ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 43.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: Are there any new things we could be adding to our liturgies today? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: This is a wonderful question that follows up on the question before because there are some new things that we need to pay attention to that have come about in the liturgical renewal in Christendom since Vatican II which was the great ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic church. There is, in the introduction to the hymnal that I read before, a phrase that I have found to be of great guidance for me when I talk about the liturgy. Again, that was written by Norman * Nagle. And this is what he said: "That we have this living heritage and something new." Now, just think about that little expression, a living heritage and something new. Our heritage is not dead; it is alive. It is alive because that heritage is Christ himself who is alive and living among us by that bodily presence I've been talking about over and over and over again. And that living heritage is embodied by us, living people. And it�s contemporary because it's going on now. And yet, it's things that have gone on before there are things that have really, in many ways, an ancient pedigree, what some people call the great tradition or the historic liturgy, as I've mentioned before. But there is that something new. That something new is something that we now begin to assimilate into our liturgical life because it reflects who we are in our own time and in our own space and in our own culture. I've already given you one example of this when I was talking about the ordinaries, how we brought in, in the 1960's, '70's, a new ordinary, "This is the feast� that has really kind of taken the church by storm, not only our church, but Christendom. People are using that throughout the Christian world because it's a beautiful hymn, and it reflects the Biblical faith, and is something that speaks to who we are about, in some ways better than anything before has done. One of the things that we have usually had in our church as a kind of principle of liturgical reform, when we bring new things in, is that we have done it as a community. In other words, we've done it as a church. We haven't done it as a bunch of individuals in various congregations who are just kind of bringing things in willy-nilly. We decided we're going to choose people who are kind of going to receive from the church suggestions about what should be new. And then, we're going to test them in a church, and then as a church body were going to say, okay. Together, let's try these new things, or let's try those new things. Now, unfortunately, that process has broken down a little bit over the past twenty-five years because it's almost as if every congregation is its own church, and the pastor is like the pope, and he brings in whatever he wants. And you've got all these new things happening in these congregations, and so people have this sense of something happening all the time. There is newness that is too much, and again, this question is so related to the one that goes before that they really do go together. But let me illustrate a practical pastoral example of this. When I was a pastor in a parish in Middletown, Connecticut, I learned very early on that the folks who were a little bit older, who were shut in, who were in the nursing homes, for example, they were familiar with the old hymnal, the Lutheran Hymnal. This was in their brain. This was imbedded in them. And so for me to bring the new hymnal to them would have been foolish because they didn't know it. It wasn�t a part of who they were. It was a part of their identity. So I always took the old hymnal with me, and it was always amazing to me how they knew the liturgy by heart, even if they could really no longer communicate with me in a lot of different ways. This was because Sunday in an Sunday out, they had this continuity with the past. They did things that were familiar and became part of their memory. It became part of who they were. I'll never forget as a parish pastor, I had a small church so I had small confirmation classes, and one of the things I wanted my confirmands to understand was that the church was larger than Sunday morning. So I�d always take them on calls with me and take them to hospitals and nursing homes. I would always get permission from their families and the places I went, but I�d take them all along with me so they could see the people of God in these various places. And it also gave them a chance to kind of see the suffering of the church because that's where Christ is in the suffering saints. And part of what it means to be a Christian is to visit these people and include them in your life. I'll never forget this one class I took to a nursing home that was, perhaps, the nicest home. It kind of had an aura to it. Maybe some of you are familiar with those homes where the smell isn�t as a pleasant as it might be. And at that time, I had three girls in my class. These were thirteen year-olds and they were just starting to wear makeup, and they were kind of oblivious to life. Here we are, let's go pastor. We got in the car. We�re going along. I'll never forget when we walked into that nursing home, and here are these three girls who are, you know, they had their perfume on, and all of a sudden, they smelled that home. You could almost watch the makeup drain from their faces, and they got white as a sheet. They kind of, we can't go any further, pastor. This is�they saw the people there. And as I said, this wasn�t the nicest home and so people were loud, and it was a little chaotic. I remember ushering them down the hall into the room where I was visiting a woman who had Alzheimer's. I told them ahead of time what to expect, that we would have a conversation that wouldn't be very cogent, but to just wait and watch me and participate with me. Whenever I visited people, I always had a communion set where I would set the table. I had a wonderful white cloth I'd put down. I had candles and a beautiful little chalice and a place for the sacrament. And I always put on a stole. And when I did this, the woman we were visiting, you could see a change come over her that she knew this was a holy moment. You could really see that the kids were kind of struck by this. Then, as we went into the liturgy, you could see--now, here was a woman who wasn't making much sense with me beforehand. I was asking her questions, and she was just kind of not communicating very well. But the minute we went into the liturgy, she knew it all. She not only said her apart, she said my part. And you could see that the kids were deeply struck by this. Here is that living heritage alive in a woman who can't really communicate very well. And I�ll tell you one of the most endearing things in my life as a