Category Archives: Spirituality

All Souls Thoughts

I do have a draft of On Memorizing Scripture, III written but it’s not finished yet; ought to be up in the next day or two as nothing else is going on…

Today, however, it’s worth saying a few things about All Souls…

If we talk about a Baptismal Ecclesiology and take it seriously, than All Souls—alongside All Saints—ought to be a huge day in our church. Because this is a celebration of baptismal ecclesiology on display. The vast majority of the baptized sleep in the earth. But, as our Proper Preface says, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended…” As fellow witness with us, closer to the resurrection than we, this is our day to celebrate that while we miss their physical absence, we remember their spiritual presence alongside us. This is a core part of our faith: that the whole company of the baptized is joined together in the Body of Christ, hid with Christ in God.

One of the things that makes celebrating this day hard is, ironically, the appropriation of All Saints’ Day. Since Vatican II, I suppose, Protestant churches like the Lutheran one I grew up in marked All Saints Sunday by reading the necrology—the list of those who had died in the previous year. In a Lutheran context, I suppose that makes sense with Luther’s emphasis on simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) and the Augsburg Confessions rejection of Saint as a category outside of the general meaning of “baptized believer.”

The proto-catechism in the BCP doesn’t make it any easier either, noting that “The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.” (BCP 862)

Classically, liturgically, there has been a distinction between “saints” and “souls.” All Saints got white vestments; All Souls got black. The saints are rejoicing in the nearer presence of God now; the souls are sleeping in the earth or else on a path to purification since Matthew—relaying Christ’s words—records “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God…” The saints are the already; the souls are the not yet.

And yet who wants to see their family’s dead as the not yet? Commemorated on the day for sinners rather than saints? The emotional weight makes this a challenging topic to handle with both pastoral and theological integrity. (And, no, “pastoral” is not cover for “bad theology” despite its usual deployment…)

I know I’m not a saint; bring on the black vestments! Put me on the All Souls’ list! (Speaking rhetorically—hopefully it’ll be a while before that’ll be necessary, deo volente.) But—remember me as one of the baptized.

There’s a scramble each year by most clergy and parish administrators to pull together the list of names to be read in the parish necrology. And this makes we wish for a recovery of the concept of a Guild of All Souls, a group of intercessors at the parish level who pray for the baptized of the parish before the sacrament. Who pray for the whole parish—those above ground as well as those below.

We honor the baptismal ecclesiology of our church and prayer book when we enact it in our practices, rather than giving it lip-service for causes.

Especially these things weigh on me this year amongst the Covid pandemic and the protests against souls lost because of racism. So, I invite you to remember the baptized, the living and the dead.

Here are the forms for the Office for the Dead that I put up before.

Here is a book I discovered the other day on Project Canterbury that also contains Anglican resources for burial and remembering the whole company of the baptized which also contains Anglican-style Offices for the Dead.

Clarification on Daily Office Page

Given the comments I’ve received, let me clarify the point of the Daily Office page that I put up yesterday…

The purpose of this page is not a replacement of the St. Bede’s Breviary. Nor am I trying to impose my choices on others.

A lot of church web sites use WordPress. Also, many parishes have a tradition of praying the offices—or at least Morning Prayer—in a particular way. This plugin will allow the easy inclusion of the Daily Office done their way on their websites. A dashboard for the site administrator enables them to tailor it to their local practice.

The plugin uses a shortcode that will let the users choose how to use it—anything from a separate static post for any given office to a page containing them all that automatically updates each day.

Hopefully that clarifies things a bit…

Lesser Feasts & Fasts, 2018 as a CSV

I’m working up several things to show you all, but none of them are quite ready yet… I keep writing things, but they’re not quite finished yet, and then life happens, so several things are in the queue.

This is an easy one, though… I was asked about a csv file with the current contents of Lesser Feasts & Fasts, 2018. I do have such a file and am sharing it here. Naturally, it meets my needs, providing the month, day, title, and collects  (Rite I and II) for each liturgical observance of Optional Observance. (I.e., it contains no Sundays or Holy Days, only those observances falling within section 5 of the BCP’s Calendar breakdown.) Nor does it contain biographies or biblical lections as the latter are intended for Eucharists, not as replacements for the Daily Office in-course lections which only give way to Holy Days.

