Good Friday Service - 2009

We had a wonderful Good Friday service today at Westney Heights Baptist Church, where I serve as Theologian in Residence. It was expecially nice to sing older hymns with such tremendous theological content. We look forward to Easter Sunday morning when the choir will present a cantata. The tone of today's service was subdued but passionately grateful. Here is the Order of Service:

Prelude
Call to Worship
Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
O Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our maker! (Isa. 6:3, Ps.

95:6)
Invocation Prayer

God Instructs Us Through His Word

Responsive Reading – Psalm 22:1-18
Hymn of Meditation – “O Sacred Head Now Wounded”
Responsive Reading – Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12
Hymn of Meditation – “Beneath the Cross of Jesus”
Scripture Reading – John 19:16-37- Bruce Young
Sermon: The Doctrine of the Atonement as the Basis of Worship
Hymn – “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”

God Strengthens and Nourishes Us Through His Body and Blood

The Call to the Table of the Lord
Call to Repentance – Isaiah 55:6-7
Responsive Confession of Sin – Psalm 51:1-12
Prayer of Confession
Hymn of Confession – “Just As I Am“
Assurance of Forgiveness – I John 1:9
The Bread and the Cup
Hymn of Commitment – “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?”
Benediction
"And now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, equip you with all you need for doing his will. May he who became the great Shepherd of the sheep by an everlasting agreement between God and you, signed with his blood, produce in you through the power of Christ all that is pleasing to him. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen. (Hebrews 13:20-21)
Postlude

Reflections on Part I of The Spirit of the Liturgy

In this post I offer a few reflections on Part I "The Essence of the Liturgy" of the book The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI.

1. Benedict XVI makes it clear that worship is the central theme of the Bible. From Abraham to the Exodus to Sinai to the Tabernacle to the Prophets to the Temple to Jesus to the Church to the Heavenly City of Jerusalem - the focus is on worship. How should God be worshipped? How can we worship God rightly? I don't see how to deny it; the Bible is all about worship.

2. False worship is rooted in sin - in the attempt to assume the role of God in deciding what is and is not acceptable worship. The worship of the Golden Calf was not a relapse into Egyptian idolatry so much as it was a refusal to wait patiently for Moses to come down from the mountain with God's instruction on how to worship the Living God in the right manner.

3. Sin involves both self-worship - putting ourselves in the place of God as Adam and Eve did - but it also involves trying to worship God by means of self-generated methods of worship, as in the golden calf incident. So not just any worship will do. Worship planning is not supposed to be an exercise in imaginationa and human creativity, but rather a matter of obedience to God's revealed Word.

4. This has huge implications for the Free Church tradition, in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on spontanaity and personal involvement out of a fear of dead ritualism and empty forms, as in the Catholic and Anglican traditions out of which the Free Church tradition comes. There is a great deal of danger in free church worship of falling into golden calf worship, i.e. self-generated worship. Clearly, we Evangelicals are trying sincerely to worship the God of Scripture. That is not the problem. The problem is that we may fall into human invented methods of worshipping God even though God has revealed how He is to be worshipped in Scripture.

5. Worship is not a compensating mechanism for a fallen world; it is the central purpose for which the world was created. God created us for covenant and covenant means relationship. Worship, therefore, says Benedict XVI, is the soul of the covenant.

6. Benedict XVI rightly points out that sacrifice is the heart of worship. This idea is under relentless attack today from the Evangelical Left, the Emerging Church, Feminism, and Liberal Protestantism in general. But sacrifice is central to the Scriptures, the Tradition, and all branches of Christian Faith (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism).

7. Benedict XVI notes the re-definition of sacrifice in Scripture from destruction to the true surrender of the self to God. The Bible deals with sacrifice in order to teach us what true sacrifice is. True sacrifice is "a way of being;" it is the surrender of all things to God that God may be all and in all.

