Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer responds to Jordan Peterson’s insights into Traditional Liturgy.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and a couple of days ago, Jordan Petersons says something really fascinating about liturgy and why he thinks young men are drawn to traditional liturgy in particular that I wanted to talk about because I think he’s hammering home in his own way two important points, but I want to make sure that we understand him in the right context. So I’m going to let him kind of present his case and see if we can draw two themes from it.
CLIP:
Well, you see one that young men are returning to the church and to the more traditional forms, right? So the more traditional the church, the more popular it’s becoming, and I think there’s a reason for that. So I’ve attended a fair number of Orthodox services with my friend Jonathan Pacho, and they’re very ritualized. And so unlike a Protestant ceremony say, or service, which is much more dependent on the preacher, well, you can’t criticize an orthodox service. It’s like going to a ballet and saying like, what’s going on here? Well, that’s a stupid question. What does that mean? Those dances on the stage, it’s like the dance is the meaning. There’s no, there’s no getting under that. You can not like it, but you could criticize it from within its confines. You could see, well, I’ve seen better mala, but you can’t say, well, what the hell is this? Well, it’s the same thing in an orthodox ceremony. It’s ritualized, it’s a dance and it, it’s not the words only, it’s the words in the architecture, in the images, in the history, and so you’re in it, you’re participating in it.
Joe:
Alright, so the first thing to take away is that there’s a draw towards traditional worship, traditional forms of liturgy, because precisely in that it’s ritual. It resists the kind of modern have it your way impulses. It’s not dependent excessively on the skill of the preacher. For instance, and I can speak to this, right, I’ve been to mass in I think 20 some odd different countries and frequently I was in places where I didn’t speak the language. Now sometimes the mass was in Latin, other times it was in the local language, but you entered into this thing that didn’t rely on the eloquence of the priest. It didn’t rely on the brilliance of the person leading it, and so as a result it brought you into something else. Now, you could still say, this priest celebrates mass better, or as he gives the example with the ballet, you could say this is a better ballerina than that, but there is still nevertheless something where it no longer depends in the same way on the individual person, the leader of the thing in a strange way takes it off of the priest as much as Catholics and Orthodox can be criticized for being clericals liturgically, ironically, there’s almost the opposite is true that the priest matters less than you think in terms of his personal qualities, right?
His status as a priest is incredibly important. His status as a brilliant singer or a beautiful preacher or any of these things is considerably less important. But Peterson’s going to make a second point as well, which I want to make sure that we don’t miss. For modern people it’s more
CLIP:
Satisfying and it’s partly because we’re so distant from that. It’s an embodied form of worship and we don’t even know what that means. Well, that’s what you do when you dance with someone you love. That’s an embodied form of worship. If you’re fortunate and you can’t argue about those things, they’re outside of the realm of argumentation and we don’t even believe that such a realm exists, especially if we’re postmodern. Everything’s in the text. It’s like, yeah, right, have it your way, which is what you want.
Joe:
So that’s the second draw that this is embodied worship. You’ll note there that he also has a critique implicit that when you try to just do text-based approaches to worship, I’m just going to preach the Bible and that’s going to be it. That doesn’t produce embodied or ritualistic worship. It does make it too much about you. Now this is a critique that I think many Protestants actually agree with. So for instance in the book, why Do Protestants Convert, which came out I believe last year, Brad Little John and Chris Castaldo do their best to try to analyze why they think Protestants become Catholic, and particularly why so many brilliant Protestants have become Catholic in recent years. In the forward to the book, one of the points that Carl Truman makes who is himself I believe in OPC Presbyterian minister, he says, then there’s worship. The idiom of the rock concert with added Ted talk is scarcely adequate to convey the holiness of God, the beauty of worship and the seriousness of the Christian faith.
And I think this is a good point and one that in some way nuances Peterson’s point because it can’t just be young men like this better because then you’ll notice we’re still in the realm of have it your way. It has to be traditional liturgy is actually more fitting for the grandeur of God and that’s missing in much of modern worship. This isn’t a strict just like Catholic Orthodox Protestants kind of question. This is a question to how we think about the nature of worship. Now obviously different religious traditions think about worship very differently, but even within those traditions you’re going to find different wings that maybe take different approaches to worship. So the point I’m trying to draw out here is there is this draw among the young for traditional worship and which this especially among young men, and it seems to be rooted not just in subjective preference, but maybe for an intuitive sense that there is more out there than what many people have grown up with in American Christianity. Dr. Chris Aldo, one of the co-authors of book that I just mentioned was actually interviewed by Austin Suggs of Gospel Simplicity and Austin pressed him on this point. I thought it was a worthwhile back in forth from two Protestants who perceive the same problem in much of Protestant worship.
