Continuing Home

The ongoing saga of a Continuing Anglican church home, as seen by a member of the laity.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

"Discarding Accretions" revisited

Blog readers may recall that a month or so I had mentioned a couple of items that had crept into our service. One was saying the Prayer of Humble Access along with the priest, though the rubrics say the priest says it alone. A number of you noted that it was written so it could be said either way; our Rector prefers it be said by the priest alone.

The other item was saying "Thanks be to God" after the Epistle, in response to "Here endeth the Epistle." (Are we thanking God that the Epistle is ended?) This clearly came from the 1979 BCP, where the Epistle reading may end with:
Reader: The Word of the Lord.
People: Thanks be to God.

But it is interesting to note that the '79 (at least in the place I looked; I do not know my way around it at all anymore) also allows:
Reader: Here ends the Reading (Epistle).
People (say nothing)

In any event, in the first posting on this subject I assumed that this practice would quickly disappear once a few of us became aware of the issue. It has not but then nothing has been done, either. In the overall scheme of things, it's pretty small.

posted by Continuing Home @ 4:23 PM  

3 Comments:

  • At 7:47 AM, Blogger Continuing Home said…

    Really! Interesting. We do not use the missal; we're "strictly" 1928 BCP, and have been pretty much the whole time I've been here.

    I wonder if we have a copy of the missal around somewhere? I'd be interested to see if it's in there.

     

  • At 4:30 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    The Anglican Missal allows for the "ministers" to respond with "Thanks be to God" after the reading of the Epistle. However, it is very likely that the practice of the congregation responding with those words comes from the 1979 book, where the Epistle reading ends with "The Word of the Lord", to which the proper reply is "Thanks be to God". In the Book of Common Prayer tradition, there is no response needed or called for, to the words "Here endeth the Epistle".

     

  • At 6:25 PM, Blogger Continuing Home said…

    anglican priest, I think you've put your finger on it. I've been thinking back and I simply do not recall the use of the Missal, though there have been at rare times elements of it used in one service or another.

    That we responded per the '79 I likely missed simply because I'd come from 15 years of using the '79 and the trial liturgies and, like most laity, didn't pay a lot of attention to the particulars, much less the rubrics to a liturgy I already knew by heart.

     

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