Copyright: © 1995 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

A recent communication from the worship office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America reports that, in parishes of that denomination, once-a-month celebrations of Holy Communion are no longer the standard; more parishes are celebrating the Communion twice a month, or even weekly.

This can only be heralded as good news, representing, one supposes, a return to our confessional commitments as Lutherans (Augustana xxiv). One hears, further, of a proliferation of celebrations of Holy Communion even in the "megachurches", those assemblies influenced by the principles of the so-called "church growth movement", and frequently featuring "worship opportunities" designed along the lines of "entertainment evangelism".

So, I hear you say, the Dominion of God is just around the corner, for North American Lutherans? Not quite.

I've had opportunity recently to experience celebrations of Holy Communion -- even weekly celebrations -- that I've been forced to conclude were actually anti-sacramental. I am referring to a kind of worship leadership -- It's almost always a failing of the leaders, not the people -- that regards sacramental faithfulness as chiefly a matter of choosing the right words: words sung in hymns, words read from scripture, words spoken in prayers and preaching.

In an earlier essay in this series, I identified this pathology as "word-reductionism": all the meanings of worship, including sacramental worship, reside in the words used there. According to this sectarianism, to concern ourselves with other "non-verbal" elements in the experience is to betray an unwholesome and elitist obsession with adiaphora.

Words alone: that's all that matters in Christian worship. All else in worship is unimportant, in this view: the unhealthy fixation of pedants: the space arrangements, the music, the posture or position or gesture of worship leaders, the ceremonial, the vestments (or lack of them), the books read from. (Or lack of them: "word-reductionists" seem to prefer throw-away leaflets for reading lections.)

A contempt for rubrics perforce accompanies this "word-reductionism". (The "Three R's" of ritual are routinely ignored in this pathology: rites, rubrics, and roles: see my earlier essay in this series.) Yet I can recall a current liturgical "superstar" arguing for the critical importance of rubrics: If our rubrics are correct, he maintained, we almost don't need the words. That is, if we know what we're supposed to be doing, at a given moment in worship, the words will be there.

But contempt for rubrics, or carelessness with them, is characteristic of the piety I'm describing here. The result of this view -- I label it a sectarianism, a liturgical pathology -- is anti-sacramental sacraments.

Sacraments, in the Christian tradition, are composed of three realities, not one: word, and action, and even things, material, stuff. The "fullest truth about God", says one of my teachers, is not one word, but two: Word and Sacrament: visible word, enacted word, incarnated word.

So: What do the sacraments add to a simple Service of the Word? I'll tell you: molecules! Here we wash, we eat, we drink, we digest, we metabolize. It is as if God wants to meet you, wants to rescue you, to the level of your atoms, to the level of your molecules. True sacramental worship takes that incarnational reality with utmost seriousness; it wants to honour not only the texts of our worship, but the "visible words" as well: the phenomenology of ritual, how the event is experienced in all its fullness.

That fullness necessarily includes the intellect, of course, but also the emotions, the spirit, the imagination, the body -- and each of its five senses.

I love the Hebrew word dabar in this respect. It has at least three meanings: word, and deed, and even thing. There is a model for you of truly authentic sacramental worship! Never word alone, but always word, and deed (action, event, "rubrics"), and even thing: the stuff of incarnation, the molecules, the atoms, in water and bread and cup and oil, in book and artifacts and vestments.

Anything less than that, in Christian worship, is simply not "the fullest truth about God."