8. Benedict XVI notes that worship has both an historical and a cosmic element in it. However, he is clear that the historical element gets priority and compares true Christian worship to gnostic worship in which liberation from finitude through the ascent of the mind to God on the basis of special knowledge grasped only by the initiated ones. Christian worship, by contrast, requires something to happen in history (the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection) and also expects a future redemption of the world (the Second Coming, the Kingdom of God, the descent of the Heavenly City). Worship that has lost its eschatological "edge," that is, its eager expectation for the revelation of Jesus Christ as Lord is worship that is playing with gnosticism.

9. I confess I get tired of hearing from the breathless, over-wrought salesmen of "THE GREATEST NEW THING EVER." Listen to some quotes from a recent Evangelical author hyping his "new reality" that all church leaders are supposed to learn about from him.

"The current church culture in North america is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. . . the world is profoundly different than it was at the middle of the last century . . . We are entering a new epoch of human history called the postmodern age. The postmodern world will demand a new church expression, just as did the rise of the modern world. . . Its creation has made obsolete much of our goals and activities in the church world."

The world demands a new church "expression" (whatever that is)? Really now? Was the world happy with the old church expression before these shifts? The world is profoundly different? Says who? How? The church is on life support? Did Jesus forget about us? My point is simply that moving from the breathless, wild-eyed apocalypticism of some Evangelicals to reading Benedict XVI is simply to embrace sanity and faith. Benedict XVI is calm, thoughtful and determined to be faithful. He is biblical and reflective in his approach, the goal of which is to worship God rightly. Apparently, he thinks that if the Church gets this right, much of the rest will fall into place. Above all he is concerned to be biblical and faithful, rather than relevant and cutting edge.

10. In chapter 3 Benedict XVI proposes that the central question we need to ask about worship is how to worship so as to demonstrate that the NT corresponds to the inner drama of the OT. The OT poses the questions; the NT gives the answers. This is a program of hermeneutics and a method for doing theology, as well as a guide to evaluating the various elements of worship.

11. The prophetic critique of worship is not, as liberal Protestantism thinks, a rejection of cult or liturgy in favor of social ethics. It is not an either/or. The synagogue was not an advance in the history of religions over the Temple. The Temple and the sacrificial system were fufilled in Jesus Christ. So when Yoder interpreted as speaking as if he means to say that the trajectory of the Bible was toward exile and synagogue services centering on the Word means that the ideas of Temple, sacrifice, liturgy and worship are left behind or relativized, he is being interpreted in such a way as to turn him into a heretic. For liberals, the ideas of sin and salvation indeed are relativized and rendered obsolete once the link between worship and ethics becomes clear in the prophets and in Jesus. But far from being relativized, the ideas of Temple, sacrifice, liturgy and sacraments remain central in the Gospels, the Epistles and the Bible as a whole. Worship is not just a pep rally for the millennium development goals, as it so often appears to be in liberal Protestant worship.

12. The coming together of the Stoic concept of the Logos, the NT idea of the Word made flesh and the wisdom Christology of the NT means that sacrifice takes on a cosmic, as well as a moral and sacramental, character. The Eucharist is the meeting point of universal themes of sin, reconciliation and redemption. Benedict XVI's emphasis on the universal import of Christian worship will not let us lose sight of the fact that God's work is so much bigger than either the pietistic Protestant emphasis on my personal salvation or the liberal Protestant emphasis on the improvement of human society here and now. We celebrate the redemption of the whole cosmos and history is the stage on which this redemption is being worked out. The coming kingdom is so much bigger than my heart or improvements to the welfare state; it is the New Heavens and the New Earth.

The Spirit of the Liturgy, Part I, Ch. 3

This is ch. 3 of part I, "From the Old Testament to the New: The Fundamental Form of the Christian Liturgy - Its Determination by Biblical Faith." This is the third chapter of the book and the end of Part I: "The Essence of the Liturgy."

