Liturgy Matters: Reflection on a Conversation, and a Plea

The following is an excerpt from "Episcopal Liturgy: A Conversation" published in the Spring 2014 issue of "From the Mountain", the biannual journal-newsletter of The School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.  Seminarian Joe Woodfin interviewed the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander and the Rev. Canon James Turrell, both of the School of Theology, and the Rev. Dr. Louis Weil, of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

What do you think is the most interesting emerging trend in the liturgical life of The Episcopal Church today? 

Alexander: There are two trends that appear to be from different sides.  One is a very clear visible movement to get back to the basics: more traditional structures, approaches, and ways of worship.  This trend is primarily being driven by the youth and young adults.  On the other hand, the generation before them is interested in refreshing, renewing, and reshaping parts of some rites, while still being based in a liturgical tradition.  Both are operating, though, from a common root: a desire for worshipers to participate more deeply in the liturgical and sacramental life of the church. 

Turrell: I think it is people pushing the envelope, making structural alterations and not using the Prayer Book liturgy in the name of ministering to postmodern millennials.  There is a tension there between the need for room for liturgical creativity and the fact that the BCP is what we've agreed on as a church.  It's not clear that some of the creative liturgies have the same kind of historical roots as those that drove the 1979 BCP, nor do they have the same kind of trial use and scrutiny. 

Weil: A trend that particularly concerns me is an attitude toward the BCP that sees it as simply one option among many as a basis for public worship.  A phrase that particularly concerns me is, "We need to move outside the box."  Behind this phrase is the image of the BCP as hopelessly restrictive, a limit to "creativity."  I value creativity, and we need genuinely creative liturgical movement.  But to use an image that was shared with me years ago by the late Bishop of Louisiana -- Bishop Noland -- talking about a different issue, he said, "It seems to me that we need to know the melody before we try to do the variations."

 On the one hand, these observations are disheartening, as they represent voices much more experienced and knowledgeable than my own confirming my own worries about current liturgical trends in TEC.  I view the Prayer Book as "a treasure trove that most of our parishes have only begun to mine" (to borrow a phrase of Dean Alexander's from elsewhere in the interview) and as the most distinctive, solid, and unifying feature of a church that often seems to be all over the place.  The BCP grounds us in the catholic faith, saturates us in the Scriptures, shapes us in a way that is authentically Anglican, and is the clearest explication of "the doctrine and discipline" of the Episcopal Church.  If you want to know what Episcopalians believe, spend some time with the Book of Common Prayer.  So, it deeply concerns me to see a significant proportion of our church "pushing the envelope" by disregarding rubrics, and criticizing the Prayer Book as "a limit to 'creativity'" and "simply one option among many."

On the other hand, it is encouraging to hear that these concerns are shared by influential leaders in TEC.  That these are men who are very directly involved in forming the clergy of the church of tomorrow is even more hopeful.  And I also am particularly heartened by Dean Alexander's assertion that the trend for more structure and tradition in reaffirming the essentials of the faith "is primarily being driven by the youth and young adults."  I've had numerous conversations about this very topic, and it does indeed seem to be true (it certainly is for me, and seems to be so for many of my peers in TEC).  Regarding the trends being advocated by "the generation before," even if I may find them unattractive, I would agree that they spring from a sincere desire to see people more meaningfully encounter God in the Church.  So, if a parish full of boomers who came of age in an era when all tradition and authority was viewed with suspicion (or hostility) finds that a folk mass with gender inclusive language and experimental liturgy speaks to their souls and helps them to experience the risen Christ, I'm not going to cry out against it.  Just please don't justify it "in the name of ministering to postmodern millennials."  Or, as Fr. Robert Hendrickson put it a while back when discussing potential hymnal revision, "don't do it for the kids."  And it may sound harsh, but please, please, don't saddle the Episcopal Church of tomorrow with entrenched liturgical reforms (e.g. Prayer Book revision) that divorce us from centuries of the traditions of the faithful and even may (unwittingly) obscure or blunt the transforming power of the gospel itself.  Some of this "refreshing, renewing, and reshaping" seems dated already, and may be found to be almost useless in another twenty or thirty years.  At that time, the torch of leadership will have been passed on by the advocates of such change, but the rest of the Church will have to live with their legacy, for better or worse.

