A Window Into Contemporary Worship Preaching
Note: This sermon was preached by a pastor of a “Contemporary Worship” LCMS congregation. I’ve redacted anything that would identify the pastor or the congregation. I have only made slight edits regarding punctuation and repeated words (this is a transcript pulled from YouTube). Any such errors are mine. This is the entire sermon.
I urge Gottesdienst readers to read it or listen to it. It is a window into the minds of those who see preaching very differently than we do (I’ve served as the Sermon’s Editor for our print journal since 2010). It is also a window into the minds of those who have abolished the Mass: an apologetic for doing so. It is a window into what they believe our Lutheran confession of faith is, and to what extent their practice is shaped by the Real Presence. It is also a window into what this pastor believes about those of us who retain the traditional liturgy and hymnody, and what he believes our motivations are.
This sermon is also a window into the pastoral practice of those who opt out of liturgical worship, especially as illustrated by his own account of the liturgy remaining in the heart and mind of a person with Alzheimer’s. How are pastors to care in the future for such parishioners whose piety has been formed in a non-liturgical church? He never reflects on that pastoral dilemma in this sermon. While articulating the benefits of the liturgy, he chooses not to retain it. I find that tragic and lamentable.
I believe this sermon lays out clearly that we are two separate and irreconcilable synods. Our members and pastors move in mutually-exclusive circles. And while I disagree with this pastor, I appreciate his candor. — Ed.
A Sermon on Joshua 5:2-15
So excited to have you here. We’re in the middle of our series on Joshua, and you might be wondering, hey, every other week you’ve done the reading from Joshua. Why didn’t you do it this week? You did it from Ephesians. Well, see, chapter five is all about circumcision, and I didn’t feel like that was a great topic with the kids in the room, or just a fun thing to read about. So, but we’re going to talk about it because it’s very important.
And so, what we’re going to talk about today is in chapter five, we really see three things that point to the same thing. And the first thing is this: God comes to Joshua. He says, “Joshua, you guys are getting ready to fight a big battle and win. And he says, “The the all the younger people of the Israelites they haven’t been circumcised, and this is a sign to show that you belong to me and that I have a covenant with you. And so you need to circumcise all the young men that aren’t circumcised. So I’m sure that was a great meeting that he had with them. But because they had two flint rocks that they would, yeah. Do you guys want some more details on that?
Okay, but then what we also see is in the next little section of chapter five is that they, as they are getting ready for for battle, they observe the Passover meal. This is something that they had done for 40 years now, as it was a celebration of what God did to rescue them out of Egypt, and so they they celebrate the Passover meal.
So we see them doing that, and then the third thing that we see in chapter five is that the commander of the Lord’s army, so an angel in charge of the the Lord’s army, comes down to Joshua, and Joshua is standing there with him, and he says, “Well, take off your shoes. This is holy ground.” And he takes off his shoes. And so, what we see is three different things. Because today, what we’re going to talk about is traditions. And what we see is three different traditions in front of us.
We see, well, there’s certain attire you’re supposed to have when you’re in the presence of the Lord. So, take off your shoes. We see different services that remember different things and celebrations, and so that’s another type of tradition. And then we see circumcision, another type of tradition. And so when we step back and we say, okay, we know that churches are filled with traditions, and customs, and rituals, and so why are they all different? Which ones are the right ones? Which ones are the wrong ones? Which ones are the old ones? Which ones are the new ones? How do we decide what we do and what we don’t do? And what is the role of traditions?
How many of you maybe have a friend or a family member that is a part of a church that has a tradition that you’re at odds with, and maybe it’s caused tension before? It’s like, well, your church doesn’t do this. Our church does do this. You guys don’t stand. We stand. You guys don’t recite this. We do recite this. You say, and we let these traditions be very important. And and so here’s the question: Are they important, and why? And if they are important, what what should we do, and what shouldn’t we do? And so what we see here is this: with circumcision, to to start with, God is the one who who tells us to do this. He does this in Genesis chapter 17. He says, “This is a way I’m going to make a covenant with you, and so I want you to do this to show that you belong to me, and you’re the people under the promise that I have given to Abraham. And so they they do this. The Israelites do this, and there’s many other outward traditions that that God has them do. For instance, they have dietary laws. They’re not allowed to eat any unclean animals. It lists them all in Leviticus chapter 11.
And so, no pigs, so no bacon, no pork chops, no shellfish. Any lobster and crab cake fans out there? Yeah, and no rabbits, camels, eels. I don’t have a problem with that. No scavenger birds, and God says we’re not going to be like everybody else. We’re going to be set apart. You’re going to not eat these things, but you can eat everything else. But you’re also not to have rare steak, nothing with blood in it. And so, all you rare steak people, that’s gross. But you can do that now. [Note: the red color in a rare steak is not blood. The blood was already all drained out of the meat — Ed.]
