Psalmcast Ep 001 Transcript

The social media gurus I’ve been looking to for assistance say that posting transcripts of the show is a Good Thing because it helps bring in the search engine traffic that a sound file alone won’t do. So here is a transcription of the first show. As you’ll see, the sentences in bold (the parts that were echoey in the podcast) are transitions and introductions to particular sections that I’ll use each show.

And, those of you who care about audio quality will be pleased to know that my production assistant has donated an old pair of ballet tights to the show, and subsequently helped me make a pop filter.  That should improve things a bit for the next show which ought to be posted up in the next few days…

Again, the original audio version can be found here.

 

Introduction

Hi, I’m Derek Olsen, creator of St. Bede Productions. I’m an Episcopal layman with a PhD in New Testament and a passion for the intersection of Liturgy and Scripture. Welcome to the St. Bede Psalmcast, a podcast about the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary, reading them in the context of the Sunday service and alongside the Church Fathers. Today, we’ll be talking about Psalm 25, verses 1 through 9, the psalm appointed for The First Sunday of Advent in Year C which this year falls on November 29th, 2015. The psalm will be read from the translation found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, but feel free to read along in whatever translation you prefer.

Hi, this is Greta; I’m a layperson at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Ten Hills—and I’m also the production assistant at the St. Bede Psalmcast. Here is Psalm 25:1-9 from the Book of Common Prayer:

1   To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you; *

let me not be humiliated, nor let my enemies triumph over me.

2   Let none who look to you be put to shame; *

let the treacherous be disappointed in their schemes.

3   Show me your ways, O LORD, *

and teach me your paths.

4   Lead me in your truth and teach me, *

for you are the God of my salvation; in you have I trusted all the day long.

5   Remember, O LORD, your compassion and love, *

for they are from everlasting.

6   Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; *

remember me according to your love and for the sake of your goodness, O LORD.

7   Gracious and upright is the LORD; *

therefore he teaches sinners in his way.

8   He guides the humble in doing right *

and teaches his way to the lowly.

9   All the paths of the LORD are love and faithfulness *

to those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.

Liturgical Context

So, why is this psalm appointed here for this day?

The First Sunday of Advent is a big day liturgically. Advent is a four-week season that helps distract us from the Christmas shopping season. Actually, it gets us ready for Christmas the Church’s way rather than the culture’s way. Not only that, it also serves as the beginning of the church year. So—in a very real sense, we’re celebrating New Year’s Day for the church today. The word Advent literally means “the coming towards” or “the approach” and it refers to the coming of Christ. In a very obvious and basic sense, we are getting ready for Christmas, but there is actually a lot more to it than that.

Bernard of Clairvaux—he was a monastic reformer in the 12th century—he liked to talk about three different Advents of Christ that are all bound up together within our season of Advent: First, there is the coming of Jesus as the babe in the manager at Christmas. This is all about humility and simplicity and the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel. Second, there’s the coming of Jesus as Judge on the last day. This is all about glory and majesty and power. But then, between those two, is the hidden coming. Alright—this is the one when Christ is born within our own hearts. And that’s what Advent is, it’s a season of preparation, of careful watching, this is when we’re getting ourselves ready for these multiple comings of Christ into our life and into our world.

So—our psalm is one of the readings that is going to set the scene for this whole season.

This psalm appears in the context of three other readings: The Old Testament lesson is from Jeremiah 33:14-16 which is a prophecy that God is going to fulfill the promise that he made long ago to raise up a “righteous branch” for David. The New Testament Epistle is 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 which asks to strengthen the hearts of the church in holiness so that they will be blameless before God at the coming of Jesus Christ and his saints. The Gospel reading is Luke 21:25-36 which talks about the return of the Son of Man on the clouds with great glory to usher in the Kingdom of God. Jesus calls on his listeners to “be on guard” and “be alert at all times” in order that they may live faithfully and not be caught with their guard down when this great and terrible day dawns. As you can see, these readings are focusing around the final coming of Christ, so the point they keep hammering on is for us to wait for the promise, to keep awake, and to keep our eyes out because Christ is coming into our lives—we may not know how or when, but he’s coming!