CLIP:
How do you look at this gripe that a lot of Protestants might have of the worship feels shallow and they want something with a little more depth?
Because I’m afraid it is so often shallow and I’m a pastor, I don’t want to cast aspersions on other pastors or other churches, but yeah, stereotypes exist for a reason and it’s as people often say, the concert with the Ted talk, with the pelvic thrusting praise team and fog machine and this sort of thing, and that really is a far cry from the way Christians have worshiped and looks a little bit like American consumerism.
Joe:
Now, I would add to that only that it’s not just the fog machine praise team, even a lot of what we call conservative Protestantism where it’s someone preaching with maybe a little bit of music at the beginning and the end, but it’s mostly just somebody preaching from the pulpit, their interpretation of the Bible that looks radically different from Christian worship for 2000 years. And that’s a problem if you think worship matters. Now, Thomas Keating is a monk who is somewhat controversial for his views on things like centering prayer, and I’m going to ignore all of those things because that’s not the reason I mentioned him today in his book, the Mystery of Christ. I like the way he describes what liturgy is doing because it explains why we care about this, why it’s worth really fighting for worship to be done well, and he situates it in kind of an evangelical context in the sense of the proclamation of the gospel.
He says this, he says, we who are incomplete, confused, and riddled with the consequences of original sin constitute the human family that the son of God took upon himself. The basic thrust of Jesus’s message is to invite us into divine union, which is the soul remedy for the human predicament arty. I love the way he frames that lacking the experience of divine union. We feel alienated from ourselves, God, other people and the cosmos. Let’s pause right there because some people aren’t used to that way of framing it, but the idea is really simple, that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, they have a healthy relationship to themselves. Your intellect in your will would be in healthy relationship to your passions. This gets broken in the fall, not in a way that’s totally lost, but you see an obvious alienation. We do things we don’t want to do.
As St. Paul talks about, your mind may want you to do, your body may be desiring something else. You have this interior war. Likewise, in the Garden of Eden, we were in right relationship with God. We no longer are. There’s the estrangement of sin. Adam and Eve’s own relationship with one another is broken. We see this very clearly in Genesis three. So we’ve got the intrapersonal relationship, we’ve got man’s relationship with God, we’ve got interpersonal relationship and you have the cosmological relationship. Adam is in right relation with the animals of the garden showing like the order of creation is itself damaged by the effects of sin. This is a biblical theme that sometimes we overlook. So lacking the experience of divine union, we feel alienated from ourselves, God, other people and the cosmos. Hence we find substitutes for the happiness for which we were predestined, but which we do not know how to find that God made us in other words for happiness and he made us to live in right relationship and yet we don’t.
And so what do we do? We go and try to find that happiness someplace other than the way God designed it to be found. That’s the original sin, right? Trying to achieve knowledge of good and evil on our terms rather than on God’s terms. But it’s also the story of every sin ever since I’m trying to make myself happy because on some level I don’t trust God will make me happy. As Kean says this, misguided search for happiness is the human predicament that the gospel addresses. The first word that Jesus speaks as he enters upon his ministry is repent, which means change the direction in which you are looking for happiness. I like this way by the way of describing repentance. It’s not just about feeling guilt. No, no, no. Look, you are looking for happiness and God wants you to be happy, but you’re looking for happiness in areas that won’t actually make you happy. God wants to show you how to live in the rightly ordered relationships that are more satisfying.
So Kean says happiness cannot be found in the program’s fashion in early childhood and based upon instinctual needs for survival and security, affection and esteem and program and control over as much of life as possible. These programs cannot possibly work in adult life, although everyone tries hard to make them workable by programs there. He just means there are certain mechanisms you settled on early in your life to try to achieve happiness, security, safety, all those things. And if you’re being honest, they don’t work. This is where broken relationships come from. This is where sin comes from. We have these things that we came up with on our own and they’re not workable. So notice in framing the situation like this, it’s clear that the problem isn’t just wrong theology or wrong belief, it’s a whole disordered relationship we have with reality. And so there’s a much bigger problem here than, oh, I didn’t know that the God of the universe was triune before and now I do.
