 By lay preacher, Will Harron
Awake, O my God, decree justice; let the assembly of the peoples gather round you. Good morning, saints! I’ve been asked to give a teaching sermon this morning on church governance, and the gospel reading for our feast of Saint James gives such a touching entry to this issue. Because this reading is, in its own way, also about church governance. Governance and politics are very nearly dirty words in our society, especially when combined with “church.” And there’s very real and compelling reasons why this has become the case: The corruption that power, money, and human immiseration have wrought on our systems of government and governance, the way that “politics” has become a synonym for fecklessness, partisanship, and deadlock, and the way that systems and structures of power have become pathways of abuse. And so, what, is church governance? James and John’s mother is asking this exact question. Let’s think about this text, what’s going on in the moment. This mother knows her sons have been following this teacher, this potential king and deliverer, for some time, and giving up all they owned, all of the systems and relationship with power that they had previously been enmeshed in, to do so. She has an idea of what Jesus’s kingdom will mean - a new world where the Roman oppression has been overthrown, replaced by a power structure where Jesus will be at the top. She has faith that this will be an effect with cosmic ramifications. And she know the worth of her sons. So she goes to Jesus and asks that they be given positions of honor in this new kingdom. Thanks, mom! Jesus deflects this request - as he told the disciples in the preceding passage, he is travelling to Jerusalem to face death. The honor of being at Jesus’s right and left is one fraught with danger rather than being heir to power. And this scene immediately provokes an uproar among the other 10 disciples. Why should James and John be at Jesus’s right and left? Why not Peter and Andrew, or Thomas and Matthew? Why disrupt the magnificent equality of the 12? And so Jesus again steps in, repeating and underscoring the message that the first will be last and the last will be first. This time, he expresses it as, “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave,” contrasting this to the worldly rulers who lord it over each other in extreme hierarchies. The kingdom that Jesus proclaims will be led from below, empowered by service, and following the witness and example of one who faced and overcame death itself to bring liberation. How does our own church governance relate to this witness and example? In the 18th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says that when two are three are gathered in his name, he is with them. I like to borrow that phrasing to say that when two or three people are gathered, for any decision, politics ensues. Because what politics is, at the root, is people engaged in group dynamics around how to distribute power. And so rather than a dirty word, for me politics and governance are expressions of how an institution composed of tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions, of people organizes itself. And while we don’t need to be focused on governance at all times to the exclusion of other ministries, we are all called to take up roles in the organization of our church. On page 855 of the Book of Common Prayer, in the Catechism, the ministry of the laity – people not ordained to the diaconal, priestly, or episcopal ministry, is defined as: to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. So church governance is, in its own ways, all of our work. How does this work in our Episcopal Church? For one thing, the Episcopal Church has some explicit hierarchies. We have bishops - it’s in the name, it’s what Episcopal means. Bishops serve as the chief priest and pastor of their diocese, and they act as the CEO of the legal corporation of the diocese. Our diocese, Western Massachusetts, is one of one hundred and eight dioceses in the Episcopal Church. Each diocese has a bishop, called the ordinary, or the bishop diocesan. Some of the larger dioceses have additional bishops - with titles such as suffragan, assistant, or co-adjutor, but the bishop diocesan is the top of the organizational chart of the diocese. Each bishop serves in the churchwide House of Bishops, which meets several times per year, and many bishops also serve on various churchwide bodies. But the Episcopal Church is not all about bishops! Bishops are elected by priests and by lay people - generally, each parish or church in a diocese is entitled to send representatives to the Diocesan Convention, an annual event where elections happen, budgets are passed, and the membership of the diocese can weigh in on the various issues facing the church. Bishops are elected at special meetings of Diocesan Convention (our Diocese will be electing our next bishop at an Electing Convention the day following our Diocesan Convention). The lay and clergy delegates to Diocesan Convention also elect the Diocese’s Deputies to General Convention. General Convention is the governing body of the entire Episcopal Church. It meets every three years, a triennium, and the next meeting will be in 2027 in Phoenix, Arizona. Each of the 108 dioceses is entitled to elect four clergy deputies and four lay deputies, as well as alternates for each, who take part in the General Convention. All of the deputies form a House of Deputies, which is the counterpart to the House of Bishops - we have a bicameral church legislature. The deputies and bishops spend the months before General Convention engaged in legislative committee work, taking all of the reports and proposed resolutions and budgets and statements and working to create a cohesive body of legislation that can be debated and voted for over the course of several days. Both houses - Deputies and Bishops, must pass legislation for it to take effect. In between the triennial meeting of General Convention, the church is governed by an Executive Council. This council is presided over by the officers of each house of the Convention - the Presiding Bishop, who is elected by the House of Bishops, and the President of the House of Deputies, which is elected by, you guessed it, the house of Deputies. Bishop Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and Julia Ayala Harris is the President of the House of Deputies. Because Episcopalians love acronyms, they’re often referred to as the PB and the PHOD. There is also the Executive Office of General Convention, also called the General Convention Office, or GCO, which is the bureaucratic glue that holds the two Houses together and makes General Convention function. The interim Executive Officer of General Convention is Molly James. These officers, as well as the Treasurer of General Convention, currently Kurt Barnes, serve as officers of the Executive Council. Joining them are thirty eight elected members of Executive Council. Twenty of them, consisting of bishops, priests, deacons, and laity, are elected at General Convention. The other eighteen - 9 clergy and 9 lay members - are elected by the nine Provinces, geographical regions that I will talk about momentarily. The Executive Council meets quarterly and conducts the day-to-day business of the church. But most of the legislation passed by General Convention is larger in scope than an Executive Council. In between meetings of General Convention, the presiding officers of the two houses appoint Episcopalians from across the church to interim bodies, working groups who are tasked with taking the legislation passed by General Convention and applying it. Some interim bodies are standing commissions, carrying an ongoing mandate broader than one General Convention. I serve on one of them - the Standing Commission for Formation and Ministry Development. We are currently working on enacting legislation passed by General Convention around access to Spanish language resources, issues around clergy formation, gathering various Christian formation materials into an easily accessible online hub, and other projects. Other standing commissions include