Thursday, March 21, 2013

 

Luke 19:28-40; Is. 50:4-9a; Ps. 31:9-16; Phil. 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

Commemoration: Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)

 

Psalm 31:14 "But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand…"

 

            Throughout Lent we have been entering the Sunday liturgy by chanting the Litany, an ancient form of prayer using call and response and the repeated phrase Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy). It has ancestors in the Jewish Alvinu Malkeinu and the Orthodox ektenia (prayed by the deacon, in similar form to the current Lutheran Kyrie of the Eucharistic liturgy.) During the time of Gregory the Great (6th c.), the Litany was used in public processions, often to counter pagan festival processions. Martin Luther considered it a beautiful prayer, translating the Litany of Saints into German, while also omitting the direct petitions to saints. This is essentially the form we chant yet today, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of Henry VIII, used it, along with the Sarum Processionale, as a model for the first English language liturgy, the Exhortation and Litany of 1544.

 

• Chant the Great  Litany (ELW, Hymn 238) as a part of your Prayers.