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ROUGHLY EDITED COPY

LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2

00.LW2

Captioning provided By:Caption First, Inc.

P.O. Box 1924

Lombard, IL60148

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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.

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> DR. ARTHUR JUST: My name is Arthur Just, and I am a professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have been a pastor since 1980, and the first four years of my ministry I spent as a pastor at GraceLutheranChurch in Middletown, Connecticut, a lovely parish on the Connecticut River. We had about three hundred souls, a congregation that had some conflict but was really a wonderful experience for me. I've been at the seminary now for twenty years. I'm starting my twenty-first year. And I’ve taught a number of things in the course of those twenty years. For a long while, twelve years, my primary area of teaching was homiletics.

Throughout that time, I've always taught Lutheran worship, although liturgy in Lutheran worship is, in a sense, a bit of a hobby for me. It's a secondary aspect of my work because my doctoral studies and my studies at the STM level were in the New Testament

I went to the seminary that I now teach at, and I received my Masters of Sacred Theology from YaleDivinitySchool in 1984 in New Testament and liturgics, and then my Ph.D. at the University of Durham in England in New Testament in 1990. My thesis was on the Emmaus story so my primary area of teaching is Luke and Acts, but I also teach courses like Galatians and Hebrews. I have taught pastoral theology as well and really, many other courses in the pastoral ministry department.

I'm also the dean of the chapel at the seminary in Fort Wayne and have been that for about four and a half years now and enjoy it immensely. It's a wonderful experience to be able to lead the worship life of our community and to be there every day to greet people and to worship with them. I also am director of the deacon of studies program which is a new hat that I am wearing and also am enjoying that very much because I think it's a wonderful opportunity for our church and for the women in our church to serve the Lord in this capacity.

I'm essentially from New England, which is where I was born and raised although I've had a lot of experience overseas. My family lived in Mexico City for eight years and in Spain for four years. And I have a wonderful family. I have a daughter who is a graduate from ValparaisoUniversity, and she's now an English teacher getting married this year. I have a son at IndianaUniversity in Bloomington studying to be an artist. And then I have a son who is going to be a freshman in high school which is a very exciting thing for us. We love the years of high school.

One of my passions, as I think you'll see in this course, is the worship of the church. And the last twenty years, I think one of the primary places that I have found myself to be in this church, is somebody who is out in the church speaking about the worship of the church. So as much as it is, in a sense, a secondary thing for me, it really has become very primary, especially now that I've become dean of the chapel.

But I look forward to the time that we're going to have together and to be able to think through some of the very important things that we have to do as a church, as we gather together for worship. And I hope that the time we have together is one in which it will be salutary for you and one that we will be able to, at some point when we perhaps meet one another, share in the common treasures that we have as Lutherans in our liturgical life.

> DR. JAMES BRAUER: I'm Jim Brauer, professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and dean of the chapel.

I was born in Colorado. I lived in Utah as a youngster and then Wisconsin. Living in Utah was a little bit like living in a foreign land among the Mormons. That was slightly formative in itself, even though I was quite young. I'm a graduate of Concordia Seminary St. Louis, and I also have a master of sacred theology from St. Louis, a master of sacred music from New York's Union Seminary, and a Ph.D. in music from City University of New York. Now that's an interesting combination, a Lutheran institution, a really Protestant institution, Union Seminary, in it's kind of global view of Protestantism. And from the City University of New York in music which is very global in the sense that the history of musical instruments was at the museum in the curator's office, and the *musicology course was taught by somebody who was born in Ethiopia and was an African himself, to introduce you to this plus the other kind of world scholars.

The thesis that I wrote was about Lutheran music in the seventeenth century so I did my research in Germany and studied how the French, English, and Italians influence the German sacred music in the use of instruments. So it was kind of a cultural orientation. And I was ordained in 1965 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Packers. I hope that doesn't get me in trouble with any students, but it is part of my life.

My call, my first one, was to teach at * Bronxville Concordia College, New York. And thus my orientation, all in New York schools, and to teach Latin, Greek, and religion. Then after a few years of doing that, I moved into the music department, eventually became department chairman and division chairman. And after twenty-two years of serving there, I was executive director for the Commission on Worship for four years. So I got to see kind of a global picture and ethnic viewpoints as we worked on various projects.