As is well known by anyone who has read these pages for any amount of time, the current Episcopal concept of sanctity is rootless, fragmented, and ultimately incoherent. I literally laughed-out-loud  when last I ran across the flavor text at Church Publishing for LLF2018 which informs the buyer that: “Lesser Feasts and Fasts has not been updated since 2006. This new edition, adopted at the 79th General Convention (resolution A065), fills that need.” Both of these lines are quite incorrect.

In the first line, LFF has received a lot of work since 2006—it’s just that none of the items produced has satisfied the complex and contradictory demands of both houses of  General Convention. And Liza and I have the files and correspondence to prove it!

In the second, LFF2018 was not “adopted” flatly as the text suggests but is in a period of trial use. Furthermore, the current text is not what was proposed, but is a mash-up up several offerings that actually miss the point of what Liza and the sanctoral team was trying to accomplish with what they did submit.

What is an improvement here is the overall quality of the collects. Not all of them received the treatment they needed, but a few of us did manage to do some solid work on several of them that needed some serious repair. In particular, I tackled many of the saints in the first millennium when I was overhauling things for Great Cloud of Witnesses, and then addressed several more as final drafts of LFF2018 were going before the Legislative Committee at GC. So—I’d like to see more attention paid to the collects here.

Enough chatter—here’s the file: Episcopal_LFF2018_DAO

Daily Office Stats: Observations on Origins

Following up on the previous post, I ended it with a data-dump so it’s only proper to spend a bit of time talking about what those figures actually mean… Here’s a roll-up table of the main findings looking at the biblical books specified by season in the Ordo XIII trajectory of the Daily Office that we encounter from the early eighth century through the eleventh century:

Yes, the word counts are anachronistic as this is reckoning NRSV words, not the Vulgate, but they wouldn’t be radically different. I’m allowing it for the sake of comparison later on…

What this chart depicts is if the listed readings were all apportioned equally, how long it would take to read through the material intended for each season.  This is unlikely to reflect reality because of several factors.

First, biblical readings were handled differently in different times and places within the Night Office. Usually they were read during the first nocturn which was usually the only nocturn on ferial days. On Sundays and other feast days, the biblical lesson occupied the first nocturn, the second, and third contain material pertaining to the feast. During the summer, not all monasteries had full readings during the first nocturn given the shorter length of the night. Alternatively, Ælfric praises his monks for maintaining a full three-lesson course during the summer (LME 80). If Matins were roughly the same amount of time each day—that is if the monks were roused at the same time of night—then more time could be devoted to biblical reading on the single nocturn ferias than on the feast days; roughly a third of the amount of in-course reading would occur on these days than the others.

Now—the object of this current series is to look at the contemporary two-year Daily Office lectionary, not the early medieval one. However, if one did have the time and inclination to try and figure out exactly how much time was devoted to these readings and to figure out an exact amount of how much of this biblical material could reasonably be read within the service and what would be relegated to the refectory, this is how you’d do it…

  • Identify a place, preferably San Gall/Reichenau given the wealth of surviving material from them online
  • Calculate the word counts of the 2nd Nocturn sermones and the 3rd Nocturn homiliae from Paul the Deacon’s homiliary
  • Compare the relative lengths of sermones vs. homiliae and determine if they are roughly equal
  • Allot roughly that amount of space for a 1st Nocturn biblical reading
  • Calculate a balance of 1 nocturn vs. 3 nocturn days within given seasons from the local kalendars
  • Start with an assumption that on 1 nocturn mornings, the entire amount calculated for 1st/2nd/3rd Nocturn readings would be focused on biblical reading
  • Look at the surviving Bibles/biblical portion manuscripts to see what kinds of chapter divisions they were using and see if these fit the counts in any way shape or form. (I’d think you’d want to work in some math from De Bruyne’s classic Sommaires, divisions et
    rubriques de la Bible latine to help you out here…)

