Liturgy Series Part III: Prayer of the Day/The Church Year

A. Hanson, St Paul, MN. 2013.

The prayer of the day is when the community is gathered together in prayer.  The prayer of the day concludes the "gathering" portion of the service and leads the assembly into the Word portion of the liturgy.

There is much variety in the way that an opening prayer can be written.  The prayer includes an opening address to God ("Gracious and ever-living God"), the body of the prayer, and a closing address ("In your holy name we pray") followed by "amen."  The prayer can be written by the presiding minister or assisting minister, or a prayer from a worship book can be used that is appropriate to the season in the church year.

Yes, the church has a calendar of its own.  You might have noticed that throughout the year the vestments of the pastor (the stole) and the paraments on the altar (fancy cloths that are draped upon it) will change color.  The ELCA site has a larger description of what the colors signify here.

The church year begins with Advent.  Advent is the the season of preparation that occurs in the four weeks before Christmas.  Despite what consumer culture would have you believe, it is not a ramp up to Christmas. In fact, it is a distinct season with its own hymns and practices and is more solemn than Christmas.  The color for Advent is blue.

The season of Christmas takes place beginning on Christmas Day and running through Epiphany, which is twelve days.  It celebrates the birth of Christ and the incarnation of God (God made flesh).  The color for the season of Christmas is white.

In the time after Epiphany we celebrate the baptism of Christ, as well as the Transfiguration of Christ.  We celebrate light in the darkness of winter and Christ as the light of the world.  The color white is used for festivals in this time, while the color green is used for other sundays.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the season of Lent.  On Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge "We are but dust and to dust we shall return" and that we cannot save ourselves from sin or death.  Many Christians receive the imposition of ashes upon their forehead as a sign of outward mark of penitence.  The ashes are made from the palms from the previous year's Palm Sunday.  The color for Ash wednesday is black.

The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and lasts for 40 days.  This time echoes the time Jesus spent in the Wilderness and Moses' time on Mt Sinai.  It is a time of contemplation and preparation for Easter.  Lutherans do not understand Lent to be an entirely penitential season, but rather, a season of confession of sin rooted in the promise of God that comes through Christ on the cross.  The color for the season of Lent is purple.

Lent ends with the start of Holy Week, which begins with Palm Sunday.  I have written at length about Palm Sunday , Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil in previous posts.  This is the highest holy time in the church year.  The color gold is used for Easter (or white if gold is not available), the only time in the church year one would see these vestments and paraments.  We tell the story of Holy Week and Easter each year using the Gospel of John because it has the highest Christology out of the four Gospels.

The time after Easter is celebrated until Pentecost.  Pentecost is celebrated 50 days after Easter and celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit and the mission of God extending to all of humanity.  We hear the story of Pentecost in the book of Acts 2, and how we are all filled with the Holy Spirit.  The story of Christ is no longer just among the disciples.  The color for Pentecost is red.

The time after Pentecost is known as "ordinary time."  Ordinary time includes some lesser festivals and occurs until Christ the King Sunday, just before Advent begins the following November/Early December.  During Ordinary Time we hear the story of God in Christ and in us.  The color for ordinary  time is green.

Up next...

Part IV: Reading the Scriptures

Liturgy Series Part II: Kyrie

A. Hanson, Salzburg, Austria. 

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison.

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.

The Kyrie is a sung or spoken verse that is a part of the Gathering portion of the Liturgy.  Kyrie Eleison is derived from the Greek words for Lord, Κυριος,  and Mercy, Ελεος.

The Kyrie is derived from a story in Mark 10:46-52, in which Jesus and the disciples come upon a blind man named Bartimaeus sitting by the side of road near Jericho.  Bartimaeus, hearing that Jesus was nearby cries out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"  The crowd tells the blind man to be quiet over and over again.  Jesus stopped and says, "bring him here."  Jesus heals him and says, "Go, your faith has made you well."

When we cry out, "Kyrie Eleison" we are acknowledging our utter dependence on Christ for healing.  In the last 20 or 30 years, as liturgy has been re-imagined in an attempt to be relevant, one of the trends has been to create an up-tempo, festive rendition of the Kyrie.  This sort of liturgy has made the unfortunate (and confusing) move of essentially turning the Kyrie into an opening hymn and/or canticle of praise.

One of my pastor friends remarked upon hearing a particularly festive arrangement of the Kyrie, "Are we or are we not begging for mercy from the God of heaven and earth?"

Now, worship is often joyful, but the Kyrie is a prayer for God's mercy to continue to be present in us and in the assembly.  We often say upon hearing particularly painful news, "Kyrie Eleison.  Lord have mercy."  This is what we say when we are so at a loss for words that we know not what else to say in the midst of our grief and pain.  And we come to worship each week weary and hungry and desiring to be filled up with God's mercy and grace.  This is what we ask for with the words "Kyrie Eleison."

So the Kyrie is a prayer sung or spoken as part of the liturgy to bear witness to our dependence upon God for healing and strength and to ask for God's mercy to fill the church and the world.

Up next...

Part III: Prayer of the Day

Liturgy Series Part I: Confession and Forgiveness

Christ icon that I made for a class project
using magazine pages, 2011

The Confession is one of the most bewildering parts of the liturgy and probably feels really uncomfortable to members of our worshipping communities that have not been a part of a congregation before.  That, and the fact that culturally, we do not spend much time talking about our human failings.  We would rather attempt to cover them up and polish up our image and do everything possible to get ahead.

