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Just Another Jim
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Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy

Waiting for God

Essay on the midweek Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts
April 17, 2005

There is a dual movement in worship that is most frequently expressed in spatial terms. On the one hand, the worshiper goes to God and on the other hand, God comes to us. But expressing this movement spatially is problematic, because it easily leaves the impression that worship is a 50%-50% deal with God meeting us half way. Without denying the dual movement of worship, it needs to be said that nothing could be further from the truth. I was reminded of the paradox of the dual movement during Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesday evening. Just before the first entrance and presentation of the gifts (the bread and wine), a song is sung by the choir. During the fourth week of Lent this song has to do with the cross of Christ, following thematically from Sunday's Divine Liturgy, which is the Sunday of the Cross of Christ. The song begins,

Today the Unapproachable by Nature approaches me, And frees me from passions by enduring the Passion. The Light of the blind is spat upon by sinfulness, And gives His back to scourging for the sake of the captives.

Shortly after these words are sung, the bread and wine are brought from the altar area into the nave where they are greeted by the worshipers. [see footnote] Following this movement there is a long pause in the service filled by the choir singing two different hymns: “Let my prayer ascend to you like incense, and the lifting up of my hands like an evening sacrifice.” Being a Presanctified Liturgy, there is not a great deal of preparation involved before the communicants receive communion. During Divine Liturgy (the Sunday Morning service) there is constant movement and activity in the altar area in preparation for the sanctification of the gifts. In the Presanctified Liturgy it appears, from the perspective of the worshiper in the nave, that the Priest and Deacon simply do a lot of standing around, waiting, like the rest of us, for the Great Entrance and the activities that follow preparing for the communion of the faithful, waiting for the choir to finish repeatedly singing, “Let my prayer ascend to you like incense . . .”

Put another way, there is a lot of “dead time” in the Presanctified service. Cut out the dead time and the service could probably be cut to thirty minutes in length and everybody could get into the Fellowship Hall for the potluck dinner to satiate their growling stomachs.

In the Divine Liturgy the great and central act in this worship movement is the anaphora, or the “lifting up.” In the context of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, the priest literally lifts up the bread and wine toward heaven in the context of the words, “Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee, in behalf of all, and for all.” This lifting up to heaven symbolizes our heavenly journey more succinctly than any other single act in the Divine Liturgy. With the journey complete, we gather around the throne for a praise-fest and the Heavenly Banquet before being offered a “good word” from God (the literal meaning of Benediction) and sent on our way back out into the world.

But the sense of movement in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is completely different. Rather than “lifting up,” I would say the central metaphor is waiting. Isaiah says that they who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. This renewal of strength sets the stage for his three memorable descriptions of divine strength: the shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint (Is. 40:31). Notice in this verse that the waiting leads to the possibility of “mounting up” or “lifting up.”

But there are two different sorts of waiting. One is an imposed waiting. I grew up as a preacher's kid, so I knew all about waiting at church. We were always the last to leave, so waiting involved standing by the door, then leaning on the door, which often led to sitting by the door pouting. This is the same sort of waiting referred to above. One ought to fast before receiving the divine sustenance of communion, and a standard rule of thumb for an evening liturgy like that of the Presanctified Gifts is that one should fast from noon on. With the service not beginning until 6:30 p.m. and dinner conceivable not starting until 8:00, the wait through the service could be a real chore. One can get grumpy when one is hungry and it appears that everyone (including the priest and deacon) is waiting around for the chanter to finish a seemingly endless song about something or other—I'm not listening after all, because I'm hungry and want to get downstairs to eat!

Of course this is not at all what Isaiah means when he speaks of those who “wait upon the Lord.”

But two kinds of waiting implies two kinds of time. If the meaning of time is not understood, the meaning of waiting upon the Lord will not be understood either. Chronological time (chronos in Greek) is the measurement of events one after another. The chronological child of a minister says, “I've been waiting for fifteen minutes! How much longer are you going to be, dad!” But there is another conception of time where things have to fall into place, where time itself has to ripen, ready to be picked, like a red tomato on the vine. In this second conception of time, time itself (that is, chronological time) seems to stand still, as if waiting for “that moment” (whatever “that moment” happens to be). I lived for a couple of summers in western Kansas where tornadoes and violent thunderstorms were common place. When those gigantic thunderheads began to pass overhead, the birds would stop singing, the wind would stop blowing, and all that would remain would be greenish clouds overhead and the urgency of the sirens blaring in the background. And in that moment time stood still.

This “time stood still” and “waiting for time to ripen” conception is at the heart of the beginning of the New Testament. Paul describes it this way. “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son . . .” (Gal. 4:4). While we certainly have this conception of time, we don't have a specific word for it. But the Greek language does. This is kairos. This is time that we must wait for. Chronos seemingly stands still while we wait for kairos to ripen and tear open the heavens.

