Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

Good Friday, 2010

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I approach Good Friday with awe and fear. The liturgy of the day and the day itself are full of raw emotion and powerful imagery. Reading the Passion according to St. John with its virulent anti-Judaism is deeply problematic and offensive. Then the solemn collects and the veneration of the cross seem to draw us into the crucifixion, bringing all of our emotional turmoil to the surface.

When crafting the liturgy for the day, I always struggle with finding the right tone: allowing us to recognize our sinfulness but also inviting us to experience the love of Christ. I sometimes think that we overdo it. As a layperson, I often experienced the emotionalism and emphasis on Jesus’ suffering as off-putting. Perhaps the epitome of that was once at All Saints’ Chapel in Sewanee, after the Stations of the Cross that took us up University Avenue. Soloists sang the Tomas Luis de Victoria setting of the Solemn Reproaches. It was beautiful but bone-chilling. The anti-semitism of the text, coupled with the historical context of its composition (16th century Spain, during the Inquisition) almost turned my stomach.

Still, there are things that must be there for me on Good Friday. Bach, for example, specifically, “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded.” The German text, with English translation, is available here. The origin of the text is quite interesting. Paul Gerhardt, a German Lutheran pastor in the seventeenth century, adapted a Latin hymn from the fourteenth century. In some respects it is full of Medieval sensibility. The original focuses on aspects of Christ’s suffering. Gerhardt refocuses the hymn on the individual, for example, in this stanza (Alexander translation):

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.

Whatever else Good Friday is about, the concluding prayer is a powerful message on this day:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

Now my tongue the mystery telling

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Now, my tongue, the mystery telling,
Of the glorious body sing,
And the blood, all price excelling,
Which all mankind’s Lord and King,
In a virgin’s womb once dwelling,
Shed for this world’s ransoming.

Given for us and condescending
To be born for us below,
He, with men in converse blending,
Dwelt the seed of truth to sow,
Till He closed with wondrous ending
His most patient life below.

That last night, at supper lying
’Mid the twelve, His chosen band,
Jesus, with the law complying,
Keeps the feast its rites demand;
Then, more precious food supplying,
Gives Himself with His own hand.

Word made flesh, true bread He maketh
By His word His flesh to be;
Wine His Blood: which whoso taketh
Must from carnal thoughts be free;
Faith alone, though sight forsaketh
Shows true hearts the mystery.

Therefore we, before Him bending,
This great sacrament revere;
Types and shadows have their ending,
For the newer rite is here;
Faith, our outward sense befriending,
Makes our inward vision clear.

Glory let us give, and blessing,
To the Father and the Son;
Honor, might and praise addressing
While eternal ages run,
Ever, too, His love confessing,
Who from Both with Both is One.

He loved them to the end: Homily for Maundy Thursday

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April 1, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

From time to time, I share with you some pieces of my Mennonite background. I do it occasionally, because it both helps you get to know me a little bit better, and because the very different Mennonite tradition from which I come is an important witness to the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. Mennonites have a great deal to teach the larger Christian tradition.

Continue reading →

Collect for Wednesday in Holy Week

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Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

Before 1662, the Book of Common Prayer did not include special collects for the weekdays of Holy Week. The collect for Palm Sunday was used throughout the week. This collect first appeared in the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer. The references to being whipped and spit upon point our attention forward to the events following Jesus’ arrest. The collects for Tuesday and Wednesday seem to be reflections on the passion. They connect Jesus’ suffering with our own.

I’m tempted to see a “modern” turn in this development; modern in the sense of modern individualism and emotionalism.

Wednesday in Holy Week

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The gospel appointed for today is John 13:21-32. Two things in this text fascinate me. First that the gospel writer states “Jesus was troubled in spirit.” It’s something of an anomaly for John, because throughout the gospel Jesus is well aware of what is going to happen to him. For example, in chapter 12, Jesus says, “And what should I pray? Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” It seems almost as if it is John’s direct contradiction of the scene in Gethsemane in the Synoptic gospels, where Jesus prays that “this cup may be taken from me.”

The second interesting thing is Judas. We are fascinated with him, we want to understand why he betrayed Jesus. That attempt to figure Judas out is present already in the gospels. We see it hear, with the reference to Satan entering him. But we may be misdirecting our focus.

This takes place at the Last Supper, just after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, including the feet of Judas, and after he explained his actions as a model of servanthood for his disciples to imitate. Chapter 13 begins, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” What may matter most about Judas is that Jesus loved him, modeled that love in service, and invited him to participate in a life of loving service.

Tuesday in Holy Week: Collect and Reflections

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Here’s the collect of the day:

O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Apparently adapted from a collect in the 1928 English Book of Common Prayer (so Hatchett), it is Pauline in theology “glory in the cross of Christ” but perhaps shades over into something less healthy with the expressed desire to “gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of … Jesus Christ.”

There’s a tendency in much of Christian piety toward self-abasement. Left unchecked, it can be destructive both on a personal level and for the whole community. I suppose that what bothers me in the collect is the repetition of the word “shame.” Surely “shame” was not at the heart of Jesus’ experience of the crucifixion. Did it play a role in early Christian reflection on the cross? Folly and shame are not identical; nor is shame a stumbling block as Paul observes of the cross in today’s reading from I Corinthians 1:18-31.

