Here is a list, in the proper order, of all the posts in this topic:

Forward

Introductory Material:

1. Saint Gregory, Our Patron
   
2. A History of Liturgical Ministry (Pt 1)
   
3. A History of Liturgical Ministry (Pt 2)
   
4. A History of Liturgical Ministry (Pt 3)
   
5. A History of Liturgical Ministry (Pt 4)
   
6. A History of Liturgical Ministry (Pt 5)
   
7. Ministers of Worship
   
8. Affectionate Context
   
9. Building Plan and Symbolism (Pt 1)
   
10. Building Plan and Symbolism (Pt 2)

Structure of the Liturgy:

Liturgy of the Word

1. Gathering and Preparing Music
   
2. Entry Procession and Incense
   
3. Readings and Canticles
   
4. Sermon and Alleluia Procession
   
5. Lord’s Prayer and Prayers of the People

Liturgy of the Sacrament

1. Tripudium Procession to the Table and Transfer of Gifts
   
2. Kiss of Peace
   
3. Excursus: Eucharistic Sacrifice
   
4. The Preface
   
5. Great Thanksgiving
   
6. Fraction, Elevation and Communion
   
7. Postcommunion
   
8. Alms and Food Collection

Perhaps I need to break each post out into its composite subsections (the final post, for example, has a total of five sections running to the end of the rite). If I do so, I will change this listing of contents.

Many thanks to Rick Fabian and to All Saints Company for permission to post this.

E Give in response to God’s gifts to us, and so take part in God’s generosity. Hence this moment is the classical, and classically Anglican, moment for collecting contributions, alms and food for the poor. The deacon announces, “Seeing how freely God loves us, let us share the good things we have received, so that all the world may know God’s love.” The congregation fill baskets with tinned food and clothes for the homeless, and money for the Church’s work, and place these gifts on the altar table with the remaining bread and wine.

Here is the reason we do not remove the eucharistic remains to the sacristy, as is the current fashion. By joining the people’s gifts with God’s gifts at this point, we make plain that all our gifts come from God — not that we receive the eucharistic gifts in return for our offerings, as a laypeople’s “offertory” procession unhappily implies. Recently some reformers have recanted their earlier sponsorship for the laypeople’s “offertory” procession, and argued for almsgiving after communion as the classic and best arrangement. (*) After an initial experiment with almsgathering at the very end of the service (newcomers were confused and did not contribute) we moved this action to the postcommunion, with more fruitful results.

Polychronia We sing Polychronia (“God grant them many years!”) on a famous Russian melody to people celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, to new members, newlyweds, newborns, newly baptized, or a guest preacher. (When the Bishop visits we sing this chant during the Missa instead: see below.)

Carol After giving quick instruction, the clergy and the cantor lead the congregation dancing around the altar table and all the gathered gifts, singing a hymn. Medieval carols originally were dances in which the dancers sang the music, as we do, and we call this event “the Carol.” Today medieval dance steps are too complex and athletic for our purpose. Instead we use one of five simple Greek steps—each suiting a different hymn rhythm— that are even more ancient (two appear in moisaics of Alexander the Great) and still live in Greek folk dance. These repeat a single figure over and over, so they are simple to learn and sing to; and they move steadily to one side, so the dancers can feel and see the whole group moving together. We accompany the dance with drums and sistrums, as Ethiopian Christians do, and we normally use the same Carol hymn two or three weeks running, so people can join in with easy familiarity.

Dancing has drawn even more enthusiasm than we hoped. Before founding St Gregory’s, we experimented with caroling at the Episcopal Church at Yale, where it became a popular Easter event. And after St Gregory’s first Easter our people insisted they wanted to dance at every liturgy. So we do, even on Good Friday. Indeed, counting the Tripudium procession to the altar, our congregation dance twice. Very occasionally a newcomer opts out, but by this point most have abandoned all hope for a normal church service, and will give another novelty a try. Those who do almost always say they enjoyed it.

Missa The Christian eucharist has known a huge variety of endings, from a simple exchange of the Peace to a long chain of hymns, prayers, and washing up. These endings have included prayers of thanksgiving after communion and farewell benedictions. Most popular was the Missa, in which the Bishop went to the center of the nave (“behind the Ambo”), extended his hands over the people in a final prayer, and the whole congregation came for him to lay hands on them in quick succession. This ritual was also called “coming to the bishop’s hand,” and in fourth century Jerusalem it concluded all services, eucharistic or not, even if the bishop had to be hauled into church at the final moment to perform it. (*)

When the Bishop is present at St Gregory’s (and we do have them, often), the Polychronia chant accompanies this exuberant, affectionate and tumultuous ritual. Singing the congregation rush forward around the Bishop, who lays hands speedily on everyone’s heads, praying blessings over and over. Already popular in fourth century Jerusalem, the Missa soon spread among all churches, because it allows everyone a chance to feel palpably the Bishop uniting us in prayer fellowship with Christians everywhere.

Our restored Missa has proved overwhelmingly popular — indeed, our Bishop loved it at once. In 1993 he led the Diocesan Convention in celebrating the liturgy as we do at St Gregory’s, and specifically asked for the Missa. After only a brief hesitation, three hundred delegates pressed forward eagerly for a blessing and touch from his hand, while all sang the Polychronion. The entire ceremony lasted less than three minutes.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta — the Roman Catholic Church’s first woman bishop since Teresa of Ávila — did this same heartwarming ceremony every time she entered a house of her nuns. The Missa has given us the word “Mass” (from the Roman deacon’s final plea: “Ite, missa est‚ — That was the Missa; now go home!”) and the western sacramental ritual of Confirmation, originally a bishop’s Missa after baptism.

Finishing the Feast At last the colorful altar cloths, alms and tinned food for the poor give place to coffee and cakes set out on the bare altar table; the doors re-open; and the congregation consume the remaining bread and wine along with the other food, lingering to greet each other as long as they wish—usually a good while. Thus the familiar parish coffee hour continues the eucharistic feast, still centered on Jesus’ table, and the liturgical gathering gradually returns to the place it began: the open doors through which the world enters the church and the church enters the world.

Editor’s Note: When last I was at SGN, in October of 2007, the coffee hour continued with a pot-luck (or, as we say in Dixie, a covered-dish) luncheon, held in the church around the altar. I was told this new tradition has been increasing in regularity.

This is an adaptation of a custom I’ve seen at many Orthodox parishes which offer lunch after liturgy. The usual claim is since Orthodox must fast for 12 hours before communion, it is important to break the fast. But in fact this meal, called in the Russian Orthodox tradition, “Trapeza”, is the continuation of the ancient Agape Feast. Trapeza means “Table” and it was intended as exactly that: another table, like the altar, around which the community gathers for fellowship. It was also a way to share food (“communion-like”) with those who were not prepared or otherwise denied communion. Since SGN does not deny communion, what we see – in the luncheon, as well as in the more anaemic, tradtional “coffee hour”, is the desire for and the manifestation of the earliest churchs’ constant living of community. – DHR

SHORT Prayerful Silence ends the Communion. After communion the vessels return to the table and are veiled against insects once again. Current fashion favors sending the remaining bread and wine for consumption offstage; but we are not done with them yet! We will shortly set the people’s offerings of money and food for the poor alongside them on the table. Later the people will finish the bread and wine there along with cakes, cookies, coffee and juices — and champagne on occasion — as an extension of the eucharistic feast.

The Presider then recites one of these prophecies as a blessing. THe first is in the longest use at St Gregory’s. The latter two came into use following the turn of the century.

Baruch Prophecy (Baruch 5)
Arise, Jerusalem, and stand on high,
and look about toward the east,
and behold your children
gathered together from the rising to the setting sun,
at the Word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them.
For they went out from you on foot, led away by enemies;
but the Lord will bring them back to you
riding high in honour,
as children of the Kingdom.
Blessed + be the name of the Lord, henceforth and forevermore.

