A Wonderful Gift
A Prayer of ThanksgivingThe Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them to the Lord.
Let us us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give him thanks and praise.
And so we join the saints and angels in proclaiming your glory, as we sing:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory!
Hosanna in the highest!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!
A true friend recently sent me a great gift: a copy of the Book of Common Prayer.
It's been said that this one little volume is the envy of non-Anglican Christians the world over. Just reading it, one can see why. It's a genuine treasure of the English language.
(The other book's way cool too. Thanks Paul.)
This matches what ELCA Lutherans use, almost verbatim.
I knew this liturgy phonetically as an infant before I knew what the words meant.
Dean:
Ummm, well, gee... you're welcome!
Yup.
You have a friend with great taste, says this Episcopalian (technically Anglo-Catholic.)
Me being Catholic, my wife (herself an Anglican) likes to say:
Episcopalianism: All the Redemption, Half the Guilt!
It's amazing how well that works in Latin, too! Sort of right out of the Catholic hymnals.
Wonder which one came first? Purely out of curiosity, not to start some sort of communal flame war!
Your readers are uncovering another beauty of the Preface and Sanctus that you cite. It is the ancient preparation for Holy Communion that unites all the liturgical churches. The Sanctus is even more ancient, taken from the song of the seraphim in Isaiah 6 and the greeting given to Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The liturgical churches include a Proper Preface in the midst of what you've quoted that reflects the time of the church year. While Luther eliminated what he considered to be the sacrifical elements of the Catholic liturgy of his time, he retained this part of the Communion liturgy as did the English Reformation.
My favorites are the psalms:
The Lord to me a shepard is, want therefore shall not I...
I prefer the language of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, but that's just me...
"It is meet and right so to do."
so says this Former Roman Catholic who is now in the Anglican Catholic Church
Florence King calls Anglicanism "the Chivas Regal of American Protestantism." I always liked that line.