pastor was after we left there, we talked about that with the kids, and they were very impressed by what happened in that experience. And those three girls, they went back and they visited her in that home because they had a connection there. Now, think about it. What if I were changing the liturgy every week? What if I were bringing in new things every week for that woman? In her whole life, she was coming into a worship where there wasn't a continuity with the past, where there weren't things she could expect. Which liturgy would I use when I visited her in the hospital? I wouldn't have access to that memory. I wouldn�t be able to get at that memory that the liturgy still had embedded in her. This has become a very personal thing for me because my mother has Alzheimer's. She really doesn't recognize me anymore. She smiles when I come in because she knows that I'm familiar. She doesn't know my name anymore. And yet, we stand together in the liturgy every Sunday that we go to church together, and she still sings the liturgy. She prays the Lord's prayer. And just another illustration. I�ll never forget when we took her to a baseball game. Totally uninterested. She was, you know, completely agitated. But during the seventh inning stretch, when we stood up to sing take me out to the ball game, she belted it out because she knew it. It was part of her memory. There is that kind of that tradition, that heritage that is coming down Now, this is kind of a roundabout way to talk about what are some of the new things. Well, there are lots of them, new hymns, hymns that reflect the kind of contemporary sounds that we're hearing in our churches today that are good. I'm talking about music that endures, not necessarily the throw-away pop culture music, but music that has a character to it that will endure, that can be handed down from generation to generation. Many of them are folk tunes. One of the things that those who kind of study music--and this isn't necessarily my area--but they tell me that it's either the classical forms or the folk forms that are ones that span the generations, that the pop culture, the music that's here today gone tomorrow has never been used by the church. And so I think we can open ourselves up to more, particularly the folk songs, of the Christian faith and certainly ones that are outside our own culture, even into cultures that might seem very foreign to us. In our new hymnal supplement and in our new hymnal, we're going to have many hymns from the Latin countries, Latin America, South America, from China, from Africa. These are folk tunes that they use in their culture that we're now able to use in ours that reflect, I think, a wonderful way, of embracing the kind of the transcultural character of the liturgy itself. The new way in which we do the psalms is, I think, an exciting thing. In our new hymnal, we started chanting psalms again. For some people, those chants are a little wooden. They're not that interesting. But there are many different ways in which we can do the psalms. And in the hymnal supplement, as I mentioned before, we've actually gone back to a way of doing the psalms that is the most ancient way. And yet, we're using psalm tones and tunes to the antiphons that reflect the language of music today. So you're kind of mixing both together, and I think that's a wonderful opportunity for us to embrace a new way of doing the psalms that we've never done before I mentioned the new canticle, "This is the feast." But there are other canticles that are available to us. We're using new psalmody, for example, during the offertory. There are new psalms in the postcommunion canticle. There are new hymns that are being used in the liturgy that I think are very helpful. We have to be careful there to stay with the ordinaries as kind of the meat and potatoes of our liturgical life. But here there are new ways of responding within the Diving Service that I think we need to consider carefully as we move forward. One of the things that perhaps many people aren't aware of is in the Lutheran Hymnal, that is the old hymnal, where we talk about the liturgy of the Lord's Supper on page 15. That is actually an innovation in some ways. I mean the order of service itself. When you see Lutheran Worship, Divine Service II, even though it's not that much different from the Lutheran Hymnal, the way in which the order is reflects the more ancient order. Now, what we're seeing there are different orders. They're not radically different, but they are certainly ways in which the church has decided to do a different kind of format. And even though they began with the word and they have the sacrament and they certainly have the times of movement, some of the little nuances there in which they are patterned does show that the church is open and embracing new orders. One of the things I think we have to be careful about though is providing continuity. And what I teach at the seminary to our students is that there is a need for variety during the year because people want variety. But don't give it to them Sunday after Sunday. Have continuity within the season, but variety between the seasons. So, for example, what I recommend is during Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, use a particular setting. I recommend Divine Service I from Lutheran Worship because that is the most beautiful Gloria in Excelsis. That's going to be reflected in the new hymnal in a revised page 15 from the Lutheran Hymnal. Use that for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Then, when you go to Lent and Easter, go to Divine Service II where you can use "This is the feast" which is the canticle for Easter. Then when you go to Pentecost, you can go to another one of the settings, and maybe even use two during Pentecost, but only two, I would say. At most, four during the year. Now, notice you have continuity within a season, but there's a freshness between seasons. And here's something that's new. Here's something that's different. We also have a new lectionary. It's forty, fifty years old, but its new, never been used before, invented in the 1960's. It has been revised by us, and it is revised by all the churches that use it, and yet, here is where there is great continuity between the churches. This new lectionary is something that is still fresh for many of us who were brought up on the one-year series. That's a wonderful lectionary. But the three-year series also has some wonderful virtues as well, and I think we need to see that we have this variety within our church to use either the one-year or three-year series. But the three-year is still for us, very new. There are probably a number of other things that I'm forgetting, but perhaps when Dr. Brauer and I, at the end of this course, talk together, we can bring up some of the new things because I think that's one of the questions that will be asked at that time.