EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

Holy Week is generally believed to have developed in Jerusalem in the fourth century during the episcopate of the great bishop and preacher St. Cyril. The Easter Vigil was already in existence, and the combination of a heightened interest in Christian history, the construction of churches on the sacred sites in the Holy Land by Constantine, and the influx of pilgrims to Jerusalem for Easter produced the series of services that became our Holy Week.

These services were usually held in Jerusalem on the original sites and at the times indicated in the gospels. The Spanish pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the 380s, was fascinated by the novel celebration of what they called the Great Week and described the services in detail in her journal. She was particularly impressed that the psalms and readings were appropriate to the time and place – obviously a new idea to her.

Whether the Holy Week liturgies were invented by Cyril or borrowed from other churches, it was from Jerusalem that pilgrims took them home, adapting and incorporating them into the liturgical cycle of their own churches. These rites thus provided the basic structure of the liturgical celebrations of Holy Week. Kenneth Stevenson calls the piety of these rites ‘rememorative’: they remember the historical events of the passion. They do not imitate them like a passion play, but they are remembered symbolically so that we may enter into them. The gospel story is the thread on which the events hang, and we move with Christ from event to event throughout the week.

Maundy Thursday

The name Maundy Thursday is derived from the Latin mandatum, and refers to the new commandment (novum mandatum) in John 13:34 (‘that you love one another, just as I have loved you’), appointed in the Prayer Book to be sung as an antiphon during the footwashing, which came to be called ‘the Maundy’ in medieval England. The Proper Liturgy celebrates the events of the Last Supper, the footwashing and the institution of the Eucharist. It is the only Eucharist celebrated between Wednesday and the Great Vigil and ties the events of the Last Supper to those of Good Friday. It is appropriately celebrated as a Holy Week liturgy connecting the institution of the Eucharist with the sacrifice of the cross.

The evening or late afternoon celebration of the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday is mentioned by St. Augustine and was known to Egeria on her fourth-century visit to Jerusalem. Both spoke of the general reception of communion on the occasion. We have become accustomed to afternoon and evening celebrations of the Eucharist, but for the Christians of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages the evening Eucharist of Maundy Thursday was unique. Its very uniqueness tended to force the hour of celebration back into the morning, until the general revival of the evening Eucharist in the twentieth century.

Red Vestments are worn for the Proper Liturgy of Maundy Thursday commemorating the Last Supper. The distinctive elements of the liturgy are the washing of the feet, the reservation of the Sacrament for Good Friday communion, and the stripping of the altar. The reservation of the Sacrament is for the purpose of administering communion at the Good Friday liturgy. If communion is not to be administered on Good Friday, then the Sacrament is consumed following the reception of communion at this liturgy.

In many places the Sacrament is reserved in a place where people may keep watch before it, following the example of the apostles whom Jesus asked to watch and pray with him before the Last Supper (Matthew 26:40-41). This all-night vigil apparently began, like so many other Holy Week ceremonies, in fourth-century Jerusalem.

There are two partially inconsistent explanations of the ceremony of washing feet. One is that it is a dramatic portrayal of the actions of Jesus at the Last Supper. The presider washes the feet of twelve men to imitate what Christ did. The second explanation focuses on two passages from John’s gospel: the new commandment and the command to wash each other’s feet which concludes the Maundy gospel (John 13:34; John 13:14-15). In this explanation, the washing of feet is the outward and visible sign of the love of Christ, which we are commanded to share with one another. We therefore wash one another’s feet as Christ commanded that we all may share in that love. It is not an acted parable to be watched, but an action in which all are invited to participate.

The Episcopal Center will join with St. Joseph’s for our Maundy Thursday Liturgy on March 20, 2008 at 6:00pm, at St. Joseph’s.

Good Friday

The observance of the Friday before Easter as a commemoration of the crucifixion can be traced back to Jerusalem in the fourth century. Prior to that time, Easter had been a unitive celebration of the passion and resurrection. The Pascha combined both fast and feast and included the entire saving event of Christ’s dying and rising again: crucifixion and resurrection were celebrated as a single event in its many aspects, as God’s victory in Christ over sin and death. It was not until the fourth century, when the observance of Good Friday spread throughout the Christian East and then to the West, that the two aspects were separated into Good Friday and Easter celebrations. The Good Friday proper liturgy consists of three parts: the Liturgy of the Word, the veneration of the cross, and communion from the reserved sacrament. Celebration of the Eucharist is not permitted on Good Friday, and all consecrated bread and wine must be consumed following the distribution of communion at the Good Friday service.