No, it’s much deeper than just getting a little bit of theology right? There’s a much deeper brokenness and therefore the remedy is much deeper as Katie puts it. Happiness can be found only in the experience of union with God, the experience that also unites us to everyone in the human family and to all reality. So catch that the solution here isn’t just a set of theological principles. It is being brought into right ordered relationships, divine union in this way and having a rightly ordered set of relationships with God. And then my neighbor, this by the way are the two great commandments Jesus gives to love God and love neighbor. This is what he’s come to do is to rightly ordered broken relationships. This is possible only through divine graves. This is possible only through Christ initiation, but this is what he’s doing. And Kean points out this return to unity is the good news that the liturgy proclaims, right?
The liturgy doesn’t just exist to give us more theological information about God. Someone can stand in the front of a room and preach for 40 minutes and give you more information about God. And if that was the nature of our problem with sin and rupture in the fall, then great, but it isn’t. And so this is also why Jesus, the response to sin is not let me give you more books. Here’s 27 books. You can call ’em the New Testament. No, the response to sin is Jesus becomes embodied in the incarnation. Now the books come as well. I’m not saying theological knowledge doesn’t matter or any of those things at all, but if that’s all, you’ve got a disembodied Christianity that has books and no Christ that’s incomplete and incomplete in a really radical way.
In Keating’s words, the liturgy is the supreme vehicle for transmitting the divine life manifested in Jesus Christ, the divine human being. When Jesus, through his resurrection and ascension entered into his trans historical life, the liturgy became the extension of his humanity in time. And I get it, phrases like trans historical sound really weird, but I think what he’s saying in plain English is this, the incarnation isn’t just a one and done sort of event that is no longer relevant in the world today. It’s not just a past event that stopped with Jesus’s ascension into heaven. Rather the incarnation continues in a real way and we can talk about this in two closely related senses. First, Jesus promises that he gives us his body. This is his promise in the Eucharist, he says, this is my body, this is my blood. When we’re talking about this, we want to remember the body and blood of Christ are the human distinctives that show his embodiment.
They show his incarnation. And so Jesus’s promise there is the continuation of the incarnation in a liturgical way in the Eucharist, but second, the church itself is described in scripture as the body of Christ. For instance, in one Corinthians 12, this is one of the images St. Paul uses and in Ephesians five it’s the body and the bride. And so the church as the people of God, as the body of Christ comes together and offers the eucharistic body of Christ to the Father and what you have there is the body still being made present, not in just a metaphorical way, but in a true way. This is what’s often missed. So certain Protestant theologies in particular the Calvinist tradition has a spiritual view of the real presence where it’s something more than just a symbol sometimes called Christ’s pneumatic presence. He’s spiritually present. And what I find so striking about it is how counter that emphasis is to Christ’s emphasis, meaning Christ says, this is my body, this is my blood, not this is my spirit.
Christ focuses on the embodiment that continues liturgically. Whereas again, certain eucharistic theologies take a very disembodied either symbolic or spiritualized version that seems to miss the incarnate aspect to what’s happening both in the church and in the host, in the eucharistic liturgical experience if you want to call it that. So that’s one of the reasons why I think we want something that isn’t just me doing it my way in a sort of disembodied way or on my terms, but I want to then turn from Keating now to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his tremendous work, the spirit of the liturgy because he has an examination of Exodus that I think really drives this home early on in the book and one of the points that he makes is that man himself cannot simply make worship. This is a point that I think Peterson has, I don’t want to say stumbled into, but arrived at, we’ll say if God does not reveal himself, man is clutching empty space, right?
If worship is this encounter between God and man, that’s not something we can just do on our own. And he quotes Moses in Exodus 10 who says to Pharaoh, we do not know with what we must serve the Lord. Now that context is easy to miss, but we’re partway through the 10 plagues and Pharaoh is kind of ready to give up and let the Israelites go, but only on his terms. And so he says to Moses, go serve the Lord. Your children also may go with you only let your flocks and your herds remain behind. So what’s he doing? He’s trying to make sure that they don’t leave and not come back, and Moses says, that’s not going to work and it’s not going to work for liturgical reasons. He says, you must also let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.