But then they also had a lot of people go to like Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 22, and they say, “Look, God has even these weird things about what kind of clothing you can wear. Like it can’t be wool and linen woven together, you know. And the punishment for that is death. Like what kind of God is this, you know? And we step back and we see all these things: the Sabbath, the festivals, the sacrifices, the purity rituals that they would do, the sacrifice rituals that they would do. And we go, okay, God, you had all these rules and traditions. Like, what was the point of all this, right? And God tells us that the point was this: that these weren’t just arbitrary things that He wanted His people to jump through a bunch of hoops. That He said, all the people on this earth, I want to set apart My people, and they’re going to do things differently so they stand out to the rest of the world, so we’re going to do things this way, and this will mark you as a follower of me, and this will discipline you to say I’m not going to be like the rest of the world. I’m going to follow God, and when you hear that, you go, Oh, that’s kind of like what you do with us today, that there are certain things that we’re to abstain from, and certain things we are to do if we’re going to mark ourselves as followers of Him and stand out to the rest of the world, and so this was His way of doing it back then.
But then, what we read is Jesus comes into the the scene on in the New Testament, and Jesus says, “Look, good news! I fulfilled all those old things that that I have fulfilled the sacrifices in the synagogue. You don’t need to do those anymore. I am the spotless lamb that has died once and for all.” He says the the different foods that you’re not allowed to eat that’s all been forgiven. You don’t have to do any of that, and so that’s in Mark chapter seven that that’s that’s all taken away. That you can eat whatever you want.
He says all these rules between the the Jews and the the non-church people. You know what kind of clothing, what kind of practices, rituals, purification, all this. He says, “I’ve abolished all that. It’s all been fulfilled in my life, death, and resurrection. And so we step back, and then we even look at circumcision in Acts chapter 15. So the the Jews start to believe in Jesus. Some of them do, some of them don’t, and the ones that do believe in Jesus, they’re going around and they’re spreading the gospel to all these people that are not from Jewish backgrounds, and so they’re telling them, “Hey, if you want to believe in Jesus, you need to be circumcised.” And the people on the outside are going, “I don’t really want to believe in Jesus that bad,” and and so then they have this debate. Well, do they actually? Because that’s an Old Testament thing, and Jesus is telling us that following Him is all we need to do. And some of them are debating this. Well, I think you you have to be circumcised in order to be saved.
And so in Acts chapter 15, they actually have a whole church meeting about this, and we can read about it. And what they come up with is this. They said, okay, we need to decide what traditions are worth holding on to and what traditions aren’t worth holding on to? Because right now, some of our traditions are actually pushing people away, and we want people to come and believe.
And if our traditions are actually pushing people away, then we should we should talk about whether they we want them or not. And so, at the end of this, what they say in Acts chapter 15 is they write a letter and they say, “Okay, look, here’s the things that you actually have to keep doing. These are the requirements. You can’t. You have to abstain from from what’s been sacrificed to idols. So so no meat with blood in it, and nothing that’s been strangled. And you have to stay away from sexual immorality because they would have like prostitutes that you would sleep with at the temple so that you would get things out of these idol gods. And they would have orgies and stuff like that, and they’re like, okay, all this stuff that goes with all this foreign god worship, none of that. But otherwise, you’re free to worship as you want.
And what they said was this: if you want to boil it down, it comes down to this. They said that all of all of the things that we have, all of our traditions, that what we see is that we want people to come to Jesus, and if these traditions are going to get in the way of people coming to Jesus, then then we’re going to get rid of them because what is necessary, we want to set apart to follow Christ and do. But but the traditions can’t get in the way of reaching the lost, which brings us to today.
You see, some of you might not know this. We’re a Lutheran church, and specifically a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and and here we are, you know, 2000 years later from all of this, and we are still in our church body having debates like this. We just had our national convention this summer down in Phoenix, and and still today they were talking about this battle of what traditions do we hold on to and what traditions do we not hold on to because there is a group within the Lutheran Church that says you know what like all the pastors should be wearing collars and wearing vestments and should have the same order of service and the same liturgy.
