ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 19.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: Maybe I should have asked this question first. But what are the early rites of Christians? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: I have already described that when early Christians gathered in their homes, the two major rites are word and sacrament. Let me put them in a context that, in a sense, will give you a sense of the entire rhythm of Christian life in the early Christian communities. There was, in the early Christian church, a clear concentration in the urban centers of the empire of the Christian faith. Now certainly, there was Christianity in the rural areas, but it was in the cities where Christians thrived. And when you have these small house churches, you have many of them. There were, for example, in the second century in Rome at the time of Hippolytus, hundreds of house churches that dotted the city. Now, you have to understand that early Christians had at the heart and core of their liturgical life a great sense of how they needed to evangelize the world. And they built their liturgical life around the center of this *missiological, this sense of mission that they had to bring Christ to everybody. The rhythm of the early Christian life was for Christians to go out into the highways and byways and in an individual one-on-one way, speak to those who they came in contact with about the hope that was in them. And when these people clearly could hear in this witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, they would be brought to these house churches where they would go through a process in which they would be brought to baptism. Now, the rites, the liturgical rites, were centered in this sense of evangelizing these people who were preparing for baptism. And one of the things that surprises us a little bit is how long they took in the early Christian communities, to teach people the faith, what we call catechesis, before baptism. Now, there's probably a number of ways of explaining that. Certainly, one of the ways is this is a time of persecution and therefore, it calls the church to take great care in how it instructs people in the faith and brings them to this momentous time where they enter the kingdom of God through these waters of baptism. But I think there's also a sense in this time of persecution they had to be very careful, not only for those who were coming in that that they not be brought in quickly into the Christian church and then recognize that they're going to be martyred for something they truly didn't completely, totally believe in. Or they would come quickly into the church, and when they are in a state of persecution, they would betray their fellow Christians to the authorities. And there would be widespread persecution in the churches where they would apostatize, that is, give up the faith, and show the Roman authorities where the Christians could be found. The way in which these people who were preparing for baptism were instructed was in the liturgy of the word. And when I explain that liturgy in detail, you'll see how it is absolutely fundamental to the instruction of those preparing for baptism which is why the liturgy of the word was called the liturgy f the catechumens. This was a time when they were being instructed in the faith. These people who were preparing for baptism, what we call catechumens, and catechesis comes from the word echo so what catechumens do is they echo back what they hear. And literally a catechumen is a hearer of the word, one who hears the word of God, one who is shaped by that word, transformed by that word, comes into communion with Christ by that word and then speaks back that word to the one who is catechizing him. This process of catechesis is at the heart and core of the Christian liturgy. Because what happened to these catechumens is that they would, after a period of sometimes one, too, even three years, be brought to the moment when they are baptized. And most baptisms occurred at specific times in the church, Easter being the primary time, Pentecost and some other church festivals. Adults, we're talking about here, would be brought to baptism at these specific moments. And remember, most of the early Christians who are baptized were adults. Infants were baptized immediately, usually on the eighth day, like circumcision from the Old Testament. But adults will go through a period of time before they were baptized. And the rite of the liturgy of the word is foundational to their instruction in the faith. This movement toward baptism is the movement of the liturgy. And after they�re baptized, they can come to the second part of the liturgy which is the liturgy of the Lord's Supper. Baptism is the, in a sense, the ticket into the Lord's Supper. It is the initiation into receiving this great mystery of Christ's body and blood. And so you see that the rhythm of Christian life is baptismal, teaching the faith being washed then coming to the supper. Now, the way in which this worked liturgically and in terms of kind of the organization of the church is when a house church reached its capacity, they would split it off. And they would take half of the church baptized and they would start another church. So they'd have half now baptized here and have baptized here. And then they would fill them up with catechumens until they became full and then they would split them off again. And what you can see there in the way in which the church is organized is it�s organized around this liturgy of word and sacrament in which people are being brought into this presence of Christ. They're being taught, prepared for baptism so that they might receive the supper. This is at the heart and core of the early Christian rites. And when we now explain these rites, you're going to see how vital they were in the life of the church.