Our cattle also must go with us. Not a hoof shall be left behind for we must take of them to serve the Lord our God, and we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there now to surface reading. It just sounds like maybe Moses is being kind of sneaky. We got to take everything we’ve got. We’re definitely coming back. Wink, wink. No, there’s something much deeper going on there that Moses is saying, I can’t worship God on my terms. I can’t worship God on Pharaoh’s terms. Pharaoh can’t just say, here’s how you’re allowed to worship God because that gets wrong. The very heart of worship, which is giving God what he’s owed, and if I decide what I think God deserves or Pharaoh does, well this is disastrously wrong because I’m acting as God rather than God acting like God or Pharaoh’s acting like God. The state is acting like God, right? You’re allowed to worship in this way. You’re allowed to do this sort of thing. And the biblical answer to this, the answer God reveals through Moses is not acceptable. We don’t accept the state’s terms, we don’t accept the individual’s terms, God, not me, not the state decides what true worship looks like, and I can’t prejudge to say, here’s what I’m willing to do. Here’s what I’m not willing to do.
Cardinal Raser goes on to say that these words, Moses’ words de Pharaoh display a fundamental law of all liturgy when God does not reveal himself, man can of course from the sense of God within him, build alters to the unknown God, as Acts 1723 points out, he can reach out toward God in his thinking and try to feel his way toward him, but real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship him. In other words, if you’re someone who’s been worshiping God on your terms, going to the kind of worship experience that feels really good to you, that’s just based on your own preferences. You’re in a sort of similar position to the Athenians and Acts 17 who have this temple to the unknown God. Because in both cases you have man reaching out to God, but on man’s terms. Now Ratzinger is clear.
That’s not all bad, right? When St. Paul goes to the Areopagus and he praises the religiosity of these people who are trying to worship God in their own way because it wasn’t out of a spirit of hubris, it was out of a spirit of ignorance. They felt the desire for relationship with God, but they didn’t know how to worship him, so they gave him what they could. That is good, but there is something better which is worshiping God the way God wants to be worshiped. And if we have an understanding of who God is, I don’t need to sell you on that. You should already know like, oh yeah, definitely like this. I want to do nice things for my wife and I want to give her good gifts, say on her birthday, but if I know maybe from one of her sisters she really wants X, Y, z, now I can give her not just a gift from the heart, but a gift from the heart that corresponds to what she wants that is better.
I hope you see why that’s better. I hope for the sake of your own marriages or future marriages, you see why that’s better? Well, likewise with God, it’s good that we’re desiring to serve him, love him, praise him. It’s better when we serve him. Love him, praise him in the way he has called us to do. But that means we have to be formed in a new way in response to worship because for many of us, especially coming from this American context, it is as Dr. Castaldo says, the American consumer in us, the Burger King have it your way experience where everything is on my terms, and this is what Ratzinger’s warning about in spirit of the liturgy. He says, in any form, liturgy includes some kind of institution. It cannot spring from imagination our own creativity. Then it would just remain a cry in the dark or mere self affirmation.
Liturgy implies a real relationship with another who reveals himself to us and gives our existence a new direction, revealing himself to us and giving our existence a new direction is a thing. I think Keating describes well and explains why this is embodied right, and it explains why it’s not just on our own prerogative. In the Old Testament, we’re given a cautionary tale about this. As Inger points out, there’s a series in fact of very impressive testimonies to the truth that the liturgy is not a matter of what you please. I love that he uses the phrase what you please because it’s so close to Peterson’s have it your way and Aldo’s consumerism remarks. You see a through line there I think where people are realizing something is going wrong, and it’s not just that our worship looks Baal, it’s not just that it’s limited, it’s that it’s baal and limited precisely because it’s being led by our own desires and that’s producing this shallow, irreverent, and uninspiring sort of product.
