Calendars, Collects, and
Lectionaries: Part II
Are there Abiding Lessons for
the Modern Church?
Written by Dan McDonald
For the sake of honesty in
presenting this blog, I acknowledge that I am partial to the liturgical sort of
worship which makes use of church calendars, lectionaries (with assigned
Scripture texts) and collects (proscribed prayers meant to be used with the
readings and observances of a church calendar in liturgical worship). Nonetheless I recognize that God meets with
and I believe gives approval of worship different from what I like on a routine
basis. But I do believe there are three
lessons we can draw from the benefits of the liturgical style of worship that
we can began to discuss in my previous
blog.
A lack of ease in obtaining copies
of the Holy Scriptures was one of the reasons I felt the early church developed
a worship service making use of a lectionary proscribing assigned readings from
the Scriptures and proscribed prayers known as collects. There were certain benefits of that practice
that I think we may not easily think about.
The first benefit I would like to
consider in this blog is how the focus of the early church was directed towards
seeing Christ in his life events and in his teachings. I spent a number of years in churches where
most of the preaching was done by going through books of the Bible in a
consecutive “expository” manner. There
was this feeling that when you came to a passage you had to say something about
it even the truth taught that day did not seem all that significant to spend
the thirty, forty-five, or even sixty minutes addressing. This is where we were in the Bible and we
needed to deal with this passage no matter how much we would have liked to be
able to hearing about something that seemed a bit more applicable to our church
setting. In some ways those sort of
sermon days created an idea that understanding the Christian faith was
primarily an academic exercise, and it led to the idea that we had to have a “Biblical
understanding” about every issue and every verse, no matter significant or
insignificant it might seem to be.
I think the leaders within the early
church, the Church Fathers, and the Apostles might have said to us something
like “The Bible is important but the importance of the Bible is to set forth
the person, life, work, and teachings of Jesus Christ.” That is something I think the liturgical
church making use of a church calendar to follow the life and teachings of
Jesus Christ more or less accomplished. The
first thing we can learn from the use of collects, lectionaries, and a church
calendar is that Christ, as the one who is the revelation of God by the power
of the Holy Spirit should always be the focus of our teaching of God’s people. Beware of turning our Christian faith into a
mere academic exercise. Jesus told the
people of his day, “You search the Scriptures thinking that in them you have
eternal life, and it is they which testify of Me.”
The second benefit I see in using a
church calendar, lectionary, and collect was that Christians were taught how to
pray through the use of the collects. The
disciples asked Jesus, during his ministry to teach them to pray. Jesus gave the disciples the Lord’s Prayer in
response to that request. In Luke 11:2
Jesus says of the prayer he had taught them, “When you pray, say.” Luke writes of the Lord’s Prayer as if the
prayer was to be recited and repeated by Christians. Matthew, on the other hand, in Matthew 6:9 is
described as saying, “After this manner, therefore pray ye.” These introductions to the Lord’s Prayer are
compatible. Yes we should make a habit
of praying the Lord’s Prayer. It is a
good prayer to pray and to repeat. But
we also ought to pray our own words of prayer based on the form of the Lord’s
Prayer. We should be creative and not
merely rote in our prayers.
I think the leaders of the Ancient
Church, in writing collects as prayers to go with the Scripture texts being
preached upon on the varied days of a church calendar, were helping Christians
to learn to pray. These collects were
designed to be prayers fit and appropriate for the aspect of Christ’s life or teaching
that were being set forth on a particular day in the Church prayer. Thus on the day of Pentecost, wherein the
Church recognizes the importance of God’s sending of the Holy Spirit to indwell
the Church, one of the collects on that day teaches us to pray a prayer that is
a fitting response to God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. The Collect says, “Almighty and Most merciful
God, grant, we beseech thee, that by the indwelling of thy Holy Spirit, we may
be enlightened and strengthened for thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God,
world without end.”
