ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 45.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 does it mean to be reverent to Christ's presence? What implication does such reverence hold? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: When we talk about reverence, we're talking about something that is different for many people I think the best way to talk about this for us in the Christian church and in the Lutheran Church is to return to one of the great themes that I began with in the biblical foundations And that is that for us, as in the first century, one of the core values of our church is the holiness of God and the holy presence of Christ, his bodily presence among us If you look at the Old Testament, you'll see that they had a very healthy sense of God's holiness When you are in the presence of God, that can be a very salutary thing because there are gifts to be given and received there But if you are in God's presence in an unworthy way, that can also be to your danger and to your detriment Moses was very concerned about entering the presence of God on Mount Sinai And he was told by God to tell the people that anybody who goes and touches the mountain, they are in fear of their death When the Ark of the Covenant went into the hill country of Judea, as David led it there, you remember perhaps, in I think it's 2 Chronicles 6, says the oxen began to stumble One of the attendants reaches out and touches it and because he touches his holy thing, he is struck dead The Ark which bore the presence of God could strike down armies And when God appeared in The New Testament like the angel Gabriel, as a messenger of God appears to Mary, she's afraid as Peter is afraid when he sees Jesus and the great catch of fish and realizes that this is, in fact, the son of God And so we have to be careful when we enter into this presence even now, even in this world of ours because this is the creator who has come to his creation to bring us the new creation And when we enter into that presence, we must have a healthy awe and reverence for that presence Now, there�s lots of ways in which we can do that, even as individuals. But to speak as a corporate community, perhaps the best way we can be reverent to the presence is to believe it And to believe it by recognizing that when we come into this space, that we are like Moses We are entering on holy ground That means that the things that we do in that presence are going to be ones that reflect that holiness That means that the way we act, the way we speak, the songs we sing, the way we behave with one another are going to be ones that reflect the fact that Christ is present there bodily among us I always like to illustrate this in kind of a practical way If you were to meet the queen of England, you would probably put on your best suit, and you certainly wouldn't go up to her and slap her on the back and say, how are you doing, old girl You�d treat her with a reverence because she is the queen Or, if you want to translate it into our culture, the president Although in some ways that's not quite transferable because some of our presidents want to be known as kind of one of us Or when you attend your daughter's wedding, you don't go in shorts Or at least, I hope you wouldn't You�d probably put on a special suit, and there would be a particular decorum that you have because this is a special day This is, in fact, a holy day There are times in our lives that we do things in a certain way because we recognize that they are different from any other time And if, in fact, heaven is present in our worship in the person of Jesus Christ, then what we say, what we do, how we act is going to reflect our belief in that presence When we receive the gifts from that presence, we receive them in thankfulness and praise And there is certainly a reverence in the way in which we do that There is, what you might say, a particular kind of etiquette when we stand in the presence of God that we assume And sometimes, that etiquette can be over formalized where we are so stiff we don't seem as if we are natural We have to recognize also that this is our home This is where we belong Even though we may be formal in the sense that we have form, we should feel comfortable in God's presence We should feel, in a sense, that we are in a place that he has called us to be That this is our home This is where we belong And that that sense of comfort, that sense of ease that we have is also a part of the reverence that we experience when we are in God's place As I said, this is a difficult question to answer because if you look at the history of the church, people express the way in which they are reverent in different ways But in our culture, I would say that reverence is where we have a healthy sense of being in a place where we are, in a sense, distant because it is such a holy thing, and yet, we are also attracted in that we know that there is something that is being given here, a gift beyond compare And so there is in our culture, in a sense of reverence, that sense of familiarity and that sense of distance And yet, this has always been the healthy tension, even in the Old Testament, around the presence of God That it both attracts us because we know there is something there to receive, but it also, in a sense, repels us because we know it can be dangerous ground if we come into that presence unworthily I think the best thing to use here is common sense, to think about this in a way that what seems natural to us when the creator and redeemer of all things is the host of our meal If we think of it in that way, then I think we will understand what it means to be reverent in the presence of God.