A few weeks ago I attended a major-league baseball game. After the national anthem, the game got underway. When a batter had three strikes, the umpire called him out; when he hit the ball, he ran to first base, always counter-clockwise around the diamond—a diamond, not a triangle or circle. Everyone stood up and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning. How predictable. How boring, right?

Well, no. The game did have some slow moments, of course, but occasionally a player made a spectacular play. For the entire top of the ninth inning, the crowd was on its feet cheering on the home team nonstop as the visitors failed to score. The structure and tradition of baseball allowed the game to proceed smoothly. The fans could focus on the very essence of baseball without having to deal with the fleeting whims of owners, managers, umpires, or popular opinion. The team members, the stadiums, and the fans themselves had changed over the years, but baseball had not.

We humans do not thrive on change for the sake of change. Instead, we look for change within a familiar and reliable framework. This is one of the advantages of liturgical worship with historical roots. Flexibility within a framework permits Christians to focus on the essence of worship—God the Holy Trinity nourishing us with his grace in Word and sacrament—without being distracted by one-week-only innovations and interruptions. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshiping.”

This does not mean that nothing in the order of service can ever change. Christians have carefully and gradually made changes to their central act of worship—gathering to hear God’s Word and receive his sacraments—since the earliest days of Christianity. But they always preserved the unchanging truths within a structure that complemented those truths. Then they handed it down—that’s the origin of the word “tradition”—from one generation to the next.

The beginnings of the order of worship