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The
Bishop's Journal
March 2002
This Is the Feast!
"This is the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia!" This beautiful hymn of praise - drawn from the vision of the heavenly banquet described in the book of Revelation - has become a primary component of the Lutheran worship service. The words bombard us with inspiring images of the Lamb's heavenly banquet! This is the resurrection feast that has no end, richly described in all its glory.
How strange, then, to sing such a stirring and anticipatory hymn, only to find - thirty or so minutes later - that the feast is not to be celebrated; at least not on this day. It isn't a "communion Sunday" - a strange phrase in itself! As one old friend once wryly suggested, we ought to be singing, "Where is the feast of victory for our God?"
The first Christians could not have imagined a Sunday liturgy that didn't include the eucharist; a pattern that has continued to be the norm in most Christian churches for all of the intervening two thousand years. Our experience as Lutherans, however, has been less consistent.
Although the Lutheran Confessions strongly affirmed the importance of weekly communion - for a variety of reasons - less frequent celebrations became normative for many North American Lutherans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the reasons were very practical - itinerant pastors were rarely able to visit their congregations on more than a quarterly or monthly schedule. Others were more culturally determined, as immigrant Lutheran communities came to be influenced by more dominant traditions whose sacramental piety was markedly different from that articulated by Luther and the early reformers.
Over the past three decades, however, North American Lutherans have made great progress toward restoring the full liturgy of Word and Sacrament to its rightful place as the normative pattern for the church's primary service of worship. For some of our congregations this is nothing new. Some of them have celebrated weekly communion for almost forty years! For others this is a relatively new development and communion is still celebrated on a monthly or bi-weekly schedule. The pattern, however, is clearly established, and slowly but surely, more and more of our congregations have come to the point where they are able to provide both Word and the Sacrament ministry on a weekly basis.
The season of Lent has traditionally been seen as a time of abstinence. It is a time of fasting where we might avoid certain foods or beverages. In our worship services, we deliberately omit certain festive portions of the liturgy. The season of Easter, however, is a time to pull out all the stops. It is a time of celebration where abstinence should be the last thing on anybody's mind! It is our great high feast!
Congregations that have not yet established a weekly eucharist, might find the 50 day Easter to Pentecost season to be a wonderful time in which to experience a more frequent pattern of communing. "This is, indeed, the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia!" May it be so for us this Easter; not only in word but also in experience!
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
