ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 41.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: Please permit me to ask a question which may help me get my arms around all that we have discussed in this course. What is the importance of continuity with the generations that came before us as we gather for worship today? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Paul, this is one of the most important questions to ask, especially in this day and age where we sometimes are not as sensitive as we might be to this question of continuity. Let me begin by just talking a little bit about our culture and its desire to provide continuity for itself in many ways. I've been alerted, in my lifetime, that there has been increasingly greater interest in genealogy, family genealogy and family lineage than ever before. Where I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we have the second largest genealogical library in the country next to Salt Lake City, which of course to the Mormon faith, is fundamental to their faith in terms of tracing generations. The idea of continuity with what went before, knowing your roots, is all about identity, who you are, how you have come into being, who it is that you are in terms of your family, in terms of the things that have shaped you from generation to generation. This has also been expressed in our culture very much by the rise in genetic therapy, and you are what your genes are. If you know your history, your medical history, and you know the kinds of things that are in your family, you will have a better sense of understanding what might be going on in you physically. There, continuity with the past is very important and there are other ways in which this is reflected in our lives. People are interested more and more in historical things. One of the words that has become kind of an unpopular word among Lutherans is the word tradition. When we talk about continuity between generations, we really are talking about tradition. Now, one of the reasons why tradition is sometimes a bad word for Lutherans is because we do have people within Christendom who use tradition, even above Scripture to order their lives, which is something that you and I would not probably find to be part of what we understand ourselves to be as Lutheran Christians as having tradition in such a prominent way. But if you look at Luke's Gospel for example, the very first four verses of his gospel, he uses the word tradition. And the word for Luke, and the word tradition in the New Testament, oftentimes refers to the scriptures, that the first king of line of tradition is the scriptures itself. And what does the word tradition mean? It means to hand over, to give over something. Tradition is the way in which the church hands down the faith. And that's why the Scriptures is the first line of the tradition, to hand over the faith is to hand over the scriptures. Now, I think we all agree that's a good thing. I think all of us would agree that we want our children to be believers. We want them to know the biblical faith. We want them to know the stories of the scriptures. We want to hand down to them this wonderful gift that has been given to us in Scriptures; namely, that the center of Scriptures is our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. When we talk about the continuity between generations, we're talking about how there are many, as the book of Hebrews says, has gone before us in the faith. We're surrounded by this cloud of witnesses who have testified in their lives how significant the gospel is for them and how it has ordered their lives and in many ways, how it has preserved them in very difficult times, times and not just simply of persecution for being a Christian, but times of suffering and times of trial. If you look at the history of the church as we have seen it at worship, you will see that worship is the context in which the biblical story is told. Worship is where the Scriptures are handed down. Worship is where the Scriptures are explicated by the pastors as he interprets them in the scriptures. Worship is where the ritual of the church, the rites, the patterns of behavior that we have in the presence of God are learned. And these are good things. These are things that we want to inherit from our grandmothers and great grandmothers. This is something that gives us great comfort that when we enter into the presence of Christ, we are singing hymns. We are singing spirituals songs or the ordinaries, these liturgical hymns, that have been sung for generations and that we know by their use in the church, by the fact that they've been there for a long time, that they're saying things about God that our true. I don't know if it is comforting for you or not, but it is of great comfort to me that when I sing the Sanctus, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabbath, Heaven and Earth are full of your glory. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. When I sing that, I think of the fact that Jesus probably sang that in the synagogue liturgy. And that the very words that I am singing now were sung by my Lord. I'm deeply comforted by the fact that the Lutheran liturgy that I have been using my entire life was used by my great grandfather when he was ordained as a pastor in 1878. Sure, there are some differences. But if you look at the liturgy he used then, it is the historic liturgy with its entrance rite, with its word service, its preparation of the table, its sacrament, and its distribution. They were there. He sang the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. He read the same lessons I read. There is extraordinary continuity there that gives me access to a man who I value as part of my family, even though he's somebody I never met, somebody I never had the privilege of knowing. Let me illustrate this in another way, too, where there is continuity even now among us. One of the things that really struck me when I was serving a mission in Spain for three months, I preached in this little Spanish church, and we had our services at noon because people had to travel from all over and so to give them time to get there they would come at 12:00. And I always had lessons that I read, and these were lessons that were part of my liturgical life in the United States and they were very happy to kind of take part of those liturgical lessons. Every Sunday morning very early, as part of my preparations--and this is something I did because I'm interested in liturgy and I'm interested in how other churches would do things--I would go to the local Roman Catholic Church in the small town that I was in, *Pola. And I found it fascinating that the lessons that I heard in this small little church in northern Spain were in fact the same lessons that I was going to preach on that day in this Lutheran Church. And that these were the same lessons that my wife and children were going to be hearing at St. Paul's in Fort Wayne, Indiana, along with all my colleagues. Now, notice the continuity there across the board. Now, that's right now. Throughout our Christian world, throughout Christendom, Christians of all different stripes were listening