Our Blog

By: Pastor Berg

I know that I’ve used this story many times before, but it bears repeating. A young man was just recently married and he offered to host his family’s annual Easter dinner. His young bride was rather nervous about cooking the Easter ham already, and as she was ready to put it in the oven, her husband said, “You better cut off both ends first.” “Why?” she asked. “I don’t know,” her husband replied, “but that’s what my mother always did.” And so the young bride cut off both ends and in the oven it went.

Later, after everyone had enjoyed the meal and the compliments were abounding for the young bride, she got up the courage to ask her mother-in-law, “Why do you always cut off both ends of the ham?” Her mother-in-law thought for a      moment and replied, “I don’t know, that’s why my mother always did.” And so the bride’s mother-in-law called her mother into the room and asked, “Why do you always cut off both ends of the ham?” The grandmother smiled and quickly said, “Because I didn’t have a pan big enough for the ham!”

It seems that sometimes we find ourselves doing things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done, even if we don’t have any idea why they were done in the first place. If you’ve grown up Lutheran or even Roman Catholic, more than likely you’ve grown up in a liturgical church. But what exactly is the liturgy? Why do we as Lutherans choose to follow it? Does it still mean something today or are we simply cutting off both ends of the ham because that’s what our forefathers did?

Those are the questions that we will strive to answer in the next months as we discuss the topic of worship. And as we look at our worship service, we want to answer the question, “Why do we do what we do when we do it?”

Perhaps a good place to start in this opening article is to define what the word “liturgy” means. The liturgy is an order of service formed in the Christian church