The Liturgy Transcends Culture

There is a common assumption today that the liturgy must reflect the language and the ethos of the current culture.  If this is true, then liturgies will veer toward the pop culture in which we live.  These culturally devised liturgies are at times exciting and entertaining, but are not transcultural.  At most, they will give only immediate satisfaction.  These liturgies then become just another expression of the culture's malaise, a feel-good, shallow, artificially uplifting sentimentality.

Furthermore, focusing on the centrality of the worshiper's experience in contemporary liturgies runs contrary to our Lutheran understanding of the hiddenness of the Kingdom in the world in which we live.  The Church's liturgy is a humble expression and demonstration of the nature of the Kingdom.  No matter how difficult our hymns, how untrained our organist, how weak our singing, God is present in our liturgy, offering His gifts of salvation.  We dare not be seduced into thinking that the Kingdom comes by our own relevant production and performance.  We must always maintain that the Kingdom is hidden under the humble means of God's proclamation of the new era of salvation in Jesus Christ through simple words, simple water, simple bread, and wine.  This is why our liturgies are sacramental and why they give what we need the most: the forgiving mercy of God in Christ through which we are cleansed and made worthy to stand in His presence and receive His gifts.  Believing that God is sacramentally present in our ancient but enduring liturgy is at the center of our understanding of God's revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ and His salvation of the world through suffering and sacrifice.  The liturgical structures of Word and Sacrament transcend all cultures and create our Lutheran theology of worship.

Lutheran worship is its own culture, distinct from both the pop culture of secular society and the worship that characterizes most evangelical denominations in our country today.  The Lutheran Church must develop and maintain its own cultural language that reflects the values and structures of Scripture, not of the current culture.  And this language can be shaped only by a biblical theology that affirms Christ's work of making right what has gone wrong in declaring us righteous and offering this righteousness to us through His bodily presence in our worship in Word and Sacrament.  Our belief that Jesus Christ is present in worship binds our Church together as a community, confessing one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all.  This community is the Body of Christ, the Church.  One day, the liturgical problems will no longer exist for the Church, for we will worship the Lamb in His kingdom that has no end.  For now, however, we must constantly remember that we have now the one God who is sacramentally present among us as Savior and who continually invites us to the ongoing feast.

From Heaven on Earth: The Gifts of Christ in the Divine Service by Arthur A. Just Jr.  Concordia Publishing House: 2008, pp. 28-29.