Catch phrases. . .

I must begin by pleading guilty of using all sorts of catch phrases.  We Lutherans generally do this all the time.  We have our favorites (Law and Gospel, Word and Sacrament, means of grace, etc.).  Others have their own favorites.  It is short hand for putting many words on the page.  Some of them are Biblical.  Among them are terms we use without much explanation or definition on Sunday morning -- presuming our people know the vocabulary in God's Word -- like justification, sanctification, even grace and mercy.  Some of them are borrowed from other languages, such as catechesis.  Some of them are simply goofy -- the way we turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns or the way we state the obvious as though it were some sort of profound truth (think sayings like permanently in mission, missional, etc.)  Some of them are trendy, we must admit, but the ones we ought not to be using are the ones that are rooted in the moment, borrowed from culture, or reflective of an alien Gospel.  Those are the ones we should be most concerned about.

The vocabulary of the Church was once the vocabulary of Scripture.  I confess that this day has passed.  In part, this day has come and gone because we are more ignorant of Scripture than the generations who went before us.  This is due also to the poverty of the literature that our schools teach but it is due primarily to the fact that most folks don't really care what the Bible says about much of anything anymore.  As the collect once so famously prayed, we do not in our time read, mark, and inwardly digest the Word of God but are amazingly distant from God's voice as Christians and churches as well as a nation and culture.  The days when you will see a bumper sticker that proclaims God said it, I believe it, that makes it true have long ago disappeared.  You can judge the age of the bumper sticker by the age of the bumper to which it is attached and this sentiment is a reflection of a past more than a present or a future.

Our Confessions and creeds and even the words of the liturgy are profoundly Biblical.  If we did not get this vocabulary from reading the Bible, you could very well get it from the Divine Service on Sunday morning.  The liturgy is and has always been the most important means of catechizing the faith (oops, I fell into one of those catch words!).  As the liturgy has begun to borrow more words from the culture, it has become more detached from Scripture and more reflective of us and of the moment in which we find ourselves.  While this is absolutely true of those without much of a liturgy in the first place, Evangelicals are not the only ones who have seen the trend continue.  In fact, the modern liturgical movement has flourished into a cause for giving the liturgy its own vocabulary -- if not in the actual words prayed then in the description of what it is or what is going on in it.  Think here of words like inculturation.

What has replaced our Biblical vocabulary, sadly, is a vocabulary borrowed from some of the worst sources -- the media and its pet causes.  This language is largely vacuous, labored, wordy, and thick -- just like the answers to the great questions of our age like what is a man or a woman?   It is the trendy language of our time coated with just enough Christian veneer so that we presume it is saying what we have always said.  And that is the problem.  Discernment in this age has become the practice not of noting what Scripture says and how it says it but sifting through the tea leaves of what is on the minds of the general population or the media talking heads and then repackaging that as if it were God's voice.  It is a passive vocabulary strong on such things as listening but weak on such things as truth, virtue, goodness, right, and wrong.  It is a perspective in which how we are heard is more important than what we say and so the things God has unequivocally spoken are about as offensive to us as anything can be.  This age loves nuance.  We routinely trash the giants of our past because they did not reflect the woke conscience of our time and so we are without anchor on a sea of words -- except that the speech police will muzzle us if we dare to offend the moment.

The cause for good liturgy is the same cause for hearing Scripture -- we need to think like God thinks, speak like God has spoken, and language as a tool has its highest expression when we say back to God what God has said to us and when we say to the world what God has said in His Word.  The goal can never be a god who is like us but a people who are daily being remade from their fallen image into His holiness by the power not of their will or their reason but solely by the Spirit.  Words matter.  It is about time we remembered that God's words matter most of all.