Ratzinger warns that nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in the story of the golden calf. Now, if you don’t remember the narrative of the golden calf, this is in Exodus chapter 32, and the Israelites are at Mount Sinai and Moses has gone up Sinai to converse with God to get the 10 and a lot of other stuff is going on, but it’s taking a long time. And so the people go up to Moses’, brother Aaron, the high priest, and they say to him, up, make us Gods who shall go before us? As for this, Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him and they’ve just gotten tired of waiting. They don’t want the patience it takes to receive what God is going to lead them into. They want something that corresponds to their own desires.
They want to have it their way, and a little bit of context here might help throughout the early chapters of Exodus, the cry that Moses is leading with Pharaoh is that they can go three days journey into the wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord our God as he will command us. Now you’ll notice there there’s still a sense that God’s going to do it on his terms, but the one thing that people felt like they were in control of was the timeline. It’s going to take three days and it doesn’t take three days. By the time all is said and done, it’s not just a three day break from slavery, it’s something much more radical. The people are led completely out of slavery, and this is good news, but it also much longer by the time they get to cyan, it hasn’t been three days, it’s been three months as Exodus 19 tells us, and then Moses is up on the mountain and they’re waiting and they’re waiting and they’re waiting, and so they say, well, maybe he’s dead.
Now, you’d think Aaron would be like, that’s my brother guys, and the same God who led us out of slavery surely knows how to keep an appointment. He’s coming back, but that’s not what happens. Aaron instead tells him, take off the rings of gold which are in the ears of your wives, your sons and your daughters, and bring them to me. Now, there’s something very tragic about this that we can overlook. God had inspired the Egyptian neighbors of the Israelites to be generous, and so they gave them quantities of gold. There’s a miraculous softening of the heart, and so the Israelites before they’re embarking on the journey, ask for jewelry and gold and these things, and it was a way of securing what would’ve been a nice life for the Israelites as they’re on this very difficult journey. But instead, what do they do with it? They turn it into the golden calf, this idol, and then they say, these are your gods of Israel who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
What Inger points out is something that’s really easy to overlook. Even though there’s this language of Gods, it doesn’t seem that either the people or Aaron are just wanting to return into Egyptian paganism rather they’re trying to worship the God of Israel, but on their own terms. He puts it like this. He says, the cult meaning cult is like worship conducted by the high priest. Aaron is not meant to serve any of the false gods of the heathen. The aposty is more subtle. There’s no obvious turning away from God to the false gods. Outwardly, the people remain completely attached to the same God. Remember, they’re wanting the God who brought them out of Egypt, and that’s what Aaron claims to be giving them with the golden calf. They’re not saying We’re done with that God, now that we’re out of Egypt, we want a different God.
They want the same God kind of, but they want him on their terms. They want to glorify the God who led Israel out of Egypt and believe that they may very properly represent his mysterious power. In the image of a bull calf, everything seems to be an order, presumably even the rituals and complete conformity to the rubrics, and yet it is a falling away from the worship of God to idolatry. This is often by the way, described just like, oh, it’s bad because it’s an image that only scratches the surface. No, it’s bad because it’s worshiping God in a way contrary to what God desired to be worshiped. Remember the whole point was that they needed to get to Sinai and then God would show them how to worship him? Well, they get to Sinai and they get tired of waiting for God and decide they’re going to worship him in a wave their own choosing.
That totally flips the whole reason they were there. They were there to learn how to worship God, and instead they’re substituting manmade worship. The worship of the golden calf, as Ratzinger puts it, is a self-generated cult again, cult here, not like crazy cult leader cult here like worship. When Moses stays away for too long and God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back. See what it’s doing there? It’s this desire to make God answer us because we’re tired of waiting for him. This is by the way, the appeal of a lot of the occult and a lot of other things like trying to get divine power on our terms rather than allowing God to be God. Worship. As redinger puts, it becomes a feast that the community gives itself a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself.
Eating, drinking and making Mary the dance around the golden calf is an image of the self-seeking worship. It is a kind of Baal self-gratification, and sure enough, if you read Exodus 32 verses five to six, you’ll see just that after Aaron makes a golden calf, he builds an altar before it and announces there’ll be a feast the next day they rise up early in the morning, they offer burnt offerings and peace offerings, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. They’re eating, drinking and making marry, but they’re doing all of this kind of revelry again on their own terms. And so RA Singer warrants that this narrative is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship. Ultimately, it is no longer concerned with God was giving oneself a nice little alternative world manufactured from one’s own resources.
