Friends,

Some of you might have noticed a change in our liturgy (the words printed in our bulletin that we use for worship) last week. We are just over halfway through the season after Pentecost - the longest season of the church year, sometimes called Ordinary Time, that lasts from the Feast of Pentecost until Christ the King Sunday just before Advent begins. The Liturgy Planning Team thought that this halfway point would be a good time to switch up our liturgical language and use the Book of Common Prayer for the majority of the service. St. Mark's, like most Episcopal Churches these days, is a good mix of lifelong Episcopalians, those who have very recently begun attending an Episcopal Church, and everything in between. Familiarity with the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayeris probably equally as diverse.

When I was a child, we growing up in the Episcopal Church, we used the Prayer Books in the pews during worship. I liked learning how to flip between the service order for Eucharist and the Psalms or prayers for the day. I remember getting my own copy - the dark red leather, the gold letters spelling out my name on the front. Part of me wishes that carrying, caring for, and using the book still had the resonances it did for me and my family when I was little.

It is however, a myth, that an Episcopalian could walk into any Episcopal Church and find oneself right at home because of the Prayer Book. The version we have been using for well over thirty years, the 1979 Prayer Book, gives so many options, so much freedom that a high church anglo-catholic used to chanting and incense would wonder how it could possibly be the same church if she wandered into low church Sunday Morning Prayer. There's just never been the kind of unity around the Prayer Book that some of us imagined. The creators of the 1979 BCP wanted it to be a resource for local liturgical innovation, not a rigid requirement.

So why use it? Well, Episcopalians don't have any sort of doctrine to which we demand assent. Presbyterians and Lutherans, for example, have statements of faith that define their theology. We don't really have that. We only have our tradition of common prayer. When people ask what we believe, our traditional answer is to  say, "Come worship with us!" Going back to our guiding star, can help us recenter ourselves even if we wish to keep tinkering and experimenting with liturgical language. Also, the BCP is beautiful and aesthetics have a place in worship where we seek to put language around a mystery. While our more current attempts at liturgy can be wonderfully specific to the moment we are in, this older language is multi-valent, seeking to encompass more than our little lives, but a wider sea of human experience.

I hope you enjoy what, to some, will be familiar words and to others entirely new. As always, I invite you to join our Liturgy Planning Team which meets the first Tuesday of the month at 7:00 pm. 

Peace,

Justi