Decorum

Following up on the posts C.S. Lewis on Ceremony, Gerhard: On Change and Ceremony, Walther on Customs, we have one of our Magpies, Fr. Peter Berg, on decorum in the Divine Service:

"Simply put, worship is to be dignified and orderly. After all, our God is a God of order. He called all things into being in six ordered days. We are beholden to Him since we are part of that order. He is to be feared. Though grace triumphs in the end, this side of the Jordan we never leave the burning bush of Sinai. Throughout scripture we read of people better than us taking off their shoes and falling face down before this God. Today's ecclesiastical comedians, who weekly wander from their pulpits with their cute, self-deprecating humor, are wholly out of place before this Holy Other. They have no decorum."

with footnote

"Again, if the Old and New Testament are to be paradigmatic, which they should be, we must ask this about the endemic use of humor in sermonizing, "Where in all of Scripture do we see examples of this? Elijah? John the Baptizer? Jesus?" It won't do to say that we live in different times. We don't, we live in the same times ever since the Fall. God's sense of humor, if we must speak this way, is ironic and painful, He makes us laugh at our folly through our tears."

Read the entire essay: Fr. Peter Berg - "The Cultus of Israel, Sign and Paradigm." An essay published in Leitourgiae Propria Adiaphoria Non Est, an essay in Honor of the Rev. Dr. Burnell F. Eckardt on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (aka the FritzSchrift)