the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, the Standing Commission on World Mission, and the Standing Commission on Structure, Governance, Constitution and Canons (a mouthful, but I hear they have their own t-shirts, and I want one). Other interim bodies include Task Forces, constituted for a single three year term to work on a specific issue, as well as various ecumenical and interfaith bodies that the Episcopal Church sends representatives to. This triennium, some task forces include Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property and LGBTQ+ Inclusion. Any Episcopalian can apply to serve on an Interim Body - you don’t have to be on your church’s Vestry or be elected to Diocesan Convention or General Convention. After each General Convention the church opens an application process for Episcopalians interested in serving on an interim body to put their name forward for consideration. Supporting the General Convention, dioceses, interim bodies, and Episcopalians everywhere are the Presiding Bishops’ staff. The Presiding Bishop serves as the CEO of the Episcopal Church - our corporate name is the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, or DFMS. The DFMS is headquartered at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, and so sometimes the churchwide office is referred to as 815. The Presiding Bishops’ staff includes staff officers working on youth ministry, leadership development, racial justice, global mission, as well as supporting dioceses outside of the United States, ministry to members of the Armed Forces, and up until very recently, refugee resettlement. And so that’s our churchwide governance. Moving laterally across the org chart, I want to also mention Provinces. The 108 dioceses of the Episcopal Church are arranged in 9 geographical Provinces. Confusingly, Province is also the term used for member churches of the Anglican Communion - the Episcopal Church is a province of the Anglican Communion and also has 9 provinces. We are in Province 1! Province 1 is the 7 dioceses of New England - Western Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Provinces don’t quite fit into the “hierarchical” model of the Episcopal church. I serve as the Provincial Coordinator for Province 1 - it’s my job, and it’s not full time. Provinces look different in each region. Because Province 1 is geographically compact, we have some advantages that help us organize our ministry effectively. Provinces fill the gap between dioceses and the churchwide systems of governance and ministry. Province 1 supports its dioceses with a Province 1 School for Deacons, a modest grant program for ministries that connect multiple dioceses, and, recently, sponsorship of the Episcopal Path to Creation Justice, a program guiding Parishes through a year of discernment and action around climate issues. Each Province has a Provincial Synod- the provincial version of Diocesan Convention - and each diocese elects delegates to the Synod. In Province 1 we call our Synod Provincial Conference. The Synod has one extremely important churchwide mandate - electing a lay member and a clergy member to Executive Council. Beyond that duty, the Province is free to experiment and explore the best way to engage in ministry in its context. All this is a confusing rush to get through in one teaching sermon, and one might reasonably ask, amidst all of this governance and bureaucracy and structure, where is Jesus? Jesus is present in the faithful Episcopalians who put their time and talent and effort towards building and maintaining structures that allows our church to worship together, engage in pressing issues, and stay in faithful relationship across 50 states and over a dozen countries. Jesus and his kin-dom are present when Episcopalians in their diocesan and General Convention and Provincial Synods urge the church to speak on behalf of the marginalized. Jesus is with us when Episcopalians build provincial networks to take part in indigenous justice efforts or to raise up young leaders. Jesus is with us when we pray faithfully for servant leaders to take a turn in our various leadership bodies, whether on our Vestry, serving our Diocese, or stepping into churchwide leadership. We have certainly created a structure more complex and convoluted than what James and John’s mother was envisioning when she asked for her sons to sit at Jesus’s right and left, or when the disciples squabbled over their internal pecking order. I think there are days when what we have doesn’t quite pass the test of the leader being the servant rather than lording it over others. But the governance of our church reflects an honest engagement with the realities of two or three, or a million and a half, Episcopalians praying, serving, giving, and being church together. I pray, and I hope you will pray with me, for the leaders in our church - in our parish, diocese, province, and the whole Episcopal Church - and pray that they reflect and continue to reflect the model of Christ’s servant leadership.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
The force fueling what we know as rapture theology was persecution, real and imagined. Paul’s little church in Thessalonika in northern Macedonia in 51 AD was undergoing real persecution by its religious opponents. Paul wrote his first letter in an attempt to counsel perseverance and hope. The key text is 4:17 (NIV). There we read, “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” This text gained the nickname “rapture text” because St. Jerome in his Latin translation of the Bible used the Latin verb rapio - meaning to snatch away - to translate Paul’s original Greek. More about this in a minute. But, here’s the quiding question for today: Is rapture the right way to think about leaving this world? Well, I was once a member of a small group invited to be raptured up to heaven. Had I accepted, I might not be here with you today to tell the story. Nearly fifty years ago, I was a student in a seminar at Harvard Divinity School with theologian Harvey Cox titled “Contemporary Theological Movements.” Harvey is now ninety-five years young. He’s the most influential theologian of our times. He published his first best seller, The Secular City, in 1965, and he’s still at it: in 2022, at the age of 93, he published his latest title - A New Heaven. One day, as I and my dozen or so classmates entered Harvey’s seminar room, we noticed a pair of strangers already sitting at the conference table. They’d been invited by one of our classmates who introduced them as representatives of the “UFO religion.” UFO Religion” is an umbrella nickname that covers many groups. Their starting point is the belief that messengers from heaven like themselves will come down to rescue the faithful from this evil world and “rapture” them, or “snatch them up” to heaven, as Paul puts it. Our visitors claimed they were no longer living mortal, physical lives. They’d been raptured up to heaven, and then sent back down to earth to rapture new converts into the hereafter. After about half an hour, Harvey Cox, who’d remained silent up to that point, had heard enough. He slammed his Bible down on the conference table and said, “Okay, time to show me where in the Bible the word ‘rapture’ appears. I dare you to find it.” Well, they couldn’t do it because the word rapture cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. Harvey then rose to his feet and stamped out saying he was heading home to seek some “rapture” of his own (he lived just down the street from the “Div” School). And so, our professor deserted us. We continued the discussion with these two guys on our own, and - no - we did not accept their invitation to join the ranks of the raptured. Harvey Cox was right: the English noun “rapture” cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. The closest you can come to it is in St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin, known as the “Vulgate Bible” (Vulgate meaning “common tongue”), which he completed in the late fourth century A.D. Jerome translated First Thessalonians 4:17 using a form of the Latin verb rapio which means "to snatch up"). Our violent English word “rape” comes from