The concluding verse, from Psalm 113, is used as a blessing in the Chabûrah and in the worship of nearly all churches. This psalm verse once introduced the blessing of the cup following the Chabûrah, and probably migrated here to accompany the distribution of the antidôron when that became the laypeople’s effective communion in most eastern liturgies. Since our worship moves on to dancing and further feasting on coffee and cakes, this blessing serves to end the formal communion and begin a more informal phase — a parallel to its use in eastern rites today. The other two blessings, following, serve parallel roles in the liturgy, as a break between the communion rites and the dancing (etc) that follows.

Wisdom Blessing (Wisdom 6)
Wisdom is brilliant, she never fades.
By those who love her, she is easily seen,
by those who seek her, she is readily found.
She is a breath of God’s power
an image of God’s goodness
the eternal light and mirror of God’s glory.
Now let + Wisdom do all things, renew all things,
and pass into holy souls everywhere
to make them friends of God.

Isaiah Promise (Isaiah 55)
Come, all who are thirsty, come to the waters
Come, you who have no food, come and eat
come and buy without money, without price
The Lord has made a covenant with you
to love you faithfully forever.
You shall go out with joy
and be led forth with peace.
This + is the promise the Lord has said it.

E HAVE already sung the Lord’s Prayer to begin the Prayers of the People, and do not repeat it here. R. Taft has argued (at a North American Academy of Liturgy seminar in 1989) that the Lord’s Prayer migrated here, not on account of its reference to feeding, but on account of its petition for forgiveness. Just as those excommunicated for major sins (the Penitents) were anciently restored to communion by the Bishop’s pardon, so regular communicants could ask pardon for their minor offences by repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and then share worthily in the bread and wine. Unfortunately, by undermining the principle that nothing can make us worthy of Christ’s banquet, this innovation begins a long history of devotional confusion. It also overturns the gospels’ order of events, which derives from Jesus’ own teaching and example: in God’s kingdom we are first welcomed, forgiven, and fed; and then we repent and reform our lives — as the Zacchaeus story exemplifies (Luke 19).

Fraction After the people’s Amen to the Great Thanksgiving, the Presider and Deacons distribute the bread and wine into vessels for communion. Following G. Dix’s theory of The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), many modern celebrants highlight this action, called the fraction, as a gesture fraught with meaning. Some lift the bread and break it dramatically, suggesting the Fraction completes the sacrifice of Jesus, broken on the Cross. (One cathedral I visited punctuated this gesture with a banshee shriek from the organ’s Spanish Trumpet stop — I was so startled I sat on my new felt hat!) But a gesture implying that something happens to Christ in the liturgy is just what the sixteenth century Reformers called a “superstition.” The original Fraction was a functional matter of distributing the bread and wine for the Communion — it was the Communion that truly completed the eucharistic sacrifice. So we perform the Fraction plainly. The Presider and assisting presbyters divide up the bread; the deacon divides up the wine, a somewhat more complex job.

More than One Cup! Function determines the number of vessels on the Table. Throughout history as the number of communicants grew, so did the number of communion vessels: in the east, giant patens held the bread (still Ethiopian custom); western medieval churches with tiny sanctuaries piled excess loaves on panniers held by subdeacons squeezed in behind the presider; renaissance reformers replaced their goblet chalices with imposing silver pitchers, to supply the wine communion newly restored to the laity. But the shrinkage of late medieval communions, and the introduction of unleavened bread in the ninth century west, allowed both eastern and western churches to return to a single chalice and paten on the Altar Table — and in the east even a single loaf — accidentally restoring the rabbinical scale likely seen at Jesus’ Last Supper, and clearly assumed by Paul, who makes this one loaf a symbol of the Church’s unity. (1 Corinthians 10:17) Therefore some modern liturgists try to keep this visual symbol by an artifice, confining the extra vessels required offstage until the fraction. But Massey Shepherd protested that Vatican II reformers (of whom he was one) deliberately demoted this symbol, instead honoring practical function as fundamental to ritual. And we abandoned it at St Gregory’s when the congregation crowding around the Altar made it impossibly clumsy. Now all the vessels needed stand on the Table throughout the prayer, covered beforehand and afterward with veils embroidered by the Indian Christians of Kerala; and at Easter and other very crowded services we use a giant Ethiopian wooden paten piled high with many homemade loaves.

At crowded services, as chalices empty we extend the wine by co-mixture, pouring the flagon of consecrated wine into other cups brought half-filled to the table. This ancient practice serves both symbolic unity and speedy distribution for Communion. Should the bread or wine run out, we do not repeat the Great Thanksgiving prayer’s Last Supper narrative, as the American Prayer Book newly directs: the Anglican reformers would have seen magical superstition in such “hocus pocus;” moreover, it contradicts renewal by singling out one paragraph of the prayer as the consecrating moment. Instead, like eastern Christians we drop a fragment of consecrated bread into a fresh chalice, by extension making this wine the Blood of Christ. (And should the consecrated bread run out, we intinct fresh bread to the same end.) The same method serves for delivering communion to the sick. Haghia Sophia made this simple practice standard by the eleventh century for communion from the presanctified gifts, reckoning that sacramental theology allows no distinction between Christ’s Body and Blood. (*) Such elegant thinking solves problems still vexing western reform. As easterners have enjoyed two uninterrupted millennia of lay communion in both species, westerners may learn from them when we can.

During the preparation of the elements, the people sing the Syrian chant “Servant [or Lamb] of God” or an Easter Troparion or other seasonal text. The familiar western text of this Syrian hymn is corrupt. According to C.H. Dodd, 2 Isaiah’s image of the Suffering Servant was mistranslated in John’s gospel from Aramaic, a language that spells “Servant” and “Lamb” alike. Moreover the hymn’s last repetition has been changed peculiarly to fit worship at Rome, where the Peace follows before Communion. We sing the hymn in a more primitive form (“Servant of God, you take away the sins of the world”), invoking 2 Isaiah’s original prophecy, and not altering the last repetition. For wider use, a setting of our music to the more familiar text appears in Church Hymnal Studies V: Congregational Music for Eucharist (1980).

One is Holy Once prepared, the clergy lift the gifts for all to see, turning around to the whole company and inviting them to share: “Holy gifts for holy people.”

The congregation reply, “One is holy, one is Lord: Jesus Christ, to the glory of God our Mothering Father! Amen.”

Many eastern sources begin communion with this dialogue, which I have Englished in expanded gender terms. (An explanation follows here.) Recent American Prayer Book reform introduced the presider’s original line alone in early drafts, whereupon some readers objected — contradicting St Paul — that sinners could not be called holy. So the authors compromised: “The Gifts of God for the People of God.” Yet that objection would hardly have arisen had drafts included the people’s original response, which quotes the Gloria in excelsis, making plain the orthodox sense.

It is tempting to think that eastern usage inspired Cranmer’s queer decision to set the Gloria in excelsis at the end of his eucharistic rite, where it remained in Anglican Prayer Books until the twentieth century. The communion chants Lamb of God and One is Holy, both Syrian in origin, branch off from the Gloria in excelsis, another Syrian hymn which functions as a concluding doxology at Lauds — not the eucharist — in eastern worship. The Sarum rite shows Byzantine liturgy was understood in medieval England, but Cranmer’s knowlege is less clear to us.

My translation here, and other translations used by St Gregory’s composers, reflect our policy to pluralize gender language in every service, rather than restrict it to any one standard. Commenting on the Song of Songs, Gregory Nyssen says the groom’s mother in the biblical poem symbolizes God, since God has no gender, so that a woman represents God as well as a man. Gregory’s exegisis inspired the icon behind our presider’s chair, and the people’s communion response seems an excellent place to speak it aloud. “Mothering Father” echoes clearly the Gloria in excelsis, while giving the feminine image the verb: this has four advantages. Gregory and his fellow Cappadocians insist that God’s actions are all we can know about God. Secondly, despite some other theologians’ faith in nouns and copulas, poets and storytellers know that verbs dominate what people hear. Again, Scripture uses nouns and verbs alike with male images, but verbs more often with female images for God — such as a hen brooding over chicks, or a nurse coaxing an unwilling child to her breast.