Peace of Christ.
     

Visitation

In commemoration of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth (May 31).  I am, at least, consistent in my tardiness.  A reading from Jeremy Taylor, an appropriate verse of Scripture, and some original verse.  Though I didn't set out to do so, it ending up being a sort of non-traditional sonnet.
Peace.

From The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by Bishop Jeremy Taylor:

"Mary found no one so fit as her cousin Elizabeth to share the first emanations of her overjoyed heart, for she was to be the mother of the Baptist, who was sent as forerunner to prepare the way of the Lord her son.  It is not easy to imagine what collision of joys was at this blessed meeting; two mothers of two great princes, the one the greatest that was born of woman, the other his Lord.  When these who were made mothers by two miracles came together, they met with joy and mysteriousness.  The mother of our Lord went to visit the mother of his servant, and the Holy Ghost made the meeting festival ... By this God would have us know that when the blessings of God descend upon us, they should be published in the communion of the saints, so that our charity and eucharist may increase that of others, and the praises of God be sung aloud, till the sound strike at heaven and join with the alleluias which the morning stars in their orbs pay to their great creator."

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.  And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.   ~Colossians 3:16-17


Great the women who bore
The tidings in the hill country.
The highly favored one,
Her greeting at the door
Spurs the Forerunner to leap, he
Acknowledging the Son
Enthroned in princely state,
Beauteous in the womb of the morn.
The prophetess bows down,
Inspired, to relate
The revelation to be born,
And confirm her renown.
She cries, 'The mother of my Lord,'
And she, 'Magnificat,' outpoured.

  

Responding to the Call, and Believing What We Pray in the Magnificat

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
     for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will called me blessed:
     the Almighty has done great things for me,
     and holy is his name.
He has mercy on those who fear him 
     in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, 
     he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
     and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
     and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel,
     for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers,
     to Abraham and his children for ever.

I am currently reading On Being a Priest Today, by Rosalind Brown and Christopher Cocksworth.  In Chapter 3, "On Being for God", the authors begin by referencing the call of Moses, "the father of ministry by grace through faith."  When confronted with the call of God in the Burning Bush,

Moses' response was archetypal, echoed throughout the generations of calls to ministry: 'Who am I that I should go?' (Exodus 3:12).  God's reply to Moses is equally foundational and remains the word to all who have been called: 'I will be with you; and this shall be a sign for you that is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain' (Exodus 3:12).  Moses' response is a statement of his own weakness.  God's response is a promise of his presence -- a promise that will be known to be true only in its believing, only in obeying the call, only in the doing of ministry.

The authors point out that it is Moses' very recognition of his own unworthiness that validates the call of God on his life.  It is true that Moses, in himself, is not fit to fulfill such a high and holy calling; no one is.  It is when an individual realizes this, however, that he or she is fit to be used as an instrument of God, through which He will accomplish great and wondrous things.  If Moses is the father of ministry by grace through faith, the Church may justly look to Mary as the Mother of all who say 'yes' to God.  Brown and Cocksworth continue:

Moses' song exalts the Lord as the true God who is able to accomplish the unexpected.  It is the same key in which Hannah, Mary, and other biblical characters sang.  'There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you,' sings Hannah, no one 'raises up the poor from the dust' and makes the 'barren bear seven children' (I Samuel 2:2).  Mary's soul, too, 'proclaims the greatness of the Lord' who has 'looked with favor on his lowly servant' (Luke 1:46-48).  The Daily Office invites us to sing these familiar words of the Magnificat each evening as we gather the day before God in prayer.  The day may have felt very unproductive.  The powerful forces of the world may have seemed secure on their thrones and we, feeble against them.  But the theological truth in the strange kenotic workings of God is that even on this day, when our ministry has seemed at its most barren, God has done great things for us and through us, simply because, with Mary, our faith has said 'Here am I, the servant of the Lord' (Luke 1:38).  

