world, is by means of rituals. Now, some of those rituals are private ones. We sometimes even call them habits or customs. And then there are public rituals, rituals that involve large bodies of people. One of the reasons why we survive in a world that is, in a sense, hostile to us, a world in which sometimes it's hard to get up in the morning and face, is because we have built into our lives rituals that guide us across these various boundaries that we face throughout our life. Anthropologists who have studied cultures from around the world, and I'm not just talking about Christian cultures. I'm talking about non-Christian cultures as well, recognize that there are certain boundaries that human beings have in life that they cross as they make their way from earth to death. And whenever they cross one of these boundaries, there's always a status change. They're moving from one status to another. And these are boundaries that are common in every culture Let me illustrate them with ones that I think we can all identify with. When there's a death, no matter what culture you're in, there is a status change. A person has a life with that loved one, and when that death occurs, they have to cross a boundary in which they now live in a life without that loved one. Anthropologists call this a rite of passage where they move from one status to another across a boundary. And that is something that is absolutely fundamental to the way in which they recognize their status in the community in a different way. Whenever you cross one of these boundaries, another one would be marriage, or a puberty rite, or something like that, whenever you cross one of these boundaries, it can always be an anxiety-ridden time because you are moving in betwixt and in between two different statuses. They sometimes call this, anthropologists, a threshold. Or, if you want to use the technical language, they call it a limit, and that they call the experience a liminal experience. That is, it's an in betwixt and in between experience. Think of it when you walk into a room across a threshold, especially in a room that's full of people, and you're coming in from the outside, and especially if you're late, like, for class. Even though there may not be a big change in you, there is something that happens to you when you cross that boundary and you enter into the new space. Crossing that boundary is filled with little bit of anxiety. Your blood pressure would probably go up a little. Your pulse rate would change. People have always found that when they cross a boundary, it's important to have a ritual, to have a time when you have certain things that you do that are safe, that guide you across that boundary. Whenever I travel overseas, especially when I've gone to countries that don't have the same freedoms that we have in this country, it's always a very liminal experience when you go through the border guards and they look at your passport and they ask you questions, and you don't know if you're going to get in or not. And that's especially true when you're coming the other way into the United States, and there's always a sense of kind of relief and kind of a relaxation that overtakes you when you come into the freedom that we love and enjoy in this country in which we live. The most liminal experience, namely, the experience that is so fraught with danger and anxiety, at least in the worship of Israel, was when they entered into the presence of God. That could be very dangerous. And if you read the scriptures, you know that sometimes those who entered into God's presence in an unworthy way or who touched the Ark when they weren't supposed to, some very bad things could happen. They could die from being in the presence of God unworthily. That's why they had all these boundaries. And in each of those boundaries, there were structures or rituals that helped them mediate those boundaries. They broke up, for example, the world in which they lived into spaces that were designated as holy places. And they had certain rituals that helped people understand whether or not they were worthy to enter into those spaces. They designated time. The Sabbath was a holy day. This was set aside for worship. This was set aside to come into God's presence, not that the other days weren�t holy or special, but this was more special because it was spent in the hearing of God's word and receiving of his gifts. And so they had a structure in the Sabbath itself that helped them understand how it was that they would set aside a particular time to enter into God's presence. And then, of course, there were the rites themselves. The rites were the things that they said, the sequence of events that they engaged in, the scripture that they read, the psalms that they sang, the hymns that they sang as they stood in God's presence or in the case of the temple, the sacrifices that were offered. If you look at the sacrifices, one of the things you will discover is that there were two times of day when they made the atonement sacrifices, at 9:00 in the morning and at 3:00 in the afternoon. This is when the priests would go into the holy place and make these atonement sacrifices that look forward to the blood of Jesus, the Messiah, who would come and give his blood for the world. This is when the people would gather together to pray. They would pray there in what would be called the