Alright—but why this psalm? Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that the lectionary is doing a bit of a throw-back. For some thirteen hundred years, the Western church has been singing this psalm on this day. We’ll come back to this a little later, but there were three different chants all taken from this psalm that basically kicked off the church year. This was kind of the theme song for the start of the church year. The opening lines of this psalm were the first song of the first Eucharist of each new church year and as a result, a lot of missals and chant books have the opening words of this psalm on beautifully decorated pages. There’s a link in the show notes to one from a 10th century chant book from Aquitaine in France—make sure you take a look at that.    So, by appointing Psalm 25 here, the lectionary is giving a nod to that longstanding tradition.

Another reason—and likely one of the reasons that it was put here in the first place—is that St. Augustine in his reading of the psalm picked out one verse and applied it to the two different public advents of Christ. In the version Augustine was using the last verse that Greta read, verse 9, says, “All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth.”(Ours says “love and faithfulness, his said “mercy and truth”—not too different.) So, he took this and said, “For they understand the Lord as merciful at His first advent, and as the Judge at His second, who in meekness and gentleness seek His testament, when with His Own Blood He redeemed us to a new life; and in the Prophets and Evangelists, His testimonies. “ So—he’s connecting mercy with Jesus’s coming in flesh at Bethlehem and Christmas and then connecting truth with the coming of Christ as judge at the end of history. Thus, since St. Augustine made this advent connection with this psalm, it was a natural choice when the church was making programming decisions and thinking about what texts to use to kick off the season.

Thus, to sum up, this psalm is here because it’s got some serious Advent connections. It’s got a history of use in Advent, Augustine connects it with both the first and last comings of Christ, and it fits in with readings about waiting for the promise of God to be fulfilled and keeping to the path while we await the day of Christ’s coming.

Interpretive Context

Now, is there other information we need to help us understand what’s going on?  

I do want to touch on one thing briefly. Cassiodorus reminds us (and we’ll talk more about him and his interpretation in just a second, I promise) he reminds us that this psalm is “mostly” an acrostic. Specifically this is an alphabetical acrostic. And what that means is that if you are looking at the psalm in Hebrew, you’ll see that the first letter of each line follows the sequence of the alphabet. So—the first line of the psalm starts with aleph, the second line with beth, then the third line with gimel, then the fourth line with daleth and so on through the rest of the alphabet. The only things is that we’re missing qoph which is the Hebrew letter for Q and that the author cheats a little bit with vav because there’s an aleph is in front of the vav but aleph is kind of “vowelish” so, I think we can let it slide.

So, this is a technique that we see in other places in the Hebrew Bible is well. It’s a particular form of poetry that often has a connection with wisdom literature and the scribal class. Partly that’s because it’s a visual game—this is something that you’d see as you’re reading—which means, you have to be able to read in order to get the joke. This is isn’t the kind of thing you can hear so it relies on the ability to read Hebrew in order to even recognize that this happening. We see this acrostic style in some other places. The poem in praise of the good wife in Proverbs 31 does this. Psalm 111 does this as does 112 and some others. The book of Lamentations is actually composed of four of these put together, and then the great granddaddy of them all is psalm 119 which takes this idea and just goes crazy with it. I’m sure will get to that on a later show. So—this psalm has got an acrostic structure which implies some wisdom connections and therefore the idea of reading and study and meditation.

Historical Readings

Since we’re not the first Christians to read the psalms, what insights have others found within this text before we came along?

We’ve already talked a little bit about St. Augustine already so we’re going to go ahead and skip him for now. Let’s talk about this other guy I keep mentioning for a moment. So—Cassiodorus was a student of Augustine’s writings and after a big political career where he was basically prime minister for what was left of the Roman Empire in the west he retired and started up his own monastery and wrote a massive commentary on the psalms. This was in the sixth century. I’m sure I’ll do a show specifically on him in the not-to-distant future but that’s what you need to know about him for now. Right—so—Cassiodorus does an overview and breaks this psalm into three parts. For him, this whole psalm is spoken to God by the church. So—the speaker here is the church. In the first four verses, the church wants to know God’s intentions and ways. Then, in the second section, verses 5 through 10, the church asks for God’s kindness and mercy. Then, the third section—verse 11 to the end—expands on the idea that those who keep God’s commandments both deserve and will receive eternal rewards. So—that’s the big picture for Cassiodorus: there are three sections but the part that the lectionary gives us is only those first two sections where the Church is learning God’s ways and asking for God’s mercy.