this word. Jerome used a form of this word altogether twenty times in his Latin translation. Before we go any further let’s clarify some terms. Rapture theology is a way some Christians understand eschatology. Eschatology comes from a Greek word meaning “last things,” and refers to descriptions of what will happen when the world comes to its end, or its “eschaton.” The literary form by which descriptions of the eschaton are transmitted is called “apocalyptic,” coming from a Greek word that means “revealing.” That’s how the final book of the Bible, bearing the Greek title, Apocalypse of John, came to be called in general English usage The Book of Revelation. The actual event at which the end occurs is often called informally “the apocalypse,” but in formal theology (“God-talk”) it’s called the eschaton. Finally, another word associated with eschatological events is Armageddon, the place where some believe a final cosmic battle will begin between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This word appears only once in the Bible, yet it’s one of the most familiar words in Christian discussions of the eschaton. The single occurrence is in Revelation 16, verse 16 (“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”). Now, Armageddon was not just the stuff of eschatological nightmares; it was a real geographical place in ancient Israel (so by the way was hell, but that’s a story for another day). Armageddon was a city in ancient northern Israel named Megiddo, in Hebrew, Har Megiddo: “Megiddo Hill.” You can visit its archaeological remains. At its height during the reign of Solomon in the 900s B.C.E., Megiddo lay astride one of the busiest trade routes between Egypt and regions to the northeast, and as such was the scene of many battles as people competed with one another. It’s this history that led to the myth that at the eschaton, the final great battle between the forces of good and evil will occur there. Relatively speaking, no one paid much attention to biblical passages predicting the rapture until the nineteenth century in some parts of Europe and our own United States. Then, thanks to ministers like John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield there was a surge of interest in Christian eschatological thinking, including rapture theology: the conviction that Christ will suddenly snatch “his bride,” the Church, and carry her off to heaven before the eschaton begins. Darby and Scofield were what we in the trade call “premillennial dispensationalists”: that’s a mouthful for people who believe Christ will return to the world at a particular place and time to prepare it for its final thousand years before it ends. The problem with this idea is that there isn’t a shred of support for it in scripture. The passage most often cited to tell us how it will really happen is Matthew 24, verse 36, where Jesus says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (NIV).” The Trinitarian Congregational Church in Northfield, where I served as a Supply minister for three months during Covid, called Cyrus Scofield as its pastor in 1895. Unfortunately, he is remembered as a disagreeable bully who, apparently not busy enough with pastoring, strove to control what was being taught in D. L. Moody’s Northfield school just up the street. Those who knew John Nelson Darby remember him likewise as an ill-tempered, controlling, and scornful curmudgeon. In Massachusetts during this period, William Miller persuaded tens of thousands of his followers that the world would end on October 22,1844. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was asked if he was prepared. He replied, “The end of the world does not affect me; I can get along without it.” A new surge of interest in the rapture and in eschatology began in the early 1980s, even reaching the White House. President Reagan once told a pro-Israeli lobbyist in 1983, 'You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we're the generation that's going to see that come about.” Reagan’s interest in Armageddon prompted one writer to investigate the activities of Pantex, one of the nation’s nuclear bomb assembly and storage sites, located in Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo plays host to a number of evangelical sects who believe fervently in Armageddon, and some of them believe that Armageddon and the rapture of the faithful at the eschaton will come to pass by way of a nuclear holocaust. Such are the beliefs of some who divide the world between absolute good and absolute evil, between the followers of the Lord and the followers of Satan. For them, nuclear war is the Armageddon that the Book of Revelation predicts and Rapture is the vehicle by which they will be saved while all others are destroyed and damned eternally. Rapture theology reached its height in popularity with Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which was published in 1970, and which the New York Times called the best selling non-fiction book of the decade. A few decades later came the “Left Behind” series, sixteen novels authored by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye that began appearing in 1995. So far, sixty million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold worldwide. The thesis of these books is that just before the Second Coming of Christ all genuine Christian believers in Jesus will be raptured: they will go straight to heaven into God’s presence without first passing through death, like the two gentlemen who came to my seminar. Those who don’t believe in Jesus will be “left behind” on earth to suffer and perish at Armageddon. They made a movie based on these books: a kind of Christian “Home Alone” film. In the end, what’s most disturbing about rapture theology and what’s missing is any vision of spiritual community, any vision of shared humanity in which all God's children put their hopes in a peaceful and just coexistence. And, this is the point that so many miss about biblical apocalyptic expressions of the eschaton: they are not predictions of the destruction of this world but allegorical cries of hope for release from tyranny in this world and the restoration of peace and justice in the here and now. The Book of Revelation was written by a man named John, almost certainly not the author of the Gospel, but another John who was sent into exile on the Aegean island of Patmos during the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century A.D. John’s book is an allegorical cry, not for the eschaton, but for release from the rule of Rome and restoration of the rule of God in what the Book of Revelation calls a “new Jerusalem (3:12 and 21:2).” Likewise, the apocalyptic Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible stands as a Jewish protest against the extreme Hellenism of the Greek ruler Antiochus IV, who in 167 BCE profaned the temple in Jerusalem by setting up an altar to Zeus there and sacrificing a pig on it. This event is referred to in Daniel 11:31 as “the abomination that makes desolate,” a phrase repeated by Jesus in his prediction of the destruction of the temple in Mark 13:14 and Matthew 24:15. Jesus thought the temple priesthood had been taken over by men whose principal loyalty was to Rome, not to God. And finally, Paul’s aim in his First Letter to the Thessalonians was to encourage his little church there to persevere in the face of persecution from far more numerous rival religious groups. But, let’s return to our guiding question: is rapture the right way to be thinking about leaving this world? As bad as things are in our world, you and I have not lived as members of a persecuted religious minority. The holy spirit speaks to us in different voices than it did in the first centuries of Christianity. I take that to mean that we should not read some parts of the Bible so literally. The rabbinical approach to the Jewish Torah has long been as follows: read a portion every day, pray about what you read, then behave according to the principle Jews call in Hebrew, chesed: doing “acts of loving kindness.” That’s very different from reading scripture with your hands tied behind your back. All of us want a future. Will it be an inclusive or an exclusive future? Will it be a future where some are damned and “left behind?” Does that vision make any sense to people who say they believe that God is love? Will it be a “meeting in the air,” as the old gospel tune has it, or a meeting here on the ground of God's creation, the good earth, where we can together - all of us - work to establish a healthy, sustainable present and future for all? It’s a choice between fatalism and hope. Which will we choose? Never give up on this beautiful world God created for you and me. Repent of the harm we do to it daily and to one another. Take a lesson from Harvey Cox. Look to the here and now for your rapture. Look for it in a gorgeous sunset. Look for it in beautiful music. Look for it in the faces of your friends and loved ones. Don’t let people like Tim LaHaye and those who are building nuclear weapons in Texas have the final say on rapture. Amen.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
