Copyright: © 2000 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.

Recall, yet once again, gentle reader, my argument in these paragraphs: I am challenging here the hegemony of our verbalizings in Christian worship. I am inveighing against that distinctively Lutheran sectarianism which I have identified as "word-reductionism". See Essays 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, et al, above.

More: I am arguing that the so-called non-verbal aspects of the experience of Christian worship may be understood, from a more "catholic" perspective, as simply an extension of that Word we proclaim in our verbalizings. That is, our architectural arrangements; the posture, position, and gestures of worship leaders and people; the "signs" and artifacts we deal with in our ritualizings --such as the water of our Baptising, the bread and cup of our Meal-- all these are simply "visible words," to use Augustine's pregnant terminology.

Put in still another way: When you have your verbalizings all in place in worship planning -- your sermon, your scripture readings, your prayers, your hymn-texts -- then you still have a major responsibility ahead of you, before you are finished: making certain that all the non-verbal aspects of the experience of worship do not contradict your verbalizings there, but rather support and extend and enlarge your verbalizings.

And again, I am not arguing that pastors and worship leaders become careless about their verbalizings. I am trying to urge that pastors and worship leaders become equally intentional about, equally attentive to, the non-verbals. These non-verbals in our worship are simply part of the fullness of the Word, which, always and inevitably and without exception, takes incarnational form among us. Sacramental form, you might say.

One major implication of our incarnational, sacramental faith is this: We are enjoined, by our Gospel, to honour the "stuff" of creation, the molecules. The Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the Sacraments all have the effect of giving unprecedented honour to the stuff of creation, the molecules. It is some very specific molecules --of water, of bread, of wine-- that serve to distinguish sacramental worship from all other kinds of worship: Services of the Word; Services of Prayer and Praise; Services of Meditation or Contemplation; Morning Prayer; Evening Prayer; whatever.

Those molecules make all the difference for us as a sacramental church. They are not separate from the spoken Word; they are themselves extensions of the verbal: "visible words". As such, they demand of us a dignity, a respect, an honour, in our worship, that can -- and should, and does, at least when we are at our best -- inform and direct our relationship, beyond and outside of our worship, to all the world's "stuff," to each of the world's molecules. At its truest and best, the Christian's relation to the stuff of this world is identical to that described by Abraham Joshua Heschell: For people of the Bible, he says, "everything is either holy, or not yet holy."

Hence my un-apologetic concern, in these pages, with the so-called adiaphora of worship: ritual subtleties; rubrical and terminological punctiliousness; aesthetic considerations and judgments; phenomenological and observational discriminations. I am simply trying here to be faithful to the Word, in all its glorious fullness.

And trying to exhort you to the same faithfulness.

As surely as words, these "signs" express and communicate human import. Adiaphora? Certainly. Aspects of human culture, "neither commanded nor rejected" in the Gospel? Sure. But also: Media of Meaning. Bearers of a Word.

These non-verbal "signs" and gestures and artifacts "speak". What a pity when pastors and worship leaders are unaware of what they are saying!

Does it make any difference, to your eternal salvation, whether the Scriptures are read each week from a large, handsome volume, or from a flimsy paper leaflet? No. But what is that throw-away leaflet "saying" about our respect for the Word? About our worship leaders, and about their reverent engagement in this event? About the expectations of our worship leaders as to our own reverent engagement in this event, as congregation?

The late, sainted Robert Hovda has written a splendid essay, contrasting the moment when the scriptures are read in a premier performance of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, in Washington's Kennedy Center, with the same moment he observed the next day in a parish celebration. In the Bernstein -- subtitled, not incidentally, "A Theatre Piece..." -- a vested minister carries a large, handsomely-bound book, with measured dignity, to the accompaniment of sublime song and pageantry, to the Celebrant (sic), who "touches and opens the book with marked deliberateness...". In the parish Mass the next day, in contrast, the priest stumbles to his feet and fumbles perfunctorily through a reading from a newsprint leaflet. Concludes Hovda:

"In the first instance, everything that was done was done in earnest, with a respect and care that were visible in gesture and movement and the quality of the materials employed. The audience...could not help but become involved...In many psychological ways, that audience became a congregation...In the second, the congregation had to make heroic efforts to prevent itself from becoming a mere audience..."

"D.O.M.: To God the Highest and Best" says the motto on every bottle of Benedictine liqueur. To God, yes, yes, yes, of course. We want to offer to God our very best. But it's people, not God, who need it, who crave excellence: our most deliberate care, our deepest respect, our most determined efforts at splendour. Without denying the reality of our debt to God, that is, I am writing these paragraphs, not so much out of a traditional "high-church" instinct ("To God the highest and best!"), as out of a passionate humanism: "To people the highest and best!"

It's people, not God, after all, who need our gifts, who need excellence, who are fed by excellence, who are starving for excellence. And, you could argue, they're certainly not finding excellence in the world around them, for the most part. Or perhaps -- equal if not greater tragedy! -- finding excellence everywhere else out there in the world (the Kennedy Center included), and not finding excellence at worship on Sunday morning. That large, handsomely-bound book "honours the molecules" in a way the newsprint leaflet cannot. The book is "holy"; the throw-away pamphlet "not yet holy."

Let me risk offending your pieties yet once more, faithful reader, with this thought: To read Scripture from a throw-away leaflet, rather than from a handsome book, is to demean God's people; not so much to demean or dishonour God, as to demean and dishonour God's people; to offer them a stone instead of bread.

Well. This has been a more extended defence of my thesis than I had intended. Next month we return to the arts of worship, and to an investigation into what I have called the "signs" we use there. They are:

1. the water of our Baptising;
2. the food of our Meal: bread, wine, milk and honey (yes!);
3. the oil of our anointing;
4. lamps and/or candles, including the Vesper Candle and the Paschal Candle;
5. cross or crucifix;
6. our books, including Bible and Altar Book/Missal;
7. flowers and greens;
8. the printed bulletin or guide-to-worship;
9. vestments, paraments and banners.