Exploring Christian Worship

Part Two: Listening and Responding to the Word of God

Introduction

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray.
(Justin, First Apology 67)

Luke 24:25-27, 32. After coming alongside the Emmaus disciples and listening to their stories, Jesus led them to hear and understand the Scripture in a fresh way.

He "interpreted the scriptures to them."
A Christ-centered approach to the Old Testament.
The result, "did not our hearts burn within us?" Similar to John Wesley's testimony that his heart was "strangely warmed." Note: it was only after the fact that they perceived what had happened. The power of Scripture is thus not strictly tied to our intellectual understanding. We have to "ruminate" on it, let it change us on the inside, even if we do not perceive or understand its significance at the time.

The Bible must be at the heart of Christian worship. Worship may be defined as the celebration of God's saving deeds--and these deeds are recorded for us in Scripture! Part of celebration is telling the story. In fact, recounting the saving deeds of God was and is a key feature of Jewish worship.

Jewish synagogue worship was centered around Scripture and prayer. This would have naturally been the pattern for the first Christians to follow.

Development

One of the earliest references to Christian worship comes from a letter from Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, to emperor Trajan (ca. 111).

They stated that the sum total of their error or misjudgment, had been coming to a meeting on a given day before dawn, and singing responsively a hymn to Christ as to God, swearing with a holy oath not to commit any crime, never to steal or commit robbery, commit adultery, fail a sworn agreement or refuse to return a sum left in trust. When all this was finished, it was their custom to go their separate ways, and later re-assemble to take food of an ordinary and simple kind. But after my edict which forbids all political societies, they did in fact give this up.
(Pliny, Epistle 96).

Pliny described two distinct meetings: an early-morning service of prayer and an evening communal meal. In later times, these gatherings were combined into a single event, divided into "The Service of the Word" and "The Service of the Table." We will examine the prayer service today and the communal meal in the next session.

Scholars are generally agreed that this early morning service was patterned after the Jewish synagogue liturgy, which involved three distinct parts or movements:

Shema ("Hear, O Israel"): The creed of Judaism, which served as a call to worship.
Tefillah: The corporate prayers, also called the Amidah (the "standing" prayer) and the Shemoneh Esreh (the "eighteen" benedictions). The earliest pattern was a series of brief prayers arranged in a fairly well established order, but with flexibility in the actual wording.
Torah: The reading and explanation of the Scripture.The reading of the Torah was clearly the high point of the service. It was accompanied with great pageantry and devotion. The actual structure was as follows:

The Ark is opened and the reader takes the Torah scroll.
Procession to the reading desk.
Chanting of the day's Torah passage.
Lifting up of the open Torah for the people's veneration.
A second procession returning the Torah to the Ark.
A reading from the prophets (the haftarah or "closing").
The sermon.

Early Christian worship made two fundamental shifts to this pattern, and did so at such an early period that there is little if any record of the original pattern in practice in the church.

(1) First, all the available evidence suggests that the Shema fell out of use in Christian worship at a very early stage. Some have suggested it was replaced at least in some settings by a recitation of the Ten Commandments--which may explain Pliny's reference to Christians "swearing with a holy oath not to commit any crime."

(2) Second, Jewish worship kept (and still keeps) the pattern Prayer-then-Scripture. All of the earliest records indicate that the Christian pattern was Scripture-then-Prayer. As we saw in the previous session, the first official act of worship in later centuries was the greeting and call to order by the bishop, which led immediately to the reading of the Scripture lessons.

The Earliest Christian Preaching

A sermon was not a fixed, predictable feature in the synagogue. If a biblical scholar or preacher were present, he would be invited to speak (Lk 4:16-17; Ac 13:15-16), but a sermon was not considered obligatory. In contrast, preachings seems to be an expected, normal feature of Christian worship from the very beginning. The available evidence leads us to conclude that early Christian preaching was:

Informal--more often a homilia ("talk") than a logos ("discourse")
Interactive--opportunities for dialogue, asking questions, etc.
Often done by laity--Origen (3rd century) was invited to preach in churches years before his ordination.
Often "tag-teamed"--The Apostolic Constitutions (late 4th century) allows for multiple sermons by the elders, with the bishop speaking last of all.

