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Mar 29 - Apr 4: Holy Week and Triduum

3/26/2015

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Holy Week at Christ Church Anglican

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Thoughts on Holy Week
This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, which means we are getting ready to move into deep Lent, or Holy Week, an intensive time of prayer and preparation immediately before Easter.
 
What makes Holy Week so holy? In a very important sense, nothing. By Christ’s atoning death and mighty resurrection, he has extended his glorious reign over all time and space. Every day is a new day in his inaugurated kingdom, as we look forward to the culmination of his victory on that day when he returns to finish his work.
 
Christ secured his victory not in an eternal now or ethereal abstraction, but in time and space. God the Son became incarnate and lived a normal human life like we all do, bound like our lives all are by a particular locale and a particular culture and language and, most importantly, but a particular set of days and years. The liturgical Holy Week corresponds to the last actual week of Christ’s human life, which ended in his crucifixion and death. In that sense, Holy Week reminds us of the concrete actuality of Christ’s life and most especially his Passion, his one sacrifice once made for all. As it draws our attention and focuses our devotion on this most climactic moment of our Lord’s ministry to us, that moment when death was truly swallowed up by life, Holy Week is most holy indeed.
 
At Christ Church, we will be offering a number of services to help us focus our attention on this singular moment of our redemption in Christ which climax in the great "Three Days" (or Triduum in Latin), Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. As his victory is truly assured and not in any real sense repeated by our remembrance of it, hints of resurrection hope and glorious victory will be peppered throughout even the most solemn of our liturgies. We remember his Passion in the light of his resurrected glory. Even in Holy Week, the Lord is risen indeed!
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Palm Sunday, March 29
Perhaps one of the most dramatic of all our liturgies throughout the year, the Palm Sunday liturgy is meant to contrast the extremes of Jesus’s own final week. On the first day of that week, he was ushered into Jerusalem as King David’s long-awaited heir on the praises and exaltations of an enthralled crowd. On the last day of that week, he was dead in a tomb, a mob of that same city having cried out “Crucify him! We have no king but Caesar! Crucify him!” We will process and sing his praises as David’s heir, and then we will take the part of the crowd in a dramatic reading of the Passion account of Mark’s Gospel. We will at once sing his praises and demand his public execution, a potent reminder that our sin has hopelessly confused us and makes us ultimately responsible for our Lord’s death.
Maundy Thursday, April 2
This service celebrates the Last Supper of our Lord, his establishment of Holy Communion, and his command (Latin mandatum, from whence the day’s name comes) that we love one another as he loved us and gave himself up for us. The service traditionally concludes with a solemn stripping of the sanctuary, as our Lord’s own body was stripped bare before his final humiliation. The service will be held jointly with the Methodists at 7:00 pm and will be about an hour long.
Good Friday, April 3
Noonday: We will partner with the Wayne Ministerium for the annual ecumenical service of the Passion at noon, the hour Christ was nailed to his cross. The procession will start at Wayne Presbyterian Church at noon and will conclude at St. Katherine of Sienna Roman Catholic Church on Lancaster Avenue in Wayne for the service proper.

Evening: Holy Communion is not traditionally celebrated between Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil. For that reason we will have a contemplative service of meditation and adoration of Christ’s Passion. The service will follow the format of Evening Prayer, with simple plainsong music, special intercessions for the world (the “solemn collects of Good Friday,” one of the most ancient parts of the Good Friday or any other liturgy), and a final meditation on the Passion using a Nigerian devotion adapted from the medieval Latin “Reproaches.” The service will be a little longer than one hour, starting at 7:00 pm at Wayne UMC.
Holy Saturday, April 4
The Easter Vigil is one of the most ancient Christian liturgies of any kind, and has been celebrated in its basic form for over sixteen hundred years. How can we at Christ Church Anglican not do such a service? The service will begin in the dark, symbolizing the darkness of Christ’s sealed tomb. The Easter Fire will be lit, symbolizing the beginning of his resurrected life out of death, and by this light we will read from the Old Testament of the gradual unfolding of God’s plan of salvation up to Christ. Then with the great “Easter Shout,” we will transition out of Lent and officially into Easter with the First Eucharist of Easter. The service will be about two hours long, starting at 8:00 pm at Wayne UMC.
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Once again I want to stress that none of these services, while focusing as many of them do on the particulars of Christ’s suffering, are meant to convey that his final victory has not already been achieved once and for all time. He is risen! But as he calls us all who follow him to take up our crosses after him and marvel at the divine glory revealed by his self-emptying to the point of death, it is appropriate that we should set aside some time every year specially dedicated to that purpose. I hope that our Lord meets you richly as you worship with us at Christ Church Anglican this Holy Week.
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Feb 25 - Mar 25: Midweek Lenten Study

3/4/2015

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Celebration of Discipline Lenten Study and Potluck

What: On Wednesday nights throughout Lent, we will co-host with Wayne United Methodist Church and St. Matthew's United Methodist Church of Valley Forge a Lenten Potluck and Study. We will be working our way through selections of Richard Foster's classic book The Celebation of Discipline. This book formed a watershed of evangelical engagement with the classical disciplines of the Christian spiritual life. For our study, we will be focusing on the following disciplines:
  • February 25: Prayer (Luke 11:1-13, Foster chapter 3), led by Lillian Smith, pastor, St. Matthew's UMC.
  • March 4: Study (Rom. 12:1-2, Foster chapter 5), led by Joe DiPaolo, pastor, Wayne UMC.
  • March 11: Fasting (Matt. 6:16-21, Foster chapter 4), led by Gary Jacabella, pastor, Berwyn UMC.
  • March 18: Service (Matt. 20:20-28), Foster chapter 9), led by Rashad Grove, pastor, First Baptist of Wayne
  • March 25: Worship (John 4:19-26, Foster chapter 11), led by Adam Rick, yours truly. 
Note that there will be no study on the Wednesday of Holy Week (April 1).

