ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 21.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: Again, thanks. And now would you mind going on to describe for us the structure of the liturgy of the sacrament. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Nick, thank you for that question because we need to see how the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper go together. And we need to consider them as a unit. There's a symphony of movement here. And you can't have one without the other. And the liturgy of the word, if you remember back in the table fellowship of Jesus, must kind of prepare the way for the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. If you remember the Emmaus story, when Jesus opens up the Scriptures to them, which is, in a sense, the liturgy of the word on the road, it causes them to have burning hearts, but doesn't open their eyes to see Jesus. The opening of the eyes only comes in the breaking of the bread which is, of course, the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. You have to have burning hearts before you have open eyes. And that has to precede the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. So what you see happening here among those who are now to receive the sacrament, are those who have been prepared to receive it because they've heard the word of God. They�ve heard it read and preached upon, and they are now ready, anxious, hungering, and thirsting for this holy food that they are about to receive. Now, just like the liturgy of the word, the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper in the early Christian churches is very simple. We do know that already in the second century, what we know as the preface of the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper is already in place. And that is the words that you know so well: The Lord be with you, and with your spirit. Lift up your hearts. We left them to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is meet and right that we do this. Those three phrases, that dialogue between the pastor and congregation, is some of the most ancient language in our church and some of the most powerful theologically. When the pastor greets the people with the phrase, the Lord be with you, this is the language of presence. This is the language of the angel Gabriel to Mary when he says, the Lord be with you. This is the language of Jesus to Peter. This is a language that describes the reality of Christ's bodily presence. And when the people say, and with your spirit, they are simply saying that the pastor now as he is going to speak the words of God, that through this speaking, the fact that he stands in the stead and by the command of Christ, Christ is going to be present in, with, and under bread and wine with his very body and blood. One of my favorite parts is when the pastor says, lift up your hearts. This doesn't simply mean get excited or, you know, let's lift ourselves up. But this is the description of how now we, in this earthly place, are lifting ourselves up into the heavenly places. This is a statement of how now we are being lifted up into heaven, how heaven and earth are coming together because of the bodily presence of Christ. And when the pastor says, lift up your hearts, the people respond with great fervor, we lift them to the Lord. We want to enter into heaven. We want to come together as heaven and earth in Christ. And this is why we give thanks. This is the language of the Eucharist. We give thanks because all these things, now, are happening for our good. And this is why it is good and right, as we say now in the new translations, it is good and right that we do this. Now, in the earliest Christian church, they didn't have what we now call the proper preface because, as we're going to see, there wasn't much of a church year. The proper preface is something that develops in the post-Constantinian Era when you have now a more developed church year where you can bring specific things that describe the character of that church year. But in the early Christian church, what they would begin to do right after the preface, was begin to pray over the bread and wine, what is called by scholars the Eucharist prayer. From the beginning, and for 1500 years, Christians prayed at the Lord�s Supper. Because what Jesus calls us to do is to bless and give thanks over bread and wine in a way that is reverent to that presence and faithful to the way in which he did it. The early Eucharist prayers are wonderful examples of how Christians understood the Lord�s Supper as being in the context of God's mighty acts of salvation. So when you read the early Eucharist prayers what you see them doing is reciting, beginning with the Old Testament, how God has acted mightily in the life of Israel and now in the life of the church to bring his salvation to them. And so, in a sense, what you see in the Eucharist prayer is a balance of the sermon just as the sermon kind of unfolds the word of God by showing how Christ is now acting in us, in the world and how he acted before and continues to do that. Now, the Eucharist prayer is doing the same thing, and the climax of the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper are the words of institution which are the very words of Jesus where, in the context of the Eucharist prayer, all these mighty acts of salvation come to their fulfillment, come to their completion on the night in which he was betrayed and took bread. And when he had given thanks he gave it to them saying, take, eat, this is my body. And after the supper, take, drink, this cup is the New Testament in my blood. Now, this is the second climax of the liturgy. And notice that it has the same character as the first climax. The gospel were the very words of Jesus, and now, in the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper, you have the very words of Jesus. And it is through these words, the words of Jesus himself, that the Holy Spirit works, and in a miraculous and mysterious way, by word and spirit, Christ is now present for us in bread and wine to give us his body and blood. When the words of institution were spoken, the prayer ends with a recital again of how God continues to feed his people. And here you see where the Eucharist prayer gives thanks to God for these gifts and petitions God to continue to feed his people with this holy food. Then early Christians would pray the Lord's Prayer, and at some point in this process, they would sing the Sanctus where they would acknowledge, in this magnificent hymn, the reality of what was happening in the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. As we mentioned before, how heaven and earth are now filled with the glory of Jesus. And there is that wonderful phrase from Psalm 118 in the Sanctus where we say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. This is called the Benedictus, the blessedness. And this is a simple description of how Jesus now comes to us in his body and blood. His name has been placed upon us in the invocation. His name has been placed upon us in the reading of the gospel, and now, his name is placed upon us in the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. In the simple distribution of this meal to the people of God, in a small space like early Christians worshipped in, was elegant and clean. The bread was broken and distributed. The cup was shared. The service was over. No great times of movement. No great processions, but a simple meal which is why the table was a table. It's so important for us to see that the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper is still a meal. And if you read the New Testament, you'll see that the early Christians celebrated a meal there between the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Lord�s Supper. It was only because of abuses in places like Corinth that the meal drops out, and it becomes now simply a ritual meal. But this is eating and drinking in the presence of Christ with bread and wine in which we receive this heavenly gift. And so what we've seen in the early Christian liturgical rites are these two simple structures of word and sacrament which was at the foundation of early Christian worship.