Finally,“Mothering Father,” while poetically terse, is also what Paul Tillich called, in Dynamics of Faith (1962), a “broken image:” thanks to cognitive dissonance its limits are self-evident, proof against idolatry. Tillich would likely have seen brokenness, rather than inclusiveness, as the chief virtue in feminist God language today. He called his the “Protestant Principle,” while claiming rightly it was older than Protestantism. Among Gregory Nyssen’s intellectual heirs, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Ávila composed feminist terms of lasting usefulness with it: “Jesus our Mother,” for one pertinent example. Purer, less dissonant female images bear the virtue of brokenness only temporarily. Once we grow accustomed to them, they will prove as dangerous as patriarchal terms are, and as matriarchal terms have been for other faiths.

To Everyone by Name Returning the gifts to the table, the clergy begin the communion. Following eastern Christian custom, we give the eucharist to each communicant by name. The Presider receives bread and wine from the deacon, (A modified Byzantinism: they would have preferred a cleric of the same order.(*) then communicates the deacon, assisting ministers, and anyone newly baptized or married at this service; then the Presider and deacon carry the bread among the people. Lay ministers follow carrying chalices through the crowd, who pass the cups to each other while the ministers see that the cups reach everyone.

The Chabûrah usually involved small groups, who fit around one dinner table. The host shared one loaf and one cup with his guests, delivering each with his own hands. Paul found this symbol a powerful reminder of church unity (1 Corintians 10:17); yet even in his lifetime churches must have become too crowded to make it practical. Eastern churches can still employ one communion minister, since today few of their laypeople ordinarily communicate; but western Christians can preserve only a vestigial gesture, for example by ordering the Presider to communicate the deacons or lay assistants, who then split up and communicate the rest. And once this unity symbol is broken, there seems little point in restricting the distributorship to some laypeople — thus clericalized — and not others. Especially if other methods are speedier; alas, the Communion is often the slowest part of an understaffed western liturgy. By contrast, our system works swiftly, with the chalices moving in a leap-frog pattern. And our people like this mixture of communion methods— both receiving from a vested “host” and serving one another.

Infants and children receive with the rest, sometimes at their parents’ helpful hands. Thus every Christian receives Christ’s body and blood from another Christian, and so from the Church; and the whole company shares Jesus’ prophetic ministry, welcoming sinners to the table and feeding them.

ollowing rabbinical custom, the Presider secures the congregation’s assent, (“Let us give thanks… It is right…”) and begins the Great Thanksgiving prayer, from which the entire Eucharistic Liturgy (Greek for “Thanksgiving Service”) takes its name. This prayer, derived from the long blessing (kiddûsh) over the first winecup opening formal discussion at the Chabûrah, thanks God for all the acts of creation and salvation that climaxed in Jesus’ life-giving death and resurrection, and prays for the gift of Christ’s Spirit and the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom. Centuries of debate have focussed on this prayer, on God’s answer to it, and on the place of these in Christian faith. Even a summary of the central points would overextend this pamphlet; a paragraph alone must suffice here.

The eucharist is a “sacrament,” (from the Latin, sacramentum, meaning “oath”) that is, a promise from God: our prayer will be granted, because Jesus himself is God’s “yes” answer. (2 Corinthians 1:20) As we pray for Jesus’ presence with us, so his Spirit is here; and the bread and wine are his body and blood shared with us, just as the Last Supper story affirms. According to that story, he followed the Chabûrah ritual, giving thanks as usual; then when handing out the bread and wine, he used words that made plain his own faith: his coming death would be a life-giving sacrifice. Instead of taking back Jesus’ life, God would give his life to the world. Just so, he is present now wherever two or three gather in his name (Matthew 18:20), and our worship from beginning to end is full of him. The gospel resurrection stories show that his followers recognized his presence especially when keeping his Chabûrah, and Christians ever since have honored this feast as the climax of their worship.

Changing Notions and Rites During later ages the table ritual changed to emphasize current notions of how Christ was present or what his presence meant. The fight against Arianism provided the first occasion. In an effort to buttress Christ’s divinity, John Chrysostom and other orthodox preachers proclaimed that the eucharistic bread was God’s own body. As Chrysostom himself complained, the faithful responded by giving that divine stuff a wide berth, increasingly shunning communion as dangerously sacred. For a long time most laypeople reserved communion, and even baptism, until their deathbeds.

Reformers in the ninth, sixteenth and twentieth centuries revamped the ritual following current historical (or historicized) ideas. Alcuin, Calvin and Dix are good examples: each found their contemporary liturgies different from the gospel Last Supper narratives, and set about “restoring” what he thought had got lost. Their historical views were partly conjectural, however, and they “restored” customs (like unleavened bread) that the meal had not had before. All these reformers meant to strengthen the continuity linking contemporary Christian worshippers with Jesus and his followers. Today the same intention leads us to simplify or omit symbols once popular, in favor of others we find more fundamental or inclusive. Perhaps one day others may do the same with our work!

Concelebration – Size Matters Byzantine bishops and presbyters concelebrate on occasion. After Vatican II, Roman Catholic reformers seized on this practice for a compromise that might enable priests trained for daily private masses to share in a single community eucharist; Anglicans welcomed it as a vehicle for collegiality; and ecumenists made it a sign of mutual denominational respect. By contrast, the classical pattern calls for one Presider at the table, taking the unifying role of the Chabûrah host, and yielding this place to a visiting presbyter when ecumenical circumstances warrant it. (*)

Following Hellenistic Symposium custom, rabbis at the Chabûrah, and early Christians following the Didachê, blessed the bread and wine separately at either end of a full meal, with scriptural discussion afterward. (Later the eating, drinking and discussing overlapped.) A Chabûrah host began this meal holding a loaf while giving thanks over it in normal family style, then broke off pieces, popping one in his mouth and giving each guest a morsel. Likewise after supper, he held the winecup while giving thanks, then shared it, first sipping himself, and then delivering it to each guest in turn. The Last Supper story says that during these distributions — not during the prayer — Jesus told his disciples, “Take, eat, this is my body…” and “…this is my blood…”

Such a ritual worked well enough for small groups. But the growth of church membership called for adjustments. (Among northern European Jews today the host exchanges sips of wine with each guest: a gesture few hosts could complete with a large crowd!) Christians soon separated the supper from the blessings of bread and wine, and joined these blessings into a single prayer; in the fourth century this prayer acquired an explanatory narrative of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples. As the amount of bread and wine increased, the deacons began piling these gifts on the table, or holding them in baskets when even the table became too small. Thus the host quit handling them, and instead stood praying with his hands raised throughout. After the fourth century, the decline of popular communion reduced the quantities needed, but presidents continued to celebrate without handling the gifts until the ninth century in the west, and until today in the east. (It astonishes Anglo-catholic seminarians to learn that Eastern Orthodox clergy never touch the bread and wine during the Great Thanksgiving, and have not for eighteen hundred years!)

Presdidigitation In the west, the era of Charlemagne and Cluny saw revived Christian interest in Judaism, year-long conferences between monks and rabbis, and a well-intentioned but mistaken “restoration” of seemingly “lost” Jewish ritual. Because the gospel accounts fixed Jesus’ death near Passover time, westerners now began eating unleavened Passover bread at their eucharist; and their presiders began mimicking Jesus’ actions as the Roman Great Thanksgiving prayer narrated them —lifting the bread, the cup, and their eyes on cue, and making hand signs at every verb. The resulting prestidigitation resembled neither Chabûrah nor Seder ritual; but it can still be seen in some form at most western altars today. Anglican Prayer Books still urge or require it. Nevertheless some western presiders follow a simpler, earlier style, either holding the bread and wine aloft throughout the prayer, or standing with empty hands raised as eastern Christian presidents have done since the third century. When the gifts exceed one paten and chaliceful, the latter method is still the only practical one, and so is our unvarying use at St Gregory’s.

