Lord Is an Indispensable Word

No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
— 1 Corinthians 12:3

In the summer of 1962, my younger sister and I were taken to Sunday worship for the first time. It was Christ Church Episcopal, Sausalito, California. I was 7, and I remember the occasion vividly. The four of us took our places in a pew. For clothes, I had been bedecked in a little suit and tie, and my feet encased in polished black leather shoes. My mother wore a hat, which she never otherwise did. This was 1962, after all. When I saw my father fill out a little blue card, taken from the back of the pew, then put in it a big plate that was being passed around, I somehow knew that we were in for it. But I rather liked the whole experience.

I followed the service from the prayer book that my father held open for me. It was Morning Prayer (Holy Communion being offered monthly, at least at the middle Sunday service we were attending). Again, this was 1962.

In the course of the service, I heard and read the word Lord, which I didn’t recall hearing or seeing before. I had heard the word God, and knew (or thought I knew) what it meant. But Lord was new. I thought that it had a good sound and that it looked lovely on the page. I did pick up that it was a someone, and that it was a someone whom we were addressing. Who it was I didn’t know. Afterward, on the car ride home, I asked, “Who is the Lord?” My parents did answer, their answer did seem to satisfy, but just what they said, I no longer remember.

A few months later, my father, sister, and I were baptized — all on the same Sunday. That’s another vivid memory, most especially the feel of the water running down my face. In the next years, my family and I were exceptionally active (until we suddenly stopped attending). Church was a place (and what I’d now call a way of being) in which I felt I belonged — very much unlike school. Not until many years later did I become a good student; and neither then nor any time since then have I been athletically accomplished. School was not (then) a happy fit. But church was different; a place of belonging and blessing: a place of addressing (and being addressed by) someone called Lord.

But now, quite a few years later, our church is a place where Lord is frequently either being replaced or much thinned out in usage. In liturgies these days, it is frequently replaced with either God, or Savior, as though these three words were interchangeable religious synonyms. They are not. Each of them has its distinctive range of meaning. Each of them has its irreplaceable part to play in our historic vocabulary of faith.

To call Jesus Lord — and, of course, we aren’t talking about mere vocalization of some magic word — but to call him Lord doesn’t come naturally to any of us. That we should be able to call him Lord, with all that this is meant to mean, is itself God’s gift: a gracious, providential, and mysterious gift; given to us through the power of the Spirit. There’s a reason that the church’s earliest creed — and still its most fundamental creed — is precisely “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9). Christian history tells us that our sisters and brothers in the faith have sometimes faced the ultimate earthly risk for the full integrity of confessing that creed.

I’ve sought to understand the current resistance to the liturgical use of the word Lord. Probing to find underlying rationales, I’ve found two:

First, that Lord supposedly is a remnant — best relinquished — of aristocratic, hierarchically stratified society. (In the United States we like to think that we’ve left such structures behind. And maybe, to an extent, we have. Perhaps, though, more than we like to admit, we’ve just gone from overt expressions of such structures to the covert.) But in the point at hand, this argument misses a core dimension of what is involved in calling God or Jesus Lord. Our confession in faith of the One who is Lord includes the belief that nothing else and no one else truly is Lord. Not even the earthly “best of our best,” and certainly not we ourselves, either. Under the one true Lordship, all other “lordships” are either severely qualified or subverted. There was good reason why the early Christians were thought to be genuine threats to the order of the Roman Empire. We weren’t antiauthoritarian anarchists. But “powers and principalities” (see Eph. 6:12) don’t like to be told that their subjects will not give them unqualified allegiance. Our primal creed must not be regarded as a mere vestige of the past. It must be kept in our minds and hearts — and on our lips.

Second, it has been argued that Lord is a word that conveys great distance to the one being so addressed. Not so! While Lord and the words it translates certainly came to carry ultimate cosmic significance, in their roots they are household terms. They each denote someone who leads and cares for a household. They are terms, not of distance, but of immediate relationship. I believe that their root aspects still substantially inform their cosmic meaning and their religious use. An aspect of the English word Lord that I especially cherish is its derivation from the Old English word for loaf-bearer hlafweard — the one who provides the family its bread. Loaf-bearer. How apt this is for Jesus, who gives the Bread that he himself is for “the life of the world” (John 6:51).

Jesus is already the rightful Lord of all things. But truly to call him Lord is to recognize him for who he is — and who he is for us. It means to be in living relationship with him; practically and directly, personally and in fellowship. It means that our first allegiance — both immediate and ultimate — is to him. It means that we cherish his leadership, and trust, utterly, in his protection and provision. It means, in short, that we know ourselves to be a part of his great household.

The liturgical replacement (or notable reduction) of Lord is a marked departure from the prayer books, both of 1928 and 1979 (and all others before them) — and a marked departure from the language of both the Holy Scriptures and historic Christian devotion. Something (or Someone) is missing. A lordless liturgy may seem less risky, but — to me — it’s both less real, and more lonely.

I’d much encourage far deeper reflection on, and less mere reaction to, the word Lord, as well as much greater caution in setting it aside in our liturgies, lest we awake one day — and to channel a phrase of St. Jerome’s — groan to find ourselves disconnected from both our being and our belonging (see Jerome’s Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19).

The Rev. Adam Linton is an active retired Episcopal priest, now living in Montana. He served parishes in Illinois, Utah, and Massachusetts, and as Deputy to General Convention 2006.