Category Archives: Illuminating Liturgy

LitBit Commentary – The language of worship

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Perhaps the largest challenge for the language of worship is that one set of words…needs somehow to embrace, express, and elicit the worship of a whole group of people. From the perspective of a worshiper, public worship always involves using words that come from someone else. One skill for worshipers to hone is the skill of “learning to mean the words that someone else gives us,” whether those are the words of a songwriter or prayer leader. This skill requires a unique mix of humility (submitting ourselves to words given to us by the community of faith), grace (willingness to offer the benefit of the doubt when those words may not have been well chosen), and intention (actually to appropriate those words as our own).

The Worship Sourcebook (alt)

 

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LitBit Commentary – James Torrance on Worship 4

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“Under the pressures of our culture, and of theological controversy, are we not in danger of losing that living centre – of forgetting that the real agent in the life of the Church is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ?  Then our worship becomes in practice Unitarian and Pelagian, simply what we, religious people, do.”

James Torrance, Worship, Community and the triune God of Grace, p.107

 

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LitBit Commentary – John Zizioulas on the Eucharist

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“In the Eucharist we can find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates himself to us, we enter into communion with him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through man into communion with God. All this takes place in Christ and the Spirit, who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom.”
John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church

 

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LitBit Commentary – Alexander Schmemann on Prayer

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We pray in Christ, and he, through his Holy Spirit, prays in us, who are gathered in his name. “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Galatians 4.6). We can add nothing to this prayer, but according to his will, according to his love, we have become members of his body, we are one with him and have participation in his protection and intercession for the world.

Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, p.54

 

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LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on grace 1

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“The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.  That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves – to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed.  It is a more authentic desire because more comprehensive, turning away from the illusory attraction of an innocence that cannot be recovered unless the world is unmade.  Grace will remake but not undo.”

Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p.89

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LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on the Eucharist 13

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“Celebrating the Eucharist not only reminds us that we are invited to be guests; it also reminds us that we are given the freedom to invite others to be guests as well. We have experienced the hospitality of God in Christ; our lives are therefore set free to be hospitable… Being in the neighbourhood of Jesus is sharing Jesus’ freedom to invite – to make our lives and our communities places of welcome for those most deeply in need of solidarity, of fellowship.”

Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.46f

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LitBit Commentary – Timothy Radcliffe on the Eucharist 2

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Think of the domination, exploitation and pollution of man and nature that goes with bread, all the bitterness of competition and class struggle, all the organized selfishness of tariffs and price-rings, all the wicked oddity of a world distribution that brings plenty to some and malnutrition to others, bringing them to that symbol of poverty we call the bread line.  And wine too – fruit of the vine and work of human hands, the wine of holidays and weddings … This wine is also the bottle, the source of some of the most tragic forms of human degradation: drunkenness, broken homes, sensuality, debt.  What Christ bodies himself into is bread and wine like this, and he manages to make sense of it, to humanize it.  Nothing human is alien to him.  If we bring bread and wine to the Lord’s Table, we are implicating ourselves in being prepared to bring to God all that bread and wine mean.  We are implicating ourselves in bringing to God, for him to make sense of, all which is broken and unlovely.  We are implicating ourselves in the sorrow as well as the joy of the world.

Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church? p.130

 

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LitBit Commentary – Rowan Williams on the Eucharist 12

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“The Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus’ life, and so proclaimed hope for the whole world of matter. The material, habitually used as a means of exclusion, of violence, can become a means of communication. Matter as hoarded or dominated or exploited speaks of the distortion and ultimate severance of relationship, and as such can only be a sign of death… The matter of the Eucharist, carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation”

Rowan Williams, Resurrection, p.112f

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LitBit Commentary – Stanley Hauerwas on Confession

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“…as Christians we cannot learn to confess our sins unless we are forgiven. Indeed as has often been stressed, prior to forgiveness we cannot know we are sinners. For it is our tendency to want to be forgivers such that we remain basically in a power relation to those we have forgiven. But it is the great message of the Gospel that we will only find our lives in that of Jesus to the extent that we are capable of accepting forgiveness. But accepting forgiveness does not come easily, because it puts us literally out of control.”

Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom p.109

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