A few points to note as we go along… First off, in several places the psalm talks about paths and ways; we see that twice in verse 3 and then again in verses 7 and 8 and 9 and 11. So this is a persistent image here in this psalm, that there is a way or path, and Cassiodorus connects this with the Law of God. And—it’s really interesting—there’s a great picture of this. The Utrecht Psalter is a really special manuscript from the 9th century. It was probably made in France near Rheims, and what makes it so special is that it has these line drawings in it that illustrate all of the psalms and the canticles that are in it, and these pictures are often drawing on the interpretations of Cassiodorus and Augustine. The image for Psalm 25 (and I have a link to that in the show notes as well) is terrific because front and center is an image of the advent of Christ, it’s Christ standing on the clouds of glory, but he’s handing a scroll of his ways to a guy who is clearly travelling on the way. So, you get this great Advent—and also teaching—image right up there front and center.

A few other things from Cassiodorus. He can’t resist taking a shot at heretics every once in a while. So, in verse 5 where it says that the compassion and love of God “are from everlasting,” he uses this to get a dig in at the Pelagians.  When we say they are “from everlasting” we mean from the very beginning and Cassiodorus takes this to remind us that God’s grace was always around from the beginning and that even before we begin to intend something, God’s grace is at work in it, aiding us and give us strength. It’s funny—Augustine doesn’t actually go anywhere near there on this verse so Cassiodorus ends up sounding more Augustinian than Augustine does.

Two more quick things before we move on… Cassiodorus picks up both verse six which is in our section and verse 10 which isn’t and does something interesting. If the speaker is the church—and that’s how he’s reading it—then the Church is reminding God and us that it contains sinners in its midst. It’s not pure, it’s not only full of perfect people. And here he was arguing against certain groups who did have that perspective. He says, no, any church group who says that they have to be totally pure isn’t listening here to the voice of the church itself who is confessing that it is a whole mix of folks of all sorts and conditions. We’re in no way just a club for the pure and the holy.

The other point is that riffing off of verse 4, he says, “There are two factors that make good Christians: the first that we believe that God is our Savior, the second that we must await his recompense with patience all our lives.” So—these are key things that make us who we are. First, we gotta have faith (Hey, that could be a song…oh…anyway). Second—waiting, patience, that’s an element here that this psalm brings up.

So—now that we’ve looked at the lectionary, we’ve looked at the whole acrostic thing, we’ve talked a bit about Cassiodorus, it’s time to get down to the psalm itself.

Thematic Reading

How do we read this psalm on this day?

I think the best approach is to take the hint from Cassiodorus but also the Latin Mass Propers. As I said before, the western church has historically featured this psalm in the chants for mass for this day. And what they focus on is the first four verses. It’s about trust and truth. The end of the psalm actually goes in some different directions. I’d read it differently if we were reading whole thing—but we’re not. And since we’re not, then trust and truth are really at the heart of what we’ve got here.

Trust is about promises. God has made promises. Specifically—God made promises to Israel. That’s the whole “righteous branch” thing that we’ve got going on in the first lesson. But, there’s also an implicit promise that’s near and dear to the heart of the psalmist: “let me not be humiliated, nor let my enemies triumph over me…Let the treacherous be disappointed in their schemes” There’s an implicit promise here that God is going to make sure that we come out on top. Well—on top of what, though? What enemies are we talking about, exactly? I think the psalmist would say literally enemies, like bad guys with swords or sneaky people with messed-up contracts. Readers invested in classical Christian Spirituality like John Cassian are going to say, no, he means the vices, those bad behaviors that we get tempted to do seemingly out of nowhere. Me, I’d rather go with Cassian on this one and I think that’s where the whole “truth” thing comes in. “Lead me in your truth and teach me.” Unless God has started handing out tactical advice, this sounds more like moral instruction to me rather than something that’s going to help us in an actual fight against real bad guys. “Lead me in your truth and teach me…He guides the humble in doing right and teaches his way to the lowly.” That doesn’t sound physical at all to me, and knowing that this psalm is an acrostic and therefore has some connections to the literate, philosophical, scribal culture, I think a moral reading makes a lot of sense. So—we’re probably not actually talking about physical enemies here even though the psalm starts off sounding a lot like it.

So, we trust in the help of God and we trust in his teaching—and, really, that’s where the help comes from. That’s the content of the help in a really important way. Verse 9 nails it. That’s the last one we get and we stop once we get it: “All the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness.” Right? That’s our plumb line. That’s our measure. That’s how we can tell when we’re in the groove with God’s will: if love and faithfulness are the means, the method, and the fruit, then it’s a pretty safe bet that we’re going the right direction. If what we’re up to compromises either of these—love or faithfulness, then, we should probably give it a long hard look.

