A Quick Primer on Liturgical Theology
Ever wondered how to understand Christian worship? Here is a quick overview of liturgical theology…
Word & Sacrament
In his masterful book Liturgical Theology, Simon Chan observed that, “[Worship] practices have always returned to two things, Word and sacrament.” Our Sunday worship takes this seriously. The first part of the service is the word, and the second is the sacrament. We do this because we believe that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) The Word became flesh. Two natures in one: word and sacrament.
Sponsored
We see two, just as we see Christ’s two natures, and yet there is one Son of God. In a mystery, the word of God and the grace of God through the means of the sacraments are one. It is a mistake to divide word and sacrament in our minds. They aren’t balanced against one another or held in tension. They are both fully manifested, just as Christ is one person with two natures. In the service of the word, we are predominantly charged to “hear.” In the service of the sacrament, to “receive.” The gospel is heard and received in both word and sacrament.
For this primer, think of ‘word’ and ‘sacrament‘ as your main headings. Think of these two powerful realities as one full expression of the same gospel, but with two expressions. Ponder on them as two ways of hearing and receiving the death, burial, and resurrection power of Jesus Christ.
Think of the following pairs of subsets that flow from word and sacrament, as outlined here:
- Word and Sacrament
- Gathering and Sending
- The Mystery and the Mundane
- Take, Bless, Break, and Give
- Paradise
These realities overlap and intertwine; remembering them helps us understand how our souls are formed in worship.
Gathering & Sending
In each part of our worship, we are gathering and sending. In the service of the Word, we open with acclamation and call to worship. God gathers his people. The Church is called together by the power of the Holy Spirit. True, the gospel must be preached and the call to worship must go forth through human lips and hearts. It is God, however, who adds to our number. As he gathers his people for worship, he gathers them to shape their hearts and minds with the gospel.
In our liturgy, at the end of the service of the word, we have peace. This is a sending. We are being sent to reconcile. As St Paul wrote, we are agents of reconciliation. We are sent into the service of the sacrament first.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
2 Corinthians 5:18, 19
In baptism, we must die with Christ, be buried with him, and rise with him to new life. In the Eucharist, we must be nourished by his body and blood. The great Thanksgiving then gathers us again, this time around the holy table. Christ invites us to his meal.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:3, 4
Liturgical Theology: Calls to Compel Them to Come In
This ends with the Post-Communion prayer and the dismissal, which sends us out into the world to love and serve the Lord, so we start with the gospel. We then have word and sacrament. Within those two services, we gather and send. We renew this each time we sit down for a meal. We gather with family or friends, we bless our food, and we eat together. The sacrament nourishes us, sent along again on our various callings.
This is what Jesus did over and over again in his earthly ministry. Gather the twelve, send them out. Gather them again, send them out. Collect them and breathe upon them. Gather them after the resurrection and commission them to be sent into all the world.
Gather them with the other disciples in Jerusalem, and send the Holy Spirit upon them, then send them out to do his will. We are continually gathered and then sent. In all this gathering and sending, there is a great mystery at work: the mystery of the gospel, along with the Holy Spirit. There is also the “mundane” life for us humans.
The Mystery of the Mundane: Inward & Outward
God uses physical means of grace and affects spiritual grace. God uses both the visible and the invisible. In a great mystery, the mundane matters just as much as the miraculous. A faithful, well-meaning Christian once said to me,
I like it when we leave the Prayer Book behind and pray. That’s when the Spirit moves.
I can understand that perspective; we don’t need to try to divide our physical, human nature in worship. Dividing the physical and the spiritual and equating only the physical with evil or sin is a heresy related to Gnosticism. The Spirit can move through the prayer book, through our spontaneous prayers, and through even our failures to pray. Christ is present in bread and wine. Baptismal water does “save us” through faith by washing our consciences. Liturgical theologians often discuss the aspect of mystery; we too frequently ignore the mundane, human elements. St Paul wrote about the Church to the Ephesians,
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
Ephesians 2:19-22
Filled Mystically & Physically
We are a mystical body, both spiritual and physical. We are human beings whom the Holy Spirit fills. Jesus founded the Church on human beings: the apostles, prophets, and Jesus himself. It is a structure, a historical institution. Yet it is a holy temple, a dwelling place for God. The Church is a mystical communion with all the saints. It is simultaneously a great mystery and a human community.
