The current issue of Liturgy is concerned with the future of the Liturgical Renewal movement, which had as one of its main concerns the restoration of the vital link between the church’s worship and its proclamation of the divine justice. In 2005, Daniel M. Bell explored the radical overturning of concepts of justice and mercy as diametrically opposed principals, and outlined the way in which they are viewed as essentially related moves of the divine working in the writings of Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas.

Justice redeems; it does not enforce a strict accounting of what is due. Accordingly, “what is due” is determined in accord with what, under the guidance of the Spirit, is discerned best to foster the communion of humanity in the divine love. Thus, at time justice may entail mercy and forgiveness, forgoing a strict accounting of what is due. For this reason, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas insist that there is no conflict or opposition between divine justice and mercy. Justice and mercy are not opposing logics: rather they share a single end: the return of all love – the sociality of all desire – in God. Justice attains its end by enacting mercy to overcome sin. Mercy overcomes sin to attain its true end, which is justice. In this way, mercy implements perfect justice (Aquinas) and the rule of God’s justice is mercy (Anselm). At this point the classical conception of justice as a strict rendering of “what is due” explodes, for the classical world had little or no place for forgiveness. Yet it is precisely at this moment, when justice and mercy join hands, that humanity is liberated and is provided a path beyond the agony and conflict of sin.

How do contemporary rites of reconciliation seek to maintain and celebrate the unity of the divine justice with the divine mercy, over against the secular dichotomy of the two which is regularly proclaimed in our public life?

Justice for All: Confession and Sin, Liturgy, 20:1, 31-36.

The Rev. Dr. Daniel M. Bell Jr. is Professor of Theological Ethics at Lutheran Southern Theological Seminary. He is the author of many books, most recently Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The Parable of the Tenants has been the source of much supersessionist teaching over the centuries. In the 1 September – 23 November issue of Homily Service: an ecumentical resource for sharing the word, Stephen C. Kolderup considered the dangers of this passage.

The preacher who enters the scene described by Jesus in this passage will want to tread carefully. It presumes an agrarian system filled with exploitation, resentment, and eventual overflowing violence. Before it becomes an allegory about the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, it is an audience participation exercise where Jesus’ hearers would have chosen up sides over the justice and realities of absentee landlords. Some helpful background on peasant household economics appears in Social-Science commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, by Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaught (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003, pp. 390-391).
Nevertheless, the story is used to bring judgment on the religious leaders, vindication of the rejected son, and an announcement of a new group of tenants “that produces the fruits of the Kingdom.” We can get stuck within the cycle of accountability, judgment, and replacement in this story or we can look to the one who is the cornerstone of a new community. Are we up to the task of interpretation and is the congregation up to the task of producing a harvest for God in response to the grace of Jesus Christ?

Is it possible to preach this text in a non-supersessionist way? What effect will the recent attacks upon worker’s rights in the United States have upon the way that this text is preached?

Homily Service: an ecumenical resource for sharing the word, vol. 41, no. 4, p. 53-54.

Stephen C. Kolderup is the pastor of First United Presbyterian Church in Leroy, Illinois. He was part of the creative team for the Worship For Life curriculum from the Calvin Institute.

In several of the essays contained in the current issue, the Liturgical Renewal Movement’s emphasis on the essential connection between worship and justice is emphasized. In 2008, Scott Haldeman examined this emphasis more closely, suggesting five characteristics of worship that does justice. The first of these characteristics was that worship that does justice is subject to human need rather than transcendent of bodily experience as a "spiritual" exercise.

My own church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has a nickname based on our reformed notion of predestination and our habitual bodily comportment in worship: "the frozen chosen." Most Presbyterians check their bodies at the door and bring only their minds to worship for edification—a rather diminished sense of participation to be sure. We sit quietly and listen to our well-educated clergy expound upon the day's text. We do sing but not lustily. We do pray but not expectantly. We don't get warmed up or get our hands dirty or even, as Billy Holiday used to sing, muss the crease in [our] blue serge pants." We practice being interested but dispassionate, calm, and collected. We leave perhaps with a new insight but as isolated and affirmed in our middle class propriety as we were when we came in. Perhaps Presbyterians and others reflect in our practices an attempt to transcend our physicality and live on a more "spiritual" plane in our worshiping assemblies as the Pharisees who confronted Jesus one Sabbath day. Jesus and the disciples were walking through a field and, being hungry, they picked some grain to eat. The Pharisees accused them of breaking the Sabbath code. Jesus replied, "The Sabbath is for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).

Worship shaped by the values and traditions of Liturgical Renewal is most often characterized by an appolonian rather than a dionysian aesthetic. How does this interfere with our ability to offer worship that is fully embodied and incarnational?

Scott Haldeman (2002) "The Welcome Table, Worship that does justice and makes peace, Liturgy, 17:1, p. 6.

Scott Haldeman is Associate Professor of Worship at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, most recently Towards Liturgies that Reconcile: Race and ritual among African-American and European-American protestants.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

In the September – November 2008 issue of Homily Service, Diana Stephens turned to the tradition of the desert abbas and ammas, to illuminate the Epistle lesson for this week: Philippians 2: 1-13.

For the abbas and ammas, being of the same mind that was in Christ Jesus meant aligning oneself with God’s purposes, and being able to think, feel, and act as Jesus would. It was also about unity: unity of heart, mind and spirit. But only the humble, in their attempts to be like Christ, have the desire and strength to empty themselves of their egos and be filled with the Spirit – “for it is God who is at work in you” (v 13) – that they might “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (v 2). Such unity within oneself, with the Holy, and with the community was the goal of the spiritual life in the desert.

