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.

Faithful readers of these paragraphs will recall my recent confession (Essay 44) to a shameless fascination with movies, and all that pertains to show biz. Here's a second confession -- I'm telling you more about me than you perhaps want to know! -- I'm also a shameless fan of high-fashion models, those flawless faces and anorexic frames that fuel the fantasies of us less- favoured folk. I can identify many of them by their cheekbones alone, and name them: Cheryl Teigs, Christy Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Heidi Klum, Stephanie Seymour, Laetitia Casta.

What's my justification for this obsession? I don't have any, other than rejoicing in admiration of God's handiwork, wherever I find it. If I wanted to be pompous or pretentious -- Heaven forbid! -- I'd tell you that my fixation, at its best, represents, yet once again, an honouring of God's Creation, and a passionate respect for the First Article of the Creed: God saw everything that God had made, "and behold, it was very good." The adjective, in Hebrew, is tov, and it means, among other things, "emotionally satisfying." I can relate to that.

"I don't believe in God," says a contemporary fashion photographer, "but when I look at Laetitia Casta, I could change my mind." When you encounter one of those fabulous faces staring out at you from a magazine cover at the supermarket check-out, the believer's heart is invited to murmer a devout doxology. A berachah, even. This believer's heart, anyhow.

Yes, from one perspective, those splendid faces can be thought of as an advertisement for God's glories. And this thought brings me to my topic for today: those non-architectural "signs" in Christian worship that also speak of the Gospel. Today we turn, that is, from the Four Grand Architectural Signs of font, altar, ambo, and sedilia, to what we might call "artifactural" or "artifactual" signs. If font, altar, ambo, and sedilia represent the "signs" in our workplace, these "signs" we now consider could be thought of as those present in our toolbox.

I'm thinking of those articles and artifacts we deal with every week as worship leaders: 1) the Water of our Baptising and the Bread and Cup of Holy Communion; 2) the Bible we read and preach from, the "altar book" of worship leaders, and other print resources: hymnbooks, psalm settings, etc.; 3) the Vesper candle, the Paschal candle, and other candles and lamps; 4) the alb of Baptism and other vestments; 5) paraments, banners, and other "vesture" for the worship space; 6) flowers, greens, and other embellishments to our worship spaces, such as the Advent Wreath; and even 7) the printed bulletin or guide-to-worship. For 8) the oil of our anointing, see Essay 43 above.

But before we move to examine each of these in turn, I want to lay out some principles we've touched on in previous pieces in these pages, but now in greater specificity and depth. What guides us in selecting and utilizing these vessels and vestments, these articles and artifacts?

Let's consider, first, the "word" character of each of these "signs," and then recall the three burdens of meaning in anything we use from our toolbox. First, these signs, in common with everything human beings do and make and wear, have the character of a "word." They cannot help but "speak" about our perceptions of ourself and our world. They express and communicate our values, that is, they reveal what it is we value, what it is we honour.

And supremely, in our worship, we want to honour God. The word "worship," after all, is derived from "worth-ship": By prayer and praise and thanksgiving we are acknowledging our debt to the Triune God, our Ultimate Good, what for us is most worthy, our Ground of Being, our Highest Value. So it is with everything human beings do, and make, and wear. We honour our God -- or not! -- by what we keep in our toolbox, and how we use what's there.

And we want to honour people too. You could argue -- I myself would be willing to argue -- that the Christian faith is at its most authentic when it honours the neighbour. To honour people is the surest way to honour the Triune God. Jesus himself is our model here. Christians are unapologetically humanist. This Christian is, anyhow.

And we honour the Word. For children of the Reformation, the Word is always Jesus Christ; only derivatively may we use the term to refer to a book, that is, the Bible, our Scriptures.

And so, by derivation, we honour finally the Word present in Scriptures, and that same Word present in preaching, in Sacrament, and in loving service. The Word today, as always, assumes three incognitos: 1) in written form; 2) in spoken form, such as preaching and teaching; 3) and in enacted form (in sacraments, and acts of loving service).

Each of these incognitos possesses both assets and liabilities.

The asset of the Written Word is its "thereness": You can study it; It is investigatable. But it's pretty static: It just sits there until you pick it up and read it. And of course you must be literate in order to, as they say, access it.

The Spoken Word was Luther's favourite. It's dynamic and alive; It reaches out and addresses you, as no book can. It can be precise and fluid and nuanced and subtle and specific as no sacrament or act of love can be. But it's the Enacted Word, in sacrament and the act of loving serving, that affects you most deeply, I would argue. To see the human rights protesters set upon by police dogs: That affects you; It gets to you, at the deepest levels.

And each of these "signs" in worship carries three burdens of meaning (see Essay 07 and Essay 21 above): 1) the utilitarian or functional: Candles, for example, serve the function of illuminating the leaders' tasks; 2) the symbolic or pedagogical or phenomenological: Candles, further, can be explained as visual metaphors, as symbols of the Light of the World; and 3) the historical or trans-cultural: Your Grandma used candles in worship; Luther did; Augustine did; Judas Maccabaeus did.

Keeping the above principles firmly in mind, we turn next time to Water, Bread and Cup.