Ok, enough of that… Given the biblical coverage laid out in Ordo XIII, how much of the Bible is actually read in the Daily Office each year? The full OT is listed plus supplemental contents from the Apocrypha (or, the full OT as they thought of it…), but only 25.4% of the New Testament. The Gospels and the Pauline epistles including Hebrews are missing.  These would be the materials covered in Mass, ideally, but we’re not including that lectionary in this reckoning. So:

Daily Office Stats: Bible & Origins

Christian liturgical communities founded themselves upon the ceaseless and cyclical repetition of Scripture. In the Christian West, our insight into exactly how they intended this to occur is not terribly clear until we move into the first half of the 8th century. The Ordines Romani were the liturgical instructions intended to clarify how the many liturgical books were supposed to relate to one another within monastic communities. Ordo XIII, which appears in several forms until the unifying Romano-German Pontifical in the 10th century, presents a scheme that solidifies a norm in the West: The Psalter is prayed through every week in the Office; the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles are read during Mass in the yearly cycle; the entire rest of Scripture is read each year during the Night Office (Matins).

The listing in the 8th century Ordo XIIIa is rather rough but apportions the various books according to a mix of liturgical seasons and secular months. Thus:

  • The Heptateuch (i.e., Genesis through Judges) is read from Septuagesima (the three week pre-Lenten period) until two weeks before Easter (i.e., Passion Sunday)
  • Jeremiah is read from Passion Sunday until Maundy Thursday
  • The Triduum has its own specific out-of-course readings but includes a lot of Lamentations (this will eventually become the Tenebrae Office…)
  • Easter starts with the Acts of the Apostles, then the 7 General or Catholic Letters of the New Testament, and then the Book of Revelation is read until the Octave of Pentecost
  • From the Octave of Pentecost the Historical Books (the Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles) until the first Sunday of August
  • In August are read the “Books of Solomon”—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the Wisdom of Solomon (likely Sirach as well?)
  • In September are read Job, Judith, Esther, and Esdras (the ones in the Apocrypha; Ezra and Nehemiah are probably included in the high summer History read)
  • In October are read the books of the Maccabees
  • November is given to Ezekiel, Daniel, and the 12 Minor Prophets
  • In December/Advent the prophet Isaiah is read

This is the kind of pattern that we see in sources throughout the medieval period. For instance, in Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham written around the year 1000 we see this same pattern repeated (LME 70-77). Ælfric, of course, also includes the responsaries that ought to be sung at these times as well. He concludes his rehearsal of this material with the following note:

“And be it known that, in the course of a year, the entire canon [of Scripture] ought to be read in church, but because we are lazy and slothful servants we read in the refectory whatever we do not cover in church (LME 78).”

This is an important note for two reasons. First, all of these lists are very general because the course of reading each year varied due to the placement of Easter and because of the many saints’ days that interrupted the normal course. Second, by placing the rest of the readings during mealtime in the refectory, an outlet was provided if the full amount of reading was not or could not be completed in church during the time allotted for the Office.

And that’s the key piece here: time. Any amount of reading can be covered given time. But—as we’ll see—time is the chief limiting factor that shapes the potential and possibilities of Daily Office lectionaries, especially those that hold to this classical ideal of reading the entire canon in a year.

In order to consider this subject properly, let’s begin with a quick look at the scope of Scripture itself. What exactly is there to be covered?

As we well know, Scripture is divided into books, chapters, and verses. Honestly, using these as statistical measures to look at reading lengths and reading coverage are of limited usefulness… They’re uneven. There is no standardized length to a chapter or a verse. The earlier we go, the more the problem is compounded too since the chapters we are familiar with now were standardized in the 13th century and verses in the 16th. It is far safer, then, to look at word counts rather than chapter or verse counts.

