Trial Liturgy Use During Lent
February 23, 2023
Greetings and welcome to the season of Lent. This season is a traditional time to reflect on our relationship to God and to God’s people, to study and to reflect on where we feel called to amend our lives to be more aligned with God’s purposes. To that end, the people of St. James will be engaging in a variety of Lenten practices: some will either fast or adopt a new discipline, some will participate in our joint “One Book, One Diocese” book study with St. Martin’s Episcopal Church or our Lenten Retreat at St. Martin’s, and some will join us for weekday Morning Prayer or Wednesday Evensongs.
We will also be using one of the trial-use Eucharistic Prayers for our Sunday worship during Lent. The Episcopal Church as a national body has drafted these prayers to offer more expansive language for how we talk about God and more inclusive language for each other. We of the Anglican tradition have repeatedly updated the language of our prayer book since the first version in 1549, just as we ourselves have changed the ways we think about God and each other since 1549.
As you follow along in the worship, you will notice places where simply “he” is changed to “God” or “Lord” is changed to “Savior.” In other places phrases are updated, such as “forgive you all your sins through the grace of Jesus Christ” during the absolution and “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” during the Nicene Creed. As we engage in these updated prayers, some of us may find the changes to be profound while some of us may find the updates so minor as to be unnoticed (indeed, there are many ways in which our 1979 prayer book update was a far more radical departure from the previous prayers). Some of us may grow used to the prayers over the course of Lent and come to love them, while some of us may give it a try and find we like the 1979 version better. The goal in our liturgy is always to explore how the words we use more deeply connect us and illuminate our relationship to God and each other. I encourage you to closely follow along in the prayers this season and take it as an opportunity for reflection and study this Lent.
The Forum on Sunday mornings in Lent will also feature an examination of these prayers and be a wonderful place to continue the discussion. There will be an opportunity at the end of the season to share these reflections and feedback that will be passed on to our national General Convention of The Episcopal Church as we continue to do the work of being expansive in our language for God and inclusive of God’s people.
The Rev. Canon Steven Balke