This all relates to Advent because we are moving into a season of preparation as we do so, we are thinking about the promises that God has made. We trust in those promises even while we wait in order to see them fully realized in our life and in our reality. At the same time, as we recall what things Gd has done for us, we have some work we need to do as well.  Advent calls us to prepare by making ready for the coming of Christ both as the merciful incarnate Son of God and as the Judge who will judge us against his truth. As a result, this season calls us to pay special attention to the ways in which we walk, to inquire within ourselves if they are the paths we have been taught by God and to measure them against the definitive plumb lines of love and faithfulness.

So, to wrap it up: Psalm 25 is here to kick off Advent for us, just like it’s been doing for at least the last 1300 years in the Western liturgy. It’s about trusting in the promises of God, and it’s about learning the truth and carrying it out and the ultimate test of truth is rooted in the twin virtues of love and faithfulness.

Conclusion

So—that’s what we have to say today about Psalm 25, verses 1-9 as the psalm appointed for the First Sunday of Advent in Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary. Again, I’d like to give a big thank you to Greta for reading the psalm for us.  If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends about it and leave a review on iTunes. You can find more of my thoughts at www.StBedeproductions.com and follow me on Twitter (and there’s a link you can follow on my blog and in the show notes.) Until next time, I’m Derek Olsen for St. Bede Productions.

O come, let us get a grip

A piece appeared on the Covenant blog yesterday bemoaning the fact that we don’t have all of Psalm 95 printed in the Morning Prayer service. Personally, while I do have some sympathy for the position,  I don’t find this nearly the issue the author does. Here’s the thing…

  • Psalm 95 can always be used in place of the shortened version
  • We have the full version in Rite I language on pg. 146 for those of us who prefer that idiom
  • The Daily Office Lectionary mandates the use of the entire Psalm 95 on Fridays in Lent

To those points, let me add the following…

  • the shortened version acheives liturgically what the church intends with the Venite
  • the author offends against the American mashup currently found in Rite I by proclaiming it to have been accomplished with “two less offensive verses,” expanded with the comment, “There was no textual reason for this change, except perhaps to remove verses that might make one uncomfortable.”

First, the job of the Venite is to call us to prayer. This is what I’ve written previously on the Venite -as-invitatory:

At the heart of the concept of the invitatory is an invitation. The appointed texts urge those praying them to worship. Psalm 95 holds such a privileged place because it does it three times in rapid succession. It opens with a repeated call to worship in verses 1 and 2: “Come let us sing…let us shout for joy…Let us come…and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.” The call repeats in verse 6:  “Come, let us bow down.” The other element of Psalm 95 that made is so attractive is found at the end of verse 7: “Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!” Although this passage logically goes with the next section of the psalm which gives the rebellion of the people under Moses as an example of what not to do, the Rite II Venite ends here. In addition to the call to come and worship, we are reminded to also listen and take heed of what God is telling us. The Rite I Venite preferred not to include any of the condemnatory section, but swaps in additional encouragement to praise from Psalm 96 and retains the notion that God is also coming to meet us in our worship.

Thus, when you’re looking at intention, the Venite does what it’s supposed to do. I do agree that it is stronger with the rest of the Psalm, but it still gets the job done.

What touched a sore spot for me in the article is the notion that the verses introduced from Ps 96 are mild and inoffensive. The irony of this is that the day before this article came out, I found myself pausing and appreciating just those words in the Venite because they helped reinforce the Advent concept and because starting each day with a remembrance of the Last Judgement is a fine thing to do.

Because—let’s recall—that is what those verses from Psalm 96 are fundamentally about.

Yes, they depict creation joining us in our morning praise, but the reason that the whole creation rejoices is because God is coming to set all things right and to enforce justice, righteousness, and equity upon the earth. That’s Last Judgement material, and we (yes, we) who consume and hoard such a disproportionate percentage of the goods of creation, ought to remember and feel a certain amount of trepidation about the choices we make on a daily basis that reinforce inequity on a global scale that Christ will come to correct…

So, yes, I too, would prefer the full Psalm 95 (and actually have it programmed that way in the breviary throughout Lent). However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the shorter version; it does what it’s supposed to do. But—and this is probably my main point—if you believe that the verses from Psalm 96 are “less offensive,” you’re not reading them carefully enough.