The story of the Nicene Creed begins with what happened nearly three hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion when secular and religious divisions brought the Roman Empire nearly to a breaking point. It’s a vast and contentious topic. So, I’m going to limit us to two guiding questions: What secular and theological forces were behind the formation of the Nicene Creed, and, what place should the Creed have for us in our spiritual and worship life today? Let’s begin by looking at something familiar: the Whiteman Windows behind the altar. Look behind the altar at the window just to the left of the cross at the top of the wooden arch. Can you see the ship and cross in the glass? And, can you see the Greek word in white glass just above the ship and cross? If you can’t see it, get a copy of the wonderful pamphlet describing those windows from our church website or the office. That Greek word oikoumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη) in the window is the single most important word in the New Testament for us Christians apart from the sayings of Jesus, and it’s the concept of oikoumene that guided the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Yes, by the way, oikoumene gives us our word ecumenical (also by the way our word economy: economics as an ecumenical activity? Hmm! Think about that. The root word is oikos, which translates literally as “household,” but in a wider, more global sense, the household that makes up the inhabited world. Forms of the word oikos appear 106 times in the Greek New Testament. Our New Testament writers were acutely aware how important the word is to the religious lives of Christians. The pamphlet about the Whiteman Windows will tell you that oikoumene translates as “one of many.” It’s more complicated than that. The term oikoumene is a combination of that Greek word oikos meaning “household” and another Greek word “mene” meaning “management.” Household management: this is the sense Aristotle used the word, his vision of our world as a coherent, well-managed household. Now, there is no escaping the fact that whenever the need to manage something arises, some degree of coercion usually isn’t far behind. Unity at the expense of diversity has always been trouble, and diversity at the expense of unity spells division, and division is never good. This means there will always be tension between the forces of unity and diversity. Attempts to resolve the tension have never worked in history: for starters think of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot The pursuit of perfection in human nature has always led to gargantuan amounts of bloodshed. For our purposes, the tension between unity and diversity was perhaps never so manifest as in the life of Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. Alexander and his Greek and Roman successors including the Emperor Constantine used the term oikoumene to describe a vision of a global economic, communal, cultural, and political household, a universal household where unity embraced diversity and never descended into division. That was the vision. The reality was something different, as we shall see. We call Alexander’s brand of oikoumene “Hellenism,” because its cultural roots are in Greek culture, and “Hellas” is the ancient Greek word for Greece. Alexander dreamed of a unified world in which all people would share in the mutual pursuit of survival and happiness by cooperating fully with one another just as members of a single familial household ideally would. A glance at a map of the world after Alexander and his army rolled through shows the extent to which he made this dream come true. You’ll notice how many cities and regions were renamed with Greek names. Alexander wanted the world to be quite literally one big household, a vast melting pot of peoples and races all under the umbrella of Greek Hellenistic culture. To this end, he promoted racial mixing by encouraging his soldiers to intermarry with local women in conquered regions after which he gave them land upon which to build their homes. The Greek philosopher and biographer Plutarch (46-120 CE), in his treatise, "On the Fortunes of Alexander,” summed up Alexander's dream of a unified family of peoples with these words: “Brought together into one body . . . mixing all together in one loving cup.” The quest for a common “managed household” was further advanced through the institution of a universal coinage, universal use of the Greek language, compatible trade practices, and religion by importing the Greek gods into foreign cities everywhere, including Jerusalem, to the great dismay of some Jews, but not as many Jews as you might think. Much of Jerusalem was rebuilt in the Hellenistic style, and one of its most enthusiastic builders was the Jewish King, Herod the Great. Hellenistic cities were built with underground water delivery and sewage removal ducts that rendered these cities cleaner, healthier, more sanitary places to live than many others for the next two thousand years. Thanks to archaeology, today you can visit sections of these water and sewage systems that ran beneath the streets of Hellenistic Jerusalem. The famous Roman roads and postal service really did make material life better (the dark 1979 comedy movie, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” gets it right about this), and the inescapable fact is that most folks were willing to accept the coercion it took to maintain these standards. Followers of Jesus and other rebellious Jewish rabbis were the exception. After Jesus, there were many other exceptions to the rule, hence many more gospels than the four that made the final team, and many more writings laying claim to be Christian. Thanks to the influence of Alexander, what we call the “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Bible” was translated into Greek (guess where), not in Jerusalem, but in the newly constructed city of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Rhacotis and renamed in honor of its conqueror. It was completed in the second century BCE and bears the title “Septuagint,” Greek for “Seventy,” so named because it was thought around seventy scholars were involved in the project. For a long time, most people living under Greco-Roman rule thanked the global dream of Alexander the Great for that. And, after Alexander died and the oikoumene began to break apart it was the Romans who put it back together again stronger than ever (yes, the Romans were Hellenists, too, through and through1). In addition to the word oikoumene, the Romans used a Latin phrase very familiar to those of us who still carry dollar bills around: e pluribus unum, “out of many one.” The great Roman statesman Cicero put it this way, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” So, why spend so much time discussing this strange Greek word oikoumene in our window behind me? Because outside the New Testament, it’s that very secular Greek word that is perhaps most responsible for creating the spirit governing the creation of the Nicene Creed and for defining ourselves as Christians: people of God who strive to live in loving communion with one another under one roof in a unified “household” governed by faith. The chink