Liturgical Top 10

1517 recognizes and celebrates its readership of Christians with varied backgrounds and diverse worship rites and styles. In this article, John Bombaro shares his passion for the liturgy, how he finds it grounded in Scripture, and what advantages he believes it brings to believers. 

 True enough, churchly liturgy has little in common with today’s forms of music, entertainment, or technology. And yet, the vast majority of the world’s Christians routinely engage in liturgical worship. They do so, speaking of the power and profundity of the “Divine Liturgy” not because they deem it their “style” but because they understand it as the principle means by which God in Christ saves sinners, sanctifies his people, and is known in the world. To more fully express the meaning and value of the liturgy, I’ve adapted an article from William Cwirla [1] and presented it here as a Top Ten list:

10. The liturgy connects us with thousands of years of Jewish and Christian history. Great parts of the Apostles’ Creed, the Bible’s songs, and most liturgical responses go back to the Old Testament and the time of the apostles. The liturgy grounds us in the Bible and the ongoing narrative of “God with us.” The earliest Christians adapted and reformed the liturgies of the synagogue and the Sabbath and “traditioned” them. The race of faith, then, is a relay race, one generation handing on to the next generation the traditioned faith once delivered to the saints. The historic liturgy highlights this fact, as it is passed from generation to generation like a treasured inheritance.

1 Corinthians 11.2: Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things, and keep the traditions, as I delivered them to you.

2 Thessalonians 2.15: Therefore, brothers, stand fast, and hold the traditions that you have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

2 Thessalonians 3.6 — Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw yourselves from every brother that walks disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.

9. The liturgy serves as a line of demarcation. The liturgy has the capacity to distinguish believers from unbelievers, the initiated and the uninitiated, through the vocabulary and rites particular to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. George Lindbeck noted how a community is defined by their nomenclature and “cult.” Together, they yield a unique culture. The Rite of Holy Baptism, for example, exemplifies that line of demarcation with its “birthing” event and denominating the baptized into Christ Jesus as “Christian.” The liturgy thus gives clear expression through word and rite of what we believe about God, ourselves and the world. In other words, it preserves the Bible’s truths and renders them easily recognized, understood, confessed, sung, and celebrated as specifically Christian culture. The for what we believe determines how we worship, and how we worship shows and perpetuates what we believe. 

8. The liturgy is both theological and Christological.This is to say that the liturgy is purposely Father-Son-and Holy Spirit focused through and through. The focus rests on who God is and what He has done and continues to do through Christ and the Holy Spirit in human history. Indeed, the liturgy unfolds how God abides with us, for us, in the here and now. From the invocation in God’s name to the benediction in His name, the liturgy pivots on the activity of the Holy Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—manifesting the ongoing kingdom message and miracles of Christ Jesus. The emphasis of the liturgy, therefore, does not fall on “me” or “we” but on God in Christ reconciling us to Himself and giving Himself to us in grace, mercy, peace and love.

7. The liturgy is a teacher. The liturgy teaches the whole counsel of God. Everything from creation and redemption to sanctification and God’s kingdom is proclaimed and celebrated in the liturgy. But it also teaches about God Himself through word, song, rites, colors, clothing, art, icons, fixtures, vessels, architecture and many other things, including the calendar itself. In other words, the liturgy bespeaks of a literacy — a theological literacy of divine presence and activity.

6. The liturgy can serve every culture and all generations. The liturgy can be found pretty much anywhere a Christian may travel or reside. Moreover, it can be learned and enjoyed by believers of any age. Persons of the widest spectrum of abilities can learn and pray the Lord’s Prayer, confess the Creeds, and chant the Psalms. In this way, the liturgy should be prized as multi-generational and timeless. The liturgy therefore may be participatory in ways that alternate forms of worship are not, since it is about the theology of worship and not style.
7. 
   The liturgy allows us to rest.To be contemporary is to always strive to keep with the times. Repetition, however, is the mother of learning, a familiar place of restful nurturing. Fixed texts and annual cycles of readings lend to deep and sustained learning. In a world full of (mostly unwelcome) surprises that keep us on edge, it is nice to go into the House of the Lord and be in familiar surroundings with familiar rituals and words. To be sure, mindless repetition does not accomplish anything (nor does endless variety that keeps us on our toes!), and that is why the liturgy is taught and re-taught so that Christians are constantly refreshed as to its power and promise. What is more, as noted earlier, the liturgy is vastly diverse anyway. Our current Lutheran liturgy offers no less than five settings for Mass, plus a dozen other services that may be partially transposed. Incorporating alternate forms, settings, and ceremonies, along with the changing calendar, keeps the liturgy lively and lovely but not alien or unfamiliar, like the restlessness that comes with guessing what may happen next.

