05-4 Theology of the..

LOGIA FORUM 69
10. Our worship says what we believe. What we believe determines
how we worship. The language and actions of the liturgy
publicly express and enact our common faith. Our worship is
therefore Christian, and confessionally Lutheran. What we confess
as Lutherans determines how we worship as Lutherans. What
is preached from the pulpit is enacted in the liturgy Our worship
is therefore of such a nature that others who share our confession
know at once that they are one in faith and confession with us,
and so may confidently participate in full unity of faith.
11. Our worship is intentionally evangelical. Our liturgy deals
with the reality of sin, so that the sinner is addressed by both law
and gospel, both of which do what they say: kill and make alive,
wound and heal In the liturgy of word and sacrament, God gives
us his gracious, healing and saving gifts. Our faith does not create
the gifts; it simply receives them.
12. Public worship is personal, but not individualistic. Every
aspect of divine service corporate. All are addressed as sinners
and saints. All are reassured that they belong to the baptised family
of God. All are built up through word and sacrament into the
body of Christ. All are united in common adoration, in confession
of their faith, in thanksgiving, and in prayer.
13. Our corporate worship is public witness to the world, not
a private act. It is done in public view and with the public in
view. In our ministry of priestly intercession we bring the world
to God, and through his ministry to us, God authorises and
equips us to bring him in all his saving mercy to the world.
14. In worship we offer God the best we have to offer. We use
the best words and the best forms, the best music and the best
arts. Only the best is appropriate in the divine service in which
God gives us his best.
These, then, are the principles which guide our worship on
Luther Campus. It is our hope and prayer that these principles
will be affirmed by the whole church and followed by its pastors
as they initiate God’s people into the divine liturgy.
CRAZY TALK, STUPID TALK
Goethe once commented, “One should, each day, try to hear a little
song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a
few reasonable words.” From radio and television hosts to church consultants
and pastoral conference presenters, we hear a lot of religious
talk—not all of which is particularly reasonable. In his book Crazy
Talk, Stupid Talk, Neil Postman discusses the semantic environment
in which we find ourselves. A “verbal empire of intricate dimension”
is being built by many people in our congregations today that threatens
to move our churches into a kind of behavior that would have
been deemed crazy not all that long ago. Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk by
Neil Postman (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1976), pages 3–5.
Stupidity is words. It is not something people “possess,” like their
kidneys. Stupidity is something we speak, sentences that do not
“make sense” or are self-defeating. We may speak such sentences
to others or only to ourselves. But the point is that stupidity is
something we do with our larynx.
What our larynx does is controlled by the way we manage our
minds. No one knows, of course, what “mind” is and there are
even those who think it wise to avoid discussing it altogether. But
this much we can say: The main stuff of the mind is sentences.
“Minding” and “languaging” are, for all practical purposes, one
and the same. When we are thinking, we are mostly arranging
sentences in our heads. When we are thinking stupid, we are
arranging stupid sentences.
I will go so far as to say that the entire subject matter of stupidity
is encompassed by the study of our ways of talking. Even when we
do a nonverbal stupid thing, like smoking a cigarette (one of my
own cherished stupidities), we have preceded the act by talking to
ourselves in such a way as to make it appear reasonable. One might
say that stupid talk is the generative act from which all the Higher
Stupidities flow. The word, in a word, brings forth the act.
Moreover, stupidity is something of a linguistic achievement.
It does not, I believe, come naturally to us. We must learn how
to do it, and practice how to do it. Naturally, once having learned
and practiced it, we find it difficult, possibly painful, to forget
how to do it. Speaking, after all, is a habit, and habits, by definition,
are hard to break.
Craziness is much the same thing. Crazy behavior is produced
by our generating certain kinds of sentences which we have nurtured
and crown to love. When, for example, Lynnette Fromme
was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate
Gerald Ford, she said, “I want [Charles] Manson out. I want a
world of peace.” Considering the hideous circumstances by
which Manson came to be imprisoned, and considering what
most people mean by “peace,” you might say that Ms. Fromme
exhibited an almost wondrous creativity in putting those two
sentences together. We can fairly assume that she sees a connection
between them. There are, no doubt, several unspoken sentences
by which she has formed a bridge between Manson and
peace. Even further, there must be still more sentences by which
she connects Manson and peace to the assassination of Ford.
Crazy acts are not illogical to those who do them. But the point is
that in order to do them, you must first build a verbal empire of
intricate dimension. A great deal of crazy talk must be processed
before assassination will appear as a reasonable thing to do.
UPPER STORY LANDING
A Review of Upper Story Landing compact disc by Jeffery Neal
Larson and The Scent of a Flower We Know cassette tape by Jeffery
Neal Larson. Order from Jeffery Larson, 37645 Farwell Drive, Fremont,
CA 94536.
Some years ago Solzhenitsyn, at that time an exile from “godless
communism,” characterized western culture as “a world split
apart” from its Christian roots. Indeed we are. Cut off from solid
moorings in the eternal verities of God, our world has gradually
been emptied of values, increasingly adrift on a sea of subjective
human feeling. Few contemporary artists have the moral
courage, the spiritual depth, and the intellectual integrity to look