Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #273: A History of Christian Worship Part Two - The Times of the N

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your Your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Welcome back to Voices in My Head.

As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm glad that you could join me here this week. Gonna get right into it after I say this one thing. I just want to remind you, I still haven't had a chance to re-record the ending of the show, the outro, and there's one bit of information on there that's wrong. I'm no longer with PairBooking for booking purposes, so just rickleejames.com/bookings if you're looking to have me come for a concert or any sort of speaking engagement. You'll be able to find my offer sheet there, and I just wanted to let you know that because the outro is wrong. PairBooking is no longer in business, so I'm no longer booking through PairBooking, doing it all myself online. So rickleejames.com/bookings. All right, with that being said, That said, I'm going to get into part 2 of the history of Christian worship. I'm so glad you could join me again. I've gotten a lot of good feedback for session 1, and this is— my plan is to have this be a 10-part session on the history of Christian worship. So I'm just going to get right into it today. Session 2: The History of Christian Worship: The Times of the New Testament. As we saw in our previous session, for most of the first century, the followers of Jesus continued to worship with their fellow Jews in synagogues and temples. However, it was becoming clear that Christianity had a different vision of what it meant to worship God. This difference made a break with Judaism inevitable, and by the end of the first century, that break actually did finally happen. Because Christians believed that in Jesus a new age had dawned upon the world, they began meeting for worship on Sunday instead of Saturday. Sunday was the first day of the week, the day when God spoke light into creation. It was the day when the church was birthed on Pentecost, and most importantly, Sunday is the day on which Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Now, while Saturday was the Sabbath day, Sunday became the Lord's Day, marking a new eschatological order in the universe. In Jesus, the totality of life, death, and time itself conformed to his lordship and took on new significance. So welcome to the times of the New Testament, where the early church sprung to life. The Table. It would be nice if we could easily point to one definitive way that the early church worshiped in the New Testament, but there is just simply not one specific way. The early church was a picture of diversity, in many ways pioneering Christian worship through the new frontier of Christianity where there were great mysteries, and there was much to be explored. In these exciting new days, the Spirit was manifesting itself through preaching, prophecy, tongues, baptism, and intercessory prayer. The words of Jesus seem to describe the atmosphere that the early Christians were breathing: "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." In the New Testament, we see a number of hymns being brought to life. There is the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, which says, "My soul glorifies the Lord," or magnifies the Lord, "and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." You can find that in Luke chapter 1, verses 46 through 55 if you want to read the whole song. Many songwriters have actually put music to that over the years, and I always wonder what the original music would have sounded like. Then there's the Benedictus, the song of Zachariah. And it goes, praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. And that's found in Luke chapter 1, verses 68 through 79. There's the Nunc Dimittis, or the Song of Simeon. Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation. That is found in Luke chapter 2, verses 29 through 32. There's the Kenosis hymn from the Greek word ekenosen, which means he emptied. Who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And that's found in Philippians 2, verses 6 through 11. I encourage the songwriters who listen to the show, those are some rich places to try to write songs from. They actually were songs to start with. They were hymns of the church, and I think it would be wonderful if we could continue to find ways to recapture those for our congregations today. They're beautiful, powerful, and theologically strong songs for us to sing. Anyway, that's just a side note. I encourage you to do that. Let's get back into the New Testament. Well, based on the evidence in the New Testament, it's safe to assume that the place where these acts of worship were happening was in the weekly Sunday evening gatherings at the Lord's table. The table was central to worship in Christianity's ancient faith because of the particular significance that Jesus placed upon table fellowship. Often when Jesus shared a meal, it would take on religious significance. When he was at supper with Levi, Jesus was criticized for joyfully eating and drinking with sinners. Jesus seemed to enjoy dining with sinful people so much he was called a glutton and a drunk. These times around the table with Jesus are well documented in the Gospel of Luke. At these mealtimes, Jesus challenges many of the Pharisaic barriers that were in place. Between sinners and the righteous, the, the decidedly religious, worship-oriented terms. And one of the most well-known parables revolves around the table as well. When the prodigal son comes home, there is a great party thrown on his behalf, and the feast becomes the sign of reconciliation. You can almost envision the music, the dancing, and the celebration that's happening at the feast In this parable of the prodigal son, as we call it, what a beautiful lens through which to view the New Testament table fellowship. Worship at the