After Brenda and I were married and moved to Blue Rapids, Kansas (a couple hundred miles to the east of Hays), one of our favorite forms of entertainment was sitting in the yard watching potential tornadoes develop. Most of them didn't, but on a good night we could see formless thunderhead begin to take on a circular motion. We could begin to feel the wind shift as its direction began to follow the circular motion in th clouds. Sometimes we would see a few clouds begin to get sucked into the vortext. Once or twice we actually watched the funnel develop. That is one of the great miracles of nature. The clouds are typically a roiling gray, purple, and black tinged with green. Suddenly out of this chaos order begins to form and then a perfectly white, perfectly conical tail appears within the midst of the roiling black clouds. That tail remains perfectly white until it hits the ground and begins to pick up dirt. (I will note that I've never actually seen one hit the ground.) There was no fear in watching this process, only awe. We were steps away from the house and basement where we could be as safe as reasonably possible. With the confidence of that grace, we could stand in awe at the majestic purity of the miracle that was happening before our eyes.

And then the thunderhead would pass, the wind begin to blow, picking up leaves and dust, the birds would begin to sing, and that kairotic trance of waiting would be over. We would return to our normal, chronological lives.

This is the sensibility of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Everything unfolds slowly and expectantly. The priest censes the altar four times, the west side, the south side, the east side, the north side. Each time the choir sings with almost painful slowness and deliberateness, “Let my prayer arise as incense before you and the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice.” This is the heart of kairotic waiting. It is not passive, sitting around to see what's going to happen (like we did with the storm clouds in Blue Rapids), nor is it impatience, wondering when we can get to the next event (like I did long ago, waiting for my dad), it is active waiting. It is offering up prayers, hymns, psalms as the divine time ripens and the moment of true communion comes.

Alexander Schmemann says, “It is not grace that comes down, it is we who enter into grace.” In this sense the Sunday morning Divine Liturgy and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts are the same. In the Divine Liturgy we travel to heaven, to the throne room, where we participate in the Banquet of the Lamb. In the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts we wait, our hands lifted up in expectation. Even though the “movement” is different, in both cases it is active, it is we who enter into God's grace.

At the end of the service, in the context of the final blessing, the priest offers this prayer:

0 Almighty Lord, in wisdom You created all things, and by your inexpressible providence and great goodness You have brought us to these most salutary days for the purification of body and soul, for the control of our evil inclinations, and for the hope of resurrection. During the forty days You gave Moses, your servant, the tablets of the law, inscribed by your divine hands; now also grant to us, 0 Gracious One, to fight the good fight, to run the course of the fast, to preserve our faith unstained, to crush under foot the heads of invisible serpents, to be victorious over sin, and without condemnation to attain and worship the holy resurrection.

This prayer is reminiscent of Isaiah's words in chapter 40. Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They will mount up like eagles. They will run and not be weary. They will walk and not faint. How can one possibly respond adequately to such mercy coming down from heaven? In this Liturgy, it ends with the people saying, “Blessed is the name of the Lord, now and forever. Blessed is the name of the Lord, now and forever. Blessed is the name of the Lord, now and forever.”

And with that we slowly make our way down the steps into chronological time. Having eaten of the goodness of the Lord, we now share dinner together, and strengthened in soul and body, return home to schedules, deadlines, and also the hope of the fullness of time when Christ will return in glory. Indeed, blessed is the name of the Lord, now and forever. Amen.


FOOTNOTE

I use the term “altar area” rather than the more proper “sanctuary” because the terminology was broadened by the Protestants at the time of the Reformation confusing the meaning of the term. The architecture of an Orthodox church is designed to represent heaven and is thus modeled on the Old Testament temple, with an Outer Court, a Holy Place, and a Holy of Holies. The altar itself is the Holy of Holies, with the space behind the iconostasis (the “platform” of a Protestant church being the sanctuary. The area where the pews are found is typically called the Nave in western terminology. In the Christian west, particularly during the Medieval period, this architectural sensibility was transformed into a moral (one might say a “magical”) sensibility. Priests became the conveyors of God's grace rather than an instrument to perceive God's mercy directly. The people's righteousness flowed from God through the Church (ie, the Pope, to the Bishops, to the Priests, in the Western conception) to the people. With this new sensibility the architecture began to mean something rather different. The people would come to the Outer Court and await the mediator Priest who could travel from the Holy Place to the Outer Court in order to bestow God's grace upon the waiting people. This new Western sensibility was, of course, offensive to the Protestant Reformers, as it should be to anyone who believes what the Bible says about Jesus Christ, the only Mediator. Knowing full well that the people had the privilege of approaching God directly because of the ministry of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, they purposefully changed the terminology, rejecting the idea that the Altar area is any more holy than any other part of the church and calling the whole space (both Sanctuary and Nave) the sanctuary. Sanctuary means dwelling place. Originally it referred to a dwelling place for God. Since church architecture was modeled on the Old Testament Temple, it was natural to apply the term “sanctuary” to the Holy of Holies and the Holy Place which housed it. One of the unintended consequences of the Reformers' change of terminology is that “sanctuary” came to be understood popularly as the dwelling place for people. In the Mosaic Law provisions were made for falsely accused people to go to the temple (ie, the Sanctuary) until things got sorted out. The temple became a place of protection where they could not be arrested. With this story shaping Protestant sensibilities, sanctuary came to mean a place of retreat and protection—a meaning that has nothing to do with etymology nor the original use of the term. Given these two very different histories, the proper use of the term sanctuary becomes problematic, thus my use of the less precise, but more understandable, “altar area.”