Loading...May is a month of liturgical dancing. I don’t mean that literally, unless, maybe, you are a member of the altar guild. They may feel a little out of breath with the changes in altar cloth (parament) colors from white to red to white to green, all in four weeks!
We’ll celebrate the Ascension on Mother’s Day (white). Then, we’ll finish the Easter season with the Day of Pentecost on May 19 (red). The next Sunday is Trinity Sunday (white)—a day when most preachers stumble through explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity, hoping something makes sense, but is not heretical. That is a dance in itself! And finally, at the beginning of June, we’ll change those paraments one more time to green, and they’ll stay there most Sundays for the next six months.
With these color changes, we’ll all go through a little dance with our liturgy. We’ll make a shift in our Eucharistic Prayer from “B” to “C” beginning on Trinity Sunday. “C” feels more like summer to me. There’s a distinct nod to creation. It is a very participatory Eucharistic Prayer, so we will dance together through the experience. We’ll use this one until September.
Then, in September, we will incorporate the six-week creation season into worship. Bishop White encourages us to do this. I’ll remind you later in the summer about what’s coming up, so you are not too surprised when for six weeks the Confession and Lord’s Prayer is very different than what is so familiar to us. We’ll also use a Eucharistic Prayer from the approved liturgy from Enriching Our Worship.
The Episcopal Church has a wealth of liturgical settings and resources to explore, designed especially for specific times on the liturgical calendar. I like using them because I am always surprised by what each setting elicits within me, kind of like dancing to different styles of music. In each, I hear and feel different points within the liturgy that change some bit of understanding—maybe clarifies or deepens the way I understand how God is working in and through us. I pray that you find the variety of liturgical settings intriguing and illuminating.
Be sure to mark July 28 on your calendar and plan to be in church. We’ll be celebrating our patron, St. James, with a visit from Bishop White that will include confirmations, receptions, and reaffirmations of faith. I’m not sure if there will be dancing, but it will be a morning filled with joy.
Dancing with you…
Rev. Debbie+