table was not seen to be a light snack. It was a joyous feast, not a funeral dinner. We can also see the table as a sign of reconciliation near the town of Bethsaida. Where Jesus feeds 5,000 hungry people. Here he welcomed the multitudes and spoke to them of the Kingdom of God. Then he demonstrated the present reality of the Kingdom by healing them and maybe most memorably feeding them all with food left over. Some of Jesus' most important teachings on sin, repentance, forgiveness, they happen at another feast, the Passover meal. This meal has particular religious significance not only because it is the final meal Jesus would share with his disciples before his crucifixion, but because it's the meal where Jesus is both the host and the servant. It's at the table where Jesus commands us, "Do this in remembrance of me." It's beautiful to think that the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, most desires to be remembered as the host of a meal and the servant to all. Each disciple revealed himself as a sinner and a betrayer that Passover night, but Jesus revealed himself as host and servant. Of all. Thankfully, that Upper Room meal did not turn out to be the Last Supper. The climax of the Gospel of Luke happens at the Emmaus meal, where the resurrected Jesus is made known to his disciples. Where? In the breaking of the bread. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. That's found in Luke 24:30-31. For the followers of Jesus, meals are transformational. This is why the disciples devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer. This liturgical breaking of the bread, fellowship, and prayer what we call worship, that we see in the book of Acts becomes the seal and the testimony of the Pentecost experience. At Pentecost, we see a vision of saints and sinners, Jews and Gentiles, and citizens of all nations feasting together, proof that the Messiah, the Messianic age, had come. It tells us in scripture, every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. That's in Acts chapter 2, verses 46 through 47, if you want to look that up. Well, then we have in New Testament worship, we see this 7-action pattern develop. Most scholars agree that from the very beginning, Christians at worship celebrated a full common meal with prayers of blessing. This thanksgiving, or Eucharistia, this thanksgiving meal, it was patterned after the Jewish table blessings that were prayed before and after the meal. These blessings took the form of a 7-action pattern, and it follows like this: the first action was taking bread, the second action was thanking God, the third action breaking the bread, the fourth action giving the bread, the fifth action taking the wine after the meal, the sixth action thanking God, and the seventh action, giving the wine. For a number of reasons, from accommodating larger crowds to pagan confusions, the full meal was eventually removed from the pattern, leaving the opening and closing table ceremony, now known as the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. By the time the church entered into the third century, the pattern was adjusted down to only four actions, and those four actions were taking bread and wine, thanking God over the bread and wine, breaking the bread, and giving bread and wine. Now, 1 Corinthians 11 describes the Eucharist when it was still combined with the full feast. In that passage, we find Paul addressing the abuses that led the meal to become separated. He tells them that— in that passage, we find Paul um, he tells them that they're eating the Lord's Supper, but they have splintered it into their own private meals. And because of their lack of love and their ethical responsibility to the poorer members of the congregation, they were partaking in the opposite of the meal instituted by Christ. And in 1 Corinthians 11:29, Paul indicts, indicts the Corinthian Christians saying this: For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. Now, this is an important thing for us to look at because this is one of the most misunderstood and most misused passages of Scripture. This is a really often misunderstood passage to the point that almost every time I hear it in church it's used wrongly from what it was originally intended to be used as. And it's unfortunately led many Christians to exclude themselves from receiving at the Lord's table. When Paul refers to discerning the body, otherwise we eat and drink judgment on ourselves, he isn't speaking of the bread and wine. He is speaking of the church when he says the body. To discern the body is to see your brothers and sisters gathered around the table as the visible presence of the living God. Paul wanted us to understand, I believe, that when our behavior becomes selfish and when we indulge our appetites to the point that those who are in need are going without, then we are eating and drinking judgment upon ourselves, and we are no longer living as part of the body. Now, this is instructive for those of us who lead worship. When our worship becomes self-indulgent and about pleasing ourselves to the neglect of the needs of others, then we are in a spiritually dangerous place, I believe. I believe in those times that we are eating and drinking judgment upon ourselves. Now, I could say a lot more about the table elements of worship in, in the New Testament, but for now Let's just draw these conclusions and move on to the next part of worship in the New Testament. The conclusions being: the Lord's Supper was the central act of New Testament worship. The Lord's Supper is a meal hosted by Christ for the church, even to this day. The Lord's Supper was a remembrance of the sacrifice of Christ, our Passover. And the Lord's Supper was intended to be a joyous thanksgiving celebration of Christ's victorious resurrection. Now let's move on to water in worship. The use of water for purification is common in almost every world religion. Jews used water for purification rites