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A Better Lord’s Prayer
Is it time to change the Lord’s Prayer? “Do not let me fall into temptation because it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation and then sees how I fell,” – Pope Francis I For many Christians, the ubiquity of the Lord’s Prayer is everything. Because of that, I…
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Liturgy & the Event
The earliest rule I remember about church was my Mom telling me when I was 4 or 5, sitting in the balcony at the back of Trinity, Alpena and she pointed to the Lord’s Prayer and said to me that this is the one thing she expected me to memorize. The rest of the service,…
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Announcements
I truly value communication. It has always been one of my top priorities. For a church, I’ve built a website, set up social media pages, published a weekly email newsletter, not to mention planned the weekly liturgy, written letters, visited with people, and made the obligatory announcements on Sunday morning. And strangely, one thing has…
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Nicene Creed
The strangest moment in worship happens in the middle. For many of us it is sitting right in the center of our worship. And everything around it is far more worshipful and embodies the people at prayer. We open in prayer and we read scripture and we sing and pray a psalm and we proclaim…
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Epiklesis
The epiklesis is the magic moment of the Great Thanksgiving. It is the great crescendo of the service of Holy Eucharist. It is the “shhh, everybody, shh! Here it is!” moment of the preparation of the table for communion. The prayer, which begins in a great gathering, tells of the great story, and reminds us…
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Words of Institution
The Eucharistic Prayer begins with the Sursum Corda, a conversation between the presider and the people. The Lord be with you! And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give him thanks and praise. This is…
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Peace
I’m not sure there is a more foundational element to the Christian faith than peace. We want peace, we crave peace. Peace to us is safety and security. It is silence and quiet. It is solitude in chaos. It is the sound of birds chirping and streams bubbling when we are resting in the grass.…
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Absolution
For some churches, it’s all about sin. For others, it’s all about that grace. And for still others, there is the regular insistence that we don’t talk about one without the other. We don’t talk about Good Friday without Easter. It makes a certain sense, doesn’t it? that we so often tend to focus on the…