Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church

St. Matthews Episcopal Church | 695 Southbridge St | Worcester, MA 01610 | (508) 755-4433

Rector's Greeting

March 2010

Dear Friends in Christ – 

I write this on the afternoon of the First Sunday in Lent, having just prayed the Great Litany with three different groupings of Saint Matthew’s parishioners in less than 18 hours!  Perhaps you may be thinking, “The Great Litany?  That’s A LOT of penitence!”  And, on one level, it is: a slightly-updated 16^th-century English liturgical text that goes on for almost SIX pages in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, whether read or chanted, takes a significant amount of time and concentration. No wonder it rarely gets prayed EXCEPT in Lent! 

Yet, on another level, I find it to be a profoundly meaningful prayer – a prayer that links me (and us) to the communion of saints, especially those Anglican saints of the 16^th and 17^th centuries who lived, and worked, and sometimes died, to give us prayer in a language that was understood by common people.  The Great Litany was the first set of liturgical prayers in English written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the direction of King Henry VIII, and later became part of the fabric of the earliest English prayerbooks.  More than that – and its antiquity means quite a bit to me! – this prayer covers a lot of ground theologically and pastorally.  We invoke the Name of God, “the holy, blessed and glorious  Trinity,” we recall the mysterious realities of the Incarnation of Christ and His Life, Ministry, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, and we PRAY – for ourselves and for others, for all sorts of people, many possible situations, conditions, and varieties of experiences, and for deliverance from all kinds of sins and the defeat of evil.  

Sometimes in our prayers, both public and personal, we name the names of our friends and family, the people we’ve been asked to remember, the causes and countries close to our hearts or fresh in our consciousness, the thanksgivings that are particular to our lives and the places that we live – and that is all good!  However, we are often in danger of praying ONLY for those “nearest and dearest,” and forgetting to pray for God’s blessing, protection, deliverance, or healing for “all sorts and conditions” of humanity.  The Great Litany will not let us forget them – any of them.  Nor will it allow us to practice a kind of “amnesia” about our own deeper need for repentance and forgiveness, a need that we often try to keep at arm’s length.  And so, the Great Litany names the names of our failures, our willfulness, our deeply cherished peccadilloes and our small faults – “all our sins, negligences and ignorances” (BCP p. 152) – and that is good, too! 

During this Season of Lent, perhaps the rhythm of this less-than-familiar prayer, the awkward cadences of Rite I language for our responses and worship texts, the universal embrace of the “Prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church and the world” might give us opportunities to be more “present” to our prayer and worship, and more conscious of our hunger for God.  There are sometimes blessings to found in ancient and unfamiliar words that link us to generations of faithful people who preceded us, who strove in their own days to open their hearts to the love and mercy of God no less than we do in our own time.  Each year, when I begin to think about “what will we do for Lent this year at Saint Matthew’s,” I find the pages of the Great Litany bracing and refreshing, stimulating me to think about the careful “limits” of my intercessions, my resistance to “true repentance,” my forgetfulness about the glory and mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ.  As the Great Litany draws to its close, I find much–needed encouragement in the petition: 

That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; to comfort and help the weak-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet, we beseech thee to hear us, good Lord. (BCP p. 152) 

I find myself in every line of that petition – and hope for us all as well! 

So, take out your prayerbook this Lent, turn to page 148, and pray the Great Litany on your own.  Take some time to do this, don’t rush through it, and think of all who have ever prayed this prayer – or may need to be included in your thoughts as you pray it now.  I think you’ll find it a blessing! 

In Christ, who meets us in the Wilderness –

The Reverend Nancy Baillie Strong