in the temple. Gentiles who wish to become Jews received instruction in the law and in Jewish heritage, and if they were male, they were circumcised, and then they were baptized into the house of Israel by being immersed in running water. Early Christian baptisms may have been related to the Jewish baptism of conversion described here. John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord by preaching a baptism of repentance, and this baptism was a call to be washed clean, a call to a new way, to be incorporated into a new eschatological community of those who were repentant. Baptism would play such an important part in initiation to the Christian faith that Jesus himself submitted to be baptized by John. If we truly want to follow Jesus, if we truly want to be like Jesus, then baptism is an essential part of our conversion experience, and it should be. For early Christians, For the New Testament Christians, baptism would come to take the place of circumcision as the rite of initiation. Christians dropped the practice of circumcision for a variety of reasons, including its association with nationalism, the exclusion of women, and its relation to the Old Covenant. Early Christian baptism was likely done in the nude by immersion in running water. Arguments over infant versus adult baptism wouldn't arise until much later due to more theological controversies than biblical support. Now, sometimes when the master of the house accepted the Christian faith, entire households, children included, were baptized. The age of the candidates for baptism is not discussed in the New Testament, and in contrast to the Christianity of later centuries, there was not necessarily much of a waiting period. This is possibly due to the to the fact that most converts were already devout Jews and had already experienced a lifetime in the Jewish faith. Since Christianity was in essence the fulfillment of Judaism, it's possible that further catechism wasn't seen to be necessary. So we see in Acts 8:38, the Ethiopian eunuch was baptized immediately upon confessing Jesus to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy. And in Acts 10:47, when the Apostle Peter saw saw the centurion Cornelius and his household filled with the Holy Spirit, he asked, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" Nobody investigated these people's lifestyles before they were baptized, and nobody taught them the Bible's story or provided moral or theological catechesis. The nascent Christians evidently assumed that the candidates as Jews or God-fearers knew these things already. That's actually a quote by Alan— sorry, a quote by Alan Kreider from his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, which was published by Baker Academic in 2016. I recommend that book strongly, really important book. Now, in the book of Acts, Christian baptism is spoken of with 3 implications. So if you want to think of in the book of Acts the implications for baptism, the 3 things were this: the 3 implications of Christian baptism in the early church: you were baptized for the forgiveness of sins, you were baptized into the name of Jesus, and thirdly, to receive the Holy Spirit. The Hellenistic Christians had an idea of baptism as death. And Paul adapted this view, telling us that in baptism the old person dies and the new person rises to new life in Christ. Conversion into the kingdom of God is nothing less than death to the old life and a radical rebirth into the new life. According to Paul, in baptism we are buried in the baptismal waters and we rise to walk in newness of life. Above all, baptism was initiation into the Christian faith. I know I've said that a couple times, and I'm just gonna say it one more time for emphasis. Above all, baptism was initiation into the Christian faith. This is how you were initiated in. So anytime we talk about, well, you don't really need to be baptized to be a Christian, according to the New Testament, it was a very important thing And why would you not want to be? Um, it was your initiation rite. The cleansing waters washed away all other distinctions. This is very important for us as we are baptized into Christ. The cleansing waters wash away all other distinctions, the sexual, racial, and social classifications of the old life Those are now buried with Christ. Those who are baptized, they enter into a new eschatological community in the name of Jesus. Baptism, it's the ancient act of Christian worship that helps Christians to celebrate their new identity. All of our other identities pass away in Christ. They die in the baptism, and when we come up, we are new people. Just as the Israelites, by God's grace, passed through the Red Sea escaping from slavery into freedom, so Christians pass through the water of baptism from death to life, becoming the body of Christ, the church. The Lord's Supper is the sustaining meal of the believer in this new life, as John Wesley said. Word, water, bread, and wine were the heart of worship in the New Testament. So, um, a couple things, just some, some leading questions for us as I come to the conclusion of, of this week and session 2 of, of our study of Christian worship and the history of Christian worship. While Saturday was the Sabbath day, Sunday became known as the Christians— known as this for the Christians. It became known as the Lord's Day. That's one thing that became a distinction. There's still a debate among some Christians as to whether or not we should be worshipping on the Sabbath or on the Lord's Day. For Christians, the Lord's Day became the day that we celebrated, really as a distinction to make ourselves distinct. I think that we are Christ's followers, and I covered that. So, but I just wanted to kind of re-emphasize that. So if you had any question about the Sabbath day versus the Lord's Day, uh, Saturday is the Sabbath, Sunday is the Lord's Day. Um, there was not a definitive way that the church worshiped in the New