They said you should be able to go to a Lutheran church, Missouri Synod church, anywhere in the United States, and it should be the exact same service every single place, singing the same hymns, everything, so that there’s unity, and that’s a beautiful picture. And I understand why that is, but then there are other churches within the Lutheran church that are contemporary churches like ourselves that say, well, that that works for some people, but for some people, that’s a distraction from the gospel. That’s a distraction from Christ. That they don’t understand what all that means, or or you know, to just tell me this is what I have to say and this is how I worship. That that my heart is not in that worship, and so we we have a different style of worship, and it’s not a better or worse. It’s a “hey, I always do it this way. “
You know when you get a gift card to somewhere like a restaurant, and you’re like, oh okay I like that restaurant. But you know what’s interesting is you flip it over and you’ll see that they actually have like a couple different chains and the gift card goes to all of them. You know so they have like a steakhouse and a seafood place and maybe a fast food, and it’s kind of the same thing within the Lutheran Church. Like, I love that within the box that is the Lutheran Church, you can have an incredibly traditional high church. You know, collars and smells and bells and an organ and everything. And then I love that we can have a contemporary church where we have drums and we have guitars and we can sing because all all of it goes to Jesus, and so if if this church is reaching those people that we would never reach, great. And if we are reaching these people that that church would never reach, great, because it’s all working together for the kingdom.
But still, there’s this big debate about well, okay, but what traditions should we hold onto, and which ones are we allowed to let go of? And Martin Luther famously, when he broke off from the Catholic Church, he still held on to the traditions and the Mass. He just took the services. They used to do the the services in Latin, and the the Bible used to be in Latin, so nobody could read it. He said, “Well, guess what? We want to put the the the Word of God and the worship of God in the language of the people, so they can be a part of it,” and so they they put the Bible in German, and they tried to kill him for this, and they they put the service in German so that the people could be a part of it, and and his whole spirit in that is this, that you want to speak the language of the people so that they can connect with the Lord, right?
And for me, when people ask, well, okay, is [our congregation] going to ever have a traditional service? My answer is no, and they’re like, “Why?” I said, “Because as soon as you start having different types of services, you create factions within a family, and we’re not going to do that here. And we’re not saying one is better than the other. We’re saying this is what we’re gifted to do. This is what we can do best with the team that was assembled and when we started, this is how we can best worship the Lord and lead people.
And if I’m being honest, when when y’all drive away and you got your music on, I don’t hear a lot of people listening to handbells and organs. Like, I hear you listening to songs that have pianos and guitars and drums. And so we want to put the worship. And this isn’t to mock anybody. This is saying, as I best see it, I want to make sure that we have a way that you have a song that’s in your head for the rest of the day, that’s in a style and in a language, and that you you actually worship in.
And so, when it comes to traditions, there are there are necessities. Then there are things that complement, and then there are things that abstract. And so the necessity is pretty simple. And within the Lutheran Church, there’s only two necessities that need to be there: Word and Sacraments. That the Word needs to be preached in purity, meaning that sinners are justified by grace alone, not by their works. That that through faith alone, not by rituals, through for the sake of Christ alone, that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and He is the narrow way, and the truth is revealed to us in Scripture alone, not by human reason. That that needs to be the the paramount thing that happens every Sunday. And the second thing is this: that we have the Sacraments that are done rightly, that the Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are done according to Christ’s instruction. Everything else is a big word, adiaphora.
That’s a big word today, and everybody asked me how to spell it last time. I don’t know, but it’s adiaphora, and what that word means is it’s not told to us to do in Scripture, but it’s also not forbidden in Scripture. And so that’s things like the order of service, the ceremonies, the rites, the customs, and even Luther himself – he wrote this in the Augsburg Confession [Note: Luther did not write the Augsburg Confession. — Ed.] in Article Seven. He said it’s not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites and ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere. He’s saying there ought to be expressions of the church in all different languages, in all different expressions, in all different cultures, all pointing to the same God, and we don’t all have to look the same, and so when we when we look at the things and we say, okay, is this a complementary thing where it helps us find Jesus, or is this a distracting thing where it takes us away from Jesus? There are these things that we have to wrestle with as a church. For instance, you know, like collars. You know, why do pastors wear the the collars?
Well, they wear the cassock, the black outfit, and then they have a white collar around their neck to show I’m a sinner, but when I speak, I speak on behalf of a pure and holy God. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. There are many, many communities and many places where that works for me. If I were to wear that, people would go, “Oh, Father, what time is Mass? You know, and I’m like, “Well, that’s not us. That’s not what we do.” And there, there are some people that that would not see that as an approachable person to talk to. And I want to seem approachable.
When this church got together, there were seven families that started this church nine years ago. And what we said was this: the two things that made this church, we said we want to start a church where where you are excited to invite somebody to come, and where even someone with no church background will feel comfortable and want to come back, and so we actually weighed through all these things. We actually talked about what I would wear on a Sunday, and this is what we came up with. They were like, do something that looks natural, but not like you just rolled in off the street. And I was like, how about this? And they were like, keep it up.
