ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 15.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. That's helpful. It leads me to wonder then what did Christians borrow from Jesus' participation in the liturgical life of Israel. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Next to the first question, Paul, this may be one of the most important ones to ask at this point in our course because it's so important for us today to recognize that our liturgy that we are using here in the twenty first century is deeply based in the biblical structures that Jesus worshipped with and in the New Testament itself reaching back into the Jewish precedents. Now, so far, I've tried to draw out some of those implications, but let me summarize them now. And this is an opportunity for us now to look at the larger picture of what we have done thus far. When you look at the liturgical life that Jesus lived in with his apostles, with the first century Jews who then became the foundation for the Christian church, you will see that for them, what they do as Christians liturgically did not kind of fall out of heaven in a Glad bag. It came to them from what they're used to. And there was this very natural transition from the worship of the Old Testament, the worship of Israel, and now the worship of the post-Pentecost Christian church. You can see very clearly in my previous comments that what is fundamental to understanding the biblical foundations for Christian worship and what Christians borrowed from the liturgical life of Jesus are these two structures of word and sacrament. We have shown that these structures have the theological foundation of continuation of the teachings of Jesus and the miracles of Jesus where the teaching is really the liturgy of the word, and the miracles is the liturgy of the Lord's Supper. But we've also seen that this foundational structure of word and sacrament is part of the table fellowship of Jesus where you see him submitting himself, again, to the cultural character of eating together with people and its liturgical ramifications as he sits at table and he teaches them and then he breaks bread with them as a sign of the intimacy of that fellowship that is prepared for by the teaching that gives way to the eating. These two structures of word and sacrament are the foundational structures. And as we now stand back and look at the liturgical life of Israel, we'll see, as I even mentioned before, that in the word service of the early Christians, they essentially, for all intents and purposes, borrowed the structure of the reading of the scriptures in the synagogue liturgy as the structure for their word service. When we describe that word service, we're going to see that they do flip it around. In other words, the Jews begin with the most important books, you know, from the Torah, where as Christians end with the most important book, the gospels. So in that way they take the basic structure, but they flip it around. But I think it's also important to recognize that as part of the word service, the Christians also borrowed the teaching at the table that takes place at the Passover when the food is explained and the narration of the exodus is given and the teaching at the table that Jesus did in the Sabbath evenings Seders, which were, as we said, a mini Passover but was a preparation for the eating. And so in the word service of Christians, there is a borrowing from the synagogue, from the Passover Seder and the Sabbath evening Seder. Of course, in the liturgy of the sacrament it's much easier to see where the influence comes from. It is essentially, now, a Passover Seder that has been completely, totally, in a sense, given new meaning by Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed and he gives his body and blood in, with, and under the bread and wine. The liturgy of the Lord's Supper, for all intents and purposes, flows right out of that Passover Seder. And so you see that the grand influences on the Christian liturgy are synagogue and the House Seders. Now, perhaps you're a little surprised that I have not mentioned the temple at all. What is remarkable about early Christian worship is that they borrowed absolutely nothing from the temple. The temple was an anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. It's sacrificial, cultic system anticipated the shedding of the blood of the Messiah for the sins of the world. Once that sacrifice of Christ was made, there were now, as the book of Hebrews says, no more need for sacrifices. And so for all intents and purposes, the temple becomes obsolete when Jesus gives up his life as a sacrifice for our sins and the temple curtain is torn asunder. That is not just simply the symbolic value of the tearing of the curtain. It is the reality now that all sacrifices have come to their end, come to their fulfillment, to completion in the death of God's son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, I think it is fair to say that in reading the scriptures and praying and singing, which were part of the temple liturgy, Christians do, in a sense, borrow that. The way in which the word read, the way in which they prayed, the way in which they sang the hymns was really borrowed more from the synagogue liturgy than the temple liturgy. Many people today, when they talk about our worship, speak about it as being kind of a German liturgy. One of the things we're going to see now as we watch the various components of the liturgy come into place in the history of Christian worship is to recognize a number of things. First of all, our liturgy is intensely biblical from beginning to end. It is infused with the biblical texts and the biblical ethos. Secondly, if one is looking for a kind of a cultural connotation for the worship that we now use, it certainly would be first century Palestine. But, and we probably won't have time to go into this in detail, the liturgy that we have today essentially comes from the North African church. Instead of being a German liturgy, our liturgy actually comes from the Mideast and North Africa, not even Italy or Spain or the Mediterranean. But it is a deeply biblical text, a biblical structure, if you want to use that language. Now, we will see that certainly some of the hymns we sing are from Germany. These date, of course, from the Reformation. This is something that Dr. Brauer will talk to you about. And certainly, you might say that some of the music even that we use in our liturgy has some German influence, but my musician friends tell me that really, most of the liturgical chants that we use in our hymnals are not from Germany. They are English or they are American. And so when we look now at the development of the liturgy in the early Christian communities up until the time of the Reformation, we're going to see that it is a liturgy that continues to maintain this biblical foundation. And as we look now at the structures of the liturgy, we're going to see how deeply embedded they are in the worship life of Israel and the worship life of Jesus and all those who call themselves Christians as they followed him through the ends of the earth.