to the same scripture lessons and then, if you extend that over generations, you begin to realize what I was trying to talk about earlier, and which I think is perhaps the answer to this question, that if our liturgy is defined by the bodily presence of Christ, who is heaven on earth, that this is liturgy that takes us beyond ourselves into another world, so to speak, where we do worship with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven with all the saints who have died and risen in Christ. That means that we can't be so narrow in our own worship that it is only for this place and this time, but that there is something about having a worship that extends not only across Christendom today, but across the hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of years, that Christians have worshiped together. When I was a young person, we lived in Mexico City. At the time, I didn�t think liturgical thoughts. I remember I was confirmed there in Mexico City at the age of fourteen. Right after that, we went to a small town and went to what they call a mariachi Mass where they basically use the songs of the mariachis for the liturgy. I never really been to a Catholic church up until that time, and here I am in this Catholic church in Mexico. It's really almost like a demonstration, but it was a true service. But what struck me as a fourteen year-old, is that I could follow the service because it began the way we did, and it had the Kyrie and I knew it. And I knew it in Spanish, and I could hear the words. And it had the Gloria. And it had the reading of the scriptures. And it had the Sanctus. And it had the Lord's Supper. It had the Agnus Dei. Now that struck me that, wow, even though these people are so different, and even though the music is different, there is a structural continuity that we have. I think the value of this is something that perhaps in our culture underestimate. And the more that we think about this, the more we realize how important it is. Let me close this by just reflecting on a principle that I mentioned before, but this is where I wanted to talk about it because I think this is a great place to use this principle to illustrate the significance of your question. There is a maxim that has been bantered around in liturgical circles for about 1,600 years. It comes from a man by the name of *Prosper of Aquitaine. In Latin it�s *Lex orandi, lex prudende, which, if you translate it, it simply means that the way in which you pray is going to establish or constitute the way in which you believe. Now just think about that for a minute. When you come in to worship, which is the way of prayer, that's what they mean by that. They�re really talking about the Sunday morning liturgy. What you do in your worship is very fundamental for shaping and forming and nurturing what you confess, what you believe. If I'm a Lutheran and I start singing Baptist hymns for ten years, I'm going to start believing like a Baptist. That's just what happens. I'm not making a value judgment there. I'm just simply saying that that's the power of hymnody. If I worship in a particular way, that is going to shape the way in which I think about things in terms of my confession of faith. One of the reasons why we've been going through the liturgy as we have to show you the structures and to show you the importance of the word of God and the various things that were handed down as vehicles for the people's response to the word of God, was to show you that the liturgy itself in this great historical character that has been there for some many hundreds of years, has been there because it teaches a way of belief that you know is true. And this is why we have to be so careful about the changes we make. And this is why we have to be so careful about the hymns we sing. And this is why we have to listen carefully to our pastors� sermons to make sure that he is representing the Biblical faith in what he is saying because preaching is a fundamental way in which faith is handed down. When you have that principle, the way of prayer is ultimately the way you're going to believe, you're going to see the power of liturgy in shaping people's lives and shaping their faith. This is why when you see changes going on in the liturgy, you have to be a diagnostician of those things. You have to be able to say, okay. What is it that's happening here? I need to diagnose is this good, or is this not good. And if it's not good, why is it not good, and what must we do to get it back to where it is something that really does reflect what we believe. As Lutherans though, we are people who have a confession of faith. And we do flip that around because we will say what we believe does shape the way we pray. And that is for us, as Lutherans, as important as the other one. The other one happens to be a reflection of reality. That's what happens if you pray a particular way, you're going to believe this particular way. But in order to make sure that our prayer is reflecting the truth of what we believe, we have to be sure that it is shaped by our confession. And as the Lutheran Church, we have a wonderful confessional heritage that I know Dr. Brauer is going to spend a great deal of time talking to you about. We need to apply that confessional heritage to our liturgies so that we can see how important it is that there is continuity. One of the things I do at the end of my class in Lutheran worship is I draw out all the various Lutheran traditions from the time of Luther. And then I go back before that and show all the traditions that led up to Luther. And what is remarkable when you look at the kind of trajectory of all these liturgical rites, is that what they were doing in the fourth century is essentially what Luther returns to in the sixteenth century. It's what our Lutheran ancestors in the nineteenth century when they came over from Germany brought with them from Germany. And it's essentially what we're doing today. Again, for me, that is very, very powerful that I am worshiping like the saints in the fourth century like Luther, like Walther and *Leah, like my grandparents and my great grandparents. That there is this wonderful continuity that puts me in this line of faithful Christians who have been preserved faithful unto death by means of this worship in which they have stood in the presence of God. This is a question, I think, many of our church leaders today need to think carefully about as we see the culture begin to kind of bombard us. We have to be careful not to let the culture come in too much, but also to be aware of the fact that we are cultural beings and it has to reflect, to a certain extent, the culture in which we live. That's why we work so hard at what we do liturgically, that we have to have a healthy balance there. One of the things that helps us as a principal in guiding us in the way in which the culture impacts our lives is to always ask the question: Is this a liturgy that my great-grandfather would like to use. Would Luther feel comfortable standing in the presence of Christ by means of this? As I like to say in somewhat of a comical way to my students, when you pick the hymns, what Abraham like to sing this?