Christ at the Center: Exploring the Liturgy of the Word

“For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

I Corinthians 3:11

If you are joining us today for the first time, I should explain that in the Episcopal Church it’s our practice to have one, not three sermons, and that after rather than before the Scripture readings.  But today, my purpose is to provide an instruction about this service we celebrate week by week, the Holy Eucharist, which is the highest and most ancient form of Christian worship.  Today we explore the first part of the worship service, the Liturgy of the Word.  As Saint Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle, Christ is the foundation on which all His Church’s work depends.   The Liturgy of the Word, above all, testifies to Him, and places Him at the center of the life we share as His people.

Our worship begins with a hymn, hopefully one that announces a theme appropriate to the season or the particular readings that will be presented later in the service.  Hymns are a relatively new addition to the Eucharistic liturgy, only becoming popular with Episcopalians about a hundred and fifty years ago.  Their practical function is to cover the time those leading the service need to get from place to place.  But many of our hymns teach the faith with power or, like the one we have just sung, are moving personal prayers.  Many of our hymns have stirring tunes, but the texts are deeply important, and serve as a kind of supplementary prayer book.  We pray that in all things, we may live as we sing. 

Then follows an acclamation of the One who has brought us together, God whom we praise.  In this season, we especially recall that He is merciful, the forgiver of our sins.  To praise God requires our very best, an uplifted mind, a pure heart—an answer in kind to His abundant love for us.

Only One Lord

“They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy.”  Hebrews 11:37-38

They stared out from the frescoes on the walls that faced toward the large baptismal font, their eyes determined, confident, serene. The bodies of the saints, wrapped in the vestments of archbishops and abbots, were static and grand, timeless like the figures in most Orthodox ikons.  But there was something unusual in their faces—an unexpected wrinkle here, a drooping eyelid there.  Was that the mark of a scar? 

I asked the guide about them.  They were, in fact, portraits, he said.  Father Cyprian, the master iconographer, had known these men.  He’d done the faces himself.  The saints were leaders of his own time.  Some had been his friends.  Perhaps he’d served alongside some of them at the Divine Liturgy, or they’d sat in the shade to share a glass together on a summer’s afternoon, back before the awful civil war and the ransacking of the monasteries, back when mother Russia was a land of monks and holy men. 

They were the modern martyrs, the guide said, they’d given their lives for the Gospel in that bloodiest of centuries, the twentieth.  The Communists had sent them to glory with the machine gun and the hand-grenade.  Father Cyprian had escaped, and along with the scattered remnants of several other religious houses, he’d helped to found this monastery, Holy Trinity, in the wilds of central New York State. 

Who Do You Say That I Am?

“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”    St. Mark 8:38

A few years ago, Pastor Allison and I led a mission trip to Washington DC for teenagers from our two churches.  We were aiming to help these rural kids understand what urban poverty is really like, and to support a number of ministries that were working among the poor in the city.  It was an amazing experience for all of us, and together we lived on a food stamp budget, visited and prayed with the homeless, chopped vegetables at the DC Central Kitchen, and helped serve meals at a shelter.  Our Bible studies each day focused on different parts of the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s revolutionary song of praise, which we prayed together each evening. 

We also gave the teens an assignment, to memorize the Magnificat over the course of our time, so that its message could form their spiritual lives.  One beautiful evening of the trip, we were walking up 14^th Street, on our way back to our dorm from a concert on the steps of the Capitol.  Unprompted, a few of our girls joined hands, and started to recite the Magnificat together as they walked down the street.  “He has put down the mighty from their seats, and has lifted up the lowly,” they chanted.  “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”[1]  We were just past the Willard Hotel, about a block from the White House, and on the sidewalks, filled with tourists from every part of the world, all eyes turned to the girls.  Now they may have just been trying to learn the lines, but knowing those particular girls well, I think there was something more to it.