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Just Another Jim
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Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy

We Who Mystically Represent the Cherubim

Essay on the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
March 20, 2005

I have not been looking forward to Easter this year. I am a firm believer that authentic celebration requires preparation. Particularly in a Christian context, celebration without preparation is generally empty and devoid of the sort of meaning we should find in the Christian faith. It was a month into the season and Lent seemed pretty trivialized and this had led to my gloomy outlook for Easter. Because of this I recommended to Brenda that we switch horses midstream and go up to St Thomas Syrian Orthodox Church a couple of weeks ago. The timing, while accidental, was fortuitous. The Byzantine calendar that the Orthodox Church follows is a couple weeks off the western calendar to which we are accustomed. As a result, Orthodox Easter has already cycled to the end of its time frame. Easter is about as early as it can be this year (March 27) as reckoned on the western calendar, but is as late as possible (May 1) on the Orthodox calendar. Although Holy Week was just around the corner for the western churches, the Orthodox had not even begun Great Lent. The Sunday we arrived at St Thomas was the last Sunday before Great and Holy Lent. Standing in Divine Liturgy, we both realized that we wanted to spend Lent and Pascha (the Orthodox name for Easter) among the Orthodox singing their profoundly rich liturgy in the midst of the sights, sounds and smells that are at the heart of Byzantine worship.

Orthodox church buildings bring out the poet in me. One is visibly surrounded by that “great cloud of witnesses” the author of Hebrews talks about in chap. 12. The gilded icons, beautiful tapestries, and ornate furniture bring to life the psalmist's joy in entering into the beauty of the ancient temple. The chanting, incense, and a theater of worship creates a sensory barrage that brings to life the book of Revelation in a way that no story teller or golden-tongued Protestant preacher ever could. But my single favorite part of Orthodox worship is the moment when the Cherubic Hymn is sung. But in order to understand, we need some context.

It is sung shortly after the sermon during that lull when the clergy and acolytes are preparing the elements for Holy Communion. The ever-busy Protestants don't care for lulls. The communion elements are prepared before worship. They can therefore jump from sermon to creed to offering to Great Prayer of Thanksgiving without missing a beat, except that the elders may march to the front of the church; but the efficient worship leader has the elders process during the offering. Some Protestants, Presbyterians among them, include action with the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving and words of institution, visibly pouring the wine and visibly breaking the bread at the appropriate moments. This action takes much longer in both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox liturgies. The Catholics typically sing a communion hymn during the preparation, and according to Roman dogma it is during the Great Prayer that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into Body and Blood and thus the bells are rung: Three jingles for the bread; three jingles for the body, and three more jingles when the Host is lifted up for all to see—all this done in solemn silence with the faithful looking on.

But the Orthodox, ever attentive to teachable moments and also lovers of grand drama, have transformed this lull before the communing of the faithful, into one of the most sublime didactic sequences in all of Christian worship. The priest is preparing the elements and getting ready for “the Great Entrance” when the Body and Blood of Christ (ie, the very person of Christ) is brought out and processed among the people so that they can greet him as they greeted each other when entering into the worship space. During the preparation, the people (in truth, it's generally just the choir with one or two scattered voices from the congregation) sing the Cherubic hymn, slowly and majestically:

We who mystically represent the Cherubim,
and sing to the life-giving Trinity the thrice-holy hymn,
let us now lay aside all earthly care,
that we may receive the King of all,
who comes invisibly upborne by the Angelic Hosts.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

This hymn explicitly states, week in and week out, one of the key pieces of Orthodox liturgical theology. Sunday morning worship is not something we come and listen to, it is a drama that we participate in. It is essentially a reenactment of the book of Revelation. The Divine Liturgy (for this is what the Orthodox call their Sunday morning worship) is often called a journey into heaven. It is a journey that takes us to the very throne where we find the sacrificed Lamb, with the angels and elders gathered around singing “holy, holy, holy ...” (the thrice-holy hymn) for eternity. This, my favorite image of worship, is the source idea for my song “Angels and Elders” which is found elsewhere on this web site. (Click on the song title if you want to go to that web page and listen to it.)

