The designation of Lent 5 Sunday as “Passion Sunday” in the BCP 2019 is a return to the same designation in the BCP 1928, where the two-week period from Lent 5 Sunday through Holy Saturday is also called “Passiontide.” The Collect and readings assigned in Lent 5A continue the trajectory of the penitential season, highlighting…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 4A
Lent is a season the church employs to teach that, by the light of the Son of God coming into the world, darkness opposed to his arrival is exposed. In these middle weeks of Lent Year A, the church assigns long Gospel readings from the Book of John in which there is significant dialogue between…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 3A
“It gives me great pleasure to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.” The scriptures, contrary to Albert Einstein, regard stubborn disobedience to the word of God as a non-conformity in which the Almighty takes no pleasure (though he forgives through Christ). As a group, the readings assigned for Lent 3 perhaps deliver…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 2A
In our worship during Lent 1, the church introduced, in dramatic fashion, the intense opposition in the world to the revelation of the Son of God. Now in Lent 2A, the prayers and propers highlight a critical internal conflict within the believing community: faith versus works as the path to fellowship with God. The assigned…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 1A
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and an abrupt shift in the church year from the Incarnation cycle (Advent through Epiphany) to the Paschal cycle (Lent through Pentecost). If, in general, the celebration of the incarnation of Christ has oriented us to wonder at the glory of Christ in the world, our worship now…
Today in the Spirit: Last Sunday of Epiphany A (Transfiguration)
On the Last Sunday of Epiphany every year, we contemplate in our worship the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ. In this season of celebrating the Father God’s power to reveal the glory of the Son in the world, the various accounts of the Transfiguration in the Gospels form a bookend for the worshiper, with the accounts…
Today in the Spirit: Epiphany 5A
At the end of the Beatitudes we heard last Sunday, Jesus makes a dramatic shift from the third person “Blessed are those” to the second person “Blessed are you,” and there he remains throughout the remainder of the Sermon on the Mount. At Epiphany 5A, we hear in the assigned Gospel reading Matthew 5:13-20 the…
Today in the Spirit: Epiphany 4A
In Year A, walking with Jesus in our worship, with the Gospel of Matthew as our guide, the church will focus on the biblical illumination of Jesus as divine teacher. For five consecutive weeks, we will be immersed in the Sermon on the Mount, the first and largest of Jesus’ five teaching discourses in Matthew….
Today in the Spirit: Epiphany 3A
At Epiphany 3, out of the church’s selection of Sunday Gospel readings, we contemplate in worship the glory of Jesus Christ revealed in the earliest events of his ministry in Galilee (northern Palestine). In Year A, the assigned Gospel reading this week is from Matthew 4:12-22. In his narration of Jesus’ move north, Matthew (as…
Today in the Spirit: Epiphany 2A
Liturgical churches most often consider the period after the Feast of our Lord’s Baptism and the day before Ash Wednesday to be “Ordinary Time” in the season of Epiphany. The term “ordinary” refers not to space for the mundane but to a period ordered by numbers in the BCP and a series of Gospel readings…
Today in the Spirit: Epiphany 1A
Prepositions are important in the Book of Common Prayer. One change in the BCP 2019 that can easily go unnoticed is the designation Sundays “of Epiphany” in the new book compared with Sundays “after Epiphany” or “after the Epiphany” in earlier versions. What does the new title communicate? One response is that the Epiphany (the…
Today in the Spirit: Christmas 2A
We continue to celebrate the Christmas season on the Second Sunday of Christmas. For Christmas 2, the Church gives two options for the assigned Gospel readings in all three lectionary years. These, together with the various options for Gospel readings on Christmas Day, provide coverage of all the infancy and childhood narratives of our Lord’s…
