You are accustomed to hear two words paired, and those words are Word and sacrament. The two do go together, and are not in the slightest degree at odds with one another. But in the minds of some, they are at odds, and sides are chosen.
Some choose a rationalistic service, where the Word is never done, never eaten, and this is why such congregations deceive themselves. To hear the Word without doing, James tells us, is to be self-deceived. But those who do without hearing are no better. The services they devise are a fool’s errand, running off to obey the master without hearing what He has said to do.
When these two things, Word and sacrament, Word and divinely appointed ritual, are set at odds with one another, one must give way before the other. And then the one which has “conquered” promptly ceases to become itself.
In the waters of baptism, and in the bread and wine of the Supper, God has given us a divinely appointed image. But this image only remains such when it is married to the Word. Severed from the Word, image always becomes spectacle, ritual turns into gross spectacle. This is what we see in both pop evangelical worship and certain forms of high liturgical worship—we see spectacle, the natural idiom of paganism.
But severed from image, the Word becomes an arid set of propositions, and however much time it occupies, it can only do so by becoming thinner and thinner. At the end of the day, we have something which pretends to infinite richness through this process of homeopathic dilution, but which is nevertheless mostly water.
Test your souls. The more You hear the Word, the more you should hunger for the bread of life. The more you eat the bread of life, the more you should want to hear the Word preached and declared.