4. The liturgy is a family ordeal. To use church-speak, the liturgy is “corporate” in nature and purpose. The liturgy draws us out of ourselves and into Christ by faith and the neighbor by love. We’re all in this together. That’s what baptism does: it makes us family and so the gathering of family is for the benefit of all. To be sure, there is a time and place for your personal relationship with the Lord and that’s a good thing, but the liturgy is about the family gathering, family celebrations, family needs, and of course the family meal. So it is cultural and communal in ways intended by the Lord to form, inform, and reform us as brothers and sisters of the Kingdom, rather than consumers within a market.

3. The liturgy rescues us from the tyranny of the contemporary. The liturgy helps redeem us from the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches to be properly orientated in this world in the very presence of the Lord whose grace overcomes the rat race life. In other words, by connecting us with the ancient past and the coming eschaton determined by Christ, the liturgy helps to save us from a myopic vision of ourselves in the “here and now,” as if that were the end all, be all. It isn’t. What is more, through the traditioned faith, the liturgy manifests the wisdom of ages past, the valor of the apostles and saints, and the noble devotion of our forefathers. In these ways, the liturgy sobers arrogant thoughts that “we have arrived” as moderns, as well as the “cult of progress.” The divine liturgy says: Let’s begin with Confession and Holy Absolution to get God’s perspective on things.

2. The liturgy is external. The liturgy supplies a concrete, external anchor in the death and resurrection of Jesus through word, water, pastor, bread and wine. Faith comes by hearing the external word of Christ. Inner feelings and opinions give way to the truth outside of us, such that confronts us in the liturgy of the Word and the liturgies of the Sacraments. Along the way, God ministers to our feelings and stirs feelings of love, joy, and peace through things that get our eyes off of ourselves and onto Christ.

1. The number one reason why we extol the liturgy is because it is the Word of God. Christ is the Word of God made flesh and this same Word of God made flesh continues to come to us in his Word and Sacraments. To miss this point is to render the power and efficacy of the liturgy merely a “style” of worship. Read the liturgy and you will see that it is the Word of God speaking to us and we responding back with that which is most certain and true — the Word of God in Christ, the Word of God that is Christ.

For readers more interested in some context, John gives a brief context about the liturgy: 

There are two levels of consideration. First, the liturgy is the means by which the Lord speaks and does His saving and sanctifying, but also how he is recognizably and reliably present for us. In other words, the liturgy is God’s specific means of presence and operation within the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. The liturgy itself originates in the Old Testament worship of the Jews, achieving a form in synagogue worship that would greatly influence the Eucharistic Liturgy of Christianity. The major rites of Christian liturgy, as well as the content of gospel preaching, were instituted and ordained by Christ as the means by which God gives Himself for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. 

That’s the first way to understand the liturgy — as God’s doing and being present among us to justify sinners and sanctify His saints. As such, the liturgy is the sum and substance of God’s Word and Sacrament ministry, administered by the Lord Himself: hence the Augsburg Confession’s definition of the Church is liturgically expressed as “the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel” (AC VII:1). This might be a surprise to some: The Church has a christological reference, not an anthropological reference. It is less about the activity of people (e.g., assembling and calling themselves a “church”) and everything to do with Christ’s liturgical activities and presence. Christ, then, determines both the Church and its mission. And because Christ’s liturgical presence is so specific, it is readily found. We may know who the Lord is, where he is, and what he is doing. There’s no searching or guess work: God makes himself known through the means of grace and Christic self-donation — the holy gospel and the sacraments administered according to the gospel.

The second level of consideration is the expression of the liturgy. These are the Bible-based rites through which the Lord gives himself (and therefore all the benefits of receiving Him) to us — preaching, Scripture reading, holy baptism, declaring our sins forgiven, holy baptism, holy communion, and the giving of his blessing and peace. Because they are of God and from God, these two dimensions of the liturgy give great confidence, security and comfort to the people of God, the world over, generation after generation.

A third level could be mentioned, and that would be of the ceremonial accoutrements of the divine liturgy. Here we would find both variation and generosity on the part of the Church’s imagination, informed by catechetical (that is, didactic) symbolism and content. While the liturgy and its rights are non-negotiable as the expressed will of God in Christ (in large part constituting what it means to worship “in Spirit and in truth”), ceremonial acts are governed by meaningful principles of decorum, orderliness, and beauty.