Tradition. Liturgy. Of all the words maligned in today's church, these two have suffered the most corruption. No longer do we think of the richness of our heritage or the depth and power of liturgical worship when these words are spoken. No, today we hear these words and too often exclaim: "Boring! Give us somethmg fresh and new." My hope is that this article will provide something fresh and new, particularly as it relates to traditional liturgical worship.

    But first a word about worship itself. Worship is what makes the church the church. To say that is to recogmze that our worship of God through Jesus Christ distinguishes us from other human organizations whose actions closely resemble the church’s. It is also to say that worship forms and shapes our identity as the body of Christ in and for the world.

     Our confession of faith describes worship as "central to the life of the church." Contrary to what many believe, worship is not simply another "program" in the list of activities of a particular church, but is the center from which all programs and ministries spring. While it is pos- sible to be a church without a youth fellowship or women's group, it is not possible to be a church without worship. Worship is what makes the church the church.

     At its root, worship is response. Luther once defined worship as "the tenth leper turning back." Authentic wor- ship happens because God creates us for and calls us to worship, just as the words of the catechism proclaim: our chief end is to glorify God. Directed to God, our worship is a gift in response to who God is.

     When the community of faith gathers for worship, we do so to lose ourselves in wonder and praise. We gather in recognition that we are creatures formed by a loving Creator. We gather to ascribe to God the honor due God’s name. In other words, we gather to delight in the God who delights in us. Praise is the heart of all Christian worship.

     So much of what parades as worship today has lost its heart. In our churches, worship is frequently directed to an audience other than God. Our culture is determined to find a use for everything, including worship. Any effort to make worship "useful" destroys worship, because there can be no ulterior motive for praise. If we corrupt our worship by making it useful to us, the entire relationship between us and God is flipped upside down. As Leander Keck has observed, "The opening line of the Westminster confession is now reversed, for now the chief end of God is to glorify us and to be useful to us indefinitely" (Keck, 36).

     Only purposeless praise can cope effectively with our self-preoccupation, because by definition praise is not a means to an end but the end itself If God is really worthy of our praise, then God is to be praised for who God is and not for what our worship will get God to do for us. If the gospel is correct, God is to be praised because of what God has already done for us, and will do for us, that we cannot do for ourselves.

     On the surface, these thoughts about worship are painfully simple. Everybody knows that worship is directed to God. We learned that in lesson one of Sunday School. But, these simple thoughts have yet to enter the con-sciousness of the church. We continue to turn worship into something for us "to get something out of." We make worship therapy by promising that it will cure what ails you. We make worship enlistment by using it to solicit teachers and other volunteers. We turn worship into an evangelism seminar where people who are not part of the community of faith are the object of our user friendly discussion about how wonderful their life would be with God in it. In the face of dwindling numbers in the pews, churches are promising all sorts of things in the name of worship. Before we realized what was happening, we removed God from the center of the church's worship.

     Given our culture's thoughts about tradition, this is not altogether surprising. Whenever traditions are shattered or rejected out of hand, a sort of amnesia sets in. We get cut off from our sources without ever being aware of it. Unfortunately, few are calling for a return to tradition. Innovation and novelty are the order of the day. But if we can reclaim a healthier understanding of the role of tradition in our lives, the church's worship will develop a richness that is sorely missing today.

     Tradition implies at least three things---a giver, a gift, and a recipient. Tradition passes on some reality or idea between two poles. The content is that which the giver has to give and the receiver can receive. By its very nature, therefore, tradition mediates between two extremes, bringing them into unity.

     Tradition, insofar as it takes place in history, binds together past and future' It has been called the living past. Jaroslav Pelikan brilliantly clarified the difference between tradition and traditionalism when he called tradi- tion "the living faith of the dead" and traditionalism "the dead faith of the living." If the gift perishes in the process of transmission, it becomes the dead past, a mere memory. The faith of the dead, if it is to live, must take root in the minds and hearts of those who receive it. Thus tradition, by its very nature, demands attention to the recipient as well as to the gift and the giver. As such, tradition is never static. Henri de Lubac noted, "Tradition ... is in fact just the opposite of a burden of the past: it is a vital ener- gy, a propulsive as much as protective force" (as quoted by Avery Dulles).

