Year: 2009

(To be included in tomorrow’s Palm Sunday service)

A Litany of Lenten Scrolls

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)

• Man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God;
• Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table;
• Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and has given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God;
• 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.

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. (more…)

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All Glory, laud and honour

Refrain:

All glory, laud and honour
To Thee, Redeemer, King,
To Whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring.

Thou art the King of Israel,
Thou David’s royal Son,
Who in the Lord’s Name comest,
The King and Blessèd One.

Refrain:

The company of angels
Are praising Thee on High,
And mortal men and all things
Created make reply.

Refrain:

The people of the Hebrews
With palms before Thee went;
Our prayer and praise and anthems
Before Thee we present.

Refrain:

To Thee, before Thy passion,
They sang their hymns of praise;
To Thee, now high exalted,
Our melody we raise.

Refrain:

Thou didst accept their praises;
Accept the prayers we bring,
Who in all good delightest,
Thou good and gracious King.

Refrain:

This 9th century hymn by St. Theodulph of Orleans has, from its beginnings, been associated with Palm Sunday and thus with Holy Week. An apocryphal legend claims that Theodulph sang it from a prison window as King Louis the Pious was processing on Palm Sunday, and was freed as a result of the King’s pleasure! In any event, the hymn, along with its 17th century tune by Melchior Teschner, first published in Leipzig in 1615, has become a memorable feature of the Palm Sunday liturgy. As J.M. Neale, the 19th century translator of many Latin hymns, noted “another verse was usually sung until the 17th Century, at the quaintness of which we can scarcely avoid a smile“:

Be Thou, O Lord, the Rider,
And we the little ass,
That to God’s holy city
Together we may pass.

We sing this hymn in procession, out of the ‘prison’ of the Hall, as it were, on our way to the Church (minus the verse above, though without disrespect to all and any little asses!) Gloria, laus et honor.

Almighty God, whose most 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 the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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