These words should remind us that our institutional forms and ritual habits are neither holdovers from the ceremonial order of the old covenant nor are they empty gestures no longer needed or godly in the new covenant. Indeed, they have been fulfilled. What were once merely forms and habits are now filled with Christ. This is a vibrant liturgy not because the people are with it or into it or it has all the bells and whistles but because Christ is there, the One who fulfilled all that went before and who gives to the present the taste of the eternal which is coming. Listen to his words:
Once upon a time, Israel offered sacrificial worship at a sanctuary through the ministrations of priests, but Jesus opened the door to a post-religious world sans sacrifice, sans sanctuary, sans priest, sans everything. That’s a misreading. Augustine captures the actual thrust of the letter when he characterizes the transition as one from shadow to reality, symbol to truth. Christian liturgical practice is still sacrificial and priestly, but through Jesus we have access to the real, original, heavenly things. What Israel did in twilight, the church does in the full light of day. The new doesn’t inaugurate an a-liturgical form of life and worship, but radically rearranges liturgy itself.That is the point we so often either take for granted and thus relegate to the realm of the theoretical or we miss entirely. Through Christ we do have access to the eternal and that access does not come to us by escaping or eschewing the earthly forms of the means of grace but directly through them. It is as if we have become the woman caught in her sin who distracts the conversation to the idea of which mountain. Jesus does not denigrate the mountains that where they worshiped but insisted that it was not a choice between those hills in the past but the revelation of what was here now in Christ -- the heavenly brought to earth to bring us to our home on high and fulfill all the promises of yesterday.
It is clear that most of what passes for worship is an almost gleeful abandonment of anything that would resemble the past in favor of an individualist and emotional piety in which worship is almost irrelevant and the earthly replaced entirely. This surely ends up being either an other worldly spirituality in which nothing of today has meaning or it ends up with a present day spirituality in which today is the only things that has meaning. God must be shedding tears. He has fulfilled all that was promised and filled the present with Christ so that we may glimpse the future and be kept unto the consummation of all things and here we are clapping our hands, stomping our feet, and propelling ourselves into an emotional high or arguing ourselves into heaven as if all the work of Christ depended upon a yea or a nay from us. Lutherans have, as I have often said, the fullness of it all in the efficacious Word AND Sacraments, catholic doctrine, liturgy, and practice, and the vibrant fruit of God's work in the present through the doctrine of vocation. What a shame we do not value and live out what we have. In this, we are not unlike that woman arguing with Jesus at the well while He is giving us what is beyond our wildest hopes and dreams in the mystery of His grace that saves us now for eternity.