At St Gregory’s the whole congregation stands around the Presider, praying together; and the collegial value of clergy concelebration vanishes into the crowd. The Presider stands at the table’s flat side, facing the icon of Christ, Lord of the Dance. The deacon and people stand all around the table, praying with their hands raised: the classic Christian posture for public prayer. (This posture included raising eyes heavenward as well.) The Presider sings the entire Great Thanksgiving prayer in this stance without manual gestures of any kind, leaving the deacon to turn pages and shoo flies. The congregation join in, droning softly in free harmony throughout the prayer, and singing Acclamations and Amen.

When to sing The Great Thanksgiving enfolds two scriptural hymns, both taken from Jewish synagogue worship, and normally sung in quick succession. (They are conventionally named for the first word of their texts in Latin.) The Sanctus from Isaiah 6 recalls God’s appearance in the Jerusalem temple as in a royal court, attended by seraphim crying “Holy! Holy! Holy!” — a Hebrew superlative, meaning God is the holiest of all. To evoke the Jerusalem temple surroundings at their hometown services, many synagogues synchronized their worship with temple ritual, stood temple furniture around their buildings, and opened with this hymn. Christian synagogue architecture focussed on Christ’s table, instead of the temple, as the place where we know God’s presence, and therefore moved the Sanctus to the table liturgy, attaching it to the Great Thanksgiving either as a climax to the whole prayer, or to the prayer’s opening praises.

The Benedictus is a short refrain conflating two verses from Psalm 118, which sings of God triumphantly rescuing Israel from peril, and of victory sacrifices. The psalm recurs in New Testament preaching about Jesus’ death and resurrection (See Acts, Hebrews, et al.) and Jesus’ Last Supper may have included it. The Benedictus refrain ends the eucharistic meal in the second-century Didachê text, our earliest surviving Great Thanksgiving prayer, and Chabûrah texts likewise have the company sing the same psalm before leaving, possibly using refrains like this one. Thus Psalm 118 is likely the “hymn” mentioned at this point in the Last Supper story. (Mark 14:26)

It appears that the Sanctus was moved from the opening of the synagogue reading service to the close of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, adjoining the Benedictus refrain; and later elaborations were tacked on after these hymns, so that the Sanctus and Benedictus fell somewhere near the middle of the resulting chain of prayers.

E.C. Ratcliff (in his The Sanctus and the Pattern of the Early Anaphora, published in the “Journal of Ecclesiastical History,” 1950) points to the fourth century Apostolic Constitutions as a late survival of a more primitive pattern, by which these hymns concluded the prayer. G. Cuming (to whose memory this pamphlet is dedicated) found Ratcliff’s theory too wide-sweeping: some ancient prayers may have developed according to Ratcliff’s theory; others demonstrably did not.

The Shape of the Thanksgiving When the Sanctus and Benedictus hymns fall in the middle of Great Thanksgiving prayers, as they do in most western prayers written since the fourth century, they divide two very different sections. The former section states a scriptural theme for the day’s celebration, and may change following the lectionary; the section after the hymns is fixed, and focusses on Jesus’ death and the table meal. Ratcliff’s theory suggests a possible explanation for this format: the first section may reflect a primitive stage when the Presider or preacher improvised the prayer “prophetically” suiting the occasion (the Didachê expressly approves this practice), and the hymns followed. The second section may then have emerged as a form for non-prophetic presidents to recite: with time this form grew more extensive and detailed. Then as prophecy disappeared, both forms may have been repeated together, conserving tradition. The Benedictus’ conflation with the Sanctus and separation from the Communion and post-communion implies that something like this happened somewhere, with widely copied results.

At St Gregory’s we use Great Thanksgiving prayers in both formats: those supplied in the Prayer Book and subsequent official publications, which locate the hymns in the middle of the prayer; and a small series of our own authorship, based on the form (not the length!) of the Apostolic Constitutions, recalling creation and salvation history from the lectionary readings, and climaxing with the Sanctus and Benedictus. It is a felicitous form for prayer writing, as the paragraphs move naturally from past to present to realized eschatological hope, climaxing in Isaiah’s majestic hymn.

The Prayer Book supplies six full prayers and an outline for writing more; official sources have added experimental drafts; other Anglican provinces have added theirs; and we have written a short series based on scriptural themes for various lectionary seasons.

The early Church was rich with many such prayers, originally freely composed from Bible imagery, as synagogue and Chabûrah prayers were. Centuries of Roman pressure for uniformity, followed by Reformation wrangling over eucharistic dogma, produced a legacy of western prayers in fierce denominational isolation from each other. By contrast, many eastern churches borrowed each other’s prayers, assigning them to diverse calendar occasions. Here as elsewhere, Anglican practice is shifting in an eastward direction; Roman reforms may be too. Despite formal diversity, however, the content of modern Great Thanksgiving prayers is similar today, as revisions and new compositions are increasingly harmonized under ecumenical influence.

A typical prayer begins by praising God for creation, then recalls God’s revelation to Israel, climaxing in the ministry of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and his Spirit poured out on the world. The prayer then narrates the Last Supper story, repeating Jesus’ sacrificial words when he shared his bread and wine. This story was first told to Paul at Antioch, and copied from his letter (1 Corinthians 11) into the gospels and many eucharistic prayers. Alas, since medieval times it has provided occasion for false magic and groundless sectarian polemic.

When doe it happen? Western schoolmen, misreading ancient prayers’ references to the saving actions of God’s Word (that is, to Jesus’ incarnation and death) reasoned that Jesus’ words in this paragraph of the Great Thanksgiving prayer must perform the sacrificial action at each eucharist. With bizarre precision, they settled on a single central letter in the Roman prayer version as the “moment of consecration:” the “e” in “enim,” a word missing from the scripture story even in Latin bibles! Western presiders began repeating Jesus’ words bent over in a whisper — a dramatic technique here twisted from its use in Syrian worship — and quickly lifting the bread or the cup for the faithful to adore, before completing the prayer. Vulgar witchcraft recognized the magical implications, corrupting the Latin text “hoc est corpus meum /this is my body” into hocus pocus, and the consecrated bread into amulets for white magic against bad luck and vampires, or for black magic at supposed devil’s masses.

Though appalled at these consequences, the Reformers accepted the schoolmen’s premise, and rooted out sacrificial references to purge superstition. For four hundred years polemicists made Jesus’ words an essential test of sacramental validity, as western denominations condemned each other’s worship. The few ancient prayers surviving without this paragraph were treated as unusable anomalies, or even as non-eucharistic prayers suitable for lay presiders at church suppers! To their credit, Eastern Christians resisted identifying any one “moment of consecration,” insisting that the Epiclêsis asking for the Holy Spirit was as important to the prayer as the Last Supper story. But western fashion influenced the ceremonial of some eastern churches too, only shifting this to the epiclesis instead. Our American Prayer Book requires the Last Supper story in freely composed prayers and prayers consecrating additional bread and wine, as though this were the minimal condition for validity.

However, modern textual criticism (M. Johnson et al.) shows this story was introduced into Great Thanksgiving prayers in the fourth century, when explanations instructing the crowds of new converts pervaded public worship. Most older prayers were edited then to receive it. Today insistence upon this paragraph as essential for sacramental validity would excommunicate the first three centuries of Christians, who are our sole source for scriptural and ritual tradition — an absurd position. As research uncovers more diverse usage at every historical level, ecumenists rely ever more on the classic doctrine of intention: a local church’s (or denomination’s) rites are valid if that church intends what the worldwide Church intends. Writing the Last Supper story into modern prayers shows that valid intention, but cannot be not the essential test.

Epiclesis Next, the Presider asks for God’s Spirit to show that Jesus lives in us as we share this bread and wine, which we offer out of all God has given us. Finally the prayer asks God to bless and unify the Church, and bring God’s reign to fulfillment, in accord with Jesus’ faith.

Much ink and blood have been spilt over this part of the prayer, called the Epiclêsis, that is “calling down [the Holy Spirit].” Rather than rehearse the controversies that still cleave Christians here, I note Ratcliff’s theory that the prayer originally asked for the Spirit’s gifts on the Church, and only later consigned them to the bread and wine, thereby opening up insoluble disputes about what happened to these objects as a result. In this pamphlet I have tried to honor the main arguments: the unity of our offering with Christ’s perfect offering; the meaning of Christ’s actions in the context of the Hebrew scriptures he knew; the Church’s faithful intentions in remembering him; the fruits of his life and death realized in the lives of his followers, individually and corporately; and God’s creative and free generosity towards us, from which we have all the gifts we fight over.