This chapter is packed with biblical theology and argues that Chirstian worship must be understood as what the Church does to celebrate the faith of the New Testament as understood as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Liturgy is not merely copying Old Testament forms as if the Incarnation had never happened, but it is understands the Incarnation as the fulfillment of the faith of the Old Testament rather than as something new and unexpected in history. Christian worship is true worship, as opposed to pagan worship, which was futile. Yet what pagan, OT, NT and contemporary worship have in common is "the attempt to be found at every stage of history, to overcome guilt and bring back the world into right order." (35) Yet, apart from Christ "an immense feeling of futility pervades everything."

Sacrifice is at the heart of worship. Pagan worship seems to recognize this with human sacrifice, but actually human sacrifice is the evasion of the true gift of self, which is true sacrifice. In all sacrificial systems, including that of the OT, representation is at the heart of it, yet representation always falls short. What then diffrentiates Israel's worship form paganism? Firstly, it is the One to whom it is directed. Paganism worships lesser powers; Israel knows the True God who alone is Creator and Lord. Secondly, Israel's worship leads directly to Jesus Christ by its inner logic. As Benedict XVI puts it: "The NT corresponds to the inner drama of the Old." (37)

Interpreting Leviticus in the light of the crucial chapter 26, which threatens Israel with exile, prevents us from understanding the sacficial system as "an eternally valid form of worship." (37) Instead, the sacrificial system is historical and directed toward the future. Two foundational texts that establish this trajectory are Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis and the Passover in Exodus. The sacrifice of Isaac establishes representative sacrifice by divine command as eschatological expectation. This hope is fulfilled in the Lamb, "who comes from God and is for that very reason not a replacement but a true representative, in whom we are ourselves are taken to God." (38) Although Benedict XVI fails to say so in so many words, it is an obvious development of this line of thought that Christ unifies the sacrifice of self with human sacrifice insofar as in his humanity he represents us. We are incorporated into him and thus we are able to give our lives to God and receive them back in resurrection. This kind of thinking underlies Rom. 6:1-10.

The Passover reveals the lamb who is the ransom through which Israel is delivered. Throughout the OT we see that "Its sacrificial system is constantly accompanied by prophetic disquiet and questioning." (39) In I Sam. 15:32 we read "More precious than sacrifice is obedience, submission than the fat of rams!" and this is echoed in Hosea 6:6 and in the words of Jesus: "I desire mercy and not sacrifice." (Mt. 9:13 12:7) The radical critique of the Temple offered by Stephen builds on Amos 5:21-23 and Jesus' predcition of the destruction of the Temple. Benedict XVI writes:

"The essential work of Moses was the construction of the tabernacle and the ordering of worship, which was also the very heart of the order of law and moral instruction. If this is so, then it is clear that the new Prophet, the definitive Prophet, will lead the people out of the age of the tabernacle and its impermanence, out of all the inadequacy of sacrifical animals. He will 'destroy' the Temple and indeed 'change the customs that Moses had delivered. The prophets who followed Moses were the great witnesses to the impermanence of all these customs. Raising their voices they pushed history forward to the New Moses." (42)

Jesus' prediction of the destruction of the Temple is a prophecy of the Cross and the Resurrection is the beginning of the new Temple, which is the body of Christ. Benedict XVI notes: "Interpreted at its deepest level, the prophecy of the Resurrection is also a prophecy of the Eucharist. The body of Christ sacrificed and precisely as sacrificed is living." (43)

With no Temple, "the sacrifice is the "word," the word of prayer, which goes up from man to God, emobdying the whole of man's existence and enabling him to become 'word' (logos) in himself. It is man, conforming himself to logos and becoming logos through faith, who is the true sacrifice, the true glory of God in the world." (46) However, disembodied prayer is insufficient:
"The Word alone is not enough."

