Worship in the garden. . .

I can imagine that the first worship of God which took place in Eden was perhaps the recitation of the warnings and promises associated with the garden, in particular about the tree of life.  By rehearsing the words of God, Adam and Eve were worshiping the almighty.  Of course, such worship did not prevent the entrance of sin and its rebellion against the Word of God.  We all know that.  But the worship of God was from the beginning the remembrance of His Word and the telling out loud of that Word.

When sin changed all of that, I can also imagine that the worship after the Fall was similarly the recitation of the promise of God, in particular the promise of the One who was to come who would have His heal bruised but who would crush the serpent's head.  There was no Temple of the Tree of Life where this took place that but that does not mean that the worship which they had known was entirely forgotten.  The words of warning and promise were replaced by the words of promise that the son of the woman would become their redeemer.

Later, after the giving of the Law, Israel gathered still around the Word of the Lord.  The words of the Law were repeated ritually in the same way the warning issued in the Garden was repeated while still in Eden.  And, of course, after the fulfillment of that promise in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, the words of the Lord continues to be repeated in worship, telling again the story of Him who died and rose never to die again.  It is something to ponder.

Of course, Norman Nagel already knew that long before I ever did and it came from him.  Saying back to God what He has first said to us we repeat what is most certain and true and this is the shape of worship. Still.  Worship is not telling God what we think or feel but repeating back to Him what He has said, words which are borne from faith in His Word.  In this way we own the promises and so demonstrate that we are His and do not belong to the world but to Him.

The form of the Mass is really an outline of words of God set in paraphrase or literally from the Scriptures in speech or song.  The Divine Service is and should be almost completely made up of God's Word in our mouths, saying back to Him what He has first said to us.  That is not to say this is the sole content of worship but it always was and always will be the primary content of worship (this side of glory, anyway).  By the way, that also includes the visible Word of the Sacraments.  They are not reenactments of anything but the anamnesis or remembrance which He has commanded in which His Word is attached to baptismal water, bread, and wine.  These are not dramas or play acting but doing what the Word tells us to do and so are just like repeating what He has said.  God is glorified.  Even better, we are served with His grace and gifts.  Thanks be to God!

An eternal today. . .

There are always questions to pastors about what kind of body or what will the body look like after the resurrection.  I cannot tell you how many people have very specific thoughts about which moment of their present lives and bodies they wish to be eternal.  We are a very picky people.  It seems that the resurrection is for many of us merely the undoing of death so that the present moment continues without end.  That may sound good but it is not.  God does not merely stop the body from dying and thus preserve it as it is forever.  It would be a good miracle, I guess, but it is less than the miracle God has prepared for those who love Him.

All of this remind me of a particular passage within the Eastern version of St. Thomas (at least in esteem, anyway), Maximus.  Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 13 August 662), was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar who, in his early life, was a civil servant and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He gave it all up to enter the monastic life.  Maximus had studied philosophy, particularly, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato.  At this point in time you are glazing over and so am I.  Though Maximus is venerated in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, he was eventually persecuted for his Christological positions and, as punishment, his tongue and right hand were mutilated.  Now that was in the day when heretics suffered consequences other than a best selling book!

So I am getting distracted a bit.  Anyway, Maximus was asked by a bishop to respond to the some monks who claimed that, after the resurrection, the glorified bodies of the saints will be similar to our present bodies, just not subject to death.  They said:

In the resurrection, bodies will once again be sustained in their life by phlegm and blood, by yellow and black bile, by drawing breath and physical food. Thus, through the resurrection, nothing foreign to or beyond this present life will appear except the inability of the bodies to die again.

That was probably too much information for most but you get the idea.  Life goes on and on and on just like it is today except that death is no more.  Maximus thought the monks had set the bar entirely too low, settling for a snapshot of this life with the annoyance of death but with everything else associated with this moral existence as enough.  That was shocking to Maximus.  

They thus espouse an everlasting death and an endless corruption. For if death is the corruption of those things constitutive of bodies; and if the body is being forever corrupted in its very constitution by the influx of various nourishments along with the flux of its exhalation, all due to the natural antipathy of the interior humors by which it is also constituted—then they are assuming that, after the resurrection, the body is forever sustained by means of those same constitutive elements, thereby proclaiming that death is preserved in unbroken perpetuity. We ought instead to believe that the body is raised in its essence and form, yet is incorruptible and immortal and, as the Apostle says, “spiritual” instead of “psychical,” insofar as the body’s invariable, constitutive property suffers no corruption at all. For God knows how to dignify the body itself, transforming it into an impassible body. 

