Christian Reconciliation Carnival:
The Question of the Month

The Christian Reconcilliation Carnival is an “almost-monthly” carnival focusing on the topic of the divide in our churches. The carnival will be here this month. Two posts can be offered each month, one on the “question for the month”, the other of general interest. This month’s quesrtion is:

The topic will be: If you had to choose one thing that you believe your church or tradition does the best, or one contribution you believe your church body makes to Christendom as a whole, what would that be?

As those regular readers know, and to inform the welcome remainder, January last my family started attending an Eastern Orthodox (OCA) church (website here). Previously, I had been attending a ECUSA (Episcopal) parish and was raised Lutheran until I fell away after college.

Orthodoxy makes the claim that the essential and ‘best’ thing about their tradition is the liturgy. And, far from gainsaying them, I’d have to wholeheartedly agree. Before I go into attempting to highlight some of the differences between the Western liturgical rite and the Eastern, I’d like to make one remark. As was noted earlier, one of the big stumbling blocks between churches is that we, in our different traditions, are pretty much all busy on Sunday morning … attending our own parishes. Most, if not all, Orthodox churches have a Great Vespers service on Saturday night. This is a shorter service (~45 minutes) which captures some of the qualities of the Eastern rite but importantly is not on Sunday morning. It also doesn’t (in ordinarily) have a Eucharist so everyone participates equally for those whom that might be an issue.

Below the fold, find a short list of some of the differences between Eastern and Western rites, this list is gathered from my off-the-cuff observations and not a careful study.

• There are a lot more repeated elements in the service. The primary repeated element is “Lord have mercy” as part of intercessory prayers. Every introduction moving to another element in the liturgy is prefaced by one or more such intercessions. This serves to hammer home a penitential attitude.
• In the Old World (Europe and Mid-East) Orthodox churches have no pews and everyone stands throughout the entire service. This is not the case in the US, however one stands a lot more than in Western rite services.
• Incense is used in every service. It was pointed out to me at one point, that incense is, in Scripture, always associated with worship.
• The only music is a cappella choral singing. Additionally, almost everything is sung. In a standard liturgy, only the creed and two other similar statements are “said”. The rest of the service is sung or chanted by choir, congregation, or clergy. With song, and incense, and the many beautiful icons, this makes for a highly sensorial service.
• This liturgy is held to hold the place in Orthdoxy as taking the place of the confession or statement of faith for the other traditions. Consequently it is jam packed with theology. As an example, in one of the Lenten (or Holy week) the chant used the word “noetic” as an adjective. Now, I’m pretty well read however, I don’t use “noetic” in casual conversation. It took a minute or two for me to cull meaning and extract what that meant in context. OCA chant moves along at a brisk clip (Greek Orthodox apparently is more measured chant). So therefore, after decoding “noetic” I had to “catch up”. This was a striking example, but there are a lot of complicated theological statements (hammered out over the first millenia) embedded throughout the service. If one wants to follow and understand what is being said in the liturgy … that can be a dizzying (and rewarding) experience.
• Accordingly, having so much “more” content in the liturgy reduces the centrality of the homily.
• The service is longer. Typical services run 90 minutes on Sunday morning for the St. Chrysostom liturgy. The St. Basil liturgy (of which the former was amended by St. John Chysostom) is a little, perhaps 30 minutes, longer.

Last week, Weekend Fisher remarked that a good hymn does more than a good homily. A rejoinder might be … really really good liturgy might be better than both.