in the armor of the oikoumene was the possibility that force would be used to maintain it. Usually, it took relatively soft power to keep order. When that didn’t work, the iron fist came down. The philosophical vision of “household management” that Aristotle passed down to his student Alexander ensured that the quest for common creeds quickly became exclusionary in Christian history. The fact is, there have always been multiple creeds in Christianity. Interestingly, the Greek word that gives us our word “heresy,” originally meant “choice,” not something to be condemned. Early Christians had many choices until “management” stepped in under Constantine. Okay, so Why did Constantine call the bishops to Nicea in the first place? Alexander’s dream of a singular world oikoumene didn’t last long. No sooner had he died of fever in Iraq while marching his army back home to Macedon than his generals fell to squabbling with each other and the dominion began to fall apart. The Romans, who inherited the remains of Alexander’s empire, tried hard to keep it together, but for a while fared even worse. There was indeed a period of a hundred years of genuine peace and order under Caesar Augustus, but otherwise it was chronic instability nearly everywhere. For the next 132 years after Marcus Aurelius (ruled 121-180) until the accession of Constantine, forty emperors were either assassinated or met some other violent death, a few of them through torture. One sad joke making the rounds in those times ran that a gladiator stood a better chance of surviving his contest in the Colosseum than did an emperor of escaping assassination. In addition, the imperial bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Then there were the so-called “barbarian invasions”: mainly Germans from the north and Persians from the East. These movements of people into the empire, which was roughly the size of the continental United States, put pressure on increasingly scarce resources. Described in histories as “invasions,” for the most part they resembled the recent flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border states, people seeking a better life. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the empire had recently come through a pandemic. We aren’t sure what virus or bacterium caused it but that pandemic wiped out ten percent of the population of the empire, and at its height in Rome itself it was killing 5,000 people a day. Under such conditions of extreme social stress, it became so difficult to maintain civil order that it was decided to divide the empire into four quadrants. This tetrarchy (or rule of four emperors) was established by the Emperor Diocletian in 293. Constantine became emperor in the year 306 (d. 337) and thereby inherited this mess. He immediately set out to revitalize the oikoumene and restore unity. He abolished the tetrarchy in favor of his own singular rule; and in the year 313, he propagated what was known as the Edict of Milan, proclaiming our religion as officially recognized and protected. The problem was that our religion by that time had become riven with sectarianism. This was the immediate reason Constantine in the year 325 convened an ecclesiastical council, what came to be called the First Ecumenical Council (there’s our word oikoumene again!) in the ancient city of Nicea where the Turkish city of Iznik is located today. All that was needed was a catalyst to get the ball rolling toward the Nicene Creed, and that catalyst was a theological dispute we know as the “Arian Controversy.” Arianism was a theological doctrine, attributed to a Christian Priest from Libya named Arius. He held that Christ, whom Christians proclaimed as the "Son of God," was not actually divine, but physically created and therefore changeable, not eternal. In short, Christ was mortal. And so, to dispel Arianism, the council drew up a "creed" that described the oneness of God the Father and the Son using the Greek word homoousion ("one substance" - GK, ὁμοούσιον). The scriptural reference taken to support this definition was John 10 verse 30, “I and the Father are one.” Arianism was duly rejected. The hope was that this change would lead to religious unity in the Church and and with it civil and social unity. Unhappily, that didn’t happen. Ambiguities in the homoousion ("one substance") formula sparked fresh arguments and created the need for follow up councils. A Second Ecumenical Council in 381 was held in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and that is when most of the final wording we use was put in place. But, the theological tinkering and wordsmithing continued in the Third Ecumenical Council which was held in the city of Ephesus in 431. This council featured wrangling over the status of Christ’s mother Mary. Then came in 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council, this one at Chalcedon in the modern city of Kadıköy (Kadikoy), near Istanbul. At Chalcedon, Christ was affirmed to be one person with two full and complete natures one human the other divine. However, this formula made matters even worse because Christians to the east of Rome couldn’t tolerate the dual nature creed. Over the following centuries, other differences arose leading to the formal break in 1054 that created the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox churches in the East. Theological differences aside, the real problem was regionalism: what Christians living to the east really resented was a pope in Rome telling them what they should do and not do and what they should believe. Most Eastern Christians, then, with some exceptions, affirmed that Christ had one nature only and this nature was divine, not human. Hence, they came to be called Monophysites (Greek for "one nature"). Today, the chief examples of Monophysite Christianity are the Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic (Egyptian) Churches. So went the process we call “the Christological controversies,” which can be summed up as arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ: “How human was he, and how divine?” It may be hard for some of us to understand what caused people at the time to get so riled up over this question until we consider how the forces of regionalism in our country, for example, are pitting the urbanized coastal regions against the more rural “heartland,” as it’s called; and how political instability, immigration, and a vicious recent pandemic have eroded our own national sense of unity and mutual trust today. What’s less forgivable about all this is how the regional power struggles in Constantine’s realm corrupted perhaps the most orthodox expression of our Christian faith, a failure to accept the relationship of God, Christ, and Spirit (our holy Trinity) for what it is: a mystery, a holy mystery. It’s a failure stemming from the hubristic (prideful) sin of thinking it possible that we could ever reduce the greatest mystery of life, the nature of divine reality, to rational concepts like “substance” and “nature.” God and Christ remain a mystery, a holy mystery, in theological parlance, ineffable, that is to say, indescribable, inexpressible, undefinable. We experience this mystery symbolically and spiritually, not rationally. It can only happen when we perform what the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” Saying the Nicene Creed meaningfully takes a leap of faith. The Creed - any creed - functions as a holy reminder that as members of God’s creation we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, something that continues to call us into ever widening circles of loving connectedness in this “household” of ours: connectedness with God and with God’s creation. Creeds remind us that indeed there is more to life and more to reality than what meets the eye. Having seen how the Creed came to be and how it functions, let’s turn our attention now to that second guiding question: How should we align ourselves with the use of the Creed in our worship today? I don’t think there is a single right creed or any single right way to say it. I suspect I share this view with at least some of you. When it comes to the Nicene Creed or any other affirmation of faith, I don’t think a coercive common response is right. Personally, I do strive to listen carefully to every word of the Nicene Creed as I recite it because for me it’s a way I can connect with other people of faith past and present stretching back two millennia. That approach may not work for you. Sometimes as we recite the Creed my attention strays. When that happens, the sound of other voices - your voices surrounding me - calls me back and reminds me that we’re engaged in a communal act that draws us together and connects us with the voices of all the Christians who’ve come before us. In these moments, we’re no longer individuals but a community of believers, the body of Christ, one ecumenical “household.” We are at least for that moment a bona fide oikoumene. One of the obstacles preventing the Creed from occupying a more central place in our spiritual lives is our radical American individualism, which we inherited from the European Enlightenment by way of thinkers like John Locke and David Hume. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his two volume Democracy in America written after his visit here in the 1830s was anxious even back then about our excessive individualism. And, in his recent (2022) book,2 Bill McKibben chides us for what he calls our “hyper individualism.” I think excessive individualism is chiefly responsible for the difficulty some of us have reciting the creed and the difficulty a larger number of Americans have belonging to organized religion in general, not to mention the political madness that is presently tearing us apart. We Americans frequently forget that we are a “household” here on what Native Americans used to call “Turtle Island.” For this reason, the best starting point isto remember that when we recite the Creed, we begin by saying, “We believe.” It's that sense of “we-ness,” the first person plural denoting connection and oneness with others, that permeates the whole recitation. Reciting the Creed reminds us of the promise we made or was made on our behalf at our baptisms: the promise that God is at the very heart of every breath we take and everything we do here in this “household” of ours. On the subject of whether the holy mysteries of our faith should be sung or recited, I’m with the late Yale Professor of Medieval History, Jaroslav Pelikan, who argued that the Creed should be sung, as we do here in this church on high holy days, not merely recited. This reminds me of the famous formula attributed to Saint Augustine, Qui cantat, bis orat: “Whoever sings prays twice.” In the final analysis, the Nicene Creed is one way, among many, we express our identity as a “household,” an oikoumene. We also call ourselves “the Body of Christ,” but I confess I like “household,” too, maybe even more. The “management” part of oikoumene and the implied threat of coercion I can do without. But, the Nicene Creed need not be the only way to affirm our faith in public worship. As I said at the outset, I don’t think we will ever resolve the tension between unity and diversity in human behavior and I despair about the presence of coercion in human relations. I do think we should celebrate the alternate creeds we recite here at Saints James and Andrew (such as the wonderful South Indian Profession of Faith we recited here in place of the Nicene Creed last week). We have many possible ways to affirm and articulate our faith. Affirming our faith in different words is good for our spiritual selves just as a varied diet of healthy food is good for our bodily selves. The Nicene Creed was an imperfect, over-rationalized attempt to express what means most to us and a response to civil power struggles and disorder. The tumultuous history out of which it emerged, including the many attempts to refine it, stands in stark contrast to its place in the hearts of many of us today and to the millions of Christian hearts that have adored it these past two thousand years. Is it time to set it aside? Constantine’s admittedly coercive attempt to impose unity has been labeled a “heresy” by his severest critics, and they don’t mean heresy in the old sense as a “choice.” Similar coercive attempts to impose unity where regionalism threatens to undo it have occurred in other religions. Unhappily, households of all kinds can slip into intolerance, authoritarianism, and repression. The dynamics of coercion and conquest remain an omnipresent threat, never far from the surface in every relationship, from family households to entire civilizations. If our guiding principle is that we love one another, as Jesus put it in his new commandment to us in John 13:34, then we must remember that Jesus took love as something we do, not something we believe: we must walk the walk, not just talk it. So, think of creeds as things that remind us what we should do in our lives, not just things that bounce around in our heads. When we say in a moment, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,” tell yourselves that those words translate into our commitment to act out that new commandment - to love one another - as Jesus delivered it to us in John 13:34. But. loving one another should never be restricted to any particular set of words. For this reason, I think it's spiritually healthy to prayerfully consider other ways of expressing what theologian Paul Tillich used to call the “ultimate concern” at the center of our lives. In the meantime, I hope we will continue to grant the Creed a place in our liturgical life and at the same time remain open to exploring alternatives as the Holy Spirit leads us. God has revealed Godself in many different ways beginning with how we perceive God throughout the Bible. It follows that we be drawn to a variety of ways to express how we experience divine reality. Amen. 1 Rome was perhaps the least original civilization in history. The Romans borrowed freely from the Greeks. Even the Greek gods had their temples in Rome: Zeus was renamed Jupiter, Aphrodite was renamed Venus, and so on. 2 The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, 2022, 118ff.  By Rev. Heather J. Blais, Rector
Earlier this year, I promised to offer a teaching sermon on the Lord’s Prayer. Today we’ll focus on: how this prayer was introduced; its use within the service of Holy Eucharist; the evolution of the English translation; and finally, how the wider Church interprets this prayer today. And yes, there is a handout (see below), especially designed for the English geeks amongst us. Introducing the Lord’s Prayer Right out of the gate, there was no ‘original’ version of the Lord’s Prayer.* The prayer is presented in two different gospels: Matthew and Luke. The text of the prayer, as preserved in the gospels, is in Greek, and are themselves translations from Aramaic or Hebrew. The versions presented in Mathew and Luke are similar, but quite different. Luke’s version omits any reference to heaven or God’s will being done, and both versions omit the doxology we are familiar with. Liturgically, the Church has generally drawn upon Matthew's version. Fairly early in his gospel, as part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he tells the disciples: “Pray like this” (CEB6:9). After teaching the Lord’s Prayer, he adds: “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins” (CEB 6:14-15). This might lead us to speculate - is God’s forgiveness conditional? If we want to think in binary terms, sure, that’s one way to read it. But we know God is the original expansive thinker, always nudging us to open our hearts, minds, and souls to see a bigger vision; a deeper understanding of meaning. Our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once preached: “Mutual forgiveness and repentance, healing and reconciliation are hard work and they often take time. Healing and reconciliation do not happen quickly. But it happens, if we are willing, to allow God’s grace to work in us, for God’s grace is sufficient. God is able.”