 

St. Augustine’s Prayer Book: Call for Corrections

I received word today from Forward Movement that they are getting ready to do a reprint of the St. Augustine’s Prayer Book that David Cobb and I revised. Before the presses start running, though, they wanted to make check if there were any uncaught typos or oddities that ought to be corrected in the next version.

Have you seen anything?

And, no, this isn’t the opportunity to revisit items put in or taken out, but to make sure that what is there is there correctly…

Advent

I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving and a good start to Advent. I’ve got some posts in the works that are proceeding in fits and starts. Barring actual substance, then, here are some manuscript pictures!

Advent puts us in mind of the Second Coming and the judgement; suitably, here’s a rendition of the Last Judgement complete with the selected “sheep” at Christ’s right hand and the “goats” being led off by devils, all surmounted by Christ clearly displaying his five wounds from the Carrow Psalter (Walters, W.34 first discussed here):

The Last Judgement

Carrow Psalter f.30v

 

The kalendar page for December is pretty typical for a thirteenth-century kalendar, but does have some items to remark on. Here’s the full page:

Kalendar for December

Carrow Psalter, f.41v

Like most December kalendars, it’s rather spare since Advent was a penitential season. There are a couple of points to make on the feasts at the top of the page…

First feasts of December

Carrow Psalter f.41v detail

I’m at a loss concerning the bishop being celebrated on December 4th. I’d expect St. Osmund or St. Barabara here ordinarily; I’ll have to poke into this one a bit more… I was initially trying to read “Ambrose” here and we do have the “A”, an abbreviated m/n (that’s the line over top the “a”), and a likely “b”, but nothing else fits. And it’s on the wrong day. In any case, the note in red next to his name indicates that this is the last possible day for the first Sunday of Advent.

Nicholas and the Conception of the BVM get gold lettering; these are major feasts—I’d expect nine lessons and special propers. The Octave of St. Andrew falls between them.

A bit lower down, we see one of the liturgical entries that will survive into the first BCP:

Middle feasts of December

Carrow Psalter, f.41v detail

The entry on December 16th is the “O Sapientia” that signals the start of the O Antiphons. Again, note that the sequence begins on the 16th, not the 17th (the now standard Roman Catholic date) meaning that the Marian O Antiphon that we find in the Sarum tradition was likely included in the sequence used in this region. Of course, this makes me wonder how widely this usage was found. I should probably check some German, mid-French, and Italian souerces of similar date and compare…

The St. Bede Psalmcast: Episode 1

I’m working on a book project right now. It’s two-volume set for Liturgical Press. The first volume is a straight-forward historical work on the interpretation of the Psalms in the early Medival West with a particular emphasis on Cassiodorus. His three volume commentary was the central path through which monks of the first millennium learned the Psalms, learned how to read Scripture, and gained a basic understanding of the liberal arts. The working title is The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Interpretation of the Psalms in the Early Medieval West.

The second volume is an explicitly confessional work that will engage how Cassiodorus and the Church Fathers interpreted the Psalms and what the modern Church can learn from them. How can a contemporary Christian read alongside the Fathers and still take into account the riches provided by the scientific study of the Scriptures and modern approaches to biblical interpretation? The working title for this volume is Psalming Christ: Learning to Pray the Psalms with Cassiodorus and the Church Fathers.

Now—while I was working on my dissertation and the work on prayer book spirituality (coming out early 2016; Scott Gunn swears to it!) I found sharing what I was writing on the blog to be a great help. I’m not at the writing stage yet, though–I’m still doing preliminary research, and it’s easy to let that stuff slip to the side ahead of more imminent therefore urgent deadlines. So, I’ve decided to go the public accountable route again with my reasearch by means of a podcast. I don’t know if this will work; I don’t know if it will last. But it’s a start!

I’ll be looking at the psalms as scheduled by the Revised Common Lectionary. I’m hoping to put out an episode every two weeks, posting on Tuesday before the upcoming Sunday. The format is pretty simple: I’ll look at the lectionary context, the general interpretive context, and historical readings (with a focus on Cassiodorus for obvious reasons), then provide a thematic reading that tries to pull it all together.

Of course, I owe a big thank you to Kyle Oliver, Holli Powell, and Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale for their advice on putting even a basic podcast like this one together.

So—without further ado: the St. Bede Psalmcast

https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep001-ps-25-yrc-advent1

Thanks again to my crack Production Assistant Greta for reading the psalm! I’ll be looking for other readers for other psalms as things develop…

Here is the link to the Gradual Albiense, the French chant book I mentioned with the decorated page (which is also the feature illustration of the track).