In the synagogue, the sermon would have been followed by an open discussion of the texts and their interpretation. We see this in the New Testament in the accounts of Stephen, Paul, and others "debating" in the synagogue (Ac 6:8-10; 13:44-45; 17:1-3; 18:4). Shmuel Safrai describes the situation:

This exposition of Scripture was more a lesson than a sermon, and congregants were encouraged to ask questions. In fact, the asking of questions was so central to rabbinic teaching method that often the preacher-teacher began his sermon by just seating himself and waiting until someone from the audience asked a question. ...Today public speakers often employ a Question-and-Answer period, especially as a means of clarification at the end of a lecture. In first-century Jewish society this approach was usually the main method of instruction ("The Place of Women in First-century Synagogues," Priscilla Papers 16:1 (2002) 11).

Certain passages in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor 14) suggest that this custom was observed in earliest Christianity. Most preaching in the first 200 years of the church was in fact quite informal, and the question-and-answer, conversational format persisted even into the fourth century in some remote congregations. This leads us to an important observation...

Hearing and Responding

The "Service of the Word" was thus not just about hearing, but about hearing and responding. It was not passive or quietistic: at every step along the way, there was a rhythm of hearing and response. In Justin's description of an early second-century liturgy, there was already a pattern of hearing the Scripture and responding with prayer. Later, the pattern would become more complex, but still built around this original premise:

Before the Scripture reading, the deacon would announce "Silence" or "Let us be attentive" or some such expression to call the congregation to attention. After each passage, the reader would announce, "The word of the Lord," with the response, "Thanks be to God."
After each reading, the congregation would respond with a psalm. (The Gloria Patri was originally a concluding ascription of praise added at the end of a psalm to give it an overtly Christian setting.)
The last scripture was always the Gospel, for which the congregation stood in reverence. Opening and concluding dialogues were more elaborate, and before the reading there would be a Gospel Acclamation or brief song of praise. The Gospel reading was festooned with pageantry and devotion, probably a holdover from synagogue customs surrounding the reading of the Torah.
Following the sermon, as has been discussed, the congregation would rise to pray. The prayers themselves were most likely in the form of dialogue between the congregation and the prayer leader (most often the deacon).
Beginning in the fifth century, the Creed was also recited as a response to the word of God.

Responses were not always formal or structured. As late as the fifth century, behavior was noted that we might think was a product of later American revivalism or Pentecostalism. There are references to John Chrysostom and Augustine literally having to call the congregation back to order during the course of the liturgy! One Augustine scholar notes:

Augustine’s congregation was in the habit of reacting to whatever was read or preached with all the liveliness of their temperament. They shouted comments, sighed, and laughed, like children at the cinema” (F. Van Der Meer, Augustine the Bishop; quoted by Eddie Ensley, Sounds of Wonder, 284).

Worship Disciplines for the Service of the Word

(1) Listening, contemplation, silence (hesychia = meditative attentiveness).
(2) Contemplative reading (lectio divina) or “praying the scripture,” engaging the imagination, putting yourself in the story.
(3) Singing was a key form of congregational response:

"Apart from those moments when the Scriptures are being read or a sermon is preached, when the bishop is praying aloud or the deacon is specifying the intentions of the litany of community prayer, is there any time when the faithful assembled in the church are not singing? Truly I see nothing better, more useful or holy that they could do" (Augustine, Epistle 55, 18-19).

(4) Confessing faith--through creeds, testimonies, dialogue, etc.

(5) Prayer. It was customary to pray standing (cf. Mt 6:5; Mk 11:25; Lk 18:11), with hands outstretched:

"With modesty and humility, with not even our hands too loftily elevated, but elevated temperately and becomingly" (Tertullian, On Prayer 17).

Raising the hands in prayer is, of course, attested as early as the first century (1 Ti 2:8) and is amply illustrated in the prayer postures depicted in the Roman catacombs.)

On to Part Three: Meeting Jesus at the Table
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