23 August 2010

Reminder: St. Bartholomew's Day Divine Service

Tomorrow, Tuesday August 24th,  at 6 p.m. at St. Paul's, we'll celebrate a spoken Divine Service, commemorating St. Bartholomew, the Apostle.  Join us if you can!

From that day's liturgy:

I will speak of Your testimonies before kings, O Lord, and shall not be put to shame.  I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord forever; with my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness to all generations... Almighty God, Your Son, Jesus Christ, chose Bartholomew to be an apostle to preach the blessed Gospel.  Grant that Your Church may love what he believed and preach what he taught... Their voice has gone out to all the earth... But I am among you as one who serves... All praise for him whose candor Through all his doubt You saw When Philip at the fig tree Disclosed You in the Law.  Discern beneath our surface, O Lord, what we can be, That by Your truth made guileless, Your glory we may see... for You have mightily governed and protected Your holy Church, in which the blessed Apostles and Evangelists proclaimed Your divine and saving Gospel.  Therefore with Patriarchs and Prophets, Apostles and Evangelists, with Your servant Bartholomew, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name...

3 comments:

Jeremy Loesch said...

Will, How are you going to work in Bartholomew's death by flaying into your sermon?

Chris said...

Fr. Weedon,

I'm just curious. Do you not have the resources (e.g. music, personnel, etc.) so that you can chant the divine service (in Gregorian psalmody or the Lutheran alternative) between yourself and the congregation? As you know, there's no such thing as a spoken divine liturgy in the Eastern Rite. Is there no counterpart in the Western?

William Weedon said...

Chris,

We could indeed chant without accompaniment. But in the West there is a tradition of "low mass" - no deacon or subdeacon, and no music. The texts of the Mass come across in a different way when they are spoken - speaking the Gloria in Excelsis, for example, makes you realize what a wonderful prayer this is. Lutherans were and many are, I would think, of all the Western traditions the least likely to speak a liturgy - the amount of emphasis placed upon the music of the rite (beginning with Luther's Deutsche Messe on forward) is in striking contrast to that of the Anglican rite with its focus on the words.