Here is a link to the psalm in the Utrecht Psalter with its illustration. (Yes, the umbering is different. We’ll talk about that next time…)

I mention iTunes—it’s not on iTunes yet. Hopefully that’ll occur at some point in the near future!

The First SCLM Meeting of the New Triennium

Just a brief note on why things have been so silent the last couple of days… We did indeed have the first meeting of the Standing Commission on Liturgy & Music for the new triennium. I won’t bore you with trying to list out details; the minutes should be up in the not too distant future. I am happy to say that I am no longer secretary!! This is good news for me as doing the minutes was always quite a chore as my way of doing them is very verbose and therefore time consuming.

What I will give you is a few quick impressions.

First, the SCLM is larger now than it was before. General Convention expanded the size of the group; we now have 5 bishops, 5 priests, and 10 laity. (I suppose deacons would have been in the clergy spot with the priests, but we have none.) With the increase we have a better representation of church musicians than we had last triennium. I’m happy to see that.

Second, due to the timing of the meeting, we were episco-poor; only one of our bishop members was present with us. It’s hard to have a full feel of the group with several important members missing.

Third, despite the absence of most of the bishops, I found this gathering to have a different spirit around the table than last triennium. There was some real positive energy and a sense of hope about our work together. Little “work” gets done at these initial meetings. Rather there is a lot of organization in order to move towards doing work and also getting a sense of the individuals around the table and how the group dynamics will flow.

Fourth, needless to say, there is a diversity of opinion around the table. I do think that we are starting with the right questions; we’ll see how the process develops.

Short and vague, I know, but I’m still processing and waiting to see how things shake out.

Sarum Rite Material Update: The Risby Ordinal

If you are interested in historical English liturgy, then you ought to be checking for new material over on Dr. William Renwick’s Sarum Rite page on a regular basis. The number of sound files as well as text/music files are truly staggering.

One of the relatively new items definitely deserves a highlight. John Hackney has done a transcription of the revised Sarum old ordinal (the Risby Ordinal) found in BL Harley 1001.  As much as I love and respect W. H. Frere, his edition of this text was and is simply untenable. The work presented here is terrific and has a great set of footnotes accompanying it as well.

If medieval English liturgy is your thing, be sure to download it.

Floating along with St. Brendan

Now—in something completely unrelated to prayer book revision plans, I have a new post up at Godspace. This one is a musing around the concept of pilgrimage, and my way into it is a brief meditation on the Voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator. If you’ve not encuntered this text before, I’d urge you to do so. It’s quite fascinating. I have a feeling I will drill into it quite a bit deeper at some point in time.

But that time is not now.

Too many other plates in the air at the moment…

Prayer Book Revision Plan: The Three Essentials

The now infamous prayer book revision resolution from General Convention directs the Standing Commission on Liturgy & Music (SCLM) to : “prepare a plan for the comprehensive revision of the current Book of Common Prayer and present that plan to the 79th General Convention.”

Note that. We’re not directed to do any prayer book revision; we’re simply asked to prepare a plan that will be (no doubt) debated and acted upon at the next General Convention.

The second resolve is particularly interesting to me. It asks us to be informed by seven different forms of diversity found within the church: “That such a plan for revision utilize the riches of our Church’s liturgical, cultural, racial, generational, linguistic, gender and ethnic diversity in order to share common worship.”

This language neither prejudices us nor gives us a whole lot of direction. When I took up the “Holy Women, Holy Men” (HWHM) material, diversity was mandated but was not being tracked or quantified in any way leading to a more lopsided collection than had been intended. If diversity is a major component here, identifying and quantifying it is a central task in order to be thoroughly and properly inclusive.

The third resolve touches on the field I know from my day job as an IT professional (no, I’m not a priest, professor, full-time blogger or any number of other things that people often assume; I have a regular 9-5 corporate job…): “that the plan for revision take into consideration the use of current technologies which provide access to a broad range of liturgical resources.”

At the same time there is also a hymnal revision resolution that essentially asks a similar thing with fewer words: “That the 78th General Convention direct the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) to prepare a plan for the comprehensive revision of the Hymnal 1982.”

There are a whole bunch of things that need to be done. But as I read, review, and pray about these resolutions, there are three things that keep returning to my mind. These are what I consider the three essential tasks that we have to get right before we can do either plan right. These aren’t particuularly sexy, interesting, or fun. But they are necessary.

