For Glory and for Beauty

Exodus 28 describes the fabrication of the priestly garments and multiple times echoes the phrase "for glory and for beauty." 

This is in stark contrast to modern worship tendencies to downplay vestments, ritual and ceremony. The modern church - including swaths of confessional Lutheranism - downplay the ritual and ceremony of worship. 

C.S. Lewis in the Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford, 1942, pg. 17

"A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major domo preceding the boar's head at the Christmas feast - all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual."

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is often proffered not only as proof of humility but a violent exercise in adiaphora - "I don't have to do it your way, God is happy with whatever I choose to give him." This service of self in worship is a hidden form of idolatry. Or perhaps worse - "I will reach more people by making my service easier for outsiders to understand" - as if you, by your actions, can bring people to faith instead of the Holy Spirit! 

No, the liturgy, vestments and ceremony are not prescribed by God in the Bible, but we do see in the Old Testament that God absolutely prescribed liturgy, vestments and ceremony for his Old Testament believers. While we are not bound by the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, we run the risk of being Marcionites if we completely abandon the principles God lays down, and we can still learn from Old Testament worship. God loves pomegranates and almond blossoms! His called servants are HOLY TO THE LORD. Leviticus 9 lays out the liturgical pattern we still observe in our faithful churches today. We should take the liturgy with all its ritual and ceremony which has been handed down for us over the last two centuries and see how it points to Christ, and Christ alone, how the rubrics that are taken for granted have deeper meaning and instead of stripping them away, and edify our congregants by explaining, nurturing, and then keeping the ceremonies of our fathers and theirs. 

"Must Lutheranism be shorn of its glory to adapt it to our times in our land?" Charles Porterfield Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology p.208

No, it mustn't. This is the great idolatry of self, that we must adapt our theology and our worship to modern human concerns.