Everyday Liturgy

Advent Candies

Thomas — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:38:33 +0000

On Tuesday I wrote the post Tomorrow is Advent Candle Day and fellow CCBlogger David from Unorthodoxology misunderstood the title, for a second, as Advent Candie Day. That would be nice, huh?

Advent candies are for in Advent Calendars, but what if we used candies to build expectation?

How about buy an extra large chocolate bar from your favorite fair-trade store and break it into 25 pieces, with one piece being a quarter or half of the bar...that way the little pieces you eat will finally lead up to one big piece on Christmas morn!

Or buy 24 pieces of candy you kind of like, like mini Twix or Kit Kat bars, and then lead up to a great looking, perfect fair trade dark chocolate bar with real bits of coffee. Yeah, that would be my ultimate candy bar, and a fair trade cooperative named Santander makes them.

Or if you hate dark chocolate have 24 little pieces of dark chocolate then some milk chocolate on Christmas. If you don't like Milk Chocolate just flip the experiment around. If you like white chocolate it's about time you take the training wheels off...

How would you build anticipation with Advent candies?

Liturgy In the Local Community: An Ecumenically Local Worldview

Thomas — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:35:43 +0000

Local community is often seen as synonymous with the local church, and the local church is often seen as synonymous with "that church over there on the hill." For liturgy to truly be meaningful in a local community I think pastors, lay persons, and congregations need to begin to think of the local church as all the churches in a local community. In other words, the local church is the grouping of the handful (maybe dozens) of churches that are down the road from each other, down the block from each other, or even next door to each other. The church plant I attend meets inside of another church---talk about the proximity of churches in a locality. When the local church is thought of as the collective of churches in a community, then liturgy is seen in a fresher, and I would add truer, light.

Liturgy is "the public work," and the local church presents itself to the community through its worship, both inside the church and outside the church in the local community. The local church is present at the deli when a member of First Baptist Church is buying some lunch meat the same way the local church is present in the community when a parishioner of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church is talking to someone at the local Post Office. The local church is present in the local community seven days a week.

This re-orientation from the local church as a single church to a collective of churches points the Christians of the local community towards each other in conversation and dialogue. As the Body of Christ doing the public work through worship, discipleship, stewardship, and fellowship we are all working to see the Kingdom of God come to the shared local community. We might work in different ways, we might not agree with each others theology, we might not approve of each others techniques (or lack there of), but we must see that we are working together. We must see each other as an ecumenical movement of the Kingdom in a particular place. And we must see the collective that is the local church in the local community as being the presence of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace and mercy of the Father.

The community my church, The Plant is centered in, Allendale, NJ, has a public Stations of the Cross each year that all the churches in the local community participate in on Good Friday. The pilgrims of Christ go throughout the town to different stations and participate in public worship. This is a perfect example of how the liturgy can and should function in the local community: the local church getting together, worshiping together as the public work, and presenting themselves as the presence of Christ inside the local community.

Please read the three previous posts in this series:

Liturgy In the Local Community

Liturgy In the Local Community: The Recovery of Historical Theology

Liturgy In the Local Community: The Foundation of Your Tradition

Throwing Prayer Books Against the Wall

Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:00:35 +0000

I am not a very dexterous individual with my hands. I am the prototypical kid who is tagged as the "super-smart" kid but couldn't cut or fold his way out of an arts and crafts project to save his life. My wife can attest to this. I can't open jars. I rip open mail. I have her fold letters because mine will never, ever be straight. I gave up guitar because I couldn't get my fingers onto the right spot on the fret board. The only thing I can do with my fingers well is type. And that is why I blog...

And this is why I almost threw the prayer book against the wall. I have always used the Book of Common Prayer online, picking and choosing---being a BCP consumerist. I needed to get over this, and in order to review The Sacramental Life in a meaningful way, I needed to get my hands on the book version. So I bought a nice leatherette copy with gilded edges. And the edges stick like you wouldn't believe! I need to break this book in. The only thing is that it is so hard for an undexterous person like myself to pry the pages apart so I was sitting there this morning taking a minute or so for each page. It took me 15 minutes to go through morning prayer this morning because I had to fiddle with the pages. It really vexed me and I thought about throwing it, my favorite action when I've lost it and cannot control my anger any longer. Alas, I finished prayer and got all the pages for Morning Prayer Rite 1 undone.

Is this some type of initiation process for the BCP? Was I a newbie who was appropriately hazed this morning by the generations of Episcopalians and Anglicans who pass their prayer books down from generation to generation so that this never happens to them?

I am just not looking forward to the day twenty years or so from now when I give my copy of Common Prayer to my eldest child and have to go through this process all over again!

His Faithful Love Endures Forever

Thomas — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:25:44 +0000

Many churches will be celebrating Thanksgiving services in the coming weeks, including The Plant. For our service this Sunday I created this responsive reading of Psalm 136. Just download the attachment. Let me know if you use it! The text follows below.

Text of the Reading:

Responsive Reading for Thanksgiving Service (Psalm 136)

Leader 1: Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!

Congregation: His faithful love endures forever.

Leader 2: Give thanks to the God of gods.