Why: It is all the more appropriate that we would reacquaint and equip ourselves with these disciplines during the season of Lent, when we are all called to a special examination of our progress with the Lord. Remember, though, that these disciplines in themselves don't make us worthy of God's grace. We have received God's grace freely in Jesus, apart from works, that no one may boast. Having received this great gift, it is our privilege to respond with gratitude with all that we are. These disciplines help us to do just that.

When: Wednesdays in Lent, excluding Holy Week, from 6:00 to 7:30. Dinner at 6:00, study at 6:40.

Where: St. Matthew's United Methodist Church, 600 Walker Rd, Wayne, PA 19087.

What to bring: Your Bible, Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, and food to share.
  • Buy Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline here.
  • Go deeper with his companion volume Spiritual Classics: Select Readings on the Twelve Spiritual Disciplines, which you can purchase here. (We will not be using this volume in our study officially, but it is a great companion volume which will acquaint you with some of the great spiritual writers of the past.)
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Feb 22 - Mar 29: Confirmation Class

3/1/2015

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Following Christ the Anglican Way: A Confirmation Series

Our bishop, the Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, will be making a visit to Christ Church on Sunday, May 3, and he would like to confirm or receive anyone who may be willing. To that end, we will be offering a five week Confirmation series throughout Lent based on an in-house curriculum entitled: Following Christ the Anglican Way. The curriculum comes with a reader which can be downloaded from a link below, and participants are strongly encouraged to read each week's lesson before we gather. These are the topics we will be covering and when:
  • February 22: Confirmation and Holy Order in the Church: What is confirmation? What are its biblical roots? What is its relationship to baptism? Why does the bishop have to be involved? Why have bishops in the church at all? What if I have already been confirmed in another denomination?
  • March 1: DAY OFF because of winter storm.
  • March 8: Canons, Creeds, and Councils: How do Anglicans define their core identity as "reformed catholic Christians"? What are our basic authorities as a church? Where did the New Testament canon come from? Where did the Creeds come from? What are these so-called "ecumenical councils," and why do we care today about the concilliar decisions of the Church from fifteen hundred years ago?
  • March 15: The Book of Common Prayer: What is "common prayer"? What is The Book of Common Prayer? Why do we have such a book? How does such a book inform our identity as Anglicans?  What were some of the fundamental assumptions about worship which guided the formation of The Book of Common Prayer?
  • March 22: The 39 Articles of Religion: What are the Articles of Religion? What fundamental assumptions informed their composition and reception in the church? How do we read them today? What doe the Articles tell us about core principles of Anglicanism?
  • March 29 (Palm Sunday): The Anglican Communion and Beyond: How did the Church of England become a global Anglican Communion? How does the Anglican Communion understand its relationship to other Christian communions? How does the Anglican Communion govern itself? What is Anglican Realignment, and how does it relate to the global Communion, and the local national church to which we belong?
Subsequent formation in the symbols of our liturgy may be provided during Eastertide but will not be required. 

The class will be held after the church service on Sunday from 6:00 to 7:00 in the Conference Room at Wayne United Methodist Church. Because of the limited space, only those seeking to be confirmed or received or exploring the possibility of the same, or who are new to the Anglican tradition and are interested in learning more about it are encouraged to attend. Anyone committed to being confirmed by Bishop Julian Dobbs in May is required to attend.

Download "Following Christ the Anglican Way: A Confirmation Reader" by clicking here (PDF, 866 kb).
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Feb 22 - Mar 29: The Ten Words Study

3/1/2015

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Throughout Lent we will be having a study of the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue (Greek for "Ten Words"), after our principle service. The study will be led by Isaac Demme. 

The study and memorization of the Ten Commandments forms one of the four foundations of classical catechesis and formation, the other three being the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. The Creed forms you in the basic essentials of right belief. The Lord's Prayer forms you in the basic essentials of right prayer. The Sacraments form you in the basic essentials of right worship. The Ten Commandments form you in the basic essentials of right behavior. Head, heart, spirit, and body (with obvious overlap between all of them), taken together these things form the core of the Christian life. 

Note that all of them are fundamentally biblical, the Creed itself comprising merely a succinct summary of biblical faith, because a robust engagement with the word of God in Scripture is the most essential ingredient of disciplined Christian life.

Stay tuned for a summary of each day's topic of study.


The Fellowship Hour will continue as normal immediately after the service. From about 6:00 onward, those who are interested will peal away for the study. The study will conclude by 7:00 pm.

UPDATE: owing to the winter storm on Sunday, March 1, we cancelled the study for that Sunday and will now make up that time on Palm Sunday, March 19.
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