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.

Christian worship reflects an incarnated faith -- as you are perhaps tired of being reminded in these essays! -- and one implication of this reality is its devotion to the principle of the critical importance of SIGN and symbol in what we do.

The Reformers were correctly concerned with the substance of faith, and wanted to distinguish between theological substance and "adiaphora" -- those matters neither commanded nor rejected by the Gospel, such as forms of worship and of church governance.

Nevertheless, Luther himself would be the first to acknowledge the teaching function of much that we might identify as "adiaphora": music, gesture, vestments, architectural setting -- all of these are "languages" which human beings utilize to express themselves and to communicate. What we do and how we do it cannot fail to teach.

What we teach by what we do is the subject of these essays -- and indeed the subject of all rubrics or directions for Christian worship. Hence our unapologetic concern here with "adiaphora," and with the importance of signs and symbols in worship.

Further, we in the West -- in the "First World" -- live in an age of cultural inflation. Our senses are assaulted daily by visual and aural and even tactile stimuli. Music washes over us in the shopping mall, in the supermarket, in the dentist's waiting room; visual images, chiefly from television, and chiefly commercial in intent, assault our eyes and lodge stubbornly in the subconscious.

Not surprisingly, we have learned to tune out; to turn it all off. And we have become culturally and aesthetically cynical, in the process.

Further still: We modern Western Christians, in our intoxication with innovation and with technology, have largely succeeded in insulating ourselves against "primary experience" by interposing secondary -- second-hand! -- substitutions. Plastic or silk flowers that never die; electric candles that flicker at the touch of a switch; electronic keyboard instruments that simulate pipe organ sounds; electronic "public address" systems that amplify (and distort!) the human voice; even wall-to-wall carpeting -- each of these "modern" technological innovations is most often nothing but an unfortunate (if well-intentioned) mistake when applied to the needs of Christian worship. They usually serve only to insulate worshipers -- to distance us -- from experiencing the truly authentic.

Nevertheless there remains within us a deep cultural hunger for the authentic; for the things that matter; a yearning for contact and engagement with the heights and depths of human life. In a word, we are simultaneously over-fed and under-nourished, in our "Plastic Age." We are over-fed with that which does not satisfy; yet we are also under-nourished, deeply hungering for the primary experiences that our forebears could take for granted.

The miracle of a single candle-flame illumining a darkened nave, for example; the warm exhilaration of a human hand laid upon your head in blessing; the measured breathing of your neighbor in the hush of silent congregational meditation after the reading of scripture: these paragraphs are written in the conviction that modern Western Christians are starved for such experiences.

A devout attention to the signs and symbols of Christian worship, their power and potential, is therefore simply part of our homework as worship leaders.

Further: these "signs" -- these actions, these articles and artifacts of our tradition -- carry three burdens of meaning: 1) the utilitarian; 2) the symbolic (or phenomonological or pedagogical); and 3) the historical.

The utilitarian function is not often clearly enough displayed among us; hence these paragraphs, with their (perhaps pedantic) pains to explicate that functional meaning first and foremost.

The symbolic (or pedagogical or phenomonological) function of the signs in our worship represents a teaching opportunity that we ignore to our diminishment, as these pages attempt to point out. We silence an important voice, we muzzle a potentially eloquent witness, when we are not sensitive to what these objects and actions teach. (And teach they do, whether or not we are aware of what they teach!)

And when we attend to the importance of these signs, we are honouring an incarnational principle that is at the heart of Christian faith: "God so loved the world..." Not incidentally, the verb in the Vulgate is not amo ("loved...") as we might expect, but delexit: "takes delight in..."

The historical function of these signs relates to our inherited traditions. We are living in an age of exciting ecumenical convergence, not least in a re-appreciation, in all Christian communities, of the value of our common inherited traditions and our common historic roots. It is no accident that historic patterns and perceptions in worship have had enormous staying power: many of these patterns and perceptions have fed the faith of Christian believers for literally hundreds of years. We do well today to regard them with some seriousness: they recall us to our holy history.

The gathered congregation is itself the chief sign and symbol in Christian worship. Our bodies -- not our buildings! --are the temples of the Holy Spirit.

So care must be taken to ensure that the highest honour and reverence in our worship is directed toward the people present. Jesus' words at the Supper, "This is my body..." must rightly be applied to the gathered community of believers as well as to the sacramental bread. More than that: the church itself, the Christian community, is the chief "sacrament" of Christ's presence. And our profession of faith in the words of the Creed in "the resurrection of the Body" is first of all a corporate profession of faith, and only secondarily, and derivatively, an individual profession of faith.

(Note that in the primitive Christian community, the term "church" was understood as referring only to the people; the church building was more properly "the house of the church".)

Beyond the assembly itself, however, are certain architectural signs and symbols important in worship; and what we might call artifactual signs and symbols.

The chief architectural signs in Christian worship are 1) font, 2) altar/table, 3) pulpit/lectern/ambo, and 4) the sedilia (seat) of the presider/leader.

The chief artifactual signs are 1) the water of our Baptising; 2) the bread and cup of Holy Communion; 3) the oil of our anointing; 4) lamps and/or candles, including the Vesper Candle of Evening Prayer and the Paschal Candle of the Easter Vigil; 5) cross or crucifix; 6) our books, including Bible and the worship leader's Altar Book or missal; 7) flowers and greens; 8) the printed bulletin or guide-to-worship; 9) vestments, paraments and banners.

Next month we'll consider, first, the four grand architectural signs; and then move on to the nine "artifactual" signs.

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Parts of this essay first appeared in Enlarging the Sign: Worship and the Hunger for Primary Experience, an essay in the Pastoral Essays on the Statement on Sacramental Practices series posted at Lift Up Your Hearts.