They were not paying attention to St. Paul.  As the Apostle Paul teaches, in the resurrection human beings will be raised with incorruptible spiritual bodies in the general resurrection (1 Cor 15:35-56).  Now, to be fair, nobody gets what this all means exactly.  We are not given a preview of how this actually works out but enough to say it is not going to be an endless today with all else being equal.  Yet, like the monks of old to whom Maximus contended, we too often are ready to settle for just that.  We want nothing more than the best moment of this life preserved forever.  If that is all we want, we have sorely underestimated the Lord.  Worse, we have overestimated the best moment of this life.  I have a feeling that Joel Osteen with his best life now would have liked these monks.  Not so much Maximus, however.  

You do not get to choose soul or body for both are constitutive parts of the human being.  Even when death dissolves this union, the person is not simply left with a soul but looks forward to a new and glorious body like unto Christ's own.  Our salvation is neither the liberation of the person from the physical nor the simple elimination of death from the physical but a new and glorious body in which body the soul is joined forever.  The Kingdom is populated not simply by souls, but by embodied persons.  Now I will admit that I find many of the Eastern church fathers somewhat obtuse and hard to follow.  Maximus is no exception.  I write this only to show that there is no new error and that Maximus could be addressing those today who hope from God little more than a preserved moment in time rather the promise of all things made new. 

 

Remnants. . .

Hymns are not what they once were.  They have succumbed to the modern day penchant to shorten and make bland what was once long and rich in language and poetry.  Take a look at just about any modern hymnal and you will find the longer hymns of yesteryear edited down to a few stanzas and the symbolism stripped away in favor of non-specific language designed not to offend.  It is sad but it is more than simple tragedy.  We have forgotten a tradition and we have proven ourselves too weak to preserve what was passed down to us.  The reality is that most of our hymns are really mere fragments of what were originally very long and often complex compositions.  It was a different time, to be sure, but we forget that even these long and complicated hymns were put to memory and sung in the home and throughout the day as worked.  In our effort to reduce these to 3-5 stanzas, we also have lost the desire and, perhaps, the ability to sing even one stanza of our favorite hymns.

The fact is that many excellent hymns are only fragments from lengthy compositions which have taken on a life apart from the context in which they were created.  The enormous length of a great many hymns is beyond our comprehension today and certainly outside the realm of our desire either to learn or to sing.  I am not at all suggesting that we must treat every hymn text as if it were Scripture and take it as is.  What I am asking, however, is that we learn which stanzas were kept and which disregarded and which were combined into what is an effectively new composition.  It is my conviction that some of the best has been lost and some of the most profound hymnody rendered inaccessible to us today.  Can you imagine doing the same kind of thing to the Psalms?  What would the great Psalms sound like if we had edited them for length and for content?  I dare say that they would no longer be called the prayerbook or hymnbook of the Bible.

As a Lutheran, I mean to say that some of the most sacramental imagery has been lost to us as we parsed the words we received to fit the modern ear and as we translated hymns from one language and era to another.  In particular, baptismal imagery and the symbolic language that would refer to the Sacrament of the Altar have been eroded by well-meaning but destructive translations and summaries.  While I am grateful to Catherine Winkworth for her monumental work of rendering Lutheran chorales into English and thus preserving them for my use today, her own theological presuppositions have surely worked out of many of her translations some of the richest sacramental and symbolic language inherent in the original.  We must do better.  I am in awe of the work of Matthew Carver in translating with a good sense of poetry and a command of the languages.  He reminds us that we are not and should not be beholden to the well-meaning efforts of those in the past whose work may have intentionally or accidentally overlooked such sacramental nuances in the original text.  This also would enhance the riches of those great hymnwriters of the past who have bequeathed to us many more texts and compositions than are now contained in any one hymnal.

Finally, there is a good cause for resurrecting the idea of memorizing hymn texts both for children and adults.  I well recall visiting an elderly blind woman in what was then called Lutheran Home in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  I was a seminary student attached as an ordained deacon to Redeemer Lutheran in that city.  Truth to be told, I had no real idea what I could do for her but she told me simply to read to her the hymns from The Lutheran Hymnal (the only hymnal in our church at the time).  What I noticed is that this woman in her late 80s was mouthing in silence all the words to the many stanzas of the hymns I was reading to her.  She did not want simply to hear them but wanted to hear a voice speak them with her as she moved her lips and thus formed a small congregation of two.  Sadly, most of us today cannot even get through one stanza much less the 20 or more stanzas to some of the best of the hymns passed down to us.  Where would we be today if the same circumstance applied to us?  I fear we would be hearing the words as if for the first time and thus be deprived of this witness living in our hearts and minds.

