Sermon - Liturgy of the Word

The Liturgy of the Word September 23, 2012 Mother Jessica Schaap Today we come to the third in our series on the Eucharist. We will be looking at the liturgy of the word. Where does it begin? Where does it end? What does it include?

Low Mass: After the collect of the Day, it begins with the Epistle reading and ends with the Absolution and Comfortable Words.

High Mass/Modern Rite: It begins with the Old Testament Reading and ends with the Peace.

The liturgy of the word is filled with activity: reading, listening, singing and responding.

When we hear the Holy Scriptures we are, as in the words of that famous collect from the Second Sunday of Advent, praying that we may “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” There is a lot of action implied in that series of verbs. With this series of verbs, the collect also implies we need to take time. Just like eating any large meal we shouldn’t rush, we need to allow time to properly digest the food that we are given.

That is why we pray in the collect to digest Scripture – to eat and digest it, let it nourish us and form us. In the liturgy of the word, we commit ourselves to many steps, to taking the time to be attentive to Scripture and to the ways in which God wants to feed us in this place and time. Over time, may we all come to the place where we can say with the poet George Herbert: “Oh Book, infinite sweetness! Let my heart Suck ev’ry letter, and a honey gain.”

To help our hearts taste the honey of Scripture, let us look a little more closely at each component of the liturgy of the Word.

We read from the Old Testament and the New Testament to make clear our belief that the God revealed in the Old is the same God known in the New. As Article VII from the Thirty Nine articles states: “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New.” We make our response to the readings with a Psalm – the chief prayer book of the ancient Hebrews and of the church.

We read from the Epistles of the New Testament because they testify to the work of God’s Holy Spirit in the early church. It is the same Holy Spirit which inspires and dwells with us now.

Because it reveals the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ, we especially reverence the reading of the Gospel in several ways: we stand, make a procession, sing an acclamation,] make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, lips, and hearts, use incense, elevate the book of the Gospels, and kiss it. For us, the gospel - or good news - of Jesus Christ made known in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is the lens through which we read the whole of Scripture.

The whole sufficiency of Scripture, to adapt from article six of the thirty nine articles, is in its revelation of salvation by the Word of God, Jesus Christ. In other words, the Word, capital “W”, is Jesus, and the Word communicates to us through the word, small “w”, of scripture.

The homily is meant to extend the proclamation of the Scriptures, to proclaim the faith of the Church and with humility discover and listen for what God wishes to reveal to a particular community. Just as the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist does, the liturgy of the word is meant to draw us into relationship with Jesus. This relationship doesn’t have an end – it is always meant for growth and development. It makes sense, then, to include the creed, the prayers of the people, the confession and absolution, and the peace in the liturgy of the word. They are all appropriate responses to the lifegiving Word who has reached out to us through scripture and the homily. These responses bond us to the One who has made us and loved us and formed us for his own. These responses bond us to one another.

The liturgy of the word is dynamic; it is made up of call and response; it reflects our belief that the Word is alive and active and saving today. It requires us to inwardly digest it. As another thing to digest, and it’s quite a mouthful(!), I’d like to end with a quotation from the 2004 Windsor Report on the nature and authority of Scripture. The Windsor Report arose from the work of the Lambeth Commission on Communion which was established by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The second sentence gives as sufficient a summary of the Bible as I’ve ever read.

For Jesus and the early Christians, 'authority' was not conceived as a static source of information or the giving of orders (as the word 'authority' has sometimes implied), but in terms of the dynamic inbreaking of God's kingdom, that is, God's sovereign, saving, redeeming and reconciling rule over all creation. This saving rule of God, long promised and awaited in Israel, broke in upon the world in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection, to be then implemented through the work of the Spirit until the final act of grace which will create the promised new heavens and new earth…the purpose of scripture is not simply to supply true information, nor just to prescribe in matters of belief and conduct, nor merely to act as a court of appeal, but to be part of the dynamic life of the Spirit through which God the Father is making the victory which was won by Jesus' death and resurrection operative within the world and in and through human beings.

In essence, this quote from the Windsor report, especially in its last sentence tells us why we’re doing what we’re doing in the liturgy of the word. We in the church participate in this liturgy to “be part of the dynamic life of the Spirit” to know and to share the victorious saving, redeeming, and reconciling work of the Holy Trinity. Let us hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest that.