As an aid in following these readings, I’ve made a little booklet with all the readings for each day. I stick it in the front cover of my Book of Common Prayer so I’m always fully equipped do pray the Daily Office in the BCP with just the one book. If you’ve ever prayed through the Daily Office from the BCP, you know how much flipping there is throughout the book, the bible, the hymnal, etc. Making these little booklets adds a little convenience and helps focus my daily Bible reading. Since I find them helpful, I figured I’d make them public. If you print the attached file double-sided and then fold it right down the middle, you will have your own booklet with all the readings for the second half of Lent. Watch for a new booklet as we rapidly approach Easter.

Year Two Lent Part Two Booklet

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        **The full text of the Great Litany can be found at http://www.richardliantonio.com/prayer/?p=169

One of the most curious occurrences within the season of Lent in the Anglican Tradition is the praying of the Great Litany. Traditionally, this is done on the first, second, third and fifth Sundays of Lent, although in many churches it is limited to the first Sunday. Quite simply, a litany is a series of petitions that are said in a responsive fashion between a leader and an entire congregation. In the Great Litany, nearly every general area of prayer is addressed including prayer for various aspects of the church, the world, the government, and the poor. These petitions are prefaced by a series of requests asking God to deliver us from all manner of afflictions: evil, sin, heresy, schism, natural disasters, political disasters, violence, death, etc.

The reason why I say this is curious is because it is definitively not “seeker-sensitive.” By that term I am referring to a tendency in modern church practice to make everything easily accessible and pleasing to people with no prior experience at that or any church. Little could be more peculiar or awkward to someone unfamiliar with the practice for a church service to begin without warning, with ten to twelve minutes of a cappella chanting of prayers with the congregation repeating the same refrain the entire time. This happens as the choir, clergy and lay ministers process into the sanctuary and continue to process around the sanctuary until the entire litany is over. Though I undoubtedly loved the experience and wish it was practiced more frequently I have to admit it was quite strange.

Ironically, the Great Litany was actually the first piece of liturgy that ever existed in the English language. Thomas Cranmer was appointed the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury in 1532. He was largely responsible for producing the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and was later burned at the stake as a heretic under the reign of Mary Tudor (also known as Bloody Mary). It is hard to understand at this point in history, but at that time all church services were in Latin. It was not until the Protestant reformation that liturgy began to be performed in the vernacular language. Henry VIII commissioned Cranmer to write the Litany because at the time it was the practice for litanies to be offered in procession through public neighborhoods. Henry was disappointed that people were not responding and joining in the prayers. He keenly perceived that this was because the people “understode no parte of suche prayers or suffrages as were used to be songe and sayde.” He accordingly decreed that a litany be written in English

We know that he compiled the litany from a combination of Catholic, Lutheran and Greek Orthodox sources. It remains to the present day almost entirely the same, sung to the same chants Cranmer originally assigned. Why was this the first piece of English liturgy? Why is still practiced to the present day? The only reason I can imagine, is that from its inception, the Anglican tradition saw prayer as central to its life together and mission in the world. The Great Litany, though now seeming like an oddity to many, is a reminder that English speaking and worshipping Christians from the beginning earnestly desired God’s intervention and involvement in all areas of life. With this, I could not be in stronger solidarity.

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J.M.W. Turner, Throwing Overboard the Dying and the Dead

Holy God,
our lives are laid open before you;
rescue us from the chaos of sin
and through the death of your Son
bring us healing and make us whole
in Jesus Christ our Lord
Amen.

Almighty Father,
we languish as lost children in a world forlorn,
finding it hard to trust anything or anyone.
By your tender compassion
open our hearts again to your love,
that we might follow in the way of the cross
and in returning and rest be saved
through Jesus Christ our Lord
Amen.

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Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the six-and-a-half week season of Lent. The part we all know about Ash Wednesday is that people get ashes smudged on their foreheads and walk around looking somewhat goofy for the rest of the day. The part that is less well known is what the whole ritual of the ashes means. Most simply, it is an approximation of the ancient practice of placing ashes one’s head as a sign of mourning (together with wearing sackcloth). Interestingly enough, as the ashes are applied to the forehead, the priest says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This phrase gives a significant indicator of meaning that moves beyond an overly introspective obsession with self-abasement and self-hatred stylized as repentance. To say that one is dust often is interpreted as an expression both diminutive and derogatory. It conjures up popular notions of “the depravity of man” [sic] which cooperates effortlessly with the self-deprecation that has gradually become the automatic path of movement for our hearts the way an unremitting drip of water would eventually form a channel in soil. Returning to the Lord with all of the heart is undeniably central to Ash Wednesday and Lent, but there is more to this phrase that can and must inform our repentance.

The invocation of dust language harkens back to the creation and Garden of Eden narratives at the beginning of Genesis. The text tells us that “the Lord God formed the human person of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). The first thing this tells us is that as humans, we are fundamentally people of the earth. We were formed from the dust, showing that our material composition is elemental to who we are as people. It is not a “lesser” component of our being, it is who we are. This is further illustrated by the fact that the word for human (adam), in this passage and the rest of the Old Testament, is etymologically related to the word “ground” (adamah). We are quite literally earth-lings. It also shows us that, as the formation of dust was given life by the breath of God, we constantly live only in dependance upon the gracious gift of God.