And in this lull in the worship service, when the priest is preparing the elements for Holy Communion, the people are singing—in this great heavenly drama performed here on earth—we play the part of the cherubim gathered around the throne. This congregational role is also silently proclaimed and plainly visible in an Orthodox church. Standing there we are literally surrounded (on all sides and above) with icons of Christ, Mary, the God-bearer, the apostles, angels, and saints. And as we slowly and solemnly sing the Cherubic Hymn, we are reminded that these are not some distant and wonderful strangers, but rather we all are part of this very congregation gathered around the throne of God.

At one point during the singing of the Cherubic Hymn, the priest comes out from behind the iconostasis and begins to cense (that is, shake incense upon) the icons. He begins with the icon of our Lord Jesus Christ and then turns to the left and censes Mary, the God-bearer, and then back to the right, censing John the Baptist, and then back to the left, censing the patron saint of the local church (in this case St. Thomas), then more saints and angels, prophets and patriarchs. Finally, the priest turns to the congregation (we who mystically represent the cherubim) and censes us, before returning to the altar to prepare for the Great Entrance.

And in this moment one of the great truths of orthodox Christian faith is proclaimed in the sublime power of drama.

One of the common Christian misconceptions is that saints are somehow far removed from us. We're nothing (or close to it) and they're everything (or close to it). In many Christian traditions, the faithful ask them to pray for “us sinners” because our own faith is weak, and we look to them as examples because our own lives are less than exemplary. In the Christian West this perceived distance between “those saints” and “us sinners” is expressed in two different ways. In the Roman Catholic church the emphasis is on the saints who are high and lifted up. In the Protestant Church, the emphasis is on us sinners, who are reminded that we are dirt (or worms, as Isaac Watts said, in the beloved Protestant Hymn, At the Cross, “such a worm as I”), albeit dirt shaped by God's hand and enlivened by the divine Breath. At its most extreme, Roman Catholic piety speaks of an excess of holiness that these saints have built up that we can use when our own holiness fails. At the most Protestant extreme lie the Calvinists who revel in the doctrine of total depravity and the utter sinfulness and wickedness of humankind.

But in the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy, while the people are singing, “we who mystically represent the cherubim ...”, the priest is censing, first the savior, then the saints and angels, and then, including us with that august group, the congregation itself. Even the incense speaks to the mystery of this holiness that we represent. Incense is essentially the dust of the earth: a concoction of sawdust (so it will smoke), and clay (to slow the burning), and tree resins and essential oils (so it will smell), all burned on a piece of charcoal. When it is all done what you have remaining is a pile of dust. This appeals to my Protestant (and particularly Presbyterian) sensibilities. We're all dust, we're dirty, grimy, and pretty useless. But contained in the censer and in the hands of the priest this concoction of different kinds of dust becomes the rich, smelly smoke of the incense that represents our holiness, and the prayers of the people, as they arise to God (Psalm 141:2).

Theologians (both Protestant and Orthodox) argue as to the precise meaning of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. Led by the Presbyterians, one group of theologians protest that it doesn't mean we humans are worthless scum, just that original sin wiped out any inherent goodness that could possibly provide a springboard to humans attempting to find God on our own. In other words, we are inexorably lost without the divine offer of grace. Other theologians (a few Presbyterians among them) protest that the very structure of the doctrine dismisses the inherent glory of both the divine creation in general, and specifically, the image of God breathed into Adam at creation. That argument will probably continue until the return of Christ in glory, but in the meantime, the two different points that both sides of the debate are making (sometimes at the exclusion of the other) are both made in a single, beautiful picture, as the divinely smelly smoke (ie, plain old dust particles set aloft by the Fire and Breath) curl around the icon of Christ, Mary, the God-bearer, John the Baptist, and even the congregation, including that man standing near the aisle, momentarily not paying attention to the liturgy, his thoughts wandering far off, yet playing the role of “we who mystically represent the cherubim” and, nonetheless, being censed by the priest just as the icon of our Lord and Savior was censed.

Being a Protestant, I can't take holy communion in an Orthodox church. But even for me, one who has to look on as an outsider at that most holy event, there is something which I can participate in that speaks to the mystical union of heaven and earth: The Cherubic Hymn, where I can mystically represent the cherubim amidst the divinely smelly smoke rising from the censer. Thanks be to God.