Lutheran Worship: A Full-Body Experience

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Newsletter article for October 2025

True worship is a matter of the heart, faith in the heart—trust in the Lord and His promises as they are given here and now in the Word and the Sacraments. When it comes to what worship is, Lutherans believe, teach, and confess that “faith is the divine service that receives the benefits offered by God. God wants to be worshiped through faith so that we receive from Him those things He promises and offers.” (AP IV 49) The sinful woman who anointed Christ is an example of this worship: “The woman came with the opinion that forgiveness of sins should be sought in Christ. This worship is the highest worship of Christ. She could think nothing greater about Christ. To seek forgiveness of sins from Him was truly to acknowledge the Messiah. To think of Christ this way, to worship Him this way, to embrace Him this way, is truly to believe.” (AP V 33) The sainted Norman Nagel, in the “Introduction to Lutheran Worship (1982) puts all this quite simply: “Our Lord speaks and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. Faith that is born from what is heard acknowledges the gifts received with eager thankfulness and praise.” (LW, p. 6)

So, then, how should we worship? Well, Lutherans also believe, teach, and confess that “it is not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere.” (AC VII) Much ink has been spilled on that exact question and what Augsburg Confession, Article VII actually means in answering that question. It’s meaning probably deals more with saying that one can’t dictate to congregations where the elevation of the blessed elements of Communion must happen rather than saying no one can force a congregation to use the hymnal. But that whole conversation would be an article in its own right! Solomon’s Spirit-filled words strike home: “Of making many books there is no end.” (Eccl 12:12)

Trusting Christ and receiving His Word and especially His forgiveness, and trusting that forgiveness, is true worship. Thus worship is a matter of the soul—the organ of the human being where faith resides. But you are not only a soul. It’s false to say that your soul is you and your body is not you. Your body and your soul are united as one person: you! It’s wrong to say that our bodies are only vessels of our true selves (our souls). No, human beings were created by God as body and soul together. “The LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life, and the man became a living being.” (Gen 2)

Faith, as a matter of the soul, thus resides deeper than any one part of your body. This is why God defines faith in Him this way: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Deut 6) Is faith, then, a matter of your heart or a matter of your soul or a matter of your mind or a matter of your strength? Yes! Faith encompasses the whole of you, even though, properly speaking it resides in your soul rather than your brain cells, though, of course, faith in Christ affects and drives how you use your brain as well as your heart and soul and strength. Faith affects what you think or ponder, what you feel or do.

So, then, we finally come to the point of the article. If faith in Christ is a matter of the soul, but you aren’t just soul, then faith in Christ also affects your body. In fact, it affects everything that makes you, you—heart, body, soul, mind, strength! Moreover, if true worship of Christ is faith in Him and receiving His forgiveness, then such worship, while truly happening through faith alone, which resides in the heart or soul alone, also comes out in your mind and strength. Faith in Christ and its worship of Christ (receiving His forgiveness) happens in and with your body. To put all of this in concrete terms: You hear the Word; you receive Communion; and you sing praises.

Christ unites His Word with physical things, that is, He delivers His Word, His forgiveness, mercy, and grace, with things that you can observe with your senses. You see, touch, taste and smell them. You see the pastor who absolves you. The water splashes on your forehead. You taste the bread. You smell the wine as you drink it. Faith hears the Word and believes the physical thing delivers what is said. The Pastor’s forgiveness is God’s forgiveness. Baptism “works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation.” (Small Catechism) The blessed bread is the body of Christ. The blessed wine is His blood.

We are physical beings who believe, and this is why the LORD Christ also instituted His Sacraments. “Just as the Word enters the ear in order to strike our heart, so the rite itself strikes the eye, in order to move the heart. The effect of the Word and of the rite is the same. It has been well said by Augustine that a Sacrament is a visible Word, because the rite is received by the eyes and is, as it were, a picture of the Word, illustrating the same thing as the Word. The result of both is the same.” (AP XIII § 5)

The physical nature of receiving the Lord’s forgiveness (with hears and foreheads and mouths) corresponds to the bodily relief of then receiving forgiveness with faith. “What does that mean?” you might ask. Well, since Luther’s good at answering that question, let’s see his answer in the Large Catechism about this idea. First he says, “The body cannot seize and make its own what is given in and with the Sacrament. This is done by the faith in the heart, which discerns this treasure and desires it.” (LC V § 37) He also says, “We must never think of the Sacrament as something harmful from which we had better flee, but as a pure, wholesome, comforting remedy that grants salvation and comfort. It will cure you and give you life both in soul and body. For where the soul has recovered, the body also is relieved.” (LC V § 68) And so our blessing at communion is “This body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen and preserve you in body and soul unto life everlasting. Depart in peace.”

