What Makes Lutheran Worship Lutheran - by Dr. Joel Biermann

"The worship wars may have been largely settled, but it's still worth asking what qualifies as Lutheran worship. As Joel Biermann makes clear, it is NOT about ticking off a list of essential elements. It is about paying attention to God giving his gifts and to the fundamental reality of lex orandi lex credendi."

   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZeKZVxXHw&t=772s

 

TRANSCRIPT

We don't hear a lot anymore about worship wars. When I was a student at the Seminary, it was kind of the hot thing—contemporary versus traditional and all these kinds of things going on. It seems to me that, in a large way, this has been kind of more or less settled. Most of the gatherings I go to, senate-wide or district-wide, tend to have, by default, gone to a “by the book” sort of thing, an out-of-LSB sort of thing. So I think that’s kind of where we’ve settled on stuff.

So maybe this is a P question, but I still think it’s worth asking: What makes worship Lutheran? This comes up. Students are still pressing me on this kind of question, and I get parishioners who are very interested. So I want to offer a few thoughts about this, and I think this is a part of the discussion that, in my opinion, gets too little attention. I want to hang my discussion here on the old phrase Lex orandi, Lex credendi.

It was Prosper of Aquitaine, way back in the fifth century, who first said something close to this axiom. Rome uses it, and they maybe mean something else by it, but here’s what I mean by it, and here’s what I think we should rightly understand Lex orandi, Lex credendi. This is a little Latin phrase: Lex means law, orandi means praying, and credendi means to believe or believing. So literally, this is "law praying, law believing." More loosely translated, it means the law of praying is the law of believing. In other words, how you pray, how you worship, impacts what you believe.

Now, you can debate and say, "Oh, I don’t think that’s true." It doesn’t matter if you think it’s true—it is. And here’s where I’m coming from: This is simply a reality of our human nature. It is a psychological, anthropological, sociological reality. It’s just the way it is, and it has been recognized all the way back since the ancients. Aristotle knew it. Augustine knew it. Everybody knows this. How you do something, how you’re habituated, becomes what you are, what you believe. This is just basic to human formation, basic to pedagogy, and catechesis. It’s a fundamental reality. How you worship will absolutely impact how you believe.

So I operate with two little subset corollaries to this. Worship like a Pentecostal, and you’ll believe like a Pentecostal. Worship like a Roman Catholic, and you’ll believe like a Roman Catholic. And you know it’s true. You’ve seen the evidence. We see it when people who go to congregations that are very loose and very contemporary in their style of worship, and kind of do things with lots of singing and then a little sermon tacked on the end. Then their parishioners move away, and they end up going to non-denominational churches that feel comfortable to them. We say, "What’s going on? How come they’re forsaking their theology?" Well, Lex orandi, Lex credendi. And we see it when people who are steeped in a highly liturgical, High Church kind of context, and we see them not being satisfied with the liturgy, and then they swim the Tiber or the Bosphorus and go off and become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox because they’ve got better liturgy. So, Lex orandi, Lex credendi is simply the truth of how things work, and we need to recognize this.

Because this also plays out when we start talking about worship that is appropriate or Lutheran, or that we like, or that is maybe not so good. We have these big debates. There’s still a running question of, "What makes Lutheran worship Lutheran?" Well, I’ve got a very simple, straightforward, somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer, but I think it’s the right one: What makes Lutheran worship Lutheran is when Lutherans are worshiping. That’s Lutheran worship. That means it’s pretty wide open. The Formula of Concord, Article 10, makes clear that it needs to stay wide open, but I’m going to do a separate video on that some other time. Right now, I just want to zero in on this kind of question of formation through our practices and how we operate in the Lex orandi, Lex credendi thing.

So when worship is going on, and Lutherans are doing it, that constitutes Lutheran worship. So that means there’s no real checklist, and frankly, this kind of drives me nuts when I encounter people who operate with this Lutheran worship checklist. You must have an invocation, you must have a confession, you must have scripture reading, you must have the Lord’s Prayer, and you must have a Creed, and the sermon. And if you’ve got those things there, you’re Lutheran worship, and it’s like check, check, check, check, as if that’s what makes it Lutheran. It’s absurd. It’s just silly. No, there’s no checklist of things you have to have.

So when Lutheran worship, it’s Lutheran worship. And what do Lutherans do? They gather around God’s gifts. God gives his gifts through preaching the Word, being proclaimed, the gospel going out. God gives his gifts through the sacraments, being rightly done: baptism being celebrated, the Lord’s Supper being delivered, God’s gospel gifts being given to his people. And his people respond with joyful praise. And that’s what makes Lutheran worship Lutheran.

Now, what’s always going on in every worship context, because Lex orandi, Lex credendi is absolutely true, is that the worship that is happening is forming the people who are worshiping. So one of the things I think we need to be asking ourselves—the question of, especially those of us who are responsible for worship and even those of us who are sitting in the pews and being formed by the worship—we should be asking ourselves the question: What kind of Christians is this worship making?

This is an issue I don’t see given nearly enough attention, but we should be asking this question right up front. Not only should we be asking the question, “Are we delivering the gospel well today? Is this worship conducive to people re-celebrating God’s gifts to them?” We should be asking those questions, but we should also be asking, “What kind of Christians am I making by this sort of worship?” And this becomes important over the long stretch of a year or a lifetime of a congregation. Because we can do some kind of worship on one Sunday, maybe on the next Sunday, we do a different kind of worship, and then over the course of the year, you should ask the question, “Taken together, how are we teaching our people to think? What kind of Christians are we making with this way of worshiping?”