The Good Friday liturgy is a solemn commemoration of and participation in the great events of this day, the salvation of the human race through the victory of Christ, who by dying destroyed death, not a funeral for Jesus. Nonetheless, it is a powerful liturgy, which begins and ends in silence. Many churches then close and lock their doors until the Great Vigil of Easter.

The Episcopal Center will join with St. Joseph’s for our Good Friday service at St. Joseph’s at 6:00 pm at St. Joseph’s. Bishop Michael Curry will be our guest preacher.

Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday, also called the Holy Sabbath and the Great Sabbath, is an empty day, the day when Christ rested in the tomb and all creation awaited the resurrection. Only the daily offices are traditional. The altar is bare, as on Good Friday, although in some places it is covered with a funeral pall. The entrance is in silence. After the gospel and homily, and in place of the Prayers of the People, the anthem from the Burial of the Dead is sung or said. The presider then leads the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer and the service concludes with the grace. All bow to the altar and leave in silence.

The Episcopal Center and St. Joseph’s will hold our Holy Saturday Service at 9:00am, March 22, at St. Joseph’s.

The Great Vigil of Easter

The Holy Week services carry us through the events of the passion. The Great Vigil, a more ancient services, leads us from death to life with Christ through fire, light, word, water, and bread and wine. A new fire is kindled, a great candle is lighted, by its light the Bible is read, prayer and praise are offered, and we celebrate the Easter sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. At the Great Vigil we celebrate the paschal mystery, which incorporates us into Christ’s saving acts.

The service of Light is a special form of the lamp lighting that was once a part of every evening service. In origin it is a utilitarian act: the service is at night, and light is needed. The service will be long, so a large light is needed. Yet it did not long remain a utilitarian act. Not only at the Vigil, but at every evening service, the bringing of light into the dark building was identified with the light of Christ shining in the darkness. At the Great Vigil the service begins with the lighting of a new fire. The ritual extinguishing of the old lights and the kindling of a new fire is an archetypal symbol of renewal and new birth. Before the invention of matches it was serious business to put out your source of light and kindle a new one. So the Great Vigil starts with this act of beginning anew, as reflected in the presider’s prayer ‘that in this Paschal feast we may so burn with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may attain to the festival of everlasting light’ (BCP p. 285).

The deacon leads the congregation into the church, carrying the newly lighted candle and proclaiming it ‘the Light of Christ.’ The candles of the congregation and the lights of the church are lighted from the new light. The Exsultet is a special example of the prayer for light which traditionally accompanies the lighting of the evening light. It celebrates not only the mighty acts of God in Moses and in Christ, but our own participation in these events through the Easter sacraments of baptism and Eucharist.

By the light of this new fire the Old Testament is read, beginning with the story of Creation, and including Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea. Each reading is followed by a psalm or canticle and a collect which gives the reading Christian context. As many as twelve lessons have been read at various times, but the Prayer Book requires two and offers nine.

After the readings the action moves to the font, where the water is blessed, the candidates are baptized, and the baptismal covenant is renewed by the congregation. Baptism is the theological climax of the Great Vigil.

Finally, the church, renewed and increased by the addition of the newly baptized, makes Eucharist, as we join in celebrating the Easter Eucharist and in receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. The bond of union with God in Christ established in the font is proclaimed in the reading from Romans 6.

It is all there. Not with the drama of Palm Sunday and Good Friday, but with the solid symbols of faith, fire, light, water, bread and wine, and with the proclamation of the Word of God. In the Great Vigil of Easter we pass over with Christ from death to life, and with the church from Lent to Easter.

The Episcopal Center and St. Joseph’s will celebrate the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 7:30 pm.

Our Easter Sunday service will be at St. Joseph’s at 10:30 a.m. and will be followed by a festive brunch. Bishop Michael Curry will join us as celebrant and preacher.

—- excerpted from Leonel L. Mitchell, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and the Great Fifty Days (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1996).

“Dear People of God,” begins the invitation to the observance of a holy Lent in the Book of Common Prayer. “I invite you, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent.” (BCP, pps. 264-265)

You’ll note that this is an invitation, not a command. We have, thank goodness, moved beyond the age of mandatory chapel attendance (although, ironically, ‘mandatory’ attendance at various other meetings seems to be on the upswing). So why accept that invitation? Why come to church?

