by CCW | 4 April 2009 10:15
(To be included in tomorrow’s Palm Sunday service[1])
Narrator:
We are sustained in the Lenten journey of our lives by the living Word of God. The Sunday School and Confirmation Class and all of us have been challenged to take to heart the Words of Scripture on these Sundays of Lent and for the journey of Holy Week. They have been written on scrolls.
(the Students will then recite the five scrolls of Scriptural verses)
Narrator:
We begin Holy Week with shouts of joy and rejoicing. We shall end Holy Week with the joyous celebration of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. And in between? Holy Week is the spectacle of our betrayals. Our shouts of ‘hosanna’ turn to the cries of ‘crucify’. Holy Week would immerse us in the Passion of Christ. “We shall look on him whom we have pierced.” We are in this story as the betrayers of Christ and of one another. Only through the accounts of the Passion in their fullness can we come to the greater joys of Easter. It begins with Matthew’s account of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(Then follows the drama of The Passion according to St. Matthew)
Narrator:
The Passion can only bring us to our knees in the Litany. The Litany is the first part of the Latin liturgy that was translated into English and modified by Archbishop Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer. It is, in this sense, the earliest modern liturgy. A comprehensive form of prayer, it teaches us how to pray and what to pray for. Rooted and grounded in the Word of God, the Litany is about our penitential adoration of God.
The Litany follows, interspersed with Meditations upon each of the scriptural passages of the Lenten Scrolls.
“Man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”
1st Meditation:
It is through the witness of the Scriptures that we know God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is Jesus who in the Gospels teaches us about our heavenly Father, about himself as the anointed Son and about the Holy Spirit. But what is also revealed in the witness of the Scriptures is our betrayal of the God who reveals himself to us. “Against thee, only have I sinned,” David says in his great penitential psalm, Psalm 51. His cry is for mercy; “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness.” The words of Holy Scripture proceed from the mouth of God. They convict us but even more they open us out to the everlasting mercy and goodness of God. We betray the God who is Trinity but it is the mercy of the Trinity that we seek. The words of Holy Scripture help us to contemplate the mystery of God and the mystery of our redemption. These great mysteries are made known in the story of Christ. In the Litany we pray the story of God’s mercy in Jesus Christ. “Good Lord, deliver us.” We pray the Passion and only so can we live, “not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
“Truth Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
2nd Meditation:
There is nothing easy about the journey of penitential adoration. After all, we have to contemplate many unpleasant things about ourselves and one another. How can we do that? There can only be penitence through our hold on the truth in Jesus Christ. There is adoration in our recognition of the need for mercy, for forgiveness, and for healing. There is the adoration of the truth of God in Jesus Christ. Yet, the Litany also reminds us that penitential adoration is not self-serving. In being open to God we are painfully aware of the needs of others. The Canaanite woman, who came to Jesus, came seeking mercy, not for herself, but for her daughter. She persists in her quest and will not be put off. She holds on to the truth which she perceives in Jesus. The strength of her desire is brought out in the dialogue. Jesus wants us to want what is true and right and good. It can only come through humble perseverance and attention to the truth of God revealed. Humility, and humility alone, is open to the truth of God and to the needs of one another. The Litany proceeds to teach us what and who to pray for. All the “sorts and conditions” of our wounded and broken humanity are before us. We learn to place the needs and concerns of our world and day with God, the God who wills to have us break into his heart through persistent prayer. “Truth Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” “We sinners do beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God.”
“Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and has given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.”
3rd Meditation:
We have just prayed for God’s merciful guidance for the various walks of life which belong to our world and day. In all our vocations we are meant to “walk in love,” a love which is nothing less than the love of God for us shown in Jesus Christ. Nowhere is that love made more visible and more powerfully present than in Holy Week. The passion of Christ is the book of love opened before us. That love guides the life of the Church in her ministry and service. In the witness of the Scriptures, too, we are bidden to pray for the grace of God to guide the life of the political community in the various offices of power and service. We are reminded of the conditions of the world in which we are to “walk in love” regardless of what office or station we have been placed – church, government, law, military, education, family. This awareness of the objective institutions of human life teaches us that it is through such institutions, and not apart from them, that the works of corporal mercy can be accomplished. In other words, we are reminded that we are always part of a body, a community. It is in the body of Christ that we pray for needs of the world, a world that is broken and wounded by sin and sorrow. It is in that world that we are called to “walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and has given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.” The way of penitential adoration is always the way of sacrificial love and service.
“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”
4th Meditation:
Christ in the wilderness feeds the multitude and from that feast left-overs are gathered up. What is gathered up continues to feed us in our journeying. Such are “the crumbs which fall from [our master’s] table” in the wilderness of our lives. God provides more and better than we know or deserve. He provides for us in the wilderness of human experience. That wilderness is fraught with suffering and pain, brokenness and grief, and with a profound sense of human limitation and human sinfulness that compromises both the created order of nature and the human environment in which we live. We confront the ugly and hideous reality of our sins in our animosities and hatreds. The Litany, in a way, takes through the dry valleys of our wilderness lives. These realities are not hid from view neither are they ignored or denied. Nothing is to be lost but all is to be gathered up in prayer. It is gathered into the mercies of Christ. It is not only the left-overs from the picnic that are gathered up to sustain us for another day; all the broken fragments of our lives are gathered up in prayer to the Lord that in him we might find wholeness and salvation. We are made aware of the constant need for Christ’s redeeming grace. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”
“The Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
5th Meditation:
The Litany concludes in a powerful sequence of petitions to Christ as “the Son of God”, to Christ as “the Lamb of God”, and, finally, to the Trinity from which the Litany began, in the threefold Kyrie Eleison: “Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ, have mercy upon us, Lord, have mercy upon us.” In short, we are reminded that the Son of man is the Son of God whose service means his free willing sacrifice, “a ransom for many,” that opens us out to the homeland of the spirit in the communion of the Trinity. Through the cross and passion of Christ, as we have constantly prayed in the Litany, we have canvassed the wilderness of the human condition, placing ourselves, our world, and one another in the mercies of Christ. But our journey is not ours alone; indeed, it is not really ours at all. We can only journey with Christ. Such are the powerful lessons of Holy Week. They are the lessons, too, of the Litany. They are the lessons that belong to the way of penitential adoration, the lessons that place us in the mercies of Christ without which there can be no joy. We go into holy week so that we can behold him “whom [we] have pierced.” Our prayer is “Lord, have mercy,” for it is only in the mercy of the one who has totally given himself for us, “an offering and a sacrifice to God,” that we can come to Calvary and, ultimately, to the joys of Easter. The litany of the Lenten Scrolls sustains us in the way of the Cross.
Conclusion:
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/04/04/a-litany-of-lenten-scrolls/
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