Nearly all modern rites call for Acclamations from the people during the Great Thanksgiving — an eastern custom reflecting two thousand years of popular vernacular worship, with parallels in black American church services and African folk music. These Acclamations can vary, but at St Gregory’s we set one Acclamation to music and use it with all prayers, so the congregation can take full part in the Great Thanksgiving without following printed booklets.

The Byzantine Acclamations from the Prayer Book’s Eucharistic Prayer D — a prayer largely written by Gregory of Nyssa’s brother Basil — are the best; and we adapt other prayers to use them. These Acclamations lack the futurist eschatology which other officially authorized Acclamations emphasize, and which contradicts Jesus’ emphasis on the Kingdom come now. (*)

This contradiction shows starkly how far the ascendant liturgical renewal lags behind New Testament scholarship. Perrin’s analysis of gospel tradition has dominated scholarly criticism for thirty years. Yet not one of the officially published new Great Thanksgiving prayers expresses Jesus’ distinctive teaching on the coming of God’s Kingdom; most unwittingly betray it for futurist expectation, in concert with early Christian apologetic. We need a new generation of prayers to bring Jesus’ message into Christian worship.

Finally, following Jewish custom, the congregation add their AMEN, confirming all the Presider has prayed on their behalf.

Transition Between Liturgy of the Word and the Eucharistic Rite During the peace and the transfer of Gifts, Deacons recruit laypeople to close the church’s glass inner doors. This was the signal for the rabbinical Feast of Friends to begin. Students arriving after the doors had closed returned home without joining their rabbi’s supper discussion. Closing the doors creates an intimate atmosphere, encouraging everyone to leave worldly thoughts behind and share single-mindedly in what follows — as the Preface immediately orders. We re-open our doors at Coffee Hour.

By returning to the earliest and simplest Transfer of Gifts at St Gregory’s, we enable the congregation to move smoothly and directly from the emotional warmth of the Kiss of Peace to the Preface (“Lift up your hearts!”) and the Great Thanksgiving.

In 1970, A. Schmemann told me he was convinced this was the best liturgical order, whether or not historical evidence supported it; from R. Taft’s reconstruction I infer this was the effective Byzantine order until the middle ages. (*) So long as the Transfer of Gifts was carried out during the Peace, all but the deacons could ignore it; and even when it developed into a distinct ceremony, its texts at first extended the Preface rite. Thus the earliest accompanying chant, Psalm 24, welcomes the Lord’s majestic arrival; and the Byzantine refrains later composed for the psalm — namely, the Cherubic hymn, the Powers of Heaven hymn, and the Jerusalem refrain familiar around the world today as “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” [Hymn 324] — each imbue that procession with the sense of the Preface: abandon all lowly thoughts, and attend to the divine business at hand! This same sense suffuses the two Byzantine “offertory” refrains added shortly afterward:. Only the last mentions the eucharistic gifts, and it depicts these, too, as gifts we receive, just as we might receive an arriving king.

As the Transfer of Gifts ritual grew, however, it acquired hymns and prayers anticipating the sacrificial content of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, and so acquired the sense of an “offertory.” In the current Roman rite these prayers virtually duplicate the Great Thanksgiving: a redundancy our Prayer Book authors rejected, but many Episcopal clergy have introduced on their own.

Even without that redundancy, however, the current Prayer Book order — Prayers of the People, Peace, Transfer of Gifts, Preface, Great Thanksgiving — sets these two (underlined) emotional climaxes in competition with each other, separated by ceremonial turmoil. In formal parishes the Great Thanksgiving may win this competition; in folksy parishes the Peace wins hands down; and the liturgy loses in both. Restoring the earliest and simplest Transfer of Gifts joins both climaxing moments so that one leads to the next, and the liturgy wins after all.

The Preface The Prayer Book [p. 404] provides the Syrian Preface dialogue from the fourth century Apostolic Constitutions and later Byzantine use, as a variant form — an excellent dialogue, too little used. We include here the Syrian instruction to parents, which we have edited slightly to fit our order of events, together with its response from the people. “Sacrifice of Praise” is the Levitical name for the Thank Offering (tôdah), the oldest Israelite communion offering.

At the Chabûrah, the Feast of Friends, a dialogue between host and diners introduced the climactic blessing of the final cup: during this dialogue the diners recited a blessing from Psalm 113: “Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth forever more.” The Christian dialogue before the Great Thanksgiving prayer echoes this pattern.(*)

The cantor ends the noisy Peace by announcing the music page, and all the vested party turns to the congregation, crying, “Draw near! Draw near!” One deacon continues with the ancient (and still timely) chant, “Parents, take your children in hand! Let us love one another that we may offer the holy sacrifice in peace.”

(This audio track of the preface dialogue is actually 2 different services edited together: a Sunday morning liturgy – with about 200 present, and a smaller, more intimate service from Saturday night. So you hear two presiders voices during the dialogue, as well as a deacon whose voice cracks.)

The people sing their reply, “A blessing of peace! a sacrifice of praise!” and the Presider blesses the congregation with St Paul’s Trinitarian blessing (2 Corinthians 13:14) making the Cross sign in all directions with the processional cross.

The Blessing Now? Acts 6 implies that the deacons originally took food blessed but not eaten at the common eucharistic meal, and distributed it to the poor. Sometime after the common meal had separated from the eucharist, the bread brought by the people but not chosen for the Great Thanksgiving was still blessed and distributed, only now to those who attended without receiving the eucharistic gifts. From the 5th to the 16th centuries, most laypeople attended the liturgy in this way, except on special occasions; only clergy received the eucharistic bread and wine regularly. Hence the climax of a medieval congregation’s worship was not the Communion, but the Missa or dismissal, when they “came to the bishop’s hand” for a blessing — the conclusion to all public services when he was present — and received the substitute blessed bread. (Byzantine churches still follow that custom, and call the bread antidôron, “substitute gift.”) As this effectively became the people’s communion rite, the blessing dialogue adapted from the Chabûrah appeared at this point, so that the president’s blessing closed the service.

Now that practically everyone in church shares the eucharistic bread and wine, the president’s blessing can return to its original place, as the Prayer Book variant provides [p. 404]. This is by far the best place for it: here it augments rather than competes with the Great Thanksgiving, which follows as the climax of all the blessings and prayers.

Sursum Corda Next the Presider sings, “Lift up your hearts.” A charge of this sort, called the Preface, opened most Roman civic and cultic meetings by instructing the public to present their business there, or depart. R. Taft presented this explanation at a North American Academy of Liturgy seminar in 1984. In the same way a bailiff opens American court sessions crying, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Court is now in session; let all those with business to bring before this court draw near!” Taft concluded that the liturgical Preface is: “Lift up your hearts,” and that this instruction prompted all to raise their hands as well as their hearts, in the classic Christian prayer posture.

Taft’s discovery corrects a hoary misunderstanding about the relation between the Preface and the Great Thanksgiving that immediately follows. Western Great Thanksgiving prayers typically begin with a short, variable part before the Sanctus & Benedictus, then follow with a longer fixed part. Medieval ceremonial finesse favored diffuse variations, and one English missal boasted 281 alternatives for that opening paragraph! (*)

By contrast, the prayer’s long fixed part contains the dramatic Last Supper story and hard-fought sacramental talk: hence reformers since the middle ages — including Cranmer — came to treat it as the essential stuff. These commonsensically misread the label “Preface” as a name for the prayer’s earlier variable part, as though that introduced the more essential fixed part the way an author’s preface introduces a book. Today most textbooks, and all Book of Common Prayer editions, call the Great Thanksgiving’s varying openings “Proper Prefaces.” Whereas conservative Latin liturgical printers, resisting common sense, have kept the “Preface” label’s proper historical place on the page: preceding rather than following the command, “Lift up your hearts,” to which it belongs.