The roots of liberalism. . .

Though you would not know it today, the very word liberal has its roots in liberty.  It was, at least in the beginning, a word used to describe those who loved freedom.  It originated from the Latin word liber, which means "free."  It began to include ideas of generosity, selflessness, and a person of magnanimous character.  Of course, the word “liberal” has evolved into many different meanings, many of which are decidedly not liberal at all. In political and social theory, “liberalism” did not necessarily mean progressive but was also rooted in the ideals of freedom, rights, and democracy.  In this way, it is quite correct to speak of the American constitutional idea as liberal and embodying the highest institutional attachment to freedom or liberty, to the enshrinement of rights meant to protect the minority from the dictatorship of the majority, and authority which is conferred by democratic vote.  It also contained the idea of laws and a society free from prejudice -- although the implications of that are still being worked out.  As recently as the 1800s, this meant holding to the essentials of individual freedoms over the collective will but at some point it also began to include the idea of government action to compel what was considered to be freedom when that collective will demurred.  Social action began to enter its heyday in the 1960s as this idea was structured into laws over racism, feminism, and poverty.

At some point, however, this took a turn from which we have not yet seen correction.  Liberal has come to mean those who insist upon the minority surrendering its rights for the common good.  It has come to mean the liberty of government to strip away once sacred rights in pursuit of a particular vision of what society and common life looks like.  The once profound tenets of liberty have been willingly surrendered by the masses in pursuit of safety, equality of once unpopular ideas which have now taken root, and in the effecting of a progressive state unhinged by those things which were once considered to be its foundations.  It is not simply that liberal has come to mean those who now trade their principles for the sake of their political or social ideology but those who have become enemies in combat against what were once considered allies of a generous freedom.  Most notably, religion and, in particular, Christian religion has suffered this fate.  There is no prejudice allowed today except that prejudice against ideas once common but now forbidden and that includes most of the moral character of Christian faith and life, rooting in marriage and family.  Antagonism against Christianity and against its ethical and social support for everything from justice to children has become the singular mark of liberalism today.

In other words, liberalism has become decidedly illiberal.  Individual rights and freedoms no longer are sacred or worth preservation and liberals enthusiastically supported the artificial restriction of many of those rights and freedoms during the pandemic.  That single event has had lasting and profound consequences for the individual rights and freedoms of the individual and of religion in America.  We should have seen this coming.  After all, the abortion controversy would have presumed that the liberal path was to protect and defend those with the least status or ability to defend themselves -- the unborn.  But that is not what happened.  Liberal meant not simply allowing but championing the murder of the unborn at the whim and desire of the woman.  Liberal took the same tack with homosexuality.  It did not simply advocate for the extension of rights accorded to heterosexuals to the gay but the wholesale redefinition of marriage away from children and family.  The problem today is not that marriage was redefined but it was effectively stripped from the foundation of family in which selfless love and life was offered for the sake of the spouse and the children everyone expected to be born to that family.  That is not what marriage means today and it is revealed by the appallingly high rate of abortion and the shockingly low birth rate.  The liberal position has come at the expense of love that costs you something and children so that the highest value attached to liberty is the freedom NOT to marry or to end it when you want and NOT to have children even it that means killing the unborn in the womb.

Theologically, liberals are not simply advocating for the freedom of interpretation of traditional Christian values and ideals but is at odds with the Scriptures, creed, and confession.  It has grown to the point where it seems the liberal task to prove how what once was believed, taught, and confessed was in error and cannot possibly be held by a reasoned and educated mind today.  While this is certainly true with Christian teachings that have historically conflicted with modern social ideas of sexual desire, gender identity, marriage, abortion, and such, it is not only about these.  It is a modern idea to presume that the Old Testament is filled with myth and legend, that its stories are incredible and therefore not factual, and that its transmission down through the ages corrupted and distorted the text to the point where no one can really know the truth behind it.  The Scriptures which were once a common anchor for both Roman Catholics and Protestants have become a deep, dark, imagined book in which nearly everything is suspect except the principles of love and self-fulfillment.  Liberalism is a threat against any regular orthodoxy of who Christ was and is and what He accomplished.  It is not simply that some disagree with orthodox Christian doctrine but they insist that it is untenable to hold what was once considered sacred.  Even more so, they seem determined to fence off what was once orthodox and catholic until it is forgotten or erased from memory.  There is no liberty left in such liberalism and it has taken on its sole mission to render traditional and orthodox Christian truth and proclamation offensive.

