ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 23.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: What did the various authors mean when they speak about the urban liturgy, or the liturgy on the town? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: The imperial liturgy that I have just described, that is this five-fold shape, becomes something that spreads throughout the Roman Empire. One of the places where this liturgy is developed is in Jerusalem which has now become a city of pilgrimage. Many people don't realize that during the early domestic period, the period of persecution from 30 to the time of Constantine in 312 A.D., Jerusalem was really not a significant place at all. In fact, it wasn't even called Jerusalem. It was called Aelia Capitolina, just a small roman outpost in the Mideast. But with Constantine, in particular with the efforts of his mother Helen, in uncovering the holy places, Christians from throughout the world from Rome, Alexandria, Caesarea, from many of these great Christian urban centers would travel to Jerusalem to see these holy places and to experience the liturgy of a Jerusalem. Now, in the fourth century, somewhere around the year 375, we have the diary of a nun from northern Spain by the name of *Ageria who writes back to her sisters in the convent in Spain about the liturgy in Jerusalem that describes in detail this historic liturgy that I've just been describing to you. And one of the things that she tells them about is the fact that what the early Christians did now with this historic liturgy is they took it into the streets. If the evangelistic thrust of the earliest Christians was to go out into the highways and byways and bring Christians -- to bring these new Christians into the liturgy, the thrust of this imperial period is to take the liturgy out into the streets. And this is happening in Jerusalem, Rome, in Constantinople, in all the great urban areas. But its inspiration comes from Jerusalem. What they would do occasionally, and I'm talking four or five times a year, and in Jerusalem, it was always associated with the High Holy days, particularly of Holy Week or Christmas or Epiphany or times like that. What they would do is that they would begin the liturgy outside of the main Basilica in a small square when the world began its day. And they would begin with what we would probably call our matins, a service of word, prayer, and song where they would read scriptures there in the square as the sun is beginning to rise. They would pray. And they would sing songs. And then they would begin to make their procession to the large basilica. Occasionally, they would stop in another place and they would do another liturgy similar to matins. And as they're making the procession, more and more people are joining it. Now, what many people don't realize is that the number one tool of evangelism in this period was the liturgy itself. The Romans were fascinated by what they were seeing. They were hearing the word of God, and they were following this procession as it made its way to the main church. Everything that happened up until the time they get to the main church is essentially the entrance rite. It�s a long entrance rite. It would sometimes take two or three hours in the morning to get to the main church. But when they got there in the late morning it was there that they had the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the sacrament. Now, not everybody to fit in the church. And here, you can see how the church is already probably filled with some people, but then there would be people who have been following the procession would try to fit into the church. But everybody else who could not be in the main church would go out into their own little house churches or their smaller churches in the city where they would hear the liturgy of the word and receive the sacrament there. One of the things they try to do, though, from his main church with the bishop presiding over the liturgy was to consecrate enough bread and wine so that it could be taken out into all the churches of the city so that everybody would commune from the one table at the hand of the bishop himself. Now, this was not always possible to do, but they tried to do this as best they could. So the distribution of the sacrament would include the whole city. Now, what the goal of this liturgy on the town, this urban liturgy, was to have as its ultimate expression was not simply to evangelize the city, but to show the unity of the church. There was one bishop. There was one altar. This was done in the whole day. It was done in one large liturgy that showed how Christians were bound together in unity around the presence of Christ. Now, this liturgy in the main basilica would take place for three or four hours, late into the afternoon. And then from there, the bishop would travel to another square to end the day with the lamp lighting, which is how the day ended for the pagans, with vespers or evening prayer. If you remember, our evening prayer is about the lighting of the lamps which is a reflection of this particular urban liturgy that brought the whole day to the end. Now look what's happening here, you have the whole city. You have the unity around the bishop and the one altar. And when you do this say 5, 6, 7 times a year, the Roman Empire is beginning to see the significance of what the Christians are confessing about Christ. This is why the numbers begin to explode during this time. It's not simply that this is the legal religion and this is what everybody is doing. But the liturgy itself is so magnificent. It's so majestic in its power. It is so awesome in its character. It is so mysterious and deeply moving that even the Romans who were used to those pagan worship rites that I described earlier are seeing now that the Christians have something that is worth partaking of. They are struck by the reverence of these rites. They are struck by their holiness. They are struck by the belief that the Christians have that the creator of all things, Jesus Christ himself, is present bodily giving these gifts. And they want to be part of it. We're going to see that this urban liturgy is very important to what happens in the next medieval period in the more northern parts of Europe as the barbarians come down and invade Rome and begin now to become Christians and take this liturgy into their homes. We're going to see how this liturgy on the town is foundational for how they begin to understand the liturgy. And so what we see here in this urban liturgy, it is a way in which Christians and now see themselves as evangelizing the whole world. This was an extraordinarily ambitious and courageous thing to do. But you can see how clearly here liturgy and mission go together. This is something that we forget sometimes when we look at our worship. And what we're going to see here is that these Christians did not change the liturgy, adapt the liturgy, to the culture in which they lived. What they were trying to do was convert the culture to show the culture that it needed to be transformed by the liturgy. And it is that principle that we're going to see is foundational for the health and growth of the church.