All is Ready The Christian liturgical Preface calls on us to abandon worldly or evil thoughts and raise our hearts and minds to God, so we can share in Christ’s life-giving sacramental supper. Expressing this attitude physically, all raise their hands (and their eyes if they wish, like fourth century Christians) and hold them aloft throughout the Great Thanksgiving that follows. Veils covering the bread and wine to keep insects off are now lifted, and deacons stand by to shoo flies during the prayer.

Editor’s Note: In the print version of Worship at St Gregory’s, the following text appears between the passages discussing the Preface and the Great Thanksgiving. I Have moved it forward one step, as it were, so that the theology of the act is presented here, before the discussion of the liturgical action begins. For the reader, Fabian’s discussion of our evolving understanding of Jesus’ life and death may be present strong challenges to deeply-held assumptions about Christianity, but it is important to know the ideas from which the actions flow. I find it interesting that, in this theory, it is our pagan ideas of sacrifice, outside of Jesus’ Jewish context, that have influenced our understanding Jesus’ actions.

We normally speak of Sacrifice as an exchange, whereby we give up something we have and value, to get something we value more — as a baseball player does, for example, in a “sacrifice play.” In such a play, a batter aims the ball to the nearest waiting opponent, ensuring that the batter will be put “out,” while his better-placed teammates have extra time to score runs. The batter forfeits his own chance to score, and his career record suffers; but his team wins. (Our diocese sponsors annual excursions to professional baseball games where worshippers can reflect on this noble pagan spectacle, and aid the Episcopal Charities Drive with part of their ticket money.) That is the classical pagan sense of sacrifice, expressed in the Roman maxim do ut des: “I give to you [god], so that you will give to me.”

Pagan Assumptions The Hellenistic world which received the gospel of Jesus’ sacrificial death assumed that was what it meant: Jesus gave up his life, destroying himself on the Cross, in order to get something from God; and in the eucharistic meal, which Christians call a sacrifice, they offer him to God again and again, getting more and more of what he died for. This interpretation has dominated debates about the eucharist ever since, as medieval western clergy multiplied their celebrations to fill the world with Christ’s winnings, as disgusted Reformers purged all such “superstitious” behavior — and all sacrificial language too — and as modern apologists struggle to make acceptable sense of our tradition for an era that finds blood sacrifice hideous and cruel. (The same interpretation lends western literature a neurotic focus on Christian suffering and self-immolation.)

Apologies by Jungmann and others may soften some of the worst implications; but in fact they miss the mark when explaining the New Testament picture of Jesus’ sacrificial death, and even the sacrificial eucharistic meal, because the Old Testament thought underlying these differs radically from pagan logic. I am indebted here to R. Dentan, Lectures in Old Testament Theology (1970). Research progresses everywhere, multiplying exponentially, so that no scholar can keep abreast of it all. Modern liturgical revision began in close concert with modern scriptural criticism, but must struggle to stay in touch with recent developments in Old Testament and even New Testament research. Some of these developments now undermine assumptions by mainline liturgical reformers. At the scholarly conferences for liturgists which have contributed much to this pamphlet, discussion of these challenges is long overdue.

Jewish Sacrifice The earliest Hebrew offerings were cereal offerings, basically feasts which happy harvesters shared with the God who had blessed them.(*) Only one offering, the Sin Offering, worked otherwise. This animal sacrifice, rare in the confident Davidic kingdom, grew dominant after deportations had gutted that kingdom and left Judah a subject state. Because its ritual imitates the ancient Thank Offering or “Sacrifice of Praise (tôdah),” differing only in the disposition of the sacrificial remains, some infer that the Sin Offering (chattath) may even have originated after the exile. In any case this standardized ritual helped standardize sacrificial thinking, with the Sin Offering as the new model.

Priests now added the Sin Offering to each cereal offering and to many other rites, hoping to cover the sins that had caused the exile and that still blocked a return to Davidic glory. By Jesus’ time the Jerusalem temple had become a slaughterhouse, piling on Sin Offerings three times a day — a timetable which synchronized worship in many town synagogues as well, so that everyone had it in mind. (*) P. Bradshaw, witing in Daily Prayer in the Early Church, (1981), establishes that not all synagogues operated the same way. Nevertheless, caricatures of pharisees in Matthew’s gospel show that synchronicity with the sacrificial schedule was a widely recognized standard of piety, and possibly the dominant standard. Here is the sacrifice and the thinking that underpin New Testament talk of Jesus’ death, and especially talk of the eucharistic bread and wine as his body and blood.

In the eyes of Old Testament writers (Psalms 50, 104, 146) all life belongs forever to God, who created it and can never lose it. Humans and other animals enjoy filling up with life (or breath) for a while; then when they die it flows back to God like water (or blood) running back into a sea, leaving the once lively creature empty and weak (that is, dead). A sinner cut off from God, and so from the sea of life that filled her at birth, can only lose that life and die. But God mercifully offers a way out: if the sinner will bring a ram to the temple, and instead of killing it to eat it, kill it prayerfully and leave it for the priests to eat, God will not take that ram’s life back, but will give it to the sinner as a sort of life-transplant. (The sinner does not exactly receive the ram’s life, because there is no such thing; there is only life, some of which was in the sinner, and some in the ram, until both lost what life they had.)

This transaction is the opposite of the pagan do ut des.

Post-exilic Thank Offering texts indeed promise a reward: do this and you will dwell long in the land your God is giving you, and prosper there. (Deuteronomy 28, etc.) Like the ascendant chattath Sin Offering, these texts reflect the pain of exile, and the desire not to repeat it. But remarkably enough, the thank offerers are not told to give up something of their own; instead, they are to feast on the food they have brought to the temple, and bless God who has so blessed their fields, their flocks and their table. (Deuteronomy 26, etc.) This is hardly do ut des!

That the Sin Offering is nowhere explained as a payment in kind for restoring God’s favor, is even more remarkable. By comparison, ancient Greek and Indian religion abounded in such transactions. In this transaction God gains and loses nothing, because God already has everything (Psalm 50), and the sinner has already lost all she has, and has nothing left to give God. As for the ram, it would be killed and eaten in any case. All that happens differently, as the Psalmists see it, is that the sinner gets new life for free. Thus in Old Testament thought, “sacrificial” means “life-giving,” not “self-destroying.” (Only sin is self-destroying.)

Two Models or Three Stages? Recent Jewish scholarship has resolved a half century’s debate over the ritual context of this meal. Because the Gospels fix Jesus’ death at Passover time, many have assumed that his Last Supper was a Passover meal, or Seder. Yet the Christian eucharist shows no trace of Seder ritual before the ninth century, when Alcuin and others “restored” (in fact, introduced) such Passover elements as unleavened bread, which they assumed had got lost.

In The Shape of the Liturgy (1945) Dom Gregory Dix argued that the Last Supper could not have been a Seder, since Jesus died before Passover; instead, the eucharist derived from the Chabûrah, or Feast of Friends, which rabbis kept regularly with their close disciples. C. Kucharek’s The Byzantine-Slav Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, (1971) and L. Mitchell’s The Meaning of Ritual, (1977) match Chabûrah procedure with the early Christian liturgy described in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, or Didachê.

Yet Dix’s argument drew opposition, notably from J. Jeremias in his The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (1966) who conjectured a different Palestinian calendar for Passover; and indeed Jewish scholars have established that Passover calendars varied then. Moreover, our sources for Jewish Chabûrah ritual date from Christian times, and likely reflect Christian influence.

Now Jewish research shows that these models are not alternatives, but only chronological stages in the history of the same meal. This was no Jewish ritual at all, but rather the Hellenistic Symposium: originally a banquet eaten without alcohol, followed by a drinking bout with philosophical discussion. Among Jews and Christians it evolved as the formal discussion gradually invaded the dinner, and focussed on the symbolic meaning of the foods eaten. The Last Supper story portrays an early stage in this evolution; the Didachê and Chabûrah, intermediate stages; and the modern Seder, the final term. J. Tabory’s Towards a history of the paschal meal (NAAL paper 1998), cites many publications from 1907 to the present in this regard. A companion paper The Last Supper and the anti-chavurah meal by A. Rosenberg shows early Chabûrah rules required exclusive purity — but of the diners, not of the ceremony or the food, where rabbinical legislation focussed later.