These collects taught the early
church that prayer is both a proper preparation and a proper response to
hearing the truths about Christ presented in the Gospel. These prayers, expressed in the collects were
formed to make use of our most exact words of praise in an expression of beauty
as well as praise. Yes it is true that
God hears our grunts and groans and speedily processed prayers during the day
but should it not be the response of someone who believes that God in Christ is
the lover of our souls, of our entire beings for us to desire to express
ourselves in praise to him with the highest sense of expression we can
muster? That is the writers of the
collects sought to do. They kept the
amount of words in these prayers few, but the meaning was as exact and
expressive as they could truthfully present these words. So even if these collects are not used in a
modern worship service, it should be the desire of every Christian to learn to
stretch themselves, their vocabularies, their passion, and their devotion in
the words they use to express their need of God and their gratitude for his
mercy bestowed upon them in and through holy worship.
There is one last lesson I think
that every member of a church and every minister should consider. In the early Church there were few members
that had copies of the Holy Scriptures.
I think we have a hard time realizing what a privilege and honor one who
was recognized as being called to the ministry had in the early church. Imagine if other leaders in the church and
the people of the church had determined that God seemed to be showing one
person for the ministry of the Word of God in the church. St. Paul writes to St. Timothy as a leader of
the church to look for faithful men who will be able to be entrusted with the
Scriptures and will be able to teach others also. So imagine in a setting where only a few
people have copies of the Scriptures, St. Timothy approaches someone and says, “I
want to entrust you with the scrolls of the Word of God in our church’s
safekeeping. You are to faithfully learn
them, and then you are to faithfully teach them. Will you do this for the people of God, will
you be faithful in this to God?
That is why when it comes time to
install someone to handling the Word of God, the foremost quality to be found
in the servant who is to handle the Word of God is his faithfulness. His insights may become tainted and turned
aside. His wit, his sense of humor, his
speaking qualities, his ability to attract people must be minimized in
comparison with one quality, is this person a faithful servant unto God and God’s
people?
In this regard I love the story of
how St.
Ambrose was selected to become the Bishop of Milan. The Bishopric in Milan was vacant and the
church was deeply divided by the Trinitarian battles of the fourth
century. Approximately half of the
church was Aryan and half of the church was Trinitarian. It appeared likely that the next Bishop might
literally be selected by a riot in the streets inside or outside of the church. Ambrose was a respected governor of the
territory, a political leader. He had
not yet been baptized. He was a
catechumen in training for baptism.
Reportedly it was a child who said “Let Ambrose be Bishop.” Whoever recommended the idea, both sides
decided Ambrose was a good choice. He
was known as a fair and just man, dignified and judicious. In a mere week Ambrose was baptized, made a
deacon, ordained into the office of presbytery, and consecrated as a Bishop.” He set out to learn the issues and led
virtually the entire church of Milan to a Trinitarian understanding of the
faith. He later became the one who
probably most influenced St. Augustine to becoming a Christian. But perhaps his greatest moment in which he
proved the church of Milan correct for selecting him to the Bishopric was when
he dealt with the Emperor Theodosius.
The Emperor had near absolute authority.
He had ordered the execution of some Christians in Thessalonica. Not long following this execution Theodosius
came to Milan, and as the Christian Emperor expected to be served Holy
Communion by Bishop Ambrose. Ambrose
refused the Emperor the communion, saying he needed to repent of his sin, for
he had blood on his hands. It was the
sort of stand that could get a Bishop beheaded or executed by an Emperor. Instead Theodosius confided with someone that
he had just met the first man he ever felt deserved to be called a Bishop. Theodosius created an edict declaring that no
one was to be executed for a set period of time after his conviction to give
the Emperor time to determine if he had been hasty in his judgment. When Theodosius came to his deathbed he requested
Ambrose to attend him. Ambrose was
selected for the right reason by the people of Milan, he was a faithful
man. He handled the word of God with
faithfulness. He dealt with his parish
faithfully. He dealt with his Emperor
faithfully. For some reason the church decided
to recognize him as a saint.
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