Be encouraged, for my Father and your Father is working until now, and Jesus has overcome the world!
Peace.

     

Changing Culture, Changing Worship?

I just finished reading Opening the Prayer Book, by the Rev. Jeffrey Lee.  It's part of "The New Church's Teaching Series."  It's the second book of the series that I've read (The Anglican Vision by James E. Griffiss being the other), and so far I've been pleased.  They are well-written as to style, and short enough to read fairly quickly, while remaining very informative.  They're popular, not scholarly, but I've never felt like I'm just reading an expanded version of a visitor's welcome pamphlet; the books strike a good balance between basic introduction and in-depth study.  I recommend.

In the last chapter of the book, Lee writes of "looking toward the future".  He notes succinctly that "One of the identifying marks of the Anglican way is its willingness to engage the realities of contemporary experience."  I would certainly agree.  But's it's another statement from the chapter that I've been chewing on.  Writing about change and revision to the prayer book (something of a continuous reality if we look at history, as Lee documents earlier in the book), Lee references a quote from the late Leonel Mitchell: "Language changes.  Culture changes.  Our worship is conditioned by both and must change in order to remain the same."

This is a thoughtful and challenging statement, and one with a couple of things to unpack.  First is the assertion that our worship is conditioned by language and culture (which, unarguably, are forever changing).  This may seem a bit threatening.  After all, is not our faith "an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast", as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it?  Consequently, Paul writes to the Ephesians that "we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves."  For myself, the idea of a culturally-conditioned worship brings to mind (to borrow from Niebuhr's typologies) the "Christ of Culture", ever-changing (one might say even manipulated), according to the shifting currents of society; not a happy vision, as I see it.  However, I think this is an overreaction.  To say that worship is conditioned by language and culture is not to say that worship is at the mercy of either.  It is, rather, an acknowledgment of what, on reflection, is quite obviously true.  The Christian faith, perhaps more than any other, has at least one foot firmly standing on the ground of this earth, for the whole of our faith points to this Man who walked the dusty roads of first century Palestine.  In the Incarnation, God enters our world and its culture.  Jesus lived within a specific and historically identifiable culture, and while He certainly challenged that culture, to maintain that the early church was not conditioned by its cultural setting is surely an exercise in self-deception.  Likewise, to read the Bible without a basic grounding in the varied cultural and historical backdrops that inform it is to choose to miss out on whole layers of understanding.  The culture in which we twenty-first century Christians live is much changed from that of the first century Roman world.  Not surprisingly, the church has undergone changes as well.

Which brings us to the second assertion of Mitchell's: our worship must change in order to remain the same.  Even the most cursory study of the history of the church will reveal that the church has evolved and changed in many ways over the course of two millennia, with the exception of the Eastern Orthodox (just kidding; sort of).  This in itself is not surprising.  What Mitchell proposes is, I think, a unique way of explaining such change.  On the one hand, it seems reasonable to say that the changes we observe in the church's worship are simply due to the influence of a changing external culture.  While Mitchell acknowledges this to an extent (as per the first assertion), he also claims that there is a very intentional logic behind the change.  The church intentionally changes the outward form of worship in order to keep alive the spirit that lies behind the form.  As the church, we are called to render worship faithfully unto God, and I certainly believe that there are right and wrong ways to do so; a change in the church's established forms of worship is no flippant thing.  But the church is not called only to worship.  As Jesus reveals in His 'high-priestly prayer' to the Father, even though we are not of the world, we remain in it.  And it is in this world that we are also called to follow the way of Our Lord: to love our neighbor, to seek the lost, to make disciples, to stand in opposition to the injustices of the kingdoms of this world, to embrace the cross.  If a particular form of worship, which  empowered the faithful to do these things in another place and time, is no longer serving to facilitate this call, why should that form of worship not change?  Indeed, is it not necessary that it change "in order to remain the same", that is, to continue to enable the church to proclaim and live the Gospel?