Which came first? The same research resolves another debate about the chief blessing prayer used, from which our Great Thanksgiving prayer descends. Though Paul refers to “the cup after supper,” and the prayer appears at the end of the meal in Jewish documents, this was not a final cup of blessing, but rather the first blessing of wine for the discussion, which originally followed a meal where no wine had yet been drunk. When the discussion entered the meal itself, the cup and cup blessing moved too.

Such a continuum makes it all the harder to say precisely what happened at Jesus’ Last Supper itself. The gospel accounts depend on Paul’s earlier account in 1 Corinthians 11, of what Christians told him at Antioch; yet Paul’s informants there presumably describing the evolved ritual by which they themselves remembered Jesus. The relation of their rite to Jesus’ own is tantalizing but indefinable.

The Last Supper story appears first in 1 Corinthians 11, and is later repeated in the synoptic passions. New Testament critics point out that Paul describes the story as hearsay, and that it may represent the Antiochene Christians’ own meal customs, and their sacrificial understanding of these, rather than a historical quotation from Jesus himself. For our purpose here, however, the scriptural writers’ thought is precisely the issue.

The contemporary Jewish meaning of the language, “this is my body….this is my blood….shed for many,” has lately been debated; but scholars agree that Jews who heard it would have understood it as sacrificial talk.

Hence Jesus’ words in the Last Supper story say nothing about self-destruction on the Cross. Instead, they promise life.

The Prophetic Sign By welcoming unready sinners to his table as a prophetic sign of God’s reign, Jesus had long outraged contemporary standards and courted death. Now, knowing death was near, he ate the hallowed rabbinical Feast of Friends (Chabûrah) with his disciples again and told them that this —his deadly dining with them—would now become life-giving, because God would make his death a sacrifice, benefitting humankind. On account of Jesus’ faithfulness in teaching the truth by word and deed, God would not take Jesus’ life back into the sea of life, but would give it to the world. “Take; eat: this is my body; do this in memory of me. Drink this, all of you: this is my blood, shed for all, and the result will be that the sins of all will be forgiven; do this in memory of me.”

When Jesus’ followers met to eat the Chabûrah in his memory, they encountered him alive (most gospel resurrection stories are mealtime scenes) and they knew God had indeed given Jesus’ life to them — to sinners whom Jesus had welcomed to his table, to companions who had abandoned him when he died. Whereas other Jews orientated their synagogues toward the Jerusalem temple, where sacrifices were offered daily, and all hoped the messiah would one day appear, these now focussed their buildings on a dinner table. Jesus’ table, not the temple, had turned out to be the true place of sacrifice, the place where God gave new life to the world.

When the Procession hymn finishes, the Presider announces the Kiss of Peace: the clergy kiss the table, and all embrace each other throughout the church, saying “Peace be with you!”

In this ritual, anciently included in every service, Christians give Christ to one another: “Peace be with you” and “the Lord be with you” have the same meaning, because “He is our Peace.” (Ephesians 2:14) Hence the Byzantine rite’s distinctive greeting at this point, “Christ is among us…He is and he will be.” Public kissing was a Christian innovation, originally baptismal: the bishop kissed the newly baptized to symbolize the gift of the Holy Spirit, just as God breathed life into Adam’s mouth (Genesis 2) and the risen Christ breathed on the disciples (John 20). (*)

Anciently, therefore, Christians exchanged the Peace by kissing on the mouth, and men and women exchanged this kiss only with members of their own sex, to avoid scandal. (How times have changed!) Later it became a kiss on the cheek, or on both cheeks, or three kisses on two cheeks: in these forms eastern Christians have continued the practice inside and outside the liturgy. Western clergy continued it vestigially; but their laypeople did not, and have been slow to resume kissing in church, preferring a handshake or a hug. What matters is expressing the gesture’s intention: to give one another the peace of Christ himself.

Californians are a huggy bunch, and the Peace goes on awhile – there is time for the deacon to join in and lay out the table too. The deacon straightens up the altar table, veiling the Gifts against insects, while the Peace continues.

It is fun, but superfluous, to exchange the Peace with everyone in sight; those nearby will serve. On the other hand, following Matthew 5:23, the Kiss of Peace provides an urgent opportunity to bridge grudges and mend fences where we know these want doing, even if we must cross the room for the job.

Now the Clergy lead the people to the altar area, singing a hymn and marching together in the ancient Tripudium step: three steps forward, one step back. This dance survives in Luxembourg today, where it is still used for the offertory procession at Pentecost, and the Benedictine scholar Godfrey Diekmann taught it to St Gregory’s congregation in 1980. It serves a great many hymns in the Episcopal Hymnbook, including most of those in duple or quadruple meters, and even other meters that provide four downbeats per line. We explain the step quickly, ask all to place a hand on the shoulder of someone ahead of them, sing, and start marching once the hymn is underway.

The Transfer of Gifts from sideboard to altar table was originally a homely part of a rabbi’s dinner with his close disciples — a formal but intimate routine called Chabûrah, or Feast of Friends. (This will be discussed further in the section on the Great Thanksgiving that follows.) The students brought gifts of food and placed them on the sideboard; when all had assembled the doors were closed, and one after another the dishes were carried to the table, blessed, and served while the company discussed the scriptures. Christians continued this simple usage for centuries: as their congregations grew, the deacons chose bread and wine from the people’s many offerings on sideboards, and carried these to the table while the people exchanged the Peace. (*)

With the appearance of crowded public church buildings, this simple Transfer of Gifts became a procession with chants and prayers extolling God’s awesome presence and creative bounty toward us, from which we offer gifts of bread and wine. In the east this ritual swelled to a juggernaut dwarfing and finally eclipsing the Entry Procession. On medieval Sundays at Haghia Sophia, 600 clergy marched in the Transfer of Gifts! No weekly liturgy could bear two such extravaganzas, so the more participatory Byzantine Entry Procession atrophied. In Byzantine churches today a mere vestige of the Entry Procession crops up amid the opening hymns and readings, and is called “Little Entrance;” while the title “Great Entrance” now belongs to the Transfer of Gifts that supplanted it.

These two Byzantine processions influenced Anglican worship during the same medieval period, but with a different result. In 1970, I took part in a full re-enactment of the English “Sarum Rite” on which Cranmer largely depended for his Prayer Book. This enactment at the New York Metropolitan Museum Cloisters, under the historical direction of Robert Wright and Boone Porter of the General Theological Seminary, climaxed an international scholarly symposium on The Year 1300. Borrowings from contemporary worship at Haghia Sophia, implied in the Sarum texts, became dramatically prominent when enacted and compared with T. Mathews’ reconstruction of Constantinopolitan worship, published the following year. (*) The enactment also resolved famous puzzles in the Sarum service books, such as the apparent solecism of misusing Byzantine offertory ritual for the Sarum entrance rite.

In fact, medieval English Sarum use adapted contemporary Byzantine ritual ingeniously. At the midpoint of monastic Sunday morning worship, after reciting prime in the chapter house, the abbot and clergy led the monks through the cloister into the church for the eucharist, with deacons carrying the bread and wine sumptuously veiled. Here the Sarum use creatively joined both Byzantine processions for the entry and the transfer of gifts, rather than setting them in competition.

This successful adaptation emerges plainly in a performance following the rubrics but less plainly from the printed mass texts, which begin with this entry chant as western mass books conventionally do. Hence historians have wondered why the English eccentrically put a Byzantine bread-and-wine procession at the start of their service — when in fact Sarum use puts the procession at midpoint, where it parallels the Byzantine order, and from the viewpoint of liturgical economy, surpasses it. Perhaps that is why the Sarum entry chant is not called introit but officium — referring to the office of prime which it concludes — and why it is sung three times, like contemporary Syro-Byzantine refrains for the Transfer of Gifts and other processions (*) rather than twice, like a Latin entry refrain. However ingenious, of course, this arrangement could not survive the 16th century suppression of monastic worship. It remains for modern Anglicans to follow Sarum’s lead by joining east and west in our own innovative way.

