LITURGY

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LITURGY

• Throwing My Bundle of Sticks in the Fire
• or Reaching Out with the Mass.

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My Sticks in the Fire
The language, life, ritual and liturgy of the
Lutheran Church are incomprehensible to the
denizens of our insane post-Christian world. This
unfamiliarity, however, provides an authentic
opportunity to intentionally evangelize the lost
wayfarer and, hopefully, to recover the bored
consumer through meaningful signs of Christ and
the Gospel revealed in the mysterious, biblical,
evangelical, confessional, catholic, and
apocalyptic world of the Lutheran Divine
Service... or Mass... or Divine Liturgy.
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Common Objections

• Traditional Liturgy is a barrier
• Church must change or die
• Content and Form Distinctions
• Doctrinal Unity Practical Disunity
• FC X gives freedom in all ceremony
• The Adiaphora Trump Card

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Assumptions Reconsidered

• Statistical Trends
• Eastern Orthodox growth
• CGM Stagnation Emergent Critique
• 9,000,000 and shrinking (25-35 k a year)
• Anecdotal Evidence
• Personal Journey
• Theological Confession
• Field of Ritual Studies

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Liturgical Renewal Movement

• Demand for Simplification of Liturgy
• Emphasis on Community-Building
• Insistence on Rationality
• Infatuation with Fourth-Century
• Frantic Search for THE LITURGY
• Social Science Modern Subjective

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Church Growth Movement

• Pragmatic-Outcome Based Approach
• Principle of Homogeneity
• Production of Popular Atmosphere
• Programming to Felt Needs
• Marketing, Manipulation, and Magic
• Social Science Modern Subjective

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Inherited Worship Dogma

• Simplicity Sitz im Leben NT Era
• Immediacy Direct Experience
• Intelligibility Cognitive Understanding
• Transparency Obvious Meaning
• Creativity Personal Local Novelty
• Spontaneity Informal Unpredictable
• Relevancy Applicable to Needs

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Ablaze!(tm) The Movement

• Evangelism is Central to Life of Church
• Friendship Sundays, Liturgies CGM is neutral
• Church Planting CGM is most effective tool
• Non-Christian Prepared by Secular Methods?
• Revitalization for Transformation of Church
• Social Systems Theory
• Leadership Training and Equipping
• Church Transformed by Secular Principles?

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Lost in the Smoldering Ruins

• Biblical Reality... more than text.
• Transcendent... more than feeling.
• Sacraments... more than doctrine.
• Church Identity... more than Lutheran.
• Personal Identity... more than consumer.
• Liturgical Ritual... more than verbal.

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Ritual Reconsiderations

• Complexity, not Simplicity
• Mediation, not Immediacy
• Mystery, not Intelligibility
• Opacity, not Transparency
• Habit, not Creativity
• Formality, not Spontaneity
• Reverence, not Relevance

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Power of Good Ritual

• Rules and Regularity Allow person freedom to act
• Objective Christ is at work in His means
• Non-Rational Theological performance
• Non-Verbal and Sensory Engages entire person
• Repetitive Habit makes true experience possible
• Transformative Actions endowed with holy
  purpose.
• Iconic Opens up heavenly, transcendent mysteries
• Liturgical Agent Attention directed elsewhere

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Theological Reconsiderations

• Incarnation Word Enfleshed
• Sacrament Divine Presence
• Scriptural Narrative Divine Encounter
• Ecclesiology Church Triumphant
• Eschatology Heavenly Invasion
• Anthropology Disordered Sinner

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The Deep Ritual of A Mass, Divine Service, or
Divine Liturgy

• Biblical Word of Christ
• Confessional Proclaims Christ
• Catholic Presence of Christ
• Evangelical Work of Christ
• Apocalyptic Reveals Christ

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Opportunity for ChurchRecovery of the Sacred

• Disillusioned words like bullets bark, As human
  gods aim for their mark,
• Made everything from toy guns that spark,
• to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark,
• Its easy to see without looking too far, that
  not much is really sacred.
• Bob Dylan, Its Alright, Ma (Im Only Bleeding)
• He (the Christian in the American South) feels
  like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who
  finds himself at the end of his quest at a
  Tupperware party. Walker Percy
• In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian
  and hardly anyone thought twice about it.
  But in the present age the survivor of theory and
  consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert,
  like St. Anthony which is to say, open to
  signs. Walker Percy

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The Religious Caveman
At a deeper level of my consciousness I brush
aside all the imposing objections against the
reality of the world and the reality of my own
humanity, even though I cannot refute them. I am
afraid I have to admit it I am a Stone Age
man.... People say, and I should have grasped it
long ago, that the objects around me have not the
slightest significance, that there is nothing in
them (and who, after all, am I?). Yes, I hear all
this, but I do not believe it. I am still on the
very lowest rung of the history of mankind. I am
an animist.... A man on his knees because he
believes that his Maker is present in a little
white wafer this is still a stumbling block in
many places, and we must thank God for
it. Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness
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Cultural Challenges

• The Bored Consumer
• The Modern Rational Illiterate
• The Cultural Wasteland

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The Bored Consumer

• No. Its really not about you.
• Self-Indulgent/Self-Absorbed
• Anti-Institutionalism
• Fast Food Theology
• Carole King Theology
• Chicken Little Theology

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The Rational Modern Illiterate

• Self-Centered
• Disordered
• Sentimental
• Enraged
• Depressed
• Lonely
• Bored
• Lustful
• Spiritually Impoverished

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The Rational Modern Illiterate
The cultural development in the West has
produced the modern, non-religious,
rationalistic, metaphysically blind human being.
Sociologists of religion have devoted their
attention to this phenomenon. They have a name
for the kind of man who believes he can make a
connection between the macrocosm and the
microcosm by means of sacral acts, who sees the
material form as a mirror of transcendence, and
who lives in the presence of God (or of the
gods) such a man is homo religiosus. In this
sense practically all people were homines
religiosi until the eighteenth century.
Mosebach, 54
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The Rational Modern Illiterate
Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid
and confused,And his brain has been mismanaged
with great skill.All he believes are his eyesAnd
his eyes, they just tell him lies. Bob Dylan,
License to Kill
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Modern Wasteland

• Naturalism We are mere beasts.
• Idealism We are the Creator.
• Romanticism We are naturally spiritual.
• Consumerism We are what we buy.
• Individualism I am the most important thing in
  the Cosmos.
• Pluralism There are many, equally valid truths.
• Nihilism Nothing matters.
• Moral Relativism Anything goes.

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Modern Wasteland
The present age is demented. It is possess by a
sense of dislocation, a loss of personal
identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage
which, in an individual patient, could be
characterized as dementia. As the century draws
to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it
can be described. It is the most scientifically
advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman,
sentimental, murderous century in human history.
Walker Percy
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Professional Concerns

• Rubricism Liturgical Fussiness
• Traditionalism Too catholic...
• Pragmatism If it works....
• Parochialism We did it our way...
• Egotism I must increase...

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Casuistry Liturgical Catechesis

• The Pastor
• Education in Liturgical/Sacramental Theology
• Eucharistic Faith and Piety
• The Bored Consumer
• Catechesis Classes, sermons, etc.
• Conversion Introduction of Ritual
• The Wayfarer in the Desert
• Recovering the Catechumenate
• Opportunity for Mystagogy