Then liturgy really does become pointless just fooling around. Now, those are harsh words and he’s going to have some harsher ones, but I want to stress that I think that there’s some truth there that if we’re very honest, we can recognize there’s a sort of sense that, well, it’s nice to go to church, it’s nice to offer worship. This music makes me feel really good about myself, and then I feel better for the week. And if that’s why you’re going, you’ve created a nice little alternative world, you’re getting something out of it, sure, but is that what worship is? You can get that around the golden calf. You can eat, drink, and be merry. Get some good cardio in dancing around there, and maybe you’d feel great. You’d feel energized. They even got up early. You know how hard it is to get people up early for real worship, but the point is true worship has to be something deeper than an experience that makes me feel good about myself.
Now, by all means, I hope it does make you feel good, but that’s not the point of it. There’s plenty of things that could make you feel good. CS Lewis famously said he didn’t need Christianity to feel good. He could have a glass of port, right? That would work. If this is just self-soothing behaviors, well then we’ve just found one more thing to try to achieve happiness on our own terms. That’s not what biblical worship is all about. It’s instead worshiping God on his terms. And it’s true. Worshiping God on his term is incredibly liberating for us, but we don’t just do anything that we would find personally liberating or personally fulfilling because if we do that, then it does just become, as Ratzinger says, just fooling around or worse, he says it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise, meaning you’re all dressed up very holy and religious, but you’ve actually stopped worshiping God.
All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness. There is no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man encounters the living God. And let’s be really clear here, rad Inger has in view here, not just like a Catholic Protestant thing. He certainly has in view Catholics who are playing around with the mass trying to do things that make it more seeker friendly to use the Protestant term for it, but just innovating, just liturgically playing around, doing their own thing. And yet scripture is replete with examples of why we shouldn’t do that. And so whether you’re Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, whatever, or just trying to understand worship, whatever you are on your journey, we should take from this that at the heart of this is that we need something more than just us reaching out to God. The other religions of the world are men and women reaching out to God.
It in Christianity, God himself descends into the world and reaches out to us upon the cross. And that’s the difference. The difference between Christianity and all those other religions, they often get things right. We don’t deny that, but they get things right from this manmade desire to seek God. A desire by the way, that is good, a desire that St. Paul praises in Acts 17, but a desire that is inferior to God reaching out to us, and so likewise, manmade, nice, pleasant worship experiences, those could be good, but they’re obviously inferior to these authentic encounters with the living God in divinely initiated worship. One other place that I would add to this because looking at the Torah as a model for this and looking specifically at Moses’ family, you saw how Aaron gets into trouble. His sons get into trouble as well. Leviticus chapter 10, and this is maybe even clearer for my money than the golden calf because they take a sensor.
This is a bowl of incense, and they put fire in it. They lay incense on it and offer what Leviticus 10 describes as unholy fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded them. Notice the language, though. They’re not worshiping a false God. They’re worshiping the true God in an unholy way. What made it unholy? Well, that God didn’t tell them to do it that way. They’re just doing it on their own initiative, and so fire came forth from the presence of the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. They became the incense themselves. They’re going to offer unholy fire. They’re going to become unholy fire. The point there isn’t that God just said, Hey, I really appreciate the liturgical creativity. I really appreciate you’re trying to give me something. No, he cares that we worship him in a way that recognizes that he’s God and we are not.
So what can we take from this? I think Jordan Peterson is absolutely right, that there are two things that are drawing many young people, especially young men, to religion. Number one, it’s embodied worship, and number two, it’s not have it your way, but I want to stress this is not just a matter of personal preference. That would still be have it your way rather. Number one, the embodied nature of worship reflects something about the truth of the incarnation. And number two, the fact that it’s not have it your way reflects something about the fact that God is God and I’m not. And so the reason we have ritual, the reason we have all of these things is because I’m not in the driver’s seat and neither is the priest. We’re part of something much bigger than us, part of a tradition, going back all the way to the time of Christ in some form where we’re simply dancers in the ballet, a ballet that’s not just us freestyling and doing our own thing. This is what Christian worship looks like and ought to look like, and it is exciting and it’s a true blessing that so many young Christians are beginning to recognize or look for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.