It begins:

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

That’s the expression of the central paradox in Pauline theology: the contrast between wisdom and folly, strength and weakness, and the assertion that when we see Jesus Christ at his weakest (i.e., on the cross), we see God at God’s most powerful. It’s an important inversion of our values and expectations, one that Paul seems to have learned through his own experience (the thorn in the flesh mentioned in II Corinthians). To translate these concepts, and this paradox into shame seems to diminish the power of what Paul is expressing.

Given the perversion of the Christian message by folks like Glenn Beck, and the Christian militia, it’s a useful reminder this week that as we approach the cross and Good Friday, understanding what it means remains elusive and easily misused.

Tuesday in Holy Week: Reaffirmation of Ordination Vows and Chrismal Mass

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It’s customary during Holy Week for the clergy to gather with their bishop for the reaffirmation of our ordination vows. I’m not a big fan of it, on the theory that either we mean what we say when we make our vows at ordination, or we don’t mean it. But I went, in part because I now have a new bishop and it seemed appropriate to reaffirm my vows. I also went because traditionally it is also the time when the bishop consecrates a new supply of oils (oil of the sick, chrism for baptizing, and oil of the catechumens).

Something Bishop Miller said in his homily struck home and the whole notion of reaffirmation began to seem significant. He began by mentioning 2 recent news items concerning Christianity: the continuing sexual abuse scandal in Roman Catholicism as well as the reports coming out of Michigan about the Christian militia group that was arrested. He pointed out the importance of trust–the trust our congregations in us as clergy and the trust that is important in our relationships with one another.

Once lost, trust is very difficult to regain and re-establish. Moreover, we live in a culture in which distrust of one other is profound and distrust of institutions is ubiquitous. Simple things like reaffirming the vows one made at ordination symbolize the work we all need to do to trust one another.

There’s a rawness about Holy Week. It feels like emotions are laid bare as we walk through the events of Jesus’ last days, that our defenses are stripped away as Jesus was stripped by the soldiers, and the altar is stripped on Maundy Thursday. In the end, we stand before the cross on Good Friday naked before God, with our only hope the prayer we say at the conclusion of the liturgy that day: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

When all of our self-deception and self-defenses are stripped away, that is how we stand before God, and what we have to hope for; and it might be a good place to begin to establish trust.

More on Monday in Holy Week

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What a difference a few verses makes. The gospel appointed for today is John 12:1-11. All of the propers for the day are here. We read much of the same gospel two weeks ago, on the fifth Sunday in Lent. That gospel is here.

The key difference is that the Sunday gospel concludes with “You always have the poor with you. You do not always have me with you.” Today’s gospel added three verses that put it into the context of John’s theme highlighting the increasing conflict between Jesus and “the Jews.” Here are those verses:

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.

The addition of these three verses completely transforms the gospel reading from a story about a woman anointing Jesus, modeling discipleship, to intense, and intensifying anti-Judaism. I never preach sermons on weekday services (unless it’s a major feast, of course) so I rarely do more than begin to struggle with the text and with what preaching the “gospel” from this text might be.

I suppose, if pressed hard enough, I might be able to come up with something, but given that tonight is the first night of Passover, all I could do was mull over the anti-Judaism of the Gospel of John, and the Jewishness of Jesus.

Monday in Holy Week

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The Collect for the Day:

Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Written by the Rev. Dr. William Reed Huntington, it first appeared here in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It is also the collect for the station at the door on Palm Sunday, and is a Collect for Friday in Morning Prayer.

It is a powerful reminder of the via crucis–the way of the cross that we share with Jesus Christ as his disciples. It does something more however, by reminding us that bearing the cross can be a light burden as Jesus promised in Matt 11:28-30:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

I spent some time sitting in the nave today in silence and prayer. It was something of a guilty pleasure given what still needs to be done this week. The bulletins aren’t ready; I don’t have all of the slots for readers and Eucharistic Ministers filled; I don’t know what’s going to happen at any of the services this week. At least I’ve got a start on my sermons.

I certainly am praying these words this week–that the way of the cross, the way of Holy week, may be none other than “the way of life and peace.”

Reflections on Palm Sunday

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Holy Week is going to be interesting. I probably didn’t articulate it to myself or to anyone else, but my approach coming into Grace was to experience worship and then to make changes to reflect my own theological and liturgical concerns. My predecessor gave me a very clear road-map and when talking to worship leaders and altar guild, it seemed that they were expecting something of the same of me.

Instead, I wanted to experience it. Part of that has to do with the people, their gifts, assumptions, and needs, but a great deal of it has to do with the space. One of the questions that I ask repeatedly is “How do we best worship in this space?”

But I’m also interested in shaping the liturgy in ways that I find meaningful. There were already some last-minute changes. Someone pointed out to me the rather obvious starting point of the Guild Hall for our Palm Sunday procession, rather than the undercroft. It made sense, both for those of our parishioners who have trouble climbing stairs, and because it was a beautiful day.

There’s the other challenge, the one created by the hybrid nature of Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday. How do you move effectively from the joy and celebration of Blessing of Palms and Procession to the Passion?

What I want to know is how to use the church’s space to help make that transition.

Stay tuned.