Now, I’m going to answer a question I think with a little direction here. I would say I think what we should be doing in our worship is we should be making Christians who are faithful in their Lutheran confession, which is made up by a series of little GWs. I’ll make it easy for us. The first one is I think we should be making Christians who are grounded. In other words, they know their foundational realities in Christ, in his spoken and his written word, and in the confessions that articulate the truth about Christ. They’re grounded in God’s right teaching, and they’re also grounded in the history of what makes the church the church. No Christian ever stands alone. We don’t live in the sort of “me and Jesus” sort of a thing. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ is not a scriptural idea, and it’s not the center of our faith. The center of our faith is Christ coming to me and putting me into his body, the church, and making me part of his story, which plays out in the life of the church. So the church matters, not just my congregation or my district or denomination, but the church. And so we should have an appreciation as Christians for all the thousands of years of Christians who have gone before us. The way that they have worshiped, the way that they have thought about God, the truth they have taught. This is what we do—the regular feed day, the rule of faith, the Corpus doctrina is the long history of that teaching, and we hold on to this same with worship. That’s why we should be teaching and cultivating in our people an appreciation for worship forms and styles and elements that go way back. Like the Kyrie that was sung in the first century of the life of the church. It’s cool to think about when we sing the Kyrie today—“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.” The first Christians were doing this. We’re doing it with them. When we speak the Creed, we’re speaking with Christians in all places and all times. That’s compelling. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer together, we’re praying the prayer Christ gave us. The apostles prayed it, for crying out loud. Now we’re praying it today. That’s pretty cool. And so we should teach people to be grounded.

And also to be Grateful for that history, grateful for that heritage, people should be taught that this way of worship, these styles, are here for a reason. They're cool, they're awesome. We can throw in other things like Gregorian chants—there’s beauty there, or Bach, Canada—there’s power there. The simplicity of sitting around the campfire singing, there’s power there. We should be grateful for the fullness and richness of all the ways Christ has given his truth to us, and the ways the church celebrates that in different cultures. There should be a gratefulness for that and an appreciation for our heritage, especially our liturgical heritage.

The third G is a generous spirit. This is huge. A generous spirit means you are able to recognize that there are many different ways of worshipping, and they’re valid and good. They have beauty in their own ways. Maybe they’re not your personal preference, but they’re still good and beautiful, and we should be able to affirm that. This is a formula of Concord thing—more on that another time. But a generous spirit needs to be cultivated. How do you do that? By exposing people to it.

Now, here’s where it gets a little tricky, because there’s a fourth G I want to throw in, which is that genuine, good worship is heartfelt. There's no denying that formulaic, empty worship—whether it’s liturgical or contemporary—is just empty. It’s junk. I’ve been in contemporary services that are vapid and trivial, and I’ve been in high-church services that are the same. Most of it has to do with how it is led and conveyed by those worshiping. I’m not talking about making it all touchy-feely. I’m talking about people recognizing that they are delivering God’s goods, that this is cool, this is important. The best worship is always worship that is genuine. Christians who are eager to encounter God’s gifts, eager to celebrate with one another, and eager to give praise to God—that’s genuine worship, and it can happen in all kinds of contexts.

Back to my generous spirit—this third G. A generous spirit says, “Look, there are different ways of doing this worship thing, and there are strengths and weaknesses to all of them.” So what should we be doing? We should cultivate in our Christians the ability to say, “I love it all. I see this as the beauty of the body of Christ.” Some of my preferences are rooted in my own formation, from my childhood or some pastor I admired, or a critical time in my life when I was deeply formed. Now I say, “That’s the right way to worship, because that’s what I like.” It boils down to taste and preference, 99% of the time. But along with that comes an appreciation for what’s gone before, grounded in gratitude, and also a generous spirit that says, “Look, there are many ways of doing this.”

We should cultivate a love for the liturgy in our people. They should be exposed to it, learn to love every one of the five services in the Lutheran Service Book (LSB), and say, “These are all cool.” We should also cultivate in them the ability to say, “Look, here I am in a service that doesn’t even follow LSB, but this is still a Lutheran service. God’s grace is here, and I can celebrate this. I can embrace this other culture’s way of doing it. It’s totally different from mine, but it’s also good and right. Maybe it’s not my first preference, but it’s not wrong. It doesn’t need to be repented of or repudiated.”

We can embrace the wholeness of this. We do that by teaching our people to experience it. We have an interesting interface here: teaching a love for the liturgy by doing it. We should be putting down good tracks so our people are well-formed in what they know. They should be able to recite the prayers, know the liturgy, know the format, the rhythm. They’re custom to it. But we should also give them surprises and novel ways of doing things once in a while to keep everyone paying attention. For example, a new way of saying the Creed could help people see value in it, or using a handwritten confession—heaven forbid—could be powerful. People stop and say, “Wait a minute, that’s a true word. I can put that confession in my own mouth and confess it because it ties into today’s sermon.” There’s a place for that.

Yes, it can be poorly done, but it can also be done very well. There’s value in helping our people realize the breadth of Christian worship, which embraces all of this. The innovation and freshness are coupled with appreciation for depth and history. All these things are going on at once. Lex orandi, lex credendi—and there’s a third one I want to endorse today, which is Lex vivendi. The law of worship is the law of believing, and the law of living. How you live your life—your ethics, the way you do things—is tied to what you believe and how you worship. They all run together. Adding Lex vivendi is helpful because it shows the wholeness of habituation. How I live, how I worship, and what I believe all become who I am.

Let’s pay attention to the law of praying, the law of believing, and the law of living. Make that a priority when thinking about what kind of worship is good, what makes worship valuable, or what makes worship not so helpful. Ask, “What kind of Christians are we making? What kind of Christian am I becoming by this way of worship?” Then your worship will be a delight to everyone around you, to yourself, and to God, who is giving his gifts in that worship.