With a shout

With a shout

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

This collect for the Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day, was prepared for the 1549 prayer book by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, based on an antiphon sung to Christ at vespers on Ascension Day. Better than most of our collects, it suits the collect’s purpose of collecting the congregation’s focus on the tone of worship that follows. The specified readings for the day are a bit distanced from the theme though; and while I love Psalm 1, which my mother helped me memorize as a child, I do regret that the new lectionary removes the option of experiencing Psalm 47 with its exultant opening “Clap your hands, all you peoples, shout to God with a cry of joy,” and its wonderfully explosive line “God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of the ram's-horn!” 

Ascension Day is one of the seven Principal Feasts of the church, but nobody these days comes to a service which is always on a Thursday. As a result, nobody gets to hear Luke’s imaginative Bible stories about that fantastical event. So in my years as parish priest I took liberties with my canonical authority, and especially with our remoteness all the way at the far end of the diocese out of the bishop’s oversight, by changing the readings at will. Now my mind is wandering. In a beautiful old historic church, with two genuine pipe organs and a Baldwin grand piano, professional musicians to play and lead, a seriously committed choir of long years dedication, and a faithful congregation who baked fresh, warm, fragrant bread for Eucharist every Sunday morning, we had the most extraordinary worship imaginable for a remote town of 2,500 people. Linda, Tass and I lived there through a golden age.

Every age has its glitter and even the oysters are gone now: bags of oysters are trucked in from Texas, Louisiana and Alabama, shucked in the oyster houses, and shipped back out in containers cleverly labeled to show where they were packed.

This, my alternative to the commentary I wrote last evening on Dzhokhar and our own golden age of America, long past. No age was truly golden, it's all in the eye of the beholder looking back. 

Gone with a shout or a whimper

T+