The experience of Israel in exile coming to God with empty hands, only prayer, and the philosophy of logos in the Greek world are both incorporated into Christian worship. However, just as the Word alone in Exilic worship is not enough: "the Hellenistic Logos-Mysticism, however grand and beautiful, allows the body to fall into insubstantiality." This Word or Logos alone worship is Gnostic. Benedict XVI then writes:

"The idea of the sacrifice of the Logos becomes a full reality only in the Logos incarnatus, the Word who is made flesh and draws 'all flesh' into th glorification of God. . . The two themes that Psalm 51 could not reconcile, the two themes that throughout the OT keep running toward one another, now really converge. . . In Jesus' self-surender on the Cross, the Word is united with the entire reality of human life and suffering. There is no longer a replacement cult. Now the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus take us up and leads us into that likeness with God, that transformation into love, which is the only true adoration." (47)

So the Eucharist is the focal point where all the lines meet. "Here at last is right worship" says Benedict XVI. "In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened up - here we see who God is and what he is like." (48)

In summing up this rich and profound chapter, Benedict XVI makes four points.

1. Christian worship cannot be viewed simply as a Christianized form of the synagogue service even though its form owes much to the synagogue service. The synagogue was always oriented toward the Temple and Christian worship embodies the fulfillment of the Temple by the true sacrifice of the Eucharist. Whereas liberal theology sees the "Word alone" worship of the synagogue as an advance in the history of religion over the sacrificial system of the Temple, Christian worship does not. Where I wrote "liberal" in the previous sentence I almost wrote "Protestant" but I'm not willing to concede that point yet. Protestant worship certainly tends toward Gnosticism and man-centered moralism, but need not do so. But in order to avoid going off the rails here, Protestant theology must listen humbly to the Church Catholic speaking through the mouth of Benedict XVI.

2. Christian worship is universal worship: "to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. (49)

3. Divine worship is the confluence of several streams: the spiritual movement of the OT, the process of inner purification within the history of religion, human quest, and divine response. "The logos of creation, the logos in man, and the true and eternal Logos made flesh, the Son, come together." (50) All this is implied in the term "Eucharist," compared to which the terms "meal" or "assembly" are inadequate by comparison. "Eucharist points to the universal form of worship that took place in the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection of Christ." (50)

4. Christian liturgy is a liturgy of hope; it is a quest for a goal. The new Temple is under construction but has not yet been revealed in its glory. "Christian liturgy is liturgy on the way, a liturgy of pilgrimage toward the transformation of the world, which will only take place when God is 'all in all.'" (50) We look forward to the day when the Heavenly Jerusalem comes down to earth and the whole creation is turned into the Temple of God.

The Spirit of the Liturgy, Part I, Ch. 2

This is chapter 2 of part I and it is entitled, "Liturgy - Cosmos - History."

In this second chapter Benedict XVI begins by dismissing as over-simplistic the idea that religions can be divided neatly into "nature religions" that are unconcerned with history and "historical religions" that are unconcerned with the cosmos. Cult and cosmos are bound up together. He also rejects the reading of the Genesis creation narratives which sees the Sabbath as merely a vision of freedom unconnected to worship, that is: "a pure vision of a liberated society as the goal of human history, that from the very beginning is anthropological and social, indeed revolutionary." (25-6) Rather: "The Sabbath is the sign of the covenant between God and man." (26)

Sounding Barthian, Benedict XVI asserts that the goal of creation is the covenant, which he calls "the love story of God and man." (26) This covenant is a relationship and worship is central to this relationship. He notes that in Exodus it says seven times that "Moses did as the LORD commanded him," words that recall the seven day work of creation. At the completion of the Tabernacle, the glory of the LORD filled it. Benedict XVI comments: "The completion of hte tent anticipates the completion of creation. God makes his dwelling in the world Heaven and earth are united." (27) But the purpose of the covenant, he stresses, is not only to save mankind but also to draw the whole of reality into communion with God. Worship is central to God's salvific purposes.

