A Psalm, Laypeople Chanting the Propers, A Carving, A Movie. The Lord's Supper.

I originally posted the following at a one-year lectionary preacher's group at Facebook that I follow with fascination. I notice that the group is intended for working preachers, which I am not, so I've deleted my comments from there and reposted them here. If you find anything here of interest, please let us know in the comments.

~~~

I would be interested to hear if and how you preachers might incorporate the Tract for Judica into your preaching, especially Ps. 129:3-4.

A few years ago I saw The Passion of the Christ movie for the first time and was deeply shocked, impressed, sickened, moved and educated by this work of devotional art, as I'm sure many of you were as well. This passage from Psalms evokes the most difficult-to-watch scene in that movie, in my opinion, the flogging of Our Lord.

As a layman, I'm blessed to be a part of our "chancel choir" which has been practicing the propers for Judica for a week or two, giving me more opportunity to meditate on the propers than I would typically have in a single pass.

There is a small carved representation of a flagrum in the beautiful reredo behind our altar. As I was waiting to receive communion last week, my eyes came to rest on the flagrum. With Ps. 129:3-4 on my mind, I had something of a flashback to the horrific scene in Gibson's film where the flagrum was used on Christ. I think it is fascinating how church decor, liturgical chant, lots of choir practice and a recent movie worked together seemlessly to provoke a strong emotional response in me to what Christ suffered for me in the events of His passion, and it did so right at the point of my reception of His true body and blood.

Of course I understand that the Sacrament is what it is and does what it does regardless of my emotional response. Yet my physical gut response to the flogging scene in the movie was a wave of nausea brought on by shock as I realize that what I'm watching carefully reproduces something THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. The buckets of stage blood in a Quentin Tarantino movie do not have that effect on me, as the theatrical artifice of all that violence is obvious.

So to feel a touch of that same shocked nausea at the Passion of Our Lord as I stand before the rail is, I think, perfectly appropriate and I thank God that in my sinful state, I have not become completely calloused; that I can (occasionally) respond to the Gospel with a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone.

As I reflect on this, I understand that it is only by faith that I can grasp that the events of Good Friday really happened as the Scriptures described them and, more to the point, that they happened on my behalf. Also, I must give credit to the one-year lectionary for helping to pull these threads together in my mind at this time.

Ransom

Truly no man can ransom another,
or give to God the price of his life,
for the ransom of their life is costly
and can never suffice,
that he should live on forever
and never see the pit.
(Psalm 49:7-9 ESV)


For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
(Mark 10:45 ESV)

Go read this!

Consecrated Space has a blog post so good that it has inspired me to begin blogging. She starts by complaining about the way evangelicals talk about "devotions" and then riffs perfectly on the great skill with which Christians turn grace into law. One of her touch points is Exodus 16, the Old Testament reading for Laetare which for you non-Latin speakers means last Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 18th; otherwise known as "National Irish-American Hangover Day."

It occurred to me that magic happens when lots and lots of Christians are meditating on the same text at the same time due to the use of the one-year lectionary.  Using the lectionary in an age of social networking has some powerful advantages that the people who came up with the lectionary could never have imagined, as the Internet was centuries in the future. And the people who invented the Internet likely never heard of the lectionary.

It's not magic, magic is make-believe. The God who gave the lectionary to the church is the same God who, much later, gave the Internet to the church. This God is not make-believe, and sometimes it almost looks like He knows what He is doing!


So this Consecrated Space post goes on to build a very good "devotion" out of a post that begins by complaining about devotions. That blogger knows how to write, which should not surprise when one looks at her bio and knows something about the University that she attended.