A brother asked Abba Tithoes, “Which way leads to humility?” The old man said, “the way of humility is this: self-control, prayer and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures.” With a focus on unity, and the pathway to unity through humility and prayer, the desert fathers and mothers did much to advance the spiritual life.

Is humility a more difficult goals for modern Western Christians to achieve, or are we simply to complascent to go to the lengths that the abbas and ammas were in order to achieve the mind of Christ?

Homily Service: An ecumenical resource for sharing the word, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1 September 2008 – 23 November 2008) p. 43.

Diane Stephens, an elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), is a spiritual director, retreat leader and affiliate faculty at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. She also serves as convener of the Liturgy & Spirituality seminar group of the North American Academy of Liturgy.

Our theme for this issue of Liturgy: The State of Liturgical Renewal is composed in the midst of the era of western Christianity’s loss of cultural hegemony. In 2001, Craig A. Satterlee called readers of our journal to consider what insights might be gained by examining the homiletical techniques of some great preachers from the extreme opposite end of this period of history: John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

The mystagogical preachers knew that it is only when people meaningfully incorporate the church’s rites into their own lives that they successfully enter the world of salvation history. In making liturgy and sacrament understandable to their hearers, the preachers therefore spoke to the real life circumstances that form the basis by which hearers discover a relationship between the rites and their lives. The preachers could articulate what difference participating in the sacraments makes in ordinary lives. Thus Chrysostom, recognizing the church’s struggle to maintain its unique identity in the face of peace with the Roman Empire, used the words and symbolic actions of the liturgy as an identity-producing representation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in order to show how the past events of the life, passion, and death of Jesus are revealed in the daily challenges that life in the secular city presents to the Christian. By explaining the liturgy in terms of daily struggle, Chrysostom offered the possibility of carrying the power of Christ’s dying and rising into life in the world. Theodore used the same liturgical signs to point to the future…For Theodore, the liturgy is the message of hope, and liturgical signs
are symbols of the hope of the world to come.

How must our current preaching and other forms of pedagogy change in order to make the church’s liturgy and sacraments both accessible and transformative in a post-Christian culture?

Craig A. Satterlee (2001): "Drawing life from the Well of Liturgical Experience, Liturgy, 16:4, 48-49.

Craig A. Satterlee serves as professor of homiletics at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and dean of the ACTS Doctor of Ministry in Preaching Program. He is the author of several books, most recently Preaching and Stewardship: Proclaiming God's Invitation to Grow.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

In the 1 September – 23 November 2008 issue of Homily service, Aaron J. Couch placed this week’s parable of the Laborer’s In The Vineyard within its larger context in the gospel according to Matthew.

The stories around [the parable] are dominated by concern for who is first and last. Matthew wishes to use the stories to break the attractive power of wealth and status for believers. A rich young man (first in society) approaches Jesus with questions about being first with God. Jesus instructs him to sell all (to become last in society), which is more than the man can contemplate. Jesus warns his disciples that being first in wealth does not make one first with God. Jesus assures his disciples that, as they have become last in the eyes of the world to follow him, they will be first with God. After the parable of the vineyard owner, the mother of James and John seeks to secure first rate positions for her sons. Jesus then instructs not to be concerned for status and power, but to be great only in service.
In the middle of these stories of being first or last, the parable of the workers in the vineyard stands... The whole sequence of stories seeks to undermine ordinary human aspirations of being first. Because God in Christ has given believers everything that matters, striving to be first in status or wealth profoundly misses the point of living.

What further light is shed on this parable’s concern with social status when we notice that the wage which each laborer receives, whether they work one hour or twelve, is a single denarius: the standard minimum day’s wage for an unskilled worker? It is barely enough, but still enough to feed oneself for the day. It is the monetary equivalent of being given today our daily bread.

Homily Service: an ecumenical resource for sharing the word. Vol. 41, No. 4 (1 September 2008 – 25 November 2008), p. 28.

Aaron J. Couch is co-pastor of First Immanuel Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon, where he shares ministry with his wife, Melinda J. Wagner.

In 2004, Frank Senn analyzed not the Liturgical Renewal movement, but four liturgical movements (restoration, renewal, revival and retrieval) which currently exist, overlapping one another within not only denominations, but within congregations, in interesting and challenging ways. He characterizes the liturgical project of the post-modern emerging church movement as one of retrieval, which seeks to incorporate what is useful from the liturgical practices of the past, while simultaneously rejecting the modernist worldview of restoration and of renewal.

Postmodern concerns arise less from philosophical disaffection with modernity than from the loss of confidence in both holistic symbol systems and organizations. Enlightenment-inspired confidence in rationality is actually thought to be at the root of much of the evil in the modern world, which made humanity and human progress the center of all reality. Rationality and ideologies related to the doctrine of progress have produced genocide, ethnic cleansing, the exploitation of nature, the domination of the world by industrially and technologically advanced countries, and the growth of a seemingly permanent underclass in our country and in other nations... There have been too many failures. The post-baby boom generations have experienced the failure of human promises, first and foremost in the failed marriages of their parents, in the disruptions and dysfunctions that have occurred in family life, and maybe with the awareness that massive numbers of their generations were not allowed to be born. The starting point of postmodern thought is that all knowledge is more an act of faith than of reason, that all truth claims are provisional, and that all human understanding is incomplete. The master image of God seems to be the archaic, the primitive.

As we consider past and the future of the Liturgical Renewal movement, how do we propose to to move past a modernist worldview toward a post-modern worldview?

Frank Senn (2004): “Four Liturgical Movements,” Liturgy, 19:4, 77-78.

Frank Senn is past president of The Liturgical Conference, senior of the Society of the Holy Trinity, and pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Evanston, Illinois.