I’d go so far as to say that they are critical: If we fail on these, we will fail on the process as a whole.

 

We Must Have a Baseline

This section could equally be entitled “The Plural of Anecdote is not ‘Data.'”

Most people who care enough to even think about prayer book revision are likely to have strong opinions on the matter. Most of us—myself included—have an idea of What The Church Wants or, perhaps more important, What The Church Needs. No surprise, then, that What The Church Needs dovetails nicely with what we think and we even have some examples of parishes to back it up: “X parish did Y and their numbers and vitality went up Z% over a period from A to B! We all need to do that!” Or, barring useful examples, we like to appeal broadly to what is going on in the church based on our idea of what is going on: “Everybody is experimenting with liturgy these days—those old forms just don’t work/Nobody I know likes any of that experimental crap, we all just want the prayer book.”

If we intend to engage in something as important as this process, then guesses aren’t good enough. It’s not even good enough for people on the SCLM to have a general level of agreement about how things should go.

We don’t need anecdotes or general feelings: we need data. We need to know what is being done now.

Are we currently seeing a mass explosion of experimental liturgies as is claimed by some? Are we seeing churches forced to draw on resources outside of our tradition because our current resources are clearly inadequate? Do we see most churches quite happily using the authorized texts with a small body of experimental outliers? What consistent alterations are we seeing across the church? (I’m looking at you, list of patriarchs in Prayer C…) What languages are we seeing used in worship? Are we seeing a use of monolingual worship, bilingual worship, multilingual worship? How is culture showing up in how people are worshipping now?

My proposal would be to literally see what the church is doing now. The way we would do that is by requesting that every Episcopal parish across every one of our dioceses email (or snail mail in locations where email is not possible) the SCLM with seven actual bulletins. The SCLM will select a particular Sunday from every season of the church year and ask that the bulletins for all services for the selected Sundays be sent in as well as a bulletin from a Principal Feast. The results would then be tabulated in a publicly viewable database: type of service, source for readings, hymns, additional ceremonies, anthems, Eucharistic Prayers, any significant additions or omissions, how many people were in each service on those given days, etc. This would give us a place to start and a sense of what the church is actually up to.

This is the data we need to begin understanding the true shape of our diversity and to know what proper kinds of questions we need to be asking. If we actually take the time to do this right, we won’t have to guess or extrapolate wildly from anecdotes: we’ll have something hard to go back to.

 

We Must Give The People Their Voices

Now—a baseline is not enough.

We need to hear from everyone who cares enough to have an opinion on the matter. What works? What doesn’t work? What needs to be changed? What doesn’t need to change?

We need to crowd-source this thing.

Surveys may be helpful here—but surveys are not enough. Furthermore, surveys are rarely truly neutral instruments. If a given person or group of people are crafting questions and limiting possible answers, then they have a certain amount of control over the responses they receive. People passionate on issues may, knowingly or not, craft the questions to elicit the answer that they want to see. (And that goes for complaints I’ve heard about the hymnal survey…)

We need free-form opportunities for input. Let me give you a for-instance… The parish the girls and I have been attending uses Prayer C a fair amount. I now have some extended experience of praying with it. Based on that experience, I have a few constructive comments on how it could be made better. (I’ll leave aside the whole “dialogue” thing for the moment which I think is theologically problematic–that would take this post in a whole other direction I don’t want to go in now, so don’t start…)

  • The beginning part “fragile earth, island home…” does sound dated. I’d like to see the concept retained but perhaps with language having a more timeless feel.
  • The Patriarch Problem needs to be handled better. Inserting names of spouses/concubines/sex partners of the various patriarchs is not the best way to do this. I’d much rather see a parallel list of OT Matriarchs: “God of Deborah, Ruth, and Judith” perhaps.
  • I’ve come to really dislike “We celebrate his death and resurrection as we await the day of his coming.” Part of my Eucharistic theology is the idea that the reference to “…until he comes again” is fulfilled almost immediately when we experience and receive the sacrament. Jesus literally comes again to us in that moment in and through the bread and wine. The idea of “coming again” does relate to the great consummation at the end of the age when Jesus returns in power and great glory, but is not and should not be limited to that moment! The use of the temporal marker “day” here bothers me because it unnecessarily restricts and limits the kind of “coming” that we are referring to.

These are the kinds of thoughts that we need to capture. You can’t do this on a survey. These kinds of comments need to be publicly made and read and evaluated.

