LITURGY

1. LITURGY • Throwing My “Bundle of Sticks” in the Fire; • or Reaching Out with the Mass.

2. My Sticks in the Fire The language, life, ritual and liturgy of the Lutheran Church are incomprehensible to the denizens of our insane post-Christian world. This unfamiliarity, however, provides an authentic opportunity to intentionally evangelize the lost wayfarer and, hopefully, to recover the bored consumer through meaningful signs of Christ and the Gospel revealed in the mysterious, biblical, evangelical, confessional, catholic, and apocalyptic world of the Lutheran Divine Service... or Mass... or Divine Liturgy.

3. Common Objections • “Traditional Liturgy” is a barrier • Church must change or die • Content and Form Distinctions • Doctrinal Unity; Practical Disunity • FC X gives freedom in all ceremony • The Adiaphora Trump Card

4. Assumptions Reconsidered • Statistical Trends: • Eastern Orthodox growth • CGM Stagnation & Emergent Critique • 9,000,000 + and shrinking (25-35 k a year) • Anecdotal Evidence • Personal Journey • Theological Confession • Field of Ritual Studies

5. Liturgical Renewal Movement • Demand for Simplification of Liturgy • Emphasis on Community-Building • Insistence on Rationality • Infatuation with Fourth-Century • Frantic Search for THE LITURGY • Social Science: Modern Subjective

6. Church Growth Movement • Pragmatic-Outcome Based Approach • Principle of Homogeneity • Production of Popular Atmosphere • Programming to Felt Needs • Marketing, Manipulation, and Magic • Social Science: Modern Subjective

7. Inherited Worship Dogma • Simplicity: Sitz im Leben NT Era • Immediacy: Direct Experience • Intelligibility: Cognitive Understanding • Transparency: Obvious Meaning • Creativity: Personal & Local Novelty • Spontaneity: Informal & Unpredictable • Relevancy: Applicable to Needs

8. Ablaze!(tm) The Movement • Evangelism is Central to Life of Church • Friendship Sundays, Liturgies: CGM is neutral • Church Planting: CGM is most effective tool • Non-Christian Prepared by Secular Methods? • Revitalization for Transformation of Church • Social Systems Theory • Leadership Training and Equipping • Church Transformed by Secular Principles?

9. Lost in the Smoldering Ruins • Biblical Reality... more than text. • Transcendent... more than feeling. • Sacraments... more than doctrine. • Church Identity... more than Lutheran. • Personal Identity... more than consumer. • Liturgical Ritual... more than verbal.

10. Ritual Reconsiderations • Complexity, not Simplicity • Mediation, not Immediacy • Mystery, not Intelligibility • Opacity, not Transparency • Habit, not Creativity • Formality, not Spontaneity • Reverence, not Relevance

11. Power of Good Ritual • Rules and Regularity: Allow person freedom to act • Objective: Christ is at work in His means • Non-Rational: Theological performance • Non-Verbal and Sensory: Engages entire person • Repetitive: Habit makes true experience possible • Transformative: Actions endowed with holy purpose. • Iconic: Opens up heavenly, transcendent mysteries • Liturgical Agent: Attention directed elsewhere

12. Theological Reconsiderations • Incarnation: Word Enfleshed • Sacrament: Divine Presence • Scriptural Narrative: Divine Encounter • Ecclesiology: Church Triumphant • Eschatology: Heavenly Invasion • Anthropology: Disordered Sinner

13. The Deep Ritual of A Mass, Divine Service, or Divine Liturgy • Biblical: Word of Christ • Confessional: Proclaims Christ • Catholic: Presence of Christ • Evangelical: Work of Christ • Apocalyptic: Reveals Christ

14. Opportunity for Church:Recovery of the Sacred • Disillusioned words like bullets bark, As human gods aim for their mark, • Made everything from toy guns that spark, • to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark, • It’s easy to see without looking too far, that not much is really sacred. • Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” • “He (the Christian in the American South) feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party.” Walker Percy • “In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.” Walker Percy

15. The Religious Caveman At a deeper level of my consciousness I brush aside all the imposing objections against the reality of the world and the reality of my own humanity, even though I cannot refute them. I am afraid I have to admit it: I am a Stone Age man.... People say, and I should have grasped it long ago, that the objects around me have not the slightest significance, that there is nothing in them (and who, after all, am I?). Yes, I hear all this, but I do not believe it. I am still on the very lowest rung of the history of mankind. I am an animist.... A man on his knees because he believes that his Maker is present in a little white wafer: this is still a stumbling block in many places, and we must thank God for it. Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness

16. Cultural Challenges • The Bored Consumer • The Modern Rational Illiterate • The Cultural Wasteland

17. The Bored Consumer • “No. It’s really not about you.” • Self-Indulgent/Self-Absorbed • Anti-Institutionalism • Fast Food Theology • Carole King Theology • Chicken Little Theology

18. The Rational Modern Illiterate • Self-Centered • Disordered • Sentimental • Enraged • Depressed • Lonely • Bored • Lustful • Spiritually Impoverished

19. The Rational Modern Illiterate The cultural development in the West “has produced the modern, non-religious, rationalistic, metaphysically blind human being. Sociologists of religion have devoted their attention to this phenomenon. They have a name for the kind of man who believes he can make a connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm by means of sacral acts, who sees the material form as a mirror of transcendence, and who lives in the presence of God (or of the gods): such a man is homo religiosus. In this sense practically all people were homines religiosi until the eighteenth century.” Mosebach, 54

20. The Rational Modern Illiterate Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused,And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.All he believes are his eyesAnd his eyes, they just tell him lies. Bob Dylan, License to Kill

21. Modern Wasteland • Naturalism: We are mere beasts. • Idealism: We are the Creator. • Romanticism: We are naturally spiritual. • Consumerism: We are what we buy. • Individualism: I am the most important thing in the Cosmos. • Pluralism: There are many, equally valid truths. • Nihilism: Nothing matters. • Moral Relativism: Anything goes.

22. Modern Wasteland “The present age is demented. It is possess by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia. As the century draws to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it can be described. It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.” Walker Percy

23. Rubricism: Liturgical Fussiness Traditionalism: Too catholic... Pragmatism: If it works.... Parochialism: We did it our way... Egotism: I must increase... Professional Concerns

24. The Pastor Education in Liturgical/Sacramental Theology Eucharistic Faith and Piety The Bored Consumer Catechesis: Classes, sermons, etc. Conversion: Introduction of Ritual The Wayfarer in the Desert Recovering the Catechumenate Opportunity for Mystagogy Casuistry: Liturgical Catechesis