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LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2
02.LW2
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>> DAVID: It's nice to meet you, Professor Just. My name
is David, and I serve a small, struggling urban
congregation in Cleveland. I love my work among my people,
but I must admit that designing worship is quite a
challenge for me. I always seek to create worship
experiences which are meaningful and faithfully Lutheran.
So here's a question that has occurred to me on more than
one occasion: What do we mean by the bodily presence of
Jesus Christ?
>> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Thank you, David. It's nice to meet
you, and you have given a question here that flows right
out of a biblical understanding of the theology of worship.
At the center of our worship is Christ, and so when we talk
about worship, we're going to see that it's a
Christological issue. Now, I use the language of the bodily
presence of Jesus Christ because this reflects our biblical
Christology. As you know, during the early church’s
controversies over the person of Christ, there were many
ecumenical councils that fought hard and hammered out in
some very clear, creedal language an understanding of what
we mean by Christ in his presence and the person of Christ.
Perhaps in your course on the early church you will hear
about the Council of Chalcedon. And it is there that we
have this wonderful description of how we understand
Christ's presence among us today.
When we talk about Christ, we always talk about the person
of Christ who has a divine and human nature, never
separating those natures, but always talking about the
person of Christ. And that person of Christ, in his divine
and human nature, is always present among us, not just his
divine nature, but his divine and human nature. One of my
colleagues who teaches early church always says it this
way: that we can never separate our salvation in Jesus
Christ from his flesh, that is, from his divine and human
nature, the person of Christ and his bodily nature. And so
when Christ is present, he's always present in the flesh.
Now, this is so important to us as worshiping Christians
because what happens when we come in to worship is that we
come into a communion with his flesh. There is a
participation and a union between our flesh and his flesh.
Now, I'll start right out by saying this is a great
mystery. This is a mystery that I in no way can explain to
you in any kind of logical form. It is something we embrace
in faith, that the scriptures describe, that the church has
tried to hammer out, as I said, in this creedal language.
But at the end of the day, how the creator of all things,
the eternal one, can be present in a finite way in finite
things is a great mystery.
When we talk about this bodily presence, we have to be very
clear that we’re not just simply talking about his bodily
presence in the Lord's Supper. That’s actually, in some
ways, easier to understand, although that's a great
mystery. Christ is present there in, with, and under bread
and wine, his body and blood. And that is something, as
Lutherans, we hold dear as reflecting the biblical
understanding of the Lord's Supper. But we also must speak
about how Christ is present in the word. In fact, what
we're going to find as we look at the liturgy of the church
in our worship, is that the word of God is absolutely
central to a biblical understanding of worship and to
understanding this notion of bodily presence. Now,
sometimes when we think of the word of God, we simply think
of a book, you know, the writings on the page, the
*inscripturated word, which of course it is. This is the
inspired, inerrant word of God. But we also have to
remember that the word is the word made flesh, Christ
himself. And I'll illustrate this in his ministry where
here the word made flesh speaks and reads the word of God,
a remarkable moment in the history of Israel where the word
reads the word.
When you and I come into the presence of God in worship,
what we are doing is we're coming into the presence of the
word made flesh, and that word comes to us through the word
that we hear. That's how the spirit works. The spirit works
with the word of God, and by means of that word and spirit,
Christ is present among us in his flesh, that bodily
presence. When we hear the word of God, we hear it from a
voice. Notice how-- and I'll use this word incarnational
that is, how fleshly that is. By incarnational I mean how
it's something that is tangible and concrete in a human
being, and human flesh. We hear the word of God, and it
comes into our ear. That's a voice that enters our ear, and
it is in this way that Christ is bodily present for us. It
is remarkable, if you think about it, that it is in the
voice, the word heard that the spirit works. Now, again,
some of you might ask what if a person can't hear. Well,
they hear it through the hands if they know sign language,
or they can read on the lips. But it still comes through a
word, whether it's heard or not.
We also need to express the fact that Christ is not only
present in the word heard and the word that is spoken over
the bread and wine where we now, after those words are
spoken and the spirit works, we receive the body and blood
of Christ, but Christ is present in us, the baptized.
That’s one of the things we sometimes forget, that we bear
in our bodies the bodily presence of Christ. In one of the
services in Lutheran Worship, the corporate confession and
absolution, we say very clearly in that liturgy, and this
reflects the Biblical faith, that Christ dwells in us, and
we'd dwell in him. That's what happens when we're baptized.
