The Great Thanksgiving

The Episcopal Church currently has nine authorized Eucharistic Prayers (The Great Thanksgiving) for celebrating Holy Communion. Our oldest dates from Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer (1549), Rite One, Eucharistic Prayer I in the 1979 prayerbook, which we and many parishes use regularly for the eight o’clock service Sunday mornings. Like it, Rite One, Eucharistic Prayer II (p.340) is in traditional language. Prayer II shifts from the sacrificial tone of Prayer 1 to more celebratory. It seems little used; and quite frankly, why the Church cast a new prayer in Elizabethan English escapes me.

There are four Rite Two prayers, A, B, C and D, in contemporary language in the prayerbook. Each is different, has a different history and, if one digs a bit, somewhat different theology, because the theology is found in what is said. 

From 1998 and authorized again by General Convention 2012, Enriching Our Worship 1 adds three more Eucharistic Prayers, designated 1, 2 and 3. During the summer at Holy Nativity, we have been using these prayers at ten-thirty worship on Sunday mornings -- 1 and 2 so far, and we’re using EOW1 Prayer 3 on July 29th and one more Sunday of our summer educational sabbatical! 

All nine of these Eucharistic Prayers have the standard features that we have discussed in Adult Sunday School, Confirmation Classes and Bible Seminars. Opening dialogue and, in varying sequence, rehearsal of salvation history, words of institution, epiclesis (invocation of the Holy Spirit), oblation (the offering of the bread and wine), anamnesis (recalling -- literally, “not forgetting”), closing with a doxology of praise. Anglican theology of the Reformation departs from our Roman roots in that our eucharist is offered as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving instead of offering the Mass as Christ’s original sacrifice. 

On my mind this morning, looking forward to using EOW1 Eucharistic Prayer 3, is something that even most clergy don’t notice. The other eight prayers all contain this rubric:

At the following words concerning the bread, the Celebrant is to hold it, or to lay a hand upon it; and at the words concerning the cup, to hold or place a hand upon the cup and any other vessel containing wine to be consecrated.

but Prayer 3 omits it. The omission is meant to ease away from the popular notion, theology, that something about the Celebrant’s touch is what consecrates the bread and wine, makes them holy, transforms them into the Body and Blood of Christ. Rather, that transformation happens as the gathered community gives thanks and celebrates with Christ present in the midst of us. There is nothing theologically “magical” about the priest touching things.

Further to this, Prayer 3 does not call the priest the Celebrant, as the other eight prayers do, but the Presider. Why? Because the Church’s theology is that the People are gathered to celebrate and are therefore in fact the celebrants; the priest is but the presider for the occasion.

This subtle shift could in time ease over into the issue of Lay and Diaconal Presidency of the Eucharist, which is advocated by the Diocese of Sydney, Australia, not elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, at least as yet.

TW+