Welcome

While I have been writing on my blog for over a month, this is the first day I've actually invited anyone (other than Jennifer) to read it. So, welcome! I chose today intentionally, as it marks one month before my confirmation in the Episcopal Church.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the way blogs work, they list the most recent entry at the top. I suggest that you scroll to the bottom of this page to begin with my first post entitled "Episcopal Peregrination" to read about the purpose of this endeavor and read the blogs in order. I especially welcome comments in response to my thoughts and suggestions for things you might want me to talk about. Click on the hyperlink at the bottom of a post called "comments" and, if you don't have a blogger account, choose "other" and let me know who you are. Send me a private e-mail, if you prefer.

Thanks for your interest.

The Fullness of Worship

Many Episcopalians understand The Book of Common Prayer to be the one main thing that holds their church together and distinguishes them from other churches. Other denominations may have confessional statements that are tightly held. Other denominations may rely on a top-down authority to create unity. Still other denominations may be held together by a particular interpretation of scripture. But what makes one Episcopal church similar to another is its common worship. You can see why this might be appealing to someone studying worship.

If you go to an Episcopal church on any given Sunday in Dallas, you will pray largely the same prayers as those I'm praying in Princeton. But what is more important to me is that many of those prayers are linked historically to the past. Even though there may be no indication in the prayer book itself, you would likely be praying with the ancient Christian Hippolytus of Rome from the year 215 or Saint Basil the Great from 350. This is nothing to say of how steeped the words of the prayer book are in actual biblical language. A very large percentage of prayers are taken from scripture in their wording or imagery. From my perspective the The Book of Common Prayer is quite biblical. For wasn't one of the main purposes of the Bible to be read publicly in the church? The words of scripture are praying-words. Click here to see an example from The Book of Common Prayer that is steeped in biblical images.

Despite all that I have said up to this point, it seems that the trend in the Episcopal church is to move away from the printed book. Rather than one set (or a few sets) of prayers being authorized, many prayers or a loose prayer format will be authorized. I've struggled with this change, as I've grown to love the ritual of The Book of Common Prayer. (An aside: While ritualism may be a bad thing, I do not believe ritual to be so. It is natural and good for humans to develop patterns in life. We get up at the same time each morning. We have habits of telling our loved ones "I love you." We brush our teeth before bed. If our habits constantly changed, we would go insane. The same is true in worship. Habits or customs or rituals of worship form us over time. When we say "I believe in God the Father, almighty maker of heaven and earth...," we live-into these words. I do not find that saying these words each and every week becomes boring or ritualistic. Rather, they form me into a Christian who believes--and more importantly acts from--the things I am saying.)

So, back to my earlier thought.... I have thought a lot about the future of The Book of Common Prayer as I have grown to love its language and meaning. And as I've seen trends to move away from its printed form, I suppose I've even mourned a bit. But I've begun to realize something, with the help of one of my priest-classmates. It isn't really so much the actual prayer book that appeals to me, but rather the fullness of worship that it exemplifies. There is a fatness in its worship that I have come to crave. And this fat is not something that can easily be trimmed off the edges, because it is integral to the entire piece of meat. This kind of worship is like a well-marbled steak. It is dispersed throughout the meat to give it a rich flavor. Without the fat it would be tough and dry.

In this kind of worship the images are rich. The language is moving. The gestures mime ancient holy actions. The entire liturgy is a divine drama. We don't come to church to merely remember Christ's supper in the upper room, but to participate in that supper. We don't come to merely hear the words of the gospel, but to enter in to the events. We come not as passive spectators, but active participants. This is why there is so much sitting and standing and kneeling and coming forward to take communion and responses from the people. This is the "school" for the divine habits of God's holy people.

This ethos (or atmosphere) is what the Episcopal church has a particular sensitivity to that appeals to me so much. And that is one reason why many people have chosen to take similar journeys to the Episcopal church, the Orthodox church, or the Catholic Church. And this sensitivity to a fullness of worship will remain even if the churches move away from The Book of Common Prayer. I have come to see that this fatness is what I really crave.

Remembering John Paul II

Episcopalians don't recognize the pope of the Roman Catholic church as the head of the universal church. But they do respect the pope as the leader of the Roman Catholic church, one of the many cultural expressions of the universal church. Rather, the universal church is governed primarily by the many historical ecumenical councils. There are a plurality of bishops recognized together as the leaders of the church universal.