Our flesh is joined to Christ’s flesh, and we now have
dwelling in us Jesus Christ himself. That's why Luther used
to call us little Christs, and that comes right out of the
early church, who, after they are baptized one of the early
Fathers said you are probably now called Christs because
you now bear in your bodies Jesus himself.
This understanding of Christ being present in the baptized
is accentuated when the baptized come together as a
community gathered around this bodily presence of Christ in
word and sacrament. And one of the things we need to say so
clearly about this bodily presence of Christ is that it is
a way in which God gives us his gifts. The gifts that we're
going to talk about are gifts that are beyond compare. But
before we talk about those gifts, let me just talk a little
bit about what it is that Christ gives to us as we now bear
him in the world.
You know, we’ve been talking, just now, about the liturgy
as we gather together as the people of God, the liturgy of
those who are assembled in the presence of Christ around
word and sacrament. But, you know, there is another
liturgy, and that is a liturgy of life where we are serving
out in the world because Christ is present in us, and we
bear witness to him by our presence in this dark world with
his presence in us. Now, If you think about Jesus and what
it is that kind of overwhelms you about his presence as he
walked and talked in Galilee and Jerusalem and in this
world in which we live, he was the center of God's love,
God's mercy, God's compassion, God's forgiveness. And
that's what we are. When we bear Christ in the world, we
bear Christ as those who love the world as Christ loves the
world. What we mean by that is that we're willing to serve
that world as he served it, with our own lives, to
sacrifice ourselves to bring his gifts to this world. And
we do that in the way in which we live together as
Christians, not only among ourselves, but with a world that
knows not Christ. We are people who love one another, and
love the world, namely, the people of this world. We're
merciful. We are kind and generous. We’re hospitable. We’re
compassionate. We're forgiving.
Luther summarized that with the word love. And he follows
Jesus here. We talked about that earlier, loving God and
loving our neighbor. That presence in the world of Christ
in us is also part of what we're talking about when we talk
about the bodily presence of Christ. Now, why do we have to
talk about this today? Well, one of the things I think
you'll discover if you just go out into this world in which
we live--and this is certainly true in the secular world-but even in the American, Protestant religious culture in
which we live, they do not have this understanding of
Jesus. I don't know the best way to describe this. Perhaps
it’s too strong to say they have a different Jesus, but
they certainly have a different understanding of Jesus that
we do and they don't believe that Jesus is present in this
world according to his flesh. They have a very interesting
way of describing this. This is not our understanding; this
is this kind of Protestant American religious cultural
understanding of Jesus that the finite is not capable of
the infinite, which means that Christ cannot be present in
finite things like water or bread and wine or even in us.
For them, it's kind of what they would call a spiritual
presence. And it's one that's mediated by their experience
or their feelings about God but does not have this
objective reality of Christ presence bodily there in word
and sacrament and in us. Now that's a big difference, and
in some ways, that's the difference that makes all the
difference in the world. And it really changes the way we
worship. It changes the way in which we understand
ourselves as Christians. In a sense, it's an identity issue
because we identify with these objective means of grace.
And that's what we're going to talk about word and
sacrament as means of grace, means by which Christ comes to
us bodily. Whereas, for this culture in which we live, they
do not see these objective means of grace, but they are
focused in on their response to that. The response is where
they center their worship, and as we began, we begin with
God, not with us. So how do they know that Christ is
present? It's their experience. It's their feeling. It's
their emotions. And that's why their worship is going to
take a different shape than ours. That is why our worship
is different from many other Christians. I hope to show you
in the next questions that we will discuss together how
ours comes out of and flows out of the scriptures
themselves and the worship of Israel. But one of the
fundamental things we need to return to as we begin this
discussion of the biblical foundations for worship is to
return to the gifts.
When Christ is present, and we have communion with him, he
gives us gifts. He is the giver, the giver of gifts beyond
compare. And these are treasures. One of the things in this
world in which we live and which perhaps they don't have as
clear an understanding of this real presence of Christ
among us, we have to recognize these treasures and rejoice
in them and share them with these people who perhaps don't
see the fullness of what we see in this extraordinary gift
that God gives us in his son. These gifts are gifts that
Luther describes so beautifully. But these gifts are ones
also that we must recognize as gifts that come to each and
every one of us individually and as a community. And as we
talk about these gifts, we will see that these gifts are
always attached to the person of Jesus Christ who is bodily
present among us.