Since the point of this series is to look at the Daily Office lectionary readings now, I’ll use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible as a base text. (I can do the same comparisons with the RSV, KJV, and even throw in the Douay-Rheims which we medievalists like to use as an English language proxy for the Vulgate, but I’ll start with the NRSV for now.) A quick glance at the numbers shows why working by chapters or verses yield inaccurate results:

 

A histogram of the canon as a whole shows that most chapters have somewhere between 15 to 30 verses. (Two outliers, Psalm 119 with its 176 verses and 4 Esdras 7 with its 140 verses have been thrown out…)

A Pareto graph confirms the wide distribution; 80% of biblical chapters are between 11 to 38 verses long which doesn’t give us a great basis for fair comparison.

To say it another way, while the average and the middle number of the set (mean & median ) are pretty close to one another, there’s a significant positive skew to the data set (i.e., there are a lot of big numbers that pull the values around) but the real key is the size of the standard deviation showing us that there’s so much variation in the data set that an average won’t give us the whole story.

We get very similar data when we look at number of words per verse. Again, a strong positive skew with wide variation (standard deviation of 10.5):

At the end of the day, the most appropriate measurement to use is the number of words in the reading. This is a far more reliable metric than chapter or verse because of the wide variation in what those can mean. Furthermore, if we are measuring our biblical readings by the word, we can also associate it to the length of the Daily Office itself which (clearly) has neither chapters nor verses, but is made up of lots of words. Finally, this will also give us a reliable time calculation. Based on a typical speaking speed, we can posit a reading rate of around 150 words per minute—perhaps even dropping it as low as 130 words per minute if we consider a prayerful speed.

So…to jump back to the starting material, what sort of a breakdown does the early medieval period offer? Because we’re working at a general book level, I’m going to break it down in terms of books, chapters, words, and # of days because I’ve always suspected (but never done the math) that’s there some weirdness baked into this system.

Septuagesima to 2nd Week before Easter 49 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Genesis 50          1,533            36,145
Exodus 40          1,213            30,199
Leviticus 27             859            22,780
Numbers 36          1,288            29,896
Deuteronomy 34             959            26,470
Joshua 24             658            17,283
Judges 21             618            17,557
Totals 232          7,128          180,330
Per Day 4.73             145              3,680 24.5 Reading Minutes
2nd Week before Easter to Maundy Thursday 11 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Jeremiah 52          1,364            40,167
Per Day 4.73             124              3,652 24.3 Reading Minutes
Because Triduum/Easter Octave are wacky I’ll skip for now…
Octave of Easter through the octave of Pentecost 49 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Acts 28          1,007            23,393
James 5             108              2,324
1 Peter 5             105              2,468
2 Peter 3                61              1,546
1 John 5             105              2,516
2 John 1                13                  305
3 John 1                15                  313
Jude 1                25                  620
Revelation 22             405            11,405
Totals 71          1,844            44,890
Per Day 1.45                38                  916 6.1 Reading Minutes
Octave of Pentecost to the First Sunday of August 49 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
1 Samuel 31             810            23,701
2 Samuel 24             695            19,278
1 Kings 22             816            22,765
2 Kings 25             719            21,845
1 Chronicles 29             942            18,414
2 Chronicles 36             822            24,321
Ezra 10             280              6,596
Nehemiah 13             406              9,727
Totals 190          5,490          146,647
Per Day 3.88             112              2,993 20.0 Reading Minutes
The First Sunday of August until September 28 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Proverbs 31             915            14,236
Ecclesiastes 12             222              5,173
Song of Solomon 8             117              2,520
Ecclesiasticus 51          1,408            26,763
Wisdom 19             436            10,118
Totals 121          3,098            58,810
Per Day 4.32             111              2,100 14.0 Reading Minutes
The First Sunday of September until October 35 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Job 42          1,070            17,240
Judith 16             340            10,312
Esther 10             167              5,329
1 Esdras 9             463            11,483
4 Esdras 16             944            22,304
Totals 93          2,984            66,668
Per Day           2.66                85              1,905 12.7 Reading Minutes
The First Sunday of October until November 28 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
1 Maccabees 16             924            21,765
2 Maccabees 15             555            15,907
3 Maccabees 7             228              7,038
4 Maccabees 18             482            10,567
Totals 56          2,189            55,277
Per Day           2.00          78.18        1,974.18 13.2 Reading Minutes
The First Sunday of November until Advent 28 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Ezekiel 48          1,273            36,151
Daniel 12             357            10,891
Amos 9             147              4,017
Habakkuk 3                56              1,334
Haggai 2                38              1,060
Hosea 14             197              4,884
Joel 3                72              1,833
Jonah 4                48              1,291
Malachi 4                55              1,703
Micah 7             105              2,926
Nahum 3                47              1,101
Obadiah 1                21                  612
Zechariah 14             211              5,927
Zephaniah 3                53              1,522
Totals 127          2,680            75,252
Per Day           4.54          95.71        2,687.57 17.9 Reading Minutes
Advent (First Sunday to Christmas Eve Day) 26 days
Book Chapters  Verses  Words
Isaiah 66          1,292            34,661
Per Day 2.54                50              1,333 8.9 Reading Minutes

