Are you old-fashioned, or up-to-date? In our worship we try to combine both. Thus in the Eucharist we incorporate prayers and songs which are timeless. Two examples come near the beginning of the service.
Nine times we ask our Lord to have mercy - Kyrie eleison in Greek. Thrice we address the Father, three times the Son and then the Holy Spirit. In churches of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the prayer is used much more often, as the congregation's response to the litanies. (A litany is a series of short prayers which are similar in content to our own intercessions.) In the Roman Catholic church, the Kyrie grew up as an independent prayer, and this prayer found its way into the first English prayer book, back in 1549.
In later prayer books, the Kyrie was combined with a recitation of the Ten Commandments. "Lord have mercy on us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." This made it less of an intercession for ourselves and for others, and more of a reminder of our individual need to obey God.
Reciting the Ten Commandments has always been a bit of an embarrassment. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount made it clear that the commandments were not at the core of the Gospel. (Few Christians would regard landscape painting and watching television on a Friday evening as evil, although the commandments forbid both!) There are three compromise solutions.
One is to combine the Commandments ("you shall not") with positive commands - things we must do. We sometimes use this combination in our worship - the words are at the back of the blue service book. Another is to use Jesus' summary of the law - to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and might, and to love our neighbour as ourself. And a third is to revert to the earlier wording, and to let the prayer "Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy" stand by itself.
It would be possible to write a whole article on the two words Kyrie eleison. With the first word, "Lord", we acknowledge God as one to whom we commit ourselves. God is the one into whose hands we yield ourselves in trust and in love. God is in control - not us.
With the second word, "have mercy", we confess our own need, our own helplessness. We admit that after we have tried our utmost and achieved nothing, we have no further solution than to come to a loving, a forgiving and an understanding God and ask for help.
The Gloria which follows ("Glory to God in the highest") affirms that in Jesus this call for mercy is answered. It is on the one hand a triumphant hymn of praise. (We should get away from the idea that hymns are poems set to music with rhyming verses. In its structure, its rhetoric, its prosody, the Gloria is as much a hymn as "O for a thousand tongues to sing.") And on the other had, the Gloria is yet again a prayer for mercy.
Like many of the psalms, the hymn assumes that our prayers have been answered. From 1552 until the middle of this century it was sung after the communion, as a preparation for departure. But in fact we already know that our prayers are answered: Eucharist is the Greek word for thanksgiving, and the keynote of the whole service is thanksgiving for the release from sin which Jesus has wrought. So it is entirely appropriate to have it at the beginning, to strike a keynote, just as the song of the angels to the shepherds welcomed Christ's birth.
Why do we not sing it in Lent? In Lent we reflect on our own weaknesses. (The braver among us try to overcome them by giving something up, or by taking something up!) We do this in memory of Jesus' forty-day fast in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry, and also in contemplation of the suffering of the Cross - the price of our weaknesses. So we mute our joy, and consider for a while the cost, until at Easter we can sing with renewed strength: "We worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory."
HD