While I also don't agree with many of the specific stances the pope took, I do respect many of his ecumenical and social justice gestures. Recognizing that he was the spiritual leader of millions of Christians around the world and a truly holy man, I feel compelled to post a prayer for him. This is a modified prayer for a recently deceased pope taken from the Daily Roman Missal:

God our Father,
you reward all who believe in you.
May your servant, John Paul II ...,
who faithfully administered the mysteries of your
forgiveness and love on earth,
rejoice with you for ever in heaven.

We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Christian Time Keeping

While my previous post may have been a good descriptive and historical overview of my Holy Week experience, I probably have not fully expressed its meaningfulness to me in a personal way. I want to explore how I have been shaped by this new (for me) way of keeping time, of which Holy Week is a part.

In my newfound experience of the Christian calendar, it is not a dispensible part of liturgy. It isn't a nice piece of decoration on the church wall. It isn't a little calligraphic flair on the "L" of liturgy. I don't mean by this that it is necessary for salvation, or even for displaying the fruits of the spirit. But it is an integral and formative aspect of worship. And if our worship is how we come to know God, and the place where we "think" about God by doing the liturgy, then the question of when is of primary importance. After all, we humans exist in space and time.

The church has recognized this from its earliest years. In Scripture we have witness that the church met on the Day of Resurrection. They may have met more often. They may have kept on going to Temple, if they were Jews. But they met on Sunday. They didn't meet on Sunday because it was the first day of the week, somehow better than the last day of the week (that the Jews met on). They didn't meet on Sunday because it was convenient for their schedules; in fact, it was a work day. Saturday would have been easier. But the church kept Sunday as their holy day from the earliest of times, because it was a wholly new day. The early Christians sometimes referred to it as "the eighth day." Not merely the same as the previous Sunday. Not the beginning of a new cycle. But a day in which the church was thrown out of its usual routine of 24 hours in 7 days a week over and over for an entire human lifespan. The church was thrown towards the eschaton--the final end of all things--in a new day of creation. This time was different; not ordinary. Holy because of God's work of raising Christ from the dead. In light of the resurrection, ordinary human time was re-worked to be made holy, in the shape of the cross, in the shape of the empty tomb.

Early Christians didn't keep time by their Rolexes. They didn't keep time by patterning it after their Jewish forebearers. They didn't keep time based on the market schedule. They didn't even keep time primarily by the motions of the sun and moon, even though they were natural realities. They kept time by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The natural progression of this way of time keeping was to order not only their week, but their entire year, after the life of Jesus. This wasn't a newfangled, foreign, or heretical idea. After all, the Jews had been patterning their time after God's mighty deeds for centuries. And the impulse to begin patterning time after the life of Christ was not some late-in-the-game play. There may even be hints of Easter in such passages as 1 Corinthians 5:7-8. The early Christians who were Jews would have naturally continued their keeping of Passover with a Christian theme. But certainly by the year 200 Christians were observing a separate yearly feast somewhat corresponding to the Jewish Passover. This early transformation of time was not antithetical to teaching in the New Testament, but grew out of its view of Sunday as a remembrance of the Resurrection. Eventually over time the church began remembering other actions of Jesus' life surrounding Easter, like Palm Sunday one week before Easter, the institution of the Lord's Supper on Thursday, and Good Friday as the time of the crucifixion. This full keeping of Holy Week was already well established when a woman named Egeria travelled all the way from Spain to Jerusalem to experience Holy Week in the year 383. We can peak back into the goings on of these ancient Christians of Jerusalem, through her personal diary:

"The next day, Sunday, is the beginning of the Easter week or, as they call it here, 'The Great Week.' .... At five o'clock the passage is read from the Gospel about the children who met the Lord with palm branches, saying, 'Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.' At this the bishop and all the people rise from their places, and start off on foot down from the summit of the Mount of Olives. All the people go before him with psalms ... , all the time repeating, 'Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.' The babies and the ones too young to walk are carried on their parents' shoulders. Everyone is carrying branches, either palm or olive, and they accompany the bishop in the very way the people did when ... they went down the hill with the Lord..." (Egeria's Travels 30-31, emphasis mine).

As I experienced these days this year it was as if I was even there those many years ago. It was as if Christ instituted the Supper for me and those in my congregation, entered Jerusalem in my midst, was crucified before my eyes. I was there on Sunday, literally carrying a palm branch.