Daily Office Lectionary Stats: Introduction

Every once in a while, questions pop up around the internet concerning the Daily Office Lectionary. These questions tend to be things like:

  • How much of the Bible actually gets read?
  • What parts get skipped?
  • Why do we skip the parts we skip?

These are all very good questions.

I started to address some of these, particularly drilling into the “why we skip what we skip” at the narrative level in my short-lived YouTube series Liturgical Look Forward.

However, I’ve been seeing more of these questions raised, particularly the bigger picture, full-content, book-level questions recently.

In the next few weeks, I shall tackle these questions directly, and answer them from a statistical point of view. We’ll begin with:

  • An overview of the scope with questions like:
    • exactly how much Bible is there, and
    • what’s the best way to get a handle on it?
  • Daily Office Lectionary, Year 1
    • What are we reading?
    • How much of it do we read?
    • What repetitions are there?
    • What is the actual percentage of Bible Coverage?
  • Daily Office Lectionary, Year 2
    • What are we reading?
    • How much of it do we read?
    • What repetitions are there?
    • What is the actual percentage of Bible Coverage?

My plan is to continue into how this lectionary compares with other Daily Office lectionaries including:

  • The 1943 Daily Office Lectionary
  • The 1928 Daily Office Lectionary
  • The English Proposed 1922 Lectionary
  • etc.

I confess to having an ulterior motive here…

The high school where I have been happily teaching for the past two years—and where my elder daughter attended—has closed. As a result, I find myself back on the job market. While I loved teaching in that environment, a majority-minority Catholic all-girls high school that mixed suburban and urban girls across the ethnic and economic spectrum together—the pay sucked. As we’re facing a daughter heading into college next year, I’m looking to head back into the corporate world, and am brushing up on my data analysis and manipulation skills.

What does that mean for you? It means statistics and pretty pictures! So—stay tuned for those. I am also hoping to get back into the blogging and writing. (it’s amazing how much free time teaching high school all day sucks up what with planning and grading and all…) The Second Series of the Prayer Book Studies series is on the cusp of being done, and once it is, I am trying to get solid progress going forward on the long-promised Psalming Christ!

Revised Trial Offices for the Dead

The trial Offices for the Dead that I posted have been seeing some use, and I have received feedback on them. I’ve finally incorporated that feedback into a new pdf version which I’m calling Revision 1.1.

Here are the changes contained in this version:

  • Venite antiphon changed from “O come, let us worship” to “: Come let us adore him.” as in prayer book MP
  • “Rest eternal * grant unto them, O LORD/And let light perpetual * shine upon them.” changed from two bicola to one: “Rest eternal grant unto them, O LORD: */And let light perpetual shine upon them.”
  • Lord’s Prayer offered in Traditional language alongside Contemporary.
  • Minor punctuation corrections
  • In MP2/EP2 “soul of your servant” for “soul of thy servant” in Collect for Recent Dead
  • All occurrences of “LORD” regularized as “LORD”
  • MP2/EP2 Prayer for the Church “eternal” regularized as “ETERNAL”
  • Rite I versions added by request

The major item is the last (Rite I versions added by request). While I prefer to use Rite I when I pray, I recognize that it is not currently the norm across the Episcopal Church. My initial concern was that If I released these in Rite I, they might be seen as by and for a niche community rather than the church at large. 