** I think what Jesus was flagging for us is that the very act of seeking to engage in a process of forgiveness, repentance, healing, and reconciliation requires us to keep ourselves open and willing to receive God’s grace. To trust God is at work within us and within those we seek to forgive; that God’s grace is sufficient and able. Especially given forgiveness is often not a one time thing; it can be hard to give and sometimes, even harder to receive. Forgiveness is an ongoing journey of trust in God’s grace. If our hearts remain hardened, we end up closing ourselves off from God’s grace and forgiveness. Not because God is unwilling to forgive us, but because we have put up a ‘do not enter’ sign, closing ourselves off from God’s grace, of the possibility of giving and receiving forgiveness. Luke offers his version towards the middle of his gospel. “Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples’” (CEB 11:1). You might even say, they wanted a formula, and so he gave them one. But after teaching them to pray, he goes on to indicate God is always there. Jesus says: “And I tell you: Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. To everyone who knocks, the door is opened.” (CEB 11:9-10). I think it’s fair to say, Jesus offers them a liturgical prayer, but also makes a point to emphasize, God answers whenever we seek God out. This may explain why so many of the phrases within the Lord’s Prayer are also found in Jewish liturgy, including prayers like, “Our Father, Our King”, the “Amidah”, and “Morning Blessings”.*** And this was quite possibly my favorite part. It means our beloved Jesus, was also a liturgist, drawing upon sacred prayers from his religious tradition and creating a new prayer with fresh language to help his followers expand and deepen their prayer life. Jesus modeled liturgical renewal from the beginning of his ministry, recognizing we can appreciate the beauty of tradition while also enlivening our prayer life with fresh language. The Lord’s Prayer within the Service of Holy Eucharist In the early Church, it was common for members to bring home eucharistic elements from the Sunday celebration. Much like today, when Kathryn Aubry-McAvoy will bring the eucharistic elements to one of our parishioners, except at this point in time, everyone could bring home the bread and wine to consume during the week. Before consuming the elements during the week, they would say the Lord’s Prayer to prepare their hearts and minds for receiving the eucharist. Which is one reason why early Church fathers believed that when the Lord’s Prayer references ‘our daily bread’ the prayer was not referencing basic daily nutrition.**** Rather they believed these words referred to the sacred meal of the eucharist. Around the time Constantine adopted Christianity, the act of saying the Lord’s Prayers as a form of personal piety was incorporated into the eucharistic service. The Lord’s Prayer has remained at this place in the Eucharistic service ever since, though the people’s involvement in saying the prayer was quite an evolution. More on that in a moment. The Evolution of the English Translation In the late fourth century, the Roman Empire split, and this led the Roman Church to transition from using Greek to Latin. While initially plenty of folks spoke Latin, the language died out around the seventh century, though it remained the required liturgical language in the Roman Church until the mid-1960s. ***** This means the early Church began using the language of the people, and slowly evolved into a language that most people did not understand. It invited and exasperated clericalism, insisting the priest was a required intermediary between God and the people. Which doesn’t exactly line up with Jesus' mission and ministry. But alas. On the very distant edges of the Roman Empire, in the Kingdom of Northumbria, which consisted of what we now think of as Northern England and the Scottish Lowlands, the Lord’s Prayer was first translated into English around 650 A.D.****** We didn’t really see other English translations, until the Protestant Reformation when the King of England, Henry VIII, left the Roman Church to found the Church of England. We know Henry’s motivations were mixed, and his decision caused a lot of political and religious upheaval. I had always been taught that this change more or less immediately led to the worship being spoken in the language of the people. But no - not the case. While Henry instigated the change, the liturgy kept being prayed in Latin for another fifteen years! Yet when the first Book of Common Prayer was published in 1549, all of that changed. A sidebar about prayer books: It’s interesting to note that the Church of England produced four different prayer books between 1549 and 1662. Because the Anglican Church is the state religion in England, prayer book revisions required government involvement, which quickly became challenging. (I mean, could you imagine trying to get prayer book revision through the American congress???) This resulted in the Church of England shying away from any further prayer book revisions, and instead creating a great deal of supplemental materials. The Episcopal Church in the United States has essentially done the same thing, producing four different prayer books between 1789 and 1979. At our 2022 General Convention, we memorialized the 1979 prayer book, and have opted to move in England’s direction of approving many supplemental materials that they expect churches will incorporate. When the Church of England first produced a prayer book in the vernacular, they also did a wild thing, they slowly began to include the laity in the prayers. Now during the service, when the Lord’s Prayer was spoken by the priest, the people concluded: ‘But deliver us from evil. Amen.’ In the 1552 revision, people were given a bit more empowerment in the liturgy and were invited to repeat each line after the priest. This remained the pattern in the two other prayer book revisions in England, and the first two prayer books for the Episcopal Church. It was not until the publication of the 1928 prayer book that the priest and the people began to say the Lord’s Prayer together. I found this to be particularly wild, that we’ve only been praying this prayer together for a little less than 100 years! While the English language and spelling norms evolved, there were relatively minor changes to the substance of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1662, England followed the Scotts in incorporating the doxology into the end of the Lord’s Prayer and it has been around ever since. The 1789 prayer book substituted minor changes like ‘which art in heaven’ to ‘who art in heaven’; and ‘in earth’ to ‘on earth’; and ‘them that trespass’ to ‘those who trespass’. The most significant change to the Lord’s Prayer took place in the 1970s when the contemporary language for the Lord’s Prayer was introduced. In many ways, the change was a long time coming. There had been a lot of change in how people spoke to one another in general. Marion Hatchett observes in his Commentary on the American Prayer Book: “In the sixteenth century ‘thou’ in English was equivalent to ‘tu’ in French or ‘du’ in German - the familiar second person singular form used to address one person, intimates, children, servants and God. It was appropriately used by those who knew themselves to be children in intimate relation to God…. The use of ‘you’ as a form of address in the rites and collects in contemporary language is the modern expression of intimacy linguistically equivalent to the usage of ‘thou’ in the earlier editions of the Prayer Book.” In other words, the shift was, in part, to ensure the prayer retained that sense of intimacy between God, our heavenly mother and father; and God’s beloved children. The second reason prompting a change, was the decision of the Roman Catholic Church to no longer require Latin in their services.