Next Benedict XVI discusses the meaning of sacrifice. Rejecting the idea that its basic meaning is "destruction," Benedict XVI follows St. Augustine in understanding sacrifice to mean "the divinization of creation and the surrender of all things to God: God in all." (28) This means that the purpose of sacrifice (which is the heart of worship) is historical. As he puts it: "Creation is history." (28)

Benedict XVI goes on to differentiate between Gnostic worship and Christian worship. (His clarity of thought is beautiful; a summary does not do it justice.) But to summarize anyway, the difference comes down to the fact that in Gnosticism the basic paradigm is the exitus and reditus, the departure and return. Finitude is a kind of sin, which has to be brought back to the infinite (30) Knowledge is the real power of redemption. (31) Gnosticism is rampant today; it is not merely an historical curiosity. In Christianity, the exitus is "not a fall from the infinite, the rupture of being . . No, exitus is first and foremost something thoroughly positive. It is the Creator's free act of creation." (32) The doctrine of creation as the contingent act of God is a Christian distinctive. The freedom given to the creature means that the creature has the ability to refuse to be dependent and thus to refuse the reditus. "Love is seen as dependence and is rejected. In its place come autonomy and autarchy." (33) This is sin. Now comes a decisively important passage:

"If 'sacrifice' in its essence is simply reuturning to love and therefore divinization, worship now has a new aspect: the healing of wounded freedom, atonement, purification, deliverance from estrangement. . . Worship is directed to the Other in himself, to his all-sufficiency, but not it refers itself to the Other who alone can extricate me from the knot that I myself cannot untie. Redemption now needs the Redeemer." (33)

Benedict XVI thus ties the very process of salvation closely to worship and thereby raises the stakes decisively. Worship is not merely therapy or self-expression or mutual edification. It is the place where God does His sovereign work of redemption and brings healing to the wounded creature. A final word:

"The circles of the cosmos and of history are now distinguished. The gift of freedom is the center of created as well as of divine being, and so the historical element has its own irrevocable meaning, but it is not for that reason separated from the cosmic element. Ultimately despite their differences, the two circles continue to be the one circle of being. The historical liturgy of Christendom is and always will be cosmic . . . Christianity is uniquely new, but it does not spurn the religious quest of human history. It takes up in itself all the prevailing preoccupations of the world's religions, and in that way it maintains a connection with them."
(34)

The Spirit of the Liturgy, Part I, Ch. 1

Today we look at chapter 1 of Pope Benedict XVI's, The Spirit of the Liturgy. It is entitled "Life and Liturgy." [Note: the book has four parts and 12 chapters, but the chapters are not numbered consecutively. So this is ch. 1 of part I.]

Here Benedict XVI begins by grounding the definition of worship in the OT and in the Exodus in particular. He points out that the goal of the Exodus was not merely to get Israel to the Promised Land. Four times Moses says to Pharaoh: "Let my people go, that they may serve me." The issue is religious liberty: Moses must lead the people to Sinai where they are taught by God how to worship Him. When they get to Sinai, God comes down onto the top of the mountain, gives the Ten Commandments and then enters into a covenant with them. Cult (or worship or liturgy) is part of this covenant, but so is "life according to the will of God." (17) Benedict XVI links ethics with worship and quotes St. Irenaeus: "The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God." (18) Here is the link between worship and life:

"Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God. Cult exists in order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that glory is given to God." (18)

Israel, Benedict XVI points out, becomes a people at Sinai. They receive instructions about worship and an all-embracing law for life. He writes "When human affairs are so ordered that there is no recognition of God, there is a belittling of man." (19) Sinai provides Israel with its "interior land" without which the exterior land is meaningless. When Israel flaunts the covenant, she eventually loses the land and goes into exile.

