Do you enjoy hymn sandwiches? They’re services where you have a hymn, a prayer, a hymn, a reading, a hymn, a talk, a hymn, another reading, a hymn, another prayer, another hymn...and so on.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with a hymn sandwich, as long as we remember that hymns are one of the many facets of worship. They are not space-fillers, or interludes of light relief between the heavy stuff of praying, learning and listening - the ecclesiastical equivalent of television commercials! They are part of the structure of the service, whether they are old traditional melodies, modern songs or choruses, or ancient psalms.
Our own regular Sunday worship has a place for hymns (unless you come to the early communion service at half past eight in the morning). But both at Morning Prayer and at the Eucharist, there are quite long periods when the organ (or the piano) is silent. This is not bad planning - it is because both services have their own format, their own structure.
This is clearest in the Eucharist. (I'll leave Morning Prayer for a later article!) Normally our second hymn is between two readings. It comes after the epistle (or some other part of the New or Old Testament). It's a preparation for the Gospel reading. Have you counted how many different things we do before the next hymn?
We listen to the Gospel, we listen to the sermon, we state what we believe, we offer our intercessions for others - for the church and the world, we confess our own sinfulness and hear the message of God's forgiveness, we pray that God will feed us, so that we may be united with Christ for ever. And we offer a sign of peace to each other.
All of these fit together. They bring us closer to the main point of the Eucharist - offering, commemorating, sharing, in the broken bread and the wine, Jesus' own sharing of himself.
The Creed marks the division between two parts of the service. What comes before it is basically instruction - "the Liturgy of the Word", the service book calls it. What comes next is much more of an intimate occasion: the church family joining together. In Eastern Orthodox churches, immediately before the Creed, there is a cry of "The doors!" Nobody really knows why or how it originated. Did it perhaps comes from the days of persecution, when the meeting became something for "members only"? "Watch the doors, and don't let anyone come in from now on"?
"We believe" allows us to say what we have in common. Our shared belief in God unites us as a family. It is not a vague belief. It is a belief that God acts in a particular kind of way, as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Creed we say at the Eucharist owes its long and rather intricate wording to the church leaders who met at Nicaea, modern Isnik in Turkey, in the year 325 at the command of the Emperor Constantine - his mandate was to make it absolutely clear what the church really believed.
The Nicene Creed, slightly altered (the reference to baptism and our hope of the resurrection have been added, and an "in other words" has been omitted), has been used as part of our worship since the fifth century. It has not always united us - one of the deepest divisions in the church, between the eastern and western traditions, arose in the twelfth century when the western church, centred in Rome, added to a statement about the Holy Spirit, asserting that the Spirit proceeded not only from the Father, but from the Father and the Son. (Our friends the Old Catholics have reverted to the old, universally agreed wording, in a spirit of unity.) But it is a way of expressing that we are all worshipping for a common reason and a common purpose.
So at the Eucharist we give thanks together. And we come together not so much for a sandwich, as for a full meal!
HD