 The minister leading the confession usually leads with some sort of introduction such as,

"Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and of one another..."

As a child, and even into young adulthood, I was attempting to list all of my sins in that short bit of silence.  I was frustrated by the fact that not only did I not have enough time to confess all my sins that I remembered (in my operating definition of the time, sins were all the bad things I did), I was tortured by the fact that I could not remember all of the things that I did wrong.  And reciting as corporate confession, such as that in setting one of the the Evangelical Lutheran Worship/ELW, our main worship book,

"Most merciful God, we confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.  We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.  We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.  For the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.  Forgive us, renew us, and lead, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen" 

sounded hollow at times.  These were not MY PERSONAL sins.  I was (and am) more likely to be jealous and mean to my sisters and impatient and controlling.  I found that I was frantically trying to confess all my sins as I remembered them and hoping to atone for them.

Martin Luther experienced these same frustrations and this is part of what led him to do much of his writings.  What makes Lutheran theology different is our understanding of sin.

This is probably going to come as a shock...

But sin is not something you do. It is a state in which you reside.  If we understand sin to be something we do, the reverse side is that we think there is something that we can do to save ourselves from that.  And that is simply not true.   Martin Luther refers to this as "incurvatus se" or the turning in upon the self.  What we testify to when we participate in the community confession is that we are utterly dependent on Christ.  We cannot save ourselves from sin, death, and all evil.


My friend Kae, who is the lead pastor at Mercy Seat (ELCA), describes confession in this way,

"Confession is me acknowledging that if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten that apple, I would have.  Confession is me acknowledging if those people who called for Jesus' death on Good Friday had not done so, I would have been the one shouting 'Crucify Him!'"  

Confession is painful because it gets at the very core of who we are.  But confession is not just confessing our sins.  The other component is just as important.  Forgiveness.

Confession and Absolution is proclamation of the Word.  We confess that we are dependent on Christ, but in the absolution (a fancy word for forgiveness) that is proclaimed for personally as Christ is "for you."  It is to say, Christ died for your sins for now and all time. You are forgiven. You are loved.  You belong.

The presiding minister (or any member of the priesthood of all believers, since we are all filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered to forgive sins) says something along these lines,

"God who is rich in mercy, loved us even when we were dead in sin, and made us alive together with Christ.  By grace you have been saved.  In the name of Jesus Christ your sins are forgiven.  Almighty God strengthen you with power through the Holy Spirit, that Christ may live in your hearts through faith.  Amen."

And that is it.  It is done.  There is nothing left for us to do because it has already been done for us.  To that, I say, "Thanks be to God!"  We do not need to list all of our sins, because they are known and already forgiven.  God does not need us to enumerate them and to do penance for them.

Now, private confession and absolution for specific things that weigh on the heart is a rite in the Lutheran Church and I believe deeply in this for the burdened conscience.  But this is solely a matter of pastoral care, not a prerequisite for being "right with God."

It has already been done.  Amen.

Part II: Kyrie

Liturgy Series: Introduction

A. Hanson, Haarlem, Netherlands

One of the things about which I am most passionate is liturgy.  So I am going to embark on a blog series about the different parts of the liturgy and what this means and why it matters.  There are four basic parts of the liturgy, Gathering, Word, Meal, and Sending. I am going to break these down into the subheadings that appear in our worship bulletins.

I have quite a few friends and people that are close to me who are new to Lutheranism or church in general, and liturgy is one of the most intimidating things to them.  To them, liturgy is something that everyone else seems to know and it demarcates the difference between who is "in" and who is "out."  And this is the exact opposite of what Liturgy should be.  I can only speak to my tradition, the ELCA, so I cannot speak for what liturgy looks like or means for other traditions.

Liturgy as we know it is derived from a Jewish service of the Word as practiced by Jesus himself (Luke 4:14-21) and a meal that is the sharing of bread and wine in remembrance of Christ's death and resurrection (Matthew 26:26-29).  There are scripture readings included in the liturgy, including psalms.  Each component of the liturgy has a biblical basis, although there is no specific liturgy in the Bible, per se.  You can read more about these scriptural components of liturgy, on the ELCA site at this link, Biblical Roots of the Liturgy.

Music is not tangential to the liturgy, in fact, it serves a very important function of illuminating and pointing to the texts.  It functions as proclamation.  It provides a communal way of remembering and reinforcing our shared story.

There is a long and dramatic (and dry) history outlined in the Book of Concord about how liturgy came to be what it is and how it served to differentiate the Lutherans from the Catholics, etc, etc.  But that is not what matters to most of us (although my Lutheran Confessions professor would probably beg to differ).  So I am going to spare you that discussion.

Instead, we move to...

Part I: Confession and Forgiveness

Internship

I am embarking on a yearlong internship beginning on August 13, 2013.  I will spend an entire year with the good people of First Lutheran Church in St Peter, MN as I learn the ins and outs of being a pastor from my excellent supervisor and the church community.  This past friday I made an initial trip down to see my new home and to meet some of the members of my internship committee.  Below I have posted a few pictures of the house itself.  So far I have had the opportunity to meet six of the ten members of my internship committee, and I think it is going to be a fantastic year!

  I will write many more posts in the year to come, but right now, check out this amazing housing!

Front of house

Backyard

living room

sunroom/the place where I will write all my sermons!

kitchen/laundry room

dining room

bedroom