However, one of the priests who was providing me with feedback said that she and her community would prefer to have them in Rite I. So–it made sense to include them in the revised form.

This PDF groups the contemporary language offices first–Morning & Evening Prayer-Form 1, then Morning & Evening Prayer-Form 2, then the traditional language offices: Morning & Evening Prayer-Form 1, then Morning & Evening Prayer-Form 2

If you do use these, please do give me some feedback on your experience of using them—what works, what doesn’t, what could be added or deleted.

PDF of the trial Offices for the Dead

At the request of some folks who had seen the previous post on my Offices for the Dead, I have compiled them in a PDF.

This contains an introduction that briefly introduces the history and purpose of the devotion (largely adapted from the blog post below)  and also offers some suggestions for how individuals and communities might use them.

Then follow Morning and Evening Prayer for Form 1, then Morning and Evening Prayer for Form 2.

After being asked about it, I decided to remove the rubricized note at the beginning regarding the doubling of antiphons. In a nutshell, in a chockful multi-Office environment,  antiphons were not said in full before and after every psalm. If it wasn’t a fancy day, only the first few notes of the antiphon were sung so the rest of the choir would know what note to start singing the psalm on. (Yes, this goes back to the period of sung Offices and limited books.) Because I left the daggers in for the sake of the liturgical purists amongst us—you know who you are—I included the note in the web versions. For a standalone general-use document for Episcopalians, it is probably unnecessary.

The PDF is located here.

Casting Psalm 20

Psalm 20 rolled around in Morning Prayer today; out of habit, I slipped into casting it as a classical drama.

Hearing the Psalm

Verse 1 mentions “the Lord” and then immediately proceeds to “you.” Interesting. So we have on stage God and also another figure whose identity is—at this point—ambiguous; we’ll call this figure Person A for now. The identity of the speaker also is not clear so I’m going to guess that it is our Congregation-Chorus. We’ll see how this hunch plays out as we continue to read.

Verse 1 lets us know that Person A is in the midst of some kind of trial—this is a “day of trouble” and they could use “defense” from the Name of the God of Jacob.

Verse 2 establishes a temple-centric model of relationship with God: God is established in “his holy place” which in the parallel second half of the verse is identified with “Zion.” The image we’re working with is that torus-shaped cosmology where heaven and earth intersect at the site of the Temple in Jerusalem which is simultaneously a building in earth and the site of the heavenly court in heaven.

Verse 3 confirms this temple-centric notion by extending Person A’s relationship with the Temple. There’s history here because now we’re talking about Person A’s past “offerings” and “burnt sacrifice.”

Verse 4 lets us know that Person A has got some difficult endeavor in mind because they have a difficult to achieve “heart’s desire” and “plans.”

Verse 5 introduces martial language into the situation: “victory and triumph.” At this point in the process, I’m going to tentatively identify Person A as the king of Judah as the logical plain-sense referent of this psalm. A quick scan through the previous verses agrees with this: we’re talking about a king of Judah during the time of the First Temple who is likely setting out on a military campaign against enemies–likely foreigners, although nothing so far in the text requires this. This verse also presents the speaking voice as a plural one, matching my initial identification of the speaker with the Congregation-Chorus.

Verse 6 confirms the identity of Person A as the king of Judah with the reference to “[the Lord’s] anointed” and the venture as a military one. The BCP translation of the psalm moves from the previous first person plural to a first person singular “I”; I see this as more of a poetic intensification of the statement of belief rather than a shift of speakers. (I can see the members of the Chorus turning to one another when they sing this line–or maybe a soloist?)

Verse 7 clarifies the military hardware used by the elites—“chariots” and “horses”—and the Congregation-Chorus’s belief (we’re back to first person plural again) that the aid of the Lord is mighter than high-tech weapons.