Because there’s no such thing as a solo Christian.

Each of us has a personal relationship with God who, as the psalmist says, created our inmost parts and knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. (Psalm 139, verse 12). When we are baptized, however, we are baptized into the Body of Christ, the household of God. We need one another to become the people God formed us to be. We can’t grow into our full stature as disciples of Jesus Christ on our own.

So this Lent, rather than giving up chocolate or caffeine or whatever else, come to church. There may be days when you don’t feel particularly holy, days when you’re bored, or skeptical, or full of doubts. There may also be days when you feel blessedly close to God, mountaintop days when you are as sure of your faith as of anything in the whole world. There will undoubtedly be plenty of days in between.

But coming together to worship, pray, sing, and partake of Holy Communion together is what makes us who we are. Week in, week out, the rhythm of worship forms us into a community shaped by the Holy Eucharist, a community shaped by love. Our Sunday Eucharists are the very center of our life together.

So this Lent, come and see. I invite you to the observance of a Holy Lent and I look forward to journeying through it together with you.

Your sister in Christ,

Sarah+

The Church has a building problem. Not, I’m very happy to report, our building: the Episcopal Center has a brand, spanking new roof and HVAC system and is doing just great!

The building problem I mean has to do with how we baptized members of the Church, also known as the Body of Christ, think of and use our buildings. Our church buildings are first and foremost the places where we come together week after week to give honor and glory to God in our celebration of the Holy Eucharist. They’re the places where we gather as a community and by doing so become a community. And they are also places that become part of our identity. All church buildings have their good points and their . . . quirks . . . but they become part of what we mean when we say, “I go to St. Swithens” or “First Church Durham” or “the Episcopal Center.”

All of those things are well and good. So what’s the problem?  The problem comes when we begin to think our primary job as Christians is to bring other people inside ‘our’ building. We like to say, “The Episcopal Church welcomes all,” and I hope that, with God’s help, that will always be true. I hope that all churches, including the Episcopal Center, do a good job of offering hospitality to every person who finds his or her way to the door.

But here’s the thing–we are, by virtue of our baptism, called to go beyond welcoming people inside our buildings. In fact, most of what we’re called to takes place outside the walls of our beloved church buildings. In the words of our baptismal covenant, we’re called to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself, and to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being (Book of Common Prayer, p. 305). At the end of every celebration of the Holy Eucharist we’re sent out into the world in peace to love and serve the Lord. And in the words of the Great Commission Jesus gives in Matthew  28:20, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . . .”

We are called to offer radical hospitality, a hospitality that can’t be contained by any walls, not even the walls of our church buildings. It probably feels a lot safer to all of us to welcome people into a familiar setting, but the kind of hospitality Jesus calls us to involves risking ourselves in new and unfamiliar settings. It involves going to places where we aren’t necessarily in charge or in control or in our comfort zones NOT because we have Christ and can take him to others, but because that’s where Christ is and he’s who we’re after.

I tend to fall in love with the places I go to church. And I give thanks that in the Episcopal Center we have a place to worship right in the middle of Duke’s campus. But our buildings are where we start, not finish. I pray that this building will be the place where the seeds of our faith will be planted, nurtured, and encouraged to grow. And I also pray that our faith will always outgrow our space and that the walls of the Episcopal Center will never be able to contain our joy at finding Christ in the world.

In peace,

Sarah+

Mission statements, missionaries, mission trips, Mission Impossible . . . what is ‘mission’ all about? If I had to construct a list of the first things that come to mind when people hear the word ‘mission’ it would include the following:

1) Mission Trip ‘Mission’ is what we do on ‘mission trips’, when we go someplace else—usually someplace with a specific need for healthcare, building or rebuilding, education, or the like—and help provide what’s needed.

2) Missionary Remember Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen? At the start of the movie she’s a prim spinster dressed in formal linen, boots, and stiff undergarments in some hot African country, plinking hymn accompaniments on an out-of-tune piano while her brother conducts a worship service in a thatch-roofed church. She is the stereotype many folks have of missionaries: people who are well-intentioned, if fish-out-of-water, do-gooders.

The Episcopal Center at Duke IS a mission (of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina) and HAS a mission and here’s what I think that means: our mission is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; and our neighbors as ourselves.

