In our walk with Jesus through the liturgical year, Palm Sunday is designed so that we might contemplate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and his death on the cross as a unit. Yes, the reading of the Passion or our Lord on Palm Sunday is no doubt an accommodation to the fact that many churchgoers would…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 5A
The designation of Lent 5 as “Passion Sunday” in the BCP 2019 is a return to that same designation in the BCP 1928 (maybe earlier, but I couldn’t find it elsewhere), where also the two-week period from Lent 5 Sunday through Holy Saturday is called “Passiontide.” The Collect and readings assigned in Lent 5A continue…
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 the One God 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…
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, understand stubborn disobedience to the word of God to be a non-conformity in which the Almighty takes no pleasure (though he forgives it through Christ!). The readings and Collect assigned for Lent 3 every…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 2A
Having established in Lent 1 that the world into which the Son of God has been revealed is inhospitable to say the least, the church assigns Bible readings in Lent 2 which highlight one critical theater of internal conflict for the believer: faith versus works as the path to fellowship with God. The Collect with…
Today in the Spirit: Lent 1A
In the season of Lent our walk with Jesus just as he walked (1 John 2:6) through the liturgical year takes a turn to face the reality of opposition from the devil and rebellion in the human heart both set like armies gathered in formation against the revelation of the Son of God. If Christmas…
The Liturgical Home: Shrove Tuesday
It’s time for Shrove Tuesday, also called Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, and Carnival. And I’m excited, not only because we will eat pancakes but also because it means we are only a day away from Lent, my favorite season of the year! The End of the Carnival The word Carnival comes from the Latin expression,…
The History of the Holy Week Collects
In this post we outline the history of the Holy Week Collects, which are found on pages 607-609 of the Book of Common Prayer 2019. In researching this topic, we drew especially from commentaries by Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Jr., Marion J. Hatchett, and C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl. What is a collect? A collect is…
Praying the Stations of the Cross: A Devotion of Suffering During a Year of Lent
In November of 2019, I sat in our priest’s office at church with my ministry partner, Jessi, as we naively discussed small group plans for 2020. It had been a discouraging season in ministry, but we had finally found a topic to get excited about. We would spend the beginning of the year studying the…
Lent is Coming!
The Psalm on the Cross When the story of Jesus’s crucifixion is told in the Gospel, Jesus is said to have spoken these words in Aramaic: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”) Perhaps because these words are the most famous of Psalm 22, their depth nearly overshadows the…