Verse 8 describes the hoped-for help described at the beginning: collapsing for the enemies and rising for the Judeans. (Is this a mixed Chorus of both priests and warriors?)

Verse 9 summarizes the psalm and provides almost a thesis statement in a concluding position.

Thus,  the psalm is a prayer to God on behalf of the king who is setting out on a military expedition. While God and the king are in focus the entire time, neither of them are given speaking roles. On the contrary, the whole psalm is in the mouth of the Congregation-Chorus. Indeed, if we wanted a more complex setup, we might even imagine two choruses, a Chorus of Priests and a Chorus of Warriors who alternate with one another. The Chorus of Priests would begin the psalm and would sing verses 1-4; then the Chorus of Warriors would enter with verses 5-9, with both Choruses singing verse 6 and 9 together.

Moving Christologically

So—what happens if we then make the Christological move and add another layer of meaning? What if we shift the identification of Person A with Christ and perhaps move to a Chorus of Angels or Disciples?

Certainly seeing Christ in a day of trouble is not difficult as this is his situation once he turns his face towards Jerusalem.

Verse 3 is reinterpreted in terms of what offering and sacrifice mean for the person of Jesus in light of his own self-emptying as described in the Philippians Christ Hymn as well as looking forward to the sacrifice of the cross. The mention of Zion as the place of this sacrifice is both literally accurate but also ironic as the site of the crucifixion.

Verse 4 likewise gains some additional pathos: the “heart’s desire” of Christ is the reconciliation of humanity and God that shall be accomplished by means of the cross.

The self-offering of verse 3 and the journey to the cross in verse 4 then require a reinterpretation of what “victory” looks like. This is no military conquest; on the contrary, this is strength made perfect in weakness.

Verse 6 then dwells in the irony of the reinterpreted victory (note the repetition of the word in this verse). The victory of Jesus the Anointed is in the accomplishment of his ministry of reconciliation that will look like anything but victory.

While verse 7 seemed hyperbolic when following the plain-sense of the passage—we’d rather trust a military victory to God than in high-tech weapons—the opposition between the spiritual and the militant seems much more appropriate when reading it Christologically. Weapons will not help you here; we’re talking about an entirely different kind of conflict where the size of your gun has absolutely nothing to do with your success.

We’ve not defined an enemy (“they”) in our Christological reading and the mention of them at this one point in verse 8 is brief enough that we don’t even need to. Instead, the focus and interest in this verse from a Christological perspective is the language of “arising and stand[ing] upright” given the obvious connections with the language of resurrection: for Christ initially as the first-fruits, then after for those who believe in him.

Verse 9, then, is a reiteration of both the ironic reversal motif (“victory to the king”) and also the earnest hope of the resurrection (“answer us when we call”).

In terms of the voicing, we could see the entire psalm in the voice of a Church-Chorus. I do think that verses 8 and 9 need to be heard in the voice of either the Church or the Disciples because of the resurrection language. An Angel-Chorus might be an interesting addition especially in verse 5 given the resonances with the angel chorus shouting for joy at the act of creation in Job 38:7; alternatively it’s also appropriate in the mouth of the Church riffing on 1 Peter 4:13 (with shades of Isaiah 12:6 as well…)

Summary

By casting it as a drama, then, attending to the plain-sense of the text, and then moving to an additional Christological sense of the text, we hear this psalm speaking to us in several voices. Our initial run-through honors the plain-sense of the text in its historical context. This was a psalm of Judah asking the blessing of God upon an unspecified military venture of the king. Our casting options could include a split chorus of priests and warriors as they combine to speak on behalf of the whole people. In addition to this meaning—not replacing it—is a Christological reading which follows in well-worn paths by identifying God’s anointed as Jesus. This reading requires a reinterpretation of victory and purpose—a reinterpretation that seems surprisingly appropriate for some verses. Ultimately, both meanings unite in affirming God’s fidelity to his Anointed and in the Chorus’s prayers for success in these endeavors.