court of the women. This was a very crowded place. As the priest went in there, they would be standing there praying out loud because that's what the Jews did. They prayed out loud, even if they were in public. And they were saying to each other and to God, be merciful to me. Make atonement for me in the sacrifices that are there. When you look at the history of Israel, you will see that at the center of the rituals is the Seder itself. That's a word that you may know from, perhaps, visiting with the Jews for Jesus or talking about the Passover Seder, but Seder is a fundamental structure in Jewish worship. Seder means order of service. But in the Old Testament, Seder meant that there was an order to God's way of dealing with humanity. The creation itself could be described as a Seder of God�s ordering the creation. Six days he brought into being this wonderful world in which we live. And that's a Seder of God's reaching into nothing and creating this wonderful world that is deeply ordered and structured. Genesis itself is a Seder of God's saving activity in the life of Israel. And if you look at Genesis, the Seder is around genealogies. If you look at a structure of Genesis, you'll see that you hear over and over again this litany, these are the generations, these are the generations, these are the generations. That's a Seder. That's an ordering of how God is going to save the world. Now, I think we need to explain that a little bit because one of the things that is going on in Genesis and the reason why Moses wrote it in the wilderness as they were wandering for forty years is that he wanted to give the Israelites hope that, in fact, in their loins, in their very bodies, lied the seed of the Messiah. And so that's why the genealogies are so important because we know, as we read those genealogies, that this is where the Messiah is going to come. And if you read the forty ninth chapter of Genesis where Jacob blesses his twelve sons, you can see that the blessing, the seed of the Messiah, is in the tribe of Judah. And so you can follow the seed throughout the Old Testament until it comes to fulfillment in Mary herself, as we mentioned in the previous question. This is a Seder. This is an ordering. This is a large concept for Jewish worship, that God is a God of order. He's a God of structure. When the Jews were exiled in 587 B.C. and sent outside of Israel, they found themselves detached from the worship life that they were accustomed to in Israel in the temple in the very life they lived in this Promised Land that god had given to them. And they had to develop another way of worshiping. And this where synagogue worship is going to develop. This is how the Jews began to understand Seder as an order of service. They developed this because of what happened when the children of Israel came out of Egypt, the Passover. That there was an order there. That's the greatest rite of passage there is, that they are separated from Egypt, they passed through the Red Sea--there's that transition. There's that liminal experience. And there's nothing more anxiety ridden than walking through a wall of water. And then they�re incorporated in the Promised Land, which is the third part of the rite of passage. Now this Passover, this Passover from, in a sense, a life of bondage into a life of freedom is one of the great Seders, ways in which God orders his redemptive life in Israel. And that idea of Seder that is expressed in this liturgical ritual of the Passover is adopted by these Jews who were exiled and really begins to take shape in the life of the people of God in the Old Testament as an order of service, namely, that here in their worship now, they have a Seder, an order. Now, one of the things you're going to find, not only among the Israelites, but among anybody who is separated from their liturgical life or is under a state of persecution or exile, is that those orders of service become very rigid because this is the way they hand down the faith. And as we look at the orders of service and the structure of their places of worship and the time at which they worship, we're going to see that for Jews at the time of Jesus, these were very ordered, very structured, very, from perhaps, our perspective, very rigid. In some cases, they were too rigid, and that's one of the things we're going to discover is one of the beauties of Christian worship is the fact that there is a freedom now that we have that perhaps our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Old Testament did not have. But the idea of structure is still there, the idea of order. And one of the things we're going to discover later on is that it is remarkable how Jesus is never critical of the way in which the Israelites worship. But he tries to help them to see that there is now a shift in the way in which they're going to worship, that he is now going to be the center of their worship, and it's not that Jesus takes away some of these boundaries or some of these structures, but he redefines them. He shows them that they must now see the structures of their worship as Christological, namely, that those structures are centered in him. And one of the ways in which we can begin to uncover these structures is to look at the way in which the Jews prayed because perhaps the most fundamental Seder, the most fundamental order for the Jews, was their way of prayer.