The Bible in Worship

Proclamation, Encounter and Response

Victoria Raymer

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780334056478
• eBook ISBN: 9780334056492
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Biblical proclamation is central to Christian worship. The Bible witnesses to the foundational experiences of the Church. Its proclamation invites worshippers into encounter with Christ, the living Word. "The Bible in Worship" seeks to make visible how the Bible is encountered in the worship of mainstream Western churches.Focusing in turn on the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Anglican traditions, Victoria Raymer offers a detailed and lively consideration of the contemporary practices of proclamation in each, considers their respective patterns of reading the Bible as part of public worship, and reflects on the place the Bible takes in daily prayer. Raymer also draws our attention towards the role the psalms play in contemporary formal liturgy, and offers a chapter on how the Bible is weaved into less formal forms of worship, including contemporary sung worship. Offering a truly holistic study of the scripture in worship, the book will resource readers to reflect on how proclamation invites response in understanding and resolve, and to consider how it might do so more effectively.

1

Proclamation of the Bible in the Worship of the Roman Catholic Church

The Word Proclaimed and Televised

The funeral Mass for Senator Edward Kennedy took place on 29 August 2009, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, Massachusetts. The Liturgy of the Word began with three readings from the Bible and a responsorial Psalm. Young family members successively walked up from the congregation to the single ambo in the sanctuary to read the first reading, lead the responsorial Psalm, Psalm 72, and read the second reading. They read from folded pieces of paper which they carried with them. The readings were announced by book (Wisdom, Romans), but not chapter and verse, and were concluded with, ‘The Word of the Lord’, to which the congregation responded, ‘Thanks be to God.’ The gospel book was then brought formally (but without candles or incense) from the altar to the ambo by a priest, a friend of the Kennedys, who was not presiding. Placing the book on the lectern of the ambo, he greeted the congregation: ‘Friends, the Lord be with you.’ He announced the Gospel, ‘A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew’, proclaimed the Gospel, concluding with ‘The Gospel of the Lord’, and lowered his head to kiss the text, which continued to rest on the lectern. The priest remained at the lectern to preach. The homily was followed by the Nicene Creed. To offer the Prayer of the Faithful, six or seven young family members gathered at the ambo and read sentences from Kennedy’s speeches fashioned into intercessions.

In this Mass the Liturgy of the Word was audible and unhurried; in the televised service it took up substantial time. It gave authority to lay Catholics to share in ministering the word. Both for members of the public watching with political or historical interest and for worshippers, the Liturgy of the Word served to rehearse Kennedy’s ‘story’ and place it in relation to the larger Christian story. The meaning and purpose of existence, understood in terms of creation and redemption by God in Jesus Christ, was proclaimed in the Mass both by the Liturgy of the Word and by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. In both there was an expectation of Christ’s presence with his people. The preaching was not expository in an academic sense. It drew on the Bible readings and, like the tributes given at the end of the service by Kennedy’s sons and President Barak Obama, was filled with biblical resonances, especially in relation to justice for the poor, as lived out in Kennedy’s political career.

On 18 September 2010, in Birmingham, England, another Massachusetts voice proclaimed the Gospel in a ceremonially similar televised ritual at the Mass for the beatification of John Henry Newman by Pope Benedict XVI. Deacon Jack Sullivan, beneficiary of Newman’s first Church-authenticated miracle, read the Gospel, from the lectern where lessons from the Old Testament and Epistle had been read by lay people. Deacon Sullivan, accompanied by candle-bearers and a thurifer, brought the gospel book in a procession from the altar, placed it on the lectern and censed it. At the end of the reading he took the gospel book to the Pope (who was presiding) to kiss and then bore it away, off camera, after the Pope had held it up and made the sign of the cross, blessing the people with it. After the Pope’s homily, the congregation were bidden, having listened to the word read and preached, to reflect on ‘the word of God spoken today’. The huge outdoor crowd then kept about two minutes’ silence.1

The Context of Catholic Tradition

Catholic tradition shares ancient and ongoing Christian understanding of the Bible as primarily oral performance, spoken, chanted, preached, recited and, secondarily, written down as an aide-memoire.2 Illuminated Bibles and Gospels, now treasured in libraries, were produced for liturgical proclamation.3 Proclamation of Scripture as the ‘normative witness of Christian faith’ has always been part of the ‘solemn celebration of the faith of the Catholic Church’.4 In addition to hearing the word at Mass, in celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours, clergy, religious and some lay Catholics engage daily in the systematic liturgical reading of Scripture. Preaching has been and remains an important element in Catholic worship.

Though audible reading of Bible passages forms an important part of today’s worship and an ecumenically shared Christian scholarly tradition is consulted in biblical interpretation, for Roman Catholics Scripture is ‘held’ by the Church. The Bible’s authority derives from its witness in conjunction with the Church’s tradition and teaching.

Particularly since the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), Catholics have been encouraged to study the Bible.5 But the Catholic Church expects them to be formed by Scripture as it enters their consciousness, not primarily through study of the Bible as a book, in its canonical order, or through Bible classes or systematic expository preaching, but through participation in the liturgy.6 A Bible in the sense of a single bound volume may not be visible in church at all. Instead, readings are likely to be proclaimed from a lectionary book containing the texts to be read from the Old Testament, Acts, Epistles and Revelation and from a separate gospel book.7 Just after Vatican II, Dutch Catholics took to reading directly from Bibles at the Eucharist. The practice did not last.8 If people follow printed readings, the text is likely to appear in missal books sometimes placed throughout the pews, with readings printed as extracts, or in ‘missalettes’ with the day’s readings on sheets of paper.9 In these formats, people see the words of the actual reading but not their canonical context. The extracts are generally identified in print but oral citation giving chapter and verse is not customary. Readings are short and often ‘filleted’, edited down to focus on particular elements in a passage or to reduce its length better to communicate the Church’s proclamation at a particular liturgy. Preaching at Sunday Mass is often – not always – a brief homily linking word to sacrament.

Throughout worship, Scripture is also instilled in people’s minds in expressions of penitence, in psalmody, in communion antiphons and as in phrases quoted in other liturgical elements.10 A test of the adequacy of new prayer texts has been ‘how congruent they are with the scriptural Word and imagery’.11 The Catholic Scripture scholar Paul Joyce attests to the role of worship in his scriptural formation as a ‘cradle Catholic’. Until he came up to Oxford to study Divinity, this was the way he knew the Bible. He had encountered it in liturgy and preaching, ‘wrapped in the assumptions of Roman Catholic doctrine and practice’ but, whether or not there was a Bible at home somewhere, he says, ‘I had not encountered it first hand.’ Today, thanks to Vatican II emphasis on Scripture, such experience is less common in households that can afford Bibles.12

Biblical Texts used in Catholic Liturgy

Before the Second Vatican Council, the text of the Bible recognized by the Church as authoritative was the Latin version known as the (old) Vulgate, in the edition mandated by the Council of Trent (1545–63). The Vulgate Old Testament, apart from the Psalter, is based on translations made by St Jerome (c.342–420) from Hebrew texts. The Vulgate (‘Gallican’) Psalter is based on Jerome’s translation from a Greek text.13 An older, ‘Old Latin’ psalm version may be included separately. The Vulgate also includes Jerome’s translations of the Gospels and re-translations of the remainder of the New Testament into Latin by linguists unknown.

Early Christians searched the Hebrew Scriptures for Messianic prophecy, an approach visible in the Emmaus narrative (Luke 24.13–32). Greek-speaking Christians generally used Greek versions of Hebrew texts now known collectively as the Sept...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• IProclamation of the Bible in the Worship of the Roman Catholic Church