ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 73.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: I would like to come back to Luther for a moment. What drove him to reform the Latin mass? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Luther took up the reform of the Latin Mass because other people were trying it and not doing it well. The story goes like this. He was hiding out so that the Holy Roman Empire could not find and destroy him, according to the wishes of the emperor and the Pope. And his partner in ministry in Wittenberg, *Carl Scott had, on Christmas of 1521, made changes to the mass because he felt the pressure of the Reformation to adjust the texts and the elements of the mass to fit more with the Reformation. And he did this in a way that was extremely disturbing to the city and to Luther. If you have seen the recent Luther movie, you will see some of that depicted, but I'll rehearse it a little bit here. On Christmas, when people came forward to receive Holy Communion without any teaching in particular, suddenly in their lives they have never received the wine, our Lord's blood, and they're forced to receive it. This had been a very sacred thing to them, a fear of spilling it or misusing it, and they'd always received just the bread. Now, all of a sudden, they are now to receive also the wine. Upsetting to some. When he gets to that point in the service before the distribution where our Lord�s words of institution are done and had been in the canon of the mass, unfortunately we don't have time here to do the whole history of this, but that was a series of prayers that surrounded the words of institution, rather long, and they were spoken at the altar in a typical mass. And the people really didn't have to hear it. Suddenly, they come to that spot where the words of institution occur and *Karl stopped is shouting into the room. And so this is a shift in the way it's done. That could seem strange and upsetting to people. And because of all the commotion in Wittenberg, it also went around the business of destroying statues and changing the space of worship in an iconoclastic way. He became concerned, and he went back to Wittenberg in early March of 1522 and joined * Karl stopped there and did a series of sermons. Now, you want to read the quietest Reformation kind of sermons. He is saying don't change it until you've taught it. Make sure people understand how to use it and what it's about. It isn't about breaking away and suddenly having everything right, but it's bringing people so they don't lose their faith and become upset over the things that should be beneficial to them. So his revisions that he did actually waited another year and a half before he put them in place. So there was a caution about this. Now, when he set about to do it then what'd he do? He said those things that had been invented by humans then he comments the mass can be removed, especially the sacrifice of the Mass and the language that went around it in the prayers, in the offertories. He set about to remove epistles that seemed to teach works, long graduals where the musical creations were of a size where people couldn't use it, the notion of dropping alleluias in Lent. He said you could sing alleluia anytime. Praise the Lord is a perfectly good thought whenever. But there was a long tradition of leaving it out in Lent. Remove those sequences and proses or Latin hymns that had entered and didn't advance the service very much and often contained fuzzy or false doctrine. And especially, get rid of the private masses where a priest comes and does the mass and collects money for others to receive the benefits of the mass as though you could do that. False teaching, that had to go. Those were human inventions that could go by the wayside. And keep then what was useful. And if you wanted to, you could keep the investments. You could keep the vessels that were used, often these were highly ornamented. You could keep candles, organs, the music that had been there before that fits with the scripture, and even images and statues in this space. So you don't have to change all that. What you change is that which has the false doctrine attached to it and the fuzzy kind of things that allows people to think that works are at the center. So in 1523 then, he came forward with a Latin mass, and you can read this in Volume 53. It starts with an introit. He says the Psalms would be better instead of just a little snippet of Psalms. Use the Kyrie. There are various melodies that can work with it. The Gloria in Excelsis, now, we're still in Latin. Epistle, a gradual and alleluia. Those were musical inherit tunes and settings. You can eliminate the sequence of prose that would follow that, kind of a hymnic creation in Latin unless the bishop wants to. So somebody would have to make a judgment. Use the gospel. You can use candles in a procession around it and incense if you want, but that's not required. The Nicene Creed remains. Now a sermon will be there, or you could put it, he says, before the introit. But we discover that's not a great idea because as people come in they miss part of the sermon so we didn't actually do that very often. Then you come to the Holy Communion part of the service after the sermon and you set up the altar with the bread and wine. The use the salutations, the Lord be with you and also with you. Lift up your hearts. We left them to the Lord. And the prefaces that are rehearsed. The work of Christ could be used. The words of institution would be sung, in other words, into the room. The Sanctus would be sung by the choir. The Lord's Prayer would be there as well as the peace, the peace of the Lord be with you always. And also with you, the response, the Agnus Dei, the distribution, the choir could sing the communion text, and that was a musical setting of a psalm text like Psalm 34, if I recall correctly. It had a long tradition of being used there. Collect, Benedicamus, or bless the Lord, bless we the lord. Thanks be to God. And a benediction. The benediction was a new idea. So it retained, it adjusted. It got rid of mostly the abuses around those prayers that have the sacrifice of the mass kind of language. So his move there was to remove the abuses, avoid the changes that offend the week, purge the nonscriptural stuff from the service. You can keep the Latin. Communicants should, he urges, notify the pastor of their intention to commune, which was an old practice in the ancient church. Preach in the vernacular. You can't have a mass unless you have a congregation so no private ones. People receive both kinds. They'd be taught how to use it properly. Create spiritual songs for the service. So he was urging, at this time even German ones, and keep the vestments, candles, organ, images and keep matins and vespers. They can be a good kind of service order to use. So his Latin mass revisions grew out of others putting their hand to it. And he knew once he did it, others would imitate so he was reluctant because this would, in a sense, create a lot of upset and change maybe needlessly. Nonetheless, he put his hand to it, and it had great impact.