While I recommend reading (or listening while it is still available) the entire sermon, I do want to draw your attention to this large section that I quote below:
But not only is there precious little proof, real proof, of this evolutionary understanding of Israelite religion, not only does the OT itself give us completely different view of things – for example, in the OT the regulations and rituals were given early to Israel as the explicit provision of God for her life as his people – but all through the Bible we are taught that law and ritual are vital to a truly faithful life and a truly fruitful church. Laws and rituals are as limiting and stifling in the Bible as wings are limiting and stifling to a bird! Nevertheless, no matter that we protest this whole theory of the literary origin of the Pentateuch, nowadays among American evangelicals, the same prejudice against ritual and organization can be seen almost everywhere we look. [Ian Hamilton made a very perceptive comment at the 30th anniversary celebration the other evening. Remember he said that the great divide between Christian believers in our time may not prove to be between different theological outlooks – for example, Calvinists and Arminians or Cessationists and Charismatics – but between believers who understand the role of historic Christian worship and are committed to that worship and believers who do not and are not.]
For many, if not most American evangelicals the sacraments are virtually an incidental feature of their religious life. Most flagship evangelical churches in the United States today which are typically the mega-churches almost never or never have the sacraments in their Sunday services. Amazing! Rituals seem to them far removed from the free expression of the soul and they have been taught to believe that such expression is all that matters. That that is what is the authentic Christian experience. Churches are independent of one another, the Christians in them related to the church only in voluntary ways, and a hue and cry goes up whenever an attempt is made to enforce some kind of order upon the life of God’s people; the sort of order that is imposed by God himself on the people of Israel in the book of Numbers. You probably have experience yourself of how such ritual acts as kneeling to pray or dressing ministers in robes or having the Lord’s Supper more frequently have proved controversial and divisive in evangelical churches of your acquaintance. The new American evangelical church service – twenty to thirty minutes of singing, an offering, and a sermon – is intentionally a service, at least so it is thought, shorn of ritual. The congregation does almost nothing. There is little to no sense of an order of acts relating the visible to the invisible world. The congregation sings (though in some of the churches I have attended recently I couldn’t tell that the congregation was singing; I couldn’t hear the voice of the congregation over the amplified voice of the singer or singers in front). The congregation may sing but it does not act. There is certainly very little resembling the worship of the book of Numbers in American churches today.
And this is supposed to be a virtue. American evangelicals in particular have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing ritual from ritualism. Ritualism is an unhealthy confidence in rituals in themselves, in the acts of worship themselves, as if these acts had some intrinsic power, apart from the worshiper’s faith or the blessing of God. But however sternly the Bible condemns ritualism, it is full of ritual from beginning to end. It commands it. It celebrates its importance, and has no fear of an ordered, even strictly ordered life for the people of God.
What we find in Numbers – the ritually ordered life of God’s people and the importance of a rightly ordered worship – we find in the New Testament as well and nowhere more emphatically than in Revelation and its picture of the ideal worship of God’s people as that worship goes on in heaven. That worship as it is described for us in the first half of the book of Revelation is clearly some picture of how early Christian congregations were worshiping the Lord on their Lord’s Day and John is drawing from his own experience of the worshiping community in his day, but it is also clearly understood by John to be a heavenly pattern that the earthly church is imitating, following, copying. Remember how we are told that the sanctuary Moses built was built as a copy of the sanctuary in heaven (Heb. 8:5) and that the rites of the ancient tabernacle and temple were “copies of heavenly things” (9:23)? I debated whether to read this to you it is a rather long reading, but give your best effort at capturing the point that is being made in this description of worship as John gives it to us, heavenly worship, in the opening chapters of Revelation.
“At the beginning of the book of Revelation, St. John tells us that he ‘was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’ (1:10). [Interpreters of Revelation] commonly hold that the visionary’s ensuing account of life and events in the heavenly Jerusalem reflect in some ways the worship practices in the churches of his time… By divine inspiration St. John’s experience of contemporary Christian liturgy was heightened into the vision of worship in the city of God.
The historical function of the early Church finds its fulfillment in worship. John, the liturgist among the apostles, indicates the place that the worship of the Church has in universal history. The Church on the mainland of Asia assembles for worship on the Lord’s Day, while John is…on the island of Patmos. But then all earthly limitations are removed and the heavenly temple itself is opened to the inward eye, as once it was opened to Isaiah. John saw ‘the tent of witness,’ the ‘ark of the covenant,’ the ‘altar,’ the ‘seven lamps,’ the ‘censer of sacrifice,’ whose smoke filled the whole temple. Men and beasts alike prostrate themselves before God and the Lamb and adore. Angels and martyrs play on their eternal harps. The lonely figure on Patmos is both witness of and sharer in the worship of heaven itself. The heavenly trumpets sound. The Trisagion [the “Holy, Holy, Holy”] is sung. The praises sung by the creatures, the stars and the worlds surge around the Creature like some fugue of Bach’s [sic] that knows no end. The heavenly choir sings the Agnus Dei. The drama of salvation rolls onward like Palestrina’s Marcellus Mass. The 144,000 voices sing a new song in words no human ear can learn. The angel proclaims an eternal gospel in unearthly glory like the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah. The final Church comes together for the ‘great Eucharist,’ a Church of priests who are to serve God throughout eternity. That is the liturgy of universal history that the seer of Patmos knew and shared in. But the brotherhood is also gathered around him, invisible, here and now a Church of priests. It receives the heavenly epistle and shares in the heavenly worship with its solemn ‘yea’ and ‘amen’ and ‘Maranatha,’ ‘even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.’ So the apocalyptic liturgist understands the doxology of the persecuted church in the framework of a liturgy that embraces all worlds and times.” [Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Church as a Worshipping Community,” Pro Ecclesia (1994) 57 and Ethelbert Stauffer, New Testament Theology, 202, cited in J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service, 132-133]
In other words, the ritual of the Christian church, the acts that believers perform in their worship in the presence of God, from ancient times to the modern day, in those acts our faith has been expressed and our understanding of our lives, their meaning, their future given shape and invested with power. John tells the entire story of the history of the world by describing Christians at worship! Their rituals reveal and express not only their most fundamental convictions but also the most fundamental of all realities: the connection between God and man; heaven and earth; the meaning and the nature of the progress of history; its coming consummation; the glory of God. So it was in the days of the book of Numbers. This explains the place and the importance of ritual acts and rules of organization we find given so solemnly in the book Numbers and other books of the Pentateuch. These rituals, that organization, create, nourish, sustain and direct the life of the community of God’s people in that way that enables their worship, not only to please God, but in fact to be an instrument of binding the community together as the people of God directing them in the service of God and indeed directing history to its appointed end.
One scholar puts it this way:
“Rituals reveal values at their deepest level…men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.” [M. Wilson in Wenham, 26]
Well the essential society of the human race is the Christian church and its ritual is its essential constitution. The importance of ritual and organization was not lost on Moses’ contemporaries, but it is much harder for modern Americans to appreciate. We are a culture that has moved so far in the other direction – from the communal to the individual, and from a ritual-shaped life to one now virtually devoid of rituals (at least intentional rituals) – that we now face the very real threat of actual depersonalization. We have so exalted the individual and his freedom to live in whatever way he chooses, even alas in the Christian church, we have so romanticized freedom that not only have we lost a sense of community in Western culture, we are now in very great danger of completely losing any sense of personhood as well. As God made man to be a person in relationship, a personhood in community, to lose the community – and community is shaped and sustained by ritual – is finally to lose the personhood as well. We now are thinking and speaking more and more of human beings as simply exalted machines or as simply higher animals and the result is that more and more we are treating other human beings as machines and as animals. But animals and machines cannot create true community and they cannot form a community that actually will bless and save the world. Accordingly, the acid of individualism has eaten away at our communities, at marriage, at family, at national cohesion – I don’t know the extent to which you realize this but it is an extraordinary thing that we are talking about the United States of America nowadays as red and blue states – we are coming apart as a people. Our sense of a shared life and a shared community is disappearing in our time and before our eyes. And, alas, and even more important it is eating away at the church, where, again, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. I’m not sure if many of us in this congregation know how individualism and subjectivity rules in American Christianity in our time. Little holds us together, little gives us a sense of our life as the life of a single community to which we are bound, in which we serve the Lord, whose community is the instrument of God’s work in human history, whose acts together are the ultimate acts of Christ’s presence – of Christ’s body – in the world.
Now, it needs to be observed that human beings, being what they are, cannot escape ritual. Man’s communal nature, his craving to embody his internal states, leads to a life of ritual. It cannot be helped. And so, even in anti-ritual cultures like our own, rituals proliferate. What we have done is simply to replace divinely ordered rituals that reflect eternal reality for our own: rituals that express, wittingly or unwittingly, the diminished and debased values of our post-enlightenment world. People would never sit through an hour and a half church service, regulated and created and formed of rituals, but they will gladly sit through a three hour football game and do the wave at the appropriate time. Our community has been transformed from a community of faith to one of entertainment; our rituals have redirected our attention from heaven to earth, from God to the self.
The modern evangelical thinks extemporary prayer is more spiritual than the written prayers of the liturgy but what is the result? We end up with prayers that are empty of any reverence for God, are overly familiar which is to say they are anti-elitist even when speaking of God. They are the expressions of our subjectivist and individualist culture even when speaking to God. I am sure the ordinary Christian who prays this way does not understand this or appreciate it but it is obviously true. And the prayers are often little more than a list of almost selfish expressions of desire for this or that. Our way of praying brings God down to our level whether or not this is our intention. It shows you how fabulously important rituals are for the maintenance and preservation of a right understanding of unseen things. It is our modern way of prayer, a ritual that expresses the modern Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. “Lord we just want to…” And this has become the church’s prayer! “Lord, we just want to love you, or to ask you…” That prayer, brothers and sisters, will not conquer the world. It does not trade in the power and reality of heaven and the glory of God! Or the robe is taken from the minister – too formal, stuffy, elitist, too P and not enough J and E – but a new uniform is put in its place – either $1000 suits and $100 ties, or a Hawaiian shirt and sandals – but is this the organization of the people of God that will confront the powers of darkness and the present world system? Is this the form of God’s people and community that will carry human history forward to its consummation? School children are freed from uniforms but immediately adopt the official uniform of their peers, but a uniform that expresses now a very different set of values, one that doesn’t threaten the world at all and conveys nothing important about our convictions as the people of God or even the calling of a young student. House churches spring up that dispense with liturgy and ministers but very soon have created their own idiosyncratic worship and forms of leadership because without them they would soon wither away. But their forms are not the Bible’s forms and they lack the authority and the power that comes from a form being a copy of what is in heaven.
The question is not whether we will have ritual and organization but whether it will be the ritual and organization that God has taught us in his Word, the ritual and organization that will shape us into his “divisions,” the military term used so often in the Pentateuch to describe the people of God on the march through the wilderness of this world and doing battle with their enemies as circumstances require. In the army one is taught to salute higher ranks on every occasion. It is done all through the day, day after day. The point is that the ritual shapes the soldiers view of himself, his life, and his relationships. Those realities become so much a part of him that when they are tested in battle, they continue to rule his life. Rituals and principles of organization convey values at a deep level. Outsiders are always more conscious of them than insiders but at a deep level they convey, they reinforce, and they direct the moral, spiritual convictions of a people.
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