And but, you know, vestments. You know, the there are churches where the pastors wear albs and cassocks, and and they they wear the stole. And it’s a beautiful thing. It points, you know, the robe points to that we have been washed in Christ and we get to wear His righteousness. The stole has the different colors to show that He speaks on behalf and the authority as a shepherd of the flock, and the cassock to show the beauty of God. And those are all great things.
If I was to wear that every Sunday, you would have to give me IVs in between services because I would sweat to death up here. I would I would literally be a mess, and that’s just not my style. I wouldn’t. There would be people that would not see that as approachable, and I want people to approach me. I love that there are people that show up here every Sunday. Some of them call me Reverend [Lastname]. Some of them call me Pastor [Lastname]. Some of them call me Pastor [Firstname], and there are some of you that just walk up and you’re like [Firstname], and I’m good with all of those, but I feel like I’m approachable because of the way I dress.
And so it’s not saying something’s wrong, and it’s not saying this is better. It’s saying this is just the way we’ve chosen. And then you know you take things like candles and chanting. That was my biggest fear coming out of seminary was God, please don’t send me to a church that chants. And it’s not because chanting is wrong. The reason why churches chant is because it elevates the words of scripture and liturgy above the everyday conversation to show these words are special. But if I had to sit up here, it would be gut wrenching for you guys because I cannot do this. My voice cracks and I can’t. Like it would be a distraction.
So we don’t do these things, and then there’s things like the liturgy. For those of you that grew up in a traditional church, you know I grew up in a traditional church, 8 a.m. You know, same, page 5 and 15 every Sunday, you know, and it was the same thing, and it was beautiful. You got to memorize it. You would know it by heart, and and that was kind of the problem for me with it was that I could just say it without meaning it, and I could just go through the motions of it. But I also understand the beauty of it.
You see, my wife, when we were dating, we went back to her parents’ house, and her grandma was in a nursing home. And her grandma [name] was was blind, but had dementia, and sometimes she’d forget she was blind, and so we went to visit her. And you know, I was holding her hand, talking to her for a little bit, getting to meet her. And we were about 15 minutes into our conversation, and all of a sudden she goes, “Whoa, who turned off the lights?” And I was, I was trying not to laugh. I was like, “Is this a joke? What’s happening here?” And then I thought, “Oh my gosh, do I have to tell her she’s blind? How is she going to react to that? You know, like what do I do? You know, and and you know, finally she was like, “I’m sorry, I’ve been traveling. I can’t see you very well.” I was like, “I don’t know what to take of that, but okay. Hope it was a great place.”
But here’s the thing. And then we took her to church, and this woman who cannot see, she participated in the entire service because she grew up a pastor’s kid and was the wife of pastor, and she knew the entire service by heart, and she participated in the whole thing, and even the hymns she began to sing. And even later on in her dementia, when she was struggling to speak, (my sister is a speech pathologist) and they see this with Alzheimer’s patients that that she would just mumble. You couldn’t understand her, but the part of your brain that sings is different than the part that speaks. And old hymns, she would sing them clear as day, and yet she couldn’t speak and mumbled. And so there is something beautiful about that ritual. There’s something beautiful about that liturgy.
In my home church, when I go home and I sing a little, “This is the Feast.” My heart is happy, and I remember that nostalgia of that. And I pray that our kids grow up with that and understand that, and so there’s there’s something beautiful about the liturgy, but also there’s something where it can be dangerous, where it can just become a check the box thing, where you come into service and it’s like my heart’s not in this. I’m just saying the words you’re telling me to say. This isn’t what’s on my heart to pray for it or to go through.
And so we’ve chosen what we’ve chosen, but it doesn’t mean that the other ways are wrong, and the hymns that we sing, we do sing hymns every once in a while, and they’re beautiful. And there are a lot of terrible, terrible new songs that are out there that say the same words 17 times, and you’re like, “I get it. I got a good, good Father.” Okay, like, come on! Like, there are some really bad new songs, and so we we want to be careful to say, well, we there are some hymns that we’re going to pull up and sing, but there are some new songs that have beauty to sing as well, and so we just want to try and balance this.
