Category Archives: Church Year

Advent Music

Contributor John Allen Bankson has a good piece on Advent Music at Know Tea.  I appreciate his perspective, since he actually has musical credentials, unlike most Reformed pastors.  Why don’t Reformed seminaries require classes on music? 

“I have always loved music.  He who knows this art is in the right frame, and fitted for every good pursuit.  We can not do without music in our schools.  A schoolmaster must know how to sing, or I would not allow him to teach.  Nor ought we to ordain young theologians to the sacred office, unless they have first been well-tried and practiced in the art in the school.” – Martin Luther (Henry Barnard, German Teachers and Educators, 158-159).

Degeneration of Sunday Worship

We forget that all things have a history.  Why do we have a weekend?  Adolf Adam’s chapter on the history of Sunday worship is quite illuminating.  Being a young buck, I didn’t know the UN had contributed to the degeneration of Sunday worship (although I wasn’t surprised to learn the UN had messed with God’s ordering of time).  By this I mean that the secular world has ordered time to coincide with the Economic Machine.  You can tell what a culture worships by looking at their calendar. 

Adam writes: “A regrettable break with Christian tradition is to be seen in recommendation R 2015 of the International Organization for Standardization, an agency connected with the United Nations Organization.  This document urges that beginning on January 1, 1976, Sunday be regarded as the last day of the week in the economic and technical sphere and thus in the whole public realm … [Sunday became] the end of the week, as the ‘week-end’ on which people rest in order then to begin a new week on Monday” (The Liturgical Year, 51).

This way of thinking is so natural now, we don’t realize it started somewhere.   

One of the saddest lines I’ve ever heard in a film was in Kate and Leopold (my wife made me watch it).  Meg Ryan and her studly boyfriend are snuggling, on Sunday, after a weekend fling.  She says something like: “I hate Sunday … because the next day is Monday.”  What a depressing worldview!  The world works for 5 days so it can party for two.  Christians ascend into heavenly worship every Sunday, and then go out into the world for 6 days, illuminated by the Light of the World.  The world works frenetically so it can play; Christians know God created man to work in the world, taking dominion over it.  Oddly enough, when we have a biblical view of work and worship, our play actually becomes restful. 

Ascension Day

Belated Ascension Day thoughts from Schmemann:

“The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the word, of their ministry to the world. For there–in heaven–they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension,’ they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. They brought no programs and no theories; but wherever they went, the seeds of the Kingdom sprouted, faith was kindled, life was transfigured, things impossible were made possible … In the church today, we so often find we meet only the same old world, not Christ and His kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind us,” (For the Life of the World, 28).

I’m thoroughly enjoying Schmemann. Every page is pure gold.