Benedict XVI stresses: "Worship, that is, the right kind of cult, of relationship with God, is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world. . . Even the decidedly atheistic, materialistic systems create their own forms of cult, though, of course, they can only be an illusion and strive in vain, by bombastic trumpeting to conceal their nothingness." (21) Man cannot make worship. Worship apart from revelation is empty, as the Golden Calf incident illustrates. The people grew tired of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with the revelation of how worship should be done and tried to invent thier own cult. This was apostasy - a self-generated cult. Benedicts XVI calls it: "a circle closed in upon itself: eating, drinking and making merry." (23) He also says:

"The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. The narrative of the golden calf is a warning against any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship." (23)

The stakes could hardly be much higher. There is such a thing as false worship and false worship is religious apostasy. How can we avoid making our worship today a self-generated cult that is closed in upon itself? Only by ensuring that our worship arises up out of, and faithfully reflects, Divine revelation through Scripture. Chapter 2 will continue on this theme.

"The Spirit of the Liturgy" - A Conversation With the Pope

In 2000, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger published a book entitled, The Spirit of the Liturgy, in which he sets for a vision of renewal of worship in the Church. I believe that his vision is of interest to the whole ecumenical Church and not only Roman Catholicism. His book is grounded in Scripture, historically aware and quite practical. I find that my comments on worship generate more debate than those on any other topic among my students and younger readers of this blog. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. In Pope Benedict XVI, we have a pope who believes that worship is the central means by which the Church can be renewed and the world saved, so my readers should be interested in what he has to say.

In the Preface, Benedict XVI mentions the book by Roman Guardini by the same title, which was published in 1918. He says that this book inagurated the Liturgical Movement in Germany and "helped us to rediscover the liturgy in all its beauty, hidden wealth, and time-transcending grandeur, to see it as the animating center of the Church, the very center of the Christian life. . . We were now willing to see the liturgy . . . as the prayer of the Church, a prayer in which Christ unceasingly becomes contemporary with us, enters into our lives." (7)

Benedict XVI compares the liturgy to a fresco that has been preserved from damage by an overlay of whitewash by later generations. The colors and figures of the fresco are laid bare by liturgical renewal, but the fresco is threatened by destruction if steps are not taken to preserve it from damaging influences. He says that the purpose of his book is to assist with a renewal of understanding of the message and reality of the liturgy so that it can be preserved as a source of renewal in the Church. His goal, therefore, is not to "invent" or "revise" the liturgy, but also not simply to freeze the current liturgy as if it were to be clung to unthinkingly. This is the program of ressourcement applied to worship and it is a matter of being radical enough to return to the roots so that the tree of worship can flourish and bear fruit today.

Over the next few days (or maybe weeks?) I'll try to post on each chapter. There are 12 chapters organized as follows:

Part I: The Essence of the Liturgy
1. Liturgy and Life: The Place of Liturgy in Reality
2. Liturgy - Cosmos - History
3. From Old Testament to New: The Fundamental Form of the Christian Liturgy - Its Determination by Biblical Faith

Part II: Time and Space in the Liturgy
1. The Relationship of the Liturgy to Time and Space: Some Preliminary Questions
2. Sacred Places - The Significance of the Church Building
3. The Altar and the Direction of Liturgical Prayer
4. The Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament
5. Sacred Time

Part III: Art and Liturgy
1. The Question of Images
2. Music and Liturgy

Part IV: LIturgical Form
1. Rite
2. The Body and Liturgy
(1) "Active Participation"
(2) The Sign of the Cross
(3) Posture
(4) Gestures
(5) The Human Voice
(6) Vestments
(7) Matter

One final note is on the meaning of the word "liturgy." Some refer to the "non-liturgical churches" as if it could be the case that any church could worship without liturgy. This is impossible. We all have liturgies. The Orthodox, RC, Anglican and some Protestant traditions have more or less fixed liturgies, whereas the so-called Free Churches do not. Yet every congregation falls into a fairly set liturgy over time, even if the liturgy is referred to as a "worship style." Since we all have liturgies of one kind or another, it is potentially instructive to learn from tradition other than our own. This is the goal of this series: to see what we can learn from the Roman Catholic tradition about worship.