And so here’s the things that that we see is that no matter what, we do want tradition. We are always going to continue to do the creed. We do it every communion Sunday, because we want that to be part of what we do: the statement of faith that unites us as a family. And people say, “Well, why don’t we do it every week?” Because I don’t want to every single week have something that says, “Hey, this is what we all believe,” and there’ll be a new person going, “That’s not what I believe.” And so, on a communion Sunday, it makes sense to do something like that, to say, “Hey, we’re about to do something that is a sacred meal, and this might be something that you’re not included in because you’re not there yet. You don’t believe.” But I don’t want to have something like that every single week that makes somebody feel off because they’re not believing that yet. And so we just do it on communion Sundays. We say the Lord’s Prayer, and that’s something that we recite. And there’s beauty to that.
I’ll tell you a quick story. We went two summers ago, to the national youth gathering with all our high schoolers, and on the way back, we went through the most horrific storm I’ve ever been on on a plane. And I thought the plane, I mean, it felt like the plane was coming apart.
Like I mean, the plane was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I had I had kids crying, throwing up. We had one in the front screaming, “We’re all gonna die!” I mean, and it felt like it. It felt like it. And in that moment, I was like, I forgot who I was for a second. I was like, wait a minute, I’m the pastor, and I was like, I should pray. Like, and I was so scared and terrified, I couldn’t even think of what to say. And so, what came out? The Lord’s prayer, because it was so ingrained in my heart. And what did everyone around me start screaming at the top of their lungs? The Lord’s Prayer. And so there is a beautiful thing about having these ritual prayers.
But also at our dinner table, when all of a sudden we sit down and the kids are like, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.” Okay, is is the ritual serving the purpose that we’re that it’s supposed to serve it in that moment, no. So now we we don’t do that. Now at our table, I pick somebody and I go pray for us, and they’re like, okay, and they have to pray from the heart.
So rituals are good if they continue to point to Jesus, but once rituals become just checking the boxes, they’re not good. And so we always want to hold on to rituals, and anytime a ritual gets elevated above Jesus, and anytime that you have these rituals, and there are churches that say this, well, if your church doesn’t do X, Y, Z, then your church isn’t saved, and only these people that do these rituals, and you’re like, no, that’s a ritual, that’s an adiaphora, that’s not a biblical thing, that’s you, that’s a man-made tradition that you have elevated and said this is what it is. And anytime we put faith in rituals, like if you have last rites, you’re going to be saved. If you pray this prayer, you’re going to be saved. No, that’s you, and that’s what he’s talking about in Ephesians. This is what [the lector] read. How are we saved? By grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It’s not our works. It’s not our rituals. It’s not our human traditions. It’s nothing that we do that saves us.
And so, when we have these things that we struggle with, like these traditions that come between us, we should never let them divide the church body. That your friend goes to another church that has different traditions, great, because all of us are pointing to the same God. But at the end of the day, what we need to recognize about this is our traditions don’t save us. Coming to church doesn’t save us. Praying certain prayers doesn’t save us. Doing certain rituals doesn’t save us. Faith in Jesus Christ saves us, and so let our traditions always be something that point us to Jesus and not distract away from Jesus.
And some of you right now are probably thinking, you know what? There’s some traditions that we do that I think are just checking the boxes and don’t actually point to Jesus, and that’s what we want to talk about today. And so, pray through that as you go home and talk about that as a family. What are the rituals that point us to Jesus, and what are the things that are distracting from Jesus?
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we come before you today, and Lord, we pray that everything we do would glorify you. We pray that in every way we would continue to grow in our relationship with you, and whether we’re brand new here today or whether we’ve known you all our lives, all of us continue to take steps forward to you. That’s what we pray for. And Lord, we come before you, and we are sinners. We are in need of your salvation, and so we confess our sins, our thoughts, and our words, and our deeds that we have done against you and against others. And Lord, we pray that you would hear our confession now. Lord God, hear our prayer. Forgive us of these sins that we have confessed, and Lord, the sins that we still need to lay before you.
We pray that you would convict our heart and show us the ways that we fall short, so that we can be right with you and right with others. Lord, forgive us in the name of your Son Jesus, who died on the cross in our place and shed his blood over us to forgive us once and for all. It is in His name and by His power that we pray that we would be forgiven. And all God’s people said, “Amen.”
You see, the mission of the church that Jesus gives us is one thing: to reach the lost, to reach one more. And however best we can position ourselves to do that, whether that is historical liturgy that continues through generation to generation, or whether it’s carefully adapting forms of the liturgy so that the gospel can be heard clearly in a new context, no matter who it is or how it is. Our job is to reach the lost, to let them know that there is nothing, there is nothing they can do to separate themselves from the love of God, and so go from this place, knowing that you are loved, you are cherished, and you are forgiven.
The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and all God’s people said, “Amen.”
We’re going to invite the kids to come in, and then we have a tradition that we stand when we sing, and there’s no reason behind it besides that it’s reverent. So get up.