The problem of compromise and dialogue is made impossible since the liberal has only one goal -- to make what was once held impossible or untenable to be held anymore.  You actually see this working out in Rome when the Latin Mass folks insist upon the right to continue what was once the norm for ove3r 400 years while the liberals (Cupich) insist that no one has the right to anything except the post-Vatican II Mass (as done by those who have stripped it of all its traditional practices).  You also see in in Lutherans who have dismantled the institutions of marriage and family and have rejected the liturgy in an ill-advised separation between so-called style and substance in worship.  The liberal would have refused such animosity while preserving the freedom to disagree but, in religion as in politics, modern day liberals refuse to grant such freedom to those who continue to hold to what was once normative for all.  In this way, again, liberals have proven themselves most illiberal.

What the eye beholds. . .

For many liturgical Christians, and in particular Roman Catholics, the experience of going to church on Sunday morning is made more difficult with buildings which are unfriendly to the liturgy.  We all know this and even though some of those were built in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the people are forced to inhabit structures which do not fit the purpose of worship.  I am purposely ignoring evangelicals and wannabe evangelicals who do not even have a concept of liturgy or church architecture and who delight in providing a warehouse setting for worship in which the stage, the band, and the talking head are all that matters.  What is at odds with the liturgy is an architectural focus on people more than God.  While you might assume that this has only to do with a lack of vertical dimension, it is also true of the kind of art or the lack of it in those structures.  They have the feel of larger personal space more than the formal space of the Word and the Sacraments.  They seem like public spaces in conference centers or other public gatherings in which the whole thing is designed around the desire to schmooze rather than to hear the voice of God's Word or receive His gifts.  They are pedestrian, devoid of art, ornament, symbolsm, and any sense of the holy.  Many of them are downright ugly on top of it -- with brutalist forms and materials that are cold and aloof.  It is no wonder that the liturgy suffers when the regular environment in which it lives is so at odds with its purpose.

While some might insist that the liturgy can function anyway, and that is true, we are not talking about the exception but about the regular place where the people of God gather.  Of course, the liturgy can take place in the barest or ugliest of places but why should it have to?  Why should it be forced to take on the role of making the obviously secular setting a home for the holy ground on which God meets His people with His grace and gifts?  But what it exactly what we have done.  We have forced the liturgy to fight against the surroundings in order to do its job.  While this is obviously about the adornment or lack thereof, it is also about the space itself.  So often modern buildings are reluctant to surrender any space to the chancel and so that whole focus of the liturgy in those spaces is compacted within a setting that refuses to make the movement inherent in the liturgy possible or to accommodate the Divine Service.  I grew up in one such church building that had a chancel smaller than most master bathrooms.  It did not allow for kneeling or for more than a few to commune at a time and the furniture in it had to be moved simply to allow the distribution to take place.  The furnishings were fine but they were crammed into a space smaller than the church kitchen.

Some of you might think that this is merely about preference or taste or even nostalgia for another time.  This may have a very small part in this, I do not deny, but the major problem here is not the longing for another era or the desire to build a gothic cathedral.  It is simply this.  Will/does the space hinder the liturgy and support what happens there or does it work against it?   For those who complain that this is merely about aesthetics, how do you explain a God who goes to such great pains to tell the Israelites what the Temple should look like -- right down to the vestments of the priests -- but thinks that less is more for the New Testament?  Did God get a lobotomy?  Or maybe we have misread a great many things.  At stake is not mere style or taste but theology.  The space itself has a relationship to what takes place within that space.  A ballroom may be a great ballroom and a terrible space for worship.  The same is true of a bar or tire shop or grocery store.  They are built to accommodate their purpose.  Why do we think that churches should not be built or remodeled to support what happens therein?  Why should church buildings not accommodate their purpose and support what takes place within them?  It is clear that people outside the faith expect Christians churches to look like, well, Christian churches.  Is there a reason those inside the Church think otherwise? 

I am not saying that every bad building must be torn down but we ought to evaluate the space and decide how to make it accommodate its purpose.  Some may be remodeled rather easily and inexpensively in order to do just that.  Others will need bigger budgets and dreams.  A few may not be salvageable.  In any case, what the eye beholds reflects what the mind conceives.  That is what is at stake in the subject of church architecture.