ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 50.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: My name is Nick, by the way, and my fledgling ministry is in the heart of the city of Los Angeles proper. Prior to becoming involved in the work of pastoral ministry, I was a high school biology teacher. Here's my first question: Why did the Reformation make faith such a key element of Christian worship? And what had been the key elements for worship prior to the Reformation? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: That is an excellent question, obviously. How does faith fit with this idea of Christian worship? It didn't fit so well at the time of the Reformation. When we look back into the time of Jesus Christ and the disciples, Jesus was in the process of revealing the Father. He spoke for the Father through him. You would know who the father was, so Jesus told us. And he was the one who walked on this earth trusting the Father, showing us how a perfect life could be lived, but also became our savior. And his victory over sin on the cross was celebrated and confirmed by his resurrection. And under Jesus, we have this new covenant. We set aside the Old Testament worship, and now, we live by faith in Jesus Christ as savior. When you look at the New Testament, the story of Acts, the spread of the gospel, you see that that was the key element, to bring this message of Jesus as savior so that people could trust in him. Now, this was carried into Europe through the missionaries. And as the church grew, it encountered counter-ideas by Christians and by thinkers who questioned various doctrines. So heresies emerged. They had to be stamped out. The Creed summarized the faith and carried the gospel in that form and teaching from the apostles. The idea of worship was altered in the Middle Ages as the church experienced the lack of teaching and learning in society so it became more and more a spectator sport, maybe not a sport, but a spectator event. And this changed the way people viewed the worship, and teachings then were adjusted. For example, when there was great fear of giving the people the Lord's body and blood in the wine in the cup, lest this be spilled and be dishonored, they said, well, it would be just fine to receive only the bread. That was a less messy thing to distribute. That's not what Jesus taught, but that was a change that was made. And then the teaching alongside went well, if you receive the bread, you receive, obviously, some of the blood that would be in the body of Christ so you receive the whole thing. Don't worry about it. They made the mass, the central act of worship of gathered Christians, into a sacrifice that was offered to God as a good work to aid your salvation. Jesus' death on the cross, his resurrection wasn't enough. You needed, in a sense, to be there in the mass to be with God and to bring other works in order to be saved. So it became not only a spectator thing to come and watch the mass as the sacrifice was done again, but you would multiply masses and these could be sold to help your drunken uncle, now in purgatory, to be released. And so at the time of the Reformation we even have certificates sold that are meant to release you from the weight of your sins and the offering of these good works by others transferred to you through this process run by the pope and agents of his. Well, this took the element of faith out of it and made the mass into a work that you offered to God. And that was the purpose of it. So the Reformation looked again at what Jesus taught, and they clarified that you are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Now, by Grace is an important line or part of that line, grace meaning the mercy of God. It's not your works, but that God is so merciful that you have the benefits of what Jesus has done. And the benefits are received through faith. That faith simply grasps hold of the promise of salvation in Jesus Christ, and by that, moved by the Holy Spirit to receive it this way. It's all yours, the whole benefits of salvation and eternal life and peace with God and forgiveness. So the works are not the key to it. The faith is. Works that are not our performance when they�re good works, and they're beautiful in God's eyes. This is really done through the Holy Spirit because our human nature is a rebellious nature. It doesn't want to do good works. It wants to put things before God that would make him like us, look favorably, so we can take no credit for these. We need, like, faith to give the credit to the Holy Spirit working in us. It is not the works that save us; faith does. And the words that come along with faith work by the Holy Spirit also flow from God. God is not looking then for the outward act of showing up at the mass but the inward act of faith that trusts him for what is received through faith. Only God can tell when the outward act and the faith are coming together. So the Reformation had to clarify that it wasn't the outward act that God wanted, of receiving Holy Communion or hearing the word. It was actually believing what it offered. Faith, not the outboard act is what God wants. So faith is central, and that's what we preach. That's what we pray about. That's what we sing about, our trust in Jesus Christ. It's all about faith. So in our confessional language, faith, worship, *inaudible, *cultus divinus, *cultus Dei, are the kind of words, the worship of God is that faith receiving. That is what God is seeking.