******* This meant they needed English translations. Up until this point, when other Protestant churches were looking for an English translation of common prayers, such as the Lord’s Prayer, they looked to the Anglican prayer book. You can imagine why the Roman Catholic leadership would not have wanted to use one of the breakaway church’s English translations for their liturgy. So they created their own International Commission on English in the Liturgy. Meanwhile, many Protestant denominations who had long used the Anglican versions, were eager to modernize the prayers. This led to the creation of the International Consultation on English Texts, an ecumenical group charged with crafting English translations of the prayers our denominations have in common. In the early 1970s, they published Prayers We Have in Common: Agreed Liturgical Texts, which included what we think of as the ‘contemporary’ Lord’s Prayer. When the Episcopal Church revised the prayer book in 1979, they made a pastorally sensitive decision to include both the traditional and the contemporary version used by many other denominations. Today, the Episcopal Church belongs to the North American Consultation on Common Texts, which is a member of the English Language Liturgical Consultation, groups that continue the important work of giving us a common language in our core Christian prayers across denominations.*** How the Wider Church Interprets the Lord’s Prayer Today Let’s walk through how the wider Church understands the Lord’s Prayer today - briefly. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” Scholars believe this part of the prayer could mean a couple of different things, and generally recommend leaving enough space for both interpretations. One thought is that this petition is urgently seeking the action of God - something along the lines of “...[Creator] show yourself to be the Holy One; bring in your kingdom; establish your will, on earth as in heaven.”* Another thought, is when this prayer is compared to Jewish prayers, it makes a solid case that the petition is praying for human action so God’s name may be sanctioned, God’s kingdom established, and God’s will done.* “Give us this day our daily bread;” Similarly, scholars suggest there are a couple of ways to interpret this petition, and again, recommend keeping enough space for both meanings.* The Greek word that is translated into ‘daily’ is actually a bit vague.* It may mean ‘bread for tomorrow’, as in ‘the great tomorrow’, referring to a heavenly banquet.* It also can be understood as ‘the bread which is necessary’, and given the amount of hunger in our world, there is a solid argument for this perspective too.* “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” We’ve already touched on this a bit. In essence: we are committed to the practice of forgiveness, we forgive others when they wrong us, and we ask God to forgive us when we wrong God. “Save us from the time of trial.” Scholars note two potential misconceptions that often arise. The first is that God would “tempt” or entice people to evil, and the second is to think that the original Greek word that means “temptation” means something different than simply being tempted to not sin.* The original meaning is more akin to not denying or renouncing our faith when tempted, either in the here or now, but especially in that biblical sense of the trials Christians will face during the challenges of end times written about in apocalyptic literature.* “and deliver us from evil.” This alludes to the evil powers of this world; the selfishness, fear, anger, and hate that can separate us from God and care of God’s world. “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and for ever.” This doxology, which is a later addition, reflects the normal Jewish practice of concluding prayers of petition with a doxology of praise.* I hope our exploration of the Lord’s Prayer today, and its evolution in the Christian tradition, helps us to have a better sense of why we use the contemporary version in our primary worship service, while each individual always has the choice to pray the one they hold dear either in worship or in private prayer. As we prepare to head back out into the world today, I would invite each of us to keep reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer: How do the words of the prayer inform our understanding of God? How does this prayer bind us with other Christians across the world? Amen. * https://www.englishtexts.org/the-lords-prayer ** https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2017/05/23/presiding-bishop-preaches-on-forgiveness-repentance-healing-and-reconciliation-in-haiti/ *** https://weekly.israelbiblecenter.com/lords-prayer-jewish-liturgy and https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/text-of-avinu-malkeinu/ **** Marion Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book, p. 378, 90, 29. ***** https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL07383020/ ****** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Prayer ******* https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/international-consultation-english-texts-icet The Lord’s Prayer Matthew 6:9-13 Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. (taken from the Revised Standard Version, as found on English Language Liturgical Consultation) Luke 11:2-4 Father, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; And forgive us our sins, For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us; And lead us not into temptation. (taken from the Revised Standard Version, as found on English Language Liturgical Consultation) 650 A.D. - Old English FADER USÆR ðu arð in heofnu Sie gehalgad NOMA ÐIN. Tocymeð RÍC ÐIN. Sie WILLO ÐIN suæ is in heofne and in eorðo. HLAF USERNE of'wistlic sel ús todæg, and f'gef us SCYLDA USRA, suæ uoe f'gefon SCYLDGUM USUM. And ne inlæd usih in costunge, ah gefrig usich from yfle. (Bell, Laird D T. Northumbrian Culture and Language) 1549 Prayer Book - England The priest Our father, whyche art in heaven, halowed be thy name. Thy Kyngdome come. Thy wyll be doen in yearth, as it is in heaven. Geve us this daye our dayly breade. And forgeve us our trespaces, as wee forgeve them that trespasse agaynst us. And leade us not into temptacion. The aunswere But deliver us from evill. Amen. (taken from 1549 prayer book) 1552 Prayer Book - England Changed how the prayer was offered. The people would repeat each line after the priest. Spelling evolved, but same words. 1559 Prayer Book - England The people still repeat each line after the priest. Further evolution of spelling, but same intended words. 1662 Prayer Book - England Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen. (taken from 1662 prayer book; this is still the official prayerbook of England) The people still repeat each line after the priest. Spelling looks more familiar. Added doxology. 1789 Prayer Book - U.S. Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen (taken from 1789 prayer book) The people still repeat each line after the priest. Some words are changed to adapt to language norms of the time. 1892 Prayer Book - U.S. The people still repeat each line after the priest. Content stays the same. 1928 Prayer Book - U.S. The priest and the people now say the prayer together. Content stays the same. 1970 Prayers We Have in Common: Agreed Liturgical Texts was produced by the International Consultation on English Texts, and established the ‘contemporary’ Lord’s Prayer used in the wider church. They created translations used across Roman and Protestant churches, such as: Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, the Gloria (Glory to God), the Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy), etc. 1979 Prayer Book - U.S. Traditional Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen. 1979 Prayer Book - U.S. Contemporary Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your Name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever. Amen. |
Mission
We believe God is calling us to cultivate a community of love, joy, hope, and healing. Jesus is our model for a life of faith, compassion, hospitality, and service. We strive to be affirming and accessible, welcoming and inclusive; we seek to promote reconciliation, exercise responsible stewardship, and embrace ancient traditions for modern lives.
Office HoursTuesday 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed holidays Our gardens and grounds are open from dawn to dusk for the community to pray, rest, be. Please help us take care of this sacred space by following the outdoor ethic & principle of “leave no trace.” |
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