The real question, as I see it, is neither to determine whether or not our worship is conditioned by culture, nor whether it should change.  The question is: How do we take part in a continual, intentional renewal of worship in a way that facilitates the mission of the church today while also preserving the integrity of the faith we have received?  At what point does a well-intentioned, missional attempt to change the form of our worship cross the line and begin to erode sound doctrine and the foundations of the faith?  Are there areas in the church today where this line has already been crossed?

What do you think?

Peace.                            

Ye Holy Angels Bright

I couldn't resist posting this.  We sang no. 625, "Ye Holy Angels Bright", by the seventeenth century Puritan Richard Baxter, as our dismissal hymn in church today.  I was familiar with the tune (it's a great one, Darwall's 148th; I posted a video below), but it was the words that struck me.  I'm not sure I'd ever really listened to them before (or at least they had never so impressed me).  Such a beautiful hymn, and a stirring image of the communion of saints, both those "blessed souls at rest" and we "who toil below".  It is a communion that is not bound by space or time, and that includes also all the angelic host of heaven (as we were reminded yesterday, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels).
Peace to you, and grace to "bear thou thy part" in the coming week.


Ye Holy Angels Bright
by Richard Baxter, revised by John Hampden Gurney

Ye holy angels bright,
Who wait at God's right hand,
Or through the realms of light
Fly at your Lord's command,
Assist our song, for else the theme
Too high doth seem for mortal tongue.

Ye blessed souls at rest,
Who ran this earthly race
And now, from sin released,
Behold the Savior's face,
God's praises sound, as in his sight
With sweet delight ye do abound.

Ye saints, who toil below,
Adore your heavenly King,
And onward as ye go
Some joyful anthem sing;
Take what he gives and praise him still
Through good or ill, who ever lives!

My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in God above:
And with a well tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love!
Let all thy days till life shall end
Whate'er he send, be filled with praise.

  

Praying with Saints and Angels on Michaelmas

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.
~Collect for Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels

A short excerpt from Opening the Prayer Book, by Jeffrey Lee.  In Chapter Seven: Liturgy in Action, Lee writes about the intention behind the 1979 Book of Common Prayer to more fully realize the very reality proclaimed by the prayer book's title: namely, that the work, worship, and prayer of the church is to be primarily communal, not private.  It is certainly true that we are often less than resoundingly successful at living truly communal Christian lives, and Lee acknowledges that we often miss the mark.  I myself am aware of critics (and have to an extent shared in their concern) who allege that the variety of options in the current prayer book actually serves to undermine the unity of the church, that the diversity means we are in fact no longer a church of common prayer.  For this reason, I find Lee's assessment fascinating and helpful.  He writes that the 1979 prayer book "may look like prayer books from earlier times, but it is actually a resource library for pastoral liturgy", with the attendant necessity that every individual parish must be actively involved in determining how they will live into that liturgy.  The worshiping community does not simply open to a certain page and read straight through a single, standard set of prayers, hymns, and offerings.  Rather, the format, or "shape" of the liturgy is standard, while many details remain to be determined at the parish level.  Thus, we might say, the local community comes to have a sense of meaningful ownership in the liturgy.  Here is Lee writing about the communal reality of prayer.

We gather for common prayer.  In the last several decades, liturgical reformers within Anglicanism and among Christians in general have sought to reclaim a more vigorous understanding and practice of the communal dimension of Christian prayer.  For the Christian, in a real sense, there is no such thing as private prayer.  In fact, the word "private" shares a root with "deprivation" - privatio in Latin is to deprive.  This is not to deny the importance of times of personal prayer; but even personal prayer is fundamentally ecclesial in nature.  When Christians pray, they do so with the church, not in isolation, even if they are alone:  we pray always "with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven" (BCP 362). 

Peace, and happy Michaelmas!