Furthermore, we need some crowd-based methods of indicating opinion on said opinions. I’m thinking of something like and up-vote/down-vote system that will allow responses that receive the most reactions to flow towards the top so they can be read and responded to by more people.

There are plenty of good web technologies out there designed to enable this kind of feedback. We need to pick one and then use it to actually listen to what the church is saying—not just the little circle of people who happen to be on the SCLM for a given triennium. No, everybody is not going to agree. But having watched the performance of Episcopal social media during General Convention and the web-casted TREC meeting leads me to believe that there is a synergy that erupts when we all start talking together. As far as I’m concerned, one of the great structure discoveries for me of last GC was the rise of the House of Twitter. We need to leverage that kind of excitement and energy.

 

We Must Show The People Accountability Through Transparency

One of the biggest complaints about recent SCLM work, and I’m thinking specifically about Enriching Our Worship (EOW) and HWHM here, is that something goes missing between the stated principles and the final products. As Matthew Olver has noted in his on-going pieces on EOW (part 1 and part 2 with a forthcoming part 3), the original documents leading up to EOW contained this passage:

In Christian liturgy, the truth of the Gospel which proclaims Jesus as the Son of God the Father and as Lord is essential. The terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Lord” are retained as expressive of that truth.

But, as we know, those terms were conspicuously absent from the final product.

Too, throughout the HWHM experiment there were issues regarding how completely the people included within the resource met the published criteria, particularly in terms of time limits, recognition across the church, and evidence of faith commitment (including baptismal status). Over time the criteria came to include escape clauses so that several of these could be dispensed with as desired.

I think that we as a commission have earned ourselves a credibility problem.

If we solicit feedback—particularly the two forms I’ve indicated above—then we need to bear fruit that demonstrates that we have taken it seriously and acted upon it.

When it came to to make revisions to the narratives going into Great Cloud of Witnesses, my committee and I read through the detailed comments left on the blog posts. I weighed them carefully as I made my own edits. I didn’t include all of them, but I certainly used the majority of them.

We need to demonstrate that this kind of engagement is happening and has happened.

Liturgies developed should be developed publicly. We, the church, need to be able to see them, reflect about them, use them (under proper parameters, of course), and comment about our experiences with them. We need to see that our thoughts and suggestions have at least been considered even if they are not accepted. (And if they are not, some clear appeal to the established principles and criteria would be meet and right!) We need to see that the liturgies being developed do, in fact, reflect any criteria and principles adopted to guide the process.

Something like Mediawiki, the engine that drives Wikipedia (free and open-source), is ideal for this. The liturgies can be seen, we can see the edits and version history, and the talk pages could provide space for reflection linked to but separate from the trial content.

Adam Wood has proposed something similar driven by similar concerns. (Here’s a Wired write-upon another of his projects if you don’t know him.) [I personally think that the ultimate end of our liturgical endeavors should be encoded in TEI XML for easy conversion into human-readable documents and web pages or machine-readable JSON for web and mobile apps, but that’s another debate.]

Using such a system offers transparent accountability. We know who did what when with what theology under which principles, and we will have an opportunity to make public comment about it.

So—those are the three essential things I think we need to incorporate into whatever plans for the prayer book and hymnal get offered to the next General Convention:

  • We need actual data on how the prayer book and hymnal are (or aren’t) being used right now
  • We need an effective vehicle for the church to communicate and deliberate on what we use now
  • We need an effective vehicle for the clear and accountable construction and dissemination of new liturgical experiments

These may not be the sexy topics like inclusive language or what to do with Confirmation, but they represent essential first steps to do the discussions right.

The Historical Background of Ezra and Nehemiah

If you’ve been following along in the Daily Office, our first readings at Morning Prayer have been coming from the historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Now—if your Ancient Near Eastern history is a little sketchy (and there’s no shame in admitting that), I ran across a great refresher over the weekend.

One of my favorite podcasts (along with The Collect Call, of course!) is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. His latest episode is the beginning of a series that tackles the Persian Wars and, in particular, the famous Battle of Thermopylae. However, Dan always provides an abundant amount of context to help you understand what was really at stake and how the various players got to where they were. The first episode in the King of Kings series is a great refresher (or first time around) on the major ANE players, and gives an entertaining (and quite accurate as far as I can tell) account of how the Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, and Persians fit together, including some helpful references to how and where these peoples show up in the Old Testament.

If you’re looking for a big-picture sweep of what was going on in the time of the Major Prophets through Ezra-Nehemiah, I heartily recommend it!