Testament, so just wanted to remind you of that, to kind of recap, um, based on the evidence in the New Testament It's just safe to assume that the weekly Sunday evening gatherings were happening at the Lord's table. And so there's things that we might want to ask if that's true. If it's true that one of the main ways that Jesus wished to be remembered was as the host of a meal, what effect might that have on our theology of worship? If Jesus actually commanded us to do this in remembrance of me. It's one of the, you know, direct commands we have from Scripture. I believe it's something that should be part and parcel of our worship. The early church believed that. The New Testament church believed that. For centuries, that was the central act of worship. It was what Christians did. It was what made their worship Christian. Was the Lord's table. I really think we need to start thinking about that more when we're talking about how we structure our worship. And if we're going to be a church that calls ourselves Christian, why would we not want to take part in Christian acts and have them on a regular basis? It's a good question for us to wrestle with and struggle through. I can tell you where I fall on it. I think we should do it every time we gather together and more. I know a lot of people disagree, but I'm just going back to early church patterns established by Jesus and the disciples, and I think you can't go wrong with having the Lord's table as often as possible. It's not about something that's going to lose its meaning over time. We do many things that are important and essential not because they're meaningful, but because we need them. We don't eat breakfast in the morning because it's meaningful, or eat every day because it's meaningful. We eat because we need to, to live. And Wesley called communion the sustaining meal of the believer. So just some food for thought, no pun intended. Taking the bread and wine, thanking God over the bread and wine, breaking the bread, giving the bread and wine— this, this Eucharistic action was so important. And, and then when we talk about baptism too, just to recap a little bit tonight, Liturgical rite of baptism came to take the place of circumcision. Circumcision was what, what marked you as a believer, as a good Jew, and all male Jews would be circumcised. Baptism took the place of that, not an altar call. And I know we could debate about that, and I'm not saying that you're gonna go to hell if you're not baptized, but I would say every Christian should desire to be in solidarity with the ancient faith through baptism. We believe there's a mysterious side to baptism that we can't understand. We believe it's something that God works through the baptismal waters. It's something that's not done by us, it's something that's done for us. It is initiation into the family, and it's something that marks us as the body of Christ. And so We strongly believe in baptism. And the, the 3 implications, just to recap, in the book of Acts, the Christian baptism had 3 implications: the forgiveness of sins, you were baptized into the name of Jesus, and baptism was the method of receiving the Holy Spirit. And above all, though, it was initiation into the Christian faith. So a good question for us not only to think about Eucharist, but also to think about baptism. In your local context, in the church where you worship, is baptism seen more as a sign of repentance, or is it seen more as a sign of Christian initiation? I don't have an answer for you. I'm just curious as to what your church teaches about that. Maybe you could write in and tell me this week. I'd love to hear about it. You can go either to You can send me an email, rick@rickleejames.com, on Twitter @RickLeeJames, or you could even go to our Voices in My Head Facebook page, the Voices in My Head podcast. We don't get a lot of interaction on the Facebook page. Mostly it's on other methods, whether it be email or Twitter, but feel free. I'd love to hear from you on that. I'd love to hear what your church sees baptism more as, a sign of repentance or as an act of Christian initiation. With that being said, that is week 2 of our study of the history of Christian worship. I want to remind everybody that listens that if you leave a review on iTunes, it helps us, it helps our visibility, and the more reviews we can get, the better. This is only part 2 of what I believe is going to be a 10-parter. It may go a little longer, but I don't think we're going to go beyond, uh, 10 parts. It should be at least 10 parts as we come through this. I'm still working out some conclusions on some different things, but we're going to keep moving right along through the different centuries. So thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. As always, you can go to rickleejames.com and find out more about what I do. By the way, if you're following the progress of the new album Thunder, it's apparently supposed to be mixed in the next 2 weeks, so hoping to have that good news for you. And the new album, we're planning on releasing it on vinyl. Really excited about that. And just keep following at rickleejames.com, and you can follow that blog there if you like. Sign up for email, and I'll send you out updates as things happen. And you'll also be notified by email each week when a new episode of Voices in My Head posts. So make sure you sign up for our email at rickleejames.com. All right, I guess that's all I have tonight. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. I hope you're enjoying this study on the history of Christian worship.

Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author page on amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, You can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet.

And now the benediction: May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen your inner being for every good work And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore.

Amen.