And then, thirteen years ago, I came to Concordia Seminary to teach. Now along the way, when I was a college teacher, I was also involved on a weekly basis in congregations in the leadership of worship, especially the musical side because the pastor usually didn't have an assistant. When he went on vacation, I would go preach in his place. And I'd get somebody else to play the organ. But that gave me an interaction in the congregation life in one place for fourteen years where I dealt with the children and adults in how to express and use music in that place in artistic ways, even though it was primarily a blue-collar kind of committee. And then later, for another six or seven years, in a place that was mostly white collar and very interested in the arts. And I had others who would take care of other choirs.

Even when I was in college and high school, I was already assisting with worship by playing the organ and so forth, and even held positions where I did this on a Sunday basis in college. So, you know, I was formed into these questions just by needing to know and make good choices and to work with others. That was helpful when I came to Concordia Seminary to teach about worship, to see it kind of in a user's viewpoint because I heard the sermon twice on Sundays. I got to do things multiple times and to learn to assess and to help people in doing it. Likewise, to be on a campus with a daily chapel through all these years and then to lead a seminary campus in a daily chapel program and to prepare the special services and to teach then the courses that prepare people to do this. So I teach the basic course. I teach also about hymnody, about the theology of worship, about cultural adaptation of it, even to a doctoral level. And this has been a great joy for me to wrestle with all the questions that come theologically, culturally into the practice of individuals with many different congregations as the students of this course will have individual choices to make. And I hope what we do will be extremely helpful.

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY

LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2

01.LW2

Captioning provided By:Caption First, Inc.

P.O. Box 1924

Lombard, IL60148

********

> JOSHUA: Hello, Dr. Just. I'm Joshua, and I come from the wide open ranch lands of eastern Wyoming. My ministry is very rural in character. I have a feeling the other students and I will have many more questions than usual for this class. So I'll work to keep my questions brief. I'll begin by asking: what is central to a biblical understanding of the theology of worship?

> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, Joshua for a most excellent question and perhaps the most important question that we will discuss in this course on worship. The question about the biblical understanding of the theology of worship is central to what we're going to be talking about because everything that we are going to say flows from that theology of worship.

The fact that our worship is centered in the Scriptures is one of the great comforts that we have as Lutherans and as Christians who gather together around the presence of Christ. One of the ways of getting at an answer to that question is to ask this: what is God doing when we gather together around the word and the sacrament? When we look at a biblical theology of worship, we have to begin by asking ourselves how did Jesus worship. Where did he worship? What rites did He use? What was the time framework in which He worshipped? That not only includes Jesus, but that includes the apostles and all the first century Jews, and it's a question that involves us in how the Old Testament worshipped.

One of the great things about the biblical understanding of a theology of worship is that it shows us very clearly the continuity of our own worship with not only Jesus and the apostles, but going back to the very beginning of scripture itself. One of the things I will be doing throughout my time with you in this course, is talking about the structures of worship and how important they are, the structures of the rite itself, that is, how we worship, the form that we use as we go from one point to another, the space in which we worship which is very important, and we're going to see historically have that space shaped the way in which Christians worship. And of course, time, how Christians understand time, when they worship, and how, in Christ, everything seems to change in the way in which we understand the time in which we live.

When you look at a biblical understanding of worship, what you see very clearly is that we must focus our attention on what I'm going to call the liturgical structures of word and sacrament. Now, there are a number of ways of talking about a theology of worship from a biblical perspective. One way is to talk about it from our perspective, from what we might call a theology from below, from the perspective of our worship. And when we talk about it that way, we will use the word worship because worship involves what we do, and our praise, our thanksgiving, our response to God. This is, of course, fundamental to the way in which Israel worshipped and the way we worship. But it's interesting when you actually look at the scriptures itself, as important as our response is, as important as the idea of worship, that is our praise and adoration is in the scriptures, the scriptures always begin from God's perspective, from what God is doing. And we're going to discover that here the biblical understanding of worship and the Lutheran understanding come together beautifully.

When we look at it from God's perspective, what we will discover is that God is giving gifts. I'm going to use the language of gifts throughout this course, and it's so important to recognize that worship is all about the gifts, the gifts that come to us. And here's the second thing that's just so important, they come to us through the real presence of Jesus Christ. No, I use will real presence because that’s Lutheran language. But you're going to see that I am also going to talk about the bodily presence because I think that describes the real presence in a more concrete and particular way. This bodily real presence of Christ is at the center of a biblical understanding of worship. And when we talk about the real bodily presence of Jesus Christ, we're talking about a mystery that is almost impossible for us to understand.

