Matthew 13:52.
There was a time, before I became a lay elder and music director in my current LCMS church, that I went to a liturgical church every Sunday in the AM, and a charismatic non-liturgical church every Sunday in the PM. I found God in the drama of the liturgy, and I found God in the power of the Spirit in the charismata, and having both made my relationship to God that much stronger. I have never met anyone else who had the same experience: they want one and despise the other, which to me is a great shame.
The author prescribes more play acting. It is as in some Catholic churches in the heyday of Vatican II derived contortions when we got church committees designing “creative” liturgies as in “how can we make it more relevant” and liturgy itself became a show, a performance. Praise God most of that is gone but Catholics have not shed the performance model of those days, not yet. The priest still faces the congregation and is still more in the model of an emcee than is meet.
The Suicide of Altering the Faith in the Liturgy
Catholic Family News ^ | January, 2005 | Father Paul Kramer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1346700/posts
From this morning’s post by “Brothers of John the Steadfast,” a Lutheran liturgical organization; I found it interesting, given the thread here:
“The history of ritual is largely a history of what humans do. But Luther insisted that in liturgy God does something. The Christian mass, he insisted, bucking a long history, activates God’s testament, his last will. … Martin Luther’s authority was Hebrews 9.17, ‘For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive.’
“Who has ever heard that he who receives an inheritance has done a good work? He simply takes to himself a benefit. Likewise in the mass we give nothing to Christ, but only receive from him; unless they are willing to call this a good work, that a person sits still and permits himself to be benefited, given food and drink, clothed and healed, helped and redeemed. [Luther’s Works, vol. 35, p. 93]
“Oliver K. Olson, Reclaiming the Lutheran Liturgical Heritage, p. 13 (Minneapolis: ReClaim Resources 2007).”