The response or rather result of receiving the Lord’s Word and Sacraments in faith also involves your whole person. It’s not only your soul that praises the Lord. “My soul doth mangify the LORD,” the Blessed Virgin Mary sings. “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” the Pslamist calls us to sing. (Ps 103) Indeed, “I will bless the LORD at all times, His praise shall continually be in my moth.” (Ps 34) The soul makes use of the body to praise. We also see this happen in the Bible. Worship was always hearing and receiving God’s Word and Gifts (sacrifices) in faith but the people stood for the Word of God (Nehemiah 9), they bowed down before the LORD Christ (Luke 17), they lifted up their hands in prayer (Ps 134), or even faced toward Jerusalem (Daniel 8).

The body is also used in the ceremonies of the Divine Service. While these ceremonies of the Divine Service are not necessarily worship in themselves, they are related to. Our Confessions put it this way: “Our churches are falsely accused of abolishing the Mass. The Mass is held among us and celebrated with the highest reverence. Nearly all the usual ceremonies are also preserved, except that the parts sung in Latin are interspersed here and there with German hymns. These have been added to teach the people. For ceremonies are needed for this reason alone, that the uneducated be taught ‹what they need to know about Christ›.” (AP XXIV § 1–3) Here ceremonies would include things like posture or actions for blessing, prayer, the Creed, or even Communion. Ceremonies also include things like “holy days, festivals” (AC XV) or “the series of lessons, of prayers, vestments, and other such things.” (AC XXIV § 1)

What do these ceremonies (“other such things”) include? Making the sign of the cross, posture for prayer, genuflecting, bowing, the folding of hands, the pastor’s hands for blessing. So many things fall into this category! But they all involve the use of our bodies in order to teach and confess what we believe about the Words being spoken or sung. Words that remind us of Baptism and its benefits offer the opportunity to make the sign of the cross. We take proper posture for prayer: humbly kneeling (Ps 95:6) or even boldly standing! (Heb 4:16) This also involves the Elevation of the blessed elements at Communion and the Genuflection as well. They teach and confess that we really believe Christ’s Words and we’re awed and humbled and praise Him for bringing us His body to eat and His blood to drink. There are many such ceremonies around all sorts of pieces of the Divine Service that are in some times and places dropped and maybe later on brought back, while other places retained them the whole time! This shouldn’t surprise us, after all, since “it is not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, should be the same everywhere.” (AC VII)

Lutheran Worship is a full-body experience: as our soul makes use of our ears to hear and mouths to eat, it also makes use of our bodies to stand or kneel or make the sign of the cross or eat and drink or sing! Sometimes it’s a bit like a full-contact sport when the hymns (Words) are new and unfamiliar. Voices get sore sometimes, but yet there is joy in the Word for they are what bolster faith. The ceremonies, too, sometimes surprising but they do teach and confess what we believe about Christ and what His Word says at particular parts of the service. Whether sitting, standing, kneel, whether hands are lifted or folded, whether eyes are up to heaven or closed and downward, doesn’t quite matter. There are reasons for all these things, and when we do them it’s echoed by what we see in the Bible from the likes of Abraham, Solomon, Mary, Zacchaeus, and many others! Their faith, their heartfelt confidence in the Lord, worked itself out in their bodies.

And so Lutheran Worship, or rather, Biblical worship, is not an out of body experience. It’s no mountain top experience. It’s rather a in the body experience. It’s hearing the Word. It’s eating Communion. It’s using your voice box to sing “psalms and hymns and Spiritual songs.” (Eph 5) It’s a full-body experience. It involves your ears, your eyes, your mouth, your hands, your body, your voice. All of you—heart, soul, mind, strength—is worshiping God by receiving His Word and Sacraments and then follows your prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, which we do in and with our bodies.