I'm also going to use the language of eschatology which means the last things or, as some people would say, the end times. Jesus himself is, in a sense, the last thing. When Jesus comes, when he breaks into our world and becomes flesh, becomes one of us, the end has come. The eschaton, you might know that language. The end, the eschaton has come. And so we have present in our world, when Jesus comes in the flesh, heaven itself because wherever Jesus is, there is heaven. And one of the things we're going to see when we look at the biblical understanding of worship is that it's not only centered in Christ, but it is centered in the fact that where Christ is bodily present, so also is heaven, and as we're going to see, the angels, the archangels, and the whole company of heaven.

We're going to use a lot of different words in this course that you may not be familiar with, or you may be familiar with, but you don't necessarily have the specific definition. I'm going to use the language of the church. And part of that language is going to use the language of such words as eschatology but also a word that is familiar to you that I want to define now, and that is the word liturgy.

There were a number of different ways in which early Christians could have defined their worship. They could have used all kinds of different words. The word worship is used in the Scriptures that describes our praise and our adoration, our response to God. One of the other words they could use--and here's a technical word which I won't use often, but it might be interesting for you to know--the word *synaxis which is very similar to the word synagogue which simply means to come together to do something in common. And what Christians did is they came together to receive gifts from Christ's presence in word and in sacrament. The word *synaxis was a word that you'll see in the literature that describes the worship of early Christians but for some reason that word was not the word that Christians used to define what they did when they gathered together as a community to stand in the presence of God and receive these gifts. The word they chose was liturgy, and it's an interesting word that they should choose because it's not necessarily a uniquely biblical or Christian or Jewish word. Now, you will see that word, and in Greek it's *laetergia. You'll see that word in the Scriptures, but it's also a word that comes out of the pagan, secular world of Jesus and the apostles. In fact, it's a very, very popular word in the Roman Empire, and it's a word that describes the obligation or the responsibility of a Roman citizen as that Roman citizen sees himself or herself as serving the greater good. Or, to put it this way, a Roman citizen would understand his or her *laetergia, his or her liturgy, to serve of the empire for the sake of the empire.

I'll illustrate it this way. Let's say I'm a rich Roman citizen, and I have a huge estate on the Appian Way in Italy, which is, I think, the road from Rome to Brindisi. This is a wonderful road that has a significant place in the Roman world. This is where the military would go up and down. This is a place where you would have commerce. It was a vital road. As a Roman citizen with an estate on this road, my *laetergia, my service, my obligation, my liturgy to the Roman Empire was to take care of that part of the road. That was my obligation. That was my responsibility, and I did it for the greater good. This is how I understood my place in this world in which I live.

Now, if you think about it, if you look at that word from the Roman perspective, it is what I'm doing. It's very similar to the understanding of worship. This is my response to God. Christians flipped it a little bit. And here's how they took that word, borrowed it, and redefined it for themselves. What was important for early Christians was the Father’s *laetergia, the Father’s liturgy, the Father's service. And what does the Father do? And I'm talking, of course, about God the Father and the Holy Trinity. The Father sends his Son, and that sending of the Son is this extraordinary, divine invasion. One of the ways of looking at this is to see Jesus as an alien coming from another cosmos, another world, and invading our world. We must understand that when the Father sends the Son, He is sending the creator, the one who spoke in Genesis, and all things came into being. That creator must now come back to his creation as one of us, breaking in, invading us, becoming one of us, becoming a creature like us, a human being, flash of our flesh, bone of our bones, so that he, the creator, might recreate this world that had fallen into sin.

One of the things that we all know so well is that we live in a world that is deeply, deeply infected with the virus of sin. If you go back to Genesis, and you must go back to Genesis if you want to talk about the biblical understanding of worship, you know that God created everything good and everything right. And then all of a sudden, something went terribly wrong. The creation that was so good and so right went suddenly wrong with the disobedience of our first parents. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, in God's good pleasure, as a reflection of his glory. They were created to worship and praise him which is what, in a sense, they did in the Garden of Eden. They did nothing but engage in this glorification of God because they were in his image, and they were a reflection of his glory. But when they fell into sin, they were infected with the virus in which everything that was so right now went so totally wrong. And one of the things I know that you can identify with, and everyone can identify with, is that in this world in which we live, you and I, no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, we can not make right what has gone wrong. Only God can do that, and that's why God needed this *laetergia, this service to us, this liturgy. The Father’s liturgy is to restore this creation, to make right what has gone wrong. And the only one that can do that is the second person of the Trinity sent by the Father into this world to make right what has gone wrong through his death. The Father’s liturgy ends in a cross. And it is only there in the cross where we see Jesus making right what has gone wrong. Only he can do that. We can't.