We feel that we must choose whether the church is spiritual or human. Rather than try to divide up where the human ends and the spiritual begins, Paul wants us to strive to see ourselves as redeemed human beings. Our modern mode of knowing pulls toward binary thinking. We feel that we must choose whether the church is spiritual or human. There is a third way, often hidden from us. The third way is to see these two aspects fully operating together.
Liturgical Implications on our Worship
This has powerful implications in our theology of worship. Human beings read the Word of God with their mouths and hear it with their physical ears. We process it in English, and our brains interpret these sounds and morphemes into concepts we see with our minds’ eyes. Yet this Word lives and breathes; it is powerful, God-inspired, and uniquely expresses the story of our Creator God and His redemptive plan. It unlocks human hearts. The sacrament is the same. It is bread and wine. It is the body and blood of Christ. “This is the common that God has made holy.”
God is With Us in the Sacraments
We, the people of God, are ordinary people whom God has made holy. We remain human beings. And yet the form of this world, its patterns of thinking, its goals, its desires, its ruthlessness and selfishness are passing away. The Almighty redeemed us, and the Holy Spirit is sanctifying us; the Spirit fills us, and yet He continually fills us. Sinners we are, yet we are saints.
We are human as we take on the high call of leading worship. Our people are human. We do human things. We sing, we talk, we bow, we eat, we bathe, we drink—real water, real tables, real wood, real bread, and wine. God’s children participate in the body and blood of Christ; we hear the very word of God speak.
We receive his very presence; yet we are also the temple of the Holy Spirit. He moves. He moves in us. God is with us as humans. He is transforming us, not erasing us. It’s a great mystery, and at the same time, it is part of everyday human life to worship God.
Take, Bless, Break, & Give
Dom Gregory Dix famously pointed out that the Eucharistic pattern of the early church followed the actions of Christ, as described by Matthew,
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.”
Matthew 26:26
We still follow this pattern as we gather to worship in word and sacrament. We follow it at the table, yes. We take bread, bless it, break it, and give it along with the wine, the blood of the new covenant.
Be this as it may, he also takes us from the world. He blesses us with his grace and his Holy Spirit. He breaks us through our repentance and faith in baptism and our continual confession of sin. And, as the great commission says, he then sends us out into the world. We are his body, broken in the world and blessed with his presence, in the world, and yet not of the world.
Finally, Paradise
Alexander Schmemann writes of the joy of the moment of the Sursum Corda (the Lord be with you) in the liturgy:
When man stands before the throne of God, when he has fulfilled all that God has given him to fulfill, when all sins are forgiven, all joy restored, then there is nothing else to do but to give thanks. Eucharist (Thanksgiving) is the state of perfect man. Eucharist is the life of paradise.
For the Life of the World, p. 37
“Paradise” or “heaven” is not merely somewhere we go after we die, before the resurrection. The kingdom of heaven is within us, among us, around us. Heaven is not something to wait for. Christ is here, and he appears to us most powerfully when we gather and when we receive his sacraments. We taste heaven. Time stands still. We are at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Right here, right now, heaven and earth have come together.
These are ways that Christians have long understood Christian worship. We practice and live it out; it isn’t merely theoretical. These concepts help satisfy the “what” and “why” of it. It is the devotion and praise of the faithful, gathered by the Spirit and sent into the world, that is the true heart of worship.
Image by: Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
My Journey into Psalm Chanting (with the St. Bernard Breviary)
The St. Bernard Breviary offers a gentle introduction to chant, explaining why it is beneficial and giving a primer on how to get started. For parishioners with no previous experience in chant or musical education, it is a wonderful resource.
The Heritage of Anglican Theology by J.I. Packer (Review)
J. I. Packer. The Heritage of Anglican Theology. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021, 384 pages, $39.99) Remembering Packer About a decade ago, I came across a copy of J.I. Packer’s Knowing God in Kathmandu (long story). I remember little from my reading that night save for Packer’s obvious, humble confidence in the love of the God…
