Guests who worship with us for the first time often notice that our service follows a set order. The pastor and the congregation speak and sing to one another from the hymnal, and the same words return week after week. Some visitors find this formal. We find it freeing. The order of service, which the church calls the liturgy, is the way God’s gifts are handed to us, and we receive them in the form the church has given for that purpose.
God serves us first
Lutherans call the Sunday service the Divine Service. The name translates the German word Gottesdienst, and it carries a double meaning. It is our service to God, and it is first God’s service to us. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession makes the distinction plainly: “The service and worship of the Gospel is to receive good things from God” (Ap IV 310).
The preface to our hymnal, Lutheran Service Book, puts it this way: “Our Lord speaks and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. Faith that is born from what is heard acknowledges the gifts received with eager thankfulness and praise.” That movement shapes everything that happens on Sunday morning. God speaks His forgiveness in the Absolution. He speaks His Word in the readings and the sermon. He gives the body and blood of His Son in the Sacrament. Our confession, prayers, and songs answer what He has first given.
Gifts that come through means
God does not ask us to search for Him in our feelings or to climb toward Him by our own effort. He comes to us through means that He has chosen. The Augsburg Confession teaches, “So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. Through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given” (AC V 1-2).
The liturgy exists to carry those means to the people. Its parts are arranged so that the gifts arrive in order: confession and Absolution, then the Word, then the Supper. From the first days of the church, Christians have gathered in this way. After Pentecost, the believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The Divine Service keeps that same pattern.
The words of the liturgy are Scripture
Much of what we sing in the service comes directly from the Bible. The Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy”) is the cry of the blind and the sick who called to Jesus for help (Matthew 15:22; Mark 10:47). The Gloria in Excelsis begins with the song of the angels at Bethlehem (Luke 2:14). The Sanctus joins the song of the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision to the crowds’ greeting on Palm Sunday (Isaiah 6:3; Matthew 21:9). The Agnus Dei repeats John the Baptist’s words about Jesus: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). After communion, we sing the Nunc Dimittis, the song of old Simeon, who held the infant Christ and was ready to depart in peace (Luke 2:29-32).
When we sing these words, we pray the way the Bible teaches us to pray, and we stand with the saints who first spoke them.
Why a fixed form
The Lutheran reformers did not throw out the church’s worship. They cleaned it of what contradicted the Gospel and kept the rest. The Augsburg Confession answers the charge that the Lutherans had abolished the Mass: the Mass is retained among us and “celebrated with the highest reverence,” and “nearly all the usual ceremonies are also preserved” (AC XXIV 1-2). The confessors also taught that church rites “that can be observed without sin” should be kept, since “they contribute to peace and good order in the Church” (AC XV 1).
A fixed form serves the gifts in several practical ways. The pastor does not invent the service each week, so the congregation receives Christ’s gifts on His terms rather than on the preferences of one man. Children learn the liturgy by heart long before they can read, and elderly members who can no longer see the page can still pray it. A Christian who travels to another Lutheran congregation hears the same Absolution and sings the same Sanctus. The words that the congregation knows by memory are also the words that come back to a person in a hospital bed or at a graveside.
The form is not the gift. Christ is the gift, and the liturgy is the vessel that carries Him to us. We keep the vessel with care so that nothing spills.
The settings we use
Lutheran Service Book provides several musical settings of the Divine Service. The order and the substance of each setting are the same, while the music and some of the texts differ. Our Saviour uses two of them.
Divine Service, Setting One (LSB, page 151) came into our hymnal through Lutheran Worship (1982). Many members know its music from the blue hymnal. Its hymn of praise may be the Gloria in Excelsis or “This Is the Feast,” a canticle drawn from Revelation 5 and 19.
Divine Service, Setting Three (LSB, page 184) is the service that Missouri Synod Lutherans sang for most of the twentieth century from The Lutheran Hymnal (1941), page 15. Its text comes from the Common Service of 1888, which drew together the historic Lutheran orders of the Reformation era. Many of our older members learned the faith through these words and melodies.
The two settings alternate through the church year. We sing Setting Three from the First Sunday in Advent through the Transfiguration of Our Lord. On Septuagesima, when the pre-Lenten season begins, the Sundays change to Setting One, which continues through Palm Sunday. Ash Wednesday keeps Setting Three. From Maundy Thursday through the end of June, we return to Setting Three. On the first Sunday in July, we take up Setting One again and keep it until the Festival of the Reformation, when Setting Three returns for the close of the church year and the Advent season that follows.
Joining us
You do not need to know the service to worship with us. Each part of the liturgy is printed in the hymnal or in the bulletin, with page numbers announced as we go. Sit near a member if you like, and he or she will gladly help you find your place. Listen, sing what you can, and receive what God gives. After a few Sundays, the words will begin to stay with you, and in time they will become your own prayer.