ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 12.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: Would you kindly give us an example of house worship from Luke's gospel. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Perhaps more than any other gospel, Luke shows us what house worship looks like in the life of Jesus. There are numerous examples starting with Levi the tax collector, the very first meal in a home which, of course, is a moment of controversy where the Pharisees discuss with Jesus and his disciples whether he should eat with this tax collector and sinner. There is also in Luke 7 a meal in a Pharisee's home where this sinful woman slips in and anoints Jesus' feet, and she becomes an example now of somebody who comes in repentance and faith and receives the forgiveness of sins. It's very important to see that when Jesus has table fellowship with people, whether it be Levi the tax collector or this sinful woman, if one comes in repentance and faith, one receives the forgiveness of sins. There are numerous other meals. I already mentioned before the feeding of the five thousand, which even though it's not in a house, it has the same format as a house worship. The Passover meal that Jesus celebrated on the night in which he was betrayed was a house meal. And the Emmaus meal was in a house. One of the other meals that is of interest to us is the meal that closes off Jesus' journey to Jerusalem which frames Luke's Gospel in that it's a meal with another tax collector, this time a man described as the chief tax collector, Zacchaeus. So Jesus begins his table fellowship in Luke's Gospel with Levi the tax collector and ends it, in a sense, with Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector where you have this wonderful language about how Jesus says, I must be in your house, or it is necessary for me to be in your house. And the final words he says there is that the son of man came to seek and to save the lost. Now, all these meals take place in the house. And what we have here is what I described earlier, and that is the Sabbath evening Seder, which was kind of a mini-Passover. We're going to look at the structure of the Passover later, but for a moment, let's stop and talk about this mini-Passover service in the house. This was a meal that began with the blessing for the day and a blessing that was over the bread and wine, and then the eating of the meal. And then after the eating of the meal, a grace after the meal. Now, the Jews had this all the time, that is, every week, Sabbath to Sabbath, what we said earlier would be their Sabbath but our Friday night. But, for example, when a Pharisee would invite a special guest like Jesus, between the blessing of the day and the breaking of the bread and the blessing over the bread, the invited guest would be invited to teach. That's why we see in these house meals, in the table fellowship of Jesus, an example of his teaching and his miracles. In fact, much of the teaching that Jesus did was in the context of these homes because after celebrating the Sabbath evening Seder with his people, he would go to the synagogue in the morning and teach at the synagogue. You see, the table fellowship in the house was an opportunity for Jesus to teach. The disciples continued to this in their ministry. In Chapter 9, Jesus sends out the twelve to preach the kingdom of God and to heal, teaching and miracles. And where does he send them? He sends them from house to house. They are to do exactly what Jesus did, to be ones who bring the kingdom by their speaking and to perform miracles that demonstrate that, in fact, they do bear in themselves the power to teach on behalf of God. And then only in Luke, Chapter 10, Jesus sends out the seventy. He sends them from house to house to do the same thing the twelve did, to preach the kingdom of God and to heal. And here you see again the continuation of the ministry of Jesus in the home. And one of the interesting things that happens among the seventy is they are sent out with a new greeting, the greeting of peace. Peace be to this house because they bring the word of God which brings the peace of God which passes all understanding. Jesus, in a sense, fulfills this after the resurrection when he comes to the eleven who are huddled in the upper room in a house, and as he greets them for the first time, what does he say to them in this house? He says, peace be to this house. And then to demonstrate that he is not a ghost, that he is flesh and blood, what does he do? He eats a piece of roasted fish having table fellowship with them after he rose from the dead. The Book of Acts is a book in which you see the disciples continuing Jesus' ministry of going from house to house. And what you have here is the disciples doing evangelism in a way that would have been very familiar with the Jews because of their house worship, but also very familiar to the Romans because they also had their table fellowship in their homes, and they have their own little house gods and their little altars in their home. So Christians, by having worship in the houses, simply continue what the Jews understood as a place of worship, and even the Romans understood as a place of worship. And as we will see later on in this course, the primary place for worship of Christians for the first three hundred years of Christianity was in the home where they celebrated table fellowship with God, gathering around God's word and God's sacrament where God was present in the word and the sacrament bearing the gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation.