Said to a friend of mine: 'The problem with you liturgy guys is that you're stuck in the past.'
Um, exactly wrong. The liturgy is all about the future: it's the celebration and very gift of the future age reached to us in the present for us to live from. It's not that the use of the historic liturgy binds you to the past. Oh, sure it joins you to the community of those who throughout the ages have lived, quite literally, from the age to come. But it is Contemporary Worship by its very definition that is intrinsically time-bound and possessed by a myopic approach that chains you to the sad world of the present, and suggests that the present suffices!
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What most people who criticize the liturgy fail to take into account is that a person is different every time he takes part in it. If it were not so, the liturgy would simply be rote repetition. But every time we do celebrate it, we have passed through another period of sinning, another period of some suffering, another time of remembering the joy that is ours, another realization of the magnitude of the gift we have received from our Lord and Savior by being in and being sustained as members of His Kingdom, another realization of the immeasurable love God has for His people by giving His Son to take away our sins, and another opportunity to meditate on the love, patience, humility and discipline of our Lord, so that the author of Hebrews could write, 12:2, “who for the sake of the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, disregarding its shame…” The person who receives the Body and Blood of our Lord is not the same person who received it the week before.
I am in the eightieth year of my life, but the words, “Lift up your hearts,” have never once felt repetitive.
Peace and Joy!
George A. Marquart
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