ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 20.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: Thank you for your responses to Joshua's questions. May I follow up by asking you to describe for us the structure of the liturgy of the word. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: When we talk about the Jewish precedents of Christian worship, we mentioned how the synagogue liturgy becomes the format for the way in which Christians now read the scriptures. One of the things that we sometimes don't realize is that one of the most valuable, and one of the rarest things that Christians had were copies of the scrolls of the New Testament. We don't realize how expensive it was to have a scroll of a gospel or an epistle. And your average humble house church could not afford, in those early years--we're talking here about this domestic period�-they couldn't afford the entire New Testament. This is one of the reasons why they had a bishop. One of the things that the bishop did was distribute the scrolls of the Scriptures to all these various communities. Now, when you have, let's say the Gospel of Luke, which is of course the gospel I've been speaking about. If you have that, say, only for four weeks or five weeks, you're going to read the scripture for a long time. The estimates that we have of how long the scripture was read in the early Christian communities was anywhere from one-half hour to an hour. Now think about that. Think about how long that is to hear the word of God I am chairman of the lectionary committee for the new hymnal, and one of the things I did when we were beginning to revise the lectionaries is I was trying to encourage our committee to have lessons that were a little longer than we were used to. The average length of time of our reading of the word on a Sunday morning is between five and seven minutes. I was trying to expand it to eight or nine minutes, which doesn't seem like a long time. For many people to move from five to six to seven minutes to eight, nine minutes is quite a change. Oftentimes when I teach the book of Galatians, I read that text to my students, and it takes me about twenty-one, twenty-two minutes. The book of Hebrews, for example, which is a little longer takes me about forty minutes. So you can see that if you read scriptures for say an hour, you can read a great deal of the scriptures in that time period. When Christians gathered together in the liturgy of the word, this is how they read the scriptures. Most of the communities had a number of scrolls from the Old Testament so they always had an Old Testament to read. This is how they would begin. They would begin by reading either from the Pentateuch, the first five Books of Moses, or from the prophets or the historical books and sometimes, from all three. And as we described in the synagogue liturgy, after each reading, there would be a pause. They would reflect on the reading by means of a psalm. They would sing the psalm and use it as a time of meditation upon the themes they had just read. This means that they are carefully choosing their readings like we do in our lectionary. After the reading of the Old Testament and the psalm, they would read from the epistles. These would be the epistles of Paul or Peter or John or some of the others. Oftentimes, because they would have these for only a short time, they would read the entire epistle itself or at least a good chunk of it. This was always a continuous reading because unlike the Old Testament, they would only have this for a short period of time. And it was best to kind of read it through. One of the things you'll discover in how scripture was read when it was read from the New Testament in the early Christian communities, was that it was a continuous reading of either the epistles or the Gospel itself. After the reading of the epistle they would do another psalm. But what early Christians would do now is that they would attach to this psalm an alleluia. Because they were already standing, there were no seats. They couldn't stand up for the gospel so the way in which they recognized now the very words of Jesus was by singing this alleluia, what Luther calls the perpetual voice of the church. The reading of the Holy gospel was the climax of the liturgy of the word. And the reason for this is because here are the very words of Jesus. If you look at this as an ascending scale, you'll see that you kind of start here with the Old Testament. You begin to move up towards the epistle and then you come to the point where you have this climactic moment where you read the words of Jesus in the Holy gospel. And that is the climax, not the sermon. The sermon is a continuation of that. But the real climax in the liturgy of the word are the very words of Jesus. Now, when the Gospel was read--and as I said, it was read probably for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes--the preacher would now preach on all the lessons of the day centering his words on the words of Jesus. But this is where we see how the preacher who would preach now for about an hour would bring together all the texts that were read in a liturgical way, commenting on those texts, expounding those texts, explaining those texts for those who had just heard that reading for an hour. Now, we're talking about a liturgy that�s going from anywhere to an hour and a half to two hours. This is why it's called the liturgy of the catechumens because so much time is spent in the word of God. This is where they're instructed in the faith. This is where they're taught what God is doing in the Scriptures. This is where they learn how to interpret the scriptures and hear how to hear the gospel. If you do this for a year or two, you really are immersed in the life of Jesus and in God's holy word. When the preaching was over, this was the time for prayer. And there was a very specific way of praying at this moment in the liturgy. It's called the prayer of dismissal which is where we get the word mass from, missa in the Latin mass. These were prayers that prayed for the church, for the world, for the needs of the community, for all the concerns that the community had. But then, at the end of these prayers, those who were not worthy or prepared to receive the Lord's Supper were dismissed from the assembly into another place. Now, this included the catechumens who were not yet baptized. They would not come to the Lord's Supper until they were baptized so the pastor would pray over them that they may continue to grow in their faith by hearing the word of God as they move toward their baptism. And by means of this prayer, they would leave the community of the baptized. There were others as well who would leave, specifically two categories: those who had, in some way, kind of offended the community and offended God by what we might call a public sin. This is what we might call the penitential class. These were people who were baptized but had committed a public sin. And as they were being restored to the church through repentance and confession of sins, they too were dismissed with prayer. On the other side of the coin were those who had offended the church by means of not a sin, but a public confession of something that the church did not consider to be part of the correct doctrine of the church, those who were, in a sense, the *heterodox. Those whose understanding of Christ, for example, was not the understanding of the church. They were being taught or being restored back to this right understanding. And until such time as that came, they too would be dismissed from the community. Now, these last two categories: the penitents and those who confessed something that was not part of the church�s teaching, these were people who are baptized. But all three of these categories were not allowed to come to the Lord's Supper. And after they were dismissed with prayer, they would close the door. In some cases, they would lock them. This is where we have our origin of closed communion. It's the closed door. That those who were not prepared to enter now into this holy of holies, this holy presence of God, and of course, the reason the early Christians did this, was because of their love for these people just like we were speaking about in the early Jewish rites, people who entered into the holiness of God in the temple not in a worthy way were in danger. So also, were these people's faith in danger if they were not prepared and worthy to receive these gifts, these holy gifts. This comes from a high understanding of the sacrament, a reverence for the presence of Christ and the desire to protect people from entering into this presence in a manner that is unworthy or unprepared. When the baptized now were together having dismissed those who could not come to the supper, the way in which they now acknowledged that they were in a state of reconciliation with one another is that they would do an extraordinary thing, something that was not a cultural phenomenon, that was not part of the culture of the world in which they lived, but was something that the freedom of the gospel gave them the ability to do. And that is that they would exchange the kiss of peace. Now, we might be shocked to recognize that this kiss was a full bodied kiss on the mouth. Men to men, women to women where in exchanging this kiss, which you hear referred to in the New Testament over and over again, particularly in the epistles of Paul, in this exchange of the kiss they're saying to one another we are at peace with one another. We are reconciled. We might now as a community come together and receive this gift as community because this is a moment, as we described before where heaven and earth come together in Christ. And when this kiss of peace was exchanged, they were ready now to set the table with the bread and wine which brings us then to the liturgy of the Lord's Supper.