Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Daniel 7:9-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:1-8; Mark 11:1-11

It may not seem like it, but we’re coming up on the new year.  Next Sunday marks the beginning of the new church year, with the beginning of Advent.  Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting we get together on Saturday night and count down to midnight, with Judy giving us a little “Auld Lang Syne” on the organ.  I’m not even suggesting that we make New Year’s resolutions: there’s enough time to make them, and to break them, later.

What I am suggesting, though, is that we begin anew. That we go back to the beginning and start from scratch.  That we leave our assumptions at the door, because there’s nothing God likes more than shattering our preconceptions. What is Christmas about, after all, if not God shaming the wise and turning the world’s notion of power on its ear, by coming into the world in the form of a baby born of an unwed teenage mother, who spent a lot of years needing to be fed and bathed and taken care of, before He got around to offering us the bread of life, the waters of baptism, and the promise of eternal rest.

Much as I love our Episcopal liturgy, though, it makes it hard for us to start from scratch. There are so many words that we hear each week: the Collect for Purity, the Collect of the Day, four Scripture readings, the sermon – however scintillating it might be – the creed, the prayers of the people, the confession and absolution, the sursum corda (that’s the technical name for the “lift up your hearts” bit), the proper preface, the Sanctus, the words of institution, the Lord’s prayer, the invitation, and the post-communion prayer.  Wow, even naming them all takes a fair bit of time. 

So even if we want to start fresh, we’re confronted with lots of words, and well-known words at that. While it’s been said that familiarity breeds contempt, in this case I think it breeds apathy, and deadness.  After all, how much of what’s spoken in services each week do we really hear, and ponder, and reflect upon? And how much rolls off us, like water off a duck’s back, as we figure, “Oh, I know what that means. That’s old hat.  Let’s just keep moving forward.”

So rather than try to look afresh at the entire service, let’s just pick one part. It’s a familiar one, because we say, or sing, the words every Sunday, after we’re done with the parts of the service that change from week to week, like the lessons and the sermon.  At that point we move into the Eucharistic Prayer, where we join “our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of [God’s] Name.” And then we all sing the Sanctus, so called because that’s the Latin word for “holy,” which is repeated three times to begin the hymn: “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.” This is pretty much a direct quote from the song of the four seraphim in the book of Revelation (4:8).

That’s actually the end of the Sanctus, because the last two lines are called the Benedictus, the Latin word for “blessed.”  And so we make the sign of the cross as we sing, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”

I was reminded of the fact that what we call the Sanctus is actually two different things a few months ago when I took services at St. Stephen’s and Catherine Nichols came up here. They do things a little differently down there, as I learned when I was leading the congregation in the Sanctus at the 8:00 service, and when I got to the “Blessed is He” part, I was the only one left speaking.  It turns out that they never say the Benedictus at that service, although no one had mentioned that to me in advance. Perhaps they were being old school, since for about two hundred years the Prayer Book left that part out.  So I did what any good priest would do: pretend like I was in complete control and conclude the prayer solo, as if nothing was wrong.

The reason no one had thought to warn me is that they always did it that way.  And I find myself wondering what we do without thinking, because we always do it that way. So I thought I’d do something I’ve never done before: have a little contest, a sort of liturgical game show.  There are only 2 questions, and they should be easy, because they’re just about the Sanctus that we sing every week.

First question, what the heck does the word “Hosanna” mean?  We must know the answer to that, since we sing “Hosanna” twice a service, and we even heard it in this morning’s gospel reading.

The answer is “Hosanna” means “save us,” and the verses in Mark we read this morning are a direct quotation from Psalm 118: “Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  “Hosanna” is just the Greek word for “save us,” and it makes perfect sense that the disciples would sing that song of praise when Jesus was entering Jerusalem, because they needed saving, and the Lord was there to rescue them.  And it makes sense that we’d sing it every Sunday, because it’s the one part of the Eucharistic prayer that we all say together – the people here at St. Paul’s, and the people at every other Episcopal church, along with all the company of heaven – in the midst of the other stuff the priest says and does for us as we just look on.

Before I ask the second question, can I see a show of hands from everyone who makes the sign of the cross when they sing the Benedictus: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” which was also part of our gospel reading this morning? Great. Now the second question is: Why?  The sign of the Cross is an expression of the Trinity, which is why we make it at the absolution and the blessing, which are done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  So why make it at the Benedictus, which is all about Jesus?