Following the speculations of G. Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy (1945) twentieth century reformers have generally assumed that western tradition highlights the laypeople’s work in supplying the gifts, over the deacons’ work in transferring them: Dix attributes the liturgical east-west split to this single distinction. As a result, up-to-date western liturgies, including most Anglican liturgies, now feature a juggernaut of laypeople (instead of clergy) carrying bread and wine, and prayers acknowledging the people’s labor (instead of God’s bounty) in producing those gifts for the Church’s use. Alas, far from restoring primitive worship, this practice only completes its decadence, as the laypeople chosen to take part are carefully “representative” — one man, one woman, one old, one young, one from each ethnic group — and so effectively clericalized. (What are clergy but representative laypeople?) Moreover, the practice springs from a false historical assumption. C. Buchanan shows, pace Dix, that early western ritual for the gifts matched the early Byzantine, and that both rites’ prayers portrayed our gifts of bread, wine and alms as a small return on God’s gifts to us. (*) Buchanan proposes that the natural place, and the historic Anglican place, for money offerings follows communion: there we give alms in response to all God has already given us in creating and redeeming the world. That is the very argument of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, and of the gospels as well.

The deacon introduces the Prayers Of The People. These begin with the Lord’s Prayer, continue with a free Littany — launched and prompted by the deacon — and finish as the Presider prays the Collect of the Day. The full order of prayers is as follows:

1. All sing the Lord’s Prayer, without its doxology (“for the Kingdom…”)

2. The deacon offers the first Litany petition, for peace, and the people supply further petitions and thanksgivings freely, ending each one, “let us pray to [or bless] the Lord.”

3. The people respond each time, “Lord have mercy” or “Thanks be to God.”

4. The deacon prompts fresh petitions occasionally to ensure that we pray for all appropriate concerns the Prayer Book directs [p. 383].

5. The Presider ends the free petitions with a petition for the dead.

6. The deacon says fixed concluding petitions for reconciliation and God’s Kingdom, and the litany commendation.

7. The Presider sings Collect of the Day — but in place of its doxology:

8. All sing the Lord’s Prayer doxology and Amen.

This use of the Collect of the Day best suits the Prayer Book rubric [p. 394], which recommends a collect appropriate to the season or occasion celebrated, as the first choice for concluding the prayers. Dr Boone Porter also recommends this use. Ending the whole prayer series with the Lord’s Prayer doxology unifies the petitions, thanksgivings and collect as extensions of Jesus’ own prayer — which St Paul tells us they are. (Romans 8:26)

The gospels and other sources imply this is roughly how Jesus’ first disciples used the Lord’s Prayer. A rabbi typically ended his sermon with a prayer embodying his teaching. By the Second Century AD these teaching prayers jelled into a standard form, now named among Jews by its first word Kaddish, or “Hallowed [be your name].” Luke’s setting for the Lord’s Prayer (“Lord, teach us to pray…” Luke 11:1) reflects this pattern. Some scholars hold the Lord’s Prayer is the rabbi Jesus’ characteristic Kaddish, emphasizing the distinctive features of his teaching, especially its Jubilee imagery. (*) Other gospel scholars attribute the Lord’s Prayer and Jubilee imagery in general to Christian community tradition, and not to Jesus himself.

After the rabbi finished, the deacon and congregation continued with a series of prayers (tefillah), at first freely composed around an emerging outline. (*) Among Jews this series developed into eighteen stylized collects; among Christians, somewhat later, into a litany of petitions with one collect at the end. For Good Friday the Prayer Book provides an older, intermediate form of this development, offering petitions in thematic groups, each group begun with an invitation and ended with a collect. At St Gregory’s we adapt that form to our familiar litany use by supplying, “…let us pray to the Lord / Lord have mercy,” after each petition. In this way our congregation can pray by heart, without books, whatever the season.

Historians debate why the Lord’s teaching prayer was eventually torn from its natural place in liturgy, following the sermon, and removed to the communion, where it now stands in most rites, while the accompanying prayers stayed behind with the sermon. Some argue the petition for feeding inspired this change; R. Taft and others favor the petition for forgiveness. By contrast, outside the eucharist the original Jewish format endured hardily. Despite a commonplace misconception, based on decadent devotional elaborations, that the Lord’s Prayer should conclude and “sum up” congregational petitions, Anglican Prayer Books actually follow the Jewish pattern, both during non-eucharistic services and whenever the daily office precedes the eucharistic meal: the Lord’s Prayer (without doxology) introduces other petitions — often quoted from the psalms — and these conclude in a collect (with doxology). This is the format we have restored and adapted for participatory eucharistic use.

Forgiveness The Lord’s Prayer itself includes a petition for forgiveness of our sins, and the deacon’s Litany prays for our enemies and for forgiveness and generosity throughout the world. Jesus exhorted people to forgive freely, and proclaimed forgiveness even to wthose who had not expressly asked for it. When the gospels express his teaching narratively, for example in the Zacchaeus story, the invariable narrative pattern is: first forgiven and accepted by God, then repentant and forgiving — a pattern all Christian reconciliation rites reverse!

The Jesuit writer George McCauley observes that sacramental theorists have blundered for centuries by focussing on what the faithful receive, instead of on what the Church does in obedience to Christ’s command — forgiving sins, baptizing the world, etc. By contrast, the gospels’ pattern repeats not only the verbal content, but the visible actions of Jesus’ teaching, healing, and passion, as a pattern of the way God works. This pattern belongs in the liturgy. So instead of asking for absolution in the litany, we pray for grace to forgive our enemies and for forgiveness throughout the world — switching our focus from receiving forgiveness to giving it, which is what both Jesus and the gospel writers urged. (Two or three texts direct us to seek forgiveness, while a hundred implore us to give it.) Then in the Great Thanksgiving we thank God for the forgiveness that Christ has brought us and all humankind.

Penitential Rites We make no further penitential devotions on Sundays or feasts; and the eucharist itself suffices for liturgical absolution — a provision that accords with Jesus’ own custom at meals. Corporate penitential devotions had no place in the eucharist at first, and the Council of Nicaea forbade their introduction on Sundays and throughout Eastertide (Canon 20). They became popular during the turmoil of Roman civilization’s decline (the sixth century “rogation period”), and the later middle ages provided them for the few worshippers making their communion — something most people did rarely — until these devotions became a regular addition to the Sunday liturgy. But they do not fit in, and modern liturgists despair of finding a workable moment for them in the service. The Prayer Book provides them for optional use; and we opt not to use them. St Gregory’s clergy have an active ministry of spiritual direction, and hear confessions from all who wish sacramental absolution.

On Ash Wednesday the Prayer Book begins the Lenten fast with an extended penitential service: this is our one regular corporate penitential action within a eucharist, excepting war or like emergency.

Worthy Communion Rigorists have promoted penitential devotions as preparation and qualification for communion. But Jesus welcomed the undeserving to his table: N. Perrin and other leading gospel scholars argue this was the chief offence for which his outraged contemporaries betrayed him and saw him crucified. (*) Dining with the undeserving was Jesus’ chosen prophetic sign, the embodiment of all he taught about God’s Kingdom already come, and our challenge to respond. It was a radical gesture, and led him to abandon baptism as a preparatory rite because incorporating the unprepared was the essential symbol. Although his followers resumed baptizing, they maintained his fundamental concept of God’s banquet shared with the impure — thanks partly to Paul’s arguments. The Church traditionally holds that no preparation can make us worthy of it; instead, the eucharist itself makes us worthy.

As for baptism, its true purpose is not to admit people to further sacraments, but to empower them for life and mission in the new humanity of Christ. Far from requiring Baptism before communion, then, the Church might more logically reverse the conventional order, and baptize for Christ’s mission those whom Christ has already welcomed to his table, and fed with his body and blood. The Book of Acts evidences this order of events as well as the other (*) and gospel scholarship suggests this order embodies more faithfully Jesus’ own teaching and practice.