Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 29 - Development of the Church Year (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 29.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. ******** >> DAVID: I'm sorry to step right back in, but I'm curious about the development of the church year. When did it become fully developed and why? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: In a way, David, I've already talked a little bit about the context for the development of the church year when I talked about the imperial period and the expansion of the liturgy, particularly the liturgy in Jerusalem. As soon as you get places of worship being placed on the holy places and recognizing these places and the days in which these places were used in the Scriptures, in the life of Jesus, you begin to set yourself in historical time and in historical places. Now, the history of the church year is a lot like the rest of the liturgy. It is very complex, and its development is shrouded in mystery. Much of it is anonymous. And we don't know many of the origins. But we do know this: that from the beginning, Easter was a day that was recognized as a historical day. It was called the *Pascha. It was the three-day sequence of Good Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And that it was a day that was recognized very early as a historical remembrance of what happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem. Perhaps the next most recent festival is Epiphany, the coming of the wise men which was immediately associated with January 6th. There were lots of reasons for that, some that we may get into later, but that was probably the next most recent festival. Christmas was much later in the year 338 even though there were glimpses of Christmas ahead of time. That is when it first became an official holiday. But which you have these historic places, you now begin to see historical time come in. And one of the things that happened is in Alexandria, after Epiphany, following the sequence in the Gospels, there would be the coming of the wise men. There would be the baptism of Jesus. And then there would be the forty days of Jesus in the wilderness. And all of those happened after the celebration of the Epiphany on January 6th. Now, sometime in the fourth century, probably in Jerusalem, that forty days that recognized the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, that was detached from the Epiphany celebration and attached to a time of preparation for Easter which comes to be known as Lent. This was a time, Lent was now, a time not so much of penance, although it was. But it was a time that was attached to Easter as a time of preparation for the catechumens who were coming to baptism. Lent was a time for baptismal preparation. And those who were baptized, in a sense, renewed their baptismal vows as they accompanied these catechumens who were coming to baptism as the baptized during this period of time. This was also a time of penance, and there was a penitential journey of those who were going through the final stages of being restored back to the church, as we mentioned earlier, because of a public sin. And now what we call Ash Wednesday was really first and foremost the enrollment of the catechumens in the final stages of their preparations for baptism, but also a time in which ashes were poured on the penitents and they are put in sackcloth so that they might go through the final stages of their preparation of restoration to the church and the Lord's Supper on Monday Thursday. All these things happen in the post-Constantanian period. And in order to fully understand the church year in its development, we really need to recognize two things about it that are fundamental to its development. The first thing is it's theological foundation. These are first and foremost. But the second thing is that the church year, because it grew up in the Western Hemisphere, or I should say in the Northern Hemisphere, that it has a rhythm that corresponds to nature. So you have this theological rhythm, and you have this natural rhythm. And those two go together very nicely as the church year grows in the post-Constantinian period. We will see that the development of the church year is centered on the life of Christ. And so its early development is deeply christological. It was a way for people to see Christ very clearly in the way during the year that they recognize time. And so Christ comes to them every Sunday, but Christ now becomes part of their yearly observations. And one of the things that we're going to see as we watch this theological and natural development of the church year is that there is a very healthy tension between Sunday and church year that gave a fullness for the people of God in a way in which they embraced time in a Christian way.