The reason people make the sign of the Cross at that point was that way back when, when services were conducted in Latin (which most people didn’t speak), the priest would be up in the front of the church with his back to the congregation, saying his magical prayers while the parishioners were saying their own.  The service was timed so that the people sang the Benedictus at the precise time the priest raised up the bread and wine to God. So the people were crossing themselves not because of the words they were singing, but in recognition of the Holy Spirit coming down upon the bread and wine. Nowadays, even though the Holy Spirit comes down later in the service, we still cross ourselves at the Benedictus.  That’s what known as the tail wagging the theological dog.

Not only are many of us unaware of how crossing ourselves at the Benedictus got started – and why it doesn’t make much sense now – we don’t even know what the sign itself means.  When people first made the sign of the cross, they did so on their forehead with just the thumb. Then it expanded to cover the whole chest made with two fingers, to affirm against the heretics of the time that Jesus was, indeed, both human and divine. Later three fingers were used, as a reflection of the Trinity. And even to this day, the Western churches go left first, while the Eastern churches go right. Leave it to the Church of England to cross on the wrong side of the chest.  

The bottom line is that we do a lot of this without thinking, which led the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng to wonder this:
 

In the light of the cross of Jesus Christ is there not something questionable about that shrunken, often purely ritual gesture of making a crosslike sign which is thoughtlessly repeated a thousand times and often degraded to a more or less magical symbol?

In the light of this cross is there not something questionable even about the crucifix on the wall, if it has no effect on practice and people think that they can escape the burden of Christ’s cross with the aid of these traditional and ornamental bits and pieces? [1]
 

The point I’m trying to get across is that we don’t have a very good idea of why do a lot of things we do.  We sing the Sanctus because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and it’s a really nice-sounding hymn, but we don’t understand the words, and we don’t realize that it’s the people’s hymn, where all the people of God, including the angels and the archangels, get to horn in on the priest’s little party at the altar and sing out that they agree, that they understand, that their voices must be heard, too.  And we cross ourselves for no apparent reason and perhaps in a heretical fashion (depending on how many fingers we use and whether we break right or left first). 

Why bring all this up? Why point out how little we know about what we’re doing? Because when I was a little kid, one year a friend of the family joined us for Christmas.  The next year, though, this friend made other plans, which absolutely mortified me. “But she always spends Christmas with us,” I cried, simply because I couldn’t remember a Christmas without her, though there had been some.  My parents, being good parents, invited her over, and I was placated. 

But we’re not children, and the Church shouldn’t be in the business of placating.  The Church shouldn’t ask us to do things that we don’t understand.  The Church shouldn’t let us get away with doing things because we mistakenly believe that they’ve always been done that way, when they haven’t.  The Church should be in the business of empowering, and teaching, and calling the people to rigorous honesty.  Perhaps the Church does a disservice by including so many words in services, beautiful as they are.  Perhaps we could see God more clearly if there were only a few words each week, so that we could reflect and meditate and eventually comprehend each one. 

As we enter this new Church year, I challenge you to start from the beginning. Don’t take anything for granted.  Don’t gloss over things you don’t understand: seek out their meaning. Don’t assume that just because we do things a certain way that that’s the way they should be done, or even that we’ve always done them that way.  We mustn’t value familiarity over truth; we mustn’t choose comfort over discovery.

In one of his books, Frederick Buechner describes a scene between a dying woman and her two young sons.  The scene is narrated by the woman’s perpetually searching brother, who reminds me a lot of myself.  This is how it goes:
 

After she had kissed them goodbye and we were about to leave, Tony gave an enormous yawn, stretching one fat arm up into the air and knuckling his eyes with the other, and it seemed to rub her the wrong way because she sounded quite angry when she spoke to him and in some ways more like herself than I’d heard her for a long time.  ‘Now you stay awake, Tony,’ she said.  ‘You just keep your eyes open and stay awake.’

There was a lot of life in her voice … and I can hear her saying it still … Stay awake were the last words she spoke to my younger nephew and namesake, and looking back on it, not just the words but the fire inside them, what I think she meant was stay alive. ‘You just stay alive’ was what she told that fat little boy with his zipper half unzipped, or there would be Hell to pay.  And then we were gone. [2]
 

Isn’t that what Jesus said to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, just a few days after they’d been singing all those Hosanna’s? Isn’t that what Jesus is calling each of us to do today: stay awake.  Stay alive. Hear the word of God, and let it change you. Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t say words you don’t understand or cross yourself just because that’s what you’ve always done or because the Prayer Book says you should. Listen, question, struggle, search, stay awake.  Toss your assumptions in the trash. Start afresh.  A new year is dawning, full of possibility. Don’t miss it.

[1] Hans Küng, trans. Edward Quinn, On Being a Christian (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1976): 573-574.

[2] Frederick Buechner, Lion Country, in The Book of Bebb (New York: Harper & Row, 1971): 89.

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