If you’ve been around this blog or read or listened to much of anything I’ve been interested in over the last few years, you’d know that I’m a fan of robust, historic Christian worship. At Trinity, we follow a very traditional liturgy in our worship, we sing historic hymns and psalms and canticles and chants, and we have a hearty appreciation for the Church calendar, celebrating the major feasts and fasts of the Christian year as our fathers before us.
This means that many of our prayers are set and remain the same for many months of the year, many songs and pieces of service music remain unchanged, and we perform the same actions and speak scripted responses to one another Sunday after Sunday. And there are good reasons for this:
First, we believe it shows honor to our fathers and mothers in the faith, praying their prayers and singing their songs, and recognizes substantively that we have come into the middle of a conversation, or better, into the middle of a great dance that began centuries ago. We are part of something much, much bigger than our congregation here in Idaho at the beginning of the third millennium. But secondly, we also believe that it is formative and pedagogical. Similar to some of the aspects of classical education, some of the most important lessons we learn are learned through ingrained habits and ritualized repetition. This is also a standing objection to the frequent assumption in the modern church that only that which is spontaneous is genuine. Or the converse, which is highly skeptical of ritual, repetition, or scripting anything — even though the most non-liturgical churches still develop patterns, habits, and traditions. Finally, like many other treasured traditions (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc.), the repetition grows in glory and loveliness over time. It may seem awkward to say, “The Lord be with/And with your spirit” or “The peace of the Lord be with you/and also with you” at first, but over time, as we learn this language of the Church, the language of the Spirit, those words take on the love and joy of “Merry Christmas!” and “Christ is risen/He is risen indeed!” We believe that God meets us in worship by His Spirit and through the forms and words and prayers and rituals, is forming and re-forming us His people into a new humanity. And just as you might say in a generic way, America is a “Christmas and Easter” culture — which actually describes our Christian devotion in all of its shallow, non-committal glory quite well — the ultimate aim is for the whole of our worship and devotion to Jesus to fill our lives throughout our days and years. Continue Reading…