Of course, that may be easier said than understood. There are a lot of different ways of thinking about what it means to love God and our neighbors. I tend to believe it has more to do with what we do and how we are than with what we say or even with making new Episcopalians (and I say that as someone who loves and is deeply commited to that part of God’s vineyard known as the Episcopal Church).

Loving God and our neighbors—I look forward to talking, working, reflecting, and praying with you this coming year as we learn together what we mean by ‘mission.’

Blessings,

Sarah+

I know it’s going to be a good summer if by the end of the school year I have a big stack of books waiting. This promises to be a very good summer.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to ‘do good work’ in the world. It’s hard to spend more than a few minutes on Duke’s campus without realizing that this community of students is passionately interested in attacking some of the hardest and most pressing issues in the world: hunger, poverty, genocide, homelessness, access to healthcare, and fair wages among them.

At the same time, it’s hard to open a newspaper or magazine without coming across an ad for some product that includes a tie-in to a good cause as part of its purchase price. Part of the profits generated from each purchase will go to saving the environment, furthering research on a cure for breast cancer, or distributing anti-retroviral medicine in Africa, just to name a few examples.

So, I’m thinking about ‘consumption’ and ‘choice’ and how those things shape our response to the call to love God and our neighbors. I’ve gathered some interesting-looking books, including Jeffrey Sachs’, The End of Poverty; Moritz Thomsen’s, Living Poor and The Farm on the River of Emeralds; Samuel Wells’, God’s Companions; John le Carre’s, The Constant Gardener. I’m still tracking down some other titles and looking for more suggestions.

Of course, come July 21st, all other reading will have to wait until I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It is summer, after all.

Blessings,

Sarah+

I love Lent! I know I’m getting ahead of myself since Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, isn’t until February 21. But we’re getting close and I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s Lent’s reputation: bummer of a season. You know, it’s all heavy and penitential and means giving up things we love (chocolate, wine, t.v., whatever). And fasting. What’s fun about fasting?

But here’s the reality: Lent is a gift from God. How so? Because Lent is a time of intense concentration and renewed immersion in our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. Think of it as a camera lens. Pentecost, which goes from Pentecost Sunday until the first Sunday in Advent, is a wide-angle lens, a time of broad focus on the life and work of the Church. Advent is the family photo album, all of us gathered and preparing to celebrate the birth of the infant Jesus. In Christmastide and Epiphany the lens is trained on the early life and work of Jesus, and then in Lent, the lens zooms in for a tight focus on our relationship with the God who made, loves, and sustains us.

Lent is a time for us to strip away the accumulated layers of things that distract us from what’s at the core of our very being–the gospel news that God who loves us beyond all imagining has reached out, taken hold of us, and won’t let go. That’s what Jesus is all about, God’s gift of drawing us back to God’s self in spite of all we’ve done and do to put distance in between us. And Lent is really about focusing on that distance, on the ways we continue to turn away from God and on our need and desire to turn back. Read the rest »

Have you ever thought about how easy it is to draw a line between what we do on Sunday and what we do every other day of the week? We may think of some activities as ‘sacred’ (anything that happens in church, for instance) and others as ‘secular’ (anything that happens at school, work, or elsewhere in our everyday lives). For Christians, however, there is no line between Sunday and the rest of the week nor one category for ‘sacred’ and another for ‘secular.’ Christians can’t compartmentalize.

Christians believe in a God who is the maker of heaven and earth and of all that is, seen and unseen. All of Creation belongs to God who made it and who calls us to be its stewards, to enjoy it and to care for it as God would have us care for it. The practice of being God’s stewards bursts any boundaries we’d like to set up between Sunday and every other day and between things that are ‘sacred’ or ‘secular.’ Wherever we are and whatever we are doing we are always God’s creatures in the midst of God’s Creation. Read the rest »

I’ve been thinking about sabbath-keeping lately. The first week of the semester - with all the rushing around and moving in and sorting out schedules and greeting old friends and making new ones - may not seem like the most obvious time to focus on Sabbath. But it is precisely because I’ve been feeling frenzied that I’ve been drawn to Sabbath.

And it’s more than nostalgia for vacations just past that’s got me thinking about sabbath-keeping. It’s recognizing that my mounting anxiety is a sure sign I need to rest. More specifically, it’s a sign I need to rest in God. Read the rest »