Walter Brueggeman develops this idea by saying, “Thus human persons are dependent, vulnerable, and precarious, relying each moment on the gracious gift of breath which makes human life possible. Moreover, this precarious condition is definitional for human existence, marking the human person from the very first moment of existence. That is, human vulnerability is not late, not chosen, not punishment, not an aberration, not related to sin. It belongs to the healthy, original characterization of human personhood in relation to God.”1

Thus the call to “remember that we are dust” is not simply an appeal to repentance. It is an invitation to recall one’s own creaturehood and again become comfortable with one’s own vulnerability. The dominant values of our culture reward efficiency, execution, perfection and predictability. Over the past hundred years, in nearly every sector of society we have repeatedly chosen machines to replace humans and continually place ourselves in a losing battle to compete with them. Thus humanity has become increasingly like machines in a delusional attempt to transcend our frail creaturehood by imitating them. The delusional nature of this cultural neurosis could be explicated at length but is epitomized in the belief and practice that transcendence lies in machination. Like Adam and Eve we desire to reach beyond the limits of human being, to transcend the God-given limits of fragile vulnerability. Like Adam and Eve we must be told that such a pursuit is exceedingly futile. We place unspeakable demands upon ourselves imagining that we have greater power and ability than we ultimately in fact possess. For Adam and Eve, the cure was magical fruit, but remarkably, we imagine our escape will come through modeling our lives after machines. Thus Christian holiness becomes transmogrified into an irrational perfectionism, that through unyielding rigidity aspires to an inaccessible divinity.

We receive ashes on our foreheads and experience the tender yet confrontational beckoning to “remember that we are dust.” We must remember that as humans we are ever and always creatures, earth-lings, ground-lings. If it takes receiving ashes to begin grasping this, so be it. If it takes lying on the ground in the dust, so be it. We must recover this foundational truth. The Lenten recollection then no longer comes to us in collusion with the self-hatred of failure to attain an unreachable, yea, idolatrous goal. Rather, it comes to us in its truly biblical form, as an express not of God’s derision, but of his tender compassion. When God remembers our origin, it does not lead him to despise us. Instead, God’s knowledge of our beginnings in the dust is indeed the source of the heart-rending pity of a Father for his suffering children:

As a father has compassion for his children,
so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him.
For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.

Psalm 103:13-14

——————-
1 Walter Brueggeman, “Remember, You are Dust,” Journal for Preachers 14 no. 2 1991, 4.

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“How long, oh Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” Psalm 13:1-2

How did these verses get in the Bible? How are they inspired by the Holy Spirit? How were they part of Jewish liturgy and prayer? Why have the been incorporated as part of Christian worship for the entire history of the church? How are these words remotely Christian?

Interesting questions regarding an even more interesting set of verses. It is remarkable that these verses stand as they are in the Biblical text. They are not followed by a rebuke our a denunciation for a bad confession. They are not followed by a discourse on the omniscience of God to correct the obviously true fact that God cannot and does not forget us. Neither are they set forth as an example of someone wavering in faith as if they had a long way to grow in trusting God.  Rather this text is in a collection of songs to be sung in the regular worship of the people of God. Possibly even more striking is that this text is not alone in the book of Psalms but is one among many like it with its climax possibly being Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” Rather than corrected with qualifications, these verses and the cries that they express in the heart of every human being are left to stand.

The Holy Spirit and the compilers of the canon deemed it fit that these words were important for the life of the people of God throughout the ages. However, at times we run across the attitude of “trust” and “faith” in God, in which one is confident that everything is turning out the way God wanted it and everything is working out the best possible way and thus we can be at peace. This faith seems to overshoot the faith of the Biblical witness itself and almost seems like “trusting God too much.” The Psalmist here and in other places apparently recognized that everything was not turning out the best possible way and in a sense perceived her god-forsaken status in the fallen world.

How can these prayers be ours as Christians who affirm the tender-hearted and tenaciously faithful love of the all-powerful God? Is there room for the recognition of our god-forsakenness without all the qualifiers immediately rushing in? How can we as believers in the promise of God express our pain and grief over the apparent non-fulfillment of the promise and the radical disconjunction between what we hope for and what we know should be? Every prayer we offer screams of this gut-wrenching, painful contradiction between what we believe God to be like and what we experience as reality in the world. Is the problem truly just in our perspective? If we understood from God’s perspective would that make all of our pain an unmixed blessing? Not many answers on this end, just a conviction that I want the real me – the perplexed, in pain, aware of my shortcomings me to know God and what He is like. I don’t want the “me” with no problems and everything is working out great to believe that God loves me and is faithful towards me. I want the isolated, god-forsaken, broken, longing-for-something-beyond me to glance outside my shell and somehow learn to trust and hope in a God who loves and delights in me.

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