A EUCHARISTIC LITURGY FROM A NEW ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK

A World Tour of Anglican Liturgies
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The three liturgies in this series are an attempt to dip into the differences between the American Prayer Book services and those of other parts of the world, or of the Christian church. Such differences highlight differing attitudes or varying cultural slants.

While the lections are listed on the covers of the New Zealand and the Nassau and the Bahamas leaflets, the lections for the Church of South India celebration of the Lord’s Supper are from Year B, Proper 28, NRSV, Revised Common Lectionary.

An added note concerning the Nassau and the Bahamas mass, is that it’s a fullout “smells and bells” celebration, which requires some preparation of acolytes and other altar personnel, as well as having incense and a sanctus bell on hand.

Note too that the Church of South India liturgy makes use of flowers . . .

perhaps not surprisingly.

Thanks to the 5:00 pm Saturday worshiping community at Grace Episcopal Church, Traverse City, Michigan, USA.

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Note: download is print ready. Print front and back with 8 1/2" x 11" (US) paper. Fold in half to make worship booklet.

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Commentary in Worship Leaflet

DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century,
spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every
race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable
human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from
infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the
pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves
and dens of the earth.

Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their
crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in

triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for
the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the
wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old
woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for
Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole
provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because
my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much
tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the
Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for
the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain
so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in
the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of
scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of
the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary
of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all
day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the
canonization of St. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the
reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of
them.

And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred
thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the
parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the
“plebs sancta Dei” – the holy common people of God.

Dom Gregory Dix, in his “The Shape of the Liturgy”