     While liturgy and tradition are not synonyms, they are closely connected. Tradition is more extensive than litur- gy, since, even in the church, there are other forms of tra- dition. Liturgy, however is recognized as a prime instance of tradition.

     Liturgy means "the works of the people." Originally, this, encompassed all that Christians did in service to God both in worship and in their daily living. Since worship is the chief work of the people, liturgy came to be identified with the Sunday morning worship of the church.

     A church's liturgy can be elaborate or simple, but it always provides for these three things: space, time, order. The liturgy functions as a courtesy, and reveals some of the community's theology. Liturgy helps the members of the community to remember that there are others to whom God speaks and who risk their lives in an answer. Liturgy "is the gracious acknowledgment that others in the family also have needs and rights, and that I am neither the only nor the favorite child" (Peterson, 84).

     While liturgy should be marked by a certain amount of stability, it should not be any more static than tradition is. While it will be directed to God, its forms of expression should always take account of the needs and capacities of the worshiping community. Further, because liturgy, like tradition in general, is a living reality, no one stage of its development should be fossilized for use in the church.

     Unfortunately, this has happened far too often in those churches who attempt to listen to the tradition through the liturgy. We tend to get into ruts and fall into stale patterns with little or no variation. But, the fault lies not with the tradition itself, but with our failure to exercise creativity in utilizing the rich resources our tradition holds and entertaining changes in continuity with what has gone before.

     The classical liturgy of the church provides no lack of room for creativity, rightly understood. The choice of music, the preparation of liturgical space, the composition of the sermon, and the intercessions all place heavy demands on the talents of those concerned.

     Let's assume for a moment that innovation is called for today. Would it surprise you to learn that a return to the rich tradition from whose roots we spring might actually be the "new" thing lacking in our worship today? At its best, that's what the tradition and liturgy provide for us–a well of resources from which to craft texts and develop rituals which pay attention to both poles of our life, the tra dition and the present.

     In The Senses of Preaching, Tom Long describes a breakfast that he and his brother prepared for their mother one Mothers'Day. "At long last we returned to their room with a steaming breakfast of defiant coffee, molten eggs, carbonized bacon, and biscuits which would have rivaled an apprentice stonemason .... Inept as we were at cooking, we had so obviously prepared the meal with respect and devotion that, even though they surely found it virtually indigestible, they still counted it among their most beloved dining experiences. Somehow I believe that worship is just this way: often half-baked or over-done, but when entered into with care and devotion, graciously received and even savored by our long-suffering God" (93).

     Worship, directed to God and undertaken with care, respect, and devotion, mindful of the tradition with a past and a future, is "is like a dance. It is necessary to learn the proper steps, even to practice them, and to observe the rhythm of the music. It is more important, though, to give oneself with abandon to the dance, to be so prepared that the mechanics can be forgotten in the act of joining in harmony with one's partner. The grace of worship is not that we are able to dance so well, but that God deigns to circle the floor with us in the first place" (Long, The Senses of Preaching, 91).

Works Cited

Long, Thomas G., The Senses of Preaching. John Knox Press: Atlanta, 1988.
Dulles, Avery, The Ways We Worship.
Peterson, Eugene, Answering God The Psalms as Tools for Prayer. Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1991.
 Keck, Leander E., The Church Confident. Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1993.
 

  Rev. John Leggett is pastor of Brookhaven (CPC), Nashville, Tennessee. Rev. Leggett teaches classes on worship and liturgy in the Program of Alternate Studies, serves on the denominational Board of Christian Education.  He is married to Alayne Michelle and they have one daughter, Rachel.